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Announcing ThinkSocial Award Winners and Release of Blueprints in Social Media for the Public Interest

Founded this year, ThinkSocial's goal is to connect people and ideas to advance the use of social media to address society's most pressing challenges. Today we announce our inaugural ThinkSocial Award Winners.
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Entrepreneur and Digital strategist

Entrepreneur and Digital strategist
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Founded this year, ThinkSocial's goal is to connect people and ideas to advance the use of social media to address society's most pressing challenges.

Today we are very proud to announce the inaugural ThinkSocial Award Winners and also release Blueprints 1.0, a report detailing trends in social media for the public interest.

The first draft of the report is part of a longer effort dedicated to the study and advancement social media in the public interest. It features concept definitions and examples for ten trends that we believe are shaping the use of social media. We have compiled this list through interviews with public and private sector leaders; analysis of initiatives, organizations and government programs; reviews of industry and mainstream news coverage; and submissions from thousands of online participants.

Highlighted trends from the report include:

  • Active Witness/Active Witnessing: Active witnessing occurs when individuals or groups share information and stories about important and often dramatic events through the use of digital tools. Examples include long-established "active witness" network Witness.org, a non-profit that empowers people to tell stories of human rights abuses through video technology.

  • Social Production/Mass Collaboration: Social production or mass collaborating occurs when large numbers of people work independently on a single project, often modular in its nature, to create a product of significant value and complexity. Examples include Invisible Children, a non-profit that spreads awareness about child soldiers in Northern Uganda, educational charity DonorsChoose.org, and charity: water, which uses Google Earth to track the progress of its projects.

  • Social Alignment/Social Aligning: Social aligning occurs when institutions engage with their constituents, consumers or other important stakeholders through social media to identify and take collective action on shared goals--often goals with a public purpose. Examples of social alignment include retail giant Target who recently gave 5% of its profit, or about3 million a week, to charity. For two weeks this past May, Target recruited Facebook users to help the corporation decide which ten charities would receive the "Bullseye Gives" funds and what percentage of the money the selected charities would receive.

  • Social Transacting/Social Transactions: Social transacting occurs when people spend time or money online engaged in activities that generate financial and social value for causes. Social transacting is demonstrated in Zynga's popular virtual farming game, FarmVille, where players can purchase certain charity-linked items with their virtual currency. Zynga's "Sweet Seeds for Haiti" promotion, where 50% of proceeds benefited Haitian charities FONKOZE.org and FATEM.org, generated487,000 for the charities.

    • You can view the full list of trends together with a deeper analysis of each of the award recipients here: http://think-social.org/awards/blueprints

    Winners of the inaugural 2009 ThinkSocial Awards include:

    • Kiva.org: a peer-to-peer micro-lending web site, enabling entrepreneurs in developing countries to receive loans from lenders around the world.

  • SocialVibe: an organization aids charities via brand activities that generate micro-donations.

  • The March 18th Movement: founded by Hamid Tehrani and Mideast Youth, seeks to expand the world's understanding of bloggers as de facto journalists, and extend the protections normally accorded to journalists to all those who share information and stories of repression and corruption online.

    • A special commendation award was also being presented to:

    • Amanda Rose: the founder of Twestival Global and Local, which is a concurrent series of offline events for charity, organized by volunteers in cities around the world via Twitter.

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