Submitted by Todd on Mon, 2009/12/07 - 11:50
Posted in
When popular Chinese social networking site Renren introduced the concept of "public homepages" for businesses and organizations in July this year, a number of NGOs were among the first to take advantage of this new service, including the Red Cross's Sunshine in Your Heart Project, TRAFFIC China (link in Chinese), The Climate Group, and Greenpeace China.
To date, these NGOs have each attracted tens of thousands of "friends" among the existing users of the website. The organizations can publish content such as articles, links, photos and video clips to their Renren homepage, and this content will be visible to those friends the next time they log onto their account. Of the organizations listed above, Greenpeace China has the greatest number of friends, currently standing at over 170,000.
In a recent paper (link in Chinese), Liu Qijing and Peng Jingjia of Xiamen University discuss the value of social networking services to NGOs, concluding that they offer notable benefits in terms of reach, interactivity, mobilising campaigners, and targeting communications. However, they point out that there are also limitations, such as difficulty reaching ordinary members of the public (without an existing interest in the issue), and difficulty measuring the extent to which online participation by website users translates into real action offline.
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