Background: The resurgence of civil society has largely been attributed to the sector’s ability to exploit new interactive technologies and its ability to adapt its communication and mobilisation strategies.Objectives: This study focuses on how South African civil society organisations (CSOs) deploy Web 2.0 services and technologies for social advocacy and the context of this technology use.Whilst the literature points to many studies relating to the use of the Internet for advocacy, it also suggests that the role and impact of emerging technologies have not been studied in any detail in CSOs. Such studies have the potential to provide new perspectives to current theoretical frameworks and also to add to the discourse around the use of emerging technologies for advocacy.Method: A survey of South African CSOs explored the level of knowledge of social media services and revealed which services in particular were being adopted.Results: The key findings that emerged were that the sector has a low level of knowledge of social media services and an accompanying low level of adoption. These are partly explained by factors such as macro-economic policies and low levels of Internet penetration and ICT readiness.Conclusion: Further research to determine why certain social media services have been embraced more willingly than others and an analysis of the patterns of adoption to determine any underlying significance or relationships is necessary. An analysis of how CSOs build their advocacy capabilities by appropriating social media and how they thus provide alternate discourses and agendas would be instructive.

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Background: The impact and consequences of social media adoption on society are only just being realised and studied in detail; consequently, there is no universal agreement as to the reasons for the adoption of these services. Even understanding why some social media services are popular remains to some extent elusive. The practical use of Web 2.0 does not provide any answers either with, for example, a noticeable difference in the way social media was strategically used by Barack Obama and Mitch Romney in the lead-up to the 2009 American elections. However, recent studies that have focused on social media adoption within specific sectors have begun to shed some light on these emerging adoption patterns; two studies in particular are illustrative: a 2012 study on the newspaper sector and a study on social media adoption and e-government.Objectives: This study investigates why South African civil society organisations (CSOs) adopt Web 2.0 services and the perceived and actual benefits of such adoption.Method: A survey questionnaire was sent to 1712 South African CSOs listed in the Prodder database to explore why certain social media services were adopted and the perceived benefits thereof.Results: Internal reasons for the adoption of social media services by South African CSOs coalesce around organisational visibility and access to information. External reasons focus on organisations needing to become more relevant and more connected to like-minded organisations and initiatives.Conclusion: The pervasiveness of Web 2.0 technologies makes it inevitable that CSOs will have to restructure themselves to remain relevant.

This study focuses on how civil society organisations strategically deploy Web 2.0 technologies for transnational social advocacy and the impact of this technology adoption on civil society organisations' roles, structure, and orientation. The global environmental justice organisation, Greenpeace is used as a case study. Greenpeace advocates for changes in environmental policy and behaviour, has been at the forefront of environmental issues, and has used the mass media as an effective campaigning tool. The key findings that emerged was that social media has become a key ingredient of Greenpeace's campaigning strategy and has been embraced at both a strategic and operational level. The emergence of a collaborative communications paradigm has necessitated a level of organisational introspection evidenced in both changes in the organisation's strategic planning processes and changes to the organisational structure.

Online advocacy is big business. Online advocacy organisations need to structure themselves along business lines for fund raising, and to strategically utilise their online and traditional resources to achieve their goals. The growing influence of civil society organisations has been fuelled largely by an increase and ubiquity of emerging technologies. There is no evidence of a detailed analysis of social media led advocacy campaigns in the literature. The global environmental justice organisation, Greenpeace is used as a case study. The rise of online social media has provided the organisation with an alternative to traditional mass media. There have been some notable successes for Greenpeace. The most recent of which has been its efforts to halt the drilling for oil in the Arctic. Equally the Greenpeace campaigns have sometimes provoked the public ire, for example in their miscalculation of the fallout over their recent Nazca plains intrusion. It is clear that to attain any level of success the organisation needs to structure itself on sound business principles and strategies.