Leveraging Social Media for Online Advocacy
I recently gave a lecture at American University’s Public Affairs and Advocacy Institute on how to use social media and other online strategies for advocacy. You can watch it here.
Commander McBragg Saves the Daily Show
“There! Zanzibar! Did I ever tell you about the time I won the first Emmy for the Daily Show?” asked Commander McBragg.
“NO, Commander, but I…” Before Zanzibar could respond, the Commander continued.
New (and Old) Reports on Citizen Engagement and Online Strategy
The General Services Administration just released a new report “Engaging Citizens in Government.” The report assembles the thoughts of 24 IT leaders from several nations, states, and local government agencies, as well as other thought leaders. Among them is a piece from White House Director of Citizen Participation Katie Stanton, who played an instrumental role in President Obama’s online townhall earlier this year.
And while I am on the topic of interesting, downloadable reports and guides related to online politics and advocacy, here are a few more that I think are worth a read:
Delany, Colin. 2009. Online Politics 101.
Stein, Michael & Katrin Verclas. 2008. Using Mobile Phones in Advocacy Campaigns.
DigiActive. 2009. The DigiActive Guide to Twitter for Activism.
Gharbia, Sami Ben. 2008. Cross-posting for Advocacy: An Introduction to Effective Social Media Integration. Global Voices Advocacy.
DigiActive. 2008. A DigiActive Introduction to Facebook Activism.
Germany, Julie Barko, ed. 2008. Best Practices for Political Advertising Online. Washington, DC: Institute for Politics, Democracy, & the Internet.
Karpf, David. 2008. Measuring Influence in the Political Blogosphere: Who’s Winning and How Can We Tell? Politics and Technology Review.
Citability.org Offers a Simple Idea to Help Open the Government
The problem is simply stated on the homepage of Citability.org. “Government websites are ever changing and cannot be cited. Content changes without notice or accountability.” The solution has a simple starting point: create permanent, date stamped URLs for each paragraph of every federal document posted to the web.
Researchers eyes light up when they hear this idea. “Of course,” they say, “that would make it so easy to find government information online.” It would make it easy to track changes to documents, such as bills and regulations, as they evolve throughout the policy formation process. It would make it possible to use a common search engine to find all comments written about any paragraph in any federal document.
Citability.org is the latest project from the League of Technical Voters to help create a transparent government. Silona Bonewald, the League’s Executive Director, is big on simple solutions to problems many think are to complicated to solve. This is the latest, and perhaps most elegant of her simple solutions.
Imagine the level of accountability such a system would put on Congress. We could all track how legislators modify each line of the budget as it moves through the process. And legislators could keep an eye on what the media and voters are saying about key provisions of any bill.
All you would have to do is search for the URL in any search engine and see all who link to the paragraph. If the link is to an older version of the paragraph, it would take you to a list of all older and newer versions of the paragraph in the archive. The end result is all these comments across the entire web become linked, they become a conversation.
Citability.org isn’t the complete solution to the transparent government puzzle, but it clearly is a first step towards it. And given that Congress, for example, has already implemented permanent URLs for each bill, adding paragraph and date markers to those links is a small adjustment.
Cross posted on Huffington Post.
Twitter Tips for Advocacy
I recently gave an interview for Studio 1080 on KUDO in Anchorage, AK about using Twitter for advocacy/marketing and wanted to share it with you. Here is the gist of the conversation:
Why tweet?
In the US alone, there are 26.5 million people on Twitter and among them are many, if not most of the most influential people in the country. These people are talking about all of the issues of the day, from the most mundane to the most profound. If you are not on Twitter, you are not part of the conversations that matter most to you and your cause, and you are missing the opportunity to engage with the people who are most able to influence large segments of the country and the key decision makers affecting your mission.
What are three simple things people can do to maximize their twitter impact?
- Make sure your audience includes the most influential people in your issue space.
- Be sure your tweets are engaging and valuable to your target audience, providing links to useful content, easy to use facts and talking points, and, whenever possible, are directly engaging people and conversations already in progress on Twitter.
- Be human! Make sure people can see that there is a real, live, caring person behind your tweets.
Explain the importance of the hashtag and the retweet.
- Hashtags (#text) are how Twitter aggregates conversations and creates affinity groups. They are completely informal (you can make them up on the spot). Within a tweet, a hashtag is a link to a search query. So, if you click on #iranelection in a tweet, for example, it takes you to a Search.Twitter.com results page for that hashtag, where you can see what everyone is saying about that topic. Why else use them? Because hashtags get your tweets in front of new audiences, people who are not already following you.
- Retweeting is a way to share the love on Twitter. When you see a tweet you like, retweeting it (reposting it with attribution to the original source): 1) Shares the information in the tweet with your audience (and hashtag audiences you might add), 2) Creates a deeper connection between you and the original tweeter, and 3) Helps grow your audience and enhance your reputation as a member of the Twitter community.
How important is twitter as a marketing tool?
- Twitter is essential for monitoring real-time reactions to your brand and issues.
- Twitter is a real-time response channel to deepen your relationship with your constituents, customers, and friends.
- Twitter is a great channel to get new ideas and products into the market, to create a buzz about what you are doing, really fast.
What are the biggest mistakes people make using twitter to get attention for their cause?
- Writing tweets without conveying value to audience. For example, tweeting what the important point of an article you are linking to is better than just tweeting the title and the link. That is why auto feeds to Twitter don’t do well unless the headlines are written for Twitter.
- Tweeting too much or too little. Too much varies depending on the quality of your tweets. The more valuable the information, the more often you can tweet. Too little tweeting means your tweets fall off your audience’s radar and you lose their attention.
Cross posted on techPresident.com and KStreetCafe.com.
Organizing on the Social Web: A Cold Blast From the Past
While for many the social web seems but a few years old, I have long argued that it has its roots in the pre-web internet. Not only have many of the key online organizing tools (email, chat, and discussion forums) been around since the internet was a text-only platform, but political and issue groups have been using them since those early days. By the late 1990′s, the web was well established and being used much as it is today on Facebook and Twitter, though with somewhat more primitive tools.
One of the more disturbing examples of early online social network organizing involves the Aryan Resistance, a white supremacist movement in the United States. In a 1998 essay by Milton Kliem, Jr. tactics that will seem all too familiar to today’s online organizers were spelled out to help the Aryan Resistance spread its message and recruit new followers.
Social Media Listening Tools
I found a great article on tools for monitoring social media. There are 13 of these tools listed. Some I am familiar with, others I need to explore.
But as we get deeper into engaging the social web, these tools will be very useful. The full article is here and the 13 tools are below:
These are the Networks of Our Lives
When I was growing up in Maine, we had four networks: ABC, NBC, CBS, and PBS. When I was a young adult, Fox joined the list. Then cable came along and the number of networks exploded. Sure, cable networks were small, compared to the big 5, but with the reach of cable, even small networks like WGN out of Chicago turned people all over the world into Cubs fans.
These days, we have a new crop of networks. But unlike the last explosion, these networks are not on television. They are on the internet. Yes, the internet; that collection of websites and other platforms that deliver us all sorts of information. We are talking about Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Flickr, and YouTube. We are talking Yahoo, Google, lions, tiger, and bears, oh my… oops… that was an old habit slipping in.
