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Archive for the ‘Social Media’ Category

Twitter grassroots advocacy – SEIU vs act.ly

by Jennifer Berk | Friday, October 23rd, 2009

It’s one thing to just broadcast your campaign messages on Twitter. This is what a grassroots advocacy program on Twitter looks like (from Nancy Scola at Personal Democracy Forum):

But stuffing an auto-retweeting into an advertisement, making the message editable, and then attaching the whole thing to topical blog posts? Not until today, my friend. Over on Daily Kos, SEIU is running ads that encourage would-be tweeters to post a note protesting gender discrimination when it comes to health insurance — such as denying women coverage for pre-existing conditions like providing for the continuation of the species (i.e., pregnancy). Step two is that the pre-packaged tweet also links up to an SEIU online deli-style ticket machine, where people can ‘”take a number” to be counted amongst those opposed to gender discrimination in health care.

Note that

This takes advantage of a built-in characteristic of the platform: the ability to use the website to post a tweet, and therefore to create a link with suggested wording.
Advertising gets the message in front of a sympathetic (and tech-savvy) audience.
The results aren’t visible only on Twitter; there’s an aggregator the campaign controls as well.

So what could be better? Most obviously, the aggregator doesn’t really link to Twitter as well as it could (“it seems to move up a number every time someone clicks on the machine, , not necessarily every time they tweet”), so not everyone who retweets the message and passes it on may be counted.

This is where act.ly excels: creator Jim Gilliam explains, “You sign a petition by tweeting it, and other people can sign the petition just be re-tweeting it.” The tweet is action and word of mouth in one, and the act.ly site takes care of reporting and statistics (and tracking whether the target has responded). Definitely worth a look if you’re planning a Twitter grassroots campaign.

Tags: advocacy, Daily Kos, Twitter
Posted in Grassroots, Issue Advocacy, Recent Trends, Social Media | No Comments »

“There hasn’t been a conscious decision”: Building social media participation in your organization

by Jennifer Berk | Monday, July 13th, 2009

John Haydon had a post a while ago about the National Wildlife Federation’s involvement in social media that gets at the main way organizations are adopting new tools. One or two people experiment, they see some results, and others join them over time. Danielle Brigida said:

Mostly it was my coworker Kristin Johnson and I, spending a few hours a week playing around with different social media sites and testing out NWF’s messages on them. There hasn’t been a conscious decision to do this stuff–a few of us just started doing it and the organization is seeing the benefits and is jumping on board one program at a time.

This is the normal pattern. So why do people often regret it?

What would you have done differently with social media if you knew what you know now?
Probably worked more with our program staff initially.

You always want to do this. You want to involve all the subject matter experts right away, and it never quite happens. So how do you plan to build that involvement over time?

First, determine your early professional adopters.

This isn’t about early adopters anymore: personal social media accounts are extremely common. But not everyone is comfortable using these tools for work, leaving a professional electron trail that could be used by their organization long after they leave and that will remain part of their record as they continue their career elsewhere. Find the people who want to become thought leaders, who are willing to experiment with something new even in a context with higher stakes. You probably already know who in your organization this is.

Second, create an orientation and add new participants.

When you have results, more people will want to join in. They’ll be less willing to experiment, so be sure they know the results of your early experiments and how to get a return from the time they spend on social media. Teach them how to create content, but also how to promote it and how to build their audience. To keep everyone in sync with your organizational communications strategy, hold an orientation and occasional meetings where they can talk to each other.

Third, corral your late-adopters.

Not everyone will volunteer. Some organizations might require participation, but that isn’t a good thing to spring on people – especially in social media, where success depends on making these tools part of your routine. Instead, think about how to include people in a way that fits their style, perhaps by interviewing them yourself and talking about what you learned. A colleague might also dislike one tool but adopt another later on, so don’t stop asking them to get involved!

Posted in Issue Advocacy, Social Media | No Comments »

The Ten Best Ideas from BlogPotomac

by Jennifer Berk | Saturday, June 13th, 2009

BlogPotomac yesterday was an even better event than last year – less 101, more "here's how to actually use social media to reach organizational goals." Here's my list of the ten most thought-provoking comments from our speakers:

Shel Holtz: I don't know how you establish a long-term community around a movie.

Shel's talk on barriers to using social media (or any other new thing) in organizations was great, but what particularly struck me was his example of not every social media project being long-term. The Transformers sequel's foray into social media included a create-an-avatar tool (click Create a Profile Pic at the top left) with presets for various social networks, so fans of the franchise could show their interest and discover others who shared it. Not a long-term thing, but very effective in piggybacking on existing social media usage.
Shireen Mitchell: Watching on TV is different from being there in person, and social media can fill some (but not all) of the gaps.

At the Republican National Convention, they had a giant screen in the hall that the TV cameras never looked at. Shireen noticed how different the feel was for people present versus those watching from home (potentially dangerous in politics), and started blogging pictures of the screen. This kind of rounding out is a great opportunity for citizen reporting, as well as activity event creators should plan for and try to support.
Shireen Mitchell: The way Congress responds to advocates who use social media will determine how it's used.

This was her response to my question, based on POLC: Reaching Congress, according to Congress and according to advocates. It's a great answer in theory – reward the people who contact you in a way you like with your attention – but will require some technical implementation help in practice. One tool we might see: a Twitter client that filters out keywords, so a Member of Congress could tally up a set of identical petition-type tweets without having to read them all. If the Twitter spammers get any more persistent with unsolicited @replies, we might all find that useful.
Scott Monty: Your network is a social media monitoring tool.

When Ford hired Scott Monty to run their social media efforts, they got access to the goodwill Scott had built up online. I'd thought about this in the past from the perspective of crisis management, that when Scott said he'd look into something, people would wait to see what he found out instead of continuing to savage the company. But Scott explained that his friends also sent him things he should look into, posts he should comment on, etc. That human curation of important items is at least as accurate as social media monitoring services, making a broad network a concrete asset for online reputation work.
Scott Monty: Social media can serve different purposes for different departments and in different regions.

Social media can be customer service, recruiting, advocacy, fundraising, product development…. The new idea here is that your organization may be divided in a variety of ways, and the same proliferation of opportunities applies to all of them. You have to consider how social media can work for a particular person holding a particular job, in a particular brand/program, in a particular department, in a particular region. The best social media ideas will come from the context surrounding particular people.
Liz Strauss: As soon as you're hired, you're no longer a customer: learn to listen.

As soon as you walk in the door, you start knowing too much. If you want to know what customers think, you have to ask them. If you want to know what the internal customers of your work think, you have to ask them too. When we talk about social media, the first step mentioned is always to listen, but the evangelist better apply the same advice to her own work. Don't be the social media lead who spends so much time facing outward that he doesn't improve internal communication as well.
Amber Naslund: Using company resources but only building your own brand means both the company and you suffer when you leave.

This was from the personal branding session led by Amber and Aaron Brazell. Both presenters were very clear that having a personal brand get in the way of an organizational goal was unacceptable. But when the organizational goal is "make us seem like a friendly company," the person representing the company is using their own friendliness to make the company friendly. Not being able to separate the personal from the professional face is fine, as long as you connect to others' work to make the company look better as well as yourself.
Scott Monty (yet again): Have a social media succession plan.

Jen McClure's question in Amber's and Aaron's session was actually directed at Scott, asking whether Scott's work at Ford was comparable to Robert Scoble's at Microsoft (where people followed Scoble away when he left), and whether that problem was a reason to have more voices for a company than one spokesman. Scott made the excellent point that CEOs have succession plans, and they're even more the face of the company than he would ever be. Building a group of people within the company who have their own solid platforms should gradually alleviate this concern (I'd say Dell is well on its way, for instance, while Comcast has a team that's not as mature). The position of social media leader is more visible than most jobs, and succession planning in general is a neglected art, but planning for social media turnover is perfectly possible.
Shashi Bellamkonda: Reach out to other internal evangelists.

One of Network Solutions's employees is a top beer blogger in the DC area. Shashi asked his advice about how to make the Network Solutions blog better. Another employee didn't have time to talk, so Shashi said "call me next time you go out for a smoke" and met him there. You can listen and create a community internally, and it will help you listen and create a community externally.
Doug Meacham: Invite your community to spend downtime with you.

In a session with Kaitlyn Wilkins and Rohit Bhargava (who was filling in for David Armano) on Using Offline Interactions to Strengthen Your Brand Online, Doug told the story of the Campout music festival. Pitchatent Records and bands Cracker and Camper Van Beethoven invite fans to camp with them, listen to music, and interact – and build a stronger community around the music. For similar reasons, conferences are adding social events open to local non-attendees (e.g. BlogPotomac, MarketingProfs B2B Forum, Buzz2009). Informal time strengthens relationships, which is what social media is all about, after all.

Thanks to Geoff Livingston (and CRT/tanaka and Debbie Weil and A Brand New Way) for putting the conference together again – looking forward to the third this fall. For more reports from this BlogPotomac, see Julie's liveblog (including the sessions from Shel Holtz, Shireen Mitchell, Scott Monty, and Aaron Brazell and Amber Naslund) as well as:

So what was your favorite idea from BlogPotomac?

Posted in Social Media | 4 Comments »

POLC: How We Did It – the role of money in the Obama and McCain campaigns

by Jennifer Berk | Tuesday, April 21st, 2009

The theme of this keynote conversation, the last session I was able to attend, wasn't particularly supposed to be money. Joe Rospars (Former Director of New Media, Obama) and Michael Palmer (eCampaign Director, McCain) talked about what they did, their results, and lessons for future campaigns, but from early on the focus was definitely resources.

Why resources? Well, aside from being able to buy more TV ads, the Obama campaign had more staff. Probably a lot more staff. One New York Times story about August campaign spending, for instance, said "Mr. Obama, the Democratic candidate from Illinois, spent $2.7 million
on salaries in August, compared with $1.1 million for Mr. McCain, the
Republican of Arizona."

So what can you do with extra staff time?

Be in more places – Obama had profiles and updates on Facebook and MySpace and LinkedIn but also Eons, BlackPlanet, MiGente….
Build tools – Online phonebanking. iPhone app (built by supporters, not the campaign itself). Election day turnout system. Polling place finder. Investing in technology to make the campaign more efficient.
Send many targeted messages – Segment, use the ladder of engagement to get people more involved over time, identify your best advocates – all of those strategies take time.
Create your own news – From the NYTimes Bits blog: “The campaign’s official stuff they created for YouTube was watched for
14.5 million hours,” Mr. Trippi said. “To buy 14.5 million hours on
broadcast TV is $47 million.”

With less money/time, you should probably focus on the sites with greater returns and find existing tools. It's still worth targeting your messages and creating your own news, even if you can't follow those strategies to the same extent.

As Palmer said, McCain's campaign tried to keep up with Obama's, but I'd say one place they might have done better is the last point: they started out offering reporters and bloggers lots of access, but that tightened as they did more poorly. If you don't have a national campaign's ability to get messages out with TV ads, etc., you can't afford to follow their example. In the age of Google, more content about you means finding more supporters. More supporters gets you more donations gets you more staff time gets you more supporters – you can win an election that way.

Posted in Grassroots, Recent Trends, Social Media | No Comments »