Without a Yard

Some have noticed that the new gig has some, erm, restrictions on what I can say/publish about politics, which is totally fine & offers a handy excuse to neglect the blog.

BUT I couldn’t let this month-long provincial campaign go by without a non-partisan post begging y’all to give a crap…even if it’s a tiny crap.  You know what I mean.

Step One – Vote

Pretty much the LEAST you can do – consider it civic hygiene.  Best make sure that you are registered to do it on October 6th.  Don’t know which riding you’re in but can remember your postal code?  You’re golden.  Even if you’re super busy & can’t get to the polling station on E-day you can get a mail-in ballot.  Even if you’re away at school you can vote in your home riding or choose your school’s riding.  Even if you don’t live in the province anymore you can cast an absentee ballot.  Even if you are doing time you can vote from a correctional facility. You see where this is going, right?  No excuse.

Step Two – Read

The only thing hotter than a voter is an informed voter.  So get your read on, blaze up those GoogleAlerts, spice up your RSS reader & track campaign coverage from multiple outlets. Trevor’s built a fantastic resource on Politwitter that’ll serve up Ontario-only content.  He’s also aggregating blog posts that can be organized by province; same for Facebook pages.  Bonus points if you check party platforms before deciding which local candidate best represents your values & priorities.  Might also be fun to geek out & read past results for a context-refresher.

Step Three – Talk

Don’t get me wrong, FourSquare cafe check-ins, emo Instagram photos & food-related Twitter revelations are FASCINATING.  Just wondering if we could mix it up for the next month.  Try floating a leader’s campaign promise as a subject of discussion & see where things go.  Please note that Step Three is not labelled ‘Speech;’ talking means thoughtful conversations, interactions & respect for other points of view.  Godspeed on that one.

Step Four – Help

There are LOADS of gigs with Elections Ontario if you’d like to get involved hands-on. There’s also an Elections Ontario Outreach Team member for each riding who’ll support community events your organization is planning.  One of the most satisfying volunteer gigs I’ve ever worked was registering voters (you’d think it was rescuing all those drowning puppies, but no!).  Even if volunteers can’t actually get voters registered like in the U.S., you can point them to some great online information, including this post written specifically for new Canadians on Settlement.org or these youth-focused links & posts from Apathy Is Boring.

Thanks for indulging my nagging & good luck muddling through the onslaught of media coverage. Beats the breathless wannabe-L.A.  TIFF gossip, right?

Herein lies the sequel to the last post on humour & activism…some interesting case studies & words of encouragement have been ping’ed back.

Honourable mentions & fond reminiscing over LOLs of yore went to many American-election-related clips (Sarah Silverman’s Great Schlep, Barely Political’s Obama Girl meme) & last winter’s brutal Prop 8 melee in California, whose only silver lining/legacy is this over-the-top-star-studded-musical a melodic religious fundamentalist parody.

Celebrity aside, the juice that kept these URLs circulating was the humourous content – what many marketers/communicators love to call ‘sticky’ messaging – transmitted thanks to a wry undertone, quirky theme or flat-out parody.

The need to be *truly* funny was driven home by this week’s Sunlight Foundation blog post about how ineffective standard mass emails are for political/advocacy campaigns.

We’ve become increasingly immune to receiving messages guiltily prodding us into action, making donations or heightening our awareness through this inbox-filling-platform.  Just think – how many emails with witty titles do you delete sight-unseen on the daily?

One of the great things about pumping out newsletter-style emails to your preaching-to-the-converted-list is the metrics that you can mine for unique hits, forwards, open-rates, etc.

Sadly, according to the folks at Sunlight, open rates ain’t what they used to be.  Jake Brewer echoed many consultant/client concerns musing:

“I have a confession to make, though. I really don’t like email that much. I see 30% open rate and think “70% delete rate.” I see 8% click through, and think… “oh jeez.”

Strongly encourage you to check out his entire post as he eerily accurately dissects what has now become the cookie-cutter template for all advocacy/NGO emails:

SUBJ: Something catchy/funny/intriguing/pun to get you to open the email

That prompted an ‘oh jeez’ of my own…guilty as charged.  Often.  Moving beyond cheeky wordplay, what other funny elements can campaign communicators whip out to stand out?

One recent example, which used cheeky language IRL & online, stands out because it focused on the mobile platform’s hottest PYT, Foursquare.

Earthjustice’s San Francisco campaign is now in metro stations to assist their legal efforts to prosecute the oil companies behind the spill. BART stations around SF are displaying this advertisement, prompting transit users to check into a location called “Earthjustice Ad“, which results in an Earthjustice donor chipping in $10.

Many reasons to love this campaign, let’s try to list most of’em here:

• No onus on participants to donate

• BUT campaign message lingers in user’s Foursquare stream…& Earthjustice hopes users’ll scratch curious itches by visiting the NGO’s site…& hopefully/eventually donating themselves…

• By checking into the location, user’s friends’ streams are notified (the kids are calling this ‘viral’ these days)

• More bang-for-buck on ad-buy

• Metrics, metrics, metrics

• Novelty & time-killing aspect of foursquare is a perfect fit for transit downtimes (types the mayor of three streetcar lines…)

Now Earthjustice isn’t about to bonus its staff with a foursquare-funded Faberge egghunt anytime soon.

A quick visit to the registered location page itself yields some underwhelming results:

But, hey, it’s early days & in the grand scheme of things it’s $3,100 that I’d bet Earthjustice wouldn’t receive otherwise from these transit users’ involvement.  (There’s also a ‘Various Locations‘ version, too, with similar uptake).

It’d be great to hear what your predictions are for the next wave of cheeky/funny/quirky advocacy work going & how big of a role will mobile/location-based apps play…

Thought it might be informative to dust off ye olde bloge to share a quick & dirty summary of the twitter conversations that are happening this weekend regarding the G20 summit (& more often than not, the riots/vandalism that surrounded them).  Despite being smugly camped out in the east end, crazy stuff still managed to go down in my hood, & like many Torontonians I took to the webs to passive aggressively vent:

Overall, Twitter users commenting on the G20 reached 448 million, which will no doubt trickle to over 450 million by tomorrow:

A sample size of 500 most recent tweets referencing the G20 found less than 3% positive, 18% outright negative & a surprisingly large percentage, almost 80%, neutral. This bears true with a simple search reference-check, mainly descriptive comments about the weekend events:

This next stat is especially interesting, & we’ll see more of this trend in RT-momentum as live streaming breaking news becomes the norm on Twitter, & as more users experiment with actual live-streaming video capabilities on their mobile devices. With almost a third of all G20 tweets overall, the power of the “RT” can’t be ignored. For many this weekend, re-tweeted photos (Queen W/Spadina standoff), OHs (over-heard comments)/quotes & descriptions, flooded streams & instantaneously propelled one user’s note into a massive new audience:

And more often than not, that one user’s note that flooded other’s streams wasn’t coming from a high profile journo or media outlet. Only 2% of high authority twitter users were chiming in on the G20, which includes references in RTs:

& if there is any question whether the riot/vandalism overtook the media agenda/online user’s attention span…well, this is the graph of words associated with the G20, most often used ‘Spadina’/'Queen’/'Protester’/'Protest’ & CP24. Kudos vandals – you won the internet.

Big thanks to the Sysomos lads for building the tubes that makes all the pretty piecharts!

It’s been a long non-blogging stretch, which included live music (natch), a bday (piñata & nacho-enhanced), driver’s ed (2^nd time’s a charm, right?), domain registration lapse (ack!) & details emerging on what could be the wildest winter ever…

Thankfully, the key sanity check (outside of running/air-drum solo’ing) has been reading.  One of the best nerdy reads in a long while has been the Hatcher Group‘s recent report ‘New Media & Social Change: How Nonprofits are Using Web-based Technologies to Reach their Goals.’ Despite the sins of unnecessary capitalization, this is a punchy report worth downloading regardless of whether you or your clients are in the nonprofit sector.

Why is the Hatcher report, which is filled with some good ‘how-tos’ & tip sheets, different than the usual freebie ebooks or ‘top ten’ digg/delicious-bait blog posts?  It’s the data peppered throughout the report, which was culled from a relatively recent survey (May 2009).  The survey asked 70 key questions to gauge 30 NGOs’ new media interest & experience.  Most telling were these statistics confirming NGOs’ attuned state regarding the online world:

• 53% ‘infrequently’ & 30% ‘frequently’ perform blogger outreach (& 57% spend at least 1-2 hours a week doing so)
• 73% frequently monitor blog references to their organization &/or issue
• 60% increased their fanbase, 40% increased web traffic & 20% increased media coverage thanks to Facebook

It’s valuable to stay on top of this sector’s digital communications habits because it’s planting social media seeds in the most fertile ground.  This fertility is thanks to two factors – the necessity of very cost-conscious tool-use & a youngish workforce with a seemingly limitless supply of passion for their cause.

About this time last year, I drafted an interview list for a winter interview circuit of New York, Washington DC, Los Angeles & San Francisco.  A large percentage of the almost 30 interviewees were working for social change either in-house at non-profits or at agencies dedicated to the nonprofit sector.  While almost all of the interviewees were at or near the cutting edge of online tool adoption & seamlessly integrating digital communications into their organization’s overall plan, the Hatcher Report is a valuable sample of an average NGOs’ habits.

To demonstrate the more realistic snapshot & less experimental respondents, check out this survey response about the aims of an organization’s blogger outreach:

• 91% of organizations hoped to reach media
• 83% wanted advocates, legislators &/or staff to take note
• 70% sought the general public’s engagement through this unique digital channel

Perceiving online communications & blogger outreach as primarily a ‘means to an end’ for mainstream media coverage is a somewhat disheartening response from almost all 30 groups the Hatcher Group surveyed.  While blogs can break or popularize stories before they are reported in newspapers or on television, the 91% wish to affect MSM left me worrying that blogger outreach wasn’t being executed with the best intentions, & as a consequence, without the most tactful approach.

Am I being completely paranoid?  It seems odd that there was a 20% gap between NGOs who considered the ‘general public’ as a separate entity worth speaking with via blogs vs. feeding messages to the masses in a backdoor fashion via blog authors.  Regardless of this concern, the report is a great short read & in addition to the data offers short & sweet reminders about best practices in conducting campaigns online.

What do KISS, IKEA & Muslim women have in common? Unfortunately there’s no snappy punchline, it’s just an excuse to weave a nerd narrative through a bunch of interesting news stories.

I’m sure by now you’ve got your Oshawa B&B resos, relieved to hear the city’s glam-rocker residents’ KISS ARMY allegiance wasn’t in vain. The band ran a straightforward prove-how-much-you-love-us online contest, which was styled like a petition, requiring city residents to submit email addresses, & promised a concert for the winning city (regrettably it was a KISS concert).  After the band announced the winning city, they published a tour schedule that did not include Oshawa. Now, it doesn’t take Columbo to examine a tour schedule & discover a gap that is geographically & schedule-wise able to accommodate a ‘secret’ show or ‘by popular demand’ second night in a venue (Hello Wilco, Welcome to Massey Hall x2!).  Nonetheless, the interwebs’ hyper hypos have an irrepressible impulse to stretch their harnesses.  The city was up in arms, thousands joined Facebook protest groups, locals became ‘representatives’ on news outlets, fansites heaved & a PR maelstrom ensued.  Can’t completely blame unnerved fans for their reaction, but it proves that an online ‘petition’ campaign banking on engaging region-specific communities must reach all stakeholders clearly, consistently & concurrently – online & in ‘public’/mainstream media messaging – or face the wrath of multiple red-dye-tongue-waggings.

From KISS to kisses, The Times’ Freakonomics blogger Steven Dubner references gay rights kissing protests in Salt Lake City (or ‘IRL’ – in real life) in a fantastic quorum post called ‘How Much Do Protests Really Matter?’.  It’s a great long piece that highlights some of the most effective protests throughout history – & puts the KISS KRAP, ridiculous IKEA font fiasco & the ultimate online overreaction of #AmazonFail (of which Shirkey’s blushing reflection is the best) – into perspective.  Kent State, this ain’t. Aside from totally dismissing the online flareups, what can be gleaned from recent issues that’ve made their way into the mainstream?

One positive example of addressing consumer concerns straight-on is the triage-style response from Tim Horton’s to their comp’ed coffee clusterfritter.  After being accused of supporting anti-gay groups, HQ calmly, widely, publicly stated otherwise, while explaining the franchisee relationship & corporate values in a balanced manner.  Though they’ll go down in Twitter history as being ‘too slow’, realistically a major multi-national addressing an online issue centered on a (not ideal ideologically…) backwoods charity BBQ in less than 48 hours (counting weekend days…sadly the downside of our email era is expectation to check 24/7) is approaching impressive.

Finally, last Sunday’s NYTimes magazine on women’s issues had a special ‘The Medium’ column on Feminist Hawks by Virginia Herrernan. It illustrates how ‘motherhood’ issues (for lack of a better word…) can be repackaged, re-purposed & emailed for protest campaigns under new auspices.  In this case an anti-Afghan outlook was wrapped in women’s rights.  Herrernan tracked a popular email petition propelled by pundits such as David Horowitz that sought signatures supporting persecuted Muslim women, but stated military aggression was the solution to women’s liberation.  “This material is expected to help seal Horowitz’s general case for the war on terror, though he has not yet changed the name of his cause to, say, the war on misogyny.”

It might be hard to assign a #fail to online protests writ large, but the summer months brought a new level of inane chatter that could be called out & calmed down as the temperature drops & leaves begin to fall.  Creating online communities, sharing fact-checked/substantiated information & organizing IRL events is one of the strengths of the internet.  Our creative communities’ ongoing successes in subverting negative legislative/funding changes & presenting a strong case for supporting the arts is my favourite example of combining social networks, multimedia & the power of assembly to affect legislative change & public discourse.  Maybe revisiting the history of protests & learning from past well-informed, organized, thoughtful participants, will remind us of this.  You’ve been assigned Whingeing History for first period, first semester – enjoy the final days of summer, kids