Without a Yard

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

One of the oft-tossed phrases on The Twitter is ‘first world problem.’ Don’t know if it has jumped the meme shark, but it consistently serves a vital tone-defining purpose by allowing a user to whinge freely while communicating some self-awareness.  It’s a sly wink that in the grand scheme’o'things this croissant-less-cafe, super-long-supermarket-cue or obnoxious-TTC-seatmate is less tragedy, more inconvenience.

Two totally unrelated distinctly Canadian happenings over the summer have me thinking more about this phrase within the context of advocacy campaigns and public policy.

There is no shortage of interesting, well-researched, vibrant and thoughtful pieces written by political and tech bloggers on the CRTC hearings and the belief in ‘net neutrality’ - an issue that’s been close to my heart since the early aughts when interning at Heritage Canada and researching new media policies’ effects on our cultural industries.  And while it pains me to say this, not to undermine the many passonate people devoting energy to covering the hearings…I think we’re dealing with a #firstworldproblem here.

So I wanted to raise another #firstworldproblem, since we’re sitting here comfortably online in our sheltered homes or offices, powered by hydro, enjoying the interwebs (throttled or not) into the political blogosphere - howabout this summer’s TWO elections happening among Canada’s aboriginal population?  Any thoughts on the candidates campaign websites or the coverage or tools to monitor donations/events/promises?  Thought not.

With total affectionate bias towards the writer, I strongly believe that this piece by Waub Rice best reflects how the AFN election is both important and flawed in moving forward on issues affecting the quality of life of our country’s on-reserve native population.  Please do take a moment to read it to have a *glipse* of what it would be like growing up TODAY on-reserve across Canada where the speed of internet access is an unlikely topic of conversation.

Last month a blog post surfaced citing a very dated Stats Canada report (published 2004 using 00/01 datasets) calling this lack of internet access a ’second digital divide,’ but mainly attributed off-reserve aboriginal Canadians’ rates of use to living in non-urban areas and tracking alongside non-aboriginal rural internet access trends.

Essentially, sadly, on and off reserve internet access rates and the overall lack of robust compelling information and potentially collaborative spaces online regarding the issues facing aboriginal Canadians, the composition of band councils, the election of chiefs and the AFN itself, is due to the lack of the basics for many - we’re not talking high speed/wireless/unthrottled internet - it’s electricity, computers and modems - and in many cases the communities have yet to be ‘wired’ themselves.

As the AFN process will undoubtedly evolve, as noted in today’s Globe’s encouraging piece here, internet access for Aboriginal Canadians will become much more important.  Hopefully within the next five years we will see an infastrucutre that supports on-reserve and off-reserve natives to have access to all candidates’ information and tools with which they can raise issues, coordinate campaigns and offer the same level of engagement despite a community’s location.

The same tools used to communicate the challenges of first-past-the-post or advocate for electoral reform in provincial elections in Ontario and most recently BC will hopefully be used to engage Aboriginal Canadians in a discussion around building a more representative political system.  That’s a #firstworldproblem worth devoting some energy, IMHO.

In the midst of some eye-opening on-the-ground-coverage in Iran & reflections on social media’s use in times of crisis, Twitter’s been lauded as a tool able to bring ‘outsiders’ into the loop with unprecedented immediacy and increasing importance.  Most well-known & demonstrative of its role thus far were yesterday’s announcement that the US State Department contacted Twitter HQ to request the delay of scheduled updates to ensure continued information was broadcast from innumerable frustrated citizens & the underwhelmed disappointment with mainstream media coverage of the election among observers worldwide over the past week (a.k.a. #CNNfail).

When asked by friends to explain Twitter (often phrased as “Why the crap are you on your iPhone again, Rudey McJerkalot?!”), which happens a lot since this (flattering?!) bizarro world recognition, it’s hard to describe the scale & scope of the medium.  Depending on who you choose to follow, your daily dose of information via Twitter can consist solely of leaked hiphop mixtape bittorrents, horoscopes, localvore recipes, or salacious spam.

Like blogging, Twitter’s had a tough go earning the respect of mainstream media.

Lest I sound like a mohawk’d-Misfits-lovin’-kid screaming ‘Punk’s not dead!’, with every ‘decline of the relevancy of X’ article, there’s another useful voice popping up or staying vibrant online - be it on Twitter, blogs or holographic robot interpretive dances. The bad/boring/bored robots rust - this ratio of success:fail says nothing about the medium - the same can be said for unrecorded songs, unpublished poems & unsewn outfits.

Hopefully after this week’s umpteenth demonstration of Twitter’s usefulness beyond hype-y marketing forays it’ll stop being second-guessed as a fuel source to move forward an issue’s narrative.

Closer to home, & far more capable of describing the whats & whos of Twitter, are the computer whizzes at Sysomos.  Their report released on Friday is phenomenal. Some brilliant observations can be gleaned from just scanning the Summary if you’re tight for time, here are my favourites with my comments in parentheses:

-  21% of users have never posted a Tweet (Would most agree that the 1/5 ratio of ‘lurkers’ is the same for chat rooms & forums?)

-  72.5% of users joined between January - May 2009 (Mind-boggling growth rates, thanks to Oprah & Ashton)

-  65.5% of self-identified ‘PR Professionals’ have never posted an update ( hm. )

-  55% of users use something other than Twitter.com’s webpage version, Tweetdeck is #1 with 19.7% marketshare (could determine viability of pay-to-play or tiered membership offering based on how many users opt for paid mobile applications)

Hopefully the next generation of this report could examine the content overall to determine how many posts are Retweets (or ‘RT’s), sharing website URLs & messages to ask/reply to other users (’@’s back & forth) - this might give us a better idea of how conversational the medium can be vs. the broadcast-y nature in which it has been characterized/dismissed.

On that nerdy note, I bid you adieu & hope our paths cross in music nerdery this week during NXNE

Special hat-tip to Count Gavin (a.k.a. Gavin Stephens - hilarious Toronto comic) for movie-reference-reminder….

Completely blissed out after having a very edu-mi-cational Tuesday yesterday.  Was very lucky to meet the enthusiastic crew of EQAO with Intangibles auteur, colleague & reformed protester Boyd Neil, when we presented concepts and examples demonstrating the impact of digital media on the education sector to our province’s communications professionals.

Wrapped the afternoon/early evening on my old stomping ground, UofT campus - Sid Smith specifically.  Like a reverse of Proust’s dunkin’madelaine, the 70s dystopian architecture brought back the faint whiff of Fung Mess Hall chicken fingers & recycled over-brewed coffee.  Long-time-bud-turned-expert-’crat & professorial-type Josh Hjartarson was misguided enough to expose a mess of malleable minds to my mad ravings on the subject of government relations.  Of course Josh was his always affable self, presenting with sharp quips, awesome examples and too-hip clips.  My jokes about Napster being free when I was in undergrad were met with crickets’n'tumbleweeds.  Le sigh.

Some tough queries from the always bright UofT PoliSci students that’re TEN YEARS YOUNGER THAN ME.  If y’all have any queries about what I *do* in GR…fire away…or click ahoy:

Finally, the most edu-mi-cational part of the day was discovering new music & meeting new Tweeps in the 2nd Twuneup Community (Follow’em @TwunesTO).  My pick out of all the the amazing cover songs? Beck+Of Montreal = AWESOME (not crystal clear recording…)