We’re living in a mobile age. You can’t walk down the street without bumping into someone on their smart phone. And now with the stunningly fast growth in sales for iPads, people are spending less and less time at their actual computers.

Wired magazine famously declared last year that “The Web is Dead.” In the article, Chris Anderson and Michael Wolff argue that we’re abandoning the web for sleeker, simpler services. They say that “these dedicated platforms often just work better or fit better into [people’s] lives (the screen comes to them, they don’t have to go to the screen).” People are no longer interested in seeking. They are interested in getting.

In today’s world, people are constantly on the go. And so naturally, staying connected and receiving information happens on the go as well. In fact, a recent study by Flurry found that people are now spending more time on mobile apps than they are on websites.  Consumers in June spent 74 minutes per day on websites compared with 81 minutes using applications. That’s a growth of 91 percent over the past year. The data speaks for itself: mobile apps are crucial in reaching audiences.

So what does this mean for advocacy? Web sites alone will no longer cut it. Sure, your online Grassroots Action Centers and the Web tools you employ for grassroots action (for example, providing the opportunity for your activists to send emails directly to Congress) should remain part of your overall advocacy strategy. But you have to look beyond the Web now.

Some advocacy organizations have begun to embrace this growing trend. In the beginning of June, the ONE campaign launched an iPhone app dedicated to encouraging activism in order to enact social change. In short, the app provides the user with relevant information about “various advocacy movements…then lets you call a senator, sign a petition or join up with a real life rally for causes in order to raise awareness.” The interest in the app has been tremendous. During its first two weeks, the free application recorded more than 20,000 downloads.*

Other grassroots groups have actually been taking advantage of this innovative tool for awhile. In June 2010, The Poker Players Alliance created an iPhone app that allows users to take a variety of actions. Directly from their iPhone, a user can get the latest PPA news and updates, connect with other PPA members, and actually donate via PayPal. Even better, it has a ‘click to call Congress’ feature, where users can simply click a button and be automatically connected via phone to their member of Congress’ office in Washington, D.C. For all of those poker enthusiasts on the go, it has never been easier, and less time-consuming, to take action.

Remember this: if a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? If you are asking your audience to take action, it only matters if you reach them where they are paying attention. Consider utilizing mobile apps in your next advocacy campaign. The results may astound you.

*Source: http://philanthropy.com/blogs/social-philanthropy/new-nonprofit-apps-advocacy-management-and-mission-get-attention/28766

Last year, Wired Magazine proclaimed that “The Web is Dead.” The authors of the article argued that although the Internet is alive and well, its users are increasingly turning to simple and semi-closed applications.  Demand for accessing the wide-open Web through browsers is fading.  Instead, we now prefer the type of mobile, streamlined computing available through smart phones and iPads.

One recent marketing trend shows how right the Wired article may be.  More and more, companies are moving away from listing their Web addresses in print and TV advertisements.  Instead, many top brands are pushing their target audiences to a Facebook fan page.

In Volkswagen’s “Meet the Volkswagens” commercial, the company lists its Facebook address on the final shot of the ad: facebook.com/vw.  Procter & Gamble, one of the biggest companies in the world, is now regularly listing Facebook addresses in print and TV advertisements for many of its top products.  According to AdAge, P&G now has more than 15 brands with Facebook followings in the six figures.  Two of its brands — Pringles and Old Spice — had 9 million and 1.3 million, respectively, as of April 2011.

This shift away from using traditional Web addresses as the tagline for advertisements in favor of Facebook URLs is fascinating from a business perspective.  For marketing professionals, every decision boils down to how to best maximize a company’s return on investment (ROI).  Some companies have clearly decided that increasing traffic to their Facebook pages offers a better ROI than driving traffic to their Web sites.  A company as large as P&G would not make this move unless its marketing executives were confident that sending consumers to Facebook is more likely to increase sales.

Part of this ROI calculation likely stems from the type of long-term consumer engagement that Facebook offers for companies.  A potential customer who “likes” a brand on Facebook has effectively integrated the brand into their everyday lives.  Fans will see the brand’s status updates in their News Feeds and may even join a conversation alongside of other brand aficionados.  The potential for this type of long-term engagement may well be what is motivating companies to drive traffic to Facebook, even though a web site offers consumers the chance to actually research and even purchase products.

What does this mean for advocacy organizations?  Every organization should be thinking about whether it would get a better ROI by driving people to its Facebook presence as opposed to its Web site.  We should be thinking about the value of a “like” for our organization on Facebook.  We should be thinking about the return we might get if a member or potential member receives status updates about the organization in their News Feeds.

Even if you think that your Web site offers more value to members and is a better clearinghouse of information, your organization would be well-served to consider using your Facebook URL in marketing materials and emails.  The ROI just might be worth it.

Cross-posted from Adfero

Last week I gave a presentation at America’s Small Business Summit, sponsored by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, about how small businesses and organizations can develop an effective — but manageable — social media strategy.

I deliberately stayed away from talking about the latest and greatest tactics, and the newest and coolest tools.  Why?  It has become far too easy to get caught up in looking at what’s new, interesting, or different.  In reality, what we should be focusing on is what will fundamentally help our organizations achieve their missions on a daily, monthly, and yearly basis.

Organizations too often develop a social media strategy that is not properly integrated into its overarching goals.  So rather than spending time on the latest Twitter app or discussing the merits of Facebook’s latest design changes, I encouraged attendees not to get bogged down in the tactics.  Instead, I urged them to develop their social media strategies in the context of their organization’s key goals.

If your organization is looking to develop or refine your social media strategy, here are six steps to guide you along the way.

1. Clarifying the Organization’s Priorities. Even if you “get” social media, you can’t jump right in to creating a tactical plan.  First and foremost, it is critical to identify your organization’s goals.  For a business, it might be trying to win more customers, to recruit top talent, or increase revenue by a certain percentage.  For an association, a goal might be to recruit and retain members, to increase attendance at a tradeshow, or to achieve a certain policy objective.  Before you even think about tactics, you need to start by understanding what is driving your organization as a whole.  Otherwise, you will be implementing a plan that lacks any real purpose.
2. Setting Social Media Goals. With these key goals in mind, you should move on to develop specific goals for your organization’s social media efforts.  One example: increase your Facebook page’s monthly views by 50%.  Although traditional PR campaigns focus heavily on setting goals for media coverage, we often skip this step for social media efforts because we have no idea what to expect.  But even if social media represents unchartered territory for your organization, forming goals does two important things.  First, it focuses your social media team on what is really important.  Second, it gives your team an idea of what to work towards, even if that goal turns out to be unrealistic.  A corporation would never launch a new product without giving its sales force target revenue goals.  That’s true even if the company is completely unsure of how the product will perform.  Setting social media goals, even if they are somewhat arbitrary, provides direction for your team and sets expectations.
3. Choosing Social Media Tactics. Perhaps the most overwhelming step in this process in deciding where and how to spend your social media resources.  Over the past few years, there has been an explosion in social media sites, especially those designed to facilitate sharing.  But in the past year or two, the dust has settled.  Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn have emerged as the three most widely used social media sites and the most important sites for your organization to consider using.  Picking among these sites requires knowing your audience.  Each social media outlet has pro’s and con’s for individual audiences. Facebook, for example, is best for appealing to a broad-based, mainstream audience.  In contrast, Twitter users – although far fewer in number than Facebook – represent a highly engaged segment of the online population and are much more likely to create (rather than just share) content.  Finally, LinkedIn is a professional site that might be right if your organization is hoping to impact the business community or to use working groups.  Choose the right vehicle (or vehicles) for engaging your target audience.
4. Developing an Operational Plan. The next step is taking your goals and your selected tactics to form a comprehensive plan that breaks down what your organization should be doing on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis.  This operational plan should lay out each activity and assign each one to a specific person in the organization (in some cases, that may be the same person).  Your operational plan should also detail how you will monitor responses to your online activity and what your approach to engagement will be (for example, it should detail your comment policies).  Finally, your plan should include a process for reporting and evaluating your progress. You might wonder if such a detailed approach will stifle creativity.  It shouldn’t, as long as your plan allows for opportunities to be creative along the way.  The key is to set specific times to reevaluate and refine your tactics and goals
5. Getting Organizational Buy-In. Your strategy will only be successful if it has organization-wide support.  One way to get buy-in is to involve as many people as you can in the planning process itself, which will create a sense of ownership in the employees who participate.  Once you have your plan, be sure to educate other employees who may not have been part of the planning.  You should emphasize that social media success will translate into broader success for the organization as a whole, ultimately benefiting every employee.  Finally, to the extent that is possible, delegate responsibility for the social media strategy to as many employees as possible.
6. Implementing the Strategy. The last step involves executing the strategy you have created.  At this stage, it is best to think of classifying each of the activities listed above into the following categories: research, design (organizational priorities, social media goals, and tactics), implementation (getting buy in), administration (operational plan), and optimization.  As I noted above, implementation will work best if you have carved out time to refine and optimize your strategy as you move forward.  These opportunities will ensure your strategy remains effective and manageable.

Last week, event registration site Eventbrite released data indicating that an individual Facebook “Like” is capable of driving more sales than a single tweet.  The study used in-house social analytics tools to track ticket sales, finding that the average tweet drove $0.80 in sales as compared to the average Facebook Like, which drove $1.34.

It may very well be that Facebook is a better tool for direct marketing to the general population.  But Eventbrite’s findings – and the media coverage that followed – miss the point about Twitter’s value.

Because Eventbrite’s findings were focused on how often the general population signs up for event, it’s not surprising that Facebook would win the head-to-head battle with Twitter.  As I have written before, the Twitter-Facebook divide can be explained by an analogy to two important but very different Inside-the-Beltway publications.  Facebook is best compared to Politico: both appeal to the general population and have a high volume of users/readers.

Twitter, in contrast, is about influencing the influencers.  Twitter is more like the National Journal of the social media world: it has a smaller user base, but the users themselves are more media-savvy and connected.

A study performed by ExactTarget last fall shows the influence of Twitter users.   The email marketing company found that active Twitter users’ reach goes far beyond Twitter: 72% of Twitter users publish blog posts at least monthly, 70% comment on blogs, 61% comment on news sites, and 61% write at least one product review monthly.

Morgan Stewart, the principal of ExactTarget’s research and education group, commented that the study’s findings showed “that even though the number of active Twitter users is less than Facebook or email, the concentration of highly engaged and influential content creators is unrivaled.”

If your goal is to sell tickets to a particular event, Facebook may be the right place to focus your efforts.  But ignoring Twitter altogether is a mistake – it is the best place to engage with content creators whose influence and connections extend far beyond the site itself.

Key contact programs are vital in today’s advocacy environment.  Having a large grassroots army that can mobilize on a range of issues is necessary, but not sufficient.  Organizations also need to be able to call on a committed group of activists who are willing to go above and beyond.

Unlike a traditional grassroots campaign, a key contact program focuses on a narrower subset of individuals.  Specifically, a “key contact” is someone who either (1) has an established relationship with an elected official; (2) has a comfort level with engaging in intense advocacy activities, such as making phone calls or doing in-person visits; or (3) has built up political capital through involvement in groups like the PTA.  One useful approach to building a key contact program around these types of individuals is the RAP Index.

Earlier this year, the Congressional Management Foundation released “Perceptions of Citizen Advocacy on Capitol Hill,” compiling the results of a survey of more than 250 congressional staff about constituent communications.  (Disclaimer: My firm, Adfero Group, is a co-sponsor of the report.)

One figure in the CMF’s report shows how Congressional staffers rated the influence of various advocacy tactics.  At the top of the list were “in person visits from constituents,” which 46% of respondents rated as having “a lot of positive influence,” and 51% rated as having “some influence.”   In contrast, only 1% of respondents rated “form email messages” as having “a lot of positive influence,” with 50% responding that form emails have “some influence.”

Although high-volume efforts like form email campaigns play a role in effective advocacy strategies, these statistics show that making an impact on Capitol Hill largely depends on high-touch advocacy tactics.  A Member’s one-on-one time with the well-educated and well-connected advocate is crucial to advancing an organization’s message.

If your organization is looking to develop a key contact program, here are some steps to follow:

1) Begin building in advance. An effective key contact program takes time to create.  It is not something you can develop overnight when your organization is facing an unexpected crisis.  If you expect a tough legislative fight in the future, start thinking about a key contact program now.

2) Focus on geography. You may not need a key contact program that spans all 50 states.  Outline your legislative goals for the next several years and figure out what states and districts are most important for those goals.  Concentrate your key contact program in these areas.

3) Analyze your current assets. Far too many organizations try to jumpstart a key contact program by starting from scratch instead of looking back to see who has taken action in the past.  Start with your existing assets and build from there.

4) Survey your entire membership. You should consider everyone, regardless of whether or not they have taken action in the past.  You never know who is going to turn out to be a great advocate.  A member may not be interested in politics, but her son could play on a soccer team with a Senator’s son.  When you survey your membership, your goal should be to figure out who has the key relationships, what those relationships are, and how strong they are.  You may find your best advocates from the most unlikely of sources.

5) Continually educate and inform your key contacts. The biggest mistake organizations make is to build a key contact list and then neglect it for three, six, or even twelve months when there is no pressing legislative goal.  You should provide your key contacts with special insider information on a regular basis to keep them engaged.

6) Reward and recognize. Your organization should brainstorm creative ways to reward and recognize your best advocates.   For example, the American Society of Anesthesiologists (an Adfero client) recently launched its “Advocacy Network,” which allows advocates to log into a Web site to report each action they take, place themselves on the ASA Advocacy Map, and earn points toward the ranking of “superactivist.”  The ASA’s efforts to reward its advocates have dramatically increased participation within its network.  Your efforts to recognize top activists will pay off.

7) Continually recruit and refine your efforts. Don’t neglect newcomers to the game.  You should regularly adjust your key contact program to be sure it is working effectively.

For nearly a decade, the Communicating with Congress project has worked to improve communications between the public and Members of Congress.  This post provides a roadmap for both advocacy organizations and Members on how to use the information from the project’s latest report.

Recommendations for Advocacy Organizations

There are five key points that advocacy organizations should take away from the CMF’s latest report as they plan their grassroots strategies.

#1: Educate Your Members

In a 2007 poll conducted by CMF, 44% of Americans responded that they had contacted a U.S. Senator or U.S. Representative within the previous five years.  That statistic is truly staggering.  Nearly half of Americans have actively participated in our democratic system during the past five years.  The Internet has opened a new and much broader conversation between constituents and elected representatives.

In general, Capitol Hill seems to agree that Internet-facilitated constituent involvement is a good thing.  In a separate CMF poll, Members and their staffers responded that grassroots advocacy has increased participation and accountability.  However, they also believe that the quality of constituent interactions has declined and that the public’s overall understanding of Congress has decreased.

Online advocacy tools have almost made it too easy to contact Congress.  To contact a Member, all citizens need to do is fill out their name and click a button.  Congress’s perception of an uninformed citizenry reflects a certain degree of complacency in the grassroots community.  Organizations have come to rely (sometimes exclusively) on this one-click access to Congress to implement their strategies.

Organizations and corporations need to take the time to educate their members and employees about how Congress and advocacy works.  For example, activists should understand the issues they are writing about.  They should also understand that a well-written, personalized letter is more likely to have an impact than a form letter.  Directing members to a click-and-send form may be easy and may produce fast results, but advocacy groups need to resist the temptation to stop there.

#2: Mobilize Key Activists

The CMF’s report also demonstrates that advocacy groups need to step up efforts to engage in high-touch grassroots campaigns.  To do so, organizations must make a renewed effort to identify, recruit, educate, and mobilize key activists.

In most districts, there are a handful of constituents who are willing to spend a great deal of time advocating on behalf of an issue — much more than the five minutes it takes to send a form email.  Advocacy groups need to recognize these activists and recruit them to participate in the high-touch, personalized type of campaign that tends to most effectively influence Congress.  Here again, educating key activists about the issues and about how Congress works is critical.  High-touch campaigns will be most effective when activists understand advocacy.

#3: Create a Tele-Town Hall Advocacy Strategy

One of the specific ways that advocacy groups can engage in high-touch campaigns is to develop a Tele Town Hall (TTH) advocacy strategy.   According to the CMF’s report, Congress’s use of TTH’s has exploded over the past few years.

Staffers report that the popularity of TTH’s is due to the impact they have on Members: hearing the emotion in a constituent’s voice as she talks about an issue can be more powerful than even the most eloquent email.  Members are fully engaged when they participate in TTH’s, replicating the feel of an in-person visit and town hall meetings.  TTH’s also offer certain advantages over these traditional in-person forms of engagement.  Up until last year’s healthcare debate, in-person town hall meetings tended to attract true activists.  In contrast, by contacting large number of constituents via telephone calls, TTH’s allow Members to get insight from everyday citizens.

TTH’s present a challenge for advocacy organizations, but there are still ways to leverage their growing relevance.  First, advocacy organizations should make an effort to know when Members are holding TTH’s.  Although they are not always well-publicized, many Members allow constituents to sign up to participate in advance.  Advocacy groups should also prepare members for how to participate effectively in a TTH by asking good questions in an appropriate way — again, education is key.

For those organizations with a large membership base (such as the AARP) or corporations with a large number of employees in a particular district or state (such as Wal-Mart in Arkansas), there is an opportunity to self-organize TTH’s that are exclusive to their own members. (Kudos to the AARP, which has already self-organized a number of TTH’s.)  In some cases, a format that utilizes video — such as on online broadcast via U-Stream — may be even more beneficial, creating a stronger connection between the Member and participants.  Taking the initiative to organize this type of an event will give members and employees a unique chance to directly communicate with Congress.

#4: Volume Still Matters

In the advocacy community, the message that has emerged in the past few years is that campaigns built around form emails are less effective than those built around personalized communications from constituents.  When grassroots professionals pick up CMF’s report, they will once again see that form emails are rated as being significantly less effective than other types of advocacy activities.

In some ways, this is obvious: a personalized email is far more likely to have an impact than a form email.  It connects an issue to an individual constituent, and provides stories for Members to use on the floor as they advocate for a particular bill or amendment.

Yet, the CMF’s rating only tells half the story: it focuses on quality and ignores quantity.  One form email may do little (especially when compared to a personalized email), but 10,000 form emails indicating for a bill obviously has a much greater effect on a Member than a single in-person advocating against the bill.

The “somewhat effective” rating is also more reflective of a junior staffer’s perspective than a Member’s.  Many lower-level staffers typically dislike high-volume email campaigns because they mean more work.  Members, on the other hand, respond to volume.  One Republican Senator reinforced this point when he told the CMF that “mail matters more than constituents think it does.” Hill offices catalogue all emails, even those they never respond to.  And when Hill offices produce mail reports, those reports typically don’t distinguish between form emails and personalized ones.

For a Member, seeing that 5,000 constituents have sent emails in support of an issue will have an impact.  When I worked on the Hill, the Member I worked for insisted on getting updates before every key vote about the number of constituents who had contacted the office both for and against the bill.

Advocacy groups that adopt a strict “no form email” approach may miss out on one of the most important ways of influencing Congress.  High-touch efforts are critical, but volume still matters.

#5: Plan Strategy Based on Goals and Stop Playing Games

Choosing between form email campaigns and high-touch efforts should depend on the nature of the organization’s legislative goal.  For groups seeking to have a long-term impact — perhaps by jump-starting a Congressional investigation or a new piece of legislation — a high-touch approach is best.  If the chosen tactic is an individualized email campaign, organizations need to educate members about both the issue they are writing about and how to draft an effective letter in their own words.  Emails that explain why the author cares about an issue and why other constituents in their District share their concerns are more likely to have an impact and provide Members with content for floor speeches.

For those groups whose goal is to influence pending vote on a specific piece of legislation at the last minute, the best approach is a form email campaign.  Volume matters (see above), and Hill offices can process form emails more quickly to give Members the percentages of constituents in favor of and against the bill. Since personalized letters take more time to be entered into a Member’s mail system than form letters, I would make the case that organizations should encourage advocates to send form emails in the final days leading up to the vote to ensure they are counted.

What is not effective, regardless of an organization’s short- or long-term goals, is game-playing.  To avoid the “form email” label, some groups have invented alternatives.  Rather than using a single letter, groups ask constituents to fill in the blanks to “personalize” an email, or to pick and choose from an assortment of pre-written paragraphs to form the body of a letter.

Hill offices are not fooled by these deceptive efforts.  Earlier this year, at a Get PR Smart event about strategies for reaching Congress, panelists Eric Jones (from Sen. Tom Harkin’s office) and Armstrong Robinson (from Rep. Geoff Davis’s office) expressed resentment toward these types of efforts.  Most Hill staffers understand that these “alternatives” are just another form of game-playing.  By trying to manufacture personalized stories, these tactics only make life more difficult for staffers who have to wade through convoluted emails only to discover that the email doesn’t say anything personal at all.  Advocacy groups should stop trying to game the system.

Recommendations for Congress

Although advocacy groups have a lot of work to do, the CMF reports also makes it clear that Congress still has its own shortcomings when it comes to constituent communications.

#1: Ignore Constituent Email at Your Own Peril

The volume of emails that Congressional offices receive on a daily basis would make it understandable for Members to take short-cuts to avoid having to respond to each one individually.  Yet the CMF’s report shows that if Congress ignores constituent emails, they do so at their own peril.

Several years ago, my colleague Chris Battle, himself a former chief of staff on the Hill, wrote an opinion piece in Roll Call in which he encouraged Congress to catch up with the times.  At that time, some Congressional offices were trying to decrease their workloads by actively discouraging constituents from using email.  Chris advocated for Congress to adapt to emerging technologies and find ways to facilitate, rather than dissuade, constituent email.

Thankfully, the CMF’s report indicates that most Hill offices recognize that the high volumes of email they receive represent an opportunity.  Junior staffers are understandably still discouraged by the amount of work that constituent email entails; after all, they are the ones responsible for recording each incoming email and ensuring it is responded to appropriately.   However, the Members themselves, as well as chiefs of staff, appreciate that email campaigns represent an opportunity to build a database of constituents and to begin a conversation with the public.

#2:  Update Technology & Operational Procedures

CMF’s report also demonstrates that Congress still needs to update the tools they use to manage their constituent communications.  (Disclosure: I am an owner of Fireside21, a company that provides software solutions to Member offices.)  Increasingly, technology is moving in a direction that will allow Hill offices to track all forms of communication in a single database, allowing Hill offices to view an individual constituent’s entire history of communications.  Not only can technology streamline the work for Hill staffers, it can also result in improved engagement between Members and constituents.

Recommendations for Congress and Advocacy Organizations

Finally, both Congress and advocacy groups could benefit from working towards two goals that will lead to a more effective and engaged relationship between constituents and Members.

#1: Write Emails Like Emails

Although both advocacy groups and Hill officers are using email as their primary means of communication, both sides could use a lesson in email etiquette.  The letters that advocacy groups draft often sound formulaic, more like a press release than an email.  Similarly, the email responses Members send read as if they are written by first-year attorneys.

The format is email – but neither side is sending anything that sounds like a real email.  Both sides would benefit from using more informal language and treating email exchanges as a real-life conversation, not as paper correspondence.

#2: Streamline Communications between Citizens and Congress

Moving forward, two goals for communicating with Congress stand out.  Advocacy groups want to legitimize email campaigns as an accepted grassroots strategy that is taken seriously on Capitol Hill.  Congress, in turn, wants to relieve the stress that comes with handling large volumes of inbound emails.

Despite the apparent divergence between these two goals, streamlining the constituent-Member conversation could potentially solve both problems.  Another one of the CMF’s projects, a Partnership for a More Perfect Union, is dedicated to developing a set of standards for software companies that send letters to the Hill.  These standards would require emails to contain certain data points that make it clear what organization is behind the email and what specific campaign the email is associated with.

Adopting some version of these standards would solve both problems.  For Congress, it relieves some of the angst that Hill staffers face by making mail much easier to sort and respond to.  For advocacy organizations that choose to follow the standards, it would give a higher degree of credibility to email campaigns by increasing transparency and making Congress more receptive to high-volume campaigns.

Cross-posted from Adfero.com

Facebook and Twitter are clearly two very different social media platforms.  For advocacy professionals in particular, building a community on Facebook is very different than building an engaged following on Twitter.  The Twitter-Facebook divide is best explained by an analogy to two Inside the Beltway publications that represent different but equally important audiences: Politico and National Journal.

Facebook is to Politico…

Although its coverage is focused exclusively on one topic, Politico maintains a broad and diverse audience.  It is read by Inside the Beltway professionals and political junkies everywhere, from D.C. to the South to the Midwest.  In 2009, Politico reportedly had a circulation of 32,000, with 6.7 million unique visitors to its web site per month.

Similarly, Facebook is used by a wide variety of the American public. Your neighbor, your co-worker, even your mother is increasingly likely to be a Facebook user. According to Facebook, the site now has more than 500 million active users.  Fifty percent of those users log in to Facebook on a daily basis.  The sheer volume of activity on the site makes it a no-brainer for advocacy professionals looking to build a large and active following.  Facebook’s mainstream appeal also makes it an easier sell to management: because executives are also likely to know friends and family members who use the website regularly, it is easier for them to recognize the value of building a presence on the site.

… As Twitter is to National Journal.

Twitter, on the other hand, has not gone quite so mainstream.  Although the site continues to grow and was projected to reach 200 million users by the end of 2010, a much smaller percentage of the American public use Twitter on a daily basis. One 2010 study estimated that just 21% of Twitter users are active, with a relatively small number of “power users” responsible for the vast majority of Tweets.

It is easy to see why these statistics might discourage advocacy professionals from dedicating scarce resources and budget to maintaining a Twitter account.  Yet, Twitter users should not be overlooked so quickly.  The key is understanding Twitter’s main advantage.  Unless you are Ashton Kutcher, using Twitter is not about reaching a broad audience like Facebook or Politico.  Instead, Twitter offers a way to engage with a small but influential user base, reflecting the approach taken by National Journal.

Like Politico, National Journal is narrowly focused on political issues.  However, the publication’s readership is much smaller than Politico’s, with its total circulation just under 12,000.  But, those 12,000 readers are primarily made up of the most influential Inside the Beltway figures, including Members of Congress and their staffs and Executive Branch officials.

Obviously, Twitter users are not quite so uniformly prominent.  In general, though, Twitter users do represent a more media-savvy, influential section of the population.  In essence, Twitter is a place to influence the influencers.  Advocacy professionals should not write off Twitter without understanding the opportunities it offers to influence journalists, bloggers, policy wonks, and lawmakers.  For organizations looking to engage meaningfully about policy issues online, Twitter is perhaps the place to start the conversation.

What do you think? Is this a helpful analogy? I would love to hear your thoughts on how public affairs professionals understand the unique value of both Facebook and Twitter.

Cross-posted from Ad Week

Newspaper Business Model: Unsustainable in Any Form
The ‘newspapers are dying’ story line is hardly novel

U.S. newspapers as we know them will be extinct by 2017.

So says Ross Dawson, a self-proclaimed “futurist” from Australia who released a global newspaper extinction time line in October. Dawson’s latest time line makes country-by-country predictions based on factors including a nation’s demographics, consumer behaviors and technological capacities. Unsurprisingly, the U.S. newspaper empire is predicted to crumble first, given Americans’ widespread adoption of handheld technology and the declining state of the nation’s newspaper industry. The newspaper will apparently endure a slow and painful death around the globe, spanning from 2017 to 2040—and, perhaps, beyond. (He predicted that Australian newspapers would meet their demise by 2022.)

The “newspapers are dying” story line is hardly novel. Most media gurus agree that the paper-and-ink newspaper is on the decline and will eventually become a relic. Yet many, including Dawson, believe that the news organizations themselves will survive in some transformed state. Forbes’ media columnist Dirk Smilie, for instance, is another one who argues that newspapers will stage a comeback after widespread efforts to cut costs and staff. In some cases, he expects that new management will provide much-needed energy to the dying organizations.

The rationale: people have to get their news from somewhere, right? If a market for news content still exists, it’s believed, newspaper organizations will just have to adapt their methods of delivery. Specifically, they’ll have to abandon newsstands and paperboys in favor of Web sites, blogs and mobile apps.

But this confidence in the newspaper industry’s ability to adapt is misplaced. The newspaper business model is simply not flexible enough to undergo such a dramatic transformation—especially given the increasingly competitive online news industry.

One example is The Huffington Post, which now trails only The New York Times in monthly Web traffic.Some reports note that it regularly outperforms other major dailies like USA Today, The Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post. Yes, The Huffington Post is primarily an aggregator. It produces little original content and certainly nothing on the scale of a major daily’s investigative reporting. But the growing Web site maintains a full-time staff of approximately 185 employees. More importantly, after struggling to monetize its popularity for the past several years, Forbes magazine expects HuffPo to triple its revenues in 2010.

If—or, according to Dawson, when—The  New York Times stops printing newspapers, it will be able to eliminate an incredible amount in overhead costs: no more paper, no more ink, no more delivery trucks, no more production staff. Yet even a streamlined, paperless New York Times will have operating costs that are simply unsustainable. In particular, it’s difficult to envision how the organization—which had 1,332 newsroom employees alone in 2008—will ever be able to operate on a shoestring staff of 200.

And HuffPo is only the tip of the iceberg of competition. National newspapers once dominant in niche areas no longer enjoy monopolies. For example, Politico’s coverage has forced The Washington Post to fight for its once faithful political audience. In-depth investigative reporting is increasingly being performed by nonprofit organizations.

Even regional dailies’ classic areas of coverage are in jeopardy. ESPN.com, for instance, has launched a series of Web sites providing localized coverage in regional sports markets.

A lot can happen in the next seven years. New technologies could present entirely new challenges to newspapers and their upstart competitors. Creative solutions could emerge. But today it seems unrealistic to expect that newspaper organizations will be able find a profitable business model to support the type of dramatic transformation that is necessary to compete.

The newspaper business model appears financially unsustainable, both in its current form and any conceivable future variation. From a business perspective, 2017 may be too generous a prediction.

In a 2007 poll, 44% of Americans responded that they had contacted a U.S. Senator or U.S. Representative within the previous five years.

According to the Congressional Management Foundation’s Communicating with Congress report, this percentage was significantly higher than a 2004 poll, largely due to the increased availability of online tools to contact Congress.

CMF’s data suggests a more engaged electorate – something that should be viewed as a positive. After all, an ideal representative democracy functions best when more citizens voice their opinions.

Yet in a recent piece for The Huffington Post titled “The Tragedy of Political Advocacy,” Jake Brewer takes issue with this very trend. Jake’s main point is that modern advocacy campaigns create lots of noise, but produce few tangible results. The result? Lobbyists play an even more important role in the lawmaking process. Hill staffers don’t know what or who to pay attention to, so they turn to hired guns to make sense of their overflowing inboxes.

In many ways, Jake is right. Frustration with email-focused grassroots campaigns — and the organizations that create them — is understandable. No one can argue (at least not with a straight face) that inundating Capitol Hill offices with email messages is the most effective way to achieve a policy goal. Campaigns built around phone calls and snail mail letters don’t fare any better.

Advocacy organizations have become their own worst enemies. They focus on generating a certain number of constituent “actions,” hoping that the sheer volume of contacts will make Members take notice of an issue. In trying to stand out, most grassroots campaigns only create more noise.

There are undoubtedly more effective ways of implementing advocacy campaigns. But Jake’s critique of modern advocacy trivializes what the Internet has done for democracy. It is undeniable that a much larger percentage of the American public is in contact with Congress because of the Internet.

Increased political engagement is something to be embraced, in spite of the headaches it brings. The advocacy community should be focusing on how to harness Americans’ increased appetite for involvement and translate it into a more meaningful dialogue with Congress.

Right now, real conversations between Members and their constituents are few and far between. A Hill staffer sending a form response back to a campaign-generated email does little for either side. There is surely a richer way for constituents and legislators to communicate. (The CMF has gone so far as to release an entire report on “Recommendations for Improving the Democratic Dialogue.”)

Jake certainly does not advocate for eliminating public engagement with Congress. His proposed solutions (including hand delivering petitions to Capitol Hill offices and compiling constituent votes on specific pieces of legislation) focus on how to package constituent opinions in a way that is understandable to Members. And sure, a straightforward statistic (e.g., “44% of citizens in your district support the jobs bill, H.R. 999″) will probably have more impact than 5,000 emails asking for some sort of unspecified action on the economy. But Jake’s proposals still fall short of establishing a conversational model of engagement.

One example that comes closer to a conversational approach is the America Speaking Out campaign, an effort of the House Republicans. (Disclaimer: My firm, Adfero Group, worked on the campaign’s launch.) The campaign’s goal is to increase dialogue between Congress and citizens. Americans can “speak out” by posting ideas for how Congress can act on policy issues like health care and energy. Other citizens can vote on the proposals and respond with their own comments and suggestions.

Allowing citizens to engage in dialogue with one another is the first step. Ideally, Members should also be jumping into the discussions. By allowing multiple citizens and their elective representatives to exchange viewpoints, it becomes a true conversation. The advocacy community should be focusing its creativity on finding these types of solutions.

The real “tragedy of political advocacy” would be failing to deliver the conversational opportunities that Congress and the American public are obviously ready to embrace.

The sheer volume of Congressional newcomers creates an opportunity for organizations to rethink their advocacy strategies.  Connecting with new Members will require the right message and the right tactics.

Over the next few weeks, K Street Café will feature a discussion on how advocacy organizations can create an effective grassroots plan for 2011.

A few things to look forward to:

- Insights from the Congressional Management Foundation, the organization that guides freshman Members during their first 90 days in office.  CMF will explain the resources it provides to Members on setting up offices, obtaining committee assignments, selecting technology vendors, and hiring core staff members.

- Analysis from Ken Ward, CEO of Fireside21, a company that produces Web-based tools for constituent communications.   As someone who regularly works with Capitol Hill offices, Ken will explain how new Members set up their processes for handling incoming communications.

- Advice from savvy grassroots professionals on how their organizations plan for Congress’s biannual overhaul.  Jennifer Karr from the American Medical Association will share how the AMA is gearing up for 2011.

We look forward to hearing your thoughts on how you are planning for the new Congress.