K Street Cafe

I continue to read articles (well, see headlines – as I don’t bother to read them) about the “Top 50” or “Top 100” power Twitter users or online influencers. This concept is ridiculous. Especially when they show up in public relations or advocacy publications. Unless your industry happens to be the entertainment of sports – and even then I question their influence – the top 50, 100 or 1,000,000 mean nothing. Let’s be honest, here are the so-called top influncers:

Lada Gaga

Justin Bieber

Kim Kardashian

The Onion

Ashton Kutcher

Charlie Sheen

Mashable

Hell, even Ryan Seacrest

Identifying valuable influencers to target your audience has nothing to do with quantity. That’s the problem with all of the “influence measurement tools” such as Klout. The metrics of these tools are limited – there is no human analysis. There is only an algorithm which measures quantity. I suspect that the owners of these influence measurement tools would argue otherwise, making a case that the quantity is tied to like-minded social groups.

Not really.

Want to raise your Klout score? Do this: Tweet constantly and tweet about whatever the hottest topic of the day is, regardless if you give a damn about it or not. Tweet about the latest trending topic, scandal, and celebrities to see your score rise.

Determining the quality of a network is not a task for computerized algorithms. It requires human intelligence. It requires a discriminating approach to whom your audience is, and who the most valuable surrogates in that audience may be.

Let’s consider the legal community. If you have a massive network of Twitter followers filled with spammers, product promoters and porn stars, your reach is limited. If your network consists of legitimate individuals that have a limited to non-existent interest in legal theory or practice, but who are trying to build their own networks through use of automated tools, you’re not building an influential network. You might be building a broad network, but one that is untargeted and unhelpful.

Be selective. Know your audience. Weed out anyone in your network that does not advance your purpose for being online. Think of it as compound interest. If you build a small group of in-the-know followers – no matter your industry – then you will be reaching the holy grail of what PR folks refer to as target audience. Each of these finely selected individuals will, in all likelihood, have their own networks of various sizes, with a significant degree of others who follow your issue and care about the topic you’re promoting. They can, in turn, then share that information with their networks of similarly minded individuals. With each circle outward that you go, the value of the network diminishes of course. However, that is the very nature of social networks.

Do the unthinkable: Make your network small. You will be far better off with a smaller network of people whom only you can know fit the profile of infuencers within your target audience. In the old days, these folks were called surrogates. So shrink. Klout will frown on you. All the social media mavens will frown on you. But your audience will smile. As the content you’ll be providing, and the content you’ll be receiving will be relevant.

Several years ago our Innovate to Motivate conference hosted then Gallup Managing Partner Ron Balmer to talk about Gallup’s research on customer engagement and how it applies to grassroots organizations. It was one of our most highly rated workstorms. Gallup has been at the forefront of engagement research; they define it as the degree to which people will work for or against your organization or brand. I think most of us would agree that definition of stakeholder engagement is worth pursuing. They have published recent research which reinforces Ron’s prescient admonitions.

Engagement matters because the world is driven to distraction. With engagement, your stakeholders give you the benefit of the doubt when you screw up. They also have your brand as a part of their own identity. They can’t imagine a world without your organization or cause, and criticizing your organization means criticizing themselves.

Gallup conducted research with over 17,000 social media users to determine how people interact with social media and its effectiveness as a marketing tool. Gallup doesn’t conduct shoddy research, so I think it’s worth our time to see if there are applications for those of us in the grassroots persuasion business. After all, we are marketers of ideas and action.  (more…)

Come hear Adfero Group’s own Sue Zoldak and Purple Forge’s John Craig discuss how organizations are using Mobile apps to organize, mobilize and engage their target audiences in grassroots advocacy, lobbying and campaigning.

Are you currently using Mobile to reach your organization’s assets? Find out more and sign up here.

Date: Thursday, November 10, 2011, 6:00 p.m.

Location:
Adfero Group
1666 K Street NW, Suite 250
Washington, D.C.

Schedule:

6:00 – 6:30 Meet & Greet
6:30 – 6:40 Introductions
6:45 – 7:30 Sue Zoldak (Adfero Group) & John Craig (Purple Forge)
7:30 – 8:00 Q&A

(more…)

The Occupy Wall Street protesters are the latest high-profile example of how underdogs don’t use their positions as effectively as they could. 

I give the protesters credit for getting off their computers and on the streets. Research we conducted with hundreds of grassroots professionals found that getting their volunteers into the trenches was their No. 1 challenge.

I also give them  points for understanding that being the underdog can be an advantage in the business and political arenas, especially during an economic decline. That’s what my research found.  I interviewed more than 1,000 grassroots advocates and the senators, members of Congress,  state legislators and business leaders whose minds they changed for my new book, The Underdog Edge: How Ordinary People Change the Minds of the Powerful…and Live to Tell About It.  Based on those interviews and survey responses, we have uncovered the seven key extreme influence tactics required to persuade those up the food chain. Upward influence matters because it’s about the results, not just noise.

We usually support the underdog, but my research found that not all underdogs are created equal. If you want the advantage of the underdog mantle, you can’t have a huge amount of resources, so the protestors made a mistake when they allowed the members of more than three dozen unions to march with them. Successful underdogs have few resources and don’t squander their resources. Few in America view unions as resource-starved underdogs, so the sympathy factor is negated.  (more…)

Cross-posted from Congressional Management Foundation

Congressional offices are receiving between 200 to 1,000 percent more constituent communications than they were ten years ago. Despite the increase, a survey of congressional staff indicates that 90 percent believe constituent communications remains a “high priority” for the office. But sizable percentages of staff report that their offices are shifting resources to manage the increased demand.

The findings are part of a new report released today by the Congressional Management Foundation (CMF), How Citizen Advocacy Is Changing Mail Operations on Capitol Hill. The report is based on a survey of 260 congressional staff on how email and the Internet are affecting office procedures. CMF researchers also collected mail volume data from ten House and Senate offices.

Read the report here.

“Congress is working hard to adapt to and understand this new environment,” the report states. “But are most Members and staff of the Congress fundamentally rethinking what they do, or simply trying to apply a 20th century paradigm, workflow, and communications process to a 21st century challenge?”

(more…)

By Kalee Miller and Caroline Sheedy of Adfero Group

With 800 million active users, Facebook has earned the title of most popular social network around the globe. At the f8 conference a few weeks ago, CEO and Founder Mark Zuckerberg announced some big changes, the latest in the site’s constant evolution. It’s hard for a lot of users to adjust to the new features and, for organizations using Facebook in advocacy efforts, it may seem like things are changing just as they were getting the hang of things. Despite the growing pains, Facebook is a valuable tool that can raise awareness and inspire action.  

Here are a few rules to live by:

1.       A Few Can Activate Many

Engagement, not number of fans, is key. On average, every time someone shares a link to your organization’s website on Facebook, two to five people will visit it. In any online campaign, it’s imperative to utilize social context. People care about what their friends are doing and are heavily influenced by actions. If you can show Facebook users that their friends “liked” or engaged with your page, chances are high that you can get them involved, too.  
So, now the question is, how? 

 
• Use Facebook Questions. Asking your fans a question leads to viral exposure. If you ask a question, it will appear on your fans’ newsfeed. If they answer or follow that question, their friends can also see the activity. This is also a good way to get direct feedback from your fans. 
• Use Facebook to live stream your events or town halls. Free tools like UStream allow you to broadcast your event to all of your fans. Also, if you use event materials to let people know they can tune in on your Facebook page, you are likely to get more fans.
•  Make everything you can an event.  All of your organization’s events should be shared on Facebook. You should also use this tool for virtual events or calls to action (i.e. “Call your congressman by noon today!”).  Again, this allows your fans’ friends to see their action, making them more likely to join in. (more…)

Many Americans are consumed with football in the fall.  But the budget and economic crisis has advocacy professionals obsessed with a slightly different group—the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction—or the ‘Super Committee.’

The Super Committee is charged with recommending how to reduce the U.S. deficit by at least $1.5 trillion over the next ten years, and has until Thanksgiving to do so. Committee members say comments from the public are being taken seriously (here’s the web form to prove it), though some of them are also limiting participation: for instance, Senator Baucus (D-Mont.) is not taking messages from any one who doesn’t live in Montana — even though the mission is national in scope.

The limited time frame for decisions and the committee’s difficult task makes advocacy especially challenging. What’s an advocacy group to do?

Hopefully, most organizations have plans in place to handle a sudden grassroots need. But if your organization was not quite as prepared as others, don’t despair. Even in this Internet age, all politics is still local. (more…)

Event: Using Research to Guide Your Advocacy Strategy
When: Friday, September 16 (9 – 10:30 am)
Where: The National Press Club (529 14th Street NW, Washington DC)

Can opinion research help unlock the key to winning your advocacy effort? From free survey platforms and social media polling to state-of-the-art message testing, Adfero Group’s Sue Zoldak will be discussing the research tools that you can apply to increase your campaign’s effectiveness.

Join us as we explore how public affairs campaigns use research to find, reach, and win over their audience. We will take questions from attendees and discuss your case study live.

Click here to find out more
and
REGISTER TODAY!

by Patrick Hynes

Cross-posted from The Daily Caller

Despite the successful and headline-grabbing launch of Google+, only 13 members of the U.S. Senate and 15 members of the U.S. House of Representatives have established profiles on the new social networking site, far fewer than the number from each chamber who are active on Facebook and Twitter.

Google+ launched in July to much fanfare and within three weeks had attracted 20 million users in the U.S. Some technology pundits have labeled it a “Facebook killer.”

Congress’s slow adoption of Google+ comes as a surprise because the new social networking platform contains at least one unique function the others do not: It allows users to segregate relationships into “Circles,” meaning members of Congress can isolate constituents from other followers. Heavy social networking “spam” from non-constituents is a significant frustration for members and their social media staffs.

“Just the other day, someone posted on our Facebook wall that she wished my boss was her senator,” a Hill press secretary told me.

A recent study by the Congressional Management Foundation reports that members of Congress and key staff have embraced social media as a tool to communicate with constituents. But privately, many also complain they receive too much pre-packaged “Astroturf” in the form of canned Tweets and Facebook wall postings. In many cases, these communications come from people far away from the members’ districts or from undetermined locations. Google+ Circles allow members of Congress to target their communications directly to people in the states or districts they represent, while ignoring communications directed at them from people outside their states or districts. (more…)

Cross-posted from Adfero

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. (more…)