K Street Cafe

After catching the last flight out of my hometown of Nashville last May before torrential downpours forced the airport to close, I was heartbroken when I returned to DC and learned that family and friends were under water. They were up the creek without a paddle, only the creek had come to them, and it was still coming.

A new documentary short from the folks at The Tennessean shows how social media helped the middle Tennessee region come to grips with the crisis, and ultimately rebound from it:

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Facebook is getting into the spirit of Election Day with a poll locator widget along with an “I Voted” button that you can post on your page which includes a tally of those that clicked the button.

On the U.S. Politics on Facebook page, they have a post which tallied the number of Republicans, Democrats and Independents that have voted. I presume this information is coming from their members who have self-identified themselves politically and have clicked on their “I Voted” button.

This got me thinking… could a social media widget like Facebook’s help create a larger wave of voter intensity, given that most people friend those they know and share common interests and values with? And what is the impact of one politically savvy friend on Facebook?

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This guest post comes from Ellie Brown, a graduate student at American University studying internet advocacy campaigns and blogging at the Daily Social.

Well what do you know? Nestlé listened. Following a two month Greenpeace assault on palm oil purchasing practices of the food giant, Nestlé announced earlier this week that they will stop purchasing palm oil (used in many popular products like Kit Kats) from companies that own “high-risk” plantations and farms. These high-risk plantations are accused of driving the destruction of natural habitats for animals like the orangutan. The new “zero-deforestation” policy is in partnership with The Forest Trust that will work with Nestlé to amend its palm oil purchasing policies.

Nestlé’s decision comes after a tumultuous 8-weeks in which Greenpeace released a provocative video on YouTube to raise awareness of Nestlé’s questionable methods for acquiring palm oil. The video, which likens eating a Kit Kat to eating an orangutan, was subsequently removed by Nestlé; an action that spurred an even greater backlash from the Greenpeace community who bombarded Nestlé with calls, emails and Facebook page comments. Now enter social media “meltdown” as Nestlé representatives responded to Facebook comments with mild requests for users to stop using altered versions of the Nestlé logo as their Facebook profile picture or risk their comments being taken down. Needless to say, users were not happy with this restriction of their right to publicly protest on an open forum like a company’s Facebook page and the comment threads were shared on blogs and news articles across the Internet – directing even more negative attention toward Nestlé.

As a result of the targeted Greenpeace campaign and the added headache of a social media crisis, Nestlé was forced to pay attention and had to address the problems with the palm oil it buys. Hopefully, Nestlé’s new policies will help save some orangutans and make some of us feel better about eating Kit Kats.

A few Thursday evenings ago, NBC aired a rerun of last year’s highly anticipated The Office episode that featured Pam and Jim getting married. When I watched the episode again two weeks ago, I could not help thinking about a crucial lesson to be learned for any organization planning their next advocacy campaign.

If you watched Pam and Jim’s wedding, you will recall that the writers heavily borrowed the memorable wedding routine from the extraordinarily popular YouTube video JK Wedding Dance. It’s the one where the wedding party dances down the aisle to Chris Brown’s song, Forever.  The video became so popular (now over 44 million views on YouTube) that the entire group was invited to recreate the routine on The Today Show.

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In case you missed it, the Hill ran my column “Promoting a Cause Through YouTube,” about the State Department’s use of social media as a powerful diplomacy tool used to promote democracy around the world.

Much can be learned by studying State’s Democracy Video Challenge user generated content campaign.  Launched last year, the Video Challenge invites citizens worldwide to submit videos completing the phrase “Democracy is…”  The campaign had more than 900 video submissions and was successful in engaging the public through social media.

The Democracy Video Challenge provides many good lessons for advocacy organizations trying to recruit and mobilize supporters both here and around the world.

Today YouTube announced the official launch of YouTube DIRECT, a tool that allows organizations to collect, moderate and then display videos from users directly on their organization’s web site or an associated YouTube channel. The stated intention of the tool is to allow news organizations to develop an array of user-generated stringers who can upload video reports and commentary to a news web site while maintaining the news site’s editorial control. (At the time of writing it was not 100% clear whether the tool was limited to official news services only – let’s hope not).

But let’s think outside of the box here. Why limit this to news organizations? Could you image what a forward thinking non-profit or advocacy group could do with this kind of technology? (more…)

There is a great discussion going on about whether Twitter is a strategy, or not, on the Progress Exchange Listserv. It was launched by Jon Pincus’s blog post on Tales from the Net and rejoined by Colin Delany on ePolitics.

Jon’s post

Colin’s response to Jon

Here is my response:

At the risk of being inflammatory (no offense meant Jon)… come on folks… aren’t we past the days when we refer to a tool (or a communication channel) as a strategy? The internet is not a strategy. A blog is not a strategy. And neither is Twitter.

These are channels for communication and we develop strategies for using them.

I am a big fan of Twitter. And I am always developing strategies for using it. But that is fundamentally different from saying Twitter is a strategy. Twitter can be used to inform people about ideas, promote events, engage conversations, and mobilize actions. And for each of these you can adopt a variety of strategies and tactics (using hashtags to engage different groups, linking groups together, etc.).

I also believe, as McLuhan wrote, that technology is not ideologically neutral. Tools are not just tools that can be used for any purpose. Each communication tool has its own ideology. For example, socially dynamic tools like Twitter are inherently more democratic than broadcast tools like TV. Thus, strategies for Twitter that exploit the democratic nature of the channel will work better than command and control strategies. And vice versa for TV.

What makes Twitter inherently democratic? Well, 1) generally anyone can follow anyone else and 2) no one can restrict who uses a hashtag or how they use it. What makes TV inherently undemocratic? 1) only the producers of the content control the content, 2) access to the channel is restricted, and 3) no feedback loop.

OK… so the ideology of Twitter constrains what strategies work on it (or at least work better), but the bottom line is still: Twitter is not a strategy, but a channel that allows us to pursue a variety of strategies for how we use it.

By Carie Lewis

Here at HSUS, our email file is largely skewed to older women. We’ve been in the social media space for 2+ years now, trying to broaden our audience. But we haven’t done much integration of our email file and website to our social media presence because of the fear that the demographic of the two don’t match.

So, when it was time for our annual Spay Day Online Pet Photo Contest, and there was the question of whether or not to invest money in an accompanying Facebook application, there were some skeptics.

Being the social media person at the organization, I was all for it. I knew that as long as the application took advantage of Facebook’s viral features, it would take off. In my mind, this meant:

1 – all functions had to stay within the Facebook platform (instead of taking you to the external site)

2 – the Facebook app had to be a mirror of the external site and not a separate entity

3 – there had to be some function to post a “box” to your profile to show off your pet

4 – there had to be some function to post a “story” to your newsfeed, both when you installed the app and when you entered your pet

Of course, that’s overly-simplified. It took a long time to get it to where it is now. But the time and money were both worth it, as it essentially paid for itself. (more…)

Last week, The Cato Institute placed a full page ad in many major newspapers with a statement that showed there is not full agreement among economists about Obama’s stimulus plan.

But long before the ink was ever set to paper, thousands of people across the country had already seen the ad, and were commenting on it and sharing it with friends online.

By making the ad available to bloggers before it ran in the papers, Cato was able to generate a media buzz long before our main product even existed. Most of all, we gave bloggers the opportunity to scoop old media giants like The New York Times. (more…)

I didn’t know I was running for president until I saw this new video from AARP.  The truth is, AARP is launching a new election campaign that lets you put anyone’s name into their video as the candidate for president. Why? Because this election is all about YOU.

AARP’s new campaign is really about connecting with voters.  The very essence of this video campaign is to give the people a chance to insert themselves into the message, and then insert their friends.  Very personal touch, indeed.

While not the first to do something like this (Job Jab lets you put your face on an animated character), this light-hearted campaign really gets to the heart of electoral politics–YOU.

Want to send the ad to your friends with their name in it? Click here and have some fun.