Three Easy Steps For Going Viral

Recently Greenpeace conducted a series of actions at the G20 meeting in Pittsburgh.

As a Board member I was asked to let people in my network know about the actions, and Greenpeace made it easy by giving me the tools to spread their news quickly and easily.

Here are three tips for getting your network to pass your news on to friends and colleagues.



Click here for more!


Three Steps To Going Viral

1) Send out a brief paragraph in advance of your event that describes what you will be doing and that motivates people to participate remotely

Example:

“[Organization] will release a report on local food production in Illinois and then visit with legislators in Springfield. Follow us throughout the day and stay up-to-date as we post new images, photos and stories on our landing page.”

2) Provide multiple ways in which interested audiences can follow along.
Be organized and prepare to report on your activities throughout the day in a wide variety of ways

-Website address
-Location where photos are being posted
-Location for video or interviews
-Twitter hashtag

3) Give your audience a way to help pass the information along
Suggest various ways for your audience to stay involved and make it easy to do by giving them tools for doing so.

Example:

“We’ll keep you posted as the day goes along. But, in the meantime, we could use your help spreading the word.”

Facebook Users: Ask people to post a status message and Give people a short paragraph to put up on their Facebook page. Include the url of your landing page.

Urge people to leave a comment on their own status update or to copy the message and post it as their own status

Twitter users: Provide copy and ask people to post it as an update. Urge people to retweet new info as it develops throughout the day.

Email to external listservs and coalition groups: Give your audiences the text for a message and encourage them to send it to all of their networks – listservs, groups, coalitions, etc.

Still Trying to Figure Out Twitter?

Twitter has been a hot topic at a number of parties I've been at recently. My peers (the 50 - 70 year old crowd) are a tolerant group, but many shake their heads when it comes to Twitter, perplexed about what the big deal could be. ("who wants to communicate all the time," is a common question.)

I confess, I haven't found a way to work it into my routine much -- I'm still working on learning to blog regularly. Who knows, by the time I get that down, we may have moved on to something else.

Nevertheless, here is a great article in the Wall Street Journal that shows exactly how Twitter works, if you work it.

Webinars: More Like a Talkshow Than a Workshop

I did one of my first webinar trainings yesterday and, while it wasn't terrible, it was much more difficult than the in-person trainings I am used to doing.

This article expressed my feelings exactly:

What I hadn't bargained for was the deadly quiet, the utter lack of audience interaction. No eye contact. No heads nodding. No "sense of the room"-that vital sixth sense experienced speakers hone to alert them to the audience drifting away. Worse than the sound of one hand clapping, this was the sound of one voice yapping.

A colleague from Community Media Workshop, who was listening in, advised me to think of a webinars as more like hosting a talk radio show than conducting a traditional workshop.

Three quick points that I will definately use the next time after the jump

Click here for more!

Three tips for better webinars:

1) Get all the words off the PowerPoint slide. As my colleague said: Just put up a funny picture and start talking.

2) People used to tell their audience what they were going to tell them and then summarized at the end what they just told them. That doesn't work well in the webinar world. You need to engage and re-engage your audience by telling stories related to the topic.

3) Continually remind and cue people on how they can come into the conversation much like a talk show host does, for example, "people who want to share a similar experience, click the chat button in the lower left or press star six to unmute your phone."

Google News Puts "Spotlight" on In-Depth News

Google News has added a new section that highlights “in-depth pieces of lasting value.” Called Spotlight, and like the rest of Google News, the stories are selected by an undisclosed algorithm. The Spotlight seems to shine on longer features that have bounced around blogs for a few days. Lifestyle and opinion pieces seems to appear often, and The New York Times is a frequent source.

In this era of "fast news" - I'm curious to see if readers will flock to the Spotlight.

Oh the Woes of Bloggers

I found this humorous post on one of my favorite sites, gawker.com, about a Wall Street Journal story reporting on new blogger woes. Apparently, the unemployed are invading blogger home turfs: coffee shops with free wi-fi access. As Gawker eloquently puts it:

...places that used to be exclusively blogger wi-fi campgrounds have been infiltrated by the unemployed who are too poor to afford wi-fi in their apartments, so they have to go to coffee shops for internet access to look for jobs...

Luckily, I get to blog from my office. Internet access included.

(image via gawker.com)

Another One Bites the Dust

One more publication, The Printed Blog, closed up shop this week. This new kind of newprint publication--which compiled posts from local blogs in a printed format-- was, in my opinion, a novel idea. But due to lack of outside investment capital, The Printed Blog folded. And alas, bloggers will continue to find their audiences online, and not in newsprint.

On Line in Iran

Excellent post on how information flow from the Iranian protests was entirely new media. Even cable news, which made its bones on reporting first when there was trouble in the world was no where to be seen when this story started breaking over the weekend.

People on line knew about it; people who were relying on other media did not. Simple as that.

WindyCitizen Deal With CBS2 Website May Be Wave of the Future

CBS2 now prominently hosts a feed from WindyCitizen on the front page of the local section of its web site.

This is a good example of how MSM (mainstream media) is creating partnerships with smaller players to obtain content that they don't have the resources to gather.

WindyCitizen is a "reader-edited" news site where anyone can recommend, rate and discuss local news.

WindyCitizen gives CBS2 a granularity to their coverage that they can't get on their own, and is a good example of how organizations can work their way up the media food chain by posting on sites like WindyCitizen.

Blogger Breaks Waterboarding Torture Story

If anyone has any lingering suspicion that blogs are taking over the world of journalism, consider this.

It was a blogger who uncovered this week's top story that the CIA used waterboarding more than 266 times on two Al-Queda suspects.

Marcy Wheeler from emptywheel.com discovered that atrocious figure had not been redacted from the memos released by the U.S. Justice Department late last week.

The new information on the number of waterboarding episodes came out over the weekend when a number of bloggers, including Marcy Wheeler of the blog emptywheel, discovered it in the May 30, 2005, memo.

The sentences in the memo containing that information appear to have been redacted from some copies but are visible in others. Initial news reports about the memos in The New York Times and other publications did not include the numbers.

MacArthur Justice Center Attorney Joe Margulies is working to secure the release of Abu Zubaida who endured waterboarding 83 times based on suspicions the government has tacitly conceded were misinformed.

Beachwood Reporter, Chicagotalks win awards

Tribune is laying off more folks and Streetwise is in trouble. How about some good Chicago media news?

Beachwood Reporter and Chicagotalks were recognized for journalistic excellence recently. "Out of Order" and "Off the Record," investigative pieces by Erica Christoffer and Becky Schlikerman about the lack of transparency in Chicago City Council committee meetings, won a Society of Professional Journalists Sigma Delta Chi award for investigative reporting.

Today Beachwood proprietor Steve Rhodes wrote about the award and also how he feels about the value of news professionals sharing and linking. It will be interesting to see if big MSM organizations come around.

Street papers growing

According to an article in the New York Times:

Newspapers produced and sold by homeless people in dozens of American cities are flourishing even as the deepening recession endangers conventional newspapers. At many of them, circulation is growing, along with the sales forces dispatched to sell the papers to passers-by.

According to the article, the current recession has brought new and, in some cases, highly skilled vendors to the industry, and the "offbeat" coverage is attracting new interest.

So don't forget to buy that copy of Streetwise when you see someone selling here in Chicago.

Chicago Fosters New Media Models

You may have received a copy of The Printed Blog at your neighborhood El stop. Another new Chicago news aggregator called Newser, is also trying to engineer a new financial model for delivering the news. According to the Sun-Times, this new company is employing 11 full-time employees (note: the article doesn't say "reporters"). Like a lot of new, news sources, it searches far and wide for content developed by others. One more news "source" that is attempting to make money by purveying a product paid for by others. It can't work in the long run. If the people who create high quality content can't make a living or profit by doing it, they it's just going to go away.

What NOT to do on Twitter

VDC engages folks on Twitter for one of our clients and individually - if you are considering or already using Twitter for your organization, this list of what not to do on Twitter by B.L. Ochman is very useful. A lot of these "don'ts" apply mainly to businesses, but they are good lessons for nonprofits and activists as well.

The advice on the list I think is most important is that your main goal should be to be interesting and add value to the community - try to make only every few tweets about your organization specifically. In between promoting the work of your group, link to interesting articles about your subject and retweet and respond to folks talking about it. Most importantly, "listen" to what is being said on all sides of the discussion - you can search for key terms and monitor conversation in real time. Doing this will postition your org as trusted and useful to people who care about your cause - if all goes well, in turn, these followers will share your content and message with their friends who may not be as familiar.

Remember, principles for engaging people on Twitter are similar to all social media tools: the quality of your relationships and interaction matters more than the quanitity.

Filter-Free News: Lessons from Obama's Communications

Sure, you can still catch President Barack Obama on traditional mainstream media outlets like 60 Minutes, but he is effectively reaching out to niche media as well. Who didn’t see ESPN’s coverage of the president’s picks for the NCAA basketball tournament.

Politico.com had this article about Obama's outreach plans, and it's something we can ALL learn from.

Obama himself plans to meet soon with liberal bloggers, according to an administration official. With little fanfare, he’s already sat for interviews with Black Enterprise magazine, Telemundo and Los Angeles-based Hispanic radio host Eddie “Piolin” Sotelo…

…Obama can exploit the fact that the traditional newspapers and networks are weakened by competition from cable and the Web, and by a faltering business model. What’s more, the proliferation of outlets has been embraced in recent years by a newly energized liberal base — eager to match the decades-old success of conservatives in building media channels to circumvent what they see as a biased or trivia-minded Washington press corps.

So in an age where traditional newspapers and networks are weakened, where it’s tougher to land that story in the Trib or Sun-Times, take a lesson from the President and include bloggers and other niche media in your next outreach plan.

(image from ESPN.com)

To Tweet or Not To Tweet?

Twitter is the latest social media/communications/networking/online gadget that everyone seems to be on.

With only 140-characters for messages (aka “tweets”), people post daily musings, trade food recipes, or provide real-time commentary on special events.

Many organizations are tapping into this network to reach audiences in a new way. VDC recently launched a Twitter feed for one of our clients, the Healing Our Waters - Great Lakes Coalition (@healthylakes). We see it as a great tool to provide instant updates on advocacy issues, links to media reports, and find other individuals interested in our cause. Before you hop on, check out this article on finding the right "brand voice" for your organization.

Chicago media outlets and reporters are all over Twitter too - here's a good round up on where to find them.

I myself started a Twitter account (@FirstLadyA). At the moment I've been using it as a tool to connect with my sister and read tweets by my favorite media sources - from David Gregory to Perez Hilton. My tweets are pretty random though - but feel free to check me out!

The Emerging Media Ecosystem

Have you seen this? (Click for a bigger version)


Wow. In my opinion, this gets it right.

In these interesting times, good communications strategies need to take into account a lot more than the colors of the brochure or what the headline is in the Tribune - we'll need to take into account the filters and aggregators and the sharers of this content as well. The way I like to think of it, these people and programs at the top and bottom of the graph represent conversations about the news people have been having for years and years, only now they are bigger, more public and easier to jump into.

For communications people and activists, our messages are a lot harder to control, but there is so much more opportunity to engage people.

What do you think?

(graphic from inju via Community Media Workshop)

How nonprofits can use YouTube

Social media blog Mashable posted 10 of the Smartest Big Brands in Social Media, which is some pretty interesting reading and viewing. Tops on the list is Blendtech, who increased sales by a lot through their YouTube campaign "Will It Blend?" Here's my personal favorite:



Mike and I saw the person who came up with this speak at a conference last year - he gave a really great presentation, but Mike and I were trying to figure out how YouTube ideas like this can work for a wonky policy report or an ask.

While it isn't as easy as destroying stuff and taping it, I think there are some ways nonprofits and activists can engage people with YouTube. Here are some examples:

Show the faces of your work or issue in a documentary style, like AFL-CIO and ACORN did in their Seven Days at Minimum Wage campaign. This can help the public, decision makers, and funders see what your work means at a human level:



Make a targeted ask for action or funding, like this video by the League of Young Voters. Depending on the audience, it can be a good change from a letter or postcard:



"Punk" the bad guys, like Greenpeace did by infiltrating a Kleenex campaign (Kleenex uses virgin rainforest their products):



It's easy to get started - all you need is a camera and a computer. Google has even implemented a program specifically for nonprofits.

Have you seen a great use of YouTube by a nonprofit or activist org?