The Pew Internet & American Life Project has released their latest report examining social media use among teens and young adults.  One important finding is that teen blogging is on the decline while social media use is on the rise. Here are some key points of the report:

• Just 8 percent of Internet users ages 12 to 17 reported that they use Twitter.
• Blogging is declining as a means of communication for teens.
• Many teens are migrating from MySpace to Facebook.
• Three-quarters of teens and 93 percent of adults ages 18 to 29 have a cell phone.

The New York Times recently ran an article entitled “The Internet vs. Obama”, which argues that “technological evolution has made it progressively harder to get big things done in this country, and now it’s just about impossible. This isn’t just Obama’s problem; it’s America’s problem.”

One of the arguments supporting this view is that the division of readers and viewers into “demographically and ideologically discrete micro-audiences makes it easy for interest groups to get scare stories (e.g. “death panels”) to the people most likely to be terrified by them.” Pollsters the quickly barrage legislators with the views of “constituents who, having been barraged by these stories, have little idea what’s actually in the bills that outrage them.”

The article continues:

It’s no exaggeration to say that technology has subverted the original idea of America. The founders explicitly rejected direct democracy — in which citizens vote on every issue — in favor of representative democracy. The idea was that legislators would convene at a safe remove from voters and, thus insulated from the din of narrow interests and widespread but ephemeral passions, do what was in the long-term interest of their constituents and of the nation. Now information technology has stripped away the insulation that physical distance provided back when information couldn’t travel faster than a horse.

It’s hard to agree with this view from a grassroots perspective, especially since Web 2.0 has granted many of us the tools — now cheap and easy to use — to participate in and fight for change. The elites’ power to control the national debate has been eroded, making them long for the “good old days.”   They feel threatened and that’s a good thing…

The right-roots are taking credit for the Scott Brown victory in MA. In Sunday’s Washington Post, two GOP online consultants argue that being out of power has allowed the rightroots to leapfrog over the established GOP leadership. Here are a few of their key claims: 

• Previously rightroots strategists were laughed out of high-level campaign meetings, told that online budgets are the first thing to go and informed that having a Facebook page is “unpresidential.” And it wasn’t until recently that people stopped asking techies to fix their computers.

• Being out-of-power nurtures online organizing: It’s not as though GOP organizers woke up last fall and realized they’d better learn to use this Internet thing. [Repubs] are out of power — and the party out of power has the stronger incentive to innovate. If it doesn’t, the base will. Netroots protests dragged the Democratic Party into the 21st century kicking and screaming in 2006 and 2008. Frustrated with the president and health-care reform, the conservative “tea party” movement has done the same for the Republicans in the past year.

• It’s not that the GOP is any less capable of using technology than the Democrats are. It was just that during the years that the netroots really took off — 2004 to 2008 — Republicans were not angry enough (or desperate enough) to use all the weapons in their arsenal. A single, unifying outrage, like the Democrats’ opposition to the Iraq war and to President George W. Bush, was missing.

• The Internet isn’t a line item in a campaign budget anymore. It’s not just something you have to pay for, underneath catering and radio ads. It has reorganized the way Americans do everything — including elect their leaders. Candidates who would have had no chance before the Internet can now overcome huge odds, with the people they energize serving as the backbone of their campaign.

• These forces all came together in the MA Senate special election. Scott Brown’s supporters became fans of the candidate on Facebook, where they commented on his status updates and uploaded their own photos. The Republican Senate hopeful took to Twitter, using the #masen hashtag to let his followers know how the race was going. His campaign powered its field operation through targeted online ads and Web-based spreadsheets, and raised $12 million from 157,000 individual donations in the last two weeks of the race. After he won last week, his team live-streamed the election-night party in Boston online.

The right roots think that their party seems finally to be catching up online — just in time for 2010 and 2012.

For more than a decade, progressives and liberals have dominated online politics, but that’s beginning to change. A year after Obama’s campaign domination of online fund-raising, online organizing and social media, Ross Douthat of the NYT raises the possibility that the right may have begun to outflank the left online. According to Douthat:

• Republican politicians have taken over Twitter. Sarah Palin has 1.2 million followers on Facebook. And in liberal Massachusetts, Scott Brown, the Republican Senate candidate, has used Internet fund-raising to put the fear of God into the Bay State’s establishment. Last Monday, Brown raised $1.3 million from an online “money bomb,” and his campaign reportedly went on to raise a million dollars a day throughout the week. The race’s online landscape looks like last November’s in reverse: from YouTube views to Facebook fans to Twitter followers, Brown enjoys an Obama-esque edge over his Democratic rival, Martha Coakley.

• Brown’s race…demonstrated there’s no necessary connection between online organizing and liberal politics. The Web is just like every pre-Internet political arena: ideology matters less than the level of anger at the incumbent party, and the level of enthusiasm an insurgent candidate can generate.

• The attempts to turn the [Obama] campaign’s online community, weakly re-dubbed Organizing for America, into a permanent political force have flopped. In a recent post on the Web site Personal Democracy Forum, Micah Sifry captured the free-floating sense of anger with Obama’s governance: “The people who voted for him weren’t organized in any kind of new or powerful way, and the special interests … sat first at the table and wrote the menu. Myth met reality, and came up wanting.

Are robocalls effective? According to Shaun Dakin the answer is a resounding “NO”. While robocalls appear to be a “useful way to call attention to a mailing, they have never otherwise been found to result in a measurable increase in turnout.” After numerous studies involving millions of phone calls, no robocall has shown any significant increase in turnout.  Here are summaries of four robocall studies:

• A 2005 study failed to show that robocalls generated mobilization results among youth voters. This study was conducted during the 2005 New Jersey Gubernatorial Election. 18,000 young voters were randomly selected to be robocalled with one of two GOTV messages, while the rest of the young voters in the election were left uncontacted. The first group’s message encouraged turnout and informed the voters of their polling location. The second group’s message was a generic turnout encouragement. Neither message was effective at increasing turnout over the uncontacted group.

• A 2006 study failed to find that robocalls increased turnout among Latino voters when the calls were placed from a Latino organization. The National Association of Latino Elected Officials (NALEO) conducted the study during the 2006 General Election in five California counties. Robocalls were delivered to 61,422 low propensity Latino voters. No effect on turnout was found among those who were called relative to those who were not called.

• A 2005 study failed to find that robocalls had an effect when using the voice of a Latino celebrity. NALEO conducted this study in California, New Mexico, and the city of Houston, TX, during the 2002 General Election. More than 250,000 phone numbers associated with Latino voters received two robocalls each. The calls were recorded in Spanish by a Spanish-language-television celebrity anchorwoman. The researchers found no statistically reliable increase in turnout among those who were assigned to receive the calls relative to those who were assigned to not receive the calls. The cost of the robocall campaign was $23,725 which means that the robocalls in this study resulted in a cost per vote of approximately $275.

• Another study failed to demonstrate an effect from robocalls using political endorsements. This experiment was conducted during the Texas Republican Primary for State Supreme Court Justice. In this study, hundreds of thousands of Republican voters received a robocall message recorded by popular Republican Governor, Rick Perry. The message encouraged Republicans to turnout for the upcoming election, and to vote specifically for the endorsed nominee. Those who received the robocalls were not measurably more likely to vote than those who did not.

Nature has published a short interview with psychologist Robert Gifford looking at the effective messaging around climate change.

Based on the problem of pubic distrust of scientific messages presenting a range of data (b/c good science is explicit about unknowns), Gifford proposes five elements of effective science messaging:

1. It has to have some urgency.
2. It has to have as much certainty as can be mustered with integrity.
3. There can’t be just one message: there must be messages targeted to different groups.
4. Messages should be framed in positive terms. (People are less willing to change their behaviour if you tell them they have to make sacrifices. If you tell them they can be in the vanguard, be a hero, be the one that helps — that works.)
5. You have to give people the sense that their vote counts and that their effort won’t be in vain.

Of course this doesn’t apply just to messaging around climate change and science.

According to a new study by the Pew Research Center, the great majority of actual reporting still comes from newspapers, but even those outlets are driven largely by reporting on government statements, not journalists own investigative reporting.  Here’s a quick summary of a few of the report’s findings:

• Looking at six major story lines that developed over one week last July, 83 percent of the reports in local news media “were essentially repetitive, conveying no new information.”

• Despite shrinking resources of established news outlets, “of the stories that did contain new information, nearly all, 95 percent, came from old media — most of them newspapers…These stories then tended to set the narrative agenda for most other media outlets.”

• Even the reporting done by traditional media was driven mostly by government statements rather than journalists’ own digging, the study found.

• There are some markets, like San Diego and Minneapolis, where the online news start-ups have become significant sources of original reporting.

A handful of celebrities are highly effective at using Facebook pages to connect with fans and promote their movies, albums and other products. Mashable has tried to extract some lessons we might learn from them. While comparisons to grassroots groups is laughable, it’s useful to keep an eye on anyone whose experimenting with online platforms. So with a grain of salt, here are three of the “lessons”:

1. Be authentic and engaging: Vin Diesel has over 7 million fans and is the most aggressive and authentic celebrity on Facebook. Diesel, who you probably know from The Fast and the Furious movies, has developed his fan base on Facebook by taking pictures of himself with his friends, family, and other celebrities. He has written extensively on his wall about his life, various activities he’s participating in, and often engages fans by asking questions. The results are mind-blowing, as he has tens of thousands of likes and comments for each item he shares.

What we can learn: Be authentic and start conversations instead of just pushing promotional material.

2. Offer fresh content: Ashton Kutcher: Ashton Kutcher is probably best known, in the social media world, as the man that challenged CNN to a race to a million Twitter followers and won. What you may not know about Kutcher is that he has also built a similar following on his Facebook Fan Page. Right now he has over 4 million fans. He has a “video” tab where he records videos of himself talking about different things from the convenience of his house. In addition, he shares relevant news, and videos from his startup, Blahgirls.

What we can learn: It’s important to engage fans with great, fresh content and keep them coming back for more.

3. Tell your story: Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps has one of the most popular Facebook Pages in the world, with over 2.8 million fans. He uses Facebook as an online diary, talking about his experiences, and sharing videos of himself and pictures from his sponsorships (one has him eating a hot dog at Subway). You may remember the controversy when he was caught smoking marijuana, you’ll see on his page that he apologizes for it to his fans. Phelps also talks about events like the Special Olympics, branding himself as a philanthropist.

What we can learn: Use your voice. Use Facebook to tell your side of the story and express your views.

The direct mail guru’s over at Mal Warwick Assoc. have posted a useful summary of the key points from a new book by Chip and Dan Health entitled Made to Stick, which explores what ideas work best in direct mail. They are:

• Simplicity—short, profound statements are powerful. Focus on the message’s core—think “proverbs.”
• Unexpectedness—generate lasting interest. Create a gap in people’s knowledge to make them curious.
• Concreteness—make ideas clear so everyone understands them. Explain ideas through (many) real examples.
• Credibility—make people believe your idea. Use vivid details, use statistics to illustrate a relationship (rather than a number) that people will remember.
• Emotional—tap into people’s feelings to make them care about the idea.
• Stories—the right stories can inspire and make people act.

This might be useful little checklist the next time you’re drafting up some direct mail.

Bloggers matter to our work because they’re often more sympathetic to our issues than the mainstream media.  Bloggers also need a constant stream of content, which we can provide — including news of local protests, poltical intrigue, framing up news stories, etc.  Blogs are also often the place to begin to get the word out about an issue, especially when political and media elites are keeping a close eye on what’s bubbling up through the blogsphere. This is why Crib Notes obsessivly tracks analysis of the evolving blogsphere — we see bloggers as yet another audience grassroots groups need to parse and understand.

So here’s another recent study by Technorati entitled “State of the Blogosphere 2009”, which reviews the use of Twitter by bloggers in 2009.  They found that:

• Bloggers use Twitter much more than does the general population. In a poll conducted by Penn, Schoen & Berland Associates in May 2009, just 14% of the general population used Twitter – but 73% of respondents in this survey do. Those who use Twitter say they do so to promote their blogs, bring interesting links to light, and to understand what people are buzzing about. 50% of Part Timers say they use Twitter to market their businesses. Other uses of Twitter, like interacting with companies (24%), politicians (11%), and celebrities (9%), are much less popular.
• 52% syndicate their blog posts to their Twitter Account, and 41% do so while also posting tweets that are not associated with their blogs. Twitter usage appears to be most pronounced among 18-24 (52%) and 25-34 (47%) year olds.
• 26% of bloggers who also use Twitter say that the service has eaten into the time they spend updating their traditional blogs – though 65% say it has had no effect. Even among the technologically sophisticated audience of bloggers, 35% of those who do not use Twitter say it’s because they do not understand the point . And 54% report that they don’t feel the need to broadcast their life, despite the popularity of “personal musings” as a blog topic.