M+R has a great checklist for preparing to live tweet an event. As they remind us “Live-tweeting can be a great way to build your audience on Twitter – if you do it right…Setting yourself up for successful live-tweeting before the event is just as important as doing a good job with the tweets themselves. Thinking through a few simple things in advance will not only ensure that you can logistically do your tweeting from the event, but it can also massively increase the number of people who see your tweets.” Here’s the checklist to get you started:

1. Follow the people you think will be interested in the content you will be posting and the people you know are going to the event. They may follow you back, helping you build an audience!
2. Check the event location for Wi-Fi and/or mobile phone service. Some events held at hotel or conference venues have spotty reception or Wi-Fi. If you need a password to access the internet, make sure to find it out in advance!
3. Find out the designated hashtag for the event and promote it to your followers before the event begins. This allows people to search for tweets related to the event — regardless of who posts them.
4. If there is no designated hashtag, search Twitter to see what hashtag(s) other attendees are using and follow suit.
5. If there is no hashtag already in use, choose a short but memorable combination of letters and numbers and start the trend yourself. For example, M+R’s annual Benchmarks event was live-tweeted under the hashtag #2011Bench. Before settling on a hashtag, do a quick search to make sure the hashtag isn’t already in use!
6. Find out the Twitter handles of speakers/presenters at the event ahead of time so you can mention them in your tweets if you quote them. Those people may re-tweet your tweet to their followers, which could help build your audience!
7. Decide whether you’ll be tweeting from a phone or a computer. If you’re tweeting from a non-smart phone, you’ll need to add your phone to your Twitter account ahead of time. Log in to Twitter, go to http://twitter.com/devices and follow the instructions on the screen.
8. If you’re tweeting from an iPhone or another smartphone, download the Hootsuite or Twitter application.
9. Bring a charger for your phone or laptop – tweeting can wear out your battery and it’s best to be prepared.
10. Decide how you will archive all of the tweets from the event. Sign up for a free service such as twapperkeeper.com.

According to the Care2 Frogloop blog, group texting can make organizers lives a lot easier in communicating quickly and more efficiently with key staff.  Imagine  you’re organizing a field event and need to keep in touch with 15 organizers throughout the day. Group texting offers a good option to stay connected, answer questions, and deal with logistics. In other words, loose the dorky looking walkie-talkies.  Frogloop broke down the basics of group texting for us. Here’s how it works:

If you’re a first time user, create an account with a service provider like Groupme or Fast Society and download their app. Users can usually create an unlimited number of texting groups via smartphones, a standard mobile phone using texting commands or even online through the vendors website. Invite others to join the group by typing in their names and phone numbers and start texting away.

When you add people to your group they will receive a text message from the service provider notifying them that they’ve been added to your group. They will also be able to view other group members. Every time you and other members send a text, the entire group receives the text message so remember not to abuse it with unnecessary messages because you want people to find it useful and not tune you out. You can delete the group at any time.

All of the group texting service providers offer similar services but in the race to become the most popular, there are also some slight differences. A list with pros and cons is available here.

But Be Aware of Extra Fees: Most of the group texting service providers let users toggle back and fourth between getting SMS texts and receiving notifications through the provider’s app. Be aware that messaging and data rates may apply depending on the users contract with their mobile provider.

The Pew Hispanic Center released a report a few months ago on the use of digital technology by Latinos. There is a lot of debate among grassroots organizers about the topography of the digital divide — so it’s good to see some raw data. Pew’s survey showed that Latinos are “less likely than whites to access the internet, have a home broadband connection or own a cell phone.” And while Latinos lag behind blacks in home broadband access, they have similar rates of internet and cell phone use.  Here are some other key findings:

• While about two-thirds of Latino (65%) and black (66%) adults went online in 2010, more than three-fourths (77%) of white adults did so. In terms of broadband use at home, there is a large gap between Latinos (45%) and whites (65%), and the rate among blacks (52%) is somewhat higher than that of Latinos. Fully 85% of whites owned a cell phone in 2010, compared with 76% of Latinos and 79% of blacks.

• Hispanics, on average, have lower levels of education and earn less than whites. Controlling for these factors, the differences in internet use, home broadband access and cell phone use between Hispanics and whites disappear. In other words, Hispanics and whites who have similar socioeconomic characteristics have similar usage patterns for these technologies.

• Respondents were asked specifically about whether they access the internet and whether they use email, texting or instant messaging from a cell phone. The findings reveal a mixed pattern of non-voice cell phone application use across ethnic and racial groups. Hispanics are less likely than whites to use any non-voice applications on a cell phone (58% vs. 64%), and they are also less likely than whites to send or receive text messages (55% vs. 61%). However, Hispanics and whites are equally likely to access the internet and send or receive email from a cell phone. And Hispanics are more likely than whites to engage in instant messaging (34% vs. 20%). Compared with blacks, Hispanics are less likely to access the internet (31% vs. 41%) or send or receive email (27% vs. 33%) from a cell phone, but rates of texting and instant messaging are similar for the two groups.

In response to a recent study showing that as many as half of congressional staffers believe online form messages are fake, M+R Research Labs put together a helpful tip list on how to “turn online advocacy into real-world change.” The list was developed to help groups targeting Congress, but they’re equally usefully for local legislative organizing.

1. “Online petitions” should only be the first step. For most organizations, easy online advocacy actions such as petitions or letters to Congress are the best way to recruit large numbers of new supporters. But don’t stop there! Think of your online petition as an entry point for a new activist or a way to begin engaging your list on an issue, and then build up to higher impact actions like phone calls, letters to the editor, and offline events.
2. Make high-impact advocacy easier. Congressional offices pay much more attention to phone calls than online messages (as long as they’re from actual constituents!). But picking up the phone is much harder than filling out an online form to send a letter, and many supporters can find it intimidating. Make sure you’re guiding your advocates through the process and arming them with information, and consider using online tools to make calling and writing letters to the editor easier. For instance, M+R recently helped AARP create, implement and roll out a tool that helped constituents call their legislators with just one click. When users clicked the “call now” button, a personalized link made action-taker’s phone ring immediately, automatically connecting them to their own Members of Congress — no dialing required!
3. Integrate online and offline work. If you’re offering an offline petition, make an organizational commitment to deliver the petitions at a lobby day or press event, tell supporters what you’re going to do, grab some video or at least a few good photos while you’re doing it, and then report back to your activists on how it went. Hold virtual lobby days so that your supporters are writing and calling at the same time that representatives of your organization are visiting Capitol Hill. And help your most hardcore supporters meet with lawmakers on their own. The Human Rights Campaign ran integrated campaigns in 2009 and 2010 that helped ordinary supporters set up meetings with their Members of Congress in local district offices. The sign-up tools and promotions were all online, but the online effort was backed by a strong field team that followed up with constituents to provide them with the resources and support they needed to be successful (and to ensure that their meetings actually took place!)
4. Take advantage of social networks. A recent study found that 64% of surveyed Hill staffers think Facebook is an important way to understand their constituents’ views. Direct your supporters to their representatives’ Facebook pages and ask them to write on their walls. Encourage your supporters to tweet members of Congress who are on Twitter. Last year, the ENOUGH Project flooded the Facebook walls of ten members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee with messages in the hopes of getting the conflict minerals bill out of committee. 48 hours and over 500 messages later, two of the ten — as well as another three who had not been targeted — decided to co-sponsor the bill, which passed into law a few months later. During the health care reform debate, Organizing for America built a “Tweet Congress” tool that allowed users to enter their zip code to find their Representative or Senators, making it easy for them to connect and apply pressure via a new medium.
5. Go local. Capitol Hill is crowded and noisy. New tools make it easier than ever to reach supporters, and easier than ever for supporters to contact Congress — so more people are doing it than ever before. To avoid being drowned out, reach out to members of Congress in their home districts. M+R’s grassroots mobilization team puts organizers on the ground in key states and districts to mobilize local partners, recruit and train activists, push an issue in the local media, provide support to national online organizing, and facilitate congressional contact at town halls and district offices. We use online tools to connect supporters to organizers, generate grassroots momentum, and turn out attendance at locally organized events. It’s a highly effective combination!

Younger folks juggle a whole range of electronic devices in their daily lives. Pew has put out a new study that found that younger users prefer laptops to desktops and using their cell phones for a variety of functions, including internet, email, music, games, and video.

Among the findings:

• Cell phones are by far the most popular device among American adults, especially for adults under the age of 65. Some 85% of adults own cell phones overall. Taking pictures (done by 76% of cell owners) and text messaging (done by 72% of cell owners) are the two non-voice functions that are widely popular among all cell phone users.
• Desktop computers are most popular with adults ages 35-65, with 69% of Gen X, 65% of Younger Boomers and 64% of Older Boomers owning these devices.
• Millennials are the only generation that is more likely to own a laptop computer or netbook than a desktop:  70% own a laptop, compared with 57% who own a desktop.
• While almost half of all adults own an mp3 player like an iPod, this device is by far the most popular with Millennials, the youngest generation—74% of adults ages 18-34 own an mp3 player, compared with 56% of the next oldest generation, Gen X (ages 35-46).
• Game consoles are significantly more popular with adults ages 18-46, with 63% owning these devices.
• 5% of all adults own an e-book reader; they are least popular with adults age 75 and older, with 2% owning this device.
• Tablet computers, such as the iPad, are most popular with American adults age 65 and younger. 4% of all adults own this device.

Additionally, about one in 11 (9%) adults do not own any of the devices we asked about, including 43% of adults age 75 and older.

As protests in Egypt heat up, government authorities have quickly moved to shut down nationwide internet access — something that is frighteningly  easy for elites to accomplish and should be a wake-up call for all of using corporate-controlled platforms as organizing tools. But undaunted, protesters have quickly switched to using a new app called SayNow that doesn’t require an internet connection to broadcast twitter messages. SayNow is a voice-based social media platform that gives Egyptians three phone numbers to call and leave a voicemail, which is then posted on the Internet as a recorded Twitter message. The messages are at twitter.com/speak2tweet and can also be heard by telephone.

According to the New York Times “The result is a story of a revolution unfolding in short bursts. Sometimes speaking for just several seconds, other times for more than a minute, the disembodied voices convey highly charged moments of excitement or calm declarations of what life is like in the Arab world’s most populous country as it seeks to overturn the rule of its leader. Not all of the callers were phoning from inside Egypt. On Tuesday the service started to identify the country, with a hash mark, from which each recorded message came. While most were from Egypt, they included calls from Germany and the United States in Arabic and English, as well as messages from Arabic speakers in the Netherlands and Turkey.”

This is a great example of the novel marriage of old technology — land lines — with a new social media tool — Twitter. And an App that some of us might find useful for our folks stuck on the wrong side of the digital divide.

Many of us have been closely tracking the evolving “digital divide” in our communities. For the first few decades of the digital revolution we knew that many of our folks lacked access to the basic tools of the internet age — placing them on the wrong side of the “digital divide.”  Then things began to change. The rise of ever-more powerful mobile devices — essentially computers in your pocket — resulted in Latinos and blacks to be more likely than the general population to access the Web by cellular phones, and they use their phones more often to do more things.  So for example:

• 51% percent of Hispanics and 46% of blacks use their phones to access the Internet, compared with 33% of whites, according to a July 2010 Pew poll.
• Forty-seven percent of Latinos and 41% of blacks use their phones for e-mail, compared with 30% of whites. The figures for using social media like Facebook via phone were 36% for Latinos, 33% for blacks and 19% for whites.

But while one divide has begun to close, another may be opening.  Here’s how a researcher at Pew explains the growing problem: “[N]ow some see a new “digital divide” emerging — with Latinos and blacks being challenged by more, not less, access to technology. It’s tough to fill out a job application on a cellphone, for example. Researchers have noticed signs of segregation online that perpetuate divisions in the physical world. And blacks and Latinos may be using their increased Web access more for entertainment than empowerment.”

According to a new study out by Pew, an overwhelming majority of adults are now regular texters — with more than 72 percent of those over 18 now sending messages via their phones. Adult usage still pales in comparison to texting among teenagers, who send an average of five times as many texts as their adult counterparts.

The report also found that, broken down by race, African Americans and Hispanics are “more intense and frequent” users of a phone’s capabilities than whites.  And parents with children under 18 in the home are also more likely to own a phone than those without kids.

Here are a few of the other key findings of the study:

• Adult texters are sending an average of 10 texts per day, while those ages 12 to 17 are sending about 50 texts per day. There are some prolific adult texters – about 5 percent of adults send 200 texts per day or more; about 15 percent of teens do the same.
• Gender is not a major factor when it comes to texting; men and women send and receive the same number of texts on a daily basis.
• If you text often, it’s likely that you also make a lot of voice calls. But if you’re a light texter, you do not make up for the lack of communication with phone calls – small number of texts also translated into a small number of calls. On average, adults will make and receive about five calls per day.
• Overall, about 82 percent of people now own a cell phone, Pew said. “Just as many adults have a cell phone as have a computer,” the report said.

Dazed and confused about Twitter hashtags?  We stumbled on a this nice little introductory wiki primer entitled “Hashtags Introduction“.  Below are a few key points:

• Hashtags are a community-driven convention for adding additional context and metadata to your tweets. They’re like tags on Flickr, only added inline to your post. You create a hashtag simply by prefixing a word with a hash symbol: #hashtag.
• Hashtags were developed as a means to create “groupings” on Twitter, without having to change the basic service. The hash symbol is a convention borrowed primarily from IRC channels, and later from Jaiku’s channels.

How To Use Hashtags

• Start using hashtags in your tweets, preceding key words. It can be helpful to do a little research first, to find out if the subject you’re tweeting already has an established hashtag. Also, check Suggestions and Tips and Example Uses below for ettiquette and general usage.
• Finally, track other tweets on the subjects you’re interested in (ie: those containing the appropriate hashtags) by browsing/searching at Hashtags.org, TwitterGroups, TweetChat, TweetGrid, Twitterfall, etc. You can set it up with RSS feeds as well.

Suggestions and tips

• The use of hashtags is still an emergent phenomena, and as such, etiquette is negotiable, though some have already expressed their distaste for hashtags.
• Used sparingly and respectfully, hashtags can provide useful context and cues for recall, as well as increased utility for the track feature. Used excessively can cause annoyance, confusion or frustration, and may lead people to stop following you. It’s best to use hashtags explicitly when they’re going to add value, rather than on every word in an update.
• A good rule of thumb to follow is to focus on your update first, and only if it quantitatively adds value, to append one-three hashtags. There are no hard and fast rules, but Twitter should continue to be about answering the simple question: “What are you doing” rather than “What tags apply to what you’re doing?”
• CamelCase: When creating a hashtag for something that may consist of two or more words its a good idea to use the “CamelCase” format to maintain legibility. The idea is to join words with each words initial letter capitalized. For example if I wanted to create a hashtag  for south Africa, I would type out: #SouthAfrica instead of #southafrica

According to Reuters, the actor Ed Norton is leading a new venture called Crowdrise “that gives people a free way to create their own fundraising pages to share through social networks, winning points and prizes along the way.” Crowdrise was developed after Norton found Twitter to be an effective way to raise $1.2 million for his long-term cause, the Maasai Wilderness Conservation Trust, by running New York’s marathon last year.  According to Norton “People use Twitter or Facebook because it’s a way to share their personal narrative but we wanted to give people a platform to say, these are the causes I care about, I am volunteering and sponsor me.”

Here’s how Norton and Co. describe the way users can tap into Crowdrise:

START FUNDRAISING PROJECTS: Whether you’re running a marathon, volunteering, or have causes that you care deeply about, create your own Fundraising Pages on Crowdrise and choose from over a million charities to raise money for. If it takes you more than a minute to create your Page, you’re probably just a really slow typist.

GET YOUR VOLUNTEER PROJECTS SPONSORED: Post all your Volunteer Projects on Crowdrise so everyone sees how you’re making a difference. Go a step further and get your friends to Sponsor your Volunteer Projects to raise money for Charity, the exact same way someone running a marathon does.

MAKE YOUR CAMPAIGNS COMPELLING: Use your personal stories, powerful photos and videos, and our Best Promos Ever to create campaigns that are so compelling that your supporters not only donate money but want to join your Project Team and tell everyone they know about it.

GET VOTES AND WIN AMAZING PRIZES: Earn 100 points for every Vote you get from the Crowdrise Community and get 10 points for every $1 you raise for Charity. The goal is to allow the community to award the best Volunteers and Fundraisers in the world with lots of Points. Top Point Earners not only win amazing prizes, but they’ll be recognized for their extraordinary achievements by becoming Crowdrise Royalty.

And here’s a chart for how the program works: