The folks over at the New Organizing Institute have a great “tip of the day” for new twitter users. If you’re on Twitter, you’ve probably seen a few tweets that look something like this: “.@neworganizing, what time does tonight’s event start?” So what’s the dot (.) at the beginning of a tweet?  According to NOI, “It all comes down to how Twitter determines what to show people. When your tweet starts with the handle of a person or organization, Twitter assumes it’s a reply. So why does that matter?”

• Replies are filtered. Twitter assumes replies are semi-private, so tweets that start with a handle (@neworganizing what time…) get filtered. Only people who follow BOTH you AND the account you’re tweeting at will see a reply. This keeps your stream from getting filled with questions and replies between other people.
• Why is this good? It’s helpful if you follow people who answer a lot of questions on Twitter. For example, I follow lots of fantasy football analysts who answer hundreds of questions per day. If I saw all those responses, it would clog my stream.
• Why is it bad? Maybe you want everyone to see the tweet you sent to @WhiteHouse and RT you. Or maybe you want everyone to see your response to a question. When people tweet questions at @neworganizing, I usually want everyone who follows us to see the response, because I know others may have the same question.
• How to solve it. If you’re tweeting at someone and you want all your followers to see it, put any character in front of the handle. It could be a dot (.), a >, a blank space, a word (Hey @WhiteHouse), or anything you want. As long as @ isn’t the first character in your tweet, Twitter gets tricked into thinking it’s just an ordinary tweet, and shows it to everyone who follows you or searches for the other party’s handle.

For better or worse, Facebook continues to “evolve.” In the last few weeks alone they have introduced three new features: improved Photos, the Ticker, and Top News. Copyblogger has offered up three easy ways that folks can take advantage of these latest Facebook features:

1. Upload those big, beautiful photos

The new photos are much larger.

When you upload an album you can create a mini-story that is eye-catching and provocative. Post more pictures on your Facebook Page and think about what story you can tell with the photos.

The other great thing about the new photo size is that they take up more space in the News Feed. You are claiming more real estate than a typical post. Remember to add comments onto the main picture in the Album so you can also get your message across, along with your great images.

2. Keep track of The Ticker

The Ticker has probably been the most controversial of the changes Facebook introduced. Some people like it, others can’t stand it, and some have hidden it.

The way to get the most out of the Ticker is to encourage interaction. When you are getting more interaction throughout the day on your posts, other people can easily click on their friend’s Ticker update to see what their friend is commenting on or Liking

Your post can have a longer life if there is a continuing conversation. Any time someone comments, their friends have the potential to see the post and the thread of comments, then jump in and add to the conversation.

Post often (once or twice a day if possible) so you can pop into that Ticker more often.

Make sure you are sharing great, relevant content and ask questions related to that content in the update, just as AllFacebook.com did in the Ticker shown here.

3. Stay on top of the Top Stories

Top Stories aren’t actually completely new.

We used to have Top News and Most Recent on separate tabs. But now they are blended into one stream. Top Stories are what Facebook thinks you want to see, based on past interactions.

If you want to be a Top Story, make sure you are getting those comments and Likes.

So how do you get more comments and Likes?

 

Social media tools are powerful for quickly and cheaply broadcasting our frames and messages out to the world.  But tools like Twitter and Facebook are also very effective listening devices. NTEN has a useful post on 5 free tools to listen to what people are saying and where they are saying it.   Many of these tools are Twitter-focused, because Twitter is the easiest place to get started in listening.

Google Alerts (alerts.google.com): At the bare minimum, you should use Google Alerts for your organization’s name, acronym, prominent staff names like your ED, and large campaigns you’re working on. Depending on the number of mentions you get, you’ll probably want to set the alerts to come to your inbox as they happen, so you know quickly what’s being said and can determine a response, if needed.

Tweetdeck (tweetdeck.com): Tweetdeck is great because it runs in the background and gives you desktop alerts for mentions, similar to Microsoft Outlook when you get a new email. You can customize the different columns and have an array of search terms for people talking about you on Twitter. For example, mine has the following columns: @ replies of my personal twitter account, @ replies of my organizational account, mentions of “humane society”, mentions of “hsus”, and direct messages.

Tweetbeep (tweetbeep.com): Tweetbeep is essentially Google Alerts for Twitter. Whenever you’re mentioned on Twitter, you’ll get sent an email with details of that mention. You  can specify any search term you want. This is great for people who are not ready for the power of Tweetdeck with all its bells and whistles. Twitter is the most real-time account you have of what people are saying about you, so it’s really important to have a Twitter listening tool that matches your comfort level.

Kurrently (kurrently.com): It is amazing, and scary, how many people still do not lock down the privacy on their Facebook profiles. That’s what makes Kurrently so useful: it’s a search engine for public Facebook updates. It actually now pulls in a lot more than Facebook updates, but that’s what I find it most useful for.

Twitter Analyzer (twitteranalyzer.com): It is very important to think about your goals and how you’re going to measure success when diving into a new online venture, and listening is no different. Twitter Analyzer provides a breadth of statistics it provides and its ease of use. The graphs are pretty, too. It provides data such as number of followers, number of tweets, number of retweets, top hashtags, number of mentions, etc – which are great metrics. For Facebook, check out their built-in analytics for your fan page.

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!

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.

In The New Yorker this week, Malcolm Gladwell wrote a stinging critique of the claim that social media like Twitter and Facebook are reinventing activism.  We’ve pulled a few key quotes below, but the full article is worth a read. Gladwell is coming late to the debate, but he does a decent job at summing up a long-standing argument that’s been broiling in the grassroots organizing sector for some time. The following should give the gist of his core claims:

Twitter is a way of following (or being followed by) people you may never have met. Facebook is a tool for efficiently managing your acquaintances, for keeping up with the people you would not otherwise be able to stay in touch with. That’s why you can have a thousand “friends” on Facebook, as you never could in real life. This is in many ways a wonderful thing. There is strength in weak ties, as the sociologist Mark Granovetter has observed. Our acquaintances—not our friends—are our greatest source of new ideas and information. The Internet lets us exploit the power of these kinds of distant connections with marvellous efficiency. It’s terrific at the diffusion of innovation, interdisciplinary collaboration, seamlessly matching up buyers and sellers, and the logistical functions of the dating world. But weak ties seldom led to high-risk activism.

The civil-rights movement was high-risk activism. It was also, crucially, strategic activism: a challenge to the establishment mounted with precision and discipline. The N.A.A.C.P. was a centralized organization, run from New York according to highly formalized operating procedures…social media are not about this kind of hierarchical organization. Facebook and the like are tools for building networks, which are the opposite, in structure and character, of hierarchies. Unlike hierarchies, with their rules and procedures, networks aren’t controlled by a single central authority. Decisions are made through consensus, and the ties that bind people to the group are loose.

“Social networks are effective at increasing participation — by lessening the level of motivation that participation requires,” he writes. And the “weak ties” created by these platforms, he adds, cannot promote the discipline and strategy that true political activism requires.

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:

MobileActive has put together a beginner’s guide for groups experimenting with mobile fundraising.  Here’s what they suggest groups consider before deciding whether or not to explore the possibilities of mobile giving:

• First and foremost, ask yourself how mobile donations fit into your overall fundraising strategies. What are your goals? Who is your audience? What are your current tactics? How does mobile fit in? Consider more fine-grained questions such as this: Does reaching out to new donors, maybe from a different demographic, make sense for your organization? Are your current organizational programs conducive to mobile giving (for example, do you run large events on a regular basis where building a mobile list and text donations make sense?)
• Can you cover the start-up and overhead costs for a mobile giving campaign (more on that below “Don’t Worry About Breaking Even” section that follows).
• Is mobile giving becoming a factor in fundraising for comparable nonprofits in your field?
• Can you afford not to explore the possibilities of mobile giving? This is not just a matter of the money involved: it is a matter of demonstrating to your supporters that you are aggressively pursuing your organization’s needs and goals, that you are savvy in the use of technology (if that matters to your brand), etc.
• You need some support for a new technology. How willing are your staff and volunteers to explore new ways of working?
• For some organizations, you may be helping your donors to make their first text message-based donations. Will they need reassurance and support? Can you provide it?

Later in the week we’ll post some tips on how to get started on your mobile fundraising campaign.

In Politics Magazine, Josh Koster and Tyler Davis offer up a great example of an effective microtargeted ad campaign they helped run against Lou Dobbs:

We needed to gain and keep the press’ attention, so we deployed digital paid media to target media employees specifically. The Facebook feature “workplace targeting” was our primary weapon. We targeted all CNN/AOL-Time Warner employees with 500 points per day (the Facebook max). We ran dozens of different ads, testing message hooks from “Why did you let Lou Dobbs broadcast from a hate rally?” to “Why is CNN profiting off racism?” We even called out CNN’s on-air talent by name: “Hey Soledad O’Brian, why don’t you ask Lou Dobbs what it’s like to be Latino in America,” to ensure the CNN staff was sending screenshots between departments. We also workplace targeted the staff of the 25 biggest political and national news outlets in the country.

Consensus is that the anti-Lou Dobbs drive directed at getting him getting dropped from CNN “seemed to really benefit from the fact that a considerable number of people were, in a wide-spread sort of way, getting fed up with Dobbs’ increasing vehemence — and volume — over the last months and years of his stint at CNN…Rather than leaving folks to yell at the TV and throw pillows at Dobbs’ face, the campaign gave them a vehicle for those passions.”

It’s a Great example of the power of online microtargeting that is cheap and fast. But it’s not just the power of the tech tools. Part of their success what based on their objective of giving a loud voice to what people are already thinking and perhaps even grumbling about, but not really saying outloud.

Youtube’s nonprofit program now allows organizations in the program to insert personalized external links into videos using the Annotations feature. This is especially big news for anyone using video to fundraise.

The new Call-To-Action capability means that groups can now build graphics within a video that ask people to “Donate” or “Sign Up” or “Sign the Petition” and then use an invisible annotation to make it so viewers can click on the link.  This works both on the Youtube page and with embedded video on your organizational site.

Users can also go back to old videos on the site and add annotations that are visible that can say “Donate Now” and that link to pages on your site.

YouTube has previously enabled users to add text notes and bubbles, links to other YouTube videos or channels, and highlighted areas.  But giving users the ability to control formatting of their annotations (change font size, etc) and build invisible hyperlinks into their own videos is a new important tool for groups to drive people to their organizational sites.

Here’s a screenshot of CharityWater’s use of the annotations tool to fundraise:

And here is an interesting use of the annotations device by droptheweapons.org about the ramifications of carrying or using a knife, where they allow viewers to choose various plot lines as they watch the video.