Not An Alternative

Presentation at Yearly Kos Convention

Beka, who works with Not An Alternative and Greenpeace, attended The Yearly Kos Convention last week. There she presented on a panel called “Politics 2.0 - How social networks and new media are changing politics.” A good summary of her presentation is available at See What’s Out There.

Social Networks - The last post from Yearly Kos”

On Friday I went to a social networking panel at Yearly Kos and this is the last thing I have to write up from the conference. The title of the session was “Politics 2.0 - How social networks and new media are changing politics.” On the panel we had Amy Rubin, Stephanie Taylor, Beka Economopoulos and Ruby Sinreich. I didn’t stay for the entire thing, but what I caught was good.

First up was Ruby Sinreich. Her subject was, what makes for effective social networks. Here are some notes:

1. Strong Social Ties
a. personal relationships
b. trust
c. awareness - you have to know the network exists

2. Common Story - we have to be on the same page (eg. Sorry Everybody)

3. Communication grid so people can talk to each other

eg. drinkingliberally.com which is online and offline
one-to-many. You have to have the ability to communicate.

4. Shared Resources
a. data information - eg. wikipedia
b. skills and expertise
c. money
d. space

5. Clarity of Purpose
a. do you feel like a member?
b. knowing what the network is for

After her talk she showed different types of network diagrams. According to Ruby, the mesh network is the best because it is not dependent on a single point — if one person leaves it stays together.

Amy Rubin, the Deputy Director of New Media from the John Edwards campaign then talked about their social network strategy as it related to promoting a webcast after the last debate.

My take-aways from her talk:

1. You can reach out to lots of online communities, but you need a single site that brings all the information together.

2. Meet people where they are, don’t make MySpace people come to Facebook or try to create groups that cross network platforms. Yes, it is more work, but you have to meet people where they live online.

3. Focus on influencers. Not everyone is equal, let the people who influence their friends move your message.

4. The list will grow naturally as you give people what they want where they want it. Don’t make them leave their comfort zone to do something you want them to do. List growth comes when people are interested.

5. Care2, working with them was great to seed the actions.

6. Created private leadership groups within each social network - give the people working the most something special.

The highlight of the session was Beka Economopoulos from Greenpeace. Yes, her name alone would make it a highlight.

She is an online organizer for Greenpeace. Her history is with off-line organizing and so her job is to see how we can leverage social networks and integrate web 2.0 platforms to leverage off-line results. In other words… can you use the web to get people to show up and do things in the real world.

She organizes days of action so people can participate to do bake sales or congressional visits. Greenpeace has 65,000 friends in MySpace. Getting friends is not a communications strategy — MySpace isn’t a web page it’s a network. She had a nice analogy for this. “A friend on a social network is like putting on a bumper sticker.” It’s a sign of affiliation but that’s it.

At Greenpeace, they have a team of interns who work to respond to people it pays off. Their email list is growing and they consider those friends to be an extension of their email list because they send their newsletters and alerts to them as well. So the 65,000 new eyeballs and ears are great, but they are paying close attention to how to convert those people to activists.

She then showed us an amazing case study of action against Kimberly Clark, the big paper company. Kimberly Clark makes Kleenex and they heard that Kleenex was going to be shooting a commercial in Times Square. The commercial was to have real people sit on a couch and tell the camera about their “Kleenex moment.” This makes for great TV because it is an authentic voice. Beka called this the “fetishization of the reality TV genre.” And it set them up for a fall.

Greenpeace inserted themselves into the the story. They are focused on what she called “narrative driven campaigning and culturally focused organizing.” Which is to say, paying attention to what the symbols in the culture are that are resonating and how you can insert yourself into the story and point those symbols in new a direction and with new meaning. So Beka and her merry band brought their own crew and hidden mics and inserted themselves into this commercial shoot. The goal was to educate people about the fact that Kleenex is made from virgin forests and uses no recycled content.

What’s terrific here is not only how well this worked, but how they used the product of it to create a story and training video. The idea with this video is to empower more people to take their own actions and to get people thinking that they too can become an activists. Have a look:

One thing you will notice is that it’s long for web video. She said that friends thought it was too long but it holds together to tell a story — more training video than PSA. All the people in the action are new people. The guy who did the sound bites had never done anything before, now they are all hooked. Beka then promoted this to blogs, focusing on online progressive news and environmental blogs, then promoted it to ad agency and brand people.

Her conclusion was that there is a flattening of politics with over-saturation of media and so organizations should focus their energy and resources when and where you have good content. Amen Sister!

She also said, to my great delight, that there is no such thing as virability. You have to work the communities to get critical mass. She said that on MySpace they are getting very high conversion rates and that people who were individually messaged on a bake sale had a 15% conversion rate to off-line participation and that their average is 10% conversation. That’s huge.

I am looking forward to seeing what they do next.