Remember all that money your organization, campaign or company spent on Facebook Ads designed to build a following for your Facebook Page? Well, that real estate is steadily losing its value:
With the introduction of the “subscribe” feature, Facebook’s news feed has begun favoring posts and activity from subscriptions over posts from fan pages. This means it has become even more difficult to get content from your fan page seen in your followers’ news feeds. So what now?
M&R’s Amy Peyro has some specific suggestions in her article for boosting the performance of your Facebook posts, but really, this entire situation is pretty damn frustrating for online communicators. Facebook is happy to take our money, but after cashing the checks they’re equally happy to change the rules to significantly cut the value of that investment: if the fans we paid to reach don’t see our content as often, each click on an ad is functionally worth less.
Yet another illustration of the danger of relying on a third-party platform for advocacy! If you don’t own the list, you don’t own the list — and the company that DOES own it can do what it wants with something you spent time and.or money building. Zuckerberg wants vendor-neutral channels like email to fade away in favor of means of communication he owns? Hey buddy, I know what’s in it for YOU, but why should WE go along?
– cpd
January 25th, 2012
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Update: The good folks at PopVox will be tweeting out links to any legislation mentioned in the SOTU and the Republican response at @PopVox. Handy!
Big news today — my NWLC colleague Danielle Jackson and I are invited to the White House (along with digital communications folks from other advocacy organizations) to live-tweet the State of the Union. Exciting stuff! We’ve armed ourselves with a big spreadsheet of pre-prepared tweets, based on topics that could come up and including links to NWLC resources and other background materials. Should be an exciting night, and besides the @NWLC tweets I’ll also be covering the live-tweeting event itself on @epolitics. Follow it here — I’ve embedded the @epolitics Twitter feed below.
This White House invitation (sent through their Office of Public Engagement) is a classic example of blogger/online activist relations — they can’t exactly give us exclusive information or the other usual goodies we online communicators use to entice online opinion leaders, but they CAN give us a seat in a meeting room in the White House complex, which is pretty damn cool all around. Plus, we’ll have a chance to schmooze with White House digital outreach folks, which provides another benefit. Excellent work all around, and the kind of event that political campaigns can learn from.
Plus, you can get involved: after the speech, Obama’s comms folks will be taking questions online.
10:00 pm EST: Immediately following the speech, pose your questions to a live panel. Administration Officials will answer your questions about the President’s address. In addition to taking your questions, the panelists will take questions submitted via Twitter (using hashtags #WHChat & #SOTU), Google+ and Facebook. Feel free to call on your followers to add their voice to the discussion and share their questions.
Another interesting #SOTU social media angles: Yahoo wants your 140-character analysis of the speech (via Elana Levin), which sounds like political commentary as haiku! Next, Quora will be taking questions that administration officials will answer over the following few days (via A Loyal Reader — thanks, Dad!), and the President will be answering questions directly on January 30th in a Google+ “hangout” (via Lisa Byrne). Quite the social media push from the White House these days…purely a coincidence that we’re in an election year, right?
@epolitics Twitter feed below, after the break. Live coverage should being sometime after 8 pm Eastern…don’t miss it.
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January 24th, 2012
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Howdy folks, on Saturday I sat down with NationBuilder’s Chief Organizer Adriel Hampton (via Skype) to talk about, well, a lot! We started with a focus on the SOPA protests and Chris Dodd’s new education on the power of internet politics, but we went much farther afield, including ruminations on the nature of a post-manufacturing America…yep, we did some good, old-fashioned nerding out (in which the eternal subject of a genocidal war of robots vs. humans did of course come up). As Adriel wrote:
On this episode of NationBuilder’s Leaders and Creators, I talk with Colin Delany…about the historical online action, former Sen. Chris Dodd’s old-school lobbying efforts to push the SOPA/PIPA bills on behalf of the Motion Picture Association of America, and what this battle between traditional entertainment industry interests and the web means for the future of tech industry lobbying in DC.
Colin and I also discuss the philosophies in Jaron Lanier’s “You Are Not a Gadget” and Kurt Vonnegut’s “Player Piano,” and how organizations, from advocacy non-profits to citizens groups like the Tea Party, turn their online networks into offline political influence.
Listen below:
Good times all around, and keep an eye out for future installments of NationBuilder’s “Leaders and Creators Podcast” series.
– cpd
January 23rd, 2012
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Capitalizing on yesterday’s South Carolina primary win, Newt Gingrich sent out an email last night lighting the fuse on a million-dollar “money bomb” (a concentrated online fundraising effort) to “knock out” those who stand between him and the presidency. Though the original email suggested that Romney and Republican elites were the target (it included lines like “we need a bold Reagan conservative to debate Obama” and “this campaign is going to continue to rely on millions of patriots from across the country rather than just a handful of wealthy donors and bundlers”), a subsequent message focused on the incumbent:
“I was asked at a town hall in South Carolina how I plan to “bloody Obama’s nose” and point out to the American public his many failures. My response was simple: I don’t want to bloody Barack Obama’s nose, I want to knock him out! And after last night’s resounding victory, we’re in a position to do just that.”
One million dollars? That’ll pay off his $800,000 website for sure, with a little something left over for Tiffany’s! (Sorry, couldn’t resist). Money bombs are a great way for a campaign to turn a burst of momentum and attention into the potential for further victories, though in this case even $1,000,000 is likely to be pocket change compared with what the Establishment will spend to try to stop Gingrich via SuperPACS and other channels in the next few weeks. But as with Elizabeth Warren’s recent success with the tactic, a lucrative money bomb also demonstrates grassroots support, something Gingrich will need, since he lacks a strong local organization in Florida and the Super Tuesday States.
BTW, Rick Santorum also tried to launch a money bomb recently, but he did so using a name (“Conservatives United Moneybomb”) that lends itself to an unfortunate acronym and headlines like this one. Dude, get a clue.
– cpd
January 22nd, 2012
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Elizabeth Warren’s campaign scored a coup the other day: they hired Lauren Miller to run their new media shop. Lauren’s a friend, but more than that she’s one of the best email people in the business, and someone who actually knows what the hell she’s talking about. Warren could not have made a better choice.
A conversation at Lauren’s going-away party the other night sparked a connection — a few weeks ago Jason Rosenbaum over at the PCCC mentioned to me that he thought that a campaign’s first hire should should be a digital communications director, in part because nowadays they’re involved in EVERYTHING a campaign does. From fundraising to grassroots organizing, communications to strategy, what they build and the relationships they supervise are now fundamental, and someone who knows what they’re doing in that area should come on board as early as possible.
I mentioned that idea to Lauren, and she amended it to add a dedicated fundraiser to the first round of hires. After all, the digital director needs to be paid! And of course to buy technology and talent as needed. An excellent point, and the motion is accepted: a campaign’s first two hires should be a digital media director and a fundraising guru to shake enough money out of the trees to pay for his or her work. Okay, fine, hire an overall campaign manager before them if you have to, but you get the idea.
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January 20th, 2012
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Hi folks, here’s a quick reminder: RadCampaign’s Allyson Kapin, Jeanette Russell and I will be having our “Advocacy Rising” discussion today at 4 pm at SalsaLabs. Here are the details, and I hope you can make it! Note that the monthly Salsa happy hour will start right afterwards, so bring a prodigious thirst and a desire to schmooze. And, don’t miss the preview article, “Riding an Electoral Wave: How Election-Year Politics Can Promote Your Issues.” See you there!
– cpd
January 19th, 2012
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Also published on HuffingtonPost
Here’s an angle that just occurred to me about today’s widespread online protests against the “Stop Online Piracy Act”: normally we talk about digital activism being HOSTED on the internet, but this is a great example of what happens when the companies behind the internet start to DRIVE protest. And when they’re driving the protest, it’s their customers and users who matter.
One immediate consequence of so many sites shutting down: quite likely, a short, sharp spike in human productivity! With no Wikipedia to be my procrastination-buddy, how can I “spend” time “researching” the latest findings on Kuyper Belt Objects or doing vital “work” like checking out the anti-aircraft armament of modern Chinese ocean-going frigates? What, I’m supposed to do my job??? Even the LOLcats have gone on strike!
In any case, if you’re out of the loop, here’s what’s up. To protest legislation in Congress that (among other things) would make it much easier to shut down websites that host content that someone claims is pirated, sites ranging from Wikipedia to Google have painted themselves black or shut down their normal content in favor of asking readers to pressure their representatives to kill the bill. For instance, Wikipedia asks U.S. readers to enter a zip code and then contact their congressmembers, conveniently providing both the phone numbers and a link to the members’ web contact forms. No list-building here! Just pure advocacy.
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January 18th, 2012
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Wikipedia and a slew of other sites may have shut down today to protest SOPA, but that’s not the only big story in the online advocacy space this week: yesterday Blackbaud announced that the company would be buying Convio, a leading provider of email advocacy and online fundraising for nonprofits and trade associations (disclaimer: my current employer uses Convio for our email-list management). Seems like just yesterday it was Convio buying GetActive, which I was then using at my previous full-time job!
As you can imagine, this development stirred up an anthill on the listservs, with some people still unhappy with Blackbaud about how it handled its acquisition of Kintera years ago (among other things). My favorite response: on a Convio customer conference call yesterday, one online organizer apparently prefaced a question for Convio’s Gene Austin with, “As someone who just signed a contract with Convio because it WASN’T Blackbaud….” Ouch!
I’m generally in the camp that more competition in the industry is better, which is one reason I’ve been a fan of the rise of NationBuilder, but not everyone agrees. For two vastly opinions, check out Talkin’ Blackbaud Blues and Why I’m Optimistic About Blackbaud’s Acquisition of Convio. You can guess that I lean toward the former, but ultimately it doesn’t really matter: this is business, and it looks like something as close to a done deal as you’re going to get.
Update: see also Building a Community, Not an Empire, Blackbaud Buys their Rival Convio: Now What?, and What might Blackbaud do with Convio?
– cpd
January 18th, 2012
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As part of their Advocacy Rising program, the good folks at SalsaLabs asked me to contribute the piece below, which first appeared on Salsa Commons. One thing I left out — nonprofits have to be careful what they say in an election year if they mention candidates. The exact rules depend on your IRS nonprofit status (i.e., which flavor of nonprofit you are), so check with the lawyers early on so that you know the ground rules. While you’re waiting to hear back from them, be sure to check out our in-person discussion on Thursday.
Riding an Electoral Wave: How Election-Year Politics Can Promote Your Issues
It’s an election year! With a gridlocked Congress! Doesn’t leave much room for issue-advocacy, right? Wrong: the long months of politicking in a presidential election year can actually give advocacy organizations great opportunities to boost the prominence of their issues — BUT only if they’re ready.
The Media Dynamic
Perhaps you’ve noticed that political coverage has certain dynamic, one that might be described as lemming-like. I.e., at any given point in the campaign, political reporters tend to cluster around a relatively small number of stories that themselves constantly change. One week it’s Newt Gingrich’s jewelry purchases, another it’s Mitt Romney’s apparent joy at firing people, but don’t worry — reporters will eventually circle around to Barack Obama’s birth certificate so he won’t feel lonely. What unifies most of these stories is that they’re ephemeral: they blow up big one week (or day or hour) and are nearly forgotten the next. Though collectively they gradually come to define the candidates, few stick around long enough to matter much on their own. Another common characteristic: they’re very much in-the-moment, driven by gaffes, attacks and other immediate developments in the campaigns, and hence difficult to predict in advance.
Ironically, the speed with which these stories brew up can actually work to advocacy organizations’ advantage. Reporters and bloggers won’t be experts in most of the issues involved, so they’ll be scrambling to get information to fill out their stories. And if you’re ready when one of your issues pops, YOU can be the beneficiary of their ignorance/hunger for content. Here’s what you’ll need to take advantage of the election-year media dynamic to promote your issues and connect with new supporters.
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January 15th, 2012
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Hey kids! Sorry for the recent publishing hiatus — no doubt I was waiting for the New Hampshire primary results with such anticipation that it induced long-term paralysis. Or mind-erasing boredom, whichever.
But never fear, you can get a much-needed dose of e.politics soon, and in person even! (Ladies, please — no fainting.) Next Thursday I’ll join RadCampaign’s Allyson Kapin and Jeanette Russell of SalsaLabs at Salsa’s DC lair for a post-webinar, pre-happy hour discussion about how nonprofits and advocacy organizations can leverage the election-year media frenzy to promote their issues and themselves. It’s part of Salsa’s “Advocacy Rising” series, and note that Salsa’s offices feature free beer of the cold and yummy variety.
Next up, Lizandra Vidal and I are working on the details of a panel she got accepted for the Pennsylvania Progressive Summit in February. We’ll focus on a perennial favorite topic — integrating online and offline campaigning — with help from some local Pennsylvania groups who’ve been doing just that. DC types, it’ll be worth the trip to Philly.
Finally, and this is the big news, I’m speaking at South by Southwest in March! A friend from Austin was putting together a late-submitted, Occupy-themed panel and tapped me to moderate, which was pretty damn cool of him all around. More details soon, but we’ve been accepted and obviously I’m psyched as hell.
Other site news: a couple of articles are sitting in the hopper, waiting for finishing touches, as is a loooong list of Quick Hits (they do stack up). And the rewrite of “Winning in 2010″ for 2012 is under way! Keep an ear open for the announcement and be ready to spread the word. Thank you, and that is all — for now.
– cpd
January 15th, 2012
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Oh man, do I love some skepticism, and Trilogy Interactive’s Will Bunnett and Steve Olson have a healthy dose of it for us today. Remember those stories about social media “predicting” the outcome of this year’s Iowa Caucus? Apparently, they very much needed some cold water poured on ‘em (and you wonder why I added so many caveats to the numbers we published here). Take it away:
(Mis)reading the Twitter and Facebook Tea Leaves
By Will Bunnett and Steve Olson
Infographic by Maureen Noone
Originally published on TrilogyInteractive.com
With all the excitement around the Iowa caucuses in New Media Land, you could be forgiven for thinking the biggest contest of the night was seeing who could most convincingly predict the results on Twitter and Facebook. As Mashable asked, “Did Twitter Predict the Iowa Caucus Better Than Pundits?”
After looking at several models, the answer is, unfortunately, no.
Several groups got in on the fun of trying, though:
- Social media monitoring agency Ensomo looked at social media mentions, likes, and retweets of the GOP candidates, from December 23-30 (published on Epolitics.com).
- SocialBakers looked at Facebook’s “people talking about” metric in the week leading up to January 2, and the total number of Facebook fans.
- Sociagility used its proprietary PRINT score from mid-December.
- Globalpoint looked at the total number of Twitter mentions about each candidate in the final week of December.
None of these metrics came even close to a significant correlation to the final caucus results, with one exception: Globalpoint, with a suspiciously strong correlation of 0.99 — almost perfect, and well ahead of the traditional gold standard, the Des Moines Register’s poll, which came in at a 0.86 correlation with the final results.
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January 5th, 2012
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Guest article! Experienced digital organizer Laura Packard (of PowerThru Consulting) has some excellent advice for email list managers who want to maximize their list performance. She uses techniques in Salsa as examples, but the lessons should apply to most CRM/mass email systems. This article originally appeared on PowerThru Consulting’s site, and also check out Laura’s earlier article on building your list through social media.
Spring-Cleaning Your Email List for Deliverability
By Laura Packard
The weather outside may be frightful, but I’ve got spring cleaning on my mind, and here’s why: we’re in the middle of a big email list cleaning project for a client and have learned some interesting stuff along the way.
Any list that’s been around for a while has accumulated ghost email addresses. People change jobs, change ISPs, change names… and even the ISPs merge or go under or just rebrand. So email addresses that once were good, often decay. Then there are the email addresses that were never good — typo’d on entry. Also, roving spambots are filling in online forms left and right with garbage. Plus there are the garden-variety duplicate records created by people clicking forms too many times etc.
Ghost addresses mess your stats up. You may think you have a list of 100,000 people, and your email program reports show sends are going out to 100,000 people. But if 10,000 of them are ghosts, your open and click rate is so much better than you think! Minor thing, right?
Yeah, but this is where it gets interesting. Did you know that some of the major email providers recycle old dead email addresses as spam traps? So emailing to the ghosts is not so harmless after all. It can get you flagged as a spammer and hurt deliverability to the real live bodies on your list. Plus more and more the big ISPs use engagement levels (how many people open, click, mark your emails as not spam etc.) to determine whether you get shunted off to the spam folder or not. If you’re sending to ghosts, there won’t be any engagement… and this will hurt your deliverability to the live ones. We’ve seen this with one client and Gmail.
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January 5th, 2012
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Courtesy of our friend Steven Kleine, Principal at Ensomo (a social media monitoring and analysis firm), see below for a graph of the online mentions of the various Republican presidential candidates in the week ending Friday, December 30th. (If you want the actual hard numbers, charts are here.)
Click for larger version
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January 2nd, 2012
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So Ron Paul made the bigtime today: a feature in the New York Times. What about? Those little newsletters that came out in his name a couple of decades back. You know, the ones that (among other things) predicted an upcoming race war and “contain[ed] bigotry against black, Jews, and gays and an obsession with conspiracies.”
Perhaps the only surprise is that it took this long for the big guys to notice: plenty of people have known about the more controversial parts of the Paul oeuvre forever (Dave Weigel notes that he wrote about the newsletters four years ago). But the interesting part from an online politics point of view is that this is a classic example of the internet’s double-edged nature.
Paul’s message has long resonated on the internet, and in the 2008 cycle his supporters were everywhere online, even helping him top all other Republicans in fundraising in the last quarter of ’07. This time around, he’s running perhaps a more balanced campaign, with a strong grassroots structure married to social media buzz (tops on Twitter!) and a digital fundraising machine that’s paying for a wave of television ads. Online/offline integration indeed!
But if you live by the ‘net, you can die by it, too: the internet gives old, old documents a new shot at prominence, including those newsletters apparently aimed at winning at least a few of the white supremicist crowd over to the Libertarian creed. Just as Romney’s flip-flops are lovingly preserved on video on sites like WhichMitt.com, the words that went out in Paul’s name in the early 90′s can spread infinitely farther in digital form than they did on paper, and in the process potentially convince a lot of people who might have given an iconoclastic candidate like him a chance to stay the hell away instead. Consistency is Paul’s main virtue, and a rare one in a politician. But consistency with these words? Political doom — and rightly so.
Thanks to long-time friend and Epolitics.com reader Burt Edwards for suggesting that a Ron Paul piece would be a good idea right about now.
– cpd
December 26th, 2011
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