e.politics: online advocacy tools & tactics

Quick Hits — November 30, 2006

How-to site edition.

• Hiding in Plain Sight. Democracy In Action’s Jason Z. talks about the extent to which readers skim and filter our information — complete with a groovy eyeball route map over a typical newsletter.
• Link Building Strategy — “SEO’s Holy Grail” (Part 2). On One Degree, a Canada-based marketing blog, David Dougherty examines how inbound and outbound links contribute to your site’s search engine ranking.
• Study Sets New Benchmarks for Online Community. IDI’s Blogger Relations Blog looks at a survey of the behaviors of online community members and suggests that organizations can use the numbers as they try to bring their members into online discussions.
• Are You the 1 Person in 4 Who Reads Beyond the Ineffective Headline? In a good companion to the DIA piece, Nancy Schwartz writes about how important good headlines are in getting people to actually read the crap, er, gems with which we incessantly bombard them.

– cpd

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Influence, Don’t Dictate: Letting Go of Message Control

Alan Rosenblatt has a good article on Frogloop this week urging organizations not to fear hostile comments on blogs and other online forums. It’s an elaboration of his idea a few weeks ago that Google has destroyed message control, that it’s better in a networked world to frame your opponents’ arguments and refute them than to ignore them entirely. It’s a concept that also meshes well with Tuesday’s article about social media and the advantages of letting site visitors create content at will.

Of course, like every other strategy, social media has its place — you probably don’t want random strangers writing your press releases. But I agree with him that you shouldn’t worry too much about allowing the public to criticize you, as long as you ask them to observe basic rules of behavior and are careful to answer any charges promptly.

– cpd

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Pulling Offline Members onto Your Email List

Sarah DiJulio with M&R Strategic Services has some excellent tips for converting traditional offline members into online activists. Switching members from snailmail to email for many communications has the obvious advantage of lowering mailing costs and can also reduce the barriers for donations (besides turning your members into potential e-advocates). Note: the mix of direct mail and email is important, since email addresses churn but snail mail can follow a forwarding notice. Make sure you can still reach your members even if their online addresses change.

Here’s what Sarah has to say:
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