What Happens When You Avoid the Groundswell

Janet was good at representing Exxon Mobil Corp on Twitter. She responded to people's inquiries, provided interesting facts about the company, and even talked about the infamous Exxon Valdez oil spill. The problem, though, was that Janet was not an Exxon employee. Nor was she affiliated with Exxon in any way, shape or form!

As you can imagine, this scared the pants off of corporate giant Exxon, who takes great care in controlling the messages they send out to the public. They've designated only a handful of employees to deliver such messages. When the story broke in 2008, "Janet" was using http://twitter.com/exxonmobilcorp to falsely portray Exxon, even using a background picture of Exxon gas stations. Exxon reps commented at the time that they were not using Twitter or any other social networking tool, and clearly weren't monitoring the buzz about their company online, avoiding the groundswell completely.

Brand jacking is not something new to the web - because it's so easy to set up a profile, anyone can be pretend to be an employee from a company in just minutes. (See a list of official Twitter brands here.) Rather than following the steps outlined in Groundswell to listen, talk, energize, support, and embrace their online constituents, Exxon chose to deal with the situation behind closed doors - contacting Twitter to have the false feed removed because of copyright infringement of the photos and immediately talking to and responding to questions from the press.

What they should have done is participate in the groundswell from the beginning. Large corporations should invest the resources and budget to hire someone to maintain their online presences and snatch up corporate names like "exxon mobil corp" on Twitter and Facebook before brand-jackers do. They should think of a strategy for their online presence, engage their audiences, and participate in discussion. This incident cost Exxon its brand identity, called attention to their non-engagement online, and fooled the Twittersphere, costing them the precious trust of the online community.

As of today, it appears that Exxon has set up an official Twitter feed. Like Groundswell says, you cannot ignore this trend.

Blogging @ PBS's Idea Lab

I found an awesome blog hosted by PBS called MediaShift Idea Lab.

"Idea Lab is a group blog by innovators who are reinventing community news for the Digital Age. Each Idea Lab blogger is a winner of the Knight News Challenge grant to reshape community news."

Awesome. They have a best practices section, reports from high-level conferences like Gov 2.0 (Check out: "Report from Gov 2.0: A Nerd, Suit, Spook, and Database Smoothie"), and the best part is, you can TALK to the writers and engage in a conversation about any of these topics. I can read Idea Lab's live Twitter feed directly from the page (I love embedded Twitter widgets) and users can declare which articles are their "favorites", and the site pulls out "featured comments" from users. Pretty interactive and comprehensive. Although too bad it appears that their Twitter feed is not actually updated by a human, but rather by an RSS feed directly from their site via twitterfeed.

This, as we've learned in Dr. Rosenblatt's class, is a no-no ---- It's what we're doing here at USIP and something that's on my list of things to change. I've only been here about 4 weeks and one of my top priorities is to revamp the way we do all of our social networking -- which appears to me to h ave been put together rather quickly and without much strategy. Probably from some pressure from the powers that be.

Act.ly and Social Networks

I love act.ly! I am learning about it through my digital political strategy class at JHU. I just participated in a petition/experiment that my professor Dr. Alan Rosenblatt is conducting. Apparently there is a game for Twitterers called Mobster World (I'm not even going to link to it so that this doesn't happen to you too... you can search for it if you want!). If you sign up to play this game, it will hijack your follower list on Twitter and send them a direct message FROM YOU if you sign up to play! There's no way to make this stop - no contact information on Mobster's site and no way for people to click and opt-out.

Not only is this super-annoying but it's just WRONG! This got me remembering how annoying cold calling and automated calling is, especially when the "robot" fails and calls you at 2AM. At least now, I can do something about it from my own desk. I signed up for act.ly and "signed" Dr. Rosenblatt's petition by allowing act.ly to Tweet the cause on my Twitter account. My irritation actually led me to find and follow EndTheRoboCalls on Twitter and all sorts of interesting and cool petitions that I can participate in on Act.ly.

This takes advantage of the essence of social networking: republishing information to individual social networks makes that information viral and reaches many people quickly.

Maybe I'll start a petition to remove tourists who stand on the left of the escalators (when they should be standing on the right, walking on the left) from the Metro system. :)

Webcasting Today

Ahh, social networking. Today's webcast was successful, but I won't have complete numbers for you until tomorrow.

Embedding that Twitter widget (a picture of our webcasting page and the embedded Twitter widget that I used, above) that showed real-time updates of our Twitter feed onto the page that featured the live webcast today seemed to work well -- except it kept scrolling through ALL of our tweets, even ones that were 60 days old! I tried to stop the loop in the java script code but to no avail. Might have to do some more research on how to control how many tweets are displayed when I have a bit more time, but overall the widget worked great..You can find it at:

http://twitter.com/goodies/widgets

Another problem with this widget is, however, that it only displays YOUR feed. It doesn't display everyone who's talking about your issue using the hashtag. This seems to hinder conversation a bit more. It'd be interesting for readers to get a whole picture of the conversation that's happening. I'm looking into using TweetGrid for our next live webcast in hopes to engage our audiences in more of a conversation, rather than just passive readers of our tweets.

According to TweetDeck (also awesome, check it out at: http://tweetdeck.com/beta/) we had about 11 people talk to us via Twitter during the event -- mostly commenting on our speaker's remarks or RT'ing our live tweets. Not bad....! Rigby would be proud of our microblogging - we put a human face to our name and helped reach out to a global audience who didn't actually have to be in Washington to attend the event.

Twitter Strategy for Gov Departments

Found an awesome template outlining a strategy for governments using Twitter:

http://blogs.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/digitalengagement/post/2009/07/21/Template-Twitter-strategy-for-Government-Departments.aspx

These points seem especially critical to me:

• To set clear objectives and metrics to make sure there's a return on the investment of staff time (and if there isn’t, we’ll stop doing it)
• To make sure the channel is used consistently and carefully, to protect corporate reputation from silly mistakes or inappropriate use
• To plan varied and interesting content, and enthuse those who will provide it into actively wanting to do so.

Review: Rigby's "Mobilizing Generation 2.0"

Ben Rigby's book Mobilizing Generation 2.0: A Practical Guide to Using Web 2.0 focuses on using Web 2.0 tools to engage youth in political conversation. The book does an excellent job of providing a very basic overview of these tools, but doesn't necessarily keep its focus on youth. In fact, the principles Rigby discusses in his book can be used across all audiences and all types of organizations -- not just political ones.

Rigby covers blogging, social networking, video and photo sharing, mobile phones, wikis, maps and virtual worlds. While reading the book, I had USIP in mind. We use some of these tools, but not all. We are active participants on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, but Rigby’s book helped me think about how to use Flickr and Digg. We also use Viewbook for photo sharing and for creating easy slideshows that we can embed on our website. Rigby doesn’t mention it, but I highly recommend it: http://www.viewbook.com/. USIP also uses a wiki as our Intranet site; according to Rigby, using a wiki can help improve internal communication. It also helps decentralize information and allows multi-users to contribute content and feel like they are participating in their organization.

Ribgy also spent a lot of time in each chapter discussing the consequences of trying to build a Web 2.0 tool from scratch – either trying to build one’s one social network or hosting one’s one media content, etc. He advises against this because of the amount of staff dedication and effort it takes to maintain these sites. He says that time could be better spent strategizing and benefiting from users of an existing social network instead. He’s right about this point – unless your organization has the time, money, and staff to host their own services, making use of existing ones are far beneficial. Event at USIP, with a staff about 250 and our own IT department, we use existing social networks and have determined that building our own Web 2.0 tools would be less fruitful for us.

Perhaps the most surprising of all was the success of virtual networks such as Second Life. Although I knew that Second Life had received a lot of media attention, I didn't realize that organizations such as BBC Radio had demonstrated success using Second Life, as Rigby mentions. I also didn’t realize the power of mobile phones in connecting people – I always think of mobile phones as something personal and private, rather than a tool to be used to blast marketing messages. Rigby does point out, however, that using mobile phones isn’t quite popular yet because of the restrictions placed on them by phone companies.

Throughout the book, Rigby emphasizes the important of “tagging” and “folksonomy” – the taxonomy of the people. Tagging content online is the future – it can help organize thousands of files into searchable terms that people can readily use. I’m happy to report that USIP’s new website, launched June 2009, employs the tagging strategy to help people find the content they are looking for. They can see all content that have been tagged for a particular issue area on our site. Our feedback as shows that tagging does indeed improve the functionality of the website, and I agree wholeheartedly with Rigby that this is the wave of the future and perhaps an important part of Web 3.0 – the semantic web.

Using Social Networking: Twitter and USIP

The U.S. Institute of Peace is a Congressionally funded think-tank that I've worked at for nearly 4 years now. It's an interesting paradox because we're not a federal agency, but we're funded by Congress. We're not an advocacy group, but our goal is to share our research and tools for peacebuilding and peacekeeping. Here's our mission statement:

The United States Institute of Peace is an independent, nonpartisan, national institution established and funded by Congress. Its goals are to help:

• Prevent and resolve violent international conflicts
• Promote post-conflict stability and development
• Increase conflict management capacity, tools, and intellectual capital worldwide

The Institute does this by empowering others with knowledge, skills, and resources, as well as by directly engaging in peacebuilding efforts around the globe.

Therefore, in order to be effective and continue to receive funding, engaging people with our work is essential to our success. One of the primary strategies is using the web to disseminate and share our work. I manage and help create the online strategy for USIP.org.

Social networking is becoming an increasingly important part of the strategy of USIP.org, which I help craft. This strategy is a continual process that grows and evolves with trends and the needs of our audiences.

Recently, we've improved the webcasting capabilities of USIP.org. USIP often convenes public events relevant to current political issues. We've had to come up with innovative ways to reach our global audience that aren't always able to attend events in Washington. One of the ways we've chosen to do this, in addition to webcasting, is through social networking tools on the web.

On Monday, (9/21) we'll be hosting a live webcast of one of our events on preventing mass atrocities. Should be quite interesting. During the live stream, I'll be able to monitor how many people are logged in watching. In addition to advertising this event through email blasts and on our site's homepage, we've also looked at interactive ways to promote this event. USIP hosts a twitter page that I manage and am involved in. It has about 700 followers. We've advertised there too - and on Friday, I discovered that Twitter offers a neat little widget that allows you to embed live Twitter updates into your website. I'm trying to experiment and discover the best ways to maximize our visibility on Twitter, and how engaging in dialogue with users of the Twitter network can help my organization better understand what type of information interests our audiences.

We've assigned someone to tweet live during the event and assigned the event a hash tag to engage our followers in a discussion. I've also embedded the Twitter widget onto our event webpage so that users can watch the live webcast and read our tweets during the event simultaneously in one place.

Like Ben Rigby says in his book Mobilizing Generation 2.0: A Practical Guide to Using the Web, using Web 2.0 tools appropriately is a successful method of engaging the public - especially youth. Rigby calls the Twitter service "microblogging": a short, informal way to have a conversation with an audience. Our ultimate goal is to engage people on policy issues related to peacebuilding through Web 2.0 tools such as microblogging.

My next posts - on Sunday and Monday - will be review the Ribgy book in more detail (so far, I highly recommend it as a go-to beginner's handbook on Web 2.0 tools. It's perfect for someone who's looking for background information to convince their organization to use Web 2.o, or who just wants to have a basic understanding of the tools) and I'll be reporting back on the success of using USIP.org's Web 2.0 strategies to engage in a two-way conversation with our audiences. I'll be monitoring how many people are logged in to the live webcast to see if our online marketing efforts paid off and I'll also be monitoring our Twitter status to see how many people engage us in conversation, how many people "retweet" our tweets, or mention us in their own posts (this would have a desirable viral effect.. more on that later), and I'll be working with our specialist who is tweeting live during the event to ensure that we are following the instructions carefully outlined in Rigby's book: keeping the messages short, conversational, and most of all, human.

Happy weekend.