Social Media and the Pickens Plan Virtual March April 3, 2009
We have been writing a lot of self promotional blog posts about our work on the Pickens Plan web program lately. I am going to write one more and then I promise to move on to other topics. 
The last three days, the Pickens Plan has been holding a virtual march on Washington in support of the elements of the Plan. The team has recruited over 4.5 million virtual marchers and there has been tons of online activity this week around the March. In support of the effort, we built some social media tools that help spread the word about the March in various online communities.
Using Hashtag to Promote Action
Prior to this week, the Pickens Plan team hadn’t really been using hashtags as a way to organize content on Twitter. In advance of the virtual march, we launched the #pickensplan hash tag through our Pickens Plan Twitter account and encouraged supporters to use the tag to promote the Plan. To promote the tag, we also launched a page on the virtual march site that aggregates all mentions of the tag. The page includes a leaderboard that recognizes the users that have used the #pickensplan hashtag most frequently and tools that allow users to post Pickens tweets right from the page itself.
This strategy has worked well, as the #pickensplan hashtag has become ubiquitous and a great many users are promoting the march by tweeting our suggested messages.
Contacting Congress via Facebook and Twitter
A big part of the virtual march centers around asking activists to contact their legislators in support of the elements of the Plan. Like everyone else, the site includes the ability for people to send emails to Congress. To surround the situation, the Pickens team also launched a page listing member of Congress on Twitter and Facebook and encouraged users to reach out on those venues. You can see a screen grab from the page below.
If you check out #pickensplan on Twitter, you’ll see examples of supporters reaching out to their Representatives using these tools. Given its closed nature, it is more difficult to show the results on Facebook.
You can learn more about the Pickens Plan virtual march here.
