Energy Advocates Voice Internet Mobilization Strategies in DC Roundtable
Energy advocates and online mobilization experts gathered at the Center for American Progress Action Fund in Washington, DC, to talk about successes and challenges in gathering activists both on and offline.
Heather Lauer, director of online strategy for the Pickens Plan, talked about the process of gathering the Plan’s 1.5 million-plus participants and building a social network to connect members. (As the technical partner of the Pickens Plan, The Bivings Group has provided ongoing development and support on the Plan’s web communications network, including its primary site and its Ning-based social action network, Push.)
Other organizations, such as the Energy Action Coalition, built supporter bases through focusing on the goals of a particular voting group. The EAC spread its message among young people throughout college campuses and focused empowering the under-30 vote.
No matter the strategy, all members of the panel agreed on the importance of coming together in a combined effort to face energy challenges and the need to reach out to a growing base of supporters.
"We have a tremendous amount of education that needs to be done and we also have no time. This is not something that the good guys are going to win on the inside," said Brad Johnson of ThinkProgress.org.
In order to reach a broader base, Michael Silberman of 1sky.org emphasized 1Sky’s tactic of organizing community events around key issues, which can be effective both online and off. Silberman and his team worked with Greenpeace to organize rallies and push constituents to contact legislators during Congressional recesses.
While enticing audiences to participate in specific events can be a highly productive way of gaining new members, participants on the panel said it is not as effective as maintaining a long-term, sustained strategy of support.
“We’re relying on dedicated Moveon.org members to motivate other members,” said Michael Sherrard, who works on Moveon.org’s recent Power Up America campaign. “To make real progress is going to require a building crescendo of organizing.”
On top of organizational strategy, the panel discussed effective messaging methods of both within their supporter bases and with the public. Panel moderator and Associate Director for Online Advocacy Alan Rosenblatt recommended using a closed-audience SMS communicator to share messages within your group, and “leveraging Twitter makes that dynamic more public” if you are aiming for a broader audience.
The Center for American Progress Action Fund promotes regular InternetAdvocacy Roundtable discussions as part of its Wired for Progress program. Online attendees can watch live streams of discussions and submit questions online. A listing of past and upcoming Internet Advocacy Roundtables is available here.
The Race for E-Reading Intensifies
While Amazon is way ahead of the competition in the race for control over the soon-to-be billion-dollar e-reading industry, the game has just begun, and major players entering the field might make for a much more interesting battle.
Barnes and Noble, whose business has been slipping over the past decade with the increase in publishing costs and the slump in sales, in March paid nearly $16 million for Fictionwise.com, a Scott Pendergrast company launched in 2000 with an eye to corner the e-book market.
With an e-book supplier as large as Fictionwise, Barnes and Noble seems to be taking slightly different strategic approach than Amazon, which is focusing many of its resources to turn its Kindle and Kindle 2 into the iPod of e-readers.
Last month, Barnes and Noble released a free e-reader for BlackBerry devices, utilizing Fictionwise’s content, which comes in a variety of formats. The BlackBerry reader should allow Barnes and Noble to create a supporter base by the time it launches its own complete e-bookstore, which might happen before the end of the year, according to PaidContent.org.
A new online bookstore that competes with Amazon will take the pressure off of content providers and onto hardware developers, which is how the e-reading game becomes fun for consumers.
While the Kindle 2 has gotten rave reviews, emerging new models of e-readers threaten to challenge its success by giving e-readers a variety of options.
Readius, a pocket e-reader soon to be released, has one up on the Kindle for portability and uses a flexible “e-paper” screen developed by PolymerVision.
Readius market release has not been confirmed yet, but the company plans on launching in Europe and then North America.
Sony’s Reader boasts “e-ink technology” that makes the screen easy to see even in direct sunlight, a feature built after complaints that the first Kindle was hard to see in some weather conditions. Although the Reader is simpler and nearly $100 cheaper than the Kindle 2, Sony may need to boost their content partnerships to compete with Amazon and Barnes and Noble’s e-book selection.
Yammer: Cool, but Pointless and a little Sketchy
I spent some time today playing with Yammer, which allows organizations to essentially set up their own private micro-blogging community limited to their employees. Put more simply, it allows a company like us (The Bivings Group) to set up our own private Twitter.
Yammer works great!
There is a lot to like here from a technical perspective:
- Sign up is simple. You join simply by signing up with your organizational email address and you automatically join the network.
- The user interface is great. The design is very similar to Twitter, so it is very easy to use and familiar.
- It has a great Adobe Air client. You can use Yammer via a slick desktop program that is reminiscent of Twhirl, which is a compliment.
- There are some great additional features you won’t find on Twitter. Yammer includes the ability to create and subscribe to groups, upload files as part of your updates and view an organizational chart of your company the system creates for you.
This is a nicely made web application.
What’s the point?
After playing with Yammer for a while and inviting some of my colleagues to join me, I’m left struggling to come up with a reason that a company would need a private micro-blogging network. We certainly don’t at Bivings. I have millions of ways to communicate with my colleagues already. I can get project updates from Basecamp, chat on Instant Messenger, send individual or group emails using old fashioned Microsoft Outlook, keep tabs on folks via social networks like Twitter and Facebook, or god forbid, simply walk across the room and talk to folks.
I don’t have the problem Yammer solves. I don’t imagine many others do either.
Confusing to employees?
Jason Fried from 37 Signals wrote a few great posts last week about how Get Satisfaction’s set up sort of passively forces companies to use their service. Yammer has a similar problem.
I was the first person to sign up for the service from an @bivings.com email address. By doing this, I automatically created a network for The Bivings Group without really being aware of it. After joining, I am encouraged to invite colleagues to join me on Yammer as a way of spreading the word, and they are encouraged to do the same after they sign up. With the big “Bivings” branding at the top of the page and a bunch of work colleagues participating, this thing pretty quickly starts to look like a company-sponsored site even though its not. This could lead to confusion for employees at larger companies.
If, as a company representative, you want to take control of your Yammer network to clear up this confusion and exert some administrative control, you have to claim the network on the Yammer enterprise services page. There is a free version of Yammer for enterprises, but to sign up you have to enter your credit card, and a lot of the functionality you’d want as a company administrator is only available if you pay Yammer’s per user fees. For its silver and gold versions Yammer charges $1 and $5 respectively per user, which means the service gets expensive pretty quickly. At 30 people, it would cost The Bivings Group $150 per month for the entire firm to use the product.
Perhaps more importantly, I do not see any way for a company to opt out of Yammer completely should they not want their employees to use the tool. So the only way for a company to really exert control is to sign up for either a free or paid Yammer account for their domain and start monitoring it.
I would be fine if Yammer were either 100% unofficial or 100% official. Trying to have it both ways seems sketchy to me though. This middle ground can lead to confusion among employees and/or kind of coerce companies into using it.
I think Get Satisfaction is a little sketchy in the same way, as it is trying to have it both ways too with its official/unofficial customer services pages.
What do you think?
Hospitals and the Social Web
While doing some research for a talk I gave a few weeks ago, I came across a fantastic blog called “Found in the Cache” that examines how hospitals are using the social web. The blog’s author, Ed Bennett, is tracking which hospitals maintain their are own blogs and have launched presences on Twitter, YouTube and Facebook. Below are the pure numbers:
- 206 unique hospitals total have some sort of social web presences (one of the items below)
- 124 have YouTube channels
- 117 have Twitter Accounts
- 82 have Facebook pages
- 22 maintain official Blogs
While Bennett does not claim to have searched for presences for every single hospital (or hospital system) in the United States, to put this number in context there are an estimated 5,000 community hospitals in the U.S. You can view the raw data of Bennett’s findings here.
Interestingly, Bennett has found that Twitter use by hospitals is growing rapidly, and that it will soon be the most popular social tool for hospitals. The chart below shows the Twitter growth trend as compared to YouTube.
You can view a list of the most popular hospitals on Twitter here.
In reviewing the actual presences the hospitals created, I found the quality of the accounts to be all over the place. Some truly great work is being done, such as the Twitter account of Henry Ford Health System, which recently got some press for live tweeting during a brain operation. Other accounts were clearly experiments, with little activity and interaction. We’re at the beginning of a trend here, with the hospitals using these tools blazing the trail and establishing best practices for others to follow in the years ahead.
I’m going to keep reading Bennett’s blog, as I think the social web has great potential to help hospitals deepen their relationships with the community’s they serve.
Ning.com Gets a Major Upgrade
In the last six months we have helped build Ning social networks for the Pickens Plan and the National Peace Corps Association, among others. We are fans of the platform.
Yesterday, Ning launched a redesigned version of their main website, www.ning.com. This is a major upgrade. Users of Ning networks know that under the previous design you pretty much had to visit each network you belonged to individually to figure out what was going on in each community. This redesign allows users to login to www.ning.com and get an aggregated view of activity in all your networks, much like the Facebook news feed. This is significant, as it makes it much easier for Ning users to keep track of activity on all the networks they belong to. This should lead to greater participation by existing network members, and help networks grow virally as this participation is documented in various news feeds.
Congrats to the Ning team. This is good stuff.
Check out the video below and this blog post for more on the redesign.