It's amazing what is happening with the Iranian elections and twitter and organizing. The Iranian government poked a beehive with a short stick when they turned off SMS just before last week's election. But the ramifications are even broader: as one tweet read yesterday, the Iran election is a death blow to the argument that new media will make people less civicly engaged. The amazing thing about twitter, as pointed out by my technologist husband, is that its API makes it harder to block, and activists can conceivably keep popping up alternative ways out to twitter as long as they could spread the word about new portals to it.

Here is an article in the NY Times that describes how it is all working.

PS>> Kudos to the Twitter staff for delaying a scheduled maintenance outage to allow the system to continue to serve as an organizing and information hub around the Iranian Elections.

An article in the Harvard Business Review highlighted a phenomenon that gives something an individual had a hand in creating more value than the identical or better something not created by our own hand. Dubbed the Ikea Effect, because of that company's model requiring most of its products to be assembled by the consumer, it is an argument for the value of engagement strategies, which seek to develop campaigns, products and services from the input of the people likely to use and promote them.

Nonprofits and advocacy organizations are still struggling with how to open their work to their constituents and supporters, and will continue to as long as professional staff are paid for creating and implementing campaigns, rather than engaging communities.

I read an article called "The Dynamics of Personal Influence" in the Harvard Business Review recently which highlights studies done to show the range of personal influence over others. The study looked at trends such as smoking and being happy, and found that if you do those things it is likely that those within three degrees removed from you also do those things. In other words, if you report being happy, your friends and their friends and their friends are more likely to be happy. If you smoke, the same--your friends, and their friends, and their friends are also likely to smoke. The percentage decreases as the influence fans across the degrees of connection, until the fourth degree (your friends, friends' friends' friend) no longer has a higher likelihood of your behavior or habits.

This article talks about the implications that this might bring to sell more products or jump start creativity and innovation within a corporate setting. To me it brings up advocacy and personal implications. Think about how many people you know. And then how many people they know. And when you total the number of people that you can influence through these three degrees, the average person is likely to have influence over tens of thousands of people. So what do we want tens of thousands of people to do? It really makes the words of Gandhi ring true: We must be the change we want to see in the world. The notion of three degrees of personal influence really made me think about mundane things like my facebook status updates totally differently.

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I compiled a list of IMHO great examples of social media used for causes for a friend who works at a foundation exploring how to fund this area. Thought it was relevant enough to put out there on the blog. Post your examples as well.

1. Facebook: I could say a lot about how nonprofits can and cannot use Facebook as part of their strategies. In some ways, the parts of Facebook that have been developed for organizing on Facebook are the worst parts of it. Groups and Causes both lack just about every tool that makes organizing in the 21st century so powerful. However, it is the other aspects of Facebook that allow us to connect to friends so powerfully that causes and nonprofits are starting to really utilize, particularly donate your status or profile picture campaigns and to a lesser degree events.
2. SMS: Obama’s SMS campaign was used in the way that it can work. SMS is a highly personalized mode of communication. It is only those with whom you want to be most intimate with that you want to text with. People wanted to be closer to Barak Obama, and SMS messages enabled that to a degree never before seen.
3. Creative Fundraising: A group of Ron Paul supporters that had nothing to do with the campaign, organized an online fund-raiser on Guy Fawkes Day, bringing in more than $4 million and 21,000 new contributors in a single day — the largest 24-hour haul of any Republican candidate to date. The key word here is creative. Not fundraising.
4. Video: I may be a little biased here, but Students for a Free Tibet has done some great video work—from instant satellite uploads of nonviolent civil disobedience and banner hangs inside Tibet and China to updates to their communities to on the spot interviews with government officials. They even created their own internet television station during the Olympics where you could get news updates, see profiles on the activists who were getting arrested, see movies on Tibet, etc.
5. Viral Video: The Great Schlep was a classic example of brilliantly executed video with all of the makings to go viral. 1.25 million views on You Tube alone.
6. A bad example: I love the folks at moveon.org, but I think that it is an outdated model for how to use social media to advance causes. Their system is not really participatory in the way that the Obama campaign proved is possible—moveon.org members vote on a set number of initiatives or videos. Obama’s myBO.com gave people the ability to create their own campaign and implement it, not just push a prescribed one developed by professional staffers. What moveon.org’s system IS really good at is rapid response to an important and timely issue or opportunity. The moveon.org system also doesn’t allow its members to know each other and self organize. It is almost too dependant online, and hasn’t translated to offline, which to me is an important indicator of a successful social media tool.

An article that outlines some great social media used for causes

The NY Times also did an extensive article this weekend on how Egyptian youth used Facebook to organize. It highlights that social network sites like Facebook are hard for repressive regimes to identify as activist threats and shut down. "[A]round the world, dissidents thrive on sites, like Facebook, that are used primarily for more mundane purposes (like exchanging pictures of cute cats). Authoritarian regimes can’t block political Facebook groups without blocking all the “American Idol” fans and cat lovers as well. “The government can’t simply shut down Facebook, because doing so would alert a large group of people who they can’t afford to radicalize,” Zuckerman explained."

Other State Department officials told me they believe that social-networking software like Facebook’s has the potential to become a powerful pro-democracy tool. They pointed to recent developments in Saudi Arabia, where in November a Facebook group helped organize a national hunger strike against the kingdom’s imprisonment of political opponents, and in Colombia, where activists last February used Facebook to organize one of the largest protests ever held in that country, a nationwide series of demonstrations against the FARC insurgency. Not long ago, the State Department created its own group on Facebook called “Alliance of Youth Movements,” a coalition of groups from a dozen countries who use Facebook for political organizing. Last month, they brought an international collection of young online political activists, including one from the April 6 group, as well as Facebook executives and representatives from Google and MTV, to New York for a three-day conference.

Lastly, I'll just throw in a couple of interesting quotes:

Communities are sticky in ways that mass media never was, it requires a very different approach to what we create, how we create it and how we market it.
Yochai Benkler, Wealth of Networks

In the new and evolving online world, the greatest momentum goes not to the candidate with the most detailed plan for conquering the Web but to the candidate who surrenders his own image to the clicking masses

Such developments probably came as no surprise to many in the business world, who understood years ago that the Web represented not simply another mass medium to be gamed but also a fundamental shift in the once static relationship between producer and consumer. It is by nature a participatory medium, in which customers demand a more personal stake in the products they consume.
Matt Bai, NY Times writer + author of “The Argument: Billionaires, Bloggers and the Battle to Remake Democratic Politics"

I've been reading Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everyone since summer...I know, its ridiculous that I can't finish it, especially since it is so good. But I have kids, and its been a year like no other for many reasons. So, I'm half-way through, but wanted to catalog some of my favorite bits for you. I definitely suggest reading it (and maybe you can tell me how it ends)...

When we change the way we communicate, we change society.

Conversation creates more a sense of community than sharing does.

Information sharing produces shared awareness among participants, and collaborative production relies on shared creation, but collective action creates shared responsibility, by tying the user's identity to the identity of the group.

“The invention of a tool doesn’t create change; it has to be around long enough that most of society is using it. Its when a technology becomes normal, then ubiquitous, and finally so pervasive as to be invisible, that the really profound changes happen, and for young people today, our new social tools have passed normal and are heading to ubiquitous, and invisible is coming.”

Our social tools are not an improvement to modern society; they are a challenge to it. New technology makes nre things possible: out another way, when new technology appears, previously impossible things start occurring. If enough of those impossible things are important and happen in a bundle, quickly, the change becomes a revolution.

We are plainly witnessing a restructuring of the media businesses, but their suffering isn't unique, its prophetic.

...The category of 'consumer' is now a temporary behavior rather than a permanent identity."

The video on the website below is one of the most concise and complete descriptions of the moment in time that brought about the Obama win and helps to reframe how to move forward more effectively:

www.nextagenda.org

(P.S.: Next Agenda as an organization is quite interesting too: a self-described hybrid between a new think tank, new technology and new media...One to keep an eye on.)

As you all know, I am obsessed with culture and how we can use it to build, grow and sustain movements for social change. I mentioned earlier in my blog the founding of an organization called the Culture Project that is dedicated to using culture to forward a conservative agenda based around liberty. I signed up for their mailing list, and received this in my box this AM announcing their efforts to get conservatives into jobs in the cultural industries. From the email, "We have to do more than complain about mainstream media bias; we need to infiltrate the media with multitudes of Foundational thinking individuals."

The tone of the email (see below) makes me realize that in addition to a post-election retreat to regional and state levels of governing, conservatives are thinking about how to “dethrone” the left’s influence over culture. Elsewhere in their publications they talk about Liberals as controlling culture and their institution is the only think tank out there to do cultural battle.

Perhaps the culture wars are not over…Perhaps they are just beginning.

From: admin@thecultureproject.org
Date: November 19, 2008 8:15:53 AM PST
Subject: The Culture Project Announces Job Search Links Page
Reply-To: miked@thecultureproject.org

Dear Erin,
Since the election, we at The Culture Project are more convinced than ever that the conservative movement is going to have a very difficult time gaining political power if it continues to think that cultural influence professions somehow eternally belong to the left. 



We have to do more than complain about mainstream media bias; we need to infiltrate the media with multitudes of Foundational thinking individuals.

The same goes for other professions that have powerful and lasting cultural impact on the hearts and minds of the American people. 

To that end we’ve created a page of job search links so that there can be no doubt about the mission of The Culture Project. This is a tiny step toward our objective of one day dethroning the left as the arbiters of the American worldview through our cultural institutions. As we grow there will be many more programs and strategies deployed to tackle this Herculean task, but the journey of a thousand miles . . .



Any suggestions on your part would be most welcome.


Cordially,

Mike D'Virgilio
Founder and Executive Director
The Culture Project
http://thecultureproject.org/

Some progressives have offered that in this financial crisis whoever can be the “prosperity maker” will win. But prosperity doesn’t reinforce our frame (to use a term that is so 2004 that even I cringe to write it).

If the conservatives are about liberty, let progressives be about opportunity. We have a leader in Obama that can be the symbol of opportunity and the American dream. We have an activated grassroots that is ready to be a movement. We have issues—the economy, health care and education-that reinforce this value and each other. Opportunity through economics, health care and education, is the path to the American dream.

Republicans at the Republican Governors’ Association last week talked about the need to reposition their party as the one with “the solutions to fulfilling the American Dream”. Their path will surely be many of the frames they’ve used to date: liberty, small government, lower taxes. And they’ve framed the Democrats and progressives as irresponsible on these values.

But what if we started talking about taxes as a path to opportunity? About responsible government that makes sure that free markets and Wall Street don’t take away Main Street’s opportunity to live the American Dream. Health care and education as pathways to opportunity (for all).

America has always been an aspiration-based culture. It is why Nike commercials give us goose bumps and the realm of possibility (like sending a man to the moon) excites us. Opportunity reinforces this cultural orientation. And when we step into culture’s stream, our work becomes much, much easier.

As un-sexy as it is to say about the most exciting electoral win in the history of American politics, the Obama win was all about organizing and infrastructure. For several decades, progressive infrastructure has been waning, and we’ve been organizing like it was the 20th century with “fold” rather than “baton” media models and “we-just-need-to-be-louder” broadcast rather than conversational engagement strategies. Yeah, we needed help communicating our values, too. But when it comes down to it, the quantity and quality of organizing and infrastructure is what allowed the Obama campaign to have so much engagement with voters and volunteers.

An engagement marketer named Alan Moore explains how by looking at exit polling and determined that Obama was able to contact 11 million more voters than McCain. (Obama reached 34 million. McCain reached 23 million.) This means that the Obama campaign had contacted one in every four people who voted in this year’s election. Through an incredible field operation that was “disciplined volunteer-driven bottom-up-AND-top-down, distributed and massively scalable organizing campaign”, according to the NY Times, Obama was also able to convert more of his contacts.

The Obama campaign structured this organizing and infrastructure based on engagement strategies of this century not the last. “Thomas Jefferson used newspapers to win the presidency, FDR used radio to change the way he governed, JFK was the first president to understand television, and Howard Dean saw the value of the Web for raising money. But Senator Barak Obama understood that you could use the Web to lower the cost of building a political brand, create a sense of connection and engagement, and dispense with the command and control method of governing to allow people to self-organize to do the work.”

Indeed, the field operations that Obama campaign created and ran seem to be completely different than previous efforts. They spent considerable time and resources identifying, recruiting and training volunteers who would identify, recruit and train more volunteers. “We decided that our volunteers would not be measured by the amount of voter contacts that they made in the summer—but instead by the number of volunteers they were recruiting, training and testing,” said one Field Organizer. In doing this, the Obama Campaign amassed an army of volunteers across the country that were able to have millions of conversations with would-be voters on issues of the day, and those millions of conversations are now part of the organizing and infrastructure legacy of this campaign because they imbibed a sense of ownership in the campaign. As the NY Times recently reported, “Now Obama’s 20-month conversation with the electorate enters a new phase. There is a sense of ownership, a kind of possessive entitlement, on the part of the people who worked to elect him.”

Beyond the Obama Phenomenon there was a huge amount of progressive infrastructure being built. In 2004, the Democratic retreat and navel gazing inspired more focus on a state level. Organizers in places such as New Mexico and Michigan (and by the time of the 2008 election in a dozen states) began to focus on building power at a state level. The progressives got together to agree to utilize a single database for voter activation. And more than in previous years and election cycles, a renewed focus on how independent nonprofits and advocacy organizations could play a role in electoral politics, as well as leadership development. The results can be seen in places like New Mexico where a clean sweep has transformed the state from red to solidly blue.

Now what remains to be seen is how will Obama continue to nurture the campaign organizing and infrastructure as he and his team transition into governing? Will he be able to apply his community organizing skills in governing? Reports such as the Obama administration’s intention to put all government contracts online and his indication in his text message to his list that he will “be in touch soon on what’s next make me think he will.

One way that Obama could do this is to set up a Community Outreach position in his administration to liaise with the young people and the nonprofit world that helped him move voters and issues in this election. This position could include a national coordinator in the White House that coordinates “State Ambassadors” who play an active role in maintaining and enhancing the Obama Movement, or what I like to think of as the “Opportunity Movement” (more on this in a later rant).

The second thought is that the progressive movement needs to immediately come together around an issue that will activate and reinforce and connect the Obama + state infrastructure. The ideal for this kind of a campaign would be an issue that has national scope, but is legislated at a state-level; that is connective, meaning that it incorporates multiple issues rather than silos them; and that is not distinctly progressive in nature, but can reach across the divide of partisan politics to, as the Obama field operation was fond of saying “Respect. Empower. Include.” the 46% of the country that voted for McCain.

The issue that stands in my mind as fitting of these needs is Energy, as its policy is decided largely at a state level, it has national and even international implications and consistency, it incorporates economics (think green jobs), environment, and American innovation. We have seen a few wins at a state level (think Missouri’s Prop C). And we might even find that our greatest foes in this battle--corporate lobbyists—might have other worries given the economic collapse. Finally, energy has incredible existing infrastructure to build upon in organizations like the Apollo Alliance, Green for All, 1 Sky, and Energy Action Coalition.

Next, given the economic situation our country finds ourselves in, we also need to immediately prepare our organizations and organizers for lean resources and extraordinary possibility. If enough of us can get together to think this through, I think we can find a sweet spot between what resources we think will be available next year, and the quick and successive waves of opportunity that we are sure to face in the coming 12-24 months.

I tend to think that all of the leadership development we’ve been doing across the country could lead to efficiencies that organizers are not often known for. We need to be able to do more with fewer resources. Again, innovation, collaboration, making connections between organizations and issues, and focusing on proven engagement strategies that will reach people outside of the Moveon.orgs and other established and successful organizations. The best way to find innovation, to inspire collaborations and to make connections is by bringing people, particularly organizers, together.

We also need to make sure that whatever we embark on has cultural relevance, or is framed in a way that it can be carried by the stream of culture. By this I mean that we need to think about issues and campaigns that can tap into our American identity, how we form community, and how we find meaning in our lives. When we do this, we win not just on issues and in election, but we win the hearts and minds of America.

Resources:

Alan Moore’s website


How Obama Tapped Into Social Networks Power

The New Organizers, Part 1: What's really behind Obama's ground game

The Other Winner