Twitter As an Advocacy & Hatchet Tool

A listserv I'm on has had a very interesting thread about Tweeting recently beginning with a piece from Politico that says more GOP electeds are on Twitter than are Democratic Elected Officials almost 2:1 - 100 to 56 according to Tweet Congress.

"A total of 261 Dems are ignoring the new technology (Claire McCaskill ain't one 'em) compared to 119 non-Tweet R's."

This broke into a discussion that questioned the demographic of Twitter and its usefulness to the political youth movement as well as its effectiveness for advocacy and/or outreach.

According to the Nielson Wire

"Twitter’s footprint has expanded impressively in the first half of 2009, reaching 10.7 percent of all active Internet users in June. Perhaps even more impressively, this growth has come despite a lack of widespread adoption by children, teens, and young adults. In June 2009, only 16 percent of Twitter.com website users were under the age of 25. Bear in mind persons under 25 make up nearly one quarter of the active US Internet universe, which means that Twitter.com effectively under-indexes on the youth market by 36 percent."

What Jason Pollock from The Youngest Candidate remarked was that early adoptors of Twitter were already middle aged, where early adopters of Facebook and MySpace were in their teens and 20's. Twitter was more of a technology phenomenon when I began using it, but it has grown from there to become more of the social network people see it as today.

The major focus for me has been with search engine optimization. You hear this thrown around a lot but, essentially it means that the more sites you promote your blog posts to, the more ways people are able to find it, and the higher it will climb in a google search.

My example to the list was something we orchestrated earlier this year during the Kansas Legislative Session. A number of my friends were early Twitter adopters, and have talked it up so significantly that everyone we know is now on Twitter, creating a predominantly progressive following on the site in Kansas. So while nationally there might be more GOP elected officials on Twitter than democrats, in our state, progressives dominate the pool and use it constantly to promote progressive blogs and bloggers, causes, and candidates, while also waging major hits online to GOP electeds at the federal and state level.

We suffer from a profound lack of transparency in our state Capitol. There are no video or recording devices allowed inside the chamber or committee rooms. If you want audio you have to go get the day's tape and search for the quote you want. Then basically put the audio into a video that just features the member's photo. It sucks. But, this past session we had progressive lobbyists and bloggers live tweeting the legislature and committees with our offensive network of retweeters prepared to spread the word.

Early in the session then Governor Kathleen Sebelius (now Secretary of Health and Human Services) had proposed solutions to the budget difficulties Kansas, like many other states, was having. The GOP lead legislature wasn't interested in pushing the Governor's plan and as such threatened to shut down the government. We knew there was going to be a throw-down throughout the day and had primed our group to be prepared to Tweet and drive traffic all day about how the GOP didn't care about regular people in Kansas.

It began early with a few blog posts on Kansas Jackass , and a clever name PayCheck Gate. Then the tweet storm began. For a few hours we tweeted and encouraged other to do so about the controversy, we encouraged people to call elected officials, we crossposted blogs, and everything had the tag #ksgop.

People made fun of us, asking why we were promoting progressive values like getting paid all while labeling it with KSGOP? It seemed silly. Until about three o'clock that afternoon when a google search for KSGOP reveled our blogs as the #1 search. Second, was the thread on search.twitter.com for our hashtag, and third was the KSGOP's website, which by the way, is www.ksgop.com.

So, while I agree that there are limits and flaws to organizing with Twitter, you can build a powerful social media advocacy movement that young people can participate in via smart phones and sometimes while at work or in class. Further, it doesn't require youth to give money, write a letter or email, or make a call. You can create the movement, activate it, then do a process story about it followed by fundraising around it's success. You can use it to tear down and build up, depending on your agenda or your org's strategy and goals.

Best Practices

Many of you have heard me say that my real job at Mixed Media is to just cause trouble on the internet all day. But its something everyone can learn, develop, and foster if they have the time and energy to do so.

My suggestion, particularly to those organizations or campaigns working in the states or in specific cities that are smaller (like Atlanta vs Chicago and NYC) is to do a workshop for your members on Twitter. Show them the practical applications, how they can use it to help, and network them in with your movement. Use it to promote small things first like blogs or news pieces. Watch via search.twitter.com or BackTweets how the branches of the tree work, if it's not working build your base with more workshops, or consider doing blast emails or facebook messages asking folks to RT @Whoever or change their status update.

Your result will be a following much more powerful than someone who has 40,000 friends - it will be hundreds of people that will retweet and advocate for your causes.

You can build local and regional movements quickly and easily then use them to promote your organization, have friends help cultivate small donors, promote online outreach, and give your members some form of consistent participation that they feel is meaningful without having to donate money all the time.

Twitter - USE IT! If you ever have any questions feel free to email me - my information is on the about page.