online tools

One of the big criticisms of Google Wave is that people don't see how they can use it for anything productive. My post yesterday on 60 Free Online Tools for Organizing was based on a crowdsourcing effort with Colin Curtis and Sarah Burris using Wave, and I wanted to give a brief description of how it worked.

The first thing I did was create a Wave, start of the list, and add a comment to it explaining what I wanted to do. I added Colin and Sarah to the Wave and from there were started dumping all of our potential resources onto that first post.

Once we had a pretty big list, I created a comment below it to organize resources into categories with the links to each tool. This functioned as the main outline to the post combined with our notes from the first list.

Throughout the process we used the comment functionality to explain why certain resources should or should not be included, as well as anything else pertaining to the post.

Since it seemed to work so well, I created a tag called "Post Ideas" that I now use for Waves discussing potential posts. I can filter my inbox to only show these, which provides a good resource for posting in the future.

And that's how we did it. Wave allowed us to combine the document collaboration of Google Docs with an easy to follow thread of discussion that drove the development of the post. While it worked extremely well with only a couple of people involved, it is possible that a large number of collaborators could make the process bulkier and harder to follow.

Have you used Google Wave effectively as a productivity tool? Did you try it out after reading this post? Share your experiences in the comments.

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.

Bloguette Meghan McCain had an interesting article in the Daily Beast yesterday that addresses the techless nature of the GOP.

During the campaign season the only youth outreach I could find coming out of the McCain campaign was Meghan and her friends that traveled with the campaign and reported on the goings on.

Since this seems to be the week of children of the GOP coming out to tell all it is fitting Meghan wanted to talk about her experience as well. She says that the whole idea of the blog and project about being on the trail "was met with confusion and resistance" to begin with. "A few people even asked me what's a blog."

For the record, what you're reading right now.... is a blog.

She also said that she got the idea that people thought she was wasting her time, "The Republican party isn't exactly Internet savvy," she says.

I would argue that there are many people in the GOP that are very tech savvy. The College Republicans developed a nice little social network site that no one really uses, if you're a frequent reader of FM you know we know all about that site. And there are a hand full of remarkable tech savvy guys (sadly they're all men) who do some good work for a party that has little to no support for them. Meghan's lament isn't an isolated one.

"Unless the GOP evolves as the party that can successfully utilize the Web, we'll continue to lose influence. I think nothing confirms this fact to be more true than this recent election. I don’t claim to be an expert on mobilizing voters, but a significant number of the readers on mccainblogette.com, my blog, were between the ages of 18 and 30, a key demographic that either party would want. Many of the established Republican strategists told me that young people would not visit my web site."

So, Meghan started calling around asking people about the kind of outreach that happened online from the GOP to see what people's opinions were. Her findings?

"Instead, they told me that not having enough money was a huge factor in our loss—not our misuse of the Internet. Others were just plain angry, blaming the liberal media, and not the party's shortcomings online. Of course, there is truth in some of this. But denial only amplifies the stereotypes about Republicans being disconnected."

I live in the heartland, Meghan... I feel you're pain. No one here really gets the internet either. They think we're liberal because we blog - gotta love it! Her friend Rob Kubasko who helped develop mccainblogette.com tells her that it isn't the technology so much as having a message driven system that I guess includes the technology. He goes on to say that people want to be on Twitter because its cool but their tweets are lame making them part of the disconnect not the solution.

Another friend Becky Donatelli says that more and more people are getting their news from the Daily Show and SNL and spending the day on their Blackberry and laptops. She says that old school political operatives are aggravated by this (I agree but don't isolate it to the GOP) but it makes you wonder if these operatives are just choosing not to evolve simply because they don't like what the alternative is: Uncontrolled renegades unbridled by strategy and message campaigns wildly submitting whatever their thoughts online for the world to see.

Sounds like a party!

Meghan says "Until the Republican party joins the twenty-first century and learns how to use the Internet, its members will keep getting older and the youth of America will just keep logging on to the other side."

I would argue that technology is a big part of this because its where we spend our time, but I think having a message, political philosophy, and strong outreach in person as well as online is key to capturing the youth of America. That was the problem with STORM - its not enough to know that youth are on SN's its about knowing them well enough to understand where they are

The Obama campaign has received a lot of acclaim for its use of technology. Here are some tools you can use to build your presence online.

Scribd
Scribd is an online document-sharing tool that the Obama campaign utilized to publish issue papers. Your organization can use Scribd in much the same way. The service allows users to embed documents on blogs and websites. Here is an example using Obama's domestic hunger plan:

Barack Obama & Joe Biden's Plan for Tackling Domestic Hunger

Get your own at Scribd or explore others: Government Business leadership industry

You can also use with copies of organization bylaws and other public documents, or you could publish one-pagers and other literature that can be printed out and distributed by supporters. You can enable comments on your documents in order to get feedback from your members on a document.

Supported file formats are Word/Open Office documents, text files, Powerpoint presentations, PDF files, and Excel/Open Office spreadsheets.

Scribd provides a desktop bulk uploader to make the process of putting a large number of documents online as easy as possible, though it currently only runs on Windows XP/Vista.

Flickr
Flickr is an online photo service that was also utilized extensively by the Obama campaign. I have written about some of the uses of Flickr in a previous Future Majority post.

Tons of Flickr tools, applications, and plugins have been developed to complement the service, including the one below that creates an embeddable slide show from a photostream.

Created with Admarket's flickrSLiDR.

Sproutbuilder
Sproutbuilder is a tool that let's you create powerful widgets that can be deployed anywhere online. I published a tutorial on my personal site on how to create basic Sprout widgets. You can get an idea about the possibilities of these widgets on Sprout's How it Works page.

Those are just a few online tools that you can use to build your online presence. What tools have you or your organization used and how did you use them? Share in the comments.

According to Colin Delany's ePolitics.com

IPDI Book Discussion on Online Politics 101 with Colin Delany - Wednesday, August 13
Noon-1:30pm
The library of the Graduate School of Political Management
4th Floor
GWU’s Media and Public Affairs Building
805 21st Street, NW
Washington, DC 20052

RSVP REQUIRED to julie@ipdi.org

Should be a hoot and a half, and I’ll see if Julie will let me record it on one of those new-fangled video devices I hear are all the rage.

See also the new cut version of mine and Colin's mutual interview (upper right) which pretty much keeps the camera on the person who is talking the whole time... its fun for the whole family.

Flowgram - Flowgram is a screen-casting tool that lets you walk people through the use of a website, comment on items online, or a number of other applications with audio and text commentary.

SlideRocket - SlideRocket is an online presentation application that allows you to create rich presentations with a lot of features, effects and transitions. You can see one I made here.

Summize - Summize lets you search the Twitterverse for keywords to see what people are tweeting about your organization or cause.

While many people are aware of Flickr as a photo sharing site, there are a number of features and uses that are underutilized by organizations.

Flickr Tags

Have you ever wished that there was a way to aggregate all of the pictures that people took at one of your events? Well, with the use of Flickr tags it is possible. By deciding upon a Flickr tag for your event in advance and sharing it with your members, they can tag all the photos they took at your event. A search for that tag will result in showing all the pictures uploaded of your event. You can put the Flickr tag in your event's program, on the Facebook event, send the tag to people that have signed up, or just make an announcement at the event about it. By encouraging your members to sign up for Flickr accounts and use the accepted Flickr tag, you will have access to a lot more pictures than you could have through other means.

Flicker Groups

Flickr also has a groups feature that is useful. Have your members join the Flickr group and upload their related pictures to it. This enables an organization to have access to a wide variety of pictures of their activities to use when needed. It also will let you create slideshows that can be embedded on websites and MySpace pages.

Official Flickr Accounts

Your organization itself should create a Flickr account in order to upload and share official pictures and graphics. This allows you to create embedded photo galleries using only pictures that you approve. Photos can be organized into sets (and collections of sets with a $25/year Pro account). This way you can have a collection for each year and a set for every event, or any other organizational combination that you choose.

You can also use Flickr to host online button images so their use doesn't use too much of your website's bandwidth.

Also, check out Andy Beal's post on using Flickr groups to build traffic to your website.

Do you have any questions about using Flickr? Have you used Flickr for your organization? Leave a comment and share.