Pinterest and Politics

I hear all the kids these days use Pinterest.  I’m not entirely sure what that is, but I guess it has to do with using images to represent events, things you like or want, happenings in your life or even just cute stuff, like puppies.  I’m on it (I think), but just can’t integrate it in to my life yet.

That said, I may need to learn how to do so soon as, according to a USA Today article, the political world is starting to pick-up on this tool.  Both the presidential campaigns have accounts designed to capture the attention of subgroups of voters.  President Obama, for example, has a “pet lovers for Obama” board.  I’m a little obsessed with it.

Until now I’ve thought of Pinterest as just another social media site to try to keep up with (is there such a thing as “social media stress?”)  But as Alan Rosenblatt from the Center for American Progress Action Fund (and a friend) points out in the USA Today article "[Pinterest’s] core is not political . . . its audience is a group of people who need to be reached with this message because they’re not being reached otherwise.”  Reaching new audiences… Hmmm… That sounds good.  Pictures of cute puppies and to-die-for shoes, here I come.

Tweets Now Archived at Library of Congress

Here on our blog, we talk a lot about how important Social Media is to any person or organization’s advocacy campaign. With this in mind, I found an interesting article yesterday that announced that Twitter and The Library of Congress have signed an agreement that EVERY PUBLIC TWEET EVER SENT will be archived in the Library’s historical record. The only tweets to not be archived are those marked private by the user.

This agreement between Twitter and the Library of Congress will obviously have strong implications. First, every public tweet your organization ever sends out will now be on record. Conversely, every public tweet Congresspersons, Senators, and Candidates send will also be on permanent record. For this reason, the carelessness some people,organizations, and politicians have with tweets will be even more costly in the future. Second, once the archive has been built up, we might have the capability to research twitter trends to track public opinion on certain issues. This could be a real game changer.

Do Social Media Campaigns Really Work? We Think So (and we know best)!

There was an interesting article in the Washington Post Style section this past weekend about a woman who started an online petition for JC Penney to retract a T-Shirt from its stores which read: “I’m too pretty to do my homework, so my brother has to do it for me.” Between the 1,600 signatures she collected by putting her campaign on Change.org and the negative comments JC Penney was receiving on Facebook and product reviews, the T-Shirt was pulled from their stores within 13 hours of the petition’s birth.

This article is amusing, yes, but it is also very telling about the profound effect a social media campaign can have on a grassroots advocacy effort. It’s easy to get discouraged and think that the time and energy you put into your social media effort just ends up as white noise somewhere in the vast expanses of cyber space. Also, I would be lying if I claimed that every grassroots advocacy issue with a social media presence is successful within 13 hours (or at all for that matter).  That said, what this article shows us is that a well-organized, well thought out campaign with a strong message can be extremely effective not only for building a foundation of supporters but for getting your message heard by the people you want to hear it. Your cause may not have an attention-grabbing, insulting T-Shirt to get people fired up, but if you can find a creative way to appeal to your audience, your advocacy base will only grow. Better yet, there is a serious possibility that you will accomplish something. 

Congress- Now Available via Smart Phone

Do you ever find yourself riding home on the Metro, suddenly overwhelmed by the urge to know what bills were introduced in Congress today? Do you get irritable if you don’t have an instantaneous way to find out who represents the 99203 zip code in Congress? If you’re anything like me, and I bet you are, those situations plague you on a nearly daily basis. Fortunately, if you have a Droid or an iPhone, there is an app for that.

Droid owners are in luck; the “Congress” application by Sunlight Labs is by far the best available on any platform. To find it, search in the marketplace for “Congress.” The application allows you to search for members of Congress by name, state, current location and zip code—perfect for enlightening those unenlightened friends who don’t know who represents them in Congress (you’re going to be so popular!). The application also allows you to search bills and laws, and gives details such as who introduced it, current activity and bill text via Thomas.gov. Once you find an interesting bill, you can share the information easily via Facebook, Twitter, text message or email. It also tracks votes in Congress, gives committee member listings for all committee and lists upcoming hearings. And if all of those features weren’t exciting enough, you can also create personalized alerts to be notified of activity for any bill. Now, you have no excuse to be caught off-guard when your local post office is renamed!

The applications available to iPhone users aren’t as comprehensive as the “Congress” application for Droid. Sunlight Labs does have a iPhone version of “Congress”, but it only has House and Senate floor updates, Whip notices (as nerdy as I am, I’m not entirely sure I would ever look at Whip notices), hearing information, and miscellaneous Congressional Budget Office (CBO) reports and other governmental documents. The application is fantastic if you want to see how a certain bill was scored by the CBO, but less helpful if you want to know basic information, such as who is the at-large Congressman for Montana (Rep. Denny Rehberg, by the way). If you’re looking for a basic Congressional guide, your best bet is the “Congress 411” application. It allows you to search members by Senate, House and location. But, the bill information and video feed seems to be rather outdated, so proceed with caution.

However, iPhone users win overall with the C-SPAN app, which is currently unavailable on the Droid. And with C-SPAN radio, C-SPAN, C-SPAN2 and C-SPAN3, who needs Congressional directories when you can listen to history in real time?

The Social Congress

All jokes about Anthony Weiner aside, a recent report from the Congressional Management Foundation (http://www.congressfoundation.org/) finds that "most members of Congress have thoroughly integrated social media in to their communications operations, and are using new media tools to gauge public opinion, communicate with constituents and reach new people." 

The findings on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube were particularly interesting, with  64% of responding offices finding Facebook to be a somewhat or very useful tool for understanding constituent's views, while only 34% see YouTube as such. 

Yet staff seem to realize that  YouTube is the number two search engine after Google (really, it's true).  A whopping 72% think that YouTube is an important mechanism for communicating their member's view.  Notice the difference:  34% see YouTube as useful for receiving input while 72% see YouTube as useful for delivering messages.  I'm not sure why that is, but it tells me we can be a lot more effective in using this tools to get advocacy messages across to members of Congress.

In addition, I'm curious about how the rise of social media will impact this little thing we call "constituency."  When dealing with plain, old snail mail addresses, legislators and staff know whether the person they are communicating with is a constituent.  Online, it's much more difficult.  One of the first rules of advocacy is to be sure you can demonstrate why you're relevant to your audience -- and for Congress that means being a constituent.  But will social media change this basic tenant of representative democracy?  I'm not sure, but I'll be paying attention, I promise

Other findings suggest that many staff are concerned that their offices do not spend enough time on social media, with younger staffers find social media far more important to the operations than older staff do.  This tells me that the use of social media will only rise as older staff retire and newer staff, with their social savvy, come to Capitol Hill.

What can we take away from this?  Apparently the Internet is here to stay and we avoid it at our peril.  Even if your demographic is older and your first thought is "well, my members won't use social media"," remember that your ultimate audience, legislators and their staff, do.

Scandals, Twitter and Congress

Unless you've been living under a rock (and no, I don't want to insult rock dwellers) you've probably heard that a certain Congressman used a certain social media outlet to send pictures of certain parts of his anatomy to certain women. I realized that I can't type all the particulars because so many of them contain words that might be censored, particularly the Congressman's name.

In this whole situation there is one entity that I think needs defending -- and that is Twitter. To paraphrase an adage about guns (i.e, guns don't kill people, people do), "Twitter doesn't embarass people: people do." If there is any lesson to be learned from this whole sordid affair, it's that we all should be careful about a) what we post on the Internet and b) monitoring what others post because it's out there forever. The alternative is to not do embarassing things, but that doesn't seem like a very viable option for most of us.

I'm guilty of this too, of course. There are certainly unflattering pictures of me all over the Internet. I thought I was safe because these were taken before digital cameras (yes, I'm that old), but it turns out you can scan these pictures into a digital format and post them. Who knew?

All that said, social media approaches can be incredibly useful in grassroots advocacy efforts (as the advocacy guru you knew I'd get around to this). Once you stop snickering at the recent scandals (I admit, I'm not there yet), take a few quick and easy steps to use some of these outlets to promote your policy cause, including:

1) Facebook: Find your legislators on Facebook and "like" them. You don't have to actually like them, but it's a great way to keep track of what those legislators are up to as well as their general perspective on the world -- always good to know when you're advocating at them.

2) Twitter: As we've seen, sometimes legislators send out something totally inappropriate and that's always fun. But Twitter is also a good way, like Facebook, to learn more about their representatives' policy views.

3) You Tube: I learned recently that YouTube is the number two search engine after Google. Not only did this make me feel old (what are the kids doing these days?) but it made me realize my current videos are terrible. We're fixing that, but I think you'll find that many members of Congress have already figured this out and have many useful videos posted on their YouTube channels.

4) Linked In: Always a great resource for finding connections between your network and those you're trying to reach. Imagine the power of contacting a legislator through a mutual friend. The legislator is far more likely to take your call and perhaps even meet with you.

5) Two Way Street: No, that's not a social media channel, but it's always a good idea to ask legislators and their staff to follow you on all your own channels. You can make it even more appealing to them by posting videos of your meetings with them, positive updates about their work on your Facebook page and notes on your Twitter feed.

Take just one of these steps and you'll be using social media for good, not evil, in no time!

News Flash: Politicians Like to Self-Promote

A recent article in the Washington Post titled "Tweeting Their Own Horns" reports on a recent study from the University of Maryland on Congressional use of the micro-blogging service Twitter.

I know this will shock you: it turns out that politicians generally use Twitter to promote themselves. The researchers reviewed tweets through February, 2009 as well as postings in June, 2009 and August, 2009 to make comparisons about when Congress is in session versus out. According to the lead researcher:

"Twitter by its nature is a very self-absorbed service," said Jennifer Golbeck, lead researcher and assistant professor in the university's College of Information Studies. "Politicians are very self-important people."

Now, I think it's appropriate to cut our elected leaders a little slack. I'll bet that if you checked out most of the Twitter feeds out there, you'd find that the majority of users are focused on "self-promotion" versus "world peace."

While you can point to a few uses of Twitter as an interactive tool for promoting dialogue between parties, for the most part it is still being used by EVERYONE, not just politicians, as a mechanism for promoting a business, a cause or one's own daily routine. I'll confess that I use it (www.twitter.com/advocacyguru) to promote my particular cause (umm, and the services I provide around that cause) of making everyone on the planet better advocates. See how cleverly I snuck that in?

I guess my main point is that while the study does make for interesting reading, I hope people won't be using it as ammunition to feel even more cynical about our elected officials than we already do. As with all new technologies, it will take time to move Twitter from a promotional tool to an interactive tool. It's probably a good idea to think of Twitter as an evolution, not a revolution.

And if you're looking for ways to be part of the evolution, check out the TweetCongress site, which is working to connect citizens with their legislators in whole, new 140 character or less ways.

Facebook, Obama & the Future of Grassroots

Yesterday a few thousand souls turned out at George Mason University to hear Sen. Barack Obama's (D-IL) first political rally since announcing the formation of his presidential exploratory committee. Unremarkable you say? Well, what's interesting is that this event wasn't the product of political consultants, campaign operatives, or even the good Senator himself. According to the Washington Post, the event was organized and promoted through two Facebook.com groups of students who support Obama's run for the White House.

Last summer Meredith Segal was a rising junior at Bowdoin College in Maine. Her enthusiasm for Sen. Obama led to a Facebook group, Barack Obama for President (subsequently renamed "Students for Obama"). Yesterday, she took the podium in Fairfax to introduce him. Her group now counts more than 56,000 members. Another Facebook group of young people supporting his candidacy numbers a whopping 200,000. Segal and her compatriots are now working to transition from an online group to a true grassroots network with regional organizing and other networking tools (website, blog, etc.)

Young people have traditionally been considered low turnout voters largely disinterested in politics. In the grassroots world -- particularly for associations and other DC interest groups -- they are usually third class citizens. Afterthoughts. However, the times they are a changin'. The Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning and Engagement studies voting patterns among 18 - 24 year olds. Among their findings:

• In 2004, youth voting surged to its highest levels in a decade
• In 2006, the trend continued with the young people comprising the demographic with strongest voter turnout growth since the 2002 midterm

The Pew Charitable Trust found that in certain targeted districts the 2006 youth vote turnout more than doubled from '02 levels. This happened in 36 congressional districts ... more than the current Democratic majority in the House.

Could it be that young people can be mobilized as a significant element of a grassroots network or campaign if we use the right tools? Most grassroots campaigns mostly ignore students and young professionals. That's a mistake. A growing pool of data suggests these may be some of the most passionate advocates ... and they usually have time and energy to be engaged. Trouble is, we can't just throw the same old grassroots tools at them and expect results.

New tools can lead not only to more participation but also the kind of participation that launches a student from a New England campus computer to sharing the stage with a high-profile presidential candidate. What I'm saying is that they don't to just want to passively belong, they want to really engage.

Technology is certainly part of the answer to turning young people into grassroots activists. But, the real trick is the work Meredith Segal is trying to figure out right now: translating online interest into offline action.