Online Communications Philosophy

Kung Fu Quip: "Yet that statement is the essence of this new era of Internet communications. Allowing people to see you, and to understand you, actually protects you from the random out of context quote. As your comfort with exposure increases, and you open your dialog more and more, you will guard against the misstatement. Your allies will have more ammunition to protect your back and your enemies will have less of a vacuum to fill with an errant remark."

More sage advice from Mike Turk. Top of ticket candidates rarely suffer from this malady, but down-ticket politicians should take heed. Better to have an extensive online communication record with a few blemishes than a vaccuum eagerly filled by your opposition.

Is OpenID Being Exploited By The Big Internet Companies?

Great article at TechCrunch about OpenID. While the big players are paying lip-service, not all are actually supporting it.

I think OpenID is the key to converting potential online activists. Far more than a simple matter of convenience in terms of being able to take your login and profile information with you from place to place, properly leveraged, OpenID will mean that your persona can travel with you from site to site.

What's the difference? Information not only about who you are but also what you have done and what you are interested in can be used by networked sites. In the political world this has potential for uniting party sites with campaign sites and converting top level level interest into activism and down-ticket involvement.

Digital Divide? Try "The Electrical Divide"

So I'm in the New Orleans Airport trying to get back to DC after the NTC.

A funny thing happens when a technology conference winds down and all the participants start flying home. Finding a free electrical outlet in airport terminals becomes more difficult than sniffing out truffles. Everyone is jacked in, amp'd up, and charging away before the battery draining flight, and if you're not 2 hours early, you're out of luck barring a window seat and a solar powered trickle charger.

Of course we had this same problem at the conference itself, every breakout session was a rush to find the available electrical outlets and their adjoining seats -- live-bloggers furiously tapping away on their keyboards whilst long tendrils coming from their laptops snake their way half across the room to sole outlet in the room.

One of the smartest travelers I've encountered lately at an airport politely asked me if I minded being unplugged briefly so she could introduce her own multi-plug surge protector into my circuit. Smart girl. But really this is only a band-aid on a larger festering problem that I can only imagine is going to get much, much worse: there isn't enough electricity to go around when you aren't at home or the office. Blame it on battery life, aging power infrastructure, or just an increasing number of people who need to be constantly connected to a device that allows more substantive interface than their two thumbs.

The answer? Clearly people aren't trending toward using less gadgets. Battery life is getting better, but not fast enough. Give me something that supports four plus hours of hardcore gaming on it before it craps out and I'll be happy. As it is I can barely coax 2 hours of light web browsing out of my own laptop before it starts warning me of impending data loss due to uncontrolled shutdown.

So I say, let's offer people more electricity at public venues. Let's make it easier for people to plug in by offering more outlets in more convenient places. Something tells me outlet placement on airport concourses was laid out more with vaccuum cleaners in mind than laptop useage. I understand that current electrical systems may not be able to support everyone plugging in, but surely we could at least double the amount of plugs in a given area without rewiring and incurring a lot of cost.

And like anything else, it would be great if access to electricity was built into facilities in a modular fashion, so outlets and power sources could actually be moved around according to need. They already do it with lighting setups at IKEA, how hard could it be to scale up? Imagine if there were central electrical tracks running throughout a building that could be tapped into easily and safely by small outlet boxes that could be moved from place to place according to demand? Furniture could also tap into the tracks and could be outfitted so there were plugs in every armest.

Easier to make better batteries? Probably. But even if they last for 24 hours at a time, chances you'll be running out of juice on your last charge a good hour before they start boarding your flight. And then you'll be walking around the airport, hunting for a spare outlet like the rest of us electricity starved travelers.

Liveblogging 08NTC: Nonprofit Search Engine Optimization

Designed by Mr. Kevin Lee Didit

SEO starts with actually being the best resource on your target keyword.

Once you have the relevant content, then you can focus on streamlining your site for being read by robots.

Google PageRank -- named for Larry Page. (Bet you didn't know that.) The toolbar tells you how important this page in relation to other pages like it.

Search engines do not index content in DHTML or AJAX elements. (at all?) (visibility vs. display?)

"Any time the user's experience and the Spider's experience diverge, it's bad."

Content: Use the inverted pyramid style for writing to get relevancy at the top of the page.

Search engines don't follow pull down menus? (does that include Suckerfish, all CSS driven?) (need to compensate with sitemap to get the robots moving through all the pages on the site).

Links to your site from other sites that use your keyword are a (or the) primary determiner of page rank.

Reciprocal linking is not as heavily weighted as one way links. Benefit only goes from the linker to the linked.

...had to take off for the airport, I'll try to find a more comprehensive post on this session or simply link to the presentation online as soon as I can...

Liveblogging 08NTC: Building, Growing, and Sustaining a Vibrant Online Community – How to Reach Beyond Traditional Tools into the Web 2.0 Sphere

Beth Kanter

The Cute Dog Theory

• Assess your community's social activities (technographics)
• Discuss and set objectives first (two-way discussion)
• Transparency
• Relationship building
• Rewards (recognition)
• Reciprocity (don't' see results immediately, need 1-2 hours a day investment)
• Define your communities rules or guidelines (open as possible, but plan for the worst)
• Start small, reiterate over and over, learn from your experiments

Tools

• Flickr: techsoup is giving away professional accounts to non-profits.
• Object based sharing community
• Cohesive groups of people sharing photos common to their interests
• Start with an individual profile
• Setup a separate organization profile, then document organization events
• Set org/group guidelines, copyright rules, etc up front

Compelling imagery works as basis for building online communities.

Twitter

• Social presence tool: what are you doing (what has your attention) right now.
• personal networking tool
• news resource
• twitterpack (identify leaders in your sector)
• Fundraising:
• reaching out to networks to mobilize activists
• "twitter rally" -- requires social capital

Keith Morris aka Jade Lilly

Second Life
Basically an MMORPG minus the game and the rules.

• Social Platform: chat, concerts, etc
• Whole world is user generated content
• Currency exchange: Lindens
• Relay for Life (American Cancer Society Signature Fundraising Event) has raised hundreds of thousands of dollars utilizing Second Life to mimic offline fundraising techniques

Abby Sandlin of Charity Dynamics

Social networking allows you to identify activists through actual 2-way communication. Start by documenting your goals and expectations at the outset, then set aside resources to work toward that goal. Later you can then track your ROI.

What to measure for ROI?

• Recency: timing, duration, consistency
  
• Quantity: analytics, UGC points
  
• Quality: tone and type of conversations
  
• Response Rate:
  
• Origination
  

Success metrics are trackable for social networking projects!

Details on tracking devices and notes from questions at:

http://ntc08-communities.wikispaces.com/

Liveblogging 08NTC: Now You Have a Lot of User Generated Content: Tracking and Using It?

Designed by Mr. Sheldon Mains | Sheldon Mains Consulting

90% of online community lurks, 9% contribute, 1% contribute the most, according to Nielson.

UGC characteristics:

• Many strikeouts
• Few homeruns
• Not much in between

Alpha User Generators:

• Opinionated
  
• Independent
  
• Provocative
• Disciplined
• Specialized

Examples:

• Joy Towles Ezell
• Tom Elko
• Glenn McAnamana, Meetup.com
• The_real_yaki, Craigslist
• Ginny C., Care2 News Network
  

What do they want?

• An audience
• A free exchange of ideas (chaotic conversation based on provocative discourse)

"We like to wait for the community to self-manage because it keeps our group authentic." The Nature Conservancy on it's Flickr group.

UGC Strategy

• Setup: Allow intake via multi-channels, have standards, offer help.
• Intake: set your own categories and offer fixed and freeform tagging, as well as geo-spatial (and demo?) tagging.
• Display: allow views based on organization generated models and also user generated models. Setup feeds to aggregate content to other outlets.
  

Twin Cities Daily Planet
Content aggregated from area bloggers, citizen journalists, etc. Mix of content that is pulled in and also commissioned. Open calendars can be updated by community. Users can comment on any story on the site.

Liveblogging 08NTC: An Intimate Look at a Successful Online Fundraising Campaign

Email Fundraising Principles:

Designed by Mr. Jeff Patrick | Common Knowledge

Email send
Sending in the middle of the week is safest. 12 noon is the best time, early morning can also be ideal. Late afternoon is not ideal. Reference your own site traffic to determine peak interest period.

Campaign Results

Withing 24 hours you are seeing 70% of your actions, 90% within 48 hours.

Typical Metrics

• Open rate: 20% is great


• Click rate:


• Conversion rate: 1-2% phenominal, start at less than .5%


• Average donation: $100 is top of the range


• Churn rate: 20-30%/year

Jeff says there is value in seperating communication between activists and donors -- that cross pollination can be bad as people only want to belong to one group.

In general, email donations average higher than the equivalent audience in direct mail.

Use yearly rate of opt-out to measure rates on individual emails to gauge progress and analyze numbers.

Women want more information to make the same decisions than men do. Women are more likely to read the totality of a piece of communication.

Call to action box on right side should have text link and graphical link to cover all bases in terms of filtering by email clients.

Email brand stays consistent across all email, but different types of communication should have subtle creative differences to provide visual cues for users.

Subject lines need to be representative of content. Interesting but unrepresentative subject lines don't lead to as many conversions.

59% of email clients default to turning images off in email.

Have representative text elements that substitute for all graphical elements which may not be shown.

Hotspot: Text at the very top of the email. Text needs to encompass call to action and branding. Link goes to action page. Message gets across no matter the email client.

Do not link "click here." Use actual text for your links. People scan the page for links, if linked text has no message, none gets conveyed. Buttons on the other hand already have a visual component so putting "click here" on it is ok. Button still needs context though in order to be effective.

Donation Form
Limit options whenever possible. Focus on the LCD for best completion rate. CVV2 unnecessary and possibly harmful (can increase dropout rate by 10-15% for the form). Carding is the only situation under which you might need the additional verification. Kintera and Convio already scan for this kind of behavior to limit issues and can initiate the CVV2 option on the backend automatically.

3rd party video on secure webpages

David All describes the value of video in the donation process well in this post, however he's misleading readers on a key point:

* You can not use a third-party flash video provider (like YouTube or Blip.TV) on secure websites which is why we are hosting this video, and only this video, on our servers. (from "DonationTubes: How and Why TechRepublican.com")

Fortunately, with Brightcove you can in fact easily embed your Brightcove video into secure pages. Simply update the relevant links in the embed object to "https://..." and you are off to the races. Here's a good example of this in action: Senator Mitch McConnell's campaign website.

Liveblog Politics Online: How Web Video Changes the Conversation

My first crack at liveblogging...

Panelists from Why Tuesday and UpTake.

Why Tuesday
This organization is pushing for voting reform, trying to increase voter turnout by moving voting day from Tuesday to a weekend or making voting day a National Holiday.

Video helped legitimize and publicize their issue when they got some of the Presidential candidates on video discussing their own takes on voting reform.

UpTake
Citizen journalists covering their own local issues via video and audio. Examples shown include coverage of bike protestors in Minneapolis. Inclusion of citizen journalists into the protests humanized the formerly brutal response to the protests by local police.

Phil Noble asks (wow, I'm sitting next to Phil Noble): how do you rank the UGC you take in to quantify quality? (I'm thinking OutBrain may be one answer he's looking for).

Jason Barnett of Uptake makes it very clear that the key to successful video is being authentic. They don't even censor curse words from the video that they publish.

TubeMogul.com
Will automatically distribute your video to all of the major video sites. They will also report the stats back from all of these other sites (on their fee based model).

How to promote a user generated video contest:

• Build the frame
• Do some video of yourself (show what you want)
• Pick a date
• PR push for the event
• Seed the field with players
• Prizes don't work as incentives

Rapid response video has been used by sitting members to respond to issues. Subsequently MSM uses the video as part of their coverage.

Video can be repurposed on YouTube by updating the keywords so videos piggyback on the backs of other more popular videos. (This will only be ultimately successful if the video is actually related, since this is a common spam practice which is being cracked down on by YouTube.)

Filming Tips

• Stay away from hard drive cameras (mini-DV best)
• Mic is important (sound can be more important than picture)
• Write down questions and story line
• Do b-roll and background clips
• Face talking for 5 minutes is boring (spice up with related material)

Xacti Camera
HD model not great, but regular model can be good enough for decent video and passable sound

FreeVlog.org
Will walk you through all the information you need to get set up to take video. Free tools, equipment, tips, etc. Geared towards first time video producers.

Google "compression tips" to find out the best way to tailor video to YouTube posting.

Mogulus.com allows you to switch between remote live video feeds in a live video feed.