One of the real treats of speaking at the Canadian Marketing Association's Word of Mouth Marketing Conference last week was meeting Mitch Joel, President of Twist Image and the guy behind one of the best podcasts on the Internets.

It's called Six Pixels of Separation, and it focuses on the leading edge of marketing with a strong emphasis on social media. It's spontaneous, engaging, fun and always informative. And it gives you a glimpse into Mitch's fine, fertile and fascinating mind.

I'm a fan, which means life doesn't get much better than this: Mitch and I sat down after a great dinner (yes, fellow Vancouverites, there is great sushi to be had in Toronto, when you have Jennifer Evans hunting it down for you), and he broke out his voice recorder.

For the next eight minutes, he asked really challenging (that's as opposed to aggressive) questions about very big issues. We talked about change, marketing ethics, social trust and the prospects for humane capitalism. It was great, and it was also some of the hardest work I've ever done in an interview; I found myself mulling over the ideas we discussed well into the wee hours that night.

Check out the episode here – and then do yourself a favour and subscribe to Mitch's podcast if you haven't already.

One of the nicest, most talented folks in Vancouver’s independent media scene is leaving town. Dawn Buie is off to Toronto… which means there’s a dream job opening up at The Tyee:

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Paul DiPerna recently posted a conversation we had about social media on his Blau Exchange web site. Blau Exchange is

a web-based initiative that will be an intermediary for professional groups interested in how information and communications technologies (ICTs) affect society, with particular focus on the Internet and World Wide Web.

Paul interviewed me about my own history on the web and my perspective on what comes next. If you're interested in how Social Signal got started, where we're going, or how we see the web, please read the interview. Here's a sample tidbit:

Young organizations are no more likely to make mistakes in their community-building than are well-established organizations; if anything, they're less likely, because they're less constrained by conventional ideas about message control. But anyone who's new to the social web has certain challenges and there are certainly are some mistakes we see more often.

The most common mistake is to focus all the attention, energy and resources on building the technical structure of a community, without thinking about the social structure. I was lucky to work on telecentre.org with Mark Surman, the Managing Director of that project, who made a point of allocating several times more dollars for animating and supporting his online community than he'd allocated to actually building the web infrastructure. We encourage our clients to think about spending at least as much on supporting their community as they do on setting it up -- maybe not the first year, when your technical costs are front-loaded, but certainly over time. If you haven't got a budget to pay for site animation (aka moderation), ongoing content development, and participant incentives (like contest prizes), then you're was ting your money by building an online community. Better to take half your budget, set it aside for the support of the community itself, and build a more modest site in the first place. When we design a site we create an activity plan as well as a site architecture so that our clients think through ongoing support of the site as well as set up.

I hope folks will find the interview useful, or at least interesting -- and if you check it out, be sure to read some of Paul's other fascinating interviews with folks like Howard Rheingold and Craig Newmark.

 

We're just back from two days in Houston as the guests of ttweak, a marketing, communications and design firm that shares our belief that authentic, original voices are the best way to convey a message. ttweak's best-known work is probably their Houston It's Worth It campaign, but their extensive and varied experience also includes a number of video projects that let interview subjects, rather than narrators, tell the story. ttweak principals Randy Twaddle and Dave Thompson proved to us that Houston is indeed worth it, not only for the food (mmm, bbq. I mean mmm, Mexican. I mean, mmm, Cajun.) but even more notably for the almost unbelievably friendly people.

While we were in Houston we had the opportunity to meet with a number of ttweak's clients, all of whom reinforced our impression that Randy and Dave have mastered the art of bottom-up marketing campaigns -- and did so long before us johnny-come-latelys in the Web 2.0 world started yakking on about user-generated content. Here's some of the wisdom we gleaned from their example and their advice:

• Let participants speak for themselves. Don't drown out original voices with heavy-handed narration or moderation.
• Remain tool agnostic. If your goal is to convey a message, you'll need to choose a different medium depending on the message you're delivering.
• Production values matter. Don't kid yourself into thinking that people will see past your barebones interface to appreciate the depth or brilliant of your feature set. Appearance counts.
• Invest in your local community. Even if your business has a national or international reach, a solid reputation with clients in your own city provides a bedrock for growth.
• Build relationships with your client's entire team. During one client visit, we saw how ttweak's introduction counted with the CEO -- but we also saw Dave on hugging terms with the parking valet. We got a warm reception in the boardroom -- and a warm car waiting outside when we were done.
• Client service is the surest way to grow a business. Resist the temptation to cash in by focusing on a single hot product, or cash out by selling your company to the highest bidder.
• Do what you're great at. Over-reaching is the surest way to burn your client -- and your brand.

We're excited to work with a company that realizes Web 2.0 values of user engagement in all of its work. And thanks again to Randy and Dave for introducing us to their wonderful city!

What makes for a transformative media moment: a moment when an individual reads, watches or hears a news story and is galvanized to take action on an issue? Social Signal hopes to offer a new answer to that question with the WIDget, a tool that will turn words into deeds by marrying web-savvy media outlets with the latest nonprofit volunteer and donation opportunities.

The WIDget is our proposal to the Knight Foundation's 21st Century News Challenge, a call for "new ways to understand news and act on it...new ways for people to communicate interactively to better understand one another...[and] new ways for people to use information."

The WIDget answers this challenge by by using the latest Internet tools to match issue-oriented journalism with opportunities for concrete citizen engagement. Through a Words Into Deeds widget (WIDget), online media outlets, blogs, audio and video sites will be able to complement any issue-specific story with a set of related volunteer and donation opportunities. You can read about the WIDget and take a look at a mock-up in our draft proposal for the Knight Foundation (PDF).

We've made a conscious decision to share our proposal before the December 31 submission deadline because we think that a community converesation about the proposal can help make it stronger, and help us find the best partners to support the WIDget's development. You can contribute to this process if you are:

• A nonprofit organization that maintains organizational databases: contact Social Signal to add your database to the list of databases that will be tapped by the WIDget.
• A nonprofit organization that wants to promote its donor or volunteer opportunities: contact Social Signal to add your organization’s name to the list of nonprofits who want to appear in WIDget listings.
• A media outlet or blogger: contact Social Signal to add your outlet or blog site to the list of outlets that would deploy the WIDget to offer volunteer and donor opportunities to your readers.
• An interested observer: share your thoughts about the WIDget by commenting on this blog post or by emailing Social Signal with your comments.

To contact Social Signal, please e-mail widget@socialsignal.com.

Thanks in advance for any comments or suggested partnerships, and we'll keep you posted on how our proposal evolves.

We're delighted that Change Everything has been noted on TechCrunch as "a nice alternative to the user generated advertising model".

Marshall Kirkpatrick writes:

I think this is a great example of a company making use of Web 2.0 tools to promote themselves in a way that places the ballance of the impact on providing value to users and incurs promotional benefits for themselves as a consequence of that. Though this model may seem less immediately lucrative, it’s also much less likely to face the kind of anti-corporate backlash bubbling up in MySpace and YouTube.

Marshall had a couple of tips for us, too:

Unlike at 43Things, there’s not the option at ChangeEverything to mark a goal as something you have done already or the question of whether a goal is worth persuing or not - perhaps leftists are too Quixotic for such features.

These are both options we hope to introduce on the site soon - so no, lefties aren't too Quixotic (in this respect, anyhow!)

Just a quick note – I’ll be on Sean Holman’s Public Eye with Kate Trgovac, to talk about Petro-Canada’s YouTube gambit. We’re on at 8 p.m., right after the news. That's 1070 kHz on your AM dial in sunny Victoria, or listen live online.

There's a panel on right now with three fascinating thinkers and doers in online political activism: Joan Blades, Amy Goodman and – facilitating – Micah Sifry. Here are my very rough notes.

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Micah Sifry says we're all newbies; these are early days and new tools, and we're all still learning what they can do

Joan Blades gives a quick history of MoveOn.org. In 1998, they created the site as an online petition to have Congress censure the president and get on with more pressing issues. They sent the link to 100 friends, and soon found themselves with half a million responses.

Listening is a big part of what they do – user comments, surveys – but they don't want to overwhelm. Last week they did house parties to have people identify the three big ideas we should focus on (we already know what we're against); they asked people afterward how they went. People get together at those parties and, although they focus on federal issues, start working on local issues as well.

Her new favourite project is MomsRising. While MoveOn is about what's on the top of the news, MomsRising deals with issues that may not have surfaced but that affect people profoundly.

Micah asks to what degree this is an attempt to influence media agendas and consciousness, and to what degree they're actually trying to affect electoral outcomes. Joan responds that MoveOn has always been political, and cites their fundraising effort to run an ad before the Iraq War to call for time to let the weapons inspectors do their work. Media and public opinion are part of the political work.

Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! begins by saying the media are the most powerful institutions on earth, and that it's very dangerous that most are mediated by corporations. "They've been deployed by the Pentagon, and we have to take it back." Democracy Now! emerged from Pacifica Radio in 1996.

She points out that outcomes in the U.S. deeply affect the rest of the world, and calls the grassroots in the U.S. a "pro-democracy movement" – the same term we use for similar movements around the world. The Seattle protests were a turning point for grassroots media, and their ability to tell stories the mainstream media were missing (or actually misreporting).

Around the time of 9/11, a community TV station began to carry Democracy Now, and it took off. They broadcast as well as video streaming at MNN.org, then got requests from lots of other stations. Soon they had to use satellite hookups.

One or two final observations: You know the issues in your communities; they have global effect. The exposure of the WMD lie also exposed the complicity of the media in acting as an uncritical conduit for the Bush administration. They hope they're providing a conduit to the Internet for those who aren't wired yet. Open-source has been critical for their growth.

Joan talks about the importance of the network neutrality debate. Micah suggests switching your investments to punish the companies pushing to end net neutrality. Amy takes a swipe at Mike McCurry, the former Clinton staffer now working for the telecos against net neutrality.

Amy: East Timor independence in 2002 - they had the equivalent of one T1 line for the entire country. So Democracy Now! pieced their video together on CDs, handed them to strangers at the airport, and asked them to leave them at the desk in Australia. They found a net cafe owner who would drive to the airport, pick up the CDs and send the data on to be reassembled and aired, broadcast quality.

They podcast and video podcast. On top of that, and TV and radio, they put out transcripts within a few hours. How? They take the MP3, and the closed captioners (required by law) would send back their rough transcript. They then send the MP3 broken into segments, with the closed captioning transcript, to volunteers who edit the transcripts and send them back clean. The transcript has been absolutely key; they got an irate call a little while ago from the Newshour with Jim Lehrer saying they'd just booked DN's two guests, and they usually give the host the DN transcript. She calls this "trickle-up journalism."

Micah pushes back a little, and says Democracy Now! doesn't seem to be involving its audience in gathering news. He contrasts them with OhMyNews, which has a network that will soon rival AP.

Amy replies that views and listeners provide many stories, but Micah says that process is visible only to Amy's group. When will we move from many-to-one or one-to-many to a many-to-many process that still filters up the best material? Amy says they're launching a new Ruby-on-Rails-based site in a few months. But she says she can't stress enough how central listeners and viewers are.

Micah turns to Joan, and asks whether there was a conscious decision not to have a MoveOn blog, while MomsRising has one.

Joan says the lack of a MoveOn blog reflects a sheer limit on capacity. There are lots of great things to do, and they can only act on a few. There are about 20 core team members, with a rotating group signing emails. They have to choose between a mailing, house parties and a blog. Email is the only way to contact MoveOn, because there are three million people involved.

Micah points out that once the Dean campaign reached 600,000 members, whenever they sent out an email and only 10 per cent of the recipients responded, they had 60,000 replies, far more than they could cope with – so they had to hide their email address. Joan says they're learning about how to involve volunteers, and it's an ongoing process of having MoveOn members help MoveOn members.

They emailed their membership to tell them about MomsRising, but they're trying to build an even bigger base. There are a lot of women who aren't participating and who are put off by the way politics is done. We think we're so pro-mother, she says, yet the number one cause of poverty is having a child. The U.S. is one of only four countries without paid maternity leave. There's a reason we're number 38 or so in child mortality, even though we pay more than any other nation per capita for health care.

Micah asks about the phenomenon of mommy bloggers, and about BlogHer. Is that an organizing opportunity? Joan says their aligned organizations are broad and deep. When vast numbers of Americans are having the same problems – she hasn't even gone off on child care yet – how can you use the Internet to bring these issues to the fore? It's no small thing – this is a huge challenge. That's why the book, the t-shirt, the song, the documentary coming out, the blogging.

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We're getting into audience discussion, and I'd like to take part, so I'll post these notes now.

 

 

You can catch some of Alex's thinking on social networks in the latest issue of Fast Company. It's part of a great piece by Anya Kamenetz on what social networks mean for business, government and social enterprises:

If your customers are satisfied, networks can help build fanatical loyalty; if not, they'll amplify every complaint until you do something about it. They are fund-raising platforms. They unify activists of every stripe, transforming an atomized mass of individuals with few resources into an international movement able to put multinational corporations and governments on the defensive. [...] They provide an authentic, peer-to-peer channel of communication that is far more credible than any corporate flackery. And all this after only four years or so in development. On the day you read this, a quarter of a million more people will jump onto MySpace, each with her own particular purpose in mind.

Kamenetz points out that companies and governments alike have every reason to take notice when social networks aggregate the opinions of thousands or even millions of people – people they might otherwise ignore.

Activists adopted these new technologies early on because the tools mesh perfectly with the goal of connecting and empowering individuals. "Those of us in online activism have been thinking about these issues for years," says Alexandra Samuel, head of Vancouver, British Columbia-based startup Social Signal. "Suddenly the tech world and the business world are interested in collaborating and building communities." [emphasis ours] Samuel wrote her 2004 poli-sci dissertation at Harvard on "hacktivists" who use legal and illegal means online to do things such as protest international trade agreements; her startup builds and grows customized online communities. And while her first clients were all nonprofits and government agencies, now she's getting approached by businesses, including Canada's largest credit union. "The name of the game now is to engage the user in creating value," she says.

Sometimes that value is economic and commercial; sometimes it's social or cultural; very often, it's unexpected (hello, Chevy Tahoe). The non-profits, governments and businesses that see the highest yields from that value will be the ones that don't fear their members, citizens and customers, but invite them into the boardroom.