What Would Harvey Do? Social media through a hero's eyes

WWHD: What Would Harvey Do?An introduction to social media using the (hypothetical) case study of Harvey Milk

Mark Farmer

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On today’s menu

• A brief introduction to social media via one of the great, and recently celebrated, social activists.

• What technologies Harvey Milk would use, if he were trying to accomplish his goals today?

• Not a survey of what social media tools are being used by community groups and non-profits.

• Not a biography of Harvey Milk, nor an analysis of his accomplishments.

• A fun intro to the world of social media, with Harvey Milk as an example, with case studies and insights to guide you in your next steps.

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How did we get here?

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Me Me Me

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Brands Ahoy!

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The Truth about Social Media

• Before getting into Harvey’s story, a few things to remember about social media…

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EPIC!!!

• No other discipline in the history of communication is so fraught with hyperbole and SHEER HYPE!

• But social media isn’t quite the moving-heaven-and-earth experience you may have been lead to believe it is.

• So don’t worry – it’s much simpler than you might think.

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Ok, not so epic….

• It’s communication.

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Communication

• The important thing to remember at all times, is that the fundamental nature and aspects of human communication haven’t changed since we came down out of the trees.

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P2P

• It’s still just someone talking to someone else.

• So do what you would if you were talking with an acquaintance.

• Don’t do anything you wouldn’t do if you were talking with an acquaintance.

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The Street Corner

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A kind of magic?

• With social media, as with all communication, you don’t get something for nothing: social media isn’t magic. It’s not going to solve your communication ills or change any communications fundamentals.

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Don’t, don’t… don’t believe the hype

• Too many people fall into the trap of believing that social media is a shortcut to more bang for their communication buck.

• They put a couple of wheels in motion, and then wait for wonders to occur.

• Wonders fail to occur, anger and disappointmentensue, and then the offending media get shut down.

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Not

• Social media isn’t a campaign. It’s a conversation.

• Yes, that’s a cliche.

• Yes, it’s 100% true.

• If you treat it like an ad campaign that you turn on and off, and expect results, you’re going to be mistaken.

• It takes time to either build a network or tap into an existing one that’s going to care about your brand, and your product, whatever that may be.

• So start building your network now for when you really need results to happen later. Get people interacting with you. n

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e

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Cargo Cult

• Just because you build it doesn’t mean they’ll come.

• Time and again I meet organizations that see the exterior trappings of social media, and execute some of them at their organization, in the belief that it’s the mechanisms that make social media happen:

• Usually, this fails to produce the desired result.

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So what does work?

• Every time I see social media work, above all else, I see two common factors, time and again:

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Compelling Content

• Me: 130 followers.

• Sockington: 1,513,649 followers.

• Typical Sockington tweet:

• STRREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEETCH oh come now this belly doesn't rub itself DO I HAVE TO DROP ALL THE HINTS AROUND HERE

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Compelling Community

• 1,513,649 followers

• 7,538 “Likes” on Facebook

• 434 people are part of his community page on Facebook

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Compelling Community

• Achewood.com

• My best-commented piece on webheresies.com: 13 comments, not including mine

• Achewood’s last cartoon: 221 comments

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Great success!

• The monster social media success stories you sometimes hear about happen because someone tapped the natural enthusiasm an existing group of people demonstrate for a particular brand.

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Brand

• The difficulty: not everyone has a strong brand.

• Inconvenient truth: not everyone has as established as strong a connection with their audience as they think they do.

• Social media can’t create that kind of connection out of nothing, but it can help you build it out if you’re willing to put in the effort.

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Success Story #1: The Fiskateers

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Who the Hell are ‘The Fiskateers’?

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• Fiskars wanted to try something different.

• Hired Brains on Fire to help them.

• Combined social media with real live people.

• Created “The Fiskateers,” a group of user-evangelists who combined in-store visits with an online community.

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The Win

• Goal: recruit 200 more of these ambassadors in six months.

• Fiskars achieved that in 24 hours and reached 20 times that number within eighteen months.

• Goal: increase “chatter” (online conversations mentioning the company by name) by ten per cent.

• It increased by 600 per cent over a 20-week period.

• Goal: increase store sales in specific areas by ten per cent.

• Increased 300 per cent in the first year alone.

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• What did they do right?

– Tapped into people’s natural enthusiasm, specifically their natural enthusiasm for a brand (and an activity)

– Didn’t limit themselves to the virtual world – married social media with face-to-face.

• Some of the most interesting and impactful success stories with social media happen when the virtual & real worlds get together and have a party.

– Worked from an existing, strong brand.

– Fitted social media to an existing infrastructure and audience, not vice-versa.

• E-mail me for a link to the complete case study.

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So, WWHD?

• Milk’s #1 goal was to motivate and organize people.

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So, WWHD?

• So what social media work best for motivation and organization, especially for social change?

• Blogging

• Social Networks

• SMS

• Twitter

• E-mail (yes, e-mail – stick with me on this one)

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The good ol’ not-so-good-ol’ days

• Dan Nicoletta

– “One thing about a lot of the political movement of that time that people don't realize is that it was the same 10 people doing everything... we imagine that it was epic because it was epic sociologically in terms of what was shifting, but it was the same ten people doing everything... well maybe 20 on a good day.”

– Social media changes all that.

– To borrow a term from the military, it’s a ‘Force multiplier’ – it allows you to do things you couldn’t normally otherwise do, by increasing your capacity and reach.

– In the case of social media and social change, it enables others to help you make that change.

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Building Community

• The good ol’ days

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Building Community

• The good new days

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Building Community

• Not the only game in town, but close enough - Roughly ½ of all Canadians are on Facebook.

• For some people, it’s becoming the web.

• Used to be a choice between setting up a fan page and a group.

• That choice is gone now, thanks to the ‘like’ button.

• Replacing previous tools like Evite for many functions.

• One of the best ways to promote a broad engagement with the public.

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Organizing

• Then

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Organizing

• The winner?

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Organizing

• Now

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Trippy? Trippi!

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One-on-one

• Then

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One-on-one

• Now

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E-mail

• Still works well. Completely unglamorous, but completely useful.

• And more importantly, it’s direct, in a way that thing like FB really aren’t

• Compare: about 106 million people world-wide have Twitter accounts.

• More than twice that number of peoplehave e-mail accounts.

• In the USA alone.

• E-mail lends itself to direct calls for action because it’s direct:one e-mail per person. It’s a personal medium, not abroadcast one.

• Not to say it’s the only way tomake a call for action, but it’s agood way

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Microblogging, circa 1975

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• Great way to quickly, easily get your thoughts out there.

• It’s also an outstanding way to coordinate people in the field in real-time.

• What it doesn’t do as well as those things is conversation.

• Can Twitter be used conversationally? Absolutely?

• Is it being used conversationally in most cases? No.

• Twitter is still too often a communication one-way street.

• How Twitter defines ‘conversation’

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• Twitter is becoming more and more versatile, but it’s not a panacea. Its limitations haven’t changed, even as its popularity has increased.

– 140-character limit.

– Demographic reach: elderly, marginal communities, others.

• Success stories:

– Chilean earthquake

– Iranian protests

– Thai protests

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Staffing the phones

• Old days

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Staffing the phones

• Recently old days

– SMS messaging.

– Dedicated short-code?

– Make SURE you have a white list.

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Staffing the phones

• Now

– Social media goes mobile:

• Twitter (Twitterific, HootSuite, etc.)

• Facebook.

– Dedicated apps:

• Providing value or just a novel way of promoting yourself?

• Approximately 150,000 apps on the iPhone store. How will yours stand out?

• What’s the ROI on a $10K layout?

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This is how we do it

vs.

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Publishing

• Then

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• Now

Now

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Blogging

• Dan Nicoletta

– “I think the first campaign's literature is really clunky and was done on some funky mimeograph machine, for example, just because the guy across the street had one and was willing to run stuff for the campaign... and then later our own printing press and silkscreen operation, etc., etc. to save money we didn't have in the first place... “

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Success Story #2 – Blogging at the ACA

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ASK

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Lessons from Harvey

• You have to capture people’s attention and interest before they’ll listen...

• ... and you have to get people to care before they’ll act.

• Find a champion (and it may be you).

• Walk the walk.

• Take risks (smart risks).

• Learn by doing.

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The killer “Be”s

• Be authentic

• Be succinct

• Be useful

• Be honest

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Further reading

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• Social media trends & analysis:

– twistimage.com/blog

– webworkerdaily.com

– sncr.org

• Technology news, including social media:

– cnet.com

• Examples of how to do it right:

– bluestatedigital.com

• Social activism:

– actonprinciples.org

– thedallasprinciples.org

Further surfing

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Contact me

• E-mail: [email protected]

• Website: webness.biz

• Blog: webheresies.com

• Twitter: markus64

• Facebook: markus64

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Thank you

• And thank you to Harvey Milk, for blazing a trail, and being an inspiration.

“If a bullet should enter my brain,let that bullet destroy every closet door.”

Mark Farmer

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WWHD?

What Would Harvey Do? Social media through a hero's eyes

Technology

Transcript of What Would Harvey Do? Social media through a hero's eyes