Activism at the speed of Skittles! #p2 and Ask the President (DRAFT!)
DRAFT! Work in progress, feedback welcome.
Final version to appear on The Seminal.
2009 03 26
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#askpres: lessons learned?
What are the learnings from our Ask the President experience?
For me, a few off the top of the head.
1) a single page with instructions where people can vote for multiple ideas is extremely valuable for competitions like this (although our layout still needs work)
2) the combination of a twitter account (@p2pt0) and hashtag (#p2) is a good one
3) I briefly went hashtag-crazy. Oops. Thanks to Myrna the Minx for pointing this out. More generally this is something we still have to sort out: how to get the information diffusion to work effectively across hashtags?
What else?
jon
Ask the President: update heading into the home stretch
Ask the President (aka #askpres) has gotten brief mentions in the Politico, a second link from WashPo, and Jake Tapper tweeted about it. Momentum is building! And there are other projects going on to get citizen input into White House press conferences:
- Jake Tapper is soliciting questions on Twitter and will read them all. He’s aware of #askpres.
- Faiz Shakir is soliciting questions on his (registration-required) blog at Center for American Progress. He did not appear to be aware of #askpres. I tweeted to Alan Davidson, and per Ari’s request Harry Waisbren is trying to use his contacts at CAP to connect people.
Four of the questions on the list on the #p2’s wiki* are in the top 12 on the Ask the President site, including the one I submitted on behalf of Get FISA Right (what are your plans and timeframe to get FISA right) at #8.
2009 03 24
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Mr President, do you like Skittles? (DRAFT!!!!)
The first installment of Lessons from Skittles for poets and activists briefly described how Skittles’ Twitter-centric viral marketing campaign caught fire and concluded that one lesson is that activists without a lot of time or money should seriously consider incorporating Twitter in their plans.  That’s a pretty general conclusion. So our next two installments will look at two case-studies in progress. You can watch them unfold as they’re happening, or even better get involved and learn by doing.
This weekend we’ll cover Ask the President, which offers poets and activists a chance to propose and vote on questions for White House press conferences. As Ari Melber discussed in The People’s Press Conference, Ask the President — #askpres for short — will need to create buzz to have a chance at getting their questions asked and answered. Activists also need to create buzz to help get their questions voted up.
The following weekend, we’ll discuss 30 Poets / 30 Days, a project for National Poetry Month in April 1 being organized by my brother, Gregory K of Gottabook. Three years ago, Greg’s blog post about “Fibs” (Fibonacci Poetry) went viral and got picked up by the mighty Slashdot and then the New York Times.  Will lightning strike twice?
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Lessons from Skittles for poets and activists, parts 1 (and 2?) (DRAFT!!!!)
DRAFT! Work in Progress! Feedback, please!
Final version to be published in The Seminal, potentially in two parts
- excerpt from skittles home page, March 2009
Launching “Ask The President” on Twitter
Original draft March 16. Revised March 19.
“Net movement” journalist/activist Ari Melber’s latest brainstorm, Ask the President, is launching on March 19 at http://www.communitycounts.com/Obama.  The basic idea is to provide a followon to Change.gov’s short-lived Open for Questions series [1, 2]: a way for people to submit potential questions and vote on what they think the best ones are. It’s an intriguing idea, with the possibility of providing a path around the media gatekeepers who have historically controlled access.
Here are some thoughts about how Tweeple (people on Twitter) who support the idea can help with Ask the President‘s launch.
Testing out TweetSuite
I’m testing out Dan Zarella’s TweetSuite, which includes Tweetbacks and a Tweet This button.
Unfortunately, according to the comments here, it apparently only works on posts that have been created since the plugin has been installed. Â Â So I’m creating this post to test things out.
We shall see …
The #p2 Hashtag and Strategies for Progressives on Twitter
Originally published on The Exception
Co-written with Tracy Viselli. Previous draft here.
#digg it!: initial experimental results — and let’s try it again!
please digg, retweet, and follow on twitter
Update, 2:30 PM: please also digg and retweet the Nordstrom action alert
Update 4:30 PM: Jen Nedeau’s Can social media save the day? has more
Last Friday’s #Digg it! A proposal for women of color, feminists, and progressives on Twitter experiment went remarkably well for a first attempt. Here’s the data.
Two of the for posts sent to Twitter with a #digg tag got significant retweeting. While it’s hard to know for sure, looking at the names of the diggers it seems that we were also getting some additional diggs via Twitter. The table below also includes the total number of diggs as of 3 PM Pacific time on Friday
| Post | tweets | total diggs | from Twitter (estimate) |
| Don’t Divorce Me | 8 | 30 | 6-10 |
| #digg it | 5 | 28 | 5-8 |
| Lilly Ledbetter | 1 | 22 | 1-3 |
| NO on Collins-Nelson | 2 | 6 | 1-3 |
Eight retweets may not sound like a lot, But looking at it differently, those 8 retweets reached over 700 followers plus however many people are following the #topprog, #lgbt, and #jti* channels — and had a measurable impact on digg results. According to retweetist popular URLs get retweeted by over 100 people in a 24 hour period so there’s clearly significant upside here. And of course there are lessons about how to do it better.
Like I say, great results for a first attempt.
So let’s try it again! Please digg and retweet.
And please also digg at least one of the first posts (1, 2, 3, 4). While it’s too late to get any of them on to digg’s front page, this is still a very useful way of tracking how far this discussion has spread. Thanks!
To follow along on Twitter, using the new improved magic incantation.*
Additional discussion, and a little more data, below the fold.
How progressives can use Twitter: a strategic perspective (DRAFT)
DRAFT, CURRENTLY BEING REVISED SUBSTANTIALLY.  New recommendations here. Thanks all for the feedback!
Final version to appear in The Exception.
Collaboratively authored with Tracy Viselli.
Zuckerberg: Facebook to ratchet up exploitation, only bans “outliers”
Richard Wray, in Facebook aims to market its user data bank to businesses on guardian.co.uk:
Facebook intends to capitalise on the wealth of information it has about its users by offering its 150 million-strong customer base to corporations as a market research tool. The appearance, later this year, of corporate polls targeted at certain parts of the Facebook audience because of the information they have posted on their pages, is likely to infuriate privacy campaigners.
No, ya think?
Facebook Founder Mark Zuckerberg, sporting a tie, demoed it at Davos. (No report on whether any attendees brought up privacy issues.) Mark also shmoozed with Robert Scoble about Facebook’s “intense” year, and defended Facebook’s arbitrary and secretive banning policy:
He also said that his system looks for “outlying†behavior. He said if you behave like an average user you should never trigger the algorithms that will get you kicked off.
Take action: Demand justice in the killing of Oscar Grant
From Color of Change’s site:
On New Year’s Eve, Oscar Grant was shot execution-style by a transit police officer in Oakland, California. He was shot in the back while face-down on a subway platform, unarmed and posing no threat.
Twelve days later–despite several videos showing what happened–the officer who killed Grant hasn’t been arrested, charged, or even questioned. He quit the force and has refused to speak. The District Attorney has done nothing.
It’s time to demand that California Attorney General Jerry Brown take over the case and arrest Grant’s killer, and to ask that the US Department of Justice launch an independent investigation into the conduct of local authorities. Please join us:
http://www.colorofchange.org/oscar/
Oscar Grant is the third man murdered by BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) police in the past 17 years. All three victims were Black and none posed a serious threat. In each case, BART and county authorities have failed to hold the officers accountable.