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
A few weeks ago Agency.com and Skittles kicked off “Interweb the rainbow”, a brilliant marketing campaign that involved multiple social networks. The idea’s simple: replace the skittles.com home page with different social network sites. Late that Sunday evening, they set it up to be a Twitter search for “skittles”.
On Monday, skittles was the #1 topic on Twitter.
By Tuesday, there were zillions of blog posts and positive articles in the Wall Street Journal, LA Times, the Financial Times and Advertising Age.* Skittlemania died down quickly, but the publicity continued after Skittles switched their home page to Facebook, on Wednesday. One example: an AP article on Facebook’s rework of their home pages devoted two paragraphs to Skittles.
It’s too early to know whether Skittles will stand the test of time “Hugely successful” is an understatement.
Twitter: an epicenter for buzz
In this series I’ll discuss what activists can learn from the Skittles experience — and poets, too, for reasons that’ll become clear next week soon enough. (Here’s a teaser.)  Let’s start with the most obvious one: Twitter’s a great place to create buzz right now.
Twitter’s filled with highly-networked people into PR, marketing, social media, and blogging. It’s got great viral propagation mechanisms like retweeting, hashtags, top searches, “Follow Friday”, the Monday night Journalist/PR chat, and so on. In fact, right now Twitter’s quite possibly the most buzz-enabling place on the internet. And the numbers you need to start getting attention are still surprisingly small; as the Motrin Moms showed us in November, a few thousand activists can leverage Twitter get a story into the New York Times in 24 hours.
And while there was an agency and a little bit of custom development involved, Skittlemania was a heck of a lot cheaper than most if not all of the classics on Mustafa’s excellent list of amazing viral marketing successes in Social Media Icon. For Anonymous, who leveraged Skittlemania to great placement of get an anti-Scientology message in the LA Times, it was even cheaper.
So lesson #1 is Activists and poets — and anybody else who wants media attention without spending a lot of any money — should consider including Twitter in their plans.  Launching “Ask the President” on Twitter on Liminal States is an example zero-budget and minimal-time-investment launch plan with discussion and early statistics.
Things happen quickly in the Twitterverse
The basic idea behind Ask the President is simple: a web site that lets people on the Internet vote on what questions they want to hear at the a White House press conference. Ari Melber’s The People’s Press Conference, Katrina vanden Heuvel’s Ask the President, Megan Garber’s Presidential Press Conference, Pro-Am Edition in the Columbia Journalism Review, and Evan McMorris-Santorio’s Word On The Tweet: @MrPresident Edition* in the National Journal makes a strong case for why this is likely to resonate with the Obama campaign, whose transition team ran the similar Open for Questions pilot [1, 2].
Ari asked me if I’d help him and Shaun Dakin promote Ask the President on Twitter, which is why I wrote up the launch plan.  On Wednesday, not long before last Thursday’s launch, we got the media release that President Obama had scheduled a live press conference for 8 p.m. (Eastern) on Tuesday.  How convenient! But hmm, if we’re launching on Thursday, do we have a chance to build enough buzz by Tuesday?
Well, Skittles and got rolling over the weekend, and were all over the press and blogosphere. The anti-Facebook organizing in mid-February [1, 2, 3] went to #1 on Monday, and by Tuesday night Facebook had backed down. The Motrin Moms did the same thing to Motrin November only even faster [1, 2, 3]. Things happen quickly in the Twitterverse.
So Lesson #2 is that as long as you can get some action going in the blogosphere and other social network sites, if you launch on Twitter over the weekend you can be media darlings by Tuesday.
Start playing now … and stay tuned!
Yeah I know. Who wants to launch over the weekend. It’ll be fun though. I promise.  Lesson 3 from Skittles is Everybody knows: fun rules.
And it won’t take a lot of time at all. A little Twitter search magic gets you a page which includes a lot of questions you can vote for along with tips from the @AskThePresident profile and updates about articles and blog posts.   If you see a question that looks interesting, you can click on the link to take you to a page where you can read more and vote for or against it. For example, here’s a tweets from sharpiedshoes, ggordonliddy, and KDeutsch that caught my attention:
Terrorist Threat Level never goes below “Be Very Fearful and Give Up Your Rights”?” http://tinyurl.com/cmpanu
http://tinyurl.com/c4o2c4 Great question by one of my producers #tcot
#AskPres audience is a little defensive about fact that working class are underrepresented -28 Net Votes http://tinyurl.com/djgh4l
Once you’re there, the green thumbs-up button is a yes vote and, the red thumbs-down is no.
And if you’re on Twitter, the “ReTweet” button brings up a page for a twitter message with the tinyurl and hashtag already filled in, which is every helpful. “Tweet this” be a better choice for the name; hopefully it’ll change soon. Or you can just retweet on Twitter like usual, for example this one from me:
RT @KDeutsch: #AskPres audience is a little defensive about how working class are underrepresented -28 Net Votes http://tinyurl.com/djgh4l
If you’ve got a little more time, you don’t have to stop there of course. Browse around for other questions and tweet them. Sign up and submit your own questions or video … and tweet about them! If you’re a blogger, check out the embedding technique that Sarah Jaffe uses on Alterdestiny.**
See? I told you it wouldn’t be so bad. And the fun’s just starting.
Stay tuned for more.
jon
* I know any publicity is good publicity, but would it be too much to have asked that they used either @AskThePresident or #askpres rather than a totally unrelated Twitter profile? Sheesh.
** if anybody has any luck getting this to work on WordPress or Wetpaint, please let me know!
jon | 21-Mar-09 at 3:22 am | Permalink
One post or two? It’d be best if the last section with how to participate is available by late Sunday afternoon. Most straightforward is a single 1000ish-word post. There’s a natural break there though (and I am working on some good graphics for the seond half), so the alternative two 500-word posts is very tempting. We could always start the second post circulating in draft form for feedback on Liminal States Sunday and then get it on The Seminal on Monday …
Debra J. Chandler | 21-Mar-09 at 6:21 am | Permalink
Yeah, this is great.
(There is a missing pronoun in one paragraph just after you start taking about Ask the President. )
Do you want my gut reaction? Or do you want my academic scholarly reaction?
My gut reaction is that that is too complicated for most “regular” people. In order to actually have, for example, the homeless population represented (there are a few on twitter) we would have to probably look at it more like a step by step process, with the ultimate question: How is this going to help?
Which brings up other questions about this attempt to get on the President’s agenda for his Tuesday speech:
1) what about building a twitter coalition? That way we could prioritize issues and include the multiplicity of voices?
2) how does the Skittles example inform the chances of a political process that will have lasting effects?
3) what about an option to have something like a “press release” or series of “press releases” sent out on twitwalls (they are better than blogs at least in the beginning – less clicks!) AND then presented in a blog to the President?
4) can we have directions for the embed?
Just my thoughts, gut or otherwise, I am not sure, I just woke up.
peace out & thks 4 including me in this fantastic movement.
LOVE YOU ALL xoxo
MrsCarpediem | 21-Mar-09 at 6:27 am | Permalink
I think this is great! I would love to see a follow up piece or something that links how twitter is the online version of traditional advertising/marketing strategy.
Prius gives initial models out to celebs to create “buzz” – You need five ppl to try the product and spread positive word-of-mouth. Those five tell their five, etc. It’s a traditional model but an untraditional twist. Rapid time response via twitter — replacing the email forward? phone call to a friend? banner ad?
Ask the President had a similar bump and launch. I started RTing and advertising its launch and was hit by people in my follow saying it was “spam” — not the case to those in the loop from the #p2 chats.
Another hour passed, it was confirmed as not spam: Voila! Massive launch/support.
I think “The Skittles Experiment” shows that using 1. free channels 2. traditional marketing strategies = successful word of mouth advertising. Liquid gold for marketers. And “Ask The President” shows that it works for brand new products just as well as ridiculously well branded ones.
2 posts – I like that Idea! 🙂 Keep feeding the information mountain…
Sarah J | 21-Mar-09 at 7:24 am | Permalink
I guess I might be crazy, but I still have no idea actually what the “skittles experiment” did.
Can’t get the embedding to work on my WordPress page or my Tumblr. Those would be good things to note for the developer, especially since WordPress is software people often use on proprietary blogs (like mine at ohyouprettythings.net) as well as through wordpress.com, and because Tumblr, for the most part, is ridiculously easy to post things with.
As far as Twitter goes, I’ve been pushing AskThePresident, plan on continuing to do so, tweeting at least a question a day. Tends to work better when you’re promoting a specific thing rather than just the site as a whole–the site can be a little daunting because there are so many questions.
Shaun Dakin | 21-Mar-09 at 8:25 am | Permalink
Great start Jon.
Jason Rosenbaum | 21-Mar-09 at 9:48 am | Permalink
I think this is great, as well. It flows well and explains the idea. I’m agnostic as to whether it should be 1 or 2 posts, it could go either way as far as I’m concerned.
Gregory K. | 21-Mar-09 at 9:55 am | Permalink
I’ll try to have more substantial comments later. It seemed good content wise to me, but I haven’t had coffee yet. Still, in my haze I noticed there’s either a period or middle part of the sentence missing here:
It’s too early to know whether Skittles will stand the test of time “Hugely successful†is an understatement.
Also, just above that, I’m not sure why your first asterisk footnote (after Advertising Age) is saying “why didn’t they use #askpres”. You’re discussing the Skittles story, right???
Second para after START PLAYING NOW…. should either be “here are” or something else:
For example, here’s a tweets from sharpiedshoes, ggordonliddy, and KDeutsch that caught my attention:
Then just above your example of your own retweet, was this with something missing:
“Tweet this†be a better choice for the name; hopefully it’ll change soon.
Oh… and I love those top 10 viral campaigns!
jon | 21-Mar-09 at 11:15 am | Permalink
Thanks all for the excellent and quick feedback! i also got some responses on Twitter. thus far sentiment is generally in favor of two posts.
Debra: i want both gut and academic reactions! agreed that it’s a very difficult issue to get people who don’t have computers and broadband at home represented fairly (as somebody said to me in a Twitter reply, libraries aren’t enough) and people without homes have an even harder time. In the short term, I think that Ask The President’s best approach is probably to be transparent: “right now, yes, these are the perspectives of the online community, which presumes access to technology, and people with more time and technology skills have a major advantage”. Results will be filtered through that lens, but as long as there’s a commitment to deal with this and a good plan going forward hopefully it won’t be too damaging to AskThePresident’s credibility.
All the promotion options you discuss are excellent and the planning page on the #p2 wiki has some initial discussion of instructions and how to promote and coalitions.
mrscarpediem that’s a good topic to cover later in the series. and interesting point about how people’s attitudes changed. actually before we launched there was some accidental spamming — HootSuite’s multiple-account support and hashtags had an unexpected interaction — so I can see why there was sensitivity. it’s a good thing to keep in mind as we’re promoting, we want guidelines for responsible retweeting.
SarahJ, I meant to have a footnote with more Skittles info; i’ll include it in the revision. Thanks for checking on the technology, i’ll let @colarusso know on Twitter. Agreed that it’s a lot more effective to promote individual questions than the site as a whole. The “question of the day” is a great idea and I’ll add it to the planning page next time I edit.
Shaun, thanks!
Jason, glad you like it, and thanks as always for the flexibility.
yo, bro: thanks as always! yeah, they way Mustafa used video made it a really vibrant list. what do you think of “Ask the President: the biggest thing since Subservient Chicken!” as a tag line? Good luck with the prep for the 30 Poets / 30 Days launch Monday!
Thanks again all for all the feedback and help!
jon
Debra J. Chandler | 21-Mar-09 at 11:44 am | Permalink
Hi Jon et al
Nice comments and great feedback. I have to agree that the embed does NOT work. I struggled for one hour, even changed the html and added close tags, it will not embed in wordpress. I got it FINALLY to embed in my Twitwall, but not as an embed!!??!!
Anyway, there are homeless people on Twitter, as mentioned before, so I would suggest we ask them what they think. I think we should have campaigns to reach those who are not included in THIS discussion and AskThePresident yet. They are often on Twitter, believe it or not.
Still in the dark about what is going to happen with all these messages… Will it just be the top 1 or 5 or something that even have a chance at reaching the White House or the East Wing or the whatever?
I would like to suggest that we have a Twitter Team that is NOT media, but community oriented. Then that Twitter Team could give a coalition perspective.
It is not always the issue with the most votes that has the best chance of reaching the most people or representing the most disenfranchised group.
I vote for the unemployed as the most disenfranchised. I am unemployed and I have never been eligible for any kind of benefit.
Despite my doctorate from UCLA, I am still treated as if I have leprosy by all institutions and most people, just because I am in financial trouble.
The interest rate on my car loan is over 30%, that includes an extra $4K that I had to put in the loan because I have poor credit. That is just the tip of the iceberg.
Thanks, see you online soon,
DJ
Myrna the Minx | 21-Mar-09 at 1:24 pm | Permalink
I annotated edits I would make on Diigo. Look for my sticky notes and let me know if you cant see them (have to be logged into your account)
jon | 21-Mar-09 at 3:28 pm | Permalink
Thanks DJ and Myrna I’ll get to those soon …
David made some tweaks on the site and said it should work now in WordPress … let’s see …
w00t w00t!
jon | 21-Mar-09 at 3:40 pm | Permalink
from Charlotte-Anne Lucas in email, quoted with permission
Great feedback. It’s good to have trained professionals involved 🙂
jon | 21-Mar-09 at 3:53 pm | Permalink
Debra said things weren’t working for her question so I’m going to try it …
noxhanti | 21-Mar-09 at 3:57 pm | Permalink
Sorry I’m not tech/ print savvy but wanted to add that whilst those without constant access to the net may be under represented the net gives them possibilities to connect like never before as well as a sense of empowerment. Just been talking to someone on twitter who is /was clueless about how it works but has been taken out of his isolation by the tool. Moreover, as he gains in confidence he is expressing himself more even though the computer keeps dying on him (???). To what extent he is able to affect change directly through his present conversations on Twitter is perhaps separate from the added impetous to do things in the off-line world.
Lessons from Skittles for poets and activists: part 1 now posted on The Seminal! « Liminal states | 22-Mar-09 at 4:24 pm | Permalink
[…] Thanks to everybody who gave feedback on the draft version I posted earlier (which also gives some ideas about what next week’s installment will cover). Apologies in advance; if I missed anybody in the credits at the end of the article in the Seminal; please let me know and we’ll get it fixed. […]
jon | 22-Mar-09 at 4:55 pm | Permalink
As the trackback above implies, the article’s up on The Seminal. At least from my perspective, it’s much much better than the draft version was. So once again thanks to everybody for your time!
There’s a discussion about Twitter, diversity, and empowerment going on in — see Ari Melber’s length comment here. That thread’s a better place for ongoing discussion so I’ll cut-and-paste excerpts from Debra’s and noxhanti’s posts to that thread. Excellent points all around and it’s great that we’re having this conversation!
jon