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?
Ask the President
With a press conference scheduled for tonight at 8 PM Eastern, Ask the President is in high gear: the more buzz today, the more likely it is that one of the questions might be asked. So it’s a great opportunity to follow along and see what Twitter activism looks like.  A few suggestions:
- if you’re into progressive politics and diversity, follow the discussions on the #p2 hashtag about the project
- if you’re into the Constitution and the rule of law, check out what Get FISA Right is up to
- to see everything that’s happening on #askpres, use TweetLeft (you can choose from askpres or a bunch of other tags) or twitter search
Don’t just follow along passively … get involved! When you see somebody tweet about a question
- if there’s a question you’re promoting, tweet about it
- reply on for why you think the questions are good or bad
- And don’t forget to vote! It’s ridiculously easy: just click on the green thumbs-up button if you think this is a good question to cover at the press conference, or the red thumbs-down if you think it’s bad.  You don’t even have to log in.
It’s an interesting experiment in activism, and potentially even a chance to influence the media. How cool is that?
jon
Skittles photo from ambibambie39507’s flickr page,
licensed under Creative Commons
Jon Pincus is a strategist, writer, and activist living in the Seattle area, currently working with Deborah Pierce and his brother Greg on Tales from the Net, a book on social networks. As well as being an co-founder with Tracy Viselli of the #p2 (“progressives2.0”) Twitter hashtag and an organizer for the Voter Suppression Wiki and Get FISA Right , he’s vice-chair for online visibility for the 2009 ACM Computers, Freedom, and Privacy conference. He blogs about these and other topics at Liminal States and elsewhere.
jon | 23-Mar-09 at 6:25 pm | Permalink
For #p2, our strategy tomorrow is to work with everybody else involved in Ask the President get action on the #askpres hashtag and try to get it to the top 10, whilie using the discussions on the #p2+#askpres hashtags and the p2pt0 Twitter account for communications among ourselves.
Please keep your eye out for interesting-looking questions on Twitter and reply or retweet, with our usual sparkling repartee.
Whenever possible, try to direct people towards the “landing page” at http://p2pt0.wetpaint.com/page/Ask+the+President. This has all our questions, so people are somewhat more likely to vote for more than one. It also has instructions, so people are more likely to be able to vote for and promote the ideas they’re interested in.
As always, feedback and suggestions welcome!
jon
PS: And don’t forget to vote! It’s hard to know how much influence we can have (the way embeds and links are done favors the big blogs and traditional media’s web sites), and so the statistics we gather will be very useful.
Debra J. Chandler | 23-Mar-09 at 6:57 pm | Permalink
Wow.
I am more interested in how AskPres is going to create REAL change outside the Twitterville community. People will have no idea what #P2 is about…
Also, I am a little confused, what is the second book deal going to be about?
jon | 23-Mar-09 at 7:06 pm | Permalink
Debra,
Thanks for the feedback. Lots of people (including me) are talking about AskPres will or won’t create change; this post though is part of a series on creating buzz on Twitter, so focuses on that.
Good feedback on the book deal being confusing. I’ll clean that up.
jon
Gregory K. | 23-Mar-09 at 9:33 pm | Permalink
Of course I focus on “me” first, but I did want to point out that it was three years ago that Fibs flew, and that there’s a bit of confusing phrasing in “National Poetry Month in April 1”.
Also, it’s a bit unclear from this post if there is definitely going to be a question asked or if this is more of a dry run for the future. Or if the answer is unknown. Your post makes it sound like a given — this is the question I want asked! If I vote for the highest vote-getter and it’s not asked, I’m gonna feel deflated. I think the idea of a ticking clock is good regardless, but if there’s some clarity (even if the clarity is just “hey, we hope it’ll be asked”) that’d help. Otherwise, good info and clear for me to follow.
jon | 23-Mar-09 at 9:58 pm | Permalink
Three years? Really? How time flies while you’re having fun!
And it’s not clear whether or not there’s going to be a question asked. I’ll clarify. Good feedback as always — thanks!