Social Media and Networking

Boom goes the Twitter: 5 lessons about content and community as Twitter implodes.

November 29, 2022 by Ted Fickes Leave a Comment

Two toy storm troopers made of Legos hold a mobile phone charging cord. Photo by Will Porada via Unsplash.

Many of the nonprofit-oriented email lists and Slack groups I am on have had multiple threads titled (more or less): what are you doing about Twitter?

So far, the smart money isn’t betting against Twitter: “don’t leave…wait and see…maybe set up over on Mastodon or something…download your Twitter history…surely it will exist in some form so keep your group/personal account on there.”

That’s useful advice though it comes with an eye-catching caveat: remaining on Twitter means engaging on a platform whose owner overtly accommodates anti-semitism and white supremacy.

Most nonprofits have put a lot of time and treasure into Twitter over the years. It’s become a way to reach supporters and the media. Here are a few follower numbers: ACLU = 1,900,000 followers / Sierra Club = 379,000 followers / Feeding America =464,000 followers / Nature Conservancy = 996,000 followers.

My suggestion is to develop a content strategy built upon platforms you control and stories about, by and for your community. Social media platforms are advertising and marketing businesses. As such, their interests may not align with yours and their model can change or go away altogether.

Perhaps you or your organization aren’t impacted by Twitter’s changes. Chances are you’re using Facebook, LinkedIn, TikTok, Instagram and other networks. All present the same existential challenges. We’re all at risk.

Five Lessons

Here are five lessons for nonprofit communicators and community builders as we consider Twitter.

[1] Understand who was in your Twitter community, what the needed from you and how they engaged with each other.

The value add of Twitter (or any network) is the people out there in your community. You could reach people and get them talking. A “viral” tweet was that moment of people talking to other people on your behalf. I wouldn’t call that community building. But it shows the value of networks.

[2] Twitter was an entrance to community. What other “doors in” do you have?

Community has doors in, doors out, and places where the work happens. Twitter was a big “doors in” platform. You could find people interested in similar topics by sharing your knowledge, searching for hashtags and engaging through replies and retweets. Communities could engage on Twitter but for most it offered an entry point or a way to stay updated.

There are a few communities for whom Twitter was a central meeting and learning place. See this about people working in the California legislature or the value of Twitter to the public health community. That level of community engagement may be hard to replace. But it’s not the norm for many nonprofits.

[3] Craft online community to outlast platforms.

Building a community that outlasts a platform means meeting people where they are, providing tools and training that let people use your content on the platform, and acknowledging people and their efforts.

The role of content and platforms in a community is not dependent on what you put out there or how many people you reach. What other people say and do is what turns a list of people (or subscribers or members or followers) into a community. People look for social proof and social cues. One is more likely to talk about an issue if they hear/see friends talking about it.

[4] Communities and their content, stories and legacy need control of the space in or on which they operate.

Communities don’t thrive over time on rented land. You can open the door to people on a proprietary platform like Twitter (or TikTok, Facebook, Instagram or even Slack). You can use a platform to distribute information and help organize people.

But a platform can change owners, change terms and even close. This puts community connections at risk. It also means the loss of content, stories and community infrastructure like stories, documents, links and more.

What content and communications channels can you control? That probably includes your website (articles, reports, hosted videos and more) and email (including advocacy, fundraising, newsletters and other material). It may include videos on a YouTube page, though that hosting and its interfaces are not under your control. It could include webinars and in-person content – material delivered at events and meetings.

[5] Running social media without a content strategy is irresponsible.

At least it’s a fixable problem. Support a cross-department team to develop, implement and iterate content strategy.

Almost every organization using Twitter and other social media platforms rely on them as a marketing channel. Organizations create content and they tweet about it. The goal is to let followers know and, hopefully, get followers to tell others about the content. This could be web posts, online reports, events, video, or just native social content – tweets or Facebook posts, for example.

The demise of Twitter, constant questioning of Facebook’s ethics and algorithms, and the potential political perils of TikTok are just a few examples of why organizations can’t equate a social media program with a content strategy. Creating content and posting to social media without an underlying content strategy is at best reckless and at worst financial malpractice.

“What should we do with our organization’s Twitter account?” is not the question to ask right now. Instead, ask who was getting value from your Twitter, what was that value and how was it delivered? The answers to those questions will give actionable insights to immediate next steps. More important, those answers help inform a content strategy that connects your storytelling, audience and the impact you and your community need to have on the world.

It’s possible that your content strategy will point towards investing in content you own on platforms your community accesses and can use to engage with your organization and others. This could mean rethinking email to make it more personal, deliverable and successful. It may mean investing in programs that look like organizing so that you have a better picture of your community, its needs, interests and skills. You may create more how-to articles and videos, webinars and volunteer training programs. Perhaps it’s something completely different. So long it isn’t investing in followers on a platform you don’t control simply because it is there.

The incentives are all wrong

February 12, 2019 by Ted Fickes Leave a Comment

It’s normal to be exhausted by endless crises, a President who throws tweet bombs at 6 am every day and the non-stop punditry cycle. Unfortunately, wearing you out is a valuable, sometimes intentional, benefit to those who disagree with you.

A crisis a day makes good information go away

There’s a lot of fallout when multiple political and social crises go viral on social media every day. Journalists, analysts, politicians and activists get worn out sprinting on a nonstop treadmill of hot takes, misinformation, new details and (eventually) personal attacks.

More problematic to actual advocacy, governance and storytelling is that it all happens at a pace that doesn’t allow nuance. The incentive and reward system surrounding social media, and in effect storytelling, is dangerous.

We’re seeing a growing sentiment that journalists (and others) would be more effective at their work if they leave social media. Jeff Jarvis counters that it’s the duty of journalists to listen to their audience and engage in community conversations.

Journalists (and activists and anyone, really) tend to burn out when living life responding to constant outrage. Sometimes, people join in and share things later proven to be false. Or statements that deserve much greater nuance.

But I agree with Jarvis that those whose job it is to report the news can’t run from the public square. Same goes for those of us whose role it is to use stories to illuminate a path towards more just and equitable communities.

We can and usually should moderate the speed at which we act online. We can develop personal and organizational principles that outline our ethics and values with respect to information and personal data. Some of us (not all) can spend less time on social media and more in personal conversation.

Perhaps there are strategies for better using tools and networks to gather information and engage in community conversations. I’m a fan of Hearken and their approach to audience/reader engagement (and listening). It’s helpful, positive and structured. Not reckless. It complements social networks instead of depending on them.

Then there’s the Covington thing

All the above-described soul searching seemed to take center stage in the aftermath of about 1,508,000 hours of collective watching and punditry interpreting what went on when the Covington behaved very badly.

Any large and unsupervised group of teenage tourists wandering around a city rarely ends well. Mob-like behaviors happen in groups. Decorum and self-reflection aren’t rewarded. The group, lacking any consensus, is quick to support quick if thoughtless action.

The longread, How I Knew the #CovingtonBoys Video Was Clickbait, posits that the video first shared wasn’t necessarily inaccurate but was intentionally edited to generate attention and outrage on social media. The implication: Americans spent a week attacking one another in response to a video intentionally crafted to do just that.

The article doesn’t excuse the behavior of the kids from Covington or anyone else in DC that day. But it does raise valuable questions about the failure of journalism, and storytelling in general, to function in an always on, hyperactive environment that rewards conflict and emotion instead of nuance and perspective gained over time.

How do nonprofits and activists navigate an environment that rewards going to extremes? As a sector, we’ve long highlighted worst case scenarios to raise money and get people to take action. It’s worth considering whether earning support requires driving people into a fury. If so, we can and should do better.

Talk about meeting people where they are

Ten million concurrent users (aka individual people) watched a live performance inside the video game Fortnite. The performance at Pleasant Park by DJ/Producer Marshmello (and AOC joining a fundraiser on Twitch livestream fundraiser to talk about transgender rights) may portend much of what’s to come in the world of supporter engagement and recruitment.

Stories about storytelling and social change

Screenwriter and systems change innovator Ella Saltmarshe in Stanford Social Innovation Review last year on the connection between storytelling and systemic change:

How can we empower generations of storytellers to use this most ancient of technologies to change systems for the better?

We need to develop new processes of collective storytelling to help us navigate these turbulent and polarizing times. As such, we need more stories about stories in the field of systems change. There are many more examples, tools, and ways of usingof stories to share. It is time for systems change practitioners and storytellers to work together in new ways to build a better world so that “living happily ever after” exists off the page, as well as on it.

The intersection of tech and doing good work

Professionally speaking, it can be hard to find the spot in the venn diagram where tech skills overlap with social good. I recently spoke with Noah Hart who runs Tech Jobs for Good. He shared with me that setting up the job board and email list grew out of many conversations with coders, project managers and others with tech skills who, like him, were frustrated in their quest to do work that benefits communities, not just investors. Check it out.

Who uploaded me?

Is your org uploading lists to Facebook without the express permission of people on that list? Facebook is setting up ways for people to figure out who uploaded their data, though I have little confidence Facebook will clearly present this info to people.

Couple things, though: The history of all in one software solutions in the CMS/CRM space is spotty at best, at least in the nonprofit world which isn’t far removed from local news imho. They better invest in implementation support, culture change, and sharing innovation across the sector. Also, despite what I just said about similar systems not working well in the nonprofit space, small orgs really need something like this (and the skills/support to make it work).

Many (most?) nonprofit content projects suck

That’s in part due to having too many cooks in the kitchen. Maybe it’s not too many cooks but confusion about who preps, who cooks, who tastes, who serves the meal. Ever watched a “restaurant wars” episode of Top Chef? Poor team management is where good food goes to die. Same for good content.

The DARCI accountability grid offers a way of helping teams know who makes decisions, who’s accountable for work and who implements. In other words, a content creator knows who will jump into the editing process and when. Content strategist Liz Murphy has a good piece on using DARCI in content projects – maybe it will help you out.

Events, stories and more goodness

No surprise to hear that subscription and membership models will become the key revenue focus for the news industry this year according to the annual Reuters Journalism, Media and Technology Trends and Predictions report. Also, look for online journalism to continue saying membership when they mean subscription.

This is a thorough list of user experience and design conferences around the world in 2019. UX and design is really all about how people interact with what they see and feel around them. So the language can differ but loads to be learned at some of these for the non-designer who works with content, storytelling or advocacy. The UX Collective newsletter is a good one, too, by the way.

The role technology plays in creating agency and power for the powerless, viewed through the lens of women in India documenting violence, sharing their experience, and changing systems.

Bright Ideas: O Facebook What Art Thou?

December 11, 2018 by Ted Fickes Leave a Comment

Here’s the latest edition of Bright Ideas where we take a look at changing Facebook relevance may mean to content, storytelling and marketing. Also, why is BuzzFeed doing tote bags? And new jobs for great people. Subscribe here:

O Facebook, What Art Thou? I’m not going to make the case that Facebook is going away. At least not anytime soon. But the obstacles it faces, largely challenges of its own making, should be of enormous concern to any nonprofit campaigner, fundraiser or leader. (And present exciting opportunities for positive change, I hope.)

First, let’s look at how anti-user Facebook’s core product, the ad manager (ha, I mean the news feed), has become. Despite Facebook’s self-proclaimed return to being a place for friends in 2018, it’s pretty much a visual (and targeted) classified ads platform. Example: at 4 pm last Wednesday I pulled up my Facebook feed and scrolled through the first 25 posts. Twelve were from pages I’ve followed at one time or another. Five were ads. Eight were from people I know. Five of those were straight up reshares of page content with no context.

So much for friends.

Second, the world that analyzes these things is full of stories about declining Facebook use among people under 25 and Europeans, among others. This parallels data about falling interest in the US. Meanwhile, Facebook does seem to have followed through on its promise to deprioritize news by sending less traffic to media sites â€“ a hit to online publishers that’s unlikely, in the short term, to do anything about public trust in media.

Where does that leave us? In the short term, probably in the same place we’ve been for a couple years now. Facebook is huge and any organization willing to put real resources behind the creation and advertising of engaging content that can help bring people (and their data) to Facebook is going to be okay.

But can nonprofits as well as media orgs (including nonprofit journalism) continue to rely on social media to drive growth and visits to their websites? And can nonprofits (and even the consultants surrounding them) continue relying on a platform that seems okay absolving itself of political, social and human collateral damage?

Hey, I’m on Facebook. It’s complicated. But somehow I think we need to aim for more human-scale relationship building that don’t outsource targeting of lookalike audiences to an unregulated corporation.

That means, I think, more tools people can use to create news and fewer platforms for sharing news. More members and fewer audiences. More teaching people to tell stories and less talking about storytelling.

If you think this edition of Bright Ideas is interesting (dare we say useful?), please forward it along or share it on Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook. You could share it on Instgram but that would be weird. Get this from a friend? Want to subscribe? Head over here.

Just say no to Trumpian Drift. How advocates, journalists, leaders tell stories of migrants and refugees says a lot about how society views citizenship and basic human rights. Masha Gessen urges journalists to choose their words and stories with more care because the scale of problems facing us requires smarter â€“ and more scaled â€“ reporting. She points this out in the quote below and it’s important for advocates to be aware of this, hold media to account, and to also be very conscious of how every story is framed in their own communications:

â€œLike most coverage, but perhaps more than most coverage, the writing about immigration has been suffering from what I think of as Trumpian drift. Journalists casually use terms like crossing the border illegally when referring to asylum seekersâ€”when in fact there is no law that says they must use the ports of entry. Journalists increasingly buy into the framing of immigration policy as a strategy for preventing people from entering the United States. And then there is the conspicuous use of the words caravan and migrant to refer to people fleeing for safety.
â€“ Masha Gessen

Adding value by adding values. This is a headline I can get behind because I see nonprofits, unintentionally in most cases, making pitches for financial support and action that reflect the righteousness of their work as though it’s assumed every member or reader had a hand in creating their theory of change. Ben Terrett writes about how successful product design does a great job solving user problems but often shows no regard for public values (using the apropos and timely example of scooters littering most major cities).

Nonprofits and civil society are â€“ or should be â€“ modeling inclusive behavior that helps all consider the impact our work has on the whole community: the powerless, not just members, wealthy donors or the loudest voices. Thanks to Paul de Gregorio for sharing this one.

The constant pressure of tracking everything is burning out journalists. And I know that many activists and campaigners feel the same way as reporters John Crowley spoke to for this piece at Nieman Lab. A few things: (1) Stop reporting on Trump’s tweets. They exist only to overwhelm media bandwidth and make everything about him. (2) We hear a lot about tech solutions to info overload, turning off notifications, and self-care. All good (phone notifications are truly evil). But, as Crowley points out, much of this is driven by management and leaders who support systems that place professional and personal value on constant work.

Does climate fiction lead to climate action? Only if readers are also accessing cultural messages that effective action is possible. Researcher Matthew Schneider-Mayerson surveyed US readers of 19 works “cli-fi” to understand how climate storytelling may help shape advocacy and opinions on climate change.

So…who actually does what in high-performing digital comms team? Every organization is churning out content. Very few are well-staffed for it. The good folks at Contentius put together this smart field guide to content roles.

Get your BuzzFeed tote bag now. It’s free when you make your $100 membership payment. Pretty cynical tone to this piece by Christine Schmidt for NiemanLab but it seems meaningful that a private media company with a household name is scrambling to try every membership experiment it can. Curious how membership as a BuzzWord hooks on here but I’m rooting for the great writers there.

This great little piece from Transparency International shares five ways to help people engage in campaigns. It’s insights that go beyond anti-corruption activism to support most any issue and the communications around it. All orgs could benefit from a user-centered focus on accessibility, safety, relevance, credibility and responsiveness.

Anyone going to (or involved in) the #Reframe Conference on Mental Health and the Media? Looks interesting!

Do good work

A few great roles at the intersection of digital, content, creative and campaigning. Have one to share? Click reply and let me know. Have an idea of your next perfect role but not finding it? Send me a note.

Chicago-based Hearken helps newsrooms listen to and engage the public on the way to building public trust and stronger stories. They’re hiring US-based engagement consultants to work with their 150 (and growing) clients. Engagement consultants should have newsroom experience but, as the description says, “please donâ€™t be discouraged if your title doesnâ€™t include engagement-related words.”
Free Press has several campaigning/organizing roles open: Campaign Manager, Online Community Manager and Digital Manager. Free Press is leading the fight for net neutrality in the US by, in part, engaging tens of thousands of volunteer activists. The team is based in western Massachusetts, Washington, DC, and remote locations around the US.
New Citizenship Project is doing smart work helping orgs and campaigns engage people in more meaningful and powerful ways. The London-based group is bringing on a Strategist. Check it out if you’re over that way.
United for Iran is hiring a Civic Technology Program Director based in Berkeley. Great group and should be a wonderful opportunity to do innovative work. Note: must be fluent in Farsi.
I don’t know much about Communitas America but this Program Manager role that will run coworking and a social venture accelerator looks super interesting. Based in the Bronx.
Greenpeace is filling two Media and Digital Analyst roles to guide the global organization’s tracking and learning from social media, news, and all the other bits that fly around the internets. Flexible location.
The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights is hiring a DC-based Digital Director.
Campaign Legal Center in Washington, DC, is hiring a Multimedia Strategist.
The BlueGreen Alliance is hiring a Denver-based Colorado State Coordinator to grow and run the Alliance’s work there.

Here’s a google spreadsheet full of job lists, email groups and online job boards where you’ll find roles like these posted. It’s editable (for now) so feel free to comment or add a resource.

What’s on your â€œyou should read thisâ€ list?

Here’s a short version of mine. Read either of these? Have anything to add? Hit reply and share what you’re digging into (or at least hoping to with any theoretical extra time).

The Art of Gathering: How we meet and why it matters by Priya Parker. Social media means we’re constantly interacting with one another but I don’t think we know how to really come together in beneficial ways.
Selfie: How we became so self-obsessed and what it’s doing to us by Will Stoor. A tour through the history and science of the idea of self and how that’s playing out in a world that seems to value narcissism over community (which, ironically, is the opposite of centuries of human culture and storytelling).

Addendum

Question? Idea to share? Let’s talk. Reply or email [email protected]

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3 Reasons to use Yelp and TripAdvisor in your social media and outreach campaigns

September 10, 2014 by Ted Fickes Leave a Comment

Taken a trip lately? Youâ€™ve likely used sites like TripAdvisor and Yelp to research places to eat, sleep and visit. Youâ€™re not alone. Yelp received 138 million unique visitors in the second quarter of 2014. TripAdvisor sites currently receives 280 million visits each month. The sites are highly trafficked by millions in the US and around the world looking for information and/or willingly writing up reviews and sharing photos.

Yelp and TripAdvisor (along with similar crowd-driven travel sites) are treasure troves of content that can help those of you working on place-based advocacy and outreach. The sites come up high in search results, provide user-generated content that can accurately describe what people are looking for and doing when visiting a place, and are themselves communities with highly engaged participants.

Here are three ways to take advantage of crowdsourced travel sites.

Use Yelp and TripAdvisor’sÂ search result superpowers to reach new and interested audiences

Example of place-based search results. These Google results for Point Lobos show Yelp near the top and no advertising.

Crowdsourced travel sites like Yelp and TripAdvisor are content rich, linked to from across the web and optimized to perform well in search. Google a national or state park and youâ€™re likely to see a TripAdvisor or Yelp entry near the top of the results. The Point Lobos (a state natural reserve in California) search results here are an example.

This demonstrates the power of the search strategy used by these sites. In many cases, though, it also provides an opportunity to reach very interested audiences: people planning to visit an area. Often, nobody is advertising around online searches for parks and other natural places.

Use this as an opportunity to test search ads (hopefully using a Google Grant so the cost is zero). People are looking for things to do, sites to see, best adventures in the area and maybe even current events. Build a set of search ads around those interests and offer content that meets these needs. You could even ask people to fill out a form and provide an email address to receive information. Simply put, though, itâ€™s a quick way to drive people to your content (instead of having them go straight to Yelp). [Read more…] about 3 Reasons to use Yelp and TripAdvisor in your social media and outreach campaigns

Pot and Obamacare beat out real conversations about health in Colorado

July 23, 2014 by Ted Fickes Leave a Comment

The annual Colorado Health Symposium kicked off earlier today. The SymposiumÂ has become the main gathering of people in the state and region working on a wide range of health issues (and it’s likely a big event on the national scene). Colorado Health Foundation staff organizing the event do a great job using YouTube, the web, Twitter and Facebook to engage people during the event. The content is great. Follow along on Twitter at #14CHS.

The theme of this year’s Colorado Health Symposium is Health Transformed: The Power of Engagement. Today’s discussions about how to engage people in health conversations talked about meeting people where they are, communicating on their terms and how to use language that fits the community you’re trying to reach.

That’s a great place to focus attention. Advocates that don’t engage their audience aren’t doing their job.

But it got me to thinking about how people are talking about health in Colorado now (and how much they’re talking about it). What ARE people talking about when they talk about health in Colorado? What else are they talking about? What can we learn about the state of public engagement on health by the looking at recent online conversations?

The chart below uses Topsy to analyze the use of three sets of keywords on Twitter in the past month: (1) tweets that have the words “health” and “Colorado” in them; (2) tweets that have the words “healthcare” and “Colorado” in them; and (3) tweets that have the words “pot” and “Colorado” in them.

health-pot-conversation-30day-900 — The “colorado health” conversation is dwarfed by mentions of pot. Talk of health in the state is dominated by debates over Obamacare.

None of these are huge conversations over the past month and, clearly, the conversation about each of the topics represented by these terms is bigger than the numbers in this chart. We’re only looking for these specific words, after all. And we’re only looking at Twitter in the past month. This is just one snapshot, not an extensive analysis. Hop on Topsy to play with these or other terms.

But the chart is telling. The biggest “spike” in Colorado health conversation happened on July 20th as the result of a Denver Post story about billing issues with healthcare plans sold on the Colorado exchange. This story has little to do with health but is instead tied to the continual political debate over Obamacare/the Affordable Care Act. It’s probably no surprise to anyone that politically charged conversations about health insurance laws displace actual health conversation.

It bears further analysis but what’s potentially concerning is that health conversation – and the ability of the health community to engage real people about health issues online – is being confused and displaced by the healthcare debate. A few thoughts on what this might mean:

Online channels certainly aren’t the only (and maybe not the best) place to engage people on health issues. Many people in key audiences may not be online, or at least not on Twitter, though I’m guessing many are on Facebook and other networks. The health conversation, like many others, needs many points of contact.
Real human health stories need more (and stronger) online voices to compete with the healthcare policy debate. Access to healthcare services is a huge part of good health but politicizing it is polarizing the discussion and making it hard to have real conversations about other aspects of good health (nutrition, food choices/prices/access, school lunches, active children and more).
More analysis of the health conversation wouldn’t hurt. How are real people talking about health (and healthcare) in Colorado? And the nation? There’s a wealth of data out there on the social networks waiting to be scooped up.

And what about the pot conversation in Colorado? Well,Â people use the word “pot” in connection with Colorado much more often than they do health or healthcare. Welcome to Colorado! We threw pot into this chart mostly for comparison’s sake. Seems that health and healthcare should be bigger conversations than pot. Something to aspire to (and maybe learn from) going forward.

As advocates, if we want to engage people online weÂ need to know what they’re talking about and how they’re talking about it. Otherwise, weÂ may be talking to ourselves.

Twelve things learned from using social media in a community crisis

September 17, 2013 by Ted Fickes Leave a Comment

Earlier this year my partner in crime here at Bright+3 left Colorado for Washington, DC, to work as Policy Advisor on Energy and Environment for Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont. Prior to moving to DC, Jacob served as a city council member and then mayor of Golden, Colorado.

Like me, Jacob has always been intrigued by the ability of digital communications to connect and support people in their community, personal and political endeavors. Jacob maintained an email newsletter and website for years while a candidate, councilman and mayor. During his council and mayoral campaigns, we tested what was (at the time) innovative integration of voter files, email lists, volunteer data and walking lists to help target his efforts.

As elected officials go, it seemed that Jacob knew how to make the most of email and social media in his job. That experience was tested in March, 2011, when the Indian Gulch wildfire started just west of Golden (in the foothills on the west side of Denver). The fire lasted a week and became the nation’s largest at that time. Hundreds of homes were threatened.

The City of Golden had an emergency operations plan and a process by which city and county, the Sheriff’s department and fire officials would update the media. But wildfires move fast in dry windy hills and the need to get information out to residents with homes in and around those hills is urgent. Social media, email and the web raise expectations about information availability and local leaders are pressured to supply accurate and rapid news.

A few weeks ago, Jacob and Bill Fisher, a Golden City Council member, released a brief, highly readable report analyzing the lessons learned about communications (particularly digital/online networks) from the Indian Gulch fire. The report digs into early observations shared on the site Emergency Management in 2011.Â [Read more…] about Twelve things learned from using social media in a community crisis

A friend of a friend: How Obama used Facebook to turn out voters

December 6, 2012 by brightplus3 Leave a Comment

We all know that social networks can be a crucial arena for engaging your supporters and developing new relationships, but for a sense of scale look no further than the 2012 presidential campaigns. Both campaigns made extensive use of social networks like Spotify, Pinterest, Instagram, Tumblr, and, of course, the giants Facebook and Twitter.

One major problem for the campaigns in the closing weeks of the race: 18-29 year-old voters are very difficult to reach by phone, and making sure that very specific audience actually voted was a critical campaign element, especially for the Obama campaign. Their solution: aggressively, intelligently, and strategically using Facebook to identify supporters, keep them engaged, and then – during the GOTV (“get out the vote”) efforts in the final weeks – reminding them to actually vote.

Because of their early and sustained efforts identifying supporters through Facebook, 85% of the campaign’s GOTV 18-29 year-old targets were friends of friends of Barack Obama on Facebook. Obama for American Digital Director Teddy Goff explains, “We had about seven million instances of people contacting about five million people, all of their friends who they knew … these were people we had to reach, and couldn’t reach otherwise.”

And note the importance of very clearly identifying the audience. Even though Facebook users span a wide range of demographics, different demographics use the network differently. This was a strategy targeted for a very specific demographic. This not-so-little detail highlights a common problem in exhortations for nonprofits to use social networks more aggressively. The first step should always be defining the goal, and the second step – always – understanding the mechanisms of change enough to clearly and specifically define the audiences you need to influence. Then you can figure out if and how social networks matter, and how to use them effectively if they do.

But there is clearly a growing chance that social networks will matter, and if your target audience for a given campaign includes 18-29 year-olds in the United States, then social networks may well be critical part of your strategy.

Jacob Smith is the co-author of The Nimble Nonprofit: An Unconventional Guide to Sustaining and Growing Your Nonprofit, the former mayor of Golden, Colorado, and a nonprofit consultant.