Advocacy Avenue

Ada Lovelace Day: Cheryl Contee

Ada Lovelace Day celebrates women excelling in technology.

Cheryl Contee went on from our team (when we were Issue Dynamics) to Fleishman-Hillard and then to her own consulting shop, Fission Strategy.  In each role, she's been a force for using websites, blogs, and social media to promote companies and causes online, as well as a popular speaker at industry events.  And in her spare time, she's built the Jack and Jill Politics blog into "one of the most influential African American political blogs on the internet this campaign cycle and a stalwart online advocate for Barack Obama and against racism in campaign discourse" (and got quite a bit of media attention when she revealed her identity as well).

Check out Cheryl's blogging or her Twitter feed, and please participate in Ada Lovelace Day by blogging about a woman in technology whom you admire!

Recovery.gov: transparency and its complications

Yesterday, President Obama signed the $800 billion economic stimulus bill, and as announced a couple weeks ago in his YouTube address, his web team has created Recovery.gov to allow people to track where the money goes. Some observations:

1. There isn't much there yet. Not too surprising, but there are very few pages on the site so far. They haven't even yet copied the whole bill text over from its place on WhiteHouse.gov, letting people see the plan and its implementation in one place.
2. Lots of interactive items. I particularly like the scrolling timeline (apparently a Drupal module). The jobs map's pop-up information blocks look far more utilitarian than the rest of the (lovely) site design, and I can't click through for more specifics, but perhaps they'll come. The challenge with providing lots of data (which the site will do) is to also allow people to effectively visualize it.
3. Consistent design with WhiteHouse.gov and Change.gov. Very smart. You know you're on an Obama administration site the moment you land there, and with Obama's approval ratings high, the new site will have an automatic boost in people's trust. Branding was a strong point of the campaign, so much so that it inspired copying.
4. It's built on Drupal. (Announcement by project founder Dries Buytaert.) This is a technical point, but with sociological implications. Drupal is software designed for community sites, not for one-way information flow. Hopefully the site will take advantage of crowd-sourcing, building a community of news gathering like the one that made Talking Points Memo Time's best blog of 2009. Change.gov included discussion, but it would be nice to see a post-inauguration site allowing more input than a comment form - though the privacy policy doesn't offer evidence that will happen, alas.
5. How many sites can the White House manage? The stimulus is an unusually important bill, but I could see them also launching sites for health reform, for energy policy, etc., along with the already-announced FinancialStability.gov (and AStrongMiddleClass.gov, but that redirects to the main White House site). They'll need to consider how much staff time it takes not just to build but to manage each site: adding new information, guiding any discussion, and communicating with users who've requested updates. Updating WhiteHouse.gov has already proven challenging, though most of those issues seem to have been worked out.

A few reactions from the political technology community:

Nancy Scole of Personal Democracy Forum's TechPresident: What's Missing: (1) A Responsible Party. The Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board which will oversee Recovery.gov, hasn't been formed yet. So, email away! But know that there isn't really yet anyone on the receiving end. (2) Data. Data. Data. Of course, with the act three hours old, there just isn't much yet. That said, whether Recovery.gov will give open-government advocates the raw data that they're hungering for is still an open question. The site is, thus far, populated by the shiny consumer-end charts. A that's good start, but no replacement, advocates say, for raw XML data then can then use for mash-ups and number crunching.

Ellen Miller of the Sunlight Foundation blog: The basics are pretty simple. Recovery.gov must make the raw data available and it must be housed in system so that data can flow in and out easily. There should be open programming interfaces that allow developers to share and analyze data. Timeliness is key, so is accuracy. That, plus a few simple tools for easy citizen access would be a great place to start. A little blogging now might help with a few of the basics: What data is getting collected and how often? Who has to report? How often will the data be updated and how often will it made available to the public? What’s the database going to look like what’s the relationship to USASpending.gov? What kinds of content will Recovery.gov produce around the data? (Will there be regular emails when new information is available, blogging with analysis, etc.)?

Dennis McDonald: It’s not just the performance of the “stimulus” package that will be interesting to track, though. How the Administration develops the systems and processes that are needed to track and report on progress in an open and interactive fashion will also impact the recovery. Whether you call these systems and processes “e-government” or “government 2.0” or something else entirely, they will need careful planning as well as speed and experimentation. No one has ever tried to do “open government” before on such a massive scale. As I’ve pointed out already, the challenges that must be faced are great.

Micah Sifry of Personal Democracy Forum: I'm sure Obama's pronouncements on the shape of Recovery.gov are probably keeping his new media team awake 24-7, but his political team ought to be paying attention too. Imagine if citizens take his exhortations to heart and start monitoring their local government(s) to track how the money is being spent, and the site makes it easy for them to visibly share and pool those reports. Who exactly is responsible if, say, a school construction grant isn't being used properly? Recovery.gov could be a great tool for making government work, but along the way, it might also make a lot of existing government workers pretty unhappy.

Hopefully I can add more later - I'm particularly waiting for Colin Delany's take, as well as Patrick Ruffini's and Mindy Finn's.

Why create an integrated advocacy campaign

An individual advocacy action can be successful on its own, but a campaign that reinforces its message using a variety of channels, media, and communicators can build greater momentum and involvement. In a world flooded with more and more information, your constituents will be most enthusiastic if you're available where they are and interact with them on their terms. If you understand them, they'll join your efforts.

On the corporate side, integrated marketing communications and multichannel marketing are responding to the same trends, and companies know that "Users who interact with your company over multiple channels are more loyal than single-channel customers." The trick is to become part of people's lives, something they choose to become more involved in over time - and keep reaching them in different ways, so they don't get bored.

We think about integrated advocacy campaigns as including:

• traditional public affairs - Hill briefings, media relations, coalition building;
• conventional online tactics - petitions, email newsletters, tell-a-friend forms;
• and new social media tools - virtual events, micromedia, social networks.

It's not easy to coordinate everything, but each piece increases your impact. Why not add something your constituents will want to tell their friends about?

Social media "expert" evaluations

Dave Fleet has an excellent post this morning on 8 Questions to Ask Your "Social Media Expert", building on Ike Pigott's on finding useful Twitter "experts". Dave is offering a guide to "weeding-out the pundits from the practitioners," so I figured I'd answer his questions for Amplify's Internet practice.

1. Can you give me an example of social media work you’ve completed for a client recently?

Sure. We're working with a religious organization to promote education about and understanding of other faiths, using Facebook and YouTube among other avenues.

2. How do you go about pitching bloggers?

We research an issue area, finding influential and interesting bloggers who would care about our topic (usually they've written about something related in the past). Often we already have relationships with some bloggers who fit those criteria. Whether we know a blogger or not, we write offering information and say we hope they'll consider blogging about it.

3. How do you monitor what people are saying about you?

Google Alerts, Twitter search, comments from clients and friends at other organizations (offline conversations count too). We're investigating several social media monitoring services but haven't made choices yet.

4. Where can I find you online?

Our website, our other blog Disruptive Women in Health Care, Facebook. Our staff is on LinkedIn, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, and lots of other places as well.

5. Can you write my blog for me?

We do blog training and work with our clients so they can easily keep something fresh on their blogs - create publication calendars, set up Delicious so they have a recent news feed, etc. Writing a blog is a valuable process as well as a way to promote your work (listen to Tom Peters and Seth Godin), and having someone else write it makes no sense.

6. How do you measure results?

Usually number of actions taken - advocacy lends itself better to hard numbers than marketing generally does.

7. How would you define social media?

People interacting online. I'm waiting for a better way to say "and I include mobile services in that too," but no one's invented a good word yet.

8. Can you just pretend to be me online?

No. See (5) for some of the reasons. We actually don't have people ask us this, so either we're just lucky or most advocates want to convey messages themselves.

All right, now go look at Dave's post and see if I got the right answers!

Innovative Health Advocacy: Strategies To Break Through The Noise

The following post is a reprint of remarks made by Robin Strongin, CEO of Amplify Public Affairs, at Innovative Health Advocacy:  Strategies to Break Through the Post-Election Noise, a breakfast briefing Amplify organized and co-sponsored with The Hill, and Care 2.

- - - -

Good Morning.

I am curious—most everyone here this morning has some connection to health care—by a show of hands, how many of you read blogs regularly for work?

How many of you post or comment on blogs?

I want to start with one of my favorite anecdotes—this is from a speech by Congressman Pete Stark, Democrat from California, who back in October 2002 addressed the Commonwealth Club with a talk on Prescription Drug Coverage and Medicare:

I can tell you in about 30 seconds everything I know about health care.  Years and years ago, Jake Pickle, a congressman from Texas, reformed Social Security and decided we would have 6 subcommittees on the Ways & Means Committee.  I was happily going along, and chaired what we called the Welfare Committee and wrote Aid to Families with Dependent Children laws and all kinds of exciting things like that.  Then I rewrote the life insurance tax code.  But we came into the Congress in 1984 to reorganize, and somebody wanted my committee, which was the teeny tax committee.  After we went through choosing, all that was left was Health or Social Security.  Social Security had just reformed—there was nothing to do there—so I said, I’ll take Health.  I didn’t know anything about it.  That was on a Tuesday, and by that Friday I knew about 4 or 5 organs in my body that I hadn’t known previously existed and each one had a lobbyist in Washington and they all offered me a transplant.  And I began to think—What is health care?

Now, 6 years later, Cong Stark continues to shake things up in health care as Chair of the Ways and Means Health Subcommittee.

The Chairman, who knows more about all the organs in his body also knows a little something about how to give—and get—information from lobbyists and others.

I went to his website and there he was, on a giant you tube video—then just for good measure I checked The Hill’s Congress Blog—and the man is still talking about Medicare—only this time he is also blogging about it—the post I read was entitled “Senate Republicans Medicare Plan is Not the Answer” (June 12, 2008).

What’s going on here?

Starting a Group Blog: Post-Launch - Growth / Conclusion

Starting a Group Blog series:

• Introduction
• Preparation - Strategy
• Pre-Launch - Expectations
• Launch - Execution
• Post-Launch - Growth / Conclusion

Just as you planned and agreed with your bloggers how leaving the blog would work, you now need a plan for how adding bloggers will work. Maybe adding a blogger is entirely the decision of the sponsoring organization, or maybe it requires the approval of some percentage of the current bloggers. Think about whether adding bloggers means each person posts less often or whether it means your posting frequency grows.

Whether or not you add regular bloggers, you should consider having guest bloggers. In fact, one of the best ways to recruit additional regular bloggers is to have them guest post a couple of times first and see how they fit into your blog's community. Guest bloggers can be recruited from regular commenters, bloggers on related blogs, and experts on your topics.

You should inform all the bloggers regularly (probably monthly) about how the blog is doing - how many hits, links, comments, etc. Make sure the bloggers can see how the blog affects their own careers, not just the benefits for the sponsoring organization - for instance, mention any blogger's media hits or speaking opportunities to the whole group.

Conclusion

Managing a group blog can be a great opportunity for an organization to be seen as a leader in its field and for that organization to promote like-minded voices in the blogosphere. If you invest the time to start up your group blog with clear focus and expectations, it will be easier to manage and more likely to take off. Your bloggers will enjoy writing for you, and you'll enjoy working with them. And you'll have a great blog.

Good luck, and have fun blogging!

Starting a Group Blog: Launch - Execution

After last week's launch of our new group blog, Disruptive Women in Health Care, we're back.

Starting a Group Blog series:

• Introduction
• Preparation - Strategy
• Pre-Launch - Expectations
• Launch - Execution
• Post-Launch - Growth / Conclusion

Designing and building your group blog will be almost exactly like creating an individual blog, so there's no reason to discuss it at length here. The only obvious addition (other than more user accounts) is that you'll need to set up a reminder system, so bloggers know when they're supposed to post.

The sponsoring organization will probably be responsible for the launch strategy: contacting all those bloggers you found in the preparation stage and recruiting them to link to you, as well as more traditional public relations. You should be at least copied on any media requests to the bloggers, and if one of your bloggers receives a request they should make sure you hear about it immediately.

The sponsoring organization will probably have primary responsibility for monitoring comments and responding as detailed in the comment policy. Plan staffing for the blog accordingly, and realize that as your audience grows comment management will take more time.

Starting a Group Blog: Pre-Launch - Expectations

Starting a Group Blog series:

• Introduction
• Preparation - Strategy
• Pre-Launch - Expectations
• Launch - Execution
• Post-Launch - Growth / Conclusion

Once you've chosen your strategy and found your bloggers, you'll need to set expectations with them. Each blogger's actions will affect the reputation of the sponsoring organization, of the other bloggers, and of the blog itself, so all parties will need to be comfortable with these standards.

First come analogs of journalistic standards. Controversial statements are fine (and will probably increase traffic), but libel (false and damaging statements) is illegal in the US. Be sure bloggers understand the difference. While no law requires the retraction and correction of an error, it's good practice for bloggers to strike through that text and add a correction, either at that point or at the bottom of the post. Let your bloggers know that you require them to do this. For a particularly important error, they may want to also write a new post explaining and correcting it. Writing a new post without altering the original one shouldn't be permitted, since visitors may come only to the original post from a search engine and not see the correction.

Next, set up your posting/commenting standards. One common method is to assign a person to each day you plan to post (for instance, one blogger is responsible for posting every other Tuesday). Bloggers should be expected to monitor and comment in the comment threads of their own posts, and you'll jumpstart commenting and increase the community feel of your blog by also expecting them to comment on your other bloggers' posts on a regular schedule. If your posting schedule has each blogger posting every two weeks, it's reasonable to expect them to also make a comment on another post every two weeks.

Starting a Group Blog: Preparation - Strategy

Starting a Group Blog series:

• Introduction
• Preparation - Strategy
• Pre-Launch - Expectations
• Launch - Execution
• Post-Launch - Growth / Conclusion

The first part of your strategy is the same as for starting an individual blog: choose your focus/niche, determine your expected audience, and choose the blog name / domain name (and trademark them if you choose). Once you have those, start compiling a list of related blogs, both as a resource for your writers (who can react to related posts) and to use in your promotion efforts.

Then start recruiting your bloggers, and determine (probably with their help) how you're going to structure ownership and copyrights for this blog.  Most likely the bloggers will want to retain copyright on the posts they write, while the sponsoring organization will have the right to publish those posts indefinitely.  If you're interested in rights to republish the content in other forms (ebooks, podcasts, white papers, books), make sure to discuss that early!  See the content reuse and leaving the blog sections (in later posts in this series) for additional considerations.  The sponsoring organization will probably own the blog name, domain name, and design.

You'll want a variety of bloggers with different expertise and viewpoints, so don't rely on one person's network to find them. Consider teaming up with established bloggers, and consider recruiting excellent writers who've never read a blog.  Note that in a group blog you probably don't want ghostwriting, because that additional layer of coordination will be frustrating over time.

Starting a Group Blog: Introduction

Why start a group blog instead of an individual blog?  Clearly the first reason is to cover your topic more thoroughly.  One person has only so much time to blog and, more importantly, can only know so many sides of a topic.  Recruiting multiple bloggers means more perspectives, more options, more ideas (and for the bloggers, it means built-in discussion partners and commenters).

More prosaically, while starting an individual blog definitely requires less coordination than sponsoring a group blog, a group blog can multiply your efforts since others will be helping with writing and promotion.  You'll be able to spend more time on making the blog successful, rather than on creating all the content yourself.

There are four stages in starting a group blog.  The first is preparation, in which you set your strategy by determining your topic, your audience, and your bloggers. The second is pre-launch, in which you get down to the nitty-gritty of expectations for bloggers, for the sponsoring organization, and for the public.  The third is launch, in which you create and publicize the blog.  Finally, the fourth is post-launch growth, in which you monitor the continuing effort of writing and promoting the blog.

This post starts a weekly series on what you need to do and the decisions you need to make to start an effective group blog.  It's written from our experience (lots of thought about legalities, for instance) so we're hoping others will chime in with more advice!  Why should (or shouldn't) someone consider starting a group blog?

Starting a Group Blog series:

• Introduction
• Preparation - Strategy
• Pre-Launch - Expectations
• Launch - Execution
• Post-Launch - Growth / Conclusion