The Groundswell of Advocacy
Posted on | October 20, 2009 | No Comments
Today was a perfect day to be thinking about the groundswell and advocacy. At about 11 this morning, President Obama’s official Twitter page sent a tweet asking people to call their member of Congress and express their support for health reform. The goal was 100,000 calls to Congress, but they had reached their goal within an astonishing four hours of the first tweet, and as of now, they’re at 235,989, a number that is several thousand people higher than when I started writing this post. After placing a call, many people tweeted the following update:,
I just made today’s 232,25th health reform call to Congress. Help us get to 200,000: http://bit.ly/1t6LPH #hc09 #CallCongress #OFA
The message gets people personally involved in feeling like they have helped to meet the goal personally and by encouraging friends to take action. It also takes full advantage of hash tags to push the topic into trending topics.
In class this week and next, we’re reading Groundswell, a book about business in an online world of social technologies. The book is a practical approach to taking advantage of the groundswell of people involved in online communities and spaces to shape a brand, improve customer service and public relations, and spread the word about a product or business. The framework has the potential to be immensely useful not just to businesses, but also to NGOs and government agencies.
The groundswell includes five types of people, say the authors: creators, critics, collectors, joiners, and spectators. One of the reasons the Obama campaign and now Organizing for America (OFA) have done so well is that they have targeted many different segments of the online population with appropriate messages for different types of people who are participating in the worldwide online conversation. The #CallCongress message was delivered through email, for the spectators who don’t regularly produce or critique content online but are members of listservs and discussion groups, and Twitter, for the joiners and creators who use it as an online network and platform for self-publishing.
The #CallCongress effort was so successful because it is a trusted, well-regarded brand, at least by the vast majority of those who follow Obama’s Twitter or receive OFA emails, that tapped into the groundswell: the roiling, tumultuous online collection of conversations and communities that was already tweeting, blogging, and reading about health care reform, and gave them a simple, concrete set of actions with which they could have an effect on the effort for health care reform.
The #CallCongress campaign is not the only area in which the executive branch is participating in the online space in completely new and interesting ways. In the State Department, Jared Cohen is the point person for social media and youth issues. He helped convince Twitter to delay maintenance in order to support the democratic process during the Iranian elections. In an interview with NPR, it is clear that Cohen recognizes the groundswell: he says that those who say that not many people around the world have access to these technologies are missing the significant upward trend in access:
So take a country like Pakistan, for instance: In 2001, Pakistan had 750,000 mobile phone subscriptions. By 2008, just seven years later, it had 78 million, which is an astronomical jump. In Afghanistan, today there’s 23 percent of the population with access to mobile phones; they say by 2011 it’s going to be close to 72 percent. So it’s not about how many people have access today, it’s about how many people have access tomorrow and a year from now. And so we have a unique opportunity to engage in that space while access is continuing to spread.
He recognizes that it is important for the State Department, and the US government more broadly, to understand the truth of its brand for people around the world and to engage in conversation and become a trusted voice in the online conversation. He adds:
We can recognize that nobody can control these technologies — bad people will continue to use them, but that’s all the more reason to engage in these spaces. And the other option is to…shy away from it. If you do that, it’s not going to stop them from using it. In fact, all it’s going to do is give them more of an opening without any effort to counter their narratives.
Like the State Department and Organizing for America, NGOs and governments need to start to figure out how to strategically position themselves in the important online communities and to help shape the ongoing conversations about their issues and their brands.
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