Two weeks before the 2011 San Francisco municipal elections, mayoral candidate David Chiu and his new media director Candice Dayoan presented to October’s Online Community Meetup in San Francisco on how a candidate can use new media to raise awareness and get the message out, as well as test the message and make adjustments based on constituent feedback.

Raising Awareness and Communicating Out

“Politics is changing,” Dayoan begins. “With 16 candidates running for mayor, you have to stand out.” And that is precisely what Team Chiu has tried to do. They created a campaign video spoofing the new film “Moneyball,” which the Huffington Post San Francisco called “the most entertaining campaign commercial yet.. Chiu crushed this one out of the park.”

Chiu was the first to launch a Twitter feed and currently has the most followers amongst the mayoral candidates. He also has an excellent Facebook page and a dynamic website that provides information on the candidate, policy positions, and opportunities to get involved.

The campaign is on Google+ and uses SoundCloud, a social media company that allows one to record audio messages and share them online. Dayoan explains that SoundCloud is an excellent tool for communicating their message because, as President of the Board of Supervisors, David frequently has to make tie-breaking votes on controversial issues. SoundCloud allows him to explain his positions in short sound bites that can be embedded on his website and shared via social media.

Listening and Gathering Feedback

While communicating the message out is definitely important for Dayoan and her team, it is far from the only way David Chiu is using new media in his campaign. The campaign also places a high value on “listening” – paying attention to the individuals within one’s community – and as applicable to the campaign environment as to any other type of community.

In the corporate world, “listening” generally refers to participating in a community to study one’s audience and learn what types of people are involved (or potentially could be involved) in a community.

In the David Chiu world, it refers to a continuous feedback loop that includes both online and offline channels. The campaign began by hosting more than 30 community meetings over the course of a month. They then used this input to craft “A Blueprint for 21st Century San Francisco.” Next, the new media team put this plan on Chiu’s website, and gathered feedback via forums, Twitter, and live-chats. Any type of organization could do something similar for their cause or to reach and understand their community better.

The new media team communicates this feedback to the communications team, policy team and the candidate. Through this continuous feedback loop, David and his team are constantly refining their platform and message to address the questions and concerns of San Francisco voters.

How do you use social media to engage and advocate for your cause? If you work at an advocacy-based organization, what type of feedback do you collect from your users to help engage them in mobilizing for your work? Share in the comments below.

Photo: Susan Chavez

Simple, stylistic and powerful, this short clip from Skip1.org demonstrates that we can all make a big difference in a small way.

Twitter is a good news aggregator but even at 140 characters a message, there is only so much that can be processed.

In college I took a class on the role of literature in democracy. One morning we were discussing different sources of news and I proudly raised my hand and outlined how I had nearly a dozen major news sources bookmarked on my laptop.

I thought I was being smart (and in retrospect a show off) by demonstrating my attention to different perspectives and opinions. My teacher disagreed. She thought it was a waste of time to read so much of the same information.

Nearly a half-decade later, I see her point. A growing awareness that email subscriptions are getting out of hand convinced me it is time to organize and reduce my incoming sources of information. For if I don’t, I may lose too much of that elusive resource that all people seem to lack – my time.

In the old world, this wasn’t a big problem. We didn’t have information flying at us at all times. There were valuable filters – people who would sift through the clutter and only pass along the most relevant and interesting news – called journalists.

Today, we still have journalists, only their arena has swelled under the weight of millions of amateur journalists (anyone who uses social media in a sense).  Professional journalists now experience unprecedented competitive pressure from these amateurs. Likewise – shifting seas have created great opportunity for all types of people and organizations. The implications of this for public good efforts is significant.

Allyson Kapin argued on frogloop last month that nonprofits over invest in social media because the benefits of the tools are inflated. My feeling is not necessarily. The epochal transition of power in Egypt is proof enough that there is potential to accomplish great things using social media tools.

Allyson is not entirely wrong though. It depends on purpose. There is no one size fits all solution, but, in general, if a nonprofit doesn’t have a large need for public engagement, then yes, they could be over investing in social media.

However if a nonprofit is more closely aligned with a campaign, has a communications strategy and most importantly can present a simple and meaningful message – I’d argue that nonprofit (or campaign) might be under investing in social media.

The person who currently holds this position, 10-year Times veteran reporter Jenifer Preston, will go back to full-time reporting and focus on social media with a particular emphasis on the intersection of social media and politics.

While this may seem like a dismissal of social media, it is in fact the exact opposite. It reflects the Time’s belief that social media is too big to be handled by any one person or even team of people. It must be integrated into the efforts of every reporter and editor who works for the newspaper.

Initially, Preston encountered resistance and hesitancy on the part of reporters towards using social media tools. “What did I hear at the very beginning?” Preston said. “Twitter is all about what people are having for lunch… no one says that anymore.” In fact, in addition to teaching her colleagues the value of Twitter, the New York Times politics department has begun to use Facebook to help build a community interested in their content.

Preston worked hard to train reporters and editors in how best to utilize social media tools and was also a major influence in the Times decision to eliminate her position. She explains: “Social media can’t belong to one person; it needs to be part of everyone’s job. It has to be integrated into the existing editorial process and production process. I’m convinced that’s the only way we’re going to crack the engagement nut.”

Photo courtesy of Matt Dernoga

UMD for Clean Energy is a student group at the University of Maryland. Last fall they developed a campaign called ‘Green for College Park’ that targeted candidates in their local city council race (College Park, MD).

• Organizers,  due to the smaller size of the community, are able to use new media to quickly reach a large portion of their target audience and force candidates to take their issues seriously. Smart targeting of local blogs was key to this effort.
• By reaching out to major environmental blogs, the campaign was able to bring outsize national attention to a local race.
• Many local races do not receive the same attention as larger state and national elections, and because of this, with smart messaging on the campaign’s part, new media allows organizers to have a more substantial impact than on larger campaigns that are frequently covered by the mainstream media.

Photo of Google's headquarters in Beijing. Courtesy of veen on Flikr.

Since April (three months ago), Google has been effectively ignoring China’s censors by automatically redirecting traffic from its Chinese website, Google.cn, to its Hong Kong website Google.com.hk. The difference is that Hong Kong is a special territory of China that is governed independently from the mainland. Google.cn is censored but Google.com.hk is not.

In a compromise announced Friday, China will renew Google’s license to operate in the country, but Google must stop its current practice of automatically redirecting Chinese users of its censored website Google.cn to its uncensored website Google.com.hg. However, in exchange Google can put a link on its main page for Google.cn to Google.com.hk and all Chinese users will be allowed to move freely between Google.cn and Google.com.hk.

This verdict is being widely billed as a compromise which benefits the interests of both Google and China. However, from a human rights perspective this a clear win for Google. The company presented China with a nearly impossible negotiating position by calling for them to end their signature policy.

The compromise does require Chinese users to show a bit of sophistication to avoid the great firewall and because of this it allows China to save some face. However, at the end of the day, Google just stared down the largest and fastest growing country in the world, and won.

However, this stand-off is likely far from over. Google won this round. But Google has positioned itself at center of a major challenge for the Chinese Government.

As James Lewis of the Center for Strategic and International Studies said:

“They like technology, they like access to the global information infrastructure but they don’t like the political implications.”

Their model is to post a video in partnership with a non-profit or service based organization and ask viewers to sponsor the video by pledging to donate one penny per view the video gets. If the video gets 1,000 hits, the sponsor owes $10 and so on. The more viral a video gets, and by extension the more exposure the message of the video receives, the more money the partner organization earns.

This a great model. It follows that if Eddie and Jason Lee can build their community – particularly on YouTube – the Jubilee Project will build awareness and fundraise for key issues and programs. The founders encourage users and viewers of the Jubilee Project to create their own videos and upload them to the Jubilee Project’s YouTube channel.

Their first video will be posted this Thursday, July 8^th. It is called “The Waiting Game” and below is the preview. They are raising money for a refugee group called Liberty in North Korea.

Thanks to M+R Strategic Services — who recently released their first ever non-profit Text Messaging Benchmarks Study — we have some numbers.

M+R analyzed data from five advocacy focused non-profits with well established text messaging programs. These partner organizations were American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA), Planned Parenthood Federation of America, NARAL Pro-Choice America, The Humane Society of the United States (HSUS), Defenders of Wildlife, and Human Rights Campaign.

They then broke advocacy text messages into two categories: text-to-call and petition texts. Petition texts asked the subscriber to support an organization by responding with a keyword such as “PLEDGE”. Text-to-call messages ask the reader to take action by calling a specific target (i.e. Senator X). Unsurprisingly petition texts had a higher response rate than text-to-call messages (14.6% versus 4.67%).

What is surprising though is how high the text-to-call rate actually was. 4.67 percent is six times the M+R 2009 benchmark response rate for advocacy emails asking the supporter to call a target. M+R notes: “this rate is impressive, and indicative of the power of text messaging to generate an immediate response.”

What is truly interesting about these numbers — and I think a very positive sign for political and advocacy campaigns — is how much sending an incredibly tough ask via text message seems to increase the response rate.

This makes me wonder what the text response rate for other tough asks like “write a letter to the editor” or “volunteer” would be?

This is election season. Will political campaigns be more successful if they use text lists to solicit volunteers? How about to recruit attendees for major rallies? These are certainly areas the Obama campaign laid the groundwork for.

UPDATE: Ever wondered how significant the mobile market is? Pew Research Center just released numbers that to some extent confirm the obvious but are still highly impressive:

• Between April 2009 and May 2010 mobile phone use increased by a minimum of seven percentage points across 8 categories of use. http://pewresearch.org/pubs/1654/wireless-internet-users-cell-phone-mobile-data-applications

Apparently Google agrees with me that we’d just assume keep the paid journalist around a bit longer because in this month’s cover story for the Atlantic James Fallows offers a detailed investigation into the state of the news business and efforts Google has undertaken to improve the industries financial fortunes.

I am most impressed by the last two proposals. Google’s team knows advertising algorithms better than anyone, and though it sounds strange, it makes sense that the worlds most effective unbundler might also have some decent ideas on how to bundle content (i.e. under a paywall).

Utah Attorney General Mark Shurtleff used Twitter to announce an execution this past Friday.  Shurtleff tweeted: ”I just gave the go ahead to Corrections Director to proceed with Gardner’s execution. May God grant him the mercy he denied his victims.”

Personally, I’m not sure how much I like the idea of using Twitter to mark an execution, but I suppose if you are using it for all news updates, it is appropriate. Which does beg the question – is Twitter as an outreach tool  becoming simply a news aggregator in 120 characters or less? And is all news good news for Twitter?