I am having lots of fun playing with a talk from the Microsoft campus. Dr Weinberger (Cluetrain manifesto, small pieces...) is in town! It is very cool that the Microsoft staff have so effectively blogged the presentation.
There is some wonderful stuff here for advocacy campaign planners to think about in the context of the organizational and media strategy they typically use.
Ambiguity is the core of relationships. The extent to which you know more about a group than you can state explicitly is the extent to which the group is real.
Membership...big organizations know lots about their members. They want to know more and more so that the leadership of an organization can manipulate messages to appeal to each segment of their list. (The problem is that entire perspective about the "list" is failing. A list is not a group) A list can not act. We want to build groups and not lists. We want to allow our members to connect with each other to build their own ties that have little connection with the centralized organization and leadership. Sierra Clubs group structure is a strength.
Particularly, I love the rant on message control and communication. I have been looking for the words and justifications to see why controlled messages don't work as effectively. I think the following quotes start to shed light on the subject.
“professionalism is great, but the web loves amateurs more”. “Community is a place where people care about each other ; know about each other”. “What is the opposite of marketing? Voice!”. “Corporations have spent relentless efforts to suppress their voice and to suppress the voice of the customers; they have also spent a lot of time to take the meaning our of what they say and do”. “Keep the imperfection from the voice”.... “in blog, one of the most important thing is to write badly”
Look at memos vs. email. Memos are formal, reviewed, voiceless, narrowcast. Email is a voicier medium. (By the way, the Internet is not a medium. It’s a place I enter into, not just something I send bits through. If you don’t get that, you miss what is drawing people in.) Email: really different. Hugely informal, not reviewed, individual, cc: everyone. (Or brief, funny, hastily written, ill conceived, thoughtless, and regrettable.)
“Let’s pick on someone. Kenmore. Their site is full of marketing crap. And it has useful information, but it’s buried eight clicks deep. If I want useful information, I go to everybody’s home page, and I find myself here, in this discussion. Why do I trust the information more in these than on the web site? Because it’s badly written (therefore human), positive AND negative, and followed by discussion so I can fact check. It’s human and deals much better with the deep ambiguities of the world than marketing. Look at this thread: there’s a physicist of lint here talking about dryers! Conversations like this on the web are smarter than any company can be.”
Message volume, chatter, conversation about a topic are the most important elements in engageing to people interested in an issue. However, the professional marketing and message crafters want to kill that dialogue. They want to be the sole source for information on an issue. It is a model that is failing and our advocacy campaigns strategists have not yet figured it out.
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What needs to change? How can conversations replace broadcasts? How do you build a new set of connections between people and important issues and policy levers?
1. Invest in new types of organizations and tools that connect people to each other and not merely to the broadcast message. More focus on Advokit and Meetup less on one-to-many strategies.
2. Distribute power (staff time, talent, resources and money) to the edges of the movement. Shift the agenda of larger portions of the movement to be "service" based giving support and tools to individuals in the field and smaller all volunteer groups. Empower your most talented people to occasionally fight for local agendas.
3. Create a "staff share" program across the movement. Strategically support conversations (informally - social gatherings, conference calls, email, conferences, blogs) . Let a larger portion of the staff develop and execute campaigns to move a environmental agenda forward.
4. Always be prepared for help. Manage your workflow in a way that highlights the work of others and is prepared for others to come in an take over your job. Build and distribute the work that anyone does on an issue that you think would be useful.
There is a huge slice of the American public that are sick of the prepackaged and perfectionist nature of our messages and messengers. The want real passion, debate and voice. They want to participate on their terms and they are going to continue to resist being slapped into a database, segmented onto a list and data mined into a category of unengaged, uninterested, donor, member, activist, whatever. They are an important part of the future success of civic engagement and we need to invest in new methods to engage with them.
