Environmental Activism

In the age of Web 2.0 and the Rise of the Service

Oriented Web
Eric Cumbee
12/4/2008
Dr.McCurdy
Table of Contents
Introduction .................................................................................................................................................. 4
Web 1.0.........................................................................................................................................................6
Web 2.0.........................................................................................................................................................7
2004 ..........................................................................................................................................................7
2006 ..........................................................................................................................................................8
Web 2.5-ish ................................................................................................................................................. 10
2008 ........................................................................................................................................................11
Web Services and Platforms of the 2008 Election......................................................................................12
Twitter.....................................................................................................................................................12
USTREAM.TV ...........................................................................................................................................13
Kyte.TV ....................................................................................................................................................14
QIK.TV .....................................................................................................................................................15
My.BarrackObama.com .......................................................................................................................... 15
Where Environmental Advocacy Groups Stand..........................................................................................15
Problems with Methodology .................................................................................................................. 15
Revised Methodology ............................................................................................................................. 16
Overall Findings.......................................................................................................................................17
PICKENSPLAN.COM .................................................................................................................................17
Appealing Design.................................................................................................................................18
Video ................................................................................................................................................... 18
Social Media........................................................................................................................................ 18
Action Items ........................................................................................................................................ 18
Fundraising..........................................................................................................................................19
MYENERGY ..........................................................................................................................................19
Where Now? ...............................................................................................................................................19
A Comprehensive Strategy..........................................................................................................................20
Key Differences ....................................................................................................................................... 20
Facebook................................................................................................................................................. 21
Twitter.....................................................................................................................................................22
Streaming Video......................................................................................................................................22
In House Social Networking Sites............................................................................................................ 23
Conclusion................................................................................................................................................... 23
Works Citied................................................................................................................................................ 25
Introduction
There is little doubt that the internet is one of the most disruptive technologies of the

last 20 years. Technologists define disruptive technology as any technology or innovation that

significantly disrupts the common thinking or status quo in how we communicate and do

business. While communications mediums, such as television, radio, telephone, the telegraph,

and even the movable type printing press, were considered disruptive technologies at the time,

the internet is different in that its simple evolution tends to bring about new disruptive

technologies on a regular basis. While Television and other communication mediums certainly

made incremental improvements in areas such as quality, the basic functionality of these

technologies is still basically the same as when they were introduced. The internet on the other

hand is very different today than it was even 2 years ago, and certainly more complex and

feature rich, than Tim Berners-Lee the inventor of the internet could have ever imagined when

he first developed the concept of Hyper-Text Links and markup language, in the mid 1980s.

The internet and the World Wide Web as we know it has undergone vast changes in the

scant 20 years that it has been readily available to the general public. So much so that new

monikers are being created to define the different periods of its history, much like geological

periods. First there was what is now called Web 1.0, which were mainly static documents,

slowly as technologies such as the Common Gateway interface Specification, JavaScript, Flash,

and scripting languages such as Post Hyper Text processor (PHP) were developed the web

moved away from consisting of just static documents, to simple interactive applications. Many

have dubbed this as the beginning of what is now called Web 2.0. Web 2.0 marks the start of

the trend where web pages begging to evolve into applications and services, that rival similar
desktop applications in functionality, richness of experience, and performance. Today we are

essentially at Web 2.5. While the use of Asynchronous JavaScript and eXtensible Markup

Language (XML) AJAX, and new technologies such as SilverLight by Microsoft, has continued to

make web applications increasingly more interactive, and more feature rich, the major hallmark

of Web 2.5 is the development of standards, and design practices that make interacting across

a multitude of websites and applications easier. Web 2.5 is also an intermediary step towards

Web 3.0, which many call the Semantic Web. The key feature of the semantic web is an

increased definition and standards for how data is transmitted between web applications and

services.

Communication has always been a critical part of political campaigns. Once a

communications media has attained a large enough install base to make it a viable method of

communication for the general public it is almost immediately adopted by political campaigns,

both for candidate campaigns, and for issue advocacy campaigns alike. While due to the 2, 4 or

even six year election cycles of the United States, it may appear that political groups tend to lag

behind other non political applications. While in fact there is a slight lag in adoption of new

communications technologies, it is not as big of a gap as many may believe. Political campaigns

are often early adopters of emerging technologies. Especially those that offer a cheap if not

free method to communicate with a specific niche of users.

The evolution of the use of the internet in political settings tracks very closely to the

evolution of the internet. This is mainly because that until recently political organizations used

existing software and services, and use models instead of creating new services and
applications. However that is slowly changing. In this paper I will highlight technologies and

services, that are readily available and that are in use in a political context, or that could be

used in a political context, and then present a potential use case in environmental issue

advocacy, and or a real life use case. I will also cover concepts and implications of the use of

these services.

Web 1.0
By today’s standards the environmental issues and political websites of the Web 1.0 era

are not really that exciting. The first campaign websites of any degree of complexity appeared

in the 1996 elections where both Bob Dole and Bill Clinton had campaign websites. Using a

WHOIS query the domain names RNC.org and democrats.org were first registered in 1995.

Using the same method the domain name greenpeace.com was register in mid 1996, and the

domain name sierraclub.com was registered in 1999. Ascertaining the exact date that these

sites came online, and if these were there first attempts at websites, and the exact functionality

of these sites are difficult due to time required to check all variations of domain names in the

WHOIS database, and the fact that comprehensive archives of websites only date as far back as

1997. These websites for the most part were static pages that offered limited amounts of

interactivity, and were one way in nature. These sites might have a basic email contact form,

and given the limited amount of bandwidth available to most users these sites might have had

a very small amount of short extremely low quality audio or video.

The first political website that showed the basic hallmarks of what would be considered

the start of the transition to web 2.0 is that of Arizona Senator John McCain’s 2000 Presidential
campaign website. At the time McCain set new records for fundraising, by using an online

contribution system. It was also the first time that the website address became a important

part of campaign communications. McCain set a one day fundraising record when he

mentioned johnmccain.com on the Larry King show.

Web 2.0

2004
The Web 2.0 era in political campaigns began in Ernest with the 2004 presidential

elections. Former Vermont Governor Howard Dean, who took advantage of

new web 2.0 services such as Meetup.com, a service that helps people with

common interests to set up meetings. Dean used Meetup.com to organize

meeting of his supporters, and even went as far as signing a deal to

integrate Meetup.com’s functionality directly into his campaign website

(Wikipedia, Howard Dean).

Figure 1: The popular Dean also made use of the internet to raise over 25.4 million dollars
Dean for America bat
was regularly featured
on the site challenging as of September 30th, 2003 (Wikipedia, Howard Dean). Much of that was
supporters to break
fundraising records through small contributions ranging from 5 dollars to 100 dollars. Many

political experts point to the Dean campaign as a early model for Barrack Obama’s campaign

organization and focus on small contribution fund raising.

Another key web 2.0 aspect of the 2004 Election cycle is the Web Log or more

commonly the Blog. A Blog is simply a collection of entries by a person, or group of persons

listed in a reverse chronological order. These posts can be composed of Text, Audio, Video or
Images, hypertext links, or a combination of those. Most blogs also tend to offer the ability for

readers to comment and engage in discussion about the topic of a blog post. However, not all

Blogs offer this feature, and comments can be disabled on a post by post basis at the writer’s

discretion. Blogs played a major role in the 2004 Presidential Election. Howard Dean built a

large grassroots following amongst Progressive bloggers, which later became known as the

Netroots. Conservative Bloggers also played a major part in the general election, by first

breaking the story that Memos used in a 60 Minutes II story, by Dan Rather about George W.

Bush’s time in the Texas Air National Guard were forgeries. This was a turning point in the 2004

election, as it proved to some that, there were members of the mainstream media that were

covertly and actively campaigning against the president.

2006
The 2006 mid-term elections were a transitional period for Web 2.0 in political

campaigns. Fixtures of the 2004 election such as blogs played an important part in the election,

while new technologies, also played an ever increasing role. The most important technologies

of the 2006 election cycle were the advent of affordable online video, and Social Networking.

While online video has been available in some form or another since the mid 1990s, 2006

marked the first time that online video was easily accessible by the average person. This is

mainly a function of the ongoing decrease in the cost of storage space, bandwidth, and

advancements in video compression technology. Youtube.com quickly became the top video

sharing site on the internet, and allowed campaigns and individuals alike an outlet to share

videos.
 Campaigns immediately started sharing their standard

television ads on YouTube, and quickly branched out into

postings video packages created entirely for YouTube.

YouTube

Individuals were also quick to populate YouTube with political

pol

content, ranging from Video Blog posts of users expressing

their opinion, to video of campaign events, and full blown

Figure 2: The Weekly Standard news productions. One of the pivotal moments of the 2006
Magazine Cover

campaign was when Virginia Republican United States Senator

George Allen,, who had a slight lead over Democrat James Webb, infamously called a Webb

campaign volunteer who was filming the event a “Macaca”.

“Macaca”. This video became an overnight

viral hit on YouTube, and many attribute this event as playing a major role in his defeat.

The second major disruptive technology that played a significant impact in the 2006

election cycle was social networking sites. Facebook seems

to be the Social Networking platform of choice currently.

While Facebook began operating in early 2004, it started

starte

at Harvard only, and slowly expanded to other schools in

the next year. It was only in 2006 that Facebook was

available to most college and high school students; this

along with the introduction of the Friend feed transformed

Figure 3: Facebook Friend Feed
Facebook into a platform for social and political activism,

that few could have imagined when it was first introduced (Wikipedia, Facebook). With the

Groups and Events functionality it quickly allowed organizers to find people with common
 interests and organize them in to groups that allow

for quick communication of vital information and

discussion. Then organizers are able to quickly alert

and mobilize members to action through the events

feature. The Facebook Friend Feed amplified the effect of groups, where if one person in a

sociall graph joins the group, this action is then advertised to the rest of their social network,

this can lead to groups growing exponentially to thousands of members in just a few hours. This

is what is referred to as “going viral” in social media terms.

While
ile online video and social networking services such as Youtube and Facebook made

their debut in the 2006 election cycle, the full magnitude of their effect had not yet been felt.

Web 2.5-ish

It is hard for me to distinguish where the 2006 election cycle ended and the 2008

election cycle began. It seems that the 2008 election cycle began in earnest on November 8th,

2006,, the day after the 2006 mid-term

mid elections. Candidates slowly began throwing their hats

into the ring for president in the weeks after the

the 2006 election, to start what for now is the

longest presidential election cycle in American history.

However in 2007 a trend started in web technologies that were not part of the

consensus definition of what Web 2.0 was. The problem with the definition off web 2.0 is that

there is no firm definition of what Web 2.0 is. It is more a broad set of principles agreed upon

by technologists, and developers. From 2007 onward, I believe that we have moved away from
what the original definition of web 2.0 was, and while not worthy of being called Web 3.0, I

think the current trend defiantly deserves the moniker of Web 2.5. While these trends were

certainly apparent since the beginning of Web 2.0, and even as early as 2005 we could see the

potential of Application Programming Interfaces. Simply put an API is a specification for how

external entities can interact with Web Applications (Wikipedia, Application Programming

Interface). APIs essentially allow web applications and increasing now web services to

communicate and share data between one another.

One of the earliest examples of a mainstream web application or service adopting an

API was that of Google Maps. By providing an open and documented API, Google allowed third

parties to develop applications that make use of Google’s mapping technology, and the

associated services such as geocoding and geo-location.

Another Simpler implementation of an API that dates back to before that of the Google

Maps API is that of Real Simple Syndication or RSS. RSS is the technology that allows Blogs and

other types of web applications that deal with information in a chronological order, to share

that data with other sites, in the example of a blog it could be an Aggregator service such as

Google Reader, or a mobile RSS reader for a blackberry handheld.

2008
2008 was at least for now the high water mark of technology in political endeavors, and

social networks and APIs played an extremely important role. In 2007 Facebook did something

that turned them into a social media platform as opposed to a social networking application.

They released an API for accessing and manipulating data stored on Facebook, along with
specifications on how to build applications that can connect and be displayed within Facebook.

This is a vast departure from Facebook’s previous policy of strictly controlling what features and

what type of content could be placed on Facebook. The new model allowed third party

developers to create new applications that leveraged the Facebook infrastructure to offer new

features that many users wanted.

Web Services and Platforms of the 2008 Election

While I have briefly discussed the services, applications that were a big part of previous

election cycles in the Web 2.0 Era, I want to go into a little more depth about a few of the

platforms and services that played a big part of the 2008 Election cycle. This is mainly because

this is a relatively stable benchmark for comparison of what the current state of political

technology is in comparison to that in use in the environmental issue advocacy arena.

Twitter
Twitter was the wild card this year; I do not think anyone really knew what you were

supposed to do with it, or how you were supposed to use it. Essentially, Twitter is a

combination of instant messaging, micro blogging, and text messaging. Users post messages

that are up to 140 characters long called “tweets”. Users can reply to tweets by adding

@(username) to their message, and can send a direct message to another user by adding D:

(username) to their message. The 140 character limit is not arbitrary; rather it is the same as

the limit of character for sending a text message over the cellular network. Twitter allows users

to subscribe to users using a short text code, which enables users to receive the updates of

others directly on their cellular phone (Twitter,FAQ).

 What is interesting about Twitter is that different people and organizations have found

completely different uses for Twitter. Many such as Bloggers use Twitter to communicate new

content to followers, others use it as a forum for discussion. Both Presidential candidates used

Twitter to update followers on important campaign information, and to announce what they

were currently doing. One of the more interesting uses that I found was Twitters use by the

RNC Welcoming Committee an anarchist group that was responsible for many of the violent

protests at the Republican National Convention in September 2008. This Group used a series of

twitter accounts to coordinate movements and actions of protestors, and to distribute

information about police movements, Information about arrested protestors, and information

about food service (Tin Can Comms Collective,Plugging in to the Comms Infrastructure).

USTREAM.TV
I want to start by saying that USTREAM.TV is not the only service in this space, several

other services such as Justin.tv, Mogulus.tv, and StickAM.tv all started at roughly the same

time; however I am more familiar with USTREAM.TV and for the sake of my argument I will

focus solely on USTREAM.TV.

This is really the natural evolution of Video on the internet after video sharing sites such

as Youtube and Blip.TV. The difference between USTREAM.TV and youtube is that USTREAM

offers live video streaming, instead of short pre-recorded clips that youtube offers. Live

Webcasts are nothing new they have been around since the late 1990s early 2000s. The

difference with this is that where previously live webcasts required expensive equipment, and

very expensive specialized streaming servers, which were only affordable to organizations

serious about webcasting with sufficient resources. USTREAM on the other hand is free, and
requires limited amount equipment. Anyone with a computer, webcam, and broadband

internet connection can now stream video live to the internet. USTREAM also offers a social

aspect to the live video streams, they make them embeddable so that they can be posted on

blogs and other sites, and each show has a chat room. Also taking advantage of the APIs of

other Web Applications, by allowing users to send a announcement of a new show to

Facebook, twitter, and blogs, by simply entering there credentials for each site into ustream.

USTREAM even provides the ability to publish video of the live stream to sites like Youtube and

Facebook for later viewing. All of the major party candidates for president made wide use of

USTREAM.TV, and several Congressional candidates including USAF General Richard Goddard in

the Georgia 8th Congressional District made use of USTREAM in the course of the campaign, to

broadcast major policy speeches and victory celebrations.

Kyte.TV
Kyte.TV is a hybrid of Youtube and the live streaming sites. Except Kyte offers the ability

to upload video, pictures and audio directly to the internet directly from a mobile phone, and

allows users to integrate them with live video from a computer and select mobile devices into

shows. This is a popular technology with Bloggers who used it to quickly upload video of events

to their blogs. Again it makes use of APIs to automatically publish these shows to other social

networking sites. While not in use by any campaign that I could find, this is a technology I

believe could play a big role in the 2010 elections.

QIK.TV
Qik is another live video streaming service except that it is specifically for mobile devices

such as Apple Iphones, Windows mobile devices, and Blackberry Handhelds. I will not go into

much detail about this service other than it is another service that is on my 2010 watch list.

My.BarrackObama.com
Unlike the other services that I have highlighted, My.Barrackobama.com is not really

what you would consider a web service, and it’s primary function is not commercial. Instead

My.BarrackObama.com is a social networking/organizing tool that was built specifically for

Barrack Obama’s Presidential Campaign. It helped promote self organizing amongst its

members, encouraged people to donate money, and recruit new donors and volunteers, and to

coordinate the Obama get out the vote effort. It is still too early to assess the exact benefit of

this tool, however given the fact that Barrack Obama won presidency, outraised and outspent

John McCain 5 to 1, and exceeded all goals for the GOTV program, it is safe to assume that this

tool served its purpose. I am including this as I believe it will be the baseline for analysis on

which all other social mobilization platforms will be judged.

Where Environmental Advocacy Groups Stand

Problems with Methodology

Initially my metrics for analysis of the effectiveness were going to be Media,

Membership, and Money. I believed at the time that data would be available to make these

comparisons; this assumption was based on a spot check of data sources such as comscore, a

database that tracks web site statistics. The Federal Election Commission contribution

database, and inquires to different advocacy groups. However it was discovered that data
availability is limited in many cases. In some cases this is due to even some of larger

Environmental advocacy websites being considered statistically insignificant to provide the type

of statistical data, needed to complete an analysis. It was also discovered that through a loop

hole in the IRS tax code, that many Environmental Advocacy groups were registered as a 501c

(4) social welfare organization, and therefore are able to make political expenditures without

having to file expenditure and fundraising reports with the Federal Election Commission. Finally

this was not totally unexpected but none of the organizations that I emailed responded with

data on web recruitment efforts.

Revised Methodology
Being forced to revise my methodology, I decided to focus on direct observations and

studies of different Environmental and Energy Advocacy groups websites. The following table

reflects the attributes I looked for in my analysis and a brief description of what I was looking

for.

Attribute Description

Appealing Design The Website is designed in a friendly logical

manner that draws attention to the key points
of the site.
Video Use of services such as Youtube, Ustream, etc

Social Media Use of Facebook, Myspace,Twitter,etc

Action Items Users are prompted to take action to support

policies, initiatives
Fundraising The site encourages visitors to donate in
unique way.
Overall Findings
In my opinion the web efforts of the environmental advocacy groups is significantly

behind that off major party candidate campaigns. Most sites made no obvious use of social

media, with the exception of links to Facebook groups in a few examples. Some groups had a

youtube channel, however most failed to use their website to promote them. I was unable to

find an example of an environmental advocacy group using twitter or ustream, with the

exception of one. How ever given the limited search feature of twitter, it is entirely possible

that more groups made use of twitter, but I was unable to find it.

Most Groups did have the ability to accept online contributions, however they did little

to promote that other than a large donate now button. One site which due to professional

ethics I will not name did not make use of Secure Socket layer Encryption or SSL to protect

online contribution pages.

I also studied a variety of Facebook Applications that were promoted as environmental

however most of them were green washed, and were actually attempts by individuals to make

money, with a minimum amount going to environmental causes.

PICKENSPLAN.COM
I was able to identify one environmental policy organization that really managed to in

my opinion at least be on par with the major party national presidential candidates. That site

was the pickensplan.com, the website that promotes the Pickens Plan, the alternative energy

proposal by eccentric oil-man T Boone Pickens.

Appealing Design
When first visiting the Pickens Plan website you are asked to endorse the Pickens Plan

by entering your name, email address and zip code, on a landing page. You have the option to

either do that or skip on to the main site, which while it is important to collect names and

emails, it Is also important to not pressure users into giving this information up. At one point in

the 2008 Campaign, you could not get to BarrackObama.com without giving out a name phone

number and email address. The site itself is a clean, colorful design that draws attention to all

the critical functions and features of the site. The use of Flash and Ajax makes the site highly

interactive and easy to use.

Video
The Pickens Plan web site makes great use of online video, as it is a prominent part of

the front page. One of the most effective videos on the site is that of Mr. Pickens standing at a

white board explaining the Pickens plan. While not advertised on the site at several points they

used Ustream.tv to hold live town hall meetings.

Social Media
The Pickens plan makes extensive use of social media sites, such as Facebook, LinkedIn,

MySpace, Push, twitter, youtube, and Digg. Even more importantly they cross promote these

social networking services by featuring icons for each service prominently on the website.

Action Items
Another great feature of the Pickens Plan website, and which is a common occurrence

on candidate websites, is a list of actions that visitors can undertake to support the Pickens

Plan. Visitors are encouraged email President-Elect Obama, and congress to support the

Pickens Plan.
Fundraising
The only exception to the Pickens Plan website is that it does not offer people the

option to donate money. This is mostly because the Pickens Plan is being self funded by T.

Boone Pickens.

MYENERGY
MYENERGY Is a social networking site established by the Pickens Plan that serves largely

the same purpose of My.BarrackObama.com. it is intended to promote self organization

amongst activists. While it is not on the same scope or breadth of the Obama system, it is an

impressive effort for a non major party website.

Where Now?
 Environmental advocacy groups should closely study what the Pickens Plan has done as

far as electronic campaigns go.

 Environmental Advocacy Groups should study what Major party candidates have done

and adapt those strategies to their purpose.

 It is hard to pretend that given the level of resources available to these groups that they

will ever completely outdo the top candidate campaigns. However with the rapid

evolution of web services, the first person to capitalize on these services is often given a

advantage.
A Comprehensive Strategy
The tools and services that I have outlined previously are viable options for promoting

action on environmental policies and other forms of activism. However these organizations

along with many candidate centric organizations seem to fall into the trap of believing that all

that is required for a social media strategy is to simply have a presence with a blog, and

accounts on popular social media sites. However a truly effective social media strategy must be

a lot more in-depth and well thought out than that. In some cases a poorly designed or

executed social media strategy can in fact be detrimental to an organization.

In this section I will attempt to outline effective uses of Social Media for an

environmental issue campaign.

If I were tasked with developing a social media strategy for environmental issue

campaign, I would start by establishing a baseline strategy based on political candidates and

major party social media efforts, and altering that strategy to take into account the differences

between a candidate and issue advocacy campaign.

Key Differences
 Lack of Figure Head- Most issue advocacy campaigns lacks a figurehead, while candidate

campaigns have the candidate to act as a figure head. As successful as it was, I seriously

doubt that Barrack Obama’s campaign would have been had as much success as it did

without a campaign. The lack of a well known figurehead makes garnering earned media

difficult at best.

 Duration- Most Issues advocacy especially environmental ones are perpetual, with the

exception of 527s that seem to appear around election time, and then suddenly
 disappear immediately afterwards. This is a stark contrast to most candidate campaigns

where they are established 1 to 2 years before the election and in some cases exist in

some form between election cycles. This in my opinion is actually an advantage for the

issue advocacy groups, as they can build lasting grass-roots organization and constantly

make use of this organization to prevent it from atrophying.

Facebook
Facebook pages are a great way to distribute information to supporters; it also provides

the largest audience of any social networking site. Every Organization should make use of either

a Facebook Page, or group to connect with supporters. It should have some level of integration

with the Organizations websites, in which it pulls content into the group from the Website. This

can easily be accomplished by using RSS.

Groups should also explore the potential of Facebook Applications, to engage

supporters in new ways, and to allow them to more visibly show their support for that cause.

Applications also hold great potential in allowing users to casually perform actions that benefit

the organization, such as telling friends, donating, and even phone banking.

A third way to utilize Facebook is the use of the Facebook Advertising platform. The

Facebook Ad platform, offers a fairly effective method of micro targeting users, based on

demographics and interests. A group could easily use information on supporters to create a

profile of likely supporters and then buy ads based on that profile to more effectively target

potential supporters with Ads.

Twitter
Twitter is an ever evolving platform, so what may be an effective strategy today, may

not be the most effective strategy tomorrow. One of the best ways for organizations to use

twitter is like all social media, by creating a conversation. Having someone monitors twitter,

and reply to supporters is one of the most effective ways to utilize Twitter. This is one area that

it seems most political candidates do not seem to get. Twitter is a very effective media for self-

organization and collaboration between supporters. By fostering a sense of community and

engagement with the community, a group of supporters can quickly self organize to perform

actions needed to support the organization, with minimal guidance or expenditure of resources

by the organization.

Twitter can also be used as a simple yet effective text messaging alert system, to

provide notifications of important information and alerts to users via text messaging. This was

very effective when used by the RNC protestors, who utilized twitter, and cheap prepaid cell

phones, to coordinate protests around the Republican National Convention.

Organizations should also build twitter features into their website. It takes a minimum

amount of effort to use the Twitter API to display “Tweets” either based on members, or by

using a organizing method known as Hash-tags.

Streaming Video
Organizations should use streaming video where ever possible. Every event, press

conference, etc, should be streamed online and recorded videos should be published to video

sharing sites. Organizations should also consider holding special web only events such as e-
town halls, or “strategy meetings” and take questions from viewers, and let the viewers and

principals set the conversation rather than the moderator.

Supporters should also be encouraged to upload videos and even stream live them

talking about or doing thing related to the organization, or fan videos of campaign events.

These videos and live streams can be organized into channels and should be featured and

promoted on a section of the group’s site and other social media outlets.

In House Social Networking Sites

The concept of an in house social networking websites are an interesting concept, and if

done right can be incredibly effective. However campaigns should be aware of the fact that this

is the most intensive and expensive route a campaign can take. White label social networking

systems geared towards political organizations are available; they can run several thousand

dollars per month.

Conclusion
Environmental advocacy groups in my opinion are along ways behind major party

candidates and other sector issue advocacy groups as far as their campaigns use of web

services and social media. Social Media has proven that it can be an equalizer for smaller

groups, and environmental groups should take notice of that fact.

However it is important to note that social media is simply a tool, no amount of

programming or engineering, can overcome an improperly run social media campaign. That is

because social media is about the conversation, not the tools or media over which it takes
place. Campaigns can have all of the social media tools they want, but unless they engage users

in the conversation, social media will be ineffective.

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