{"id":460,"date":"2009-03-21T02:43:23","date_gmt":"2009-03-21T09:43:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.talesfromthe.net\/jon\/?p=460"},"modified":"2009-03-21T02:43:23","modified_gmt":"2009-03-21T09:43:23","slug":"lessons-from-skittles-for-activists-and-poets-part-1-draft","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/2024.thenexus.today\/index.php\/2009\/03\/21\/lessons-from-skittles-for-activists-and-poets-part-1-draft\/","title":{"rendered":"Lessons from Skittles for poets and activists, parts 1 (and 2?) (DRAFT!!!!)"},"content":{"rendered":"

DRAFT! Work in Progress!\u00c2\u00a0 Feedback, please!<\/span>
\nFinal version to be published in The Seminal, potentially in two parts
\n<\/em><\/p>\n

\n
\n
\n
\"\"<\/a><\/dt>\n
excerpt from skittles home page, March 2009<\/dd>\n<\/dl>\n<\/div>\n

A few weeks ago Agency.com and Skittles kicked off “Interweb the rainbow”, a brilliant marketing campaign that involved multiple social networks.\u00c2\u00a0 The idea’s simple: replace the skittles.com home page with different social network sites.\u00c2\u00a0 Late that Sunday evening, they set it up to be a Twitter search for “skittles”.<\/p>\n

On Monday, skittles was the #1 topic on Twitter.<\/p>\n

By Tuesday, there were zillions of blog posts and positive articles in the Wall Street Journal,<\/a> LA Times<\/a>, the Financial Times<\/a> and Advertising Age<\/a>.*\u00c2\u00a0 Skittlemania died down quickly, but the publicity continued after Skittles switched their home page to Facebook, on Wednesday.\u00c2\u00a0 One example: an AP article on Facebook’s rework of their home pages devoted two paragraphs to Skittles.<\/p>\n

It’s too early to know whether Skittles will stand the test of time “Hugely successful” is an understatement.<\/p>\n

Twitter: an epicenter for buzz<\/h2>\n

In this series I’ll discuss what activists can learn from the Skittles experience — and poets, too, for reasons that’ll become clear next week soon enough.\u00c2\u00a0 (Here’s a teaser.)\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0 Let’s start with the most obvious one: Twitter’s a great place to create buzz right now.<\/p>\n

Twitter’s filled with highly-networked people into PR, marketing, social media, and blogging.\u00c2\u00a0 It’s got great viral propagation mechanisms like retweeting, hashtags, top searches, “Follow Friday”, the Monday night Journalist\/PR chat, and so on.\u00c2\u00a0 In fact, right now Twitter’s quite possibly the most buzz-enabling place on the internet.\u00c2\u00a0 And the numbers you need to start getting attention are still surprisingly small; as the Motrin Moms showed us in November, a few thousand activists can leverage Twitter get a story into the New York Times in 24 hours<\/a>.<\/p>\n

And while there was an agency and a little bit of custom development involved, Skittlemania was a heck of a lot cheaper than most if not all of the classics on Mustafa’s excellent list<\/a> of amazing viral marketing successes in Social Media Icon<\/em>.\u00c2\u00a0 For Anonymous, who leveraged Skittlemania to great placement of get an anti-Scientology message in the LA Times<\/em><\/a>, it was even cheaper.<\/p>\n

So lesson #1\u00c2\u00a0 is\u00c2\u00a0 Activists and poets — and anybody else who wants media attention without spending a lot of any money — should consider including Twitter in their plans<\/strong>.\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0 Launching “Ask the President” on Twitter<\/a> on Liminal States<\/em> is an example zero-budget and minimal-time-investment launch plan with discussion and early statistics.<\/p>\n

Things happen quickly in the Twitterverse<\/h2>\n

The basic idea behind Ask the President<\/strong> is simple: a web site<\/a> that lets people on the Internet vote on what questions they want to hear at the a White House press conference.\u00c2\u00a0 Ari Melber’s The People\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Press Conference<\/a>, Katrina vanden Heuvel’s Ask the President<\/a>,\u00c2\u00a0 Megan Garber’s Presidential Press Conference, Pro-Am Edition<\/a> in the Columbia Journalism Review, <\/em>and Evan McMorris-Santorio’s Word On The Tweet: @MrPresident Edition<\/a>* in the National Journal <\/em>makes a strong case for why this is likely to resonate with the Obama campaign, whose transition team ran the similar Open for Questions<\/strong> pilot [1<\/a>, 2<\/a>].<\/p>\n

Ari asked me if I’d help him and Shaun Dakin promote Ask the President<\/strong> on Twitter, which is why I wrote up the launch plan<\/a>.\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0 On Wednesday, not long before last Thursday’s launch, we got the media release that President Obama had scheduled a live press conference for 8 p.m. (Eastern) on Tuesday.\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0 How convenient!\u00c2\u00a0 But hmm, if we’re launching on Thursday, do we have a chance to build enough buzz by Tuesday?<\/p>\n

Well, Skittles and got rolling over the weekend, and were all over the press and blogosphere.\u00c2\u00a0 The anti-Facebook organizing in mid-February [1, 2, 3] went to #1 on Monday, and by Tuesday night Facebook had backed down.\u00c2\u00a0 The Motrin Moms did the same thing to Motrin November only even faster [1, 2, 3].\u00c2\u00a0 Things happen quickly in the Twitterverse.<\/p>\n

So Lesson #2 is that as long as you can get some action going in the blogosphere and other social network sites, if you launch on Twitter over the weekend you can be media darlings by Tuesday<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

Start playing now … and stay tuned!<\/h2>\n

Yeah I know.\u00c2\u00a0 Who wants to launch over the weekend.\u00c2\u00a0 It’ll be fun though.\u00c2\u00a0 I promise.\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0 Lesson 3 from Skittles is Everybody knows: fun rules<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

And\u00c2\u00a0 it won’t take a lot of time at all.\u00c2\u00a0 A little Twitter search magic<\/a> gets you a page which includes a lot of questions you can vote for along with tips from the @AskThePresident profile and updates about articles and blog posts. \u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0 If you see a question that looks interesting, you can click on the link to take you to a page where you can read more and vote for or against it.\u00c2\u00a0 For example, here’s a tweets from\u00c2\u00a0 sharpiedshoes<\/a>,\u00c2\u00a0ggordonliddy<\/a>, and\u00c2\u00a0 KDeutsch<\/a> that caught my attention:<\/p>\n

\n

Terrorist Threat Level never goes below “Be Very Fearful and Give Up Your Rights”?” http:\/\/tinyurl<\/strong>.com\/cmpanu<\/a> <\/span><\/p>\n

http:\/\/tinyurl<\/strong>.com\/c4o2c4<\/a> Great question by one of my producers #tcot<\/a><\/span><\/div>\n

\n<\/span><\/div>\n
#AskPres audience is a little defensive about fact that working class are underrepresented -28 Net Votes http:\/\/tinyurl<\/strong>.com\/djgh4l<\/a> <\/span><\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Once you’re there,\u00c2\u00a0 the green thumbs-up button is a yes vote and, the red thumbs-down is no.<\/p>\n

And if you’re on Twitter, the “ReTweet” button brings up a page for a twitter message with the tinyurl and hashtag already filled in, which is every helpful.\u00c2\u00a0 “Tweet this” be a better choice for the name; hopefully it’ll change soon.\u00c2\u00a0 Or you can just retweet on Twitter like usual, for example this one<\/a> from me:<\/p>\n

\n

RT @KDeutsch<\/a>: #AskPres audience is a little defensive about how working class are underrepresented -28 Net Votes http:\/\/tinyurl<\/strong>.com\/djgh4l<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

If you’ve got a little more time, you don’t have to stop there of course.\u00c2\u00a0 Browse around for other questions and tweet them. <\/span>Sign up and submit your own questions or video … and tweet about them! <\/span> If you’re a blogger, check out the embedding technique<\/a> that Sarah Jaffe uses on Alterdestiny<\/em>.**<\/span><\/p>\n

See?\u00c2\u00a0 I told you it wouldn’t be so bad.\u00c2\u00a0 And the fun’s just starting.
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

Stay tuned for more.
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

jon
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

* I know any publicity is good publicity, but would it be too much to have asked that they used either @AskThePresident or #askpres rather than a totally unrelated Twitter profile?\u00c2\u00a0 Sheesh.<\/p>\n

** if anybody has any luck getting this to work on WordPress or Wetpaint, please let me know!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

DRAFT! Work in Progress!\u00c2\u00a0 Feedback, please! Final version to be published in The Seminal, potentially in two parts excerpt from skittles home page, March 2009<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,13,16,1],"tags":[120,378],"class_list":["post-460","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-political","category-social-computing","category-tales-from-the-net","category-uncategorized","tag-drafts","tag-twitter"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/2024.thenexus.today\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/460","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/2024.thenexus.today\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/2024.thenexus.today\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/2024.thenexus.today\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/2024.thenexus.today\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=460"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/2024.thenexus.today\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/460\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/2024.thenexus.today\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=460"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/2024.thenexus.today\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=460"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/2024.thenexus.today\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=460"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}