Beware Social Media Snake Oil – BusinessWeek
“All the hype may obscure the real potential of these online tools.”What Just Happened?: The meaning of McGinnβs win
[...]
Washington state’s Environmental Priorities Coalition has released their 2010 Environment Priorities.Β These are the key issues that the entire Washington state environmental movement are going to drive forward via team offense.
The three 2010 environmental priorities are:
Safe [...]… by open-standards based streams, served via a distributed network of servers? OpenID + Atom/ActivityStreams + PubSubHubBub = open source twitter, facebook, etc.
[...]Come join our team at Groundwire (formerly ONE/Northwest) and help us build a better world!
Groundwire is growing, and we’re looking for an experienced strategy consultant to join our team. Β Our ideal candidate will have real world, senior level organizing and/or fundraising experience (online and offline), believe in the importance [...]
Meep!… don’t get along so nicely.Β How vexing.
[...]As many of my readers likely know by now, my organization ONE/Northwest has just rebranded itself as Groundwire.Β Obviously, our domain name changed, and with it our email addresses.Β One of the many “switchover” tasks we faced was the challenge of updating our email addresses on the many [...]
Seth Godin overgeneralizes again, but usefully (emphasis mine):
Any sufficiently overheated industry will eventually resemble high school. High school is filled with insecurity, social climbing, backbiting, false friends, faux achievements, high drama and not much content. Much of this insecurity comes from a market that doesn’t make good judgments, that [...]I think we would all be better off without analyses like this which inventory how many social media tools large advocacy groups are using as if using more tools is somehow indicative of sophistication, effectiveness or having a solid strategy for achieving your organizing goals.
Sigh.Β When will consultants stop [...]
My imminent return from sabbatical is not the only HR news at ONE/Northwest… we’re also hiring in our CRM consulting team!Β If you’re an experienced CRM database consultant who’s looking for a great opportunity to help organizations make transformational social change, then we want you as our new [...]
Alas, with the arrival of the fall rains comes the end of my three-month sabbatical from ONE/Northwest. I return to work on Monday.
I’ll be refocusing my role a bit — more time on strategy and writing, less time on web consulting. ONE/Northwest itself is headed for some pretty exciting changes, [...]
Joel Burton, Chris Calloway, Chris Ewing and Chris Rossi (with some remote assistance from Alex Clark and Matthew Wilkes) just wrapped up an insanely productive sprint focused on improving ZopeSkel, the code generator for Plone integrators and developers.Β Β At the end of their in-depth write-up, they share some [...]
So, I’m sitting on the couch this afternoon, surfing the internets on my (unplugged) mid-2007 MacBook, when suddenly, the computer shuts off.
Thinking I’d failed to notice the low battery warning, I plugged in and restarted, only to find that:
The battery indicator was suddenly showing “no battery available” The fan [...]
My dear friend Yoram Bauman, Ph.D., aka the “Stand-Up Economist” has just sent his first book to the printers!Β The Cartoon Introduction to Economics is, as the name implies, an microeconomics textbook in the style of a graphic novel.Β It’s now available for [...]
It’s hard to build a movement when you won’t stand with your own.Β Very disappointing.
[...]From Marshall Ganz’s lectures on organizing:
Stories of βnowβ articulate a challenge we face now, the choice we are called upon to make, and the meaning of βmaking the right choiceβ, in particular the hope that may be there. Stories of βnowβ are really stories set in the past, present [...]Paul Krugman has a great column on climate change today.Β This leapt out at me.
“For three decades the dominant political ideology in America has extolled private enterprise and denigrated government, but climate change is a problem that can only be addressed through government action. And rather than concede the [...]Supporters of long-term social change should not just be providing resources to organizing campaigns. They should also be focusing on helping decisionmakers become more able to hear the messages that social change campaigns are sending.
What good is funding campaigns to send faxes, emails, tweets, phone calls and letters to legislators [...]
I just finished reading “The Inheritance,” a new book by New York Times foreign correspondant David E. Sanger. It’s a lucid, thoughtful look inside the Bush foreign policy legacy, with a strong focus on the challenging global security situations in North Korea, Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan that the Obama administration [...]
Molly and I have been working on a little “skunkworks” project that we’re delighted to bring out of “stealth mode”…
2.0, August 28, 12 weeks
Age: 12 weeks
Length: 5cm
Gender: Tadpole or chicken, we’re not sure yet
Expected launch date: March 14, 2010
Parents: Brimming with joy, anticipation and mild [...]
Stumbled across an interesting, resonant paragraph from Vinnie Mirchandani that worked best for me out of context:
My concern with Social CRM is we will build better antennae and pick up even more… signals. But unless we have passionate (and empowered) employees who can follow up and do something about [...]Some interesting thoughts from Gerald Marzorati, the editor of the New York Times Magazine (highlights are mine):
Q. Thank you for answering questions. I believe that the Magazine is one of the great weekly publications for in-depth, intelligent reporting on a wide variety of timely issues. The New Yorker comes [...]
A somewhat rambling post from Lee at HorsesAss had this gem stuck in at the bottom:
While the people whose paranoia far outweighs their ability to grasp complex issues continue to show up at town halls and scream their heads off, I still hold out some hope that enough Americans [...]… or at least that’s my theory.
I think it would be very interesting to take a truly random sample of nonprofits (any ideas on a good methodology?), and do some online research to find out how many of these nonprofits are actually being talked about “organically” online.
My bet: under 10%.
This [...]
