There are a lot of ways to cover the Komen/PP firestorm–too many, in fact. For the purposes of my work here, I’m going to focus on what made this brouhaha different than any other concerning Planned Parenthood, the lessons learned if you’re on the defensive, and the lessons learned if you’re on the offensive.

The culture of this particular moment

I’m going to first spend some time investigating why it was that this particular attack on reproductive health and Planned Parenthood was so explosive. Planned Parenthood has been under attack for quite a while, and especially in the last few years– those working on reproductive freedom issues won’t likely soon forget the US House trying to defund Planned Parenthood altogether in 2011, for example. (And we won’t forget Stephen Colbert’s completely amazing takedown, either.) So why was Komen’s move so incendiary? And what can we learn from it?

Invariably, I know people working with social media strategy are eventually going to be asked to reproduce situations like Komen/PP. They’re going to be asked to make this new campaign GO VIRAL. Let’s get this part out of the way: Nothing can ever be made “viral” on purpose, period. Anyone who says differently is selling something.*

Here are the salient points about This Moment for future campaign work:

1. Komen mistook the community of breast cancer survivors and cause supporters as their own community and supporters. People who are involved in working towards a cure for breast cancer are coming to this work often for very emotional reasons: because they have survived, or they know someone who has– or hasn’t. They appreciate that Komen is leading the charge, but their passion ultimately centers itself on breast cancer.

Katha Pollitt points out in her Nation piece, by the way, that Komen’s origins are activist and feminist in nature:

Breast cancer activism began as a feminist cause, after all: the initial impetus, back when Komen was founded in 1982, was the silence and shame surrounding the disease, the lack of research funding and the general sexism pervading treatment. Those are all feminist issues, and were structured as such in public discourse at the time.

This has been mainstreamed in many ways, and particularly the pinkwashing campaigns have normalized breast cancer as part of our everyday conversations about women’s health and cancer in general. (Pinkwashing is problematic for a number of reasons; I’m not going down that road here, but read the piece at the link above if you want to know more.)  In any case, Komen’s championing of breast cancer support on multiple fronts gave the organization the impression that people cared about Komen. They don’t. They clearly care about Komen’s money and that it always goes towards supporting breast cancer initiatives, though.

Will Komen be able to fix this? I don’t know. As a colleague pointed out to me in an email:

I doubt that Komen can regain the trust and support of the millions of disappointed women. Komen’s former meme was “We fight breast cancer for you and the people you love.” A new meme has been created: “We are part of the nasty culture wars that have hurt so many, and we care more about that than about whether you die from breast cancer.”

2. Furthermore, emotional connections in general matter. Planned Parenthood has an incredibly emotional relationship to their constituencies: the women for whom they provide services, and of course, the advocates for reproductive rights and justice. Look at any of the stories posted on the Tumblr that I created, Planned Parenthood Saved Me, and you’ll find people not referring just to the services that they received, but more so, the care, understanding and non-judgmental support. More on the Tumblr later, but the bottom line here is that Planned Parenthood has carefully cultivated that emotional connection into a relationship. When the crap comes down in a relationship, friends are there for each other. PP’s constituencies felt personally attacked by Komen, and responded as such.

How was that different than the legislative attacks of last year? Mostly because so many more women outside of PP’s traditional constituencies were involved, but I’d also say that this felt particularly jarring to core activists and supporters. This wasn’t the usual social conservative attack: A non-partisan organization (albeit one with a dubious history, about more of which we’re learning every day) caved to anti-choice pressure. That hurt.

While an organization can’t create this kind of attack for themselves, what they can do is this: Create your community before you need them. Leverage emotional connections to your work into real relationships.

3. A reconnection of reproductive healthcare as real healthcare was made in the wider mainstream community. This one is harder to quantify– or at least, I’ve been having trouble quantifying it. There are two parts of this: that women have assumed for the last couple decades that care of their ladyparts is automatically going to be covered under other healthcare provisions; two, that Planned Parenthood has morphed in the public consciousness as a healthcare provider to an abortionplex (as depicted by The Onion, a satirical newspaper. Also, see the Yelp reviews.). Rebecca Traister and Joan Walsh talk about this in their excellent Salon piece:

For the first time in what feels like forever, passion and fury were being loudly, proudly given in a full-throated voice, on behalf of women – women as moral actors; women as citizens with rights, health, bodies, freedoms; women as people with families and economic concerns. [...]
The demonization of Planned Parenthood should have awakened the country to the radicalism of the right, and how far it has pushed the political conversation. It’s been hard to measure the degree of the radicalism, so slowly and unceasingly has it crept across our consciousness and the political discourse. But it’s important to remember how mainstream Planned Parenthood used to be. It was the respectable, even Republican, advocate for women’s health, including reproductive services.

Both of these common-culture frames/memes — assuming care and demonizing Planned Parenthood– have contributed to the chipping away at reproductive health and freedom. The emotional pain of the moment combined with the chipping away led many women outside of traditional activism spheres to their a-ha moment last week.

Lessons learned: if you’re under attack

So, the mob has lit their torches and gotten out their pitchforks. What do you do? Assuming you’ve already built your community before you need it, there are a few other things to keep in mind.

1. Say something. Komen chose to remain silent, and as pointed out by Raven Brooks over at the Netroots Foundation, they allowed the conversation to get away from them. What could they have said? “We’re listening. We hear you. We know you’re upset, we’re here for you.”

I was reminded in this situation of a problem that my dear friend Jaclyn Friedman faced a few weeks ago. She wrote a column about Blue Ivy, and in it, didn’t use a racial justice lens on Black women’s sexuality. This upset a lot of people, understandably, and Jaclyn was faced with a lot of angry tweets. So, she tweeted that she was about to get in a car and drive to an event for a few hours, but didn’t want people to think she was being silent. She also tweeted that she was genuinely listening to concerns and wanted to take time to process and respond properly. When she did respond, she posted an apology that has since been held up as a shining example of how to handle this kind of situation. While not everyone was satisfied, many people who previously were angry with her took the time to support and thank her.

2. When you do finally say something, don’t do it in plastic. Komen posted a video that was widely criticized as flat and inauthentic. It reminded me of watching people who dance who’ve recently been taught how to dance. They’ve got all the moves down, but it’s awkward–they’ve got no flow. People at this point don’t want to hear about numbers. They don’t care, frankly, about understanding you at this point. They want you to understand them.

Also weird: they never mentioned Planned Parenthood in this video, as if mentioning PP would make the entire Komen organization evaporate instantly. This is clearly straight out of an old-school PR book: don’t mention the enemy! Time to get that memo out again: old-school PR tactics don’t work in social media. You’re in a conversation.

More tips can be found at my post on #AmazonFAIL from 3 years ago (these rules haven’t changed!), over at Allyson Kapin’s post on Frogloop, and Raven’s post at Netroots Foundation.

Lessons learned: if you’re on the attack

Again, we’re assuming here that you’ve already built your community before you need it. I can’t stress enough how important this is. You might also want to look at Beth Kanter’s Ladder of Engagement to understand more how people become involved with your organization through digital channels.

1. While you can’t create these kind of opportunities on the fly, you can be ready for them when they happen. Removing barriers to effective, nimble organizational response is key. Planned Parenthood had an email out almost immediately, and their social media followed suit.

2. Don’t forget targeted, multi-pronged approaches to digital activism.  While a lot of yelling and screaming on social media may make you feel better as an individual, you have to ask yourself: Does an organization like Komen really care about loose cannon spray? I don’t think that they do. In that vein, a lot of people with whom I work started talking right away about how to hurt Komen financially, using a targeted set of strategies to shame current donors into withdrawing support, and to raise money for Planned Parenthood.

I also started wondering what kind of activism could be done with women who don’t have any money to withdraw or re-donate–those who would be most affected by a lack of services at Planned Parenthood. It was with that impetus that I created the Tumblr blog, Planned Parenthood Saved Me, as a storytelling vehicle. Numbers and statistics don’t tell stories; people do. That’s how we relate to one another. Collecting these stories in one place became a powerful messaging tool: for Planned Parenthood itself, if they wanted to use it; for journalists looking for the human side of this story; and, of course, for the women who have lived through horrific healthcare experiences, who were saved by PP, as a tool of catharsis and support.

What else can we examine here? Leave your thoughts, ideas and lessons in the comments, or ping me with them on Twitter.

At the beginning of December, Aspen Baker, the executive director of Exhale, wrote me an email. “I’m looking for a social media coordinator and web person for a short-term project,” she said. “Interested?” I’ve always been a fan of Aspen’s work at Exhale — they’re a nonprofit organization which provides the first and only nonjudgmental national, multilingual after-abortion talkline. One of the things I love most about Exhale, which I learned largely through their campaign, is their advocacy of “pro-voice” in dealing with abortion. Every woman’s voice deserves to be heard; women (in numerous political contexts) don’t need to be talked at, shamed, have numbers and percentages thrown at them as much as they need to be listened to, and told that they are loved.

The project Aspen had in mind was exciting from the outset–large with names but fraught with challenges. It turns out that MTV approached them when they decided to do a special on abortion for their program “16 & Pregnant.” Now, if you’re not familiar, MTV has two reality shows about teen pregnancy running; “16 & Pregnant” is one of them, and the other is “Teen Mom.” They’ve both been running for two seasons, and up until this special, neither series showed any teen having an abortion. This is noteworthy because 37% of all teen pregnancies do end in abortion; many have criticized MTV for not showing a large portion of the teen pregnancy experience.

MTV came to Exhale originally looking for women who would be willing to go on the show and talk about their experience having an abortion. Exhale ultimately got the opportunity to help shape how the show was put together, and used this opportunity to do some pro-voice educating with the production team. They wanted to show that it was possible to have an honest, thoughtful, nuanced conversation about abortion that wouldn’t be polarizing and inflammatory. And, most importantly, they wanted MTV’s young viewers who have had abortions to personally relate to the stories shared on the special.

Aspen then wanted to create a social media campaign and website to accompany the airing of the special. It was slated to air at 11:30pm on Dec 28th, just a few days after Christmas, and there would be no commercial interruptions, and no promotions announcing that the show would be on. So, despite the bonus of having a nationwide audience, we ran the risk of no one hearing about it. The other challenge was that we weren’t allowed to announce the show ourselves until MTV was ready, which likely (given their desire to fly this under the radar) wasn’t going to be until right before the show.

HOW WE BUILT THE CAMPAIGN

I quickly enlisted the help of Sonal Bains, with whom I work often: we split client work quite nicely, with me on the strategic development and technology end of things, and Sonal on the implementation and media relation end of things. Both of us come from strong offline organizing backgrounds, and this informs our style of work and collaboration. (Plus, Sonal’s hilarious.) The takeaway here is that as you assess your campaign, it’s helpful to write down what your strong points are, what you bring to the table. I know that I don’t have the relationships with bloggers and journalists that Sonal does, for example. If you’re working within an organization, get your key players together and write down concrete skills and time availability as part of your campaign brainstorming. On Exhale’s side, their Director of Programs, Jovida Ross, played a critical role in the implementation of the campaign and was a great partner for Sonal and I. We had a small yet mighty team of high-functioning, excellent communicators.

Aspen’s campaign idea was to create a digital safe space where the women who decided to tell their stories on the show–and by extension, all women who’d had abortions–would feel loved and supported. Central to this space would be a website where anyone could submit a message of love or support. Any political messages (from any corner of the debate) would not be accepted; Aspen’s vision was a zone free of typical advocacy posturing, and wanted it only to focus on the women. Why? In Exhale’s extensive counseling experience, they have found that political rhetoric can shut down women seeking emotional support after abortion. This would be a space where we wouldn’t allow that to happen.

It was important to me to give the campaign a catchy name that had emotional resonance. I rejected our original names that were things like “Your story matters” and “You are loved.” They were all vague, emotionally absent, and just didn’t hit on the enormity of what we were trying to pull off. I asked our group to think of names that were plays on the title of the show, allowing us to capitalize on the already-popular brand; it was Aspen that landed “16 & Loved.”

ELEMENTS OF THE CAMPAIGN

• Set up metrics and analytics to track how the campaign performs
• Build a quick ‘n’ dirty website to capture submissions of love
• Rename the Twitter profile from “xhaleisprovoice” to “ExhaleProVoice” and use the hashtag #16andloved to capture the conversations about the campaign
• Build the Facebook Page for Exhale as an organization, and use it to share the love, and updates about the campaign.
• Involved the reproductive justice blogging community by organizing a private, embargoed call before the special airs, and inviting people to participate in a live blog during the show.

METRICS

I’m a big fan of Rowfeeder for my social media tracking needs. I work with individuals and small organizations, so we pretty much can’t afford tools like Radian6, which is one of the more popular services in the non-profit sphere. For $35/month, Rowfeeder lets us track up to 3 terms on both Twitter and Facebook. On top of providing interesting metrics reports that you can tweak and do fun things with in Excel (if you’re that kind of nerd; not that I know anything about that), it also dumps all the mentions/posts it finds into a Google doc for you, so that you have the raw data.

We chose to have it track #16andloved, ExhaleProVoice and xhaleprovoice (in case there were tons of people using the old Twitter handle). In retrospect, I should have chosen 16andloved without the hash sign; that would have also captured mentions of the website where neither the hashtag nor Twitter handle were used.

WEBSITE

We purchased 16andloved.com and set up hosting with LivingDot.com (their “One” plan for $10.95/month). We installed WordPress, and chose the Therapy theme from WooThemes for $75. I recreated the “16 & Pregnant” logo to read “16 & Loved” by hand using my Wacom Intuos drawing tablet.

For the submissions and posting, we used a few WordPress plugins. The submission form was created by Contact Form 7, and we had to sent to a special email address that we hooked up to Postie. Postie turned the submission emails into draft blog posts, and we checked regularly and approved/discarded the posts. We also used an extension for Contact Form 7 that captured the submissions and added all the info to a table in the database that could be exported. We also used the Really Simple CAPTCHA to keep out spam/bot submissions.

I installed the WP Supercache plugin in case the site got really popular and crashed (it did once). For social sharing, we used the Facebook Likes It plugin (this seems to have been abandoned; I can’t find its install page anymore), and the WP Tweet button plugin.

TWITTER

Before we got word we could talk about the special, we started working on building the community engagement by joining existing abortion conversations, following and engaging with influential folks that we identified, and also posting a few teasers about having Exciting News! to share very soon.

Once we got the go ahead, we launched the website and started soliciting submissions. We received several dozen on the first day, and tweeted some of our favorites. We continued to solicit, post favorites, retweet others’ Twitter posts, and respond to inquiries. Because of the short time period for the campaign, we didn’t do as much curating as I normally advocate for. That’s not to say that we used Twitter as a broadcast tool (a big no-no!); we still maintained a very conversational focus. It’s just that for this case, most of the focus was on “16 & Loved.”

We also used Twitter to promote airing of the show, watching the live blog we were putting together, and to continue to curate responses.

FACEBOOK

Prior to this campaign, Exhale had a Page that they didn’t use, but they did have a Cause with ~1,000 members. My experiences with Causes haven’t been overly fantastic; I feel like it takes a lot of time and resource investment to get minimal material return. Especially for the purposes of our campaign (promoting submissions to the site, and getting the word out about the show), I feel like a Page would serve our purposes much better. The biggest thing is that status updates and links from Pages are more likely to appear in a fan’s news feed, and that was absolutely critical for us.

I asked 25 friends quick to Like it before we even did that much with it so that we could land a username, making it easier to share the Page with the wider world. We chose http://facebook.com/ExhaleProVoice. We then started posting periodic updates to the Cause, asking people to Like the page so that they could stay in touch with Exhale and its Very Exciting News! that was coming.

After that, we used a similar posting strategy as to what we had going on at Twitter.

BLOGGER CALL AND LIVEBLOG

Sonal got to work right away on putting together a conference call for the blogging and journalist communities. She contacted about 10-12 people who write about abortion issues and women’s rights on a larger scale. The Friday before we launched, we hosted the call just using FreeConferenceCall.com. We scheduled a short talk with Aspen, a few words from a spokesperson who had had an abortion. We stressed that the information we were sharing was embargoed, and we would let them know as soon as we could when they could share with their communities. We had a few key asks: 1. to see who wanted to participate in our live blog, 2. to see who was willing to write about the show and our campaign, and 3. to stress the importance of the pro-voice angle of our movement, and ask that they respect that as much as possible. We then opened it up to Q&A, and altogether, we spent about an hour on the phone together.

Five or six of the bloggers on the call volunteered to participate in the live blog the night that the show aired. In addition, the Women’s Media Center offered to create a “watch-in,” and they shared it with their community. How that worked: They created a Facebook event in which people were invited to watch the show (in their own homes) and voice their opinions about it.

For the liveblog, we used CoverItLive. They make it very easy to get a group of approved panelists, as they’re called, to come together and chat live. You can embed the CoverItLive tool in any website very easily, and we encouraged our panelists to do so, widening our reach. I monitored the comments from the community and approved appropriate messages as the show aired. Sonal worked on monitoring the new submissions to the website. After the special was over, people could also re-read the liveblog.

RESULTS! (That’s what you’ve been waiting for, right?)

The straight-up numbers*…

• Website: ~9,000 visits, with most of those happening between Dec. 22nd and Dec. 30th. Users spent an average of 2:26 minutes on the site, and visited 2.1 pages while they stayed. 200+ submissions.
• Twitter: Followers increased from 235 to 465; 548 mentions of @ExhaleProVoice (from 12/20/10, that’s ~27/day); 1563 mentions of #16andloved (from 12/20/10, that’s ~78/day)
• Facebook: Fans went from under 25 to 616; 617 likes of posts with 1,152 active users; Dec. 29th was the most popular day for likes and comments; 86% female fans; 62% are 18-34
• Liveblog:  During the show, we maxed at ~120 viewers at once, with a total of 422 viewers. 175 panelist comments were published; 234 reader comments were sent (98 were published). Since then, the live blog has been replayed over 900 times.
• Media: About 25 blog posts and articles, including feminist strongholds of Feministing, Feministe, Jezebel; independent media such as Salon.com, Change.org, and Care2; mainstream media such as ABCNews, NY Post, Washington Post. Two weeks later, an article on the campaign appeared in the NY Times.

Were these good numbers? All told, yes! We were very happy with them. Moreover, we were even more thrilled with our qualitative metrics, which for me are the real measure of a social media campaign: The overwhelming messages of love and support often left us emotional and speechless. We received very few negative submissions (less than 5), and very few negative comments online. (There was a minor campaign by a conservative blogger, but it never caught traction.) All around, a huge, huge set of cultural wins for the pro-voice movement.

* Exhale agreed to let me publish these numbers. Normally, all quantitative and qualitative metrics are kept private as part of my contracts.

THE INTRO

For background on the #dearjohn campaign, check out these posts from Sady Doyle and Amanda Marcotte.

If you’re not on Twitter, but you’d like a helping hand through the sign-up process, go here.

If you’re new to Twitter, and want an introduction to basic concepts– retweets, hashtags, and mentions, oh my!– go here.

THE GOODS

One of the more attractive social media tactics when it comes to creating a stir is to use hashtags. Hashtags, in the case of campaigns and politics, can be useful to:

• collect all the tweets about a particular topic in one place;
• put pressure on public figures to respond to a topic (because of the above);

What’s a hashtag? It’s an agreed-upon keyword preceded by the pound sign that’s added to your tweet. In this case, we’re using #dearjohn. No special skill is required–just type it into your tweet, or copy and paste it.

Tweets with the #dearjohn hashtag should convey one or more of the following:

• A sense of urgency about sexual assault and reproductive rights.
• A personal story–storytelling is what gets to people, not isolated facts and figures.
• Deep conviction. You don’t have to tell your story to be authentic, but your words should be your own.

UPDATE: Check out Sady’s newer post for content ideas and guidelines.

Consider also monitoring the #dearjohn hashtag (how to do that is explained below) and retweeting posts that you agree with. Amplifying powerful messages and diverse voices goes a long way towards building critical mass.

It’s also helpful to include the Twitter handles of people that you want to hear your message. House representatives who are sponsoring the bill should be considered first–start with @SpeakerBoehner himself. A list of the rest of the co-sponsors–all 173 of them!– can be found here (click on “Co-sponsors” under Representative Christopher Smith). You can use GovLuv to find the Twitter handles of the representative you wish to mention. Consider also sending messages of thanks to representatives who are speaking out and standing up for women in this fight. UPDATE: Amaditalks on Tumblr compiled the whole list here.

You might also think about starting (or joining an existing) an act.ly petition to collect #dearjohn tweeters in yet another online location.

A word about decency/politeness: You don’t have to be nice in your tweets when confronting folks that support HR3. But calling names, making false or libelous accusations, etc., only hurts the rest of the movement. Be outraged, but keep your head on straight.

A word about trolls: If you’re new to this kind of thing, you might not have had much experience with trolling behavior. Basically, a troll is someone who actually isn’t interested in having a productive discussion, and only posts extremely inflammatory comments to derail the entire conversation. Ignore them. Block them. Do not, repeat, do not respond in any way, shape or form–do not even tell them that you’re blocking them. Trolls are vampires: they are emboldened and strengthened by any response to their antics, and you will inevitably be weakened. I know it’s hard to ignore them. But trust me, it is the only way.

To see the running log of all #dearjohn posts, you can do a few things:

• Keep coming back to this post and clicking on #dearjohn
• Look at the top of your Twitter page–there’s a search box. Enter #dearjohn into it, and when you see the search results, you’ll notice a button at the top right of the results–”Save this search.” Click that. Then, to find it again, look at the top of your Timeline for the “Searches” link. Click on it, and you’ll be shown a list of your saved searches.
• For more advanced options, you can perform an advanced Twitter search here: https://search.twitter.com/advanced

I’ll continue to update this post as the movement builds and evolves. Have a tip for me? Feel free to @me on Twitter, or drop a line.

Check it out: full text, audiocast with slides, and guerrilla video:

• The Free-for-All Web and the Secret Tyrants We All Are

You can also have a look at other presentations, workshops and talks that I’ve done.

Both of these frames are problematic. It’s challenging to articulate exactly why, but I’m going to give it my best shot–because language has evolved within the same power structures we seek to tear down, we don’t always have the words to describe the problem.

Human rights within both frames are treated as a commodity that is traded. This is based on our market understanding of what we do with commodities: we accumulate, we spend, we give, we win, we lose. But if we really believe that certain rights are inalienable to humans, we can’t and shouldn’t commodify them. By doing so we support a power structure where rights are doled out and taken away at the whims of the dominant paradigm.

It also, in a deeper metaphorical sense, suggests that women aren’t necessarily fully human– they must be given the right to vote, or they must fight and win it for themselves. It’s not assumed that women would naturally vote in the grand scheme of things. We think so now (mostly), but if we continue to use this language, we support the antiquated structures that keep women from being recognized fully as humans.

If you’re into this kind of thing, by the way, and have the patience for heavy academic text, I highly recommend Women, Fire & Dangerous Things by George Lakoff. There’s a section called “Anger, Lust & Rape” that is truly disturbingly insightful as to how unraveling language can reveal our darkest cultural secrets. I’ll see if I can get in touch with George and post the piece here.

It was also pointed out to me that it seems like I’m saying that confidence and assertiveness are the purview of dudes only. This is a layered argument, one that’s a bit complicated for me to take apart, but let me give it a whirl. First and foremost, I am an ardent, aggressive nay-sayer of anything seeming “naturally” female or male behavior– I believe all our crap is learned, almost 100% entirely. So, M, apologies if it sounds like that in my first post. What I’m doing here is running with Shirky’s version of the argument to concentrate on taking apart a cultural standard that we’re all forced to live by– not one that I believe myself. The fact that dudes hold most of the power, and dudes believe a lot of the ickier stuff in Shirky’s post themselves, etc., reinforces this cultural standard.

In the dept-of-personal-sharing that’s been happening, I’ve also always been one of those outspoken, brash ladies and it’s often served me well professionally. But personally, that’s still up in the air. There are times that I feel damaged and inauthentic when I’ve been acting like an overconfident jerk, and that’s not how I want to ultimately live my life. I wrote this post from that place, of wanting to change the culture so that different personality traits can be rewarded, so that we can have (as I said) a more holistic, welcoming set of standards.

My last point is on the note of personal sharing– just a quick observation, I have been simply bowled over by the number of women who’ve come out of the woodwork in this discussion to share their own stories of self-promo BS, things they were told to do, what not to do, etc. This kind of storytelling and sharing is what’s so powerful to me about our ability to connect, mostly through social networks, and raise each others’ consciousness around these discussion. It’s not just facts and overheard anecdotes, it’s our lives. And that, my friends, is a very very powerful thing.

A post from Internet analyst/author/smart-person Clay Shirky titled “A Rant About Women” has got quite the discussion going around the Intertubes. Read (or at least skim) it before continuing; let me also take this introductory opportunity to do the obligatory feminist thing and thank the dude for taking time out of his busy schedule to wrestle with the giant questions of why don’t women do as well as men at X. Here it comes… thank you. OK, so I’m being a wee bit sarcastic, but seriously: it really is nice to see these conversations happen outside of the usual suspected fora of listservs, blogs, etc, all for and by the ladies.

Much of the resulting discussion has been a bit heavy-handed on both sides– “OMG, he’s totally right!” “OMG, he’s totally wrong!” Some great points have already been well covered by others, especially Jezebel blogger Anna’s point that women aren’t allowed culturally to be the aggressive jerks that successful men are. This was also the place where I had the most visceral reaction — the conclusion that we need to teach women to be more like men: more assertive and aggressive, demanding of what they want and need. This approach to solving the “where are teh womenz” problem misses the mark in a way that 70s & 80s power feminism also missed the mark for me. The “we’re just as good as men” statements and subsequent actions set the wrong frame. It assumes:

• Men’s success and ways of achieving it are the gold standard.
• Women’s lack of success and lack of use of men’s ways is the deviant behavior. (as in, “deviant from the norm,” not deviant as in “naughty”)
• Therefore, women should act more like men to be successful.

Personally, I’m just not that interested in acting more like a dude for the chance that my work gets more widely recognized or that I get paid more to do it, and I suspect many other women aren’t, either. It’s sort of, just maybe, one of the myriad of reasons we haven’t been acting like dudes since women’s lib, y’know?

What’s far more interesting to me is shifting the cultural consciousness around what being successful means, and what it then takes to achieve it. Creating a more holistic standard to which men and women both can hold themselves, and then compete/collaborate, etc., offers us an opportunity to break down terribly unhealthy versions of masculinity and femininity that oppress us all.

Asking women to be more like men (which is different than what Shirky claims we’re doing when we ask men to be “sensitive” and “listen” — that’s just asking for a little humanity, there) falls on a spectrum of prescribing feminine behavior that is dangerous and unhealthy. We’re putting the onus on women to fit themselves into a culture that doesn’t value them enough to begin with. It sounds a lot like misguided sexual assault prevention tactics (“how not to get yourself raped!”), and Shirky goes there himself when he points out the time colleges spend teaching women self-defense. Me? I cringed right there.� Where are the colleges teaching men not to rape women?*

I’ve been looking for an excuse to post about this great piece from Jill at I Blame the Patriarchy, wherein she rewrites one of those email chain letters telling women what to do in order not to get themselves attacked, into a guide for men on how to prevent sexual assault. Now seems as good a time as any:

Sexual Assault Prevention Tips Guaranteed to Work

1. Don't put drugs in women's drinks.

2. When you see a woman walking by herself, leave her alone.

3. If you pull over to help a woman whose car has broken down, remember not to assault her.

4. If you are in a lift and a woman gets in, don't assault her. You know what? Don't even ogle her.

5. When you encounter a woman who is asleep, the safest course of action is to not assault her.

6. Never creep into a woman's home through an unlocked door or window, or spring out at her from between parked cars, or assault her.

7. When you lurk in bushes and doorways with criminal intentions, always wear bright clothing, wave a flashlight, or play "Boys Who Rape (Should All Be Destroyed)" by the Raveonettes on a boombox really loud, so women in the vicinity will know where to aim their flamethrowers.

8. USE THE BUDDY SYSTEM! If it is inconvenient for you to stop yourself from assaulting women, ask a trusted friend to accompany you when in public.

9. Carry a rape whistle. If you find that you are about to assault a woman, you can hand the whistle to your buddy, so s/he can blow it to call for help.

10. Give your buddy a revolver, so that when indifferent passers-by either ignore the rape whistle, or gather round to enjoy the spectacle, s/he can pistol-whip you.

Don't forget: Honesty is the best policy. When asking a woman out on a date, don't pretend that you are interested in her as a person; tell her straight up that you expect to be assaulting her later. If you don't communicate your intentions, the woman may take it as a sign that you do not plan to rape her.

Men-folk: see how terrible and condescending and infuriating it is to be on the receiving end of this kind of thing? Jill’s list o’ tips makes me laugh and cry a little.

Tactics to solve gender inequality that don’t address the wider cultural discrimination and structural oppression, that only put the problem in women’s own hands, do nothing but perpetuate a system that keep women “in their place.” This is shockingly unappealing to us at the receiving end of said place assignment.

UPDATE, 1/19: Follow-up post is here.

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* When I was at SUNY-Albany, there was a program for men only called “A Few Good Men,” though I don’t know what the content was. If anyone has references to good programs (though I’m skeptical they’re offered at the same frequency and with the same enthusiastic energy as self-defense for women courses), please post them in the comments.

Update, 7/13/09: Two things. There’s a post on my progress and thoughts here, and also, to reflect the offline donations I’m getting, I’m now gradually lowering the goal of the ChipIn.

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Friends, colleagues, clients! Lend me your ears…

I’m writing you with some exciting news that makes me very happy. I just signed a contract from Berrett-Koehler publishers to write a book I’ve been imagining for a long time. But it’s going to take some very hard work on my part, and I hope you can help me succeed.

The book I’m writing is on the topic that has been all the rage in the media — social networking and all that implies with Twitter, Facebook, and much more. Here’s the purpose of the book: how do we ensure that these tools are in being used most effectively by those who have too often been on the sidelines of technology advances– women, people of color, queer folk, and more?

This is a fabulous opportunity for many social change advocates to jump into the new tech conversations and help shape the future, and I want to make sure that happens. Specific topics I want to cover about women’s experiences online include privacy and security, as well as shifting cultural values through organizing and action. I’m also going to be highlighting the voices of experts working in with social media in communities of color and more– voices you don’t hear when tech is being talked about.

Here’s my challenge and why I need your help: Berrett-Koehler is an incredible publisher — supportive, collaborative, and incredibly innovative– and I’m thrilled to be working with them. But they don’t pay advances. So, to do this book (and it is incredibly fast-tracked), I need to stop working as a consultant for the next three months and do nothing but write the book. Thus, I need investors. I need you to help me raise $15,000 to cover my expenses, travel, and research. Please toss some money into a “Feed Deanna” pot!

I’m off to a good start: the Hightower Lowdown (Jim Hightower’s monthly newsletter), where I’ve worked for 4 years, is covering my rent through the summer. And Don Hazen, editor of AlterNet.org (where I also have worked) and Doug Kreeger (AlterNet’s board chair) will put the first $2,000 in if people will match it. All donations of $250 and over can be made through the Independent Media Institute, so they’ll be tax-deductible.

So, here I am, hat in hand for a good cause. I’ll make you proud. You can donate via PayPal at http://www.deannazandt.com/chipin or send a check to me (address below).

I know it is a tough time to be asking for money with many people out of work and struggling. I hope you’ll forgive my chutzpah. Yet I want this all to happen so badly I can taste it; it’s more than anything I’ve wanted in a very long time. It’s a dream come true in many ways, and I hope even if you can’t give at this time, you’ll join me in celebrating the moment.

much love,
deanna

P.S. — For anyone who donates $100 or more, I will give you a copy of the book with an inscription of my heartfelt thanks. One more time, that donation link is:

http://www.deannazandt.com/chipin

P.P.S. — Thanks in advance for anything and everything that you can do to support this wildly excited, somewhat humbled first-time author. Here’s more info about the book: http://www.deannazandt.com/bookannounce , and I’ll be blogging as much of the book’s content as possible at http://www.deannazandt.com/ throughout the summer.

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For donations over $250, checks can be made payable to:

Independent Media Institute
77 Federal St
San Francisco, CA 94107

Memo: Deanna Zandt Project

http://www.lets-panic.com/

What do I want to do, I hear you asking yourself? In short — I do want you to buy the book, after all — I’m going to be describing the social media moment as a huge opportunity for social change and action. If you’ve read some of what I’ve written about Twitter and other services, and my ideas about the giant gene pool and the desperate need for diversity, you have an idea of where the book will go. Plus, it’ll be stunningly entertaining to boot!

It was interesting to go from “I don’t think I ever want to write a book” at the end of February to looking at what I’ve got to sign for the deal in the middle of May. I wanted to share this part of the story as both a testament to Johanna’s powerful skillz of persuasion, as well as a revelatory moment about how these things can work– especially for women who think they have to know every detail of everything before they set off on sharing their expertise. Not that I know anything about that.

In the beginning, I couldn’t identify what topic (of the myriad of things I’m interested in) I’d have enough passion, expertise and attention span to write an entire book about. Johanna asked me to complete an exercise as homework after our first official call, where I was to answer three questions:

• What community do I identify with, am affiliated with or otherwise care about?
• What is that community’s point of pain? What’s preventing them from getting to the next level?
• What book could I write to address that point of pain?

Well, jeez, that was easy. My community, through my work in feminism over the years, is women; their point of pain is an intimidation and/or distrust of new technologies, and yeah, I’m pretty sure I could write a book helping them get over that hump. As Johanna and I fleshed out my ideas, we both realized that what I’m talking about is larger than just women needing to take advantage of this moment. I’m going to be talking about and bringing in experts from the fields of racial justice, LGBTQQI organizing, the front lines of the class warfare… yeah. It’s going to be one big party in my book.

So, there you have it. We’re attempting to do this on a strikingly fast timetable, and I’m going to be looking to my community for help in a few areas. One of them is fundraising, but that’s a separate story that I’ll blog later this week. For now, I’ll be over here just bouncin’ off the walls.

PS– A big, big, big shoutout to Christine Cupaiuolo, the most fabulous editor ever, without whose help I seriously would not have been able to put together a proposal that knocked it out of the park as hard as it did. Can’t wait to move on to the book work with you, CMC!

I wanted to share with you an amazing worldwide conference that I’m participating in next week. It’s called “Women Who Tech,” and it brings together hundreds of women who leverage their technology savvy to inspire change and transform the world. And it takes place all online and on the phone!

Women Who Tech
When: May 12, 2009. Panels are 50 min long and run from 11AM EDT to 6PM EDT.
Where: Everywhere via phone and web
http://womenwhotech.com/
A mere $10 for a whole day of goodness

I participated last year, and at first I thought the distance thing was going to be strange– but it’s absolutely incredible, and I highly recommend joining in the fun. What’s great is that this is really not just for women who currently tech– if you’re interested social media, launching a startup, learning about new tools… this is *the* place to be.

I’ll be moderating this panel:

What Shirky Didn’t Tell Us – 4PM EDT
This panel will look at problems that are arising along gender, class and race lines within the new paradigms of Web 2.0, 3.0 and beyond. When we remove explicit structure from the organizing and tech equation, inherent structure arises– illustrating through technology just how far we have to go for social equality. But we don’t want to just kvetch about the problems: this panel will present and brainstorm solutions together. Panelists: Allison Fine, techPresident and Personal Democracy Forum, Tanya Tarr, AFSCME.

Thennnnn, there are parties that evening in major cities for participants to get together and socialize. Shockingly, I’m throwing the NYC party. Details:

NYC Women Who Tech After-Party
6:30pm – 9:00pm
Donnybrook
35 Clinton St (corner of Stanton)
http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=73623154033
Drink specials and noshy things galore!

Feel free to come by and say “hi” even if you’re not attending the conference. Other parties are scheduled for DC, San Francisco, London and Atlanta, too.

I can’t express enough how excited I am to be part of this gang. Please feel free to forward on, and if you’re one of those journalist types and you want to write about the events or women in technology in general, drop me a line!

As the day has worn on, more parts of the story are unfolding, and all these little tidbits at the intersection of tech, culture, media and commerce are more than fascinating. This is the kind of story that sends me down the rabbit hole of musing for days.

Let’s start with the tech side of things

According to Jessica Valenti (and her publisher, Seal Press), Amazon reps are claiming that this is a purely internal issue caused by the mysterious “glitch” spoken of last night. I don’t think the reps know what they’re talking about, frankly. What I think is going on: there is a severe vulnerability in the Amazon flagging-for-inappropriate system, and it’s been found and exploited by one or more nerds with too much time on their hands. Amazon’s mistake, vis a vis the brave new world of social media, is two-fold:

• Refusing to acknowledge a vulnerability. People are reaching the point not just that they like transparency in dealing with people who hold lots of important info on their behalf, but they are coming to demand it. Amazon’s “nothing more to see here” approach is damaging to the relationship they have with those outraged by the exploit.
• Refusing to acknowledge the pain of affected people. If you have an entire relationship built on trust (with personal info, with commitments to move products, with referrals and wishlists, etc), you have the obligation to have that uncomfortable sit-down when a betrayal is introduced to the relationship. Amazon hasn’t done that yet. Yikes.

There’s a livejournal blogger out there now claiming responsibility for the exploit. I won’t link over, because I actually think he’s full of crap, as do those who’ve attempted to reproduce his exploitative code. It’s a well known practice for those with no skillz to take responsibility for things they have no part of to build up their hacker cred. Please. You know what tipped me off, for the record? The references to wanting to have anonymous sex with women and heroin from Craigslist. Fetishy-objectifying of women is common in the hacker community, for sure, but this guy is just… silly.

This doesn’t mean that someone didn’t come up with something similar– I’m almost positive they did. Which means that Amazon has a serious problem, and they better have a better explanation than the “glitch.”

There’s a bigger picture here: cultural implications

From a tech point of view, recommendation systems and flag-as-inappropriate tools that aren’t built to handle gaming the system are just no good. It’s unacceptable that a masterminding giant such as Amazon wasn’t prepared for this kind of attack. Especially considering how much it affects Amazon’s contract and relationship with the people that provide them with the goods its users demand, and how much users trust Amazon to do the Right Thing.

On a wider cultural scale, as I’d mentioned in the article in the WMC, the cultural implications of these attacks — especially when it’s big enough to get this kind of attention — are huge. Geek culture is one of the last vestiges of an overtly sexist and toxic environment for anyone who’s not a straight guy, most likely white and middle-class. (Not limited to the nerds of computer love, either– check out this post on misogyny and comic books from Amptoons.) When these attacks occur, it reveals not just the hatred that the hackers themselves have for women and LGBT folk, but the wider cultural intolerance we still have running rampant.

Decades of victories in civil rights for women and people of color, and more recently, LGBT folk seeking rights to get married, cannot correct the thousands of years of damage on which our culture is built. When a system of rapid information distribution (oh, like say, The Internet!) provides anonymity, free(-ish) speech and very little accountability, it makes it easy for people’s True Feelings to come out. It’s my feeling that what we see online is a mirror showing us the dark underbelly of what exists.

Some would react by clamping on the anonymity, the level of free speech and the accountability, often all at once. Sure, keeping trolls off your comments section is probably a good idea. Enacting laws making it impossible to operate independently and anonymously online? Bad idea. Very bad. We need to be addressing the root causes of our misogyny, our racism, our homophobia — not piling on bandaids, duct tape and bailing twine to keep people’s mouths shut. Only when it came to the threat of physical danger would I advocate for restriction. I have witnessed friends and colleagues being attacked viciously, and there is no one on this planet that deserves that level of fear stuffed down their throats.

It’s time to get real, folks. These attacks are proof that feminism and its partners in other social justice work still have a long, long way to go. Long way. I’m on board… are you?

Updates on theories, conspiracy and otherwise, are welcome in the comments.

Over the holiday weekend, a firestorm let loose on the Internet: For no apparent reason, books on Amazon.com with feminist, LGBT and sexual-empowerment themes were removed from the sales rankings, numbers that show how well a product is performing on the website.

Angry authors and readers responded by launching a full-on social media assault, using blogs, Facebook and Twitter to raise awareness and to collect signatures on a petition.

Rapid response campaigns not affiliated with any one organization are increasingly becoming the norm in the age of free communication tools.� The Amazon incident (dubbed "AmazonFAIL," drawing on usage of "fail" as an indicator of strong disapproval in online cultures) is a fascinating example in part because of the cultural motivation behind and the mechanics of the removal and the implications for sales of "banned" books.

Read the full article here.

Bonus: I also played superfangrrl and got my picture taken with Jane Fonda.