• Monday, 9:30am. Hyatt TX Ballroom 1.
  The best donuts you’ve ever had in your life will be served!
  People Power: Leveraging Personal Stories to Build Influence.
  http://schedule.sxsw.com/events/event_IAP7037
  With: Twanna Hines, Jean Russell, Cheryl Contee and Andrea Miller.
  Now, social is personal. From finance site Mint.com’s anti-immigration blog post gaffe to YourTango CEO Andrea Miller’s “How to Date an Indian (Advice for the Non-Indian),” social media fuses personal with public in a way never seen before. Whether sharing taste in hiphop, dating preferences, provocative political ideas, or insider information about a soon-to-be-launched business, social media strategically develops personal and professional reputations. Stories can build audiences, grow support for campaigns and change mainstream ideas about social issues. They can also alienate various communities, compromise business information confidentiality or damage brands. If social media has shown us anything, it’s that stories still matter. This panel will be a concrete conversation on how successful online personalities have managed their personal and professional lives using social media: telling authentic stories about our experiences, and using those stories to build powerful, engaged communities.
• Monday, 11:30am. SXSW Bookstore — ACC Ballroom Foyer D
  Book signing! I’ll be there till 12pm.
  http://schedule.sxsw.com/events/event_OE00561
• Monday, 12:30pm. Icehauers, 83 Rainey St.
  Twitter for Good at SXSW and Beyond
  http://claire.us.com/twitter-for-good-at-sxsw-and-beyond/
  The lovely Claire Diaz Ortiz, who leads philanthropy and social innovation at Twitter, is hosting this lunchtime discussion and workshop to answer the question: “What 1 THING could Twitter, Inc. do to better help non-profits, causes, and anyone trying to make a difference in the world using the platform?” More details at Claire’s blog post.

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.

June 3-4: Personal Democracy Forum, New York City. This is one of my favorite conferences all year because it’s one of the few that blend many worlds well together: Technology, electoral politics, advocacy politics and cultural analysis. I’m giving a 10-minute talk on Thursday, June 3, that will (definitively!) answer the question: “Can the Internet fix politics?” Muwahaha. Other luminaries on the speaking roster include Howard Rheingold, Clay Shirky, Cheryl Contee, Jane Hamsher, Arianna Huffington, Esther Dyson, Anil Dash and many, many more. Register today — I’ve got a code to give you $100 off the registration; just email me and ask for it.

June 7-9: America’s Future Now, Washington DC. A yearly pilgramage to DC for progressives, where we talk strategy and tactics for challenging the right-wing agenda. I’ll be moderating a workshop on Tuesday morning, June 8, on social networking with Toby Chaudhuri, and we’ve actually turned it into a gameshow format: Social Media Jeopardy! Contestants will be Lizz Winstead, Garlin Gilchrist II, Scott Goodstein and Heather Holdridge. Also, Monday night, June 7, will see the DC launch of my book, thanks to Toby and Scott of Revolution Messaging, who are throwing me a killer party. Wooooo! Register today for all the goods.

June 9-11: Making Media Connections, Chicago, IL. I’m thrilled to be keynoting this gathering of non-profit communicators, put together by the Community Media Workshop. This year’s theme is “Storytelling and Strategy in the Digital Age,” which hits home strong for me– it’s through our stories that we have always made change, and our shiny new digital tools give us unprecedented capabilities to tell them. Register today for this amazing conference. (PS — That Friday night, June 11, I’ll be reading at Women & Children First, and having a party afterwards nearby.)

(note: You can look at the slides and text here; here’s the video.)

A week and a half ago, I received an email asking me if I’d be willing to do an Ignite talk for the March 4 NYC event, part of Global Ignite Week. If you’re not familiar with Ignite, here’s the deal: You have 5 minutes to give your talk; you create a PowerPoint presentation to go with the talk, but here’s the kicker: You must do 20 slides, and the slides will advance automatically every 15 seconds. Talk about creative restraint inspiration! Not only is it an amazing challenge and a great place to flex your speaker muscles, but the Ignite platform also reaches far and wide into multiple communities, and can be a huge opportunity to reach lots of audiences with your message. Was I up for it? Sure.

Then the panic set in. Oh my God, what I have I signed myself up for?

Tikva Morowati, one of the organizers of the event, said she needed my topic and description by later that day. Yeep. I knew I would have a hard time getting this all together on my own, so, like any good social citizen, I went to my community. First thing I did was email a listserv I belong to, where I knew many of the women had given Ignite talks before, for advice. The takeaways:

• Practice. A lot. 5 minutes goes by fast, but those 15 seconds go by faster.
• Don’t use the slides to make your point. They can add humor, etc., but as the organizers say: they should be icing.
• Leave padding for both your own potential stumble and laughs/heckling.
• Know your audience. Igniters tend to come, at least in NYC, from the tech/startup community.
• Be smart. Don’t dumb anything down.

Next thing I did was beg the most entertaining stage performer I know, Baratunde Thurston, to spend a few minutes with me that day. I needed a crash course in both topic generation — how to create a message that was going to be true to how seriously I take my work, and be engaging/fun — as well as pointers on how to set up the talk itself. He generously took time to have a little lunch and run through some ideas. His advice? Make sure you tell a story people can insert themselves into. Also, consider giving counter examples to what you want to illustrate.

I knew I wanted to talk about how social networks are shifting our cultural consciousness, a huge chunk of what I cover in Share This!. Baratunde and I came up with the idea to base it around a pop song, make that the hook of the talk. On my way home from our meeting, I scrolled through my iPod looking for songs, and landed on, “It’s Not Easy Being Green.”

Of course! The Muppets! And who better to be my model social citizen than Kermit himself?

I quickly drafted a title — “What Would Kermit Do? How Being a Muppet on Social Networks Can Change the World” — and a description, and got to work on the actual talk. Now, a word about my prep: I’m a recovering overachiever. I was that kid in school that would do the most outrageous OCD acts to learn material and concepts inside out– think Tracy Flick for academics. I’ve been in recovery for a number of years now, but Ignite made me relapse. (In a good way, I hope.)

Melissa Pierce, who’s making an unbelievably awesome film called “Life In Perpetual Beta,” offered to bounce ideas around with me. I can’t stress enough how much the buddy system helped, here–throughout the process, every panic was eased by checking in quickly with my buddy. She sent me this great video, “Why and How to Give an Ignite Talk,” which stresses storytelling as the basis of every talk.

I looked up how many words a 5-minute talk was, and most sources agreed that it was somewhere around 700-800 words. So, I drafted a 750-word piece around what I wanted to say. Melissa and I moved things around a bit, and then I set to timing myself reading the whole piece and editing it until it was just under 5 minutes. Then, I timed out where the 15 second breaks roughly were, and broke up the talk in my document editor.

Then came the fun part. I knew that I wanted the visuals to be strong, and the words to be few. Thus, I set about to watching the Muppet Movie (which was the focal point for the whole talk) and finding stills that would work for each slot. Because I knew the movie inside out (I’m talkin’, nearly word for word), this part was easy. Once the stills were gathered, I dropped them all in Photoshop and added the text for each–I don’t like the way PowerPoint does text; Photoshop gives me much more control. All in all, this part probably took me 6-7 hours.

I also landed on doing the idea of a tshirt — playing off the “Jesus is my homeboy” meme, I created “Kermit is my homeboy.” The kind people at Neighborhoodies.com, just up the way in DUMBO Brooklyn, let me know they could have it printed by Wednesday. Yay!

The overachiever then kicked into high gear. This was a technique that I’ve used to memorize all kinds of things since I was probably 10 or 11 years old– scripts for acting roles, texts for oral exams, you name it. I made an MP3 of me reading the talk, and started listening to it whenever I could. On the train, walking around, etc. But the craziest part, which really seems to work for me, is that I listened to it on loop while I slept every night, from Monday to Wednesday nights.

I spent most of my waking practice time–probably an hour each day this week–trying to memorize the talk without looking at the presentation or my script. I made 20 index cards with 3-4 keywords to help me keep going when I’d start to stumble, and each time, I found myself using the cards less. By Wednesday, I was able to get through most of it on the train. Over Wednesday evening, I started measuring it with the presentation timing, and it was pretty much spot-on. Doing that part over and over showed me where I was likely to run long, and where I had room to futz. I even made myself a cocktail and practiced it a little buzzed, just in case I went on stage last.

Thursday, I had a whirlwind day of other speaking gigs, so I didn’t get that much time to practice during the day. The hour or so before the show, though, I went over to the Bowery Poetry Club. I used to work there, so as long as there’s no one using the stage, friends are sort of allowed to use it for unofficial practice space. This helped me get used to the lights, as well as the distractions of people walking around, talking, etc., through my spiel.

By the time I arrived at Galapagos, my brain was pretty much fried and I found it impossible to keep practicing. Thus, I unleashed my nervous energy being super chatty with my fellow speakers (thanks to Noel and Andy for humoring me, heh). I also found out I was going on first– this panicked me initially, but then I realized I could (a) get it over with, and (b) not have to worry about following someone truly spectacular. (And whew, because there were some rockstars last night!)

Then, the big moment came, and there I was onstage. Once it got going, I was shocked to find it rolling out of my mouth. I worry that it sounded *too* rehearsed at times, but mostly, I’m really pleased with how I did. People laughed at the things I hoped they would, and many have reported back that they really enjoyed it. Looking forward to sharing the video with you all!

I'm gonna start off by telling you a little story from the spring that I wrote about in my book, "Share This! How You Will Change the World with Social Networking." It comes out in June 2010.

It's a Saturday afternoon, Easter weekend, Passover is going on, things are pretty quiet in the world online and off. A lotta digitally-oriented people, when they're bored, will do things like Google themselves and check website stats and whatnot. Authors tend to go to Amazon and check their sales ranks. Now, the sales rank is not just about how many books they've sold, it's also the key to the whole Amazon system. If you don't have a sales rank for your book or product, you don't turn up in search results on the site, for example.

Well, that Saturday afternoon, some authors were surprised to find that they no longer had sales ranks on their books, and that suddenly their books weren't appearing in search results. Murmurs began on Twitter as authors posted their findings here and there, and consumers started posting about failed searches. Someone started using a hashtag to express their extreme dissatisfaction. Who knows what a hashtag is? [If you want to learn more about the power -- and fun -- of hashtags, go watch Baratunde Thurston's video, "There's A #Hashtag For That."]

That hashtag was #AmazonFAIL. ("fail" is a really fun snarky catchall word for "this sucks" events.) Because of that, people participating were able to track all of the related posts about Amazon. Within a few hours, enough information had been gathered to show the types of books that were being flagged: LGBT, feminist, and disability themed sex-positive books. They mysteriously received an "adult" flag while heteronormative sexual books, like Playboy calendars, and anti-gay screeds, remained untouched.

The flames fanned higher, and soon various "web celebrities" took up the cause, using their social capital and influence to share stories about books that were being, in effect, digitally banned. Not long after, several newspapers caught wind of the firestorm… the LA Times blogged the de-ranking Sunday.

The mob stormed the castle all day Sunday. By later that night — Easter Sunday, no less — Amazon was forced to make a statement in response. A spokesperson told Publisher's Weekly that the de-ranking problem was a "glitch," and that Amazon was looking into it.

Now, imagine the same scenario just 10 years ago. Amazon, even then, was a popular online retailer with a good amount of credibility. If a huge swath of books had been removed from the site in 1999, how would people have protested? It would have been through angry emails to the corporate offices. Perhaps op-eds might have been pitched to various newspapers, and over several days and weeks various civil rights groups might have gotten involved somehow. In short, everyday people would have had to rely on a slow-moving hierarchical system with lots of gatekeepers along the way deciding if this was a worthwhile issue.

Instead, in 2009, these voices slipped into the consciousness of the web, created a campaign without any organization or funding, and forced Amazon to respond within 12 hours. And to ice that cake, the mainstream media played catch-up in the following days, hoping to catch the scraps of the story. [Postscript was that Amazon said it was Amazon France's fault; they were updating the catalog over the weekend and accidentally flagged all these books. Which to me sounds a lot like "oh you guys, I totally have a girlfriend, she just lives in FRANCE." But whatever. I digress.]

You've learned about a ton of new tactics and strategies today. But one of the biggest things to understand is that something very fundamental has not changed at all about organizing. Before any organizing happens, online or offline, before you get your phonebanking, your petitions, your door-knocking, your lobby days, your email campaigns, your anything– change starts with stories. Our stories. Storytelling has been the most powerful building block for social change since the beginning of time… think about how long we've been sitting around the campfire! What these tools that you've spent all day hashing out do is give us unprecedented power to share our stories to many more people than we could have imagined.

What happens when you tell stories? Two very magical things: you build trust with other people in your network, and from there you build empathy. It's very important to note that I'm not talking about sympathy. Sympathy is where you feel bad for someone who's had something bad happen to them. Empathy is where you actually share in the emotions that other people have and express. It's a powerful, deeply primal experience.

The trust we create with one another on social networks is what fuels the empathetic response we have to one another, even if we don't know each other that well. That trust-created empathy is what will lead us away from the isolation, and thus apathy, that we've experienced as a culture in the last century's focus on mass communications and market demographics… siloing people and separating them. These technologies are all about connecting, engaging, sharing.

Your presence is required in this work: we need you here in the online social space. Desperately. We are confronting a tremendous opportunity to bring in voices previously marginalized or dismissed when it comes to shaping public conversations. But change won't happen on its own… it requires you to show up, and to participate. Tech will not solve our problems. We will solve our problems, using technology.

If you choose to sit this one out, though, there's a ripple effect caused by your void. Because you're not contributing to the larger, very public conversations about what's happening in the world and how problems should be solved, the conversation will go on without you. Others will be defining and directing the conversation without the benefit of your experiences and knowledge. Y'know, like what's been going on for most of us for the last few thousand years.

Here's the thing: Creating a just society is sort of like the evolution of species. If you have a bunch of the same DNA mixing together, the species mutates poorly and eventually dies off. But bring in variety — new strains of DNA — and you create a stronger species.  It's no different in idea generation. You get a bunch of the same people talking to each other and making the rules for a few millennia, and eventually you're going to end up with a lack of meaningful advancement.

It's time to bring fresh life into the conversations that we're having about social change, and sharing our stories are our strongest bets for doing so.

I think we can change the traditional power dynamics. In fact, I think you will change the traditional power dynamics. But it's not all shiny happy rainbows and butterflies, though.

We're living like fish in the water on the Internet right now: we don't know, or we're not willing to recognize, that we're soaking the social structures we've been living with for hundreds, maybe thousands of years. We're porting our understanding of the offline world… with all our prejudices, biases and hierarchies… onto the blank canvas of the Internet. Especially in spaces that are focused on relationships and social features, we have to be aware of this. Research like that of noted tech rockstar danah boyd shows that people self-segregate online–white people hang out with white people online, even tho, for example a Pew study showed that an African-American online is more likely to use Twitter than a white person online. A Harvard study showed us that men are twice as more likely to follow another man on Twitter, etc., even tho women make up more than have of all social networks' memberships. We've got to interrupt this pattern now, with conscious effort and action.

This is where the storytelling comes in. Lemme tell you another.

In the summer of 2009, a private country club in Philadelphia banned a group of African-American children from swimming in its pool, despite the fact that the kids' camp had paid for their swimming privileges. Capturing the public’s tremendous shock and outrage, comedian Elon James White, host of the popular web series “This Week in Blackness,” opened an episode with the words: "Hi, I'm broadcasting live from 1952…"

When I heard about the incident, I signed petitions, I passed the info along on Twitter and Facebook, and I talked about it with my friends, both online and off. As the dialogue continued, people started to share stories on social networks about the first time they had been discriminated against. I read story after unfiltered, unedited story, written by friends and people I barely knew. Each time, the stories were devastating; so was the fact that I hadn't heard them before.

I realized that without social media, I probably never would have heard those stories. Or, I might have heard one of them, isolated from others. Being white, I have never been the victim of racism, and since many of my friends are white, they haven't either. Prior to social media, I mostly likely wouldn't have ended up in the company of a group of people of color sharing their childhood discrimination stories so openly and honestly.

Social networks offer a huge potential for overlap between groups of people. Even though humans will always be drawn to others that they think are like them in one way or another, sharing powerful stories with one other has the potential to reach across social boundaries and create new kinds of safe spaces.

So yeah, we'll always look for people who are like us, but we'll never be able to isolate ourselves completely from those who are different from us. Social media tools make it easier than ever to dip in and out of social circles. In that space of relatively pressure-free exploration is where the overlap can start to occur.

In the case of sharing stories of childhood discrimination, there was an assumed level of safety through the trust and empathy we had established with one another. I trusted the people I follow on Twitter, and in turn, they trusted me to listen.

I received an education that day. It's one thing to read stories in the newspaper and get upset; it's an entirely different, deeper experience to read friends and colleagues sharing intimate, painful, raw moments in real time. Those shared moments left me feeling not just more passionate about addressing racism, but also more willing to hear what’s being said when I need to listen.

Change does not, and will not, happen in isolation or on an individual basis… we need each other to produce results. As we start to explore with social media, we have the potential to deepen our understanding of one another's life experiences, and in turn, ourselves. Telling our stories in real, authentic ways becomes critical to moving others toward progress and change.

So! To sum up some takeaways for you all:

1. Organizers: you are not reaching everyone if you are just going to the most popular social network of the moment.
2. Don't forget that you bring bias to the table. When you enter a space that doesn't have formal structure, like a lot of the Internet, our own biases will take over.
3. Your stories matter. The stories of your community members matter even more. I hereby knight you with an ambassadorship to a more democratic future. Do you choose to accept this mission?

Thank you!

Presentation:

Here’s some links to the presentations and workshops that I led and co-led all week; thanks to the participants who took killer notes. There’s tons of incredible info on, and being added to, this wiki, so check back often:

• Inspiration: Social Networks (midway down the page). Day one was all about showing our participants the myriad of tools at their disposal and some successes that others have had. [PowerPoint preso here]
• Measure THIS! Social Media ROI. How to think about metrics for social media work. [No session notes yet, but PowerPoint preso here.]
• Engaging business leaders and decision-makers through social media, led with Eric Squair.
• Twitter for Individuals and Organizations. (shocker, right?)

http://www.deannazandt.com/presentations/nssr/

Then a day or two of downtime with the parents while I’m in the neighborhood, which always does the soul some good. But alas, it’ll be back to the city to resume apartment hunting madness. Anyone have any leads on a dog-friendly 2 bedroom apartment in Brooklyn?

• Empowering online communities (full color), 2.3MB
• Empowering online communities (printable black-n-white), 1.1MB

Also, here’s the link to the resource list: http://del.icio.us/tag/wamweb2.0

• Presentation: Web 2.0 (PDF, 2.2MB)
• Presentation: Web 2.0, printable version (PDF, 2.1MB)
• Glossary: Web 2.0 (PDF, 32kb)

[If you weren't in LA, you might find it interesting, but my disclaimer is that this isn't in any way an end-all be-all on "the Web 2.0." It's a primer for media folk who wanted to be brought up to speed, and avoids geek-speak as much as possible. :-) ]