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.

You know about social media. You know that you’ve got to get on board with it for your organization, or for your own activist work. You may have even signed up for Twitter or Facebook already, but you don’t know where to start. What are the right tools to use? What do I say? Why are other people doing this? And, perhaps, most importantly: how the hell do I know if it’s working?!

View the full event page for the whole description and pricing information, and to register. We’re also offering scholarships for those in need.

WE ARE GOING TO HAVE SO MUCH FUN.

Oh, and speaking of need, I should mention how this idea came about– a lot of people come to Jen Angel (of Aid & Abet) and I looking for a hands-on workshop, but can’t afford to bring me into their organization or event. This workshop will get folks who need it the most, working on the front lines, the skills they need without emptying their budgets.

Based on how things go in SF, I’ll be offering this boot camp in other cities (likely next up will be NYC and DC), and possibly online. If you’re interested helping to host one in other cities, please let us know– leave a comment below or send me an email. And, if you’re interested in bringing me to your organization for a group training or strategy session, drop Jen a line.

Increasingly, I’m getting mentions from people with whom I’m not familiar, asking to click on links to their work. I see this happening to my friends, too, so I thought I’d collect and share my responses to one Twitter user on why this doesn’t work that well.

“	.@gbedard1 ok, time for some free advice. People pay thousands for this (or they just buy my book, haha), so take notes:
	randomdeanna September 9, 2011

“	.@gbedard1 I don’t have a relationship to you or your work, so randomly tweeting me isn’t going to make me click your link
	randomdeanna September 9, 2011

“	.@gbedard1 when I check out who you are, I see you’re randomly tweeting a lot of ppl, so now you kinda look like a spammer. oh noes!
	randomdeanna September 9, 2011

“	.@gbedard1 Twitter isn’t a shortcut to popularity. It’s a means to build relationships.
	randomdeanna September 9, 2011

“	.@gbedard1 So start getting to know the ppl whose attention you want, and let them get to know you. *Then* pitch them shamelessly. :) /end
	randomdeanna September 9, 2011

 UPDATE: I got a little swipe about my ego being too big to click on links. Granted, my ego is ginormous (ask anyone who knows me intimately offline), but for once, it doesn’t have much to do with the situation at hand. I’m just explaining here how important the relationship mechanism is for sharing information– it’s called “social” media for a reason. Tee hee.

What I’ve found troublesome so far is that the atmosphere/culture Google+ has far less “personality” than the other services do. I don’t see as much intimate content there (yet?) as I do other services. And the intimate content that is posted there doesn’t seem to resonate as much with readers.

I’m theorizing that this is entirely due to Circles. Because people have the ability to limit their more intimate moments to smaller groups of people, they seem to be automatically choosing to keep most intimate moments extremely private. This is a boon for issues of safety and vulnerability, for sure– as an advocate for privacy controls elsewhere, and against egregious privacy changes, I of course see the value.

But I’m mourning a little bit the loss of what often, for me, makes social networking so interesting: the very human, authentic versions of ourselves being shared in a wider public way. That kind of sharing initiates trust-building, validates others who have similar experiences, educates those who don’t, among many other sociological phenomena. But really, bottom line here, it made everyone seem actually human.

Google+ feels like a personal branding engine. And I hate personal branding. I’m often reminded of this quote from Tara Hunt in my book:

“People shouldn’t be acting more like brands,” she said. “We’re humans! Instead of having a personal brand, why not just have a personality?”

People on Google+ are sharing what they think wider audiences want to hear from them. Audiences. As in, “let me broadcast to you.” There is a missing emotional connection there that makes posting something “sharing.”

The last few years, we’ve had this remarkable revolution in sharing that has made it a little safer, and a little more fun, to make ourselves a teensy bit vulnerable. Now that we have a toy that gives us the option to hide our vulnerability, it feels like we’re choosing the easy way out.

The other thing that bothers me is the amount of people on Google+ talking about their exodus from the new red-headed stepchild of the moment, Facebook. I’m no lover of how Facebook handles a lot of its policies, mind you, but it still holds lots of value for me. One of my (many, many) cousins, who just had her first baby, isn’t on Google+ to share photos of him. Neither is my brother, who posts rare but utterly hilarious status updates. Nor are a huge swath of people from whom I want to learn, and about whose lives I want to hear.

Maybe you’re saying, “Not yet.” And maybe you’re right– maybe there will be a huge exodus someday, just as we all left Friendster and MySpace. But the tone of these anti-Facebook-community statements reminds me too much of what danah boyd talked about in her Personal Democracy Forum 2009 keynote, “The Not-So-Hidden Politics of Class Online.” If you haven’t heard or read it, go now.

The basic point is that because social networks are social, they are completely wrapped up in all of the class, race, gender and other identity parameters that we carry with us in our offline lives. When the exodus from MySpace to Facebook started, it started with predominantly white, affluent kids who decided to get away from the “ghetto” of MySpace. A key quote from boyd:

They narrated MySpace as the dangerous underbelly of the Internet while Facebook was the utopian savior.

It sounds achingly familiar to what I read on Google+ == getting away from family members, getting away from app/game users, getting away from the inconsequential jabbering. There have also been sexist/ageist analyses saying “your mom won’t use Google+.” Because it started with the tech elite (who, I dare say, don’t have the highest emotional intelligence a lot of the time), this sad course of Escaping The Other(s) has started to be set.

This is all anecdotal, so I’m trying to raise a red flag and ask people to thing about their migratory behaviors and thought processes.

And, for the record, personally, I’m a big fan of inconsequential jabbering.

• We all know that social media get the word out at lightning speed–but what struck me most about this news was not the speed of information, but the immediacy of community development. People are using Twitter and Facebook to work out what are, for many, complicated emotions. Relief, joy, anger, sadness are all appearing at once. This is in stark contrast to what we often see in traditional media soundbites (particularly video media), where broad strokes are painted when it comes to emotional content–i.e., those people are cheering, those people over there are not. Social media is creating a space where it’s acceptable, and useful, to express multiple feelings. This is also very different than, for example, the days following 9/11–when the war on Afghanistan was announced, it was largely extremely taboo in American public squares (online or off) to express concern, or disagreement. Part of that was the political climate, but part of that was that there weren’t necessary effective public spaces for people to be nuanced human beings.
• I’m also struck by the speed with humor was employed as a tactic to process the news. Again, in contrast to 9/11, when we waited two weeks for the new issue of The Onion to come out–no one made any jokes before then. Not only was it taboo, but there just wasn’t a way to deal. (By the way, that issue of The Onion might be the best one ever–headlines like, “God Angrily Clarifies ‘Don’t Kill’ Rule, “Hijackers Surprised To Find Selves in Hell,” and many more gems.) Last night, some of the immediate jokes, some in good taste, some not, clearly paved a way for people to express all kinds of reactions to this global news phenomenon. My personal favorites were @marcfaletti‘s “It was that f***ing iPad location history, wasn’t it?” and the newly created @OsamaInHell account tweeting, “Wait, what?”

More as time allows today…

In that spirit, here’s some simple advice about how to treat others with respect and still have fun online. The number one rule? Ask first.

Mind-blowing concept, I know! But with the ease with which we can refer to and tag each other on different services, we forget that sometimes people don’t want to be referred to or tagged. Just because someone has a public profile, doesn’t mean they want to be quoted at every juncture! Here are some standard questions I use:

• Can I post what you just said to Twitter and Facebook? Should I credit you, or should it be anonymous/overheard?
• I took a great picture of us–check it out. Can I post it and tag you with it?
• I’m checking into Foursquare for this restaurant. Can I say that I’m having dinner with you?

Not only does this tell your friend that you actually care about their privacy (most people like that), but it also helps spread the reminder that they should do the same for you and others.

The more you do it, the more comfortable it’ll be for both you and your friends. Now, onward with your sharing!

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.

So, you’re ready to sign up for Twitter! Sometimes the signup process can be a bit daunting, so I created this short guide showing you what you need to know. Let’s get started!

Go to http://twitter.com/, and you should see a screen like this. Click the yellow “Give it a try” button on the right.

STEP 1: Create your account

You’ll be taken to a screen where you’re asked to fill out your information. Fill in your real name, your username (what you’ll use to log in, and how other Twitter users will refer to you), a password, and your email address. Along the way, Twitter will tell you if each of your entries is valid or not.

There’s also a checkbox that reads “Let others find me by my email address.” This means that if someone already knows your email address, they can use it to find and follow you. Twitter never reveals your email address to anyone who doesn’t already have it, though.

I generally uncheck the “send me email updates” box, and then click “Create my account.”

Then Twitter needs to make sure that you’re a human. You’ll see a CAPTCHA box; type in the words that you see. Here’s an example:

STEP 2: FINDING YOUR PEOPLE

Twitter helps you find people that you think are interesting—either because you like the topic that they tweet about most often, or because you know them.

You’re first shown a screen where you are offered a series of topics, and if you click on the topic, it’ll show you people Twitter suggests for that topic. Click the “follow” button to the right to start following them.

Note that you don’t have to follow any of these people, and you can choose to stop following them at any time.

Click the blue “Next step: friends” button in the lower middle of the screen to move on. You’ll be taken to a screen asking you if you want to search any of your online contacts from Gmail, Yahoo or AOL. If you have an account with any of those services, and you use the address book there to store information, click on the service you belong to. (If not, click the blue “Skip import” button in the bottom middle.)

You’ll then follow the steps your email provider uses to connect with Twitter—I’m showing Gmail here. Twitter doesn’t store or save this information; it’s a one-time deal.

It then takes a few seconds for your contacts to load, and you’re shown a screen that it’s working on it. When it’s done, it shows you a list of everyone in your address book that are already on Twitter.

You can click on “follow” next to the people that you want to appear in your feed. If they haven’t allowed themselves to be found via email, you’ll see a message that says so, and you can request to follow them. You’ll be notified if the request was approved.

When you’re all done, click the blue “Finish” button in the lower right. You’ll then be asked to send an invite to all the other people in your contact list who aren’t on Twitter. Skip this! Don’t do it.

You’re now shown your home screen, with all of the tweets from the people you’ve chosen to follow in reverse chronological order (newest on top). You’re also asked to confirm your email address; do this right away to get rid of that nagging message.

STEP 3: FAMILIARIZING YOURSELF WITH TWITTER’S FEATURES

Let’s take a quick tour of the home screen.

1. This is the main navigation for Twitter.
   • Home:brings you back to this screen
   • Profile: shows you a screen of your own tweets
   • Messages: Private messages sent only to you; also called Direct Messages or DMs. Only people that you follow are allowed to send you DMs.
   • Who To Follow: brings you to the stuff we covered in Step 2
   • Click on your username for additional items: Settings, Help, Sign out
2. Here’s where you’ll enter your status update, in 140 characters or less. There’s a counter in the upper right of the box to tell you how many characters you have left.
3. This area shows you information about yourself. Click on any of the numbers next to followers, following, favorites and lists for detailed information about each.
4. Here’s your list of tweets from the people you’re following. This is called the Timeline. (Some people also refer to this as their Feed.)
5. This section is where you can look at how you’re interacting with the rest of the world.
   • @Mentions. Click here to see if people have mentioned you.
   • Retweets. Click here to see tweets that have been passed along by others in your timeline. You can also see which of your tweets have been retweeted by others.

STEP 4: ADJUSTING YOUR SETTINGS

Click on the Settings link in the main navigation. The first screen you’re taken to has things like your email address and time zone; adjust these if needed. Click on the “Profile” link in the Settings’ navigation, just below where it says, “yourusername’s settings.”

You’re taken to a screen where you can update how you appear to other Twitter users.

It’s important to fill these out as accurately (and un-ironically/un-sarcastically) as you feel comfortable with, so that other users who are either searching for you or who discover you will see quickly who you are, and what you’re about. You should also use a picture that’s you, a close approximation of you, or is otherwise distinctly recognizable as you. (I don’t recommend those avatar generators, for example; they produce generic looking cartoons that make it hard for people to distinguish one from the other.)

Let’s go back to the Home screen and have a look at two important conversation features.

STEP 5: LOOK WHO’S TALKING (WITH YOU)

At the top of the timeline, click the @Mentions link (in section 5 from step 3). This shows you a screen of everyone who’s mentioned your username, with the newest on top. It’s important to check these “mentions” regularly and respond accordingly. If you hover over any tweet, two links appear: “reply,” and “retweet.”

Click on “reply” to respond to the person; click on “Retweet” to share the content of that tweet with whomever is following you.

STEP 6: SEARCHING AND SAVING

If there’s a particular topic you’re interested in, Twitter allows you to search for that word (or words), and save the searches to your account. This is a good way to monitor tweets mentioning your organization’s name, topics in the kind of work that you do, or other things that interest you.

Way up top, there’s a grey box with a magnifying glass next to it. Enter the term you’re searching for, and click the magnifying glass. You’ll be given a screen of search results:

You can then save the search to your account, so you don’t have to keep reentering it every time you want to look, by clicking the “Save this search” button at the top of the search results. 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.

That’s pretty much it for the basics! Feel free to visit me at http://deannazandt.com/twitter-guides for more information.

Conceptually, encouraging dominant cultures to divesify is fabulous –I subscribe to the DNA model of ecosystems and social spaces, so I support it wholeheartedly. As I’ve said in my book and recent talks:

This is a big one: you need to find people who don’t look like you, don’t necessarily think like you, and don’t come from the same places that you do. Creating a thrivable ecosystem–whether that’s an organization or a whole society–is like the evolution of a 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.

We need you to be aware of the privilege you bring to the table – whether that’s your race, gender or your tech privilege – and make sure you’re using it responsibly and thoughtfully. Diversity is a strategic imperative for achieving collective goals. As diversity scholar Roosevelt Thomas notes, we all make better decisions–as individuals and as a society–when we account for differences and tensions.

But Johnson sort of, well, pretty much derails from the outset in his attempt. First, and I’m not going to focus on this too much, but “stalking?” Really? C’mon, we know that the world is loaded, painful and supports a culture of dominant violence. Not okay. But, moving along…

Where the argument really goes awry for me is in Johnson’s othering of the woman he follows. He’s turned her into an exotic creature on display, and taken away a little bit of her humanity. For more on exocitization, check out Racialicious’ extensive archive of awesome. There are plenty of ways to talk about race without placing people into positions that feel more like targets than participants.

This is largely about power relationships. Pretending that they don’t exist or don’t influence our decisions on how we interact with one another — especially when we’re different genders, races, sexualities, etc.– just mires us in he-said-she-said. It also perpetuates our bias, prejudices and social systems into the wild, open frontier of the Internet, and that’s a crying shame.

We’re living like fish in water on the Internet right now: We don’t know, or we’re not willing to recognize, that we’re soaking in the same 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. But all we can see is the blank canvas; we remain convinced that the Internet is a pure meritocracy and that if you just work hard enough, you’ll succeed at whatever it is that you’re trying to do. We’ve got to interrupt this pattern now, with conscious effort and action.

Lest I be a big ol’ bully and just rant about what’s wrong, allow me to offer some excerpts from my book that illustrate what I think is a healthier, more productive way to go about things. I’ll start with an example of where I was called out on my own voyeurism–shortly after the Philadelphia pool incident in 2009, and after listening on Twitter to lots of people of color share stories of childhood discrimination.

To share that kind of intimacy requires some sort of explicit or assumed “safe space”–a forum of sorts, where one can express views without threat of abuse or harassment. Safe space requires a tremendous amount of trust, and that trust allowed the people sharing the stories with each other to extend the conversation past the sound bite moments that get played out in media and other traditional public forums. “Usually when people of color talk publicly, it’s about our feelings, our mistakes, and being frank about our shortcomings,” says Ludovic Blain, director of the Progressive Era Project and a longtime social justice activist. “Often when white folks speak in the same setting, it’s about their initiatives and how they’ll make it right. That’s perverted. In the case of the racist pool, the scene was the same: people of color discussing heart-wrenching issues in front of whites. But those people were also doing a rare thing–publicly discussing what whites had done wrong.” The empathy based on shared experience, combined with trust that the conversation would be productive, brought this moment to a more necessarily intense place.

Additionally, people decided to share their stories for many reasons: to release a painful memory and get it off their chests, to connect with others who had experienced similar racism as children, to potentially educate those who needed to hear their memories, and more. Thus, the voyeuristic aspect of the experience was strong. My whiteness was hidden for a moment (via my silence, not sharing a common past experience), and social networks allowed me to enter a conversation that otherwise might have been altered by my presence. I was able to benefit regardless of whether the sharers intended for me to, and that cultural voyeurism needs to be clear when discussing issues that deal with bias around race, gender, class, and other kinds of privilege.

Later in the book, I discuss the kind of cross-pollination of culture that I believe Johnson originally intended to challenge his readers with.

To be clear, we won’t ever eliminate our biases. But we can begin to be explicit about what we learn about ourselves and our social spheres when bias rears its ugly head. Social technology researcher danah boyd suggests a series of questions for that explicit discovery process: “None of us is going to be unbiased. There is no way to be unbiased. The question is: Can you account for your biases? Can you recognize when they get in the way? Can you open up a dialogue, even if it makes you uncomfortable, with people who aren’t like you?” Opening ourselves up to that process and beginning to break out of the way we’ve been thinking about how we assume the world operates (simply because it’s operated like that for a long time) is crucial. We need to listen as selflessly as possible to what others are sharing and make sure that we’re not perpetuating restrictive social structures. … It makes me realize that often those moments are not about me at all–they are about larger injustices that I have a role in changing or stopping altogether, and it’s my job to figure out how to do that.

…

It’s important for people of all stripes and places to engage with those who are different from themselves, but to be blunt, it’s extra important for those who are a couple of notches up on the hierarchy to go through this exercise. Remember, you’re not there as part of some sociology experiment, but because you get that progress is possible only when we participate.

A crucial part of cross-pollination exercises is realizing that your role as ambassador is not to defend your position in the food chain. That’s where a lot of us get into trouble–I know I have. Your job is to recognize what privilege you bring–whether it’s your gender, your class, your race, your sexuality, etc.–and figure out how best you can use it to enable justice for people who don’t share your privilege. Jessica Hoffman, editor of make/shift magazine, pithily captured our collective responsibility to engage in self-reflection in an article she wrote about a white feminist’s role in other social justice movements: “Inexperienced because of privilege, we hadn’t thought well on our feet, and we’d been in a certain denial about how bad things might get; we’d been pissed and well meaning, but not useful [emphasis mine].” It’s the job of all of us to be useful.

Johnson’s utter failure to be useful is instructive of the larger systemic issues we face, not the least of which is the truism, “The road to hell is paved with good intentions.” A tweet from last year comes to mind on why this is true.

• New York Times: Is There Life After Facebook? (CNN.com refers to the Times story here.)

I spent an hour on Minnesota Public Radio’s Midmorning show, talking with host Kerri Miller and CNET’s Caroline McCarthy:

I went on CNN International and spoke with awesome host Fionnuala Sweeney:

Foursquare, in this case, doesn’t help me find my friends, or alert anyone to my whereabouts, or give me a snazzy badge. Through my ambient awareness of Rod’s check-ins, I knew where I could go to get what I needed without having to ask anyone, or pour through online reviews by strangers.

And my decaf Americano was damn good*.

–

*Yes, I drink decaf, even when I have the afternoon sleepies. The taste and the smell of coffee do a little bit to perk me back up. :-)

I’m pleased as punch to be speaking at this conference/show next week — should be a rollicking good time, with a stellar lineup of really interesting speakers. I’ll be talking about what dissent, muckraking and diversity really mean for the businesses of the future, which has been a nice challenge for me to write. Video clips will be posted once I have them!