Last night’s #4Change chat was put to a challenge by Twitter itself not working and keeping up, so we moved over to a CoverItLive chat.  You can review the transcript here: June #4Change Chat – Community Organizing

Thanks to all those who participated! I’ll be posting a wrap up of key points and case studies this weekend.

I love community organizing. It’s true! It’s something that I am energized by, passionate about, and take so much pleasure in helping others do well, too. I’ve had experience organizing communities offline in local communities, and organizing community online – but the kind of organizing that inspires me the most is combining online and offline. Social media tools work because they are powered by people, and people are social. And when we get connected, and can connect our networks with other networks, we get even more social and have huge potential to make great things happen.  My work with NetSquared and with Social by Social has helped shape so many of my beliefs about community organizing and has offered the opportunity to meet so many others doing it well.

Lots of organizations, campaigns, and even individuals are now using social media tools to organize online and offline – bringing local communities together in new and powerful ways.

This month’s #4Change chat takes on the topic of using social media tools for community organizing – and I hope you’ll join us!

Details:

Date: June 10th
Time: 2 pm PST, 5 pm EST, 10 pm UK
Location: Twitter! #4Change
Topic: Community Organizing

June #4Change Chat Questions:

To keep the two-hour chat on topic, I’ll be helping guide conversation by using some of the questions below to drive us to share ideas, examples and resources. If you want to take a peak at where we may go in the conversation, review the questions below.

1. What kind of communities do you currently work with and what kinds of social media tools do they use?
2. What’s the point in using “global” tools (social media) for local organizing?
3. What strategies are important to keep in mind when using social media in local organizing?
4. What tools have you or your communities found useful for growing or organizing, hosting or distributing?
5. What tools have been most unsuccessful?
6. What are the online community organizing best practices from your experience?
7. What roles are important in online community organizing?
8. What are your favorite examples or case studies where this is really working?
9. What metrics are valuable in measuring success of social media tools for organizing?

You can also suggest questions or topic areas to be included by leaving a comment on this post!

How to Participate

1. If you want to contribute to the conversation, you’ll need to have a twitter account (it’s free).
2. To follow the conversation (whether you are planning to contribute or not), use http://search.twitter.com or another application to search on Twitter for #4Change
3. Jump in to the conversation by adding #4Change to your Twitter message
4. Feeling brave? Check out TweetChat – it’s a great application that integrates with your Twitter account and makes chats more fun! You can turn it off after the chat.

Conversations and Presentations

For some recent thoughts and best practices on community building, check out:

• How our tools define “Community”
• Sustainable Community Building
• Return on Engagement for your Community
• Bringing Community Organizing into Online Campaigns
• Building Stronger Online Communities without Losing Your Sanity
• Crowdsourcing: Community vs Crowd
• Online Community Building: Gardening vs Landscaping

New to #4Change? Learn More:

To learn more about #4Change monthly twitter chat go to the #4Change Blog, read about #4Change and search twitter for #4Change. To participate just join in twitter conversation from anywhere in the world.

The January #4Change Twitter Chat will focus on the use of Twitter and other social media tools in campaigning.

About the Topic

Campaigning can mean many different things and we want to keep the definition of the topic fairly open for this chat, in order to keep insights, resources and conversation in the Q/A format as open to valuable input as possible.  Here are some ways that campaigning can be framed for the purpose of this chat:

• moving canvassing door to door to online networks
• political action
• local community building
• tying communications, partners, and actions together via social media
• social change projects or programs locally or globally

The way we examine the use of social media in campaigning can be further framed in some of these ways:

1. change campaigns (internal vs external), also organization type variations
2. social media change campaigns (specific nuances)
3. change campaigns vs political campaigns (similarities vs differences)
4. educational campaigns (organizational / institutional / internet) riffing off of last month’s topic
5. building campaign coalitions & recruiting campaign champions

How to Participate

Share your ideas now:

You can share your ideas about the topic as well as any resources, case studies, examples, research etc. by leaving a comment on this blog post.  Or, you can tag your resources or posts using Delicious with the tag “4change” and we’ll pick it up for you.

Join the Twitter chat:

1. If you want to contribute to the conversation, you’ll need to have a twitter account (it’s free).
2. To follow the conversation (whether you are planning to contribute or not), use http://search.twitter.com or another application to search on Twitter for #4Change
3. Jump in to the conversation by adding #4Change to your Twitter message
4. Feeling brave? Check out TweetChat – it’s a great application that integrates with your Twitter account and makes chats more fun! You can turn it off after the chat.

Rules for #4Change Chat

1. #4Change will be structured around a series of questions which all participants can respond to. Send your questions to @memeshift to have them considered.
2. Introduce yourself in 1 tweet at the start or when you join.
3. Stay on topic!
4. Be cool.

Details

• Date: January, 14th 2010
• When: 2 – 4 pm US Pacific Time, 5 – 7 pm US Eastern Time, 10pm – 12am London, UK (Late!)
• Where: Twitter (search for #4Change)
• Topic: Campaigning: How is social/new media affecting the the way we build and conduct campaigns? and more!

We’ll update this post with specific questions to be asked during the chat and will capture resources and conversations from the chat, too.  Send us your ideas!

—–

UPDATE: Here are the conversation starters we’ll be using in tonight’s chat.

1. How do we define campaigning in the context of social media?
- does growing a Facebook Fan page numbers count?
- does growing an email list count?
- what about calls to action that aren’t online?

2. Given our definition, what are some of the best examples you’ve seen? Why?

3. What are elements in these examples that are integral to the campaign’s success?

4. What are the most difficult aspects of managing/running a campaign?

5. What are the best ways for would-be campaigners to identify possible collaborators/partners?
- other orgs to champion campaign
- sponsors to put some skin ($) in the game
- influencers and influential communities to reach out to and engage

The next #4change chat is this Thursday – I hope you can join us!

Details:

• Date: August, 13th
• Where: Twitter (search for #4Change)
• When: 5 – 7 pm US Eastern Time
• Topic: How do social media open new doors for collaboration (especially internationally)?

Starting the Conversations

Unfortunately for me, I will unable to join the chat this Thursday; so, I’d like to offer some conversation starters now to get you thinking of questions, ideas, and stories you want to share!

Here are some questions to consider:

• has your organization found new collaborators (other organizations, companies, networks, etc.) for your work via social media use/presence?
• have you reached out, either as an individual or an organization, with opportunities to collaborate to others you only connected with via social media? why?
• what issues are unique to collaborations of this type?
• what kind of reassurances (and what are the mechanisms for providing them) are unique to parties entering collaborations via social media?
• how could collaborations enabled or maintained via social media be more or less sustainable than traditional tools/outlets?

And here are some examples to consider:

• SocialActions – a great example of social media powering the sharing and aggregation (and thus the collaboration and partnership) of social action opportunity portals all over the world
• Amnesty International, Red Cross, and others – organizers working globally/locally have changed the way they campaign or operate now that they are really in the same space (online)
• Journalism – writers are now using their social media platforms (whether it’s Twitter or Facebook, or even the newspaper’s comment-enabled websites) to collaborate with witnesses, locals, and experts for their contributions to the story

Join the Conversation

1. If you want to contribute to the conversation, you’ll need to have a twitter account (it’s free).
2. To follow the conversation (whether you are planning to contribute or not), use http://search.twitter.com or another application to search on Twitter for “#4Change”
3. Jump in to the conversation by adding “#4Change” (without the “”) to your Twitter message

Rules for #Change Chats

1. #4Change will be structured around a series of questions which all participants can respond to. Send your questions to @tomjd without the hash tag (to keep them out of the stream) to have them considered.
2. Introduce yourself in 1 tweet at the start or when you join.
3. Stay on topic!
4. Stay cool.

Join us for the chat this Thursday – looking forward to discussing the role social media play in collaboration!

Over the last few months, we have seen Twitter serve the global community by playing an important role in communications – whether it’s finding new friends (#FollowFriday), or telling the world about your government/election/political state (#IranElection), whether it’s having a conversation together (#4Change), or non-linearly replacing your RSS feed.  What do those # mean? That’s part of the key to success when using Twitter for a Global conversation. Using hashtags lets you mark your message as pertaining to a certain topic, then automatically include that message in a stream with everyone else’s that include the same hashtag.  Using Twitter search or other tools, you can watch news and updates about the election in Iran by using #IranElection; or, find interesting people to follow and connect with using #FollowFriday to peruse the recommendations that pile up on Fridays.

There are many opportunities to see hashtags in action!  There are also more and more opportunities emerging for people to coordinate global conversations that happen at the same time, instead of disconnected over time (still tied together via hashtag).  I am part of the planning team working on the monthly chat series behind #4Change.  There is also a Twitter-based chat starting up for consultants who work with social benefit organizations.

I wanted to share some of the lessons I’ve learned from my involvement with organizing Twitter chats.  I’m looking forward to your ideas, too!

1. Build a landing pad

It is helpful to have some place where you can send people interested in your topic or chat that haven’t participated before – whether it’s a website, a blog, or just a separate Twitter account.  If you have a landing pad somewhere online where you can refer people and provide information about your chats, your group, or your purpose in more than 140 characters, it will save you a lot of extra tweeting!  Plus, it will provide a natural and obviously place to aggregate your content, thoughts, updates, and promotion of the chats.

2. Brainstorm lots of questions but pick a few

It seems obvious that people using a communication tool like Twitter, and then electing to participate in a large-scale public chat would not require much prodding to keep conversation going.  But, it is actually just this reason that it’s more important to pre-select your questions.  Twitter chats are slower moving than you’d expect because everyone is waiting on the Twitter search to refresh with new posts.  It works best to have 3-5 questions selected ahead of time and shared with a core group of chat leaders or guides.  This way, there is a group of people helping keep the conversation on track, focused on one question at a time.  Otherwise, the group can quickly and easily splinter off to other topics using other hashtags, after all, that’s what Twitter enables all day, every day.

3. Consider your time

If you really want to pull in participants from all over the world, it’s important to consider what time you are holding the chat.  It’s also important to consider how long you want the chat to be.  Knowing that Twitter based chats are slower in development and pace than something like a live web chat, you don’t want it to be too narrow of a window, but you can only hold people’s attention for so long as well.

4. Narrow your focus

#4Change or #NPCons (nonprofit consultants) seem like pretty obvious topics. But coordinating a conversation would be far too difficult without a specific topic for that chat because the possibilities for questions or specific ideas within those two general topics are endless.  For example, recent 4Change topics have included using competitions for social change and Twitter as a political/revolutionary tool.  This also means people can identify ahead of time any resources they want to share during the chat and if they are interested in the specific topic of the month or not.

5. Invite your audience

If you have your topic for the month picked out, you may have some experts, prominent thinkers, or maybe organizations/companies/ groups that are known for working in or with that topic that you want to explicitly invite to participate.  Ensuring that fresh voices participate is important – we could all talk to the same group of people without organizing a public conversation.  Promoting the chat widely via Twitter and other social networks is a great way to find more participants, too.

6. Never underestimate the technology

I already mentioned that Twitter-based chats aren’t as fast-paced as live web chats or some other technologies.  But, you also have to remember that Twitter isn’t in your control!  If the server has a glitch, if there’s scheduled maintenance, or if search tools lag, then your Twitter chat will dramatically suffer.  This happened during the July #4Change chat and caused us to call the chat off half-way through as search was 15 minutes behind and many participants’ messages weren’t showing up at all.

7. Participate!

#4Change:
If you want to learn more about the #4Change monthly chat series, visit http://4change.memeshift.com  The next chat topic will be announced there and on Twitter using #4Change.

#NPCons:
Join the first #NPCons chat this coming Tuesday, 21 July, at 1pm US Pacific time.  These chats will be monthly, on the 3rd Tuesdays, at 1 pm Pacific.