See What’s Out There

The folks at NTEN have already begun planning for their Nonprofit Technology Conference 2009, and they’re asking the nonprofit community to vote for the sessions they like the most.

Last year we ran two great sessions: “The Age of YouTube” and “How to Show, Tell, and Active with a Video-centric Microsite“.

This year, we’ve submitted 8 sessions that we want to lead. Click on our session titles below and give them 5 stars (or as NTEN puts it, “I’m already there in my mind”) if you like what you see.

1. Online Video: Tools of the Trade
2. Online Video: Creating a Strategy
3. Hands-On Video Production: Documenting the NTC
4. Viral Video: How to Make it Work for Your Organization
5. You Made a Video, Now What?
6. Web 2.0: How to Get the Buy-In You Need
7. Drupal for Dummies
8. Ning: Building a Custom Social Network

See you at NTC 2009!

One of the small stories in the election is the role of Jewish voters, particularly in swing state areas, South Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania.

Most of us are familiar with the general slanders against Obama, there has been particular focus on his supposedly being a Muslim (he’s not), the strangeness of his name, etc. This misinformation is being used particularly with religious and older Jewish voters for whom Israel’s safety and the support of the US for Israel are paramount. Even a small move of Jews away from the Democratic party in Florida, for example, can change the outcome of the election.

The Jews in the Obama camp just launched a counterattack - Israelis for Obama. [And of course the counterattack takes the form of video produced primarily for the web.] Have a look:

Link: [Jewish Alliance for Change]

I was in Las Vegas over the weekend for Blog World and New Media Expo. It was terrific, mostly because of the people who attended, some of the best bloggers and new media people around. We had @chrisbrogan, @msaleem, @jasonfalls, @lizstrauss, @stoweboyd, @guykawasaki, and many many others (@name is Twitter handle).

Some of the conference highlights were the session with Tim Ferriss (4 Hour Work Week) and Mike Shinoda of Linkin Park.

The best way for sure to get the gist of what I learned is from Twitter. In every session people were Tweeting their notes.

If you don’t know Twitter, sign up. It’s basically micro-blogging — blog posts of 140 characters or less. It is also a social network, in that you follow the posts of specific people and they follow you. But you also have tags on Twitter, so everyone writing on a same topic can add a tag (in Twitter a tag starts with a #) and you can see a live stream of all posts with that tag.

So, for example, check out:

#bwe08 — this is the main conference tag

My session tag was #nminside

We had notes like this:

Blogging is a promise, if you’re not willing to fulfill that promise, you shouldn’t blog #nminside #bwe08

Q: How do we control comments? Brand control issues, we’re moving towards a world of radical transperancy #nminside #bwe08

Another interesting one was #cred and #asse9

If you aren’t sure what to do with these, go to Twitter Search and type in the tag with the #

And if you are not, follow me on Twitter @Michael_Hoffman and @See3

Guerrilla advertising example here that shows that the post-action video can be seen by many many more people than would actually see the action itself.

Link [YouTube]

Every month, a group of bloggers in the Chicago area meet up to share tips, advice and the latest trends. See3 caught up with them at their September 2008 meeting where we talked about fun websites like:

Swurl.com: Lifestreaming tool that brings all your web content to one blog
Fotoviewr: Elegant photo galleries for your Flickr photos
Touchgraph.com: Easy way to visualize your data
Chicagotalks.org : Local citizen news and journalism

We also chatted with the group organizer Barbara Iverson and local bloggers Gordon Dymowski and David Kadavy about what’s special about blogging in Chicago:

Hey bloggers! Check out the Dogooder Blog Network and spread the good.

Below are examples of some interesting videos. Each video is a different style and serves a different purpose.

Viral
Office Max One Penny Campaign (Restaurant)

Office Max One Penny Campaign (Used Car Lot)

Girl Effect

PSA
Chicago Foundation for Women

Man-on-the-Street
Amnesty International (Extraordinary Rendition)

Amnesty International (Now You Know)

Planned Parenthood (Bush-McCain Challenge)

Documentary
American Jewish World Service (Passover)

Dramatic
Connecticut Education Association

Last week we asked our peeps (or should I say Tweeps?) on Twitter, “What’s the most successful strategy your organization has used to build an email list?” Check out some of the responses below:

1) Petitions

2) Organization Donor Lists

3) Social Networking

LAMP (Learning About Multimedia Project) is a good example of an organization that has had success building their email list through a Flickr page, MySpace profile and YouTube channel.

4) Web Videos

As @DCVito mentions, it can be hard to measure how much traffic your videos are bringing in to your site or email sign-up. It’s very important to include a clear call to action with a url in your video so your audience knows how to take the next step. Here are some other tips for making your videos more effective fundraising and outreach tools.

4) Campaigns

One of the best ways to spread the word about your organization and build an email list is a campaign. A campaign uses tools like social-networking and web video to complete a sustained action that targets a particular audience for a specific goal. For example, See3 recently completed a campaign for Sierra Club called “Lightbulbs to Leadership” which included it’s own splash page, 3 video series, letter-writing campaign and house parties across the country.

When the US State Department is playing with YouTube video contests it’s a good indication that YouTube — and online video more generally — plays an important cultural role today.

From News.com

To mark the United Nations’ first-ever International Day of Democracy, the U.S. State Department launched a YouTube-based video contest on Monday.

Called the Democracy Video Challenge, the contest encourages the submission of three-minute videos that define the concept of democracy.

“The Democracy Video Challenge asks budding filmmakers, democracy advocates, and the general public to create video shorts that complete the phrase, ‘Democracy is…’,” the contest’s official Web site explains. While they don’t require entrants to be professional filmmakers, it’s pretty clear that they’re looking for something more high-end than sitting in front of your Webcam and waxing philosophical about Barack Obama.

Submissions will be accepted through January 31, and a jury will select semifinalists and then finalists. Seven winners, each one from a different global region, will be chosen by a public vote sometime in June. The winners will receive trips to New York, Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles for screenings and meetings with film industry representatives and “democracy advocates.”

There are very few rules: entrants must be 18 or older; the videos must be under three minutes long, “suitable for a general audience,” comply with YouTube’s terms of use, and either be in English or subtitled in English.

Partners in the contest include NBC Universal, the film schools at New York University and the University of Southern California, and the Directors Guild of America.

Link [Democracy Video Challenge on YouTube]

There was a great article in this past week’s New York Times Magazine about social networks that every nonprofit and cause-focused person should read. It matters how people use the sites because you can see how awareness of your cause can then travel these same pathways.

What this article explains is why we want to share what we are doing and be connected to several (or several hundred) friends who are also telling us what they are doing. Who has time for this, many people ask.

What does it mean to have constant contact with all of your friends. The article explains:
“Social scientists have a name for this sort of incessant online contact. They call it “ambient awareness.” It is, they say, very much like being physically near someone and picking up on his mood through the little things he does — body language, sighs, stray comments — out of the corner of your eye.”

What the article says is that many people sign up for the services and then wonder why they are wasting their time. But then things change:

But as the days went by, something changed. Haley discovered that he was beginning to sense the rhythms of his friends’ lives in a way he never had before. When one friend got sick with a virulent fever, he could tell by her Twitter updates when she was getting worse and the instant she finally turned the corner. He could see when friends were heading into hellish days at work or when they’d scored a big success. Even the daily catalog of sandwiches became oddly mesmerizing, a sort of metronomic click that he grew accustomed to seeing pop up in the middle of each day.

This is the paradox of ambient awareness. Each little update — each individual bit of social information — is insignificant on its own, even supremely mundane. But taken together, over time, the little snippets coalesce into a surprisingly sophisticated portrait of your friends’ and family members’ lives, like thousands of dots making a pointillist painting. This was never before possible, because in the real world, no friend would bother to call you up and detail the sandwiches she was eating. The ambient information becomes like “a type of E.S.P.,” as Haley described it to me, an invisible dimension floating over everyday life.

“It’s like I can distantly read everyone’s mind,” Haley went on to say. “I love that. I feel like I’m getting to something raw about my friends. It’s like I’ve got this heads-up display for them.” It can also lead to more real-life contact, because when one member of Haley’s group decides to go out to a bar or see a band and Twitters about his plans, the others see it, and some decide to drop by — ad hoc, self-organizing socializing.

Read the whole story.

Link [New York Times]
Hat Tip [Jeremy Liew]

Old, Grizzled Third-Party Candidate May Steal Support From McCain