I found this blog assessment flow chart from the Air Force from a Twitter alert. It is quite useful and speaks highly of the military’s ability to manage various types of posters. David Faggard who heads the public affairs division and is responsible for this tool is the head of its emerging technology division. His contact information is available on the tool. He is also a responder since I wrote him about something on the chart and whoa—heard back immediately. He must have followed his own advice. There are four types of negative posters:
Trolls – those dedicated to bashing and degrading others
Ragers—those whose posts are rants, rages, jokes, ridicules or satire
Misguided – those who make misstatements in their postings
Unhappy customers – those who post negative experiences from the pool of Air Force stakeholders
For the Advocates as we at Weber Shandwick call them, there are several choices in terms of response. The responder can concur and share a story or just let the post stand as is. The flow chart provides considerations for responding such as being transparent, sourcing your sources, timeliness, tone and influence.
Tags: advocates, Air Force, Badvocates, blog assessment, Weber Shandwick
For all those advocates of knowledge, the founder of wikipedia is asking for some help. Unusual from them but for a good cause. Read below.
Dear Reader,
Today I am going to ask you to support Wikipedia with a donation. This might sound unusual: Why does one of the world’s five most popular web properties ask for financial support from its users?
Wikipedia is built differently from almost every other top 50 website. We have a small number of paid staff, just twenty-three. Wikipedia content is free to use by anyone for any purpose. Our annual expenses are less than six million dollars. Wikipedia is run by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation, which I founded in 2003.
At its core, Wikipedia is driven by a global community of more than 150,000 volunteers - all dedicated to sharing knowledge freely. Over almost eight years, these volunteers have contributed more than 11 million articles in 265 languages. More than 275 million people come to our website every month to access information, free of charge and free of advertising.
But Wikipedia is more than a website. We share a common cause: Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That’s our commitment.
Your donation helps us in several ways. Most importantly, you will help us cover the increasing cost of managing global traffic to one of the most popular websites on the Internet. Funds also help us improve the software that runs Wikipedia — making it easier to search, easier to read, and easier to write for. We are committed to growing the free knowledge movement world-wide, by recruiting new volunteers, and building strategic partnerships with institutions of culture and learning.
Wikipedia is different. It’s the largest encyclopedia in history, written by volunteers. Like a national park or a school, we don’t believe advertising should have a place in Wikipedia. We want to keep it free and strong, but we need the support of thousands of people like you.
I invite you to join us: Your donation will help keep Wikipedia free for the whole world.
Thank you,
Jimmy Wales
DONATE NOW »
Tags: advocates, wikipedia
Advocacy networks are alive and well as the new American President-Elect gets close to Inauguration day. I just visited www.FixThisBarack.com and www.WhiteHouse2.org. These are not Obama-sponsored sites but sites where crowd sourcing thrive. At WhiteHouse2.org, you can endorse or oppose a suggestion for change. Very similar to our thinking about advocating or badvocating for a cause, government policy or legislation. Enthusiasts, fans and other advocates can also visit www.change.gov which is an Obama-endorsed site and join a discussion on policy direction. Today when I visited the site, nearly 500 comments were in response to “What social causes and service organizations are you a part of that make a difference in your community?” It is extraordinary to witness participatory government and advocacy at its best. Two people discussed a group called Invisible Children that provides aid for children in Africa who are taken by soldiers and living in this war-torn area. One explained the mission and another described the Facebook page on the charity. It was heartwrenching when I visited the site but a good example of how advocacy can spread from visit to visit.
It will be interesting to see how the political sites progress as Obama’s first 100 days (in office) ends and politics-as-usual heats up. Will people still believe that someone is listening?
We sometimes forget that Advocacy is also built via face to face (or F2F). Despite the awesome power of technology, nothing beats F2F communications and recommendations. That is why I was glad to find this article in last week’s New York Times. Researchers at The Media Lab working with Hitachi Data Systems discovered that F2F communications were far more important to an organization’s work than generally believed. In fact, the article noted that productivity improved 30% with an incremental increase in F2F communication. Apparently the results were so promising that Hitachi has established a consulting business based on the research.
This finding has plenty of application for CEOs and leaders who want to motivate their workforces and manage through this lingering recession. A little F2F will deliver valuable ROI. I am not sure if I mentioned on this blog the recent research we did at Weber Shandwick on how few leaders were communicating during these hard times and how much employees wanted to hear from them. F2F can cure many ills. CEOs and leaders should step outside their offices, wander the halls and just ask people how they are doing. Start a conversation and then everyone can get back to work with gusto.
