Can Social Media Save the Day? The evolution of #topprog #digg & #fem2

Jon Pincus, a progressive technology activist, has come up with an initial experiment based on a convergence of Twitter and Digg. He happened to use my Tweet about the Courage Campaign "Fidelity" video as a guinea pig in one recent experimentation:

Last Friday's #Digg it! A proposal for women of color, feminists, and progressives on Twitter experiment went remarkably well for a first attempt.  Here's the data.

Two of the for posts sent to Twitter with a #digg tag got significant retweeting.  While it's hard to know for sure, looking at the names of the diggers it seems that we were also getting some additional diggs via Twitter.  The table below also includes the total number of diggs as of 3 PM Pacific time on Friday.

 

Post	tweets	total diggs	from Twitter (estimate)
Don't Divorce Me	8	30	6-10
#digg it	5	28	5-8
Lilly Ledbetter	1	22	1-3
NO on Collins-Nelson	2	6	1-3

 

Eight retweets may not sound like a lot, But looking at it differently, those 8 retweets reached over 700 followers plus however many people are following the #topprog, #lgbt, and #jti* channels - and had a measurable impact on digg results.  According to retweetistpopular URLs get retweeted by over 100 people in a 24 hour period so there's clearly significant upside here.  And of course there are lessons about how to do it better.

Looking at the detailed search results*** from Twitter shows that the pattern with Jen aka HumanFolly's tweet was very different and I think much more organic.  The retweets on my post were primarily from people who had heard about it from me it via email or Facebook.  This is a great way to get an experiment like this off the ground but isn't long-term sustainable.  By contrast if you look at the retweets on her post, it's a very natural pattern.  Julia Rosen of Courage Campaign saw a reference to her video and thanked Jen, retweeting in the process; others picked it up because it looked interesting.  In addition to reaching the readers of #topprog multiple times, the eight retweeters had a total of over 700 followers.

I am really glad that Jon and others such as Tracy Viselli are launching these social media methods to help activists get the word out. If activists can work together to promote content online and garner coverage in the blogosphere, they will inevitably see more coverage by the mainstream media as a result. The greater visibility of important issues related to the women's rights movement, health care, environment and other issue advocacy can turn into fundraising dollars and political capital.

The most recent hashtag I've seen promoting content comes from the Political Voices of Women who are asking everyone to help out and Tweet stimulus facts to raise awareness about the economic plight we are in. Feel free to take part as you wish:

Join us on Twitter for "24 Hours of Stimulus: an online bipartisan citizen discussion on theEconomic Stimulus and Recovery Bill."

The discussion will start at 12 noon EST Monday, February, 9th as the President begins hisTownhall Meeting in Elkhart, Indiana and will continue for the next 24 hours, the time that the Senate is expected to vote on the bill known as S.1 - The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.

To participate in the discussion add the hashtags. #24stimulus and/or #pvow to each of your tweets. This will make sure that your message is visible to everyone participating in the discussion.

While these ideas should always be used in conjunction with greater PR efforts and offline organizing, they certainly are one way to leverage the online space for issue advocacy and improve the democratization of ideas overall.