The Future of Network Centric advocacy

The Future of Network Centric advocacy
Marty Kearns, presenter. Netcentric Campaigns.

Note: This one was a little crazy for me. I was probably the only non Social Advocacy group in the room. But believe it or not, I found a lot to take away from this session.

The big question asked at this session was: What would you do with 10,000 people for 10 minutes. That resounds with me because, while we don't get groups of 10,000 showing up at our door, we do turn away groups of 500-1000 or more who want to volunteer, but don't have enough time to spend at the our property doing helpful work. So is there some awareness piece or program piece we can have these people do at their conference that will still educate them about our mission, why also doing significant good for our organization as well. Hmmm.

How is what's going on (web 2.0, etc) shifting strategy for creating change?

Take the Buzzword - Social Networks. Forget web 2.0 for a moment and remember Social Networks are people. They don't show up on the bottom line, but they are the wealth of the social organization.

Technology has allowed social networks to spread out and stay connected in ways that would have been impossible before.

At the same time the 'organization' is becoming less central. People will advocate, network, discuss the organization or mission outside the structures the organization has set up.

Connectivity Matters. The ability of your base to connect and pass the message on is dependent on density. The more connections the fast and father the message travels.

Not everybody wants a newsletter. Some feel overloaded by information. And more and more people feel they can find information when it's valuable. (As long as you make it available on the new semantic web, I guess)

So we have to find new ways to connect. Some of these ways includes uses like: Evites, SMS Messages, meetup.com, upcoming.com

Successful viral networks must have shared resources to work. Face to face, phone to phone, email to email, sms to sms.

They also need Clarity of Purpose. And you have to know right things to ask them.

It's going to take a new type of leader to lead these new networks. I recall the old saying "leadership is finding a parade and getting infront of it" I can envision self made media celeb who does just that. So you need to find away to be in front of that parade as soon as you can.

Alex's Lemonade was powerful because it empowered others to go open their own lemonade stand. A simple PDF. (Which makes me think. What is our organizations lemonade stand?)

Some of the things being built under this new theory are networks to build engagement and to influence media. They rely on systems like Amazon's Mechanical Turk to use volunteers to identify data, organize data, do research, online searches. etc. Plus that makes these people feel more involved in the cause,/organization.

Thanks to the Presenter. He came with this amazing slide show and a great handout that really showed the power of what he was talking about with concrete examples.

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