We did it! Thanks in large part to the It’s Getting Hot In Here community, Focus the Nation is the MySpace Impact Award winner for July. We couldn’t be more thrilled at the honor, or more humbled by the overwhelming support we’ve received from folks around the country.
This prize is pretty exciting for us.
First of all, the prize will help us to hire another organizer heading into the fall. This is super important, because we’re going to be swamped when students get back! Which reminds me: do you have mad crazy organizing skills? Are you looking for a job? Do you live in, or can you move to, Portland? If so, hit me up. We’re hiring.
The second exciting thing about this prize is the exposure. In the last two weeks, we’ve added almost 300 MySpace friends, and are now adding 20 or 30 a day. This is just from the traffic the voting generated for us, but in the next month MySpace is going to run banner ads for us which should raise traffic even further.
But the question raised for me is this: how do we turn MySpace friends into meaningful support? I put an email sign-up form on the front page, as well as a link to our website, but I’m not sure how much traffic we’re actually driving back there. Beyond that, I suspect that many people who add us as friends never look at our page a second time, making any updates or blog entries there less useful. The aspects of MySpace that have proved useful are bulletins and comments. Bulletins allow us to reach all of our friends at once, and comments allow us to reach friends of friends.
Facebook obviously has slightly more advanced infrastructure for groups like ours (join our Facebook group!), but tactics there seem much the same: add as many people as possible and treat them like an email list. There are a few applications (Causes, Change.org) that seem to be working to change this, but for now that’s the general trend.
What are your experiences organizing with social networking sites? Can they be useful beyond being a sort of glorified email list?
Anyways, if you haven’t yet, add us on MySpace and make sure to sign your school up to participate if they’re not signed up already.
Congrats to Focus! You guys are well deserving of the award, and I know you’ll put the money to good use.
I personally haven’t had much luck with using Facebook groups as anything more than a bulletin board (that nobody checks regularly) and an email list (through ‘Message All Members’) (I’ve set up a Portland Focus the Nation group). It’s nice to have an easy email list, but there’s gotta be more potential we’re missing.
Well,
I just want to say that people are often dismissive of email lists. Well, email lists can be as powerful or more powerful than blogs. For example: see MoveOn, Avaaz, or others. Email organizing can be very powerful, leading to on the ground organization, activist capacity, and similar possibilities. However, one of the limitations of social networking sites is how limited you are in how you can communicate with your list.
There are a lot of resources out there about how to turn a glorified email list into an organizing medium, like Netcentric Campaigns, the New Organizing Institute, or others. Also, there is research from groups like http://www.idpi.org and experience about gender-disparity, headlines, and others that are really useful.
However, cracking into a social networking space has proven difficult and no one is doing it really well yet, so feel free to experiment.