ecomm-a-rama

Nothing like a political campaign to remind one that facts are fuzzy things regardless of how, well, factual they are. He said, she said (especially this year). This expert says one thing about health care policy. That expert says another.

But Google lets people find their own version of the facts in a matter of seconds. Our society is buried in facts and data. Be they conflicting, tangential, obvious, complicated, obscure, sweet or damning, the facts are there for everyone to see. That’s the problem - there is an awful lot for one to think about. The burden is not on the candidate to present facts - it is on the citizen to evaluate these facts. This is not a bad thing in a democracy - but is overwhelming.

The thing is that people don’t think in facts. We think in stories. We gather around the table and talk about our day in stories. We watch movies for the stories. Even journalists, who write facts, are trained to write stories.

A successful candidate weaves her version of the facts around a good story - a story in which the listener can replace the subject with themselves. “Wow, if Mary could wake up one day and get fired, lose her health insurance then get in an accident then so could I…but this guy talks about how we can do something about that.” Okay, that’s not much of a story. But it is the essence of the wheels that candidates want to get spinning in the audience. They seek connection, personification, to create a personal narrative with the listener.

Picked up a copy of Dan Pink’s book A Whole New Mind from the bookshelf the other day for something to read on a flight. The idea of story is a big theme…

We are our stories. We compress years of experience, though, and emotion into a few compact narratives that we convey to others and tell to ourselves. That has always been true. But personal narrative has become more prevalent, and perhaps more urgent in a time of abundance, when many of us are freer to seek a deeper understanding of ourselves and our purpose.

We talk often of facts and data, policies and places. Too often people don’t connect with “issues.” How do we tell stories that weave a narrative around these places and people?

Why is it some people just can’t stand MS Outlook? I don’t know. It doesn’t filter spam well. It doesn’t adhere to any real standards for email or calendar sharing. It is a memory hog. Viruses kill the joy like wrinkles in your cotton shirts first thing in the morning. You can’t pull in external accounts (yahoo, gmail, other domains easily). No IMAP. RSS support is there, I guess, but still lousy. And if you’ve ever used a mac you just feel kinda dirty using it.

So last week I decided to abandon Outlook at work and run everything through Gmail. Sure, it means I get no support from tech support at the mothership. But it also means I don’t have to worry about my desktop Outlook failing to connect to a remote exchange server.

We’re still in the testing phase here but things are looking up. With Gmail open I have multiple email addresses that I use for work coming to one inbox. I have IM right there. I have instant access to RSS feeds (which sit in Firefox’s Live Feeds, not Google Reader) and one-click access to Google Calendars and docs. Oh, and nice clean integration with Gmail on the blackberry.

So far. So good…

On day 3 of my work with The Wilderness Society, I was already treading dangerous ground. Luckily I was too clueless to know it.

I was sitting in a communication workshop in the DC office with upbeat moderator Justin Perkins of Care2 and a welcoming communications staff. Justin asked each of us to rate marketing tools by importance. We then publicly announced our ratings and compiled a group rating. I was too new to know which of these tools were already being used (and I certainly didn’t know how or how well). I had gone about numbering my tools with a specific strategy – specifically by prioritizing primary tools like press releases, research, direct mail, e-mail alerts, and the website and ranking secondary tools like videos and contests much further down the line. I figured without news and research at the backbone of our organization, what the world would we message about in our marketing. This was not the only approach – some ranked based on the current landscape at TWS while others focused on a vision toward the future. What was interesting, though, is despite the range of individual responses, it took no time at all to come to agreement once discussion fired up. The group was refreshingly aware of the need to use different communication tools for different messages and audiences.

The averaged group rankings (from most important to least) were:

1. Direct Mail
2. Action Alerts
3. Website
4. Search Engines
5. Press Releases
6. Newsletters
7. Research Reports
8. Videos
9. Social Networks
10. Organizational Blog
11. Bloggers
12. Discussion Forums
13. Events
14. Paid Advertising
15. Contests

I didn’t miss the few concerned glances from the forward-thinking group seeming to say “Wow. The new e-comm girl isn’t exactly a champion of all things technical.” But in my defense, I’m just not much of a fan of using a tool for the tool’s sake. Finally, something I think we’d all agree on!

Justin went on to talk about the sales cycle (or for those of you who prefer, the process of convincing people to support TWS). During that conversation it became even more clear that no one item in our handy, dandy toolbox is going to get us where we want to be. It takes the whole collection to make the biggest, best impact possible - a lesson that we’ll surely be drawing upon often throughout the web revamp process.

A couple weeks back there was all sorts of this and that written about the fate of direct mail and fundraising in light of some recent reporting done about the last quarter of 2007.

General gist is that some thinkers (who happen to blog) in the online fundraising and direct mail world have been writing quite a bit the last week or two about these topics. Seems to be in response to a Chronicle of Philanthropy article titled “Direct Mail Appeals Suffer, New Survey Finds” (though the article does note that environmental organizations did better than most last year). The survey in question being the Target Analysis Group’s regular report, which I believe Bruce mentioned in a recent call.

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Not only is this the best darn explanation of why and how to use RSS to keep up with all the information on the web but it is a wonderful example of how a short, simple, funny video can explain things online (where visuals matter).

Check it out at CommonCraft now…

This post at epolitics.com argues the point that online video can be (perhaps already is) more powerful than paid TV ads in the context of political campaigns.

My sense is that this is largely true. As mentioned in the post, watching an online video requires an active choice on the part of the viewer… “Hey, I want to see this.” You already have some amount of buy in. A successful TV commercial may result in some teensy bit of negative or positive sway on the part of the viewer but as soon as one comes on the immediate reaction is likely antipathy towards whoever put the ad on in the first place… “I didn’t ask to see this, I don’t want to see this, this guy is an idiot, are those wolves going to attack me? I don’t get it.”

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What is RSS and why should you care? I could chat about this all day but folks at Democracy in Action did instead and did it better than I would have. So you should go take a look at this post on their blog titled…

Why Nonprofit Managers Must Use RSS … And How to Start

Using RSS is (really, I kid you not) quite simple. IE7 and Firefox browsers (use Firefox, use Firefox, use Firefox…) have RSS readers built in that work quite well.

Creating RSS content is sometimes simple. Sometimes not so simple. Blogs make it easy. All posts on ecommarama is automagically turned into RSS content. Our website at wilderness.org does NOT, unfortunately, make it easy.

But if you’re not using RSS to keep up with news, blog posts and content from useful website then you probably should look into it. Might also give you a sense of how we could use it on our own site.

Welcome to the ’soft launch’ of a blog about electronic communications at The Wilderness Society…

http://www.ecommarama.org

The goal here is to explore communications tools, systems, networks, applications, etc. used by The Wilderness Society (and/or others) and better inform staff about what they are, best practices, strategies, etc. Much of this information simply gets lost when sent to email inboxes and email doesn’t provide much of a forum for discussion. Some other topics that may come up soon could be…

• interpreting and learning from stats collected by the website and WildAlerts
• what is this thing called MySpace (or YouTube) and could/should we care? What are other groups doing with it?
• is writing content for the web really any different than writing for print?
• case studies of using email advocacy to affect issues in Alaska, California or wherever
• you haven’t seen TWS’ online video about Moosehead Lake yet?

And it is a gentle introduction to the use of blogs in general at TWS.

Hoping that others amongst you will post entries and comments. I can quickly and easily set up an author login for you and using WordPress (the underlying publishing tool) is pretty simple, really. We just ask that posts pertain to online communications and keep in mind that these pages are public.

This video is just under five minutes long and if you stick with it then I think it’s five minutes well spent…

It is an intriguing look at how the is (and already has) radically changing how information is presented and “how it all fits together” … or doesn’t.

Should be particularly interesting to those whose job/vocation/passion is communicating ideas to (with) the masses. Controlling the message is perhaps futile.

Flickr is a photo sharing site owned by Yahoo but it is not the same as Yahoo Photos.

The Wilderness Society has a Flickr account. You (and anyone else) can see the photos that have been uploaded to it. Well, you can see the photos that have been tagged as being public.

Once uploaded, photos can be organized into sets (view all our current sets now), slideshows of sets are automatically generated (see a slideshow of National Wildlife Refgue System photos), photos can be geotagged and multiple sizes of each photo are generated.

What’s more, communities of interest can be built around photos. Friends, members and others can upload photos and tie them to wilderness or other public lands issues. Others could link to our photos. Might make it easier to manage photo contests or simple requests for folks to share photos. That’s a start.