I don’t know if you’ll have picked up on the latest in ’social media’ but I think it’s fantastic. The new format that I talk of is micro blogging (and the service is of course Twitter).
As a campaigner there are three groups that I particularly need to stay in touch with; ‘decision makers’, partners and collaborators and that sector of society that we in Oxfam call ‘the globally aware’. Twitter makes my job so much easier. This blog will deal with how twitter can help you as campaigners to be as effective as possible.
One of the things that I like most about it is that it gives me loads of opportunities to hassle, pester and charm important people.
Just last night Ed Miliband, the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, was being interviewed by Jon Snow for Channel 4 news. Before they went on air Channel 4 News sent a request out on Twitter. ‘It looks like Ed Miliband will be on the programme tonight. Please tweet your Copenhagen/climate change questions…’ I thought to myself ‘Excellent! What an opportunity.’ Here was an opportunity to ask Ed a question and get him to answer it live on national TV. Of course dozens of people responded but it was our question, the Oxfam Midlands question, that got asked.
We asked Ed ‘People living in poverty around the world are counting on you. Are you going to deliver the deal they need?’ Ed said ‘Yes we have to do that… this deal is not just about reducing emissions, it’s got to be about money for poor countries to adapt to climate change which is inevitable, and it is inevitable unfortunately.’ His answer wasn’t really anything new- although it is always good to get politicians to reiterate that they ‘have to’ get the right result for the poorest people in the world. The impact is of course wider- as well as getting Ed to reiterate it also slightly changed the emphasis of the piece that had otherwise focused mostly on the global politicking between negotiating blocs also it made sure that wherever Ed goes, even into the TV Studio, he is being reminded that tens of thousands of Oxfam supporters want him to get the deal that people living in poverty need.
Of course this is only one example- in recent weeks we’ve also targeted Nick Clegg, asking our supporters to comment on his Facebook note about climate change, and today we’re targeting President Obama as part of a global twitter storm.
The second thing that I really like about Twitter is that it helps me to keep in touch with a massive number of campaigners and other campaigns- these are the partners and collaborators that I mentioned above. As you know Oxfam works with others to overcome poverty and suffering. This means that we are happy to promote other people’s campaign ideas so long as they will help the world achieve our aim of overcoming poverty and suffering. In fact we want to do more than promote other people- we want to collaborate with people to effect the most change possible. I’ve already mentioned a couple of examples- the idea of commenting on Nick Clegg’s facebook note didn’t come from Oxfam Midlands, or even Oxfam, it came from fellow climate campaigner Peter Pannier. Another example is far grander, and we in Oxfam Midlands are only a small part of the picture, along with tens of thousands of others we are going to The Wave on December the 5th. The Wave is, as you know, a march to demonstrate public support for strong global action against climate change, and the affects of climate change, before global talks in Copenhagen. In this case we are collaborating with hundreds of others to promote The Wave by using special tags which highlight it to other users of twitter. I’ll explain these more below. If you follow oxfammidlands on twitter you will find that many of the things that we send out are repeats (re-tweets) of other organisations and other individuals good ideas for taking action.
The final thing that I find Twitter particularly useful for is keeping in touch with the ‘globally aware’ public. The globally aware public are, very basically and obviously, that section of society who keep in touch with what is going on in international affairs, they watch or read the news regularly, they think about how they fit into a global world and they think about their role in that world. As a campaigner this is the primary group of people in the public that I need to get taking action and talking about the issues that Oxfam is concerned about. Knowing what they are talking about on Twitter is useful because it allows me to make Oxfam relevant to them.
Of course as a person reading this blog you are probably interested in taking effective action, organising actions with others and making Oxfam and the movement to eradicate poverty relevant to members of the public. You can use twitter to do this really effectively.
To Start:
1) Go to www.twitter.com and sign up by clicking the link top right.
2) Follow OxfamMidlands, OxfamGB and others- you can do this using the search function on Twitter. When you follow someone everytime you visit twitter and login their updates appear in your updates list so you can see what they are up to.
3) You can also find new people on Twitter to follow- one good way is to look at the follower and following lists of others that you like- so for example if you look at the follower lists of oxfammidlands you’ll find lots of people, mostly in the Midlands, interested in fighting poverty. Likelyhood is that you’ll be interested in similar things so you might want to follow them to.
4) Tell the world what you think- to tweet go to your twitter homepage and enter in you thoughts.
5) Interact with the ‘twitterverse’ in twitter you can get more interactive by using some of the behaviours that have developed in the twitter community.
To mention someone in a tweet or to reply to something that they have said you can enter their username preceeded by an ‘@’ (so to mention oxfam midlands you use ‘@oxfammidlands’).
You can also ‘retweet’ people that say something interesting or that you agree with. To do this you ‘RT @username’ and then re-enter their message.
Another good device is hashtags- people use #and then a word to identify trends in twitter traffic. A good example was recently during ‘that’ question time which invovled that politician the hashtag #bbcqt showeed that over 75,000 tweets about the programme were tweeted during the programme.
That’s the basics- you can pick the rest up as you go along! Have fun and be effective- Tweeting, not just for twits!
