So what exactly is online advocacy? Online advocates amplify their voices using two key components of the Internet: email campaigns or e-campaigns, and social media. To understand social media it’s best to focus on the “4 C’s”, where the strength of social media is harvested:

• Content, the notion that social media tools allow everyone to become a creator, even Grandma.
• Collaboration, the idea that social media facilitates the aggregation of small individual actions into meaningful collective results, happens at three levels: conversation, co-creation and collective action.
• Community, the suggestion that social media allows sustained collaboration around a shared idea over time and across space.
• Collective Intelligence, which enables not only the collection of individual actions, but also the ability to run sophisticated algorithms on them ─ like using Google search ─ and extract meaning from them.

Below are the top 5 ways organizations and advocates are using Web-based technologies to reach their goals.

5. E-Advocacy/Email Campaigns

Email campaigns are a series of email letters that are usually written in the first person from an organization leader to its online constituents. Nonprofit organizations with a mission that includes social justice are frequently involved in promoting or opposing state and federal legislation. The widespread use of e-mail by supporters of these organizations, plus the adoption of Internet connectivity by legislators, means that many are using e-mail as an advocacy tool.

4. Blogs & Bloggers

A blog (short for weblog) is a type of website usually maintained by an individual (or blogger) that contains regular entries of commentary; often includes images, video, and external links. By appealing to bloggers organizations can create a buzz around their advocacy work. Blogs can also connect staff and volunteers, coordinate efforts, educate, provide resources to constituents, gain media attention, and reach prospective donors.

3. Micro Blogging/Twitter

Twitter is a free micro-blogging service that enables its users to send and read each others’ updates, known as tweets. Tweets are text-based posts of up to 140 characters. Twitter can be a great tool for advocacy organizations to create community and provide useful information to those they serve, volunteers, donors and other supporters. Twitter’s ability to connect people with similar interests can be harnessed for the greater social good.

2. Go Viral with Social News/Digg/Stumble Upon

Article aggregators like Digg allow anyone to submit a web link with a headline and short description. People with an account on sites like Digg can vote to move the headline up or down and leave comments. The headlines that receive the most positive votes are featured more prominently on the site. When users click on the headline to read the article an organization’s website can receive significant web traffic, making participation with social news a relatively simple way of generating attention to a specific cause.

1. Target-Specific Social Networks/Facebook/YouTube/Change.org

Facebook is the world’s largest social networking platform with over 300 million active users. Using a social network to support a cause humanizes issues, serves as a soapbox, and gives an arena to display accomplishments. Organizations are able to easily and rapidly expand the reach of a cause by exponential numbers ─ from individuals, to grassroots movements, to large corporate interests alike ─  by using social networks to connect with, inform and influence millions of people each day.

This list was compiled with citations from a Hatcher Group study released September 28, 2009.  It reveals how nonprofits are using new media technologies to advance social change. Based on interviews and a 70-question online survey of 30 nonprofits working on state-level advocacy issues, “New Media & Social Change: How Nonprofits are Using Web-based Technologies to Reach Their Goals” shows what new media tools are being used and how.

By Seth Pinckney, Media Play Nice Consultant 2009

jimray:

Every web developer on earth hates Internet Explorer for a very good, very valid reason: it sucks. Suck, in fact, doesn’t even begin to encapsulate the amount pain and angst IE causes web developers on a daily basis. The amount of time that I’ve personally spent writing code to route around the indomitable suck that is IE has quite possibly added up to years at this point. Years of my life dedicated to that slow, bloated, horrible piece of garbage. (I hope I’m not underselling this because I really, REALLY hate IE.)

Invariably, some rumor will pop up that the IE team is thinking about scrapping the awful, non-compliant, slow, buggy engine that they use to render web sites and replace it with something awesome, like Gecko or Webkit. These rumors are nothing more than teases because anyone who’s tracked Microsoft for any length of time knows that it’ll be a cold day in hell before that happens.

Fortunately, Google is full of smart people who aren’t willing to wait for Microsoft to get their act together and actually pay attention to the past decade of what’s been happening on the web. So they built Google Chrome Frame, a plug-in that actually replaces Internet Explorer’s rendering engine with the one that Google Chrome uses. Consider for a moment exactly how awesome that is. It literally installs a new HTML, CSS and javascript engine inside the otherwise abysmal browser, none the wiser to the user. One line of code, a plug-in install later, and all of the sudden, you no longer have to work around IE’s cruddy box model interpretation or dog-slow Javascript engine.

I’d like to think that this is the sort of thing that web developers will embrace en masse, but the reality is the uptick will likely be slow and for specialized applications that rely on lots of front end processing. But if it takes hold, it just might mean one of the few things that truly sucks about the internet goes away for good.