Vote for the First Anti-Genocide Hotline on Reddit

See the full alert here

My colleague, Ivan Boothe, who works with the Genocide Intervention Network and who is incredible smart about integrating social media into cause-related campaigns, pinged me about this reddit campaign.   I wanted to help him out, so follow that link above and then follow the instructions.  Then come back here.

I'm also highlighting this because it is a terrific example of using social news sites like Digg and Reddit o promote a cause (the Reddit guys were among my first video blog interviewees back in Nov. 2005) I had (wrongly) assumed that getting to the top of social news sites was a matter of dumb luck or that if something went viral.  But there's strategy involved and a tool to help you execute it.

Here's what Ivan had to say:

Just wanted to highlight a small initiative we sent out today using Collactive <http://www.collactive.com/>, a web firm that helps organizations use their network of members to promote news stories and websites to larger audiences. You can see our action in the message below, or by going to:

http://www.GenocideIntervention.net/OneMinute

Prior to this action, we used Collactive twice to promote particular op-eds (one in the Boston Globe and one in the LA Times) that aligned with our positions on how to stop genocide in Darfur. We had our members email the articles, via Collactive (which steps you through the process), and quickly raised them to the "most emailed" spot on the home page. In the case of the LA Times article, which was about the need for divestment from Sudan, we had our members specifically email the article to a vice-president at Fidelity, which has a lot of investments in Sudan-linked business firms. So in that case, we got a two-for-one -- both raising awareness of the issue and flooding a decisionmaker with an important column.

In this case, we are asking our members to vote up an article on our anti-genocide hotline, 1-800-GENOCIDE, on the social bookmarking website Reddit. We just sent this out a few hours ago, so things are still developing. Collactive also has ways to focus your network's power on YouTube videos, Digg articles and specific blog entries (for instance, to flood a blog with positive or negative comments).

We have been pretty happy with Collactive so far; if anyone has any questions about these campaigns I'd be happy to relate our experiences.

And, if you get a chance, please vote for us on Reddit. :)

In a follow up email exchange, Ivan pointed me  to some additional background on these techniques:

Here's what Collactive wrote about our Globe action:

http://www.collactive.com/success_ginet.html

The second item in this member newsletter highlighted the successes of these actions:

http://genocideintervention.net/members/newsletter/index.php/2007-05/29/

I was delighted to find this example because as I was putting the final touches on a new remixed deck of Social Media Cards I was debating about whether or not to include social news gathering sites like Digg or Reddit.   My colleague, Francesco Santini, who remixed the games a fundraising game, but in Italian had included "Segnalo" which is an Italian Digg.

Ivan's story adds an excellent example to accompany these resource links.  Thanks Ivan .. now off to integrate it into my slides show for my session at the Bridge Conference on Tuesday.

Comments

[Ian Wilker]

I've been taking a long look at Collactive the last couple days -- on the surface it's a brilliant tool; will pipe up when I've got a handle on the details.