Irish Brands using Social Media

	Twitter	Facebook	YouTube
Barry’s Tea
Bord Gáis
Butlers Chocolates
Ecocem
Eircom
FBD
Irish Times
Kerrygold
RaboDirect
Tayto
Trinity College
Vodafone

If you don’t register your brand as a twitter name, someone else will. Who knows what fun they’ll have with it before you notice?

A basic level of involvement is now expected

People expect your company to be using social media. In fact, the chances are, your customers are already talking about you on twitter, whether you’re there or not. Domino’s Pizza had a pr disaster last April, when two employees posted a video of themselves to YouTube doing awful and unhygienic things to customers’ food. Immediately, the story spread all over Twitter, Digg and the blogosphere.

Dominos biggest failing in counteracting the viral avalanche that was crashing around them was that it wasn’t on twitter to pick up all the noise of what was being said about them.

Computer Weekly

Dominos finally began to respond to the fiasco two days later. The company president, Patrick Doyle, placed ads apologising for the debacle and they created a twitter account as part of their strategy to keep a close eye on what was happening in social media. They are now communicating directly with their customers via Twitter, actively seeking out disgruntled souls, gathering information about how to make their service better, and presenting a good public face to the online community.

The Dark Side of Twitter

It’s important to be aware of of the potential pitfalls of Twitter such as social engineering, fraudsters, and bad press.

Social Engineering and Fraudsters

Customers are at risk of fraudsters impersonating banks. All they need is a likely looking username, and a false air of professionalism, to gain the trust of some customers, and then their sensitive financial data.

…a fraudster posing as a bank on Twitter could respond to a customer’s question about an account problem by asking for account passwords, Social Security numbers, and other sensitive information. Unsuspecting customers, thinking they’re on a legitimate bank Twitter page, could be duped.

Search Financial Security

Bad Press

Your customers may already be talking about you. What are they saying? Use twitters in-built search function to keep a finger on the pulse of your brand. TweetBuzzer is a useful site for keeping track of the top 100 brands on twitter, and a useful introduction to how opinion sways, and word spreads. You can also request that they track your company too.

It’s a great platform if you get it right

Twitter allows you to reach out to your customers in a very personal way. Tweets are faster and often less formal than an email, and they can be spread from person to person very quickly. There are many uses for Twitter.

Catch problems early

Are there flaws in the system? Programmers say that many eyes makes for shallow bugs. If there is a problem with your product or service, listening to the tweets of your customers can help you go find it and get it sorted quickly. The feedback ranges from general belly-aching, to direct and specific pleas. The latter can help you to pin-point exactly where you can fix things to retain customers. This tweet was followed with sympathy and discussion from other twitter users about the details of the problem, and advice about other banks to switch to. This could have been the perfect moment for a compassionate intervention from customer service. Then the following tweets may have been praise rather than damning details.

Nip pr issues in the bud

Customers hurting? Twitter is an excellent, real-time barometer for how people feel about a particular product or service, individual bank, or even the sector as a whole. See what news and ideas are spreading. Excellent customer experience may be rewarded with a bit of free word of mouth advertising.

Etiquette

Do not abuse hashtags or trending topics. These are key words that twitter uses to keep track of what topics are popular at any given moment. HabitatUK did last June, and they got roasted over it. If you attempt shady publicity tactics, the community will retaliate. SocialMediaToday offers the following advice:

It’s ok to fail. Do it quickly and apologise publicly. People are a lot more forgiving when you admit to your mistakes rather than deny any wrongdoing.

Don’t spam. The quality of your tweets is what attracts followers. If you spam or have low quality tweets, soon the only followers you will have will be spambots.

It’s a New Advertising Channel

As well as being a social tool, Twitter is also a new advertising channel. It has some similarities with voluntarily joined email newsletters; your message has more weight when the user has consciously opted in to receive it. Twitter ads have immediacy which other mediums can only dream of, and there is also the possibility that your customers will choose to spread the message further.

Bare in mind however, that nobody spontaneously tweets about an average experience. “I’ve had four years of loyal service with XYZ Bank, I guess they’re ok” is not a tweet you’re going to see very often. People generally only tweet about companies if they have either a very good or a very bad experience. As a result, these opinions are usually raw and unvarnished and may sting.

Social Media Success

Twitter is not just about keeping disaster at bay. Used correctly it can generate leads and bring in income. Dell claims to have made €3 million from twitter by generating a large number of followers, tweeting about products and offering coupons.

Another social media service is LinkedIn. It’s more business orientated than twitter, though they are connected. LinkedIn is a networking site with a more formal approach, and so is a good way for companies and professionals to keep in contact with each other, rather than with consumers. Goshido is one such company, which was in need of serious venture capital. They managed to raise €230,000 solely on LinkedIn. So, twitter is not the only social media channel to keep an eye on. Your company may also benefit from a YouTube channel, and perhaps a facebook page too.

And the chances are, your customers and staff are already there.

Conclusion

• Get in before someone else starts using your company name on twitter and spreading chaos, or fleecing unsuspecting customers.
• Provide an official voice, so that customer and staff opinions are not the only representations of your company.
• Make it clear to customers that you will never ask for their bank account details via twitter. Similar precautions as you might take with email and phone communication.
• Safer to stick to announcements, information, and product information.
• Listen to your customers. If you don’t, everyone else will, and spread it around.

But this is nothing new. Through the ages we’ve come from bonfires, to burning torches, to oil lamps, to light bulbs, so it’s in our nature to try to find the next innovation to make things easier and cleaner.

There are certain people who take pleasure in solving these problems themselves. A lot of home automation is done by geeks, using painstaking trial and error to get things working to their (sometimes eccentric) satisfaction. Then there are other less inventive souls who might buy a few stand-alone gadgets to automate when their lights come on, or buy a roomba to clean the floors. At the other end of the spectrum are those keen enough to get in a specialist and connect all their lights and media throughout the house, to various panels and controllers.

Remote Control

Home automation is used for many common tasks around the house.

• Security cameras and motion detectors.
• Remote control light dimmers, and timed light switches which can save energy, and give the impression that a house is occupied, even if the residents are away.
• HVAC or Heating, Ventilation and Air Conditioning.
• Automated gardening, such as watering the houseplants, and triggering outdoor sprinklers for the lawn.
• Multizone audio, spread across many rooms.

However, there are a growing number of people who wish to have access to their home controls from anywhere. There is demand for remote as in global, rather than remote as in sitting on the couch flicking through the TV channels.

Tools for Carers

As well as increasing leisure, there are lots of ways to benefit an older or disabled person with home automation. It could allow Granny to answer the door via the house phone, rather than trying to dash out to the hall in time. Or table lamp could light up when the phone rings, if she is hard of hearing. Some older people have personal alarms; small gadgets with a button to summon a neighbour or carer, in case of a fall or emergency. Another possible use of remote control might be keeping the house sufficiently warm for elderly relatives. As we age our bodies become less able to deal with the cold, so hypothermia is very dangerous to the elderly. Hypothermia is especially dangerous because once your body temperature falls below 35 degrees, you don’t feel the cold as keenly; it lowers the heart rate and blood pressure, and can lead to drowsiness. Being able to keep an eye on the temperature of the house while at work could be a great advantage for those caring for relatives at home.

Heating and Climate Control

Controlling the temperature of the home is a very important aspect of home automation.
Rudimentary heat management is nothing new, but controlling it from a distance opens up new possibilities. Thermostats, for example, have been around since the 1880’s. They regulate the temperature, by keeping it within a desired range. Modern thermostats often have timing capabilities too, so you can set the heating to come on half an hour before you get up in the morning. It can make dragging yourself out of bed on a cold winter’s day that little bit easier. To keep things economical you can lower the heating while the house is unoccupied, and warm it up again a little while before you arrive home.

But perhaps you are delayed by a late meeting, and you want to change the timing of the thermostat on the fly. This sort of remote access is becoming increasingly popular. People want fine control of their heating, hot water, and the solar panels which are gradually becoming more common. After all, there’s nothing worse than stepping off the plane at your holiday destination just to realise you forgot to turn off the immersion.

Emergencies

A traditional burglar alarm gets triggered and stays on for hours or even days, spreading rage and ill-will among neighbours, who are less likely to rush to protect your house than complain to the authorities about the noise. There is no point having an alarm going off at your house if you are out and about. Several companies already offer an improved warning system where they attempt to contact you to see if everything is ok, and even call the emergency services if necessary, instead of triggering a neighbour-infuriating siren. But perhaps in the future we will see more advanced warning systems like this which might also respond to events such as floods and fires, and maybe even subtle threats like gas leaks and carbon monoxide, instead of just intruders.

What’s Next

It seems certain that we will expect our homes will take care of us more and more and reduce tedious chores. Just as the idea of leisure time emerged in Victorian Britain because of the Industrial Revolution, we will still seek to make our work more efficient, and expand our recreation time. However, trying to identify specific innovations is more tricky. After all IBM has been promising us a self-restocking fridge for ten years now.

For more on using WAI ARIA landmark roles, see this excellent article in the Paciello Group Blog.

Computer games get a lot of bad press at times, but they aren’t just for pure entertainment or promoting violence and gore. They can also be used to impart useful skills and communicate ideas. According to Kathy Sierra, the best teaching systems utilize some of the most engaging aspects of games.

Brains love play. Find a way to bring more play (or at least a sense of playfulness) into someone’s life, and you might just end up with a fan.

Kathy Sierra, Creating Passionate Users

Games work by rewarding certain behaviors. By the process of trial and error, the player learns what works and what doesn’t, and gradually pieces together a strategy to win.

It turns out that most learnable skills can be turned into a game.

Daniel Cook, Lost Garden

Games can be a safe sandbox for people to try things out, and learn skills which can later be applied in real life.

Darfur is Dying

Darfur is Dying provides an insight into the lives of refugees of Darfur; their living conditions and stories.

This game was meant – however temporarily – to put you in the shoes of the 2.5 million refugees from Darfur, now living in camps in Sudan and Chad.

And it does. You have to choose which member of the camp to send out to forage for water, while avoiding the gun-wielding Janjaweed militias. Dying in most games just makes your character pop back to life, an unharmed carbon copy. In this game, if the character is captured, you are told of their fate, and may have to choose another character to continue. If you don’t learn fast enough, your pool of possible characters becomes increasingly narrow. When you come to the screen to choose a new character, missing persons are faded out. Over time, more and more of the characters are faded out as the population of the refugee camp dwindles. This has a much more chilling than temporarily loosing Mario.

To play the game you must make choices, and each choice has harsh repercussions. Sending out a full grown man is not allowed; he is likely to be killed. Sending out a full grown woman might be a good idea, because she can carry more water back for her family, but she risks rape and abuse if captured. The alternative, to send out a young teenager or child, also has consequences, such as abuse and kidnapping and perhaps even death.

Simple game mechanics are used to emphasis the point of the game. If your character is captured, the consequences are made clear with the ‘play again’ message.

As someone at a far off computer, and not a child or adult in Sudan, would you like the chance to try again?

In most games the ‘play again’ mechanic is just a flashing button.

The game leaves the player with some sense of the awful events transpiring in Darfur, but it also seeks to spread the message further. The ever present Take Action button allows players to pass the game on to a friend, send a message to President Obama, and several other ways to spread the word and get involved.

Free Rice

Free Rice has not one, but two altruistic goals; to increase the players’ vocabulary*, and win rice for the UN World Food Program.

For each answer you get right, we donate 10 grains of rice through the Un World Food Program to help end hunger.

It’s been a huge hit, garnering mentions in the Washington Post, USA Today and the New York Times, as well as BBC news, and CBS.

The game play itself is a bit like Who Wants To Be A Millionaire. The player gets a question, and four answers to click on. The strength of this game is its simplicity. It’s very easy to get into a state of flow, and move through the questions with very little friction. The education and the game play are seamless.

As you get pick right answers, a wooden bowl on the right hand side of the screen begins to fill with rice. This positive feedback is instant, and very encouraging. When the bowl is full, the rice is moved to a little pile at the side, and the bowl is emptied out, ready to be filled again.

When the wrong answer is given, no more rice is added to the bowl, and the correct answer is displayed on the next game screen. Whether wrong or right, the game slips by very smoothly, with no complex actions required from the player, only trying to choose the right word. Correct answers gradually increase the difficulty of the words, while incorrect answers lead to easier questions.
It’s a pure and uncluttered experience, with a much softer emotional impact than Darfur is Dying. The player is already quietly helping the cause, so rather than trying to make a fierce, one-time impact, Free Rice aims to entice the player back again and again to play a little more.

*Originally the game focused only on vocabulary, but now you can also work on your grammar, identify countries of the world, pair famous paintings with their creators, explore chemical symbols and simple maths.

Lord of the Flies

The Lord of the Flies by William Golding, tells the tale of a group of school boys stranded on a tropical island, and their descent from order into chaos. The game begins with an overview of the island which is the setting for the book. The game is made up of a series of quizzes about the characters, symbols and meaning of the novel.

The first game challenge is a simple matching game, where objects and quotations must be matched up to the correct character. Ralph is associated with the conch shell, which the children use during meetings, while Jack his rival, is paired with a knife and a mask. Piggy is associated with his glasses, which the children use to light a signal fire in the hopes of being rescued. After the quotes and objects have been properly assigned, the player is rewarded with an insight into the meanings behind the character names.

After each challenge, the player is taken back to the overview of the island, where subtle changes indicate that time has passed, and events have occurred. By the end of the first part of the game, there are tiny tents on the beach where the boys have built shelters, and a pig’s head sits on a stick in the middle of a clearing, after Jacks’ first hunt.

The second challenge is about symbolism. Objects must be matched with what they represent. The conch for example, stands for Law and Order, while the pig’s head stands for Chaos and Evil. Quotations supporting these ideas appear as the game is played. The idea that the pig’s head represents evil references the following quote.

Then he backed away, keeping his face to the skull that lay grinning at the sky.

The game reveals not just the meaning of the book, but also some of the process of uncovering it.
By the end of the second challenge the island ravaged by fire as Jack and his tribe seek to hunt down and murder Ralph, their original leader.

The third challenge is about the nature of the book itself. Is it just an adventure story or is it a fable about good and evil? By the time this quiz is completed, the zoomed out view shows the island has been found by a ship, and the children are being rescued. The final screen features a condensed biography of the author, William Golding.

In the comments section, both teachers and students hint that they would like more levels, more characters, more quotations and generally more depth. The Lord of the Flies game successfully combines knowledge with enjoyment, in a format which could be reused for a lot of other novels.

Tips for Creating an Educational Game

• The information and the game mechanics must sit well together. A literary subject like dissecting a book is not going to work well as a first person shooter. But war history might.
• Squeeze some extra meaning or atmosphere into the basic game mechanics. “You have been captured by the militia”, rather than “Game over”.
• The graphics don’t have to be too flashy. Gorgeous eye candy can lure in new players, but they stay if the game play is good, and the experience is smooth. Good gameplay will lead to a lot more worth of mouth advertising than the thin veneer of shiny graphics over a poorly made game. Especially for online games, simple stylish graphics can be much faster to load than something overly intricate, and it’s no good loosing players at the loading screen. Some games may not require any graphics at all.
• Help it to spread. Include links for people to easily send the game to their friends, or post on the social networking sites. People love to spread fun experiences, but fun, educational experiences, even more so. For charities, it can be an extra way to raise awareness.

New South Wales Government

This map showcases the investments of the New South Wales government across a range of categories including, education, energy, health, public order and safety, transport and water. Transport and education seem to be the two main focuses at the moment. Like many other maps, it can be filtered to display only certain types of projects.

The Google map’s importance to this site is emphasized by the way it’s put at the core of everything. It features prominently on the home page, to offer a good jumping off point for visitors looking to find out more about the NSW investments. There are links to articles about the investments under the map and in the sidebar, further supporting it. These, together with the map, give a very good bird’s eye view of the whole project.

Redbridge Interactive Map

Redbridge is a district of Greater London. It’s interactive map is designed to inform people of local services, including government, social and religious services.

The map can only display one filter at a time, which is just as well because all the map markers are identical little purple pins, no matter what category they relate to. A very nice feature of the map is how well it connects to information about public transport. Each item on the Redbridge map contains a link to very specific information on the Transport for London site, a comprehensive public transport tool.

Unlike most government Google maps, there is a nice feedback option on the map as well, so communication between government and citizen is not an entirely one way street. Left clicking an open area of the map opens an option to report an incident, such a pothole, litter or an abandoned vehicle. Graffiti can also be reported, and flagged for destruction, unlike the Street Art Locator, which digitally curates it instead. A similar process on a digital map, but with very different end goals.

Auckland City Council

Dormant volcanoes nestle in among the city streets in Auckland, the largest city in New Zealand. This map displays council services and information for the area.

One unusual feature of this map is that it zooms appropriately to show all flags for any given category. While this prevents any map item from being over-looked, it also has the effect of making it very difficult to compare more than one type of service. Only one set of items can be displayed at a time, so community halls can’t easily be compared with, for example, alcohol ban areas. As a result, the zoom which occurs every time a new category is selected, can have a disorientating effect.

Conclusion

Government Google Maps have a quite different set of goals than most Community Google Maps. The quality and reliability of the information provided is more important than the sheer quantity available through the croud-sourcing mechanisms of many community maps. Some goverment maps do allow for user feedback, but they draw the line at user content.

The top-down structure underlying government maps reveals itself in the details of the map. They often feature carefully numbered items, and show restraint in the type and number of map locations highlighted. Community maps, in contrast, are developed via a bottom-up type of structure and tend to be a perpetual work in progress which never reach a fully “finished” state. Government maps have a much lower chance of incorrect information and vandalism than community maps, which have open authorship, and this makes the information contained in them much more trustworthy, if less frequently updated.

Cork Greenmap

The Cork Greenmap is used to highlight businesses, services and organisations in Cork, which focus on sustainable living and natural food. The map features organic farms and food producers, a natural food bakery, and wholefood cafes, as well as gardening, fair-trade and second hand shops. This mixture of green goods and services is gathered together by volunteers and collaborators, and invites visitors to the site to contribute if they know of any additional items, not yet included.

There is a sister map available for the Dublin area also, but it doesn’t seem to be quite as lovingly updated as the Cork version.

In an effort to keep the map uncluttered, the designers have taken the unusual step of launching it with only a random selection of items visible. To get a sense of the full scope of green offerings in Cork, it is necessary to play around with the Filter, and select a variety of item types. It’s a curious approach to the problem of overcrowding which many community maps contend with, especially in built up areas.

Street Art Locator

Street art has a tendency to be ephemeral, weather-beaten, unofficial and often, but not always, illegal. All of these things make it difficult to curate and record. Despite all this, street art has many fans across the world who can now share their sightings of street art globally, thanks to StreetArtLocator.com. This site’s community gathers images of graffiti, paintings, installations and sculptures, and records the location on a Google map.

Marrying Google mapping technology and input from the street art community, the site aims to create a definitive global directory of stencils, sculpture, guerrilla art and graffiti. StreetArtLocator.com will showcase the genre in all its forms, whether made in secret, sanctioned by corporate sponsors or accepted by the art establishment.

StreetArtLocator blog

The screenshot below shows Buenos Aires, which has a variety of sightings, including stencils, graffiti and paintings, and even a few street art galleries.

Community Walk

Less polished than Cork Greenmap or the StreetArtLocator, the CommunityWalk site none the less has a very active community, and contains literally thousands of user-created maps, of wildly varying quality. Its founder Jared Cosulich originally designed the site to help his mother, who was a realtor, but over time he discovered that it could be useful for a whole range of mapping tasks.

CommunityWalk includes:

• a map of mountain biking trails in New Jersey, which categorizes them according to their difficulty level.
• a tourist trail around Yosemite National Park, with markers indicating shopping, parks and hotels.
• a Saturday afternoon walk around San Francisco of exactly 2.27miles, which takes in city streets, parkland and a stretch along the beach, with photographs of particularly scenic parts mapped to the part of the walk they were taken from.

Conclusion

In Google Maps, Google has created something very valuable for the internet community. Some years ago, people revelled in the notion that the internet would be a virtual utopia, free from the tyranny of geography, where ideas could be shared without borders. While the internet has knocked down many communication barriers, we are only now seeing the real power of mapping virtual information back onto physical locations.

In recent years there has often been a little flurry of blogging and YouTubing around election time, but only a few hardy Irish politicians blog the rest of the time. For many, it’s something they only think about in the run up to an election, because that is the traditional way to do things. Irish politicians have used the internet as if it were a poster on a lamppost; important for a few weeks, and then left to twist in the wind until taken down. The best way to blog however, is to persevere, to post regularly and gradually gather a following. This kind of approach to blogs and social media by Irish politicians is only slowly becoming more main-stream.

Dominic Hannigan is a Senator from Meath, and one of the rare regular bloggers in the political sphere, with an archive stretching back several years. His family is getting more net savvy too; he was surprised to drop in on his 80 year old father recently, who was keen to show him his new facebook page.

“He had spent the previous hour writing on other people’s walls – as an ex-Garda he has frowned on that practice for the last 80 years.”

Irish Times

Some TDs who blog, such as Thomas Byrne, are also trying out twitter. Unfortunately, Byrne seems to have petered out after only 5 tweets.

There are very few Irish politicians embracing YouTube, but Frank Chambers has given it a go. One of his videos, recorded in his kitchen, is simple and direct and addresses why voters should give him their support. He shows guts in leaving comments on, and is rewarded by a variety of offerings, attracting even celebrity blogger Damien Mulley.

damienmulley

“More views than Bertie’s Ard Fheis speech. Nice one Frank.”

Allowing people to comment on a blog or YouTube video will beget both compliments and jibes. On top of this, even your supportive internet clan may say things that make you cringe.

peterpjordan

“Good Man Frank. If for nothing else for embracingthis (sic) technology and being aware of its impact not like most of the neadhendrals (sic) that represent your party at local and national level”.

Garrett Tubridy is probably the biggest Obama copycat so far, but does he have the wit and charisma to pull it off? His website invites visitors to volunteer. His volunteer section suggests that his supporters go “canvassing, online canvassing, managing the campaign and organising events” but offers no support or detail whatsover. You can donate or sign up for an enewsletter but that’s about as far as the interactivity goes. His Video Diary 3, hosted on YouTube, has generated 2.5 stars out of 5 and received a mixture of responses in the comments section, ranging from “Fair play”, to “Guess what…an Obama font doesn’t make you Obama”.

Tubridy spends much of his time on the video blog talking about where he was that week and where he’ll be next week, rather than, his policies, beliefs, passions and opinions. He uses a variety of Obama-like techniques, but without quite managing to connect.

But he’s not alone. Most Irish politicians are trying to mimic the success of the Obama/Biden election campaign…but they haven’t quite got it right yet.

Facebook

Obama’s facebook page has videos, lists of individual supporters and supporter groups and little gifts for his followers, such as “I voted for Obama” avatars. He has over 6 million supporters so far.

If we look at his supporting facebook groups, we can see the broad appeal of the president, and how net savvy and self organising his followers can be. Obama’s supporting groups include:

• Afro Americans for Obama
• Asian Americans & Pacific Islanders for Obama
• First Americans for Obama
• Latinos for Obama
• Obama Pride
• Students for Barack Obama
• Veterans for Obama
• Women for Obama

There are some personal details displayed on the page, like any other facebook user, such as relationship status, birth date, religious views, interests, and favourite music, films, books and TV shows. Obama enjoys basketball, The Fugees and Shakespeare’s Tragedies.

Perhaps the most important elements on the page are the embedded YouTube videos. Over 50 videos have been posted in all, fulfilling a variety of different functions:

• Video messages from Obama to areas he couldn’t physically attend while campaigning
• Videos from his supporters to rally people to organise themselves, volunteer to spread the word, especially in “battleground” states
• Videos from Michelle Obama
• Lots of videos of strong speeches
• Videos explaining his policy on topics such as the economy, and foreign policy. This is particularly useful, because people often don’t understand the details of the issues. These views are stated in plain English, with little political jargon.
• Videos of celebrities supporting him. Some even have a little singsong. (Of course there are lots of unauthorised fan videos on YouTube too, such as those from Obama girl, made by political satire site Barely Political, but those don’t show up in the official Barack Obama facebook page.)
• Videos used to respond to mud slinging from opponents.

McCain too had an online presence, but perhaps his supporters were not as net savvy. His facebook page doesn’t have any personal information, comments don’t appear to be enabled and there is very little posting activity there. He didn’t leverage facebook as much as Obama did. He did appear to have some vocal supporters on YouTube however, such as the McCain Girls singing “It’s raining McCain”. But under closer scrutiny this was actually a parody video by the comedy branch of the Huffington Post. It even fooled McCain himself who praised it on Fox News.

My.BarackObama.com

Nick-named myBO by its community, this site is a very detailed tool for helping to transform supporters into campaigners, mapping online users to their local communities, so they can get out and meet people in person. But it’s built in such a user-friendly way, that users aren’t intimidated by it; each person is given a manageable list of campaigning chores, and support to complete them. For example, members are encouraged to go door to door and talk to their neighbours. The site provides walking maps, and a basic script to steer the conversation. After going door-to-door, the campaigner could then enter their feedback into the site, so that duplicate visits could be kept to a minimum and trends examined.

During the campaign, there was a video tutorial on the front page, where a supporter called Amy ran through the basics of how to use and personalise the site, in just a few minutes. This video highlights how good the user interface of myBO is, and was important in encouraging people not to be intimidated by yet another new site, but to try it for themselves.

There are a lot of different ways for people to get involved. There are options to donate, set up your own donation page for your friends and family to use, find an event near you, sign up for the newsletter, sign up to volunteer, check that you are registered to vote and purchase merchandise such as t-shirts, pins, and small flags for the garden.

The two most important tools are the ones which support his followers in campaigning themselves, either by phone or in person. These tools were absolutely key to the campaign. They empower a self-selected group of dedicated supporters, who have never met before, who may have nothing in common except their passion for their cause. It sorts them by area and interest, into groups, gives them achievable tasks to conquer, a manageable amount of information about voters, tools to make the job easy, and simple forms to report back with. There is no duplication of effort. To have that many unpaid foot soldiers, and to be able to pin point their efforts was the masterstroke of the online campaign.

It’s part of myBO’s success was down to the quality and experience of the team who helped to build it. The team included Chris Hughes, formerly of Facebook.

“‘We’ve really poured a lot of energy and thought into making this focused on real-world organizing activity,’ says Chris Hughes, the 24-year-old co-founder of Facebook, who left that company last year to help Obama with his online organizational efforts.”

Wired.com

WhiteHouse.gov

Other governments around the world to use their designated country code top-level domain, such as .ca for Canada, .uk for the United Kingdom, and .ie for Ireland, but the Americans use the .gov domain.

“The U.S. is the only country that has a government-specific top-level domain in addition to its country-code top-level domain, due to the origins of the Internet as a U.S. federal government-sponsored research network (see National Science Foundation Network and ARPANET). Other countries typically use a second-level domain for this purpose.”

Wikipedia

The official White House website, has been updated to reflect many of the lessons learned from facebook and myBO. That said, the visual changes to government websites have not been as dramatic as predicted by designer Andy Rutledge in his scathing article USA.gov Redux.

The site is very regularly updated, with news, blog posts, videos of speeches and weekly video addresses. Many of the items posted have each their own contact form, for members of the public to submit their opinions and ideas. All of this gives the site an aura of approachability.

WhiteHouse.gov also has a lot of links to social media prominently displayed, including Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, MySpace, YouTube, Vimeo and iTunes.

WhiteHouse.gov is still a work in progress however. For all the talk of transparency and attempts at keeping the public informed about government activities, there are some reports that Obama is not being as transparent as he claimed he would be.

PolitiFact.com runs a segment on its site called The Obameter, where they are painstakingly keeping track of over 500 campaign promises made by Obama. One of his promises, to allow five days of public comment before signing bills, has not been fulfilled, despite all the social media links and comment forms dotting the site.

Allow five days of public comment before signing bills

To reduce bills rushed through Congress and to the president before the public has the opportunity to review them, Obama “will not sign any non-emergency bill without giving the American public an opportunity to review and comment on the White House website for five days.”

…President Barack Obama signed the Credit Card Accountability, Responsibility, and Disclosure (CARD) Act of 2009 on May 22, only two days after the bill was finalized in Congress.

The law doesn’t take effect for a full year, so it clearly is not emergency legislation. We should also note that the White House doesn’t make it easy for people to find where to leave comments on pending legislation. The Web site does not have a tab for comments or pending legislation and, when we finally discovered the undated comment area for the credit card bill through a global search of the White House site, it wasn’t clear where it was located on the site or where people should go for future comments.”

PolitiFact.com

Other Sites

There are a lot of other sites associated with Obama both during and after his campaign.

Obama-Biden Transition Project

change.gov was set up two days after the election, as a transitional site, before they got to use whitehouse.gov. One of its functions was to collect/rate ideas from the public.

Serve.gov

Originally usaservice.org, this site was set up to co-ordinate individuals with service events, to give back to their community for Martin Luther King Day, on the 19th January. 2009 saw the most successful service day ever, due to Obama’s support. It took place the day before his inauguration, on the 20th January.

The Inauguration of President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden

This site was set up to organise the inauguration, with a desire to make it accessible and open. It now directs visitors to the inauguration store, which sells collectables and souvenirs of the event.

Recovery.gov

This site is used to track the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 and demonstrate where the money is being spent.

YouTube

Comments are on and moderation is off. This brave, but surprising, stance has led to a wide variety of feedback; good comments and bad, critical and complimentary, but many of the commenters aren’t even American. As a result the videos posted here do attract quite a few trolls. Positive commenters will often post once and leave, but the trolls tend to stick around and post multiple times, giving the appearance that there are more of them then there actually are.

There is hardly a social media tool left untouched by Obama between his campaign and administration, and this has left a slew of politicians worldwide scrabbling to imitate his success. So have Irish politicians awoken to the power of the internet? We’ll be examining that in the next article.

It’s difficult to predict how politics will evolve, now that Barack Obama’s successful campaign for presidency has proven the power of a sprawling online network, but he already has many imitators.

And not content to rest on his laurels, Obama has taken the lessons learned from his rise to power and begun to apply them to government internet strategy too.

Every big media shift affects politics

The introduction of television was the last big evolution of media to affect the presidency of the US.

“Part of the reason that John F. Kennedy captured the presidency was the way he performed in a series of televised debates against his Republican opponent, Richard M. Nixon. The Kennedy-Nixon debates stand out as a remarkable moment in the nation’s political history, not only because they propelled an unlikely candidate to victory, but also because they ushered in an era in which television dominated the electoral process.”

History Now

The internet is a similar game-changing medium. It is a two way flow rather than traditional broadcast of radio, television and print ads. This potential change in the direction of communication may breathe new life into the idea that a government should be afraid of its people, not the other way around.

“When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty.”

Thomas Jefferson, 3rd President of the United States

Now that he is established in the potentially isolating Oval Office, Obama has been trying to keep a finger on the pulse of the populace, which he was so well tapped into during his journey to presidency. He is known to read a selection of letters each day with this in mind. They are tucked into the day’s brief by his aides. They choose a selection of letters from those sent in by the public, with both positive and negative feedback.

So how exactly did Obama leverage the internet?

There are three keys to Obama’s success online: communication, delegation on a viral scale, and funding.

Communication

Good communication is critical, whether trying to reach people with old media or new. Obama has a flair for good public speaking, and a star quality speech writer. He used the internet to emphasise these strengths, by posting videos of his speeches online.

The job of president often involves listening to a variety of experts, digesting their reports, coming up with policies, and then explaining those policies to the public. It’s important that the communication is two way. The idea of a leader who listens as well as he speaks was well promoted online.

Delegation on a Viral Scale

When something goes viral online, it means that, instead of being disseminated from one point, it’s spreading from person to person in a self-sustaining way, just like a real virus. The Obama team set up a website to take advantage of the viral nature of the web. They made tools available to people who felt passionate about the cause, and enabled them to recruit others to be passionate too, and for all of them to find each other geographically, group together and take action.

Interestingly, while Obama has reused and adapted tactics learned while on the campaign trail, and brought them to bear in his capacity as president, this approach of creating a viral grassroots movement has not been reused much since he took office. It is likely that he feels that he no longer needs it while he is commander in chief. Instead, he has tried to direct the latent energy of his army of supporters towards community work, such as volunteering in on Martin Luther King Day, and community building. Perhaps if there were a dire emergency such as a world war or pandemic, he might have a reason to mobilize his staunchest supporters once again. Or perhaps he’ll just wait until the next election comes around to reawaken their interest.

Funding

Obama’s online legion helped to secure the leadership of the world’s most powerful country for a man who started out with quite few resources compared to the other candidates. He was an outsider from the start. The real Democratic contender was supposed to be Hillary Clinton. She was well positioned, world renowned, the wife of a former President, not to mention well versed in raising funds, through dinner parties, conferences and wealthy donors.

For her campaign (cut short, when she failed to win the democratic nomination) she managed to raise a total of $221,557,563. Towards the end, she ran out of money, and ended up investing quite a lot of her own.

John McCain, the republican candidate, raised $370 million, approximately $200 million of which came from individual contributions.

“Because McCain opted into the public financing system during the general election, he faced an $84 million limit on what he could spend, putting him at a huge disadvantage compared to Obama, who raised $66 million more than that in September alone. Although McCain lost the race, he came a long way from the early days of the campaign, when he appeared to be nearly broke.”

OpenSecrets.org

Obama raised a total of $730 million, of which a massive 88% came from individual contributions.

“Obama’s victory in the general election was aided by his tremendous fundraising success. Since the start of 2007, his campaign relied on bigger donors and smaller donors nearly equally, pulling in successive donations mostly over the Internet. After becoming his party’s nominee, Obama declined public financing and the spending limits that came with it, making him the first major-party candidate since the system was created to reject taxpayers’ money for the general election.”

OpenSecrets.org

After using the internet to achieve his goal of presidency, Barack Obama is now firmly under its scrutiny. In the next article we closely examine the sites and tools he used to spread his message online.

In October 2007, the HSE began to use Bebo as a part of a campaign to promote mental health. The “Your Mental Health” campaign was promoted on TV, radio and in cinema trailers. The purpose of the Bebo page is to reach young people, give them information about mental health, get feedback about the campaign, and to generate debate and conversation about mental health among Bebo users. Overall, it seems to have been quite successful, particularly while the advertisements were being broadcast.

Features Used

Your Mental Health uses lots of interactive elements to entice audience participation, including video, polls, quizzes and slideshows, blog posts, and the whiteboard, an application which allows visitors to draw a picture, rather than leaving a written comment.

There are three videos on the page, and each of these is a television advertisement promoting mental health, neatly connecting the Bebo page with the television campaign. There are forty polls available, with new ones being added at regular intervals. There are seven quizzes, with topics covering such issues as self-harm, peer pressure and stress. There are also three slide shows: one lists the symptoms of depression, one suggests mental health tips, and another has information about bi-polar disorder.

Interactions Gained

One of the ways we can measure the success of the Your Mental Health campaign is to look at how much interaction it inspired. There are many different kinds of interactions supported by Bebo, such as other users “friending” the page, commenting on topics started by Your Mental Health, and replying to and debating with each other.

Your Mental Health has been “friended” by over 1,300 Bebo users. The polls attracted a lot of votes and comments, particularly compared to the blog posts. The polls are bite-sized and encourage participation, whereas the blog posts are longer, more informative, and designed to provide information rather than to cause debate and secure feedback.

The quizzes generate even more interest than the polls, which is surprising because they are longer and more involved. A poll asks only one question, while quizzes tend to ask between 5 and 10 questions, and so require more time and energy. One quiz has had over four thousand takers.

The site has also inspired twenty-six whiteboard drawings by Bebo users. A whiteboard is a very different kind of encounter than a blog comment. Instead of being a response to something specific, a whiteboard is an interaction where the first move is made by the visitor. It also can be a larger emotional and time commitment than just typing; it takes longer to communicate something by drawing. The visitor sets the agenda when communicating by whiteboard.

A selection of whiteboards from the Mental Health Bebo page

Messages Sent Out, Messages Received

There are several different kinds of messages passed by the Your Mental Health campaign:

• Information the campaign seeks to send out
• Information they want to receive
• Interactions the campaign aims to promote between visitors

The blog posts give detailed information about mental health, what it is and how to maintain it, and where to turn to for help. The slideshows are also designed to educate, but in a more graphical format, with easy to absorb tips. There are links to yourmentalhealth.ie, which has more substantial articles and resources for those who need to know more.

Another key motivation for the campaign was to receive feedback and information from the target audience. There are several areas where visitors are asked to give feed back on the current campaign so that it can be tailored specifically to young people next time around, making it more effective in general.
The site encourages visitors to think about their behaviour and actions, to take quizzes and polls to compare their attitudes and knowledge with others, and to discuss mental health issues. Mental health problems can become worse if the sufferer feels isolated; this site allows people to know that they are not alone.

How to Win at Social Media

Lately it seems like everyone wants to know the secret of harnessing social media for their own devious purposes: push that blog, talk up that product, make everybody a friend of your brand. But social media is not about connecting companies with customers; people want to engage with other people. Dumping a brand into a social media profile, is not going to work, because it’s too much like a one sided conversation. The Your Mental Health campaign works on Bebo because it’s not just broadcasting a message, it’s also genuinely requesting feedback, and seeking to educate and connect people. It’s a facility, rather than an advertisement, and therefore it generates good will. This is the key to running a successful project on social media: you have to be generous, and try to give more than you expect to receive.