Environmental Activism

Environmental Activism In the age of Web 2.0 and the Rise of the Service Oriented Web Eric Cumbee 12/4/2008 Dr.McCurdy

Table of Contents Introduction .................................................................................................................................................. 4 Web 1.0.........................................................................................................................................................6 Web 2.0.........................................................................................................................................................7 2004 ..........................................................................................................................................................7 2006 ..........................................................................................................................................................8 Web 2.5-ish ................................................................................................................................................. 10 2008 ........................................................................................................................................................11 Web Services and Platforms of the 2008 Election......................................................................................12 Twitter.....................................................................................................................................................12 USTREAM.TV ...........................................................................................................................................13 Kyte.TV ....................................................................................................................................................14 QIK.TV .....................................................................................................................................................15 My.BarrackObama.com .......................................................................................................................... 15 Where Environmental Advocacy Groups Stand..........................................................................................15 Problems with Methodology .................................................................................................................. 15 Revised Methodology ............................................................................................................................. 16 Overall Findings.......................................................................................................................................17 PICKENSPLAN.COM .................................................................................................................................17 Appealing Design.................................................................................................................................18 Video ................................................................................................................................................... 18 Social Media........................................................................................................................................ 18 Action Items ........................................................................................................................................ 18 Fundraising..........................................................................................................................................19 MYENERGY ..........................................................................................................................................19 Where Now? ...............................................................................................................................................19 A Comprehensive Strategy..........................................................................................................................20 Key Differences ....................................................................................................................................... 20 Facebook................................................................................................................................................. 21 Twitter.....................................................................................................................................................22 Streaming Video......................................................................................................................................22 In House Social Networking Sites............................................................................................................ 23

Conclusion................................................................................................................................................... 23 Works Citied................................................................................................................................................ 25

Introduction There is little doubt that the internet is one of the most disruptive technologies of the last 20 years. Technologists define disruptive technology as any technology or innovation that significantly disrupts the common thinking or status quo in how we communicate and do business. While communications mediums, such as television, radio, telephone, the telegraph, and even the movable type printing press, were considered disruptive technologies at the time, the internet is different in that its simple evolution tends to bring about new disruptive technologies on a regular basis. While Television and other communication mediums certainly made incremental improvements in areas such as quality, the basic functionality of these technologies is still basically the same as when they were introduced. The internet on the other hand is very different today than it was even 2 years ago, and certainly more complex and feature rich, than Tim Berners-Lee the inventor of the internet could have ever imagined when he first developed the concept of Hyper-Text Links and markup language, in the mid 1980s. The internet and the World Wide Web as we know it has undergone vast changes in the scant 20 years that it has been readily available to the general public. So much so that new monikers are being created to define the different periods of its history, much like geological periods. First there was what is now called Web 1.0, which were mainly static documents, slowly as technologies such as the Common Gateway interface Specification, JavaScript, Flash, and scripting languages such as Post Hyper Text processor (PHP) were developed the web moved away from consisting of just static documents, to simple interactive applications. Many have dubbed this as the beginning of what is now called Web 2.0. Web 2.0 marks the start of the trend where web pages begging to evolve into applications and services, that rival similar

desktop applications in functionality, richness of experience, and performance. Today we are essentially at Web 2.5. While the use of Asynchronous JavaScript and eXtensible Markup Language (XML) AJAX, and new technologies such as SilverLight by Microsoft, has continued to make web applications increasingly more interactive, and more feature rich, the major hallmark of Web 2.5 is the development of standards, and design practices that make interacting across a multitude of websites and applications easier. Web 2.5 is also an intermediary step towards Web 3.0, which many call the Semantic Web. The key feature of the semantic web is an increased definition and standards for how data is transmitted between web applications and services. Communication has always been a critical part of political campaigns. Once a communications media has attained a large enough install base to make it a viable method of communication for the general public it is almost immediately adopted by political campaigns, both for candidate campaigns, and for issue advocacy campaigns alike. While due to the 2, 4 or even six year election cycles of the United States, it may appear that political groups tend to lag behind other non political applications. While in fact there is a slight lag in adoption of new communications technologies, it is not as big of a gap as many may believe. Political campaigns are often early adopters of emerging technologies. Especially those that offer a cheap if not free method to communicate with a specific niche of users. The evolution of the use of the internet in political settings tracks very closely to the evolution of the internet. This is mainly because that until recently political organizations used existing software and services, and use models instead of creating new services and

applications. However that is slowly changing. In this paper I will highlight technologies and services, that are readily available and that are in use in a political context, or that could be used in a political context, and then present a potential use case in environmental issue advocacy, and or a real life use case. I will also cover concepts and implications of the use of these services.

Web 1.0 By today’s standards the environmental issues and political websites of the Web 1.0 era are not really that exciting. The first campaign websites of any degree of complexity appeared in the 1996 elections where both Bob Dole and Bill Clinton had campaign websites. Using a WHOIS query the domain names RNC.org and democrats.org were first registered in 1995. Using the same method the domain name greenpeace.com was register in mid 1996, and the domain name sierraclub.com was registered in 1999. Ascertaining the exact date that these sites came online, and if these were there first attempts at websites, and the exact functionality of these sites are difficult due to time required to check all variations of domain names in the WHOIS database, and the fact that comprehensive archives of websites only date as far back as 1997. These websites for the most part were static pages that offered limited amounts of interactivity, and were one way in nature. These sites might have a basic email contact form, and given the limited amount of bandwidth available to most users these sites might have had a very small amount of short extremely low quality audio or video. The first political website that showed the basic hallmarks of what would be considered the start of the transition to web 2.0 is that of Arizona Senator John McCain’s 2000 Presidential

campaign website. At the time McCain set new records for fundraising, by using an online contribution system. It was also the first time that the website address became a important part of campaign communications. McCain set a one day fundraising record when he mentioned johnmccain.com on the Larry King show.

Web 2.0 2004 The Web 2.0 era in political campaigns began in Ernest with the 2004 presidential elections. Former Vermont Governor Howard Dean, who took advantage of new web 2.0 services such as Meetup.com, a service that helps people with common interests to set up meetings. Dean used Meetup.com to organize meeting of his supporters, and even went as far as signing a deal to integrate Meetup.com’s functionality directly into his campaign website (Wikipedia, Howard Dean). Figure 1: The popular Dean for America bat was regularly featured on the site challenging supporters to break fundraising records

Dean also made use of the internet to raise over 25.4 million dollars as of September 30th, 2003 (Wikipedia, Howard Dean). Much of that was through small contributions ranging from 5 dollars to 100 dollars. Many

political experts point to the Dean campaign as a early model for Barrack Obama’s campaign organization and focus on small contribution fund raising. Another key web 2.0 aspect of the 2004 Election cycle is the Web Log or more commonly the Blog. A Blog is simply a collection of entries by a person, or group of persons listed in a reverse chronological order. These posts can be composed of Text, Audio, Video or

Images, hypertext links, or a combination of those. Most blogs also tend to offer the ability for readers to comment and engage in discussion about the topic of a blog post. However, not all Blogs offer this feature, and comments can be disabled on a post by post basis at the writer’s discretion. Blogs played a major role in the 2004 Presidential Election. Howard Dean built a large grassroots following amongst Progressive bloggers, which later became known as the Netroots. Conservative Bloggers also played a major part in the general election, by first breaking the story that Memos used in a 60 Minutes II story, by Dan Rather about George W. Bush’s time in the Texas Air National Guard were forgeries. This was a turning point in the 2004 election, as it proved to some that, there were members of the mainstream media that were covertly and actively campaigning against the president.

2006 The 2006 mid-term elections were a transitional period for Web 2.0 in political campaigns. Fixtures of the 2004 election such as blogs played an important part in the election, while new technologies, also played an ever increasing role. The most important technologies of the 2006 election cycle were the advent of affordable online video, and Social Networking. While online video has been available in some form or another since the mid 1990s, 2006 marked the first time that online video was easily accessible by the average person. This is mainly a function of the ongoing decrease in the cost of storage space, bandwidth, and advancements in video compression technology. Youtube.com quickly became the top video sharing site on the internet, and allowed campaigns and individuals alike an outlet to share videos.

Campaigns immediately started sharing their standard television ads on YouTube, and quickly branched out into postings video packages created entirely for YouTube. YouTube Individuals were also quick to populate YouTube with political pol content, ranging from Video Blog posts of users expressing their opinion, to video of campaign events, and full blown Figure 2: The Weekly Standard Magazine Cover

news productions. One of the pivotal moments of the 2006 campaign was when Virginia Republican United States Senator

George Allen,, who had a slight lead over Democrat James Webb, infamously called a Webb campaign volunteer who was filming the event a “Macaca”. “Macaca”. This video became an overnight viral hit on YouTube, and many attribute this event as playing a major role in his defeat. The second major disruptive technology that played a significant impact in the 2006 election cycle was social networking sites. Facebook seems to be the Social Networking platform of choice currently. While Facebook began operating in early 2004, it started starte at Harvard only, and slowly expanded to other schools in the next year. It was only in 2006 that Facebook was available to most college and high school students; this along with the introduction of the Friend feed transformed Figure 3: Facebook Friend Feed

Facebook into a platform for social and political activism,

that few could have imagined when it was first introduced (Wikipedia, Facebook). With the Groups and Events functionality it quickly allowed organizers to find people with common

interests and organize them in to groups that allow for quick communication of vital information and discussion. Then organizers are able to quickly alert and mobilize members to action through the events feature. The Facebook Friend Feed amplified the effect of groups, where if one person in a sociall graph joins the group, this action is then advertised to the rest of their social network, this can lead to groups growing exponentially to thousands of members in just a few hours. This is what is referred to as “going viral” in social media terms. While ile online video and social networking services such as Youtube and Facebook made their debut in the 2006 election cycle, the full magnitude of their effect had not yet been felt.

Web 2.5-ish

It is hard for me to distinguish where the 2006 election cycle ended and the 2008 election cycle began. It seems that the 2008 election cycle began in earnest on November 8th, 2006,, the day after the 2006 mid-term mid elections. Candidates slowly began throwing their hats into the ring for president in the weeks after the the 2006 election, to start what for now is the longest presidential election cycle in American history. However in 2007 a trend started in web technologies that were not part of the consensus definition of what Web 2.0 was. The problem with the definition off web 2.0 is that there is no firm definition of what Web 2.0 is. It is more a broad set of principles agreed upon by technologists, and developers. From 2007 onward, I believe that we have moved away from

what the original definition of web 2.0 was, and while not worthy of being called Web 3.0, I think the current trend defiantly deserves the moniker of Web 2.5. While these trends were certainly apparent since the beginning of Web 2.0, and even as early as 2005 we could see the potential of Application Programming Interfaces. Simply put an API is a specification for how external entities can interact with Web Applications (Wikipedia, Application Programming Interface). APIs essentially allow web applications and increasing now web services to communicate and share data between one another. One of the earliest examples of a mainstream web application or service adopting an API was that of Google Maps. By providing an open and documented API, Google allowed third parties to develop applications that make use of Google’s mapping technology, and the associated services such as geocoding and geo-location. Another Simpler implementation of an API that dates back to before that of the Google Maps API is that of Real Simple Syndication or RSS. RSS is the technology that allows Blogs and other types of web applications that deal with information in a chronological order, to share that data with other sites, in the example of a blog it could be an Aggregator service such as Google Reader, or a mobile RSS reader for a blackberry handheld.

2008 2008 was at least for now the high water mark of technology in political endeavors, and social networks and APIs played an extremely important role. In 2007 Facebook did something that turned them into a social media platform as opposed to a social networking application. They released an API for accessing and manipulating data stored on Facebook, along with

specifications on how to build applications that can connect and be displayed within Facebook. This is a vast departure from Facebook’s previous policy of strictly controlling what features and what type of content could be placed on Facebook. The new model allowed third party developers to create new applications that leveraged the Facebook infrastructure to offer new features that many users wanted.

Web Services and Platforms of the 2008 Election While I have briefly discussed the services, applications that were a big part of previous election cycles in the Web 2.0 Era, I want to go into a little more depth about a few of the platforms and services that played a big part of the 2008 Election cycle. This is mainly because this is a relatively stable benchmark for comparison of what the current state of political technology is in comparison to that in use in the environmental issue advocacy arena.

Twitter Twitter was the wild card this year; I do not think anyone really knew what you were supposed to do with it, or how you were supposed to use it. Essentially, Twitter is a combination of instant messaging, micro blogging, and text messaging. Users post messages that are up to 140 characters long called “tweets”. Users can reply to tweets by adding @(username) to their message, and can send a direct message to another user by adding D: (username) to their message. The 140 character limit is not arbitrary; rather it is the same as the limit of character for sending a text message over the cellular network. Twitter allows users to subscribe to users using a short text code, which enables users to receive the updates of others directly on their cellular phone (Twitter,FAQ).

What is interesting about Twitter is that different people and organizations have found completely different uses for Twitter. Many such as Bloggers use Twitter to communicate new content to followers, others use it as a forum for discussion. Both Presidential candidates used Twitter to update followers on important campaign information, and to announce what they were currently doing. One of the more interesting uses that I found was Twitters use by the RNC Welcoming Committee an anarchist group that was responsible for many of the violent protests at the Republican National Convention in September 2008. This Group used a series of twitter accounts to coordinate movements and actions of protestors, and to distribute information about police movements, Information about arrested protestors, and information about food service (Tin Can Comms Collective,Plugging in to the Comms Infrastructure).

USTREAM.TV I want to start by saying that USTREAM.TV is not the only service in this space, several other services such as Justin.tv, Mogulus.tv, and StickAM.tv all started at roughly the same time; however I am more familiar with USTREAM.TV and for the sake of my argument I will focus solely on USTREAM.TV. This is really the natural evolution of Video on the internet after video sharing sites such as Youtube and Blip.TV. The difference between USTREAM.TV and youtube is that USTREAM offers live video streaming, instead of short pre-recorded clips that youtube offers. Live Webcasts are nothing new they have been around since the late 1990s early 2000s. The difference with this is that where previously live webcasts required expensive equipment, and very expensive specialized streaming servers, which were only affordable to organizations serious about webcasting with sufficient resources. USTREAM on the other hand is free, and

requires limited amount equipment. Anyone with a computer, webcam, and broadband internet connection can now stream video live to the internet. USTREAM also offers a social aspect to the live video streams, they make them embeddable so that they can be posted on blogs and other sites, and each show has a chat room. Also taking advantage of the APIs of other Web Applications, by allowing users to send a announcement of a new show to Facebook, twitter, and blogs, by simply entering there credentials for each site into ustream. USTREAM even provides the ability to publish video of the live stream to sites like Youtube and Facebook for later viewing. All of the major party candidates for president made wide use of USTREAM.TV, and several Congressional candidates including USAF General Richard Goddard in the Georgia 8th Congressional District made use of USTREAM in the course of the campaign, to broadcast major policy speeches and victory celebrations.

Kyte.TV Kyte.TV is a hybrid of Youtube and the live streaming sites. Except Kyte offers the ability to upload video, pictures and audio directly to the internet directly from a mobile phone, and allows users to integrate them with live video from a computer and select mobile devices into shows. This is a popular technology with Bloggers who used it to quickly upload video of events to their blogs. Again it makes use of APIs to automatically publish these shows to other social networking sites. While not in use by any campaign that I could find, this is a technology I believe could play a big role in the 2010 elections.

QIK.TV Qik is another live video streaming service except that it is specifically for mobile devices such as Apple Iphones, Windows mobile devices, and Blackberry Handhelds. I will not go into much detail about this service other than it is another service that is on my 2010 watch list.

My.BarrackObama.com Unlike the other services that I have highlighted, My.Barrackobama.com is not really what you would consider a web service, and it’s primary function is not commercial. Instead My.BarrackObama.com is a social networking/organizing tool that was built specifically for Barrack Obama’s Presidential Campaign. It helped promote self organizing amongst its members, encouraged people to donate money, and recruit new donors and volunteers, and to coordinate the Obama get out the vote effort. It is still too early to assess the exact benefit of this tool, however given the fact that Barrack Obama won presidency, outraised and outspent John McCain 5 to 1, and exceeded all goals for the GOTV program, it is safe to assume that this tool served its purpose. I am including this as I believe it will be the baseline for analysis on which all other social mobilization platforms will be judged.

Where Environmental Advocacy Groups Stand Problems with Methodology Initially my metrics for analysis of the effectiveness were going to be Media, Membership, and Money. I believed at the time that data would be available to make these comparisons; this assumption was based on a spot check of data sources such as comscore, a database that tracks web site statistics. The Federal Election Commission contribution database, and inquires to different advocacy groups. However it was discovered that data

availability is limited in many cases. In some cases this is due to even some of larger Environmental advocacy websites being considered statistically insignificant to provide the type of statistical data, needed to complete an analysis. It was also discovered that through a loop hole in the IRS tax code, that many Environmental Advocacy groups were registered as a 501c (4) social welfare organization, and therefore are able to make political expenditures without having to file expenditure and fundraising reports with the Federal Election Commission. Finally this was not totally unexpected but none of the organizations that I emailed responded with data on web recruitment efforts.

Revised Methodology Being forced to revise my methodology, I decided to focus on direct observations and studies of different Environmental and Energy Advocacy groups websites. The following table reflects the attributes I looked for in my analysis and a brief description of what I was looking for. Attribute

Description

Appealing Design Video

The Website is designed in a friendly logical manner that draws attention to the key points of the site. Use of services such as Youtube, Ustream, etc

Social Media

Use of Facebook, Myspace,Twitter,etc

Action Items

Users are prompted to take action to support policies, initiatives The site encourages visitors to donate in unique way.

Fundraising

Overall Findings In my opinion the web efforts of the environmental advocacy groups is significantly behind that off major party candidate campaigns. Most sites made no obvious use of social media, with the exception of links to Facebook groups in a few examples. Some groups had a youtube channel, however most failed to use their website to promote them. I was unable to find an example of an environmental advocacy group using twitter or ustream, with the exception of one. How ever given the limited search feature of twitter, it is entirely possible that more groups made use of twitter, but I was unable to find it. Most Groups did have the ability to accept online contributions, however they did little to promote that other than a large donate now button. One site which due to professional ethics I will not name did not make use of Secure Socket layer Encryption or SSL to protect online contribution pages. I also studied a variety of Facebook Applications that were promoted as environmental however most of them were green washed, and were actually attempts by individuals to make money, with a minimum amount going to environmental causes.

PICKENSPLAN.COM I was able to identify one environmental policy organization that really managed to in my opinion at least be on par with the major party national presidential candidates. That site was the pickensplan.com, the website that promotes the Pickens Plan, the alternative energy proposal by eccentric oil-man T Boone Pickens.

Appealing Design

When first visiting the Pickens Plan website you are asked to endorse the Pickens Plan by entering your name, email address and zip code, on a landing page. You have the option to either do that or skip on to the main site, which while it is important to collect names and emails, it Is also important to not pressure users into giving this information up. At one point in the 2008 Campaign, you could not get to BarrackObama.com without giving out a name phone number and email address. The site itself is a clean, colorful design that draws attention to all the critical functions and features of the site. The use of Flash and Ajax makes the site highly interactive and easy to use. Video

The Pickens Plan web site makes great use of online video, as it is a prominent part of the front page. One of the most effective videos on the site is that of Mr. Pickens standing at a white board explaining the Pickens plan. While not advertised on the site at several points they used Ustream.tv to hold live town hall meetings. Social Media

The Pickens plan makes extensive use of social media sites, such as Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, Push, twitter, youtube, and Digg. Even more importantly they cross promote these social networking services by featuring icons for each service prominently on the website. Action Items

Another great feature of the Pickens Plan website, and which is a common occurrence on candidate websites, is a list of actions that visitors can undertake to support the Pickens Plan. Visitors are encouraged email President-Elect Obama, and congress to support the Pickens Plan.

Fundraising

The only exception to the Pickens Plan website is that it does not offer people the option to donate money. This is mostly because the Pickens Plan is being self funded by T. Boone Pickens. MYENERGY

MYENERGY Is a social networking site established by the Pickens Plan that serves largely the same purpose of My.BarrackObama.com. it is intended to promote self organization amongst activists. While it is not on the same scope or breadth of the Obama system, it is an impressive effort for a non major party website.

Where Now? 

Environmental advocacy groups should closely study what the Pickens Plan has done as far as electronic campaigns go.



Environmental Advocacy Groups should study what Major party candidates have done and adapt those strategies to their purpose.



It is hard to pretend that given the level of resources available to these groups that they will ever completely outdo the top candidate campaigns. However with the rapid evolution of web services, the first person to capitalize on these services is often given a advantage.

A Comprehensive Strategy The tools and services that I have outlined previously are viable options for promoting action on environmental policies and other forms of activism. However these organizations along with many candidate centric organizations seem to fall into the trap of believing that all that is required for a social media strategy is to simply have a presence with a blog, and accounts on popular social media sites. However a truly effective social media strategy must be a lot more in-depth and well thought out than that. In some cases a poorly designed or executed social media strategy can in fact be detrimental to an organization. In this section I will attempt to outline effective uses of Social Media for an environmental issue campaign. If I were tasked with developing a social media strategy for environmental issue campaign, I would start by establishing a baseline strategy based on political candidates and major party social media efforts, and altering that strategy to take into account the differences between a candidate and issue advocacy campaign.

Key Differences 

Lack of Figure Head- Most issue advocacy campaigns lacks a figurehead, while candidate campaigns have the candidate to act as a figure head. As successful as it was, I seriously doubt that Barrack Obama’s campaign would have been had as much success as it did without a campaign. The lack of a well known figurehead makes garnering earned media difficult at best.



Duration- Most Issues advocacy especially environmental ones are perpetual, with the exception of 527s that seem to appear around election time, and then suddenly

disappear immediately afterwards. This is a stark contrast to most candidate campaigns where they are established 1 to 2 years before the election and in some cases exist in some form between election cycles. This in my opinion is actually an advantage for the issue advocacy groups, as they can build lasting grass-roots organization and constantly make use of this organization to prevent it from atrophying.

Facebook Facebook pages are a great way to distribute information to supporters; it also provides the largest audience of any social networking site. Every Organization should make use of either a Facebook Page, or group to connect with supporters. It should have some level of integration with the Organizations websites, in which it pulls content into the group from the Website. This can easily be accomplished by using RSS. Groups should also explore the potential of Facebook Applications, to engage supporters in new ways, and to allow them to more visibly show their support for that cause. Applications also hold great potential in allowing users to casually perform actions that benefit the organization, such as telling friends, donating, and even phone banking. A third way to utilize Facebook is the use of the Facebook Advertising platform. The Facebook Ad platform, offers a fairly effective method of micro targeting users, based on demographics and interests. A group could easily use information on supporters to create a profile of likely supporters and then buy ads based on that profile to more effectively target potential supporters with Ads.

Twitter Twitter is an ever evolving platform, so what may be an effective strategy today, may not be the most effective strategy tomorrow. One of the best ways for organizations to use twitter is like all social media, by creating a conversation. Having someone monitors twitter, and reply to supporters is one of the most effective ways to utilize Twitter. This is one area that it seems most political candidates do not seem to get. Twitter is a very effective media for selforganization and collaboration between supporters. By fostering a sense of community and engagement with the community, a group of supporters can quickly self organize to perform actions needed to support the organization, with minimal guidance or expenditure of resources by the organization. Twitter can also be used as a simple yet effective text messaging alert system, to provide notifications of important information and alerts to users via text messaging. This was very effective when used by the RNC protestors, who utilized twitter, and cheap prepaid cell phones, to coordinate protests around the Republican National Convention. Organizations should also build twitter features into their website. It takes a minimum amount of effort to use the Twitter API to display “Tweets” either based on members, or by using a organizing method known as Hash-tags.

Streaming Video Organizations should use streaming video where ever possible. Every event, press conference, etc, should be streamed online and recorded videos should be published to video sharing sites. Organizations should also consider holding special web only events such as e-

town halls, or “strategy meetings” and take questions from viewers, and let the viewers and principals set the conversation rather than the moderator. Supporters should also be encouraged to upload videos and even stream live them talking about or doing thing related to the organization, or fan videos of campaign events. These videos and live streams can be organized into channels and should be featured and promoted on a section of the group’s site and other social media outlets.

In House Social Networking Sites The concept of an in house social networking websites are an interesting concept, and if done right can be incredibly effective. However campaigns should be aware of the fact that this is the most intensive and expensive route a campaign can take. White label social networking systems geared towards political organizations are available; they can run several thousand dollars per month.

Conclusion Environmental advocacy groups in my opinion are along ways behind major party candidates and other sector issue advocacy groups as far as their campaigns use of web services and social media. Social Media has proven that it can be an equalizer for smaller groups, and environmental groups should take notice of that fact. However it is important to note that social media is simply a tool, no amount of programming or engineering, can overcome an improperly run social media campaign. That is because social media is about the conversation, not the tools or media over which it takes

place. Campaigns can have all of the social media tools they want, but unless they engage users in the conversation, social media will be ineffective.

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