What would Alinsky do? If he had Twitter...

Usually the early adopters of technology are businesses and later on it trickles down to government, non-profits and yes politics. In the last two elections, presidential candidates started using technology to gain an advantage over their opponents, especially during the primaries. Howard Dean and Barrack Obama used technology effectively and intelligently and the results speak for themselves.

These days, everybody is talking about Twitter but Twitter is so new that people are still trying to figure out how to use it beyond the basics.

This article is based on the book ‘Long John Twitter‘ that goes to great length to go beyond the basics of Twitter and help a reader comprehend the power of Twitter when combined with other emerging technologies. This article is intended to help politicians and activists figure out how to use Twitter and its sister applications to get ahead or at the very least not fall behind a smarter more tech. savvy rival.

Instead of mentioning current politicians and ruffling the feathers of one or the other, we will use the names Alinsky and Goldwater for this article.

If Alinsky had Twitter and its sister Apps, this is probably how it would go:

1. Alinsky would first go to http://www.twitalyzer.com and get an idea of where he stands in Twitterverse. Details like Influence, Signal Strength, Generosity, Velocity and Clout would give him useful insight.

2. Then he would go to an App called Twist and do a head to head comparison. Twist can tell him how often he is talked about in Twitterverse versus Goldwater. If Goldwater is ahead, Alinsky better giddy up.

3. Time to point his browser to Tweetstats and get some insight into his own and Goldwater’s tweeting habits. Is he tweeting at some ungodly hours? If so, those messages are most likely never getting read. Ideally he would like to spread his tweets evenly at times when his followers are more likely to read them.

4. Time to find out who has more followers, Alinsky or Goldwater. Pretty easy to do. Just type http://www.twitter.com/username and you have the details.

Armed with the above information, Alinsky and his team now needs to get down to work. They have current statistics. The objective is clear - win the election. The technology is there. How to leverage this technology to tilt the odds in favor of Alinsky.

Team Alinsky has to increase Alinsky’s followers and increase his influence with the followers. They need to show to Alinsky’s followers that he understands the issues of the day, has better solutions and can lead the way towards a better society.

Now if Alinsky has amateurs running his show, they would bombard his followers with his statements all day long till they are sick of it and tune him out. That would be a total disaster.

For a politician, having constituents and followers is great but it is quite a challenge to stay in touch, keep them engaged and motivated without wearing yourself and your team down.

Alinsky and his team are professionals so they decide to create a micro news agency. The news agency would:

1. Identify the issues that matter to his constituents.

2. Develop filters around those issues to identify relevant news.

3. Scour local, national and international news / media sites and pick news stories according to the filters set in step 2.

4. Abridge the headlines and include the URL / links to the stories while making sure they fit the 140 character limit of twitter.

5. Run the URLs / Links through a link tracking system. Without that, they wouldn’t know which news story was widely read and circulated. Metrics and Analytics are very important. Without them, you wouldn’t know if you are being effective or not.

6. Intersperse regularly scheduled communiqués from Alinsky linked to his blog.

Doing all this would require considerable manpower unless they use technology. Technology is meant to save on manpower and provide speed of delivery. Using the applications detailed in ‘Long John Twitter‘, Alinsky and his team would set up their systems to create the micro news agency using the guidelines above. Then they would let it run without human intervention. No allocation of human resources on a daily basis at all.

The team would periodically sit down and analyze the metrics. If things need to be adjusted, they would do so. If a new issue has surfaced, they would add that to the filters and start feeding related news to the followers.

As time goes by, Alinsky’s followers would know that he is in touch with the issues that matter to them. After all, he is the one feeding them information every day. They would trust him and also re-tweet / circulate his information to other people. That would further increase Alinsky’s clout / circle of influence. Day by day, Alinsky would gain strength and that could eventually tilt the scales in his favor at the ballot.

Summary: Twitter by itself is a very basic application. Combined with it’s sister applications and human ingenuity, Twitter can be a very potent message and content delivery mechanism. Use it to your advantage.

Good Luck!

###

Filed Under (Twitter) by Najee on 20-05-2009 as

What would Lincoln do?

If he had Twitter