What’s new to think about?
Last week Facebook unveiled their new community action tool for petitions. On the surface this is a great move but organizations should be wary. This tool’s target usage audience is individuals- not orgs. Why is that distinction important? The data we would love to be able to collect from it, which we currently collect from petitions run on our own websites using our CRM’s petition tool or a 3rd party tool like Action Sprout or Care 2, that data isn’t going to be made available to us.
Which leads to the inevitable conversation that will be had over and over again in the near future. When platforms create tools like this is it a net positive or a net negative for getting people engaged even if we don’t get to extract data we want? Time will tell.
Training and Webinar Alerts
March 9th & 10th we’ll be in Asheville, North Carolina with our Introduction to Social Media for Organizing training
March 30th & 31st we’ll be in Huntsville, Alabama with our Introduction to Digital Organizing training
We’re excited to announce our 2019 Train the Trainers will take place in Philadelphia right before Netroots Nation on July 8 & 9. Seats are limited so register soon!
Applications for all 3 of our digital organizing bootcamps are still open – apply today while there are still seats left!
April 7-16 Digital Organizing for Advocacy/Labor
June 17-23 Digital Organizing for Electoral Campaigns
August 11-16 Advanced Digital Organizing
Stay tuned for more training announcements in the next few weeks.
What I’m Reading
What is a digital department? – Read this one. Then keep an eye out for our webinar with the DIgital Plan around the concept of the digital menu that we use in organizations that use a distributed digital model for their work
Here’s How Messaging Is Positioned to Dominate in 2019– If you’re not thinking about a messaging strategy it’s time to start. Along the same lines make sure to read this story about the coming integration of Messenger, Instagram Messaging and WhatsApp
New Tools
Awario– I haven’t played with this one in depth yet but I did sign up for my trial time on it as it came recommended to me by some social media friends who work in other sectors
Platform Updates
Facebook
Facebook Petitions are HERE! (See the What I’m Thinking About section for my thoughts on this)
Keep your browser open on this email…go open Facebook…go to a page you are an admin on…take a close look at the Page Quality Tab– next time you have a post removed this where you will be able to find out why it was removed without having to file a ticket or email someone
Big changes to how group invites are handled (can we get an “it’s about time”?)
Instagram
You can now post to multiple Instagram accounts at the same time
Twitter
So many changes coming …some good…some not so good.. including a new layout design
The chronological timeline is back…sort of
We’re still waiting for the edit button but meantime…
Snapchat
Really this was just a question of time
YouTube
#Applause! It’s no longer possible to automatically share videos from YouTube to Twitter or Google + (which seems a bit odd since G+ really doesn’t exist anymore anyway)
Winning the Internet
Undoubtedly some of the best trendjacking ever witnessed