Author Archives: Brian Fitzgerald

April 16, 2013

Top 10 tips for infecting your non-profit with the Social Media bug

You’ve got witty, interesting people with passion, expertise, and the ability to talk the bark off a tree. You wouldn’t expect it to be hard to get EVERYONE in your organisation using Social Media, right? Except sometimes it is.

It’s so hard, in fact, that several dozen Social Media Managers turned up to a workshop at SXSW to discuss nothing but.

Panel organiser Beth Kanter, author of The Networked Non-Profit, makes a compelling case that the most effective non-profits are those in which EVERYBODY in the organisation does social media promotion of the cause, from the Executive Director all the way up to the receptionist.

Amy Sample Ward did a nice write up of the panel presentations here, and there’s a Storify treatment from Beth here. But the really best ideas came bubbling up from the collected experience in the room, and I keep circling back on juicy tips and tweets that came to the surface in this highly interactive panel, and thinking I should gather them up. So here they are as a cheat sheet. Add your own in the comments! Continue reading →

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March 15, 2013

Raise your Fist: Music and Activism

My Storified curation of a panel on musicians and activism, With Karen Scott of FitzGibbon Media, Mike Mills of R.E.M. Hillary Zuckerberg of Why Hunger, Mikel Jollet of Airborne Toxic Event and Brandon Deroche of Urgency Network.
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March 14, 2013

Broken Clay Pottery and Shards of Google Glass: SXSW 2013

Prototype device with unclear purpose other than tripping you up while walking.

The Curmudgeonly Keynote which Bruce Sterling delivers every year at tech conference SXSW riffed heavily this year on the ancient past: the lost desert people of Walnut Canyon, Arizona, who, like the flannel hipsters in the audience surrounding me, were once the greatest innovators of their day. As their climate changed, they created adaptive technologies: they learned to carve into the cliff faces, to harvest condensation, to build clay pots to catch and channel snow and rain. They became “the Stanford of desert survival techniques, the MIT of clay pottery.” But they passed. The cold wind blows through empty stone rooms. Their civilisation burned.

For Sterling, there’s a parable here about technological advance. He had predicted a few years back that the blog would be dead by 2017. Four years early, he asked with some smugness, “where at this SXSW were the keynote panels featuring rockstar bloggers? What startups or rollouts for blogging software were buzzing at SXSW? Did any panel even mention a PC?” His point: you live by disruption, you die by disruption. And when you invent the future, you consume the past. So lets leave the shards of RocketBoom and LonelyGirl15 and the latest Dell Laptop on the floor of that adobe cliff home, and consider what was roasting and eating the past with a side of Nokia this year, and picking its teeth with Blackberry bones.

Timothy Jordan of Google preparing his demo at SXSW

This was the year of the Wearables and the Printables. Tim Jordan demonstrated Google Glass. He talked commands to it and Siri-like, it took his dictation and acted on it. He tapped through email messages on his earpiece and sent images of the audience to Facebook. He looked up a word. He gave the salivating coders in the Audience tips on how to write a “Hello World” app and four principles for designing for Google Glass. There was a super cool video showing Pepsi-generation kids promising our eyeware will make roller coasters more fun.
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Filed under Net Culture, sxsw

March 11, 2013

South by So Far

It truly is the place where the future gets marketed to death before it’s invented. Midpoint mini-take-aways: wearable devices WAY beyond google glass are coming soon and present a huge and exciting user interface design challenge: and a social integration challenge. I love BUMP’s new ability to bump a photo or video to your Mac by tapping the spacebar with your cell phone. Grumpy Cat rules. And I’ve learned tons about African mobile devices, Digifrenia and Present shock, tips and tricks for hacking internal non-profit culture to create a more social-media friendly ecosystem, Trigger-ties as a viral engineering principle, and stuff in the Shuttle busses, lunch tables, and coffee breaks about UFO & conspiracy theory, Wal-Mart’s social media strategy, NASA’s space camp, how to build a Lego Tardis, the history of Wired’s internal split over blind optimism and “The Long Boom,” how Sierra Club is structured, the art of making a smokey martini, and a Texas tradition called “Chicken Shit Bingo.” Who knew?

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Filed under sxsw, Travel

March 8, 2013

SXSW 2013 Storified

This is a storified curation of most of the panels I saw at SXSW 2013, in reverse chronological order. Next time, I’m going to break these up into individual panels, and hang those on a master file of linked storified stories. It’s difficult to navigate a long piece like this by paging through until you get back to the panel you wanted. These served as notes for my wrap-up blog, Clay pots and shards of Google Glass.
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Filed under Digital Culture, sxsw

Tagged as sxsw

March 7, 2013

Tweeting from the clouds: new Boeing 777 is Digifriendly

Posted this on their Facebook page:

Dear American Airlines,

I’m flying from Amsterdam today to SXSW in Austin in one of your spankin’ new 777s, and just want to say THANK YOU for the wifi over the Atlantic, and for the promotional price of… FREE. You should keep it that way! Any marginal income you might get from a $19 pass would be peanuts compared to the goodwill and preference you’d get from people like me who live online. I’m plugged into a 220v socket so my MacBook’s battery isn’t racing the clock. I’m tweeting from 30000 feet about what a great experience this is. Please, please, keep it that way!

I can’t remember the last time I was seriously excited about an airplane. OK, the Wifi was slow of course, and cut out over the Arctic Circle, and the promise of iPod recognition and USB thumb drive media access on the USB didn’t work. The airport maps are unreadably detailed with no zoom function. The Stewardess told me there’s a system for seat to seat SMS-like communication that’s not implemented yet. And among the bugs yet to be worked out in the plane itself, seat 33C sticks out into the aisle as part of a 3 seat row behind a two seat row, making for tricky meal cart navigation. Ow. OW. Ow.

But the moment when I really felt like I was in the Matrix was on exiting the plane. You look out on a sea of seat-back screens and realise that every one is displaying a different steward or stewardess. Nice touch.

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Filed under Digital Culture

February 27, 2013

Never talk to strangers? F@&!% that, this is #SXSW

I’ve got my mophie charged, my most comfortable walking shoes broken in, my hotel was booked last August. My live blogging bookmarks are all assembled on the Macbook, the scheduling app is on the iPad and I’m sharing my calendar with folks on the Social.sxsw.com site. Got a stack of business cards for the 1870s retro crowd and Bump, Evernote Hello, Sonar, and Highlight loaded on the iPhone. I’m putting exclusive airplay and heavy rotation on Do512’s Bands-that-will-be-there playlist. I haven’t yet cut back my schedule to the realistic but what are plane flights for?

I’m ready for the marathon learning circus and creative geek-out which is South by Southwest (SXSW) in Austin, Texas.
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February 6, 2013

Upwell’s social media monitoring secrets and superpowers

Today’s best ever workshop at the Digital Mobilisation Skillshare was the session on Social Media Monitoring with @Rachelannyes (Rachel Weidinger) of Upwell.

Upwell has the great tagline “The ocean is our client” and is funded to drive an increase in all kinds of action-oriented conversations about the ocean.

Health warning: What follows are rough notes. There are gaps. There will typos.

Rachel begins with, appropriately, an ocean metaphor: “We navigate the waves of a miasma of swirling internetedness in our small boats. But we don’t have a good way to understand the currents, the winds, or the weather. If we could have a meteorology of online communications we could make better decisions.
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February 4, 2013

The ideas of the many

They’re known as the Mob Squad: digital activists, fundraisers, face to face recruiters, direct dialoguers, volunteer and action coördinators — Greenpeace staff, volunteers, and fellow travellers from other groups whose job it is to rouse rabbles, to people power campaigns for the planet, to take issue and create movement(s).

They gathered here in a secret mountain location in the south of Spain to figure out better ways to win the “War on Terra.“
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December 7, 2012

On Social Media Activism & Brand Ethics

My Q&A at LeWeb in Paris:

And relevant links:
Detox campaign
Detox Zara win
Greenwire
Gangnam style dutch kids Flash Mob
McDonalds responds to deforestation campaign
Kit Kat responds to deforestation campaign
Here’s to the Crazy ones Steve Jobs Video

UPDATE: Levi’s became the 11th brand to agree to #DeTox on 12/12/12.
Here’s a clipreel of some of the on-the-ground activities from our volunteers around the world that I mentioned:

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Filed under Activism, LeWeb

December 6, 2012

Scott Harrison Charity:Water Presentation at LeWeb

I’m at LeWeb in Paris and geeking out on this year’s theme: “Building The Internet of things.” But the best presentation I saw wasn’t on cyborg anthropology or smart-phone-controlled light bulbs, iPads on Robots or kids toys that can use retired iPhones for their brains (and I LOVED each and every one of those.)

It was this. A story. By a powerful story teller, about an important cause. Water:

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Filed under Activism, LeWeb

November 29, 2012

#DeTox: Unfinished business

Don’t bother reading this blog. Just watch this video. Share it. Send it. Like it. Comment on it. Get it on as many screens as possible.

And now that you’ve done that:

Back in the 70s and 80s, Greenpeace ran campaigns to drive toxic production out of Europe and North America. In those days, we pushed for government legislation and intra-governmental agreements to stop things like the dumping of titanium dioxide in the North Sea, factories that turned rivers red or blue depending on what dye process was running, and pipes that simply ran wastewater into whatever waterway was handy, contents often unknown and unmonitored by any government agency.

This was a nasty piece of work. Allied Chemical in New Jersey had found a loophole and was dispersing waste through a freaking SPRINKLER SYSTEM to avoid prohibitions on land burial and river disposal. Their solution effectively did both, but was entirely legal. Under arrest from left to right: Lisa Bunin, JR Yeager, Marc Gottschalk, Brian Fitzgerald, Kelly Rigg

Thing was, while we succeeded in clearing up rivers across our homelands, we drove an awful lot of those processes and factories to China, India, and Mexico. Unfinished business! Team #Detox at Greenpeace have picked up the job, however, but with a #PeoplePower twist that illustrates a pretty big shift in Greenpeace strategy and the battlefield on which we engage across the last 30 years.
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Filed under Activism, Digital Culture, Greenpeace

October 31, 2012

Make Big Oil pay for cleanup of Sandy

Dear President Obama,

Terrorists have attacked the US in New Orleans and New York. They sent thugs named Katrina and Sandy who destroyed millions of homes and businesses, took prisoners, took lives. In between, they set fire to much of the midwest and scorched the land causing major crop failures and billions in economic loss.

And what’s America doing to hunt down these terrorists and make them pay for the mess they’ve caused?

It’s pushing for more oil exploration, exporting record amounts of coal, building pipelines to the Tar Sands and fracking for gas. That’s like sending charitable donations and willing recruits to the Taliban post-9/11 and calling it retribution.
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Filed under Climate

Tagged as #Frankenstorm, #Sandy

October 30, 2012

Sandy: The Climate Links Storified

The US is under attack. Climate change has gone practically unmentioned this election season, despite growing alarm among scientists, the Pentagon’s classification of it as a threat to national security, and record-breaking droughts and Arctic ice melt. So Mother Nature has cleared her throat, and decided to raise the issue herself.

This is the horror film the world has begun to look like — one in which fake photos FROM horror films are indistinguishable from the real thing. One that many in developing countries have already been experiencing for years. One which we will all face more frequently in future. New York City has been overpowered, the Statue of Liberty brought to her knees. Winds that rip cranes from skyscrapers and record-breaking waves that surge over every defense and flood the subways, close the bridges and tunnels, imprison families in their own homes. Shelves picked clean in hardware stores and supermarkets. Uncertainty and fear.

We have someone to thank for this: the fossil fuel industry. The politicians who have ignored their responsibilities as leaders to respond to a threat to the entire planet in favor of pandering to short term interests and lining election coffers with oil money.

Here’s a storified collection to say thank you to everyone who is speaking up about WHY this storm should make us all wake up and hit the big red ACTION button. We can start by stopping the oil companies from invading the Arctic.

Sandy, Storified:

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Filed under Activism, Climate