Attention Lab Digest - Week of July 30.

(Thank you to Liana Wong, one of our illustrious Upwell interns, for helping write this post!)

We're getting busier and busier at Upwell, and cataloguing everything we do is getting a bit tough! So we're going to try something new this week with the wrap post, and touch on our top 5 highlights of the week. Each week we are going to include in our list of 5 the biggest successes we had as well as some of our failures. We'll be explaining what we learned from our successes and our failures. Of course, if you are interested in what else we did, or want to know what happened with something you saw in the Tide Report, feel free to reach out to us!

1. Making Sustainable Seafood Sexy

As if the Olympics weren't exciting enough, we found out earlier this week that London 2012 is serving sustainable seafood for participants and attendants of the Games. Their goal is to become a "Sustainable Fish City" with the Sustainable Fish Legacy attributed to London 2012.

A quick Topsy search for "sustainable seafood olympics" shows that there's not much news coverage of this story. The news coverage that exists has been shared on Twitter only a small handful of times. Cory Doctorow once noted that "conversation is king. Content is just something to talk about." With that in mind, Upwell considered how to create conversation around a piece of content that wasn't getting much attention. Learning from our recent successes with images, we started thinking about what the classic British icons are. after a rather raucus brainstorm, we ruled out an Abbey Road image with fish in the place of the Beatles, and went for a couple quicker (and easier) icons that we thought would spark some conversation: a Buckingham Palace guard: 

and the saucy David Beckham:

News about sustainable seafood may not be totally buzz-worthy, but slapping it over the image of a scantily-clad Beckham just might spark some conversation. Additionally, the Olympics hook didn't hurt. We try to find the "ocean angle" in conversations that are happening big (like we did with ocean acidification and the Rio+20 conversation). Much easier to add content to an existing conversation than to try to create content and a conversation all at once. 

Aside from how much fun we had with this project, the most exciting discovery was seeing our assumptions proven corrent. On Greenpeace USA's Facebook page, the post of the Beckham image yielded 283 likes, 113 shares, and 40 comments - that's a lot of cod indeed. The Greenpeace blog post had an additional 91 shares and 1 tweet. The Keep Calm image was also shared on Twitter by Miriam Goldstein, and subsequent responses and retweets led to over 300 views of the image. 

2. Deep Sea Coral Versus Shell

Greenpeace recently found abundant deep-sea coral at Shell's Arctic drill site. The soft coral Gersemia rubiformis, or the sea raspberry, will become vulnerable as soon as next week if Shell gets their way. Our response was to create an image macro depicting the lack of transparency from the oil giant.

Greenpeace shared this image on Facebook, resulting in 1,098 likes, 1,901 shares, and 52 comments.

Two big lessons jumped out at us from this campaign:

In retrospect, the loaded wording we used was more suitable for Greenpeace's online channels than other organizations that are active on Arctic issues, so it makes sense that Greenpeace was the one to share the image.  

One aspect of these results jumped out at us - there were far more shares than likes. This is unusual on Facebook, and insinuates a higher than average level of engagement. The text on our image calls Shell out for their deception and secrecy - a negative message. We wondered whether people may be hesitant to click "like" because there's cognitive dissonance in "liking" an image that relays bad news. Many still clicked "like" because they found our image effective, but the high number in shares possibly indicates that users would rather spread the message than just click "like" as you would on a cute cat video (or a really handsome picture of David Beckham). 

This hypothesis begs the question: do people share more when there's a negative message? If so, does this matter? It would be interesting to figure out whether major organizations use social media outlets to take advantage of this type of dissonance, its effects, and how we at Upwell could work with negative messages (but in a totally non-evil way).

3. Sharkinar - Living Every Week Like It's Shark Week

Only 9 more days until Shark Week is here! In honor of the longest running television cable program, Upwell is busy preparing for our Sharkinar on August 7th, 2012. It will be a virtual gathering of shark advocates to bring attention to conservation efforts online. 

The prep work required to make this event sharktastic is incredibly time-consuming, but our prep work for this event is a great example of Upwell's unique role in the ocean conservation world. Because we are working outside the structure of a normal organization, we are able to identify and hopefully fill gaps that could be useful to ocean communicators. 

We've curated some great content and Matt, Aaron and our interns Liana and Paulina have been consumed with gathering the data which will all go towards delivering an insightful and fun Sharkinar for you all! We don't know which direction our campaign efforts will go in, but what we are seeing is a real opportunity -- this is a big conversation and we want to amplify it.

We shared some teasers for the Sharkinar in our email invitation and Tide Reports this week - check them out. 

In case you were wondering, here's a list of organizations that have already signed up for our Sharkinar. Don't forget to sign up yourself!
Humane Society
Smithsonian
Ocean Portal
Project Aware
Mission Blue
Oceana
Ocean Conservancy
Pew Environmental Group
Shane Research Institute
SeaWeb

Speaking of sharks, it was my birthday on Tuesday and I got a jawsome shark backpack - don't get too jealous! 

4. No One Dished to the Daily Beast!

In Monday's Tide Report, we shared recent coverage in Andrew Sullivan's blog on the Daily Beast about sharks, and asked our readers to ask the Daily Beast to continue to cover ocean issues.  We were hoping to get a crew of ocean advocates to thank them for paying attention to the important issue of shark finning. We sent our own pitch over to the Daily Beast as well. We got a favorable response from the Daily Beast, but none of our readers followed suit.

We are wondering why our readers didn't jump on the bandwagon. Some theories we're throwing around include:

• It's a big ask to have our readers do traditional pitching, compared with asking them to share pre-made material on social media channels.
• It's possible that many of our readers aren't used to pitching blogs, and do not do that in their everyday work.
• The piece about the Daily Dish was buried in our Tide Report and had few clicks - perhaps people just didn't read it.  

We'll be trying this again in the future, perhaps with a different angle. If you've got some ideas, send them our way. 

5. #S(h)aveTheWhales and Bruno Mars

Talking To The Moon... and now about whales? Singer-songwriter Bruno Mars tweeted this week with a curious hashtag: #ShaveTheWhales. Yes, shave. It comes from a clever t-shirt on Threadless featuring a sperm whale rocking a luscious brown beard. 

We aren't exactly sure why Bruno Mars decided to start spreading this hashtag on Twitter, but it's gotten more people to talk about #SaveTheWhales, the actual whale-loving cause. 

This odd phenomenon taught us yet again that a celebrity with such a large social media platform can make real difference around a conservation cause, even inadvertantly. It brings into question the power of the celebrity and what great things can come of it. Ultimately, the boost in the #savethewhales hashtag came not from Bruno Mars, but from his fans. Did Bruno activate some level of latent whale-love in the pop-loving masses? If so, how can this be leveraged again, potentially for sharks during shark week?