Attention Lab Digest - Week of July 9

Whew, what a week! Having seven people in the Upwell office (as opposed to three, which was our norm up until last week) has brought lots of fresh ideas and energy to our attention campaigning.

Matt Fitzgerald is bringing saucy creativity and powerful curation skills to our work. He helped find the most liquid, attention grabbing content for our recent tide report highlighting shark population declines and put together a savvy messaging tutorial for our ocean acidification and coral reefs toolkit. Right now, he's hard at work preparing something awesome for Monday's Tide Report - keep your eyes peeled. I'll give you a hint - it has to do with rap and sharks. (Does it get any better than that?)

Our intern team - Liana Wong, Paulina Dao and Kaori Ogawa - has dived into social media metrics and attention campaigning. They're learning all the latest social media monitoring and measurement tools faster than you can say "link conversion" and are starting to do their own personal outreach on their @UpwellINTERNS twitter account. Read about what they did and learned last week in their blog post - IMHO, it's even more interesting than this one.

Here's some high level analysis of our tide report activities this week:

Reading but Not Clicking

Our Monday Tide Report focused on wrapping up the previous week, and only had one recommended action around Navy sonar and whales. Our action was only shared by Blue Planet DC and Kat Long. We don't have enough information to know exactly why our Monday tide report didn't drive much action. We did, however, receive a good deal of clicks on the very last item of our newsletter, which gives us hope that at least our readers are reading until the end. That last item? The debut of our Tumblr where we're featuring ocean news worth amplifying. Have you checked it out?

Our Second Ever Toolkit & High Tide Report

Getting Closer to the Secret Sauce

With ICRS 2012 underway this week, we jumped on the opportunity and created the 2nd ever OUTK (Official Upwell Tool Kit), this time on coral reefs and ocean acidification. We like making these, because it helps us corral all of the good stuff around a moving topic. Our goals are to lessen the burden on communicators and to feed the right topic, so that more content is shared with the right audiences, and goes as far as possible.

It was all hands on deck on Monday to get the toolkit ready for Tuesday. We gathered awesome content, made twitter lists, and reviewed messaging research to find out how best to translate the issues. Seeing that the phrases "osteoporosis of the sea" and "climate change's evil twin" were trending on twitter, we opted to create an image macro for sharing.

The image was shared on Facebook and Twitter by numerous people, including Nancy Baron, SeaWeb, Ocean Champions and the official ICRS 2012  account (thank you!!). With retweets included, the image had over 22,000 impressions on Twitter!

Tweeting Up with the Kardashians

A couple weeks ago, Media Matters posted a study about how the Kardashians receive 40 times the amount of coverage than ocean acidification in print and broadcast media. Upwell noticed two things - the online layer was missing, and the article itself spurred a significant bump in attention to ocean acidification online. We posted our own analysis on our blog, shared it in Tuesday's High Tide alert, and shared it with people who had initially shared the Media Matters post. Check out our interns' blog post for some analysis of what attention we garnered for our own post. If you haven't already shared it online, do it now!

Hot Dogs or Sharks?

Our Thursday Tide Report focused on the perilous situation sharks face worldwide. We featured findings from a recent Pew study, and urged our readers to share a handy infographic that compares the danger of sharks with the danger of other common things, like texting and hot dogs. Our recommended hot dogs or sharks tweet had over 10,000 impressions, thanks to the efforts of our readers Ken Peterson (of Monterey Bay Aquarium), Kathi Koontz (of the California Academy of Sciences) and Andrew Thaler (of Southern Fried Scientist). You all rock.

Thursday's Tide Report also featured the Midway Film Kickstarter project, which was at 75 percent of its fundraising goal. The project has now met its goal, so thank you for spreading the word!

What to Expect Tomorrow

We were also hard at work last week planning some promotion around a groundbreaking project - the West Coast Migration Tour, a project of PangeaSeed and the Beneath the Waves Film Fest. It's an art and film tour that's visiting cities on the West Coast and spreading shark and ocean conservation information and love. We fell in love with Kool Kid Kreyola's rap video - Me and My Shark Fin - and we have some pretty creative stuff lined up to help the video go big online. Look for our ideas in Monday morning's tide report.