Attention Lab Digest - Week of June 25 (and bigger transitions)

Since March, we've been busy testing our assumptions about social media outreach by running our own experimental micro-campaigns. We've been monitoring online conversations and ocean news to learn what people are talking about and how they are talking online, and then devising outreach activities that would increase attention to high-quality, science-based content (and the occasional meme-worthy silly animated gif). 

We've been tracking our success through diligent metrics, and we've learned lots. We've chronicled those lessons here on our blog. 

We are transitioning. 

At the end of the day, though, there are hundreds of voices - nonprofit organizations, academic institutions, and motivated marine evangelists - who have the tools at their disposal to do this kind of work more effectively than we can. This network of marine conservationists and ocean lovers has a broad audience, spanning from surfers to engineers to divers to eco-activists. The most social media-savvy of the bunch have cultivated a lively conversation with these audiences. We believe that ultimately, in order to effectively raise attention to ocean issues online, we must provide the tools, analysis, resources, and ideas to this network rather than attempting to do it all on our own. 

We are conditioning the climate for change. 

Our aim is not to amplify the bumps in attention - it is to raise the baseline of conversation overall. We are doing this by activating a network, rather than by trying to be a voice for a network. 

We assume many to many, not one to one. We work together. 

The Tide Report

We have started to test this through our Tide Report, a newsletter that goes out to the marine communications network. Through the Tide Report, we are:

• applying our data analytics and scraping abilities to identify the hottest conversations and understand the dynamics of those conversations.
• applying our curation skills to find the most liquid, shareable content.
• applying our campaigning skills and lessons to identify easy pathways to amplification.
• embedding metrics, so we can track what works, what resonates, and what is most useful to the community.

Wrap-Up From Last Week

Last week, we sent four tide reports. Our list may still be growing, but we are already starting to gather some useful metrics. 

On Monday, we shared news about ocean acidification on the California coast that Ocean Conservancy's George Leonard flagged for us. Thank you George! (Have a tip for us? email it to tips (at) upwell.us.) We encouraged people to share a video that shows a visualization of these changes in acidity, as well as our image macro we had created the prior week. (An image macro is an image with overlaid text. They do very well on the internet.) The video was shared by our readers Ayana Elizabeth, Miriam Goldstein, Jen Savage and Julia Roberson. 

Lessons: Video and image sharing are more popular than news sharing. A captivating visual of a complicated issue helps marine advocates simplify their message. 

On Wednesday, we shared a round-up of sustainable seafood news: the London Olympic Committee's sustainable seafood commitment, the rise of community-supported fisheries (CSFs), an article in Fast Company about the most sustainable seafood (phytoplankton) and greenwashing by a French retailer. We also shared our own blog post about the Cabo Pulmo marine reserve as well as our take on the North Carolina sea rise saga. We asked people to share a link roundup compiled by John Bruno from the SeaMonster blog. Folks were eager to share his link roundup (because it's awesome!) and also shared the CSF locator with their friends. 

Lessons: Both of the most-shared pieces in this tide report were useful resources. While we at Upwell are always looking for catchy, visual content, we mustn't lose sight of the high-quality resources that help consumers of news and seafood do it more smarter. 

On Thursday, we shared some news about sharks, NRDC's recently released beach quality studies, and a fun image of a seal clubbing a seal clubber. The piece that received the most clicks was a link to retweet David Shiffman (@WhySharksMatter) and share the news about the shark study. Our friends at Conservation International helped to amplify the news and direct attention to David. Thanks, CI! 

Lesson: People like to share and echo those in their community. We will be providing pathways to amplification that bolster the ties within the marine community.

Over the course of the week, we also did some of our own outreach. We reached out to food bloggers who might be interested in writing about CSFs, and shared with them the localcatch.org resource we shared in Wednesday's newsletter. We also reached out to some tech bloggers to share with them the very cool but undershared news about the SeaOrbiter, an underwater research vessel that looks like an awesome space ship. Look out for some potential blog articles coming down the pike from Grist and Popular Science.