Ray Dearborn's blog

The mission of Upwell is to condition the climate for change in marine conservation, and to ready people to take action. In order to do this, our team sifts through the vast amount of real-time online content about the ocean, and amplifies the best of it. Upwell’s campaigning model capitalizes on the insights we glean from Big Listening and other curation efforts, and responds to the currents of online conversation. Through an iterative process of lots and lots of campaign testing, we find ways to create spikes of attention in conversations. Ultimately, we hope to raise the day-to-day, week-to-week, month-to-month, year-to-year baseline of those conversations.

What is an Upwell campaign?

Upwell’s campaigning model combines a few key elements. Our campaigns are attention campaigns, focused on raising attention to ocean issues. They are minimum viable campaigns, operating on short time-frames and focused on rapid delivery of content, continuous learning and iteration. They are run and amplified across a distributed network, rather than being housed on, and amplified by way of our own platforms. 

The Attention Campaign

The nonprofit community has deeply-held ideas of what constitutes a campaign. Often, organizations build campaigns with institutional goals (e.g.: awareness, list-building, advocacy and fundraising campaigns), and compete with other entities in the same sector/issue space. Upwell’s attention campaigns operate on a different plane, one in which success (greater attention) elevates the work of everyone in Team Ocean, and is tied to no particular institutional outcome other than generating conversation. 

What we do with attention campaigns is try to drive more attention to existing content and actions that are not on our properties. They’re not associated with our brand. We use this loosely held connection, tying into the momentum of the news cycle, and being strategically opportunistic in the pursuit of creating spikes in attention. 

We focus on

This week, our illustrious leader, Rachel Weidinger, is present at the Greenpeace Digital Mobilisation Skillshare outside Barcelona. (Follow along on Twitter at #GPDMS). 

This morning, Rachel led a session with global campaigners and organizers on Upwell's model of Big Listening and campaigning (for more on Big Listening, check out Rachel's guest post on Beth Kanter's blog). She not only explained what we do - she also had participants break out into groups to apply Upwell's model to other issue areas. Believe it or not, what we do doesn't just work for the ocean conversation!

Brian Fitzgerald, Greenpeace's Head of Digital Networking and Mobilization, blogged his notes from the session, as well as his awesome work at using our methodology for Indonesia's rainforests. Check out the awesomeness he and his team made:

I thought Brian's post was so awesome, I left a comment for him. You should too! 

When Upwell saw the news about Cathay Pacific banning shark fins from their cargo, we thought two things:

• Let’s get some new audiences talking about shark finning.
• This is a great opportunity to do a positively framed campaign, and get people to say “thank you” to Cathay Pacific. 

As always, our aim is to increase the number of people talking about shark finning. Before we jump in to what we did and what the results were, first, a graph of our Cathay Pacific & sharks profile in Radian6. 

Social mentions September 4 - 13, 2012 of the Cathay Pacific Shark Fin Ban keyword set, built by Upwell. 

The first thing that is evident from this graph is that there is a slower drop-off after the initial news bump than we usually see with similar stories. The spike lasted several days - unusual for a news item like this. 

Upwell used a two-pronged approach, first helping to spread the news about the ban, then following up the next day with a call for people to thank Cathay Pacific for their decision in our Tide Report and social media channels.

This image spread through our social media channels was shared on hundreds of Tumblrs and in hundreds of tweets. By combining a “shark love” message with an element of urgency (the shark fin traders’ protests), it effectively activated people to voice their support.

Image macro encouraging support of Cathay Pacific’s shark fin ban

We saw over 250 tweets thanking Cathay Pacific, and over 250 posts on the Cathay Pacific Facebook wall (counted by hand) congratulating the airline on a decision well made. The majority of these thank yous aren’t captured in the above graph because they don’t include keywords in our set. It wouldn’t be time efficient to sort through every mention of “thank you” on the internet.

Overall, quite a success in pulling together a quick social media storm in support of sharks. 

// These tips are part of our #Sharkweek toolkit for ocean communicators.

As Aaron astutely pointed out earlier this week, the online #sharkweek conversation is BIG, and getting BIGGER. The majority of people involved in the conversation are merely saying "YAY sharks!!" and conservation-themed content only represents a small slice of the pie:

We are excited to jump into the shark week conversation and widen the green slice of the pie. We want to reach the masses of people who are stoked about shark week but don't know about the threats sharks face.

We've got a few ideas of how to do just that. Here are our tips for using Twitter and Facebook effectively to reach new audiences and increase attention to shark conservation during Shark Week.

These tips are for ocean-y social media managers and shark evangelists for how to engage their communities. Want tips you can share with your followers for how they can use social media to be better shark savers during #sharkweek? Share this image with them!

On Twitter

1. Monitor the conversation.

Set up a search for #sharkweek and "shark week" using your favorite Twitter tool (I use Tweetdeck, but Hootsuite is another great option). This is most of the battle. Our data indicates that this will be a bit of a firehose - we are expecting at least 200,000 mentions of Shark Week this year. Pay attention to what people are saying - look for misinformation, but also look for the people who are big shark fans and are really engaged. Everyone is a potential supporter for your cause.

Chances are, people are talking about your issue, and they might not know you exist. If you're running a campaign on hammerhead sharks, set up a search for "hammerhead," and if you're running a campaign about shark attack survivors, set up a search for "shark attack."

2. Respond to celebration with celebration.

It can be tempting to respond to a tweet that says "yeah Shark Week!" with a tweet that says "Glad you're tuning in, check out our

Ok, ok, we know it's not shark week YET (shark week starts August 12). But there was just too much shark goodness this week, so our big attention campaigns focused on the misunderstood apex predators. There was also a big bump in attention to coral reefs and their prospects for the future, spurred by an op-ed in the New York Times. Between ailing coral reefs and sharks, we had quite an exciting week. 

Kool Kid Kreyola: Where Sharks Meet Rap

The big thing on our plate this week was making this video popular. We loved it so much we featured it in our Tide Report, twice. Why'd we choose this? This is precisely the type of content we believe can amplify attention to the ocean, particularly among new audiences. Ocean content is abundant, but the edgy stuff from new voices is a bit rare. Kool Kid Kreyola is a San Francisco-based painter/rapper who is so impassioned about sharks that he is using his artistic powers to spread the word about shark finning.

We began by transcribing the lyrics in rapgenius, a website that serves as the Wikipedia for rap lyrics. We asked some of our shark scientist friends to contribute their perspective to the lyrics. We'd like to send a big Upwell shout out to David Shiffman and Chuck Bangley for droppin' some real ocean science.

We had been in conversation with a freelance writer, Christine Ottery, about another project. But when she got wind of this project, she asked us for more information, and then ended up writing an amazing blog post in the Guardian, which helped the message go farther. Many organizations that may have been hesitant to share the (somewhat NSFW) video were excited to share the article. The Guardian has a global traffic rank of 183 on Alexa (meaning it's the 183rd most popular website on the net - The New York Times is 108th, for reference). While it's UK based, the readership is global, so this was a BFD. 

Results

So far, the Guardian article has gotten over 170 mentions on twitter, and "Me and My Shark Fin"