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Attention Lab Digest - Week of July 9

Submitted by Ray Dearborn
on July 13, 2012 - 11:48am

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

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Attention Toolkit: Ocean Acidification, Coral Reefs and #ICRS2012

Submitted by Ray Dearborn
on July 9, 2012 - 11:16am

Why Act Now?

The ocean acidification conversation is bigger online than it has been in six months because of an AP article driven by Jane Lubchenco's opening talk at ICRS.

Social mentions of the Upwell Ocean Acidification keyword set, May 9 - July 9, 2012

There's a lot in this toolkit.

We've packed all the action-y goodies at the top, and background information at the end.

Being a Super Engager

Background Information

How To: Talk About Ocean Acidification in Public

 

^ How are people talking about OA online these days? The wordcloud above was generated by our resident internet trawler-in-chief using cutting-edge tools so expensive they have their own car service.

Ocean acidification... just rolls right off the tongue, doesn’t it? We’ve perused the latest in OA opinion research to bring you some tips on how to communicate OA to regular humans. 

Without further ado:

  1. Lay the groundwork. The role of the living ocean is not well understood, help your audience understand it.
  2. Be human. Use pictures, analogies and local stories to establish the problem. Introduce real live people, and their stories, to humanize and localize the issue. Stress that ocean acidification is happening now (not just in the future), and that is has measurable impacts.
  3. Science is perceived as the credible voice on this issue. Use it.
  4. Activate your audience.

Want examples?  Check out this How To: Talk About Ocean Acidification In Public

Say this: 

✔ “oceans are the lungs of the planet”

✔ “ocean acidification is the osteoporosis of the ocean”

✔ “ocean acidiciation is changing the ocean’s chemistry”

Rather than this:

X “ocean acidification is the evil

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Attention Lab Digest - Week of July 2

Submitted by Ray Dearborn
on July 8, 2012 - 10:37pm

Despite the oddity of the mid-week holiday, Upwell had a busy week. We more than doubled in size, too! On Monday, we were joined by our newest full-time staff member, Matt Fitzgerald, and on Thursday, three interns joined the Upwell crew. You can read more about them here, and you can follow our intern team on twitter at @UpwellINTERNS.

We sent out three Tide Reports last week (miss them? check out our archives.) and are super thrilled with some of the resulting amplification.

What Makes a Toolkit Tick?

On Tuesday morning, we shared some additional unpacking we did of the Rio+20 conversation, and shared news about the International Whaling Commission's decision against a South Atlantic Whale Sanctuary. We shared our toolkit again, which garnered a few mentions on Twitter. The part of Tuesday's Tide Report that got the most attention was our very own Kieran Mulvaney's blog post on Discovery News - When Orcas Attack. Miriam Goldstein tweeted about it and it was retweeted several times.

Lessons: Overall, there was not very high traffic to our toolkit. We still like toolkits and are pondering how to make them more useful in the future, and will try to prep them more in advance. The content that was most amplified was the most liquid - a video and story about the incredible cooperative attack efforts of Orcas. We'll try to include more amplification ideas around these slippery topics in future Tide Reports.

Our First Ever High Tide Alert

On Tuesday afternoon, we were discussing what content would go out in Thursday's Tide Report, including some information about  the shark fin soup ban at China's official banquets. That piece of news was already being shared widely, and we noticed that the conversation about it was still on the rise:

Seeing an opportunity, we decided to send out a "High Tide Alert," with ideas for our readers about how to jump into the conversation and make shark-friendly content spread even wider. We put together an image that played on a

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

Submitted by Ray Dearborn
on July 2, 2012 - 2:22pm

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
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Attention Toolkit: All You Need to do the IWC Thing Right on the Internet

Submitted by Ray Dearborn
on June 28, 2012 - 8:14am

The International Whaling Commission meets in Panama July 2-6. Look for a rundown of the issues in tomorrow's Tide Report.

The toolkit below was built to make it easier for you to amplify the IWC conversation online. 

We like feedback.

This toolkit is a living, breathing thing, so feel free to send us suggestions for additions and alterations.

Also, let us know what this tooklit helps you do, and we'll repay the favor by driving more attention to your content.

Ideas for online content:

  • Storify key tweets
  • Clog a backgrounder and a wrap up with great photos. Just kidding. *Blog* that stuff.
  • Use Twitter to track down a hot Skype interviewee
  • Use an image and do a text overlay to evoke conversation on Facebook

Voters in the U.S. strongly oppose commercial whaling and want the U.S. to enforce whaling bans, but many do not know that countries like Japan, Norway and Iceland are still killing whales. Many don't know it's a problem. Share image macros and quotes that help to overcome this lack of knowledge. The American Cetacean Society does that here. 

Whaling and IWC-Related Images and Videos to Amplify

We have curated photographs, infographics, and videos that bring the whaling issue to life on an IWC Pinterest board. Use these graphics and videos on your website, your facebook and twitter feeds, and your own Pinterest boards, but don't forget to attribute them! Heads up: many have restricted licenses.

Want to pin to our board? Awesome. Email us.

Upwell's IWC Pinterest board. Images to consider for posting to Twitter, Facebook and using in blog posts.

More Recent Whaling News (to use as a hook)

Greenland's Whale Meat Going More to Tourists Than Locals (Treehugger, June 26)

Seventy-Five Percent of Japanese Whale Meat 'Unsold' (Telegraph, June 14)

Whale Sanctuary Bid Falls Short (BBC News, July 2)

On Twitter

Hashtags to Watch and Use

Who to Follow

Upwell has compiled an IWC 2012

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Attention Lab Digest: #oceanacidification, Kickstarter, International Surf Day and more

Submitted by Ray Dearborn
on June 22, 2012 - 1:42pm

It's been a busy couple weeks. We keep trying stuff, and learning lots. As always, we love to share. Here are some highlights from the last two weeks of the attention lab:

#OceanAcidification

One of the biggest things to hit the internet two weeks ago was the #endfossilfuelsubsidies twitterstorm, orchestrated by a coalition of nonprofits interested in influencing the happenings at Rio+20. The hashtag campaign was so popular that there was more than one tweet per second that included #endfossilfuelsubsidies, and celebrities like Robert Redford, Stephen Fry and Mark Ruffalo were joining in the action.

Upwell saw the twitterstorm as a great opportunity to draw attention to the oceans, particularly since the focus was on climate change. One of the biggest effects of climate change is ocean acidification, a process that most are unaware of. Capitalizing on the popularity of the #endfossilfuelsubsidies campaign, Upwell created an image to amplify the hashtag while also elevating the issue of the ocean.

Embedded image on Imgur

The image plays on the classic "This is your brain on drugs" PSA, and also clearly illustrates, in a simple way, the effects of climate change on the oceans. 

We shared the image with people who were tweeting #endfossilfuelsubsidies, and also specifically targeted those who were drawing the connection between fossil fuel subsidies and ocean acidification. 

The image has been loaded nearly 4000 times, and, due to retweets by organizations like 350 (who helped orchestrate the twitterstorm), tweets mentioning #oceanacidification had over 350,000 impressions. 

We Learned

Due to the image's simplicity, and also the ability to join in on an existing conversation, we were able to successfully elevate this message. We are constantly monitoring conversations about the ocean, but perhaps some of the most important conversations to monitor are those that are popular and have a tangential relationship with the ocean.

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What the F is going on with whales?? (A case study in social media monitoring)

Submitted by Ray Dearborn
on June 21, 2012 - 4:15pm

Aaron, Upwell's captain of data and monitoring, starts each morning by opening Radian6, where he's got a fancy dashboard that tracks social mentions of all the ocean topics we're keeping our eyes on.

Don't worry if this makes your head spin. It makes mine spin. That's why we keep Aaron around. 

This morning, Aaron saw a huuuuge spike on the whale chart.

(sidenote: It looks like a fin. cool.)

What? Whales are so popular today!!! What is going on!?!  Did the rainbow whale go viral? (sidenote: yes, it did, and we take all the credit.)

Aaron dove into the data. What were people saying? 

Apparently he who must not be named decreed that twitter was down. Does the Twitter Fail Whale count as more attention for the ocean?

Here's a graph that shows how much of the whale conversation spike was due to the Twitter Fail Whale. 

Morals of the story: not all whales created equal, Aaron is graph ninja.

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Tatzoo takes over Upwell

Submitted by Ray Dearborn
on June 20, 2012 - 5:57pm

We opened Upwell’s doors to the Tatzoo project this summer, and we couldn’t be more jazzed. Tatzoo is a training program for emerging conservation leaders in the Bay Area. 

Twelve fellows are learning strategic communications, social media, and DIY activism, and launching creative team projects to help protect three local endangered species - the blue whale, Langes' Metalmark Butterfly and the San Francisco Garter Snake.

 

 

At the end of the summer, each fellow gets a kickass tattoo of their species for their leadership. 

>> Follow Tatzoo on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. <<

I have the pleasure of being the social media mentor for the program, and was super excited to welcome them into our space. I am also excited to use the strength of Upwell to help the Blue Whale team bring an ocean-y conservation ethic to the Bay Area.

We have a beautiful space in North Beach full of creative inspiration and good food, not to mention a sunny deck:

 

 

We love to lend our space to like-minded folks in the bay area. Interested? Email me!

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World Oceans Day! Sea Signals from the week of June 4

Submitted by Ray Dearborn
on June 13, 2012 - 12:32pm

Last Friday was World Oceans Day. Upwell had a busy week amplifying the efforts of the many organizations and individuals who contributed to the day of celebration. 

#worldoceansday

Most of our World Oceans Day outreach happened by amplifying the #worldoceansday hashtag on twitter. We looked for interesting content being shared through social media channels and jumped into conversations that people were having about World Oceans Day. It was a full-time job to monitor the #worldoceansday hashtag, which bodes well. More people talking about the oceans? That’s our goal.

Here are the highlights:

  • We reached out to individuals who were talking about what they could do for the oceans on Twitter and Facebook, directing them to this round-up. (Twitter outreach viewable on Topsy) 
  • We created and shared a YouTube playlist of videos curated from various organizations, and reached out to those organizations on Facebook and Twitter to let them know their videos were included. (Twitter outreach)
  • We wrote a blog post on our own website to share the round-up, the playlist, and other ideas for celebrating World Oceans Day, and shared it via Facebook and Twitter. (Twitter outreach)
  • We participated in and amplified @WhySharksMatter’s #OceanFacts conversation on Twitter. He asked people to post facts about the ocean for World Oceans Day and received hundreds of facts. He is currently developing a Storify to capture it (stay tuned...).
  • We also reached out to celebrities and influencers who could potentially move the conversation to a bigger
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Something else Jacques Cousteau did on his birthday

Submitted by Ray Dearborn
on June 11, 2012 - 2:44pm

Today is the 102nd birthday of famed explorer, Jacques-Yves Cousteau. Happy birthday Jacques, from your admirers at Upwell.

On the shelves of our North Beach office live a collection of books about social change, online metrics, and of course, the ocean. Our library would not be complete without Monsieur Cousteau.

The Ocean World of Jacques Cousteau

The Ocean World of Jacques Cousteau is an encyclopedia of marine life forms, published in the 70s, a companion to the television series that brought the wonder of undersea exploration to the masses. There's nothing like old encyclopedias to call up our nostalgia. As children, we'd pull the books off the shelves to learn something new, rather than pulling our phones out of our pockets.

And then there's Jacques' memoir, The Silent World, which recounts the first days of scuba diving with wit, courage and humor. The Upwell team sat down with the book for lunch today. We took turns storytelling, using our best Cousteau accents.

Imagine our surprise upon coming to this page, midway through the book.

On this day - June 11 - 69 years ago, just as Jacques was turning 33, he avoided deportation through a bit of cleverness.

When the Allies landed in Normandy in 1944 I left Paris by bike to join my family in the Alps, 500 miles away. I carried 110 pounds of food, wine, and documents and made it in four days, pushing up mountain trails to avoid German and maquis skirmishes. The official wartime work card that saved me several times from deportation to Germany. The first side was made out by my employer, Jacque-Yves Cousteau, producer of scientific films. The other side said that he employed Jacques-Yves Cousteau to direct the films. 

Jacques Yves Cousteau once said, "If we were logical, the future would be bleak, indeed. But we are more than logical. We are human beings, and we have faith, and we have hope, and we can work."

Keeping that in mind, Upwell gets back to work.

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