World Turtle Day + Robot Fish Police + More: Sea Signals for the week of May 20, 2012

It was a busy week at Upwell: the end of fish, seafood and slaves, mercury in dolphins from power plants, our plasticized ocean, robot fish police, robot boats, Upwell overcomes Facebook insecurity and asks for friends, and World Turtle Day.

The End of Fish, In One Chart

On Sunday, May 20th, “The End of Fish, In One Chart,”  was published on The Washington Post’s WONKBLOG by Ezra Klein.

Amplification & Reaction

When we looked at how the story was moving on Monday, May 21st, it seemed like it already had momentum in the marine conservation Twitter community, so we decided to reach out to a different audience: vegetarians and vegans. We sent a tweet to a vegan magazine with a large Twitter following, and its senior editor.  The magazine RT’d the story to its 36,000 + followers.

We also shared the link via Twitter with a sustainable seafood cookbook author to ask for her thoughts about it, and had a 2-tweet conversation.

We Learned

We’re wondering if people who write about food are an especially active online community.

Did Slaves Catch Your Seafood?

On Monday, May 21st, Salon.com ran the article, “Did Slaves Catch Your Seafood?” about how, “Thailand, a major source of fish imported to the US, depends on forced labor for its product.”

Amplification & Reaction

Thinking that this might be a story that the human trafficking community would want to share, we tweeted the story to four trafficking advocates with large Twitter followings.  Unfortunately, they didn’t RT story, and the number of clicks to the story link were minimal.

We Learned

If future stories come up about human trafficking and seafood, it might be more effective to reach out to advocates who have a smaller twitter following, or to combine Twitter outreach with email.

Mercury in Dolphins Higher Downwind of Power Plants

On Monday, May 21st, ScienceDaily posted, “Mercury in Dolphins Higher Downwind of Power Plants,”  about a Johns Hopkins University study comparing the level of toxins in wild and captive dolphins.

Amplification & Reaction

We tweeted three dolphin-related organizations, and one nonprofit that covers a range of environmental issues to make sure that they saw the piece. The dolphin-related orgs didn’t respond, but the general environmental one RT’d its 18,500 + followers.

We Learned

Our insight as to why the general environmental nonprofit RT’d the link, and the dolphin-related orgs did not, is that viewing its Twitter history shows that it shares a variety of links from different sources regularly.

Research ship finds the world's oceans are 'plasticized'

On Tuesday, May 22nd, CNN published the story, “Research ship finds that world’s oceans are ‘plasticized,’”  about how an expedition of environmentalists discoved that the pervasiveness of plastic in the ocean extends beyond the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.

In spite of this discouraing news, a handful of encouraging plastic-related stories had also been shared recently:

• Hawaii Becomes the First State in the U.S. to Ban Plastic Bags! | Surfrider Foundation
• Time has come to ban plastic grocery bags in Los Angeles | latimes.com
• Plastic Pollution: How You Can Stop Our Environmental Menace | Huffington Post

Amplification & Reaction

Because the CNN story was so disheartening, we decided to try sharing it within an Ocean Plastic Solutions Storify  that included links to the positive stories (above) as well as links to:

• Surfrider Foundation’s Pledge to Rise Above Plastic on Causes.com
• Plastic Pollution Coalition

We tweeted five of the sources mentioned in the story to let them know that they were included in the Storify. We also tweeted three bloggers who write about ocean plastic, and asked them for other ocean plastic solution story ideas.

The sources mentioned in the Storify did not share it, but the bloggers all responded via Twitter, or email.  One let us know (the next day) that Los Angeles City passed its ban on plastic bags!

We Learned

• Even though the Storify didn’t receive as many hits as our first Storify, it did help to build relationships with bloggers who are passionate about ocean plastic issues.
• Asking questions can be a wonderful way to engage with folks on Twitter
• Always put an image in your Storify header!

Robot Fish ‘Police’ the Oceans

On Tuesday, May 22, 2012, BBC news published “Robotic fish to patrol for pollution in harbours,”  a story detailing the possibilities of using a robotic fish to patrol waters and sense pollution.

Amplification & Reaction

Our tracking showed a fair amount of online conversation about the story, but little among ocean and water advocacy groups. To spur conversation, we reached out to organizations focused on ocean and water pollution issues on Twitter and asked the question “Which waters would you patrol?”

Our tweet was retweeted three times and favorited twice, but our campaign’s overall impact on amplifying the story and conversation amongst the target group was minor.

We Learned

This campaign was started in the evening pacific time and performed comparably to similar twitter-focused micro-campaigns launched during normal business hours. It was also the second campaign in which we asked a question to spur conversation (see Endangered Species Day) with little direct response to the question asked.

Robot Boats

On May 23 Wired’s Gadget Lab published “Robot Boats Survive Epic Voyage Across the Pacific – So Far,”  tracking the voyage of wave-powered-data-gathering-remote-controlled boats from San Francisco to Hawaii.

Amplification & Reaction

The story’s author, Brian Lam, asked for Upwell’s help promoting the piece – at the time there was little online conversation about the story. In reading the article, we noticed a very interesting piece of information that was not obvious in the existing online conversation – the data gathered by the robot boats is available to the public for free. We decided to reach out via Twitter and Facebook to organizations interested in ocean data collection with a message that emphasized the data angle of the story. Three of seven organizations contacted retweeted or commented on our Facebook posts. One organization and one follower of another organization favorite out tweet.

We Learned

This campaign was also primarily executed in the evening, and performed comparable to other campaigns, indicating that time of day may not be as important as we’d thought.

World Turtle Day Pinterest Board

May 23rd was World Turtle Day!

Amplification & Reaction

After our positive experience with the Goliath Grouper Pinterest Board, we decided to create a World Turtle Day Pinterest Board  that included photos of turtles from marine conservation organizations’ sites that we saw were already discussing World Turtle Day, and photos from ocean organizations’ Pinterest Boards.

We created a custom bitly URL http://bit.ly/turtlesonpinterest, and shared the Board with 11 of the organizations whose photos were featured on our World Turtle Day Pinterest Board.

According to bitly, the board as of last week received 49 clicks from 5 countries (United States, Venezuela, Canada, Germany, and Costa Rica) + “other.”  It also had 18 re-pins of images, 5 likes of images, and 10 followers.

Our tweets were RT’d 5 times, replied to 9 times, and favorited two times.

We Learned

• Create a custom bitly URL
• Pin photos from sources that you want viewers to click and read, in our case, ocean org’s sites
• Re-pin from Boards that you want your viewers to click back to, in our case, ocean org’s Boards
• Let the sources of your pins know that you have pinned their images via Twitter
• Pinterest is fun!

Upwell Facebook Page: Like Us!

In order to access Insights for the Upwell Facebook Page, we need 30 likes.

Amplification & Reaction

Because we’re ramping up to amplify World Ocean Day stories, we tagged 25 marine conservation orgs on Facebook with a request for links to their World Ocean Day events. We also tweeted a request for folks to share their World Ocean Day events on our Facebook Page, and sent emails to friend of Upwell asking them to like our Page so that we can access our Insights.

No ocean orgs shared their ocean day events on Facebook, or liked our Page.  Our tweet received 3 RT’s.  We received 12 new Likes based on our emails.

We Learned

•  It may have been too early to ask organizations to share links to their World Ocean Day events
•  At this time, it seems like reaching ocean orgs through Twitter and email is more effective than tagging on Facebook.

World Turtle Day Image Macros

Photo based content is more likely to get broadly shared on photo-centric services than text only content. Such services include Facebook (whose Wall and Timeline interfaces both give prominence to images), Tumblr, and Pinterest.

Inspired by this Buzzfeed roundup of the currently popular Evil Cow Meme we decided to try to experiment with photo-based memes—referred to as "image macros"—in the hopes that we might eventually create something equally as viral but based upon ocean content (each one containing a URL pointing to related ocean content that we want to amplify).

Thanks to sites like MemeGenerator and Quickmeme, once an initial source image has been created and uploaded, anyone can easily create new versions. If a meme takes off, a distributed competition naturally emerges, with many people vying to come up with the best possible accompanying text. The resulting captions are far funnier—and more viral—than any individual is likely to come up with on their own. Read through the "Evil Cow" images on Buzzfeed's post and you'll see what we mean.

Open source campaigns like these also allow for greater audience interactivity and freedom of expression. Irreverence, politics, profanity and other controversial content is often highly viral, but may be inappropriate for Upwell to create ourselves. By giving anyone the ability to caption these images we can encourage maximum creativity with little or no direct accountability. "Who did it? The Internet did it."

Action

• Used MemeGenerator.com, an image macro creation & hosting service, to create two turtle image macros, Sarcastic Turtle and Inquisitive Turtle, each containing a bit.ly link to a World Turtle Day story
• Searched for and selected images that were correctly Creative Commons-licensed for remix
• Created a trackable bit.ly link to Mother Nature Network's excellent World Turtle Day post
• In Photoshop, cropped the images to a square format, added photo credit (to respect the CC-BY license), and added the World Turtle Day bit.ly link
• Created trackable bit.ly links for the MemeGenerator pages for each image macro
• Using these links, posted about these images on Twitter and Facebook

We Learned

• Initial results on Facebook were promising, with Sarcastic Turtle receiving more likes and shares there than RT's on Twitter.
• As MemeGenerator.net puts their own URL in the lower right, that area should not be used for links or other text.
• After being resized by MemeGenerator's image creation tool, both the bit.ly link and the photo credit I'd added to the image became too small to read easily. In the future I would use a larger typeface, with a more pronounced outline or drop shadow, similar to what memegenerator themselves use when compositing their URL in the lower right of the image.
• The MemeGenerator website was often unresponsive, with pages and image requests frequently timing out. This made it difficult to use, problems that would likely frustrate casual visitors from adding their own captions to the images that we posted there. In the future I would try an alternate image macro creation site, like the promisingly-named QuickMeme.
• Add to Reddit next time to test in another community.