Tag Archive for 'earthhour'

20 reasons why Earth Hour social media has worked so far.

Published on September 20, 2010 in Australia, environment, social media and video. View Comments

Last Monday evening I gave a presentation at Social Media Club Sydney, along with another presentation by Dae Levine, Head of Communications with Greenpeace. The topic of the event was “Lessons Learned from Not for Profits: Local Effort, Global Effect”.

I’m not going to give you a summary of the whole event here, as there are already decent summaries here and here if you are interested.  As has been noted by various people, the two different campaigns demonstrate how quite different approaches can yield successful results, depending on the objective of the campaign.

One of the most obvious and perhaps biggest differences in the two approaches is the ‘more party than protest’ approach taken by Earth Hour, compared to the more confrontational protest approach taken by Greenpeace.

Yesterday I blogged about another Greenpeace campaign which takes a similar approach in confronting Facebook. The campaign takes aim at the company’s inadequate measures in relation to addressing its growing carbon footprint. After the success of Greenpeace’s Nestle ‘Killer’ campaign, it’ll be interesting to see how this turns out.

For those of you who might be interested, I thought I might break down my presentation into a list of points identifying  the approach taken by Earth Hour, especially in relation to social media. In short, this is how and why I think it has worked so far.

  1. Good timing: climate change action is needed and wanted by many people all over the world.
  2. It’s a simple Idea and message. It’s positive, fun and hopeful. It’s more party than protest, which encourages a lot of people to get involved.
  3. Turning off lights is a powerful visual to help deliver the message worldwide.
  4. It involves people power, with a  grassroots driven campaign.
  5. Earth Hour is an open source brand. It’s available for anyone to use.
  6. The use of social media and user generated content fits well with the grassroots driven and open source nature of the campaign.
  7. For Earth Hour there are thousands of events organised worldwide, both official and unofficial.
  8. Earth Hour social media started organically and has grown as social media has grown since 2007. In 2007 Twitter was not mainstream, Facebook was smaller, YouTube was only a couple of years old.
  9. Earth Hour has access to, and the support of the global WWF Network to help with campaign organisation. For instance, in social media there are numerous official and unofficial social network profiles worldwide, in multiple languages and on multiple networks.
  10. The network is asked to respect the open source nature of the Earth Hour brand, to let go of the brand so anyone can use it.
  11. There are numerous unofficial Earth Hour supporter profiles and an overwhelming amount of  supporter generated creative content, which organisers encourage worldwide.
  12. Local agency generated creative content is encouraged worldwide.
  13. Numerous official and unofficial partnerships are developed with companies and organisations worldwide, to help spread the word and lend support.
  14. Throughout the year, bloggers are engaged and encouraged to write about Earth Hour  – from popular, influential blogs to environmental bloggers, to regional bloggers (in different countries and languages) to any and every bloggger. Earth Hour assets such as videos, images and logos are made available for use by bloggers when possible.
  15. The rewards of an open and available brand have so far, far outweighed the risks of letting it go.
  16. The approach by organisers to social media conversations is mostly “hands off”, letting conversations flow and letting supporters argue the case when there is criticism.
  17. Interventions are based on highly ‘offensive’ content only.
  18. Traditional and social media have worked together to make the campaign a success – from print to radio to tv to websites to mobile to social.
  19. Supporter–made creative content is showcased through official Earth Hour networks.
  20. On–the–night image and video uploads, live blogging and status updates are encouraged, to help support the event itself, in real-time.

Here’s the official Earth Hour 2011 video if you haven’t seen it yet :)

Twitter Goes Mainstream, Celebs Aplenty

Published on April 20, 2009 in Twitter and social media. View Comments

Okay, so Twitter has been in the process of going mainstream for quite a while now, with the advent of various celebrities joining and enthusiastically advocating the network. I’d say it really started to intensify a few weeks ago when Diddy (@iamdiddy) appeared on The Ellen Show and spent a good deal of his time talking about how he uses Twitter all the time from his BlackBerry. Ellen then started tweeting as @theellenshow and even did a monlogue on her show about it. She also kept plugging her twitter profile and mentioned that she wanted to have a million followers.

Famous couple Demi Moore (@mrsktucher) and Aston Kutcher (@aplusk) have been on Twitter and singing its praises for a while now. Actually, as I’ve been consulting on social media for Earth Hour Global, I was pleased that Demi Moore tweeted out Earth Hour (@earthhour), encouraging her followers to participate just before the event in March. Just one tweet from a person with that many followers can have quite an impact in terms of raising awareness across the network.

If you’re on Twitter no doubt you’ll know (it was hard to miss) that last week Ashton Kutcher and CNN (@cnnbrk) were involved in a much hyped race to reach one million followers, which Kutcher won by a slim margin. Both got to a million, Twitter most probably got a lot of new sign-ups, everybody won.

If the fact that a Hollywood star and a major media company raced each other to get that many followers wasn’t enough to indicate that Twitter is going seriously mainstream, then Oprah (@Oprah) promptly got involved. You can’t really get much bigger than that in terms of mainstream media exposure. Although I haven’t seen it yet (but I read all about it one Twitter), I understand that Oprah did a show featuring Twitter, with Kutcher and one of the founders of Twitter, Evan Williams (@ev).

Now please correct me if I’m wrong, but I can’t remember Facebook getting this much attention from very famous media identities when it hit the mainstream. Back when Second Life was the social media network the traditional media was focusing on, I’m pretty sure you wouldn’t have seen Larry King or Oprah in there! Twitter is exploding in popularity right now. Many tv talk shows, newspapers, magazines and radio shows seem to be talking about it. Well known media personalities seem to be joining in droves to get in on the some of the new media action.

I have to say that the rise and rise of Twitter isn’t a surprise to many who’ve been using it for a couple of years, as I have. It’s always been growing at a fast pace. The explosive rate at which it’s growing right now is simply amazing but Twitter reaching a tipping point and moving into mainstream territory isn’t surprising to me at all. It’s always been pretty simple to use, you can take it with you on your mobile, and it can be quite addictive. My 32,000+ tweets attest to that!

Twitter has had its fair share of technical problems, especially when it comes to stability, but even throughout those problems it has kept growing at a fast pace. The question that remains now is, just how big will Twitter get? Will it grow and evolve to become a multi-billion dollar company? Will it reach the heights of Facebook, with around 200 million users worldwide?