Internet-Doing!
★ How does internet?
Here are the questions that people -- especially young people -- look to the internet to answer. And marriage equality
organizations should be prepared to answer them:
•What is happening? •What are my friends doing? •What should I be doing?
★ Can we internet?
Internet is easy! But you have to work on it every single day. Never ever look out-of-date.
•Twitter: Send out messages on Twitter several times a day. They should be a mix of information and instructions. For
example, “Supreme court will rule this afternoon, click here for article,” or, “Act now! Click here to send a letter to
Barack Obama.” Twitter users love to be bombarded with information.
Facebook: Create events and send out invitations. Easy! Post photos, videos, comments, and status updates.
•
•YouTube: Post videos. Vote on other videos. Leave comments. Subscribe. Create playlists.
•Digg: Post news stories. Comment on articles.
•RSS: Every website should have an RSS feed for updates. It’s just expected. iCal feeds help, too.
•Bloggers, bloggers, bloggers: There are lots of people writing lots of stuff. Many of them are eager to repost the news
that you send them, but it won’t occur to them to do it unless you remind them. So, have a special mailing list for
bloggers. Treat them like they are special. Tell them, “hey, you’re helping us out so much! Please post this article.”
And they will. In return, you should drive traffic to them when they do something worthy of attention.
•Networking! You can’t just dance onto the scene and suddenly everyone’s paying attention to you. You have to do
internet frequently. That means several times a day, every single day. Comment. Email. Post. Vote. Submit. Add
friends. Subscribe. Create content; link to content; comment on content. Build tons of relationships and promote
yourself relentlessly (but only in appropriate venues -- more about that later).
★ Internet army!
Internet people await your command. You can have hundreds of people doing your bidding if you organize it right and
network network network. Here’s an example of how you could do that:
Create three mailing lists for your internet armies: “Five Minute Friends,” “Ten Minute Teammates,” and “Half Hour
Heroes.” Send them an email every Wednesday, listing opportunities for them to help that match the time they can devote.
Whenever possible, ask them to submit their own suggestions, and cross-promote their content; so if a half-hour person
writes a blog post, ask ten-minute people to comment on it and link to it; and ask five-minute people to retweet it. The great
thing about having a big group of people like this is that they’re all supporting each other. They’re creating the content; and
they’re driving the traffic.
•Five-Minute Friends can: Digg an article. Vote on a video. Forward an article.
•Ten-Minute Teammates can: Comment on a Digg article or on a video. Post a photo. Invite friends to an event.
•Half-Hour Heroes can: Write a blog post. Write a letter or email. Take a photo. Post a vlog thing.
★ Avoid creepy marketing!
Don’t just form indiscriminate relationships, befriending and linking to everyone in sight. Don’t ask people to Digg eve-
rything you write; don’t create gigantic linkfarms; don’t send traffic to lame sites just because they sent traffic to you; don’t
try to cheat algorithms.
In short, don’t try to be best friends with everyone on the internet. That’s creepy. Internet users will see through it and it
will bug them, just like it would bug people if you did it in real life.
So be strategic:
•Promote yourself relentlessly in appropriate venues.
•Don’t just blast people with information -- respond to them.
•Think about your networking. Pursue the most rewarding relationships; and put the others on a back-burner.
I n t e r n e t I d e a s
Stop8.org