Ninjas and Chevy Tahoe

From Networked Advocacy

You've probably seen the funny "Ask a Ninja" videos on YouTube. The Ninja accepts and answers questions on a wide range of topics. In the "net neutrality" example above, the Ninja breaks down a rather dry and hard-to-understand issue into something fun and real.

A speaker at the True Spin conference a couple of weeks back emphasized the benefits of letting your message go. The "Ninja's" light-hearted explanation of the net neutrality issue added huge value and approachability to the net neutrality campaign.

Here at Netcentric Campaigns, we often have this same conversation with advocates struggling with how they want to engage with the online space. As the Ninja shows, often others in the broader community concerned with your issues can often do a fine, fun and often free job at personalizing, expanding and spreading your key messages.

But letting go of your message also has some risks! It's not so easy to pull back on negative publicity or word of mouth. Consider the Chevy Tahoe campaign. Through its website, Chevy offered consumers the ability to create their own ads about the Tahoe. Of course many quickly seized the opportunity to use this tool to highlight the dangers and impacts of our gas-hungry culture (see clip below).

So what should advocates do? Some thoughts:

• Networks have the ability to self-correct. Networks don't just produce information, they vet and monitor it. Think of how Wikipedia works: inappropriate or incorrect content is quickly identified and corrected by a volunteer army of editors. The trick is that many networks haven't built fully functional self-correcting capacity yet. And of course this is a bit trickier when information can so easily be intentionally spun in a disingenuous light. But still, the greater the extent network members can communicate, share information and organize, the greater the opportunity for shared vetting and monitoring of information and
• We are all increasingly exposed, like it or not. This is just how it is. One of my favorite recent books, "We are Smarter than Me", makes just this point. The book discusses how the private sector can benefit from collaboration, but the lessons apply to nonprofits as well. Nonprofits and companies alike must increasingly think about how they're going to manage their exposure, not whether they want to be exposed. Leading us back again to the need for

"It's an inescapable truth of this transparent age that sooner or later - and, mostly, sooner - the errors a company commits will be exposed for everyone to see. When a mistake is made in working with a community, the best course is to admit it without delay, apologize, and make sure it's not repeated.

"When an error surgaces, there's a natural inclination to hunker down and hope it will go away. Companies put off responding - or, worse yet, erase emails and otherwise try to deny or pretend that nothing happened. Not a good idea. As we've seen "on the highest levels," cover-ups have a way of making matters worse...

"The bottom line is this: In a world where the inner workings of government and business are daily revealed through emails, companies need to erase the word confidential from their mental hard drives. The whistleblowers reign supreme, abetted by those ever-more-powerful online search engines whose algorithms don't distinguish between good news and bad..."

We are Smarter than Me, pp 133-4

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