@TomMauchline

I build campaigns around people and data. Engagement specialist who likes the internet. This is the place where I dump ideas which I don't have a place to use right now. twitter.com/TomMauchline pinterest.com/TomMauchline

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[tommauchline]

I’d like to tell you a story about the Mayor of Oklahoma.

Six years ago Mick Cornett called a press conference in front of the elephant house at the city zoo. He was an overweight Republican running a city with one of the fattest populations in America. He had been trying to diet and exercise on his own and although he had lost 40lb in 40 weeks he still weighed 180lb, far too much for his 5ft 9in height. He decided to go public and ask the people of the city to join in. “We’re going to lose a million pounds,” he declared.

Rather than setting distant public health targets for professionals to deliver, Mr Cornett wanted individuals to be engaged. He set up a website, thiscityisonadiet.com, with advice, discussions and a weight-loss counter where everyone could add to the city’s tally. Almost 50,000 people signed up, about a third of the overweight population. It caught the city’s imagination. Restaurants offered low-calorie options and gyms offered discounts for participants.

Eighteen months into the campaign, Oklahoma had lost close to half a million pounds, but the Mayor’s constituents had realised there was a fundamental problem with building more activity into their lives — the city was built for commuting by car. The Mayor held a referendum asking people to approve a seven-year, one-cent increase in sales tax to pay for bike lanes, sidewalks, hiking trails, ice rinks, green spaces and wellness centres. The answer was a resounding “yes”.

Oklahoma hit its weight-loss target three years ago. Enthused businesses have given loans to make more improvements. It now has a higher employment rate than any urban area in America and the Mayor says that fitter and more reliable employees are a key part of the attraction. He has been re-elected for a third successive term.

This is more than a feel-good story. It is a template for how to do politics differently. The old political model, where experts draw up a strategy, announce it and hope that people will go along with it, is far less effective than igniting people’s enthusiasm and making their wishes and proposals part of the solution.

This is the future of politics in a networked world. It mirrors what every large company is doing — tapping into the public’s intelligence rather than assuming that the best answers will always be generated by the people it employs.

[tommauchline]

It's a source of great pride and great shame that I A/B tested my Grindr picture

Me

[tommauchline]

Me talking about Facebook Adverts whilst trying not to fall over. Ended up forgetting to say quite a lot so stay tuned for video 2.

[tommauchline]

Snapchat and GOTV

Snapchat’s temporary message model might make it seem like it isn’t worth your time. Sweating over content which is literally here one second and gone the next might seem less than satisfying, but in many ways it offers a better ROI than almost all other social platforms. Snapchats stick around in a users inbox flashing until they are at least tapped, where as other social platforms with their busy timelines and content algorithms can make your content easy to miss.

  True, snapchat doesn’t offer the possibility of the viral growth that other social platforms do, but it is still a great way of having a conversation with your base. And as people can be found through their phone numbers it is likely that a significant part of your base is on there waiting for you (a friend of mine found out that Carol Smile off of Changing Rooms was on snapchat after she helped out with a charity video of his).

  So whilst online sharing is more difficult building up an audience shouldn’t be too labour intensive. Targeting fun unusual content at the supporters you found through their mobile numbers should start conversations amongst them and their friends in bars and living rooms, leading to more adds. Also feeding back some of the good responses you get on more traditional social networks will help cross-pollinate. For candidates asking students to add them on snapchat whilst door knocking or doing a talk at a Uni, could be a great, fun, easy way to keep the conversation going up until election day.

  The MTV show Geordie shore experimented with snapchat during their most recent (and most successful) series. They used it to turn the show into a social occasion – no mean feat in an age of on demand telle. They used snap chat to remind people that the show was on that night, and then sent out blasts at dramatic moments in the show. Also importantly they fed back some (some being important as a friend that worked on this project said there was a significant number of shall we say ‘intimate selfies’)  of users snapchats on more traditional channels driving more people to add them on snapchat but also making watching the show seem like an event.

  The same tactics could be translated to enhance the GOTV operation of candidates - offering a great way to reach out to important first time and younger voters. Snapchats could be used to remind supporters of key policy positions, great activist work or key registration and polling dates. Then asking supporters to send in their pictures filing out voter registration forms, postal votes and ballots on election day could also provide brilliant social proof [link] content for more traditional media, helping to energize supporters.  This all helps to show the excitement and movement around a candidate as well as the election. Important as history shows that enthusiasm around candidates and elections help to turn out voters on election day.

  Whilst there are some logistical issues as the tool is still in its infancy and it should be used in conjuncture with other tools. Snapchat still can offer candidates and brands a great return on the effort they put in.

[tommauchline]

Kejriwal and his cohorts used social media to connect with India’s plugged-in and disenfranchised.

[whybray]

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Great simple email asking for my feed back from Foundation.kr - Built with delightedapp.com

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"God is just what happens when humanity is connected" - Jim Gilliam

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An article I wrote for LabourList about the bottom up organising happening on the left at the moment.

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Will the Clintons ever learn?

Bill Clinton has been a member of twitter now for a couple of weeks or so and yet he is still only following 8 people - well accounts as some are organisations. Whilst hardly important in itself it does show that the Clinton machine isn't learning from past mistakes. Hillary's 2008 presidential bid failed in part because she concentrated too much on convincing a small group of influential insiders and didn't reach out to regular people [Source].  

It would seem that the Clinton camp intrinsically doesn't get the shift in expectations the social web has caused. People now expect political communication to be reciprocal, with politicians listening as well as broadcasting. Bill should start following 'normal' people and get there take on policy and events. It could just help his wife get to the White House.

[tommauchline]

The Problem With The Boolean Social Graph

Facebook spends a lot of time reminding us it wants to be the plumbing to the social web and other sites have been quick to make use of this utility. The your friends like/brought/clicked on this stuff before you got here has been a great addition to websites and added loads of value for both consumers and businesses.

However those of us who have now had Facebook accounts for many years will now be seeing  a deterioration in the value they get from services like this. As our social graph graph gets larger and more out of date we are getting more and more recommendations from people we barely know or care about - I recently joined Netflix and all the suggestions I received were from people I spent lots of time with in secondary school but now only see in the pub when I go visit my parents at Christmas. 

As Facebook's ad products and plans for monetisation are based around this social graph it is going to have to come up with ways of either getting us to keep our graph fresh (which as an awkward Brit fills me with terror) or a friction-less way of keeping suggestions relevant.

I have no doubt that with smart people like Paul Adams  working on problems like this they will be able to build on the work they have already done. But there is an interesting question around how you keep a social graph relevant seeing as we are all to polite to un-friend people. 

[tommauchline]

My local lunch place has been A/B testing their tip jar and settled on a container which has a (sort of) target and a lot of social proof.

[tommauchline]

David Cameron has showed real leadership by standing up to his own party on the issue of Equal Marriage. So to show my gratitude (and hopefully give him the courage to stand up to the more backward backbenchers again) I'm going to go buy a thank you card and send it to him. It will carry more weight if more of us sign it. Click here to add your name.  

[tommauchline]

"So it’s just like if you want to have things evolving in politics, would you rather do your own party or would you rather work in a government and have a position where you can try to have some influence to make some reforms?"

"Hedi Slimane in 2001 offering some advice to Nick Clegg's Lib Dem critics. (Full interview: www.charlieporter.net) 

[tommauchline]

This picture is everyones FB cover photo at the moment - great free advertising. Intentional or not, it proves the value of thinking about how your customers can use your content on their own social networks. 

[tommauchline]

Open Source Legislation

Just watched this TED talk video featuring Clay Shirky in Café Nero on how the Internet – or more specifically the open source programming community could improve democracy. It shows how out of date the current debate surrounding Lords reform in the UK is. Elected representatives are very 19th century.

The video made me think of a discussion on the future of the Lords I had at a pub with David Babbs during my time at 38 Degrees – David suggested that the Lords should be run like jury service with everyone put into a lot which would decide who would become a Lord. I remember arguing that I couldn’t imagine a teacher from Birmingham fancying schlepping up to London to vote on Health care or planning policy. However it isn’t out of the realms of possibility that a teacher in Birmingham one evening wouldn’t want to look over outlines for early years policy to add his experiences in the classroom, or a builder from Glasgow wouldn’t want to use her experiences trying to get conservatories built to make planning policy more effective.

David Miliband talked in “Our Kind of Politics” about people loosing faith in representative democracy because as society becomes more educated and open people want to have more of a say in how things are run. Open source legislation could – possibly- help to turn around current levels of mistrust in the system.