Ferguson to New York, Social Media Is the Organizer’s Biggest Megaphone

Within minutes of the grand jury’s decision Wednesday, Twitter and Facebook lit up with thousands of messages around hashtags such as #EricGarner, #ICantBreathe and #BlackLivesMatter. Facebook pages called for protests in cities around the country. Hundreds of people soon crowded in protest at New York’s Grand Central Station and Times Square. This was not serendipitous. The speed with which these demonstrations came together and grew reflected intense planning by organizers and activists and shows how social media has matured into a crucial tactic for coordinating activity, drawing people to the streets and trading tips. “This can happen offline, but online we can amplify it more, and it reaches people faster,” says New York-based feminist media activist Jamia Wilson. “This is why these on-the-ground demonstrations can happen so quickly.” A similar scenario played out last week around the grand jury’s decision not to indict police officer Darren Wilson in the shooting death of teenager Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo. In that case, organizers had prepared ahead of time by using social media to organize demonstrations, setting up a website that mapped out potential places to protest and a Tumblr page to denote protests happening in places around the country. Organizers Mariame Kaba and Kelly Hayes, both in Chicago, for example, started a Facebook event page planning protests in their city. They tried to estimate when the Ferguson decision would be made, and updated the page accordingly. In part due to their planning, the protest unfolded very quickly. With the momentum of the success of the Michael Brown protests, activists were again able to set the stage, deciding on hashtags ahead of time and choosing locations to gather at after the New York verdict. Hayes was following conversations on Twitter Wednesday ahead of the Eric Garner decision, when she saw mention of a peace circle to be held in Rogers Park, Chicago, in memory of Garner. She arrived at 6 p.m., to find 40 others already there. After meticulous planning, once the demonstrations begin it’s the vivid photos and videos sent by people on the scene that ultimately spur throngs of others to join the protests, social-media experts say. “You can see that it’s not just five people standing in Times Square — it’s people marching throughout the city,” said Marcus Messner, associate professor of journalism at Virginia Commonwealth University who teaches social-media journalism. “The immediate visuals we’re seeing on Twitter and Instagram help people overcome that barrier to getting out and protesting.” Antonio French learned about unrest in Ferguson in a tweet from a traditional news outlet that used the term “mob” in it. The St. Louis alderman wanted to see for himself. When he arrived at the site of the protests, he found no media there, and no one capturing what the community was saying and feeling. “My role in those first few days was kind of like a reporter,” said the former journalist, whose Twitter following has climbed from about 4,000 before the Mike Brown protests to 120,000 today. His role has changed, he said, to peacekeeper, and then mediator between protesters and police. All of that has had a social media aspect to it, he said. “Had it not been for Twitter, I’m pretty sure that Ferguson would not have become what it has,” he said. “In fact, it’s now hard to talk about Ferguson without hashtag Ferguson.” He said he has watched as even the Ferguson police have joined the Twitter conversation. This isn’t the first time protests organized on social media have grown to such large proportions of course. In Egypt in 2010 and 2011, for example, people organized around the Facebook group “We Are All Khaled Said,” created in memory of a young man who was killed by the police after he had posted anti-police videos online from an Internet café. His murder sparked protests that ultimately led to the revolution that toppled long-time President Hosni Mubarak. One of the advantages activists have found to organizing on social media, both in Egypt as well as now in the U.S., is the ease with which they can trade ideas on the best ways to plan events. Shortly after Brown was killed, for example, New York-based activist ‘Feminista Jones’ called for people to volunteer to host local national moments of silence to mourn Brown on Aug. 14 under the hashtag #nmos14. People who had never launched a protest asked on Twitter: “What materials do we need?” “How do we get the word out?” Some activists recommended using “light boards” that can project messages on buildings to help get the attention of passersby and tell them where the protests are occurring and what the messages are. “Across different states, you see similar demonstration tactics being used because social media allows us to share,” Chicago-based activist Suey Park says. Hayes notes that social media has also made it more likely that mainstream media will notice an event, if not as it is unfolding, then later when reporters notice the trail of photos and comments on Twitter and Facebook. “Before we had Twitter and Facebook, the main chance for people to learn about our event was if the media covered it,” she said. “Now with social media, we cover our own story.” As organizers tell their story, many are keen to elevate the voices of the people most involved in local communities. “Yes, it’s important to retweet reporters, it’s important to retweet the news, but for this, many groups are advising their grassroots members to retweet people on the ground to elevate their stories,” Wilson says. But even as activists call on one another to retweet certain voices, no single face has emerged for this movement. “People are looking for an overarching leader, and I don’t think that we’re going to find that,” says Joseph Mayton, a blogger who reported in Cairo throughout the Arab Spring and now lives in California’s Bay Area. “There is no need for one leader—people can come together online and do their own thing, and head into the streets and make change.” Twitter’s data team put together a map showing the global conversation around the hashtags #BlackLivesMatter, #HandsUpDontShoot and #ICantBreathe. Note how the colors change as the news unfolds: –Jeff Elder contributed to this article

Top 10 Social Media Plugins for WordPress

Social media is a crucial component for any online marketing strategy. If you’re running your small business website on the WordPress platform, it’s incredibly easy to integrate social. There are hundreds of ready made social media plugins for WordPress to choose from. Your choice of social media plugins for your WordPress website will depend on which social platforms you use actively, what kind of content you offer on your site, and the best look and placement of social tools that complements your website design. From simple to richly featured, below are some of the best WordPress plugins for social media. Digg Digg This versatile plugin by Buffer comes with plenty of customization options and integrates with virtually any social media platform. With Digg Digg, you can create either a floating social media bar with left or right scrolling options, or sharing buttons that automatically populate at the top or bottom of each of your blog posts. Digg Digg can be used with Twitter, Facebook, Buffer, Google+, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Reddit, Tumblr – just about any social channels you might use. Facebook options include both Like and Share, and “lazy loading” helps you cut down on load times for your website. Flare Simple and eye-catching, the Flare plugin not only gives you customizable share buttons, but also lets you create and display a Follow Me widget, so your visitors can one-click follow your social media channels right from your website. The plugin is compatible with major social media platforms, including Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Google+ and more. You can customize the appearance of the buttons, and place the share bar at the top or bottom of posts, or to the left and right of your pages. The left and right options scroll down the page with viewers, and auto-hide when not in use. ShareThis With great customization, tons of features, and more than 120 supported social media platforms, ShareThis is one of the popular social media plugins for WordPress that’s been downloaded more than 1.5 million times. This plugin tool offers more than social buttons, which come in the form of a Hovering Bar that can be displayed on the right or left side of your pages, with counters and your choice of small or large buttons. In addition, ShareThis has built-in social analytics, a CopyNShare widget that helps you track shares when your content is copied and pasted, and more. Share Buttons by AddThis One of the most popular and recognizable social media plugins for WordPress, AddThis Share Buttons let you integrate with more than 330 social platforms and bookmarking sites, as well as email sharing. While there isn’t an option for a floating sidebar, the plugin gives you plenty of layout choices – and you can also get free analytics when you create an AddThis account. Floating Social Media Icon Highly rated and popular, the Floating Social Media Icon plugin gives you a customizable, configurable social bar that flies onto the screen and scrolls along with visitors. You can also disable floating and set up static icons with this plugin. Floating Social Media Icon gives you more than 20 different icon styles to choose from, so you can match the themes and styles of your website. It also supports multiple widgets, so you can display various social media buttons separately on your pages. Social Media Feather Lightweight yet powerful, Social Media Feather is a simple, high-performing social plugin that keeps speeds up and load times down by not using JavaScript. The buttons have a clean, modern look, and you can customize the appearance with social icons skins. This plugin supports shortcodes, and is currently the only social sharing plugin that supports Retina and high-resolution displays used by mobile devices like the iPad 5. Slick Social Sharing Buttons If you’re looking for a social media plugin for WordPress that’s easy to implement and comes with plenty of options, try Slick Social Sharing Buttons. This plugin lets you customize button types, specify which pages and posts to display social sharing on, and choose from either a floating or slide-out share bar. You can also customize location, direction, floating speed, animation speed and more. Slick Social Sharing Buttons supports shortcodes, and gives you a social analytics dashboard to help you track your sharing activity. Social Media Widget With a long list of supported social platforms, including email and RSS, and some fun and interesting customizations, Social Media Widget is an easy-to-use plugin that creates a sidebar widget for social sharing, with links that open a separate tab or window when clicked. Social Media Widget offers three icon sizes, four icon styles (Web 2.0, Sketch, Heart and Cutout), and four animation types to make your social media buttons stand out on the page. Shareaholic The feature-rich, powerful Shareaholic offers more than social sharing. With a stated aim to help you get readers to “actually discover and submit your articles to numerous social bookmarking sites,” this plugin supports Facebook (both Like and Send), Google+, Pinterest, Twitter, LinkedIn and other major social platforms, with share counters for many of them. In addition, Shareaholic comes with Classic Bookmarks, a Recommendations & Related Content tool, built-in Social Analytics, and official support for Google’s URL shortener as well as Google Analytics. Share Buttons by AddToAny Offering support for more than 100 social sites in 19 languages, AddToAny Share Buttons is one of the most popular social media plugins for WordPress with almost 3 million downloads. It’s easy to customize and fully featured, and supports both shares and interactive clicks – including Facebook Likes, a Tweet button for Twitter, a “Pin It” button for Pinterest, a +1 button for Google+ and more. Bookmarking and email buttons integrate with the most popular email services (Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, Outlook / Hotmail, AOL, and nearly every Web-based or desktop email program). You can customize the appearance and position of the AddToAny share bar, and integrate with Google Analytics to make the most of your social marketing. BONUS: Microblog Poster A different kind of social plugin, Microblog Poster lets you automatically push your WordPress blog content to various social media platforms. This plugin currently supports Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, LinkedIn, Delicious and more. It also supports shortcodes and multiple accounts on the same platform. Social Media Photo via Shutterstock More in: WordPress

How Mormons Use The Internet To Spread The Good Word

We tend to think of religions as being conservative, stodgy, or lagging when it comes to anything that has to do with technology, and especially online technology. Therefore it may come as a bit of a surprise to find out that at least one religion, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, whose members are commonly known by the abbreviation “LDS” or the nickname “Mormons,” is one of the most advanced large organizations in the world when it comes to SEO, content marketing, and the use of social media [Full disclosure, I am an active member of the LDS Church]. As a member of this religious community and someone who makes his living from consulting with businesses regarding digital marketing, I have been more than curious to learn from the campaigns the LDS Church has engaged in to get their message out. Here are some of the lessons entrepreneurs and businesses can take from the Mormon way of doing digital marketing. phone with blue background Search Engine Optimization (SEO) SEO, which stands for search engine optimization, includes all activities that influence the ranking of a website on a search engine for a given keyword search. The higher a website’s rankings, the more traffic it gets. Digital marketing consultant Justin Briggs analyzed the SEO efforts of the LDS Church in 2010 while working for SEO consultancy Distilled and published his results in a well-read blog post. Given the time that has passed, I decided to revisit a few of Briggs’ findings when it came to the LDS Church’s SEO tactics and results. First, I looked at rankings for non-branded, generic keywords. Although exact results may differ from one person’s computer to another, when I used the SEO software tool SEMRush to analyze Google rankings for the following keywords for desktop users in the United States, I found LDS.org rankings in the top five results for these searches: bible bible dictionary christ church music holy bible holy ghost jesus christ king james bible new testament old testament scriptures It is not easy to rank for these keywords. Using SEMRush’s competitive analysis tool, the only website that outperformed LDS.org on these searches was Wikipedia, and this doesn’t take into account the fact that LDS.org is only one of the more than 100 websites the LDS Church maintains. Others include Mormon.org, ProvidentLiving.org, and OvercomingPornography.org. But the name of the game isn’t just to rank for highly competitive, simple keywords like those above, but to also target a large number of long tail searches, or keyword phrases that are more specific. The number of searches for “holy bible” is certain to outnumber those for “isaiah let us reason together,” (LDS.org ranks fifth on Google for this search) but when you add up the aggregate visitors from millions of specific searches they outweigh the visitors searching for a handful of generic terms. The LDS Church appears to have mastered both. Perhaps this shouldn’t be too surprising coming from a religion that has an official statement on SEO, in which it says “We view SEO as a method to spread the gospel online…” Internally, the LDS Church has taken steps to use best SEO practices on all its websites, making sure each page loads quickly, has a search engine friendly URL, uses easily readable HTML text in place of graphics where possible, and uses title, H1, and other tags properly. Its websites are an excellent case study in how to implement Moz’s oft-referenced Beginner’s Guide to SEO. But one of the greatest assets the LDS Church has when it comes to SEO is its more than 15 million members around the world. Church members have long been encouraged to master technology and use it to spread the gospel message, and they have responded in recent years by setting up personal websites and blogs, many of which link liberally to LDS Church web properties. Inbound links like these are a key factor in how Google determines the credibility or importance of a website and its rankings. Following in Briggs’ footsteps once again, I compared the number of inbound links for LDS.org to those on The Moz Top 500 (last updated January, 2014) and found that the 8.8 million incoming links LDS.org has would put it in 204th place, just ahead of websites like GoDaddy.com and TechCrunch, and slightly behind Weather.com, Slashdot, and Forbes. Entrepreneurs and businesses would do well to encourage their employees and customers to be active technology users, as the LDS Church encourages its membership. As important is sharing the vision and “why” behind the “how,” so that ability is complemented by motivation. This can lead to employees and customers creating their own resources to further motivate their peers, as LDS Church member Larry Richman has done with his blog LDS Media Talk and book 101 Ways to Hasten the Work Online. Content Marketing From its General Conference videos to music from the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, the LDS Church puts a massive amount of content online. Google has indexed 11.4 million web pages on LDS.org, not all too far behind the BBC which has 12.8 million indexed web pages. But the LDS Church has hundreds of other channels where it distributes content. One of these, the companion to Mormon.org on YouTube, dubbed the “Mormon Channel,” features hundreds of professional quality videos and has 95,000 subscribers. One of the features of the channel is approximately 100 videos detailing the life and ministry of Jesus Christ, which by themselves have been seen millions of times. Paul Fischer, a Salesforce consultant posting on LinkedIn’s Pulse network, explains how the LDS Church used these Bible videos integrated with long form content to produce an Easter-themed webpage entitled “Because He Lives” that is an excellent example of inbound marketing. Fischer points out this is no amateur effort. “Upon inspecting the elements of the Easter website I noticed that the page is using Clicktale,” Fischer says. “Clicktale is a sophisticated software suite that tracks ‘mouse heatmaps.’ Some of their customers include Logitec, Lenovo, and Walmart.” Fischer goes on to explain how the Church effectively used calls to action to lead visitors down various paths, depending on the type of content and topics they were interested in. But as with SEO, the LDS Church’s greatest successes in content marketing appear to originate not from headquarters, but from its members. At Mormon.org the LDS Church has one-page profilles for well known members like José Silva, an actor from Brazil, Elaine Bradley of the Neon Trees, and Brandon Flowers of The Killers, but gives “normal” members myself, Jouni from Finland, or Eunice Eshun from Ghana the ability to create similar profiles where we can share our beliefs and answer questions. Gathering content from members has helped boost the indexed pages for that website to 748,000, and also overlaps as an effective local SEO tactic since each profile is tied to a geographic area. To take things a step further, perhaps even more is being done to promote awareness of the LDS Church and the beliefs of its members by members doing their own thing online, without any assistance whatsoever from the Church. YouTube sensations like the Shaytards, The Piano Guys, DevinSupertramp, and Lindsey Stirling have attracted billions of views to their videos, dwarfing the reach of official LDS Church channels. Key takeaways for businesses? Produce lots of great content and market it well, but even better, inspire your employees and customers to create content for you–they’ll have greater reach. Social Media Ambassador, a referral automation software firm, has compiled a list of 40 studies showing word of mouth is the most effective form of marketing. LDS Church leaders have long understood that while professional marketing and PR may be helpful, and celebrity YouTubers can provide a big boost, the real power for communicating LDS beliefs lays in encouraging every Church member to be a missionary, and that’s why social media has become a focal point in any discussion regarding the Church, missionary work, and technology. “Social media channels are global tools that can personally and positively impact large numbers of individuals and families,” said Elder David A. Bednar, a top leader in the LDS Church, in a 2014 talk entitled To Sweep the Earth as with a Flood, delivered to students at LDS Church-owned Brigham Young University. He continued, “And I believe the time has come for us as disciples of Christ to use these inspired tools appropriately and more effectively to testify.” Some of the LDS Church’s more than 80,000 full time missionaries are spending time browsing social media sites looking to engage anyone willing to discuss topics related to the Church, even if “anyone” means trolls. But it’s normal members who are flooding walls, streams, and boards with gospel-related content. Some of it is initiated by the Church, such as when the use of specific hashtags is encouraged by Church media channels (see #LDSconf), but much of it is spontaneous. In his talk, Elder Bednar spoke of the Instagram account “bofm365” started by Ben and Chelsea Prince of Arizona. Each and every day, the Princes post a new image with a reading assignment in the Book of Mormon. The account has attracted over 68,000 followers to date. The lesson for businesses and entrepreneurs here is not just to encourage employee and customer activity on social networks, but to teach consistency as a key success factor. The Greatest Success Comes From Letting Go Much more has been said (see Are the Mormons Better Than YOU at Content Marketing? by Taylor Stockwell) and could be said on what can be learned from the LDS Church when it comes to digital marketing. If there is any “one big thing” to learn, it’s to let go of control. What is clear from the success of the LDS Church with SEO, content marketing, and social media, is that the largest results have come from outside the Church organization. This couldn’t happen unless the Church took the risk of encouraging its members to use their best judgement, and get to work. Mark Zuckerberg might call this strategy “move fast and break things.” A 150 year old statement from Joseph Smith, the first President of the LDS Church, is just as apt; “I teach them correct principles, and they govern themselves.” Have you found digital marketing lessons in unlikely places? Share with us in the comments below. Joshua Steimle is the CEO of MWI, a digital marketing agency with offices in the U.S. and Hong Kong.