Lessons Learned from Tweets
Though my personal Twitter account languishes from disuse, this semester I have started tweeting actively under the FES handle. In Doha, I’ve gotten to put this skill to serious work. Through the International Organizations and Conferences class, David Emmerman, Bunyod Holmatov and I partnered with homo ecos, a Latvian NGO whose primary focus is generating environmental awareness and social movements in Latvia. Our role was to help in climate policy research and capacity building for the larger Latvian NGO community. To do this, we produced a policy paper about key issues for Latvia at COP18 (Short primer: http://homoecos.lv/uploads/files/COP18_Short_Primer(1).pdf). The paper was intended for NGOs and ministries and distributed to the Latvian delegation. We also agreed to facilitate a social media campaign for the general public. homo ecos and Latvian graduate students built the momentum on the ground in Latvia. On our side of the ocean, we built a new social media account @LatviaCOP18Chat (follow us for live coverage of COP18) and developed a social media plan with help from the FES Media team. In one week, we went from 0 to 80 followers with even more responses, retweets and attention from unexpected places, especially this one:
The reach of our relatively small enterprise surprised me, and has led me to wonder how effective social media can be in climate change communications and raising awareness. Today, there was a side event/brain-storming session hosted by Responding to Climate Change (RTCC), an online news organization and official observer, which discussed the effectiveness of social media in distributing information and facilitating change. The audience listed a number of successful social media campaigns in the past (Twitter storms of negotiators in Durban), but what really makes a successful campaign?
While Twitter has served as a great way to create transparency and clarity by providing short, concise descriptions of very complicated process, as of now it hasn’t made the next step of creating change in the negotiations. How can it get there? There a number of wonderful activist actions happening at COP18, but there simply isn’t enough awareness about them. Earlier today, I was observing an art project spurred by a Twitter campaign. Several negotiators were nearby and disclosed to me they never heard about the project, and could not figure out what it was because of a lack of signage or explanation. Less than a minute later, they walked away. The next wave of social media has to make walking away impossible. These ideas and campaigns cannot stay trapped within their own social networks if they are to survive and thrive.
We are fortunate to have forged a connection with the Latvian delegation, but the network of relationships which enabled us to do so between the Latvian NGOs, Yale and the Latvian government took years to develop. The time for social media is now, but to new tweeters and bloggers trying to get in on the action, remember that building meaningful relationships and clout takes time and patience. Because in the end, you don’t want anyone to walk away.
Twitter, Facebook, and other social media are very powerful tools, but to reach your goals you need to follow few known rules.
One of them: You must be constantly present out there, so the potential followers can find you/interact with you.
Keep it up with your project!
Thanks so much! We will definitely try to put ourselves out there more. You should follow us if you have an interest in COP18. We will live-tweet a plenary at 3!
It would be great if you put the actual impact on the Latvian twitosphere among the target indicators of your performance evaluation. It’s great watching you form ties, and the insights from the account are very informative. However, thus far you have not managed to attract attention to your account: not a single Latvian thought leader is following you, and no retweets either. You gotta get those if you want to have actual impact on the ground, not just in Doha. Step it up, and the best of luck!
Hey Janis,
Thanks for your help and comments! We realize the account still has limited reach at this point. We’re working on it. Our primary method of engaging and reaching out to Latvian thought leaders was through the policy paper. Our original task/audience for the Twitter account was Latvians interested in the environment with the goal of providing more live information about COP18; that was the driver on Twitter. We realize now that perhaps that could’ve been an initial goal for the account too, but beforehand it was hard to project how far we could/would get. We do have one member of the delegation following us currently, and will meet with the delegation here during week two to discuss policy issues (but again, those contacts were built through the research project, not social media). A limitation of this project is that we have no access on the ground in Latvia (and don’t speak the language); building these relationships over social media is a difficult process that we are trying to get better at ourselves.
This issue and how to surmount it DEFINITELY something we all should think about together for the next COP and the future of campaigns under this collaboration, especially since COP19 is in East Europe. Let’s definitely talk about this ASAP! We are going to be taking questions for our sitdown with the delegates tomorrow on the live chat. Please e-mail us your thoughts and spread the word! We want that sit-down to be as productive and helpful as possible.
I thought the policy paper was good when i read it after its initial release, but I would hardly call that an engagement offensive, as I doubt that anyone who was not already “engaged” ended up reading it. However, it’s really good progress for Latvia, where the previous COPs have been complete non-events. I hope you can do a bit to change that, and my criticism is not dissing, just pointing out a few things I find lacking. As to not having a Latvian (and perhaps a Russian) speaker on the team for tweeting, – come on, didn’t notice that Latvia has a serious language issue going on? Get somebody in Riga to translate some of the stuff. Also, remember that in terms of social networks Latvia is globally unique with the draugiem.lv near monopoly, and that’s largely to do with language preferences and skills of the Latvian net users. Sure, Twitter is influential among media types and such, and I hope you manage to get into the Latvian Raidio Twitter Apskats (http://www.latvijasradio.lv/zinas/arhivs.php?t=twitter), but in the end you have to bring this to draugiem, if you are looking to have a widespread impact. Again, good luck!