Alex White » Google

The Zero Moment of Truth for unions

Alex — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 09:04:02 +0000

Have you heard of the Zero Moment of Truth?

Perhaps you’ve heard of the First Moment of Truth (and the follow up, Second Moment of Truth)?

The Zero Moment of Truth is a marketing concept coined by Google, as an evolution of the “First Moment of Truth” which occurs “at the store when a shopper selects a product and the “Second Moment of Truth” occurs at home when the shopper experiences that product.”

Google argues that there is now a Zero Moment — “the decision-point after a stimulus leads a consumer to seek more information but before he arrives at the store — or in politics, before a voter solidifies his choice”.

For unions, the ZMOT is an increasing reality.

A study conducted by Google and market research firm Shoppers Sciences this spring found that the number of sources used by a person for the average purchase has doubled, from 5.2 to 10.4, and shoppers use each source almost twice as heavily as in the past. In politics, the Internet provides voters with vastly more resources to follow campaign developments and view candidate speeches, debates, interviews, and political analysis than ever before.

Whether members or potential members, working people turn to the Internet when they face a challenge or problem at work (the stimulus).

Can they easily find your union’s website? Is it easy for them to find the information they are looking for? Is there a clear call to action for them to connect with your union?

The answers to this question may have a powerful effect on the next step a potential member takes — or even an existing member — and whether they make contact with their union.

Unions could consider Google’s advice for political campaigns:

How are political campaigns winning the Zero Moment of Truth? By answering the questions voters are asking. They are defining themselves with ads alongside relevant Internet search results, asking supporters to share on social networking sites, and placing display ads next to relevant online news articles and blog posts. Campaigns that excel at winning the Zero Moment of Truth jump in and move quickly — optimizing, targeting, and measuring the return on their online advertising investment faster than with any other type of paid media.

Take the time to read Google’s e-book on the Zero Moment of Truth. Then download my e-book for Online Campaigning for Unions.

Online advertising is a key part of campaigning

Alex — Sat, 18 Dec 2010 11:09:09 +0000

Online advertising is essential for union and political campaigns – especially as they heat up or get closer to important milestones (e.g. calling of the election, a vote in parliament, a strike or election day itself).

Blue = Brumby, Red = Baillieu. Source: Google Trends, search traffic for 2010

A case in point is the graph above. It shows the search traffic for 2010 – the number of people in Australia that searched for either Brumby or Baillieu. It clearly shows that in the lead up to the election, there was a massive spike in searching for Baillieu, and only a small increase for Brumby.

Each search for Baillieu (and Brumby) represented an opportunity for a political campaign to run search ads on Google that link to a specific campaign landing page.

Blue = Julia Gillard, Red = Tony Abbott. Source: Google Trends, search traffic for 2010

What’s more, your online advertising (not just on Google, but Facebook, Yahoo or Bing) can micro-target specific key words, geographic locations or demographics.

For example, local political candidates could put search terms up for local schools or landmarks in the area – with the search ads linking back to a specific page on your website with more information about your policies on schools. Political parties should also use keywords for news and policy search terms. During the Federal Election, for example, Labor could have bought ads for search terms involving “leaks” or other key words associated with Laurie Oakes’ leak stories.

This screenshot shows how ads can be targeted for specific search terms - in this case, Obama.

For union campaigns, your search ads can use keywords for employers that you may have a dispute with. For example, during a dispute with a university, I arranged for Google and Facebook ads to appear when current and prospective students searched for that university – linking to a website that had information about why staff at the university were on strike. A leaked email revealed that senior university managers were deeply frustrated by this tactic – and I can confirm we got hundreds of unique visitors from these ads.

Online advertising is fairly cheap – if they are keyword ads. Banner advertising on large websites like HeraldSun.com.au or TheAge.com.au is much more expensive (in the order of $15,000 for a week or two) – and best done only for major national or state campaigns. Local political campaigns should definitely put some money into online ads, most of which are pay-per-click. This means that you only pay when someone clicks on the ad.

Most online ads of this sort let you set your own daily or weekly budget, so you get to set how much you want to spend without having it go over budget. This gives you a lot of control – and most online ad services give you daily, or live, updates on how well the ads are doing and how many people are clicking on them. (Don’t forget to link your ads to your Google Analytics.)

There is a myth that pay-per-click can be manipulated by hostile forces. For example, hostile managers or opposing political operatives, who repeatedly click on your ads, resulting in you paying for each click! However, services like Google and Facebook have safeguards for abuse like this.

Google News has destroyed a valuable asset

Alex — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 02:42:58 +0000

This won’t be a major issue for most people, but Google once had a very valuable asset: Google News.

Google News once aggregated 1000s of news stories from across the web and allowed users to customise “sections” according to their preference – even using news keyword searches. You could even decide how many stories would appear in each section, and the other of the sections. It was a very versatile service that worked “off the shelf”, but could be personalised.

Today, Google pushed out an “update” that turns Google News into a “feed”, much like a Facebook “news” feed. This has destroyed the utility of Google News, making it an incoherent mess. Worse still, there is no way to revert to the old version.

A Google employee stated on the Google support forums (which has 100s of complaints about the new “redesign”:

Thanks for your concern, everyone. We understand your frustration, but we have no plans to revert to the old version of Google News.

This is a terrible decision in my view. And clearly the vast majority of users of the Google feeback forums dislike the change.

I used Google News daily, but as of today will not be using it unless I hear that there is way to use the old version.

Most of Google’s services allow a way for their users to continue to use old versions of their products. GMail for example allows you to use the “old” version of Gmail (which does not include many of the new features). For a long time I used the old version of Gmail until the new one became more useable.

If Google is so confident that their new version of Google News is better, then they should have the confidence to allow people to migrate at their own pace.

Most of Google’s improvements are for the best, but in thise case they have destroyed a valuable asset for no good purpose.

UPDATE:

Looks like the easy way to “revert” the changes is to change the default country selection to make it specifically “Australia”. No idea how long it will be before the crappy “US Edition” of Google News is forced on Australia.

Google Analytics tip for union webmasters

Alex — Mon, 10 May 2010 22:59:19 +0000

Something I just discovered (much to my annoyance) is that Google Analytics does not allow for easy (in fact, any) migration of account data from one account to another.

Google Analytics is a very powerful tool for web masters to get information about their site, content and visitors. Every union website should use Google Analytics (and Google Webmaster tools). Not only do many useful web applications (such as email services MailChimp or Campaign Monitor) integrate with Google Analytics, but they are excellent ways to produce reports on the number of people who visit your site, and the paths they go through to find your content. Google Analytics also links to Google Adwords, another excellent tool for union campaigns.

A word of warning however. Once you create an account for your website, it’s impossible to transfer it to another person without giving them the password. This means that if you manage a number of sites, you will want to create separate accounts for each website, rather than use the “website profiles” option within an account.

Best practice for Google Analytics account set up:

Always make sure that every website you set up on Google Analytics is set up as a new Account, and not a new Profile.
Create a Google Account (or use an existing one) to create the new Analytics account.
Set yourself, or whoever will be managing the account on your end, up as an Administrator on the account. This will allow you to access and administrate everything while maintaining account exclusivity for each union campaign. This will also allow the account to be “unhooked” later, in case you leave the union or need to hand over the account to another person without losing all their historical data.

Don't prosecute the messenger

Alex — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 21:02:56 +0000

I subscribe to the Google Public Policy Blog and get updates every few days. Today, I got sent a story about a case in Italy where three Google executives have been prosecuted for a video of an autistic student being bullied at school.

In late 2006, students at a school in Turin, Italy filmed and then uploaded a video to Google Video that showed them bullying an autistic schoolmate. The video was totally reprehensible and we took it down within hours of being notified by the Italian police. We also worked with the local police to help identify the person responsible for uploading it and she was subsequently sentenced to 10 months community service by a court in Turin, as were several other classmates who were also involved. In these rare but unpleasant cases, that’s where our involvement would normally end.

But in this instance, a public prosecutor in Milan decided to indict four Google employees â€”David Drummond, Arvind Desikan, Peter Fleischer and George Reyes (who left the company in 2008). The charges brought against them were criminal defamation and a failure to comply with the Italian privacy code. To be clear, none of the four Googlers charged had anything to do with this video. They did not appear in it, film it, upload it or review it. None of them know the people involved or were even aware of the video’s existence until after it was removed.

Nevertheless, a judge in Milan today convicted 3 of the 4 defendants â€” David Drummond, Peter Fleischer and George Reyes â€” for failure to comply with the Italian privacy code. All 4 were found not guilty of criminal defamation. In essence this ruling means that employees of hosting platforms like Google Video are criminally responsible for content that users upload. We will appeal this astonishing decision because the Google employees on trial had nothing to do with the video in question. Throughout this long process, they have displayed admirable grace and fortitude. It is outrageous that they have been subjected to a trial at all.

A very apt analogy for this case is that the postal service is not responsible for someone sending hate mail, and a telco is not responsible for the unlawful content of someone’s SMS or phonecall.

Clearly services like Google Video (and Facebook in the case of the Trinity Bates murder) can’t be responsible for someone uploading potentially illegal content. Their responsibility is to enforce their terms of service and remove that illegal content as soon as they are made aware of it.

I take responsibility for the content that I personally publish to this website, but I do not do the same for comments left here by you, my readers.

A poor precedent in my view, especially since the true culprit has already been convicted and sentenced.

Seven online campaigning activities you should already be doing

Alex — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 21:33:24 +0000

In Australia, most elections take place during the normal, general election period. The accepted wisdom is that local campaigns make up, at most, 3 percent of a candidate’s primary vote. The rest comes from the central campaign from party head office: television ads, the leader’s personal appeal, the party’s policies and so on.

There are some simple things that local campaigns can do however to maximise their vote and try to reach that 3 percent boost.

Many of these ideas are more widely applicable for running online campaigns in general, and for unions in particular.

1. Have a presence on the main social networking sites

Set up a profile or page on Facebook, and depending on your campaign’s demographics, on MySpace, and Twitter.With over 6 million Australians on Facebook, 2.3 million on MySpace and around 670,000 Australians on Twitter, these are social networking sites you cannot afford to ignore. If you already have a profile on Facebook, consider setting up an official Facebook page, so you can benefit from the many extra features that pages have over groups or profiles (see here for an example of the benefits).

Just because Facebook and Twitter are the flavour of the month, don’t neglect MySpace. MySpace is still used by a large number of young people (high-schoolers), and it can be a way for you to build a longer-term relationship with teens, especially if that is a big demographic in your electorate.

If someone on your campaign team has a video camera and some experience, set up a YouTube and Vimeo channel (check here for how to do this on YouTube, and go here to set up a YouTube politician’s channel). Recording and broadcasting short campaign messages is a good way to directly talk with your electors, and sites like YouTube can be easily shared by your supporters on Facebook and Twitter. Make sure you have a call to action, such as donating, volunteering or joining your campaign mailing list.

2. Have a blog on your website

Get a campaign website if you don’t already have one. In addition to your policies, biography and how to subscribe to your mailing list, you should also make sure you have a blog. There are many easy options to install a blog on your website, and most of them are free. Using WordPress, Moveable Type or Google’s Blogger are easy to set up, and most offer a way to install or embed the blog into your own website. I personally prefer WordPress, but depending on what content management system your website uses, you may have to use another blogging platform.

Blogs are very important for search engine optimisation reasons. Blogs help you draw traffic to your site through online search engines. When most people want to find out information about a candidate, they got to their search engine (e.g. Google, Yahoo or Bing). Most blogging software is optimised for search engines, which means that it pushes your website higher up the search page. Blogs also give you an opportunity to engage with your electors and supporters. Many voters will appreciate the transparency – and you can use it to promote your events and activities.

You don’t need to personally update your blog every day. Get someone on your campaign to add blog posts – but make sure they don’t pretend to post as you. Keep your posts and the posts of your staff distinct.

Don’t expect to be getting hundreds or thousands of page views or visitors, or scores of comments on your website straight away. Promote your blog and your website in all your other communications – emails to supporters, ads in the local paper, on flyers you hand out while door-knocking. You can also advertise online…

3. Build a campaign email list

Email is still the most effective online campaigning tool. Having a large list of supporters and electors means you can directly communicate with them, without the filter of the local news. Email is very effective at building engagement and directing people to your website.

There are lots of email service providers that allow you to create email campaigns, and get data about opens. I’ve got a post here (Email is the “killer app” for online campaigns) that goes into some detail about using email.

Early in your campaign, you should be aiming to build your campaign email list – have a sign up form at all of your campaign events (fundraisers, street-stalls, etc). The people on your campaign list will be useful as volunteers, donors and of course, eventually they should vote for you.

4. Advertise online with Facebook and Google

Online advertising is an increasingly effective way to get your message to your target audience. Most online advertising lets you micro-target your ads using key words. Google Adsense and Facebook Ads are probably the most effective online advertising vehicles, although there are others (e.g. MySpace and Yahoo). Most of them allow you to set a daily, weekly or campaign budget, so you can carefully manage your advertising spend. Even a small budget of a few hundred dollars can pay big dividends. Google has a page especially for political ads – so they’ve made it easy for you.

Facebook ads can let you target people in your electorate, and also target people who share your values. Your ad can direct potential supporters to your Facebook page, or to your website.

Each ad should have a specific purpose (“call to action”), such as building your campaign email list, getting people to donate, or volunteer, or vote for you on election day.

You can also use online ads to respond to attacks against you by your opponent. By putting your response online (such as on your blog or as a YouTube video), you can use key words search terms on Google to make sure that when an elector looks for more information about the attack, they will see a link to your response. Generally, there is no more than a 3 day window for this kind of response, so act quickly.

5. Use Google Analytics or other analytics programs

There are lots of analytics programs out there, some free, some paid. The bench-mark is Google Analytics, a free service. By setting up a Google Analytics account, you can get detailed information about who comes to your website and how they use it. Google Analytics can be integrated with most email service providers, as well as Google Adsense. Google also offers other free services for websites, such as Website Optimizer, that allow you to experiment in changes to your website to make it easier to use.

UPDATE:

I should also mention a few useful resources for website testing and optimisation that can be used by relative novices. A useful tool that I’ve used on the Creative Unions website is Usabilla, an excellent free website usability testing service. They allow free testing for up to 25 users. Jackob Nielsen, the father of web usability, suggests that you only need 5 test subjects to find around 90% of the problems with your website. Testing your campaign website has never been easier (or cheaper). Just make sure you act on the findings.

6. Monitor the media and social networks

There are many free tools that allow you to track news stories about your candidate, opponent or other important topics. Google Alerts can give you immediate email notification of news stories based on key words you choose.You can also get alerts for blogs, allowing you to respond to criticisms online, reply to questions or thank supporters.

Twitter has excellent tools to allow you to monitor key words in people’s updates. Twitter Search is basic, but there are other tools, such as Twendz, which gives you more information about what people are saying about a key word. This can be very useful to get up to the minute information about what is happening locally, or what people are saying about your, your opponent or the election generally.

7. Make it easy for supporters to donate, volunteer online

Wherever your campaign is online, you need to make it easy for supporters to get involved and help your campaign. There should be a clear way for a supporter to offer to volunteer to help your campaign. You should set up an online donation account. Your communications, online and offline, should emphasise how people can get involved.

Beware and be careful

Everything you do and say online can be accessed by anyone with an Internet connection. Once the campaigning starts, be aware that your opponents will be scrutinising your online activities as well as everything you do and say on the campaign trail.

Something will go wrong. Whether it is a misinterpreted comment on your blog, or a “tweet” taken out of context, it is highly likely that something will go wrong.

The best way to handle this mishaps is, like all crisis management, to be honest, acknowledge the mistake, explain how you are remedying the problem, and move on. Ensure your response is timely – within 24 hours is a good benchmark. If possible, break the story on your own terms rather than wait to be called by the local paper or news outlet.

Do not try to hide it. Don’t delete the comment or tweet and hope that no one will notice – there are several websites that scan web pages and cache them, allowing people to look at stored versions of your website days, weeks or even months after you have removed the content.

Google Alerts and similar services will allow you to monitor what is being said, so you can make further responses as time goes on. Internet advertising will also allow you to keep your message on the front page of searches.

Some good rules of thumb to help prepare you for a crisis are:

Brainstorm with your campaign team some worst-case scenarios: Sit down and think about the worst that could happen. Try to think of ten things that could go wrong – for example: accidentally “friending” a known criminal or other undesirable person; running foul of spam laws; running out of money or a problem with fundraising; accusations of hypocrisy in the campaign (such as having a policy of supporting local businesses, but getting material printed outside the electorate, or supporting strong environmental standards but using unrecyclable paper)
Make someone responsible for responding to a crisis: Whether it’s the campaign manager or someone else with media/PR/communications experience, make sure there is someone who’s job it is to get on top of a crisis if or when it arises. This will mean that if something does happen, you won’t waste time figuring out who should respond. This person should be responsible for having a plan to respond to campaign hiccups. They should know who to talk to about getting a response out as soon as possible, such as the campaign website maintainer, and the candidate to make a media comment.
Pre-prepare some online keywords: Think about what keywords people will use to search online for more information about the crisis. Use positive words as well as negative ones. Your press releases, blog posts and videos can be optimised for these search terms, and it will save you time when the crisis hits.
Have a design, mailer or other material ready: Ask your campaign designer and/or webmaster to have a template ready for you to respond online and offline to the crisis. Having half the work done will mean you can respond much more quickly.
Find allies: Finding a third party to stand up for you is essential to crisis management. For online mishaps, getting a blogger to comment positively on the crisis, and link to your online response is a good way of getting your message out. Having the third party gives your message increased credibility. Hopefully, through your online engagement, there will be several people you can rely on – even if they are not local constituents.

Remember, online campaigning is not a silver bullet

Just because you have set up a Facebook page or joined Twitter, don’t neglect all of the other important activities of campaigning. You still need to fundraise, door knock, make phone calls, hold street stalls, and engage your electors in the flesh.

Collaborative online tools for political campaigning

Alex — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 06:05:29 +0000

You don’t need to be a big national campaign to use the myriad suite of free online tools. With the analysis of the Brown victory in Massachusetts continuing, it is emerging that this state-level campaign made extensive use of Google Apps:

But something else has Google reps particularly chuffed: how much the Brown campaign, they say, relied upon Google’s full suite of tools, including their free online collaborative apps. Brown’s new media director Robert Willington tweeted, for example, “Where would our #masen campaign be without google docs? scary thought.” The Brown campaign, said the company, relied upon Gmail Chat to communicate. And then, says Google, there was their election-day voter protection hotline, run through — you guessed it — Google Voice.

Google’s collaboration applications are truly amazing for campaigns of all kinds (as I’ve written here). The more dispersed the campaign is, the more useful they are, but even in an office environment, the multi-user, simultaneous editing of documents and databases is well worth the loss of a few bells and whistles from MS Office. Google Voice is unfortunately not yet available in Australia, but tools like Google Chat and Gmail are very powerful collaboration tools – allowing campaigners and organisers in the field to communicate in real time with staff back in campaign.

The Republicans in Mass. also used Google’s advertising features extensively:

Google reps are reporting that the campaign dropped $145,000 on a “network blast” that saturated the Internet with Brown ads in the final days of the campaign, and all told the campaign spent some $230,000 on YouTube ads and overlays, visual ads, and in-search advertising.

For local political campaigns, the kinds of strategic targeting you can achieve can be pin-point. Google allows you to go local – in fact their entire advertising business relies on relevance. Aspiring local political candidates would do well to strongly consider targeted local online advertising (not just on Google, but Bing which has 10% of the share compared to Google’s 60%, and on Facebook and MySpace as well). The key is targeting:

The ads, delivered using the “Google network blast” or “surge” tactic, include messages specific to each region; ads targeted to people living near Plymouth, Massachusetts, encourage supporters to “Volunteer in Plymouth.”

Online advertising is relatively inexpensive – you can control your marketing spend to as much or as little as you want. A local campaign with relatively few dollars at the start can have a “slow burn” while they fundraise. (Of course, online advertising should be in addition to coreflutes, letterboxing leaflets, streets stalls, door-knocking, and all the other traditional campaigning techniques.)

[Democrat candidate] Coakley’s side — thinking that it had the race sewn up — didn’t invest in a Google Ad strategy until new media strategists from Organizing for America got involved in the race

Ignore online advertising at your peril.

Using Google Docs in your union campaign

Alex — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 06:14:40 +0000

Google Documents is a free online service that provides word processing and spreadsheets that are stored online (in the “cloud”).

Google Docs basically allows you to mimic Microsoft Word, Excel and Powerpoint. The main feature (in my view) is that it is online, so it can be accessed from any computer connected to the Internet, and the second main feature is that files can be edited by multiple people at the same time.

Most of the basic features from the Office Suite are available – formatting, basic calculations, and so on – are available, although Google Docs is not as powerful as MS Office – yet. For basic word processing and spreadsheet work (without pivot tables and other advanced features) are more than capable of being handled by Google Docs. It also makes a change history for files, like the “track changes” function in Word – so you can go back and see who’s made what changes, and undo them if necessary. Files created or imported into Google Docs can be exported into native Word files – it can also read most common file types – such as .doc files and .xls files.

Google Docs is a potentially powerful tool for unions. It allows the creation of files that multiple people can edit and update. Changes appear immediately, and two or more people can open, view and edit the same file at the same time. The creator of the file can set access rights for individuals or groups – allowing some people to view the file only, and others to view and edit.

Drafting documents

Unions draft 100s of documents – from campaign leaflets to logs-of-claims, media releases, collective agreement clauses and letters of dispute notification – and more! Many of these documents are sent via email to scores of people, all of whom may make edits. This creates multiple versions of the same document, resulting in someone having to reconcile them.

Google Docs allows for the creation of a single, “master” document, that can be edited by multiple people simultaneously. All of the edits appear in the same place, and it is easy for the document owner (or decision maker) to revert unwanted changes. This can dramatically speed up drafting of documents, and allow more people (such as delegates, elected officials or staff) to be consulted in drafting important files. It also solves the problem of having several different versions of the same document.

Unions could also use Google Docs to develop draft logs of claims or agreement clauses. The membership could log in to Google Docs using a generic log in, and allowed to make changes. This could operate in a similar fashion to “wikis” – allowing open collaboration by a large number of people. Alternatively, access to edit the document could be limited to the “bargaining team”.

Maintaining databases

Google Docs offers spreadsheets. A big part of organising is maintaining good, accurate databases of members, work sites, density, and so on. Google Docs can easily provide this function – but allows multiple people to access the information at once. An excel spreadsheet on a network can only be opened and edited by one person at once. Google Docs doesn’t have this problem.

For unions that give organisers smart phones – Google Docs can be viewed remotely using a smart phone (such as the iphone or an Android phone). Thus, an organiser can check someone’s membership while on site, rather than waiting to get back to the office.

Databases can also be viewed and edited by remote union offices. For unions that have branch offices in several distant locations, this can be very useful. Rather than having to email files to remote organisers, they can log in online, and access and edit the database.

Reducing Costs

Few unions have lots of money to spend on unnecessary IT, and Microsoft relies on the expensive enterprise licenses for its Office Suite to make its mega-bucks. A union that did not require the “power tools” of MS Office’s advanced features could ditch Microsoft altogether and rely on Google Docs. (Of course, access relies on an Internet connection.)

Google Docs is free to use for not-for-profit organisations (and is only $50 per user per year for other organisations – cheap!). A union could also look at using Google Apps – a “native” version of many different Google services (including Gmail). This would allow unions to have their Google services appear as a part of their website. For example, LEAN uses Google Apps – so our Google Docs doesn’t use “docs.google.com”, but rather “lean.net.au/docs”. A union could have “yourunion.org/docs” to access all of the Google Docs services. Access would require log in of course.

Eric Lee from LabourStart has written about how there are alternatives to Microsoft Office, such as OpenOffice. My view is that online services are becoming increasingly competitive, and the collaboration features are far more useful than anything currently available from OpenOffice or Microsoft Office.

Case study: Google Spreadsheets and mass-call database

Recently, at the union I work for, we made extensive use of Google Docs for a State-wide campaign, coordinating around 100 union officials, delegates and activists over around a month. I recommended Google Docs be used as the main storage point for databases. The campaign involved calling the majority of the union’s members. So as to track how many calls were made, and to whom, we needed a database that was easy to use and accessible to multiple people simultaneously.

Google Docs allowed us to create the database of people we wanted to call. Union staff and activists could start calling immediately, from their desks or from the locally established call centre. They were able to update information straight from their internet browser. Because the updates were live, it meant that there wasn’t any cross-over in calls. Anyone else accessing the spreadsheet could see that someone had already started the call. Members responses could be tracked live, as could the number of calls made. This was very useful strategically, as it allowed me (coordinating everything) to determine if we were on track to making enough calls, or whether we needed additional resources and support.

The feedback from union staff and activists who used Google Docs was very positive. It was easy to use – just like using Excel. Mistakes could be undone easily. It allowed them to see who else was making calls – so they could keep each other accountable. For activists it also made them feel part of a larger effort than just a single person making calls.

Case Study: Google Forms and signup

Another excellent use for Google Docs is its “Forms” function. It allows the creation of online forms, such as contact forms, that people can fill out. The data collected by these forms is then stored in a Google Spreadsheet. The forms are completely customisable, with lots of options such as check boxes, drop down menues and so on.

The form I created is for the Sustainable Campus campaign – and is a signup form to allow activists to register their interest in participating.

As most members at the union I work have a computer with Internet access, and they regularly check their email, we decided an online signup form was best.

Google Docs allowed its easy creation, and I was able to easily embed it in the web page. We are then able to get live results for the number of people who’ve signed up to the campaign. This information can be exported as an .xls file or other file types, and used to create email lists, mailing lists and so on.

Migrating to Google Mail

Alex — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 21:18:07 +0000

Macquarie University has announced that it will migrate its staff email accounts over to Gmail:

About 14 Australian universities have already outsourced their student email to Gmail or Microsoft’s Live@edu service, but this week Macquarie became the first to migrate staff to the so-called cloud in a deal with Gmail.

…

However, the university was concerned that data hosting in the US could have exposed it to the US Patriot Act, which allows security agencies to override privacy restrictions to combat terrorism. As a result, Google has agreed to host the data in the European Union.

I’m a big fan of Gmail, especially for community groups. Google Apps (which includes Gmail and Google Docs) is an excellent resource for small, activist organisations. It provides for free a suite of online services that would normally cost $1000s.

We currently use Google Apps to run the administration of LEAN. This allows us to maintain our own “hosted” email groups, to give state and national officers their own email addresses, and to host documents that can be collaboratively edited.

In my view, it makes sense for organisations to switch to Google for email and other services. It is convenient, secure and generally free (for non-profits).

If I have time, I’ll write a post on how Google Docs can be used by unions for remote coordination and collaboration.

UPDATE: Article on how unions can use Google Docs now online.

Innovating from Opposition

Alex — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 21:45:38 +0000

The British Conservatives are widely viewed as being on the cutting edge of online campaigning and “digital democracy”. It’s one of the benefits of being in opposition – you don’t have the infrastructure, institutions and culture that Governments have.

Oppositions can think big, experiment and (this far out from an election) can afford minor failures. Think Obama, using social networking sites (the failure being his campaign’s botched take over of the Obama Myspace page).

The UK Tories have lifted a lot of notes from the Obama campaign’s strategy book, especially when it comes to online organising and campaigning. First was their My Conservatives site (the equivalent of Obama’s MyBO).

Now they’re using Google Moderator to help draft their election manifesto, initially on the NHS (National Health Service), but expanding over time:

Over the next few weeks, we’ll be publishing documents setting out our policies in key areas and explaining exactly how we’ll bring about the change Britain needs.

This week, as David explains in the video below, we’re focussing on the key issue of the National Health Service â€“Â you can read our draft manifesto on health by clicking here.

We wonâ€™t be picking the questions â€“ you will. Weâ€™re opening the process up by allowing you to submit questions yourself or vote on other peopleâ€™s questions â€“ and those with the most votes will be put to David.

…

We’re using Google’s “Moderator” tool to collect and organise the questions.

Obama used Google Moderator during the early days of his Presidency-elect and Presidency, which was widely lauded as part of the digital democracy (r)evolution.

So far, over 1,300 people have submitted over 600 questions. Over 20,600 votes have been cast.

A definite success for the Tories in online engagement.

Some useful Google tools

Alex — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 06:30:19 +0000

Via Crikey blog The Content Makers, and MEAA, comes some nifty search and news aggregation tips from Google.

While intended for journalists (and called “Google School”), the site also has tools and tips for union officials that need to monitor the news.

I especially recommend setting up a customised Google News page, and checking out Google Trends.

As Margaret Simons says, not a lot there that is new, but a useful list nonetheless.