grace

… filling in the negative space with positively everything

America Has Lost One of Its Greatest Voices: Dr. Howard Zinn (1922 – 2010)

I wanted students to leave my classes not just better informed, but more prepared to relinquish the safety of silence, more prepared to speak up, to act against injustice wherever they saw it. This, of course, was a recipe for trouble.

- Howard Zinn

A true leader and inspiration for those who believe strongly enough in democracy to fight for it, Dr. Howard Zinn passed away today at the age of 87. Dr. Zinn wanted to be remembered for introducing a new way of thinking and “getting more people to realize that the power ultimately rests in people themselves and that they can use it.”

Howard Zinn not only taught people history, he showed them how to shape it. He walked the talk. May he now rest in peace.

Click these links to see Dr. Zinn’s project The People Speak (history) and celebrities participating in The People Speak.

Click here for Howard Zinn’s Democracy Now podcast list.

Click here for more video & audio links for Howard Zinn.

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How *NOT* To Win An Online Campaign : PT II

In How *NOT* To Win An Online Campaign : Part I, I cautioned any political candidate (or business or nonprofit organization) who wants to wage a successful online/social media campaign to heed the following advice:

  1. Do NOT Start Late.
  2. Do NOT Confuse a Presence with a Strategy.
  3. Do NOT Play Dr. Frankenstein.

I was going to write about specific tools for “Part II,” but decided that this next point is so critical and essential to a winning online campaign that it deserved a post devoted entirely to it:

4.   Get Your Team to “Get It.”

Not long ago, I wrote an article for AYN Brand on How to Get Your Group on Board with Social Media. It was a direct response to feedback from attendees of my social media and online marketing workshops. While the attendees themselves were enthusiastic about “joining the conversation” online, one of the biggest challenges many faced was a fear of new media among their organizations’ board members and senior executives. The people who ultimately decided when and where financial and human resources should be allocated did not understand the reach and use of online tools, so they decided to ignore developing anything beyond a basic website. Rather than learn how online networking could help their organization, those stakeholders chose to remain out-of-touch and dismissed social media as “just for kids.”

It’s NOT. As I wrote, successful campaigns like President Obama’s prove:

How *NOT* To Win An Online Campaign : PT I

Since the 2009 Houston mayoral election, it seems everyone has a theory on “why Locke lost.” It would be nice if some (any?) of those theories were informed by what actually happened at Locke headquarters during the period that led to the December run-off. (Before the run-off, everyone seemed astounded that a first-time candidate with little-to-no name recognition or campaign experience was able to beat out sitting City Council Member Peter Brown, who outspent both Parker and Locke throughout the race and achieved the greatest visibility of all the candidates on television.)

I have my own ideas of why Parker won. If you want to know what they are, send me a tweet and I’ll tell you over coffee some time. But for the benefit of all the political candidates running for office this year – including Bill White for Texas Governor and Gordon Quan for Harris County Judge – I’d like to share what I learned from the campaign trail.

In 2010, White and Quan will be running against incumbents for their respective offices. In the 2009 mayoral race, while it was open due to term-limited White vacating, Parker and Brown could be considered the “incumbents” Locke faced, as they were both seasoned politicians who had developed strong support bases over years (and even over a decade for Parker) of campaigning. Similarly, it will be an uphill battle for the “new” candidates to build online support that can effectively compete with their opponents’.

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