If progressives are going to maintain their dominance online, we have to be present everywhere, especially in powerful new social media spaces like Twitter. We’ve seen what early investment in the blogosphere got us, and what lack of investment got the right. We have to continue investing in and organizing on new technologies so that we remain ahead of the curve.
More than 3,000 progressives have added themselves to TweetProgress since it's surprising launch Sunday night and we'd like to get to 5,000 as soon as possible. Add yourself to the Twitter directory that already includes Nobel Peace Prize winner and former Vice President Al Gore, MSNBC Host Rachel Maddow, and Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner among others. We hope you will as well.
ABOUT TWEETPROGRESS
It started with a vision, or rather, a visual forwarded by Jim Gilliam, creator of WhiteHouse2.org, Nationbuilder, and the Twitter petition site act.ly). It comes from a blog post on ReadWriteWeb about Twitter use during the Iran election: "Evolution of a Revolution: Visualizing Millions of Iran Tweets" by Kovas Boguta.
Conservatives on Twitter visualization
See the big blue blob on the right? That is the conservative twittersphere or as Boguta describes it: "tightly interwoven conservative twittersphere." No where on that visualization do you see progressives and that should be troubling to progressive activists.
If progressives are going to maintain their dominance online, we have to be present everywhere, especially in powerful new social media spaces like Twitter. We’ve seen what early investment in the blogosphere got us, and what lack of investment got the right. We have to continue investing in and organizing on new technologies so that we remain ahead of the curve.
What does the visualization indicate?
The nodes and connections indicate the use of hashtags. The big blue blob represents the hashtag #tcot (top conservatives on twitter) which is used an average of 2,000 times per day. Before the launch of TweetProgress, the corresponding progressive hashtag #p2 (progressives 2.0) was used an average of 400 times per day (estimates based on hashtags.org searches).
That a tag is used more often than another does not prove in any meaningful way that conservatives are more organized on Twitter than progressives, but those numbers do mean something. Twitter is being used to influence media, to create and establish messaging, to connect distributed groups, and to create communication infrastructure and progressives are failing to take advantage of the opportunities Twitter creates for political activism.
Our goal is to create a more dominant progressive infrastructure on Twitter for the left.
Why are hashtags important?
Hashtags are important because they allow other Twitter users - not only the people who directly follow you, but also elected officials, the media, activists and others who influence policy and conventional wisdom - to identify and categorize posts of specific interest.
Building a community around the #p2 hashtag provides an infrastructure for promoting progressive ideals and actions items.
Twitter is not the be all end all of online activism, but it is an online platform progressives need to make sure we own in the very near future. Drafting more progressives into an existing infrastructure, like the #p2 hashtag, will be the key to more successful actions and issue campaigns. We must increase our organizational efforts On Twitter to take advantage of the unique opportunities it offers. TweetProgress and the comunity that has sprung up around the #p2 hashtag is where progressives can begin to do that.
You can read more about the TweetProgress launch at CNN, TechPresident, and The Hill.
And for more information about Jim Gilliam (@jgilliam), Tracy Viselli (@myrnatheminx), Jon Pincus (@jdp23), and Gina Cooper (@ginacooper), the people behind TweetProgress, visit the TweetProgress About page.
So if you aren't already on Twitter, sign-up and add yourself to TweetProgress. If you're already on Twitter but don't use the #p2 tag or haven't joined TweetProgress, please do!
Tracy Viselli