RT interview of News Junkie Post Editor In Chief Gilbert Mercier on the recent French Elections and what it means for the Eurozone and Austerity.
Mercier outlines how the dislike of Nicholas Sarkozy was the central reason for the ousting his ousting, but in a wider context, is a rejection of the austerity measures imposed by both Sarkozy and German Chancellor Angela Merkel.  He goes on to explain how this election represents a shift of power away from Germany.

RT inquires how much room François Hollande, the new PM from the Socialist Party has to maneuver.  Mercier explains that there is some room, but a lot of the reforms hinge on the sustained enthusiasm.

RT asks if the Eurozone Fiscal Pact will be reviewed despite German opposition, bringing up a potential rift in relations. Mercier goes on to explain that Angela Merkel is going to have to put “some water into the wine” to deal with the anti-austerity measures being rejected everywhere in Europe.

Find me on Google

This is the final guide that will be published as a part of the Progressives Guide To Social Media series.  Up to this point, we have covered initial tactics, in depth specifics on the six main social media sites, and overviews of many more sites.  By this stage in your training, you should have registered your account all over the social media spectrum, have clicked thousands of buttons, made some new friends, and have an idea where you want to focus your efforts more intensively.

Now it’s time to put it all together.

Content Aggregation
While navigating the rapid currents of the main social media sites, you will be exposed to dozens of important articles everyday.  Usually the really hot content will already be posted on the news and bookmarking sites, so feel free to give it some support and share it on the social media sites.  If it is not already posted, post it.

Another method to find good content to share is to subscribe to different progressive websites’ RSS or Atom feeds.  If you add a few dozen feeds, it can be resource intensive on your computer however, so unless you have a newer machine with good architecture, it might be better to keep it limited to 10 or less.  You can also find excellent content on sites that specialize in content aggregation, like LiberalUrls, popurls, and DailyKix.  Install the NewsForward app.  Use Summify to find some top stories daily.  Gain social authenticity by becoming the aggregation filter you seek.  Filter out the nonsense and only post top quality content, and you will earn the respect of people.

Bookmark Tactics
Part of being a progressive social media activist is debunking conservative disinformation, propaganda, and lies.  Either by doing your own research or by finding links others have posted in political engagements, it is a good idea to bookmark (favorite) important citations for repeated later use in debates.

Nest folders within folders within folders to keep everything organized because soon you will not be able to find the citations you are looking for otherwise.  Issue specific folders are a good idea.  For instance: environment, lgbt, economics, worker rights, equal rights, science, world news, crazy Republican bills, etc.  Similarly have a bookmark folder devoted to social media sites and tools.

Social Media Dashboards
While Shareaholic is an excellent tool to perform many social media functions easily, there are also some dashboard programs that can do multiple functions at once.  While none of these cover everything you want and using a mix of them might be a necessity, they can be a huge time saver, especially when you are on the go.

Ping is similar to Shareaholic, although it allows you to update your status on Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, Tumblr, Blogger, WordPress, and other sites simultaneously with 2 clicks after you drag the Ping link to your bookmark toolbar.  There is also custom functionality to just update your status on certain sites or just post to your blogging sites.  Tracking short link statistics is another valuable feature.  Ping has been purchased by Seesmic however, and it appears that support may be discontinued in the future.

Seesmic allows you to post to Twitter, FB, and Linkedin.  You can use Seesmic on the web, on a mobile app, and a desktop program.  On the latter you can add Delicious, Tumblr, YouTube, Klout, Ping.fm, url shorteners, news readers, and more.

HootSuite probably has the best design and biggest potential out of all the dashboards at the moment.  Even if it’s coolest features are reserved for paying customers, the free version is still very functional, highly intuitive, and versatile.  Viewing your dashboard on an internet browser brings tabs for each account with different information feeds from Twitter, Facebook (including groups), Linkedin, WordPress, MySpace, etc., as well as additional apps like Tumblr, YouTube, and Flickr .  You can post to Twitter, Facebook, and Linkedin, with links being converted to the site’s own short url: ow.ly.   Clients who pay for the Enterprise service are currently able to use the dashboard for G+, although this is not available in the free version.  There is also a mobile app,  although it is prone to crashing.

TweetDeck is primarily focused on your Twitter accounts (like Echofon), although you can add your Facebook feed as well (like TwitterFeed).  It is better than both though, as it has multicolumn support and a superior interface.  You can use it within Chrome (called ChromeDeck), chrome it comes as a stand alone program (Mac and Windows), and as a mobile app.

The G++ extension allows you to see your Twitter and Facebook feeds in the G+ window, as well as share your G+ posts on them directly.  There are no free dashboards that can post to G+ at this point, but there are some tools to help integrate your experience.  PlusBounce is a tool in very primordial stages that allows you to automatically repost your Google+ updates on Twitter, Facebook, and Linkedin, and should include circle filtering soon.

Etc.  While not technically dashboards, there are some free online content distribution services that you should know about.  Dlvr.it is probably the best right now.  You can use it to feed your blog posts directly to Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, MySpace, Tumblr, and more.  You can also have them deliver your .rss feeds from your submits at social news sites (like Digg, NewsVine, etc.).  Of course most folks would rather have a link to the actual article posted instead of a link to a comments page for an article on a social news site, so this would only be valuable in niche scenarios.  Twitter Feed is another option, and there are many more.   FriendFeed will aggregate many of your social media feeds into one place. If This Then That (IFTT) can help you perform tasks based on triggers.

Communication
Once you start to get some momentum and become an influencer in the social media world, there will be a flood of communication requests from other users of the sites you frequent, bloggers, and a lot of SEO marketers.  Ration your time.  You cannot have a close, personal relationship with everyone or answer all of their questions.  It will overwhelm you.  Focus on the activists.

That being said, it is important to have some avenues in which to communicate online.  Email and chat/direct messages on social media sites can be supplemented by external instant messaging and video conferencing tools.  Skype is a very popular program to use, as well as Google Talk (Gchat) and Windows Live.

You can have bring all your chat clients under one umbrella with a multiprotocol instant messaging application.  Digsby (only available for Windows) can integrate all of your messaging services together, as well as email accounts, and a few social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and LinkedIn.  Trillian does the same job, and is available for all operating systems.

Time Management
With a limited amount of time available, it is important to ration your tasks.  Once your have mastered the content within the Progressives Guides to Social Media series, you can start to focus on actual activism.  Regardless of whether you spend an hour a day or 6 hours a day on internet activism, it is best to divide your time into thirds: 1/3rd supporting content, 1/3rd reading and researching, 1/3rd time commenting, writing, and communicating.  This will of course vary by how you want to operate, but this general principle works well.

Specialize in one social news site and one social networking site, but keep a diverse presence across all the major ones and at least a few minor ones.  When you find an important article (which should happen often), try to give it some social media love with a thumbs up on Reddit, Digg, SU, FB, G+,  Disqus, and more if you have time.  Share on Twitter, FB, and G+.  Things are constantly moving, always in a state of flux in social media, so try to keep up with all of the changes on LifeHacker and Mashable.  New functionality that suddenly appears can shift the whole landscape and your tactics will have to adjust accordingly.

While one person can be the spark that ignites world wide change, it is important to locate like-minded activists who you trust and organize into self-contained cells between 5 and 20 people.  Work cooperatively.  This is your inner circle and many smaller fish can team up against the big fish to have a major impact.

The Progressives Guide To Social Media series will give any progressive activist the tools they need to become powerful influencers in the social media world.  There is a steep learning curve, but if you’ve followed the instructions, it will all be worth the hard work after just a few short months.  There has never been a greater contrast between the forces of good and evil in this country, and our grassroots organizing backed up with the moral high ground and dedicated activists can defeat any freedom shredding corporate astroturf campaign.  This is our time.  Let’s get to work and have some fun!

Up to this point we have covered an introduction to progressive internet activism and the large social media sites.  Due to a limited amount of time that folks have online, those are the areas where the majority of their time should be focused to have the greatest impact.

That being said, there are dozens of other medium sized and smaller sites that can also be used, some of which are covered in this article.  They are more intimate communities with fewer users, which can be a nice change of pace and give your experience a more personal feel to it.  Below we will briefly cover the following sections:

Social News
Social Bookmarking
Social Networking
Misc.
Blogs

In addition to having signed up for Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Twitter, Facebook, and Google+, consider signing up for Newsvine, Fark, Meta Filter (MeFi), Slashdot (/.), Chime, Pinterest, Delicious, Diigo, Linkedin, MySpace, Orkut, hi5, netlog, Disqus, YouTube, Quora, Tumblr, Blogger, WordPress, Posterous, Care2, DailyKos, and Democratic Underground.  Turn off all notifications so you don’t get overwhelmed by emails.  You can often use your previously created profiles at Twitter, Facebook, or Google to sign up for many of these with 2 clicks.  Think about installing a password manager like LastPass, (also available as a browser extension) and write down all of your passwords on a text file and email them to yourself as a backup accessible anywhere.  This process may take some time, but you will be grateful you did it later.  You will not only establish a presence across the board, but will prevent conservative stalkers from registering in places with your username in an attempt to smear your good name (they try to frame you for inappropriate comments).  Trust me, it is a regular tactic of the right wing in their campaign of digital warfare.

SOCIAL NEWS
This category of social media focuses in on news directly: headlines, breaking stories, the cutting edge of what’s new in the news.  Users submit articles, pictures, or videos that can be voted up or down by the greater community, with discussion for each submission which can usually be voted on as well.  The basic concept is that crowdsourcing will aggregate the best content to the top, a sort of democracy on the internet model.  A key feature of social news sites is the front page, which if reached will suddenly cause a rush of eyeballs onto key content.  Time is a critical factor on Social News sites, so push hard and push fast before stories expire or are no longer new.  Reddit and Digg have already been covered, so here are a few others you might want to try out.

Newsvine
The best designed and organized social media site on the internet, Newsvine makes up for a lack of major traction by having an excellent community.  Submitting articles is called seeding, and there is no downvote button on anything, only an up arrow to click if you think the article or comment is good.  A far better way of gauging how much content you seed is resonating however is by the number of comments, which usually far exceed the actual number of votes.

Citizen Journalism is another draw, as people can write their own columns.  The main sections you should pay attention to are politics, us-news, and world-news.  Join groups such as Activism, Left of Center, Greenvine, Anti-war, Free Thinkers, Rationalists, Atheism, VineSci, scitec, Fired Up Democrats, Obamavine, Marijuana, American Progressives, GOP Watch, Occupy Wall Street, Mad for Maddow, and World News/Views.  A list of some brilliant minds can be found below to get you started on your friends list.

proglib
Soph0571
truthlover
Carloz
McSpocky
GOZO-unlimited
American Idle
luckydog
anti-status quo
easyjjgrand3
Pavilion
jfxgillis
Gulliver’s Island
The Desert Rattler
Physicist-retired
Grae
Fed up with Republicans
MWeaver

Fark
This is a completely different beast in the social news world.  It is designed not to share news, but to make fun of it.  There is very limited usage potential outside of the actual front page unless you pay a $5 per month fee (or $50/year).  Still there are 500,000 registered accounts, it’s good for some laughs, and there is some limited potential in submitting humorous content that exposes the ridiculous things the right wing is trying to.  When adding content, editorialize the title a bit at the end with a couple humorous words.

Meta Filter (MeFi)
No site has stronger user loyalty than MeFi.  The site is relatively small at ~100,000 users, but is kept almost totally troll free by the one time $5 registration, which is small price to pay for access to this awesome community.  The site is rather poorly designed, but the focus is the quality of the discussions not the aesthetic appeal.  Instead of submitting news, you submit a general interest discussion idea that is full of embedded links.  If you ever want to take the temperature on any issue, this is the place to search, but beware of getting sucked too deep into the discussions or you will suddenly find your night is spent!

Slashdot (/.)
This site is more science and tech oriented and has moderate traffic.  Politics and other more progressively themed topics are not often posted on or discussed.  However there is a certain amount of bleed-over in regards to the unprecedented conservative attacks on science, net neutrality, and for censorship that resonate well here.  Wikileaks and Anonymous themed posts are also attractive.

Chime
When a social news site called Propeller was shut down by AOL-Netscape, many users relocated to Mixx (aka Mixx Classic and not to be confused with MixxingBowl).  When Mixx tanked, most users moved to the latest incarnation called Chime.  While still a small community, there is an excellent visual design, streamlined interface, and content scrolling that should mean future growth.  New features like the widget continue to roll out as well, giving users added functionality.

It would be wise to join these communities: US Politics, Social Justice, Occupy Wall Street, Nature, We Are The 99%, Occupy the Planet, and Social Media.  There will likely be more communities built in the future to focus articles for niche communities that are usually progressively oriented, like LGBT, environment, science, secularity, unions, education, etc.  A very brief starter list of suggested friends could include:

Newaya
Loup Dargent 
Capybara
shihtzuman
Jim Scherley
JaguarTx

Olddogg
This is the perfect example of what happens when wingnuts take over a social media website.  OldDogg, run by a well respected member of the social media community, had a huge burst of success following the revolt on Digg in September 2010.  A group of rabid ultra-conservatives (the Digg Patriots) soon invaded in force, and began to use their same old tricks of artificially manipulating the site by censoring progressive content.  Non-partisan users got tired of being attacked and fled the site.  After a few months the front page began to be dominated by far right sources, site traffic subsequently collapsed, and the site shut down in late December 2011.  EDIT 20Mar’12: It has been brought to my attention that Olddogg.com has now become The News Seed, although there was no redirect when I wrote this segment of the article in December 2011.  The conservative “Digg Patriots” that poisoned the development of Olddogg with their tactics of bullying and harassment have mostly moved onto a smaller site called PolitiCollision.

SOCIAL BOOKMARKING
While social news tends to focus on recent content, social bookmarking sites provide much stronger long term traction for evergreen content.  For instance, an article about the latest Palin gaffe will not get strong traction, but an analysis of how tax cuts for the rich have led to increasing wealth inequity and more difficult conditions for the working poor will do well.  StumbleUpon was covered in the 4th guide, now three more will be briefly covered.  It is pretty easy to use the Shareaholic extension to save important progressive content on all the social bookmarking sites.

Pinterest
While technically a social ‘photo-sharing’ service, and probably more appropriately grouped in with sites like Picassa and Flickr, Pinterest behaves more like a social bookmarking service.  It has a rich visual design, fluidity of use, and is seamlessly connected to many social media sites.  The user base is overwhelmingly female.  Pinterest has demonstrated exponential growth, having surpassed both Delicious and StumbleUpon in terms of traffic, reaching an Alexa rank of 19th in the US. There are currently over 10 million registered accounts and 9 million Facebook connections.  Even more impressive is the dedication of users who spend an average of 88 minutes spent on the site, only surpassed by Tumblr (142) and Facebook (394).

While the focus of Pinterest is currently stunning imagery, there is little doubt that there is a lot of potential here for progressive activism.  Pictures with inspirational quotations and comical memes that ridicule the lunacy of the right wing resonate well here.  Further, using the bookmarklet, you can pin sites and articles from the internet, and group everything into topical board, like Progressive Media.  A video version of this site can be found at Chill.

Delicious
This site is very similar to SU except it is smaller (5 million users), has a superior organizational scheme, and up until recently a terrible graphics interface.  The latter changed when a new company bought Delicious and completely revamped the site, giving it a shiny new look and feel.  While there were a few cumbersome methods to save your previous bookmarks on the site, most people lost everything in the changeover and had to start over in late September 2011.  A popular support forum was also killed in this process, and a lot of users left the site in revolt.  If you are looking to build up a lot of things to save quickly focus on the News and Politics section.  Follow the Progressive Stack.  Bookmarking is very simple if you drag the Delicious bookmarklet (button) to your bookmark toolbar.

Diigo
Similar to the others, but with additional functionality in that users can highlight specific sections and sticky notes for pages.  Information on Diigo is stored it the cloud, but there are numerous server issues and much smaller community which may steer users away from this site.

SOCIAL NETWORKING
Twitter, Facebook, and Google+ have been covered in previous guides, and should remain the primary focal points for the progressive social networking activist.  Now a handful of other sites will be examined in brief (a small sampling of a far larger list).  It is a good idea to register an account with the sites below, even if you never intend to use them.

Linkedin
This is predominantly a business networking website.  Although there are 120 million registered accounts, it has less value to activism than the social networking sites already discussed.  Linkedin will send you a lot of emails, and not only do they seem to try to hide how to turn off notifications, there are a lot of checkboxes to click (another good use for the EasyCheckBoxes GreaseMonkey script).  Linkedin is very integrated with various social media tools to make posting here hassle free.  Search for some groups to join if you want to spend more time on the site and avoid these mistakes.

MySpace
Once the king of social networking, this site has suffered a colossal collapse under Murdoch’s evil News Corp empire and is struggling to remain relevant, despite clinging onto 130 million users.

Orkut
There are 100 million Orkut users throughout the world, but they are primarily focused in Brazil and India with a moderate presence in Japan.  Unless you intend to connect with the world activist circuit (primarily in terms of human rights), there isn’t much of a need to invest any time here.

hi5
Another site that is not very popular in the USA, but has international appeal is hi5.  With 80 million users, it has it’s strongest presence in Latin America, India, Thailand, Romania, Jamaica, Central Africa, Portugal and Mongolia.  The site has also been retooled to focus on more on Social Gaming than networking at this stage, so it will not be very valuable to activists.

netlog
Once known as Redbox and before that Facebox, there are at least 70 million Netlog users worldwide (perhaps up to 93 million). It is most popular in parts of Europe, Turkey, the Arab World, and Québec.  Geotargeting programming is designed to customize content based on your location, and Netlog is available in many languages.  This website has a bit of use for the world arena, but will not help American activists working on a national scale.

MISC.
The following sites may or may not fit the definition of social media, but are good places to register accounts and spend a bit of time on.

Disqus
This is a commenting platform with 60 million users that over a million websites utilize for their comment sections.  Register an account on Disqus, link it to your Twitter, Facebook, and Tumblr accounts.  When you comment on news sites, you can then track how well received your comments are and any replies to them on your dashboard.  You can also like or dislike pages, and automatically post the likes to Twitter and Facebook.

YouTube
There are hundreds of millions of Youtube users, making it colossal community.  Activists use this site peripherally or regularly, depending on their interests and time constraints.  It’s good to have an account here either way to support bold progressive content located by giving it a thumbs up and perhaps a quick comment.  The comments section can be a warzone, so it’s a good idea to ignore most replies and always take the highroad no matter how much a right wing troll or astoturfing zombie is trying to drag the conversation down into the mud.  Some activists who are into creating videos for political purposes may use this site quite a bit more often, and there is a lot of room to push progressive content here.  Also consider participating in the more comfortable Vimeo community.

Quora
This is a Q&A website that has shown some impressive growth over the last year.  While issue advocacy is not a part of Quora, this site is a good avenue to debunk right wing propaganda.  Activist callsigns are not allowed on this site, the rules state you must use your real name.

URL Shorteners
While there are many automated tools that will shorten your links for you, it’s nice to be able to track how many clicks your links get as well as other statistics.  Even though these are not social media sites, they are useful, so register at goo.gl, bit.ly, and su.pr.

BLOGS
Weblogs are an integral part of social media activism.  They are an excellent way to discover and aggregate content, share key articles, and to write posts that flesh out one’s views on any issue.  For instance a lot of progressives find that they are constantly debunking the same right wing disinformation, talking points, propaganda, and lies repeatedly.  Instead of spending hours each week rewriting virtually the same reply, they can just write a blog post with proper citations that does the job, then link to that.  Voila.

There is some stiff competition in the world of blogging.  Once you have opened accounts at each of these, register your blogs at Technorati.  Use Shareaholic or other tools to post good content you find on every blog you have.

Tumblr
This is now the lead blogging platform and with good reason.  Tumblr is extremely easy to use, very visual, and social.  Posting is a snap, finding others to follow is quite easy, and customization is no problem here.  The last 18 months has seen phenomenal growth of Tumblr.  There are nearly 40 million blogs (less actual users) with 14 billion posts across the network, and there is no sign that Tumblr is going to slow down anytime soon.

Blogger
Blogger is formerly known as Blogspot.  It is still a good place to build up at least a minor presence, but the design is a bit cumbersome and traffic comes in behind Tumblr and WordPress.  One of the key aspects of using Blogger is the integration with the rest of the Google package, including G+ and Picassa.

WordPress
This is a complicated yet versatile free blogging platform to use.  People can really make professional quality blog posts with WordPress, and it is the preferred platform to use by many medium and major online publications.  Learn it.

Posterous
Very similar to Tumblr but with a smaller community.  The nice thing about Posterous is your ability to feed your publishing directly to Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, Delicious, and your other blogging sites.

Social Blogging
There are also community blogging forums that provide an excellent way to springboard your ideas and meet other activists.  Join the 17 million strong Care2 community,  the bold progressives at the Daily Kos, and the Democratic Underground.

One final note about blogging needs to be covered.  While it is certainly possible for folks to spend the time to purchase and build their own website that they can eventually monetize, that takes a LOT of time and effort that could be better invested in actual activism. That being said, if what you’re writing is resonating well, you may be invited to write for other publications, most of which have no clue how to use social media.  Advise them.  It’s important to have buttons at the top of each article to make it convenient for users to give a quick SU thumbs up, Facebook like, and +1 on Google+, as well as buttons for Digg, Reddit, and Twitter.  Check out the Digg Digg wordpress plugin.  There are a lot of progressive websites that have a ton of quality content that never gets read because they don’t help readers share things in the social media world.

Don’t hate the media, become the media
-Jello Biafra

Google+ (G+) is the most recent addition to the social media world.  Unlike previous projects such as Wave and Buzz, Google+ appears to have some lasting power, having grown to over 90 million users (sometimes called Plussers) in less than a year.  There has been a genius level of rolling upgrades with new functionality appearing every few weeks.  The community is still genuine and fun, being relatively free from spammers and marketers really helps. G+ FAQ.

G+ feels like a mix between Facebook and Twitter, but with a far better flow.   Shares (posts) from your friends scroll across the main screen, or you can narrow the view to a specific circle (group).  Likewise, you can post to the public domain (visible by anyone), just your friends, specific circles, or just one person for more privacy.  There are also hangouts where you can video conference with groups up to 10 people, and chat support.  You need to have a gmail account to use G+ and Google has a strict policy that you to use your real world name, although there are a few activists who desire more anonymity that use names that just sound real.

General Strategies
To begin with flesh out your profile with a few details.  Make sure you link your other social media profiles and include a couple recommended links.  A few select photos or pictures for the top of your profile page is a good idea (they can only be animated if they are no larger than 300 pixels). Next shorten your G+ profile url using gplus.to.  It is always better to have a a short url for easier sharing than some 30 character alphanumeric string.  Add yourself to some external website directories like Group/As, gglpls, and FindPeople.

While there is more functionality, the primary use of G+ for progressive activists is to send and receive important content.  To achieve this goal, a large responsive base of friends is required.  Like Twitter, one of the quickest ways to get more followers is simply to follow other progressives (called circling) and see who adds you back after a couple weeks.  There is a large list of shared circles below that can get you started.  Spend the first month exploring the functionality of G+ and adding users.  Keep your posting restrained for a while, say 2 or 3 a day until you have at least 1000 folks who have added you to their circles.

The design of a post is simply to attach a link to a news story, picture, or video, then write a few words about it.  As noted in the introduction article of this series, a good tactic is to write a thoughtful short paragraph about a news article, then paste that comment on every social media site.  If you are reposting something shared with you, always make sure you follow etiquette by attributing where you found the information.

If a post receives a lot of reshares, go check out the very cool Ripples feature to see who is sharing it and their influence.  There is now #hashtag support on G+, such as #progressive, #p2 (progressive 2.0), #ows, #lgbt, #green, #unions, #moveon, #secular, #edu, etc.  Searching for a group of thematic posts is as simple as clicking the tag or putting in your own at after this link http://plus.google.com/u/0/s/%23 which can also be a good way to find other active G+ users.  Note that there is a maximum of 99 total “Acl entries” (hashtags + mentions) that you can put in any post.  The biggest topics of the day (which are often entertaining or tech, but rarely political) can be found at What’s Hot.  Search your top posts by replacing the numeric code in the url at this link with the one from your profile page.

There is an excellent app (mobile link) for your mobile device so you can interact on the go.  Note that updates usually come out first for Android models, with iPhone updates being shortly behind that.  There is a bit of browser favoritism as well, with a lot of handy Extensions being released for Chrome and far less support for Firefox and other browsers.  Connect/replace your blogger/blogspot profile with your G+ profile for integration.  Google+ To RSS will create the feed to your posts (alternate methods), then you can use IFTT recipes to automatically feed that into your Twitter and Facebook stream.  Generate a G+ widget for your Tumblr page or website.

Circle Enlargement
Begin by creating the following circles: Mutuals, Progressive, Recommended, and any other niches you are interested in (media, environment, lgbt, etc.; name as you like).  Try to keep the number of circles under 10 as the Circles Page is hideously designed.

A quick way of connecting with a lot of users in a very short period of time is to add entire circles that someone else has carefully sculpted and shared.  Note that you can add your carefully sculpted circles to your stream once you get them built up as well.  For instance, if you check out: 99% Circle 1 by Lynne Flynn,  you can Add Circle, name it, and poof, everyone has been added to a circle of that name on your circles page.  Find a big list of suggested circles below, but note you can only add about 1000 people per day until you are prevented from adding more.

You can also view the circles of some progressives influencers and add those you like to your Recommended circle.  If you don’t care if they circle you back, also add them to whatever niche circles they would apply to (say Progressive, Green, and/or Media, etc.).  Repeat this process over and over until you have at least 1000 people in your Recommended Circle.  You can also get started at the Google+ Unofficial Suggested Users page.  Later on, Google will have a real Suggested User list already compiled for you based on your existing friends under the ‘Find People’ tab, which you can Select All and add to your Recommended circle (capable of adding up to 500 people at a time).

Now begin posting and interacting with others.  Go to your various streams (based on your niche circles).  Add a +1, share, and/or comment on the things you like (do all 3 very liberally).  Check in at least twice a day.  Go to the Added You tab in Circles and select everyone, drag them to the Mutuals circle.  If you sometimes find someone on your stream that you don’t want to have in your circles, simply remove them.  After 2 weeks, delete the Recommended circle, and create a new circle called the same thing, Recommended2, or something of that nature.

Note that you can only add 5000 people to your circles max, regardless of how many folks have added you.  Once you near this barrier, you will need to clear out the inactive folks and those who have not added you to their circles.  Luckily, there are two extensions for Chrome (not available for other browsers at this time) called Uncircle Inactives+ and Uncircle Uncirclers+ that makes this easy.  Track your follower growth at SocialStatistics and various other funky user stats including a world map of your circlers at CircleCount.

Restrict who can send you chat messages to only your core circles (not Mutuals) in the chat privacy settings to cut down on the distractions.  If you want to meet someone face to face, feel free to start or join a Hangout.

Suggested Circles
Since G+ is still relatively new, places where circles are shared is a bit of a work in progress.  Try the Public Circles Database. There is a massive list of circles from a variety of interests located on a public Google Docs spreadsheet here.   Instead of scrolling this tome, you can just add specific circles like the ones below:

Progressive Politics by Wataru Tenga
G+ Politics: Progressives and Liberals by Andrew Hartwell
Influential LGBT Google+ Users by Dan Leveille
#p2 by moi and Sindicalistas – Trade Unionists by Lawrence Duffy
99% Circle 1 and 2 by Lynne Flynn
99% Circle by Jason M
OWS by Rob Salzman
Occupy Wall Street by Kyle Gottfried
Occupy Circle by Marc Round
Occupy Circle by Jared Mysko
People Sharing Info on Occupy Movements Worldwide by John Alchin
#OWS #occupyamerica by Levi Kent-Hickman
Occupy Pages by Harvey Wallbanger
Massive OWS circle by Mike Evans
Journalists by Jon Druin
Journalists by Jeff Jarvis
News Organizations by Breaking News page
Huffington Post by Craig Kanalley
Free Thinkers / Atheists by Yasin Inat
Atheists by Dartland Lee
Atheists by James May
Atheists, Secular Humanists and Free Thinkers by Ian Geldard
Science Circle by Chris Robinson
Science Circle by Fraser Cain
The Academy by Maggie Koerth-Baker
Science by Ravi sharma
#ScienceSunday by Robby Bowles
Space and Science by Darren Bounds
Vegetarians by Stephen Bishop

Progressive G+ Pages
Below is a sampling of more progressively oriented organizations that you might consider adding to a circle to find good content.  Note that this list is far from complete, and some of the sources might not be perfect for everyone.  There are additional pages that you might be interested in at the G+ Page Directory or the G+ Business Pages Directory.  General discussion can be found at the G+ Pages board.

Alternet
PoliticusUSA
RawStory (profile, not page)
FreakOutNation
Toke of the Town
NORML and TheWeedBlog
NewsJunkiePost
Firedoglake
Care2
Think Progress
Center for American Progress
PCCC (BoldProgressives.org)
Talking Points Memo
Media Matters for America
Current TV
Mother Jones
Grist
Slate
Wired
TreeHugger
Wikileaks
Anonymous
Occupy Wall Street (page 1 2 3)
PolitiFact
NPR
PBS
Al Jazeera English
The Guardian
BBC
RT
Breaking News
Huffington Post Politics
ProPublica
Daily Kos
MoveOn.org
AFL-CIO
Change.org
Vanity Fair
Planned Parenthood
Consumerist
Southern Poverty Law Center
Center on Budget and Policy Priorities
Common Cause
OpenCongress
Utne Reader
Indigenous Peoples Issues and Resources
Human Rights Watch
Amnesty International USA
ACLU of Northern California
PhysOrg.com
Atheist Revolution
Scientific American
New Scientist
National Geographic
Mongabay

Top Progressive G+ Users
To get you started, here is a short list of a few progressively oriented folks to add to a circle.  Note that this starter list is just a very small sampling and not everyone here might be up your alley.

Rob Salzman
Jim Feig
Stephen Bishop
Carrie Worthen
Michael Custer
Zann Zsuzsannika
Dori Easter
Justin Bale
Susan Stone
Jake Phoenix
Wes Forster
Brian Wolfe
Steven Sudit
Ron Dobbs
Darque Wing
Sarah Jones
Brian Haner
Jason Easley
Michael Schobel
Peter Menchini
Wolf Revels
John Sawyer
Cindy Brown
Maria Allison
Jane Doe
John Geiger
Macolm Mills
Ben C. O. Grimm
Jason Leopold
Stephen C. Webster
David Badash
Steve Elliott
Alan Rosenblatt
Matthew Ygelsias
Cenk Uygur
Oliver Willis
Jasiri X
Kyle Gottfried
Jay Weixelbaum

Facebook (FB) is the largest social networking website in the history of mankind.  There are over 800 million users (expected to breach 1 billion in August), while its once great rival MySpace is down to 130 million and falling.  With a community this large, it is extremely important to focus in on the key groups and not get distracted by all the noise to have a sharp impact.

To be influential on FB as a progressive internet activist, you need to establish a good rapport with key members of the community, be interactive, and have good connections in active political groups.  This takes time.  While the official policy requires people to use their real name, enforcement of this has been relaxed so some anonymity conscience folks use their activist callsign or a fake names that sound real.  Either way, your actions will determine your influence far more than anything else.

A quick word of warning before we continue here.  FB is notorious for snooping into your personal information and sharing that outside the site.  FB has made a deal with the FTC where they have promised to cease this and submit to external audits but take that as you will.  Also note that while you can use a proxy for a limited amount of protection, strong anonymity programs like TOR will set off a “suspicious IP” alert on FB, requiring some tedious steps to log in every single time.  If you use Chrome, install the Facebook Disconnect extension.  In any case, spend some time customizing your privacy settings and create a personalized url for your profile page.  FB has also just had the largest IPO in history, and how this will affect privacy and the site in general in the future is yet to be determined.

General Strategies
Fleshing out your Info page is a great way to start.  Fill in the blanks, demonstrate your interests and passions, put in your profiles for other social media sites in the Websites section, show that you are not a robot.  Start to add other progressives to your friends list right away (list of starters below), but do so at a steady pace (no more than 20 per day on average).  If you try to add too many too quickly, disciplinary action could be taken.  FB limits you to 5000 followers (you can turn yourself into a ‘page‘ after that if you wish), but it will take a year to reach this many quality folks, so don’t cross this bridge until you come to it.  Group your new friends into lists as you go depending on their primary interest.

Expanding your influence requires a legitimate presence and knowing where to focus your efforts.  There is a lot of room for expansion here, but as always, the quality of your content is more important than the quantity of your posts.  Hit the ‘like’ button on other people’s posts and comments liberally, but note that more than ~500 likes per day can trigger a temporary disabling of the ‘like’ feature.  Visit various pages and groups (below) everyday and contribute.  Use FB on the go with the brilliantly designed Facebook mobile app.

When posting status updates on your wall, there is a certain weight that the site puts on it depending on where it was posted from.  Things posted from Facebook itself have a heavier weight (and thus will make the rounds better) than those posted on FB by other means (like Shareaholic, Hootsuite, Disqus, etc.).  This is probably a worthy sacrifice considering the time that can be saved by using those tools, but for really important posts, keep this in mind and post directly from Facebook itself.

Pages and Groups
With a community this large, finding progressive pages and groups is not the problem.  The difficulty is in deciding which ones to expend your precious time and energy.  Clicking ‘like’ on a couple hundred pages is a good starting point.  This is the best compilation of pages on Facebook, they are a focal point of other folks’ efforts to push real change and reform in an organized fashion, and an excellent source of content discovery.  Also note that the Facebook rules only allow one profile, and some folks may chose to just create a page in which to conduct their activism.  While you can still interact with other pages this way, the downside is that you lose a lot of functionality in terms of being able to seek out and connect with actual individuals.

Groups differ from pages in that there is more of an emphasis on group interactivity.  Many are open (anyone can join), but they tend to attract trolls that stifle real conversation.  Closed groups require asking to join, but have far better quality discussions.  You will eventually find some secret groups (unlisted, requires an invite) that have the most honest, in depth conversations.  It is usually a good idea to turn off notifications and chat on all but the most intimate groups to avoid being pestered.  A few select groups to get you started:

#Occupy For Democrats Only
Raging Liberals
Enhanced Reasons
DRD4 dopamine fiends
PowerPlay Forum
The People’s Task Force
The Lunatic Lounge
Kick Butt Liberals
Proud to be Filthy Liberal Scum
Liberal Atheist Politics
Intellectually Promiscuous Progressives
P.A.R.R. – 12 Progressive Action to Remove Republicans

Commenting
Participating in the FB community requires commenting if you wish to have any real sway.  Posting links is fine, but without interaction, your broadcasts will soon fall upon deaf ears.  Locate other strong progressives of various causes by their comments.  Ignore or block all trolls.  They are never worth your time.

Feel free to speak your mind on Facebook, but take note that the right wing has openly declared political warfare there (like what they did on YouTube a few years ago), and will use every dirty trick in the book to silence progressive voices.  If you post any ‘questionable’ content or comments, they will mass report you.  Sometimes they mass report left-leaning folks who haven’t even posted anything remotely objectionable, which can cause remote-controlled disciplinary actions by Facebook.  Don’t let this discourage you from speaking out, just recognize if you start to get attacked, you must be hitting a nerve, and double down on what you’re doing.

Top Progressive FB Users
With a community 800 million strong, assembling the very top progressive users is an impossible task, but the list below is full of solid activists, and should get you started.

Julie Driscoll
Steve Elliott
Dust Circle
Midge Hough
Cindy Sheehan
Jesse LaGreca
Zach Oberhausen
Bill Demers
Amanda Terkel
Bob Cesca
Carrie Worthen
Andrew Porter
Anomaly OneHundred
Nick Espinosa
April Lukes-Streich
Asa Dodsworth
Clare Tremper
Chris Morrow
Dale West
Daniel Cox
Deborah Megivern Foster
Dee Austin
Douglas Rivlin
Gilbert Mercier
Herdon Katz
Gotta L. Aff
Ilyse Hogue
Janine Wallace
Jason Easley
Albert DeAscentis
Jason Leopold
John Equality Geiger
John Graziano
John P. Boyle
Josh Harkinson
Joshua Oakley
Karoli Kuns
Liam Fox
Margaret Flowers
Ray Medeiros
Robin Eublind
Sarah Jones
Shannyn Moore
David Noyes
Sheryl Fletcher
Terri Lee
Wes Forster

The shocking news about the sudden death of Andrew Breitbart has generated a whirlwind of commentary on the internet. While some opponents have made distasteful comments, Breitbart himself was guilty of dancing on people’s graves, and conservative comments following bad fortune for liberals have proven far, far worse.

This was perhaps best exemplified by the unfortunate death of Ted Kennedy in 2009.  While many conservatives were respectful, many were not, including Andrew Breitbart.

Politico reported: “Andrew Breitbart, a Washington Times columnist who oversees Breitbart.com and BigHollywood.com, tapped into the anti-Kennedy vein in the hours after the senator’s death was announced, posting a series of Twitter messages in which he called Kennedy a “villain,” a “duplicitous bastard” and a “prick.”

ThinkProgress captured a few of Breitbart’s insulting tweets as well: “Over the course of the next three hours, Breitbart unapologetically attacked Kennedy, calling him a “villain,” “a big ass motherf@#$er,” a “duplicitous bastard” and a “prick.” “I’ll shut my mouth for Carter. That’s just politics. Kennedy was a special pile of human excrement,” wrote Breitbart in one tweet.”

http://twitter.com/andrewbreitbart/status/3553169520

https://twitter.com/#!/andrewbreitbart/status/3552660988

Breitbart was not alone in this.  The commentary on many sites on the internet was appalling.  Some comments from conservatives on Digg included:

The world loses a jackass and Satan gains a close and dear friend! It’s about damn time! The world is a tad bit better today! This news was a brief ray of light in a dark world of liberalism and lies.

 too bad he didn’t suffer from the shitty healthcare nightmare him and his kind are preparing to force on the rest of us. he should have been given some pills and sent home instead of spending millions of dollars to prolong his miserable life. instead, he had the best care in the world right here in the u.s. we have the highest cancer survival rates in the world! it bonobobama-care is good enough for us, why not put congress on it for a 10 year trial first. then they can decide. imagine if you will, medicare without the fancy supliments times the healthcare in eastern europe equals kennedy-bonobobama-care.

 Brain Cancer huh? Must of been all the bullshit liberal ideas he had in his head.

Comments on the FreeRepublic were not much better:

I’m waiting for the munchkins to come out and dance.

God held his own death panel. Just a few years too late big guy! An appropriate send off would be to put him behind the wheel of an Olds and drive him off the bridge! Good Riddance!

Spiritually speaking, Ted Kennedy has been dead practically since birth. He spent his whole life a human appendage of a rotting, corrupt party, a crook who would emerge even from the hottest bath still stinking of booze. He survived longer than the rest of his family because his “life” was, until today, just a biological technicality — it is hard to kill what has, inside, been dead all along.

I am dancing!

So now we’ve got No. 8: He died just in time to deprive the Dems of their magic number for health scare

Another example of the insensitivity that conservatives can have towards death, the dying, or the suffering can be found on an article published just on Tuesday, Feb. 28th by the Miami New Times.  In it, recent Wikileaks emails suggest Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez could die within a year from cancer.  Some of the comments on the page and on social media sites include:

so, this year should go faster… FU#$% CHAVEZ!!

Whatever you believe about his politics and methods, there is little doubt that Breitbart laughed at the death of people he didn’t like, and any comments leveled against him in his passing could be considered by some people to be nothing more than karma.  In either case, many of his followers have little room to complain considering their history.

]]> http://newsjunkiepost.com/2012/03/01/conservative-outrage-over-breitbart-death-comments-are-disingenuous/feed/ 1 http://newsjunkiepost.com/2012/02/28/progressives-guide-to-social-media-5-twitter/ http://newsjunkiepost.com/2012/02/28/progressives-guide-to-social-media-5-twitter/#comments Tue, 28 Feb 2012 13:16:20 +0000 Ole Ole Olson http://newsjunkiepost.com/?p=41797 This is the fifth in a series of short articles that are intended to help grassroots activists better utilize social media websites. These are the definitive and comprehensive guides for progressives. Every week after the Intro, there will be a new guide published about how to more effectively use Reddit, Digg, StumbleUpon, Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Other Sites, and on Advanced Strategies.

At this point we break from the major social news and bookmarking sites and shift to social networking.  Twitter is important as the largest breaking information sharing source, though limited by 140 character messages.  Known as a micro-blogging service, the key to becoming a bold progressive voice in this community with over 500 million users is to acquire an audience that is both large and responsive, and this requires tweeting (posting) quality material at a steady pace.  Do not just broadcast, receive as well, or your tweets will start to fall on deaf ears.

Twitter alone fuels a decent share of the traffic articles get on the internet.  When your tweets are retweeted (shared), they disseminate information to a wide audience and variety of sources, including some big media journalists and can potentially shape the greater debate.  Your twitter stream is also a great way to learn about important stories and to educate yourself on issues.

Tweet Structure
Although you can type anything in a 140 character limit Tweet, keep the message short and to the point.  Longer tweets get breezed by more often and are more difficult to retweet by others.  The best formula to use is: Short Message or Title  +  short URL  +  #hashtags (optional).  For instance:
111th Senate Breaks A Filibuster Record http://tpm.ly/f7hBhh #p2

Most URLs or hyperlinks on the internet are simply too long, so use a link shortening service such as goo.gl, bit.ly, su.pr,  j.mp, or is.gd.  Most articles will also have a Twitter button on the side that you can click, which will open up a popup window with the headline, short url, and name the source.

Hashtags are purely optional, but can help to organize your tweets.  The term simply means putting a # before a word so that it more easily searched at places like Twazzup.  The most important hashtag for progressive content is #p2.  Others include:

Progressive Issues: #p2 #1u #topprog #rebelleft
Activism: #ows #oo #WIunion
Environmental issues: #green #eco #enviro #co2 #nature
Legalization: #mmot #marijuana #legalization #norml #mpp #leap #drugwar
Rationalist umbrellas: #sci #atheist #agnostic #secular #pagan
Various women’s and reproductive issues: #fem2 #FAB #WOC #prochoice
LGBT equal rights: #LGBT #equalrights #gay
Workers rights: #EFCA #union #unions #labor #aflcio #seiu
Immigration reform: #RI4A #CIR #dreamact #immigration
Other #SocialMedia: #digg #FB (Facebook) #SU (StumbleUpon) #reddit

Build A Following
The key to Twitter is to build a large and responsive group of followers.  The quickest way of doing this is to start out by focusing on getting people to follow you back.  Fill out your bio to let folks know a little bit about yourself and what your interests are.

Start by adding hundreds of excellent focalizers at #ConnectTheLeft  and the Progressive Twibe.  There were 6000 progressives at Tweet Progress, but that site may be down for count, as is TweetLeft.   You can also go to the lists of solid progressives and add everyone you like from it.  A few examples:

ProgressiveTuesday by @novenator
Top_Prog by @progaccumulator
Prophets by @sloppyunruh
proglib by @skippybkroo
progressive by @0ckam
follow-friday-list 1 by @manyko2
politics-liberal by @dragonflyb

Twitter Followers
0-500 Personal account, easy to manage, but minimal traction
500-2000 Gaining influence, able to disseminate information well
2000-10,000 Very strong following, yet manageable account with lists
10,000+ You are what’s called a Whale and have a huge impact

Twitter only allows you to follow 2000 folks at first, so after giving people time to reciprocate, you must stop following those who do not follow you back.  After a month, go to JustUnfollow or FriendorFollow and unfollow those who have not followed you back.  You will need the room to add progressive organizations and independent media outlet members that often never follow back.  An alternative method however is simply to add thee media sources you like to a list and not follow them.   Automated services to unfollow non-followers like buzzom and TwitterKarma are no longer available, so this process must be done manually.  Note that Twitter will only allow you to follow/unfollow a certain number of people per hour.

Once you get close to the 2000 follower cap, you can slowly keep adding more, but 90% of them must be following you back.  Start adding yourself to Following Directories including WeFollow and Twellow.

After a month, you should be up to hundreds of followers, but remember the quality of your followers will ultimately be more valuable than the quantity. Add at least 50 folks per day from that point on, and periodically remove those who don’t return the favor unless the quality of their tweets is phenomenal.  Also note that it is perfectly acceptable to have multiple Twitter accounts to separate work, personal, and activism.  The more accounts you have however, the more time you will have to spend to keep up with each one.

Organizing
This many people will make your Twitter stream fly by fairly quickly, so it is time to organize some of your followers into Lists, like the ones shown above, or niche groups like environment, unions, LGBT, science, education, etc.  That way, you can switch from list to list depending on what you want to read and will not be so overwhelmed with the pace on your main stream.  A solid tool to organize your followers is Formulists.

A way of gauging your effectiveness is to monitor how many times you are listed by others.  If you have been sending out well focused tweets at a steady pace and interacting with your followers, you will find yourself on more lists.  TopFollowFriday shows you who is recommending you.  Other interesting sites to check your personal influence include:

Klout
Tweetstats
Twitalyzer
Twittercounter
Twitaholic

Enhancing Your Experience
There are other tools that are a superior interface to the Twitter.com website itself.  These can often be used on your desktop as stand alone programs and are often available for your mobile devide so you can Tweet on the go.  Some of my favorites are:

TweetDeck
Echofon
twitterfeed
HootSuite

An easy way to share custom tweets is ClickToTweet. Start an online newspaper based on your stream at Paper.li.  Remember that the quality of your tweets is important.  If you are going to send out the same tweet more than once, space it out.  Keep your content interesting and diverse.  A good range of updates in a 24 hour period is 10-50 and each one should be separated by 5-20 minutes.  If you are on vacation, you can set up automated tweets at:

Socialoomph (free version)
PingLater
TweetLater
PostLater

Twitter is an integral part of the social media experience, and the primary tool for mass communication that progressive internet activists need to utilize.  After an initial investment of ~1 hour per day for the first month, the time invested can drop a bit, although the more engaged you stay, the higher the rewards will be.  Third party apps change frequently, so pay attention to the latest Twitter news to stay up to date with the latest methods to make your Twitter experience easier.

Top Progressive Tweeters
It is impossible to list everyone that deserves it in this short article, but here is a representative sample of some of progressive heavyweights you should follow.

OakFoSho
Shoq
theNewDeal
EileenLeft
8s
alapoet
QueerjohnPA
GottaLaff
OTOOLEFAN
cody_k
Token12ga
stone_circle
argylestyle
Anomaly100
TLW3
JoshuaStarlight
sarahlee310
maryfranholm
crewislife
Catballou
JasonLeopold
Maryannaville
thejoshuablog
srjones66
eric_pusey
Serpentine202
IanDavidB
_7654_
dustcircle
angelsavant
Proudlib
Adenovir
ballanross
Min_Reyes
ddoorn
ageofmastery
polymath22
lemonton
tamaraehawk
shondi99
jilevin
RayBeckerman
SupermanHotMale
Jason_Pollock
BrettR4763
manyko2
BoneKnightmare
heywho
BlueSkyDog
EmergentOrder
StopBeck
chi910
HailGalvatron
JohnD1967
ishtarmuz
UTSavage
TheDude0420
cherokee_autumn
DesertBeacon
silvermaneman
drdigipol

One year ago, the voice of Marc parent suddenly went silent on the internet.  His online presence was extremely influential.  Marc was one of those hyperactive activists whose broadcasting was busy, intense, and focused on real change and reform to try to make the world a better place.  There was no better content aggregator and very few bigger influencers in the social media world.  Illness suddenly struck, and Marc Parent passed away on March 28th, 2011 at the age of 59.

I never met Marc personally.  I don’t even know what he looks like, and could not find a picture of him after an exhaustive search online.  That doesn’t matter.  Connecting with someone online is just as profound and powerful of an experience as knowing them in person.

Twitter

Marc was probably most famous online for his Twitter account at @mparent77772.  Over 82,000 people followed him there and he was important enough to be listed 2653 times.  His presence was huge.  He logged 119,219 tweets, most of which were links to a variety of subjects revolving around freedom, reform, politics, human rights, and world news.

His location was listed as “In front of my screen” reflecting the massive amounts of time he dedicated to online activism.  His profile read, “Blogger – Interwebber on politics, finance, news, media, society, government, the internets – CRIMES AND CORRUPTION OF THE NEW WORLD ORDER“.  Marc’s final online communication came on March 17th with this tweet: “Colin Powell demands answers over false Iraq intel http://bit.ly/fB5YwZ”

YouTube

Marc had a very popular YouTube channel under the name CrimesandCorruption.  Opened on the Winter Solstice of 2008, it had 392 subscribers, over 500 subscriptions, and had almost 200,000 channel views.  Marc never uploaded a video, and only listed to as favorites: “Philip Zimbado: A Study of Evil” about the the horrors of Abu Ghraib anda MoxNews recording of how Dick Cheney is a war criminal.

Digg

Digg was also a focal point for Marc’s efforts.  Although he was a member since the end of April 2007, I didn’t notice a massive uptake of activism there until later in 2008.  667 people followed him there, and he dugg up over 12,000 while submitting (sharing) a massive tome of 6288 articles.

Blip

Marc loved being a DJ on Blip.fm.  He played an eclectic mix of music that was heavy on the atmospheric electronica with sounds from BlueTech and Tosca.

Google Reader

You can get a feel for what inspired Marc’s activism on his reader list.

Blogging

The first reference to a blog by Marc that I could find was on blogspot starting in 2006.  That soon sprouted into a second blogspot blog and then a third one.  Others can also be found on his profile page.  This appears to have moved to LiveJournal in 2008 with another blogging venture at PrePosterous.

Facebook

Marc’s posted on his Facebook wall on February 9th, stating, “back again for who knows how long. i answer all personal facebook (only email) messages. comments msssages i answer only in a public way. i like news tips and such. so please feel free to write. miss you guys, terribly. best, marc“.

Two days later, Marc shared the tragic news that his life was coming to an end: “been sicker than a hound dog for several weeks. not convinced yet as a few tests, doctor interviews remain, but te latest medical guess by a doc who who gave me decent service for a few years is I have 2-3 months left to annoy critics online. looks like I’m headed to a better place sooner than expected. I’m at peace with that. thing is I have a lot of loose ends to tie up, and need to preserve enough wherewithal to accomplish them and still have some fun.”

The responses from his many online friends are heart felt.  His last posting was on February 17th, and then it was silent.

Online Funeral Announcement: PARENT, Marc Joseph Claude March 16, 1952 – March 28, 2011 On March 28, 2011, Marc Parent of Edmonton peacefully passed away at the age of 59 years. He is survived by his children, Ryan, Jason and Megan; mother Colette Parent-Savaria (Leo-Paul); two sisters, Suzanne (Len) Buchniak and Lorraine (James) Hook as well as one brother, Pierre, and nephews and nieces. Marc was predeceased by his father, Albert and his nephew John. A Funeral Mass will be held at 10:30 a.m., April 2, 2011 at St. Joachim, 9928 – 110 Street, Edmonton, AB.

You can view the obituary guestbook here, which contains voices from around the world.

StumbleUpon (SU) is a challenging social bookmarking site to get a large, loyal following and content traction. It is less ergonomic than the social news site Digg, less functional than Reddit, and less social than both, but since they are sites that cater to current news, SU eventually will be the place where content can get far more long term evergreen traffic. SU is similar to Delicious in that the focus is strictly on bookmarking sites, but is far larger with 20 million users. Where they differ is that SU encourages more exploration, has a superior interface design, although contains a less advanced organizational system.

In a very counter-intuitive design, there is no real SU homepage that displays fresh or popular content. The focus is on content discovery accessed from your profile page or the toolbar. SU went through an massive redesign in December 2011 which streamlined the interface but removed some functionality (such as blogging) which caused some long-time users to abandon the site in favor of social blogging sites such as Tumblr and Posterous (Delicious saw a similar rebellion after their redesign in Sept. 2011).

SU takes out a lot of the social element from social media. You can still leave comments, but conversations for articles are virtually non-existent. There is a built in messaging system that you can use to exchange messages with other users however.

General Strategies
Start by filling out your profile. Keep your bio brief and to the point, but list your other social media profiles using html. Connect to your Twitter, Facebook, and Linkedin accounts.

Then start stumbling. Before you can expect to get strong support from anyone, you should try to have given a thumbs up to thousands of webpages (10k if possible). This requires a big investment in time initially, but most users are able to thumbs up about 200 things per day using the SU toolbar or mobile app (covered later), meaning that reaching this goal should only take a few months. Try focusing on one tag section each day and dive in. Be forewarned however that stumbling is highly addictive.

At this point, begin to seek out other strong progressives to befriend (suggested list below) and check out those who have already added you to see which ones you want to add back. Send everyone who you follow a short message saying hello and letting them know you are following them and accepting shares. Give a thumbs up on their profile page and review it (write a quick blurb saying why they’re awesome) using the tag ‘stumblers’.

Also at this stage, you can start to post more content to SU (called discovering). Use the appropriate tags (section below) and write a comment (called reviewing). Make sure to discover content from a wide variety of sources, nothing turns people off more than a user that only discovers and shares their own blog or one favorite website.

It is speculated that SU users are covertly weighted by an algorithm that depends on their contributions, particularly how many thumbs up/down they have given and other factors. Attaining a higher level along with a strong attentive following is the key to getting traction on SU.

Tools
While there are not many useful external websites to help your SU experience, there are 2 very important tools you must use. The first is the SU Toolbar.  This will take up a strip of real estate on your browser, but will have the needed buttons to stumble, thumbs up/down pages, show the number of things others have shared with you waiting your view, allow you to share pages, and other things. It is the essential way to use SU on your browser.

StumbleUpon has also developed an excellent app for your mobile device. Once you log in, you will see all of your favorite tags (interests) and can jump into pages in these sections.

Tags and Channels
When discovering content (being the first one to give a thumbs up to an article), use 5 tags (interests). Tags are used to file the webpage to a particular category where other stumblers can locate it by topic. For progressives, the top tag to use is liberal-politics.  Other suggested tags include:

politics
News(General)
Political Science
activism
humanitarianism
law
Government
drugs
liberties
anarchism
secularism
freethought
atheist-agnostic
atheist
atheism
agnostic
humanism
science
environment
nature
Ecology
green
conservation
Internet Tools

You can find content far easier if you subscribe to site channels  for the websites that feed you great information. This is still in the trial stage and there are not many progressive website channels available, but more should follow.

Sharing
When  you discover and review a webpage that you would like to get more eyeballs on, you can share it using SU. Hit Share on the toolbar, scroll down to Stumblers, then select those you would like to share this page with (write a couple words or a very brief message of thanks or about the article). Install the EasyCheckboxes GreaseMonkey Script to save time by checking every box to share at once (doesn’t work on the toolbar, share from your profile page, and this requires the Firefox browser). You can also share it on Facebook and Twitter this way (you will see the url on Twitter as an SU link).

While sharing is the biggest way to get the ball rolling for article traction, it must be used sparingly. If you try to share content too often, you will lose friends, or they will stop accepting shares from you, thereby defeating the point. There are a couple different strategies how you can maximize your impact.

Figure out who is sharing content with you on a regular basis. The general rule is the most active users can be sent a maximum of one share per day. For those who only share content with you occasionally, share one thing every 3 or 4 days. Others can be shared with once per week, and you can break down your friends list into 7 different groups, sharing one article per day with each group. There may even be a few casual users that you only share the most important articles with on a monthly basis.

Drop anyone who shares more than one link per day on average. With your other social media activities, you will find 5 of these SU users draining far too much of your time. You can see who is actually supporting your shares by looking at your Discoveries.  Put your pointer over Friends Who Like This (shown as an icon of a man with a username + x# friends) to see who is helping, but also go to ‘reviews’ since not everyone shows up. Not everyone will be helping you out, so feel free to only follow and accept shares from those who give you some support, but be patient with people too. The real world always takes precedence over the online realm.

Top Progressive Stumblers
There was a time when you could link up with other activists on the dozens of excellent groups on SU that facilitated the sharing of excellent content by theme, but these were discontinued in the latest version. As noted above, once you have reached the threshold of ~5000 stumbles, you can start adding folks and sending them an introductory hello. While it is best to bookmark users you like while doing your initial stumbling so you can add them at this point, below are some more that you might be interested in adding.
SU Icons
Spocko
sarahlee
yobaba
shihtzuman
saboma
pinkpackrat
tbhurst
Anomaly100
ouspensky
paulrfrank
mysticdave
cranelake
jMichaelEdwards
Darque
HughDB

Bold Progressives
jtucker65
wwsmith
lola775
ArbiInc
janinewallace
CaptainPlanet71
DireWolf11
RozAgain
PhilPerspective
TheDudeDean
alapoet
johnnr2
dmegivern
LiberalTexan
LiamFox
polymath22

Content Discoverers
joshuastarlight
btrfly54935
graphictruth
stephencwebster
Cosmic-Surfer
toyotabedzrock
starfocus
mschase1972
davide2323
cyberdyno