A little over two years ago, we sat down with Vancity’s Kate Dugas and William Azaroff to help them think through a New Year’s resolution contest. Little did we know we were helping to forge a dynasty.
Now the ChangeEverything.caVisa la resolution! contest is open for entries for the third year in a row, offering prizes of $100, $250 and $1,000 – all for committing to a resolution and blogging about your progress. You can find the details here.
Contests are one of the ways that community animators can encourage participation on their site. Part of what’s made Viva! work so well has been the way it dovetails so closely with the site’s mission – getting people to list their changes, blog about them and collaborate over them – and highly participatory nature.
Entrants are encouraged to get others engaged in their resolution (and in their ongoing progress reports). And even community members who opt not to enter have a chance to vote for the winner come March.
So, blogospheriverse: have any other contests caught your eye lately? What’s the most innovative way you’ve seen to encourage participation?
Our friends and clients at BC Hydro have made the leap onto YouTube, with a series of videos promoting their newly overhauled, conservation-enhanced web site.
And for Canadian comedy fans, there’s a bonus: the first six videos feature Kids in the Hall alum Kevin McDonald, pressed into service as various species of disgruntled British Columbia wildlife.
The videos are geared to getting you to check out BC Hydro’s large and growing selection of tips and how-to guides for reducing your energy footprint (with video tutorials that are pretty decent in their own right).
For BC Hydro, it’s the latest step in a social media foray that began with the Green Gifts Facebook application. For Kevin McDonald, it’s a chance to stretch his acting chops outside the narrow confines of human characters (although there was this guy a while ago…).
Now, if you’ll excuse us, we have to go weatherstrip our doorways. Or this here marmot’s going to get mighty p-o’d.
One of the reasons we’re seized with the power of social media is that we’ve seen its potential for engaging people in the most important conversations of our time. With such urgent crises as climate change on the global agenda, I draw a lot of my hope for the future from the way I see people coming together from a wide range of backgrounds – some of them unlikely – to tackle the big challenges.
A case in point: DeSmogBlog. It’s a project from someone who might seem to be an unlikely participant in trying to hold clear, informed conversations: a PR executive, namely Jim Hoggan.
A few years ago, Hoggan decided to tackle the campaign of doubt and deliberate misinformation that surrounds so much of the discussion around climate change by launching DeSmogBlog. As the site’s writers put it, “Using tricks and stunts that unsavory PR firms invented for the tobacco lobby, energy-industry contrarians are trying to confuse the public, to forestall individual and political actions that might cut into exorbitant coal, oil and gas industry profits. DeSmogBlog is here to cry foul – to shine the light on techniques and tactics that reflect badly on the PR industry and are, ultimately, bad for the planet.”
With so much of the mainstream media caught up in he-says, she-says reporting that puts climate change denial on the same footing as a broad scientific consensus, DeSmogBlog has enthusiastically dived into the fray, exposing the sources of the industry smokescreen. And what started as a pretty simple blog has since blossomed into a team of top-flight writers, media channels (including a fledgling speakers bureau) and campaigns – including the hilarious Arctic Front. DeSmogBlog is now a leading social media voice around climate change, and ranks in Technorati’s top 10,000.
They’ve done it with the help of talented folks like Kevin Grandia and Sarah Pullman on their team, and from such outside firms as Capulet Communications, Catalyst Internet and Junxion.
Issues like climate change demand not only our attention, but our engagement, with whatever energy and expertise we have at our disposal. And while Hoggan might not be a climate change scientist, he knows PR — and how it can be used both to confuse and to clarify. Thankfully, he’s chosen to use it for the better purpose.
"But surely the deadline has already passed," I hear you say. "And I've missed my chance to pitch my kick-ass presentation on (insert name of pet topic here)."
Guess again! The deadline for speaker submissions has been extended to Monday, December 22. Which means you have the whole weekend to dream up your perfect pitch.
So start fine-tuning that presentation idea. And see you at NV!
Google Reader, our newsreader of choice here at Social Signal (hunter-destroyer droids constantly prowl the premises, looking for holdouts still using Bloglines… there's one now! KABOOM!)…
Looking for advice on public speaking, speechwriting and leadership communications? Here are some of my most comprehensive posts, on topics that people ask me about most often.
