Matt Stempeck

Sara Critchfield and Adam Mordecai‘s talk at Netroots Nation (#nnupFTW) was less-than-standing-room only, so I’ve combined the parts of his talk we were able to catch with a similar talk by their colleague Peter Koechley at the Conversational Marketing Summit. Thanks to Deepa Kunapuli for her notes.

Upworthy’s goal is to amplify content worth spreading online. If you mixed the earnestness of a TED talk with the brevity of a LOLcat and Coca Cola’s distribution network, you’d end up with something like Upworthy’s network of crack content. They don’t necessarily produce the content themselves, they just make sure it goes places. While we debate the impact of technological tactics like SEO and A/B testing on the future of journalism, the Upworthy team is working to harness these new (and always changing) algorithmic tactics for social change.

Peter Koechley (@peterkoechley) thinks about virality as a product of the shareability of the source content and the clickability of the content’s packaging. Everyone who’s spent the last ten years paying consultants to produce viral content will be relieved to know that the latter part of this equation, the clickability of your content’s packaging, is much, much easier to optimize than the content itself. But people don’t spend enough time on this part of the process.

Your Headlines Matter

Sara and Adam, Peter’s colleagues at Upworthy, explain that we’re spending all of our content production time in the wrong places. We slave over the wording in the 12th paragraph of the blog post, and then write a throwaway headline that no one ends up clicking. If we care about people finding our content, we need to think generationally, or keep in mind not just our readers, but also what our readers’ friends will see should the gods of the feed place your work before their eyeballs.

Peter walks us through the three schools of headline optimization on the web. Peter started at the Onion, where hilarity depends almost entirely on the headlines. Unfortunately, because the entire joke is contained in the headline, users can get their giggles without actually clicking through to the site. So headlines from the Onion perform rather poorly in terms of driving traffic back to the website.

The second category of headline optimization is your traditional search engine optimization, where the headline contains all of the right keywords, and again, spells out what the page is about. Google loves proper nouns, but humans find them pretty boring.

Social optimization breaks from these two approaches and hits the user with just a taste of the content, worded in a compelling way, and often with an emotional tone. You may have noticed that brands are learning to generate interactions with their Facebook posts by asking for their followers’ opinions, because if they’re successful, Facebook rewards them by increasing the visibility of their posts. But anyone optimizing for click-throughs rather than comments should be considering the degree to which the headline teases and entices the reader while refraining from giving away the meat of the content. Peter calls this the curiosity gap: too vague, and I don’t care, but too specific, and I don’t need to click the link.

Peter shows a case study of two takes on the same 3-minute video about gay marriage. The video of Zach Wahls’s moving testimony about growing up with two moms reached a million views without Upworthy’s help, and without a great headline. The original video was titled “Zach Wahls speaks about family,” which, Peter points out, is bad because you don’t know who Zach is yet, and you might not particularly care about family. Even though it had already gone viral once, the team at Upworthy decided to try spreading the video again with an improved headline. Angie Aker at MoveOn.org came up with “Two Lesbians Raised a Baby And This Is What They Got” and made the video their daily share. The result was 20 million additional views of the same video, and a headline that regularly beats actual porn results for Google searches for “two lesbians”. A good headline teases, but also appeals to different audiences for completely different reasons. Even homophobes were intrigued enough to click that link. Upworthy will sometimes write 25 different headlines for each piece of content, and test response before selecting a finalist.

Greasing the Tracks of the Internet

For someone studying how ideas spread these days, Upworthy’s facilitation is interesting in a number of ways. First of all, Upworthy has taken after the Instagrams of the world and eschewed the traditional website-as-hub model. Where Instagram pushes everyone to their mobile app, the majority of Upworthy’s existence is in followers’ Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest streams. Upworthy also has some rather prominent share buttons to help you connect the dots:

Adam and Sarah also advised that we spend 55 minutes on emotion for every 5 minutes of fact. And, as cognitive studies have proven, images work much, much better than text. The default image that gets shared with the link on social networks is particularly important (you can control this with Facebook’s og:image tag).

How the Social Networks Stack Up
(for the content Upworthy has tested — your mileage may very well vary):

Twitter: Not great for actually driving people to your content. Facebook accounts for about 90% of the traffic in their tests. (It’s not clear to me if they’re only counting Twitter.com traffic, or all Twitter clients, as well. This divide has historically depressed measures of Twitter referrals). Twitter users like to share facts.
Facebook: If you have a limited budget, focus everything here. Photo posts get three to four times the interaction of regular posts, but don’t necessarily drive traffic. Close-ups of faces perform well, as do visual dichotomies, in ads as well as posts.
Reddit: Good luck. If you crack it, you are a god.
Pinterest: Hey ladies! Pix please.

Testing Virality

Adam says you must test because you are dumb. We are all dumb. Our intuition means nothing, and Upworthy’s two biggest headline hits were written by interns. You will be wrong 90% of the time.

Peter will pay you $1,000 to popularize a word that describes these phenomena other than ‘virality’.

[Video and slides of Peter’s presentation, with Sara and Adam’s presentation to follow shortly]

Sara Critchfield and Adam Mordecai‘s talk at Netroots Nation (#nnupFTW) was less-than-standing-room only, so I’ve combined the parts of his talk we were able to catch with a similar talk by their colleague Peter Koechley at the Conversational Marketing Summit. Thanks to Deepa Kunapuli for her notes.

Upworthy’s goal is to amplify content worth spreading online. If you mixed the earnestness of a TED talk with the brevity of a LOLcat and Coca Cola’s distribution network, you’d end up with something like Upworthy’s network of crack content. They don’t necessarily produce the content themselves, they just make sure it goes places. While we debate the impact of technological tactics like SEO and A/B testing on the future of journalism, the Upworthy team is working to harness these new (and always changing) algorithmic tactics for social change.

Peter Koechley (@peterkoechley) thinks about virality as a product of the shareability of the source content and the clickability of the content’s packaging. Everyone who’s spent the last ten years paying consultants to produce viral content will be relieved to know that the latter part of this equation, the clickability of your content’s packaging, is much, much easier to optimize than the content itself. But people don’t spend enough time on this part of the process.

Your Headlines Matter

Sara and Adam, Peter’s colleagues at Upworthy, explain that we’re spending all of our content production time in the wrong places. We slave over the wording in the 12th paragraph of the blog post, and then write a throwaway headline that no one ends up clicking. If we care about people finding our content, we need to think generationally, or keep in mind not just our readers, but also what our readers’ friends will see should the gods of the feed place your work before their eyeballs.

Peter walks us through the three schools of headline optimization on the web. Peter started at the Onion, where hilarity depends almost entirely on the headlines. Unfortunately, because the entire joke is contained in the headline, users can get their giggles without actually clicking through to the site. So headlines from the Onion perform rather poorly in terms of driving traffic back to the website.

The second category of headline optimization is your traditional search engine optimization, where the headline contains all of the right keywords, and again, spells out what the page is about. Google loves proper nouns, but humans find them pretty boring.

Social optimization breaks from these two approaches and hits the user with just a taste of the content, worded in a compelling way, and often with an emotional tone. You may have noticed that brands are learning to generate interactions with their Facebook posts by asking for their followers’ opinions, because if they’re successful, Facebook rewards them by increasing the visibility of their posts. But anyone optimizing for click-throughs rather than comments should be considering the degree to which the headline teases and entices the reader while refraining from giving away the meat of the content. Peter calls this the curiosity gap: too vague, and I don’t care, but too specific, and I don’t need to click the link.

Peter shows a case study of two takes on the same 3-minute video about gay marriage. The video of Zach Wahls’s moving testimony about growing up with two moms reached a million views without Upworthy’s help, and without a great headline. The original video was titled “Zach Wahls speaks about family,” which, Peter points out, is bad because you don’t know who Zach is yet, and you might not particularly care about family. Even though it had already gone viral once, the team at Upworthy decided to try spreading the video again with an improved headline. Angie Aker at MoveOn.org came up with “Two Lesbians Raised a Baby And This Is What They Got” and made the video their daily share. The result was 20 million additional views of the same video, and a headline that regularly beats actual porn results for Google searches for “two lesbians”. A good headline teases, but also appeals to different audiences for completely different reasons. Even homophobes were intrigued enough to click that link. Upworthy will sometimes write 25 different headlines for each piece of content, and test response before selecting a finalist.

Greasing the Tracks of the Internet

For someone studying how ideas spread these days, Upworthy’s facilitation is interesting in a number of ways. First of all, Upworthy has taken after the Instagrams of the world and eschewed the traditional website-as-hub model. Where Instagram pushes everyone to their mobile app, the majority of Upworthy’s existence is in followers’ Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest streams. Upworthy also has some rather prominent share buttons to help you connect the dots:

Adam and Sarah also advised that we spend 55 minutes on emotion for every 5 minutes of fact. And, as cognitive studies have proven, images work much, much better than text. The default image that gets shared with the link on social networks is particularly important (you can control this with Facebook’s og:image tag). 

How the Social Networks Stack Up
(for the content Upworthy has tested — your mileage may very well vary):

Twitter: Not great for actually driving people to your content. Facebook accounts for about 90% of the traffic in their tests. (It’s not clear to me if they’re only counting Twitter.com traffic, or all Twitter clients, as well. This divide has historically depressed measures of Twitter referrals). Twitter users like to share facts.
Facebook: If you have a limited budget, focus everything here. Photo posts get three to four times the interaction of regular posts, but don’t necessarily drive traffic. Close-ups of faces perform well, as do visual dichotomies, in ads as well as posts. 
Reddit: Good luck. If you crack it, you are a god.
Pinterest: Hey ladies! Pix please.

Testing Virality

Adam says you must test because you are dumb. We are all dumb. Our intuition means nothing, and Upworthy’s two biggest headline hits were written by interns. You will be wrong 90% of the time.

Peter will pay you $1,000 to popularize a word that describes these phenomena other than ‘virality’.

Video and slides of Peter’s presentation. Sara and Adam’s slides are pretty great, too:

There was another Tools Shootout session at Netroots Nation (#nn12) today. We’re all a bit more exhausted than Thursday’s session (13 of the Newest Political and Civic Tools), but Dan Ancona held it down and showcased another round of shiny new tools. Here are the ones I didn’t cover in the last post:

Democrats traditionally outdid Republicans online until 2010, when Republicans matched the voter file to browser cookies and targeted ads like direct mail. Jim Walsh introduced the Democratic answer: DSPolitical‘s cookie. In addition to giving out blue-frosted cookies all weekend, the tool allows campaigns to target voters online based on their voting record and 42 segments. The result is more accurate and efficient advertising (and probably a pending Filter Bubble nightmare).

Eric Ruben provides an overview Salsa Labs. The founding organization, DemocracyInAction, works with 2,200 organizations, including the AFL-CIO and many other progressive groups. The suite includes mass email tools, donation pages, a CRM, events, advocacy and contact-your-representative tools, and third party plugins.

Marci Harris founded PopVox after years as a congressional staffer. There are two ways to move legislation: move money, or move people. But there’s no good way to measure people. Counting people is hard, Congress only wants to hear from constituents, and Congress is overwhelmed by the messages generated by online tools. Congressional offices have the same number of staffers that they had in the 1970’s.

The voice of the people is diffused and frequently unfocused. A letter asking Congress to Save the Whales is not the same as asking Congress to pass HR 1234 banning whaling ships. PopVox works with Congress to deliver the people’s voice in a clean, organized format. There’s XML tagging and the messages practically sort themselves once they reach congressional offices. Individuals and organizations go through the site or its embeddable widget to support or oppose bills. All positions and counts are mapped publicly on their site. At the moment, their community is 53% Republican and 47% Democrat.

ElectNext (@electnext) is building an eHarmony for voters to find candidates they might support. They translate political data into tools that help create a more informed electorate. If you’re in the political data world today, you have access to tons of information about voters (250 unique data points). But when you flip the equation and look at what the American voter knows, consistently less than half can tell you anything about Congress, candidate positions, and other information. Where’s the average voter’s political database? ElectNext has pulled together 15 million datapoints to determine where over 4,500 candidates stand on issues. They’re live with US Senate, House and presidency and hope to expand to every US election. They also have a widget with issue and voter-candidate matching features.

Jim Pugh of Rebuild the Dream shows us Control Shift Labs, a platform to allow their members to create their own campaigns. It competes with Change.org and Signon.org, also here at the conference. As an organization, Rebuild the Dream is using the self-service campaign platform as a mechanism to identify members within their ranks who are ready to step up and assume a leadership position. This, in my opinion, is a hugely underserved area within online grassroots organizations.

Leif Utne‘s at WareCorp, which runs the SoapBlox blogging platform. It powers 80 political blogs with millions of monthly views across the network. They’ve relaunched SoapBlox.net as a media property that aggregates content. The new technology they’re announcing today is the idea of paying bloggers for content (with 50% of the advertising revenue they receive). You can become a contributor here.

Oh, and I showed off LazyTruth, which is launching imminently. Sign up at LazyTruth.com.

Netroots Nation had a New Tool Shootout session to highlight all of the cool new political tools, sponsored by New Media Ventures.

BlueStateDigital’s QuickDonate tool (now live on BarackObama.com lets your constituents save their payment information for frictionless giving. There’s also a mobile edition that pulls from the same saved credit card information, which prevents the mobile carriers from taking a cut of the donation. Even new users are spared from entering their data on a mobile device. It’s available to any organization already using BSD.

Paul Schreiber, “the TurboVote kid,” makes voting as easy as renting a DVD from Netflix. The US is 138th in voter participation. We vote on Tuesdays and generally make it hard for people to vote. Oregon introduced statewide vote-by-mail. TurboVote uses the internet to make voting as easy as buying a pair of shoes online. If the states are the laboratories of democracy, their registration requirements and forms and websites are the meth labs of democracy, Paul says. Rather than visit crappy state election board websites, you simply use TurboVote’s wizard to register to vote and/or vote by mail. When you’re done with the wizard, it generates the appropriate PDF for you to print and mail. TurboVote also has a mobile site, and partners with Voto Latino, the League of Young Voters, and other such groups.

The Voter Activation Network is working to synchronize its voter records with voters’ online social media profiles. The tool, Social Organizing, will enable organizers to reach people where they already are, rather than interrupting dinner with a phone call. There’s a strong overall trend around social organizing, and letting people bring in their real-world networks is believed to be better for all parties than a randomized call list.

Mike Sager’s working on Repurpose, a system of incentives and frequent flier miles to reward organizers who take action. They’re not just empty gamification points and badges, though; these points will direct the spending of a SuperPAC. You earn your points by doing political organizing work like canvassing, and can then redeem them to help campaigns and adbuys of your choosing.

Stephanie from SignOn.org, a free petition site created by MoveOn.org. All of the petitions created are tested with a segment of MoveOn’s huge email list, and some are further promoted within relevant segments of that list. Petition creators themselves can message the signers about anything except fundraising appeals. They’ve designed sophisticated testing systems for each petition, which is micro-targeted to others based on the petition’s signers, geography, and virality. The end result is that MoveOn is sharing their progressive email list across a wide range of progressive causes.

Tim Lim introduces his Precision Network online advertising targeting system. They can target on a number of electoral, demographic, consumer, and behavioral factors — more here.

The Agenda Project takes on the battle of ideas in American politics. Indices like http://policyexperts.org/ have always been important in national politics. The Agenda Project’s TopWonks project pulls together a stable of solid, rational policy experts all in one place.  TopWonks has a profile for the progressive thinker expert you’re looking for, whether it’s municipal tax policy or developing economies. National news brands have already begun consulting the site.

Rally lets anyone with a cause share their story and raise money. The “cause” here can be a man trying to get his fianceé to move to his city, or saving a community’s church from fiscal insolvency. You can follow causes, which gives them your email address, and donate (Rally takes a 4.5% cut of donations). The system lets you send out email fundraising appeals, and shares analytics with you (donation emails with photos and videos perform better than text-only appeals). They’re also implementing a one-click donate button.

Seth Bannon introduces Amicus, which is looking to solve the problem that most of the communications in the world of social change happens between two strangers. (phonebanks, info@ email accounts, canvassers). Amicus finds your existing Facebook friends and looks for potential matches in the official voter file. Users confirm the matches, and are then asked to contact them. After you work through your list of friends, the tool connects you with friends-of-friends as well, as you still have a much better context for knowing each other than being randomly assigned a phone number. In addition to phonebanking, the system also lets you send emails and mail postcards. On the organization’s admin side of things, you can cut a list based on the target group you’re looking to contact — young women in New Hampshire, for example. Volunteers level up as they complete actions, and group administrators can reassign the weighting of various actions. If calls suddenly become vitally important to the campaign, the admin can assign more points to calls (and so far, volunteers have responded to the re-weighting). AFL-CIO and about ten nonprofits have used the tool.

Amicus demo at the Oct NYTM from Seth Bannon on Vimeo.

Eric Hysen, from Google’s Politics and Elections team, introduces google.com/elections, Google’s main elections hub. Google’s polling place gadget (powered by Voting Information Project data) shows up in Search results whenever people search for “where do I vote” “polling place” and other election-related queries. The gadget is also embeddable with a single line of code, can be customized with pre-populated addresses, and has been featured on many official campaigns’ sites. An API is available to developers, as well. This time around, they’re adding ballot information and voter ID requirements. The goal is to help voters get everything they need to vote from the tool. It appears across Google Search, Maps, and News.

Colin from LoudSauce acknowledges that most of us hate advertising, and says LoudSauce’s goal is to repurpose advertising to make it meaningful for society. Advertising favors large, entrenched, monied interests, and lets them win the attention game. But the internet allows us to transform the medium, which has historically fueled consumption, to fuel civic engagement. The politically engaged are like technology’s early adopters: they jump in early, long before the rest of society. Crowdfunded advertising allows us to reach the laggards.

The anti-consumerist video Story of Stuff, produced in 2007, was a huge win online. But most people across broader society have still never heard of it. They raised money with their supporters online and purchased national TV ads using Google TV Ads, at under $3,000 a spot, and drove many more people to the site. Only 82 donors drove 2 million additional viewers.

Their new features allow people to set up their own media-buying campaigns and activate their personal networks to raise the money to extend the reach of their video. It’s Kickstarter for amateur media. And it’s not limited to small TV buys. You can purchase video ads on MTV, CNN, Current, and YouTube. The Redditors and Upworthies of the world might be interested in this platform. Occupy Wall Street supporters produced 12 Occupy Spots ads, covering Occupy Wall Street, Occupy the Hood, and other organic messages at http://occupyspots.com/. Creative politicos created the Meh. Romney campaign and are seeking donations to bring it to the Republican convention. [LoudSauce is onto something: Facebook is reportedly toying with a similar pay-to-promote feature to allow users to expand the reach of their content across News Feeds].

DemDash is a democracy dashboard to educate activists and voters on candidates and issues. It’s in alpha and currently covers only California politics, but will be expanded to include information from the Ballot Information Project.

John Brougher talks about NationBuilder, a complete suite of well-designed organizing and activist tools available for a low monthly subscription fee. They’ve been focused on scalability since day one, resulting in the low $20 / month (and up) cost.

Christie George introduces New Media Ventures, a fund investing in progressive political and civic startups. They support nonprofits as well as for-profits, but have noticed a lack of funding in the nonprofit space for new ideas. So, this summer they’re issuing an open call to nonprofit entrepreneurs using technology to creative progressive political change. Their three criteria are that your venture be scalable, revenue generating with a sustainable business model, and creating progressive political change. They’ll be awarding grants of $25,000. Follow @newmediaventure and @christiegeorge.

Bonus tool! via Nick Grossman: Thunderclap lets you coordinate mass amplification of the same message. Right now it works by asking people to pledge to retweet, but the same strategy could work to juice YouTube views and other social media sites. I’ve actually heard from unscrupulous commercial marketers who have gamed YouTube’s top video playlists’ algorithms, to the point that they can use Mechanical Turk to get a video onto the trending videos lists, where the video then gains many, many more organic views. Thunderclap could be the grassroots version of this tactic. Although, if you’re not going to get enough amplification of the message to break the Top Whatever lists threshold, it might be better for a campaign to spread the amplification out over a period of time than to do it all at once.