In Part 1 of “How Does RAN Rank As An Irregular Competitor?,” you and I took a peek at the Rainforest Action Network’s (RAN) Twitter strategy and found that it was somewhat lacking. In Part 2 of this post series, we examined the Facebook strategy of RAN and found that it was quite a bit better than their Twitter approach, but that their Facebook initiative wasn’t perfect. If you haven’t yet read either, or both, of those posts, and you would like to do so prior to reading this post, then just click here for Part 1 and here for Part 2.
Let’s Analyze the “Social Media Day of Action”
Today you and I will discuss the RAN Social Media Day of Action (Thursday, February 18, 2010) which was discovered during the research described in Part 2. We saw in Part 2 that the Social Media Day of Action was an online direct action against JP Morgan Chase and that RAN encouraged their fans to make various forms of protest via the social web.
As shown in Part 2, some of those forms of protest as suggested by RAN, on a page at their main website, were:
1.Update your facebook status with this message: “Chase is bankrolling the destruction of American mountains for coal. End mountaintop removal and PUT CHASE ON THE RUN. Take action today at DirtyMoney.org.
2. Upload this Chase brand jam image to your Facebook picture (image to the left)” [Richard's Note: I have not included that image in this post.]
3. Brand jam Chase’s Facebook page “Chase Community Giving.” (follow this link) [Richard's Note: I have not included that link in this post.]
4. Tweet this message: #Chase is bankrolling the destruction of American mountains. Take action at DirtyMoney.org. #coal #mtr #RAN Please RT.
5. Upload the Chase brand jam image to Flickr (image to the left) [Richard's Note: I have not included that image in this post.]
6.Blog the social media day of action
Also as discussed in Part 2, RAN posted some of the results of these actions:
- RAN and allies Tweeted to over 330,000 people
- RAN and allies touched 180,000 people on Facebook
- had over 30 unique blogs posted, including posts on Huffington Post, Treehugger and Grist
- had 3,000 people “defriend” the Chase Community Giving Facebook fan page
- reports of dozens of people cancelling their Chase credit cards and bank accounts.
- one Appalachian activist started a “Boycott Chase” Facebook group.
What you and I are going to talk about now is the results of the six suggested forms of protest, as shown above, and we are also going to check, where possible, the veracity of their result claims.
Facebook Status Updates
Shown above as #1 in the forms of protest list, RAN asked supporters to update their Facebook status with the phrase “Chase is bankrolling the destruction of American mountains for coal, etc.” A simple Google search of that passage, performed on February 23, 2010, returned 26 results. Most of those results were updates from Facebook fan pages. The fan pages were those belonging, primarily, to organizations similar to RAN (e.g., the Waterkeeper Alliance, Greenpeace, TreeHugger.) Now, please be aware that, generally, Facebook is a closed system to search engines. Personal Facebook page updates don’t appear in Google search results. But fan pages are not part of the Facebook closed system. So, Facebook fan pages will appear in search engine results.
Finding, at most, 26 fan page updates containing the passage RAN requested to be updated in Facebook isn’t very impressive, and it doesn’t lend a lot of credence to RAN’s claim, as shown above in their results list, “RAN and allies touched 180,000 people on Facebook.” Yes, Google won’t show the personal Facebook pages of those “touched” 180,000 people. But the sample of only 26 fan pages seems to stretch the credulity of the 180,000 claim. And anyway, what does “touched” mean?
Does “touched” mean that 180,000 Facebookers posted that passage as requested? Does “touched” mean that 180,000 Facebookers saw status updates from their Facebook friends which contained the passage? And if so, did those 180,000 Facebookers read the passage? Comment on it? “Like” it? The RAN claim is vague and unverifiable. Therefore, it’s veracity is questionable.
Similarly with their second suggestion, #2 in the forms of protest list, to upload the Chase brand jam to the Facebooker’s image profile, the verification problem is the same as that noted for the status updating of the passage. So, I won’t be able to examine action #2, continuing to place the veracity of their 180,000 result claim in question.
Brand Jamming and Defriending
RAN’s third suggestion, #3 in the forms of protest list, to brand jam the “Chase Community Giving” Facebook fan page, can be analyzed. Presumably, RAN meant for its RAN fans to become a fan of the Chase Community Giving page and then send a brand jammed logo image to the wall of that fan page. I assume that this brand jammed image would also be the one referred to in suggested action #5, as shown in the forms of protest list above. I won’t be showing that brand jammed image here in this post, but if you like you may view it by clicking through on this link. (That image was viewable via that link as of February 24, 2010. If the image is no longer on that page, you may wish to try this link.) So, now let’s go to the Chase Community Giving fan page to see what we find.
First, I must make a comment here regarding the appropriateness of this tactic. Perhaps you feel the same way. The Chase Community Giving fan page is a place on Facebook where interested parties would cast a vote for their favorite charity to receive a share of $5 million that JP Morgan Chase will donate. Brand jamming such a philanthropic effort, regardless of what anyone may think of any financing of mountaintop removal, is a highly inappropriate approach to protest. The Chase Community Giving initiative is not the financing arm of the company, and defacing that fan page would be an act of very low character. But even if someone was inclined to do so, I am not so sure that they could have.
On February 24, 2010, when I visited the Chase Community Giving fan page on Facebook, I found no indication of any brand jamming on the Facebook Wall of that fan page. Neither did I find any indication of brand jamming anywhere else on that Facebook fan page site. It could be that Chase may have set the fan page so that no fan posting could occur. But when I visited the fan page wall, the most recent posting from Chase was dated January 27. And that January 27 posting indicated that the charitable voting had concluded, that the funds had been awarded to the charities, and that the functionality of the fan page had been closed. This was three weeks before the Social Media Day of Action. How could anyone, even if they were so inclined, brand jam the fan page when it was essentially closed three weeks prior? Didn’t RAN know this?
As for the RAN claim of 3,000 fans “defriending” the Chase Community Giving page, when I visited the page there were approximately 2 million fans shown. If only 3,000 people “defriended” or “defanned” the page, that change would represent an attrition rate of only about 15/100ths of one percent. This is a change that is probably statistically insignificant and would seem to be an action that is largely meaningless. What could JP Morgan Chase, or any other observer, interpret from this level of attrition? Likely, not much.
Tweeting, Flickr, & Blogging
Let’s turn now to a brief analysis of RAN’s suggested forms of protest in numbers 4, 5, and 6, as shown above.
Regarding #4, the re-tweet of the message “#Chase is bankrolling the destruction of American mountains. Take action at DirtyMoney.org. #coal #mtr #RAN Please RT.,” I searched at search.twitter.com for the phrase “Chase is bankrolling the destruction of American mountains.” I selected the advanced search tab and chose the “all of these words” option. The results given were 8 pages of 50 re-tweet search results on each page, meaning that there was a total of 400 re-tweets. The oldest of those results were from February 18, meaning that these re-tweets did not commence before the Social Media Day of Action, February 18.
This number of 400 re-tweets might seem small on the surface, but of course network effects are in play here. RAN’s claim of they and their “allies” tweeting to over 330,000 people, as shown in the claim list above, is plausible. To reach this number of 330,000, each of the re-tweeters would need an average of only 825 followers. A follower level of 800, or more, is common among many Twitters in the Twitterverse.
With regard to protest form #5, on February 25, 2010, I searched Flickr.com. Following are the search terms I used to find the Chase brand jams, suggested by RAN as shown in the forms of protest list from above, and the results for each search string:
- “Chase brand jam” – 0
- “Chase blows up mountains.” – 0
- “Dirtymoney.org” – 1,256 results, but none contained the Chase brand jam
- “mountain top removal” – 3 of 653 results contained the Chase brand jam
- “mountaintop removal” – 12 of 1,666 results contained the Chase brand jam
- “mtr” – 13 of 155 results contained the Chase brand jam (I limited this search by date.)
So, by using search terms that were commonly associated with the Chase brand jam request, as per RAN’s own Social Media Day of Action page, only 28 Chase brand jams were found on Flickr.com. Not very impressive.
We now come to protest form #6, blogging. A quick search at blogsearch.google.com resulted in 135 references for the term “Social Media Day of Action.” That search was set for “all dates.” Based on these findings, the RAN result claim of “over 30 unique blogs posted” is likely accurate, but with such a low number it remains unimpressive.
Miscellaneous
Regarding RAN’s last two claims of “dozens of people cancelling their Chase credit cards and bank accounts” and “one Appalachian activist started a ‘Boycott Chase’ Facebook group,” these actions were not requested by RAN in their forms of protest list as shown above. Although these actions are direct, their effects would appear to be limited.
Conclusion
As mentioned above, RAN’s Facebook effort for the Social Media Day of Action is largely unverifiable, leaving their claimed results questionable. So on this tactic, I can’t really award many, or any, points to them toward their Irregular Competitor Threat Index ranking. However, I will subtract some points based on the effort to deface the Facebook fan page of a charitable undertaking. Such tactics are “bush league” and are potentially counter-productive for the party undertaking them.
Concerning the tweeting, I’ll say that it’s likely that they did achieve what they claimed, and a reach of over 300,000 isn’t bad. But where they really failed to shine was in their Flickr and blogging efforts as we just discussed a few paragraphs ago.
Taking into consideration everything you and I discussed in all three parts of this article, I will set the overall Irregular Competitor Threat Index ranking for RAN at “5.”
