Jeffrey Zeldman has an idea.

Just as they once united to stamp out cigarette advertising, radio and TV stations and advertisers must get together and agree that false statements in political advertisements will not be tolerated. If you run a political ad that proves to be a lie, your network will pay a steep fine, and the advertiser will pay an even steeper one.

He prefaces his idea with this:

So here’s my idea. One that could actually work, if America’s networks remember they are Americans first, revenue seekers second. (emphasis mine)

That’s a big “if,” Jeffrey! But the good news is, I don’t think it’s a necessary one. It is we as consumers who grant these networks the right to exist by watching them. If we want them to stop running untruthful ads, we should coordinate our influence as consumers to create an incentive for them to stop.

What if we all promise to watch all election coverage from the first network that pledges to turn away ads that FactCheck rates as dishonest?

If someone starts this campaign on The Point, I’ll join it in a heartbeat.

-Filed in Ideas, The Point

Next Monday, I’ll be speaking about activism and The Point at the Chicago New Media Summit. CNMS is billing itself as “Chicago’s TED,” which I guess means I have to wear a t-shirt and use swear words. Anyway, I’m thrilled to be part of an event that’s highlighting so much of the exciting work happening in here in Chicago. I’m especially looking forward to (in chronological order) Jason Fried(37 Signals), Ross Kimbarovsky & Mike Samson(CrowdSPRING), and Bumper Carroll(Second City), whose voice-over work is featured in our introductory animatics.

Here’s what I’ll be talking about:

The Internet has a proven ability to shift the balance of power between individuals and organizations. But for online activism to reach its full potential, we need to do more than port offline tactics to the Web. We must step back, revisit the challenges of collective action, and consider what the Web offers that can help overcome them. Andrew Mason explores what the world could look like in five years with tools like The Point.

It’s sure to be a stimulating couple of days - register here.

-Filed in News, The Point

Background: An extremely anticipated computer game called Spore shipped this week, albeit with a copy protection scheme (called “DRM”) that ideologically chafed many techies.

Now that Spore is released, how are gamers fighting back? By obliterating Spore’s all-important Amazon rating with an onslaught of 1-star reviews.

This is an wonderful case study in online collective action (I don’t know how it emerged, let me know if you do). I’m fascinated to see where it goes. If 1,000 consumers can influence a seemingly inevitable smash like Spore, imagine what they could do to a product preceded by a more fragile reputation?

Most companies would rather please their customers than endure a beating like this, and The Point is the perfect way to provide that option. For example, this could have been an ultimatum campaign on The Point: “Spore should loosen their DRM restrictions or else we will leave 1-star reviews on Amazon if 1,000 people join.” Few products can afford to choose the thousand 1-stars.

While one can imagine this tactic being repeated to address other consumer grievances, I fear popularity could reduce its efficacy. Reviews are still fundamentally a PR tactic, not a direct economic incentive to change. And so, as the novelty of the approach fades, so may its potency. Additionally, businesses could adapt to block this tactic, perhaps by pressuring Amazon to regulate reviews.

Don’t get me wrong - I think this is great and can’t wait to see what happens. But sustainable, predictable, repeatable tactics for influencing change must create a rational economic incentive by leveraging the consumer’s power to buy (or not to buy).

-Filed in Case Studies, Ideas, The Point

Over the past few months, we’ve been beavering away on the 1.0 version of The Point, making campaigns more flexible, improving the visual design, boosting performance, and a whole host of other improvements.

Now that we’ve delivered our 1.0 and are on a more steady schedule of delivering new features and improvements, we’ll be announcing what we’re up to here on the blog.  We’re just getting started - we have a lot of great stuff in the works!

Our aim is to release improvements to the site every week, some big, some small. Here are some highlights of what we’ve delivered in the past few weeks:

Embeddable Campaign Widget

Anyone can now embed a widget into their blog or website that allows people to join a campaign directly from there.  Today, the widget can be used for campaigns that aren’t raising money, but this week we’ll be delivering an update to allow people to join fundraisers as well.

Related Campaigns

We now show you a list of related campaigns in the left sidebar of the main campaign page, helping you find other campaigns that you might be interested in checking out.  Relationships are based on similarities among campaigns such as the same organizer, a high number of the same members or tags, etc.

Follow Campaign Discussion

You can now follow a topic or the entire discussion within a campaign.  If you turn on ‘Follow’ for a topic, you’ll get an email for all new posts to that topic.  If you turn on ‘Follow’ for the campaign discussion, you’ll get an email for any new topic that’s created or any new post.  You can turn ‘Follow’ off at any time with a single click, or from a link in any of the email that you get.

If you’re the organizer of a campaign, you’ll automatically be set up to ‘Follow’ the discussion as a convenience.

Invite People to a Campaign from your Email Address Book

The campaign invitation page now has an option to send invites to anyone in your Yahoo!, GMail, Outlook, AOL or Plaxo address book.  We never ever see nor save any of your email account information.

-Filed in News, The Point

When I help people create campaigns on The Point, the first question I ask is, “what’s blocking a solution?” In other words, who or what is stopping the problem from going away? The answer to this question is critical to determining the best approach. I divide blocks into two categories.

Block Type #1: Them (people and organizations)

At times, it’s in someone’s best interest for a problem to persist. Companies often consider it in their best interest to skimp on employee benefits, for example. It’s in the best interest of my upstairs neighbor to practice the piano at 11pm.

Campaigns on The Point are modeled specifically to break blocks like this, by manufacturing the tipping point that makes it in the block’s best interest to get out of the way. In the above example, consumers might organize a boycott against a company that only begins once enough people join (the tipping point) such that the loss of them as customers will cost more than offering benefits to their employees. Or they might offer a carrot instead of a stick, by creating a campaign pledging business to a company that provides exceptional benefits.

Block Type #2: Us (you, me, and everybody)

Certain problems are solved by getting people educated. To reduce the spread of sexually transmitted diseases, for example, we need to be aware of their existence and understand how to prevent them.

While the Web has a proven potential to quickly and cheaply spread information, often those most affected by these problems aren’t online. And I don’t know about you, but when I’m online, I’d way rather be reading about video games than STDs.

So I suggest finding a way to turn an “us” block into “them.” Identify an organization that can help increase awareness, and target a campaign at whatever is blocking them from doing so.

Why I bring this up

While these block categories aren’t a strict dichotomy, thinking about your problem this way helps determine the best tools for solving your problem. And more importantly, it moves us beyond blunt “catch-all” tools like petitions or letter writing campaigns, the potency of which are often at the mercy of PR.

Identify your block, and you’ll find many ways to leverage the power of individuals above and beyond raising a stink.

-Filed in Tactics, The Point

For the last several months, Alex Steed used Make Something Happen to explore technology’s impact on collective action. We’ve decided try something a little different. From now on, Make Something Happen will highlight breaking opportunities for e-action, while blog.thepoint.com will focus on The Point and its impact on collective action.

Why the new format for Make Something Happen?

By the time news that inspires action hits the front page, the opportunity to leverage the new wave of innovative tools for self-organizing has passed. By highlighting opportunities for grassroots action at their inception, Make Something Happen will spark a discussion about the best way to use these tools, and hopefully help increase their adoption.

We will scour the Web in search of golden opportunities, and suggest action that can take place on The Point and elsewhere. We invite you to comment, make suggestions, and of course, take action yourself.

We expect to post somewhere between 5 - 20 “action opportunities” each day, segmented into categories. We’ll start out focused on a few categories, and expand on demand.

Consider Make Something Happen your participation clearing-house. We link important news before it explodes, then suggest ways to turn your desires and frustrations into a movement.

We need your help.

This is an experiment; we need your help to make it work. Here’s what you can do:

• Contribute to the discussion. We’ll take smarter action when we put our heads together.
• Send us tips - links to stories and sites we should be watching.
• Give us feedback - is this format useful? What categories would you like to see? Are the posts appropriately focused?

Paperwork

• All of the old posts now reside at blog.thepoint.com.
• If you are an RSS subscriber, your subscription will be ported over to blog.thepoint.com.
• Here’s the RSS feed for the new Make Something Happen.
• Our community manager Aaron With’s band volcano! played their CD release show last night at The Hideout. Make sure you pick up their new CD, paperwork.

-Filed in Uncategorized