Rachel Weidinger's blog

We were born to share.

Rachel Weidinger — Fri, 15 Mar 2013 16:25:09 +0000

As we think about the glorious future of Upwell, we're talking to lots of people who have helped shape our path over the past two years. It's inspiring to see how abstract concepts have turned into daily practices, some measurable in graphs and some measured in far less 2D ways.

We're thinking a lot about sharing this week.

One of the posters we look at every day in the Upwell office.

Though we think about sharing and open access all the time, we haven't gathered those thoughts in one post. Here's a first draft of the Upwell Manifesto of Sharing.

We're on the big Team Ocean. Ray, who has several national medals in rowing, confirms our position on the team is most similar to coxswain. We are happy to serve as the boat servant, and it feels accurate to say we're guiding navigation and steering, and encouraging our team members to work together and pull hard. This is a sports metaphor I get.
Our work should be accessible to anyone in the sector. Though we can't fly around to everyone's office and personally do campaign consulting, we do it several times a week on the phone or by skype. To date, we do it for free. When we learn something that feels like an emergent best practice, we share it on our blog, and at every speaking opportunity. We also know that busy shark evangelists and social media managers don't have the luxury of digging through big reports and digesting graphs based on newly evolved methodologies. We try to make access both available and *possible* by quickly packaging the gems.
This isn't our sandbox. We surface and test models to share. Awesome ocean communications were underway long before we arrived on the scene. We're grateful for that. Lots of people play in this sandbox.
We curate best practices, too. And we bring them back from our hunts in the wild, tidily packaged, to big Team Ocean. Upworthy has done some amazing work in the past year. We didn't invent image macros. There are lots of good tactics about, but it's hard to know which are best.
Whenever we can, we teach for free. In the last few months this has included workshops at the Greenpeace Digital Mobilisation Skill Share, SXSW Interactive (on Nonprofit Times, Beth Kanter's blog), NTC (upcoming), Personal Democracy Forum (upcoming), Web of Change, a recent meeting convened by Omidyar's Democracy Fund, and many more. Budgets are tight, so having travel covered really helps. We'll give up our weekends to teach for free. We believe the sector needs this knowledge that much.
The ocean is our client. Part of what this means to us is that we should help support all of the orgs and evangelists who are helping make our client famous. We can't give money, but we can share skills and send attention.
Sharing models makes them stronger. We can only do so much testing ourselves. Releasing models into the wild means we can get better, faster, if others test the models with us.
We model an architecture of transparency. It doesn't help anyone for us to dump our files in the street. What does help is a considered, well-designed openness.
Resources are abundant. We have everything we need to acchieve our conservation goals, we just need to get it into the right basket. Competition, siloes and secrecy slow progress.
We've shared our work from the beginning. For a while we posted a soul-baring critique of every single campaign we did every single week. Ultimately, we dropped that practice because it didn't scale to produce narrative reports. We graph it now.
The intern thinks we're exactly like a cleaner wrasse. Details to follow, upon further marine biology research.
We choose appropriate licenses, and build sharing platforms. Getting the structure of sharing right matters. Hooray for foundation reports with Creative Commons licenses. And funders who respect sharing. And staff who breaks down a 160-page PDF into digestable blog posts - which we tweet about and go to lengths to cross-post.

I'm sure there are elements of our sharing that I've failed to record here. We'll be reflecting more on this and revising as we gain clarity. Speaking of which, why and how do you share?

Son of Sharkinar: More Defending Sharks Online During Shark Week

Rachel Weidinger — Thu, 09 Aug 2012 19:08:27 +0000

We heard your requests, and scheduled more time this week to share Shark Week campaigns, recruit evangelists, and ask for help. Son of Sharkinar is on the books. Join fellow shark heroes this Friday, August 10 at 11am PST/ 2pm EST. Register here, and invite your colleagues. The 10 minute State of the Shark briefing will be at the end of the call so you can hear it.

Son of Sharkinar
Friday, August 10 at 11am PST/ 2pm EST.
Register here

Our first sharkinar was a wild success, with 26 online shark fanatics attending. A wide smattering of shark advocate NGOs attended.

Shark lovers who we love even more for registering for the first Sharkinar.

Shark Social Media Backchannel

As participants requested on the call, we’ve set up a listserv backchannel for you: the Shark Social Media Backchannel. This email group can serve as a backchannel among shark conservationists and enthusiasts active on social media. You know, to make sharks more famous on the internets. You should have already recieved an invite, if not please email shark-backchannel+subscribe@googlegroups.com and we’ll get you right in.

State of the Shark Online

Aaron’s briefing is captured in this blog post. Slides are here. And you can listen to it, beginning at minute 8:01, in the recording linked here. The topline for you online shark-talkers:

Shark Week is the biggest single spike in the online shark conversation for the entire year.
The most popular theme for shark content and sentiment is Celebratory. People think sharks are awesome. (They are!)
The most popular Shark Week hashtag is #SHARKWEEK
If you're involved in the online shark conversation and want to reach a bigger, broader audience, Shark Week is an incredible opportunity to do so.
Follow the top influencers, start Tweeting and Facebooking, and join the conversation!Are you a Finfluencer?

Finfluencers. It’s a bad pun, we know. Do you tweet about sharks? Do you have a Facebook page on which you post assorted sharkanalia? Are you part of an online engagement campaign in which you interact with followers and others? Are you, in short, a shark influencer? Do you know others who might be? We compiled our own list of influencers who we’ve identified; do you have any other suggestions? Anyone you think is missing? Please let us know. And follow them.

How’s that Toolkit Coming?

A draft of our Shark Week Toolkit is posted here. We're adding the most liquid social content, composing shark myth-busting resources, and compiling compelling Shark Week campaigns from the conservation community. Check it out and send us your tips: tips@upwell.us.

But I Want Every Last Sharkinar Detail

No problem. We captured it all and organized it for you.

Hang out with fellow shark pals online. Follow The Sharkinar Twitter List.
Live notes from the Sharkinar: http://bit.ly/sharkinarnotes
Sharkinar Recording

Thanks for doing the good work. We can’t wait to run into you more in the depths of the internet.

Finally, if you need a Sharpie drawing for your Shark Week campaign, just let me know and I’ll make you as many awkward drawings of sharks as you need. Thanks for the kind words, Michelle:

I'm really appreciating the hand-drawn graphics in the #sharkinar from @upwell_us. MORE SHARKS!
— Michelle Cassidy (@ilechelm) August 7, 2012

A #sharkweek Sharkinar is so much more delightful than a webinar

Rachel Weidinger — Tue, 07 Aug 2012 16:22:20 +0000

This morning, we're convening some of the top social minds in sharkiness to talk #sharkweek. THE SHARKINAR IS UPON US.

Defending Sharks Online During Shark Week

If you talk about sharks online, please join the crew of activists, scientists, bloggers, journalists, super-tweeters, and nonprofits at 11am PST/ 2pm EST to discuss how we can change the Shark Week online conversation together.  

During the sharkinar we’ll: 
   •   Share Upwell’s “State of the Shark” conversation, and our online shark conversation baseline data
   •   Discuss your Shark Week plans, and provide resources to support each other’s campaigns
   •   Provide tips for increasing the volume of shark conservation mentions online

Register now for the Sharkinar.

Sharkinar resource round up

Follow The Sharkinar Twitter List
Live notes from the Sharkinar: http://bit.ly/sharkinarnotes
Upwell's Shark Week Toolkit (link to come)
State of the Shark Online (slides, recording and blog post to come)
Top Shark Influencers
Sharkinar Recording (link to come)

Australian Marine Reserves Drive Spike in Online Attention to MPAs

Rachel Weidinger — Fri, 22 Jun 2012 01:44:57 +0000

Australia announced last week that it would establish “the world's largest network of marine reserves, which will ring the country and cover more than 3 million square kilometres of waters to protect reefs and marine life. … The massive expansion of marine reserves [will] include key waters such as the Coral Sea and pygmy blue whale habitats off the southern coast of Western Australia.”

The announcement resulted in a significant spike in the online conversation about MPAs, as you can see below. The conversation about MPAs is generally pretty quiet with about 200 social mentions a day, so a spike to 2,000 is pretty big.

Social mentions June 5-19, 2012 for Upwell's MPA keyword set (blue) and Australian Marine Reserves (orange.)

Looking Back at World Oceans Day

Rachel Weidinger — Thu, 21 Jun 2012 19:25:44 +0000

World Oceans Day was June 8, and a multitude of organizations used the date to launch initiatives and awareness campaigns. IUCN launched a Marine World Heritage App for iPhones; MPAtlas launched; Smithsonian’s Ocean Portal hosted a live webcast (now archived) featuring Sylvia Earle; and Alexandra Cousteau broadcast a message from on board an Oceana vessel in the Baltic. Brussels’ famous Mannekin-Pis had a makeover for the day, as did New York’s Empire State Building. More interactively, several local organizations conducted beach clean-up programs, and 1World1Ocean organized a contest for students aged 12-18 explaining what the ocean means to them.

The Twitter hashtag #worldoceansday proved successful - perhaps surprisingly so - in moving the dial in online mentions and coverage of ocean issues, as this graph shows:

Social mentions in the U.S. May 18- June 15, 2012 for the Upwell "ocean" Keyword set (teal blue) , World Oceans Day (dark blue), and #worldoceansday (pale blue)

The 95,481 mentions of ocean on June 8 (23,554 of which were mentions of World Oceans Day) represented an impressive 41 percent increase over the average daily volume for the month of 67,708. “!!!” editorializes Upwell’s Aaron Muszalski

Take a minute to send a thank you email to the Ocean Project for kicking off this impressive effort. We’ll make it easy for you, email awesome World Oceans Day Coordinator Alyssa Isakower right now or tweet her thanks with tremendous ease.

Talking about #endfossilfuelsubsidies? Keep it up. (Updated)

Rachel Weidinger — Tue, 19 Jun 2012 00:07:59 +0000

Social mentions in the U.S. June 16-18, 2012 for the Upwell "ocean" Keyword set (blue) and #EndFossilFuelSubsidies (orange)

Upwell's Network Strategist Aaron Muszalski says, "#endfossifuelsubsidies is getting the same amount of social mentions now as the ocean. Which is pretty awesome."

Why is this happening?

From Jamie Henn at 350.org:

Engineering the Twitterstorm took days of advanced planning. 350.org recruited over 5,000 people to join a core "Twitter Team" designed to drive traffic at key moments throughout the day, as well as target celebrities with large twitter followings and key politicians. For over a week, people have been signing up at endfossilfuelsubsidies.org to get updates on the storm and get ready for the day of action.

We pay rather a lot of attention to how many people are talking about the ocean here at Upwell. The #EndFossilFuelSubsidies trend is likely (and predictably) falling off right now because our east coast pals are logging off for the evening. It could pick up again tomorrow. You, for example, could cause it to pick up tomorrow.

From the League of Conservation Voters:

Tweets with the hashtag #endfossilfuelsubsidies will be beamed onto global landmarks in Sydney, New Delhi, London, Rio and other locations. An offline petition for the campaign has already collected over a million signatures, and a Facebook event for the storm has drawn over 2,600 attendees.

From Jamie Henn at 350.org:

A coordinated campaign to promote the hashtag #endfossilfuelsubsidies during the Rio+20 Earth Summit has taken the internet by storm today.
The online action began at 08:00 GMT and quickly skyrocketed to the #2 trend on Twitter worldwide. As sun rose in the United States, #endfossilfuelsubsidies was still trending at #3 across the country. By evening in Australia, as activists projected tweets at the Sydney Opera House, the hashtag was trending at #2.

As a team that cares about #oceanacidification, we say go team go!

Update June 19, 2012

Social mentions in the U.S. June 16-19, 2012 for the Upwell "ocean" Keyword set (blue) and #EndFossilFuelSubsidies (orange)

The latest analysis shows nice focus through the end of the 24 hour Twitter storm. Big spike around 6pm PST to close out June 18, and a respectable bump that same evening at 8 pm.

Upwell Team Uniforms

Rachel Weidinger — Thu, 07 Jun 2012 15:35:28 +0000

It may be some time before all of the components of our Team Upwell equipment are sourced. For now, all we've found is our team Adidas, and naturally they're out of stock. The outfitting of Team Zissou has many inspiring components, and the shoes are no exception. Does anyone have a gold foil alpabet stamp we can borrow? We just need U, P, W, E, and L. Thanks.

We do not, however, find inspiration in the Team Zissou policies covering the issuing of firearms. Our summer intern program, now accepting applications, is entirely Glock free. Send us all your sea-loving, internet-whiz pals today: http://www.upwell.us/summer-internship

Marketing Toolkit for World Oceans Day

Rachel Weidinger — Tue, 05 Jun 2012 13:44:04 +0000

Alyssa at The Ocean Project has created a handy Marketing Toolkit for World Oceans Day, June 8, 2012. Targeted at communications staff, bloggers, journalists and social media evangelists, it catalogues a useful body of resources. Hop over to check it out now, and make your participation in World Oceans Day easy. Here are a few highlights from the toolkit:

Facebook Timeline Cover

Sample tweet:

Did you know June 8th is World Oceans Day? #WorldOceansDay

Sample articles for bloggers:

World Turtle Day + Robot Fish Police + More: Sea Signals for the week of May 20, 2012

Rachel Weidinger — Thu, 31 May 2012 01:30:21 +0000

It was a busy week at Upwell: the end of fish, seafood and slaves, mercury in dolphins from power plants, our plasticized ocean, robot fish police, robot boats, Upwell overcomes Facebook insecurity and asks for friends, and World Turtle Day.

The End of Fish, In One Chart

On Sunday, May 20th, “The End of Fish, In One Chart,” was published on The Washington Post’s WONKBLOG by Ezra Klein.

Amplification & Reaction

When we looked at how the story was moving on Monday, May 21st, it seemed like it already had momentum in the marine conservation Twitter community, so we decided to reach out to a different audience: vegetarians and vegans. We sent a tweet to a vegan magazine with a large Twitter following, and its senior editor. The magazine RT’d the story to its 36,000 + followers.

We also shared the link via Twitter with a sustainable seafood cookbook author to ask for her thoughts about it, and had a 2-tweet conversation.

We Learned

We’re wondering if people who write about food are an especially active online community.

Did Slaves Catch Your Seafood?

On Monday, May 21st, Salon.com ran the article, “Did Slaves Catch Your Seafood?” about how, “Thailand, a major source of fish imported to the US, depends on forced labor for its product.”

Amplification & Reaction

Thinking that this might be a story that the human trafficking community would want to share, we tweeted the story to four trafficking advocates with large Twitter followings. Unfortunately, they didn’t RT story, and the number of clicks to the story link were minimal.

We Learned

If future stories come up about human trafficking and seafood, it might be more effective to reach out to advocates who have a smaller twitter following, or to combine Twitter outreach with email.

Mercury in Dolphins Higher Downwind of Power Plants

On Monday, May 21st, ScienceDaily posted, “Mercury in Dolphins Higher Downwind of Power Plants,” about a Johns Hopkins University study comparing the level of toxins in wild and captive dolphins.

Amplification & Reaction

We tweeted three dolphin-related organizations, and one nonprofit that covers a range of environmental issues to make sure that they saw the piece. The dolphin-related orgs didn’t respond, but the general environmental one RT’d its 18,500 + followers.

We Learned

Our insight as to why the general environmental nonprofit RT’d the link, and the dolphin-related orgs did not, is that viewing its Twitter history shows that it shares a variety of links from different sources regularly.

Research ship finds the world's oceans are 'plasticized'

On Tuesday, May 22nd, CNN published the story, “Research ship finds that world’s oceans are ‘plasticized,’” about how an expedition of environmentalists discoved that the pervasiveness of plastic in the ocean extends beyond the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.

In spite of this discouraing news, a handful of encouraging plastic-related stories had also been shared recently:

Hawaii Becomes the First State in the U.S. to Ban Plastic Bags! | Surfrider Foundation
Time has come to ban plastic grocery bags in Los Angeles | latimes.com
Plastic Pollution: How You Can Stop Our Environmental Menace | Huffington Post

Amplification & Reaction

Because the CNN story was so disheartening, we decided to try sharing it within an Ocean Plastic Solutions Storify that included links to the positive stories (above) as well as links to:

Surfrider Foundation’s Pledge to Rise Above Plastic on Causes.com
Plastic Pollution Coalition

We tweeted five of the sources mentioned in the story to let them know that they were included in the Storify. We also tweeted three bloggers who write about ocean plastic, and asked them for other ocean plastic solution story ideas.

The sources mentioned in the Storify did not share it, but the bloggers all responded via Twitter, or email. One let us know (the next day) that Los Angeles City passed its ban on plastic bags!

We Learned

Even though the Storify didn’t receive as many hits as our first Storify, it did help to build relationships with bloggers who are passionate about ocean plastic issues.
Asking questions can be a wonderful way to engage with folks on Twitter
Always put an image in your Storify header!

Robot Fish ‘Police’ the Oceans

On Tuesday, May 22, 2012, BBC news published “Robotic fish to patrol for pollution in harbours,” a story detailing the possibilities of using a robotic fish to patrol waters and sense pollution.

Amplification & Reaction

Our tracking showed a fair amount of online conversation about the story, but little among ocean and water advocacy groups. To spur conversation, we reached out to organizations focused on ocean and water pollution issues on Twitter and asked the question “Which waters would you patrol?”

Our tweet was retweeted three times and favorited twice, but our campaign’s overall impact on amplifying the story and conversation amongst the target group was minor.

We Learned

This campaign was started in the evening pacific time and performed comparably to similar twitter-focused micro-campaigns launched during normal business hours. It was also the second campaign in which we asked a question to spur conversation (see Endangered Species Day) with little direct response to the question asked.

Robot Boats

On May 23 Wired’s Gadget Lab published “Robot Boats Survive Epic Voyage Across the Pacific – So Far,” tracking the voyage of wave-powered-data-gathering-remote-controlled boats from San Francisco to Hawaii.

Amplification & Reaction

The story’s author, Brian Lam, asked for Upwell’s help promoting the piece – at the time there was little online conversation about the story. In reading the article, we noticed a very interesting piece of information that was not obvious in the existing online conversation – the data gathered by the robot boats is available to the public for free. We decided to reach out via Twitter and Facebook to organizations interested in ocean data collection with a message that emphasized the data angle of the story. Three of seven organizations contacted retweeted or commented on our Facebook posts. One organization and one follower of another organization favorite out tweet.

We Learned

This campaign was also primarily executed in the evening, and performed comparable to other campaigns, indicating that time of day may not be as important as we’d thought.

World Turtle Day Pinterest Board

May 23rd was World Turtle Day!

Amplification & Reaction

After our positive experience with the Goliath Grouper Pinterest Board, we decided to create a World Turtle Day Pinterest Board that included photos of turtles from marine conservation organizations’ sites that we saw were already discussing World Turtle Day, and photos from ocean organizations’ Pinterest Boards.

We created a custom bitly URL http://bit.ly/turtlesonpinterest, and shared the Board with 11 of the organizations whose photos were featured on our World Turtle Day Pinterest Board.

According to bitly, the board as of last week received 49 clicks from 5 countries (United States, Venezuela, Canada, Germany, and Costa Rica) + “other.” It also had 18 re-pins of images, 5 likes of images, and 10 followers.

Our tweets were RT’d 5 times, replied to 9 times, and favorited two times.

We Learned

Create a custom bitly URL
Pin photos from sources that you want viewers to click and read, in our case, ocean org’s sites
Re-pin from Boards that you want your viewers to click back to, in our case, ocean org’s Boards
Let the sources of your pins know that you have pinned their images via Twitter
Pinterest is fun!

Upwell Facebook Page: Like Us!

In order to access Insights for the Upwell Facebook Page, we need 30 likes.

Amplification & Reaction

Because we’re ramping up to amplify World Ocean Day stories, we tagged 25 marine conservation orgs on Facebook with a request for links to their World Ocean Day events. We also tweeted a request for folks to share their World Ocean Day events on our Facebook Page, and sent emails to friend of Upwell asking them to like our Page so that we can access our Insights.

No ocean orgs shared their ocean day events on Facebook, or liked our Page. Our tweet received 3 RT’s. We received 12 new Likes based on our emails.

We Learned

It may have been too early to ask organizations to share links to their World Ocean Day events
At this time, it seems like reaching ocean orgs through Twitter and email is more effective than tagging on Facebook.

World Turtle Day Image Macros

Photo based content is more likely to get broadly shared on photo-centric services than text only content. Such services include Facebook (whose Wall and Timeline interfaces both give prominence to images), Tumblr, and Pinterest.

Inspired by this Buzzfeed roundup of the currently popular Evil Cow Meme we decided to try to experiment with photo-based memes—referred to as "image macros"—in the hopes that we might eventually create something equally as viral but based upon ocean content (each one containing a URL pointing to related ocean content that we want to amplify).

Thanks to sites like MemeGenerator and Quickmeme, once an initial source image has been created and uploaded, anyone can easily create new versions. If a meme takes off, a distributed competition naturally emerges, with many people vying to come up with the best possible accompanying text. The resulting captions are far funnier—and more viral—than any individual is likely to come up with on their own. Read through the "Evil Cow" images on Buzzfeed's post and you'll see what we mean.

Open source campaigns like these also allow for greater audience interactivity and freedom of expression. Irreverence, politics, profanity and other controversial content is often highly viral, but may be inappropriate for Upwell to create ourselves. By giving anyone the ability to caption these images we can encourage maximum creativity with little or no direct accountability. "Who did it? The Internet did it."

Action

Used MemeGenerator.com, an image macro creation & hosting service, to create two turtle image macros, Sarcastic Turtle and Inquisitive Turtle, each containing a bit.ly link to a World Turtle Day story
Searched for and selected images that were correctly Creative Commons-licensed for remix
Created a trackable bit.ly link to Mother Nature Network's excellent World Turtle Day post
In Photoshop, cropped the images to a square format, added photo credit (to respect the CC-BY license), and added the World Turtle Day bit.ly link
Created trackable bit.ly links for the MemeGenerator pages for each image macro
Using these links, posted about these images on Twitter and Facebook

We Learned

Initial results on Facebook were promising, with Sarcastic Turtle receiving more likes and shares there than RT's on Twitter.
As MemeGenerator.net puts their own URL in the lower right, that area should not be used for links or other text.
After being resized by MemeGenerator's image creation tool, both the bit.ly link and the photo credit I'd added to the image became too small to read easily. In the future I would use a larger typeface, with a more pronounced outline or drop shadow, similar to what memegenerator themselves use when compositing their URL in the lower right of the image.
The MemeGenerator website was often unresponsive, with pages and image requests frequently timing out. This made it difficult to use, problems that would likely frustrate casual visitors from adding their own captions to the images that we posted there. In the future I would try an alternate image macro creation site, like the promisingly-named QuickMeme.
Add to Reddit next time to test in another community.

Ocean of Life + NOAA Fisheries report + Endangered Species Day + Groupers: Sea Signals for the week of May 14, 2012

Rachel Weidinger — Mon, 21 May 2012 18:32:10 +0000

Ocean of Life
Buzz is building around the May 24th release of Callum Roberts’ new book The Ocean of Life. The Economist covered it on May 12th, and The Daily Beast shared an excerpt on May 14th (that appears in this week’s issue of Newsweek). The Mirror and Wall Street Journal covered it on May 18th, and Roberts is scheduled to be on The Diane Rehm Show in early June.

Amplification Action & Reaction
This week we reached out to 10 ocean conservation orgs by email and through Twitter to let them know about the book’s release, its coverage in The Daily Beast and The Economist, and how to request a review copy for their blog. At this writing, we’ve received one email reply from an ocean conservation organization who wrote to thank us for the heads up, and to say that they will share it through their social media channels.

Learnings
It’s possible that the other 9 organziations didn’t respond to our tweets and emails because a. the email subject lines weren’t enticing enough, b. the email was never opened because the recipient didn't recognize the sender, and/or c. we should have waited to reach out after the book’s release when anyone could pick up a copy..

NOAA Fisheries Report
On May 14, 2012, The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) released its Annual Report to Congress on the Status of U.S. Fisheries. Overall, the report was positive, announcing that six fish stocks were rebuilt, and 86% of the 258 stocks monitored were in good shape. However, 45 stocks are still overfished, showing room for improvement.

The report received early attention in major news outlets -- Associated Press, Fishnewseu, New York Times among others -- and was receiving moderate amounts of attention in social media.

Number of online mentions (including blogs, social media, and forums) of the 2011 NOAA Status of Stocks report between May 13th and May 17th, 2012.

Amplification Action & Reaction
We focused our efforts on reaching out to organizations focused on, or interested in overfishing and marine conservation and encouraged them to spread the story. Our message focused on the good news, but also recognized there’s still room for improvement.

The Blue Marine Foundation and The Black Fish responded positively to our emails asking them to write a blog post about the report or share through their social media channels.

The Blue Marine Foundations shared via Twitter on May 17. Our tweets to @oceanwildthings and @Bite_back were retweeted twice, and our @bite_back tweet was favorited.

Learnings
   •   Emailing efforts (100% success rate{2/2}) seem to produce more responses than @tweets (50% success rate {3/6}).
   •   The response to already-popular stories seems to be positive overall and relatively easy to garner modest attention for.
   •   Our amplification efforts may be more effective if we can reach outlets earlier in the story lifecycle.

Endangered Species Day
Our daily Tide Report tracked that May 18 was Endangered Species Day. We spotted @savingoceans using the day to tweet about endangered marine life and their activities to preserve it. However, other ocean and seafood-focused organizations were largely silent about their thoughts on Endangered Species Day.

Amplification Action
To spur conversation, we tweeted organizations focused on marine animal conservation and asked them which animals were on their minds today. We also reached out via email to two organizations and asked them to share Endangered Species Day with their communities.

As of this writing, we garnered some attention: Marine Bio shared Endangered Species Day with their Facebook audience and our conversation-starting tweets to organizations were re-tweeted twice. We’ll keep you updated on the progress of our efforts as they unfold.

Learnings
   •   We used the wrong hashtag in two tweets due to an errant space between “species” and “day.” Though not a horrible mistake -- one tweet with that error was still retweeted -- it’s a reminder to double check these kinds of things so we’re entering the right conversations.
   •   Again, email seems to be fairly reliable in starting conversations with organizations and soliciting engagement on issues with a 50% response rate in this micro-campaign.

Groupers
In a May 16th, fish2fork published a piece, Fishing Bans Needed to Halt Groupers’ Slide to Extinction, about a paper published in the journal of Fish & Fisheries. According to the study, a quarter of grouper species are being fished to extinction. The fish2fork piece followed a May 9th press release published by the California Academy of Sciences, and an article on ScienceDaily on the same day.

Amplification Action & Reaction
We shared the fish2fork article, and the stat that “a quarter of grouper species are being fished to extinction” via a Goliath Grouper Pinterest board featuring 14 photos of Goliath Groupers.

Goliath Grouper Pinterest screenshot

We shared the board on Facebook and Twitter, and tweeted 8 of the thirteen sources of the photos, which included a handful of ocean conservation organizations. We also searched for folks who had already tweeted about Goliath Groupers and/or the extinction stat, and let them know about the board.

The tweets received a 3 retweets and 1 comment: “goliath groupers rebounding well in the U.S., however, as far as we can tell w/o stock assessment.”

Learnings

One of the most effective tweets was an MT (Modified Tweet) of a tweet by @XRAY_Magazine about the extinction stat. We added a link to our Pinterest Board before the MT.

What stories shall we amplify this week? Let us know! Email tips@upwell.us, or tweet us @upwell_us.