Aaron Muszalski's blog

Shark Week 2012: How To Drive The Shark Conversation (Without Jumping It)

Aaron Muszalski — Tue, 07 Aug 2012 22:59:38 +0000

Update: Want a personal walk-through of the State of the Shark online? Join Son of Sharkinar on Friday, August 12 at 11:00 am PT/ 2:00 ET. We'll share Shark Week campaign plans as well.

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Shark Week 2012 is fast approaching. If you're involved in the online conversation about sharks, Shark Week represents a major opportunity to grab some attention, and extend your social media reach. Just how big is this opportunity? And what can you do to best leverage it? Using Upwell's magic "Big Data" 8-Ball, and salty nautical insight, we're going to give you the answers.

Shark Week Is Big

In a typical week, Upwell measures between 40,000 and 70,000 mentions of sharks online. During Shark Week 2011, there were over 740,000 social mentions of sharks, 95% of which were directly attributable to Shark Week.

There's no escaping it: Shark Week is responsible for the single largest bump in the online shark conversation for the entire year.

When you see that fin-shaped spike, it's time to get into the (social media) water.

Total social mentions for Upwell's keyword groups for "Sharks" and "Shark Week", January 1st - December 31st, 2011

And Getting Bigger

Since 2009, total social mentions of Shark Week have increased by a factor of five every year. If that trend holds, this year's Shark Week could generate over 2,000,000 social mentions. Now you're talking attention apex predator!

Sentiment

Of course, mentions in and of themselves are only helpful if the information or sentiment they express is factual or positive. While Shark Week unquestionably promotes strong conservation messaging, does that break through the notion of sharks being eating machines with big teeth that occasionally kill or injure humans?

Fortunately, yes, We broke down those 740,000 Shark Week-related social mentions into three categories:

Celebratory — e.g. "Sharks are awesome!"
Terror — e.g. "Sharks are violent killers!"
Conservation — e.g. "Sharks are endangered!"

And as this pie chart shows, a very significant majority were in the celebratory camp. (or as we call it, ‘Yay!’)

Online Mentions of Shark Week 2011 which contained terms associated with one of the following themes: Celebratory, Terror, and Conservation

While Terror remains a popular theme in Shark marketing (Sharketing?), it's increasingly begun to receive a negative response from audiences, particularly online. Perhaps this due to the abundance of more accurate and less sensational information about sharks that's available on the Internet. Or perhaps it's a consequence of twenty-five years of Shark Week helping to change our broader cultural attitudes about the humble elasmobranch. In any case, Terror isn't a theme we reccomend that shark conservation orgs resort to, for obvious reasons.

If you want your shark content to reach the widest possible audience, "Sharks are awesome" (or beautiful, or fascinating, etc.) is the theme to use.

Which Shark Week Hashtag is the Most Popular?

Total mentions (Twitter only) for the top Shark Week hashtags, July 5th - August 5th, 2012

With over 88% Share of Voice, #SHARKWEEK is by far the most widely used Shark Week hashtag.

There are a variety of other popular Shark Week related hashtags, most linked to a specific campaign (like Discovery's fun #PhotoChomping and #Chompie photo sharing campaigns) or event (like #VWsharkweek, Volkswagen's mobile, VW-shaped shark cage).

Mentions of these various hashtags are likely to increase as Shark Week approaches. But if you want to ensure that your content reaches the greatest possible number of shark-interested online readers, the #SHARKWEEK hashtag is clearly your best bet.

In Summary

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!

Unpacking Social Mentions of Mission Aquarius

Aaron Muszalski — Fri, 27 Jul 2012 18:49:02 +0000

Mission Aquarius has taken its bow, after several aquanauts spent a week from July 14th to 21st underwater at the Aquarius Reef Base off the Florida Keys. The project received plenty of major mainstream media attention, from NPR to the Washington Post to Fox News and even The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.

But how did it fare in online social mentions?

Upwell tracks social mentions because they're a concrete action. Creating a blog post, retweeting or posting a video is a bigger deal than just viewing content. We track ocean content makers. These makers drive the online conversation," says Rachel Weidinger.

Note that our tracking of social mentions is different from the more common metric of tracking impressions, like views on YouTube videos. We count social content as it is posted online, tracking posts with keyword searches. This social mention metric has more in common with the metric of media hits than it does with the metric of impressions.

To kick things off, here's a graph that shows overall online social mentions of Mission Aquarius from June 1-July 26:

Social mentions of the Mission Aquarius keyword set June 1-July 26, 2012 developed by Upwell

The grand total: 12,559 social mentions of Mission Aquarius. That's 12,559 times an individual took the time to create online content specifically mentioning Mission Aquarius.

Now, let's break that down a little.

Two Influencers Created Half the Attention

Many people and news outlets were speaking about Mission Aquarius. But online, the bulk of these social mentions were the result of just two sources: @ReefBase, the official Mission Aquarius twitter account (4,375 mentions since July 1st), and ocean tech journalist (and former Gizmodo Editor) Brian Lam (2,514 mentions since July 1st). This graph shows the contributions of these two sources to the overall spike:

Social mentions of the Mission Aquarius keyword set by Mission Aquarius (blue line), ReefBase (purple line), Brian Lam’s posts (orange line) June 1-July 26, 2012 developed by Upwell

Total social mentions for Upwell’s keyword groups for Mission Aquarius (blue line): 12,559; ReefBase (purple line): 4,375; Brian Lam’s total posts (orange line): 2,514.

The Wave Crests

As the close of the Aquarius base drew nearer, social mentions steadily increased. The largest wave of social mentions began to rise on July 8th (with tweets from @ReefBase, @SylviaEarle, @blam, @1World1Ocean, @MissionBlue and others) and crested on July 17th (with a story on NPR’s “Morning Edition”). Here’s a graph that breaks out (or “unpacks”) a selection of the contributors to that wave:

Social mentions of the Mission Aquarius keyword set by main influencer July 8-July 26, 2012

What this graph shows is the contributions of a number of different sources. We can see that @Reefbase and Brian Lam's Gizmodo posts scored a high number of social mentions, as did One World One Ocean and BoingBoing. Among traditional outlets, NPR and the Associated Press had notable spikes. In particular, there is one big spike on July 17. But how does that spike compare to overall social mentions? Let's take a look.

Continuing Engagement Beats Short Spikes

Social mentions of the Mission Aquarius keyword set for ReefBase (magenta) and NPR's Morning Edition (green) June 8-July 26, 2012 developed by Upwell

That spike came as a result of an item on NPR's "Morning Edition" - which generated 897 online mentions,the most of any single event. Note, however, that the spike is just that: a spike. It doesn't last, not even a little bit. In contrast, @ReefBase mentions continued steadily throughout the month, with an overall total of almost 3,500 more than NPR. Why? Because @ReefBase engaged with their audience throughout the month, building an audience -- and a conversation. Conversations are engines of attention: add content and engagement and they generate social mentions, often at a far more steady state that news media stories, which tend to spike quickly and then vanish, with little trace and even less impact on the ongoing baseline of social mentions.

So What Have we Learned?

1. Online mentions come from online sources: Of the 12,559 mentions of Mission Aquarius we measured, more than HALF of those were directly attributable to two savvy sources only: Brian Lam, and @ReefBase. The nearest traditional media source was NPR, which had fewer than 1,000 social mentions. It may seem obvious, but the way to drive online conversation is through online sources, rather than traditional media.

2. Putting the effort into one or two major online sources pays off: Mission Aquarius made the effort to invite Brian Lam to be involved closely with the project for a lengthy period, and it paid off. It's an important lesson for ocean communications professionals: Whenever possible, find a blogger or writer at a major online source, particularly if that blogger is predisposed to ocean issues, and sell them on your story, as early as possible.

3. Keep the conversation going: By maintaining a lengthy conversation in the build-up to and during Mission Aquarius, Reef Base showed that engagement beats spikes, even big spikes from major media outlets - and beats them by a significant degree. It is further evidence that it isn't enough any more to simply issue press releases or post links. For a sustained online 'bulge', we have to engage readers and others in an ongoing conversation.

Equally Evil = Socially Awesome: Unpacking The ICRS 2012 Spike

Aaron Muszalski — Sat, 21 Jul 2012 21:38:44 +0000

Update: A Look At The Ensuing Conversation

On July 13th, the New York Times posted an Op/Ed by Roger Bradbury, an ecologist at the Australian National University. Entitled "A World Without Coral Reefs", Bradbury advanced the view that a total collapse of coral reefs was all but certain, and proposed that we should reallocate funding to account for this reality. In his words:

They have become zombie ecosystems, neither dead nor truly alive in any functional sense, and on a trajectory to collapse within a human generation. [...] But by persisting in the false belief that coral reefs have a future, we grossly misallocate the funds needed to cope with the fallout from their collapse. Money isn’t spent to study what to do after the reefs are gone — on what sort of ecosystems will replace coral reefs and what opportunities there will be to nudge these into providing people with food and other useful ecosystem products and services.

With its alarming title and controversial assertions Bradbury's editorial immediately received a burst of mentions online. The New York Times doesn't enable commenting on its Op/Ed posts, so the discussion of this post took place largely in social media, as you can see below:

Total social media mentions for Upwell's keyword groups for the Bradbury Op/Ed (purple line), Revkin's 7/14 post (orange line), Gaskill's 7/16 post (pink line) and Carl Safina's 71/7 post (green line), from July 13-21, 2012

Several noted science and conservation journalists were quick to respond, including The New York Times' Andy Revkin ("Reefs in the Anthropocene – Zombie Ecology?" and "More on Coral Reefs and Resilience or Ruination"), Melissa Gaskill ("When Coral Reefs Recover"), and Carl Safina ("Life Finds a Way -- But Needs Our Help"). These posts each received their share of online attention, though none approached the number of mentions of the Bradbury post.

However, since these responses were made as comment-enabled blog posts, a good portion of the resulting engagement took place in the comments. This was especially true for Andy Revkin's two posts, which have (as of July 24th, 2012) received 79 and 43 comments respectively. This is likely attributable, at least in part, to Mr. Revkin's active use of social media sites such as Twitter, where he has over 37,000 followers.

To better place the post-ICRS conversation in context, here's what it looked like relative to ICRS itself, and the accompanying bump in online mentions for both coral reefs and ocean acidification that ICRS generated:

Total online mentions for Upwell's keyword groups for Coral Reefs (green line), Ocean Acidification (blue line), AP ICRS article (red line), Lubchenco's "equally evil twin" quote (light green line), the Bradbury Op/Ed (purple line), Revkin's 7/14 post (orange line), and Gaskill's 7/16 post (pink line), from July 7-21, 2012

Between July 13th and 20th, the "World Without Coral Reefs" Op/Ed received 1,384 mentions. This is nearly exactly as many as Jane Lubchenco's "equally evil twin" quote received the week before (1,398), and a useful illustration of the "social liquidity" of emotional content. As is often the case, controversy moves faster than context, even online.

[Update concludes here. What follows is the original ICRS unpacking post.]

ICRS - The Big Picture

The 12th International Coral Reef Symposium took place earlier this month. Coral reefs and ocean acidification were two of very first ocean conversations that we began monitoring here at Upwell, so we were understandably interested to see what impact, if any, ICRS would have on these topics.

What we found was both encouraging and informative, and we’d like to share it with you.

Total online mentions of Upwell’s keyword groups for Ocean Acidification (blue line), ICRS (magenta line) and coral reefs (green line) from April 20th - July 20th, 2012

ICRS was responsible for the single largest spike in online mentions of both ocean acidification and coral reefs in 2012 (thus far). For example, ocean acidification typically receives between 200-300 posts per day. But on July 9th, the first day of ICRS 2012, ocean acidification was mentioned nearly 3,000 times.

The impact of such large bumps in attention can not be overstated, especially for a topic like ocean acidification, which has yet to firmly establish itself as part of the mainstream dialog. (At least not in the way that say, climate change has.) By boosting their profile beyond small, core groups of scientists and activists, these conversations can reach the new audiences that are crucial for raising the ongoing baseline. That ICRS was able to generate such a marked increase in both the coral reef and OA conversations is a laudable accomplishment, and a promising sign for the future.

Unpacking The Spike

Total online mentions of Upwell’s keyword groups for Ocean Acidification (blue line), Coral Reefs (green line), ICRS (pink line), the AP article on ICRS (red line) and the Huffington Post’s ICRS article (light blue line), between July 7th and 13th, 2012

What generated this burst of attention? By far, the bulk of the online attention surrounding ICRS 2012 was the result of a single event: NOAA Undersecretary of Commerce for Oceans and Atmosphere Jane Lubchenco’s plenary address, and the resulting Associated Press article, “Science official: Ocean acidity major reef threat”. This story was quickly picked up by many other news outlets, including USA Today and the Huffington Post, and was widely tweeted about and shared online.

Equally Evil = Socially Awesome

The popularity of this article also illustrates the power of succinct, impactful messaging. In her address, Lubchenco vividly described ocean acidification as “climate change’s equally evil twin”.

Effectively bridging the gap between science and emotion, such statements are ideal for social media, where the decision to share content is made in seconds, driven as much (or more) by the heart than by the head. We can see this effect particularly well in the following comparison.

The first graph shows online mentions of both Jane Lubchenco (orange line) and her “equally evil twin” quote (blue line) from news media outlets only. During ICRS, Lubchenco received 144 mentions in news media online. In comparison, her quotation was mentioned only 98 times.

Online mentions (news media sources only) for Upwell’s keyword groups for Jane Lubchenco (orange line) and her “equally evil twin” quotation (blue line), from July 7th - 13th, 2012

Turning to social media however, this relationship becomes completely inverted. During the week of ICRS, the “equally evil twin” quote received 1,298 mentions in social media, while Jane Lubcheno was mentioned by name only 394 times.

Online mentions (social media sources only) for Upwell’s keyword groups for Jane Lubchenco (orange line) and her “equally evil twin” quotation (blue line), from July 7th - 13th, 2012

This is a vivid reminder of people’s inclination to care more about the sentiment of a quote than the accuracy of its source. At least when it comes to their initial decision to share content online.

Certainly attribution and context are important, but online, where such deeper knowledge is only a click away, the more easily people can communicate the heart of a story—the essence of why this is important and you should care about it—the more likely that story is to be shared. By intentionally providing them with such handles you drastically increase the likelihood that your content will receive the widest possible attention.

Don’t be shallow. Don’t resort to exaggeration or baseless hyperbole. And certainly don’t lie. Rather, simply remember that the river of online news is endlessly asking people to understand, to care, and to act. (Even if that ask is “merely” a share, or a Facebook like.) The easier and faster you can make that process, the more liquid your content becomes. Encapsulating a difficult issue like ocean acidification as effectively as Jane Lubchenco did at ICRS is an excellent example of doing this right.

By The Numbers: Which Ocean Acidification Hashtag Is The Most Popular?

Aaron Muszalski — Mon, 16 Jul 2012 07:46:37 +0000

Last week’s High Tide Alert highlighted the spike in online mentions of ocean acidification following NOAA chief Jane Lubchenco’s characterization of it as “osteoporosis of the sea” and “climate change’s equally evil twin.” Just for good measure, we even compared it to online mentions of the Kardashians, a subject we expanded on in our blog.

But we were curious about something. Just how are people communicating about the subject. On Twitter, the words “ocean acidification” and the hashtag #oceanacidification use up a lot of characters, leaving little room to say much about it other than “is really bad and I’m against it.” Does that work against it, and are people finding other ways to talk about it online?

Twitter mentions of Upwell’s Ocean Acidification keyword group, that included (green) or did not include (green) one or more of the top ocean acidification hashtags. (May 15th - July 15th, 2012)

Looking at the data for the past two months shows that the majority of people talking about ocean acidification aren’t using hashtags. (Since hashtags are primarily a Twitter convention, in this post we’ll be looking at monitoring data for Twitter only.)

Out of nearly 10,000 tweets related to ocean acidification, only 13.1% referred to the issue with a hashtag.

Twitter mentions of the four most popular ocean acidification hashtags appearing in tweets monitored by Upwell’s Ocean Acidification keyword group. (May 15th - July 15th, 2012)

Of those tweets that used tags, by far the most popular one was #oceanacidification, which appeared nearly half of the time, or 45.2%. In descending order of popularity, the top four ocean acidification hashtags are:

#oceanacidification (568 tweets - 45.2%)
#ocean (324 tweets - 25.8%)
#acidification (228 tweets - 18.2%)
#ocean #acidification (136 tweets - 10.8%)

It’s worth nothing that one of these—#ocean—isn’t a very good hashtag at all, at least not for grouping together content specifically related to ocean acidification. And yet we saw many tweets where the author had written “#ocean acidification”.

Twitter mentions of the #oceanacidification hashtag appearing in tweets monitored by Upwell’s Ocean Acidification keyword group. (May 15th - July 15th, 2012)

Hashtag use is becoming more common in the ocean acidification conversation online. #Oceanacidification increasingly appears to be the preferred choice, having received two significant spikes in the past sixty days. If you're tweeting about OA, we reccomend that you use it too.

Ocean Acidification vs. The Kardashians, Part Deux: The Gulf Is Even Wider Online

Aaron Muszalski — Tue, 10 Jul 2012 01:30:23 +0000

Recently, an analysis by Media Matters bemoaned the fact that print and broadcast media devoted approximately 40 times as much news coverage to the Kardashians as to ocean acidification. This was despite, and perhaps because of, the latter’s established importance—and, one is left to infer, the former’s non-importance (taking a leap of faith here that you’re on the same page as us on this one).

Media Matters’ study didn’t look at online mentions, so we did. And what we found was surprising.

Tweeting Up With The Kardashians

While the purpose of the study was evidently to hold media outlets accountable for their insubstantial coverage, looking at the relevant online mentions of the two subjects suggests that those media outlets are actually relative models of discretion, decorum and depth.

Total online mentions from January 1 - July 9, 2012 for Upwell's ocean acidification keyword set (green) and our Kardashians keyword set (red).

Between January 1 and July 9, the Kardashians received 9.6 million total mentions. In contrast, ocean acidification received 70,333 total mentions. That’s 136 times more mentions for Kim and her sisters than a declining pH. (Imagine that!)

Does this actually mean anything? Comparing Kardashians and ocean acidification isn’t so much comparing apples and oranges as it is comparing apples and the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch. But it is a strong illustration of the challenges in breaking through the online noise, and the reality of the relative size of the ocean bubble, as well as the power of celebrity.

Of course, this is looking at total online mentions. That means every publicly posted tweet, Facebook post, blog post, forum post, news article or YouTube video. Given such a large cross-section of the Internet using populace, perhaps a weakness for the sensational should not come as a surprise. What about online news media?

A Model of (Relative) Restraint

Online mentions (news media only) from January 1 - July 9, 2012 for Upwell's ocean acidification keyword set (green) and our Kardashians keyword set (red).

Narrowing our search to news media online (and omitting such sources as Twitter and Facebook) reveals perhaps some cause for hope.

Unlike print and television coverage, which, according to Media Matters, favored the Kardashians some 40 times more than ocean acidification, online the fabled family only receives 12 times greater coverage. (45,305 Kardashian mentions vs. 3,813 mentions of ocean acidification between January 1st and July 9th, 2012.)

So while online audiences overwhelmingly love talking—and tweeting—about celebrities, it appears that the online news media is less sensational than their traditional cousins. Or at least when it comes to the Kardashians.

The Kardashians — An Unwitting Force For Good In The Ocean?

Online mentions from January 1 - July 9th, 2012 for Upwell's ocean acidification keyword set (green) and the intersection of the Kardashian set and the ocean acidification set (blue)

Celebrity power can also be useful for attention campaigners. On June 27th, when Media Matters released the Kardashian study, the news received over 1,000 mentions in a single day. For smaller topics, still struggling to gain their share of online attention, such spikes are critical, helping to broaden the issue's exposure beyond small, often siloed groups of experts, activists and other stakeholders.

In the case of ocean acidification, a topic that normally receives about 261 mentions per day, a fourfold increase in attention is huge. In fact, the Kardashian study created the third largest spike in the ocean acidification conversation all year. (The largest was a March 2nd article by Wired Science, Ocean Acidification to Hit 300-Million-Year Max, the second-largest is the AP story on the ICRS we reported on yesterday.)

The Kardashians weren't involved in Media Matters' study. They weren't recruited as spokespeople for a series of ocean acidification PSA's. They were simply used as a point of comparison to make a general point about contemporary news coverage. And yet, despite that wholly arbitrary comparison, the mere inclusion of the Kardashian name still resulted in one of the largest increases in ocean acidification mentions this year.

Of course, not every mention results in a new ocean acidification activist. But when a better understanding of an unfamiliar term is only a Google search away, increasing online mentions in an important rung on that ladder. And celebrity remains a potent tool for generating such attention.

Even unwittingly.

By The Numbers: Which Rio+20 Hashtag Should You Use?

Aaron Muszalski — Tue, 19 Jun 2012 23:43:03 +0000

To receive the most attention, Upwell recommends that you include both Rio+20 and the hashtag #RioPlus20.

Yes, that's more characters. But we have reasons.

Although the Rio+20 Conference doesn't officially begin until tomorrow, the online conversation about the conference has been underway for days. This is especially noticeable on Twitter, with celebrities like Stephen Fry and band Linkin Park mentioning the event. Unfortunately, the conference's name—specifically its problematic use of the "+" character—has created some confusion about which Twitter hashtag is the correct one to use.

What are hashtags, and who chooses them?

If you know this already, feel free to skip ahead.

For the unfamiliar, a hashtag is a word within a tweet prefixed with a hash (#) sign, designed to provide an easy way to mark a tweet as having to do with a given topic or event. Originally an informal convention proposed by an early Twitter user, hashtags quickly gained widespread acceptance, and are now a ubiquitous part of the Twitter experience. More importantly, most Twitter clients, including Twitter's own web client, automatically recognize hashtags, turning them into clickable links, which easily allow users to search for other mentions of a given hashtag. This is a powerful method of discovery, enabling readers to recognize and quickly dive into a larger conversation.

However, since hashtags are a wholly emergent phenomenon—there's no "Hashtag Council" deciding which tags become the official ones, for example—it's important that Twitter users study each conversation they intend to join in order to determine which tags (if any) are already in use.

The "+20" gets ignored.

In the case of the Rio+20 Conference, this process has been complicated by the "+" character smack dab in the middle of the event's name. Why? Because Twitter doesn't recognize special characters within hashtags. As far as Twitter is concerned, a hashtag begins with the '#' character, and ends when it reaches any non alphanumeric character. Thus, when someone includes "#Rio+20" in a tweet, Twitter only sees the characters before the "+" as a valid hashtag. That is to say, only "#Rio" (the "+20" just gets ignored).

While some Twitter users are aware of this quirk, many are not. Consequently, the hashtag landscape for Rio+20 has become unusually fragmented, with no fewer than ten different tags (both with and without the hash character) appearing in Rio+20 tweets.

So what should you use? Let's look at some data.

Data is our favorite.

The chart above shows the total number of mentions/posts for the most popular Rio+20 hashtags in the past three days. Three tags are responsible for over 87% of the total volume.

#RioPlus20 is the most popular tag, with 42% of the total volume and over 19,000 unique mentions. Note that, by writing out "+" as "plus", this tag neatly sidesteps the fragmented hashtag problem I described earlier.
Rio+20 comes in second, with 26% of the total volume and 12,120 mentions. Technically, this is not a hashtag, as it isn't prepended by a "#" character, and its popularity is almost certainly due to people simply mentioning the name of the conference in their tweets.
#RioPlusSocial is the third most popular tag, with 19% of volume and 8,843 mentions. (sidenote: This is a hashtag created by the conference organizers to foster a social conversation around sustainability. Why add another hashtag to the mix and further fragment the conversation? We don't know. Tell us in a comment if you do.)

Use them all.

Based on this, we recommend that you include both Rio+20 and the hashtag #RioPlus20 in your tweets. (And, if space permits, #RioPlusSocial as well.) Why all three? Take a look at the following graph:

Although #RioPlus20 (red line) and Rio+20 (yellow line) are each very popular, very few tweets mention them together (magenta line). There are effectively three separate groups of people speaking about Rio+20 online: two that have purposefully organized (one around the hashtag #RioPlus20, and another around the hashtag #RioPlusSocial) and a third "group" that is simply speaking about the conference by its official name.

This isolation presents a great opportunity for clever attention campaigners. By crafting content that intentionally bridges these groups, not only will your tweets be more likely to receive broader attention, you will also be helping to make each group aware of the others, a move that could potentially bump the entire Rio+20 conversation up even higher.