Over the past few months, I’ve had the pleasure of getting to know Scott, who gave me the opportunity to visit the facility and see for myself what the organization does and how it transforms people. A few months ago I spent a day sitting in on one of their classes and the experience was eye-opening and profoundly affecting. When you see the system working for yourself first hand, you get the message loud and clear. Not only is what they do great for local communities, it’s great for society overall. When they contacted me a few weeks ago about getting them into social media, I was happy to join on. Here’s a quick video that we launched the project with that gives you a snapshot of what Second Chance is all about:

Designing A Social Media Presence For Second Chance

Scott’s a forward thinking, energetic guy and he recognized early that getting in to social media makes a lot of sense for his organization. From a cost perspective, social media for a non-profit is a no brainer, but Second Chance was also generating a lot of buzz after Scott was awarded the CNN hero award and released his new book. For a non profit they had a huge amount of content distributed around the web. Before I came along, they were already into email marketing and facebook as well as posting YouTube videos and getting a ton of positive press – they just needed a way to pull it all together, brand it consistently and create a place that they owned where the community could interact and share content, resources and stories with one another. We knew when we first talked about the project that we wanted consistent branding that matched their 2010 annual report across Facebook, Twitter and a customized blog, and the project evolved from there. The final product, I think, looks pretty slick and ties each social media outlet to all the others in a clear and coherent way.  Here are some screenshots of what we did. Each screenshot links to a Second Chance site, so please explore and feel free to give feedback. We’re all excited about the new direction and we hope the Second Chance community is too….

Custom WordPress Blog Design For Second Chance

Custom Facebook Welcome Page

Consistent Branding Across Facebook Tabs

Custom Twitter Branding

This post was written by Steffan Antonas. Find more at blog.steffanantonas.com

Creating A Branded Social Media Presence For A Non-Profit

Here’s a summary of the content that’s covered in the interviews. Enjoy.

1. Internal Web Censorship In China & The Great Firewall of China
2. Blogging In China
3. Chinese Internet Police
4. How Humor Slips Through The Cracks of Censorship
5. Russian Internet Censorship
6. Russian New Media and Government Manipulation
7. In Depth on Hidden Censorship in Russia
8. Economic Crisis’ Impact on China and Russia
9. The Global Network Initiative
10. Moving to Other Blogging Platforms, How Informed Citizens Are
11. Humor can lead to Meaningful Action
12. Web Questions
13. Knowing Fake Commenters
14. The Use of Anonymizers
15. Web Use and the Secret Service on Web in Russia
16. Penalty for Companies Not Censoring Content
17. Mobile Trends
18. Data Integration, Search Capacity In China

This post was written by Steffan Antonas. Find more at blog.steffanantonas.com

The Future of Freedom In The Internet Age

In these videos you’ll find brilliant people discussing remarkable new possibilities and business models for reshaping our political culture, our economy and our government. The emerging themes across all of the Gov 2.0 topics this year focus around principles of participation, collaboration, transparency, and efficiency to address the challenges facing our country and the world.  I hope the video channel embedded below will wet your appetite and encourage you to open up to new ideas and new ways of thinking about how government works and how we can make it better. If you really want to dive in with both feet first (and why wouldn’t you?), head over to gov2summit.com and drink from the firehose.

This post was written by Steffan Antonas. Find more at blog.steffanantonas.com

76 Free Videos On Rethinking & Reshaping Goverment

In Small Is The New Big, Seth Godin points out exactly why the side effects of great branding is a problem that needs fixing, and why we should worry that (as he puts it) “the unintended consequences of excellent branding…is one of the great tragedies of [the marketing] profession”. He says -

I think when traditional marketers talk about “brand”, self-esteem value is what they mean. A true brand is something where the self esteem value far exceeds the utility. It might be Heinz ketchup or a Rolex watch or a Marlboro cigarette, but in each case there’s a truly emotional connection between the brand and the user….It might be Timberland boots downtown, or Prada bags uptown. Both are ridiculously overpriced for the utility they deliver, but it’s the story we tell ourselves that matters, the label, the image, the peace of mind.

The problem, of course, is that the values and the messages that are selling us the promise of peace of mind are also leading us astray, and there’s no way to market our way out of the problem. Or is there?

Culture Jammers: The Anti-Marketers

There are activists everywhere that believe they have the answer. They call themselves Culture Jammers. You might never have heard that term, but if you’ve ever seen one of the intentionally-shocking anti-tobacco commercials produced by thetruth.com, you’ve seen culture jamming in action. Using mass media to make ironic or satirical commentary about itself and using the original medium’s communication method is what culture jamming is all about. It’s the same medium, with the opposite message. Marketing is their weapon, truth is their product, and that self-esteem formula we’ve bought into is the target.

I’ll admit the term “culture jammer” is new to me. I had heard about websites like FUH2 (a site focused on destroying the Hummer brand by flipping Hummer owners the bird) and I’d seen thetruth.org commercials, but until today I had no idea how many organizations, artists and creatives were out there doing this. Alex Steffen at Worldchanging was kind enough to point me in the right direction this morning over email. A few of his suggestions on where to start opened the flood gates – A quick Google search produces a striking number of hits (“culture jammer” returns upwards of 13 million results). There are literally hundreds of groups out there trying to change the way we tell ourselves stories about everything we consume using the same medium and techniques that got us into this mess in the first place. Brilliant.

Culture Jamming Spoof Ads

So I did some digging (naturally). Of the hundreds of examples you can find quickly on the web, here are a few that grabbed my attention. These particular examples come from one of the most well known culture jamming groups out there, Adbusters. They go right for the throat (or the heart, lungs and manhood depending on how you look at it). Enjoy.

This post was written by Steffan Antonas. Find more at blog.steffanantonas.com

Branding, Adbusting and Culture Jamming

The Iranian government have done their best to silence the virtual protest – they shut down popular sites like Flickr, Twitter, YouTube and Facebook…and the crowd found work arounds, organized themselves quickly, got the word out and the cracks in the government’s dams  broke and the flood continued. Millions of mobile phones and computers have replaced guns as the weapon of the revolution…and the crowd is winning.

As I’m writing this, people are live-tweeting Mousavi’s address to the crowd, asking the world to participate in a sea of green in all capital cities. It’s being Retweeted at an astonishing clip.

I’ve put together a list of some of the best coverage to links and resources to the event as possible below, some of it from mass media and some from citizens and organizations. The Flickr photo sets, as well as the “Anonymous Iran” site, citizen videos and live streaming are particularly noteworthy. I find this stuff incredible. If this had all happened a few years ago, the technology wouldn’t have been there to support this kind of global movement, but it is and the groundswell is ongoing and doesn’t look like it will let up. On the ground in Iran the situation is terrible, but the movement against the cause is marvelous and beautiful. It’s the first time we’ve ever seen global cooperation and information sharing at this scale – millions of Easterners and Westerners are visibly and publicly united with a common goal. Truly amazing.

Links to Resources & Media Coverage on Iran’s Protests:

• Iran 101: Understanding The Unrest (CNN)
• Iranian-Americans fed by online updates (CNN)
• Officials: Social networking providing crucial info (CNN)
• Iran’s Wired Generation Challenges Ahmadinejad (Wired)
  
• Resource: Anonymous Iran - A Full Website of links to information resources and forums for Iranians – put up by Pirate Bay (How-to surf securely and avoid censorship, protest advice, remaining anonymous on the ground, photo sets and news items)
• Resource: WorldWide Protest Planning
• Iran Activists Get Assist from ‘Anonymous,’ Pirate Bay (Wired)
• Activits Launch Hack Attacks on Tehran Regime
  
• Web Attacks Expand in Iran’s Cyber Battle (Wired)
• Taking It To the Streets – And Tweets – In Tehran
  
• Iran Protests: Twitter, the Medium of the Movement (Time)
• The Iran Election: Twitter’s Big Movement (Time)
• Time’s Coverage of Iran’s 1978 Islamic Revolution (Time)
• Robert Scoble’s Collection of Iran Protest Related “Likes” In FriendfeedThe Cyber War In Iran (GANB)
• Top Blog In Tehran with Many Resources Posted by Iranians – TehranBureau.com
  

Photo sets of Iran’s Protests:

• Mousavi1388’s Flickr photostream
• http://www.life.com/image/88491336/in-gallery/28312/iran-protests-most-violent-photos
• The Turbulent Aftermath of Iran’s Election (Time)
• CNN Photo Gallery Of Iran’s Election Protests (CNN)
• Steve Rhodes’s Flickr Set – Iran Protests In Union Square San Francisco, CA
  

Videos & LiveStreaming

• Youtube Video with US Defense Secretary Gates and Admiral Mullen talking about “the importance of utilizing Twitter, Facebook and other on-line social networking media to communicate information of national importance.”
• Iranelection.blogspot.com – A Livestream from An apartment Overlooking The Protests
• Anonymous Iran Video Forum- Collections of Hundreds of Citizen Videos on YouTube and other sites (WARNING: Some of these are NOT for the squeamish).
• Young Voters Hold Sway In the Iranian Election
  
• Police and Crowd Iran Hand in Hand – A CRUCIAL MOMENT
• Tweeting A Revolution In Iran (embedding disabled on YouTube – World News Cast Showing News Coverage Of Social Media Usage in Iran including evidence that the current president and leaders of Iran are using Facebook and Twitter to COUNTER the protest with propoganda)
  

This post was written by Steffan Antonas. Find more at blog.steffanantonas.com

The #IranElection Groundswell