Want to harness and leverage the power of social media to organize around key political issues? Unite Blue seems to have a few things to teach.
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Disorganization is the ultimate unraveling of any social or political movement. In fact, opponents to movements are so keenly aware of this that they’ll often devise a “divide and conquer” strategy. This happened recently as I was out protesting alongside the nurses here in my hometown. Many nurses have been with our local hospital for 20+ years, but after a billion dollar global health organization bought out the hospital it was demanding the unfortunate cliche: less nurses, more patients = more $$$ at the top.
And so a union-busting organization had been hired in an attempt to break down the unity of the locked-out nurses. Guess which nurses were the first to be offered their job back? That’s right. The ones who were viewed as the leaders of the strike. Divide and conquer….
It would seem awfully difficult, then, to rally and keep organized a group of people who have never truly met, but that’s precisely what seems to be happening at UniteBlue.org, a site for progressive American Twitter users that is seeking to “Connect the left because we’re stronger together.”
At UniteBlue.org you can click each individual state to begin connecting with local Twitter users.
Full disclosure: I signed in via my Twitter account to check this out. After clicking on Pennsylvania I was taken to a page of 50 Twitter users and this was only Page 1 out of 78. This comes to nearly 4,000 users just here in my state. Each user is ranked and given a Score out of 100 based on the following categories:
BlueRank: Our system for identifying the most active and influential progressives and Democrats on Twitter. Left: How far to the political left are they?
Engagement: Do they follow, mention, and retweet others?
Influence: How much do they impact the conversation?
Ratio: Ratio of users they are following to their followers.
Followers: Total number of followers.
Talkative: How many tweets and retweets do they send per day?
To see how the process works, and because many Tweeps listed were advocating for causes I’m interested in, I began to follow a few. Within 24 hours 70% of those I followed had followed me back. I’ve since had to toggle off the email settings, but Unite Blue frequently has Twitter Chats and are often coming up with clever hashtags to unleash at specified times in order maximize their impact.
While the digital warrior model has proven successful in major uprisings around the world, time will tell how or if #UniteBlue can move beyond the smaller, timely issues to have an impact on a major election. The site claims it has made 1,824,754 connections, but how meaningful are those connections? And how to measure social impact in the digital age? How many of those connections will gather together to take to the polls or the streets in an attempt to make real social change? The 2016 election will answer many of those questions.
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