Engagement 2.0: lyrics by Lennon

Ed Mitchell and Steve Bridger are working on something wonderful for Amnesty that combines human rights campaigning, John Lennon songs, an album called ‘Instant Karma‘, blogs, wikis, social networks ... and no doubt any other Web 2.0 goodness they can add to the mix.  It is part of the Amnesty Make some noise movement and may well become a model for Web 2.0-based engagement.

Ed explains in Community development across multiple networks: Amnesty:

Yoko Ono has given the rights to a bunch of John Lennon songs to Amnesty with the specific purpose to raise awareness about justice, freedom and human rights. Amnesty and Warner Brothers have organised for the songs to be covered by a bunch of artists, and sold via iTunes (for an exceptionally decent cut). As well as the songs, there is a bunch of footage of the artists saying why they think human rights are important (some of the artists would not have been able to record anything without Amnesty’s ongoing campaigning).
This all adds up to an album called ‘Instant Karma‘, which is coming out later this month; it will be promoted by the record label, but as well as this, we are going to help with promotion, in a sustainable way.
Asides to the ’selling of tunes’ model, the Amnesty team is absolutely passionate about ‘Make Some Noise’ as a vehicle for raising the issues so close to its heart; they see it as an opportunity to bring the issues closer to people’s awareness, to make them think, and, hopefully support the movement in the long term.
Thinking that way requires a new form of strategy about how to reach people who are increasingly distributed across the internet; we’re walking away from the ‘you must log in to our website‘ approach and looking to embrace the ‘we’re coming to find you on your ground‘ approach. Challenging enough I think, but we’ve also decided to do this in such a way as to enable as much learning and community development for all as possible while we do it.
We are going to help them reach out across the big name social networks which are closest to the artists’ fan bases (and youtube and flickr of course). Our plan is to do it in a co-ordinated way, by finding people within those networks who relate to the cause, and are willing to represent Amnesty responsibly (we’ll call them ambassadors for now).
Having found them, we are going to ask them to assist with the Make Some Noise presence in their social networks - the theory being that in order to make this a sustainable community development exercise (and not just another viral-styled marketing campaign thundering through the social networks), people who are already in those networks are best placed to do this themselves - they know the who and the how, we can help with the what and the when. Also, once this wave of excitement is over, Amnesty still have a clear idea of who is who in which network, and those ambassadors become increasingly closer to the organisation; hence my waffle about community.

Ed highlights an idea close to my heart:

It fits into the bigger picture of ‘engagement’, where people are increasingly looking to have some say over how they are represented; instead of being used as viral puppets, this is the beginning of looking for advice and more from supporters. We intend to develop this idea further after June’s rush to launch date; it involves considering the ‘engagement’ as a multi-domain trust building exercise, you may not be surprised to hear from me.

Congratulations to them both on winning the contract, no doubt against more conventional agencies.

Technorati Tags: engagament2.0, engagement

Comments

[Alexander Hayes]

Hi David,

Nancy White has posed your name as a contact for assisting us to action an open wiki grant - http://groups.google.com/group/futureoflearning/

See also http://www.wikieducator.org?FLNW2

Could we consider your participation and we would value you assistance immeasurably :-)

[David Wilcox]

Hi Alexander - looks fascinating, and glad to join in. You might be interested in the e-learning game I ran recently