Advocacy 2.0 Guide: Tools for Digital Advocacy

This project, from Global Voices Online, is intended to offer web-based techniques to digital activists for their online advocacy campaigning. Global Voices Online seeks to build a global anti-censorship network of bloggers and online activists dedicated to protecting freedom of expression and free access to information online.

The Advocacy 2.0 Guide (Tools for Digital Advocacy) describes techniques and tools that digital activists - and others who wish to learn from this subject - can use as part of their online advocacy campaigns. While the previous guide (Blog for a Cause!), also available on the Global Voices Online website, focused on the effective use of blogs as an advocacy tool, this guide explores creative uses of other web 2.0 applications.

The goal is to:

• Aggregate web 2.0 tools for advocacy.
  
• Provide detailed instructions on how to use them.
  
• Highlight successful experiences of web 2.0 activism by local digital activists around the world.
  
• Inspire other activists to adopt these strategies in ways that serve their specific goals and needs.

According to Global Voices Online: "From “Geo-bombing” to “multi-blogging” and Twitter to “mash-ups”, this guide explores the field of digital advocacy, intending to help activists reach out to audiences they may never have reached before."

To date (2009), it includes:

 

1. Cross-posting for Advocacy, An Introduction to Social Media Integration
• Table of Contents:
• Introduction
  
• What do you need?
  
• How to feed your blog or website to Twitter?
  
• Update your Facebook Status via Twitter
  
• FeedBlitz takes it a step further by automating email and IM delivery - Some arguments against the use of the cross-posting
  
• A good example on how to use the cross-posting technique
2. Geo-bombing: YouTube + Google Earth - a method of tagging a video to a location on Google Earth online mapping ; "Geo-bombing is one of the techniques that can be employed to enable more effective dissemination of your YouTube videos campaign through Google mapping applications like Google Maps and Google Earth. Now you can watch your geotagged videos inside Google Earth and Google Maps. Any geo-tagged YouTube video will show up when the Youtube layer of Google Earth/Maps is turned on."