Resilient Communities: The LDS Perspective

As many of you know I'm blogging now at Credo, the faith blog for Culture11. Here's my latest post:

Big welcome to Chris Dierkes and Todd Banus. Chris had an excellent first post yesterday on resilient communities, discussing the notion of the church as a uniting base across diverse cultural tensions.

In short, Chris thinks that we can weather tomorrow's storms better if we adopt best practices from religious communities (stop me if I'm off base here Chris). He suggested we look to the Latter-day Saints and hey, I think I can help! :)

Read the rest of this post about faith, culture, religion and more.

Smelling the Web 2.0 Roses

Like many new media folk I suffer from "info imperatance" - the insatiable desire for information and the deep anxiety that I may have missed something important. Occasionally, I will get off of my high speed rocket to smell the roses and gaze upon the Web 2.0 scene.

We bring you once more a look at the latest sites and companies to grace the new media arena.

• Website Analytics - Google analytics not doing it for you? Why not try Woopra. One key difference... it provides live tracking of website statistics. No need to wait hours to see who is on your website. Also, set up your stats to notify you of traffic spikes and more...
  


• Activism - Need some action? No, not that type of action. The Point is a new website where you commit to do something in exchange for something else. It can also be used as a force for change. For example, if my company doesn't offer me a dental plan I could use The Point to have 5,000 people call the HR department. A local furniture company can agree to buy a table for a school if the PTA raises $1500. I think you get the idea. I'm not sure what to make of it... but it could prove fun for a disgruntled blogger out there.
  
  
• Searching Enhancements - Do you like Cover Flow? You know, the nifty iTunes function that lets you flip through your album covers? SearchMe.com allows you to do just that. Right now its in private beta but it could prove to be a winner... if it can overcome a very real infringement on some very proprietary Apple concept. Can you say lawsuit?
  


• Content - Lists and more lists. I've profiled Listphile before, but this new new comer has a great concept. A top 11 list!? I guess it stands out. But what does stand out is the cool interface for ranking these lists of everything. Check it out: Onzilist.com
  


• UI - How much time have you spent trying to grab some guy's cool JavaScript for a mouseover menu? Fret no more... head on over to IzzyMenu and create your own fine looking drop-downs. Believe me, I've spent countless hours scouring the net for the best menu creator and this is it!
  


• New Tech - I remember one of my great aha moments about the Internet came in 1997 when I downloaded an add-on to my email application that read my emails aloud (much to my wife's chagrin). This next service wants to do the same with EVERYTHING text. Are you anxious to get on the road but just can't wait to devour the latest Mark Steyn column? Try ReadtheWords.com... better yet... listen to this post below!
  
  


• Got an iPhone? Got Twitter? Good. Now get Hahlo!
  


• Efficiency - I recall a TV ad about a decade ago where a virtual doggie fetches tickets for his hip owner and then pays the bills with a wag of the tail. While this virtual pet is still on the horizon there's a small incarnation of this reality over at Swotti, a website dedicated to combining reviews on everything from dog leashes to digital cameras. Check it out.
  


• Images - Ever worry about some Joe (not Mansour) sending you a cease and desist order when you use his image on your website? Instead of blowing half of your paycheck at iStockPhoto (or all of your paycheck at Getty Images) hop on over to PicApp to embed free images and even editorials on your webiste. I used it for the image above.
  


• Email Marketing - Not satisfied with iContact or ConstantContact? Try Campaign Monitor, which allows you to skip all of the pithy and annoying templates and only pay for the service when you use it. At $5 and 1 cent per email it's not a bad play.
  
  

More to come soon! Stay tuned. Meahwhile... read this post aloud!

From Ground Zero to the Family

First, kudos to Utah Governor Huntsman who earlier this declared February as White Ribbon Against Pornography Month. Our friends at Communities for Decency deserve a lot of credit for seeing this through. Other Utah mayors followed suit. Mayor Mike Daniels of Pleasant Grove recently noted: "Pornography can and will destroy a nation, a state, a city, a neighborhood, a family and an individual if we do not fight it".


Ground Zero

On the other side of the coin, college campuses in North Carolina and Virginia cleared a path for an annual Sex Workers Show. Deemed "art shows" these porn-ivals provide little sanctuary or hope for impressionable college students who are already saturated with promiscuity on campuses. The campus is truly "ground zero" for this growing threat.

Fortunately, some campus leader get it and are working to help students cope with the addictions. The University of Wisconsin recently hosted a forum that many thought was a pro-porn rally. Instead, the audience heard from Michael Leahy, a recovered sex addict. Kudos Michael!


That First Amendment Thing

Of course, reasonable people can object about the intersection of pornography and first amendment (we have the specious and spineless rulings from the Supreme Court to thanks for that). But the evidence of a darker side to pornography is mounting. We take heart to note that younger generations of Christians recognize the issue of Internet pornography as a top priority.

Recently, Spanish experts have concluded that pornography plays a prominent role in the psyche of pedophiles. As we've noted elsewhere, not all porn addicts are rapists and pedophiles but all rapists and pedophiles are porn addicts.

Elsewhere, lawmakers are grappling with various legislative initiatives to thwart these issues. Lawmakers in Florida are considering bills that deal with a "pole" tax, adding a dollar or so to state coffers for live sex shows. Texas just implemented a $5 tax on strip clubs. Utah has added a tax on escort services. Colorado is going down the similar road and a bill in Pennsylvania would tax all pornography.

We believe these are interesting pursuits but there is one HUGE side effect. It legitimizes all of these enterprises. I suppose the pragmatic side of the porn challenge requires us to DO something but we feel that the recent trends to ELIMINATE strip clubs are better in the long run.


Child Pornography

Fortunately, child pornography is something that almost everyone can agree to fight. Flint Waters, a special agent of the Wyoming Internet Crimes Task Force recently used state-of-the-art technology to produce a map for a county in Great Britain showing the breadth of child porn trafficking in their area. We expect the same procedures to become commonplace here in the states. Indeed, many states are making inroads strengthening existing child pornography laws while other groups lobby Congress for funding to battle this epidemic. We also expect higher education panels such as this one to address the problem.


Impact on Families

The impact on families is no less dramatic. One pastor notes the "cheap love" effect in our culture. It's not just "second-hand" pornography at libraries (a great phrase by the way) but the violence that pornography breeds. Our kids our literally the "idols" in this plague which makes raising kids that much harder.

As families turn to professional help the psychiatric field continues to address with the problem in unfortunate ways. Indeed, many professionals still do not recognize the problem. Meanwhile, our entertainment turns more aberrant, industry decisions are deeply influenced by the porn world, and innocent teenage communications turn ugly. The side effects are divorce, debt, and debauchery.

At the Lighted Candle Society, we intend to fight this battle in a two unique ways:

1. By funding scientific research into the effects of pornography and
2. By helping to bring civil litigation against producers and distributors of pornography

We've been pretty mum on our approach and our efforts but this will change shortly. Stay tuned!

Other news:

• Excellent overview of the online pornography problem
• Federal and state agencies are taking a closer look at employee computer habits after a slate of porn problems on computers.
• More pedophiles appeal to the Supreme Court. We'll be following this one closely.
• Thank you France for this innovation.
• AU Teacher keeps job after encouraging students to research pornography.
  

Special Performance this Weekend

My wife and I are performing at the Washington D.C. LDS Temple this weekend. Saturday at 7:00. The recital is free of charge. All are welcome.

New! Text Message The Troops. They TXT BACK

Connie Mack Endorses Mitt Romney

This is a great pick up for Team Romney. It adds to the growing list of Florida endorsements including:

• Former Lieutenant Governor Toni Jennings
• Former Speakers of the House Allan Bense and John Thrasher
• Florida Agriculture and Consumer Services Commissioner Charles Bronson
• Former Chairman of the Florida Republican Party Al Cardenas
• Former U.S. Congressman Tom Feeney (R-FL)
• St. Petersburg Mayor Rick Baker
• State Representatives Anitere Flores and Trey Traviesa
• Former Representatives Dennis Baxley and Dudley Goodlette
• David Griffin
• Former Florida Secretary of State Glenda Hood
• Former Senator and Chairman of the Republican Party of Florida Van Poole.
• U.S. Congresswoman Ginny Brown-Waite (R-FL)
  

More on Mack:

"Congressman Mack has been a champion of conservative leadership in Florida and in the United States Congress. I am proud to have his support and counsel," said Governor Romney. "We agree that we have lost our way in Washington and that it is time for us to return to the core Republican principles of fiscal discipline, lower taxes, a strong military and less government. I look forward to working with Congressman Mack to take our message of strong new leadership to Floridians across the state during the coming months."

"Governor Romney is a proven problem solver with an unparalleled record of success in both the public and private sectors," said Congressman Mack. "Governor Romney is a mainstream conservative leader who will be a champion of hope and opportunity for every American, a catalyst for conservative change in Washington, and a staunch defender of our freedom, security and prosperity. I'm pleased to offer Governor Romney my endorsement and look forward to working hard to help elect him the next President of the United States."

Case Study: Calculating the Viral Rate

As we noted in our piece on "Big Seed Marketing," a marketing "virus" must infect one or more people. Anthing less than a 100% infection will peter out and eventually die off. As Watts and Perreti note, designing a truly "viral" campaign is almost impossible. Most viral efforts are flukes and exceptions. Better, say the authors, to hit a large swath of people with a message, hope for a decent viral rate and then gather in more people as the message slowly decays back to parity.

Here is an update on a case study I published last week (a petition about an Oprah show), the results we saw from our petition, and how we calculated the "viral" or reproduction rate.

By any measure, the petition has been a success. To date 21,000+ people have signed on. This from a seedbase of no more than 7000 emails. So, what was the viral rate of this campaign? It's more difficult to calculate than you think. First let's set up some definitions:

• General Viral Rate - This is calculated by taking the number of recipients divided by the number of people infected over one generation of the email. So, for example, if I send an email to 10 people and half of those people send it on to one other person then the viral rate is 50%. Without using software such as ForwardTrack this number will be an estimation because we don't know the number of generations that have been processed nor the true number of "opens" and forwards.
• Impression Viral Rate - This percentage narrows our focus to the number of people who have actually opened the email and sent it on to other people who actually opened the email.
• Click-through Viral Rate - Now we're getting down to those who actually clicked through to a landing page to take action.
• Conversion Viral Rate - Lastly, we're looking for the % of people who actually signed on to the petition.

This is a fairly young science and we're treading on new ground here. Some of these rates we can calculate pretty accurately. Others, not so much.

Here are the facts on the ground frame from Phase 1 of our (which ran from 10/3 through 10/9):

Recipients: 6871

Total opens: 4136

total click-throughs: 1912

Unique petition page visitors: 25000

Conversion rate: 45%

Sign-ups: 11000

Here's a verbal walkthrough: On October 3rd we sent out our petition request to 6800 recipients. Over the next 4 days the original emails were opened by 4136 people (this includes the original recipients and people that received the email in return) and nearly 2000 people clicked through the links in those emails. In the end, however, 25,000 people visited the petition page and 11,000 of those people signed the petition (a 45% conversion rate). Apparently, people created their own emails and forwarded the link onto their friends. (Note: we use iContact for our email system and Google Analytics on the website).

There are quite a few unknowns here. So let's go with the three facts that we know for sure: number of original recipients, unique visitors to the pettion form and petition sign-ups over those 4 days.

RECIPIENTS OR OVERALL VIRAL RATE

Basically, we want to determine what the infection or viral rate would have to be on the original number of recipients (6800) to get to 25,000 visitors on the petition page. There are two ways to calculate this. 1) use the 6871 number as assumptive starting point or 2) assume a 30% open rate and bring the starting number down to 2061. In other words: should the viral rate be calculated to the overall bucket of recipients or the assumed 30% open rate? Well, let's do both.

Total Recipients To get to the magic number of 25,000 unique petition page visitors we come up with a viral rate of 78.5% over 30 generations. Which looks something like this:

Basically, this chart shows a total accumulation of 25,000 people by the 30th generation. Of course this assumes that everyone clicked through to the petition who received the email. This is the extreme case and unlikely but this model gives you an idea of what were doing here.

30% Opens

Starting at 2000 who opened the email we need an average viral rate of 91.9% over 50 generations to get to 25K.

Of course, we don't know what the viral rate was between successive generations and it's likely that the open rate was different for different people.

Alternate Calculations

One alternate theory is that the first generation email of Phase I was above 100% on average and that the rate slowly degraded from there. This is possible but again difficult to calculate.

Lastly, we can work ourselves backwards by increments and guestimate what happened:

1. 11,000 people signed the petition during Phase 1 (solid number)
2. 25,000 people visited the petition page with 45% of these converting (signing ) the petition (solid number)
3. Assuming a 25% click-through rate we get 125,000 emails that were opened (estimation)
4. Starting with the 6800 recipients we would need average viral/reproduction rate of 94.5% over 100 generations to get to the 125K number.

My conclusion is that our viral rate was probably above 80% and below 100%.

Next Steps

In Phase II of our campaign we sent a follow-up email to the 11,000 signs-ups and encouraged them to forward it on to two other people. After another 4 days we had essentially doubled the petition sign-ups. Working off the same model of total recipients and 30% open rate we came up with 51% viral rate over 10 generations and 84% over 45 generations respectively. As you can guess ,the open rates and click throughs were lower for phase II as would be expected.

Rinse, lather, repeat. Tomorrow (Monday) we will send another email out to the new 11,000 emails who signed up over Phase II and try to anticipate the number of new sign-ups. My guess is that we will see similar results but a decaying number of sign-ups. We've put a few new measures in place to track things more accurately. Stay tuned.