Social media activism: the Greenpeace experience

Blazing a trail as an online Greenpeace campaigner: part two of a conversation with JSM editor Stephen Fitzpatrick

Part two of the interview with Stephen Fitzpatrick

M: But why wait till now to start this? Everyone is talking about this kind of thing now aren’t they? Why did you wait till social media was fashionable?

SF. Well, we didn’t. I’ve been at this a long time – it just wasn’t called social media back then

M: Back when?

SF: Back to 95 actually….with Greenpeace.

M: I didn’t know that you worked with Greenpeace – I thought it was all business stuff.

SF: Actually, that’s not quite right. I began working with Greenpeace back in 96 but it was off the back of another proto-social media project with another campaigning group – an organisation called Charter 88.

M: Charter 88 - who are they?

SF: They’re a pressure group -  they campaign for ‘constitutional reform’.

Back in 95 they were planning a big public consultation exercise – asking people how they felt about a freedom of information act, a bill or rights, reform of the house of lords and a bunch of other reforms.

I got involved to help them use the net to reach people they ordinarily wouldn’t –

M: How many people responded?

SF: Over 34,000

M: That’s a lot – how many of them came through the net?

SF:  About 5% - which isn’t bad if you think about how few people were actually on line in ‘95.

It’s still is the biggest public democracy consultation exercise that’s been done – as far as I’m aware.

M: and Greenpeace?

SF:  Greenpeace were based just round the corner. I met up with the Greenpeace team over a cappucino in Clerkenwell and got talking.

The Charter 88 project was winding down so I crossed the road to Greenpeace,  who were a very different organisation to Charter 88. Greenpeace are much more maverick -  not quite so interested in public consultation!

When I got there they had been tooling up activists in the field with video cams, linking them via a communications satellite so they could get footage directly from an action onto the network in London – a completely digital operation. Very fast and responsive.

M: What kind of thing were Greenpeace doing with the Internet then?

SF: You can still find some of this on the net. I think Greenpeace archived a lot of the early net activist stuff. You can see it for yourself if you are interested.

There’s video footage of the time when French commandos took out the Rainbow Warior over Nuclear Testing in Mururoa.

You can see them throwing smoke grenades through the windows of the ship.

The crew was tooled up with camcorders and a video compressor so that the footage on the website within hours.

Demand was so massive that footage had to be shipped out to Reuters because the servers couldn’t cope.

The web operation was very advanced – nothing quite like it then and I don’t see much else that comes close even today.

When I got there it was run mainly by volunteers but there was a big audience and a lot of high profile actions had already made the news

M: Did you get ordinary people involved in what you were doing?

SF: A mixture - we were trying all kinds of stuff to see what would work.

At one point we had an activist crawling around the Larsen-b Ice shelf in the Antarctic with a video cam and some chat-software attached to his headgear beaming back footage of the cracks in the ice shelf.

He was looking down into a huge crack in the ice-shelf, beaming video back to London and answering questions from people around the world via the chat software.

It was the first time anyone had seen footage like that.

M: Did you ever go out on these actions then?

SF: No. I was always safe and sound, back in an office in London. But it was still exciting. Especially when there was a big action going on

M: Like?

SF. Onetime Greenpeace were running a campaign to raise awareness about plans by the government to open up new wilderness areas of the Atlantic to oil exploration.

So Greenpeace decided to occupy Rockall, a tiny island in the North Altlantic – I mean tiny, about 80 feet by 50 and in very rough seas.

Greenpeace flew out what looked like a Contac-400 pill with a bunch of activist inside.

They narrowly avoiding a head on collision with the Royal Navy out on night manouevres.

It was all very secret until the morning everyone opened the newspapers and there was a picture of pod there, bolted to the rock with a tiny crew of activitist inside.

We teamed up with the Knowledge Media Lab at the Open University so we could do a live interview with the activist inside the Pod.

I persuaded Johnny Walker the DJ to come into the office for the afternoon and do a ‘desertified island discs’ style programme via a sat link to the people on rock.

I got his number through a record shop in Crouch End – I can’t remember how I got in contact with them - gave him a call and suddenly, there’s an archetypal radio voice at the other end of the phone.

He says, “I’ll do it for a crate of Bud and 20 Marlboro lights!” He was very familiar with actions at sea from his old Radio Caroline days.

He turned up in cowboy boots and a Motorhead T-shirt with his hair streaming out behind him and did a show for us, interviewed the guys inside the pod about how things were going out there – this was a very precarious situation the rock being about 50 feet by 80 in very rough sea with this tiny pod bolted to it  – chatted with them, played requests (Simon and Garfunkel’s ‘I am a rock’, that sort of thing) and fielded question from people tuning in over the net.

M: Were you doing that sort of thing every day? It sound like a nice job to have

SF: Well, by ’98 we were running a more-or-less full time internet-based news service out of the london which linked to activists and campaign teams all over the world.

We were using text, audio and video, even back then and we were bypassing traditional news organisations and switching on a lot of people. The site was very popular.

Although it sound like fun it had a serious side.

We proved that it was possible to do serious stuff and entertain as well as inform and get people engaged and involved.

We weaved the news process into the campaigns and actions and got the stuff out there.

Greenpeace at that time has still got to be the best model for how a campaigning organization can become a media organization and create a news service can break and make the news.

M: Did you try your hand at community–based stuff, like myspace?

SF: Not exactly myspace but we did set up a community site called Waveland as part of the Atlantic frontier campaign. There’s a piece on it on Wikipedia – look under micro-nations.

I think it was the closest to what you’d call a community-based system, until later when I did something similar with the National Theatre.

Users could sign the constitution and get a Waveland passport, email address, chat that kind of thing.

M: Is it still going?

SF: No….it closed down a couple of years later. For a while it was pretty wild. People wrote manifestos and planned actions, even threatened to take Waveland away from Greenpeace and make it a republic, but it fizzled out after a while

M: Why didn’t Greenpeace keep it going?

SF: At that time we just didn’t have the micro-management techniques to keep an audience engaged and stimulated over time. No-one really knew what it was for – there were some woolly ideas about loyalty but they were never thought through with any rigour.

We were simply moving too fast, trying all kinds of things and didn't have time to evaluate what we were doing so we didn’t really know what was working and what wasn't

That's why, when Peter turned up at Saatchi with a whole battery of detailed analytics, I was ready.

We had done a lot of the things that he was talking about but we didn't know how to redeploy them in a structured and sustained way which would guarantee results.

Part three: What do Greenpeace and Saatchi and Saatchi have in common?

Someone disturbed enough to work for both, does his best to tell us

Part four: “I’ve just had a very interesting meeting”

How Saatchi’s ‘open door ideas policy’ kick-starts the social media lab by introducing Peter to Steve

Part five: Virtual Donal McIntyre? Not quite

How Donal McIntyre almost became an online environmental activist (courtesy of Saatchi and Saatchi)

Part six: Social media meets e-government

Repositioning a government department as a social media business