Here are a couple relevant updates:

- Come join me and others this Monday in San Francisco for a Net Impact panel called, ‘Social Change 2.0, Using the Web for Good‘.   The other speakers are:

• Leila Chirayath Janah,  Founder of Samasource
• German Freiwald, Senior Strategist, Google Grants
• Colin Mutchler, Founder of Loudsauce

see invite: http://bit.ly/akPHH6

- The new customer and business model has required some intensive work and we’re still figuring it all out.  The good news is that we’re less than a month away from the site re-design and new business model.  The other good news is that if you’re charged with increasing civic participation and social action for a community large or small, then you’re only a month away from getting your hands on an amazing tool.  The bad news is that if you’re a community organizer that was excited about using Blitz Bazaar to mobilize large numbers of people to take coordinated action to change the world, then you won’t have Blitz Bazaar.   We had to choose, sorry!    You should keep using free groupware like Ning and Facebook Groups and hopefully a player will come on the scene shortly that gives you better tools.

- I’m very excited about working closely with the Go Game team, Finnegan and Ian.  Thanks to a timely intro from Brent of CarrotMob, I’m now talking to them about a partnership to provide the Blitz Bazaar platform for the city of Berkeley!   Imagine a block by block competition (the households that live in a city block would be a team during this summer-long event) in which you get more points the more you serve your community by cutting your energy use, by volunteering at a local soup kitchen, by cleaning the graffiti off that abandoned building on the corner, etc.   The winning block will get recognized as such by the city and a big summer block party will be thrown on their block to celebrate.  The mayor will not only attend the party but will be participating also.. accumulating points from actions taken.   That’s the idea and the city wants to do it.   Cool way to get this off the ground.   Thanks Finn and Ian.  I can’t wait.   Also don’t forget to check out the amazing team building games they have been offering companies and communities for almost a decade.

- Last and definitely NOT least, I want to welcome Amie Vaccaro and Felicia Betancourt to the Blitz Bazaar team.  They’re starting to work with me on customer development and site development respectively.   I’m feel very lucky to be working with such talented and passionate individuals.

That is except for Jane McGonigal.  Just recently I saw the TED video from this futurist from the Institute for the Future.  She makes the outlandish claim that the best way to solve the world’s ills is to get people to play more computer games.  Check it out here.  I agree.”

click here to read more…

In all seriousness, we have decided to de-emphasize campaigning in our platform and re-emphasize actions. What we’ve found out through old-fashioned trial and error is that building our whole business model around campaigning is harder than building it around actions because the latter gives us a clear enterprise customer who greatly values our solution and… well, it’s a bigger market.   In the end of the day, we’re still all about letting the amateur campaigner/organizer change the world in her PJs, but it’s now more indirect.

So what am I talking about? Well if you looked at the new Blitz Bazaar website, you’d have noticed everything’s different. It used to say, “Blitz Bazaar, the best way to organize large numbers of people for a common goal.” Now it says, “reinventing community service to be more engaging, social and rewarding.”

Our site has always been about three things: people, actions and blitzes (a.k.a. campaigns). This isn’t changing. A campaign is inert unless it has large numbers of people taking action. What we’ve doing now is pulling the actions out of the blitzes and pooling them together into one place for you to digest right when you log-in. It’s simpler. The user can still check out the blitzes but everything is engineered now to encourage action-taking and to simplify user experience.   It’s also all geared towards existing communities that you’re probably a part of:  a corporation, a church, a school, a university, a town, etc.

The main reason we’re convinced Blitz Bazaar is a game-changer as compared to the other volunteer and social actions sites on the web that haven’t taken off is because we do NOT presume that people wake up in the morning wanting to look for social actions to do. I know I don’t.  Starting without that assumption, we’ve had to figure out what the biggest motivators for taking action are.   Well here’s the answer: people are motivated to do good in order to: (1) strengthen relationships, (2) build up their own reputation, (3) get something in return, (4) – when possible – to have fun! … oh yeah and that altruistic one… (5) to make the world a better place.  We all care about good ol’ #5 but what’s the trigger to get us away from Facebook, Xbox, TV screens, oh… and now the iPad?   It’s (1)-(4).

Easier said than done?  Yeah, true.   We’re an open book on what we’re doing because it’s hard and we figure that if we don’t have the answer, someone will and this is too important to hard close to our chests while the world’s biggest problem continue while we play Wii.

So our approach is to package up into one community service platform the following: social networking software for private communities (i.e. universities, schools, religious institutions, corporations, etc) & social gaming: points, levels and redeemable rewards.   What does this mean?   After you log-into our site (your school or corporate community service portal), you can see in real-time what social actions your friends and community members are doing.  You can then take action yourself.  As you take action, you get points.  As you get more points, you level up.   You also can redeem them for donated items in our gift store.    Why go to an arcade when you can have the same experience while making the world a better place and getting to know your neighbors better?

Hold on tight while we upgrade our platform over the next couple weeks to reflect these changes. It’s going to be a gem.

Also, we’re starting to talk with potential customers in the Bay Area so if you know any progressive companies with strong community service programs (CSR) or universities, schools or religious institutions that want to strengthen their own communities around social action, we really appreciate an intro.

See you out there changing the world.

By: Alessandra Jochum, Blitz Bazaar Community Manager

Hello friends!

Blitz Bazaar is back in rainy San Francisco from the WeMedia conference in Miami. If you remember a previous blog post, we were one of four business finalists in the PitchIt! Competition, competing for $25,000 to further fund our company. Well, we did not win. But that doesn’t mean we lost! Here are all the great things that came out of this week:

1. We practiced an 8 minute presentation about 80 million times. Now, we can talk about Blitz Bazaar in a much clearer way. Here’s a short version from Blitz Bazaar founder Lloyd Nimetz:

2. We realized the TRUE innovation of Blitz Bazaar: we network not only individuals, but organizations. It has never been done before (successfully) and effectively connecting organizations can lead to more effective collaboration and SYNERGY. Lloyd will elaborate on this exciting epiphany soon.

3. We saw amazing speakers like the CEO of PBS, Paula Kerger.

4.  Sweet South Florida nature: Manatees, Mangroves & Mangoes.

And with that, we will stubbornly continue to believe that the opposite of a winner is NOT a loser.

Would Martin Luther King Jr, Cesar Chavez or Mahatma Gandhi have entered a prize-driven competition for their respective causes?  Would their movements have been even more effective with the aid of the Internet and its social tools?

We’ll never know for sure, but we do know that many social movement organizations and grassroots organizers alike are starting to embrace the wild wild west of ‘e-organizing’: a landscape of new web-based tools and technologies designed to help self-organize large numbers of people and drive systemic change.

As you might have read recently in a SSIR email sent out to all magazine subscribers, Stanford students recently unveiled the first ever Movement Plan Competition.  This first year, this “Social-M Challenge” (‘M’ for Movement) is thematically focused on environmental sustainability and powered online byBlitz Bazaar, a new movement-management platform that makes it very easy for grassroots organizers to harness the power of the social web to start and grow a micro-movement, even for people with little comfort using the social web.  Full disclosure: I am the founder of Blitz Bazaar.

Phase I of the challenge closed on January 29th with eighteen submitted movement plans, the best of which were awarded $1000 each. Now through February 27th, movement leaders will nurture and adjust their movements to the realities and lessons of campaigning.  The single best-realized and most-promising of the thirteen active social movements will be awarded $10,000. Challenge funding was generously provided by the following Stanford partner organizations: the Precourt Energy Efficiency Center, the Sustainable Stanford Green Fund, the Woods Institute for the Environment, the Office of Community Engagement and the School of Humanities and Sciences.

If you check out the site, you’ll see PhDs, professors and undergrad freshman all taking collective action for the sustainability-related causes.  These are micro-movements that promote issues like vegetarianism, community supported agriculture (a.k.a, eat local food), ‘Green’ values for young children, reusable utensils, ending food waste, oil-free water in Ecuador and more.  Each movement is working towards a very specific goal and lists actions anybody can take to help further the goal.  Again, the movements are not limited to Stanford students so anybody can get involved.

In a new era defined by disruptive new social technologies and a market-driven approach to social change, it is not surprising that social movement-making be similarly incentivized.  Grassroots organizers can also be motivated using the same successful format that we’ve now gotten used to for business plans and more recently the X-prize foundation.  However, this value of this type of competition goes well beyond just catalyzing social movements and therefore social change. Anybody who’s participated in the more familiar business plan competitions in the past knows that it’s less about the money and more about the process.

Our partners at Stanford, The Precourt Institute, The Woods Institute, and the Stanford Office of Sustainability, have been pleased with the Challenge so far for a couple reasons.  First it embodies the transdisciplinary approach the University is trying to advocate.  Doctors working with engineers, MBAs and lawyers to solve the healthcare debacle makes a lot of sense but it is hard to make happen in practice.  Secondly, Social-M is seen as a valuable tool for experiential learning in an ever-more important but largely ignored discipline: campaigning.  Lastly, it is technologically innovative by incorporating social networking and social media into the loop via Blitz Bazaar.

Contingent on successful results gleamed from this Stanford’s Social-M Challenge, you can expect this “Movement Plan Competition” format to spread just like the ‘social’ business plan competition format has proliferated in the last decade.  Many more Universities and Social Movement organizations are likely to embrace this format as an effective way to teach and catalyze the discipline of movement-making, a.k.a. campaigning.

Find out here.

Aaaand..signing off.

Guess what: We were welcomed to Miami! I don’t need to go on and on about this, but I just wanted to quickly announce that Blitz Bazaar is one of the seven finalists that will now be allowed to pitch their venture at the WeMedia conference in Miami, March 9-11!

Here is a list of the the other awesome finalists:

• AssignIt: Mobile Crowd-Sourcing Apps for Hyper-Local Investigative Journalism
• Citizens Market Pilot
• LoudSauce – crowdfunded ad space for your favorite causes
• MiCAST – Mobile Information Crisis Action Support Team
• Ratemywaterquality.com
• Stractor

Check ‘em out at WeMedia.com.

Signing off, this is your community manager.

I like metaphors, so today I found myself pondering the following question:

How do you plant a movement? Can you buy movement “seed” packs? Do they need special sugar water to grow up nice and strong? Should you sing to them? The best way to go about answering this question is to delve a little deeper into Stanford University’s Social-M Challenge.

The Seeds:

The Social-M Challenge is the movement plan competition happening at Stanford that I mentioned in a former post. And though none of the participating, sustainability-themed movements are truly off the ground yet, they are pretty cool. Never before have I heard of such truly creative ways to tackle modern environmental problems.

The Sprouts:

For example, the Thanks for Acting Sustainably movement would like to recognize and encourage small, environmentally-friendly acts by simply thanking people for doing them! Did you see someone pick up somebody else’s litter? Tweet “Thx for picking up somebody else’s litter!” to the hashtag #sustaction and your Thank You will be added to a stream of Thank You’s. There are also plans to allow texting and emailing into the same stream. The idea is so simple, but has great potential to be a great source of sustainability-themed motivation.

Secondly, the Team Awesome movement wants to make it fun and mainstream to act sustainably. In Team Awesome’s perfect world, environmentalism shall NO LONGER be associated with dirty hippies. NO LONGER will “true environmentalists” look down their noses at people who aren’t hardcore enough. By creating an accepting and “silly” online community, EVERYONE can be on Team Awesome. It doesn’t matter if you spent your weekend chained to a tree or toting your disposable coffee mug around town instead of using 4 to-go containers.

These and SIXTEEN other movements are currently entering the implementation phase of the movement challenge (Check ‘em out). They now have four weeks to contend with the realities of running a campaign. I have high hopes and I can’t wait to see…

THE FRUIT!

Signing off, this is your community manager.

Hello everybody. We’ve uploaded our first tutorial video, written, directed and narrated by Blitz Bazaar founder Lloyd Nimetz!

This tutorial should explain how to (on a basic level) to use Blitz Bazaar.

If you find yourself poking around our YouTube channel, you should probably also meet Max. Just sayin’…it’s a very non-technical, quite musical explanation of Blitz Bazaar:

Enjoy our videos, friends. This is your community manager, signing off.

We submitted an application to We Media’s Pitch It! (http://wemedia.com/pitchit/) competition. According to their About Page, We Media is an organization that “helps companies and their leaders see, understand and respond to complex change.” Subsequently, their Pitch It competition seeks “Bold Ideas”; new ventures that seek to create a better world through media. (That’s us!)

Here’s the kicker: The Finalists get to pitch their ideas in one month at the We Media Pitch It! convention in Miami. $50,000 in seed money will go to the two best ideas pitched at the convention. I love conventions, winning, money, gators and sun, so please welcome us to Miami.

In all seriousness, I truly believe we are the venture this competition was designed to find. Reading our (uncut) answer to the first question should make this clear:

Question 1: What is your idea? What makes it innovative? Why is it important?

Blitz Bazaar is a web platform designed to irreversibly transform the way people mass-organize and drive social change, making it easier than ever before.

The Green Revolution in Iran and the Obama presidency have one thing in common: they both owe their existence in large part to the rise of social media and social networking. The Internet’s platforms and tools are only now reaching a level of pervasiveness and maturation such that they can start to be used for more complex social interaction.

Furthermore, people are tired of feeling powerless, unable to shape their communities. Simultaneously, most are still not willing to sacrifice the time or money needed required to self-organize and be local leaders. The solution:  Blitz Bazaar. Blitz Bazaar is an Internet campaigning platform that radically lowers the cost to organize,  radically lowering the effort and acumen required.  Blitz Bazaar is positioned to empower the emergence of a new class of non-professional organizers who can do what before only professional campaigners, activists and union leaders were capable of.

Blitz Bazaar disrupts the campaigning industry by giving everyone access to the tools they need to change their world. As a consumer web product, it Blitz Bazaar is far more accessible and affordable than the $1 billion annual professional campaign management software on the market.  It is simultaneously far more effective than Facebook Groups and other groupware products that are currently being utilized by the vanguard citizen organizers.  Finally and importantly,  Blitz Bazaar makes changing the world social and fun. Envision a mass-multiplayer game, but with real results that matter.

Blitz Bazaar’s vision is Everybody a Changemaker. We consider ourselves part of a broader civic participation movement that is democratizing power and rapidly gaining momentum on the back of new web-based technology.

Anyway, wish us luck. We’ll keep you posted. I’m your community manager, signing off.