Weaving the Roots: How to Maximize Your Social Media Impact

By William T. Hennessy

New from Broadside Books' Voices of the Tea Party. In Weaving the Roots, you'll learn how even tiny grassroots organizations can make big impacts on the world through smart use of free or inexpensive social media tools.

First you'll learn the major tools, like Facebook, twitter, LinkedIn, Google Buzz, blogging, talk radio, and SMS text. How they work, how they work together, and how you can maximize your impact with a small team.

Next, you'll explore five key activities for social networking and which tools work best: recruiting, informing, activating, advocating, coordinating

Finally, you'll find out the science behind social media. You'll get answers to questions that many don't know to ask, like what time of day to tweet or post on Facebook, which day of the week is best for which social channel, and how to announce an event to get lots of attendees without lots of time-consuming questions.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: May 31, 2011
• ISBN: 9780062112965

William T. Hennessy

Bill Hennessy is the cofounder of the St. Louis Tea Party. A veteran of the U.S. Navy, Bill served as a submariner and now works in technology marketing. His previous books include The Conservative Manifesto, and Zen Conservatism. He is editor of stlouisteaparty.com, author of hennessysview.com, and a contributor to Andrew Breitbart’s biggovernment.com. Bill lives in St. Louis County, Missouri, with Angela, his wife, and their children.

Book preview

WEAVING THE ROOTS

How to Maximize Your Social Media Impact

William T. Hennessy

BroadsideLogo_Revised_4-15-11.pdf

Contents

About Voices of the Tea Party

Weaving the Roots

A Setback and a Near Win

A Web

The Rules

The Tools

Conclusion

Bibliography

About the Author

Also by Broadside Books

Copyright

About the Publisher

About Voices of the Tea Party

Voices of the Tea Party is a real-time collaborative forum for Tea Partiers around the country that delivers in-depth information on tactics, strategy, and policy from on-the-ground activists through the use of inexpensive and easy to download e-books. The series will serve the vibrant online community of everyday Americans who launched and continue to drive the Tea Party movement, by taking their collaborative discussions to a much higher level. Tea Party supporters around the country will now be able to instantly access best practices that have succeeded elsewhere, hear the stories of others in the movement, and learn from Tea Partiers with specific policy ideas and expertise. Perhaps more important, they will be able to engage with other thought leaders by submitting their own e-book proposals for possible inclusion in the series. (Please see our website for details: broadsidebooks.net.) Readers and writers alike can thereby join the important national discussion within this ever-expanding community of citizen-activists who have dedicated themselves to securing the movement’s core values of constitutionally limited government, fiscal responsibility, and free markets.

Series editor Michael Patrick Leahy has been one of the driving forces of the Tea Party movement from its inception. He’s a co-founder of the Nationwide Tea Party Coalition, which sponsored the very first national Tea Party demonstrations; the February 27, 2009, Nationwide Chicago Tea Party; and the April 15, 2009, Tax Day Tea Party. He is also the author of The Ideological Origins of the Tea Party Movement, to be published by Broadside Books in January 2012. His website is http://www.michaelpatrickleahy.com.

Weaving the Roots

A Setback and a Near Win

Twice I drove past the St. Louis office of U.S. senator Claire McCaskill looking for a parking spot. A small crowd of MoveOn.org supporters with signs had already gathered on the sidewalk in front of McCaskill’s office on Delmar Boulevard, next door to the Nubia Café.

I found a spot one block east and across the street from the protest zone. I grabbed my video camera and my cell phone, sent one last Tweet asking Tea Partiers to join our counterprotest, and stepped into the bitterly cold January air.

I guess we’re it, said Patch Adams, who’d been waiting in his car a few yards away.

Really?

I was worried about being late, yet I was only the second Tea Partier on the scene. Forty minutes later,