New media tools such as blogs, Facebook and Twitter have been widely adopted across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) in recent years for a variety of purposes. To explore the effective integration of these tools into advocacy campaigns, Aswat gathered a group of 23 civil society activists representing 11 countries from November 20 to 22 in Istanbul, Turkey for the first annual Aswat New Media Conference. Led by a team of five specialized experts and seasoned activists in the field of new media and online activism, the event explored the effective integration of new media tools into broad advocacy campaign strategies.

The event was held in tandem with the annual meeting of the Aswat Advisory Board. The Advisory Board has worked closely with the Aswat since its inception in 2006, offering guidance and outreach as the portal developed and recommending that offline events such as the New Media Conference be organized to gather activists from throughout the region, to support online activism. This Board is comprised of group of academics, media professionals, politicians and civil society activists that meet to discuss regional trends on media and information sharing.

The success and the efficacy of an advocacy campaign depend on the ability to disseminate information and mobilize supporters quickly and effectively. In the past decade, new media has been greatly credited with enhancing the ability to disseminate information and mobilize supporters quickly and effectively, an essential component to a successful advocacy campaign. New media, commonly defined as the use of blogs, micro-blogs, multimedia, social-networking sites and mobile technology for the purpose of transmitting and processing information, has become the focus of activists and campaigners throughout the world.

In Istanbul, Aswat aimed to build on this trend by sharing new media technologies with a diverse group of activists from across the MENA region. An opening plenary session featured Sam Graham-Felsen, Content Director at Blue State Digital and former Director of Web Content and Blog Outreach for the Obama Campaign, who gave a presentation on how to inspire an organization’s base of supporters and advocates in campaign activity through the use of personal stories relayed through new media. Alan Rosenblatt, Associate Director for Online Advocacy at the Center for American Progress Action Fund, then discussed how tools in online advocacy are changing, yet communication and grass-roots organizational strategies remain the same.

Panel discussions were designed to both inspire participants to apply lessons from conference seminars in their day-to-day advocacy activities, as well as to help them seek out new media technologies and utilize them regularly to promote reform and broaden their outreach. Participants, who included mid to high-level civil society activists and journalists from across the MENA region – were actively engaged through five panel discussions led by the experts and moderated by MENA Advisory Board members. In addition to Graham-Felsen and Rosenblatt, other panelists included Katrin Verclas, co-founder and editor of MobileActive.org, Mohamad Najem, co-founder of Social Media Exchange based in Beirut, and Vlada Milovanovic, new media consultant and Creative Director for the Youth Initiative for Human Rights in Serbia.

Each panel discussion provided a comprehensive overview of the use of new media tools in campaigns. The first discussion covered the effective use of basic and more traditional tools including email, listservs, websites, and online petitions, while the second panel spotlighted the world of blogging and micro-blogging, which triggered a series of Twitter postings by participants. The third panel delved deeper into advocacy trends in the era of new media with focused discussions on social networking sites, such as Facebook, and various online forums. The conference concluded with two final panel discussions: one highlighting the dynamic tools of multimedia and on the power of mobile technology.

Participants interviewed at the end of the conference spoke enthusiastically about their plans to apply some of the new media strategies discussed during the panels. The Aswat portal will also be hosting a question and answer session with the experts to foster continued dialogue and information sharing among conference attendees.