There's an excellent diary on the recommended list called "They Aren't Afraid Of Us", and I agree with the author, rhetoricus, about the kind of war we're in. It's a large scale one, and it's the class war which you can see in the graph to the right.
How can we win the class war we're currently in which the wealthy and corporations have bought off many politicians, judges, and use billions of dollars to lobby against us? The answer is this---the tool to win is what we currently have in the power of the masses to organize and gather in strategic places.
Instead of doing the old trope of doing a large-scale protest in Washington, D.C., what is more effective are protests on a local scale in towns and cities all over states. It allows for people to organize effectively using a variety of tools available to them.
What are these tools? One such tool is social media. You can use Facebook,Twitter, Digg,Reddit, and other networks to organize. You shouldn't necessarily restrict yourself to one social media outlet, but cross-post your organizing action to as many social media outlets as you can.
On Facebook, you can start up a Facebook fan page, and customize it using iFrame tabs that embed content that users can use and share with other people. One such example is the iFrame tab application I created for nyceve on Defund Congressional Healthcare Now, called the Petition tab. The potential of iFrame tabs to help your campaign go viral is just beginning to be harnessed.
There are also other apps on Facebook that act as events widgets that are installed onto your Facebook fan page so people can keep track of events and sign up to join them. There's also the Facebook wall to keep users updated about what's going on, like this Facebook fan page called "Mr. Boehner, Where Are The Jobs?".
As long as you use your Facebook fan page effectively to organize, it helps the virality of your campaign. As I have written above, you shouldn't necessarily restrict yourself to one social media outlet.
You can use Twitter effectively by creating hashtags and linking your campaign to other hashtags. Think of them as the "tags" that are attached to diaries here. For instance, if there's lots of news attention on what is going on in Wisconsin, you can attach your relevant campaign to help the WI protestors to the hashtags #WI #unions #WIprotests. Your tweet campaign would appear in the stream of those following the hashtags.
To help back up your online organizing action, you should have a website that links to both your Facebook and Twitter. You can have a simple website based on Tumblr, WordPress, Drupal, and other CMS. The feedback loop is the most critical part of successful organizing. Everything you do should feed back into each other, such as a blog post about your campaign should go back to your Facebook fan page, be tweeted about on Twitter, cross-posted to news aggregators like Reddit, Digg, etc. It's all about getting more potential activists to sign onto your campaign.
E-mail campaigns also are another crucial part of online organizing. Even if you're not a huge organization, and are just doing this online organizing strictly by yourself, it helps to ask people to join your e-mail list. You can sign up on MailChimp to get your online campaign started---their free plan allows you to send up to 12,000 e-mails per month on a list of 2,000 subscribers. Or you can just create a Google group for people to subscribe to so they get your action e-mail blasts.
In any e-mail action campaign you do, you should always link back to the social media outlets you are using: Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Digg, et al. This is a part of the feedback loop I mentioned above.
Another tool used to successfully organize and gather is the old-fashioned word-of-mouth campaign. You can call your friends up, post flyers in coffeehouses, and text them to come join your protest campaign. If you tie the old fashioned word-of-mouth campaign to social media tools, what you get is a very powerful combination of utilizing the power of the masses to organize and gather in strategic places.
The wealthy and corporations may have the corrupt lawmakers in their pockets, billions of dollars, but what they don't have is organic grassroots action that we currently have. It's their weakness.
Let's take advantage of it today. Start up your own website, Facebook fan page, Twitter, an account on Digg, Reddit, etc., and start up your own video channel on Youtube to record your organizing campaigns. You can do it, and draw in thousands of people to your online campaign.
All it takes is focus, time, and effective use of these tools, and we can win this class war we're currently in!