He's All a-Twitter

Late in the summer of 2007, after just a few months on the job, NRDC's first-ever Netroots campaign manager, Apollo Gonzales, posted a comment on an online message board where a few thousand Toyota Prius owners known as Hypermilers obsess about their hybrid cars. He thought this hard-core fan club, whose members compete against one another to see who can get the best mileage, might be interested to know that the manufacturer of their beloved automobile was opposing a bill before Congress that would mandate stricter fuel-economy standards. Maybe, he thought, this group of efficiency fanatics would want to do something about it.

Before reaching out to the Hypermilers, Gonzales spent a few days learning about the group-its cultural environment and conversational tone, as well as how it responds to outsiders-as if he were an anthropologist investigating a newfound tribe on some far-flung island. If he wanted to talk to them, he would need to find a voice. To Gonzales, that search is the main charge of the job description he essentially wrote for himself.

Netroots campaigning is no longer new, but for many it is still an abstract concept. We can imagine what it's like to run a grassroots campaign, pounding the pavement, shaking hands, striking up conversations. You get to know the community and you speak in terms that resonate with its members. Though Gonzales may be pounding little more than his keyboard and traveling no farther than his own Washington, D.C., office, the conversations he has online are no less relevant. Getting people to talk about an issue is the first step in any campaign. For Gonzales, that means sending an e-mail, posting a comment, contributing to a blog-small actions that, repeated many times over, can add up to something big.

In the case of Toyota's reluctance to support increased fuel efficiency, Gonzales's posts to the Hypermiler message boards triggered precisely the sort of domino effect he was after. Once Hypermilers started talking about Toyota's intransigence, Gonzales moved on to more mainstream forums, such as Facebook and MySpace, where casual Prius fans exchanged news about their shared interest in hybrid cars. In each online group there was always somebody whose interest ran deeper, who talked more-perhaps cared more-and was willing to carry the message out into the wider world.

"This is about finding the people out there who care," Gonzales says. Facebook and MySpace users exchange links to other sites with relevant news, and bloggers fuel the buzz on their own sites. Chatter builds to a boil, what insiders call a blog swarm, and eventually the mainstream media pick up the conversation.

A few weeks after Gonzales posted his first comment on Toyota, New York Times columnist and Prius owner Thomas Friedman heard about it, and on October 3, 2007, he penned an op-ed titled "Et tu Toyota?" Next the Associated Press ran a story about the company's opposition to stricter fuel-economy standards. All over the country small groups of people started protesting near dealerships. Toyota stood up for stricter fuel-economy legislation.

It's hard to pin down exactly where and when social networks come together to create tangible change, but after the bill was passed in December 2007, Toyota spent $40 million in advertising to help rebuild its green image. The Washington Post and other mainstream media outlets credited NRDC for the turn of events.

NRDC hired Gonzales straight from an online-campaigning boot camp, which he attended the summer after he graduated from college. He had no relevant job experience because, he says, "few if any other organizations had similar positions. Now they all do."

The son of migrant workers from Houston, Gonzales is a tech geek who also loves the wilderness. Eleven years ago, at the age of 24, he was making good money selling industrial hardware to oil companies and the military and building Web sites for fun on the side. While he was in Las Vegas for a conference, he took a day trip to Zion National Park and got his first taste of wilderness. Soon thereafter he quit his job and for the next three years lived out of his car, camping across the Southwest and building Web sites to stay afloat financially. In 2004, he enrolled as a 31-year-old freshman at American University in Washington, D.C., where he studied public policy and communications, eventually finding himself in Internet advocacy.

Now that he's working alongside NRDC's Web and media teams, Gonzales has to speak two languages: the traditional communications vernacular and the new vocabulary of the Internet. "Social media are on a parallel but different track," Gonzales says. "It's constantly evolving. The Web and media teams had their toes in that world, but I was neck-deep."

Gonzales is determined to bring the NRDC staff along with him. Environmentalism may be rooted in the analog past-in wildlife and wild places-but it is also part of the digital future. Fortunately, Gonzales is there to guide NRDC through the wilderness.

Follow Apollo Gonzales on Twitter at www.twitter.com/apollogonzales or read his blog on Switchboard, where NRDC experts give you the skinny on the latest news about the environment: http://switchboard.nrdc.org/blogs/agonzales/