Another story …

Guerrilla Marketing

At one point, GreenNet was trying to reach out to the peace community, who weren’t using email at all. There was a peace conference in Lund, and I went – as usual I took a stack of leaflets, and left them lying around, but everyone leaves leaflets and hands out business cards so this had little effect. But … I’d also made up some tasteful green buttons with the GreenNet logo – no text, just the logo. Whenever I met someone who was on GreenNet, or signed up a new user, I gave them a badge, and quite a few people who I’d never met in person came up and asked for them.

At one point I was in a breakout meeting for the “North Atlantic Network” which was a campaign against nuclear weapons on US ships. At one point they asked how they would work together across multiple countries. Someone (not me) pointed out how many people had GreenNet badges on, and the group decided everyone should get an email account on GreenNet.

I’m forgetting the exact timing, but I’m pretty sure that Cilla Lundstrum was in the meeting, and Viv Kendon though neither of them were involved with APC at the time and I think this was the first time I met them both. It was also the conference where we solidified a relationship with PeaceNet Sweden – and they agreed to join the APC.

The North Atlantic Network became very effective, in particular through a conference which listed each nuclear armed ship, and a history of interactions with demonstrators allowing each city to be prepared with knowledge of how the ship had responded to demonstrations at its previous port. This allowed for an effective campaign to turn PR visits to port cities, into PR nightmares for the US Navy as for example city councils started asking why there were no adequate precautions against nuclear accidents on the ships.