It looks like the “Coffee Party Movement” is starting to get serious about online organizing. I just saw this Facebook ad to drive traffic to their Facebook Fan Page, which currently sits at just under 100,000 fans.

Their Facebook strategy appears to run on the central-hub model, with a national Coffee Party Page and child pages for major cities across the United States that can be found on the Favorite Pages section of the hub.

The Tea Party Patriots Fan Page has only 107,000 fans, and I expect that with this active recruiting the Coffee Party will overtake it in the next 48 hours.

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Credo Action’s OMGGOPWTF campaign has redefined the practice of paid email list building. Traditionally businesses and organizations would pay hefty sums of cash for email lists from marketing firms with a cost-per-email pricing model. Unfortunately for both the list customer and the people on those lists, unsolicited email doesn’t get a good response and honestly just pisses people off. Credo’s campaign is essentially a pay-per-email campaign that works and benefits everyone in the process.

Instead of paying an organization for their email list, every week Credo chooses a new progressive organization to receive up to 50 cents for every person that opts in to Credo’s mailing list. Each person that visits the website takes a 5 question quiz about stupid things Republicans have done or said the previous week, with each correct answer earning the chosen organization 10 cents.

The result is each week a new progressive organization, with people on its list that would likely be interested in Credo Action, uses all of its communications resources to get its members and supporters to take the quiz. This week it is the Young Democrats of America, so YDA ended up blasting its email list, posting to Facebook and Twitter, and encouraged members to spread the word to their own networks. All those people are now opting-in to Credo’s email list, and after a week passes and most of the people associated with YDA that would take part have already done so, Credo moves on to another organization.

For 50 cents or less an email Credo is getting an opted-in email address from someone that identifies with a progressive organization, and instead of paying some sleazy marketing firm they are helping that progressive organization. By having the sign-up as a trivia game it becomes more viral, since people are more willing to share a quiz than a basic sign-up page. It’s a really smart win-win idea.

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I’m a huge fan of Gary Vaynerchuk. Seriously, Gary is pretty much the best there is at using social media to build community. In this video Gary talks about advertising in this economy and how online advertising is the way to go. Although he focuses on business, everything he says is 100% true for political and non-profit organizations as well.

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