Blogs are the New Back Fences, Pew Study Shows

Research released last week by the Pew Internet & American Life Project indicates that the blogosphere is bringing people of color into conversations about neighborhood issues.

According to the study, people of color are less likely than white people to have face-to-face conversations with their neighbors about what's going on in their neighborhoods, and are significantly less likely to know most or all of their neighbors. Fifty percent of whites, 43 percent of blacks and 29 percent of Hispanics reported having face-to-face discussions about local issues in the months leading up to the study, according to Pew. However, black and Hispanic people are just as likely as white people to use blogs to keep track of what's going on in their neighborhoods, the study found.

Jeff Pulver Launches 'JustCoz' Twitter Donation Platform

One of the most anticipated talks of Media 2.0 day was ‘The State of Now” with self-described ‘technology anthropologist” and entrepreneur Jeff Pulver. He certainly did not let the crowd down, with Tweets coming into Twitterslurp saying “Awesome session with Jeff Pulver about the real time internet. Listen. Connect. Share. Engage (@mizdiva)” and “We can follow rules, we can write rules, but the greatest impact is when we break rules. inspired by Jeff Pulver” (@milouness)

DC Week Media 2.0 Day:  USA Today's Traditional and Social Media Panel

Digital Capital Week 2010 has begun, and the first tough question to be asked is: how can traditional media harness the community-building power of modern social media tools. This question was the focus of the Media 2.0 panel on Tuesday, and the panelists were rife with answers.

Robert Michael Murray, National Geographic Social Media Director, proposed thinking of social media  as a collaborative effort, focusing on the input of “fans” and customers. The key, he says, to getting the most out of your groups’ social media action is the content. Organizations like National Geographic play a role in the lifestyle of their customers, and it is through that lifestyle that they connect with them. “How can we provide value and benefit to our audience?” he asks. “Make sure we become embedded in their lifestyle. The ideas have to be unique, natural and authentic to the audience.”

5 Fight Club Quotes to Tranform Your Marketing Approach

Fight Club remains one of my favorite movies even after I read the book it was based on. The acting didn’t reduce author Chuck Palahniuk’s powerful messages. On the contrary, it helped me connect them to different social realities, including the universe of marketing.

The film’s transformative character inspires transformative actions from a business perspective. Here are a few marketing interpretations of five memorable Fight Club quotes...

Old-Timers go Modern in Quest to Stay in Congress

It's 7:19 p.m., yet Rep. Ike Skelton appears hard at work. "I just voted against the repeal of DADT," Skelton tweets via BlackBerry to alert a few hundred followers to his stance against gays openly serving in the military.

This from a man who didn't have personal computer in his office and displayed photos of himself with former President Harry Truman.

Now at age 78, after more than three decades in Congress, Skelton is going modern.

4 Ways to Measure Your Social Media Brand

Do you know how social media is helping your business? Want to find out how Twitter, Facebook and other sites are impacting your brand awareness?

The good news is social media has finally made it to the grand stage of “accountability.” A place where there are lots of people who want to measure it. The bad news is there isn’t a single clear-cut answer.

However, with a few simple steps, you can build a measurement strategy that accomplishes your goals.

Report: Online Ad Revenue Will Soon Surpass Print

We are all aware of the floundering print industry that has seen a steady decline in revenues over the last several years. Newspapers that once thrived on the cash-cows that were classifieds and print advertising have had their lunch eaten by the disruptive forces of Craigslist and online advertising, which have slowly chipped away at print ad sales. Soon, however, according to a report from PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), Internet advertising revenues will surpass those of print advertising to become the second largest segment of advertising in the U.S. behind television.

Tim Pawlenty Crowdsources His Endorsements

CQ’s Daniel Newhauser picked up on a good story late last week — Minnesota Governor and presumed 2012 Republican presidential candidate Tim Pawlenty has “crowdsourced” his backing, allowing his supporters to vote to decide which of the congressional candidates he’s endorsed should receive the bulk of his support. At stake are both money and attention, giving the candidates themselves every reason to spread the word and help Pawlenty…build his own list. 

Quality Over Quantity: Debunking 2 Social Media Myths

How do we measure success in social media?

This is a question that will continue to be asked as social media grows in prevalence and new analytics tools arrive.

While there are many methods for measuring your social network’s success, I’d like to point out two very common measurement myths and debunk these once and for all!

10 Killer Tips for Creating a Branded YouTube Channel

There was a time when YouTube (YouTube) was considered a wild-wild west of content — a place where marketers shied away from uploading their commercials, let alone building a branded channel. But these days, YouTube has become more mini-van than stagecoach. From Toyota Sienna’s high-profile television commercials urging consumers to visit their YouTube channel, to (what might be considered the anti-minivan) Harley Davidson’s fan-centric YouTube universe, there has been a noticeable shift in corporate adoption of the platform.

He'll Be Back: Arnold Schwarzenegger is on Foursquare

How can you tell that location-based social networking service Foursquare (Foursquare) is entering the mainstream? Well, the addition of movie-stars-turned-California-governors to the service is a very good clue.

Yes, you can now track Arnold Schwarzenegger’s whereabouts on Foursquare. He already has more than 1,000 followers, which is no big surprise considering his Foursquare account is advertised on his official page.

The Problem with Community Pages

Among the changes announced at F8 last week, the one most users are likely aware of already is the introduction of Community Pages and the linking of user profiles to them. This has caused a great deal of confusion for both the average user as well as the companies and brands who maintain a presence on Facebook. (In the interests of disclosure, I have clients for whom this is an issue, although I will not use them as examples.) In my view, Facebook now faces a number of issues to resolve that could have been avoided if the rollout had been planned more carefully: at present, Community Pages are hurt by a lack of transparency, a plethora of redundancy and too little explanation of their quirks.

Do Kids Read Blogs? New Study Aims to Confuse

A new study released earlier this month seems to contradict findings from Pew Internet Project's February report on the declining blog authorship and blog readership among the youngest generation of online users. Instead of seeing a downward trend in blogging, the latest research appears, at first glance, to have us questioning those prior reports.

According to the latest study, this one from BlogHer and iVillage (red flag?) and co-sponsored by Ketchum and The Nielsen Company, young adults known as "Millenials" are the top demographic group in both reading and writing blogs, with nearly one third reporting they read blogs and just over 40% saying they blog themselves.

So was the earlier study - the one claiming "kids don't blog" anymore - wrong? 

And last, and certainly least....

Hugo Chavez has decided to join Twitter.

“Comandante Chavez is going to open his Twitter account soon to wage the battle online,” Diosdado Cabello, head of the country’s telecommunications regulator, said today on state television. “I’m sure he’ll break records for numbers of followers.”

Dana Perino, the last press secretary to President Bush and now the chief issues counselor for the PR firm Burson-Marteller, shared her thoughts about the evolving media market in an interview with Beet.tv. She talked about everything from how blogs are shaping the debate over Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor to what companies can do online to protect their brands.

The full interview is below, and here are some sound bites:

• "What's really interesting to me on the Supreme Court nomination is to watch the blogs. They have journalists that are going through [Sotomayor's record], looking at all the different opinions that she rendered as a judge over her career. ... And sometimes the traditional media just doesn't have enough time to do it. They are trying to do more with less, and so they're looking at the blogs as well. So it almost becomes a symbiotic relationship."
• "A lot of new media is trying to fill the void where traditional media is falling short. And that's a good thing."
• "It's important that people be able to broaden out, read a lot of different things" other than information from their own political perspective.
• "A crisis that you might have dealt with over a couple of weeks now happens within a couple of hours, and so you have to have a team in place to be able to help you immediately."
• Companies "need to have some sort of [video] freelancers on speed dial" to react to online viral videos (like the infamous Domino's pizza clip) that could undermine their brands.

[Cross-posted at Accuracy In Media]

The House adjourned this morning without considering energy legislation. Nancy Pelosi and company were quick to make an exit, turning off the lights and the microphones in their wake. But some House Republicans stayed on the floor. At 3:30pm, they're still on the floor staging what's being called an "uprising" and a "revolt."

The lights are off. The microphones are off. CSpan isn't taping it. Nancy Pelosi "sent Capitol Police to clear the press gallery [and] lock the doors" according to news on RedState, but "Reps. Bunt, Shadegg, and Hoekstra have been taking turns remaining with media in the gallery in order to keep it open."

This revolution is not being televised. But thanks to online communication we know about it. It's on blogs like RedState, it's on the Twitter feeds of Reps. Culberson, Boehner, and Hoekstra. And now it's spreading as one person brings it up to another. I just mentioned it to a non-political friend in Texas. Her response? "Wow. This is like old school politics. This is amazing!"

This revolution is not being televised, but who the hell cares? To borrow from Rep. Culberson's tweet this morning: "Here is a powerful use of social media - when they turn off the mike we can still communicate."

Joe and I attended a lunch-time discussion of the book Netroots Rising forthcoming from Nate Wilcox and Lowell Feld at the Institute for Politics, Democracy and the Internet. Like the title would suggest, the book is about the up-turning of the traditional political order (top-down campaigns) for the tumultuous rabble-rousing democratic square of the blogosphere.

The event itself was a good cross-section of the people you'd hope to lure in with this topic--old and young, men and women, suits and jeans. Although I do strongly suspect Joe and I were among the few from the right side of the aisle. Not surprising for a book written by two Democratic consultants with an introduction from the DailyKos founder.

What I Didn't Know: Perhaps this is my own lack of schoolin', but I had never paid much attention to the foggy genesis of the "Netroots" movement. The first six-figure internet campaign was in 2002, a race for the Texas governorship. The 2004 campaigns of Howard Dean and Wesley Clark were early pioneers in harnessing the power of the internet--and the blogosphere. Clark's campaign "imploded" over this issue, while Dean's attempted an early in-house social networking system, much like the 2008 candidates are all using.

That means none of the 2008 candidates are doing anything "conceptually" new and different, as Wilcox and Feld were both quick to point out. (Which helps put their efforts into better context.) They're just utilizing more people who are more adept at using technology. And, one would presume, it's better technology, period. I've at least been playing with web design long enough to know the websites of today are much prettier and more powerful than the ones from four and six years ago.

What I Thought Was Useful: Political campaigns need to continue to figure out the best ways to integrate an organic grassroots online movement within the traditional campaign framework. I believe it was Wilcox who suggested that many politicians seem to be using the Netroots community without being in it. The example he used was of campaigns sending out blast emails--but the emails are written by staffers, not the politician. Internet technology is supposed to help people connect to other people. How truly and genuinely connected do we expect our politicians to be? Does it matter?

What I Didn't Agree With: There was, of course, a brief discussion of why Republicans seem to be lagging in their use of technology. One suggestion was that Republicans are inherently "hierarchical" older people. Since I don't consider myself hierarchical or older, I was confused. Especially because I wasn't quite sure what a hierarchical person would be like. Fond of fitting oneself into hierarchies?

Anyway, the explanation I like better is that the use of technology has been due to Party circumstances rather than personal shortcomings. Democrats were out of power and disenchanted with the party elite in the early 2000s; they were looking for new avenues to organize. In contrast, Republicans were riding a swell of victory. So now that the swell has crashed upon the shore, Republicans are scrambling to catch up. It makes sense. I think it matches reality, too.

What I'd Still Like to Know: A suggested 90% of blog readers are lurkers, people who read posts but never comment, never email, never take any action. Who are these unknown they? How do we reach out to them? How much do they have to offer? I'd bet it's a lot, and also I bet figuring out how to expand the "e-base" will be the next big thing.

By way of introduction, I'm interning for the David All Group this summer before I return to Duke University for my senior year. Yesterday I was part of a bloggers' conference call with Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI).

Ryan introduced his policy plan "A Roadmap for America's Future" two days ago to tackle the tax system, health insurance, and the impending entitlement crisis. I skimmed it, I mostly like it, and it's received a good deal of praise in the conservative blogosphere. Its main appeal—at least to me—is that it moves the debate on these issues to the right in anticipation of negotiating back to the center. And the solutions are new(-ish) so, as Ryan said, it should at least be helpful in an effort to get legislators to "move beyond rehashing the problem." Amen brother.

What I have found most interesting about this process, though, is Ryan's nice footwork with the media. He launched the plan with a Wall Street Journal op-ed: a solid column in a widely-read, highly-respected newspaper. Good play with the traditional media. The following day Ryan reached out to bloggers in a conference call. In that call, he referred to the website set up to showcase the "roadmap," a website to which most blog posts and online articles have linked.

So Ryan gets buzz created in on- and offline efforts. Plus he gets to present his undiluted message to anyone clicking on his site from links in blogs or articles, as well as anyone Googling after the Wall Street Journal piece. Well-played indeed.

We lost the Senate in 2006 because of the Internet, so to ignore it this cycle would be political malpractice. With that in mind, the NRSC has written a 39 page Web manual for Senate campaigns with tips on engaging bloggers, avoiding "macaca" moments and even how to ask for money online.