TechRepublican.com

The Second Cup: Foursquare is the New Twitter?

Meghann Olshefski — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 14:16:42 +0000

If there's anyone out there left who says you can't measure social media, here are a hundred answers.

At most of the events I've been to lately, measurement continues to be a hot topic. The first question that comes up is, "What can I measure?" That's where this cheat sheet can come in handy: a list of 100 thought-starters.

Next Year's Twitter? It's Foursquare

Among the Web's early adopter set, the answer is nearly unanimous: Foursquare.

While the technology landscape is ever-changing, I'd argue that Foursquare already has aligned itself to become next year's mainstream hit.

GOP Leads New Media Charge

One year ago, President Barack Obama’s election win transformed political campaigns by showing the power of Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and text messages.

Now Republicans are charging ahead with their own social media agendas, which are becoming more prominent in state elections and day-to-day outreach to constituents.

The GOP: Luddites or High Tech?

Are Republicans trailing the Democrats in their ability to exploit new technology to communicate with voters -- or overtaking them?

That issue flared briefly during the opening day of the Republican Governors Association annual conference here Wednesday. Former Ohio representative John Kasich offered a provocative assessment of his party's failures on that front when he complained about the lack of success of his former colleagues in Washington in projecting a compelling message to the country.

And for those of you who aren't fortunate enough to jet set to Barcelona for PdF Europe, you can listen to the audio thanks to our friends at TechPresident - Enjoy.

Sarah Palin's Twitter Fail

Jeff Vreeland — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 18:33:18 +0000

Today former Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin launched her new Twitter account (which currently has an interesting background promoting her new book).

Surprisingly this was not a switch of her handle from her previous one (@AKGovSarahPalin), but a brand new Twitter Account.

This is quite puzzling to me as to why she decided to not just switch the handle/username to a new one OR do as @DavidAll suggested and start using the handle @SarahPalin that a supporter has so graciously stated they would give to her. Even a quick search reveals 'Sarah Palin' with her old Twitter handle as verified, but the link goes to a failed url.

So I ask, Mrs. Palin (or whatever staffer runs your Twitter account) why did you make this huge mistake? You had 1000s of followers and a great community behind you that you have now decided to give up.

What do you think is the reason she made the change? Ignorance? Forced to by Publisher?

Either way, I would be more then happy to help her understand Twitter better, all she has to do is send me an email and ask :)

The Second Cup: Digital Flashback

Meghann Olshefski — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 14:36:47 +0000

David Plouffe: Negative Viral Emails as Bad as Negative TV Ads

Just off a conference call to promote Obama campaign manager David Plouffe’s new (and so-far excellent) book about the 2008 race, which I’m currently about 3/4 of the way through — more about that soon. On the call, though, I got to ask a question about the behind-the-scenes smear emails that circulated regularly throughout the campaign — what did the campaign do to respond that was most effective, and how should future political operations reply to similar tactics?

Young Political Candidates Confronted by Digital Past on Facebook

Last spring Emanuel Pleitez, 26, ran for California's 32nd Congressional seat in a special election to replace Hilda Solis, the new secretary of labor.

During the campaign, one of Pleitez's opponents, California State Sen. Gil Cedillo, discovered photos from Pleitez's Facebook profile that showed Pleitez hanging around with various women at parties. The Cedillo campaign used the photos as the basis for a mailer that was sent to homes in the district. The mailer presented Pleitez as a partier, drinker and womanizer, among other smears.

Do Republicans Trail in Using Technology?

At the Republican Governor's Association meeting, former Rep. John Kasich (R-OH) blasted his party for not embracing the newest communication tools, the Washington Post reports.

Said Kasich: "I think Republicans need to learn to communicate with the tools of the 21 st century. The women in Iran have been more effective using Twitter than House Republicans have been getting their message out to the country. We need to embrace the modern tools of the 21 st century.... Let's get with it with this stuff."

New Flip Video Cameras to Have Wi-Fi

Cisco’s popular Flip camcorder has helped sparked a revolution in digital and online video. By making video recording quick and easy to record and upload, millions of random moments have been captured (and then summarily uploaded to YouTube).

And last but not least...a major win for Republicans -

Republicans Get the Bill Online Before Democrats

How's that for transparency?

84,448 Fans and Counting

Meghann Olshefski — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 21:37:06 +0000

The Heritage Foundation, with the support of the David All Group,
is ramping up its efforts to connect with conservatives through social
networking sites and encouraging its members to share needed information
with their peers online.

Last week, the Heritage Foundation launched NoEnergyTax.com - a fully integrated and interactive site powered by Act.iv.ist to "shed light on energy taxes."

Robert Bluey, Heritage's Director of Online Strategy, had this to say about the initiative -

The real and ugly truths about cap-and-trade are not being exposed by the media. Therefore, we've created this powerful site to directly empower our nearly 70,000 Facebook Fan Page supporters with the tools they need to expose myths about this policy through their network...The power of social media is being realized through a strategic deployment of technology and a common goal.

Act.iv.ist is a sophisticated new web tool that helps organizations push their message out to the communities in which people are already active, including Facebook and Twitter.

To see for myself, I signed up as a member simply by clicking the Facebook Connect option at the top right hand corner of the site. From there, I could earn points by reading, commenting, signing up for email updates, inviting friends, and sharing information with friends and followers on Facebook and Twitter. I don't even have to go to NoEnergyTax.com - I can access the site through the Facebook fan page.

There are limitless things you can do as a supporter to win points and spread information through your personal social networks.
In fact, the more information I consume and share, the more points I can earn.

Other sticky site features include:

A dynamic points counter at the top of the page
A Leaderboard to track and reward supporters for taking action elsewhere
Seamless integration with the Facebook Connect Platform that lowers the barrier of entry for first-time site visitors

Not only are these new modern media initiatives working to help spread its conservative message, they're working to grow the Heritage Foundation's support base.

Just yesterday, Heritage accrued over 8,000 Facebook fans in one day - that's multiple times more than most organizations' total friend counts.

How do they do it?

By taking charge and taking notice in a threefold process:

1. Setting Achievable Goals

The Heritage Foundation's goal was to reach 75,000 fans. As of this afternoon, they sat at 84,448. But why stop there? The new goal is to reach 100,000 fans by 2010. They're well on their way to achieving that goal.

Why you're goals may not be that high, you can start by setting smaller, more achievable goals. Once you reach them, your members are encouraged by the momentum, and are more likely to help you reach your next goal by inviting their own friends to become supporters of your organization or campaign.

2. Recognizing Benchmarks

When the Heritage Foundation reached its 75,000 fans goal, it updated its fan page picture to recognize that achievement.

3. Thanking Supporters

One of the most important things the Heritage Foundation is doing so far is recognizing individual supporters through its Featured Fan campaign.

What are you doing to reach your goals & recognized your featured fans?

Disclosure: David All, president of the David All Group, founded TechRepublican.com

The Second Cup: You(r)Tube

Meghann Olshefski — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 14:12:25 +0000

YouTube Unveils Tool to Connect News Organizations with Citizen Journalists

MediaPost reports: Google is unveiling a tool Tuesday that enables traditional television and online news agencies to create a platform to manage a bureau of citizen journalists. These mavericks capture life-changing events on camera and upload them to YouTube. It allows media organizations to request, review and rebroadcast these clips directly from YouTube-member pages.

Connecting Citizens and Journalists with YouTube Direct

Every day, people with video cameras are changing the ways we get our news. We see it during elections. We see it during earthquakes, fires and other natural disasters. We see it on our freeways, in our schools and in our public spaces. Almost any event that takes place today has a chance of being captured on camera. As YouTube has become a global platform for sharing the news, media organizations have been looking for a good way to connect directly with citizen reporters on our site so they can broadcast this footage and bring it to a larger audience.

Enlisting the Web in the Redestricting Wars

Redistricting isn’t sexy: it involves numbers and maps, it’s wonky, and just thinking about it makes voters go to sleep. Which is immensely helpful to the politicians redrawing the lines every few years, because they know that almost no one outside of hardcore politicos is actually paying attention.

But redistricting is where the rubber meets the road in politics, since setting district boundaries is all about power: who has it, who keeps it, and who has a chance to get it in the future. And as the state-level victors of 2010 redraw legislative and congressional districts across the country, they’ll also be establishing the boundaries of power in Congress and 50 different statehouses.

You(r)Tube: Now You Too Can Collaborate, Curate

Say you have in interest in having regular folks whip out their video cameras or cell phones and create wonderful video content for your organization, advocacy group, or news enterprise. There's a great deal of appeal (especially given news and non-profit budgets these days). Your most passionate supporters have a way of channeling their energy and creativity towards advancing your work, and you get free material to work with. Win-win! Alas, there are downsides. Lots of people, frankly, create a lot of junk. And when your fans upload their stuff to YouTube, it gets lost in a sea of tangential response videos and clips of cats doing admittedly hilarious, but off-topic, tricks and stunts.

Top Internet Trends of 2000-2009: Democratization of News Media

It's November 2009 and we're nearing the end of a decade. It's been a tumultuous time of change for many industries, much of it driven by the Internet. The newspaper industry has been particularly affected by the Web. Over the past 10 years, news media has undergone a seachange akin to the invention of the printing press in 1440.

The Second Cup: By The Numbers

Meghann Olshefski — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 14:34:57 +0000

3 Social Media Lessons From the Restaurant World

In the midst of all the noise surrounding social media marketing and emerging technologies, we sometimes get caught up in the grandeur of the transition and forget how this all actually works. When you start looking around, it’s easy to think that what makes a campaign successful is some strange, quirky factor. It’s true, there’s a lot of potential to use these tools for trying out new things and creating out-of-the-box experiences, but that’s not the point. The bottom line is that social media offers an opportunity to bring something useful to your customers. To learn how to do it, look no further than the world of food chains, mobile vendors, and top of the line restaurants.

Below are three lessons from the world of food that will help you better utilize social media to bring value to your customers.

How Blogging Has Changed Over the Past 3 Years (Stats)

Reader engagement with blogs has changed dramatically over the last three years, primarily because of the rise of online social networks, according to new numbers released by analytics firm Postrank today. Postrank published an analysis based on metrics for signals like comments, trackbacks, shared links and online bookmarks for the top 1000 most-engaging feeds online and for 100,000 randomly selected blog posts in each year since 2007.

The numbers paint a stark picture: blogging has changed, but the blogging scene is in some ways in better shape than it was three years ago.

5 Ways To Promote Your Facebook Fan Page

Have you ever wondered, “How do I promote my Facebook fan page?” This article reveals 5 ways to use the power of Facebook to grow your fan base.

Why Do You Need a Facebook Fan Page? You may ask, “Why do I even need a Facebook fan page?” Here’s why: Facebook currently has an Alexa ranking of 2. They are the second most trafficked website next only to Google!

This means your Facebook page will be indexed faster on Google and other search engines, so if you don’t have a fan page, be sure to add one and promote it.

The Second Cup: Highly Effective Tweeting

Meghann Olshefski — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 14:41:38 +0000

Twitterverse is Shocked, SHOCKED: Obama Admitted to Never Using Twitter

Those of us on the West Coast - or who stayed up extra late - were able to catch President Obama's town hall live on TV from China along with the accompanying Twitter chatter. There were some amazing nuggets from the town hall. It provided a genuine dialogue with the president, who opened up on his thoughts on everything from terrorism to the open Internet, but much of that will be lost in the Twitter streams the next day or so because Barack Obama admitted (*gasp*) that he has never used Twitter.

7 Habits of Highly Effective Live Tweeters

As Twitter evolves from a casual “What are you doing?” forum to a powerful marketing and advertising tool, live tweeting is the newest strategy being used to generate buzz around events and leverage publicity.

Posting tweets while attending an event, called live tweeting, is growing more popular by the day as a way to share information to people who can’t experience it first hand.

Examples of Bias in Conservapedia's Examples of Bias in Wikipedia

I can’t say that I spend much time thinking about Conservapedia, the creationist wiki created as a counterpoint to Wikipedia, but today I happened to find myself on the page titled “Examples of Bias in Wikipedia“. As you might expect, it’s a fun one.

The Second Cup: 27 Million Tweets a Day

Meghann Olshefski — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 15:23:53 +0000

Are Any Members Of Congress Still On Myspace?

Its garish colors and pop-up jingles have finally driven nearly all of the US Congress from MySpace. Unfortunately, they've left behind a lot of their constituents.

Plenty has changed since the spring of 2007, when MySpace was seen as a potentially invaluable tool for politicians. A close look at all 100 senators' social media efforts shows that only 39 of them have profiles on the Murdoch-owned social network; of those 39, only 11 have signed in since the summer. A less rigorous look at the House supports this trend. It's one thing for a blogger, a media outlet or an advocacy organization to flee a social network for greener pastures, but aren't Congress members using social media for slightly different reasons?

IE 6 Is Almost Dead, But Not Quite

Internet Explorer 6 is the bane of web developers existence. The browser doesn’t support web standards that have become common the last few years, and making sites work in IE 6 adds significant time to the web development process. Despite the release of IE 7 in 2005 and IE 8 in 2009, a full 10% of users still use IE 6. In other words, it is still too big of a group to ignore.

Pingdom Says People Are Tweeting 27 Million Times a Day

Twitter may be having trouble finding new users in the U.S., but its existing users in the U.S. seem to be putting out a majority of the Tweets, which are now averaging 27.3 million a day. According to data provided to us by Pingdom, the pattern of Tweets follows waking hours in the U.S. (see chart), even though comScore data suggests more than half of Twitter’s users are from outside the U.S.

While this data is only a snapshot of the Twitter activity in the three weeks between October 21 and November 11, it does show that the number of messages sent out over the service is approaching a massive scale.

And...Harry Reid Goes Mobile with a healthcare petition.

The Second Cup: ReTweet Edition

Meghann Olshefski — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 14:38:52 +0000

Simple is as Simple Does: The Risk of ReTweet

Despite starting Blogger, Evan Williams rarely blogs. But yesterday, for the first time in several months, he decided to put the digital pen to the digital paper in order to lay out his thoughts for Twitter’s new Retweet functionality. It’s a great view into the mindset behind what is already becoming a controversial change.

The Problem with ReTweets

As most probably know, Twitter is in the process of launching a version of the widely used retweet on its own platform. The move has caused some controversy, as the way retweets has been implemented by Twitter is much different from the unofficial protocols that Twitter users developed organically on their own. Twitter founder Evan Williams explains Twitter’s reasoning here.

I’ve been testing out the new retweet functionality for a few days, and I must say I am not a fan at all. Sean Bonner has written a great blog post dissecting what he dislikes about Twitter retweets. In his post, he hits on my two biggest issues.

Online Advertising Stops Falling Thanks to Search

After two straight quarters of annual declines (aka, the Great Ad Recession of 2009), it looks like online advertising revenues stabilized in the third quarter. The combined online advertising revenues of Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and AOL rose 1.2 percent to $8 billion. While the online advertising industry is not out of the woods yet, it might be stabilizing.

At least it is for Google, which was the only one of the four horsemen of Internet advertising to see its ad revenues rise in the quarter (up roughly $400 million from both last quarter and last year). Yahoo, AOL, and Microsoft were all down on both a sequential and annual basis.

The Second Cup: 540 Caricatures

Meghann Olshefski — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 17:32:52 +0000

The TGIF 'Revolution' is Nothing Without a Marketing Strategy

If you were a first-time visitor from Mars and you happened to drop into a marketing meeting somewhere in the United States, you might assume that marketing people do nothing but talk about "TGIF."

That's Twitter, Google, the internet and Facebook.

There's no question these four revolutionary developments have forever changed the marketing function. Word-of-mouth has now become word of finger.

Where Money Meets New Media: A Virginia Governor's Race Postmortem

Television is still king. Printed mailers are second in line to the throne. And somewhere, waiting out in the castle courtyard, is the joker that is new media.

That's the lesson from a close reading of the campaign finance reports filed in the race for the Governor's mansion in Virginia, a race which ended with Republican ex-State Attorney General Bob McDonnell trumping Democratic State Senator Creigh Deeds, McDonnell with 59% of the vote to Deeds' 41%.

Social Media Monitoring 101: How to Get Started

You’ve probably heard people talking about social media monitoring. It’s wise to listen to conversations before you participate in them. Social media monitoring allows you to do just that.

But many brand and marketing managers responsible for social media don’t quite understand what social media monitoring is and why it’s important. Here’s a quick primer...

And just for fun --

A Mad Magazine Draws 540 Caricatures for an iPhone App...

About the members of congress and Apple rejects it.

Is it fair? You decide.