K Street Cafe

Twitter tiff: Moldy “tweet” ticks off Chicago firm (Associated Press)
A woman in Chicago is being sued by a property management company for a “tweet” about the apartment she lived in opening up the legal debate on Twitter.

Getting Senior Management On Board the Social Media Bandwagon (PR News)
PR News discusses the importance of CEO’s and other executives becoming Web 2.0 savy for the betterment of business.

I recently gave an interview for Studio 1080 on KUDO in Anchorage, AK about using Twitter for advocacy/marketing and wanted to share it with you. Here is the gist of the conversation:

Why tweet?

In the US alone, there are 26.5 million people on Twitter and among them are many, if not most of the most influential people in the country. These people are talking about all of the issues of the day, from the most mundane to the most profound. If you are not on Twitter, you are not part of the conversations that matter most to you and your cause, and you are missing the opportunity to engage with the people who are most able to influence large segments of the country and the key decision makers affecting your mission. (more…)

By now, it’s a cliché that Twitter has real-world value. Yet if you really want to appreciate both the usefulness and hipness of microblogging, try participating in a social media conference where live Tweeting is not only encouraged, the Tweets also are displayed on JumboTrons flanking the on-stage speaker.

Such was the case earlier this week at the Open Government and Innovations Conference. Held at the Convention Center in Washington, DC, the two-day conference brought together 700 “gov 2.0” types from the federal government and the consulting community that supports it. As such, not only did most attendees pack a Twitter-appified PDA; many also toted laptops or netbooks.

To meet such demand, the conference organizers established a hash tag—a unique series of characters (e.g., “ogi”), prefaced by a hash symbol (#)—to group together all #ogi Tweets. Tags, of course, are nothing new; what was new (at least for me) were the two JumboTrons that showcased, in real time on a 3×2 grid, each #ogi Tweet, coupled with the Tweeter’s headshot and user name. (more…)

The Most Engaged Brands On The Web (Tech Crunch)
Tech Crunch profiles the newest ranking of corporations based on their use of social media.

Obama is good for K Street lobbyists (The Hill)
Second quarter earnings are out for the top lobbying firms in Washington, and the Obama Administration’s interest in hot topic issues has help K Street bounce out of the economic downturn.

By Shellie J. Edge

That’s the very question I asked myself when I started a new job where many of my clients are actively involved in various social media networks. Although I’ve been in the public relations industry for more than 10 years, I still consider myself young and hip… or at least I’d like to think so. I have a Facebook page, subscribe to the hottest RSS feeds and even know a little about Twitter.  I was even inspired by what President Obama’s team was able to do with social media during his campaign last fall.

So what’s all the buzz about? Why should we care about social networking? And why should we encourage our clients to take advantage of the potential of social networking? I think we should care for several reasons. (more…)

The impact of blogs (The Hill)
Jim Synder examines the importance of blog mentions, both good and bad, in the success of a campaign.

What Type of Social Media User Are You? (Mashable)
Mashable profiles a recent survey that placed internet users within seven distinct categories based on their barriers to entry and thoughts on usefulness.

You’d better believe it, says Matthew Robson, a 15-year-old British lad whose paper on how young people devour media is being read by online marketers around the world. Robson wrote the report, How Teenagers Consume Media, while on a two week summer internship at Morgan Stanley.

After reading the young Brit’s report, most of the information is obvious: Kids don’t read newspapers, boys play video games, and no one uses the yellow pages anymore. But his comments about Twitter are what are making headlines. (more…)

A Day in the Life of a Twintern (The Big Money)
This year, Pizza Hut hired its first Twitter Intern, or Twintern.  Alexa Robinson, fresh out of college, tweets daily with a mix of pizza specials and personal anecdotes.

Full List: 50 politicos to watch (POLITICO)
Washington insiders (along with five outside the Beltway politicos) are categorizes by POLITICO as the best to follow this year.

The staple of public relations is the press release. It’s been around forever; follows generally agreed guidelines for format, content, and length; and still succeeds in its objective to publicize the item in question.

And yet, bound by stale conventions that suffocate originality and don’t play well with multimedia, the press release has become obsolete. It’s not that there’s no longer a need to announce big news formally. It’s that there’s a better way to do it than drafting 400 words of boilerplate.

Indeed, as Claire Cain Miller reported in a much-discussed article last week, the pr agency representing Flickr never issued a release on its behalf—not even when Yahoo acquired the photo-sharing Web site. Similarly, when Google has exciting news to share, it does not use a wire service.

Rather, both companies self-publish blog posts. They do so, I suspect, not because blogs are hipper, but because they’re more genuine, more personal, and more flexible than their old media counterparts. Instead of a flack ghostwriting quotes for a CEO, the individual(s) who managed the project can craft a first-person narrative recounting the project’s past, present and future with pictures and videos and links. Then, as other bloggers pick up the post, “two days later, BusinessWeek calls,” as Donna Sokolsky Burke, of Spark PR, puts it.

When you visit Google’s online “press center,” the first thing listed is not press releases. It’s blog posts. If you think this is accidental, think again.

The press release is dead. Long live the press release.