K Street Cafe

What Gladwell Gets Wrong: The Real Problem is Scale Mismatch (Technosociology)
An opposing argument to Gladwell’s piece asserts that the weak ties of social media are key to modern activism.

Expert Labs Rolls Out ThinkUp, a Gov’t Social Media Dashboard (Tech President)
ThinkUp makes strides toward Gov 2.0 by managing social media engagement.

Written by Kate Kaye, ClickZ Politics & Advocacy

The tea party movement, and the social media activism horse it rode in on, are both facing skepticism from influential thinkers including Malcolm Gladwell.

To Gladwell, author of “The Tipping Point” and “Outliers,” online advocacy and cause-related actions in social media are moot compared to activism that propelled social upheavals like the American civil rights movement of the 1960s. Social media evangelists, he wrote in this week’s The New Yorker, “seem to believe that a Facebook friend is the same as a real friend and that signing up for a donor registry in Silicon Valley today is activism in the same sense as sitting at a segregated lunch counter in Greensboro in 1960.”

As Gladwell dismissed “the outsized enthusiasm for social media” in his essay, another leading thinker ripped into one of today’s most-hyped social media activism stories – that of the tea party movement’s vaunted follower counts.

Micah Sifry, founder of Personal Democracy Forum and a proponent of digital and social technologies in politics, challenged recent reports claiming Republicans are trouncing Democrats when it comes to their social media followings. Sifry argued in a recent post on PDF’s TechPresident site, “while I don’t doubt that there is more enthusiasm on the right side of the aisle about the coming November election, I don’t think the online metrics are really so lopsided.”

To read the entire article on ClickZ, click here.

Politics Changed by New Media: Panel Speaks on the Issue (Red and Black)
Recent panel discusses the effects YouTube, social media, and blogs have had on American politics in the last ten years.

Small Change: Why the Revolution Will Not be Tweeted
(The New Yorker)
Is social media capable of inspiring and facilitating meaningful activism?

Jeff is right on the mark in his post “Your Social Media Strategy May Not Be A Strategy.” But it may even be worse than he reports. Some companies and organizations don’t even have clear tactics when it comes to social media, but still think they have a strategy.

I often remind people that knowing how to use social media is not the same thing as knowing how to use it strategically and tactically.

I have trained many college students (in my classes and interns at work) who claim to know how to use social media at the start of the training. By the end of the training the invariable comment that they never thought it through strategically or tactically before.

Our strategy at the Center for American Progress and Center for American Progress Action Fund is to use social media to influence influencers so they will share our ideas with their audiences. Sometimes that is simply to get our policy reports, videos, and interactive graphics out to an influential audience. Sometimes our goal is to mobilize people to take action to influence policymakers.

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Why You Can’t Have a Moneybomb App (Tech President)
Apple spokesperson explains why the company’s “70/30″ revenue-sharing model will stand in the way of apps built to collect political donations.

The Conversation: Understanding ‘Hashtag Politics’ (ABC News)
ABC News speaks with Michael Patrick Leahy, Co-Creator of #TCOT Tag, on how Twitter changes politics.

Cross-posted on Adfero.com

A recent study found that the majority of businesses now have a social media strategy. Really? A true social media strategy? I’m not buying it.

The study I am referring to found, when interviewing 450 senior management and marketing professionals, that 72% of the respondents claimed to have a social media strategy.

I have two beefs with this study. The first is with the methodology. Who are the 450 executives? Are they from large or small businesses? How were they selected? In order to find out, one must give their contact information to the sponsoring firm so they can download the report. No thank you.

The second problem with the study is that many confuse strategy and tactics. I have no doubt, based on experience working with organizations large and small, that many have adopted social media tactics. But tactics are very different than strategy.

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Taxes took the top spot on the Congressional Conversation Index (CCI) for August, as the pace in DC slowed for Congressional recess. Overall contact from constituents throughout the month was down across the board, with the top five issues receiving only roughly 70-80 contacts each.

Over the past several months, constituents have appeared to focus on pressing, timely issues such as the Deepwater Horizon oil spill and Arizona’s controversial immigration legislation. Concern over taxes has been steady, but this is the first time it has risen to the number one spot.

In August, the top ten CCI issues were (1) Taxes (2) Health Care (3) Immigration (4) Judiciary (5) Foreign Affairs (6) Financial Services (7) Environment (8) Defense (9) Veterans Affairs (10) Budget. Full CCI data is available below.

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Activists Upset with Facebook (Politico)
Facebook accused of limiting activism efforts online.

Open Government, Central Texas Edition (Tech President)
Today marks the first day of the manor.govfresh conference, aimed at sparking a Gov 2.0 makeover.

Written by Kate Kaye, ClickZ Politics & Advocacy

Political campaigns have long relied on things like press releases to communicate messages in response to timely news events, and to help garner earned media. But Web video is changing all that. The Republican National Committee is one of many organizations that recognizes this shift, and has worked with Craft Media/Digital throughout the year in the hopes of being on top of their video game.

So far this year, nine videos created by Craft – all of which pan the Obama administration and the Democrats – have made their way onto the RNC’s YouTube channel and been disseminated by supporters and media outlets. The issues come as no surprise: the economy, unemployment, healthcare reform, and more.

ClickZ News spoke recently with Brian Donahue, a founder and managing partner of Craft Media/Digital (pictured above) to discuss what the firm is doing for the RNC this year, and about trends in online political video. (All videos produced by Craft for the RNC are posted below the following Q&A.)

ClickZ: Tell me about the video work you’ve done with the RNC. How does it reflect how online video fits into the current political campaign landscape?

Donahue: The large majority of the material or videos we’ve done have been exclusively for the Web. This [2010 election] is really, I think, the cycle of Web videos… It’s a tremendous shift in political story telling, and that shift has been to video.

It started with McCain and Obama in ‘08…. But this year, more organizations and more campaigns are understanding they can produce longer-form videos [and] have the tools and the capabilities for distributing them pretty wide [such as in blog networks]… And it tells a story much better than a press release.

To read the entire interview on ClickZ, click here.

Blue State Digital Launches BSD Tools for Online Advocacy (BSD Tools)
BSD Tools offer organizations the ability to raise money, organize events and manage communities online.

The New and Improved Twitter (Brian Solis)
Twitter launches the biggest re-design in the site’s history – what does it mean for the advocacy world?