K Street Cafe

Written by Kate Kaye, ClickZ Politics & Advocacy

E-mails to congressional representatives are the common currency of online advocacy campaigns, but a new study shows all advocacy e-mails are not created alike. In a report published earlier this month, the Congressional Management Foundation aimed to determine how much influence e-mail, social media channels, and traditional media channels have on U.S. House Members and Senators.

The CMF survey of more than 250 congressional staffers showed that e-mails with individualized messages are far better received than form e-mails, which are often automated through advocacy campaign websites. Nineteen percent of respondents said e-mails including more personalized messages had “a lot of positive influence” on office holders who had yet to firmly decide on an issue, and 69 percent said they had some influence.

“What matters most is the content, not the vehicle,” suggested the “Communicating with Congress” report, which showed that postal mail featuring personalized messages is seen as almost equally influential to personalized e-mails. Twenty percent said they had “a lot of positive influence” and 70 percent said they had some.

Form e-mails, on the other hand, were seen as having “a lot of positive influence” by just 1 percent of participants and “some influence” by 50 percent. Social media site comments were also attributed less value. Just 1 percent said social site comments had “a lot of positive influence,” and 41 percent said they had “some influence.”

To read the entire article on ClickZ, click here.

Peter Slen of C-SPAN’s The Communicators filmed the segment below at the State of the Net Conference on January 27, 2011 — in it, Ambassador Philip Verveer, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State and U.S. Coordinator for Communications and Information Policy, and Ed Felten, Chief Technologist at the FTC, talk about their agencies’ roles in crafting official U.S. and international information and communications policy, particularly regarding social media, free expression, and online privacy:

The video is almost a half hour, but it’s an interesting pair of interviews — they also address recent political upheaval in Tunisia, censorship in China, international copyright and other property rights protections, cloud computing adoption across the federal government, and other global economic issues tied to the free flow of information.

Cross-posted from the Public Affairs Council blog

Average citizens can have more influence on congressional policy than they think, says a new study from the Congressional Management Foundation (CMF). In fact, in many cases they have more influence than lobbyists or editorial page editors.

The report, Communicating with Congress: Perceptions of Citizen Advocacy on Capitol Hill, was released this week at the Public Affairs Council’s National Grassroots Conference. It is based on a survey conducted late last year of 260 Senate and House staffers.

“The most influential advocacy strategies for swaying an undecided Member of Congress depend on personal communications from constituents,” says the study. “Whether individuals make contact face-to-face, by phone, or through personalized email or postal mail, Senators and Representatives are influenced by their constituents’ own views about the public policy issues before them.”

The key word here is “personal.” In an age when technology allows an issue group to shut down Capitol Hill servers with thousands of identical emails, it’s refreshing to hear that taking the time to visit a congressional office in person is worth the effort.

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We’ve all heard the complaint before: Why doesn’t my Web page appear when I Google [fill in the blank]? To paraphrase George Berkeley: If a Web page is published but can’t be indexed, is it still published?

Let’s face it: If you don’t show up in a search engine’s first 10 results, you don’t exist. Indeed, that Google has made predictive search the default setting only hardens this race to the top. (According to the latest report from comScore, Google continues to process two out of every three queries in the U.S.)

Fortunately, this is a solvable problem—especially if your content contains a unique word or phrase.

Consider this article from S&T Snapshots, an e-zine I once edited. Its subject is something called SportEvac. As the below screen shots show, simply by adding this word to (1) the Web page’s title (“DHS | SportEvac: Choreographing a Stadium Stampede”) and (2) its in-body header (“SportEvac: Choreographing a Stadium Stampede”), we ensured that Google would find it and rank it highly—in fact, first.

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Cross-posted from the Public Affairs Council blog

Large, diversified companies – especially those that are tightly regulated – are more likely to be politically active, right?

While everyone in public affairs knows this to be true, it took a major study analyzing 78 research projects on corporate political involvement to prove the point. What’s newsworthy is that the study, “Mixing Business with Politics: A Meta-Analysis of the Antecedents and Outcomes of Corporate Political Activity,” made another important conclusion – firms become more profitable when they become politically active.

In the study, published in this month’s Journal of Management, researchers at the University of Tennessee (Knoxville) and the University of South Florida say companies that lobby or contribute to political campaigns “enjoy about 20 percent higher performance.”

The authors conducted a “meta-analysis” of studies from the past 40 years to identify reasons why businesses are politically active, including a company’s size, level of regulation, amount of government sales and extent of foreign competition.

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How Facebook and Twitter Are Replacing Blogging (Advocacy 2.0)
According to a Technorati survey, hobbyist bloggers are blogging less, while corporate bloggers are blogging more often.

The White House Teams Up With Monster.com to Reach Out to Job Seekers (Mashable)
The White House is turning to social media to get a feel for what aspects of the job market are of most concern to citizens.

Low Cost Drives Non-Corp. Public Affairs Pros to Reach Press via Social Media (PR News)
A study on social media usage shows that corporate and non-corporate public affairs departments use social media platforms to reach out to journalists.

The hard-working transparency advocates at the Sunlight Foundation have released a new suite of tools called Politiwidgets. Each tool in the 10-widget set is as easily customizable and embeddable by bloggers as searching for, resizing, and generating code for embedding a YouTube video.

The suite includes some interesting tools that haven’t really surfaced on the web in such customizable fashion, even if the data behind the tools have become available over the past couple of years through other projects like, for example, OpenSecrets.org. The list includes (with examples given for my representative in the U.S. House, Rep. Jim Cooper, D-TN 5th):

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Originally published on the PR Week Insider Blog

A reporter for Roll Call interviewed White House senior adviser David Axelrod last Thursday about the upcoming elections.

Facing a likely historic number of losses for Democrats, Axelrod indicated that the Obama Administration didn’t do enough to explain its accomplishments to the American people.

“President Barack Obama ‘didn’t have time’ to focus on messaging as he tackled major issues that ‘came in rapid fire’ as soon as he got to office,” Axelrod said in the interview.

It’s honorable for Axelrod to admit a mistake. But I am hard-pressed to believe that better messaging would have a big impact on these mid-term elections. Even the best communications strategy would not have stopped the tide of voter dissatisfaction headed for the polls next week.

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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.

A few days ago, a colleague asked for help with a predicament common in Gov 2.0 circles: how to educate her colleagues, managers, and clients to rely more on a project wiki and less on e-mail? (Broadly defined, a “wiki” can be as simple as a folder or set of folders on a shared hard drive or as complex as a SharePoint “component” designed to look and feel like Wikipedia.) For example, how do you get someone to check the wiki for a document rather than e-mailing someone else for it? Then, once user A has the document and needs feedback on it, how do you get her to distribute a link to the wiki rather than distributing the document itself?

The first thing you might do is survey your team. Why do some people live and die by the wiki, while others shun it? What’s helpful, what can be improved, what alternatives would users recommend? These findings can facilitate several next steps.

1. “It doesn’t work.” To the extent possible, you should tweak the wiki to fix any technical glitches and simplify any cumbersome processes. Such frustrations are very real, and anything you can do to minimize them will make you a hero. (Whoever invents the version of iShare, eShare, or SharePoint that allows you to download documents from a smartphone, no doubt will make a killing.)

2. “It’s extra work.” When was the last time you communicated the wiki’s purpose and benefits to the team? Holding a meeting presents two opportunities: it allows users to vent directly to management, and it allows management to say, We hear you; here’s what we’re doing about it; here’s how you can help; and, most important, here’s why we’re using the wiki in the first place. Plus, in the future, when the temptation arises for a user to e-mail someone a question, feelings of guilt may prompt the user to visit the wiki first to see if she can learn the answer herself.

3. “I don’t want to.” If necessary, a project’s senior leaders may want to issue a directive to use e-mail only after checking the wiki. Of course, these leaders should be following their own advice, and be wiki-ing themselves. “Because the boss said so” is a powerful motivator; “if the boss can do so, so can I” is even better.

4. “I don’t know how to use it.” Every complex initiative should have an FAQ document. Sample questions for a wiki: Where do I go to find X? If I’m inactive for X minutes, does the wiki log me off? What functions don’t work (well) using Firefox rather than Internet Explorer?

5. “Nobody uses it.” In the end, nothing succeeds like peer pressure. The more people you convince, the greater your chance of success.

Finally, don’t discount the possibility that a wiki isn’t right for your project. Plenty of tools exist to accomplish even the most discrete tasks. As consultants, it behooves us to remember that what a client wants is not necessarily best, and that the end is more important than the means.