K Street Cafe

Report: Facebook and the New Age of Privacy
(Fast Company)
A look into the evolution of Facebook privacy, from the F8 Conference in April to the present.

FourSquare and Seven Months From Now: Would Lincoln Be on LinkedIn? (The Huffington Post)
More politicians look toward the web for campaigning tools as midterm elections approach.

Blackbaud Social Launches to Help Nonprofits Increase Constituent Engagement through Social Media (MarketWatch)
By integrating with existing fundraising, Internet & constituent relationship management systems, Blackbaud Social allows organizations to drive traffic from popular sites such as Facebook, Twitter & Youtube.

Vote Again 2010: Why You Should Hit The Polls
(The Huffington Post)
A coalition of over 30 youth organizations and media partners combine to encourage Gen Y to hit the polls through social media.

Originally published on PMPU.org.

The Congressional Management Foundation and its Partnership for a More Perfect Union present “Inside the Hill”, a web series that allows you to hear directly from Members and staff on how technology is changing the way Congress works. It is produced by Fleishman-Hillard.

In the third installment, “How and Why Does Congress Use Twitter,” congressional staff discuss the different uses and advantages of Twitter.

Previous editions of “Inside the Hill” are also available:

Congress and New Media: The World Has Changed

What Makes An Award Winning Website

By Erica L. Fitzsimmons

A few more thoughts on the new Facebook changes, privacy concerns and what Four Square and Gowalla should be concerned about.

The recent Facebook platform changes may have advantages for advocacy professionals as I discussed in my earlier post, “Facebook Takeover,” but due to widespread privacy concerns, several Facebook members are thinking about quitting the wildly popular social networking site.  And by several, I mean approximately 60% of them — according to a survey conducted by IT security firm, Sophos.
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The state of Maryland, the attorney general of Pennsylvania and a group of researchers are taking on political campaigns using social media platforms.

Maryland’s State Board of Elections is submitting a proposal on June 3 requiring candidates to include standard language on their Facebook pages and their associations with these campaigns. In addition, the proposal would require candidates to create a system of authenticated official Twitter accounts. If this proposal passes, regulation could begin as early as this year.
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This guest post comes from Ellie Brown, a graduate student at American University studying internet advocacy campaigns and blogging at the Daily Social.

Well what do you know? Nestlé listened. Following a two month Greenpeace assault on palm oil purchasing practices of the food giant, Nestlé announced earlier this week that they will stop purchasing palm oil (used in many popular products like Kit Kats) from companies that own “high-risk” plantations and farms. These high-risk plantations are accused of driving the destruction of natural habitats for animals like the orangutan. The new “zero-deforestation” policy is in partnership with The Forest Trust that will work with Nestlé to amend its palm oil purchasing policies.

Nestlé’s decision comes after a tumultuous 8-weeks in which Greenpeace released a provocative video on YouTube to raise awareness of Nestlé’s questionable methods for acquiring palm oil. The video, which likens eating a Kit Kat to eating an orangutan, was subsequently removed by Nestlé; an action that spurred an even greater backlash from the Greenpeace community who bombarded Nestlé with calls, emails and Facebook page comments. Now enter social media “meltdown” as Nestlé representatives responded to Facebook comments with mild requests for users to stop using altered versions of the Nestlé logo as their Facebook profile picture or risk their comments being taken down. Needless to say, users were not happy with this restriction of their right to publicly protest on an open forum like a company’s Facebook page and the comment threads were shared on blogs and news articles across the Internet – directing even more negative attention toward Nestlé.

As a result of the targeted Greenpeace campaign and the added headache of a social media crisis, Nestlé was forced to pay attention and had to address the problems with the palm oil it buys. Hopefully, Nestlé’s new policies will help save some orangutans and make some of us feel better about eating Kit Kats.

International Correspondents: The Internet election? (CNN)
Some believe this is Britain’s first social media election, while others disagree.

Washington Post Launches New PostPolitics.com Site
(Advocacy 2.0)
Last Wednesday The Washington Post announced the launch of a new political homepage, PostPolitics.com, which features articles, columns and blogs produced by Post staffers.

A few Thursday evenings ago, NBC aired a rerun of last year’s highly anticipated The Office episode that featured Pam and Jim getting married. When I watched the episode again two weeks ago, I could not help thinking about a crucial lesson to be learned for any organization planning their next advocacy campaign.

If you watched Pam and Jim’s wedding, you will recall that the writers heavily borrowed the memorable wedding routine from the extraordinarily popular YouTube video JK Wedding Dance. It’s the one where the wedding party dances down the aisle to Chris Brown’s song, Forever.  The video became so popular (now over 44 million views on YouTube) that the entire group was invited to recreate the routine on The Today Show.

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Last week at the Politics Online Conference, I sat on a panel where the question of e-mail versus social media was posed.  Is social media replacing e-mail?  Are members who join through social media more or less valuable than members collected via e-mail?
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This post has been reprinted from the SocialFish blog where it spawned a great conversation in the comments. We’d love to know what K Street Cafe readers think.

Dear Association CEO,

Tired of social media yet? You’ve surely had many conversations, at this point, with various people in your organization, about using social media to advance your mission. Everyone–from your marketing director and your publications manager, to your advocacy guru and your conference manager–has some idea of how they should be blogging, tweeting, or creating a social network.

That’s all well and good, and (stop us if we’re wrong) you’re not disputing the myriad business advantages of starting to build a social media presence in this day and age when many of your association’s members are actively communicating using these tools. But you’re a little worried…

• You’re worried about how much time will be involved in getting all these activities going.
• You’re feeling the stress from other managers and directors who have tight budgets and too much work spread among too few people already.
• You’re concerned that with lots of people doing little experiments in a piecemeal fashion, there will be duplication of effort and wasted time and energy.
• You’re particularly concerned about lost revenue from traditional sources like your paid job board.
• And, let’s be honest, you’re not particularly comfortable with letting just any employee speak for the organization (and your PR director isn’t either). You’re keen to get some guidelines and policies in place but everyone has different ideas for where to start.

So then, the challenge your organization faces is how to evolve into a social organization. This evolution will affect individual staff, internal processes, and the structure and culture of your association. And the challenges can’t be solved in an instant. You’ll probably want to help assign them to your people to tackle one at a time (or one area at a time).

But you, as CEO, have a different challenge.

Your own challenge is not about determining how your association applies social media tools in the right way, nor how particular tactics achieve specific objectives. Fundamentally, your role is to help your staff prioritize and defend their ideas by having them tell you why and how they advance the mission of the association. You are closer to the mission, the vision, the strategic objectives of the association than anyone else. You must live the mantra of “clarity over control” – in other words, that those activities that are very directly and clearly driving the mission of the organization require less control because all stakeholders – staff and members – know why this work is important and relevant to the association. They know the strategic intention of that work and their role in making it actionable.

If you can help your staff be clear about how their social media activities will advance the mission, you can begin to lay the groundwork for becoming a more social organization. The digital age (the advent of the social internet) demands less of a “mechanistic”, top-down, controlled system and more of an organic, evolving ecosystem. Your role, as CEO, is that of facilitator within this ecosystem. You are now the master cat herder – and here’s a secret you probably already know. How do you herd cats? …You tilt the floor. You point everyone in the right direction, not just through words but through action and through intent. The world around us is shifting, and you have a crucial role to play in what these changes mean for your association and this industry.

Sincerely Yours,

Maddie and Lindy
SocialFish