The K Street Café editors posited this thoughtful question to its contributors this week: How should advocacy organizations adapt to stay relevant in the changing paradigm of constituent engagement with Congress and the Administration that largely removes the need for any sort of intermediary presence?
The idea behind the question is that the government becomes SO transparent and easy to interact with that professional associations, nonprofits, and (gasp!) advocacy vendors become obsolete. My reaction is three-fold: 1) Add value to the raw data of government; 2) Provide expertise for interacting with government online; 3) Continue to use the aggregate power inherent in organizing.
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Posted by: K Street Cafe Editor
Politics Is No Longer Local. It’s Viral. (Washington Post)
Jose Antonio Vargas examines the move to individual politics that has been brought on by the use of viral and social media in the 2008 Presidential election.
6 New Web Technologies of 2008 You Need to Use Now (Wired)
These six new technologies for the web can help your organization be better prepared for the online, viral world.
Crossposted on Mediafuturenow.com
Randall Lane wrote a provocative piece in Monday’s New York Times suggesting a “ballot buddy system” among the states to permit apportioning of electoral votes among counties or congressional districts. The idea seems like one of those suggestions likely to go nowhere, except when you realize that (a) 2 states (Maine and Nebraska) have already moved in that direction, (b) the 2000 election may have permanently disencumbered any remaining pillars of the infallibility of the electoral college system and (c) the Obama campaign’s social media breakthroughs may have demonstrated the irrelevance of the system in the first place.
(Full disclosure: Lane’s current company, Doubledown Media, is a corporate law client of my law firm.)
In “A Ballot Buddy System”, Lane argues that the big win for deconstructing the electoral college was vividly illustrated in Nebraska, where Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin both campaigned in Omaha in the last weeks of the 2008 campaign – something not otherwise thought likely for an otherwise reliably red state. When counties are in play, versus whole states, “winner takes all”, a different campaign dynamic kicks in. READ MORE »
Posted by: K Street Cafe Editor
SocialFishing on the Association Front (The Buzz Bin)
The Buzz Bin sits down with Maddy Grant and Lindy Dreyer of SocialFish in the first installment of a series about organizations using social media as a method of direct marketing.
Responding to Overzealous Followers (Word of Mouth Marketing)
Gaining followers on Twitter can’t be a bad thing, right? Except perhaps in the case of a Twitter user who won’t leave your organization alone.
Cross-posted on e.politics
Now that the details are slooowly creeping out and we have a clearer idea of the Obama election team’s online numbers, what conclusions can we draw for the future? Right off the bat, Jose Antonio Vargas’s recent piece in the Post suggests something critical: online communications campaigns should consider offering supporters tiers of potential engagement.
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Posted by: K Street Cafe Editor
Fight Fire With Fire: Using Corporate Blogs to Upend Crises Online (PR News)
Patrick Seybold takes a look at how companies and organizations can learn from the examples of Dell and Whole Foods, who brought negative talk back onto their own “turf” by engaging effectively through corporate blogs.
Obama Campaign Testing the Waters for an Ongoing Grassroots Movement (Tech President)
Obama’s transition team recently released a survey to its grassroots supporters to gauge their opinions on whether the campaign’s vast network should be maintained as a separate entity or folded into the Democratic National Committee’s established online community.
Posted by: K Street Cafe Editor
Right Wing Bloggers See Their Chance (The Hill)
Bloggers whose political affiliation leans to the right see the potential for real action with the new liberal administration.
Facebook to Verify Trustworth Apps (Read Write Web)
Verified Facebook applications can provide organizations a safer way to maintain a presence in a social media environment.
In the week since Senator Obama became President-Elect Obama, much attention has been given to unprecedented role the Internet played in his campaign’s success and how his Administration will use the massive online army it built on the campaign trail to govern from the White House.
Emerging from this speculation seem to be a few main (viable) options for the President Elect to use the assets he built as a candidate (including an email list that Luigi Montanez estimates to include roughly 10-12 million individuals) to help him advance his agenda as the Chief Executive.
K Street Cafe contributor Alan Rosenblatt has written on the possibility of continuing myBarackObama.com’s sense of community alive to turn campaign supporters into policy advocates. There remain a number of legal and logistical questions about how this might unfold – should the online community be housed on WhiteHouse.gov? Even if the legal hurdles are overcome, is the federal government’s IT infrastructure even able to support the necessary functionality? (My friend David Almacy has outlined a number of potential technology obstacles, including regulations that prevent federal web sites from placing cookies on people’s computers). There is also uncertainty about whether rules would allow President Obama to use official government money to encourage people to contact their Members of Congress on key issues? (I remember helping to create one of the first Web sites for a Congressional office in the 1990s and being told we had to remove language that encouraged citizens to contact their own lawmakers in support of piece of legislation that my boss introduced). READ MORE »
Posted by: K Street Cafe Editor
Errors By Bloggers Kill Credibility & Traffic, Study Finds (Read Write Web)
A recent study produced by Goose Grade reveals that blog readers don’t rely on blogs for the majority of their news and are also are less willing to share blogs due to the frequency of spelling and grammatical errors.
Twitter Brings Faster Customer Response Time (Word of Mouth Marketing)
Rapid responses from the customer service departments of large companies on social media and networking sites is becoming the norm.
A few weeks ago, I wrote a post about the change in online communication habits from email to Social Media, suggesting that communicating via social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter could some day replace more traditional email communication as the method of choice for activists.
Many of the follow up comments I received after the post went something along this line: Excellent – I agree, but how can I convince the ‘higher-ups’ in my organization that we need to use these new tools?
At the most recent Innovative Advocacy conference, two attendees asked one of the panelists similar questions:
How can I convince my Executive Director that we should include Facebook in our advocacy strategy when he or she thinks it’s simply a fad for their high school kids? And, how can I get approval for a policy blog when the general counsel’s office is nervous about not having control over what the public can write in the comments section? READ MORE »
