K Street Cafe

US Office-Seekers Dip Into Digital Toolkits as Vote Looms (AFP)
With the November 5 mid-term elections nearing, political hopefuls turn to social media to get an edge.

Yahoo to Offer Media Links (Wall Street Journal)
Yahoo will soon roll out a new feature, Y Connect, to help drive traffic to its site.

First published on Partnership for a More Perfect Union.

You know something has had an impact on you when you’re still thinking about it weeks after the fact. And what happened recently on YouTube got me thinking.

Members of Congress and their staffs have gotten used to a world where a constituent writes a postal letter or e-mail or calls the office and the office responds in written form to the citizen’s concerns. One of the challenges that social media creates for congressional offices is that they can no longer just wait for constituent communication to come to them. They now need to monitor external sources to capture it all.

As Congresswoman Cathy McMorris-Rodgers said in our “Inside the Hill” web series, “the world has changed.”

What punctuated this for me was the flurry of activity around a Senate vote regarding the military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” (DADT) policy. Regardless of what side of this sensitive social issue you come down on, something happened that should be instructive to Members of Congress, advocacy organizations, and citizens alike.

The Service members Legal Defense Network (SLDN) is an organization dedicated to ending DADT. They recently enlisted Lady Gaga, of…well…Lady Gaga fame, to create and post a YouTube video asking her considerable fan base to call their Senators to request an end to the ban on openly gay service members. This video is interesting from a number of perspectives, not the least of which is that, when she calls her Senators live in the video, she never actually gets through to either one because the volume of calls to the Senate’s phone system resulted in a busy signal from one and an at-capacity mailbox from the other. What happens next is even more interesting.

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A Conversation with President Obama (MTV)
Last night, President Obama participated in an online/offline townhall, answering questions both from Twitter and in person.

#BeatCancer Aiming to Set World Record for Most Social Mentions (Mashable)
Livestrong aims to beat its own Guinness World Record for “Most Widespread Social Networking Message.”

Much noise is being made about the latest use of Foursquare in political campaigns – this time in the race for Chicago’s next mayor.

According to a recent Mashable post, “Digital marketing firm Proximity is inviting residents of the city to check in regularly at a Foursquare venue called “City of Chicago — Mayoral HQ.” A quick Google search reveals the location to be 410 N. Michigan Ave., which also happens to be Proximity’s corporate address.

Whoever becomes Foursquare’s mayor of “City of Chicago — Mayoral HQ” on Nov. 1 will receive the following from Proximity: “ ‘the marketing support necessary to be officially placed on the ballot’ when Chicago elects its new Mayor this February.”

While social media can be a powerful tool to connect the voting public to those running for office, is Proximity’s stunt really the best way to show off the use of social media in politics?  Elected service is not easy, and running for office isn’t a game, despite what Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert may want us to think. But their business is comedy, and Proximity’s business isn’t. Shouldn’t political professionals – and social media professionals as well – take things just a bit more seriously and not open our democracy up to even more public mockery and degradation than it already receives?

Or maybe, since everyone has the right to run for office, am I over-reacting to what is essentially a fun publicity stunt?

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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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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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.

Politicians Use Smart Phones to Reel in Voters (Fox News)
Campaigns go mobile as more politicians turn to apps for voter appeal.

Google Instant Makes SEO Irrelevant
(The Steve Rubel Stream)
Google Instant promises to change the way users find information on the web.