K Street Cafe

Debunking Popular Myths Of Social Media
(Business 2 Community)
With social media changing the communications landscape, it’s important to remember what it can, and doesn’t, offer.

Creating A Blog Is Easy; Building A Community Requires So Much More (Business 2 Community)
A look at 10 blogs that have cultivated strong communities because their creators not only understand the need for authentic two-way communication, but consistently promote great content that initiates discussion.

How to write a perfect blog post: 10 tips (PR Daily)
Don’t just focus on the content of your blog post. The way you format it is crucial in gaining attention and keeping people reading.

6 of the Top Mobile Trends to Watch (Business2Community)
In today’s world, it’s become all about mobile apps and having social networks at your fingertips whenever and wherever you may be.

After catching the last flight out of my hometown of Nashville last May before torrential downpours forced the airport to close, I was heartbroken when I returned to DC and learned that family and friends were under water. They were up the creek without a paddle, only the creek had come to them, and it was still coming.

A new documentary short from the folks at The Tennessean shows how social media helped the middle Tennessee region come to grips with the crisis, and ultimately rebound from it:

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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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First published on the Mirsky & Company blog.

FTC enforcement of its new blogger guidelines has involved typically high-profile actions against Anne Taylor LOFT (FTC ultimately taking no action) and Reverb Communications (for allegedly deceptive postings of positive reviews on iTunes for games produced by Reverb clients).

While premature to draw any broad conclusions on the enforcement environment for the new rules, a philosophical problem with the FTC’s new blogger framework is its willful ignorance of the advertising underpinnings of traditional media.

So, for example, while established newspapers like the New York Times and Washington Post depend for their credibility on perceived soundness of the journalistic “church-state” divide, readers are almost never proactively alerted to major advertising support from common story subjects in business and politics.  Disclosure more typically comes from investment or ownership relationships, in the form of “full disclosure” statements like that from Ezra Klein when reporting about Facebook (“Disclosure: Washington Post Co. Chairman Donald E. Graham is on Facebook’s board, and The Post markets itself on Facebook.”).  Not, though, from advertising relationships, even major advertisers.

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Can Case Studies and Code Chunks Help Open the Democratic Party? (Tech President)
The Democratic National Committee unveils new open-source site Open.Democrats.org aimed to increase transparency & collaboration online.

More Bloggers Throwing Hats in Ring (Politico)
Bloggers assert their power in the political arena beyond the web by running for office.

Everyone these days wants a blog. Blogs are known to be the most frequently updated—and thus most visited—facet of Web sites, and often form the crux of an organization’s online impact. Few, however, realize just how time-consuming and difficult blogging is.

Indeed, running a blogging consists not only in penning posts, but also in corralling them from colleagues and possibly guest contributors, editing them, and promoting them—not to mention moderating and responding to comments. As such, when considering a group blog for your organization, the following questions may facilitate a decision. (more…)

The staple of public relations is the press release. It’s been around forever; follows generally agreed guidelines for format, content, and length; and still succeeds in its objective to publicize the item in question.

And yet, bound by stale conventions that suffocate originality and don’t play well with multimedia, the press release has become obsolete. It’s not that there’s no longer a need to announce big news formally. It’s that there’s a better way to do it than drafting 400 words of boilerplate.

Indeed, as Claire Cain Miller reported in a much-discussed article last week, the pr agency representing Flickr never issued a release on its behalf—not even when Yahoo acquired the photo-sharing Web site. Similarly, when Google has exciting news to share, it does not use a wire service.

Rather, both companies self-publish blog posts. They do so, I suspect, not because blogs are hipper, but because they’re more genuine, more personal, and more flexible than their old media counterparts. Instead of a flack ghostwriting quotes for a CEO, the individual(s) who managed the project can craft a first-person narrative recounting the project’s past, present and future with pictures and videos and links. Then, as other bloggers pick up the post, “two days later, BusinessWeek calls,” as Donna Sokolsky Burke, of Spark PR, puts it.

When you visit Google’s online “press center,” the first thing listed is not press releases. It’s blog posts. If you think this is accidental, think again.

The press release is dead. Long live the press release.

Twitter, Flickr, Facebook Make Blogs Look So 2004 (Wired)
Paul Boutin examines how social media websites like Facebook and Twitter have over taken blogging as the most popular form of expression.

Crisis Communication for the Social Web (The Buzz Bin)
The Buzz Bin takes a look at the need for a plan to listen and communicate effectively when a crisis hits your organization online.

Ford Looks to Expand Its Global Social Outreach (Word of Mouth Marketing)
With a new executive heading up its online outreach efforts, Ford is hoping to get back into the social media game to appeal to younger car shoppers and connect with its global customer base.

Blogging Like The World Depended On It (Newsweek)
Author Brian Braiker takes a look at change.org, a soon-to-be revamped online community that is looking to have an impact on 13 key policy issues ranging from climate change to immigration by keeping activists engaged beyond the November elections.