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.

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.

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:

There are a couple of nice shout-outs to Morgan Levy and Christy Frink, co-editors of the Nashvillest blog, but it’s also important to remember Patten Fuqua’s “We Are Nashville” piece on a local hockey fan blog that landed on Huffington Post and Andrew Sullivan’s Daily Dish, and spawned a so-named disaster recovery non-profit.

So, what can the government learn from this? What has it learned? Share this post and leave us a comment below with your thoughts.

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):

• Business Card. “Biographical and contact information for any lawmaker in Congress.” The tool also includes buttons that launch Cooper’s YouTube channel and OpenCongress.org profile. The code can be customized to display the representative or senator in the site visitor’s district or state, and you can freeze the widget from updating (so it doesn’t change if a seat changes hands):
  
• Vote Report. “See what a lawmaker voted on a particular bill, and how the vote went down.” When generating code here, all you need is a bill number:
• Top Contractors. “The top 5 federal contractors in a congressional district.” You can freeze the widget from updating, to represent results contextualized to a certain date:
• Sponsorships. “Some statistics on the bills a legislator has sponsored or cosponsored, relative to their colleagues.” Find out the number of bills the Member has sponsored and/or cosponsored, relative to the chamber average, and how many of those were enacted. You can also freeze the widget from updating:
• Campaign Contributions. “How much a particular person or organization contributed to a lawmaker, in the current election cycle.” The code can be customized to display the representative or senator in the site visitor’s district or state:
• Top Contributors. “The top 5 contributors to a lawmaker, in the current election cycle.” This includes corporate and individual donors:
• Earmarks.
  “How many earmarks a lawmaker has received, relative to their colleagues.” Shows the number of earmarks received, including total dollar amounts, relative to the chamber average:

• Interest Group Ratings. “Rating received from a specific interest group.” Select from a drop-down list of 40 alphabetized, nationally-recognized interest groups, and then generate the code to see how the legislator fared (National Education Association shown here):
• District Map. “See a map of a legislator’s district.” This one is pretty self-explanatory, but is a neat feature all the same. Powered by Google Maps, you can zoom in almost to street level to really see where the boundaries of the district lie exactly:
• Party Time. “Past and upcoming fundraisers, courtesy of Party Time.” I suppose this one is for one’s inner-Salahi:

The release of the tools comes a bit late in the current campaign cycle, and here I am blogging about them on Election Day 2010. But this kind of technology will no doubt impact the policy making process just as much as the electoral process, and could be very important as we continue to learn more about Tea Party-backed candidates/new Members with very little national experience, exposure, or public personae. It will be very interesting to see how tools like this, particularly as political blogs continue to exert the kind of influence they now have relative to the early part of the century, continue to shape public discourse.

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.

At least not with newspapers.  PBS’ Newshour, NPR and other public news broadcasts commonly disclose underwriting relationships involving story subjects.  However, the same cannot be said of commercial television news broadcasts unless they involve investment or ownership relationships.

Since the underwriting structure of public broadcasting is substantively no different than the advertising relationships of newspapers, commercial television and most media websites, editorial disclosure of the financial support – of any kind – of such media outlets seems equally appropriate.

Citizen Media Law Project, in its coverage of Anne Taylor action, notes that the FTC guidelines limit disclosure to cases where the sponsorship relationship is not “reasonably expected by the audience”.

Put in the context of audience reasonable expectation, this seems rather generously written for the benefit of old-line media, which has relied for generations on the presumption of credibility by its readership much more so than disclosure.

Why then, shouldn’t bloggers be afforded the same benefit of the doubt that newspaper publishers have been given for generations?  Yes, there will always be egregious cases of paid-for “earned media” such as the Reverb case with iTunes.  But it used to be that time and dedicated readership was the ultimate arbiter of media influence.

This all begs the question of why the expectation of the relationship – rather than actual influence – is the measuring stick.

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

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.

1. How many people on your staff can write well? Poor prose is a big turnoff, and crafting snappy paragraphs is a lot harder than banging out 140 characters apiece on Twitter. Put another way, anyone can swing a baseball bat; very few can hit pitches.

2. Do these people know how to write for the Web? Richard Posner and Gary Becker are two highly esteemed and well-published professors at the University of Chicago. But their joint blog—bogged down with long paragraphs and utterly devoid of links, pictures and blockquotes—is a textbook example of why online writing demands more than copying and pasting its offline counterpart.

3. Will managers give these people sufficient time to blog? Securing buy-in at the leadership level is critical. Otherwise, blogging will be treated as a distraction from “real work.”

4. Can these people each commit to X posts per month? One of the biggest reasons for failure in the blogosphere is infrequent posting. To be sure, a solid weekly post can be just as good as daily content, but unless you’re Sergey Brin, you’ll never build an audience by blogging sporadically.

5. Is there a blogger (either on staff or whom you can hire) who can serve as the editor? Not only do editors edit—correcting grammar, adding hyperlinks and pictures where appropriate, suggesting broader themes—and solicit content, they’re also responsible for the blog’s direction, consistency, and visibility. A blog without an editor is like a ship without a captain.

6. Will the blog’s editor have the connections and standing throughout the organization to request and obtain content? If your editor is off site or lacks the respect of her peers, her ability to do her job will be compromised.

7. Will every post require approval by the C suite? If an executive or lawyer must vet everything, then a blog is more trouble than it’s worth.

On the other hand, a second set of eyes on anything for publication always is healthy—but within reason. The Cato Institute, which each day assigns a different staffer to approve each post, has found a happy medium between paranoia and prescience.

8. What niche will the blog exploit? In other words, why will people want to read it? If the niche is already occupied, how will your blog be better?

For these reasons, many blogs are stillborn. As with any project, a blog needs a strategic plan and ample resources. If you start with these boxes checked, the results can well repay the effort.

Related: Should Blogs Be Independent of or Integrated in Their Host Organization’s Web Site?

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.

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.

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.