K Street Cafe

Think Globally, Tweet Locally: British Town Council In Midst of 24 Hours of Tweets (Tech President)
The Walsall Council in West Midlands, U.K. put together a a 24-hour project to post notes to Twitter about as many activities of local government as possible.

NARA Names 3 to New Leadership Positions
(Federal Computer Week)
Archivist of the United States David Ferriero announced the formation of a new open government unit to use Web 2.0 and digital media.

The New York City Council Goes Live (Tech President)
The New York City Council began its first-ever proceedings to be broadcast across the Internet through a video live stream.

Twitter CEO Chides China (CNN)
Twitter CEO Dick Costolo responds to the plight of a Chinese woman who was sentenced to a year in a labor camp for retweeting a message.

What’s Next for Politics and Social Media?
(Smart Blog on Social Media)
While social media is becoming more important in politics, its effects are still relatively limited.

The Devolving Meaning of Social Media (Harvard Business Review)
A discussion of how the meaning of “social media” has changed.

All Online Politics is Personalized, Or May Soon Be (Tech President)
With companies like RapLeaf, campaigns can target real names and addresses from what can be gleaned about users from the web.

Facebook Lacks Friends in D.C. (Politico)
Facebook has one of the smallest policy and lobbying shops in the Capitol.

Twitter May Raise Another $200 Million (Business Insider)
Twitter has many interested investors and the company is looking into another round of financing.

Florida Activists Read Between the Lines on Foreclosure Paperwork (Washington Post)
Activists using websites to aggregate and analyze court documents related to faulty foreclosures.

Weirdest Use of Twitter by Government Agency Yet: The FCC Mocks Fox/Cablevision (New York Times)
The FCC is using tweets to call on companies to sign a deal to resume broadcasting after contracts failed to renew.

First Look: Starbucks Digital Network Is Here (Mashable)
Starbucks to launch a new digital network that will enhance the customer’s in-store experience.

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.

Written by Kate Kaye, ClickZ Politics & Advocacy

Political campaigns are stuck on Facebook, and one Washington, D.C.-based digital consultancy aims to help them put engagement on the social site to use in more ways than simply collecting “likes.” Republican agency Engage has developed a set of tools for combining Facebook, social games, and Foursquare-style action-based incentives to driven online and offline activism.

Corporate brands from restaurants to retailers have taken to Foursquare, Gowalla, and other location-based services to capitalize on the check-in fad, awarding consumers with special symbols displaying their visitation prowess, and often with discounts or freebies. Engage’s Multiply product isn’t exactly a check-in service, but it takes a cue from those mobile-centric loyalty programs to build community and inspire activism for door-to-door canvassing, fundraising events, get-out-the-vote efforts, and other key activities driving political campaigns. The tools allow campaigns to attach a system for awarding prize points and badges to their sites, and connect with Facebook’s social graph to encourage sharing among supporters’ social networks.

The notion of awarding incentives to super-supporters is nothing new. The Democratic and Republican parties, as well as individual campaigns often honor their big fundraisers – if not just with cool names and bragging rights, than with parties or other prizes.
The tool helps campaigns track individual volunteer actions, virtual and in-person – from sharing a link on Facebook or donating cash to door-knocking. “The actions that score points and the number of points are flexible from organization to organization,” said Mindy Finn, a partner at Engage. Staffers can make note of who performs a real-world task and upload that information to the system, which in turn awards points. “For example, if there was a phone bank at headquarters, [you could] award 50 points to anyone who attended,” said Finn.

While points and badges are rewards for volunteers, data is the primary reward for campaigns. As the Multiply page on Engage’s site states, “User scores let you target your supporters by likelihood to take action – tied to their phone number, email, and Facebook ID.” The firm is pushing its Data Manager upgrade, which allows campaigns to “collect form data on your site and score every single action or form submission.” Part of the Engage pitch also involves volunteers registering with Multiply.

To read the entire article on ClickZ, click here.

Ask.com Returns To Answering Questions, Web 2.0 Style (Wired)
Following in the footsteps of Yahoo Answers and Cha Cha, Ask.com re-brands itself as a question answering service.

Are Location-Based Services All Hype? (Read Write Web)
A new study released today indicates that consumers are slow to catch on to location-based services such as Foursquare.

Google Tries its Hand at Influence in Washington
(The Wall Street Journal)
The company’s growing influence is Washington, especially in the realm of ‘virtual lobbying,’ is drawing concern from critics of the popular search engine.

In Online Political Ads, Facebook Is Catching Up to Google (techPresident)
Political consultants say Facebook’s share of online political advertising dollars is quickly growing to rival Google’s.