The Cluetrain Manifesto is quite the classic. I got several comments on it from people who saw me holding it as I was reading. Although a little outdated, its copyright is 2000, its an interesting package of 95 "theses" organized into a coherent manifesto for any businessman, business owner struggling to make sense of the Internet boom and the digital arena.

I wish everyone in my organization could read this book. Although it starts off with some pretty obvious observations - the Internet has changed the way we communicate, markets need to adapt, blah blah blah - it does present some interesting solutions on how to adapt. If only people were willing to adapt. I work in an organization comprised of ex-government employees -- former Foreign Service Officers, ex-CIA employees, etc etc and for some reason, this particular breed of Washingtonian is incredibly stuck in their ways. They refuse to recognize the power that the Internet holds to radically change the way they conduct their work. They even fail to recognize the power the Internet holds in changing the political landscape - facilitating peace and negotiation and garnering support for political issues.

The 95 theses, I would say, center around a few major themes: The Internet as a virtual marketplace, the role of organizations in this transformative communications environment, the impact of this technology internally on organziations and employee communications, and how organizations can connect with this virtual marketplace. Rather than attempting to predict the future, the authors of the Cluetrain Manifesto actually set the path for the future, making this book remarkable and important for any digital strategist to read.

In other readings I came across on the Web about this book, it seems as though many unanimously agree that this book just "won't die" and the principles it proposed ten years ago are still highly debated and considered today. What's shockingly weird though is how BAD the cluetrain's website is! For a book that imparts so much information about Internet strategy, etc, the website is an absurdly bad display of design principles and strategy. Go figure.

Millenial Makeover

No wonder "Millenial Makeover" is one of the NYT Favorite Books of 2008 - it discusses some of the most pressing issues of our time: how social media affects elections and politics. The book discusses how the winning party will successfully use and keep up with technology. This technology, according to the book, is rapidly changing the political environment.

It does a fairly decent job of describing the current political environment, and predicting the future - tracing how technology changed everything from pop culture, such as music and movies, to national politics. I'd like to think of myself as a "millenial," the way the book describes them - the early adopters of society, the optimistic politically and economically, the ultimate group that every marketer wants to reach because they are the movers and shakers. It's the ultimate book for anyone wanting to learn more about and understand this millenial generation - how to reach them, identify what they want, and give it to them. It provides surprising insight into the 2008 elections -- which set a precedent for using technology to gain support quickly and efficiently. The book also discusses how campaign techniques - fundraising, advertising, etc - have been revolutionized by millenial thinkers and technology.

The insights offered in this book are valuable to anyone wanting to understand domestic politics and their correlation with the technological world.

Online Political Advertising

Yet another reading in the series edited by Julie Barko Germany from the Institute for Politics, Democracy and the Internet at George Washington University, "Best Practices for Political Advertising Online" again brings together the best in the field to contribute chapters on how the Internet is changing the political landscape. Focusing on one of the tools with the most potential for generating profit, paid advertising through search engines and other marketing tactics online, this publication shows that developing an Internet marketing strategy is both beneficial and necessary in today's media environment.

Because online advertising eliminates the physical costs of print and production, political advocacy groups can save time and money through online advertising. Search engine optimization has become more of a profession these days, and hiring someone to optimize your website to drive traffic to it and managae and maintain your online ad campaigns such as Google AdWords could be a valuable investment. Although online advertising is a relatively new field, this publication points out "best practices" in the field and advises groups to plan ahead and budget accordingly. The report also makes a good case for using online advertising and shows how a group can target a particular demographic, and reach voters online.

I compared the search engine marketing, online display advertising, and online lead generation best practices from this report to what we're doing at my organization, the U.S. Institute of Peace. Search engine marketing is perhaps the most important strategy, as it drives users back to your Web site and points them to the content you'd like them to see based on keywords. SEO (search engine optimization) uses meta-tags that are embedded in the code of the website and tell search engines what type of content appears on the page. While at USIP we concentrate heavily on this, we have failed to develop a good set of metrics in order to judge our success. SEO will become more interesting with Web 3.0 - where taxonomy, a standard set of key words to describe a page, will be replaced by folksonomy, a set of words that users develop to describe a page. Tagging and tag clouds will also be an important part of SEO.

USIP has not yet developed a strategy for using online display advertising, although this paper makes a good case for using banners and flash ads across the web to target particular demographics. Creating an online advertising network can help expand the reach of an organization or political candidate's website.

And lastly, the paper talks about using lead generation, or recruitment to gain donors and supporters. Using a CRM like Salesforce can help with this strategy because it will help organizations track people's interests and keep a record of their interactions with the organization, such as by phone, or email, or physical mailings. Although this paper describes lead generation as cost-effective -- in reality, purchasing a CRM database like Salesforce is very expensive and requires an administrator - it is a crucial aspect of reaching and retaining constituents in any political advertising campaign.

Online advertising should also be important to traditional media outlets today -- as more and more are migrating to the web, they will have to look to the Internet for ways to generate profits.

whitehouse.gov and Drupal

TechPresident and the Associated Press today reported that www.whitehouse.gov is now using the open-source web content management system Drupal to manage their website - the same platform that we use to manage www.usip.org! Drupal is an awesome software because of its community of developers that are constantly adding and updated the system. The AP says that Drupal will make the site more secure, as well. Kudos to the White House!

We the Media: The Death of Professional Journalism?

I think my greatest fear was realized last semester in a class I took called "Journalism in the Digital Age." My undergraduate degree is obsolete.

I was a dual major in broadcast journalism and international relations at Syracuse University - graduating from one of the top communications schools in the country, The Newhouse School.

Sadly, everything I learned culminating in my top-rate (and very expensive) degree was shot down by my last class and by Dan Gillmor's book "We the Media: Grassroots Journalism By the People, For the People" which sadly realizes the demise of professional journalism and applauds citizen journalism as the future of journalism.

All the standards of professional journalism, the inverted pyramid method of writing, the ethics and morals that journalists should hold when reporting a story are no longer reserved for a trained elite group of "journalists". Today, anyone can be a journalist without any sort of formal training. This brings about an interesting debate of journalism as an activity vs journalism as a profession. Which is it? I graduated thinking that it is a profession - but today's media landscape, and Gillmor's book are undoubtedly proving me wrong. Citizen journalists are proving that journalism is an activity that anyone can participate in.

I'm not denying the power of citizen journalism. In fact, I am a citizen journalist, spreading news and coming up with original ideas through my blog and my Twitter page. But citizen journalism also brings up many complex questions: what about the ethics, morals, and standards that are associated with journalism as a profession? How do laws that protect journalists and freedom of the press apply to citizen journalists, such as a bloggers? While I agree with Gillmor that citizen journalism - "grassroots journalism" - is changing the media landscape and changing the power and influence that "Big Media" companies have held throughout history, I still believe that a business model outlining a symbiotic relationship between grassroots and professional journalism will be the successful one moving forward. Gillmor outlines several business models including the "tip jar" (paying bloggers and other independent writers to cover stories that people want to hear), advertising, paid/content/subscription models, and niche publishing, or "nano publishing" - sites that target very small specific users. Niche groups can appeal to advertisers wanting to reach a particular demographic.

Take the example of OhMyNews, the South Korean news site that's based on citizen journalism that Gillmor looks at as a case-study in his book. Their model is based on the symbiotic relationship described above - they employ a core of professional editors and journalists and then solicit articles, columns, interviews and more from a cadre of citizen journalists. The professional editors then select the stories from the citizen journalists based on their meeting journalistic standards such as integrity, factual accuracy, style, etc. This "collision of journalism and technology" as Gillmor says, is helping to facilitate the rise of citizen journalism: giving citizens the power to select and create the news they digest.

I spend most of my time at work touting the benefits of technology and how empowering it can be. Similarly, Gillmor takes us on a quick trip through the evolution of the Internet, where he explains how the "read only" web developed into the "read/write" web that calls for active participation among users through wikis, blogs, etc. This type of technology is the vehicle for grassroots journalism and can help us understand the direction journalism is moving in and can help us devise successful models for the future.

The Politics-To-Go Handbook

I was excited to read The Politics-To-Go Handbook: A Guide to Using Mobile Technology in Politics because I probably know the least about mobile technology in the technological realm. I've always wanted to create a mobile phone friendly version of USIP.org. This guide, to say the least, was definitely worth printing the 100+ pages and putting into a binder to keep in my library of quick reference guides.

Even though I would have liked to read something that was less of a primer/background guide and more of a analysis of mobile strategy, this guide helped me understand the demographics of cell phone users and texters and helped lay the groundwork for what the future of the mobile industry might look like.

Demonstrating several examples of success -- like the massive texting during the Live 8 concerts and the use of popular bands like U2 to mobilize their audiences toward a certain cause through cell phone registration systems -- this piece also brought about something that I learned back in 2001 when I was studying as an undergraduate in Europe. Texting was rampant in Europe back then (I'd be lucky if someone ever actually called me!) and I remember thinking that it was weird that no one texted in the US. It was still an undiscovered service that would later prove to be a cheap, effective way for communicating with one another. This article touches on the very subject of why the US lags so far behind in mobile technology (an example Dr. Rosenblatt gave in class once asked if you put a cell phone and laptop in front of someone living in Asia and asked them to find an answer using one of the devices, chances are, they'd reach for the cellphone instead of the laptop, whereas someone in the US was more likely to reach for the laptop). Looking further into this issue seems compelling. Exploring cell phone security, mobile campaigning, fundraising capabilities, how to use cell phones for charity, and integrating video into mobile technology are all important topics for analysis in determining the future direction of mobile technology.

No doubt that mobile technology will emerge as a major player in the filed of communications in the next few years and this piece is a good primer in that direction.

The Argument: Inside the Battle to Remake Democratic Politics

You can tell when an author is a journalist. Their books are smooth, easy to read pieces that make sense and somehow make complicated topics easy to digest. Matt Bai, author of "The Argument: Inside the Battle to Remake Democratic Politics" and a journalist covering American politics for the New York Times Sunday Magazine accomplishes the task of showing how grassroots organizations are becoming major political movements and are reshaping a major political party in this country through mechanisms such as the Internet. He portrays a brilliant inside look at the inner workings of the Democratic party.

His behind-the-scenes look at the relationship between grassroots movements like MoveOn.org and blogs such as The Huffington Post and The Daily Kos (both of which I read weekly, if not daily), and huge political players like Howard Dean, Bill Clinton, the Democracy Alliance clearly shows the internal power struggles, obsession with the Republican party, and the clash of egos that have prevented the Democratic party from expanding, succeeding, and become a coherent party with a coherent "argument". While politics are clearly more complex than simple partisanship, Bai points out that the agonizing blows dealt by a cohesive and strong Republican party and the disaster left behind by the Bush administration gave the progressive party the right motivation it needed to regroup and reorganize. The election of Obama was only the first taste of sweet victory for the Democratic party; how he will actually implement his coherent message of "change" has yet to be seen. But the opportunity is there.

This type of comparison kind of reminds me of the organization of the Israeli lobby and the progress they have made through their strategic organization and leadership, as compared to other groups who could benefit from such structure and organization and a clear communications message, such as the Palestinians. Has anyone ever read The Israel Lobby? If not, you definitely should. It's an amazing look into the organization and structure and power of AIPAC (The America Israel Public Affairs Committee). It proves that having a coherent message (or an "argument") will help you succeed. It proves that new ideas backed by effective strategies also help you succeed. It's precisely what the Democratic party needs, according to Bai.

Perhaps most interesting is Bai's account of a MoveOn.org party/bbq he attended that was organized by someone energized by his disdain for FOX news and his Republican neighbor. What Bai noticed at this party was a critical notion to understanding political movements online: the participants were not young, tech savvy kids who are stereotypically known to be the ones controlling the Internet Age; but they were middle-class suburban adults who, for some time now, have felt disenfranchised by American politics, as Bai points out. MoveOn.org helps organize these people and provides a forum to connect with one another and allow their voices to be heard.

After reading the book, I decided to do some research about Matt Bai and his book and discovered that the book was quite controversial, and was actually the only political book in 2007 to be named a New York Times Notable book. I was really impressed by this book - I think Bai has an interesting take on progressive politics and I think he highlights the challenges facing American politics accurately.

O.M.G.

You have to see how amazing social networking is.

Bakcground: My status on Facebook today says: "cheers to Obama and to the nobel committee for taking this action to highlight how important diplomacy is to peacemaking."

The attached is a personal message I received on facebook from someone i went to ELEMENTARY school with and have not spoken to in about 18 years.











Text: Hi Dida - I wholeheartedly disagree with you about President Obama getting the Nobel Peace Prize. You're certainly entitled to your opinion, but I'm going to choose not to be friends with you because of it.

Dida Atassi: LOL!


Cheers to social networking.

Blogging @ PBS's Idea Lab

I found an awesome blog hosted by PBS called MediaShift Idea Lab.

"Idea Lab is a group blog by innovators who are reinventing community news for the Digital Age. Each Idea Lab blogger is a winner of the Knight News Challenge grant to reshape community news."

Awesome. They have a best practices section, reports from high-level conferences like Gov 2.0 (Check out: "Report from Gov 2.0: A Nerd, Suit, Spook, and Database Smoothie"), and the best part is, you can TALK to the writers and engage in a conversation about any of these topics. I can read Idea Lab's live Twitter feed directly from the page (I love embedded Twitter widgets) and users can declare which articles are their "favorites", and the site pulls out "featured comments" from users. Pretty interactive and comprehensive. Although too bad it appears that their Twitter feed is not actually updated by a human, but rather by an RSS feed directly from their site via twitterfeed.

This, as we've learned in Dr. Rosenblatt's class, is a no-no ---- It's what we're doing here at USIP and something that's on my list of things to change. I've only been here about 4 weeks and one of my top priorities is to revamp the way we do all of our social networking -- which appears to me to h ave been put together rather quickly and without much strategy. Probably from some pressure from the powers that be.

Care2 and Online Advocacy

Care2 is an online advocacy group that I first heard about in Rigby's book (see posts below). The do some pretty cool stuff, so I've decided to get involved by following them on Twitter, and attending a release of an e-campaigning benchmark report they are hosting with Advocacy Online. The event is actually an exclusive simultaneous live webcast in Washington, Toronto and London. I'm hoping to learn a bit more about what works with online advocacy and campaigning, the most effective ways to organize people in a virtual world, and hopefully, this report will also be able to lay out best practices. I'm starting to really get into the strategy behind these campaigns. I'll report back on what I learn. The event is on October 13.

Social Media is Older than the WWW?

This is more of a note to myself to remember to look into Dr. Rosenblatt's idea that social networks existed long before the World Wide Web. I remember being a little confused by this in class once, but now I have a better understanding of what that means.

I just read something that Dr. Rosenblatt posted to his blog that was quite frankly, amazing. It was a memo from Milton John Kleim, a member of the Aryan Resistance, a white supremacist movement in the U.S., on using social networks to their advantage. Disregarding who actually wrote it and the context of the memo, it was written back in 1998 and includes some of the same strategies for using social networks that were outlined in the Person to Person report!

Kleim talks about using USENET, an old online discussion forum, to spread their message. He advocates moving beyond their own social networks into others, warns against spamming, suggests interacting with those who express interest in their cause immediately, and promotes contacting members of the networks with some regularity.

Perhaps Dr.R is right -- this "new technology" isn't so new!

Act.ly and Social Networks

I love act.ly! I am learning about it through my digital political strategy class at JHU. I just participated in a petition/experiment that my professor Dr. Alan Rosenblatt is conducting. Apparently there is a game for Twitterers called Mobster World (I'm not even going to link to it so that this doesn't happen to you too... you can search for it if you want!). If you sign up to play this game, it will hijack your follower list on Twitter and send them a direct message FROM YOU if you sign up to play! There's no way to make this stop - no contact information on Mobster's site and no way for people to click and opt-out.

Not only is this super-annoying but it's just WRONG! This got me remembering how annoying cold calling and automated calling is, especially when the "robot" fails and calls you at 2AM. At least now, I can do something about it from my own desk. I signed up for act.ly and "signed" Dr. Rosenblatt's petition by allowing act.ly to Tweet the cause on my Twitter account. My irritation actually led me to find and follow EndTheRoboCalls on Twitter and all sorts of interesting and cool petitions that I can participate in on Act.ly.

This takes advantage of the essence of social networking: republishing information to individual social networks makes that information viral and reaches many people quickly.

Maybe I'll start a petition to remove tourists who stand on the left of the escalators (when they should be standing on the right, walking on the left) from the Metro system. :)

Person-to-Person-to-Person

It really doesn't seem so hard to use social networking to your advantage - but in reality, it is.

A group of leading expert thinkers on the strategy and the how-to behind maximizing the benefits from social networking sites teamed up to write Person-to-Person-to-Person: Harnessing the Political Power of Online Social Networks and User Generated Content (PDF), published by the Institute for Politics, Democracy and the Internet at George Washington University, and they say that social networks should be a part of a multi-faceted Internet strategy.

This stuff is so interesting to me because it's so new and the rules of the game on the Internet are so flexible. While bringing up some very salient points that all users of social media should remember in order to be successful (keep your information up-to-date, be active in an online community, and build trust among users), the report also suggests very interesting ideas for success such as promoting more user-generated content (letting go of the reigns of control seems to be a difficult thing for many organizations, including mine!) and using the Internet to research and learn more about your demographics and audiences before attempting to target them (the report offers gather.com, asianavenue.com, momsrising.com and more as good research sites). Another measure of success is the ability to translate online action into offline action, or even vice versa, such as in the case of townhall.com. A conservative talk radio company purchased the community website to harness the power of their listeners; the website has now become a place for interactivity, conversation, discussion, and blogging. They therefore turned a passive activity such as listening into activism through Internet technology.

The report also discusses the importance of youth, a historically forgotten demographic. Youth have proven to be strong social movers and shakers and, according to this report, social media strategies should be geared toward attracting and energizing youth as a primary audience. They're the ones who are more likely to use the Internet as a part of their daily lives because they are more accustomed to it, having grown up during the Internet boom.

Another key point that this report makes that I thought was interesting is the role of the "influencer" or the "leader". Finding these people are essential to online success using social networks. Influencers and leaders aren't necessarily people with big jobs or big titles, according to the report, or even people with big names. They are the people with established networks who helps to inform people and successfully changes their minds. Spending time and effort finding and talking to these people is not only beneficial but important in reaching others. These people can also help move online information offline easily.

Why has the Internet been so successful with "bringing grassroots back" as the report says? I think its simply because of convenience. We're in the information-overload age. We are too busy, too tired, and have too many people in our lives to take care of and worry about. Many of us aren't financially or physically able to participate in live demonstrations, protests, or other methods of real-life activism on issues we care about.

The Internet solves this dilemma. We can be contributing citizens, we can rally and organize groups, we can socialize with one another, we can inform each other, we can serve as the highest form of checks and balance for our government and we can bring down corrupt politicians, journalists and others by never leaving our desks.

We just have to let go of our controls and let the audiences speak.

ADC and Social Networking

I'm a member of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee on Facebook. They are an issue advocacy group and grassroots civil rights group devoted to empowering and protecting Arab-Americans. They defend civil rights, promote civic participation, defends the interest of Arab-Americans and tries to promote balanced U.S. policy in the Middle East.

Facebook seems to be like a focal point of ADC's activities. With over 2,100 members of it's group, I continually receive messages from the group asking to support or denounce particular legislation in Congress, or messages designed to raise awareness about a particular case or a person. The messages are often short and succint and include a link to direct the group member to a place of action. ADC uses a tool that I find particularly useful is called Capitol Advantage which allows ADC to send out action alerts to its members. When I receive these action alerts, I can read a short summary of the issue at hand (ie: guantanamo, hate crimes, human rights) and who I need to contact (Obama, a Congressional leader, etc), and I don't have to go out of my way to do it. ADC's Action Alert provides a form right there for me to sign my name on and hit send, and they take the responsibility for forwarding it to the appropriate people. It has a pre-drafted letter that is actually editable if you wanted to make some changes ready to go. It even gives you the option of whether you'd like ADC to send it for you through e-mail or as a printed letter.

I can send a concerned letter to my President or my Congressman all through just simply becoming a member of a Facebook group. This was all only one click away from the group's page. The page also provides me links to articles, op-eds, and information about gatherings and demonstrations all from the group's wall.

By being a member of this group on facebook, I feel automatically connected to the 2,100 and I feel as though I'm an active participant by simply taking out a minute of my day to post an interesting link to an article or by clicking send on a letter advocating for crucial change.

Here Comes Everybody....

Clay Shirkey's "Here Comes Everybody" uses real-life examples and interesting brain teasers to get across his point that power is generated through groups of people and not individuals. The connection I appreciated the most was the one he made between the function of groups and the success of online social networks. MySpace,Facebook, Flickr and YouTube haven't all succeed because of great company organization and management and a dedicated staff and a powerful public relations strategy (albeit, these are certainly factors in its success), but they've succeed through the power of people to communicate with one another. They've also succeeded because they meet the powerful psychological need for humans to be heard.

An example of this that Shirkey gives in his book is what Flickr did went it first started -- the president had her staff comment on other people's albums and photos to get the site off the ground and to show people that someone was out there watching and listening. A lot of Shirkey's book made me think about the psychology of people in a group. Take the Facebook wall, for example. A person's "wall" is a place where everyone can see someone's status updates (what they are currently doing) and where members of Facebook can have a very public "conversation" back and forth by posting on each other's walls. It is known that the "walls" are very public places. Why not have a private conversation through personal messaging or email? Why display conversations for all? Shirkey would argue that this is the group phenomenon; communication between groups is no longer private and it's no longer limited to real-world meetings. This "user-generated content", he says, isn't created for general consumption, or even for a large audience. It's geared toward a community of people - usually a small, pre-connected group of people, and this, according to Shirkey, is revolutionizing the way we communicate with each other. It is now imperative to understand this type of communication in order to reach people in the digital age. This new era of public communication brings about information overlaod and requires us to filter our information accordingly. The difference between small group communication and broadcast communication is where the fundamental changes lie; participation and production of information also now lies within the group, rather than with an elite group of writers, journalists, authors, who craft a message only directed toward large audiences.

Also particularly striking about Shirky's book is how we currently underestimate the connections and the power that a group has. He demonstrates this using the Birthday paradox, which is, according to Wikipedia, the following:

In probability theory, the birthday problem, or birthday paradox pertains to the probability that in a set of randomly chosen people some pair of them will have the same birthday. In a group of at least 23 randomly chosen people, there is more than 50% probability that some pair of them will have the same birthday. Such a result (for just 23 people, considering that there are 365 possible birthdays) is counter-intuitive to many.

Shirky uses this to show that there are many more connections among a group of people than we are inclined to think. The power of groups are harnessed when they are given the tools to work together.

This type of power is especially harnessed in social media, which makes it easy for people to contribute by providing them with the tools. For example, contributing to Wikipedia is super easy. You don't have to have any technological knowledge. You just log-in and edit and add to the collective knowledge and information. Another example of this harnessed group power, similar to Shirky's Linux example, is the Content Management System that we use here at USIP. It's called Drupal. Drupal is an open-source software that is continually built upon and enhanced by a large community of users. There are Drupal developers out there - but lots of other types of developers - web developers, software developers, coders, analysits, etc - contribute to making the system customizable and usable. Drupal has a large community of users that share and benefit from each others experiences with the system.

On the down side, however, while this book had a lot to offer, I didn't really feel like this book had anything new to offer, other than re-energizing me to think more deeply about how looking at the psychology of humans can help better understand their behavior in a group. Shirky's an idealist who is very much pro-technology, but rarely looks at the consequences of group collaboration and how this could negatively impact individual recognition and work.

Webcasting Today

Ahh, social networking. Today's webcast was successful, but I won't have complete numbers for you until tomorrow.

Embedding that Twitter widget (a picture of our webcasting page and the embedded Twitter widget that I used, above) that showed real-time updates of our Twitter feed onto the page that featured the live webcast today seemed to work well -- except it kept scrolling through ALL of our tweets, even ones that were 60 days old! I tried to stop the loop in the java script code but to no avail. Might have to do some more research on how to control how many tweets are displayed when I have a bit more time, but overall the widget worked great..You can find it at:

http://twitter.com/goodies/widgets

Another problem with this widget is, however, that it only displays YOUR feed. It doesn't display everyone who's talking about your issue using the hashtag. This seems to hinder conversation a bit more. It'd be interesting for readers to get a whole picture of the conversation that's happening. I'm looking into using TweetGrid for our next live webcast in hopes to engage our audiences in more of a conversation, rather than just passive readers of our tweets.

According to TweetDeck (also awesome, check it out at: http://tweetdeck.com/beta/) we had about 11 people talk to us via Twitter during the event -- mostly commenting on our speaker's remarks or RT'ing our live tweets. Not bad....! Rigby would be proud of our microblogging - we put a human face to our name and helped reach out to a global audience who didn't actually have to be in Washington to attend the event.

Twitter Strategy for Gov Departments

Found an awesome template outlining a strategy for governments using Twitter:

http://blogs.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/digitalengagement/post/2009/07/21/Template-Twitter-strategy-for-Government-Departments.aspx

These points seem especially critical to me:

• To set clear objectives and metrics to make sure there's a return on the investment of staff time (and if there isn’t, we’ll stop doing it)
• To make sure the channel is used consistently and carefully, to protect corporate reputation from silly mistakes or inappropriate use
• To plan varied and interesting content, and enthuse those who will provide it into actively wanting to do so.

Review: Rigby's "Mobilizing Generation 2.0"

Ben Rigby's book Mobilizing Generation 2.0: A Practical Guide to Using Web 2.0 focuses on using Web 2.0 tools to engage youth in political conversation. The book does an excellent job of providing a very basic overview of these tools, but doesn't necessarily keep its focus on youth. In fact, the principles Rigby discusses in his book can be used across all audiences and all types of organizations -- not just political ones.

Rigby covers blogging, social networking, video and photo sharing, mobile phones, wikis, maps and virtual worlds. While reading the book, I had USIP in mind. We use some of these tools, but not all. We are active participants on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, but Rigby’s book helped me think about how to use Flickr and Digg. We also use Viewbook for photo sharing and for creating easy slideshows that we can embed on our website. Rigby doesn’t mention it, but I highly recommend it: http://www.viewbook.com/. USIP also uses a wiki as our Intranet site; according to Rigby, using a wiki can help improve internal communication. It also helps decentralize information and allows multi-users to contribute content and feel like they are participating in their organization.

Ribgy also spent a lot of time in each chapter discussing the consequences of trying to build a Web 2.0 tool from scratch – either trying to build one’s one social network or hosting one’s one media content, etc. He advises against this because of the amount of staff dedication and effort it takes to maintain these sites. He says that time could be better spent strategizing and benefiting from users of an existing social network instead. He’s right about this point – unless your organization has the time, money, and staff to host their own services, making use of existing ones are far beneficial. Event at USIP, with a staff about 250 and our own IT department, we use existing social networks and have determined that building our own Web 2.0 tools would be less fruitful for us.

Perhaps the most surprising of all was the success of virtual networks such as Second Life. Although I knew that Second Life had received a lot of media attention, I didn't realize that organizations such as BBC Radio had demonstrated success using Second Life, as Rigby mentions. I also didn’t realize the power of mobile phones in connecting people – I always think of mobile phones as something personal and private, rather than a tool to be used to blast marketing messages. Rigby does point out, however, that using mobile phones isn’t quite popular yet because of the restrictions placed on them by phone companies.

Throughout the book, Rigby emphasizes the important of “tagging” and “folksonomy” – the taxonomy of the people. Tagging content online is the future – it can help organize thousands of files into searchable terms that people can readily use. I’m happy to report that USIP’s new website, launched June 2009, employs the tagging strategy to help people find the content they are looking for. They can see all content that have been tagged for a particular issue area on our site. Our feedback as shows that tagging does indeed improve the functionality of the website, and I agree wholeheartedly with Rigby that this is the wave of the future and perhaps an important part of Web 3.0 – the semantic web.

Using Social Networking: Twitter and USIP

The U.S. Institute of Peace is a Congressionally funded think-tank that I've worked at for nearly 4 years now. It's an interesting paradox because we're not a federal agency, but we're funded by Congress. We're not an advocacy group, but our goal is to share our research and tools for peacebuilding and peacekeeping. Here's our mission statement:

The United States Institute of Peace is an independent, nonpartisan, national institution established and funded by Congress. Its goals are to help:

• Prevent and resolve violent international conflicts
• Promote post-conflict stability and development
• Increase conflict management capacity, tools, and intellectual capital worldwide

The Institute does this by empowering others with knowledge, skills, and resources, as well as by directly engaging in peacebuilding efforts around the globe.

Therefore, in order to be effective and continue to receive funding, engaging people with our work is essential to our success. One of the primary strategies is using the web to disseminate and share our work. I manage and help create the online strategy for USIP.org.

Social networking is becoming an increasingly important part of the strategy of USIP.org, which I help craft. This strategy is a continual process that grows and evolves with trends and the needs of our audiences.

Recently, we've improved the webcasting capabilities of USIP.org. USIP often convenes public events relevant to current political issues. We've had to come up with innovative ways to reach our global audience that aren't always able to attend events in Washington. One of the ways we've chosen to do this, in addition to webcasting, is through social networking tools on the web.

On Monday, (9/21) we'll be hosting a live webcast of one of our events on preventing mass atrocities. Should be quite interesting. During the live stream, I'll be able to monitor how many people are logged in watching. In addition to advertising this event through email blasts and on our site's homepage, we've also looked at interactive ways to promote this event. USIP hosts a twitter page that I manage and am involved in. It has about 700 followers. We've advertised there too - and on Friday, I discovered that Twitter offers a neat little widget that allows you to embed live Twitter updates into your website. I'm trying to experiment and discover the best ways to maximize our visibility on Twitter, and how engaging in dialogue with users of the Twitter network can help my organization better understand what type of information interests our audiences.

We've assigned someone to tweet live during the event and assigned the event a hash tag to engage our followers in a discussion. I've also embedded the Twitter widget onto our event webpage so that users can watch the live webcast and read our tweets during the event simultaneously in one place.

Like Ben Rigby says in his book Mobilizing Generation 2.0: A Practical Guide to Using the Web, using Web 2.0 tools appropriately is a successful method of engaging the public - especially youth. Rigby calls the Twitter service "microblogging": a short, informal way to have a conversation with an audience. Our ultimate goal is to engage people on policy issues related to peacebuilding through Web 2.0 tools such as microblogging.

My next posts - on Sunday and Monday - will be review the Ribgy book in more detail (so far, I highly recommend it as a go-to beginner's handbook on Web 2.0 tools. It's perfect for someone who's looking for background information to convince their organization to use Web 2.o, or who just wants to have a basic understanding of the tools) and I'll be reporting back on the success of using USIP.org's Web 2.0 strategies to engage in a two-way conversation with our audiences. I'll be monitoring how many people are logged in to the live webcast to see if our online marketing efforts paid off and I'll also be monitoring our Twitter status to see how many people engage us in conversation, how many people "retweet" our tweets, or mention us in their own posts (this would have a desirable viral effect.. more on that later), and I'll be working with our specialist who is tweeting live during the event to ensure that we are following the instructions carefully outlined in Rigby's book: keeping the messages short, conversational, and most of all, human.

Happy weekend.

A Citizen of the Net

This blog will be used as a part of my Digital Political Strategies graduate course at Johns Hopkins University in Washington, DC. I'll also use it to post my insights from my experiences as a citizen of the net.

I was lucky to become a citizen of the net (a "netizen") at a very early age. I witnessed this complex system of interconnected computer networks grow and change since its inception. Today, the Internet pretty much is my life. I'm currently pursuing a Digital Communications concentration in the Masters of Communications program at Hopkins and have made a career out of studying and researching the many facets of the Internet. I have been a professional in the field of online communications for six years now and am continually amazed at how quickly things grow and change in the online world.