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- The dangers of mixing web and desktopNovember 18
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…might be overplayed. I ran across this video today over at Blogoscoped, where an ominous-sounding narrator explains why Google reading my e-mails to serve ads is a dangerous violation to privacy.
- 10 Things About Social Media Marketing You Can Learn From Barack ObamaNovember 13
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Let’s face it, the Obama Presidential campaign was one of the most successful social media marketing efforts in the history of the internet. I can count on my fingers the number of major US companies that understand new media the way the Obama campaign did.
(Incidentally, how long do you think it will take Firefox to put “Obama” in their spell-check dictionary?)
This is really not that surprising, given the involvement of people like Chris Hughes, one of the founding fathers of Facebook, as Obama’s online organizing coordinator. It also explains why Obama’s web site looks freakishly close to Facebook in design.
So what can we learn about social media marketing from the Obama campaign?
Be Authentic
Authenticity is a big, nebulous term. It’s hard to pin down and explain because it’s hard to pin down in real life, too.
For Obama, being authentic meant calling like he saw it whenever possible, instead of pandering to voter localities.
He understood that in today’s media culture, anything he said in Indiana would be compared to anything he said in Oregon, and he’d do better by just being honest about his policies and opinions than by trying to tailor them too much to the individual towns.
As a company, being authentic generally means being honest and personable. As Seth Godin pointed out,
- Twitter for Public Relations - the SlideshareNovember 12
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Kristen Foster and John Bell have decided to share their slideshow from the “Twitter Bootcamp for PR” webinar they did yesterday.
In their words:
we wanted to share a copy of our presentation deck with our readers, which includes more than 60 sides featuring the basics of Twitter, key strategies, PR best practices, and real life case studies.
Sounds like a win to me. I clicked through the deck on SlideShare and it is a good resource for business that are either thinking about getting into twitter or wondering why they should.
Don’t believe me? Check out the slideshow for yourself:
- The Future of Lobbying: The Pickens PlanNovember 7
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Do you live under a rock? If you do, you might not have heard of the Pickens Plan yet, which is former “oil tycoon” T. Boone Pickens’ roadmap to oil independence: alternative energy resources. What’s interesting is that Pickens is being progressive not only in his message but in how he is delivering it. I think the term “powerful lobbyist” is going to start changing as people realize how easy the internet makes it to gather thousands or even millions of people behind a particular policy initiative. That’s where the real leverage comes from, after all.
If you check out their web site, they have a whole “community” section that offers the standard range of community functions: profile creation, groups, events, images, and forum interaction.
So is it working?
The short answer seems to be yes. There’s a lot of activity in the community section of the site, and you can’t help but think of the Obama campaign site when you cruise through the navigation.
The groups are numerous and seem to be active, there are 8,575 pages of members that you can flip through and friend or message. In other words, the community certainly seems to be healthy.
What’s most interesting to me is ho
- Terrorist Tweeting: A Two-Edged SwordNovember 3
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If you’re over 50, all new technologies are used only for evil. Have you noticed the story on MSN about how Terrorists might use Twitter in part of an attack:
A U.S. Army intelligence report sent the media into overdrive the last few days with its pronouncement that terrorists might “Tweet” their way through an attack using the microblogging site Twitter. The Army says it “red-teamed” the possible use of Twitter, which means that a team of soldiers or analysts used Twitter to see if they could find weaknesses with the Army’s battle readiness.
Using Twitter to coordinate group efforts is not a new concept. Tweet-ups are a basic form of coordinated group action.
The obvious downside to planning your terrorist actions on Twitter are: they’re public. The obvious caveat: don’t believe everything you see on Twitter.
As an open platform, Twitter works as a two-edged sword. The best way to prepare the US Army for possible Terrorist Twitter use is to get very good ad using it themselves.