With some of the projects we've got going on here at TBG, I've been thinking a lot about who should blog and how certain parties should open their blog to comments. When a friend of mine approached me asking for help setting up a classroom blog for a summer class he will be teaching, I thought it was a great idea. It got me thinking: should teachers blog? And, if so, how should they blog? I think that blogs could be a great addition to just about any classroom in any grade level–from first grade through university. There are a variety of ways blogs can help teachers reach their students and effectively communicate subject materials: (more…)

Fritz is one the Washington Post's hipsters who is tracking the social scene here in Washington, D.C.  In the Going Out Gurus blog, he reports the closure of the lounge at the Hotel Helix, which has amassed a following since its opening in 2002.  Sigh.  However, according to The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, the paper will attempt to fill the gap created in the area's social scene by giving Washingtonians another place to meet up:  the Post's new networking section set to launch later this spring (hat tip: Media Bistro's FishbowlDC).

The Post hopes to allow site visitors to "set up their own pages and, eventually, upload their own audio and video, perhaps around themes like the Redskins or the annual cherry blossoms" — kind of like what happened in USA Today's recent redesign. 

I like the sound of this, but this announcement makes me wonder why it took so long.  WashingtonPost.com is one of the most innovative American news sites I've come across.  Not only did it adopt features like social bookmarking buttons, Technorati widgets that track blog posts linking to specific articles, and a myriad of other web specific features like Adrian Holovaty's databases that make searching through items like political attack ads, video game reviews, and former President Clinton's speaker fees from 2001 to 2005 easy along with multimedia special reports like "Being a Black Man" early on, there are many other features that other papers beat it to the punch.  The fact that the paper is interested in reporting like Fritz's from the Going Out Guru's blog proves how forward thinking it is in an at times staid and changing industry.

However, many other papers have turned their sites into quasi-social networks — even before USA Today – by providing places for site visitors to blog, submit pictures, and create profile pages.  Other news outlets see the stickiness potential of these features since they help make members of their audience feel that they are part of operation and can gain more than just knowledge from visiting a news site.  Further, they may tell others about their blog, pictures, audio, or video on the news site or spend time (potentially seeing ads) debating with others on-line. 

While I'm sitting here wondering why it took so long for the Post to turn its site into a quasi-social network, I cannot complain since the company seems unafraid to test relatively untested digital journalism waters that benefit both the paper itself and the industry in general:  other papers who are holding back to see how this strategy fares might be inspired to expand their online programs should the Post's social network succeed.  The Washington Post is definitely a trailblazer in this regard.

I wonder if someone in the not so distant future will post a wedding announcement in the paper that states, "Before I met my fiancé at the bar the Going Out Gurus suggested, we met through our Post profiles since we both clicked on each other's usernames while discussing foreign policy questions at PostGlobal."  It seems more promising to find a special someone through a common interest than meeting randomly at a bar, especially at the Helix Lounge which is closing.

We're hiring!   

Our team at TBG is seeking a bright, ambitious and hard working Associate to help develop and manage Web programs for a diverse group of clients. You will help manage online public relations campaigns and develop measurement and monitoring programs for Fortune 500 companies.

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This weekend, Editor and Publisher released some data on the most popular newspaper websites. Not surprisingly, the New York Times was at the top of the list with 12,960,000 unique visitors in February 2007. USATODAY.com, washingtonpost.com, LATimes.com, and the Wall Street Journal Online rounded out the top five.

You can see the entire list of newspaper statistics here.

While I would like to know more about how these figures were calculated, I think that data like this is really important. It give mainstream media outlets a mechanism for evaluating benchmarks and accurately assessing how they are doing online compared to their competitiors. As more and more newspapers begin to reevaluate their online programs, reliable data like this will be an important factor in determining the direction that these websites pursue.

Marketing on social networks is not always that successful as Todd has pointed out, but there are sly ways to garner some success. Facebook has an interesting feature — the news feed. Depending upon members' privacy settings, it will chronicle their activities and broadcast them to their friends.

While some Facebook denizens loathe this feature, it enables people to find out what their friends are up to. From a promotion point of view, the news feed is a great channel for others to advertise a person's or organization's cause. As Facebook denizens interact with such entities, the news feed can broadcast such action to their friends. Further, they are also indirectly vouching for a cause making it more appealing, important, or hip for their buddies.

Here are some tips on how to harness the news feed for peddling a product, person, or cause that will coax people to do things that are visible to others: (more…)

Matt Stoller of MyDD has an interesting post today that looks at why the Republicans appear to be falling behind Democrats in their use of the Internet. Here is how he closes the piece:

I’ve been digging into this question, of why the left is winning online, for years now. It’s not easy to answer, since the tools we use are accessible to anyone. On the one hand, you can argue that it’s the practical experience of using these tools that determines your success, and the GOP just is not that experienced. In 2008, or 2010, someone on the right will figure it out and bring the internet magic to the party.

On the other hand, and this is what I believe, the internet’s rise in politics is part of a larger shift in the nature of our political system that is radically reshaping both parties. The Democratic Party is ‘ahead’ not in the sense that its masters have learned the new tools, but because the party is becoming much more open and aligned around a left-wing ideology that is ascendant in America. The Republican Party will go through this shift as well, maybe in two years, maybe in four, or six, but it will catch up with modern America. But it’s going to be a very different structure with different leaders than it is today, either much more aligned with a Perotista anti-immigrant base or more left-wing and aligned with a multi-cultural America.

I agree with Stoller that this isn’t about who has better stuff. As he mentions, the tools being used are accessible to anyone and the Republicans have access to smart and capable consultants, programmers and designers (including us). The divide isn’t about who has the best tech or biggest computer.

The problem is bigger than that. It is one of mindset. At this point, the majority of Republican campaigns just don’t have the stomach to run the kind of social campaigns being deployed by Barack Obama and John Edwards. The desire for complete control is still too strong. So you end up not blogging and with fake social tools like McCainSpace.

Republicans would be lucky if they were simply losing some sort of arms races. It is a lot easier to go in the back office and build a better mouse trap than it is to get the front office to fundamentally change the way they think about campaigns.

Update: Patrick Ruffini chimes in with a thoughtful post.

Update 2:  David All rounds up all the discussion.  In the comments to one of David’s earlier posts on this issue, Bush/Cheney e-campaign guy Mike Turk said the following:

There is a consensus among a lot of GOP Internet strategists that our past electoral success has contributed directly to our complacency online. If we have a successful formula, why mess with it? We don’t, the theory goes, want to start screwing with the recipe and end up being the political equivalent of New Coke.

I suspect, and have had this sentiment confirmed by many others, that we will not right this ship before we a) lose it all, and b) spend a few years lost in the wilderness…

So far this cycle, two candidates for President have fully embraced the concept of user-generated content: John Edwards and Barack Obama. Barack Obama has his own social network and allows users to create their own blogs hosted on his site. John Edwards hosts a DailyKos style blog network that allows any user to start their own diary/blog on his site.

Is this stuff working?

It is too early to say. We know that Barack Obama’s website is getting a lot of traffic when compared to Hillary Clinton’s more static website. We know that Obama exceeded fundraising expectations during the first quarter of 2007 and that John Edwards more or less met his. Obama also raised a ton of his money on the Internet from small donors.

But we’re still sort of picking at scraps here. So following are the big questions about user-generated content and my attempt to answer them based on what we know so far and my own bias. (more…)

I’d like to take a moment here and point out a nifty new feature on Google maps. Google just launched something called “My Maps”, which gives users the ability to create their own maps, adding their own personal landmarks, lines, and shapes. You can keep your maps private, or make them available to the public via Google Earth and local searches.

I was messing around with My Maps this morning and found it incredibly easy to use. You can add pictures to your placemarkers, choose from a variety of different types of markers, and really customize the map to fit your own purpose. There is no programming or tech knowledge necessary at all; simply use your Google account to create and save your own map.

I made a map this morning that has some great DC area restaurants (and some other random stuff) on it.

Initially, I can think of a few ways that this will be useful:

• Bloggers writing about any kind of traveling. In theory bloggers could create a Google map so that their readers can visually follow where they are going (or where they have been). For example, a friend of mine went on a cross-country road trip last summer, and this would have been a really cool feature for her to use in her emails to her friends back home.
• Business sponsoring events. What a great way to enable supporters to not only get directions to an event, but to find nearby businesses and conveniences. Businesses or organizations holding conventions (think: political conventions), fundraising events, luncheons, conferences, etc., could create Google maps to show patrons where area hotels, restaurants, and airports are located in relation to the venue.
• Political support groups. On Hillary Clinton’s Senate website, she had a feature that allowed supporters to sign up to have Hillary Clinton house parties. This version of Google maps would have been a great collaborative tool. Supporters could have added their location to the Google map, allowing Hillary Clinton supporters to find one another for the purpose of having house parties. I’m sure politicians for the 2008 cycle will come up with more than one way to use this feature for their online campaigns.
• Businesses with lots of clients. Instead of just listing corporate clients on a website, businesses could post their clients on a Google map to give prospective customers a new way of looking at client lists. Colleges and universities could use this as a similar marketing tool: instead of showing pie charts of where students are from, use a Google map to illustrate these facts.

Anyway, those are just a few ideas. I think that this customizable map product is a pretty powerful tool. It’s a lot of fun and, more importantly, it has the potential to be useful. Happy Mapping!

You can read more about the launch of Google MyMaps on O’Reilly Radar.

Wagner James Au of GigaOM has a fascinating look at why, despite the endless hype, marketing in Second Life hasn’t proven to be effective yet. This is a good companion piece to a link I posted yesterday that provides some practical reasons to be skeptical of Second Life’s marketing potential (put me in the big time skeptic category).

Regardless of your personal feelings about Second Life, I think Au’s criticism of the execution of Second Life marketing efforts thusfar is illuminating:

To play in Second Life, corporations must first come to a humbling realization: in the context of the fantastic, their brands as they exist in the real world are boring, banal, and unimaginative. Car companies are trying to compete with college kids who turn a virtual automotive showroom into a 24/7 hiphop dance party, and create lovingly designed muscle cars that fly, and auction off for $2000 in real dollars at charity auctions.

Faced with such talented competition, smart marketers should concede defeat, and hire these college kids and housewives to create concept designs and prototypes that re-imagine their brands merged to existing SL-based brands which have already proved themselves in a world of infinite possibility. Or as the Komjuniti study suggests, they can keep building sterile shopping malls, and continue wondering why Residents prefer nude dance parties, giant frogs singing alt-folk rock, and samurai deathmatches– and often, all three at the same time.

I think the same thesis applies to MySpace or Youtube or any of the new so called “social” marketing channels. Bringing an old mindset to a new medium doesn’t accomplish anything. Your only chance of having real and sustained success is if the mindset shifts as well.

Sometime in the last few weeks, Hillary Clinton launched a simplified, Spanish version of her campaign website. Unless I’m missing something, Hillary is the only candidate that has gone bilingual on the web so far.

As a note, Presidential campaign websites for the general election almost always have a Spanish version.

The Onion, the satirical news outlet, launched its newspaper here in Washington, DC today. Finally, the nation’s capital has journalistic integrity!

When I received a copy last evening (today’s news yesterday – I love it!) a front page headline caught my attention. It is:”‘Most E-Mailed’ List Tearing New York Times‘ Newsroom Apart,” which of this posting I could not find on the parody site.

The gist of this silly missive is that Times staffers vie for a spot on their site’s most e-mailed list since it connotes popularity of their work if people invite others to read their articles. In the farce story, columnist Maureen Dowd allegedly makes up “cutesy names” for government officials all day and nearly two dozen staffers — including John Burns, a Pulitzer Prize winning Baghdad correspondent — want to work at the Home & Garden and Travel desks since such topics are inherently full of “click and send” qualities.

This funny piece provides interesting commentary applicable for blogging whether it is for personal, political, journalistic, or business purposes. Web surfers tend to peruse quickly and skim most of the content they come across, and that requires anyone writing content to creatively attract and keep their attention.

Thus, on-line content that attracts people’s attention must serve a purpose and somehow apply to a site’s audience. When appropriate wittiness and humor are useful, but commitment to accuracy should never wane. Even if all Ms. Dowd did throughout her work day was sitting around nicknaming politicos, she still must adhere to standards. Anyone or organization that blogs must also follow standards, or their credibility is at peril. Yes, I know that this sounds elementary, but these facts are important.

If bloggers decide to attract readers through creative and amusing writing, success typically requires commitment to this tone. I don’t know about you, but that’s tough. However, flippantly covering serious topics like DC politics successfully is possible — just look at Wonkette. Wallstrip is an excellent example of a blog that injects pop culture into typically staid business news. What are other blogs like these do you read?

Social networks on the Internet like Facebook serve more than just as places where people can connect with friends (new and old), share gossip, and post pictures of them making a fool of themselves at a kegger last night or from their spring break trip on the beach.  People can also use them to start or bolster a real world cause. 

While people show their early support for 2008 presidential candidates in groups like "One Million Strong for Barack" and "ABH: Anyone But Hillary," there are more focused niche groups where organizers rally support and organize specific real world action. 

For instance, Vice President Dick Cheney is speaking at Brigham Young University's commencement ceremonies later this month, but not everyone is happy with this speaker choice despite the conservative leanings of the school's community.  Besides voicing opposition in the student newspaper, a group on Facebook was created to serve as an organization point.  The social network provides a venue where people who share similar feelings can vent and plan, but the university has no control and likely no jurisdiction over it.  Group leaders have kept members informed on their progress on obtaining permission from the university to protest Mr. Cheney, and after approval was granted the group was used as a bulletin board for organizing the event.  Further, links to news coverage of the greater opposition and debate through comments are available there. 

It'll be interesting to see if people use the groups for politicians as places to spur real world action and host vibrant forums for debates and information gathering and sharing like the anti-Cheney at BYU group since these groups provide a way for politicians to tap into a significant chunk of the overall passive young voter demographic.  The fact that many young people who are otherwise not active are joining politically focused groups since they see that their friends join is a potential harbinger of social networks' future influence in drumming up support from the young.  In a sense when people see a group on their friend's profile, their friend is endorsing the group's mission — like electing a certain politician. 

On a related note, alumni of math, science, and technology focused high school program in the Houston area created a group to show their support for a popular teacher who was applying for the headmaster position over the program.  In fact, many of the group members graduated high school more than five years ago.  Although the headmaster applicant has a Facebook profile (and is a member of this group), it is likely that the school district administration is oblivious to the group and won't allow it to sway its decision in either way, but politicos and organizations in many cases cannot ignore such groups since people use them to spur real world action. 

When it comes to social network groups, it is very important to note that in this realm an individual, group, or organization has little or no control over them unless they create them.  Even if an individual or organization launches a group, their control is constrained to whatever the network allows.  Thus, those who want to venture into social network groups should remember what Todd wrote concerning the recent spamming on John McCain's 2008 presidential campaign site.  He said, "If campaigns are going to play in these social communities they need to understand the rules and respect the culture."

(1) Drinks with Dell

Jeff Jarvis, who has a bit of a history with Dell, went and had drinks with the Dell team in Austin. In this great post, he recaps the steps Dell has taken to rebuild itself after the Jarvis-lead Dell Hell mess two years back.

(2) MySpace Will Hold Presidential Primary

TechCrunch has the scoop on the MySpace Presidential primary that will be held in January of 2008. I’ve signed up for like 5 accounts over the years for various projects so I assume I get to vote 5 times. Awesome. I predict a victory by Ron Paul.

(3) Site Review: Tommy2008 And Thoughts To Guide Your Online Campaign

Mike Turk takes the scapel to another Republican Presidential campaign website. Turk deserves credit for coming up with creative ways of saying “this website is kind of horrible” over and over again. Sample quote: “If Rudy’s site, and Tancredo’s site spent a wild drunk night together, Tommy’s page would be the illegitimate offspring.”

(4) 10 Things You Can Do with Mixed Media RSS

Cool post by Marshall Kirkpatrick of Splashcast, which is at the top of my list of cool web aps I haven’t had time to play with yet. Here’s the elevator sentence on Splashcast: “Today, we’re the only company that provides a way for you publish a channel of mixed media content (video, photos, audio and more) that’s subscribable by RSS and can be displayed in an embeddable player.”

(5) Top 10 Reasons as to why I still need to be convinced about marketing on Second Life

HP executive Eric Kintz provides a nice breakdown of some of the flaws with Second Life as a marketing platform.

We've all seen them: websites that are part of our daily web-surfing routines that have less-than-stellar layouts, designs, or functionality.  Sites like this really get on my nerves, as they often have key information that I can't find elsewhere, so I am forced to look at them on a regular basis.  Here's a list of some of my least favorite major sites on the web and things they can do to instantly improve user experiences.

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Don't ask me what exactly web 3.0 is, but Jason Vallery has a good summary of the International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media meeting held last week in Boulder, CO, where web 3.0 was discussed.  His summary:

"While the future is far from certain, one thing is for sure. The future of social media and “web 3.0″will be focused around two key areas. Mobility and search. Developers needs to come up with better ways to get at the information you need and make it simple to do from mobile devices. While some predict the death of sites like Twitter , I think they are ground-breakers in their field. When blogging can become a commodity that is approachable to anyone, and all of that data is well organized and searchable, that is when we can say that web 3.0 has arrived."

And if I had one thing to add: that the data/information sets from a search are all the more mash-able, i.e., in standard formats that enable users to easily mix and combine the data into new information structures and applications. Think Google Maps in 5 years.