We recently completed a study of the use of the Internet by 2008 candidates for the United States Senate.  This report, which is a follow up to similar studies we conducted in 2006 and 2002, examines what features Senate candidates include on their campaign websites.  You can read the full report outlining our methodology here.

The following chart shows the percentage of candidates using each feature we looked at.

Below are some of the more intriguing findings from the report: (more…)

The transparent fundraising techniques (aka the “money bomb”) pioneered by Ron Paul are slowly starting to be adopted by candidates for lower offices.  Murray Sabrin is currently running a “money bomb” on his site in an attempt to pay down the debt he incurred running in the Republican primary for the right to face New Jersey Senator Dick Durbin.  As you’ll see, Murray is trying to raise $175,000 by tomorrow.

Obviously, it doesn’t look like he is going to reach his goal.  Trying to raise money to retire a debt doesn’t exactly inspire the way raising money for a candidate that is still running would.  Still interesting to see that Paul’s tactics are tickling down.

About two weeks ago, National Public Radio canceled one of its newest programs — The Bryant Park Project, which ended its run last Friday.  I've been following this show since its piloting stage.

The BPP, as it was commonly known as, had a strong social media component with an active staff blog, Twitter feeds (one staffer even tweeted every mile during a marathon he ran), and an active Facebook presence.  According to the New York Times, the BPP met NPR's online expectations but a lack of station carriage coupled with a $2 million a year budget led to the cancellation as NPR faces rough economic waters.

Due to the fact that a large number of people found the show through NPR's website or through its podcast, they were sad to see the show go since the show's site and podcast were doing well.  However, this web audience has helped the show continue through a new niche social networking site for the show's community named The BPP Diner.  It was started a day or so before the the show's final episode; social media consultant Rob Paterson, who has advised NPR and followed the BPP, set it up using Ning-powered software.

A few days into its creation, the network is growing, and its members are interacting with each as they mourn the ending of the show.  In fact, Tricia Mckinney, who was an editor on the show, has remained active on the site and has even posted web videos of her continuing the show's daily segment "The Most," which discussed the most popular news stories on the Internet.  Other former staff members are also actively participating on the site.

It'll be interesting to see how long the BPP community continues to thrive on this niche social network.  Further, it would be even more interesting if the top brass at NPR follow it as well.  Perhaps they'll better understand the power of social media.

Today, the Internet is abuzz about a new search engine called Cuil, which claims to return “better results” than Google.

I did a few quick searches and wasn’t that impressed.  As an example, when I search for our company name, Bivings, the first four results are random posts from The Bivings Report about John Edwards, our newspaper study, Daylife and Hotsoup.  Our main website, www.bivings.com, is the sixth result.  As another example, a search for my name returns a lot of nonsense, with the second result being a random account I set up on the DNC website two years ago and haven’t visited since.  A search for my name in Google returns a much more useful set of results.

Obviously, it isn’t fair to compare brand new Cuil to the well-established Google, and I’m sure Cuil will improve over time.

However, no matter how much Cuil improves it is going to be nearly impossible to get me to start using it as my primary search engine.  I’ve been using Google on a daily basis for five plus years and know its ins and outs.  When I do  a search for something I know what to expect.  If I search for a company name, I expect and want to see results for their main website and their Wikipedia entry.   When I search for a person’s name, I expect and want to find their personal website as the first result, followed quickly by links to their Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin accounts.

Basically, I’ve used Google so much that I don’t really know how to judge search results except by comparing them to Google.  Cuil results could be better than Google by some objective measure, but I’d still prefer Google because it returns the results I expect.  It is familiar.

It is sort of like going to Europe and being forced to drive on the left side of the road.  For all I know study after study may show driving on the left side of the road to be far superior to driving on the right.  But all the studies in the world aren’t going to make me feel comfortable doing it.

Update: Search guru Danny Sullivan has a good Cuil review.

I've eaten a lot of crow in my day…but for the first time, I am going to announce it online.  I have been completely overly critical of Google Labs.  For many months, I have lamented at Google Labs' lame attempts to create useless products that are all flash and no function.  I badgered the online waves with rants about the need for them to focus on their current products instead of creating new ones.  Recently, I have been smacked in the face for my past comments, and that smack comes in the form of an addition to Google Maps.

Google Maps recently rolled out the beta version of Walking directions in their overall program.  It's great: if the distance you are traveling is less than 6.2 miles, you will receive the option to click on "walking" and change the map to reflect pedestrian-only roads, some sidewalks, and other quicker jaunts.  Living in a pedestrian-friendly city such as DC makes this feature a Godsend for figuring out just how far away that new restaurant will be from my apartment.

The blog announcement of the new feature is quick to point out that the walking directions are still in the beta testing phase, and many sidewalks, pedestrian streets, and other smaller roads are not listed yet.  As the walking directions become more fleshed out, the program can only get more and more useful.  I'm excited.

There are two additional things that I enjoy about the new feature.  One is that it contains a large yellow warning telling me that walking is dangerous.  Ah, to live in DC.

Second, if you have already selected the walking feature and then change the ‘to' and ‘from' directions to someplace very far away, you get some side-splitting results.  It'd apparently take me over 5 days to walk from DC to my parent's house in North Carolina.  I bet that I could do it.

In my last post I made some remarks pertaining to the McCain campaign website team borrowing the tone of the Obama site. I thought it was a good upgrade to an already well designed site overall. When I popped over the McCain site today, however, I was surprised at the latest similarity. The backlit blue light that the Obama team uses on every page has now made its way to McCain’s latest promotion, McCain Nation, a grassroots event planning/searching tool.

When the Obama team first started using this illustration technique, I really liked it, and it’s been beautifully rendered. But they use it for every promo and now the crowd of wispy supporters that comes with it no longer look like race-less Americans supporting Barack Obama to me…they look like charging albinos. Or ghostly Skynyrd fans. They frighten me. Now the McCain gang wants to start in with the heavenly beams of light and surely the faceless zombies can’t be far behind.

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I wanted to sent out a quick update to share two bits of news:

(1) We will be releasing new study looking at political campaign websites next Tuesday, July 29th.  This cycle we took a look at how Senate campaigns are using the Internet to win hearts and minds and mobilize volunteers.  You can see the 2006 version of our study here and the 2002 version here.

(2) ooVoo is a cool video conferencing service that will be hosting chats with a bunch of political bloggers next week.  My colleague JW and I will be participating in a video chat at 2:00 pm on July 31 where we discuss the results of our study.  Sign up here to come chat with us (look for my name at the very bottom).  It should be fun.

Here at The Bivings Group, we strive to find creative uses for our white boards whenever they aren't filled with our latest project notes and ideas.  Eric, for one, uses his to illustrate 80s hip-hop songs in graphical format.  Freddy displays his latest doodles, and mine is typically filled with two-word to one-word combinations.  My favorite so far is "blogin," which is your login for your blog, obviously!

One day, in a fury of inspiration, I created Bivings Buzzword Bingo, which is displayed below:

Descriptions of each word and more information after the jump:

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Announced yesterday on the Facebook blog, the redesign of Facebook has finally arrived. After several delays to the new aesthetic, the developers have finally released the new platform to the masses. More AJAX, tab-centric, and a more versatile API… Here's a quick listing of some personal pros and cons with the new design.

Pros

1. Tabs! I am a sucker for tabs. They are easy to organize and keep content from becoming cluttered. My biggest complaint when the Facebook team released the API was that too many people's profiles were becoming littered with third-party applications. These apps were visually detracting, and had nothing to do with what I found Facebook to be most useful for (keeping in touch with acquaintences). With the new redesign, one can stick all their scrabble-playing-super-wall-poking ugliness on its own tab and I'll never have to go near it.
2. More intuitive photo platform. I didn't post a screenshot of my photos tab, but it is a far more intuitive way to access other users' photographs. It borrows heavily from the minimalistic UI of picasa, and now I don't have to go searching through a user's profile for a link to find their albums.
3. Better use of horizontal space. Facebook finally spread its wings a bit. The redesign makes a much better use of horizontal space, and avoids feeling clausterphobic by combining this new feature with the tabs, mentioned above. The wider limit also allows third-party developers much more freedom when it comes to mapping the UI of their applications, so I expect to see better things than graffiti and super wall.
4. Improved 'friends' module. With the redesign, the friends module was improved. Now you have a choice as to how many thumbnail pictures to display, as well as designating which ones (there were some third-party applications to have "favorite friends" displayed on the previous facebook design, does anybody know what they were called?) if you would rather permanently display your best friends.
5. Smart use of AJAX. The AJAX on the new design is both aesthetically pleasing and purpose-driven. The way I like it to be.

Cons

1. Advertisements in my face. I remember when Facebook had no ads. Then it had text-based ads. Later, they adopted vertical banners. Now, they've put those vertical banners front and center. With the decreased clutter on the pages (which is a good thing!), it leaves the advertisements to stick out like a sore thumb. With the previous design, I found I could largely ignore advertisements if I just pretended they were another annoying application.
2. More clicks. My preference for tabs aside, the prosecution points out that there is something to be said about having all "crucial" profile information contained on one page. When I need to know if the young lady in my rhetoric and composition class has awful taste in music or not, I have an additional click to consider. Multiply this by lots of young ladies and you're talking about a serious time investment.

Overall, I'm pleased with the new Facebook design. I think it's a step in the right direction, which is a personal first. This new implementation puts the criticisms of previous redesigns into perspective. I'm sure the previous flaws helped shape the success of this release. Anything to add?

Catch some pictures of the redesign after the break.

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Many of our readers are well aware that we use WordPress as the CMS platform for a number of our clientele. We thus thought it would be fun to compile a list of our favorite WordPress plugins. (more…)

Yesterday I streamed a recorded webinar from MarketingProfs titled "Beyond Trade Show Metrics: Improving Your Event Marketing ROI," conducted by Skip Cox is CEO of Exhibit Surveys, Inc.  This interested me since we had a booth at the Personal Democracy Forum for ImpactWatch last month.

During the webinar Cox discussed the concept of selective attraction.  This is basically a smarty pants way of describing the importance of attracting the trade show attendees who are the most interested and in most need of the product that an exhibit is pitching.  These people are much more likely to purchase the product or service than other attendees, and devoting time to someone who isn't interested is a waste of time when a potential client is left alone.

This makes sense since, considering our recent experience, not everyone who is attending a politics and technology conference is interested and/or in need of a media monitoring program.  For instance, I met plenty of great folks at our ImpactWatch booth, but some didn't need what we offer.  However, I hope we attracted the people who were interested in our product.

So how am I going to tie trade show exhibit metrics and search engine optimization together?

Well, selective attraction is also an important concept in SEO.  For example, we may optimize the ImpactWatch site to rank high for searches for a general keyword like "news," but a very small portion of these searchers are interested in a media monitoring product.  Perhaps they simply want to know how the stock market is doing or what Punxsutawney Phil did on Groundhog Day, not reputation management. 

Thus, it sometimes is wasteful to invest in ranking well for a general keyword.  That's why the long tail of search is an important factor to consider.  Although focusing on appropriate long tail keywords may attract fewer site visitors, if a greater portion of site visitors is coming from a more niche term are likely to convert from a visitor to a customer, that is a better practice — especially since it is probably less competitive to rank well for a niche term.  

To learn more read our SEO Basics white paper; we discuss selective attraction in the keyword section.

While E3 is declining in popularity and prestige thanks to the Internet's ability to ruin any surprises that game developers may have up their sleeves, it is still a great time to preview all the new software and hardware in the gaming market.  This year is no different, especially thanks to the announcement of Nintendo's two new attachments for the Wii console.

The list of Wii additions is getting quite long, with the Wii Zapper, Sport Set, Wii Wheel, and numerous third-party additions all being part of the growing family.  That family will soon welcome two new members: the WiiSpeak and the Wii MotionPlus.

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We just recently finished updating most of the Wordpress sites we maintain to Wordpress 2.5, so our normal process would be to monitor for security issues and wait a bit before upgrading again.  However, in reviewing the features of Wordpress 2.6 we may have to make an exception and upgrade sooner rather than later.  Seriously, it is like they read my mind and added the new features I wanted most.  Specifically:

(1) Wordpress now tracks your revision history, so you can now revert to old versions of your posts should you desire.  This will come in handy.

(2) You can now add captions easily to your images in Wordpress.  This feature is already present on the Wordpress-driven CNN Political Ticker (see image on right for sample).  (more…)

David All points to a new website from the Republican National Committee (RNC), GOPPlatform2008.com, which seeks input from Republicans in developing the GOP platform.  Following is the intro paragraph announcing the site:

Welcome to the most grassroots-driven platform development effort in the history of American politics!

The Republican Party is seeking your input as we develop the policies and principles upon which we should stand for the next four years. On this website, you can share your thoughts, participate in polls, and communicate directly with the policymakers who will be shaping the party’s agenda. All comments and feedback will be reviewed and taken into full consideration as we prepare for our convention in Minneapolis-St. Paul.

We hope that this process will guarantee the greatest amount of public input into any platform in American history!

Based on those words, I hoped to see something truly powerful and transparent like Dell IdeaStorm or MyStarbucks Idea, which are truly open platforms where users can submit, vote on and discuss ideas on how the respective companies can better serve their customers.  Both Dell and Starbucks have given customers tools they can use to actually organize against the companies if they choose.

The GOP Platform website is much more limited than the Dell and Starbucks tools.  Users can submit and browse ideas, but there is no way to promote an idea or to really have a discussion around it.  Also, according to David, the RNC appears to be reviewing ideas before making them viewable to the public.  So basically all you can do it submit an idea and review the ideas of others that have been vetted by the RNC.  So controls have been put in place to prevent things from getting out of hand.

My issue here is really with the packaging.  Like the DNC’s McCainpedia, GOP Platform promises one thing and delivers another.  It is sort of lame to hype something with the vague promise of openness and then neuter it so that the grassroots can’t truly share their thoughts in an open way.  If you don’t want to be truly transparent, don’t launch tools that hint that you are.  It is disingenuous.

To me GOP Platform seems like an effort to replicate the magic of the truly open My.BarackObama.com, while removing the risk of something like the FISA uprising happening.  You can’t have it both ways.

Update: The RNC wrote to David All regarding moderation.  They say the moderation policy is “only to prevent liberal bloggers from taking over the site.”

Also, Nancy Scola from TechPresident likes GOP Platform site a lot more than I did, calling it “mediated crowdsourcing.”  Also, the DNC plans to launch a similar website.

Admittedly, I am a Google fanboy. I use Gmail for the bulk of my correspondence, and keep track of deadlines in Google Calendar. I get all of my RSS feeds through Google Reader, and collaborate on documents with others using Google Documents. It's scary how much of my life is driven completely by Google products — but until somebody offers something better, I wouldn't have it any other way. Yesterday afternoon, there I was, going about my day-to-day business, when something interesting (read: disturbing) popped into my reader.

Google Labs announced this on their blog:

"[...] excited to announce today's release of Lively by Google - a 3D virtual experience that is the newest addition to Google Labs.

The Lively team wants to help people experience another dimension of the web. We hope you will use the product to express yourself with and without words, and to do this in the places you already visit on the web."

When I came to, I thought it had just been a horrifying nightmare. But there it was, still on my screen: Google released their own browser-residing version of Second Life. Reluctantly, I installed the plugin enabling me to take part in the "3D virtual experience". Toying around with it for a bit, I created the Bivings Lounge. After the break is my list of why Google Lively is unsuitable for just about anything beyond making a cool-looking-bear-pirate avatar.

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