Election Day is rapidly approaching. Many will have Tuesday off and the luxury of keeping score on TV from home. Others will keep tabs online. Whichever way we choose, we treat the event almost like an all-day football game (a very, very important football game), cheering or jeering as each precinct reports. If you’ll be using the net to track the results, news, or still need to make your mind up, here are some resources you’ll find useful:

CNN Election Center – Well designed, lot’s of information and clutter-free. My personal favorite.

USA Today – If it’s just the bottom line, raw news and state-by-state results you’re looking for, USA Today does the job quickly and efficiently.

Politweets – “When Twitter gets political.” 

YouTube Super Tuesday – Upload your political opinions, analysis, interviews, or campaign trail footage to YouTube, then use the interactive map to watch videos from voters, candidates, and news outlets.

Scholastic | Election 2008 – A great way to follow the election with your kids.

Google’s Map Mashups – A virtual hodgepodge of the candidates’ speeches, interviews, endorsements and appearances around the nation.

Pollster.com – The must-bookmark for all projection junkies.

Glassbooth.org – This quiz will help all you undecideds settle on a candidate.

Thumbing through the October 2008 issue of PRSA's publication Tactics was a lot like opening up my RSS folders and taking a look around. Featuring an internet/web 2.0 multiple page spread, the issue covered topics ranging from maximizing the benefits of Twitter to the convenience of using FriendFeed. Most of this seemed familiar — maybe a little too familiar, as I had seen all of this content in one form or another on various blogs over the last year or so. Even their articles (the Twitter article in particular, which made use of a numbered list) read more like blog posts than articles. Well, so what?

If the editors of Tactics thought it was worth covering this on such a grandiose scale (the web 2.0 features run eight pages), it simply means that the PR industry as a whole is still learning about these new technologies and how to use them to advance their clients' desires. I mean, these articles are quite basic, and nothing I wouldn't expect most of our readers to at least be aware of — like an entire persuasive piece on why your company needs to Twitter (sound familiar?)

Seeing this spread caused me to stop and re-examine perspectives for a moment. While people 'round these parts may take these basic elements of digital PR for granted, this area of the industry is still relatively very new. Sometimes it is good to go over the fundamentals, to relearn your basics. If you have access to PRSA's trade publications, I'd check out the issue — a good introductory summary of some elementary online PR tactics — maybe show it to your boss and convince them to start a company Twitter account.

Twitter is a micro-blogging platform that allows users to communicate with one another through short, concise, messages of no more than 140 characters. Part of the attraction of Twitter is its immediacy, which makes it ideal for sharing articles and breaking news.  Given the news focus, it is no surprise a journalists have taken to the tool, as evidenced by this list of media people on Twitter.   Given our interest in Twitter and journalism, we here at The Bivings report have come up with a list of our top five favorite media twitterers, based on the number of people following, the number of times the user updates, and content.

5. Michael Arrington sticks to the facts on his Twitter account,  @techcrunch.   Subscribers to his account are updated with the latest headlines coming in from Techcrunch.

4. Justin Pontin, editor-in-chief of Technology Review gives readers and insight into not only the latest tech news but also his life from his account, @jason_pontin. Reading his tweets you get a sense of what is like balancing publishing a magazine with the trials of being a new parent.

3. Marc Ambinder, a writer for The Atlantic Monthly. provides the latest news and rumors off the campaign trail on his page @marcambinder. The one draw back to Ambinder’s insightful posts is the site’s ugly blue backdrop.

2. People probably know Brian Stelter as the head blogger for The New York Times TV Coder blog. S telter’s twitter account at @brianstelter gives readers the benefit of both his timely articles and the latest happenings in the media.

1. What makes a great Twitter user is a mix of fact, personality and a touch of what is happening in the rumor mill. This is exactly what John A. Byrne, editor-in-chief of Business Week, does with his account, @Johnabyrne. While it’s still only followed by a small amount of people this talented writer is becoming an equally talented twitterer.

The number of journalist using twitter to spread news instantly is growing. It seems now more then ever journalists are starting to learn just how much of a virtue brevity is.

I recently got an Apple iPhone and have been going a little crazy downloading stuff from the iPhone applications store ever since making the purchase.   Given what we do here, one of the first applications I tried out was the one produced by the Barack Obama campaign.  It is nothing short of fantastic. 

The application contains all the stuff you’d expect: ability to get the latest news with a few clicks, check out Obama’s positions on a variety of issues, sign up for email and mobile updates, etc.  All that is fine and good, but the real power is in the “Call Friends” area, which encourages users to call friends in swing states to urge them to vote for Obama.  The tools allows you to report back on the results of your call (”Is the person considering Obama?”, “Have they already voted?”, etc.) and tracks who you have and haven’t called.  The application is really well done and really shows off the great potential of iPhone applications in the political space.

Does that mean I would recommend my political and public affairs clients go out and build iPhone applications?  For most of them the answer is probably no. 

The fact is not that many people have iPhones yet.  Estimates are that around 220 million Americans use the Internet, and roughly that number of people have cell phones.  Estimates are that Apple has sold a total of 13 million iPhones.  So by building applications specifically for the iPhone, you are severely limiting the audience of people that can potentially use your tool.  Given this fact, I’d seriously consider the following questions before your organizations builds a fancy iPhone applications like Obama:

(1) Are you 100% happy with your website?  Given their fundraising numbers ($150 million in September alone), the Obama essentially has unlimited funds. Given that, they are rightly surrounding the situation, building tools for Facebook, mobile phones, whatever.   In the world most of us live in, resource limitations are a fact of life, so it doesn’t make sense to build value-added tools on a device with limited adoption, like the iPhone, unless you are already doing everything you can on your website, which just about everyone can see. 

(2) Is there a compelling reason to build your application for the iPhone?  The iPhone has a pretty great web browser built in, so building an application just to publish blog entries or press releases doesn’t make any sense.  People can read that stuff through the web if they want.  What makes the Obama application special is that it makes something that would be difficult through a web interface (getting people to call their friends and family and report back the results) and makes it simple by using the iPhone’s native capabilities.  It cuts out three or four steps in the process for the end user.  Build something unique or just skip it.

(3) Do you actually think people will use your application?  With his massive listserv and ability to generate free press, Obama doesn’t have to worry much about creating buzz or marketing his applications.  If he builds it, they will come.  That isn’t the case for most of us.  Applications are a cut throat game - popular ones tend to be really popular and the rest of them pretty much exist in obscurity.  If you don’t have a big name, a compelling hook to sell and/or a marketing commitment, you might want to take a pass. 

If you can answer all these questions with a resounding yes, then go for it.  If not, your probably better off investing your resources elsewhere, at least for the time being.

There has been some discussion of cloud computing recently as Microsoft revealed Azure, their attempt to chip away at Google's unyielding grasp on the hosted services sector. Centralized computing changes the way people compute their data, simplifying the process and reducing the need for desktop software. Is this the new model for generating revenue in an increasingly connected global marketplace?

The concept of hosted solutions has been around for quite a while. The web itself can be seen as a massive bank of hosted "solutions" from static pages to the latest database driven AJAX utility. Our own ImpactWatch is a hosted platform, as are many subscription-based offerings from access to databases to hosted MMO gaming.

I see several advantages to hosted and semi-cloud based services:

• Data in the cloud means optimized devices. With the device itself computing less and more being crunched on the central servers, devices don't have to be as powerful and will consume less power.
• $$$. With torrents, file sharing, and peer-to-peer networks in wide use, hosted solutions ensure company revenues are secure and act to protect against piracy and security threats. Hosted also means less cost than real-world deliverable goods such as installation media and unnecessary packaging, as well as a tendency to reduce administrative costs in the long run.
• Real-time updates. When your bleeding-edge code finally matures into a release worthy snippet, it feels good to show the world as soon as possible. This also applies to the whole security issue.
• Anywhere, anytime. Cloud computing means being able to access your information and GTD wherever you are, as long as there's a compatible (and connected) device in the immediate vicinity. Road warriors take note.
• An increase in compatibility. Not too long ago, the software market found itself choosing between two sides of a compatibility war, and to this day these agreements dictate much of what is available for various platforms. No longer are these clashes going to occur, as cloud computing runs as native on any OS compared to any other.

Cloud services are changing (and will continue to change) the way the internet works. As web and desktop technologies go through this awkward phase of flirtation, I eagerly await the next generation of truly integrated cloud applications. Any other obvious advantages I've left out? Or how about any glaring disadvantages to this model?

As frequent readers of our blog know, The Bivings Group specializes in building websites using the content management platform Drupal.  Given this focus, we’re really excited that the premier Drupal unconference, DrupalCon, will be taking place right in our back yard this year (Washington, DC) in early March.  We’ll be sending a nice contingent to the conference, and are looking forward to meeting and learning from other Drupal developers. 

In addition to attending, we have also submitted a session idea.  Our proposed session is titled “How To Build a Multi-Lingual Website in Drupal” and will focus on what we learned building the International Journalists Network, an ambitious website that runs concurrently in five languages (English, Spanish, Portuguese, Farsi and Arabic).  The core development team that built the site will be running the session. 

Anyway, vote for our panel if the topic strikes your fancy.  And be sure to say hello if you will be attending.

YouTube + Some Creativity + Some Courage (can) = Success

YouTube is known as the land of videos of dogs running on treadmills.  While there is certainly some substantive content on the site, there is also a lot of — shall we put this nicely — fluff.  Sometimes YouTube hits are substantive while others are mere fluff.

One of the more recent hits on the site falls into the substantive category; it is a Delta Airlines in-flight safety demonstration video.  Yes, you know those boring demonstrations at the beginning of your flight that you ignore 'cause they're boring and you hope to never have to rely upon the information they present.  Well, people are watching a safety video intently without even flying.

This is an example of how a normally staid item can turn into a viral hit.  However, your father's safety demonstration is not destined for Internet fame.  Delta had to take a less traditional approach when producing this video.  

Delta wants more passengers to pay attention to its safety videos, and that's why it added some cheeky and sassy elements to its recently debuted presentation.  For instance, while explaining that smoking is prohibited on the Delta planes, the main narrator, Kathleen Lee, waved her finger in the camera.  When I was flying home from vacation last week, I sat there and asked, "Did she just wave her finger at me?"  What a flirt!  That caught my attention (plus the fact that Lee — aka "Deltalina" for her resemblance of Angelina Jolie — is absolutely gorgeous).

What I find more interesting is not the fact that Delta lightened up this serious and important aspect of its passenger service but that the airline placed the presentation on YouTube before it even premiered on an actual flight.  This was a cheap and easy way for Delta to help accomplish its goal of promoting passenger safety.

Was posting the video on YouTube a success?  While I can't speak for the airline, I think it has achieved success.  As of this posting, this video has had more than one million views since it was posted in late February of this year (we're talking an airline safety demonstration!).  Further, CNN reported that more than 300,000 views occurred before the video's in-flight debut.  Plus this new video has garnered Delta a lot of free press and more YouTube views (see the Safety category of Delta's blog).

Thus, Delta gets a gold star for its idea of posting this video on YouTube because it was smart enough to recognize that the video had potential and had the courage to try posting it in the first place.  Delta even gets some bonus points for putting behind the scene pictures from the video's shoot on its flickr stream. 

Chuck and I recently attended the 6^th Summit on Measurement, sponsored by the Institute for Public Relations (IPR).  This year the location was Portsmouth, New Hampshire, where the festivities began with a meet-and-greet in Strawberry Banke.  Tours of local restored houses and mansions were provided while conversation began among PR, measurement, and education professionals.

Don Wright, Director for the IPR Forums, greeted us the next day as we settled in for a marathon of speeches and information.  The first speaker was the Senior Manager for Corporate Communications of McDonald's:  Leslie Tiongco.  She spoke about the challenges that her team faced as they attempted to apply qualitative research to strategic execution.  McDonald's has many locations worldwide, and their new approach was to make them better, not bigger.

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Ning is a platform that allows anyone to create a custom social network in a few minutes time.  I’ve played with it a few times since it launched in late 2005, but never really did a deep drill until recently, when we started work on a project that used Ning as its social networking component.  I’ve been impressed.

Backing up, our philosophy at The Bivings Group is to do as little “from scratch” building as possible.  If a good tool exists already, we’d much rather spend our time customizing or extending it than trying to build our own bigger, badder battleship.  It is this philosophy that has lead us to embrace Drupal, Wordpress and open source development in general. 

What makes Ning interesting to me is that it is an actual platform, as opposed to just a cool site to use if you want to put up a quick social network.  You can customize it, extend it and, most importantly, build your own stuff on top of it.  This allows developers to create all sorts of value-added features for the communities they serve.  Check out Ning’s Developer and Network Creator communities to learn more. 

For those interested, following is a brief list of some of the more interesting of the 500,000 networks built on Ning. 

• Good Charlotte - The band’s entire website is powered by Ning.
• This is 50 - Social network for the rapper 50 Cent.  Has evolved into a sort of celebrity news site. 
• Hollywood Undead - Network for the emerging fan features lots of fan contests.
• Fire Fighter Nation - Over 24,000 fire fighters belong to this network.
• American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals - Social network for animals lovers. 
• Team Sarah - Lovers of Sarah Palin network here.
• The Viking Nation - Lots of colleges and high school host alumni networks on Ning.

Ning isn’t perfect and we’ve certainly struggled to do some of the things we’ve wanted to do.  But it is the best product of its kind that I’ve seen, and I’d encourage anyone interested in social networking platforms to give it a good look.

The Bivings Group, Hewlett-Packard and Porter Novelli together won the Platinum PR Award presented by PR News in the category of Research and Measurement. We are honored to be recognized for our development of HPWatch, a web-based platform that tracks and analyzes HP’s media coverage that is powered by our ImpactWatch product. The study, “A Swiss Army Knife for Measurement and Evaluation”, highlights the flexibility and breadth of the ImpactWatch monitoring and measurement tool.

A Little Bit about Our Project

HP’s original PR-measurement program lacked sophistication, required time-consuming manual processes and provided no insights into trends, competitors or campaign effectiveness. HP turned to PN and TBG to create a solution.

We worked through a series of interviews with stakeholders to determine the issues that the program needed to address. Porter-Novelli created a thorough outline of HP’s public relations initiatives and messages, mapping them to each of the company’s business lines. TBG customized a version of its ImpactWatch product, creating new modules to meet HP’s reporting requirements.

Working closely with PN, we developed policies outlining details such as tonality evaluation, created training materials and developed return on investment (ROI) calculations. To maintain objectivity, TBG developed subjective measures such as tonality, while PN used their expertise to identify coverage resulting from communication initiatives and events.

The project has been a huge success. HP’s Imaging and Printing Group now has a searchable database of six years’ worth of HP print, broadcast, online and blog coverage. In 2007 alone, the team wrote more than 150 reports with consistent metrics over nine market segments. The team has also used HPWatch to judge media event value, analyze product reviews, understand messaging effectiveness and compare coverage tonality. It truly is a Swiss army knife of evaluation.

We’d like to take this opportunity to thank all of the team members that helped in the venture. It was worth it (expect a picture of Chuck and me holding a trophy in the near future).

Brightcove is a web video publishing platform aimed at professional publishers that, according to Techcrunch, streams several hundred million videos a month.  Its clients include large media brands like Showtime, Lifetime, HBO, the New York Times and AMC (you can watch Mad Men through their player on the AMC website).  Brightcove is a paid service with prices starting at a few thousand dollars a year.

I have used Brightcove on random projects over the years and developed a love/hate relationship with the product. 

On the positive side, it is definitely the most feature rich video publishing tool I’ve ever used.  Among other features, Brightcove offer six different video players you can customize and allows you to quickly and easily set up custom video playlists and automatically serve lower quality versions of videos to people with slower Internet connections.  It is the engine behind Barack Obama’s creative Barack TV section and AMC’s Mad Men user generated video contest.  The feature set is truly impressive.

On the negative side, up until a few days ago Brightcove had one of the most maddening user interfaces I’ve ever used.  Truly awful.  Simply uploading and posting a video involved downloading a desktop client and then separately logging in to their web interface and going through more hoops.  Simply uploading a video and getting the appropriate embed code took four steps when it really should be done in one motion.  Assets, Titles, Lineups, Players.  After spending probably thirty minutes a day in their interface for a month, I had basically gotten to the point where I could do what I needed to do but had in no way mastered the platform.

So when I logged into Brightcove on Tuesday and saw that they had completely overhauled their user interface I was not happy.  It had taken a long time to get my bearings in the old interface and I had no interest in learning a new one, which I assumed would simply be confusing in different ways. 

I was wrong.  (View an overview of new interface on Techcrunch here.)

While not as easy-to-use as YouTube or Blip.tv, the Brightcove user interface has been streamlined dramatically while retaining the robust feature set that made the tool unique in the first place.  Uploading a video no longer involves installing a desktop client and has been reduced to one step.  All the value-added features are still there, but are quarantined from the upload process so that they don’t create static in the video upload process. 

Basically you can now safely use Brightcove without having a Masters degree in Computer Science.

Would I now recommend Brightcove?  It depends.  For probably 95% of the clients I work for, I’d push them towards Blip.tv if YouTube isn’t cutting it.  Blip allows for really high quality video, is relatively feature rich and costs less than Brightcove.  Brightcove is overkill for most people.  However, now that the user interface problem has been fixed, I would whole heartedly recommend Brightcove for the 5% of people that need a really high end web publishing solution.

Many product-selling websites include a lot of Web 2.0 tricks to convince the Internet surfer that the product is worth checking out.  Heck, even Cheerios has a website which includes a flashy splash intro.  Most product sites seem to be nothing more than an excuse to have a site, like a self-fulfilling prophecy of owning a company:

"Well, if we have a product, we must have a website!"

Certain consumer products have useful and inventive websites, such as this one I recently found: Acne.org.  I found this site through a linked video in YouTube.  The site contains many of these videos, which is a brilliant idea for free advertisement (click on the thumbnails for full-size pics).

The site is massive in content.  From just the home page, a viewer can tell the large amount of information conveyed throughout all of the separate pages.  The top menu bar alone contains more than twenty different sections from which to choose, all separated under broader categories.  Many of these sections include video demonstrations of the tips and tricks that the web master (and product creator) hopes to teach.  These video clips are high quality, short, well-scripted, and have reasonable volume.

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Ok. I admit it.  I never really "dugg" twitter.  While I did tweet for awhile, it was simply a different way for me to update my Facebook status.  I killed two birds (not the cute twitter bird) with one stone.  I guess that composing snappy 140-character or less haikus isn't my cup of tea, and I only drink herbal tea…

Beyond that, anyone who simply replied to me likely got ignored due to my ignorance of the rejoinder. No, I don't like desktop applications for twitter.  Half the time this ignorance was caused by twitter birds focusing on hefty the infamous whale instead of processing tweets.  Then there is the seemingly vast cottage industry of companies and products who owe their existence to twitter.  You can upload photos, shorten URLs, track your analytics, and probably submit your taxes via twitter, but nothing piqued my interest that much until now.

While checking someone's twitter feed today, I noticed links to twitter's election page at http://twurl.nl/npo6wl (shortened for mere kicks and giggles).  Through this page twitter displays tweets with specific words.  For instance, you can click on a link to see what people are tweeting about Tina Fey-impersonator Sarah Palin.  Now, I find that interesting and useful.  This service, however simple in theory, aggregates the tweets — from the serious to the snarky — in a way that enables me to quickly check the pulse of how the twitterverse feels about specific topics. 

Granted, I've seen other services that aggregate tweets around specific events and topics, but this is the first time I've seen it on twitter itself.  Hopefully, we'll see more of these useful pages instead of the birdies and the whale.

I was astounded at the amount of different technical venues for the watchers of the debate.  In four years, the Internet has started playing a more vital role in influencing voters' decisions.

Some of the most impressive tools came from an unsurprising source, the website of ‘political giant' CNN.  Not only could you watch the debate live from your laptop but you could also watch the debate live with blogger comments displayed on your screen.  In addition to that, you could watch live analysis from expert political teams.  This means that debate watchers not only had the ability to hear from their peers, but also experienced analysts.

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