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So far this year, the Pickens Plan has gathered the nation’s most powerful names in energy reform for an incredible energy summit and recruited over three million people for this week’s huge Virtual March on Washington for energy independence.

This past weekend, however, was about celebrating what the T. Boone and the Plan accomplished before 2009 even begun. Sunday night, the Pickens Plan was honored with the Association of Political Affairs Professionals award for best Public Affairs Campaign of the Year. The Bivings Group, which worked on all online aspects of the campaign, is proud to be part of the great team behind the Pickens Plan.

HBO’s “Real Time” host Bill Maher announced the award via satellite and praised T. Boone for his diligence and willingness to put aside political partisanship for the sake of achieving critical energy goals.

The Pickens Plan also won awards in several smaller categories, including best volunteer recruitment strategy.

The AAPC Awards ceremony was the culminating event of a two-day Pollie awards conference, where hundreds in the political and public affairs business gathered to discuss new media strategy and review 2008 campaign efforts.

Other major awards of the night included chief strategist to the Barack Obama presidential campaign, David Axelrod, as Political Strategist of the Year, and CD Online Ads won for Best Use of Technology.

While doing some research for a talk I gave a few weeks ago, I came across a fantastic blog called “Found in the Cache” that examines how hospitals are using the social web.  The blog’s author, Ed Bennett, is tracking which hospitals maintain their are own blogs and have launched presences on Twitter, YouTube and Facebook.  Below are the pure numbers:

• 206 unique hospitals total have some sort of social web presences (one of the items below)
• 124 have YouTube channels
• 117 have Twitter Accounts
• 82  have Facebook pages
• 22 maintain official Blogs

While Bennett does not claim to have searched for presences for every single hospital (or hospital system) in the United States, to put this number in context there are an estimated 5,000 community hospitals in the U.S.  You can view the raw data of Bennett’s findings here.

Interestingly, Bennett has found that Twitter use by hospitals is growing rapidly, and that it will soon be the most popular social tool for hospitals.  The chart below shows the Twitter growth trend as compared to YouTube.

You can view a list of the most popular hospitals on Twitter here.

In reviewing the actual presences the hospitals created, I found the quality of the accounts to be all over the place.  Some truly great work is being done, such as the Twitter account of Henry Ford Health System, which recently got some press for live tweeting during a brain operation.  Other accounts were clearly experiments, with little activity and interaction.   We’re at the beginning of a trend here, with the hospitals using these tools blazing the trail and establishing best practices for others to follow in the years ahead.

I’m going to keep reading Bennett’s blog, as I think the social web has great potential to help hospitals deepen their relationships with the community’s they serve.

Like any good American, I spent a good bit of time today watching the NCAA college basketball tournament.  I’m pretty good at ignoring commercials, but a new Vitamin Water ad I half watched tonight caught my attention.  I really don’t remember the television commercial itself at all, although from some research I believe it is this Steve Nash spot that I saw. 

What was interesting wasn’t the commercial itself, but the call to action at the end.  Where most commercials insert a logo and URL in the last frame, Vitamin Water included a link to their Facebook page at www.facebook.com/vitaminwater.   I’m no expert on TV commercials, but this is not a strategy I recall seeing before and it caught my attention. 

The strategy strikes me as very smart.  Putting your corporate site URL at the end your commercial is sort of the norm now.  People have learned to tune the URL out since it is the expectation.  Also, the sites of most consumer brands are overwhelmingly boring.  There really isn’t anything you can do beyond look at pictures of the product and maybe look up some nutritional info.  The Vitamin Water site lived down to my low expectation.  I’m sure advertising the URL of www.vitaminwater.com would drive some traffic, but to what end?   The site doesn’t provide me with any way to deepen my relationship with the brand. 

Advertising the Facebook page will catch the attention of people like me by jarring us out of our slumber by doing something unexpected.  It is new and different.   In addition, unlike Vitamin Water’s regular site the Facebook page actually gives me something to do – I can become a fan and connect/interact with other Vitamin Water lovers.  By becoming a fan, I am essentially endorsing Vitamin Water to my network on Facebook, who will find out about my new relationship with Vitamin Water via their Facebook news feed.  I’m telling the world that I think enough of Vitamin Water to associate my brand (meaning my Facebook persona) with theirs.

That is word of mouth marketing, and a hell of a lot more valuable than a visit to the Vitamin Water website . 

Like I said, this seems really smart to me.  As of this writing Vitamin water has 48,145 fans on Facebook.  I’ll update this post periodically and report back on whether it is working or not

Note: Whoever built the Vitamin Water website needs to go to a remedial SEO course.  The entire site is in Flash and the title tags of the page contain the name of the drink’s manufacturer – Glaceau. The result is that the site is hard to locate in Google for even a direct search for “vitamin water”.

In February we launched brand new, upgraded, and comprehensively re-designed versions of The Personal Democracy Forum’s sibling websites, personaldemocracy.com and techpresident.com.

There are tens of new features and offerings, but highlights include:

PdF Marketplace :  a commercial bulletin board for the poli-tech community.  Job postings, domain sales,  resumes, web services — all have a place here for exposure to a highly targeted audience.

The Pdf Network :  The Forum’s new membership program, providing insider access to key poli-tech thought leaders, discounts on conference attendance, networking, and advance notice on impending developments in the field.  (Bonus:  a subscription to one of several magazines is included in your membership.)

VoteVid :  This is techPresident’s video forum, on which anyone can propose, share, and vote on online political videos.

Topics :  The content produced by PdF’s magnificent stable of bloggers is now drawn directly into a set of seven verticals (eGovt, Fundraising, Mobile, Advertising, Video, Strategy and Cool Stuff)

Ratings and Metrics :  blog posts are now rate-able through an AJAX-based five-star ranking system, and posts can be sorted by such metrics as “Most Emailed ” and “Most Read “.

Charts:  PdF has added charts set to visually track such developing phenomena as the 2012 GOP presidential field, and the latest rankings of key political figures in terms of their Technorati rankings as well as the number of friends each has accumulated on Facebook.

Calendar :  a listing of all of the most important and groundbreaking upcoming events as determined by the PdF editorial team.

Advocacy :  a centralized grouping of the key players in political advocacy, along with profiles of each.

The reaction has been overwhelmingly welcoming and positive thus far, but have a look for yourself. Visit the site , create your free or paid membership , subscribe to the blog, learn about the fast-approaching 2009 PdF Conference .  Then, let us know what you think.

This morning when I was getting ready for work, I had the Today show on.  During the show they did a segment on dealing with the current tough economic climate.  

I was struck by one of the tips that Jean Chatzy, a financial guru, gave.  When it comes to job hunting, Chatzy urged everyone to join both Facebook and LinkedIn since she claims that every headhunter is searching those sites.  While I can definitely see why she recommends LinkedIn, the Facebook shout out surprised me.  

Facebook is primarily for social – not professional – purposes.  Granted, people do use Facebook for to network for their career needs, but if I were a headhunter, I would devote most of my time to a job targeted site like LinkedIn.  However, I guess Facebook is worth some time as well.

Also, most of the news reports I hear about Facebook are about how account holders get into trouble.  Most of the warnings are about what people place on their profiles.  The picture of you drunk at party over the weekend does not really help you maintain the model employee image.  Another concern is when a friend writes a PG-13 or higher rated comment on your profile.  Needless to say this is one of the few times I have heard that using this site is helpful to one's job hunting efforts.  The layout of LinkedIn, however, restricts the chances of "unprofessional" material appearing on one's profile.

While I am not disagreeing with Chatzy about Facebook, I just found it interesting that she would recommend Facebook as a way to get another job.  Does anyone have a story of getting a job through Facebook?

Update: BusinessWeek wonders "Is Twitter the Next Monster?"

I attended DrupalCon last week, and the various speakers pointed to a variety of Drupal resources that are of interest to Drupal users of all skills sets.  Following is a breakdown of the various resources speakers at the conference crecommended.

For the beginners who know very little if anything about Systems, Frameworks, API’s and are only interested in front end layout design, Drupal Developer and speaker Addison Berry has compiled a list of handy tools that will allow you to dive into Drupal theming through CSS and HTML styling.

• Firebug add-on for Firefox. This plugin gives you the ability to modify cascading style sheet properties on most webpages.
• Web Developer add-on for Firefox contains various tools which give you full control over how a website is displayed on your browser.
• Colourlovers.com is a site dedicated to designers who struggle to find matching color themes. There you will find support and ideas that will help you in your design work.
• The handy Devel module can display what is happening in any section of the site to an administrator. It can be very useful when debugging a block in Drupal.

(more…)

In the last six months we have helped build Ning social networks for the Pickens Plan and the National Peace Corps Association, among others.  We are fans of the platform.

Yesterday, Ning launched a redesigned version of their main website, www.ning.com.  This is a major upgrade.  Users of Ning networks know that under the previous design you pretty much had to visit each network you belonged to individually to figure out what was going on in each community.  This redesign allows users to login to www.ning.com and get an aggregated view of activity in all your networks, much like the Facebook news feed.  This is significant, as it makes it much easier for Ning users to keep track of activity on all the networks they belong to.  This should lead to greater participation by existing network members, and help networks grow virally as this participation is documented in various news feeds.

Congrats to the Ning team.  This is good stuff.

Check out the video below and this blog post for more on the redesign. 

Find more videos like this on Ning Network Creators

<Cross posted from our ImpactWatch Blog>

Editors Note: Hannah installed the Firefox plugin Power Twitter in order to get photos and videos to appear in her Twitter stream.  For those of you that want to see what it looks like, see this screengrab.

Yesterday I was walking through Mexico City and I snapped a photo of a tanning salon. I thought that, coupled with a witty comment, it would make a great tweet. Selling sun to tan people in one of the world’s sunniest cities seems like a pretty funny business to be running in a global recession.

But I haven’t posted it.

I haven’t fully embraced the new ability to embed photos in Twitter. They distract me. I feel like they are encroaching on other tweets’ personal space. And I’m assuming other users are noticing this too – making the addition of a video or photo a new tactic for making your tweet stand out from the rest.

So I have to get used to videos and photos in my Twitterstream and probably lots of them: photos of your cat, your recorded marketing pitch, any even-slightly-humorous video you find on YouTube.

I’ve made my peace with that. But would it be too much to ask for Twitter to add them a little more discreetly? How about a thumbnail with mouse-over to enlarge? Or as @pugofwar suggested on twitter this morning, a Lightbox* image on clicking.

What do you think of the new “Post Photo” feature? Are you using it? Are you loving it? Do you long for the days of links and Twitpic?

Check out Hannah’s photo-free profile on Twitter.

*That’s the script that makes images appear “over” the web page, then you click to close them.