The Bivings Report - powered by the Bivings Group

Increasingly at conferences, Twitter is a growing communication and interaction channel between speakers and attendees.  Conferences that effectively make these tweets an integral part of their proceedings better engage all participants, but doing so requires the use tools and applications that require web development know-how to set up. Fortunately, we have a free and easy tool for event organizers to use – SLURP 140!

SLURP 140 helps event organizers harness tweets about their events; it is a successor to our Twitterslurp tool that was used at both the Personal Democracy Forum and Digital Capital Week.  It provides the following services:

• Aggregation of tweets following up to five search terms
• Constantly refreshed tweet stream of all related tweets 
• Displays a leader board of your top tweeters based on their number of tweets and mentions by others
• Graphs that plot the amount of tweets by hour and day
• Opportunity for branding Slurp 140 with your event's logos and sponsors
• Access to an archive of all captured tweets (Twitter's archive currently only goes back four days)
• Additional metrics to further gauge influence and reach coming soon

SLURP 140 is a great addition to an event webpage and can be projected on screens at the event to better connect and engage tweeting participants.

Interested in using SLURP 140?  Contact us today.

Today at the Bivings Group we are happy to welcome Alla Goldman to the firm as our new Social Media & Client Services intern. Thank you again to all the other excellent applicants who applied. Below is a short note from Alla, who will soon be a frequent contributor to this blog.

-Tyler Gray,

Greetings Readers of the Bivings Report!

My name is Alla and I am the new Social Media intern here at The Bivings Group. My job will be to help clients with online social media interfacing as well as work on internet analysis projects. I will be working closely with Tyler Gray and will continue writing for this blog as well as other online media outlets. Originally from Phoenix, I have a bachelor’s degree in Russian and Political Science from the University of Arizona. I am also a fan of cupcakes, the band Weezer, blogging, and chick-lit.

Like many of my peers, I’ve been on the internet for as long as I can remember, and have been designing and coding websites since the sixth grade. My recent social media and marketing experience comes from serving on the board of directors of NACURH Inc, running a personal Tumblr blog, as well as working in legal PR at a law firm in the Phoenix area. I’m a lover of all things internet and social media: so you can often find me checking in on Foursquare, using Twitter, updating my Facebook status, writing a review for Yelp, or taking outfit pictures for Weardrobe. Having grown up online, I understand first-hand the impact that social media and online marketing can have on customers across the globe.

I could not be more excited to begin working as part of the Bivings team. If you have any questions find me on Twitter @allagoldman!

7/15/10 Updated: Thanks to all the applicants who have sent in resumes. We have received applications from several hundred candidates and this position is currently closed to new applicants. We will be finalizing our applicant pool and conducting follow up interviews this and next week.  (more…)

Non-profits and political advocacy groups, while some of the most people-powered and well-supported organizations around, are not necessarily known for being early adopters of web-based tools. Although they are based in interaction with people and causes, the true driving force of organizations such as these always has been and always will be their ability to fundraise. So now that the internet has fully changed the way everyday people communicate, interact and represent themselves, how can it change the way organizations raise funds for causes people actually care about? New media advocates say social media should be a two-way street: content from the organization itself, and input from their users. Now, however, a third avenue of use for social media is opening: Connection between non-profit groups, the people supporting them, and the donations providing their bread and butter. In this space in upcoming weeks, the Bivings Report will offer a comprehensive look at how social media and the changing online landscape can impact the fundraising process. With installments focused on the use of different social media platforms, online fundraising web-sites and what your organization’s use of these could be, we here at the Bivings Report hope to offer an in-depth look at how the next step in the internet can give your organization a leg up when it comes to raising money. 

The Bivings Group was honored this week with three awards from the International Academy of the Visual Arts’ Communicator Awards.

The video we produced for the Pew Environment Group’s Wild Australia Project was honored in the following three categories: Documentary: Award of Excellence; Education: Award of Excellence and Video or Motion Graphics: Award of Distinction.

TBG worked with Google Earth’s mapping animation tools to display various locations in Australia’s delicate Southwest Marine region.

Check out the video here:

At the Personal Democracy Forum Conference this week, The Bivings Group presented a panel on political website design and took a look at what can make a campaign site win or hugely fail.  Panelists included The Bivings Group’s Tom McCormick, Senior VP of Creative and Production Services, Allyson Kapin, founding partner of Rad Campaign, and Michael Turk, founding partner of CRAFT Media/Digital.  Alexis Matsui, TBG Senior Client Services Associate, moderated the discussion, “Political Website Design: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly.”

Each of the panelists presented their choices of the best and worst campaign sites.  At the end of the panel,  the audience voted for their favorites in each of the categories.

Here are the winners (or losers, if you choose to look at it that way):

1) The Good:  Examples of sites that our panelists thought are highly navigable, usable, and implement top-notch design.

Audience Vote: Tie between Kevin Yoder’s and Sean Duffy’s site.

2) The Bad:  Sites that fail in both aesthetic design and usability.

Audience Vote:  The winner was Meyer Marks’ Maryland Senate site.

3) The Ugly: Sites you have to see to believe.  No introduction needed.

Audience Vote: The winner by a landslide was George Hutchins’ site for a congressional run.  Runner-up was the Jerry for New Mexico site.

Stay tuned for photos from the PdF 2010 conference here:

The Bivings Group is settling in at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York for the 2010 Personal Democracy Forum conference.
 
Stop by our booth!

 
Tyler Gray and Fabiana Ramirez with TBG giveaways.

Twitterslurp – check out the latest tweets from PdF.

Personal Democracy Forum Founder and CEO Andrew Rasiej welcomes attendants.

 
Conference goers in the main auditorium.