Personal Democracy has a great blog entry regarding a recent study on the use of Facebook by candidates for political office.

Here are some key stats Personal Democracy highlighted:

(1) "36 or 25% of candidates for U.S. Senate have posted their own profiles: 17 Democrats, 11 Republicans, 8 minor party candidates and independents"

(2) "139 or 12% of candidates for U.S. House of Representative have posted their own profiles: 74 Democrats, 54 Republicans, 11 minor party candidates and independents"

(3) "52 or 43% of candidates for state Governor have posted their own profiles: 32 Democrats, 14 Republicans, 6 minor party candidates and independents"

For some reason it seems right and appropriate that guernatorial candidates would use it more than House or Senate candidates.

Read the full blog entry.

This morning our client and philanthropic partner, Washington Area Women's Foundation, launched a redesigned version of their website, thewomensfoundation.org.  The Women's Foundation works in the Washington, DC metropolitan area to better the lives of women and girls through community outreach, education, and grants.  The Women's Foundation is a fantastic organization that contributes an immense amount to communities of struggling women in the Washingon, DC area. 

We worked hard to get the site ready in advance of the Women's Foundation's annual Leadership Luncheon, which was held today.  We are hopeful that the new website helps the Women's Foundation connect with kindrid spirits out there on the web and in the blogosphere. 

Some notables about the new Washington Area Women's Foundation site:

• The Women's Foundation is blogging!  We think this is extremely exciting.  Several members of the Foundation will be writing blog entries on a regular basis, discussing the news, philanthropy, and women's issues.  We encourage everyone to check out the blog and comment on some of their recent entries.  We are hoping a real conversation takes place on this blog.  Here's their first entry.
• We built the entire site in Wordpress.  This enables members of the Women's Foundation to update all text content easily and quickly when they need to, in addition to having all the latest blogging bells and whistles are their disposable.
• The site includes a searchable database of the Foundation's grantee partners, which allows volunteers and contributors to search through the various organizations that have received Women's Foundation help in the past for volunteer and internship opportunities, as well as for opportunities for funding and contributions.
• The site successfully brings to the forefront the highly personal and emotional stories of those that The Women's Foundation has helped, and also those people on the Foundation's staff who enable the organization to operate on a daily basis.

Best of luck to the Women's Foundation with their new Web program!  And be sure to check our their blog, as they really want to participate in the discussion online.

We’ve written often here about social news sites like Digg, Reddit and Netscape that give users control of what appears on the sites’ homepage through voting.  Until a few months ago, these sites were really geared towards techies, so they were largely ignored by politicians and advocacy groups. 

Now that these social news sites have built an audience and expanded their focus beyond technology news, political groups are starting to pay attention.  And by “starting to pay attention” what I really means is “starting to manipulate.” 

I’m on a lot of political email lists.  A lot.  WIth increasing frequency, these emails from politicians and political groups are asking recipients to vote for their content on social news sites like Digg in addition to asking me for money or to write a letter to the editor or call talk radio.  Here is an example of a typical call to action.

Right or wrong, these social news sites are becoming an emerging battleground for political campaigns and advocacy groups. 

(more…)

It is just sort of a fact that very few trade associations blog.  One of the few that does is the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM), whose blog is called shopfloor.org.

Not only does NAM blog, it does so very effectively.  What makes shopfloor.org work is that it is written by real live human beings who have opinions.  Sure, some people aren't going to agree with NAM's point of view.  But regardless of your politics you have to respect NAM's willingness to participate in the conversation online.  What they are doing is extradinary for a DC-based trade association.

Following is a Q&A with Pat Cleary, the Blogger in Chief at shopfloor.org.  Listen to what he says - Pat is a true innovator whether he'll admit it or not.

(1) When did NAM start blogging?

November of 2004.

(2) Where did the idea to launch the blog come from?

I had always wanted to do one. Was the head of Public Affairs when we started it, went to Gov. Engler and he said “go.” It’s important to note that he didn’t say “What’s a blog?” He’s very tech savvy, gave us the green light, for which we are eternally grateful. Most assns are stuck at that step, awaiting a green light from the boss.  (more…)

PoliticsOnline and World e-Gov Forum have announced this year's list of nominees who are competing for the title of Top Politics and Internet World Changer of 2006. I thought I'd just encourage you to cast a vote. I must admit that I don't know a lot of the nominees apart from what I've seen online, but I support the promotion of those who make it their mission to encourage civic engagement and participation in politics using the Internet as a major medium. The Internet represents a truly democratic venue for discussion (unless you think about all of the people who do not have access to the Internet and therefore are unable to participate) and the objectives of many of these nominees are pretty interesting.

The nominees are as follows*:

(more…)

If you needed information about your city, it makes sense to head over to the metropolitan website to begin figuring out what's what. A research study by Cleveland State's Leo Jeffres and UConn's Carolyn Lin appears in Indiana University's Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication. The study examines how the websites of the 50 largest metropolitan areas in the US represented their cities and how well their websites communicated with the public, both residents and visitors, through their sites. The researchers found that while some websites offer quite a lot of useful information, they still have a ways to go to be perfectly useful, especially since the Internet is recognized as a superior platform for democraticizing society and fostering community. 

Jeffres and Lin are, in their investigation, asking a larger question, of whether or not the internet can (and has so  far) help(ed) build and support community and engagement in civic life for a variety of stakeholders, not limited to current and prospective residents, business owners and tourists. In this study, they directly ask whether or not the sample of 50 major metropolitan websites offer the kind of diverse information/content one would consider of great importance to the abovementioned stakeholders. (more…)

Erin has done a great job of reviewing the features and content of the various blogs being run by 2006 candidates for the United States Senate. Her research got me thinking about how influential/successful these campaign blogs actually are. How many people are reading them? How many people are linking to them? How well networked are they? Are they working? These questions are pretty much impossible to answer in an academically defensible way: we'd need access to the logs of all the campaign blogs to answer adequately. We're left picking through anecdotes.

So I decided to use the blog search engine Technorati to find some of these anecedotes. Without further ado, following are the criteria I looked at followed by the results. (more…)

Tech News World has an article today about the role of the Internet in the energy debate. They interviewed our very own Erin Teeling about whether politicians were using the Internet to discuss energy issues with their consituents. The short answer is that they are not - most political sites are focused on disseminating information to constituents in a top down fashion, not engaging in conversations. Here's one of Erin's quotes from the article:

"In some cases, the blogs are so bad that candidates might be better off not using a blog at all," she observed. "It is evident from our research that politicians are just not ready to give up control. Opening blogs to [reader] comments and attempting to address real issues on their Web sites, such as energy and ANWR, leaves candidates open for criticism. Campaign Web sites are supposed to be a central location where supporters can go to take action on behalf of their favorite candidate, so campaigns do not want to run the risk of negative material appearing on their sites," Teeling concluded.

You can read the article here.

For the tens of people that are interested, we put together a podcast about the findings of our recent campaign study. In the podcast, Ajit Verghese interviews myself and Erin Teeling (who actually wrote the thing) about how 2006 Senate campaigns are using the Internet. We talk about which sites are good/bad, how candidates are using blogs and podcasts and what we expect to see from political campaigns in the future, among other things. Give it a listen if you’re interested or just a glutton for punishment.

 

 Campaign Study [27:34m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Yesterday, the Herald Tribune out of Florida published an article on the use of blogs and podcasts by FL gubernatorial candidates. I was interviewed for the piece and it includes a mention of our study on the use of the Internet by 2006 Senate candidates.

Not being from Florida, I haven’t looked at any of the gubernatorial websites from down there specifically. But the story identifies an amusing tendency by folks to congratulate themselves for blogging or producing podcasts. Folks seem to think they’ve accomplished something simply by going through the simple process of setting up a blog. I understand the compulsion.

But it’s important to know that anyone can have a blog or record a podcast. Just like anyone can buy a guitar or a set of drums. The real question to ask is can they actually play the damn thing?

Gary's article on how communicators can adapt traditional PR strategies to the online environment has been published in Communique , a magazine devoted to healthcare marketing. You can find the article here.

Ajit and Erin’s recent posts about creative uses of text messaging got me thinking about Mozes, a cool texting product I played around with a few months back. In brief, Mozes allows you to create a free account and then register the keywords of your choice. People who send a text message to 66937 (MOZES) with your keyword as the message will get back a custom message of your choosing. In addition, you can use Mozes to encourage users to subscribe to your keyword and you can then send out broadcast messages to all your subscribers whenever you want.

So, I set up an account and registered the keyword “ajitmusic” as an experiment. Ajit is a friend and colleague here at Bivings and, more importantly, a talented musician who plays gigs around DC. Check out his website. Plug. Plug. Plug. Text the message “ajitmusic” to 66937 and you’ll get back a custom message and also an invitation to subscribe to broadcast messages from Ajit (or me I guess - :)). Give it a whirl. (more…)

I didn’t realize that the U.S. was such a laggard when it came to the deployment of broadband Internet access. See chart below, courtesy of the International Telecommunications Union. We’re 16th on the list of the top 20 economies, one-half Korea’s rate, and just under Liechtenstein’s.

Not very impressive; perhaps reflects a real need for policy to spur more investment and competition in the telecommunications sector. Wonder just how the debate over net-neutrality will affect our position in this chart over the coming years.

Damien pointed me to Google’s advocacy page on the net neutrality issue. The page is very “Google”. They quickly state their position and link to external sites where users can take action. Not a lot of fuss and pretty much no wasted movement or effort.

More interesting is the excellent Save the Internet website that Google directs people to. The site has a couple of unique features worth taking a look at, regardless of your position on the issue.

Save the Internet has a seperate listserv that bloggers can sign up for to receive information on how they can help mobilize their readers. I think this is very clever - they are openly asking bloggers to opt in to their blogger relations program instead of conducting these activities behind the scene.

Save the Internet also has a MySpace page they are presumably using to win support among the young. The campaign has over 13,000 MySpace friends as of this writing. As an aside, the Save the Internet campaign is a single 106 year old Capricorn that doesn’t want kids.

I was putting together a presentation today and as part of it I did a little research into politicians that podcast. What I found was semi-interesting (at least to me).

Here’s a quick list of the politicians that made the iTunes list of its 100 most popular politically-oriented podcasts:

(3) Senator Barack Obama (D-IL)
(14) General Wes Clark (D-??)
(30) Senator Russ Feingold (D-WI)
(33) Newt Gingrich (R-GA)
(51) Mark Warner (D-VA)
(59) Senator John Edwards (D-NC)
(62) Congressman Harold Ford Jr (D-TN)
(82) Congressman John Dingall (D-MI)
(86) Dick DeVos (R-MI)
(87) Senator Jon Cornyn (R-TX)
(94) Senator Hillary Clinton (D-NY)
(97) Senator Bill Frist (R-TN)

Of these twelve politicians, seven (Clark, Feingold, Gingrich, Warner, Edwards, Clinton, Frist) have been mentioned as potential 2008 Presidential candidates. In addition, two (Ford, DeVos) are running for statewide office in their home states for the first time in 2006. Presumably the other three (Obama, Dingall, Cornyn) are either just really into podcasting or gearing up for future battles.

The most recent estimates I’ve seen show that only 1% of online households regularly listen to podcasts. And a study we performed recently found that 5% of 2006 Senate candidates are maintaining podcasts on their campaign websites.

But potential 2008 Presidential candidates seem to be diving in head first. Why? I’d guess that the 2008 hopefuls are podcasting in an effort to speak to the most active members of their Party: the bloggers who are obsessed enough to listen to this stuff. This is sign number 1,129 that the fight for the hearts and minds of political bloggers in 2008 is already on.