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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.

Continuing his bi-weekly appearance on the Digital Politics Radio show with Karen Jagoda, last Tuesday Gary and Karen discussed the use of Facebook and other online advertising in the upcoming midterm elections. A few highlights and the mp3 interview bellow. Next appearance: Tuesday, August 24th at 3:00pm EST.

The show’s discussion focused on two elections – one for Governor of California, and one for the Republican Senate nomination in Colorado. The campaigns all featured use of twitter and facebook, and only time will tell whether or not shrewd use of social media had a profound impact on either election.

 Karen and Gary also discussed the prevalence of online display ads – particularly the influence that those ads may or may not wield over voters. Like business marketing, it is easy to measure Cost Per Click or other standard advertising metrics; but what about the idea that greater exposure to an ad can lead to a different voting outcome? As Gary put it – online political advertising and polling “rarely makes back money when you do it”, but it increases the overall persuasion of the voting constituency. The impact is still there, it may just be harder to measure.  The same goes for with innovation – such as Meg Whitman’s polling ads on Facebook – you’re more likely to get free press online and in print for a new and creative ad than by sticking with the status quo.

Click below to play part 1 and part 2 of the August 10th, 2010 radio show:

 

 Pt 1 - August 2010 -Digital Politics Radio : Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

 

 Pt 2 - Gary Bivings - 10 August 2010 -Digital Politics Radio : Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

 A new DC News Site launched last Sunday– and the local social media scene has been abuzz with the innovation, social media outreach, and hyper local focus seen on the site. The pages of this online portal will function to aggregate news from all over the DC metro area and create a one-stop-shop for DC residents. TBD is owned by the same company that owns POLITICO, but its model of news delivery is decidedly different. The site seamlessly mergers the ‘old media’ video news from WJLA (Channel 7) and News Channel 8 with news reporting and blog posts.

Reaching Out to The Blogging Community

127 local blogs from across the Washington DC metropolitan area have joined together to contribute and publish content though the TBD portal. The neighborhood blog section features stories from TBD staff writers as well as those found on DC-area blogs.  In order to continuously improve their content, the site is also asking for reader feedback (and not just in the comments section). Yet the best part of the new site that if you input your zip code into a handy search bar, TBD will tailor content specifically for you.

In addition to engaging with users on numerous social media platforms, TBD also released several mobile phone applications –allowing readers to get their news on the go. The Bivings Report can assess with high confidence that this new website is an arbiter of great things to come as social media merges with traditional media formals on the web. It features a large amount of white space and is intuitively designed with the end users' experience in mind. 

Cross-posted from our Impact Watch Blog

ImpactWatch now displays a real-time feed of custom filtered tweets right on your dashboard.

Based on Slurp140 technology, the new Twitter stream updates automatically to display new tweets, a leaderboard of most frequent tweeters, and stats on your tweets over time.

Best of all, you can instantly reply to or retweet any mention right from your tweet stream!

The new Twitter tool complements ImpactWatch’s existing range of feed sources which includes print, online or broadcast news, and social media sources. Depending on your monitoring and measurement needs we can customize your platform with the sources that are important to you.

Graphs and statistics also update in real-time on the Dashboard page, so you can see the who, when and what of your Twitter coverage.

We have a lot of features on the way in the coming weeks, so keep an eye out for more. Sign up for a Demo Account now to check it out!

We are proud to announce that the Bivings Group has launched the completely redesigned financial education website, MyMoneyManagement.net. In terms of the technology behind the website, My Money Management is a Drupal based website that was designed, built and customized entirely in-house. We are also very excited to be consulting with MyMoneyManagement on their social media outreach.

Please take a moment to check out the site, and follow our progress building a social media presence on Facebook and Twitter.

The full press release from our friends at the Financial Services Roundtable is bellow and available on their very stylish new website. 

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I gave the new www.gop.com a mixed review when the RNC first re-launched the site in October 2009.  A few days ago the RNC launched a new version of their flagship site, so I figured I’d take a fresh look at it.  Overall, I think it is a nice improvement, although naturally I find a few things to pick apart.  Following is the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of the redesign.

The Good

(1) The use of space on the homepage for top stories/headlines is much more logical and cleaner than the previous site.  I particularly like that they removed the giant Facebook fan box that took up way, way too much real estate for a questionable payoff in the old design.

(2) Under the prior navigation structure, there were an overwhelming number of drop down options, which I suspect lead visitors to be confused as to where to go.  The options now are much clearer, and I like the use of primary and secondary navigation elements.

(3) In the previous iteration, users had to click a button in order to sign up for email alerts.  I wrote at the time:

“The main call for users to sign up for email updates is hidden behind a click.  While I appreciate this as a user who is already on their list, as someone who builds sites for a living I would never want a user to have to click more than once to give me their email.  I’m a firmly believer in making the sign up process as simple as possible.”

This has been fixed and you can now sign up without a click.

(4) I like the little take action option that appears on the left side of the page, mostly because it is different.  I do vaguely worry that it is a little too cute and that some users will simply not see it.

(5) I like the idea of having a list of Trending headlines on the homepage.  However, I wonder if these items are handpicked or chosen based on an algorithm given the content featured (links to YouTube videos, external sites, etc.). 

(6) The Volunteer Match tool looks really interesting.  Curious as to whether it works.

The Bad

(1) The Issues section needlessly uses Flash – I presume in a misguided effort to mimic iTunes Coverflow.  It is really clunky, and I think a more traditional presentation would have been much more effective and helped with SEO.  They over though that section. 

(2) The Blog section is also a little too cute.  The RNC has nine different blogs, and in an effort to highlight all of them they developed a layout that is a bit overwhelming.  I think they would be better served aggregating the latest entries and presenting them in a format that actually looks like a blog (basically one blog stream).  A presentation like GigaOm would have been much more effective.  As it is now everything is too compartmentalized.

(3) The RNC’s social network, Our GOP, continues to strike me as not very user friendly and not up the standards of the rest of the site design wise.  It also doesn’t look to have gotten great traction, with around 10,800 users according to this page. 

(4) It has been almost a year since the launch of the original site, and the design didn’t change much until today.  I think the RNC should be iterating and improving constantly instead of holding back from these big release once a year.

The Ugly

(1) The new site allows you to change the background color from red to anything you want using a color picker.  This allowed me to change the background to a sort of fushia/purple and add a pattern.  The result of my artistic expression is below.

This strikes me as silly.  It is the sort of thing that seemed cool back in 2002.   Plus it isn’t implemented very well.  If you change your color, the original color will flash briefly every time you navigate to a new page.

More importantly, if I’m the RNC I’d want to control my brand and present the site as the designers intended.  Team Obama certainly wouldn’t have let me change www.barackobama.com to fuschia.

In the past few days, political media outlets have been abuzz with the news that Gowalla, a location based social networking service, has teamed up with politicians to create politically-themed stamps. Subsequently, Gowalla users are now able to see when politicians check-in at political rallies, fundraising dinners, and town hall meetings. With midterm elections just around the corner, this move aims to make candidates more accessible to their tech-savvy constituency.

 The new move to use GPS-centered online networking is innovative – with less than 10% of smartphone users using applications such as Gowalla and Foursquare. Politicans home to utilize Gowalla as a way to connect with voters while allowing the social network’s users to collect limited-edition campaign-themed  stamps for their virtual passports. Likewise, this continue integrating and connecting with other forms of social media, such as Twitter and Facebook. 

Many experts are saying that these forays into social media may portend a greater amount of user interaction during the 2012 presidential campaign season. But with only three months left until the next midterm elections, only time will tell how social media will continue to be used by political candidates.

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Google may still command over 60 percent market share when it comes to searches, the Microsoft-owned Bing is making steady headway ever since its introduction in June 2009. However, current data shows that Bing and Yahoo search engines’ share in the marketplace is growing – as the expense of Google. Yet due to its smaller size, Bing is quicker to innovate with new features, like the brand-new taxi cab fare calculator, as well as its intuitive answers and shopping engine. In recent months, Bing has continued adding more features – like integrating Twitter and Facebook status updates into its search results.

The change toward making search sites more user friendly (and more insightful with information) is enhancing the search experience for the average internet user.  To give users an idea of what’s going on around their neighborhoods or in interesting parts of the country, Bing has partnered up with Foursquare to provide geo-location based  information about restaurant specials and user recommendations. Bit by bit, these social media innovations help Bing stand out among its competitors – and woo social media junkies away from Google’s grip. Bing is also the official search engine within Facebook.

Further applications – whether it be the Bing Shopping iPhone app (with bar code scanner) or the Bing Health section – continue enhancing Bing’s search capabilities.  Thus far, Bing commands only 12% of the search engine market share – but its rate of growth suggests that big things may be in its future. If nothing else, Microsoft’s innovative use of social media data (twitter, foursquare, and Facebook) shows its understanding of the power that user-generated content can have on search engine traffic.

For a side by side comparison of the two sites, check out – http://www.bing-vs-google.com/