Archive: Author: The Management

Here's a cautionary tale in how not to manage your message in a networked media age, or rather, further evidence of John Gilmore's brilliant maxim, "The internet interprets censorship has damage and routes around it." Late Monday night in England, the Guardian posted a strange article reporting that it was being prevented from reporting on a question pending in Parliament. The only thing the Guardian could say was that the case involved Carter-Ruck, a prominent PR firm that specializes in working with global corporations. But that didn't stop the blogosphere, which immediately took affront at the assault on free speech. Within 24 hours the whole story was out in the open, to the chagrin of Carter-Ruck and the oil commodities...

With the help of Klout.com, a web service that analyzes Twitter usage and influence, I've been looking at the full list of Members of Congress using the tool, looking for potentially interesting relationships in the data. With about 125 House Members now using Twitter (roughly 2/3 Rs and 1/3 Ds), many of them on a daily basis, there's a rich data set to look at. I've uploaded Klout's rankings of the House Members to ManyEyes, so if you want to entertain yourself by finding out where your favorite congresstwitter rates, go ahead. But I also thought it might be interesting to see if there's a relationship between how well a Member is using Twitter, or just more basic metrics like...

Are you a virtual office worker? That's the topic of this week's PdF Network conference call, Thursday from 1-2pm EST. If you're like many people, the odds are that you--or someone you work with--are working from home or from a remote location, away from your employer's central office. According to the Telework Research Network, the number of Americans who worked from home or remotely at least one day per month for their employer rose from approximately 12.4 million in 2006 to 17.2 million in 2008. Five million employees work from home most of the time, another seven million do so at least once a month. And while we can't prove it with hard data, it's clear that for people who...

No, we're not making this up. That's just part of a late-night email message from Mayor James D. Kalb of Portsmouth, Ohio to blogger Robert Forrey, a retired English professor whose site, RiverVices seems to have gotten under Kalb's skin. In response to a public records request from Forrey for information about a controversial local park project, Kalb wrote: If there is anything else that I can do for you, which is required by law, don't hesitate to call my office. If it isn't required by law then don't bother asking, because I think that you're a worthless piece of s**t and I wouldn't p**s on you if you were on fire (my opinion). You're a poor, lonely, jealous, old man...

Yesterday, New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg announced his "Connected City" initiative, rolling out a series of programs aimed at transforming how New Yorkers interact with and get services from city government. Building on his administration’s valuable 311 program, he promised to make government more accessible by translating city websites into six languages, distributing more information via Twitter (follow @311nyc) and social networking sites, enabling users to fine-tune their usage of NYC.gov around their personal information needs, and creating a free iPhone application allowing people to submit quality-of-life complaints to 311 directly from their phone. Speaking at the IBM SmarterCities Forum in Manhattan, he declared: Every day, new technological innovations help make information flow faster, systems work better and our lives a...

Are you in charge of your organization's email list? Do you wonder if your list is performing up to snuff? What's a good response rate? How is the financial crisis affecting the environment for online fundraising? This Thursday, October 1st, 1:00-2:00pm EST on the PdF Network conference call we'll be talking with two experts, Marc Ruben and Karen Matheson of M+R Strategic Services. They'll be sharing the results of their eNonprofit Benchmarks Study for 2009, done in tandem with NTEN. It's based on an analysis of online messaging, fundraising, and advocacy data from 32 leading nonprofit organizations. We'll cover topics like: * Current benchmarks for open, click-through, response and page conversion rates * How much...

The internet is full of beauty and ugliness. Most of the time, we prefer to focus on the positive here--the ways that people, using interactive communications technologies, are empowering themselves to open up politics, and the ways that organizations and institutions are also transforming how they work to be more open, participatory and accountable. But the net is also enhancing the power of humanity's dark side--terrorists, mafioso, phishers, spammers and haters are also benefiting from interactive communications networking. Let's not kid ourselves, the internet is a mirror of real life, or rather, it's now inseparable from real life. Like other media, it reflects and amplifies what it going on, but with one huge difference: it makes everything much more discoverable....

A new online video released yesterday by liberal online behemoth MoveOn.org has hit a nerve. Starring comedian Will Ferrell and a host of A-list Hollywood actors, the video has already been 1.5 million times in less than 24 hours. Ilyse Hogue, the group's director of political advocacy and communication, tells me that it is "by far our best performing [video] through social networks." She reports that nearly 250,000 of those views have come from people clicking through links that supporters of MoveOn have placed on their Facebook pages, and another 36,000 or so from Twitter referrers. Not bad. Protect Insurance Companies PSA from Will Ferrell Personally, I found the video a bit too sarcastic and dark to convince people who aren't already...

Wondering which Members of Congress have clout? Not the kind that gets legislation passed or stopped, but the kind that turns heads online? Well, with the help of our friends at Klout.com, we've taken a look at 81 Members of Congress who have been active Twitter users over the last year, and the results may surprise you. Right now, according to Klout's analysis, which weighs 25 different variables in assigning a score to a Twitter user, no Member of Congress has more Klout than none other than Rep. Joe Wilson of South Carolina. His score: 79.0 out of 100. According to the site, that makes him a "persona" on Twitter: "You have built a personal brand around your identity. There is...

A friend responded to my post about Barack Obama's sagging YouTube statistics by noting that since the election, a lot of Obama's video viewers may have migrated over to his official White House YouTube channel. Fair point. But a close look at their metrics doesn't change my main point, that the White House isn't making very good use of online video and as a result is not connecting very well online. Here's the overall track of the White House YouTube channel, as tracked by TubeMogul: ...