A common theme in many of the political and advocacy-oriented panels at SXSW was the idea that social media’s vocabulary is honesty and transparency. As trade organizations, political candidates and government officials have adopted social media, they have needed to adopt the vocabulary of transparency to connect with the community. So if social media has encouraged transparency, can the opposite be true as well? Can policies of transparency encourage the use of social tools to solve public problems?
For those at the Politics Online Conference this afternoon, there's one session you shouldn’t miss — Pete Snyder, my boss at New Media Strategies and a veteran of more than ten years in the social media space, will hold the closing keynote conversation with Republican advertising guru Mark McKinnon, moderated by GW prof Dennis Johnson.
Scott Brown’s victory in last week’s Massachusetts Senate election has gotten plenty of Republicans fired up about their online prospects in the 2010.
Political activists living in dense areas should use the name of their home Wi-Fi networks to reach out to neighbors about political candidates. It's free, its doesn't disturb neighbors, and it has the potential to reach hundreds of voters.
There was an interesting story from the San Jose Mercury News yesterday about Ryan Coonerty, a moderately controversial mayor of Santa Cruz, California who has a much-contested Wikipedia article: "Young, highly educated and very popular with voters, or a politician who plies his trade by cashing in on resentment toward the homeless in Santa Cruz. If you get your information online, your view of Councilman Ryan Coonerty may depend on who last edited his Wikipedia page."
Street View is the latest product from Google that both amazes and alarms us. By taking millions of photos from the back of a Chevy Cobalt, Google has brought the images of far-flung neighborhoods to the comforts of our own laptops. It's also caught some pretty funny scenes on film, but perhaps the best use I've gotten out of this new feature is the ability to walk through congressional districts.
When faced with a crisis, especially in the political world, gut instinct can tell those in the firing line to hunker down and shut up. But if you genuinely think you've got an explanation or exonerating details to offer and you're getting hammered by the media (or are about to be), consider a large-scale drive to communicate.
Inauguration Day should have been viewed by all as a celebration of a new beginning, not as the last gasp opportunity to throw stones at a man who is no longer the face of our nation.
I still don’t know what the inauguration ceremony looked like four years ago. At the time, I was living in a one-room cinderblock structure in the Iraqi desert. I was certain that my experience on January 20th, 2009, would be a study in contrasts.