During the campaign, Obama relied on technology to supplement his traditional media outreach. He used the web to make the case directly to voters why is he was the best choice for President. Whether you agree with his policies, the approach was a successful one. As president, I had hoped that he would continue this approach while governing. However after the election, some of the outreach efforts slowed down. As some bloggers have pointed out, there had not been any action on his twitter page in 10 days. When I saw his first weekly address yesterday, I was delighted. I’m glad to see that he will continue his approach of talking to directly to the people.
Sometime last week, Lindy Dreyer of SocialFish wrote a very interesting post about what should be in your association social media plan. I agree with everything Lindy wrote in her post. However, I felt that one item was missing from her social media plan. I believe that before jumping on the social media bandwagon, an organization should first determine that there would be some benefit in doing so. I inquired about this missing item to Lindy via comment. My inquiry inspired a subsequent post from her.
First, I am flattered that my comment would inspired Lindy to follow up blog post. I’m blushing… can you tell? In her follow up post, Lindy makes the argument that every organization should invest in social media. She argues that they may not necessarily want to break the bank on social media outreach but every organization should at least invest some time into social media.
While I’m flattered about inspiring a blog post, I remain skeptical that every organization should invest in social media. I contend that while an organization may not foresee all the benefits of jumping on the social media bandwagon, the organization should at least insure that there is something tangible to be gained by investing their time into social media. For example, National Association of County and City Health Officials (NACCHO) is an organization focused on serving local health officials. At this point their membership consists of the vast majority, if not all, of the local health officials around the country. Their funding comes from the CDC and their programs are geared towards their current membership. To continue to be successful, an organization like NACCHO has to continue serving its members by answering to identified needs/wishes. If their membership has not identified social media as need or has not identified problems that could be solved using social media, it would be a waste of time and resources for the organization to invest in social media.
On the other hand, an organization like Be The Change, Inc. whose core mission is “building a broad-based, web-fueled, citizens’ movement that will campaign for better public policies, promote active citizenship and citizen democracy” has no choice but to jump on social media band wagon. To be successful on the web, the BTC has to follow current trends and eventually become one of the leaders when it comes to social media outreach.
To re-iterate my point, Lindy is right that your organization should have a social media plan and if you don’t have one, hire her to help you come up with one (Lindy, I want 10% referral fee…joking). However before you that, your organization should first establish that it fits within its mission and it stands to gain something by jump on the bandwagon. Once you jump on, it’s really hard to get off.
I missed Mid-week reads last week. I’m sure I had a good reason but it’s currently escaping me. Please accept my apoloiges. Since I missed last week, I will include a bonus article for your reading pleasure. I hope you enjoy reading them as much as I did.
Seriously…drop what you are doing and watch this… - I’m not a fan of this type of title for blog posts. Usually, it’s a stupid video of somone doing something moronic that they will regret having posted online in five years. While i think that this title is a bit over the top, I think the video of Gary Vaynerchuck that Saul of Freshbooks shares in this post is worth watching.
After the Election, Will Obama’s Online Army Target Congress? - This is an “old” but good one. In this post, Colin Delany of E-politics.com discusses the possibility of Obama unleashing his online supporters on the hill to apply pressure on congress as needed to get legislation through were he to be elected president. Very interesting read.
Finance Industry Giving Visualized - In the wake of the current financial crisis, we’ve been wondering how the financial industry became such “laissez faire” industry. Well, the good folks at the Sunlight foundation built a tool that shows campaign donations from the financial sector since the early 90’s. Needless to say the findings dont boathe well for our elected officials who claim to be independent.
Twitter, Facebook, Charitable Campaigning - In this post, Jeff Trexter warns online community managers of 501(c)3 organizations about the hidden risks of Web 2.o technologies when it comes to online activism. If you blog, tweet or manage your organization’s Facebook/MySpace page, this is a must read.
***Bonus*** The Playboys of Tech - The title is self-explanatory. Who says geeks don’t know how to party?
If you are reading any interesting blogs, please don’t hesitate to share them with me via comment or email at blog at makembe dot com. A more extensive list of shared reading items can be found on my Google reader shared page.
We all know that I suck at updating my photos but I do it once in while. Today is one of those days. I’ve put up pictures from Drew and Liz’s wedding earlier this summer as well as pictures from my most recent trip to Boston/NH for Boston Day of Action event and Rosh Hashana. I decided not to put the pictures of the ServiceNation summit because they are already posted on BTC Flickr page.
Mobilize.org is an all-partisan network dedicated to educating, empowering, and energizing young people to increase our civic engagement and political participation. We work to show young people how public policy impacts our lives, and more importantly – how we can impact public policy.
The orgnization put its name on the map by taking over the 2100 Fund, an organization that raised funds for organzations promoting youth activism, and writing the Democracy 2.0 Declaration (watch it).
Admitidly, prior to the summit, I had heard of Mobilize.org but I was not very familiar w/ its work. I had planned to submit a proposal for the summit but missed the deadline because of the Silverman campaign and the presidential forum. As luck would have it, at the forum, I got the priviledge and opportunity to meet mobilize’s CEO, Maya Enista, and work with her in a breakout session. During that time, I told her about my interest in the forum and she invited me to attend.
A crucial piece of the summit was the ability for those attending to present ideas and plans that solve the issue of money in politics. From the mobilize.org website:
Competitors in the Democracy 2.0 Entrepreneur Grant Summit must advance a new solution or approach to the money in politics problem - that will change the pattern in the field of civic engagement. Winners will each receive a grant, between $3,000 and $5,000 and will receive the support of Mobilize.org and its partner network to champion their proposal, creating systemic and sustainable change in the way elections are administered.Competitors in the Democracy 2.0 Entrepreneur Grant Summit must advance a new solution or approach to the money in politics problem - that will change the pattern in the field of civic engagement. Winners will each receive a grant, between $3,000 and $5,000 and will receive the support of Mobilize.org and its partner network to champion their proposal, creating systemic and sustainable change in the way elections are administered.
On the first day, keynote speaker, former Representative John Buchanan, gave an inspiring address encouraging and challenging my generation, the Millenials, to become the greatest American generation. He pointed out that money has become an element in our democracy. Technology, along with other tools, makes it easier to promote transparency and hold elected officials more accountable.
The morning on the second day, Nancy Watzman, of the Sunlight Foundation, and Political Party Time, a blog dedicacated to tracking parties thrown at both party conventions as well as fundraising activities of lawmakers, spoke about her exprience trying to bring transparancy to government since the 1990s and all the Sunlight Foundation’s projects and resources. Nancy’s address was followed by a panel that included Josh Zaharoff of Common Cause and Matt Stempeck of Americans for Campaign Reform. In the afternoon, Sam Rasoul, candidate for U.S. Congress in VA-6, stopped by to talk to us about his campaigns, his goals, the change would try to enact in congress and what he has been able to accomplish so far in VA. Between the two speakers, competitors had a chance to meet with panels of experts who gave them feedback about their proposals.
On the last day, David Mark, Senior Editor at Politico and author of Going Dirty, shared his thoughts about the current Presidential campaign as well as some notes about his book. Competitors also got a chance to present their proposals in front of the entire conference. Four winners were later announced. The first prize went to Sam Oliker-Friedland of GoVoteAbsentee.org. I whole heartily agree with the decision, as his proposal was the most developed and most likely to be sustained over the course of time. Basically, his website takes any voter of any district in the US throught the process of getting an absentee ballot. Check it out (Facebook Page) if you get a chance, and please spread the word.
The summit was a great fun and learning experience. It was a eye-opener in the fact that it made me realize how many Millenials are invovled in the political process and are seeking to improve the process and make it more accessible to everyone. I feel as though we sometimes get a bad rap for being overconnected and lazy and the summit gives us as a gneration the chacne to fight that stereotype and put our best effort into improving our democracy.
What color is your nonprofit’s blog ? - In this blog post, Beth Kanter takes Nina Simon’s categorization of different type of museums blogs and applies it to Non-profit blogs as well as provide some strategy tips. Very interesting reading for those blogging for your job/company.
Why Doesn’t Anyone Comment on Your Blog? - In this article of ASAE, Maddie Grant and Lindy Dreyer suggest some ways to get ways associations can get more comments on their blogs. I think the advice can also be true to individual blogger. Simple suggestions but they work.
What is a non-profit blog? - In this post, Britt Bravo - officially one of my new favorite bloggers - shares a list of blogs authored by non-profits/NGO orgs. Some are worth adding to your reading list.
If you like these, you can find more on my Google Reader shared page. I’m also going over my feeds and removing the blogs that I don’t read anymore. If you’re reading some good blogs and think I might find them interesting, please share them. I’m pretty much interested in everything — from politics to fashion.
I prepared this for work today. I figured it would be a good idea to share. It will be will be cross-posted at www.changewireblog.org. It was privilege to meet and work with these folks. Let me know if I missed any. It certainly was not my intentions.
Follow tonight’s ServiceNation Forum online and on twitter.
On television we expect the Forum to be broadcast live, starting at 8 pm EDT, on CNN, Fox News Channel, MSNBC, C-Span, and selected PBS stations around the country (check your local PBS listings).
In addition, MTV will also stream the Forum live. To watch the MTV stream go to http://www.bethechangeinc.org/servicenation/live. Below the MTV stream, you can subscribe to the ServiceNation Kyte player for organic content captured by our mobile producers on the floor! They will be recording behind-the-scenes, exclusive footage throughout the two-day summit. You can also watch the stream on MTV’s website at http://think.mtv.com/groups/servicenation.
Enjoy the broadcast, and stay tuned for further details on how you can watch Day 2 of the Summit. We will be sending another e-mail, and details will be posted on www.servicenation.org. You can review the full program here: http://www.bethechangeinc.org/servicenation/summit/schedule.
ServiceNation is also the talk of the town on twitter.
On a historical day in the history of this nation, much of the talk in the tech blog world was about how Robert Scoble, a prominent tech blogger, lost access to Facebook while testing a beta version of Plaxo pulse, which is a script that will allow you harvest contact information of all your friends to store them elsewhere. Too see how many other bloggers beside Scoble that covered the story, just Google “Robert Scoble and Facebook.” I was really disappointed to find the day of the Iowa primary this was much of the talk in the tech blog world. The result of this presidential election will affect the future of the Internet will greatly affect the future on the Internet and how technology as a whole will be viewed/used in this country and by the government. Aside from TechCrunch, none of these other tech bloggers have interviewed any of the dozen of presidential hopefuls on either side of the isle. If these candidates can pander that to every other constituency in the country to get their vote, why isn’t the geek community, with the exception of the Google, Microsoft and Yahoo of the worlds, also demand the attention of the future president. Net Neutrality, Identity Theft, Use of voting machines, How to address the technology divide in our public school system, media consolidation, upgrading federal government IT infrastructure are just some of the few issues that the next president will have to address. Without the bloggers and the rest of the tech world exercising any pressure or forcing the candidates to be better educated about these issues, big tech companies will be only ones to have a say on how these issues unfold. Moreover, since this election has be dubbed the “technology election”, I would imagine on the day of the first caucus the tech blogging world would be a conversation about creating objective measures that could be used to examine exactly what affect technology will have and has had on the election. More frustrating than not being able to vote in this election, to no fault of my own, is people squandering the opportunity to bring important issues to the light before it’s too late. Today’s coverage of “Scoble-Facebook gate” was would be equivalent to something like CNN covering Britney’s latest night of debauchery instead of covering Bhutto’s assassination.
Sorry Scoble but I really don’t care that Facebook banned you for breaking the rules that you agreed to uphold in the first place.
I'm Henri (pictured above). I'm a web developer currently living in DC with my girlfriend and our small HD TV. I enjoy all things sports, business, politics and tech. In my free time, I go to class, freelance and attend happy hours. This blog is place for me to rant about all the things that through to my head at any given moment. Hope you enjoy it.
p.s. The grammar and spelling mistakes are part of the writing. They give my writing some personality
Disclaimer:The opinions expressed herein are my own personal opinions and do not represent my employer's view in any way.
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I prepared this for work today. I figured it would be a good idea to share. It will be will be cross-posted at 
On a historical day in the history of this nation, much of the talk in the tech blog world was about how 
Moreover, since this election has be dubbed the “technology election”, I would imagine on the day of the first caucus the tech blogging world would be a conversation about creating objective measures that could be used to examine exactly what affect technology will have and has had on the election. More frustrating than not being able to vote in this election, to no fault of my own, is people squandering the opportunity to bring important issues to the light before it’s too late. Today’s coverage of “Scoble-Facebook gate” was would be equivalent to something like CNN covering Britney’s latest night of debauchery instead of covering 
