Facebook Updates

I’ve been monitoring how often certain campaigns update their Facebook status.

Flu.gov updates about 4-5 times a day.

Komen for the Cure only updates about once a day if that.

Interesting.

If you are friends with flu.gov, ostensibly you already are aware of the H1N1 epidemic.  So this begs the question: why so many updates?  Is this overload?  Maybe, but if flu.gov using Facebook as a key one-way communication tool, then it is getting key information to those who have asked for it.

Komen, on the other hand, is clearly using their Facebook page for online community purposes.  There are far more friends publically posting to the Komen page.  So they don’t really need to give constant updates.  (They use Twitter for that.)  When they do give an update, it’s pretty good information, whereas, flu.gov updates so much that you could kind of zone it out.

Twitter at the Conference

I spent last week at the National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC) annual conference.  It was a big event at the Walter Washington Convention Center with about 20,000 attendees.

They had a very active Twitter presence throughout the show.  They created a hash tag #naeycac; the “ac” stands for annual conference.  All the tweets from the show had that hash tag, and NAEYC put up big monitors all around the convention center with live feeds from Twitter. 

I was tweeting for my organization, and it was cool to put out a tweet and immediately see it on the big screen.

There were a lot of early childhood education bloggers and tweeters at the show, so it made for an interesting online conversation.  I quickly learned where good tech savvy sessions were being held and got a feel for sessions that I could not attend.

Lesson here is to create a hash tag for any big live event that your organization holds.  It makes the conversation simple, quick, and fun.  

Online Advocacy and the Social Net

Learned from Techpresident about a report on social media tools and major DC advocacy groups by Marc Ross, Christine Stineman, and Chris Lisi of 2ndSix, Tribe Effect and Chris Lisi Communications.

The basic conclusion is that major advocacy organizations have really only embraced email.  Many of the big ones aren’t even on Facebook, which is really like entry-level at this point.  And, of course, all the analysts/experts say you need a blog, but very few have one.

This could be a result of the fact that these groups are not savvy to the power of social media and how it could benefit them. 

BUT it could also be that they just don’t think it will work for them.

Until someone can get some good data, I’m not sure when we will know the answer to this.  While the social net worked great for Obama, can it really work for a campaign that doesn’t have that type of passionate energy behind it?  I’m not sure.  More later…

Social Mediaesque Design

I’m curious how long this design trend will last.  You know what I mean: the clouds, the curved corners, the module/widget look, the large slightly-cartoonish fonts, the in-your-face buttons. Examples: GOP.gov OR  Whitehouse.gov.

These designs, which I assume are user-friendly (they seem so), are certainly better than what preceded it.  But the time seems ripe for a creative designer to start doing something a bit different.

You know it’s about to change when all the political sites start to jump on the bandwagon.

Great widget on GOP.com

On of the blog posts on techpresident.com talked about the new GOP.com.   

The widget that caught my attention was a little dohicky on the home page that allows users to seamlessly glance at the feeds from Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Flickr.  On the Facebook feed, it showed a selection of people who support GOP.com.  Of course, I recognized some of them, as they came from my friend list.  Always interesting to learn who supports GOP.com—particularly, when it’s unexpected.

Twitter and the NFL

Despite the fact that the organization is now in shambles and the Supreme Court is about to force it to change its name (rightly, I must say), the Washington Redskins have been dear to me since the good old days of John Riggins and Darrel Green.

This week two unpleasant things happened to the team (actually it was more than two—but for the sake of simplicity, let’s keep it there for now).  One, they lost to the previously winless-since-2007 Detroit Lions.  Two, they felt they sting of the Twitter fan attack.

A rookie on the team was upset last week when fans at FedEx Field booed the team despite beating the Rams.  This rookie proceeded to damn the fans for their behavior with this Twitter post: "All you fake half hearted Skins fan can...I won't go there but I dislike you very strongly, don't come to Fed Ex to boo dim wits!!"

The fans went crazy and soon enough the story was picked up by major networks. 

Twitter and football is so interesting because for the first time fans have the opportunity to publically express their celebrations or frustrations with a team or a player.  This is particularly good for Redskins fans who have been deeply frustrated, and rightly so, ever since the team cursed themselves by moving from DC to Landover, Maryland a little over a decade ago.

 Although Twitter doesn’t allow depth or breadth of thought, it does allow for fans to get things off their chests.  This is also true during the political election season, which is very much like the NFL season (I’ll post on that later).

It’s tough to tell whether or not this is really a good thing however.  I, for one, find it fun but a wasteful enterprise, reading all these ranting and ravings.  Surely, there is some value, although I can’t quite point it out yet.  Thoughts?