Advocacy Avenue

I will be presenting at the "SOCIAL MEDIA SUMMIT: How To Use Blogging, Podcasting & The Latest Web 2.0 Technologies To Engage Your Employees, Reach Your Customers & Build Your Brand," October 22-25, 2007 in New York, NY.

The conference is very timely.  It will focus on how to apply social media technology to your communication and marketing programs to build customer and employee relationships and drive bottom-line results. 

See registation information.

I hope to see you there.

- Kevin Reid

This last Friday, Bush spoke with a group of "pro-Bush" and "Pro-military" bloggers about his policies in Iraq. According to a write up in the Washington Post, it was the first time a president had met with bloggers for a chat at the White House.

Interestingly, it was about this time of year last year that bloggers were invited to a face-to-face meeting with Former President Bill Clinton at his offices in NYC. In this instance, he invited bloggers from the other side of the political spectrum… bloggers like John Aravosis from AmericaBlog and Chris Bowers from MyDD.

Unless you are the president of the United States, it would be pretty hard to fill a room with top-tier bloggers.  An alternative is a conference call. We have recommend blogger conference calls to our clients in the past. A lot of work can go into setting these up. While you may not always get top-tier bloggers the way the President can, the effort can be worth it. These calls can help start or maintain discussions among bloggers and and keep your organization, issue or topic in the mix.

The Carnival of Nonprofit Consultants recently celebrated its first anniversary.  Congratulations to Kivi Miller, the carnival organizer, the hosts and other bloggers, who have made the carnival a success in its first year.  The list of participants, including Blogger Relations, can be found on the blog post at Nonprofit Communications.

I was recently interviewed for the Politics Online Conference vlog on questions like "How did you use technology in 2006?" and "How did the utilization of technology affect the 2006 elections?" It is an honor to be included in the project. The Institute of Politics, Democracy and the Internet at George Washington University’s annual conference is a must-attend. We are delighted to participate in this important event once again this year. Check out their blog as more videos and updates get posted.

And in the meantime, you can listen to my answers to those questions and more, here (the designer pixelated effect will go away once the video begins):

Thanks to all who attended our jam-packed Beltway Blogger Boot Camp event at the National Press Club earlier this week. If you weren’t able to come, you missed out on some great speakers. Special thanks goes to Pat Cleary of NAM, Eric Rabe of Verizon, Milo Sybrant of Amnesty International USA, Colin Delany of EPolitics, Debbie Weil of BlogWrite for CEOs and John Horrigan of the Pew Internet and American Life Project.

Colin Delany had this to say on the EPolitics blog regarding possible takeaways from Boot Camp:

• Having an organization/institutional blog is no longer an exceptional thing — blogs are becoming a normal part of communications practice.
• Before starting a blog, organizations should establish clear goals for it that are (as Cheryl Contee from IDI put it) SMART: specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and time-oriented.
• They should also have clear internal policies about what topics are to be covered, who gets to write, what the approval process is for articles, whether the blog accepts outside comments and trackbacks, and how to handle comments that might not be so welcome to the organization.
• Most successful blogs focus on a particular niche and a particular audience and stick with it (there’s a reason you don’t see me writing on this site about my other various dark obsessions besides online politics.)

Take a look at our guest speakers’ blogs and sites to get more tips and to see examples of great bloggers and blog experts in action:

Pat Cleary:
http://blog.nam.org/ 

Colin Delany:
http://www.epolitics.com/

John Horrigan:
http://www.pewinternet.org/PPF/a/105/about_staffer.asp

Eric Rabe:
http://poliblog.verizon.com/

Milo Sybrant:
http://blogs.amnestyusa.org/death-penalty

Debbie Weil:
http://www.blogwriteforceos.com/

If you’d like to receive the slides from the program, please email us at info at idi.net. We’d love to hear from you. We will be offering a few of the handouts on this site soon so that you can bring some new ideas on how to use the blogs and the social internet to your advantage for your organization.

Register now for our Beltway Blogger Boot Camp to be held on November 13 at the National Press Club.

This intense half-day session will cover the topics you need to get a jump start on what it takes to get your blog up and running.

Special guest speakers will include

• John Horrigan, Pew Internet and American Life Center
• Debbie Weil, BlogWrite for CEOs publisher and author of "The Corporate Blogging Book"

To help accomodate everyone’s busy schedules, we are offering the training twice: once in the morning and once in the afternoon.

We hope to see you there!

I just attended a Heritage Foundation event that focused on bloggers’ role in the passage of the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act AKA the Coburn-Obama bill. In August 2006, a group of largely conservative and libertarian bloggers led by Porkbusters assailed Congress asking citizens to get their senator on the record whether or not they had placed a "secret hold" blocking this public disclosure of federal expenditures in the dead of night before a recess.

The campaign also extended onto left-leaning blogs including TPMmuckraker.com, becoming a rare bi-partisan effort online. Ultimately, the culprit was revealed to be Sen. Ted Stevens (R-AK) who is often accused of pork-barreling for his state. In the past, Stevens’ tactic might have been difficult to overcome. Now, the bloggers can communicate more quickly to constituents and advocate action in a way that newspapers cannot. There are no more secrets in Washington D.C. anymore. President Bush signed the law flanked by bloggers and the powerful OMB met with them afterwards to ask for help on other initiatives. The blogs are not a fad. They are both pushing on and entering the halls of powers. The question: how are you using the power of the blogosphere to move your issues — or defuse them?

Colin Delany of e.politics has published excerpts from a recent discussion on the Progressive Exchange email list about blogs and engaging bloggers. The excerpts do a good job of touching on the issues.

Of course, we have a lot to say on this topic. Our advice: before you start any campaign, do your homework. Find out what’s being said on the topic. How many bloggers are talking about the issue? Who are your supporters? Who are the detractors? Answers to these types of questions will help inform the type of strategy you should adopt. 

For our clients, blog ads have been very successful. But, an ad campaign is just one of the many options at your disposal.  In the end, blogging is a conversation. So, the best recommendation is to start contributing to it. If you have a blog, start agreeing with your supporters and (politely) disagreeing with your detractors. Support your argument with facts, introduce new ideas and link, link, link to bloggers who have something to say on the issue. But, don’t stop there.  Visit other blogs and join the conversation there as well. If the resources are available, layering a blog ad campaign on top of this effort (not to mention doing things like traditional media relations work) can have significant additional impact, especially if awareness is high around the issue. 

Finally, if you do not have one yet, you should establish an official blogging policy for your organization or company. Know if and when you can blog, post a comment and/or communicate with other bloggers and blog readers. Going through the process of adopting a policy now will help you and your colleagues work out important issues and procedures before they arise. Work this out before you start your campaign so that everyone is on the same page.

- Kevin

There’s a great CNN article today that talks about CEO blogging. Check it out. Forrester says that 70% of Fortune 500 companies say that they plan to launch a blog this year. Right now only 6% do! Sounds ambitious and I think the takeaway is that corporations plan to move quickly to jump on the opportunity to reach consumers, the media, advocates, partners and vendors in a new way. It’s not a replacement. It’s augmentation. The message is the same. It’s nuanced for transmission over many mediums, including the website, print materials, media interviews, podcasts, YouTube, Flickr, MySpace and yes, the good old-fashioned blog you know and love. And according to the CNN article, now in multiple languages. That something we’ve been telling our clients for some time actually. Blogging is huge here and even bigger in countries like Japan.

We are recommending the Corporate Blogging Book and have ordered many copies to give as gifts to some of our best clients. Why? Well, Debbie Weil is a collegue of mine. We used to work together on the international web presence for a Fortune 500 company — Discovery Communications who come home to your TV each night with Discovery Channel, TLC, Animal Planet, Discovery Health, Travel Channel and other popular channels.

She’s a star and an expert in CEO blogging in particular. Her book has lessons for any large organization. We recently launched the very cool AnimalRescueBlog for the International Fund for Animal Welfare, a major international non-profit organization. This is a site that merges a blog, Flickr and social networked news like Digg, Del.icio.us and Care2 News with traditional online grassroots fundraising, advocacy and awareness. We’re giving them copies of the book too because it’s got good sense that anyone who really lives and breathe blogs and Web 2.0 (like us here at IDI!) would tell you if you are planning to get serious about launching a blog.