1. Relinquish a little control of your brand.  Don’t obsess over staying “on message” and instead focus on developing a productive dialogue with your constituents.

2. New media tools are a means towards an end so make sure they support your broader communications goals (e.g. increasing donations, recruiting new members, influencing public opinion, driving action on an issue) before employing them.

3. Explore ways to utilize new media tools to repurpose existing materials and gain more mileage from them.  For example, we once took b-roll and leftover footage from a client’s fieldwork and turned them into online commercials that were used for their end-of-year funding appeals on their web site and in a series of digital press releases.

Visit Amplify’s Multimedia Gallery to learn more about our new media work.

Within hours, it was cranking out a sustained barrage across the broad spectrum of modern media — statements, reports, e-mails, tweets, photos and videos — all punctuated by a high-profile presidential visit to the Gulf followed by an incendiary speech at the White House and a video recap with exclusive behind-the-scenes views of Obama in “West Wing Week,” the White House’s new online program at www.whitehouse.gov.

I’d noticed the White House’s long timeline blog post earlier, “The Ongoing Administration-Wide Response to the Deepwater BP Oil Spill”.  It starts with Search and Rescue, goes on to The President is Alerted, and lists Assets Deployed To Date starting the night of April 20th and continuing every day since.  They’re continuing to update the timeline with every day’s five to ten actions, and its length at this point is awe-inspiring.

Most importantly, their publication schedule is reaching the media: the day after the timeline was first published, Politico had an item headlined Disaster in the print edition that started with Rep. Mike Pence (R-IN), the House Republican Conference Chairman, saying the government didn’t react quickly enough to the oil leak.  But at the bottom, it mentioned the “6,300-word opus” posted by the White House.

McClatchy’s article ends with Dan Pfeiffer, White House communications director, saying “”We were successful at getting a pretty high percentage of the coverage accurately depicting the steps the administration had taken . . . . It was not clear that was going to happen (several) days ago.”

Impressive results for a crisis communication plan, in the wake of an environmental disaster that will continue to affect us for years.  Hopefully the management of the leak will have positive results soon as well….

The second half of the presentation discussed how to integrate new media and traditional media – more specifically, how to use new media to generate press coverage. An example from Amplify’s own work was an online video we created for the International Fund for Animal Welfare’s Gift for Animals program. We used archived footage from IFAW’s field work to create a video commercial that we posted on IFAW’s YouTube channel and then sent out through a digital news release. The unique approach generated media attention for the alternative gift program, including a feature on Oprah.com. Our advice to any company or organization is to explore opportunities to repurpose existing materials and get more mileage from them through social media. Think about what you’ve done recently and how it might be adapted for a new media application – but only if it reaches your target audience of course!

World AIDS Day answered this question on December 1. The HubSpot marketing blog described the participation from Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, and even Google. Each site let its users participate in spreading AIDS awareness in a way that matched its mission (change your Facebook profile picture, make your tweets display in red, add a picture of a printed sign to a Flickr group…).

So what lessons can you learn from the World AIDS Day social media campaign? Instead of limiting your efforts to one specific site, take advantage of the variety social media offers by spreading your message through multiple channels. Such a multi-faceted social media campaign that elicits the power of multiple sites enables increased visibility and the opportunity to reach a larger audience.

An integrated campaign will reach more supporters and create greater awareness – when you have the time and partners to pull it off.

A change in the guidelines may also affect lobbyists in Washington: companies will now have to dislcose[sic] their financial ties to studies by research institutes that they fund and cite to promote their positions.

If you blog, if you have a blogger relations program, or if you fund policy research, keep an eye on these guidelines as the FTC begins to enforce them.

1. Can you give me an example of social media work you’ve completed for a client recently?

Sure. We’re working with a religious organization to promote education about and understanding of other faiths, using Facebook and YouTube among other avenues.

2. How do you go about pitching bloggers?

We research an issue area, finding influential and interesting bloggers who would care about our topic (usually they’ve written about something related in the past). Often we already have relationships with some bloggers who fit those criteria. Whether we know a blogger or not, we write offering information and say we hope they’ll consider blogging about it.

3. How do you monitor what people are saying about you?

Google Alerts, Twitter search, comments from clients and friends at other organizations (offline conversations count too). We’re investigating several social media monitoring services but haven’t made choices yet.

4. Where can I find you online?

Our website, our other blog Disruptive Women in Health Care, Facebook. Our staff is on LinkedIn, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, and lots of other places as well.

5. Can you write my blog for me?

We do blog training and work with our clients so they can easily keep something fresh on their blogs – create publication calendars, set up Delicious so they have a recent news feed, etc. Writing a blog is a valuable process as well as a way to promote your work (listen to Tom Peters and Seth Godin), and having someone else write it makes no sense.

6. How do you measure results?

Usually number of actions taken – advocacy lends itself better to hard numbers than marketing generally does.

7. How would you define social media?

People interacting online. I’m waiting for a better way to say “and I include mobile services in that too,” but no one’s invented a good word yet.

8. Can you just pretend to be me online?

No. See (5) for some of the reasons. We actually don’t have people ask us this, so either we’re just lucky or most advocates want to convey messages themselves.

All right, now go look at Dave’s post and see if I got the right answers!

Holden Karnofsky, a founder of charity-rating site GiveWell.org, posted a question on MetaFilter and then answered it himself from another account. He’s left similar comments on other sites, again not identifying himself as part of the organization he’s promoting. And now he’s been demoted from executive director to program officer. The organization can recover; in time so can he (he’s 26).

Why do people astroturf? Well, because it’s easy. You don’t have to spend the time to make a real contribution, and people won’t know straight off that you’re biased. Why avoid astroturfing? Because it’s slimy, it’s often pointless, and it tends to backfire.

Slimy: Lying about who you are so you’ll become more successful? Not a good route to being/appearing trustworthy. Oh, and in the case of a public company where you have inside information, it could be illegal.

Pointless: Most astroturfers have one-track minds; for instance, Mackey became known as a booster of Whole Foods, probably rather quickly. If you spend time in a community, they learn your point of view and will discount your next statement accordingly. If you’re new, they might notice that or the community itself might be set up to give you less visibility (i.e. Slashdot’s karma system). What does being pseudonymous gain you? If you use your real affiliation, you might be listened to more as a representative of your organization.

Backfiring: On the internet no one knows who you are – until someone goes looking. Karnofsky posted his question and his answer from the same IP address and other MetaFilter posters noticed. BusinessWeek, checking that the bloggers were real, found out that Walmart was paying for the Wal-Marting Across America blog. (That story got even worse when it came out that one blogger worked for the Washington Post and his freelancing violated their ethics guidelines.) Reporter or not, anyone can check up on you, and their comments may live in Google forever.

IDI has a history of rejecting astroturfing, and it’s smart to check what your potential bloggers think of these kinds of campaigns. Don’t be the organization blaming your public relations disaster on an intern, a junior employee, or a consultant. Engaging openly will get you farther in the end.