PA Times article on the use of social media during the 2012 election

I wrote up a short piece about the impact of social media in the 2012 election. It will come out in print this month and I wanted to share it here as well.

The social media dance around the VP pick

On Friday night the news broke, that the Romney campaign was planning to reveal the vice-president in a live TV covered event at 9:05am the next day. Within a few hours however, all major news-outlets stated “Mitt Romney picks Paul Ryan”. There was no question mark, no speculation. Only these plain statements – quoting sources

Obama campaign’s “Holy Grail”: Dashboard

A recent article in the Guardian pointed to the Obama campaign’s “Holy Grail” of campaign technology: the so-called “Dashboard“. The “data acquired by volunteers from voters canvassing in Ohio will immediately be synced with that gathered by those running phonebanks in New Hampshire and with the outreach efforts of volunteers at myBarackObama.com, giving campaign bosses

Presidential Memo: Managing online records beyond paper and filing cabinets

Today, President Obama published a new presidential memo building on the efforts of the Open Government Directive he encourages departments and agencies to save money by providing government records in digital format – instead of “paper and filing cabinets”. From the White House blog: The new effort calls for reports, by each agency head, describing their

How Presidential Candidates should use Social Media

Presidential Twitter Townhall @townhall

Yesterday, President Obama sent out his first publicly observable tweet starting off a new form of online Town Hall meeting, a Twitter town hall: http://twitter.com/#!/whitehouse/status/88670359720697856 The Twitter Town Hall meeting was the second large-scale social media event sponsored by one of the most influential social media companies in the U.S.: About three months ago, Mark

TooManyWebsites.gov

This week the White House blog posted a message from Macon Phillips, the White House Director of New Media, titled “TooManyWebsites.gov”. This initiate is part of the Campaign to Cut Waste that the White House launched this week, quoting the President: “As President Obama has said, we can’t win the future with a government of

White House crowdsourcing effort to understand their audiences’ social media needs

The White House has recently asked its Facebook fans and Twitter followers to provide feedback on their social media activities. As an example, Twitter users were asked to fill out a short survey (see article in InformationWeek). https://twitter.com/#!/whitehouse/status/77422988332498944 After reviewing the feedback, the White House published what they extracted from their fans and followers in

Data.gov in the classroom: Government 2.0 syllabus

Data.gov in the classroom features resources for K-12, Universities, and Education in the World. Among them is Karim Lakhani’s Data.gov case study developed at Harvard Business School, Beth Noveck’s Democracy Design Workshop Do Tank, and now also my Government 2.0 syllabus. I have been teaching this class for the last three years and the online

PA Times: Government 2.0 revisited – Social Media Strategies in the Public Sector

The ASPA PA Times Summer Issue just came out with a special issue on social media and Web 2.0. Here is the text I originally submitted to the editors. It is printed on p. 7 & 10: Government 2.0 revisited – Social Media Strategies in the Public Sector Government 2.0 – or the use of