We’re proud to introduce a new segment to this blog: B.A.D – also known as Bivings After Dark. We’d like to give readers a look at the social and education side of public relations and social media in DC. Tyler and I belong to a number of networking groups and meet a great deal of people during our nights out on the town. Consequently, we’re launching a series of videos aimed to give you a peek at the interesting people, places, and events, we see on a weekly basis. Hopefully the videos are both entertaining and educational.

This past Monday the social media team from The Bivings report attended a Meetup sponsored by the DC PR Flacks and Washington Women in PR (WWPR). Both groups are dedicated to professional development and networking in the Washington DC metropolitan area. We found two interesting individuals who agreed to give mini interviews for the Bivings Report.

Kendra Kojcsich

• associate at Porter Novelli.
• on the board of Washington Women in PR
• follow her on twitter @KKojcsich

 Diana Firth

• SimplifywithDi
• simplifywithdi.net

After first noticing Tweets relating to the developing story of a gunman storming the Discovery Channel building not far from our office in Georgetown, we have launched another instance of Slurp140 dedicated to tracking all tweets using the #discovery hashtag: http://www.slurp140.com/discovery/ 

For live video, our friends at TBD have been doing an excellent job: “Live Video: Discovery Channel gunman hostage standoff”

A couple quick thoughts:

• A picture from @jdivenerea purporting to be of the gunman has received over 27,339 views in 1 hour and 50 minutes.  Watching the commentary unfold, a rough consensus has formed that this may actually be of an undercover police officer. http://yfrog.com/2mhdmdj

 

• The alleged shooters- James Jay Lee’s  Myspace profile and personal website (http://savetheplanetprotest.com/) have emerged. The website as a single page of hate speech, that has since crashed due to high traffic. Huffington Post has reposted the text in full. other sites have posted the text in full.
• DCist points out that the suspect has a prior history of being arrested at the Discovery Channel building
• Since we started tracking tweets shortly after TBG broke the story at 1:00pm, we have seen 9,000+ tweets by 5,477 people  

Looking for an easy way to tell whose up / whose down and what the current buzz is surrounding Mayor Fenty and Chairman Gray’s campaign for Democratic nomination to be Mayor of Washington D.C?

As part of a broader study we are working on examining the true impact of how politicians use Twitter, we are happy to launch this latest instance of Slurp140 for anyone looking to follow the campaigns online at:
http://www.slurp140.com/dcmayor/

As we have just started tracking tweets referencing “@grayformayor,” “Vince Gray”, “@fenty2010” “Adrian Fenty” and “#dcmayor” the numbers you see reflected in the total number of tweets and total people are reflective of all tweets since 12:00 pm. today.

In looking for Twitter accounts of campaign staffers, the only account that stands out is that of veteran campaign strategist @Mo Elleithee. We will keep looking, but if you know of other senior staffers with Twitter accounts let us know!

Quick facts at a glance:

Note: We are not affiliated with either campaign or Washington D.C. Board of Elections. (Nor am I related to Chairman Gray

Last week, Facebook announced a set of changes that its development platform is set to undergo within the coming months. In a blog post, the company talked about the enhancements coming to the Facbeook API. A significant change will be the replacement of FBML with iFrames, with the former having been the gold standard for designing visually appealing Fan Pages of the last several years. In fact, by the end of 2010, Facebook will no longer allow for new applications to be created using the antiquated FBML.

How will these new changes affect social media CRM on Facebook?

Short answer: it won’t.

Long answer: The changes will make it easier for developers to bring more dynamic functions to Facebook pages, games, and other applications. On August 23rd, all tabbed pages in profiles and fan Pages were readjusted to be only 520 pixels in width. This standardized (albeit more narrow) width allows for implementation of across-the-board support for IFrames  – which enable designers and developers to easily break up a page into multiple segments with some static and some dynamic sections. Iframes also tend to use lower bandwidth, when compared to single-frame variable content that has to continuously reload.

The Bivings Group is a full service Internet communications firm,  whose own developers are incredibly excited about this change. Chris Roane, a TBG developer who's familiar with FBLM noted that:

It always seemed ridiculous to me that Facebook would implement a specific language for developers to use with their system for web development (FBML). Why not tap into the same coding system that everything else uses across the internet? Instead of having to figure out how to work with a new coding system, developers and programmers can use the systems that they have always been using. This will not only make pages easier to develop, but applications should appear more seamless as it will be easier to make more complicated applications run directly in a facebook tab/page.

Today at the Bivings Group we are proud to announce our latest deployment of Slurp140 for the 2010 “Wisdom of We” conference taking place September 10th in Santa Rosa California.

Although the tweets about social media and tours through wine country are sure to make you jealous, for anyone looking to keep track of the action leading up to, during, and after the event you can visit http://www.slurp140.com/wow10 

Thanks to Shana Ray at Wisdom of We and her team at Democrasoft for using Slurp140! For more information about the event, check out the Wisdom of We 2010 blog or of course, follow the action with Slurp140!   Tickets are available via Eventbrite.

Interested in Slurp140 for your next event? Drop us a line!

On August 24th, @TylerGray and I attended a networking event hosted by @MediaBistro. This was one of several social media gatherings that our staff has attended over the course of the past several weeks, and we wanted to give you, our reader, a glimpse into what the events were actually like.

The below video is a short look into what the DC online media networking events often look like. We also took the time to interview a few of the interesting people we met at the MediaBistro event. Hopefully their unique jobs and innovate use of social media inspires others to think outside the box. Below is their contact information. If you would like to get featured on The Bivings Report at the next networking event, feel free to tweet @Bivings and let us know.

Thanks for Ruben Muska of Paradigm Companies and Kelly Barrett of the new startup Hy.Ly for sharing their interesting work!

Guerilla and social media marking campaigns all dream of going viral – a la Old Spice Man on a Horse – but some advertising really strikes out. Below is a look at two particularly bad unfortunate ad campaigns that resulted in more bad press than good. Let this be a lesson that for every Old Spice man on a horse, there is also an Aqua Teen Hunger Force bomb scare.

Mafia Wars: Leading to Wars with City Hall

No more than a few weeks ago, the video game maker Zynga was advertising for its Mafia Wars Las Vegas expansion pack.  Allegedly, this company authorized an ad agency to plant fake $25,000 bills on the sidewalks of San Francisco.  The plan was for pedestrians to pick up said bills, and find the address of the Mafia Wars website, where they could get information on Mafia Wars: Las Vegas. However, the City of San Francisco did not take the marketing tactic very well – and reported that the cleanup effort was of great expense to the city.  The San Francisco’s city attorney’s office is now officially investigating the incident.

“The Last Exorcism” and Chatroulette: Two iffy things that did not go great together

Everyone’s favorite random video chat website Chatroulete was seemingly the perfect medium on which to promote the Lionsgate horror film The Last Exorcism.  Its complete anonymity lents itself well to beginning short-lived interactions with strangers.

Playing off of this random notion, the marketing team behind The Last Exorcism decided to show a taped video to those connecting to it on the Chatroulette .  Subsequently, they released a video on their YouTube channel showing the “best of” reactions of those watching the exorcism video. In the clip, a female begins gesturing to remove her clothing, when suddenly her eyes roll back and she screams into the camera before the screen goes black. Meanwhile, the viewer is expected to look at the reactions on the male’s faces – which show notable distress.

While the Chatroulette “social experiment” service is currently down, the videos were released as part of a marketing campaign to drum up excitement for the movie. However, this is not the first YouTube video in this movie’s marketing mix. A few weeks ago, a website called Church of Saint Marks appeared online with supposed “information” on exorcism. Meanwhile, the site actually featured one of the main characters from the movie, Reverend Cotton Marcus of the fictional Saint Marks Church.

Last night I was on Yelp checking out reviews of Spike Mendelsohn’ new Capital Hill pizza joint We, The Pizza (not good).  I have a Yelp account but wasn’t logged in, so noticed a clever way they are using Facebook’s API.  If you are not logged in to Yelp, you’ll see a note at the bottom of the page telling you how many of your Facebook friends are on Yelp and encouraging you to sign up. 

This is really smart.  Yelp is essentially a social network, so people are more likely to join and be active if their friends are already using the service.  Well done Yelp.

Far and away the largest presence in the current social media market, Facebook has decided to place it’s sizable hand into the growing area of location-based social media. 

With a thoroughly-blogged-and-tweeted press conference yesterday at their Palo Alto headquarters, Facebook unleashed the newest addition to their social media arsenal, Facebook Places. A service primarily based around showing your Facebook friends where you are and seeing their present locations, Facebook Places follows the massive recent growth of location-based social media services such as Foursquare and Gowalla. Facebook Places functions much like both of those applications, with “check-ins” and tips about nearby locations such as restaurants, shops and services.

The true question from the everyday user (and the media), is whether or not Facebook Places will turn out to be a premature nail-in-the-coffin for Foursquare and Gowalla. The deciding factor may be the new additions Facebook Places makes to the traditional location-based social media experience. For instance, with Facebook Places you could check-in somewhere and then tag the friends that are there as also checked-in. You could view a map of the surrounding area and which friends have checked in nearby. These new capabilities as well as the fact that more people use Facebook than any other social media outlet could mean that Facebook Places could soon dominate location-based applications.

Speaking of, where are Foursquare and Gowalla in all of this? As a matter of fact, they’re right in the middle of it. Facebook Places will totally integrate both services, so that if you already have more mayorships than you can keep track of in Foursquare or Trips you’ve always been meaning to take with Gowalla, they’ll be supported through Facebook Places.

Also, it looks like Facebook may be facing the same central issue as the other two main players in location-based social media: monetization. Although users are submitting mountains of data based around businesses, activities and places, the applications themselves aren’t making money. When asked about this, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg says the company is more focused on the application’s three core components: checking-in, finding your friends, and finding new places-and that they’ll have to “check-in” later about making money.

Increasingly at conferences, Twitter is a growing communication and interaction channel between speakers and attendees.  Conferences that effectively make these tweets an integral part of their proceedings better engage all participants, but doing so requires the use tools and applications that require web development know-how to set up. Fortunately, we have a free and easy tool for event organizers to use – SLURP 140!

SLURP 140 helps event organizers harness tweets about their events; it is a successor to our Twitterslurp tool that was used at both the Personal Democracy Forum and Digital Capital Week.  It provides the following services:

• Aggregation of tweets following up to five search terms
• Constantly refreshed tweet stream of all related tweets 
• Displays a leader board of your top tweeters based on their number of tweets and mentions by others
• Graphs that plot the amount of tweets by hour and day
• Opportunity for branding Slurp 140 with your event's logos and sponsors
• Access to an archive of all captured tweets (Twitter's archive currently only goes back four days)
• Additional metrics to further gauge influence and reach coming soon

SLURP 140 is a great addition to an event webpage and can be projected on screens at the event to better connect and engage tweeting participants.

Interested in using SLURP 140?  Contact us today.

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Continuing his bi-weekly appearance on the Digital Politics Radio show with Karen Jagoda, last Tuesday Gary and Karen discussed the use of Facebook and other online advertising in the upcoming midterm elections. A few highlights and the mp3 interview bellow. Next appearance: Tuesday, August 24th at 3:00pm EST.

The show’s discussion focused on two elections – one for Governor of California, and one for the Republican Senate nomination in Colorado. The campaigns all featured use of twitter and facebook, and only time will tell whether or not shrewd use of social media had a profound impact on either election.

 Karen and Gary also discussed the prevalence of online display ads – particularly the influence that those ads may or may not wield over voters. Like business marketing, it is easy to measure Cost Per Click or other standard advertising metrics; but what about the idea that greater exposure to an ad can lead to a different voting outcome? As Gary put it – online political advertising and polling “rarely makes back money when you do it”, but it increases the overall persuasion of the voting constituency. The impact is still there, it may just be harder to measure.  The same goes for with innovation – such as Meg Whitman’s polling ads on Facebook – you’re more likely to get free press online and in print for a new and creative ad than by sticking with the status quo.

 

Click below to play part 1 and part 2 of the August 10th, 2010 radio show:

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 A new DC News Site launched last Sunday– and the local social media scene has been abuzz with the innovation, social media outreach, and hyper local focus seen on the site. The pages of this online portal will function to aggregate news from all over the DC metro area and create a one-stop-shop for DC residents. TBD is owned by the same company that owns POLITICO, but its model of news delivery is decidedly different. The site seamlessly mergers the ‘old media’ video news from WJLA (Channel 7) and News Channel 8 with news reporting and blog posts.

Reaching Out to The Blogging Community

127 local blogs from across the Washington DC metropolitan area have joined together to contribute and publish content though the TBD portal. The neighborhood blog section features stories from TBD staff writers as well as those found on DC-area blogs.  In order to continuously improve their content, the site is also asking for reader feedback (and not just in the comments section). Yet the best part of the new site that if you input your zip code into a handy search bar, TBD will tailor content specifically for you.

In addition to engaging with users on numerous social media platforms, TBD also released several mobile phone applications –allowing readers to get their news on the go. The Bivings Report can assess with high confidence that this new website is an arbiter of great things to come as social media merges with traditional media formals on the web. It features a large amount of white space and is intuitively designed with the end users' experience in mind. 

TBD – much like the Bivings Group's Impact Watch   Aggregation of news and posts in the blogosphere is akin to ImpactWatch, a product produced by The Bivings Group. This tool analyzes the tone and content of very news and blog article in order to create a cohesive picture about the public's perception of a product or event.  ImpactWatch is continuously revolutionizing the aggregation of news and information about particular topics. Out staff of analysts and programmers is continuously innovating this product to better enhance our results and customer usability.   

Cross-posted from our Impact Watch Blog

ImpactWatch now displays a real-time feed of custom filtered tweets right on your dashboard.

Based on Slurp140 technology, the new Twitter stream updates automatically to display new tweets, a leaderboard of most frequent tweeters, and stats on your tweets over time.

Best of all, you can instantly reply to or retweet any mention right from your tweet stream!

The new Twitter tool complements ImpactWatch’s existing range of feed sources which includes print, online or broadcast news, and social media sources. Depending on your monitoring and measurement needs we can customize your platform with the sources that are important to you.

Graphs and statistics also update in real-time on the Dashboard page, so you can see the who, when and what of your Twitter coverage.

We have a lot of features on the way in the coming weeks, so keep an eye out for more. Sign up for a Demo Account now to check it out!

We are proud to announce that the Bivings Group has launched the completely redesigned financial education website, MyMoneyManagement.net. In terms of the technology behind the website, My Money Management is a Drupal based website that was designed, built and customized entirely in-house. We are also very excited to be consulting with MyMoneyManagement on their social media outreach.

Please take a moment to check out the site, and follow our progress building a social media presence on Facebook and Twitter.

The full press release from our friends at the Financial Services Roundtable is bellow and available on their very stylish new website. 

The Financial Services Roundtable Launches New Personal Finance Website
Mymoneymanagement.net offers consumers personal finance news, tools and financial literacy resources

WASHINGTON, DC, August 11, 2010 – The Financial Services Roundtable today launched My Money Management (www.mymoneymanagement.net), a new website that features the best tools and information from financial services companies, as well as resources on financial counseling and financial education programs.

“This information will help Americans manage their personal finances with new features like hands on financial literacy curriculum,” said Steve Bartlett, President and CEO for the Roundtable. “In this economic climate, it is especially important to present an accessible, streamlined site that delivers real solutions.”

The website features financial calculators, personal finance news, links to financial education programs, and the following:

• Consumers looking for help in creating a budget or managing debt can enter their zip code to find a trained and certified financial counselor near where they live or work
• Links to two Roundtable affiliates. Hope Now which helps homeowners avoid foreclosure and ITAC, the Identity Theft Assistance Center which helps consumers prevent and recover from identity theft
• MyMoneyManagement links consumers to www.annualcreditreport.com where they can request free annual credit reports
• Real life stories of individuals dealing with financial crisis and the people and organizations that help them

My Money Management will use social media to reach consumers looking for help with specific issues such as managing debt as well as access to comprehensive financial education resources. “Customer-focused companies know they need to be where their customers, and future customers are both online and in the community,” said Anne Wallace, editorial director of My Money Management.  “Our members and partners have an abundance of information on how people can achieve their goals.  Our job is sharing it as far and wide as we can.”

“Financial education is necessary for the financial empowerment of all Americans,” said Judy Chapa, Vice President of Community Services at the Roundtable.  “My Money Management will feature many innovative financial education programs that the Roundtable member companies have developed and implemented in the communities that they serve.”

In addition to My Money Management, the Roundtable’s consumer affiliates include HOPE NOW, which helps homeowners avoid foreclosure, and ITAC, the Identity Theft Assistance Center which helps consumers avoid and recover from identity fraud.

The Financial Services Roundtable represents 100 of the largest integrated financial services companies providing banking, insurance, and investment products and services to the American consumer.  Roundtable member companies provide fuel for America’s economic engine, accounting directly for $74.7 trillion in managed assets, $1.1 trillion in revenue, and 2.3 million jobs.

 

I gave the new www.gop.com a mixed review when the RNC first re-launched the site in October 2009.  A few days ago the RNC launched a new version of their flagship site, so I figured I’d take a fresh look at it.  Overall, I think it is a nice improvement, although naturally I find a few things to pick apart.  Following is the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of the redesign.

The Good

(1) The use of space on the homepage for top stories/headlines is much more logical and cleaner than the previous site.  I particularly like that they removed the giant Facebook fan box that took up way, way too much real estate for a questionable payoff in the old design.

(2) Under the prior navigation structure, there were an overwhelming number of drop down options, which I suspect lead visitors to be confused as to where to go.  The options now are much clearer, and I like the use of primary and secondary navigation elements.

(3) In the previous iteration, users had to click a button in order to sign up for email alerts.  I wrote at the time:

“The main call for users to sign up for email updates is hidden behind a click.  While I appreciate this as a user who is already on their list, as someone who builds sites for a living I would never want a user to have to click more than once to give me their email.  I’m a firmly believer in making the sign up process as simple as possible.”

This has been fixed and you can now sign up without a click.

(4) I like the little take action option that appears on the left side of the page, mostly because it is different.  I do vaguely worry that it is a little too cute and that some users will simply not see it.

 

(5) I like the idea of having a list of Trending headlines on the homepage.  However, I wonder if these items are handpicked or chosen based on an algorithm given the content featured (links to YouTube videos, external sites, etc.). 

(6) The Volunteer Match tool looks really interesting.  Curious as to whether it works.

The Bad

(1) The Issues section needlessly uses Flash – I presume in a misguided effort to mimic iTunes Coverflow.  It is really clunky, and I think a more traditional presentation would have been much more effective and helped with SEO.  They over though that section. 

(2) The Blog section is also a little too cute.  The RNC has nine different blogs, and in an effort to highlight all of them they developed a layout that is a bit overwhelming.  I think they would be better served aggregating the latest entries and presenting them in a format that actually looks like a blog (basically one blog stream).  A presentation like GigaOm would have been much more effective.  As it is now everything is too compartmentalized.

(3) The RNC’s social network, Our GOP, continues to strike me as not very user friendly and not up the standards of the rest of the site design wise.  It also doesn’t look to have gotten great traction, with around 10,800 users according to this page. 

(4) It has been almost a year since the launch of the original site, and the design didn’t change much until today.  I think the RNC should be iterating and improving constantly instead of holding back from these big release once a year.

The Ugly

(1) The new site allows you to change the background color from red to anything you want using a color picker.  This allowed me to change the background to a sort of fushia/purple and add a pattern.  The result of my artistic expression is below.

This strikes me as silly.  It is the sort of thing that seemed cool back in 2002.   Plus it isn’t implemented very well.  If you change your color, the original color will flash briefly every time you navigate to a new page.

More importantly, if I’m the RNC I’d want to control my brand and present the site as the designers intended.  Team Obama certainly wouldn’t have let me change www.barackobama.com to fuschia.

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In the past few days, political media outlets have been abuzz with the news that Gowalla, a location based social networking service, has teamed up with politicians to create politically-themed stamps. Subsequently, Gowalla users are now able to see when politicians check-in at political rallies, fundraising dinners, and town hall meetings. With midterm elections just around the corner, this move aims to make candidates more accessible to their tech-savvy constituency.

 The new move to use GPS-centered online networking is innovative – with less than 10% of smartphone users using applications such as Gowalla and Foursquare. Politicans home to utilize Gowalla as a way to connect with voters while allowing the social network’s users to collect limited-edition campaign-themed  stamps for their virtual passports. Likewise, this continue integrating and connecting with other forms of social media, such as Twitter and Facebook. 

Many experts are saying that these forays into social media may portend a greater amount of user interaction during the 2012 presidential campaign season. But with only three months left until the next midterm elections, only time will tell how social media will continue to be used by political candidates.

 

 

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