Municipalist

Warn your daughters: Bill Clinton is blogging. Sort of. Or not.

We actually advocated for this awhile ago. Be careful what you wish for. Then again, it appears that in the short piece posted on the new Daily Beast, Clinton may be just responding to a request for what he is reading. But he is included as part of the DB's Buzz Board, sort of a group blog of various mostly lefty pseudo-intellectuals. For William J., a perfect description.

The Wall Street Meltdown comes home

Someone I know last week received some very disturbing news in a phone call from his financial advisor: A significant pile of your assets are frozen, per a judge's order. The New York Times has the larger tale here. At issue in this case is the behavior of an especially slick pack of wolves who run The Reserve Fund Management Company, a group credited with creating the money market fund vehicle in the 1970s, thought to be a very safe investment. No more. A lawsuit by Ameriprise "asserts that the Reserve Fund more than doubled its stake in commercial paper issued by Lehman Holdings last spring, after the investment bank 'was widely considered to be the next victim of the ongoing banking crisis,' " the Times reports. It also claims that the Reserve Fund tipped some big customers about its crisis in advance so that they could cash out before its losses became public, reports the Wall Street Journal law blog. [The suit itself is here.]

This interests Municipalist as we take note of a piece today in the New York Times Magazine which mocks the idiot Web sites operated by these investmant banks, which offered zero clues on the state of the world to investors:

Even as they were sick, dying or dead, their Web sites had a chipper, customer-service vibe. They were still babbling about helping me realize my dreams ... It was a missed opportunity. After all, it might have been an excellent time to shore up the confidence of those who wondered what American banks were up to, if not protecting our money. But the banks were sticking with their goofy bravado.

Tying these two tales together: Investors simply lack adequate information from the people who are running their money. Period. Does Congress's bailout address this? Note to business reporters out there: Investment company Web sites are deceitful at worst, lazy and simply inadequate operations at best. The Reserve Fund scandal has slid under the radar in the last week. But this is a local story, in probably every community in America. These people hustled and lied and no matter what happens, they have hurt people. As my friend waits to be 'unfrozen.' 

How many blogs named Fast Lane can you name?

First there was GM's highly-rated FastLane Blog. Then there was the National Science Foundation site called FastLane, " ... an interactive real-time system used to conduct NSF business over the Internet." Finally, we have The Fast Lane, the official blog from the U.S. Secretary of Transportation.

In the interest of increasing our traffic, we have decided to follow this strategy, and will soon be changing the name of this blog to MyBarackObama.com. Or maybe WeLoveSarahPalin.com. Or WhiteHouse.gov. Or DrudgeReport.com. Let us know which one you like.

Hacking Sarah Palin's email account

More proof that WikiMedia is somehow a partisan, anti-Republican organization? No! It turns out that WikiLeaks, the publisher of the emails stolen from Alask Gov. Sarah Palin has nothing at all to do with WikiPedia, at least according to this. The WikiLeaks Web site is down, as of this moment, but screen shots from Palin's stolen emails are plentiful across the Web. Be our guest. We look forward to the quick condemnation of this from the National Governors Association. Hmmm. Nothing up on the NGA site about this yet. Shocking. Here is Yahoo's corporate blog on this, except Yahoo does not mention Palin by name. One theory we have yet to hear on the biased coverage of this: That somebody within Yahoo leaked Palin's sign-in info. Why do we think this should be considered? Find a McCain-Palin supporter who works for Yahoo. Win a prize.

Also: Here is a stunningly fair and bipartisan site that tracks down the truth about Internet rumors, on Palin and on all players in the presidential campaign. FactCheck.org is a project of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania.

Q & A: Sunlight Foundation's Gabriela Schneider

Did you know: When a member of Congress embeds a YouTube video (even if it’s of a committee hearing) on the member's site, the member is violating current rules? One organization doing its best to not only oppose but change such restrictions is Sunlight Foundation. "Until Sunlight’s founding, there was no organization fully committed to enhancing the electronic disclosure of congressional activity on the Internet, and thus, engage citizens in an effective dialog with their members of Congress," says Sunlight spokeswoman Gabriela Schneider. Municipalist tracked down Gabriela to learn more about a Sunlight initiative called Let Our Congress Tweet. But we asked about the organization's other initiatives and its history too:

What is Let Our Congress Tweet? What has been its impact? We launched the first Twitter-based petition to Congress (about Twitter, no less) — Let Our Congress Tweet — to galvanize burgeoning support for updating congressional rules that affect how lawmakers can use the Internet to interact with citizens. Since early 2007, we had been actively advocating Congress to update those esoteric “franking rules” through our Open House Project, but as you can imagine, that wasn’t exactly a hot issue that Congress was advancing at full speed. (See our initial recommendations, delivered to Congress on May 8, 2007.)

However, once a new proposal started being circulated to update the franking [mail] rules that stirred some controversy (in part because of a proposal to create a ‘white list’ of pre-approved sites that members of Congress could use), we jumped at the opportunity of such an educational moment and created Let Our Congress Tweet.

We want to draw attention to the need to modernize the rules and give staffers and lawmakers clear guidance as to what they can and cannot do — the current rules are vague and definitely need updating. For instance, when a member of Congress embeds a YouTube video (even if it’s of a committee hearing) on her Web site, she is violating current rules. We thought, a) that’s pretty ridiculous; b) Congress is in the process of reconsidering the restrictions placed on their Internet use; c) people are paying attention and care about updating these outmoded rules, so let’s give them a fun new platform to tell Congress to "embrace the communication technologies that we already use" like Twitter, YouTube, Facebook and MySpace.

What is the brief history of Sunlight Foundation? When Sunlight co-founder and chairman Michael Klein, a retired Washington lawyer and business entrepreneur, was planning his post-retirement, ‘giving back’ years, he knew he wanted to support work to catalyze the cause of government transparency to clean up Washington. (This was in the wake of the Abramoff scandal.) He began researching how to support more investigative work that would probe more into congressional activities, which connected him with Sunlight co-founder and executive director Ellen Miller, a longtime advocate for disclosure of campaign finances who founded two prominent Washington-based organizations in the field of money and politics -- the Center for Responsive Politics and Public Campaign.

The social media rush is on

Here are 35 examples of corporate use of social media.

Hat tip: Debbie Weil, who recently linked to Municipalist from her bookmarks at del.icio.us.

Local government agencies make the call: Join the discussion, or try to co-opt it?

Here is one probably typical method by which local government agencies are trying to gain credibility in the social media world: by buying it.

A communications firm contracted by the city of Baltimore's transportation department is trying to buy positive coverage from small newspapers and bloggers for its initiatives. Columnist Laura Vozzella of the Baltimore Sun has the goods:

The city of Baltimore has offered free trips to Portland, Ore., Los Angeles, Phoenix and Seattle to reporters willing to write positive stories about public transit projects there.

"The city wants a total of 4 freelance journalists and/or bloggers (one person per trip) to accompany them on an expense-paid trip (air fare, hotel and meals) in exchange for positive stories in local newspapers or blogs about the transit tours before, during and after," wrote Sandra L. Harley, president of Sahara Communications, a city subcontractor.

For journalists, this is an ethics breach. So the loss of credibility here is immediate. But governmental agencies of all sizes try to influence coverage every day. With likely more than a few resorting to such old-school tactics. They do this instead of finding ways to join the discussion directly. So right away we know this communications contractor is poorly serving its client. The constituency online in support of public transportation is vast. To what extent is the Baltimore Department of Transportation making an attempt to reach it? Do it this way: Participate directly. And stop trying to co-opt it.

SEC: Corporate blogs now meet our standard for disclosing company financial info

With a headline that long, who needs to read the post? TechCrunch tells the tale in detail. TC's hope: "Can we now kill the press release?"

Here is the Security and Exchange Commission's statement.

Now we need to get the SEC's site itself to become more Web 2.0 savvy. Suggestions?

More on why corporate blogs fail

Among the valuable comments here following the Wall Street Journal's Business Technology blog post on the recent Forrester report on the sorry state of business-to-business blogging:

• I maintain and manage what I’ll call a “pr dispersal site” for a Fortune 500 company, and all efforts to “spice it up” with engaging content and an honest voice have been met with shrieks of terror from PR, marketing, corporate HQ, and the vast sea of go-betweens.
• ... A blog isn’t a pulpit, it’s a conversation. B2B marketers need to step back, understand this newer medium, and craft new strategies for successful implementation. Applying strategies from other media to the blog is like trying to induce a car to go using a buggy whip.
• Successful blogs have three things in common. 1) Personality. 2) They offer information that is valuable and/or entertaining to readers. 3) Time and resources are invested; Postings are not an afterthought. Most corporate blogs have none of the above. Like anything else, you get what you put into it.
• Most corporate blogs are strangled at birth by having to go through the legal department post by post.

Or, there is another explanation, however painful. And that is that blogging for the most part is a Gen. X/Y thing, and as long as the Boomers and their previous-century business practices remain in place, blogs will not have any real impact on how corporations -- and the public sector -- do business.

Business-to-business blogging: Learning how not to do it

For the mere cost of $379 (about what I pay to gas up the mini van), you too can own this crisp, clean new report from Forrrester Research, showing how "B2B" blogging is not what many first generation users thought it was. Is. Whatever. The report checks out 90 blogs run by Fortune 500 companies. If you can't spare the cash for the PDF, you can read about it here in this Wall Street Journal blog [helpfully titled "Business Technology."] That blog headlines its post on the Forrester Report: "Most Corporate Blogs are Unimaginative Failures." Yeah? Tell us what you really think next time.

From the report, an example of a good B2B blog: the blog by Jonathan Schwartz, CEO of Sun Microsystems. Helpfully called "Jonathan's Blog."

All of this stuff is important to public sector bloggers for many reasons, including the focus here on measuring impact. More on these issues in the days ahead.

Great comments following the WSJ post. More coverage at Content Nation and The Science of Marketing.

Wachovia: Big commitment to Web 2.0

Good post here by Ann All at IT Business Edge linking the federal government intelligence community's Intellipedia to such private sector internal Web 2.0 efforts such as the recent major commitment by Wachovia. Her crucial topic: cultural resistance. From an IT manager at Novell:

Make sure you are not just giving people a tool to use and saying, “Go use it.” Set them up to use it successfully. You need to lead people to use it slowly over time.

More about Wachovia's Web 2.0 venture here.