According to the New York Times, Twitter and LinkedIn have agreed to a partnership that will allow LinkedIn users to bring their tweets to the popular professional social network.

Adding Twitter updates to LinkedIn makes the site more dynamic and is a good move for both companies. For political and advocacy organizations, this is important because it will give LinkedIn a more prominent role as an aggregator and channel to reach potential donors. According to the NYT article:

LinkedIn’s 51 million members will now be able to send status updates — such as the fact that they are looking for an analyst on a certain topic, or posting a job opening — to Twitter on a case-by-case basis, and vice versa. People will also be able to add a section to their LinkedIn profile that contains their most recent tweets and view other people’s tweets when searching LinkedIn.

Jeff Weiner, LinkedIn’s chief executive, said that he wants LinkedIn to be the hub for all professional conversation. Integrating tweets into LinkedIn will help them find a home where they will become part of someone’s professional identity, and conversations will develop around them, he said.

Read the full piece here.

There are a lot of naysayers out there who don’t think it makes sense to use new media when you are targeting an older audience (ahem, campaign folk – I’m talking to you).

Well, the AARP might make us think again.

Few to none have been better at marketing to a senior (or as my mother would remind me, “mature”) audience than the AARP. They sell many services to that audience and have a fairly sizeable presence on Captiol Hill. They know this audience, so when they take a new strategic initiative, it’s worth taking a look.

From Ragan.com:

The nonprofit launched daily news site AARP Bulletin Today and redesigned its Web site last spring (the site came out of beta testing in September) to include Web 2.0 features to prepare for what it expects will be an exponentially growing user base, Clark says Nataki Clarke, director of online marketing.

“I think social networking is helping us demonstrate that we can be very relevant,” says Clarke, who had the numbers to back her up. “We ended August with 2.7 million unique visitors. Last August, we were at 1.9 million. That means almost a million people have discovered us in just a year,” she says.

Last Friday, Republican Members of Congress launched a firestorm over high gas prices, and they haven’t looked back since.

To fuel the fire, my good friend Eric Odom and I quickly saw the brouhaha brewing on Twitter – mostly under the vigilance of Katie Harbath, Media Lizzy, and others — and started using the hashtag “#dontgo” as a way to label posts about the conversation. Others quickly joined in, and before long we had the makings of a movement. Within an hour I had fired up WordPress and launched a new site, http://dontgo.us. By adding an RSS aggregator on the homepage and a petition post on an inside page, we were able to provide a platform for the conversation, even for people who aren’t active on Twitter.

Meanwhile, Congressman John Culberson demonstrated the reach of new media when he began broadcasting the House post-session session via his Qik channel. For those of you unfamiliar with the technology, Qik lets users broadcast live streaming video via their cell phone. Despite the Congressional blackout, Culberson was able to broadcast every word to a hungry online audience.

Robert Bluey rushed over to the Capitol and began live tweeting the event, as did Congressman Pete Hoekstra.

We still need your help

The #dontgo movement has really started to grow. Rep. Eric Cantor has launched a petition site at www.callbackcongress.com that now has over 5,000 signatures. Although responsibilities here at Flat Creek have pulled me back to work, Eric has faithfully kept http://dontgo.us updated with breaking news and links to relevant sites and is on the verge of launching a massively cool site at http://dontgomovement.com.

This really is a case study in how like-minded people who don’t even know they’re working on the same thing can converge to create something bigger than themselves. It really speaks to the nature of viral communications. There was no strategic plan, no unifying message grid, and no conference call to coordinate the whole endeavor. But people with the same passion, who had the tools at their disposal, were able to move into action quickly. Will the House reconvene? It’s not likely, but thanks to new media, more people are aware of the need for energy independence.

So if you haven’t yet, go sign the petitions at http://dontgo.us and at www.callbackcongress.com. And stay tuned. One exciting thing about viral events is their unpredictability. No one knows where this will go next, we can only hope to continue to bring attention to an important issue and make more people aware of the power of new media.

Just catching up on news feeds and came across a great post by Seth Godin about the “Nearly infinite” options online.

“…infinite is everywhere.

“There’s an infinite number of books at Barnes and Noble…

“There’s certainly, for all intents and purposes, an infinite number of web pages. And even Facebook, just a small subset of the web, has an infinite number of friends for you to make.”

This is a trend we’ve talked about before, and the answers aren’t easy. As the blogosphere began to take off prior to the 2004 election, becoming a promintent blogger was pretty straightforward – blog a lot, build an audience, and contribute to the conversation. Today, Technorati tracks over 112.8 million blogs, a literal infinity to anyone who might attempt to read them all.

So with the established trend of nearly infinite material online, there are two ways to try to find what you want. Seth Godin discusses the pros and cons of the first, which is search:

“Search makes the infinite finite (at least for a while). With search, we turn the infinite selection on Amazon into a nearly manageable finite selection. Except search (no matter where you look) is pretty lame, and it doesn’t really turn infinite collections into manageable choices.”

The other trend is aggregation. Large communities have formed around blogs that have taken the best of what they read and then put up links to their favorite slice of the blogosphere. For a reader daunted by the infinite options to read, such aggregator serves a very important role.

For a blogger, authority (and traffic) can come through the simple act of directing readers to other blogs. By taking on this function, the aggregator becomes a hub of traffic and influence. Once other bloggers begin to see traffic spikes from a noteworth link from the aggregator, they might begin to write for the aggregator.

This concept is not new. It’s the same concept as a magazine’s “Best of” issue or a summer reading list. It’s why we watch award shows. By going to that one place, we get to see what we want, as chosen by someone whom we respect.

But aggregation suffers from the same problem as the original content itself. If there is nearly an infinite number of blogs out there, mathmatically, there also could be a nearly infinite number of aggregators. In the face of this possibility, it seems then that the online properties best poised to capture this trend of aggregation are the very properties who have taken a leadership role in the current blogosphere. Only if they fail to adapt to this new trend of user-generated content will they be able to keep their leadership. The one exception I would make here are old media newspapers going online. If these papers would be willing to add links to their favorite blog posts alongside their own articles (beyond the current “who links here” footnote), their traffic would increase dramatically. People who get their news online read blogs, and if newspapers refuse to link to blogs via their own websites, they are missing a huge opportunity for eyeballs and ad revenue.

For the political campaign, capitalizing on this trend isn’t hard. Hillary Clinton’s campaign did it with their Hillary Hub. By aggregating all of the stories about their candidate — at least the positive ones — the Clinton campaign made their site a de facto source for information. Campaigns will often resist putting information online because they believe it provides “opposition research” to their opponents. I have news for you — your oppenents already have all the research they need. Instead, there are two audiences a Hillary Hub attracts: supporters and undecideds. And who doesn’t want to reach them?

So as talk of Web 3.0 builds, and the search mechanisms that will accompany it, aggregation needs to be a key part of the conversation as an evolving trend in online communications.

If you need advanced notice that the internet’s importance will continue to grow in campaigning, here it is. AdAge, the well-known magazine that reports analysis of marketing and media, completed a study that found the internet has passed TV as an information source for voters under 30.

While many political strategists dismiss youth vote trends, due in large part to their historically low turnout, those young voters will carry the internet with them over the years. Not only that, but as with other studies on Internet usage, the Web moves quickly across age brackets.

For instance, AdAge reports that 26% of all voters — regardless of age — have viewed a political candidate’s profile on a social networking site. This is an indication that the trend is already expanding beyond the 30 and under crowd. The need for a strong web presence may be a lesson that becomes more clear in coming election cycles.

Raise your hand if you have a Facebook and/or MySpace profile. Anyone here on LinkedIn? Have you ever commented on a blog?

If so, you’re part of a changing dynamic in how we communicate that very few PR professionals understand. At Flat Creek, we work to integrate communications messages across various channels, insisting that our clients focus on delivering an outstanding service or product as the basis for a good reputation. The product, the audience, and the goal are what matter most from a PR perspective.

Richard Edelman, the well-regarded president and CEO of the global PR firm which goes by his name, shares this sentiment in a recent post about how corporations must adapt their communications efforts in order to maintain some sort of brand integrity. His full post can be found here, but I’ve listed a few notable lines below:

“My central thesis is that corporations can’t buy reputation or brand loyalty any more. These are earned through performance over the long-term.”

“In this changed environment, I believe that PR can adapt as well as, if not faster, than any other communications discipline… Our aim is to educate when possible, build bridges when necessary, and respect the new market-based conversations always.”

“The new reality for communications is the sphere of cross reference, in which information moves unpredictably among equal stakeholders. Conversations now occur spontaneously, in peer-to-peer discussion, with individuals creating their own webs of trust including people like themselves.”

KEY NOTE: “PR is simply a reflection of reality, well presented perhaps but based on fact and behavior.”

National Journal has a great article today about a new process for drafting legislation:

“The standard method for writing a bill would have had [Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Ill.] and his aides calling in consumer groups, telecommunications lobbyists, and technology experts to hash out the details. Instead, Durbin reached out to the editors of two online political blogs so that he could hear directly from their readers.”

While the article (found here) is an interesting anecdote about the impact of the Internet on Capitol Hill, there are several deeper questions that come to mind from my perspective as a digital PR practitioner. How did Durbin and his staff decide which blogs to reach out to? Who was posting comments to his posts? Did any organizations with a stake in rural broadband access get wind of his efforts and e-mail their supporters to get involved with the conversation?

If Members of Congress are reaching out to Internet users directly, how is your organization positioned to have a prominent voice in the virtual policy debates of the future?

There are several options, most of which begin with active monitoring of the blogosphere and having the ability to mobilize supporters quickly. Contact us and we can talk more about positioning your clients, organization, or message in order to be a part of the online legislative process.

We’ve seen a lot of well-intentioned but, shall we say, poorly executed blogs out there. Just because you and your organization decide to begin blogging doesn’t necessarily mean you’re doing it well. While there are general rules on what makes a good blog, here are a few tips from Blogging for Business on what NOT to do with your blog:

1) Don’t stay on topic!

2) Be insular.

3) Write like traditional writing, not speaking.

4) Don’t let us know who you are!

5) Lots of colors, dozens of fonts, flashing lights, autoplay audio.

They elaborate quite a bit on each point on their entertaining and educational post. Read the rest here.