If your organization still believes that the only way to reach mass audiences is through traditional, mainstream media, then think again. Citizen journalists - those scrappy individualists who contribute articles, camera phone pictures, and new ideas to their community - are more than a trend. They are an evolution of the media landscape.

And just to bring home the point, the Knight News Challenge is offering $5 million dollars “for innovative ideas using digital experiments to transform community news.”

“The Foundation plans to invest at least $25 million over five years in the search for bold community news experiments.”

Has anyone handed your local newspaper $25 million to experiment with journalism in your community? I didn’t think so.

Citizen Journalists. Professional firms, political campaigns, and non-profits had best get to know them.

With the bounty of e-newsletters that fill our inboxes every day, it’s easy to overlook them. It’s also easy to hate them. But rarely do we take the time to forward them to clients or friends who may be interested in the topic presented. Before forwarding, however, take a moment to delete the unsubscribe link from the bottom. We’ve seen all too many clients of our own who have lost valuable subscribers after the subscriber forwarded their e-mail on to someone else, only to have that person click the Unsubscribe link.

So while it’s a great practice to forward e-newsletters just to let people know you are thinking about them, be sure they don’t get the chance to cut you off from those subscriptions you do enjoy.

McKinsey Quarterly has published a terrific survey of companies around the globe and how they are using digital marketing.

“A McKinsey survey of marketing executives from around the world shows that in marketing, things are starting to change: companies are moving online across the spectrum of marketing activities, from building awareness to after-sales service, and they see online tools as an important and effective component of their marketing strategies.”

Read the article here (registration requred). We’ll have more insights based on their survey results and our own experiences soon, but suffice it to say, digital marketing has come of age as an important strategy, it’s just a matter of keeping professionals up-to-date on the changes.

We have so many political clients, that I couldn’t help but post this rather unusual tidbit.

Politics may not take a brain surgeon, but analyzing why people are conservative or liberal takes neuroscience.

According to a study released Sunday that actually compared the brainwaves of conservatives and liberals, “Conservatives tend to crave order and structure in their lives, and are more consistent in the way they make decisions. Liberals, by contrast, show a higher tolerance for ambiguity and complexity, and adapt more easily to unexpected circumstances.”

The study goes on to suggest that:

“Whether that is good or bad, of course, depends on one’s perspective: one could interpret the results to mean that liberals are nimble-minded and conservatives rigid and stubborn.

“Or one could, with equal justice, conclude that wishy-washy liberals don’t stick to their guns, while conservatives and steadfast and loyal.”

I’m really excited to announce the launch of a new portfolio feature, Flat Creek Stories (found here), on our main website. We called it Flat Creek Stories because the results of the creative, strategic services we offer are more than a portfolio. They are our stories, and help tell the stories of our clients.

We’ve had the opportunity to bring to life many exciting stories over the last few years. From the classic stories of swanky Washington, DC events to heartfelt tales of championing a cause, Flat Creek has a few memoirs from integrating the marketing capabilities that today’s professional firm needs.

There’s only a few to start, but we’ll add more soon. I realize it’s not the flashy-est portfolio around, but it tells about what we do and why we do it. And at the end of the day, I believe helping our clients tell their stories is what we do best.

This is last minute notice, but I’ve been asked by M.E. Sprengelmeyer of the Rocky Mountain News to join an online panel of debate analysts tonight for the Fox News presidential campaign. You can join in the fun here.

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.

The Wall Street Journal published an article a few days ago about the pros and cons of blogging for small businesses. The pluses can be counted in new clients, new business and an increased profile in one’s professional community. The downside is most definitely the time-consuming writing that regular blogging takes.

I’ve found that there are blogs out there by consultants and strategists who are paid to attend conferences, write books, and blog about a given topic day in and day out. It is what they do for a full time living, much like print journalists must write their stories or TV journalists must produce their reports. Their business is, in a lot of ways, their blog.

For those of us who have more of a business than a blog, blogging multiple times a day to keep up with the pros is an impossible goal. Focusing on a more realistic goal — one post a day — is a fair target for busy professionals engaged in client service and workload management. While visitors to your site want to see new, fresh content, they also don’t want to see meaningless posts. They want to see that you are proactive, knowledgeable, and able to help them face their challenges.

For political candidates, my advice would be the same. Your campaign blog is an important tool to communicate with your target audiences and should be updated accordingly with news, pictures and links pertaining to your candidacy. But it should not be the centerpiece of your communications strategy. Blogs (and associated tools such as podcasts, vidcasts and microblogs) are tools to be used as part of an overall outreach strategy and resources should be allocated to them as such.

Is blogging worth it? If you have something to contribute to the marketplace of ideas, then you have something to contribute to the blogosphere. It’s just a matter of taking the time to share your perspective with a world of potential clients.

Those of us in marketing communications hate to see a perfectly good organization hand over their website to IT. It’s clearly a recipie for disaster.

But, what if they hand it over to marketing? Who owns it - marketing proper or PR specifically? Should IT still have a voice in this conversation?

Fundamentally, as far as we’ve moved in terms of corporate branding online, we have not reconciled the fundamentally different disciplines which are needed to really make “new media” work. It takes marketing, PR, IT and others (not to mention buy-in from management) to collectively work together to really make a project successful. But we haven’t merged those people effectively. More on that soon…

A lot of these thoughts are the result of something said this weekend at BarCamp Nashville by Chris Houchens, who writes a blog called Shotgun Marketing. While talking about social media (Facebook, MySpace, etc etc) in the context of corporate marketing he said, “It’s about reaching the audience that has already identified itself as your audience; it’s not about sales.”

His premise raises a much deeper question than how corporations should approach corporate marketing. It’s often a given that internally, marketing should own managing the online experience. But is that so? If the online experience is not about sales, then fundamentally it’s not a marketing function. Marketing is all about sales! So social media seems to fit in a different category, such as PR. Or are we back to IT?

Should it be that way? Who owns online?

There’s a lot of energy here in the room as BarCamp Nashville gets under way at the Exit/In on Elliston Place. There are a lot of good, grassroots speakers lined up today. It’s not about large corporate sponsors, but several great Nashville new media companies have pitched in to make the event possible.

There’s a lot of interactive tools for the “un-conference” today, including Twitter and a chat room.

Kudos to Marcus and Dave for having the vision to bring BarCamp to Nashville! Look forward to posting more insights and feedback later.