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World View
How Webcasting Helps Exclusive Conferences Be More Inclusive
For four days last month, Bill Clinton convened an elite group of heads of state, business leaders and celebrity activists for the annual meeting of his Clinton Global Initiative (CGI). Each year CGI picks a theme, and the focus of this year's gathering was the empowerment of women and girls in developing countries. The impact of the gathering was considerable,...
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Media Usage
The Importance and Challenges of Universal Media Literacy Education
Elizabeth Thoman, the godmother of the "media literacy" movement recently told me that the Internet has endowed her field with a sense of salience, if not urgency. "As long as media literacy education was about television, it was perceived to be fluff," she said. "But when the Internet came along, kids didn't know how to cite sources online, and they...
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PoliticalShift
The Highs (and Lows) of Public Officials on Twitter
Are high profile public officials using Twitter as a noble tool to bypass the proverbial "mainstream media filter" and communicate directly with constituencies? Or do they just see it as yet one more wall in the online echo chamber, something merely to influence and/or amplify mainstream media stories? The answer probably lies somewhere in between as I found from examining...
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World View
How Will Iranian Protests Change Twitter?
There's been much ado about Twitter's role in the political protests in Iran, and for good reason. With the Iranian government expelling foreign journalists, outlets like CNN scrambled to uncover sources where they could. They found these sources among the din of unverifiable messages surfacing on Twitter. It's been fun reading mainstream media accounts of how Twitter is, in a...
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Public Relations
Issue Advocacy on the Internet, Part 2
On May 7, I published an introduction to issue advocacy on the Internet, which looked at three opportunities and three challenges to communicators who hope to take their advocacy campaign online. Online content, I pointed out, is interactive (as opposed to merely informational), syndicatable (as opposed to confined or static) and permanent (as opposed to fleeting or disposable). These three...
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Public Relations
Issue Advocacy on the Internet, Part 1
The Internet has been alternately characterized as participatory, conversational, and collaborative. By empowering its users to create (not just consume) content, it is by design a more democratic medium than any other. There has been plenty of discussion about how, by giving everyone a public voice, the Internet is upending conventional power dynamics and enabling a new generation of opinion...
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Public Relations
Amazon's Fail: Not Using Social Media to React to #AmazonFail Meme
In what some initially speculated to be a homophobic new expurgation policy, Amazon.com removed hundreds of gay and lesbian themed books from its sales rating system, effectively concealing these books from online shoppers. Some titles were completely delisted from Amazon's search engine. The controversy may never have provoked such widespread media attention -- or an official company response -- if...
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Public Relations
PR People Must Heed Digital Reality as Newspapers Fold
Last Wednesday morning, as the sun rose over the West Coast, newspaper delivery people in Seattle dropped off the final edition of the Post Intelligencer, one of Seattle's two daily newspapers. The struggling P-I was 145 years old and, by coincidence, 145 newsroom employees were left without jobs. Hearst, which owns the news organization, announced that it will retain 20...
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PoliticalShift
Public Diplomacy in the Digital Age, Part 2
We're a nation at war. At war not with another nation, but with a hateful ideology violently expressed: terrorism. Every militaristic move a terrorist makes is designed to intimidate, frustrate, agitate....in short, communicate. Physical destruction and loss of life, crass as it sounds, are means to those ends. In this sense, the war of ideas is no longer a metaphor or a figure of speech -- it's a literal war in which we now find ourselves. And in a war of ideas, public diplomacy will be an important tool in our national security toolkit.
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Public Relations
Public Diplomacy in the Digital Age, Part 1
"What is public diplomacy?" was the first question that Ted Koppel posed at the recent Media as a Global Diplomat conference attended largely by public diplomacy professionals. I was surprised that the panelists, including the outgoing Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy & Public Affairs, couldn't readily agree on an answer to this foundational question. Koppel continued, "I thought [public...
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Public Relations
In Hudson River Landing, PR Pros Were Not First Responders
In times of crisis, communications professionals have an important -- and increasingly complicated -- role to play. We used to be the first to offer public responses to catastrophes, able to develop elucidating messages before much of the news media was on the scene. Nowadays, the type of media that will report on a crisis is often as unforeseen as...
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PoliticalShift
Obama, Congress Enlist 'Direct to Constituent' Communications
Professional communicators are paying close attention to the rise of "direct to consumer" (DTC) communications. This is a phenomenon largely enabled by the rapid proliferation and adoption of online technologies, whereby organizations can communicate directly to the public without filters or mediation from the press. Corporate blogs or advocacy groups' online "action alerts" are just a couple examples. As a...
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MarketingShift
Transparency as a PR Principle, Not a Tactic
We used to say in my profession -- public relations -- that you shouldn't say or write anything that you wouldn't want to turn up on the front page of the New York Times. Now what I like to tell clients instead is: You shouldn't say or write anything that you wouldn't want to turn up in Google search results....
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