Katya Andresen of Robin Hood Marketing fame found from the Ogilvy PR folks an interesting rundown of ways to court bloggers for marketing pitches.

In a previous incarnation, I blogged on politics with some regularity and enjoyed a brief period in the sun, when attention from other bloggers drove our site to the top of one of the many dissonant lists of blogger achievement. It was during this short period of time that me and my co-editor were asked to review two books by the PR firm of a publishing house. One was Jon Lee Anderson's wonderful "Enemy at the Gates" about the fall of Baghdad. The other was Sebastian Mallaby's book about Jim Wolfenson, "The World's Banker." The PR person sounded young and enthusiastic and really wanted us to review the books, but the truth is the selections were a bad match. Neither book was directly related to the general civil liberties/righteous screed theme of our blog, and Mallaby's book was something of a drag, considering my opinion of the World Bank at the time (evil, soul-crushing enemy of the people) and even now (gigantic, blinkered, ineffective, bloated fount of doublespeak and inaction).

These seven tips are good advice for PR people and anyone working with bloggers to highlight their issues. I'm looking for another item I found about how to start and run a blog that is a handy companion for these tips. I'll post them when I track them down.

Posted by Tarek Rizk at 3:19 PM | Permalink

Scanning around the foreign policy blogosphere over the last few days has been illuminating and disturbing at the same time. Leave the niche blogs serving issues you know are important to you, and you're in the wilderness, being bombarded with Alberto Gonzales this-and-that and what feels to most Americans like the 100th congressional vote on something akin to finding a way to locate a path to open the door to go down the hallway to get on the bus to get to the train station to leave Iraq.

But late last week, FP's Passport blog ran down a couple items you might have missed, including dire developments in Pakistan (where instability, whether you think Musharraf is evil or not, put nuclear weapons into play in a bad way), and more bad news from Darfur.

What about the devastating attack on civil liberties at the hands of the FBI? Marauding gangs in Rio's favelas? The rise of Talibanistan?

There isn't a channel for all this information, but maybe there should be. Perhaps we need a system (there must be a relatively easy way to engineer this) where news that is tagged as dominant -- say the latest on Anna Nicole Smith's autopsy/childcare arrangements, or the rabbit-hole histrionics about how bad (or wonderful!) things are in Iraq -- is omitted. What's left are all the things that have been obscured from view, like say this item about how global warming will upend everything we know about climate zones today (bye-bye polar regions!) or John Bolton's confession that he actively sought to prolong the war in Lebanon last summer, giving him enormous satisfaction (he said he was "damned proud") and personal responsibility for lives lost.

We could call this whatyouremissing.com. The internet is full of tools, from Digg to Technorati to all those "Most Emailed" lists on every news site, for making sure you see what everyone else sees. They have a purpose, and at their best they can help you find something that other folks like yourself have been reading. But at their worst, I believe they can contribute to a trimming of the information universe. Low ranked, low-visited items could just be boring. But I think there's probably a likelihood that they're merely not what the herd is reading. Who doesn't want to know what the herd missed?

Posted by Tarek Rizk at 3:19 PM | Permalink

Scanning around the foreign policy blogosphere over the last few days has been illuminating and disturbing at the same time. Leave the niche blogs serving issues you know are important to you, and you're in the wilderness, being bombarded with Alberto Gonzales this-and-that and what feels to most Americans like the 100th congressional vote on something akin to finding a way to locate a path to open the door to go down the hallway to get on the bus to get to the train station to leave Iraq.

But late last week, FP's Passport blog ran down a couple items you might have missed, including dire developments in Pakistan (where instability, whether you think Musharraf is evil or not, put nuclear weapons into play in a bad way), and more bad news from Darfur.

What about the devastating attack on civil liberties at the hands of the FBI? Marauding gangs in Rio's favelas? The rise of Talibanistan?

There isn't a channel for all this information, but maybe there should be. Perhaps we need a system (there must be a relatively easy way to engineer this) where news that is tagged as dominant -- say the latest on Anna Nicole Smith's autopsy/childcare arrangements, or the rabbit-hole histrionics about how bad (or wonderful!) things are in Iraq -- is omitted. What's left are all the things that have been obscured from view, like say this item about how global warming will upend everything we know about climate zones today (bye-bye polar regions!) or John Bolton's confession that he actively sought to prolong the war in Lebanon last summer, giving him enormous satisfaction (he said he was "damned proud") and personal responsibility for lives lost.

We could call this whatyouremissing.com. The internet is full of tools, from Digg to Technorati to all those "Most Emailed" lists on every news site, for making sure you see what everyone else sees. They have a purpose, and at their best they can help you find something that other folks like yourself have been reading. But at their worst, I believe they can contribute to a trimming of the information universe. Low ranked, low-visited items could just be boring. But I think there's probably a likelihood that they're merely not what the herd is reading. Who doesn't want to know what the herd missed?

Posted by Tarek Rizk at 3:18 PM | Permalink

[Cross-posted from Connect US Community.]

Connect Us gathered a bunch of folks from different organizations to serve as a Network Advisory Team, and I was a member of that group. A big activity Connect Us did to help understand the network better was a social networking analysis that mapped a lot of the connections between the organizations in our community, and figured out what kinds of connections were strung between all of us.

By far, the most common form of interaction (if you can call it that) was the ubiquitous email list. There were something like 250 or 300 different list-type products or services mentioned by respondents to the survey that was done to inform the analysis.

This is all merely to introduce this: The web consulting firm Beaconfire has just released a study about email lists called, "Network of Networks: Email Lists, Nature Protection, and Pollution Control." The main issue on the lists they examine is environment, but the lessons and other list-knowledge in the survey is really useful to people running the email lists that appear to be the coin of the activism realm.

(H/t to Colin at e.politics.)

Posted by Tarek Rizk at 3:17 PM | Permalink

Via Idealware's blog, I found an interesting Green Media Toolshed writeup of using Google Earth for advocacy:

Appalachian Voices is using Google Earth to shine the light on the destruction of mountains through mountain top removal. This is a great tool because it can help you reach out to audiences you may not have reached before. We are happy to see one of our members using a tool like this for their advocacy work. It is a great example of how powerful online tools can be and we hope that other progressives take note.

Go to ilovemountains.org to learn more about the tool.

Posted by Tarek Rizk at 3:16 PM | Permalink

Via Colin at ePolitics as well as all my hometown folks in Pittsburgh, I learned about the League of Young Voters Video Voter Guide.. Voter guides are among the oldest tools in the advocacy repertoire. Properly offered, they can give potential voters the information they need to make a decision at the polls, but they aren't viewed as campaign products because candidates on all sides of the political spectrum get to participate if they want. I frown on video often because I feel it's used gratuitously and have trouble imagining a lot of ordinary folks choosing to watch an unnecessary video on their computer. These give viewers a chance to meet a political candidate, and that's a truly worthwhile enterprise.

Posted by Tarek Rizk at 3:11 PM | Permalink

Free Range Graphics, the geniuses who create flash videos (my favorite: the unforgettable "Friends with Low Wages" attack on Wal-Mart), are giving away $15 K worth of services to some lucky deserving non-profit (h/t kk. Obviously, this is a great deal for the winner. It probably doesn't hurt for Free Range to review a bunch of proposals from needy nonprofits; at least a few will not win the contest but decide to buy services from Free Range anyhow.

But I wonder overall about the wisdom of these sorts of efforts. Inside the social change community, a lot of us act like NGOs but sell like regular vendors. I've got bookmarks and feeds from lots of folks chattering about social marketing, messaging, technology to improve social change efforts and everything in between, and I'd say more than half are from people whose principle income stream is not grants from foundations but fees from selling their services to non-profit clients. (Full disclosure: we are offering consulting services at market rates, natch.)

So already it feels circular for so many of us to be talking, under the guise (honest, for the most part) of sharing tips on doing the job better and more efficiently. I get even deeper down the rabbit hold when I think about how we're also quasi-auditioning for the audience of fee-paying NGOs who browse these blogs and buy helpful books and so on.

What's the redemption? I find it in the fact that we've got good things to offer them and each other. For my money, there isn't a community of competitors more friendly, more interested in helping each other, more connected and willing to share their insights than this one. As we develop this blog, and build a blogroll (something we're going to do organically from a starting with a shortlist we'll be posting soon), I plan on highlighting organizations and messengers selling things and giving them away who are making their contribution to the community a high priority but still making money.

Posted by Tarek Rizk at 3:10 PM | Permalink

I think we'll have more to say on the subject shortly, but it's important to mention that LinkedIn, the social networking tool targeted mostly toward business contacts, has introduced an initiative to use its massive network for social change. Steve Bridger writes about it at his blog on NetSquared and links to some interesting discussions about the innovation.

Look for updates soon. I'm going to snoop around and see if I can learn more about this effort.

Posted by Tarek Rizk at 3:10 PM | Permalink

Having personally presided over an online community that never took off (in fact, wasn't able to taxi down the runway), I know how easy it is to make bad assumptions about how things are going to work when it's merely bits and bytes you're shifting around on your screen. Behavior is hard to predict, and key assumptions should be poked at, repeatedly, to test their validity. This process, partially is captured well in the recommended Three Questions to ask when considering an online community, from Forum One's excellent Online Community Report blog.

Posted by Tarek Rizk at 3:07 PM | Permalink

A hobby-horse for aid-watchers has been the sky-high mission and the middling results of the Millennium Challenge Corporation. False-starts with new CEO's, lots of staff turnover, a big, distracting move of headquarters and lots of other excuses have given the MCC its choice of self-inflicted wounds to blame for poor performance. Management continues to be a concern (see the Center for Global Development's MCA Monitor blog for plenty of coverage), but an interesting item about the MCC was picked up by Chris Monasterski at the World Bank's Private Sector Development blog. In a broad stroke, the story is that MCC's pressure to reform, combined with its power to cut off funds, made recipient countries implement major legal changes in Yemen and Lesotho.

In a nutshell (though the ability to reproduce these kinds of results is far from proven), this is probably the kind of thing Americans want to see when they look at money for international development. Right?

Posted by Tarek Rizk at 3:04 PM | Permalink

On both sides of the political spectrum, early analysis is flying fast about the impact of images and video on next year's presidential campaign. I thought BAGnews' comments on the premier issue of the redesigned Time magazine story on the fall of conservatism -- and the position of John McCain in that decline -- offered some interesting insight into how imagery will inform news consumption in the years ahead. Time's redesign means "the magazine is cutting back the words; morphing more into a web adjunct; and delivering a larger part of the story in a form we're more regularly familiar with around here," meaning presumably, letting images do the heavy lifting. This spread doesn't make me think McCain's Straight Talk Express is going somewhere fun.

More stunning images came this week in the form of a masterful take on the Apple Macintosh 1984 ad urging Americans to "Vote Different" and, essentially casting Senator Clinton as Microsoft/Big Brother (sister?) and Senator Obama as the young, cool, groundbreaking upstart Apple. (Mac nerds like myself know that the original ad aired one time only, during the Super Bowl, and heralded the birth of the Macintosh computer.) Obama's campaign hasn't taken credit for the ad, which hasn't appeared on television but rather only on the internet. You can see the ad and read some commentary here.

Posted by Tarek Rizk at 3:01 PM | Permalink