About 100 or so gathered on the roof of our building to get a glimpse of the Space Shuttle Discovery.
It was slated to fly over the Washington, DC monuments for a swansong journey before officially retiring to a new home at the Smithsonian’s Udvar-Hazy Center in Dulles, VA.
It was supposed to arrive between 10 AM and 11 AM ET but it was early. Word traveled faster than the shuttle.
How did we know? Why, Twitter, of course. Thanks, @Smithsonian! (HT @shkon)
Discovery just flew over us at Dulles. Now headed in to fly over DC. Get out there and #spottheshuttle
So, we headed up to the roof and anxiously attempted to figure out just exactly which direction to look in anticipation of its arrival. Hashtags started to trend on Twitter such as #SpottheShuttle and #WelcomeDiscovery.
The Edelman Global Public Affairs team has released findings from the 2011 Capital Staffers Index, an annual global study that analyzes top trends in global public affairs and communications.
This year’s expanded report is the third annual survey based on interviews with over 500 senior staffers (legislative directors and above) from capital cities in 11 different countries around the world including Washington DC, Brussels, London, Beijing, Ottawa, Mexico City, Paris, Berlin, New Delhi, Buenos Aires and Brasilia.
Although traditional methods public affairs components are still valuable, social media channels have experienced a meteoric rise in their ability to shape and influence policy worldwide over the past year.
We discussed the new Kindle, Apple price fixing allegations, President Obama’s “We the People” petition via WhiteHouse.gov, government and social media, crowdsourcing, ID spoofing and much more.
Over the past couple weeks, the White House has been all about Twitter.
Of course, President Obama’s team isn’t exactly new to Twitter — and neither is the White House. His official @whitehouse Twitter account has been in use since April 2009 and his @BarackObama campaign handle launched in March 2007. Today, the campaign’s Twitter feed seems to be in full re-election mode with almost 9 million followers and the #Obama2012 staff working to keep it updated with both campaign and official White House news.
So, what’s new? The most recent activity of note is that the president himself is beginning to tweet.
Today, Edelman released the findings of our 2010 Capital Staffer Index during an event hosted in the Washington, DC office. Edelman’s Public Affairs & StrategyOne teams interviewed senior legislative staffers around the globe in several capital cities including Berlin, Brussels, London, Paris and Washington to determine the role and influence of various communications channels both online and off. Below are some of my initial — and personal — thoughts about the U.S. survey results.
Since his departure from the White House in January 2009, much has been said and written about President George W. Bush’s personal choice to quietly step out of the national spotlight over the past two years out of respect for his Oval Office successor.
Tomorrow, November 9, 2010, President Bush breaks his silence with the official release of his new book, Decision Points.
In it, he takes a self-described “untraditional approach” to writing his life’s memoir by providing a unique perspective of his presidency and focusing on the most demanding part of the job… making decisions.
This past weekend, the Associated Press reported that the White House was moving to an open source content management system (CMS) known as Drupal. Many among the tech set have praised the move including Nancy Scola from techPresident who was among the first to write about the change in her post, WhiteHouse.gov goes Drupal. A good read.
For those not familiar with what this actually means, a CMS is basically the back-end (not visible to visitors) of a website that allows the administrators (owners) of the site — often non-programmers — to easily organize site navigation and add content designed to appear on the front-end.
For most CMS solutions, the user experience is pretty simple, usually consisting of a password protected login, options for varied user permissions for approval and forms with specific fields based on type of content such as text, photos, audio and video. Once entered and saved, the CMS stores the information in the back-end database and displays the content on the front-end when called up by a site visitor.
My, what a difference a month makes. That’s right, this past Friday marked exactly one month since Rep. Joe Wilson (R-SC) yelled those two “spontaneous” words during a Joint Session of Congress in response to President Obama’s claim that his healthcare plan wouldn’t cover illegal immigrants.
President Obama has come a long way from “You Lie!” to being named the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize recipient!
Reaction around the world and in the media was certainly mixed with many feeling that this honor was bestowed way too soon – just eight months into his Presidency. In fact, the nomination application deadline for the prize was February 1, just 11 days after Obama took office. We don’t know who nominated him either and we won’t know a long time. They don’t release that information for 50 years.
Traditionally, August is supposed to be a little quieter in Washington, DC. Not so this summer with the current debates heating up over the future of the US economy, bailouts, healthcare reform and energy legislation.
The Internet is certainly playing a key role. In fact, YouTube may have officially reached its digital advocacy “tipping point” when a handful of videos were recently uploaded featuring flustered politicians struggling to answer tough healthcare questions during several Congressional town hall meetings.
Many Democrats in support of the bill have moved to characterize opponents as an organized, astroturfing, angry right wing mob. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) even went so far as to call the protests “un-American.” On the contrary, it was the SEIU who was caught on tape beating a black conservative who voiced dissent over the plan.
From Moldova to Motrin Moms, Twitter has become the arena of coordinated, widespread revolution several times over the last year. Still, when we look back on how the microblogging platform has evolved into a low-barrier tool for grassroots organizing, these will only be footnotes to the events of the last few days in Tehran. As protestors took to the streets of Iran to voice their discontent with the 2009 presidential election results, people from around the world were attentively watching updates from the ground on Twitter, long before hearing reports from any major news outlets.
The collection of status updates on Twitter provided the world an inside look on the dire situation within Iran from firsthand accounts, each message deeply personal and compelling to a worldwide audience. But when the masses turned to their favorite cable news network for more information, they were met with Mike Huckabee talking about credit cards or other irrelevant programming. With no recognizable coverage in mainstream media as events unfolded, it led users to cry foul on the news networks, demanding more information than 140 characters could deliver.
About 100 or so gathered on the roof of our building to get a glimpse of the Space Shuttle Discovery. 
This year’s expanded report is the third annual survey based on interviews with over 500 senior staffers (legislative directors and above) from capital cities in 11 different countries around the world including Washington DC, Brussels, London, Beijing, Ottawa, Mexico City, Paris, Berlin, New Delhi, Buenos Aires and Brasilia. 
For those not familiar with what this actually means, a CMS is basically the back-end (not visible to visitors) of a website that allows the administrators (owners) of the site — often non-programmers — to easily organize site navigation and add content designed to appear on the front-end. 
