Digital and social media are changing how government institutions, political campaigns and trade associations communicate and achieve their goals. Below is a roundup of the more interesting stories that we read over the last week:
Content, Digital and Social Media
Gawker reports that BuzzFeed deleted posts under pressure from its own business department. An internal review found at least 3 instances in which complaints from the site’s business and advertising departments led Editor-in-Chief Ben Smith to delete posts by staff. The 3 deleted posts criticized or mocked an Axe body spray ad campaign (a brand of Unilever), Pepsi’s Twitter account and Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser. Unilever, Pepsi and Microsoft all are major advertisers with BuzzFeed.
TechCrunch reports LinkedIn’s launch of Elevate, a paid mobile and desktop app for social media management. The app suggests articles to its users based on algorithms from its news recommendation services Pulse and Newsle as well as “human curation”. Users are then able to schedule and share those links across LinkedIn and Twitter. The app will be available to users in the 3rd quarter of this year.
Gov 2.0 and Public Affairs
Ernie Smith, the social media journalist for Associations Now provides an analysis of Google’s implementation this week of an update of its algorithm to favor mobile-friendly websites and its impact on trade associations. Smith provides things for associations to consider as they redesign or retrofit their mobile unfriendly site. Smith notes the challenges facing associations who have lots of legacy content on their websites.
William Powers and Deb Roy of MIT’s Laboratory for Social Machines provides insights on Medium into their research of the town of Jun in southern Spain. For the last four years, the town has been using Twitter as its principal medium for citizen-government communication. Leading the effort is Jun’s Mayor, José Antonio Rodríguez Salashas who has been recruiting the town’s 3,500 residents to join the social network and have their Twitter accounts locally verified at town hall.
Speaking of municipalities, the City of Philadelphia unveiled on its website this week a real-time analytics tool showing how people are visiting city websites. This tool may promote better civic engagement between staff and residents.
Campaigns and Elections
Dave Weigel reports in Bloomberg Politics on the launch of the app Clear by Ethan Czahor, the former CTO for Jeb Bush’s presidential exploratory committee. The free app which works as an add-on to Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram allows users to scan their social media for a series of problematic terms that could harm their public reputation in the future. Czahor resigned his position with Jeb Bush earlier this year after it was discovered he had sent tweets disparaging women. Czahor believes that the app can help millennials avoid repeating his fate.
These were some of Arc 3’s most interesting reads in digital and public affairs over the last week. What were your favorite stories? Let us know if there is a neat story that we missed! We’d love to hear from you.
