Tuesday and Tech Talk

As it’s coming to a close, I’m feeling pretty good about this Tuesday. I was productive, dipped out during lunch for a little tech talk at the Media Future Now Lunch and got to think for a bit about Twitter. 

The Media Future Now lunch was organized by none other than Shana Glickfield, the DC Concierge, and panel members included:

- David Almacy, VP of Waggener Edstrom Worldwide’s Studio D Group for the North American region

- Peter Cherukuri, Roll Call Group, Publisher
- Ben Coffee Clark, Fleishman-Hillard.
- Ernie Mosteller, Blattner Brunner, VP, Interactive Creative Director.
- Sarah Romer, Washingtonian, Director of Sales &  Marketing, Washingtonian.com

The Panelists talked about talked about a variety of things including the growing attention directed towards and the use of social media, the election, the role of technology in both campaigns and digital spending in this economic downtown. 

David Almacy, Waggener Edstrom VP and former White House Director of Internet and E-Communications definitely wins the PR Prescriptions speaker of the day award for his way with words. David’s presentation included focused on the White House’s adoption of internet technology and social media tools. He also gave new definitions to the terms ROI and OD: 

- ROI: Risk of Inaction. Refers to the consequences of lost relationships, conversations, business partnerships if not engaged in social media.

- OD: Over Digital[ize]. This was in reference to some PR pros’ tendencies to not keep things simple and pump too much digital talk into business pitches.

David started with a screen shot of the first White House website, which looked nearly prehistoric, and moved on to share stories about the BarneyCam and the involvement of the White House’s use of the Google government search, the iTunes government podcast section and Twitter to get news and other important info out.

Must say that David and the White House team were very smart in their use of the internet and social media. They were observant and learned as they went, realizing a couple things: 

1. You where the people are, and you need to make sure your content can do the same. In the case of the BarneyCam, it wasn’t long before traffic to the video on YouTube and other video sites surpassed viewers coming to the Whitehouse.gov site. It’s about getting the content out there. 

2. If you’re not doing it, someone will do it for you. When he and his team set out to create a twitter account, he was surprised to find that one was already setup. Fortunately (in large part because of his team’s online strategy), the person who set it up did so using the official White House RSS feed.

They aren’t perfect, but I wish more companies were willing to experiment as much as the white house has so far.