Municipalities across the country are adopting mobile and social media services to immediately broadcast emergency and community information. These new tools aren’t replacing the tornado sirens and emergency broadcasting systems – they’re adding to them. “It seems that everybody is following Facebook or Twitter or they’re texting friends or family,” said Trent Atkins, Lansing’s emergency  Read more »

A study of Australian parents has revealed that sites like Facebook, Twitter are making teens simply dumber. Also, new cyber-safety research commissioned by Telstra has brought to light that the popular websites are having a bad effect on kids’ health and well-being, according to parents. According to the research, 65 per cent of parents who  Read more »

During the 2000 presidential campaign, it was John McCain who first tried a radical experiment — launching a website to accept political donations. Ten years later, Internet social media completely has changed the political game. Facebook, YouTube and Twitter now can help win a national campaign or end one in an instant. Take the case of George  Read more »

Facebook issued a formal apology to former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin for deleting a post from her Facebook Page.  Facebook spokesman Andrew Noyes explained that Palin’s post criticizing the building of a mosque near ground zero was removed by an automated service, not because it violated Facebook’s content standards.  Andy Barr of Politico reports that  Read more »

Twitter has announced that it will be moving into its own data center to help avoid the outages that have plagued the micro-blogging platform.  Twitter said on its blog, “Keeping pace with these users and their Twitter activity presents some unique and complex engineering challenges. Having dedicated data centers will give us more capacity to  Read more »

I attended a Social Media Club event in Richmond, VA last year and it was packed.  The meeting started with cocktails and then a panel discussion on social media in Virginia politics (which is why attended).  According to the first ever Social Media Club census, there are over 100,000 members throughout the world.  Here are  Read more »

GigaOm is reporting that Yahoo is in talks with the link shortener Bit.ly to buy the company, but the “conversations are said to be in the early stages.”  Earlier this year Bit.ly fielded buyout offers from Twitter and Google, but no offer was reached.  In 2009, Bit.ly became the default shortner for Twitter. Read more  Read more »

Cross posted to TechRepublican Streamlining a campaign is always a good move, right? Well, not in the case of automated posting services. Services like Ping.fm, take one message and post it to multiple social media sites.  However, the campaigns that employ these services are sacrificing their online brand to shave a couple minutes off their  Read more »

The Maryland State Board of Elections became the second state to mandate how candidates can use social media.  Candidates must now include “a declaration of approval that lists their campaign treasurer” on every social media site.  The new rules also provide clarity for online advertisements, “If the ad is too small to include the full  Read more »

By Steve Pearson and Ford O’Connell While everyone is trying to figure out the changing media landscape or even what to call it, we can agree that a campaign’s ability to share information online—via blogging, e-mailing, twittering, social networking, video sharing, etc.—represents a growing opportunity to shape public perception to its advantage. How much of  Read more »