Bloggasm

I got a chance to spend time with some of the players at the Center for American Progress who run its various online media platforms. Over at the Next Web I’ve profiled some of the sophisticated campaigns they’re running:

Faiz Shakir has been the editor of Think Progress for several years and oversees a staff of nearly 20 people. He told me in a recent phone interview that having an institutional blog “churn out propaganda” wouldn’t have succeeded. “You need to be able to speak as a voice of a progressive movement,” he said. “And that means putting out content that isn’t necessarily tied to the institution and sometimes getting out ahead of the institution when there is some need to do so.”

If the senior people at CAP were at first skeptical as to whether this would work, the success of Think Progress over the years would have relieved any fears. The site gets several hundred thousand readers a day and has an email list — called The Progress Report — with over 100,000 subscribers. What first started as a blog with only a handful of writers now sports a team of investigative journalists and researchers who are producing original reporting that will rival most major news organizations.

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1. Bradley Manning’s military doctors accused of negligence over treatment

2. Google Enables Analytics For Android App Developers

3. Facebook granted a patent on “curated search”

4. Michael Arrington claims San Fransisco is driving Twitter and Zynga away because of its high taxes

5. Facebook drops the comment button, allows users to edit replies

6. Are movie review websites too acquiescent to the film industry?

7. RNC considers selling TV rights of presidential primary debates

8. Print editors’ half-hearted attempts to migrate to the web

9. Newly-released advertising statistics for newspaper industry do not look good

10. Felix Salmon on how blogs have changed journalism

11. YouTube Is Giving Away $35,000 To Unknown Partners Who Want To Be YouTube Stars

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1. CNN launches new video player and TV Everywhere. Every month it delivers 60 to 80 million video streams

2. Google’s Street View Website Gets a Big Overhaul

3. Facebook’s Comments Box now supports AOL accounts

4. China Gmail problems may be caused by Great Firewall upgrades

5. Dealing with the permanence of online reviews

6. Is this the perfect time for the New York Times to erect its pay fence?

7. An oldie but goody: The Worst Celebrity Profile Ever Written?

8. Washington Post story accidentally leaves all its editor’s notes in it

9. Where’s all the money in hyperlocal community news?

10. The secrets of Lady Gaga’s social media success

11. Michael Calderone is joining the Huffington Post? I can’t keep track of all this jumping from news org to new org!

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Over at The Next Web I profiled the co-founders of ThinkTank Digital, who have run Lady Gaga’s social media campaigns since 2008.

Despite her success on Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube, much of the early focus for her social media brand was on Myspace. Remember, in 2008 the site was still neck and neck with Facebook for social dominance, and Twitter was still planted firmly within the early adopter community. By October 2009, Gaga had amassed over 700,000 friends on Myspace.

“Myspace at the time was pretty much the hub for her fan base,” Battle explained. “We worked closely with the editorial team over there to do exclusives and do interviews and special features. Imeem was a really big platform at the time, so we worked really closely with them. We had presences on Facebook and Twitter but we really stepped up the effort over time at those places.”

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Much has been written about the anecdotal horror stories told by business owners who have been the unfortunate victims of unfair online reviews. More often than not, either Yelp or Amazon’s customer reviews are singled out in these tales of woe, and it’s hard not to develop at least some sympathy for those business owners who must watch from the sidelines, unable to take much action.

What to do? Many professional authors say they will never respond to bad Amazon reviews, and that doing so merely invites an internet rainstorm many times the negative magnitude of the original review. The New York Times today has a poignant, well-written piece from a restaurant owner who calmly assesses a negative review written about his own business:

How should we play this? Respond on each site? Let it be? Respond with vigor? Kill Mr. Cohen with kindness? Hope that a preponderance of good reviews will bury this one, or at least dilute its impact? Ignore Mr. Cohen completely? (I guess it’s too late for that, showing up here and all.)

Of course what’s often left out in these complaints is the fact that sites like Yelp and Amazon have at least some incentive to address them. They’re not just trying to create a forum for these reviewers, but a filter. While one negative review can get under the skin of a business owner, these review sites strive to make sure that comment is but one of many and that it’s put within the proper context of truthfulness and quality. Amazon, of course, sorts its reviews by the most favorited, which hypothetically rewards those that are the most thoughtful. It is the amalgamation of reviews that one considers when deciding to purchase something, and so instead of getting mired down in the weeds dealing with the lone bad review, it seems to be a better strategy to raise the overall quality of all the others.

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1. Arianna Huffington puts her money where Bill Keller’s mouth is

2. Roll Call snags Shira Toeplitz back from POLITICO. HuffPo isn’t the only one aggressively pursuing talent.

3. Everyone agrees Google is trying to get into social, but we just can’t figure out how

4. The musical chairs going on with AOL’s news staff continues to be perplexing. What are they up to?

5. What Murdoch’s The Daily lacks

6. I love The Atlantic’s “What I Read” series. It’s like popcorn

7. LA Times features a photo of Jonathan Franzen when covering an award he didn’t actually win

8. Has Google let Blogger fall by the wayside?

9. Ira Glass: I Don’t Understand Why NPR Is Not Fighting Back

10. If you bought Apple stock instead of a PowerMac in 1998, you’d have $133,000 today

11. The New York Times’ Columnist Problem

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In 2010, JESS3 created a plugin for Firefox, Chrome, and other browsers that essentially allowed you to delete your ex from the internet. By entering the ex’s first and last names and various social media handles, it would filter any mention of him or her from entering your browser.

As soon as JESS3 released the plugin our PR team began pitching and promoting it to bloggers and news outlets. Almost immediately we secured a hit on CNN. The plugin was covered on woman’s blog Jezebel and MSNBC. We reached out to dozens of tech blogs that covered the social media dating scene. First Motherboard covered it, and that hit led to further placements on Gizmodo (a tech blog with millions of daily readers) and Slashdot (one of the oldest and most influential tech websites with hundreds of thousands of daily readers).

Soon, JESS3 was fielding interviews with major news outlets. The New York Daily News covered the plugin and so did the Globe and Mail, Seattle Weekly and AOL’s Popcrunch. Within a week, JESS3′s COO was fielding multiple interviews on major television news programs and the plugin was even mention on Jimmy Fallon’s show.

As is usual with JESS3 PR projects, we received too many hits to fit concisely in a case study, but we saved most of the hits on delicious, so check them out yourself. Within a month, several million people had read or heard about the plugin and thousands of people downloaded it.