Progress Nashville thinks that public policy campaigns should be regulated like lobbyists.

This train of thought has been around a long time. The Public Relations Society of America has a decades-old debate over the licensing of marketing and public relations professionals, similar to the way a doctor or attorney must be listed with a state government. There are pros and cons. I would love to see the words “public relations” or “marketing” only used by those of us who went to school and learned how to properly conduct strategic communications. I hate the concept of “PR girls” who hand out beer at bars. However, there’s a pesky thing called the First Amendment that gets in the way. Can you really limit who sends a press release or calls a member of the media?

What’s to stop John Citizen from seeing a need in the community and launching a campaign that affects public policy. It’s called grassroots, and you can’t curb the freedom of speech. Anything that limits campaigning for policy change would severely limit the First Amendment. At what point do you start regulating? When groups officially organize? Hire professionals? When someone takes an ad out in the paper, creates a web site or distributes an e-alert? Where does public policy marketing officially begin? There’s no clear line that can be developed the way that a lobbyist meets with an elected official.

While I earn my living working on public policy campaigns, I understand how deceptive they can be when large DC-based groups invade a state or community. It’s annoying to see major ad buys in the local paper or TV that wouldn’t be there if you member of congress wasn’t a crucial vote, or a company has an interest in state-level policies. (think Comcast vs. EPB).

I understand Progress Nashville’s frustration.

Lobbying has been around a long time, as has targeted marketing. What’s dangerous is that those who represent are being subjected to marketing efforts about which we are unaware back in the districts and don’t have the opportunity to refute. These are also efforts that may take place weeks or months before legislation is introduced.

I argue that it’s up to the citizen to stay better informed. While it’s a slow process, politics are growing more transparent. This is why state and local blogs are so important. If you’re concerned about who’s influencing your member, start a blog and read the news. CQ, the Hill, Politico, WaPo and all the DC press are online. Set up google alerts to see what groups are targeting your member. Rather than push for limitations on free speech, exercise your right as a voting citizen to hold your congressional member accountable.

We can’t expect those who represent us to live in a vacuum, but perhaps we should require those who run public issue campaigns in the Washington area to follow the same rules as lobbyists who work the halls of Congress and register and report their activities.

Those of us in DC (and beyond), still report a lot of those “marketing” activities. The FEC requires disclosure of grassroots lobbying expenditures, of which Progress Nashville refers. The Supreme Court recently ruled on Wisconsin Right to Life vs. FEC, which covered policy and activism groups working on federal elections.

If someone really wanted to make an impact, a great project would be tracking activities of PACs/action funds throughout the country. That would expose the glut of policy lobbying that goes on this country. Progress Nashville is right. The average citizen has absolutely no idea what special interest groups are influencing their senator or congressman, not only from both sides of the isle, but international interests as well. However, regulation will only produce more obscure laws and vague 527-like groups. If you want to know who influences your elected officials, track the action funds.

Anyone else familiar with policy campaigns have another suggestion?

H/T Volunteer Voters

As my friend Raee would explain, I’m geeking out over the new IPDI study, Poli-fluentials: The New Political Kingmakers.

Someone stated at the press conference that people are beginning to examine the nuances of Internet involvement in politics. Since I spend a lot of time contemplating the nuances of Internet involvement in politics, I’m psyched to read it.

IPDI, with the help of a several sponsors, surveyed 10,000 influentials and took a closer look at those who are highly involved in politics. I’m sure that I’ll write another post with details for TechRepublican, but I had to gush here first.

The exciting thing is that they have a giant, and I mean giant, dataset that they just started working with. Poli-fluentials is the first report. During the Q&A, they mentioned several more areas that they’re reporting about including the regions of the country that are more powerful. Are blue states really that more active on the web than red?

I would willingly hand over any of my future offspring to get my hands on that dataset.

Go ahead and mock me about being a nerd. I promise to go shopping this weekend and watch a chick flick to balance it out.

Tonight I made it to the DC premiere of Indoctrinate U at the Kennedy Center! It’s a really great documentary and much sharper than it’s predecessor, Brainwashing 101.

The level of entrenched liberal groupthink at our universities is staggering. It’s so shocking that we don’t even realize that something is wrong until we see this film. We should not be forced to suck it up and regurgigate a liberal professor’s personal views on Iraq for a test on British Lit. Before tonight, I just thought, “Oh well, that’s college. So what if the professor is a marxist lunatic who claims that Soviet Russia was a much better place to live than the US (true story).” If higher ed is a marketplace of ideas, liberal, left-wing, progressive or socialist ideas shouldn’t be the only ones sold.

What surprises me is that Maloney visited about twenty schools and not one university official would speak to him. He interviewed several professors, including one guy at the Massachusetts Institute of Art who said that the term “white” was inherently oppressive and would continue to oppress until no longer used. He interviewed several African-American professors who were ostracized for disagreeing with affirmative action. Another woman was literally told by her academic colleagues that she would have never been hired if the faculty knew she was a Republican.

I guess diversity of thought isn’t that important in higher ed.

Maloney makes it pretty clear that academia is so dominated by the left that they forget that there’s an alternative ideology. I encountered this in grad school. I spent 4.5 months examining the “ideological gap in online activism” and my professor couldn’t understand why I kept analyzing Republican activities. I’m not sure if she ever figured out that I was conservative.

The stories in Indoctrinate U were great. Compared to the Cal Poly situation, we had it easy at UT. Even if the Issue Committee members had attempted to shoot Sukhmani in the f—ing face, he probably would have pulled out one of his many handguns and protected himself. If anyone is ever prepared for a death threat, it’s him. Thankfully, we didn’t have to face a year-long court trial with our academic careers on the line. We only suffered intimidation and run-around from the administration.

The UT gang is in it, including yours truly. Thankfully, I only appear on screen for about a minute. It was unbelievably scary see a college version of GFTS reappear. I look so different now. However, I have to admit that it was damn cool to see your own name, and the names of your friends, appear in the credits.

I’m still surprised that I got a ticket. I really wanted the gang to come for a visit and see it with me. However, everyone is still wrapped up with school. I put off buying my ticket and was surprised to see it sold out this week. Apparently, it pays to be a blogger since I met the PR person for the Motion Picture Institute this week at Heritage’s Blogger Briefing. I gave her a call, and not only did they hook me up with a ticket, but I got into the after-party. I’ve been the poor PR person responsible for accomodating last minute guests, so I really appreciated it. At the party, I overheard “Hello Kitty” girl talking to a friend. I told her that she should have brought the stuffed animal to the screening. It would have been really funny. I also asked the PR team to hold a blogger screening with wi-fi since I would love to liveblog the documentary. There are too many funny or thought-provoking lines to remember.

It also struck me how tenuous my desired career in academia may be. If an established professor in psychology was nearly fired for her political affliiation that she kept secret, will I even get into a doctoral program? I want my PhD in political communication for heaven’s sake. How many conservatives have that degree? A simple Google search of my name reveals a paper trail leading to the extreme right. I’m proud of my background and hope to continue in the conservative movement, but I may have some challenges thrown at me in the near future.

If you want to see the film, go to Indoctrinate U and request a screening. Cities with more than 500 requests will get one. DVDs will also be for sale soon. I know that I plan to buy one.

UPDATE: Verizon has reversed their decision and will allow NARAL to carry out their campaign.

Thanks to NARAL, we now know that texting isn’t considered free speech. While I’m not sad to see a pro-choice group take a few knocks, this has repercussions for everyone.

The US is far behind Europe with our cell phone technology, so SMS or texting has yet to make the impact that it has across the pond. As more political parties and advocacy groups use newer communication technologies to carry controversial messages, we’re reminded how much our laws need to catch up with technology.

The Times article points out that texting falls under the Net Neutrality debate that was highlighted here a few weeks ago with the conservative argument for and against it. Yet this Verizon decision takes the issue from a blogosphere debate to a real problem that campaigns face. What happens when you create a great texting plan and one of the largest US carriers refuses to accept it?

Do Republicans support First Amendment protection expanding to all technologies or do they fight government intrusion and hope that competition counters these types of policies?

Cross posted at TechRepublican

Elyzabethe at Yellow is the Color is calling it quits. This seems to be a trend among bloggers.

Is this part of the adoption cycle? The early adopters were probably around 2004 or earlier. Then blogging hit mainstream and everyone had one. Is the fad of blogging winding down? I would have assumed that the trend of blogging was over. The only blogs around should be angst-filled teenagers, tech nerds, stay-at-home moms, people with too much free time at work and the small group of talented writers who need to be blogging.

A while back, Raee, also at Yellow is the Color, stopped posting. She told me that she was tired of the chatter. She couldn’t add anything to the discussion, and most bloggers were yelling at each other. She’s not the only one among my blogging friends or daily reads either going private or quitting the Internets completely.

Raee has a point. Blogging is amazing because it potentially gives every blogger an equal voice. While the democratization of our communications and political systems is a good thing, it also creates a lot of noise and conflict. Democracy is never a neat or polite process.

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Edelman and PRWeek just released the Next Generation of Communicators, a report from their New Media Academic Summit 2007.

I wish that I had known about this conference! One of my major problems with academia is the wall between research and professionals. By the time a paper is peer-reviewed and published in a journal, it’s irrelevant. It’s frustrating to wait for studies to be released when you need the data now. More coordination is needed like this conference and subsequent report.

The PR field is better than most. Since the development of academic programs for public relations in the 1970s, the professional world has been deeply involved in most college programs. However, the average professor is not technologically savvy. Furthermore, the PR field just woke up last year to the world of new media. Too many communications departments are still operating under traditional media relations models, which were developed by Burneys and Lee in the 1920s. Hard to believe that even with technology, the PR field operates with 80-year-old methods, but I witness it everyday.

As Julia Hood, editor-in-chief of PRWeek notes:

Unfortunately, there are still PR programs that have not kept pace with industry momentum. Some students are exiting colleges without any notion that the everyday communication activities they engage in with their friends and family have very real applications in their future careers.

Hello! That captures my bachelor’s degree. Tennessee has an incredibly solid program for the technical aspects of communications. Thanks to UT’s School of Communication, I can write a mean press release and plan amazing events, but I learned nothing innovative. Too many PR programs are based on antiquated communications formulas.

To put it in perspective, I graduated in 2004. That was the same year that Facebook was released, Google launched their own e-mail platform and purchased a free program called Blogger. Things have snowballed just a little. Had you told me that working part-time in the IT department and blogging would help my career development, I would have sworn on my dog-eared AP Styleguide that you were crazy.

I fear that programs aren’t adapting quickly enough. It’s difficult enough to convince existing practitioners that the world has changed. The last thing we need is inadequately equipped new graduates.

H/T SixtySecondView

Earlier this week, I wanted to write about Facebook’s new Google index and didn’t get a chance. Then I heard about the Danah Boyd/Scoble discussion. Since I can’t go more than a week without posting about my favorite social utility, here goes.

I’m with Boyd here. Facebook and Myspace are constantly compared, but the two operate from completely different philosophies. Facebook was started so that college students at Harvard could meet each other–meaning you were likely to friend people you already had a greater chance of meeting. MySpace was designed as a way for musicians could promote their work. The basis of MySpace is self-promotion while Facebook helped your social life. Two completely different things.

I whole-heartedly joined Facebook because of the privacy settings. I loved that I could only friend people from my university. It was small and not intrusive. Then it went global. Then we got mini-feeds that kept tabs on everything your friends did. Then Facebook opened up to everyone without an edu address. It was only a matter of time until your profile could be opened to search engines.

I understand both arguments for and against the walled garden. As a professional communicator, I spend a lot of time trying to figure out a way to use the data on Facebook profiles. There’s so much targeted information. It’s a gold mine for marketers.

Then I approach it as a user. I’ve written about my struggle to accept Facebook as a professional tool extensively here. It started out as a way for me to stay in touch with my college friends and gradually morphed into a professional networking tool. Perhaps it’s because I’m in a city, but people are now using Facebook profiles as business cards. It’s hard to direct people to your Facebook profile when college friends are posting old sorority pictures and tagging you (Nothing scandalous. Just pictures that I’d prefer to die on someone’s old hardrive). I’ve had discussions with friends back home, and the progression of Facebook hasn’t nearly reached the level of penetration that Facebook has in DC. For example, yesterday I was at Ebenezer’s, my favorite DC coffeehouse. As I walked around, I couldn’t help but notice almost every person using a laptop in the busy shop was surfing Facebook. If you aren’t on Facebook in DC, you simply don’t exist. If you’re not in an urban area, Facebook is soley recreational.

Privacy is also a concern. I’m not the only woman out there who’s been Facebook stalked and had very scary people following my blog. Perhaps I’ve watched too many Lifetime movies, but there’s a dangerous side of the web. This is a discussion that I’ve had with my female blogging friends, so I’m not alone in being wary of complete transparency. I applaud Facebook for warning me ahead of time about the change, so that I could alter the settings on my profile. However, as Boyd points out, how many people are going to take the time to do that? There have already been too many crimes committed from information on MySpace profiles. How long until there’s the first Facebook murder? Judging by the information in my mini-feed, not many people adjust their privacy settings or use the limited profile.

Usually, I’m cheering on the transparency factor in web communicaton, but how far is it going to go? The wall between personal and professional lives has already been torn down. This is happening so quickly that I sometimes wonder if the 2.0 bubble will burst, and we’ll see a backlash of returning to complete privacy and an anonymous web.

There’s also a debate about the cool factor of Facebook to the college crowd. Since Facebook went around the early adopter pattern with college students using it before techies, there’s an interesting breakdown. The luster has worn off for most college students and recent grads while the tech crowd is still mesmerized by this flashy toy. Thus the question–will Facebook continue to grow?

I theorize that it will. Facebook is still an ingenious set up. We’re in the early days of successful social networking, and I believe it will parallel the Internet in the late nineties. Remember when you signed on AOL and were excited to get two or three e-mails? E-mail was a novelty that quickly entrenched it’s way into our lives. Now, e-mail is a burden that people try to escape. Facebook and it’s offspring will likely work their way into society in a similar pattern. Younger users may not be as excited about Facebook as they were a few years ago, but the utility has become a part of their everyday lives.

We’re starting to see momentum change on the web, but the Internet isn’t the only medium that conservatives need to utilize. For far too long, the left has taken advantage of documentaries and swayed public opinion through films like Sicko, Jesus Camp and An Inconvenient Truth.

Earlier this week, The Moving Picture Institute announced that Indoctrinate U will premiere on September 28 at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC. Directed by Evan Coyne Maloney, Indoctrinate U is a documentary examining the lack of diversity of thought and enforced speech codes across college campuses in America.

If you’re in DC, tickets are only $10 to see what promises to be one of the best documentaries of year.

This film has an interesting history with blogs and technology. As a senior at the University of Tennessee, my College Republican chapter was featured in Maloney’s original version, Brainwashing 101, which was then expanded into Indoctrinate U.

The fall of 2003 was the early days of blogging, but as Bill Hobbs noted earlier, Tennessee has a highly organized blogosphere. Through the efforts of what’s now the Tennessee Politics Blog with Adam Groves, a former officer of the club, Bill Hobbs and Glenn Reynolds, we were able to communicate our message to a wider audience than just the student paper. Thanks to the help of Tennessee bloggers reaching UT alumni, our local chapter was finally able to make a change on campus.

This is just a small example of what can happen when conservatives work together across all mediums to get a message out. Because of blogging, a small group of college students were able to change a liberal haven on campus. Four years later, the tools in our arsenal have only increased. Immigration was a good example of what happens when Republicans unite their grassroots efforts. If we continue to rally together, a revolution truly will occur.

Cross posted on TechRepublican.

If you read one blog today, click on Brian Solis. He nails it with his post on the sociology of social media.

Technology enables us to communicate, but the tools change constantly. People don’t change. People are relationship-based and communicate through networks in their lives. 

For the first time, the web allows us to mimic the way that people communicate in the real world. However, we spend more time studying the tools rather than the methods behind the tools.

From an academic perspective, most studies focus on the effect of a particular medium on people, especially with television. We aren’t focusing on how people communicate, but how they internalize the message that the medium forces on them through broadcast methods.

We’re always wondering what the next big thing is. What happens when the Facebook phenomenon ends? Will Twitter hit the mainstream? Is e-mail dead? If we understand the conversation and are participating, the tools are secondary. If true two-way communication exists, the right technology tools will be there. It’s all about that conversation:

Today, conversations are markets and markets are conversations. And the forums for these conversation cultivate an tight, unswerving and mostly unforgiving community and culture. Participation requires observation in order to understand the the sociological landscape and the dynamics that define each community. They are after all, populated by people, not audiences.

Read it.

Everyone is jumping on the social networking bandwagon, and Hugh Hefner never seems to miss a good party.

Playboy is getting into the social networking craze with PlayboyU.com, a new attempt to market to the student body in the language it is most comfortable with. It’s free to join, but enrollment is by invite only and limited to college students with .edu email address. Not unlike Facebook, it is all about letting your friends know how much of a party animal you are, allowing users to upload photos, videos and messages visible to only those within your group. Playboy says it will keep nudity off the site but not necessarily scantily clad women and will do its best to bar non-student campus personnel from joining. Social networking platform Ning, co-founded by Netscape’s Marc Andreessen, is powering PlayboyU.  (source: Cynopis).

I’m sure people will sign on just for the articles.

Are the targeted social networking sites going to work in the long-run? We have McCain Space, MyBarackObama, Nintendo Mii, LinkedIn, MySpace and now a proposed intelligence network. Are these going to survive?

Facebook works because you can draw from other networks. Instead of recreating the wheel, you can combine two, three or four other platforms. It’s far easier to draw from another pool of users than recruit your own. Unless it’s highly targeted and seperate like the intelligence world, it will be hard to maintain traffic. Once the social networking trend dies down and the next big thing comes along, will these sites stay active?