A 1980s hip-hop group called Whodini had a hit song called “Friends” The lyrics go like this – Friends how many of us have them?  Friends, the ones you can depend on? Many of my peers in the public affairs industry are probably tired of hearing this, BUT relationships and...

I took part in an interesting conversation last week at a Department of State event called Celebrating our Caribbean Heritage. The session focused on using technology to organize Diasporas. It was part of a larger Department of State focus on working with Caribbean Diasporas, people who left their homes in...

Ponder the saying, “a picture is worth a thousand words.” Typical digital video formats play at 30 frames per second. A frame is essentially a picture. By the same formula, a minute of video is worth 1.8 million words. Video, this highly effective tool of communication, was for a long...

This month Campaigns and Elections Magazine en Español asked me to write about new tools and applications for the political space.  The two types of tools that seem to generate a lot of interest when I travel to teach in Latin America are mobile applications and online, townhall-style tools that...

How would your target audience rate your site?  It’s not a question often considered by grassroots organizations or coalitions when building a website.  The question usually drifts even further out of mind once the website is up and running for some time.   Rather than continuing to publish content and find...

The last week of July was a busy time for online advocacy conferences on both the left and the right.  Netroots Nation, the largest gathering of progressive online activists, and Right Online, a newer conference (founded by three years ago by Erik Telford to train the rightroots), occurred on the...

You can teach anyone to use a social media platform like Twitter, but if she doesn’t connect with real people immediately and at every log in, then I don’t expect her to continue using it for very long. Moses Ma wrote about this for Psychology Today in March 2009: Twitter...