e.politics: online advocacy tools & tactics

DCI Group’s Excellent Guide to State Politicians and Social Media

March 15th, 2011

Back In The Day (i.e., last year) when I was at a certain online communications firm here in the DC area, we fielded a request from a client that turned out to be impossible to meet: they wanted a list of state politicians’ Facebook and Twitter feeds so that they could start targeting them with advocacy messages. Considering that there are something on the order of 7500 state legislators in this country, the lift was a bit heavier than we could manage — even Facebook’s DC office couldn’t help (they wanted the list if WE could find it).

Enter the DCI Group, new professional home of friend-of-e.politics Julie Germany, which has put together a terrific state-by-state breakdown of state officials’ social media presences. The new Digital America site uses a nice Flash U.S. map interface and has some fun ranking features (Texas ranks 19 on Facebook and 13 on Twitter!), but the really useful feature from a political communicator’s point of view is the listing of every state-level politician’s Facebook and/or Twitter feeds (man, I’d hate to be the poor bastard who has to keep THAT up to date). Plus, it’s stupid easy to navigate. Both cool AND useful — perfect technology in my book. Good work, y’all!

– cpd