e.politics: online advocacy tools & tactics

Google and Facebook Emphasize the New and the Now, For Better or Worse

Do recent changes to Google and Facebook affect political and marketing communicators? Potentially a lot, so let’s take the sites in turn.

First Google, which announced today that it’s making major changes to its search algorithms to update its main search index more frequently. Also, results pages for many queries will feature more recent content (including breaking news) over information that might have grown stale.

Overall, this change in emphasis is potentially really useful for users, particularly if Google can follow through on the idea of separating searches for evergreen content (“learning from Obama online campaign PDF“) from those for ephemeral content and recent news (“Herman Cain harassment suit“). One implication for political communicators: this emphasis on the new and the now gives us even more reason to jump on news stories quickly, since Google’s main search function should have a better chance of highlighting relevant recent content. Crank up those blogs and rapid response machines, kids: catch a news wave, and your words might spread far and wide.

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1 comment November 3rd, 2011 Trackback Bookmark on del.icio.us

Using Social Media to Build Your Email List and Vice Versa

Guest article! Experienced digital organizer Laura Packard (of PowerThru Consulting) has some great specifics on converting Facebook followers into email list-members, and vice versa. This article originally appeared on PowerThru Consulting’s site.

Using Social Media to Build Your Email List and Vice Versa

By Laura Packard

What are the benefits at the end of the day of having a large Facebook fanbase? As email performance declines over time, social media will become a much more important communication channel for reaching supporters. It’s a public sign of the health of your organization, too, and great for generating buzz and spreading news virally. However, it can be limiting in how you can communicate with your fans. (More about EdgeRank and how Facebook filters information to its users. Note that Facebook is ever-changing, so the info in this article could be out of date already!)

How can you get more direct and quantifiable benefits out of Facebook (or Twitter), maybe even make the case for an ad spend? Try using it as a tool to also build your email list.

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3 comments November 3rd, 2011 Trackback Bookmark on del.icio.us