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Google fiber project RFI for Madison | Interview of Preston Austin Imby.info

March 19, 2010 By 1 Comment

When Google speaks, people listen.  When Google offers to bring fast fiber networks into a city, people react. When Google suggest

Even the cows are looking forward to better connection speeds if Google Fiber lands in Madison.

that we might all be able to work on a 1G network with a little cooperation, organization and commitment, people take action. That’s what Madfiber.net is all about.  Even the cows want Google Fiber!

Town hall meeting educates the public

I attended the recent town Hall style meeting designed to educate the public on the RFI that the City of Madison is pursuing to win the hearts and mind of Google.  Community members of all flavors were present including city council, geeks, techies, grandmas, kids, business professionals, TV, radio, and newspapers eager to hear the opinions of the greater Madison community.

Ice cream flavor makes for sweet deal

Babcock Hall has even created a new flavor of ice cream to honor the Google Fiber interest.  I tasted it and it was very good.  I didn’t see it before it melted a little but it had candy pieces that were Google’s colors, granola for fiber, and nuts.   I am sure it had chocolate or I wouldn’t have liked it so much!

Interview of Preston Austin sets the stage for uploads

I had a chance to interview Preston Austin, co-founder of IMBY.info, and to my knowledge a pack leader in the fight to attract Google.  He leads a group who is generating action to convince Google  to extend its boundaries into every aspect of our community, beyond their very secure office in Madison.

If you are interested in participating and wish to speak your mind about this topic, here is your connection touch point:

Local website with all social touch points for Madison’s Google Fiber Network

You can find links to upload videos, pictures, post comments, fill out surveys, and state your opinions. March 26, 2010 is the big deadline for submitting the RFI and we need you on the Fan base on Facebook.

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Filed Under: Government 2.0, Social Media - Events, Video Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

A blogging approach by Wired Wisconsin | Nonprofit social media

November 4, 2009 By 2 Comments

Wired Wisconsin is a coalition of concerned individuals, businesses and organizations working to put the wired-wisconsin-logostate of Wisconsin on the cutting edge of technology. However, like most nonprofits they face challenges in trying to raise funds for outreach and marketing of their message. With only two or three employees and a couple of interns, how do they accomplish statewide what they need to do?

A social approach

After meeting several key staff members of Wired Wisconsin during the recent event – Government 2.0 | Utilizing Social Media – I looked at how they are using  social media efforts to accomplish their organizational goals and the partnerships they are forming along the way.

Wired Wisconsin is actively using social media in their public relations and outreach efforts. They appear to have started their blog about 1 year ago in October of 2008 with weekly updates to Twitter included.  The blog does not identify the author(s)  in anyway, and its lacking a personality at this point. They have a Website setup as a home base for traditional media and social media.  They have links to their Twitter profile, Facebook, Youtube, Podcasts, and a RSS feed for their blog.

Practicing what you preach

You can see that they started slow, with a website and added a blog.  You should have a strong “home” for social media links.  Just consider that with a bio area of 160 characters on Twitter, you don’t have a lot of room to state your mission and issues. So take the time to have good landing pages on your website to explain your mission.  If your budget doesn’t allow that yet, be sure to create a solid LinkedIn profile or other social media profile with very complete details that can help deliver more of your brand and various content for you, but one should be designated as home.

The first six months of blog posts are all Twitter weekly updates of news articles that they added to the Tweet stream. This is an inbound marketing tactic.  This is a good way to start with baby steps based on resources and time. Starting in February 2009, Wired Wisconsin began to offer monthly blog opinion blog posts about the issues they have coalesced around.

May 2009 brought a new addition to the action plan. Bring article content around core issues from other journalists and editorials directly into the blog posts. The Twitter updates continued and in fact they are longer and appear to more much more active during this time period.  Wired Wisconsin also penned more opinion posts covering issues.

While it appears that their Twitter activity is all about outbound press and news media type content, by creating a blog post out of the update (through the use of TwitterTools plugin on their blog)  it does help to give them weekly posts and document activity for the non Twitter users who may want to stay in touch with these issues.

Incorporating video posts

Emily Lenard, Associate Director,  explained that they have used Youtube to post their videos for free and feed to other social media sites such as Facebook. They have an ongoing program to interview state politicians on their stands for issues pertinent to Wired Wisconsin and post them on their Website.

Other uses that they have planned to put in practice for social media include:

  • Press conferences
  • News
  • Events
  • Issue presentations
  • Action alerts
  • Interviews
  • Programs

Wired Wisconsin comments

Emily Lenard has a few comments about a blogging strategy government agencies and nonprofits can follow that might help with blog ideas:

Audit and assess regularly

After a year, it may be time for Wired Wisconsin to take stock and review their activities, audiences, spaces and places for social media sites interaction.  Evaluating and benchmarking the progress over the past year for subscribers, comments, membership growth, partner additions and activity should shed some light on any changes in directions that they should pursue.

Ideally they should be blogging 2-3 times per week.  If the goal of the blog is to strictly be a news source they are doing a good job of that.  I think that they could  increase the Wired Wisconsin opinion pieces to give someone a sense of the passion and drive this organization has to make change happen. And personally, I would like to get sense of who the authors are.

Social media is about people after all and we don’t connect with companies and organizations, we connect and share passions and interest with the people inside them.

Do you have a nonprofit I should review?

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Filed Under: Business Blogging, Government 2.0, nonprofit, Social Media Strategy, Social Media Tools Tagged With: , , ,

Government 2.0 | Is using social media the same or different than B2B

October 30, 2009 By 1 Comment
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The most recent Madison, Wisconsin social media event, titled Government 2.0 Utilizing Social Media, was presented by Wired Wisconsin. It focused on social media usage for government agencies, elected officials and lobbyists. The program is an effort to get governmental agencies up to speed on social media channels and the tools to engage their audiences. After talking with some of the attendees, its clear that they are behind the curve for implementation, are unclear on how best to use social media to engage, and worried about the personal and agency legal exposure they may encounter.

Many parallels to business

The presentation primarily paralleled social media strategy for business to business markets on many points.  These include, listening to your audience first, selecting tools that are appropriate for the audience, and taking small steps in moving forward so you don’t overwhelm you or your staff.  Having a lawyer, Liza Barry-Kessler, also speak about policy and the special legal issues involved in the government sector was unique, and not something seen too often in the B2B space.

The introduction was by Thad Nation, Director of Wired Wisconsin and principal of Nation Consulting. Wired Wisconsin is a nonprofit coalition of concerned individuals, businesses and organizations working to put the state of Wisconsin on the cutting edge of technology. With goals of education, collaboration and activation, it seems an appropriate platform to use and endorse social media in all sectors of the business and governmental organizations.

Nation commented, “There is a challenge for government agencies to catch up to where most businesses and individuals are at this point of time. The goal of the session today was to provide an overview to start the learning process.”

Emily Lenard, the Associate Director of Wired Wisconsin gave an informative session on why these agencies need to embrace social media and some strategies to do so. As is the case in many public sessions on social media, there was a diverse group of attendees in terms of experience. Lenard, with an engaging style, did a good job of explaining how this channel can bring two-way conversation into the forefront. It can help people who, due to location, might otherwise miss the conversation. It can be an asset to listen to what the public has to say about an issue as well as help organizations achieve goals.

Social media works both ways

She also recognized that constituents in voting districts can use social media to share concerns, complain, and even disparage an elected representative. However, the same channels and tools allow you to share your side of the story and balance the information. Many of the audience’s concerns were around time management, moderation and/or treatment of comments and reactions.

Some of the benefits Lenard pointed out are

* Address feedback as it happens
* Reach out, react and interact with people not otherwise able to speak with you
* Allow for dialogue – two way conversation

Perhaps the biggest issue is encouraging the agencies to focus on organizational goals first. Secondly, begin to listen through a social ecosystem assessment of the people who would use their services or the type of service. Once you have some information you can then determine if social media can directly or indirectly help you. It’s clear that social media will let them connect with a wider audience.

Issues of compliance, privacy and security

The issues of compliance, legality, privacy and security are very real in the Government 2.0 space.  Not that some of these aren’t for private business.  It seems that open records laws can influence how you capture and archive things like “tweets” on Twitter, Facebook postings, etc. Like insurance and financial institutions, what you say and how you say it may get into complex compliance and security related questions.  Proceed with caution in the governmental space, but don’t overlook the benefits to the public.

How do you think they should implement social media?

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