You’d think that the crushing defeat that Obama delivered McCain recently, partially using the power of social networking, would have been taken as an example to other politicians on how to run a successful campaign using social media.

Apparently, local politicians in Vancouver’s civic election didn’t get the memo.

Vancouver is electing a new mayor and city council on November 15th, and the Vision Vancouver candidate, Gregor Robertson’s camp began to “spoof”his opponent, Peter Ladner on Twitter.

A quote from Robertson’s spokesman claimed Vision Vancouver wasn’t trying to pass off the account as Peter Ladner.

“Clearly, it is a spoof,” Ian Baillie said. “I don’t want people to think we are trying to impersonate him because we are not. We are trying to point out in a funny, humorous way some of the ridiculous things he has said.” [source]

Once the Vancouver Sun article landed, and the spoof came to light in the heavily-campaigned-at local Tech Community, there was a flurry of activity and controversy on local twitterstreams. Unfortunately, the outrage didn’t have a tag, but you can see the search string, and watch the drama unfold here.

There’s a fairly well defined protocol for spoofs on Twitter: @fakeNAME, like @fakesarahpalin, @fakejohnmccain. By hijacking his opponent’s name, Robertson crossed many protocol lines and undid almost all of the campaigning he had done in the tech community.

After a little exploration, it looks like the Vision Vancouver camp still hasn’t learned their lesson. They have created a new  twitter account at @fakepeterladner. Ok, so fine, yes, you followed “the rules” but it’s still not good politics or campaigning to take pot shots at your opponent. You want to bring light to some of the things your opponent has said? Fine. Do it in a debate, when he’s got an opportunity to respond. Debate the merits of your platform, and tell me why I should vote for you, not what the other guy has done “wrong”.

The lessons to take out of this? Register your name and your company name in all of the social marketing sites right away. Not owning your own name could come with serious consequences. And, if you’re trying to get people to choose you over another option, don’t try to win that vote by point out what the other guy is doing wrong.  In this age of transparency and honesty, you just look petty and childish.

 A couple of days ago, Wired’s Paul Boutin claimed that blogging was dead with this lede:

Thinking about launching your own blog? Here’s some friendly advice: Don’t. And if you’ve already got one, pull the plug.

So…. ok. Fine. Blogging is *so* 2004. Everyone’s gone to Twitter etc, blah blah blah.

What’s this really? This article? Is blogging dead?

No.

You’re here.

I’m here.

I’m here a lot. Heck, many of you guys are here a lot. I can tell. (I have my ways…. mwa-ha-ha!)

What I see in Boutin’s article, is that he’s being inflammatory. He’s trying to stir shit up. Hell, it’s one of the tenets of blogging. Controversy = page views and links. Which, totally correct, and Paul has done a fantastic job of doing exactly that. Page views? Hell yes. Links? OMG yes.  Hell, I’m plotting freelance articles that follow this exact formula. Give ‘em something controversial and watch the page views blow up.

In that regard, I’ve done exactly what Paul wanted, by looking at the article, blogging about it, and linking to it.

As Miss604 said, “I think blogging is changing (not dead); it’s evolving into something much bigger, allowing for more applications and tools to emerge in the online realm. It’s changing the conversation and allowing for more of a two-way street; you and your audience, wired and mobile, on and offline.”

She’s right.

Just sayin. Or maybe I’m just bloggin. whichever.

This has been bugging me for some time now, but I think in order to explain my annoyance, I have to give you some back story.

At BlogWorld Expo, I was hanging out with people I’d met at SxSW and knew from Twitter. A couple of them hassled me (gently) over my following to followers ratio. You see, I’d gotten fed up with the fact that I was missing many of the people I really wanted to know about on Twitter, and so ruthlessly slashed and burned. If we hadn’t had an actual exchange on Twitter, I was out. I culled those I was following down to approximately 250 (from about 1100).

So, ok, fine. I come home from BWE and start looking at ways to get the updates from my 250 or so “main interest” Twitter folk, while still following back just about everyone who followed me. I found that Tweetdeck will give me an “attention” group, despite the fact that the program takes up a lot of screen real estate and is kind of unwieldy.

So, I’ve begun to follow almost everyone back (unless you’re a spammer or a bot), and I’m getting a deluge of direct messages! “Thanks for the follow. Check out my blog!”, and my favourite, “Five reasons to move to Sweden”. Um, thanks but this is not why the direct message feature was introduced!

 People, restrain yourselves. Just stop it! I will find your blog if I am interested. Sending me a direct message and telling me to check you out is going to leave a bad taste in my mouth and even if I do manage to find your blog on my own, I’m not going to stick around. (image sources: screenshots taken by me)

So please, please people. If you want to say thank you for the follow or whatever, it’s ok to do that publically. It’s not a secret. Use the Twitter DMs for what they’re ACTUALLY for, ok?  Thanks.

Edited to Add: Matt makes a good point. I got all ranty and didn’t talk about what the DMs are actually FOR. I use them, as do many of my friends on Twitter, as a quick communication between two people that we don’t necessarily need all 1400 people or however many are following us to see.  I use them more or less like text messages - quick and easy, something that I can direct to one person rather than something that I want on the public timeline, but that doesn’t require as much effort/space as an email requires.

So, how are YOU using Twitter DMs?

I admit, I spent a lot of time looking at this article in disbelief, and then going back and reading bits again, but no, it’s true. One of the USA’s most prestigious journalism schools seems to be rather anti-new media.

I first learned about Alana Taylor’s PBS article on MediaShift through Mashable where she is a part-time contributor.  Alana posted a commentary on the lack of New Media savvy among her fellow students and the professor at NYU in a class called “Reporting Gen Y.”

Now, Alana is a “Gen Y” or “Quarterlifer”. A “digital native” or close to it. Call her what you will, the girl is deep in the social media scene and expected, rightly so, that her peers would be as well. It blew my mind that not only was Alana the only one to maintain a personal blog in her class, she was the only one to  have a “well, yeah” moment when her prof explained that some people get (shh, it’s a secret!) paid to blog. (A collective gasp rises from the crowd!) Alana says, “They should be fully aware at this point that blogging has become a very serious form of journalism.” And yet, it doesn’t appear that these people do get it.

One of the other stand-out points of Alana’s article was the fact that she is required to bring an actual newspaper in to class. Like, a real printed one. I can’t remember the last time I actually read anything beyond the front page of a newspaper with any intention (rather than just sitting in a waiting room).

“…we have to remember to bring in the hard copy of the New York Times every week. I take a deep sigh. Every single journalism class at NYU has required me to bring the bulky newspaper. I don’t understand why they don’t let us access the online version, get our current events news from other outlets, or even use our NYTimes app on the iPhone. Bringing the New York Times pains me because I refuse to believe that it’s the only source for credible news or Pulitzer Prize-winning journalism and it’s a big waste of trees.”

Amen, Alana, amen.

Yeah, you read that right. A professor from Bemidji State University wrote something about a local journalist. That journalist felt that the article was defamatory, and so in a stunning display of logic, that journalist decided to take Google to court. For $50 billion dollars.

Not surprisingly, the judge told said journalist to get the hell out of the court and stop wasting his time. 

If you’re interested in the detailed legal information and maneuverings, Eric Goldman has the details.  (image: iStock Photo)

I was reading Social Media Today, and Jennifer A. Jones posted about the new Ben & Jerry’s “community” site. She wasn’t very impressed about it, and frankly, neither am I.

The site, called Support Whirled Peace, is intended to support both a new flavour and Peace Day on September 21st, which is an annual event marked by the member states of the United Nations as an official day of “global ceasefire and non-violence.”

Jennifer’s post made me want to take a look at the site, and like her, I’m just not impressed. It’s cool looking, but it’s essentially just a glorified billboard. People post messages about their own brand of peace, but beyond that – there’s no interaction. There’s no…. social, in this social network site.

With all of the environmental causes that Ben & Jerry support, there’s a ton of things that they could be doing from a social media perspective. Not only that but the brand fans are so insanely loyal, they’re probably clamouring to participate, but they have to be given something to participate in.

(image source: screenshot by me)

There’s more trouble in Twitter Land. It seems that they’ve been working on deleting spammers, or at least that’s my impression, and some users are getting caught in the crossfire.

Dave Delaney is still locked out, and there doesn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason. Twitter said that his account had violated the TOS, but I  know from personal experience, Dave, and the others who were thrown out of the party early, haven’t done anything other than use the service the way they’re supposed to.

Dave is on day two of his mandatory time out even though others have been restored, an finally got a response from a Twitter rep directly, and then saw a post on GetSatisfaction from Jason Goldman, the official Twitter rep:

We’ve found that around seven accounts were accidentally suspended. They were mistakenly identified as spam; we are working to restore these accounts now.

While we have automated tools to identify spam, human review is still required before suspending accounts. Despite those safeguards, false positives can still occur and that’s what happened in this case.

I’m really sorry to those users who were affected by this mistake. We’re going to work a lot harder to make sure something like this doesn’t happen again.

All of these troubles are seriously making me wonder why I’m such a diehard twitter fan. I haven’t gotten into Identi.ca or Friendfeed or even Plurk, but I’m starting to think that I’ve really got to start moving my world.

Which are you using? Which do you think is better? And, what’s your user name over there?

(image source, screenshot from Dave Delaney)

While this might be taken out of context, the sentiment remains the same. Presidential hopeful John McCain says he hates the bloggers – why John? Because we tell the truth?

(Hattip for BuzzFeed for posting this in the first place)

I’m 79% filled with hate for Myspace. Sounds about right!

OnePlusYou Quizzes and Widgets

Online news outlets, like this one, and pretty much any other influential blog out there, are hot commodities for many PR and marketing people. If you’ve got any kind of consistent readership, companies like Matchstick Marketing will want to get you to try out and review products.

Rebecca Bollwitt, hyper-local Vancouver area blogger, Miss604, has been involved with Matchstick Marketing in the past, and even successfully reviewed a Samsung T10 for the company. In addition, she and her husband John had successfully participated in a campaign for a Nokia 6682.

But, it seems that successful campaigns from Matchstick Marketing are few and far between, and they manage to piss off more bloggers than they make happy:

Matchstick Marketing Crosses the Line into Spamming [Darren Barefoot]
The one where we all start pimping for the man [Vancouver Metblogs]
Matchstick.ca is buzz marketing gone wrong [Borris Mann]
I won’t be Nokia’s bitch [Unvarnished]
Match-Stuck [Worldwide Watercooler]
Matchstick, please stop the spam [Vancouver Metblogs]

See, the thing about blogger relations is that if you screw up, you’ll be outed, almost immediately. Citizen journalists are an immediate bunch. We usually don’t sit on things that either piss us off or make us happy very long.

The things Matchstick did wrong include:

• Contacting bloggers several different times, by several different Matchstick employees about the same campaign
• Not responding when the blogger is qualified and agrees to sign up for the campaign
• Making the bloggers go through a detailed screening process only to disqualify the blogger on an unrelated, unmentioned point
• Alienating popular bloggers by telling them that they are unqualified for the campaign they’ve been pitched hard for because they participated successfully in campaigns in recent months, but then still contacting them over and over again to participate in upcoming campaigns

Matchstick Marketing needs to get some things straightened out in the own house first, start their own blog and apologize to the bloggers they’ve pissed off, and they might get some of these people, and their loyal readers, back.

Stay tuned for an entry about how to conduct blogger relations the RIGHT way.

(image source: Newscom.com)