New Media Prof Blog » obama

Where are the doctors at the white house?

admin — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 03:05:24 +0000

This has nothing to do with Public Relations or Marketing…or does it? After a major debacle regarding healthcare reform (politically), the President’s own version of a healthcare proposal has been posted online. You can download a PDF explaining the highlights. You’ll notice some marketing and PR when you visit this part the White House website. We all know the administration has been criticized for too much PR after the election, too much exposure for the President himself and preaching transparency but not practicing it. Take a look for yourself and especially my students should study it as an evolution in modern PR. I just have one question: why aren’t any of the 19 doctors in Congress invited to the healthcare summit at the White House this week?

Grass Roots Senate Race

admin — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 04:10:14 +0000

An interesting thing happened on the way to filling Senator Ted Kennedy’s seat here in Massachusetts – the Republican candidate, Scott Brown pushed ahead of Democrat Martha Coakley with only a few days to do before the votes are cast. We are witnessing a grass roots initiative in Scott Brown’s camp that’s taken hold. New media and social media are playing a big role, keeping in mind that Scott Brown didn’t have nearly the name recognition that Martha Coakley had when this all started. Presidents Clinton and Obama visited Boston this weekend to try to bolster support for Coakley. Senator McCain has endorsed Brown, as did Ted Kennedy’s hometown newpaper, the Cape Cod Times. The Tea Party Express has endorsed Brown in a YouTube video (also a TV spot), even though the candidate was unfamiliar with the organization. Pollsters and pundits are scratching their heads. But haven’t we seen this grass roots effort demand change before?

The Online President

admin — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 17:21:08 +0000

The website says ‘The White House is Open for Questions.’ And today, President Obama had his first presidential virtual town meeting. Anyone can ask the President questions online. I am encouraged that this President clearly understands the power of new media beyond the campaign initiatives used to help get him elected. I applaude it for many reasons, not the least of which is that it gets people involved in our government with interactivity or at even to the point of submitting a link of you asking a video question. They tell us 100K questions were submitted with no pre-screening. The production looks pretty good – I counted about 4-5 cameras switched into the live feed. No hiccups in the live stream, so clearly they’ve got the technology part of scaling to volume viewers and bandwidth covered. However, at more than 10-minutes in, we are still listening to Obama’s sales pitch (did he forget he was already elected?) Now finally getting to the first question, which came from Boston (that’s where I am) was about education. Second question - re-financing home mortgages. Third question – jobs. And hallelujah – a question about tax breaks for small business owners who depend on bank loans to run the operation. We’re told that the questions chosen for a Presidential answer were chosen by the numbers of votes cast (3.5million votes) that bring that question to the top, courtesy Google analytics. And in a moment that spawned laughter in the live audience, the President explained that the question about legalizing marijuana got a lot of votes but his answer was ‘no’ in terms of that being part of the administration’s economic strategy. BTW, Google powers today’s town hall and all of the techno that led up to it including online question submission, etc). Yesterday, a writer from WebProNews called it A Google Spangled White House Town Hall, which is a valid point. And the PR machine is working overtime with videos on the White House website. But back to today’s point, I think the Online Town Hall is a good start. As a former TV producer, I would have a few comments about shortening the answers to get more questions in during the 30-minutes I’ve been watching. I actually have a business to run, so my time available to watch anything, is short, as a small business person. I’d like to see the format be more rapid-fire Q&A, preserving, of course, the answer content. The live nature of the town meeting is good and kudos for all involved for making it technically seemless. And it is obvious that the audience target is those Millennials who were tapped in mass during the Obama campaign. I think all of this is long overdue. Gone are the days when only traditional media has access to the President of the U.S. and gone are the days that our connection as the public only comes through soundbites. I think it is important for our President to stay connected to us all…because we ARE watching very carefully!

New White House Website

admin — Sat, 24 Jan 2009 18:57:25 +0000

As everyone knows by now, the new White House website went live at the exact same moment that Barack Obama became President. There’s plenty of new media there to communicate with constituents, but a bit lacking on the interactive side. Sure we can send an email, but we all know where that ends up. We can sign up for updates – I’ll wait until I get a few to decide if I will unsubscribe or not. But I gotta give ‘em credit for giving us the administration’s news of the day, some of it with video, or in the blog and some of it transcribed. Often we aren’t aware of the the details of what a new President is actually doing in terms of policy, meetings, public appearances and so forth, so it is refreshing to get the information without having to rely on the soundbite news networks with their boring or obnoxious analysis. Just give it to me straight. And the website is clearly targeting many different demographics. I’m hoping we won’t be bombarded with propaganda on the day’s Presidential news – we’ll see.