As many of my friends and colleagues know, in June 2007 I founded a local blog called Rockville Central. Within a week or two [correction: the first day] my friend and colleague, Cindy Cotte Griffiths, joined me and we co-managed the blog from that point forward.
Over time, it grew to be the second most-read local blog in Maryland and was on the forefront of a number of innovations. In March we made national news by moving entirely to a Facebook publishing platform.
Even with all the success, keeping Rockville Central going was a non-trivial undertaking and after more than four years today Cindy and I announced our decision to cease publishing. Rather than let the community whither, we diecided to make a clean break. So, today is the last day of publication for Rockville Central.
Here is the note we released this morning, in full:
It is with mixed feelings that we are announcing that, after more than four years and four months of continuous existence, as of today Rockville Central will cease publishing.
 Cindy Cotte Griffiths and Brad Rourke of Rockville Central We began Rockville Central in June 2007 and are proud that we have continually been on the forefront of local online community-building. We look around at the new online spaces devoted to aspects of Rockville and we are proud of the role we have played. Whether it is the coverage of Rockville’s elections that began with the 2007 election and continued through a groundbreaking candidate forum we produced, the many, many contributor opinions and notices of special events, or our recent shift to all-Facebook publishing – we look back on our work with pride.
We view our move to Facebook as having been successful. We have appreciated the members of our community posting photos, questions and links on Rockville Central and seeing other people respond. We’ve also been pleased to have first-hand news accounts from the people with their cell phones. Our active users have increased by over 500%. We’ve gone from about 24,000 hits a month on the website to 100,000 post views a month on Facebook. A single post on Facebook typically gets over 2,000 views.
Even with all this interaction, comments have remained civil. People have participated with thoughtful and full opinions about the issues. We’ve been able to provide a place for public discussions about Rockville based on the many news sources in our region. All these outcomes are gratifying.
However, the simple fact is that it takes a great deal of energy and time to support the online community in the way we feel it deserves. We do not make money off of Rockville Central, and never intended to. It is a labor of love and devotion to Our Fair City. We don’t feel we can devote the kind of energy it deserves and so, rather than let it whither, we decided to make a clean end.
Thank you so very much to all of our readers — both early adopters and new friends. If you are interested in following Cindy and Brad to see what else they are up to, please do so. You will see us all around Rockville and we will continue to be involved in the civic life of our City.
Farewell, friends. We’ll see you around.
~Brad Rourke and Cindy Cotte Griffiths
I definitely plan on continuing to be active in local civic affairs, and some new ideas are percolating in my head, so no condolences are necessary. This is a good move and it frees up energy and time for the next chapter.
Thank you to all who have supported Rockville Central over the years.
 I was away on vacation and so was not there to bask in the glory, but I was given a heads-up by the reporter and knew it was coming: On Sunday, June 26, me and my colleague Cindy Cotte Griffiths were featured on the front page of the Washington Post’s business section. The story, by Ian Shapira, was about our decision to move our successful local blog, Rockville Central, to a Facebook-only platform.
As of March 1, we have been publishing entirely on our Facebook page (which is open and so viewable by anyone, even those without a Facebook account). No new content is published to our web site. The results have been largely successful and our traffic and levels of interaction have both gone up.
The lede:
When the Rockville Central blog wanted to increase its readership, the owners looked to Facebook — now topping 750 million members — and thought: Let’s move everything there.
In March, Brad Rourke and Cindy Cotte Griffiths stopped publishing new content on their Web site and began posting to Facebook. Just like that, rockvillecentral.com was cast aside. The blog’s new site is theirs and Facebook’s: www.facebook.com/RockvilleCentral. Even in this era of Internet experimentation, the move was unusual.
With news organizations nationwide slashing staffs, this all-volunteer blog covering a city of 61,000 poses an intriguing possibility for the future of journalism: Is using social networking media such as Facebook a better way to reach a wide audience and still make money?
Go here to read the whole thing.
I just sent out my periodic email to folks (you can sign up at the right) and in it I gave a quick recap of the reaction to our decision this week to move Rockville Central to Facebook.
I thought you might be interested to read the note, as it collects much of the response and provides a bit more rationale.
Dear Colleagues and Friends–
For my periodic email update I wanted to share some interesting news with you.
As many of you know, a few years ago I founded a “hyperlocal news site” called Rockville Central. Since its founding in June 2007, along with my colleague Cindy Cotte Griffiths, we have built it to be one of the top five local blogs in Maryland, and it is sometimes looked to as a model for such efforts.
The key thing to know about Rockville Central is that its chief objective is civic engagement, not journalism or page views. We established it in order to provide new pathways into public life for people and, even though it has succeeded in a conventional sense, it has succeeded even more in a civic sense. People see it as a “space” that is theirs to inhabit, and deliberate over important issues facing the community.
We recently decided to make a significant shift in how we approach Rockville Central, and this has (surprisingly to us) generated a fair amount of national news.
Put simply, we are shifting from a “blog” model to a Facebook model for Rockville Central. We will no longer be posting items on our standalone website, but instead will be posting them on our Facebook page. We made that announcement on Wednesday morning.
We decided to make this move due to a variety of factors, including the fact that we know that more than two thirds of our readership are Facebook users, a number of local news outlets have sprung up in town so there is no shortage of local journalism (in part driven by our example), and because Facebook is a better mechanism for social interactions than a blog-and-comment model is.
That last point is critical. Our goal with Rockville Central is to foster interaction, not to attract eyeballs — so felt it important to go where people are and engage with them on their terms, not try to drag them over to our website.
This move has stimulated surprising national news coverage, as we appear to be among the first significant local news sites to move to Facebook-only.
Harvard University’s Nieman Lab was the first to cover the move, which we announced Wednesday. Future Journalism Project picked it up, too shortly afterwards. AOL’s Patch covered it a bit later (that one has a good interview with me). Mediabistro picked it up. The influential tech site The Next Web also mentioned the move in a piece this morning.
And, late last night, the Huffington Post ran an item.
Also, as I understand it, our move was debated on Wednesday night at an event focused on the future of online news held at the New York Times.
And, in the Twitter universe, there was response ranging from “Wow. News. Facebook-only. That’s a step.” to “Very interesting idea” to “I get it. But I don’t like it.”
Among Rockville Central readers themselves, I would characterize response as trending positive. Many loyal readers are willing to see where this move leads (we hope it will lead to deeper connection and more interaction). Others simply hate Facebook and think this is the worst idea ever, and are telling us they won’t be reading anymore (a reaction we expected and were prepared for).
For people in the democratic participation space, as many of my friends and colleagues are, I think what is interesting to look at is how we are trying to decouple the idea of being an “institution” or “organization” from being a community hub. We are saying that you don’t need to build something standalone to fulfill the role of community hub, you just need to open up a space with certain sensibilities and norms.
This is not a move that many organizations can make. We have no profit motive, nor do we have an imperative to continue surviving in the way most organizations do. So we are free to make a move like this without worrying about whether we will attract enough readers to keep going. However, we hope others will watch and maybe pick up some of the excellent community tools that are embedded already in Facebook and used every day.
 This morning we announced that our highly successful local news blog, Rockville Central, would be shifting focus. We will no longer be updating Rockville Central’s website, but instead will shift 100% to Facebook.
We think this is a pioneering — and gutsy — move. What allows us to make this move is that Rockville Central exists to engage people, not to make money or drive traffic. So, we are able to make decisions without having to worry about whether we will be able to find a revenue or traffic model.
This move is gaining some attention in the “hyperlocal journalism blogosphere.” That was not our intention, but it is sort of cool. Other hyperlocal experiments are watching to see what comes of this. To our knowledge, Rockville Central is the first local news hub to make such a move.
Here is the article as we ran it on Rockville Central this morning:
We are excited to let you know of a new development here at Rockville Central.
Since we began in June 2007 (here’s our first post), we have always stressed the community aspect. We aim to be an open, fair, and civil space in which to share views about what’s going on in Rockville. That means this site has always been about you, the participant. That focus has spurred very gratifying growth and we have remained in the top five local blogs in Maryland for a number of years.
However, traffic and readership has never been the most important measure of success for us. We are far, far more interested in knowing things like:
- How many people entered public life who had not participated before?
- How deep and robust were comment exchanges on key articles?
- How many people were sending article contributions and adding their voices?
- What other community web sites were getting started?
These measures, too, have been very gratifying as all of them have come true. Especially that last point. As new friends like Patch have gotten started and the Gazette and even the City of Rockville itself have implemented features we pioneered, and as current friends like Rockville Living have continued to grow, we are excited that the online community in and around Rockville is on its way to being vibrant and alive. The community is well served by this ecosystem of news, opinion and information.
Now, it is time for us to move to the next chapter in the life of Rockville Central.
Some time ago, we initiated Rockville Central’s Facebook page, and this has grown to become its own robust space for comments and participation. What’s more, in examining our traffic logs, it is the most important source (after Google) of traffic to the rockvillecentral.com site.
We believe that this suggests that Facebook is where people, by and large, have decided to go for their first-stop online community activities. Which begs the question: Why have a separate site, and try to drag people away from Facebook? Why not go where they are?
For entities and organizations that are trying to turn a profit, or have other institutional or organizational reasons to have a separate identity, it can make sense to have a separate web space. But Rockville Central is different and, as we thought hard about it, we realized we could find no compelling reason thatRockville Central needs to exist as a separate rockvillecentral.com site.
And so, as of March 1, all new Rockville Central content will be found solely on our Rockville CentralFacebook page. We hope you will join us there. Everything you have come to know and love about our articles will also exist in Facebook. You can comment, share, and interact — all with more ease and in one place. We’ll no longer have conversations in two different locations.
One thing that will change is that we will do less duplicative reporting. For a city its size, Rockville is well-covered, journalistically. We don’t need to duplicate the efforts of our friends. (How many recaps of the Mayor and Council meetings can you read, really?) We will focus instead on trying to build community and providing content and services that are different and not currently offered by others.
We don’t know necessarily what that will look like, but we are excited to see it emerge!
This is a bold step for us, and, to our knowledge, there are no other Facebook-only hyperlocal community hubs such as ours. It is our next step in trying to blaze a trail.
The existing rockvillecentral.com will continue to exist, and all current content will remain. Old links will still work. But, after February 28, there will be no new posts on that site, and all commenting will be closed. We invite you, instead, to post on our Facebook page.
Thank you for your loyal readership all these years, and we hope you will continue along with us as we embark on this next phase of our life.
We’ll see you over on Facebook.
Your friends,
Cindy Cotte Griffiths
Editor
Brad Rourke
Founder and Publisher
Like anyone with a blog, I have to deal with spam comments on a daily basis. I have a filter (Akismet) that takes care of a lot of it, and the few that slip through are no big deal. I just mark them as spam and move on.
But lately, I’ve been getting a new kind of unwelcome comment. Seems I have a secret enemy, who has begun posting offensive comments, using offensive fake names and emails.
I don’t want to actually print what the person has been writing, but it is sort of amusing. Very adolescent, complete with racial slurs and homophobic sentiments. So I took a screenshot. Click the image below if you want to see what they’ve been writing. (It’s profane, I warn you.)
I was naturally curious about who this might be, because it seems more personal than the normal sort of silly scratchings. I wracked my brain, trying to think about whom I might have done wrong enough to warrant this kind of grudge. Nothing came to mind.
The identity of the person remains a mystery.
And so, I imagine this game will continue. Comments will be left. I will delete them and chuckle.
I am oddly looking forward to the next installment.
 TBD.com Here’s a question I get asked often by organization managers considering getting more active in social media — Facebook in particular.
One best practice when it comes to Facebook Pages is to set the default setting so that visitors are looking at posts not only by the page owner but also by fans.
But: “What do we do when people start posting a whole bunch of stuff to our Wall?” asks the boss.
Excellent question. By and large, most organizations will get innocuous notes from fans. But for organizations with a cause that some may find controversial, or that are for some other reason possible targets of attention, may attract less desirable kinds of posts. What do you do? Just delete them from the Page? Engage?
New DC-local journalism startup TBD.com (with which the local blog I co-lead, Rockville Central, is associated) is one such organization. It’s a news outlet. People are attracted to it, as a way of promoting their own causes or bringing up their own issues.
TBD.com is committed to engaging with audiences, though — and not hiding behind an organizational wall. How they are handling their Facebook Page is a good case example of a classy move.
Recently, someone who says they are a veteran (I believe it, but can’t verify) left numerous notes and posted document scans about spraying Agent Orange in Guam. It’s a serious issue, but the tone is also more intense than most organizations might want to get behind.
Rather than just delete the posts, TBD.com Page admins wrote this:
Thanks for sharing the docs. We generally only cover local DC/VA/MD area news, but I made sure to copy down all your info here. I’m removing the repeat posts from the page, but keeping record.
Not only is the poster now more likely to be a friend and see TBD.com as honest brokers — so are other people. Here’s a tangible demonstration of the commitment to two-way.
Here it is in situ:
 Click for full size Well done, guys.
 'Magic Bus behind the U-Haul' by Flickr user blmurch After many months of poor service, frequent timeouts, and half-loaded pages, I moved the local blog I founded, Rockville Central, to a new host. I guess my first clue that I would really need to do something about this mess happened in a new client interview, when I was touting the site. My prospect pulled it up to check it out. He chuckled. “You’re site’s down,” he said.
But I didn’t act right then. No, I hesitated to move the site because I had been led to believe it is not an easy thing to move a WordPress blog. This blog is over three years old, with thousands of posts and uploaded images. But, my partner Cindy Cotte Griffiths and I have recently decided to grow Rockville Central and for that we needed a better platform. So, goodbye GoDaddy, hello Dreamhost.
I looked at a number of tutorials, and they all seemed to say slightly different things, and left out a thing or two. I thought I would write down what I did, what worked for me. This process is more methodical than some of the “five easy steps” tutorials I have seen, because I went in stages just in case things blew up. I decided I like the slow and steady approach for this task. So, here’s how:
- First, upgrade your existing installation of WordPress so it is the latest version. You can do this from within WordPress, on the admin panel.
- Copy your existing site to your computer. The best way to do this is to use an FTP program and just download the entire site. Yes, the whole thing. It may take a long time. Okay, now you have a backup in case everything goes wrong.
- Create a new folder on your computer for the new WordPress blog. It does not matter what you call it, but this will ensure that in subsequent steps you are only working on the new files, not messing with the old blog’s files. You want those pristine so you can go back if necessary.
- Copy the entire contents of the “wp-content” folder to the new folder you just created. Make sure you use the same tree structure as in the original.
- On your old blog, export all but the current month’s worth of content. This is done with the tools/export function. If you have a very large blog (like ours), try doing it year by year. You’ll do the current month of content at the very end, just before you make your new blog live. That way, if there are comments, etc., that come in while you are working you will not lose them in the switchover. When you press the “export” button, you may get taken to a page that looks sort of like a feed page. That’s becuase your browser is trying to render the export file as if it is a web page. If you get this (I did, using Chrome), “view source” for the page so you can make sure you see headers at the top that say it is a WordPress export file. If they are there, copy that source into a text editor like Notepad, and save the file with the extension “.wxr”.
- Sign up for hosting somewhere, and install WordPress. When you install the new WordPress, double check that it is the same version as your upgraded old blog. You’ll need to visit the admin page of the new blog once in order to force the install to configure the database. You might have problems doing that, because when you try to go to the new blog, you may have to type in your old address (if you set up your hosting properly) and this will take you to the old blog. Workaround: create a mirrored address for the new blog with a different url. Here’s how you create a mirrored domain in Dreamhost. Dreamhost has a special temporary holding host that you can use for this. (How this works: I signed up for hosting at Dreamhost, telling them I planned to host rockvillecentral.com there. Then I created a mirror of rockvillecentral.com that I called rockvillecentral.dreamhosters.com. To work on my new WordPress blog before I made it live to the world, I used the address: http://rockvillecentral.dreamhosters.com/wp-admin.)
- Upload the wp-content folder from your computer to your new new blog. This folder contains your old blog’s theme, plugins, and all uploaded photos. If you have a big blog, this can take a long time. I kept getting timeouts, so I went month-by-month with the photo uploads. (WordPress saves them by month, so that was easy — I just went a folder at a time). Okay, now you are just about ready to make your new blog just like your old blog.
- Open up the admin page of each (old and new) blog, in separate windows. Now comes the slightly tedious part. You want to configure your new blog so it looks like your old one, just without the content. So here is what you will have to do:
- Activate the proper theme (which you uploaded when you uploaded wp-content). If the theme is not there, you made a mistake in your upload.
- Create categories that are identical to the categories in your old blog. And (important) make sure the slug for each is the same as the old slug. Otherwise, when you import the old content at the end, you may end up with duplicate categories that you then need to clean up.
- When you go to the plugin page, you should see all the plugins from your old blog, only deactivated. Activate the ones you want to use. (I found that there were some on my old blog I wanted to abandon.) You’ll want to switch back and forth between your old blog’s admin panel and the new one as you make these configurations, to check you are making the proper settings.
- Configure your sidebar widgets. Again, going back and forth between old admin page and new admin page should make this easy.
- Finally, check the new blog’s look and feel. It should look just like your old one, only with one “Hello World” post.
- Import the old content. Okay, now you will make your blog really look right. Using the import tool, import the database .wxr file(s) you created when you exported your old blog. Now, test, test, test. Make sure it looks like you want. You will undoubtedly have missed something, so look closely. Give yourself a day to check back and look with fresh eyes. If everything is good, you can now move to the final steps. You should do these all at once if possible, so you have minimal downtime and no one comments while your blog is in transition:
- Export your current month posts from your old blog. Save the resulting .wxr file to your desktop.
- Import your current month posts into your new blog. Just like Step 9 above.
- Switch your DNS records on your domain registrar. You need to tell the world that your blog is now at a new place. To do this, you need to go into the control panel where you manage your domain and give it your new host’s dns server addresses. This is the step that makes your new blog “live.”
- Live like this for a while. This was a big move, so live with it for a while to make sure it’s working like you expect. If there are problems, try to fix them. If you can’t, you can always go back to the original blog. But, if things are working basically correctly, do the final step:
- Delete the old files from the old webhost. Because you have updated the DNS entries, you won’t be ablt to do this with your usual FTP program. You will probably have to do so from within your webhost’s administration functions. This will differ from host to host. Once you’ve deleted the files, go ahead and cancel the hosting account and it should all disappear.
Well, there you have it! Those are the steps that worked for me. It took me three days to do the prep, but I went very slowly, step by step. I did not want any down time. So I gave myself a week to do steps 1-9 Then, on Saturday morning, I did 10-12 quickly. I’m now in the middle of “living with it” to make sure all is well, and it seems like the switchover went without a hitch. In the next few days I will do step 14 (delete old) and will be alllllll done.
If you try this, let me know how it works in the comments. I will try to answer questions if I know the answers. I know it looks like a lot of rigmarole, but it was really pretty easy if I just went slowly. You can do it too!
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If you’re not in the tech world, you probably have never heard of the Silicon Valley blog called TechCrunch. This is a widely-read and frequently-updated blog on happenings throughout the tech world. It is among the handful of top news sources for the tech world.
Bear with me as I set up a scenario. The details are important.
About a month ago, the site’s founder, Michael Arrington, wrote “An Apology To Our Readers” in which he said:
I received a phone call from someone I trust who told me that one of our interns had asked for compensation in exchange for a blog post. Specifically, this intern had allegedly asked for a Macbook Air in exchange for a post about a startup
After an investigation we determined that the allegation was true. In fact, on at least one other occasion this intern was almost certainly given a computer in exchange for a post.
The intern in question has admitted to some of the allegations, and has denied others. We suspended this person while we were sorting through exactly what happened. When it became clear yesterday that there was no question that this person had requested, and in one case taken, compensation for a post, the intern was terminated.
Arrington went on to delete all posts that had been written by the intern. Since the intern was underage, his name was originally withheld.
 Daniel Brusilovsky by Flickr user magerleague Later, though, the intern came clean in both a blog post and an interview with the startup-focused blog Mixergy. His name is Daniel Brusilovsky and he’s a 17 year old senior.
Here’s what he told Mixergy:
There is supposedly a company I was meeting with who offered me a MacBook Air in exchange for a post. That got escalated to TechCrunch and TechCruch wrote a post about it and terminated my employment with them.
Brusilovsky is in the news again, one month after the incident came to light, because another character has stepped forward — a business owner who says he was the one shaken down for a story.
Sam Odio, who is CEO of a tech startup called Divvyshot (and who is as far out of the Valley as you can imagine — in Charlottesville, VA [UPDATE -- that's 'cause he's at school at UVA, according to his web contact details]), has written in his own blog that, “Daniel Brusilovsky recently asked the founder of a startup for a Macbook Air and offered coverage in exchange. That founder was me, the CEO of Divvyshot. I came forward to Mike at TechCrunch.”
For a long time, Odio had remained silent. According to him, he was initially shaken down evidently sometime in December 2009:
Daniel came to me about Air while writing this article. He wrote the article in “real time” while interviewing me. It was in this context that he told me a friend of mine (a guy I went to college with) bought him an iMac in exchange for an article. Daniel told me that the “cover story” for the iMac was that he had received it as a gift for his birthday. I don’t know exactly what their agreement was as I wasn’t there.
 Sam Odio, from his blog When Daniel told me about the iMac, he mentioned that he needed a new laptop and that he would cover Divvyshot’s upcoming announcements in exchange for a new Macbook Air. I was stunned and responded with something like “Haha, we’ll talk about it later.” I hoped the issue would be dropped after that interview but over the coming weeks Daniel continued to bring up the Air.
My reaction was always “we can do this, but not right now.” That was a mistake – I should’ve just said no. Instead it took me over a week of struggling with the issue before coming forward to Mike at TechCrunch.
Some time after coming forward to Arrington (but while he had still not told anyone else), Odio came upon what he saw as a sympathetic piece by prominent tech journalist Jason Calacanis. The piece criticized Brusilovsky’s less than full-throated apology. Odio sent a note to Calacanis saying that he was the one who’d been shaken down.
Calacanis forwarded the email to acerbic commentator Loren Feldman who took the opportunity to exert pressure to get more of the story by Tweeting: “Divvyshot. You have 24 hrs.”
And so Odio wrote his piece on Monday, laying out his role.
I am sharing the details of this story because it is a potentially very, very fruitful study about ethical decision-making. There are right-wrong as well as right-right questions all over the place:
- Brusilovsky: The way he tells it, he and Odio were sort of joking over IM and the language could have been construed as a shake down. (He’s also said Odio was the one who initiated the exchange.) If the “joking around” story is true, at what point do you put a stop to such conversation and inform your superiors?
- Odio: His start up could be made or broken (or so he thought) by a story in TechCrunch. How do you have the courage to say “no” when it is necessary (instead of a week later)?
- Arrington: Confronted with the evidence, but faced with denial, how do you respond? Do you divulge who is involved? How about the companies involved?
- Calacanis: You are a high-profile person who gets an email out of the blue. What obligation do you have over whether you divulge it or not? And to whom?
- Feldman: You care deeply about transparency. Where do you draw the line over who you “out?” Or is that even a relevant question?
My own take is that Brusilovsky was in the wrong, and I find his explanation of the story hard to swallow. But he is also a young person. While he should know better, he may not have developed his moral compass fully yet — so, while his punishment seems right, the court of public opinion might do well to give him a second chance. Don’t hate on him too hard, in other words.
But, in the chain after the initial shakedown, the questions become much more murky and interesting. Each player had a right-versus-right dilemma (as my friend Rush Kidder would say). You can make a case that they did the wrong thing or that they did the right thing.
This is worth studying as a public leader. Often, it is the wrongdoing of others that places us in our own ethical dilemmas.
 "Newspaper" by Flcikr user brad.rourke This morning, as I went outside to pick up the many newspapers to which I subscribe to home delivery (I’m old school that way), I saw an extra bundle in the middle of the driveway. It was a free print version of a new online newspaper, being helpfully delivered to my doorstep.
My immediate thoughts were very negative. More to recycle. More to pick up every morning. More to read.
But my main thought was: No one asked me if I want this, they just toss it my way for me to deal with. This is the anger that so many feel when confronted with intrusions in daily life, and why spam is so objectionable. No one asked me. The implicit statement by the organization doing the spamming is: “Our goals are more important than your convenience.”
In the commercial world, junk mail has long been despised for just this reason. But, as the imperative to communicate more effectively spreads throughout the nonprofit and public sectors, we get more and more such unwelcome messages.
I get emails that seem to be directly from the heads of small- and medium-sized community benefit organizations from which I had never heard before. I am suddenly on new lists. They all tell me to click here, or respond there, in order to unsubscribe, which is nice. But I don’t unsubscribe, as I sort-of know the people and don’t want to hurt feelings.
This has caused me to pay far, far less attention to my email inbox than I used to, because I cannot control what comes into it. That’s the “push” approach to social marketing.
Meanwhile, information streams over which I do have control, like Twitter, Facebook, and RSS feeds, have become my main source of information.
The Pull World
That is the new, “Pull World.” There is a new best practice being developed before our eyes when it comes to social marketing. As is often the case, the nonprofit or community benefit sector is a bit behind the curve. It seems like they are all suddenly discovering targeted email newsletters, just as their utility is flying out the window.
What works in the Pull World? Useful sharing. This is what can drive effective social marketing in a world where mindshare is moving from passive receptacles (reading my Inbox) to active engagement (who am I following, what feeds am I reading). When organizations share usefully with me, I go ahead and pass those messages on to my own network.
The Pull World requires discipline from any organization. It’s not easy to move from a Push mentality to a Pull mentality. It’s even harder when you factor in the organizational needs that must be met – even in the public benefit sector, organizations are not in business just to share and make people feel good, they need to survive and thrive. That means, in many cases, that their marketing messages must get out there.
It is a fine line to walk between letting people know what we are up to, and just plain vanilla PR that will be ignored. There’s no magic bullet, and different organizations are answering this question in different ways:
- Some organizations designate a few people to be their public face and unleash them to share however they choose.
- Some organizations try to create an engaging mix of equal parts organizational PR, sharing of others’ work, and just useful information regardless of source.
- Some organizations try to create communities where users create and share material that has to do with the organization.
Since there is not a consensus set of best practices yet, many organizations are trying all of these and more tactics all at once. For someone looking for The Answer, it may be dispiriting to learn that there isn’t one. But that’s just how things go at the beginning of adoption curves.
For now, most of these strategies are playing out in social media, but as the novelty of Twitter and Facebook wears off and they become unremarkable platforms, I believe these overall approaches may migrate across platforms.
The Push-Pull World
Eventually we may get to a Push-Pull world, where organizations will put out messages for people to pull down on the various sharing platforms, and will also have a set of close-in friends who have given permission to be pushed to. A great deal of an organization’s attention will be directed toward moving people from the Pull category to the Push category.
Thinking about that helpful newspaper in my driveway, it’s an attempt to create a Push relationship. But because it starts with Push, it is inherently intrusive. It’s essentially a strategy that goes like this: “We will push something into your life (a newspaper) and if you don’t complain we will keep pushing it. Our revenue model (display advertising) depends in part on the numbers of such packages we are pushing. We hope that eventually you will act in some way on something that is contained in one of our pushed messages, which will allow us to point to impact as well as reach.”
I wonder if strategies like that one will survive. They’re expensive, both in wasted material (newsprint), wasted energy, and wasted goodwill. On the other hand, maybe enough people respond, and they push enough numbers, to make it worthwhile.
But I think things are changing and someday soon we will chuckle at some of what we take for granted nowadays. The same way we chuckle at press releases sent by postal mail.
When will we get there? I don’t know. What will that look like? I don’t know that either. Some of today’s experiments will pan out, others won’t.
Now, I have one last admission to make. I do have an email list to which I send every week or two. I think that everyone on it wants to be there. But just in case, please let me know if you ever get an email you don’t want from me. It won’t hurt my feelings.
Meantime, I am going to spend a little more time on my sharing usefully.
 I am proud to announce the launch of a major new initiative that I have been working on with a few partners. The formal announcement will come later this week, but I wanted to give a preview to my readers because I am so excited about it.
Today, we are soft-launching the new Washington Times Communities. This is a new social journalist network tied into The Washington Times.
Along with partners Jacquie Kubin and Joe Szadkowski, we have been working furiously for the past months to get this in shape.
My role was to help design the management structure for this new network and to add in what I know about social networking and blogging from my experience with various other initiatives. I am also taking part in the day-to-day management of the Communities.
What It Is
We think that we have developed something that is somewhat unique among these kinds of things. Many newspapers have “community blog” sections. (In fact, the The Washington Times had one, which this new initiative replaces.) These can have widely varying content quality, widely varying updating schedules, and are typically hidden from view and separate from the rest of the newspaper’s online space.
The fundamental problem for many news organizations is that these things are hard to manage and it’s hard to know what kind of quality you’re getting.
We have created a structure which we think makes the Washington Times Communities “manageable” from an organizational perspective while at the same time open enough to make it a real blog network. At the same time, we’ve organized it so that, from a reader’s perspective, it should be easy to find what you are looking for.
There are really six Communities:
Each of these communities is led by a “mayor” who essentially curates the content for each community. Within each Community, there are between five and ten (for now) “neighborhoods.” Each of these Neighborhoods is a blog, with one author responsible for the content.
So we’ve created a hierarchy, where each of the community “mayors” is acting like the editor of a newspaper section or magazine, with each author having a specific “neighborhood” beat.
It’s all volunteer, we are not staff for the paper.
What’s Different
While we don’t claim that this is a revolutionary idea (after all, it’s a blog network, nothing earth-shaking), we do think it’s an innovation in how to approach something like this. There are a few things that make this different, in my view:
- There is direct involvement with senior management at the paper. The paper’s senior managers take a personal interest in this, all the way to the top.
- There is a direct tie to the regular online space of the paper. Content from the Communities will be featured on the main page of the Times. This means that there is a greater chance for the community content to be seen by the many millions of unique visitors to the Times’ front page per day.
- The writers are handpicked. People have to be invited to take part as an author. We chose participants keeping in mind both quality of their work, potential for growth, and willingness to devote the energy it takes to promote the Communities through social networks.
- There is support at every level. Individual authors are supported, mayors are supported by management. Authors support one another.
- There is ongoing innovation. The initiative is committed to iterating and learning at a rapid pace so we can best improve it.
- There is a constant stream of content. Every author is committing to a certain number of posts per week, so there will always be something new coming from the Communities.
I sincerely hope you will take a look, poke around, comment on a few articles, and give your feedback.
Like other blog networks, viral word of mouth will be key. You can help this initiative out immensely by sharing any articles you find interesting and by spreading the word. The Times management will be watching this closely and we want it to succeed!
Public Good, A New Online Space
 Public Good There’s another aspect of this new initiative that I am very excited about. You might have noticed above that there’s a Community called “Public Good.” I am in charge of that, and it’s an online space devoted to examining various takes on public life and community today.
I have brought together a terrific portfolio of authors, each who is writing their own blog that takes a different perspective.
These are the “neighborhoods” in Public Good:
- Dispatches From The Heartland, by John Creighton: Community life and leadership lessons
- Faith: The Flip Side, by Allison Addicott: How faith and politics intersect around the globe
- Making Change, by Donna Rae Scheffert: About people who are getting involved in helping others and making a difference
- Public Square Today, by Brad Rourke: What’s happening in public life — and why it matters (this is my column)
- Teaming Up For Success, by Carla Ledbetter: People celebrating good things that happen through successful teamwork
- Truth Be Told, by Carla Harper: Thinking a little deeper about our lives, our country and our values
- Went West, by Sutton Stokes: A transplanted easterner reflects on culture, politics, and the pursuit of happiness from his new vantage point in the Rocky Mountain West
- Young, Willing and Able, by Angela Hopp: Emerging leaders accomplishing great things
As you can see, this is a varied group!
I know that many of my readers are deeply concerned with public life and thought leaders when it comes to many different aspects of it. I hope that you will get in touch to talk about ways that I might include your perspectives, perhaps by showcasing some of your work or through an interview or podcast, or through a guest post.
See you around the Communities! Drop by Public Good!
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In 2007, I founded Rockville Central (about Rockville, MD) and comanaged it until we ceased publishing in October 2011.
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