Guest post by Mark Drapeau For a good part of my career, I was a scientist researching how animal behavior is controlled by genes and neurons. Desiring something more, I got a terrific fellowship from the scientific society AAAS in 2006 and was able to conduct science and technology policy research at the Department of Defense for a few years. That experience opened my eyes to everything from the inner workings of the military, to how the government purchases goods…
Putting the Public Back in Public Relations: Crooked Monkey Style
Guest Post by Dr. Mark Drapeau – read his blog, follow him on Twitter I hadn’t heard of the popular t-shirt company Crooked Monkey until I was invited to an exclusive party they recently held. You see, even though they get great press from actors wearing their shirts in movies and magazines talking about their fashion styles, Crooked Monkey is based in Washington, DC not widely known as the fashion capital of the country. And they wanted to do some…
Fallacious Celebrations of Facebook Fans
Guest Post by Dr. Mark Drapeau – read his blog, follow him on Twitter Source: Shutterstock Images Publishing “top 10” lists is unfortunately a staple of modern journalism. But alas, writers must drive readers’ eyeballs, even when discussing serious topics like the government. And so we find a new list that mixes Web 2.0 with the government: “Top 10 agencies with the most Facebook fans.” For the record, this list is topped by the White House with 327,592 fans, followed…
Proactive Social Media: Filling the Information Space With Great Content
Guest Post by Dr. Mark Drapeau – read his blog, follow him on Twitter Source I recently gave a talk titled Free the People! at the Potomac Forum’s Government 2.0 Leadership, Collaboration, and Public Engagement Symposium in Washington, DC that generated enough interest for me to post my slide deck and write a summary for a wider audience. These thoughts constitute some of my early ideas about “offensive social media” for organizations (this talk was particularly geared towards a government…
Making Whuffie With Julia Allison
Guest Post by Dr. Mark Drapeau – read his blog, follow him on Twitter You can’t eat whuffie, but it’s getting harder to eat without it, as Tara Hunt says in The Whuffie Factor. For the uninitiated, think of whuffie as an alternative to money – a reputation-based currency that started as a concept in a science fiction novel, now being applied to online business. Hunt’s interesting central thesis is that in order to successfully change social capital into market…
