Internet Marketing Blog

Dakota County YouTube Video PSA Contest

I've been helping out on a YouTube video PSA contest project that is sponsored by the Dakota County Public Health Department, called Respect My Ride. The purpose of the campaign was to encourage Dakota County teens to pledge to keep their cars smoke-free.  The video contest encouraged teens to create a 30-second public service announcement promoting the same message.

In addition to YouTube, the campaign made use of Facebook, MySpace, and Flickr in in trying to reach teens. The contest winners were announced yesterday. The remarkable explosion of creativity that social media has unleashed never fails to amaze me. This project was no exception.

The following playlist includes all the entries to the contest (the first three are the winners, in order):

Minnesota Council Of Nonprofits Technology & Communications Conference

I've been presenting at the Minnesota Council Of Nonprofits' annual technology and communications conference for the past two years and I will again this year. This year the conference takes place in Minneapolis on Thursday.

It is an all day event and a big production; I've always been impressed with the scope and quality of the conferences. This year, the conference is called Message+Medium+Message and it is largely devoted to social media. There is clearly a demand for information on the topic because the Council had a record number of registrants this year and the event sold out.

The conferences are so good because the Council consistently gets such talented people to participate. Perusing the list of presenters this year, I'm struck by the quality of the people who will speak. Within the social media and Internet technology sphere, here are some of the people who will share their knowledge and expertise:

Aaron Landry will be talking about Web 2.0 basics. Aaron is a prolific blogger. If you pay any attention to the Minnesota blogosphere, you can't help but run across his content. It's clear, too, that he's immersed in social media, from his blog to Twitter to Flickr, he's integrated online communication into his daily life.

Beth Kanter will talk about Nonprofits in the Age of Social Media and she'll conduct a social media game. I've been following Beth's Blog about social media and nonprofits for some time now and I'm continually impressed with her ideas there. She's also a great resource for discovering new and useful social media sites.

The citizen journalism site Twin Cities Daily Planet is represented by long-time Strib veteran Jeremy Iggers and editor Mary Turk. They'll talk about Media Relations in the Age of New Media.

Peter Fleck's wonderfully titled session, Why I Hate Facebook, will address how nonprofits can use social networking sites and, of course, why he hates Facebook. Peter blogs at his PF HYPER Blog. Peter will also talk about perhaps the most important technology of all for social media, RSS, the glue that holds the social net all together.

There are ton more talented people presenting: Check out the sessions and bios pages.

This year I'll be presenting with my Tunheim Partners colleague, Pat Lilja. Our session is called Conversational Marketing: New Media Communication Strategy. Pat and I will discuss how to engage in the conversations taking place on the popular social media sites.

If you're attending the conference, track me down and say hi. If you can't make it, I'll probably Tweet from there, so you can follow my Twitter account, if you like. I'll also be putting resources from our session online and I'll let you know when it's live.

Citizen Journalist On The Scene At Bar Fire

When most people think about citizen journalism, the overcompressed, jerky cell phone video images come to mind. While it's certainly true that those type of images often represent citizen journalism, as we've seen with the Minneapolis bridge collapse, that is not always the case.

This is another remarkable example of not just citizen journalism, but the quality citizen journalism can reach. A popular Minneapolis bar I've hung out at on more than one occasion called Maxwell's caught fire and burned down yesterday morning.

Twin Cities blogger Ed Kohler at the scene, cameras in hand, shot still photos, some video, and posted the results to his blog, The Deets, as well as to his Flickr account. Here's the video he shot at the scene:

While the quality of these images are of traditional journalistic standards, what strikes me the most about citizen journalism is the You Are There quality it tends to convey and which seems to be missing from mainstream media coverage. Perhaps that's because of the packaging that comes along with MSM reporting.

It feels sorta like Edward R. Murrow reporting from the rooftops of London during the blitz (RAM).

Online Branding In The 2008 Presidential Race

The 2008 presidential race has been called the YouTube election and that is certainly hard to dispute. There have been numerous examples of YouTube videos playing a significant role in the race for the White House.

In each instance, the YouTube videos attempted to brand a candidate one way or another and to varying degrees of success.

Pre-YouTube

The first instance of YouTube-like online branding of a politician in Minnesota, and, perhaps, nationally, occurred during Norm Coleman's 2002 campaign against the late Senator Paul Wellstone.

At the outset of Coleman's challenge against Wellstone, a couple of young Minnesotans launched the now defunct BushBoy.com that featured a hilarious Flash animation depicting Coleman as George W. Bush's lapdog and, literally, hand puppet. The animation used actual clips of Coleman speeches and played on Coleman's close relationship with the White House. I cannot, unfortunately, find the actual animation. The site was instantly popular. It worked so well because the piece exploited some essential truths of Coleman the politician: He was handpicked by Karl Rove to run against Wellstone and he had big monied supporters.

BushBoy.com was followed by JibJab during the 2004 presidential election with a Flash animation that lampooned both George W. Bush and John Kerry. Again, the satire was so effective because it absolutely nailed if not essential truths, then perceived truths of both candidates:

YouTube Politics

Prior to YouTube, you had to be pretty motivated and needed not just some technical expertise to create popular online political satire, but enough marketing savvy to build awareness. When YouTube launched in February 2005, it provided an easy way to publish satirical political videos and offered a centralized, ready-made audience for them.

Senator George Allen's Macaca Moment

What's more, YouTube ushered in the era of citizen generated media, offering a platform and an audience for raw video shot by individuals. During this presidential race, that fact played out most prominently when a worker for the James Webb senate campaign caught his opponent, Senator George Allen, using a racial slur when referring to the Webb volunteer.

Allen was considered a front-runner for the 2008 Republican presidential nomination. The Webb campaign uploaded the video to YouTube and it soon became news, with television reports airing the video itself. The widespread exposure of that video branded Senator Allen as a racist. Subsequent reports of Allen using racial slurs and his awkward attempts at explaining the video simply solidified the perception that he was a racist. Allen lost his re-election bid and, as a result of the video, was no longer a viable presidential candidate.

Rudy Giuliani in Drag

It's an understatement to say that Rudolph Giuliani faced an uphill climb in securing the conservative base of his party during his bid for the Republican presidential nomination. Conservatives saw no difference between him and a liberal Democrat. Though Guiliani failed for a variety of reasons, it certainly didn't help his cause when someone uploaded video of the former Mayor of New York in drag and flirting with Donald Trump. The video reinforced Giuliani's brand as a liberal:

Big Mother Hillary

The Obama campaign's mashup of the 1984 Apple Macintosh commercial was effective because for years Hillary Clinton has been pummeled (and branded) by her right wing critics as cold, distant, and a big government socialist:

This is the original Apple commercial:

Which, coming full circle, is based, of course, on George Orwell's novel about totalitarianism, 1984:

The Clinton's Soprano's Spoof

Riffing off the finale episode of the final season of the immensely popular HBO show The Sopranos, the Clinton campaign spoofed the finale with a lighthearted version of their own. This piece was fascinating because people tended to read into it what they wanted to see. Supporters of the Clintons saw it as a laudable attempt to show people Hillary's lighter side. Clinton critics, on the other hand, thought it entirely appropriate that the Bill and Hillary would compare themselves to a crime family. In this case, branding was in the eye of the beholder:

This is the original ending scene from The Sopranos:

Pretty Boy John

The Edwards campaign had to be mortified when a clip of the candidate appeared on YouTube that showed him obsessing over his hair, reinforcing the perception of John Edwards as a pretty boy:

The negative branding from that video was so successful that the campaign felt obliged to address it with a self-effacing video of their own for the YouTube debates:

Mitt's Many Faces

The rap against Mitt Romney has been that he never met a position he wouldn't change, if it were politically expedient to do so. And if you had any doubts, YouTube was there to remind you that Romney once held the polar opposite positions he now holds:

I Got A Crush On My Candidate

Barack Obama has been the biggest beneficiary to date of online branding through YouTube. When Barely Political launched the Obama Girl video, the branding of Obama as a sexy candidate easily took hold because he is a very charismatic man. The video has only been a positive for the campaign:

With the phenomenal success of I Got A Crush On Obama, Barely Political followed up with Obama Girl vs. Giuliani Girl:

Too Hot For Hillary

The Me Too videos followed shortly after the Obama Girl made such a big splash but not always to the benefit of the candidate. Taryn Southern, for example, released Hott 4 Hill, containing a rather obvious lesbian theme:

Huck Me

The Huckabee Girl video mocks Republican candidate Mike Huckabee's belief in Creationism:

Yes They Can

Finally, Barack Obama again benefits from independent online branding with the Yes We Can music video featuring musicians and Hollywood stars singing along to an Obama speech. The video brands Obama as an inspiring, lyrical, poetic speaker. Again, the branding is effective because it's true:

Who Needs Swift Boats?

Forget 527s, the new Swift Boat Veterans are going to be even more opaque than the shadowy groups of elections past. If you like anonymous, unaccountable attack ads, stay tuned to YouTube. We are entering a new era of political campaigns because now, with the ease of YouTube, digital cameras and editing software, one person with a clever idea and some skill now has the power to affect an election.

My New Employer

As I mentioned at the end of October, I've left the wilds of independent consultancy and taken my Internet marketing practice to Tunheim Partners, a Twin Cities-based strategic communications company that offers public relations, public affairs  and, my specialty, of course, Internet marketing.

My first official day on the job was Tuesday but since I've been working alongside my new colleagues since October, it did not at all feel like "the first day." Going from the freedom I had being self-employed, to the requirements of being an employee has been a fairly big, but entirely positive, change for me.

Now I really get to focus on the things I love to do and no longer have to deal with the necessary but pain in the ass things that go along with running your own business.

It really hit me last Friday because I had just a fantastic day that, when I stopped to think about it, made me all the more excited about working here. The first half of my day was taken up with working on several very cool and exciting online campaigns we are in the process of executing.

In addition to making me feel right at home from the moment I moved in, the people here are incredible to work with. As an independent guy, I often worked pretty much alone and when I did work with teams, it was not on a daily basis. It's a dynamic I didn't realize I missed and one I very much enjoy.

The reason I enjoy it so much is because everyone I work with is smart, skilled, and passionate about what they do. I've got a ton of talent with which to work, so I'm able to do some very engaging work that I had not often had the chance to do.

My lunch hour was spent discussing and debating some serious public policy ideas! As a matter of the course of business, we were trying to come to terms and understand some aspects of a problem and the way we did that was through discussion and debate.

I absolutely love such intellectual exercises, so it was like being in college again.

Then the rest of the day I returned to working on exciting projects.  When the day was over, I just thought to myself: I love my new job!

So, for the record: I am now Director of e-Strategy at Tunheim Partners. My email address here is derickson@tunheim.com. My phone number is 952-851-7242.

Ciao.

Google Streetview Hits Home

Google Map's StreetView feature has finally arrived in the Twin Cities, reports Pioneer Press' Julio Ojeda-Zapata.

Like Twin Cities bloggers Ed Kohler and Aaron Landry, I've been messing around with the new view.

I've done the usual things with the new feature; looked at my work location, home, haunts old and new, and, of course, the sacred fields upon which I play touch football! :-)

StreetView is cool and well implemented but a little clunky to use. With snow on the ground here in Minnesota, it's a little weird crawling through the streets of Minneapolis and Saint Paul during the summer, when the photographs were taken. The whole dynamic creates a bit of a non sequitur type experience.

The grassy landscape brings up another issue for StreetViews: These days we increasingly expect our information to be very up to date, if not absolutely current. What is Google Maps' plan for updating StreetView? How often can they reasonably re-photograph an entire metropolitan area? Or, even, presumably, the world? That seems like a Herculean task.

Finally, the marketer in me desperately wants some way to add content to the maps, like you can do with the My Maps feature. There's gotta be a way to hook up people's My Maps data with the StreetView maps so we can see the world's annotations. Click a bubble on a photograph of a store for the hours and maybe even current sales or an embedded video.

The technology seems to already exist for this type of augmented reality marketing, it's just a matter of hooking the pieces together.

MinnPost Is A Bit Underwhelming

I guess I'm not the only one who is a bit underwhelmed after the first week of MinnPost.com.

• Mark Glaser at MediaShift says MinnPost could be the next wave of journalism. 
• The Center for Citizen Media blog is disappointed, saying "it has nearly zero to do with edge-in community journalism."
• Former Stribber Steve Yelvington (found via Minnesota Monitor) pans the site as "a mid-20th century product in a strange 21st century world, and I found it needlessly dull."
• A parody site, MinnToast.com, launched on the same day as MinnPost.com.

Maybe it's unfair, but I guess I was expecting a bit more. Though as I said last week, the lineup of journalists is impressive but the site is painfully spare on journalism.  Stories, people! As of this writing, these are the stories by section that the site currently features:

• Region: 7.
• World/Nation: 4.
• Politics: 1.
• Health/Science: 1.
• Business: 0.
• Arts: 2.
• Posts: 28.  Clearly, here's where the meat is. Posts are shorter, blog post-like news stories that adhere to traditional journalistic standards. Some of the posts on this page are also listed in other sections.
• Sports: 0.
• Multimedia: 2. Stories that include video. These stories are also listed in other sections.
• Community Voices: 4.  These are citizen opinion pieces.

Let's be generous and let them double count their stories: That's a mere 49 stories over the course of the week. The stories are of the highest journalistic standards and writing of course, but if, as editor Joel Kramer has stated, they are targeting news junkies, shouldn't there be more content?

I personally was looking forward to the sports coverage because I'm a sports nut. During a time when the Minnesota Vikings boast the likely rookie of the year in Adrian Peterson and a head coach who may not last the whole year, zero sports stories?

Of the three sports-related "posts" on the site, two are Jay Weiner stadium pieces and one is about the 1927 Yankees?!?

Jay Weiner is great at what he does, but I've read the stadium story a thousand times before.  It's not that stadium stories aren't important, it's just that they're not sports stories--they're politics stories.

Steve Yelvington's criticism is that MinnPost takes traditional journalism and puts it online without taking advantage of the medium.

I couldn't agree more; innovative MinnPost is not. But I'd be fine with that if it sated this news junkie's media addiction. I'm certainly going to give it a lot more time, but after a week, MinnPost is not the fix I was hoping for.

MinnPost, Minnesota Online Only News Site Launches Tomorrow

Just got an email announcing that MinnPost, the online-only news site, will launch tomorrow morning at 11 a.m. You can get the details at the site.

If you're not familiar with the effort, the site is essentially a collection of former print journalists who want to run a statewide online-only news service that will be based on a public broadcasting model. Revenue is expected to come from pledges and big-pocket donors.

It will be interesting to see how it fares; especially as newspaper circulation continues to decline.  I wish them luck.

You should check out their Journalists page.  It's certainly an impressive collection of talent but OMG, could they be any whiter or Boomerer?!?

What It's Like To Give A Radio Interview

Perhaps it's serendipity but it's funny how things work.

On August 1st, the 35W bridge collapsed in Minneapolis, for the next few days I watched and subsequently wrote about the Minneapolis bridge collapse and citizen journalism.

As a result of that post, I was interviewed by Joseph Jaffee for his Across The Sound new marketing podcast, during which I brought up the issue of reputation management during such crises.

That interview got me thinking about reputation management in general and that I hadn't really wrote about the issue here, which resulted in a new blog category for the topic and few new posts on the subject:

• Preemptive Marketing
• Persona Marketing - Marketing Characters Online
• Consolidating Online Identities

All of the above has presumably led a Minnesota Public Radio reporter to find and interview me about managing your reputation online.

We had two fairly in-depth telephone conversations where I discussed some of the technical aspects of how search engines work and why some web pages get ranked higher than others, as well as some practical tips for managing your reputation online.

She followed that up with a request to tape an interview with me, which she did at my office.

She gave me two examples of people who had encountered negative information about themselves onlilne. A few days later I got a call back from here asking to re-interview me because her editor suggested she make the story about herself rather than the two examples she asked me about.

Considering the topic, I did some online research about her and learned a great deal about the reporter. I discovered plenty of news stories she'd produced, so I got a feel for what she was interested in professionally. I learned where she had gone to college, some of her attitudes about college, that she is very smart because she'd been awarded some fellowships to work abroad, so I also knew where she had traveled. I found a full color photograph of her.

Further, from the information I found, I could also deduce her age and her income. I had essentially built a fairly comprehensive demographic and psychographic profile of this reporter.

I found nothing damaging about her except a few things she may consider slightly embarrassing.

I gotta say, she really took one for the team by making the story about what information there was about her online.

The interview was a little weird because it was my first experience doing a radio interview that wasn't over the phone. She arrived with a little black brick that was her digital recorder and attached a set of black headphones to it and a big black microphone to it as well. It was all very sleek, black, electronic goodness. I totally want one.

Anyway, while she was interviewing me, she would direct the microphone at my keyboard whenever I went to use my computer. The only problem is that my notebook has a very quiet keyboard! At the end of the interview, she recorded about 30 seconds of room noise which is used to fade from one segment into my interview so it doesn't sound like an abrupt transition.

At one point I said something quoteworthy but the tape wasn't running, so she asked me to say it again and I think I pulled it off, but I think it sounded better the first time.

The interview was for a relatively new show called In The Loop that  incorporates live audience participation. The live show for which I was interviewed will be held on October 11, at MPR's UBS Forum at their Saint Paul studios (register for tickets here).

I'll let you know when the show goes online.

Minneapolis School Bus Accident Victim Was Local Blogger

The Minneapolis man who was killed by a school bus near Lake Calhoun last Thursday was identified by his iPod and turned out to be thirty year old local blogger, Adam Finley.

According to Mashable, Finley blogged for TV Squad--where today staff are reposting their favorite Finley pieces--and for AdJab.

Finley published a podcast at Raise Your Children My Way, Damn It! and maintained a MySpace page.

Metro Blogging Minneapolis remembers Finley.

My condolences go out to Adam's friends and families.

Google Makes Embedding Maps A Breeze

Google Maps has made using their maps on your site as easy as copying and pasting code, just like YouTube. The Google Maps blog provides instructions. This is a Google map of our location:

View Larger Map

I'd like to see greater flexibility in how you can embed your map. Right now, you can only adjust the dimensions. I'd like to see, for example, the ability to set the default state of presentation, such as whether the map is just a map, a satellite map, a hybrid of both, or a traffic map. I'd like the ability to include the left-hand sidebar that lists the locations on a custom MyMap. Still, it's nice to be able to embed a map without having to go through the step of obtaining a Google Maps API key and then having to insert it into your code.

Twin Cities Meals On Wheels Google MyMaps Mashup

Molly Kennedy of the Twin Cities are Meals On Wheels has created a wonderful Google Maps mashup of Twin Cities metropolitan Meals on Wheels locations. She used Google's new MyMaps feature.

We helped them out embedding the map into their web site, but Molly did all the hard work of creating the map and drawing the service boundaries. The map is an excellent, real-world, practical example of a maps mashup.

Google really needs to improve the ability to unearth quality citizen generated content like these maps, though. If you search for Twin Cities Meals on Wheels at Google Maps, you'll get a list of locations, but the only way you'll find this specific map is if you scroll down to the bottom of the list and click on See user-created content.

A few improvements:

1. The link should be called "See user-created maps", not content.
2. For any search that has user-created maps associated with the keywords of the search, perhaps the link should appear at the top of the list of locations, next to "Modify search."
3. Include a link to any user-generated map that is associated with an "official" location, within that location's listing; perhaps next to or within the "more info >>" link.

e-strategyblog.com vs. estrategyblog.com

Case Study: Domain Name Strategy

Hyphens in domains are problematic when it comes to earned media, online or off.  A perfect case in point presents itself to me today.

As I posted minutes ago, yesterday I gave a radio interview to a reporter from Minnesota Public Radio for the Future Tense program about citizen journalists' role covering the Minneapolis bridge collapse.

At the end of the interview, the reporter cited this blog but omitted the hyphen: "David Erickson runs  estrategyblog  dot com." I don't fault the reporter; it is entirely too common for people to omit hyphens from domain names when they cite them. It's just an inherent danger that you have to live with when you use hyphenated domains.

I bought e-strategyblog.com to match my company's domain: e-strategy.com. But as a result I have to emphasize the hyphen when citing the address: e dash strategy dot com, e dash strategyblog dot com.

People usually go to search engines if they want to find out more about something they discovered offline. So, in this case, if they wanted to read this blog, they'd either search for my name or the blog's name as they heard it: estrategyblog.com.

If I don't already have that domain in place, then it's likely people will be frustrated when they try and find me.

And I did not have the domain in place, so I'm very likely losing a lot of potential readers. And the Future Tense audience, because it is technology focused, is very likely to like this blog.

Here's how I'm addressing the situation:

1) I bought the estrategblog.com domain and I'm having it forwarded here (as of this writing, the forwarding has yet to take hold).

2) I'm writing this blog post and seeding it with the keyword estrategyblog.com in the hopes of it showing up quickly in search engine results (and blogs do tend to show up faster than web sites).

If you're planning a new web site or domain take these things under consideration. If you want a hyphenated domain, chose one that also has a non-hyphenated counterpart and put the forwarding in place.

See also:

• Domain Name Strategy - Follow Up

Future Tense Interview On Minneapolis Bridge Collapse

Today's edition of Minnesota Public Radio's Future Tense program features yours truly.

I gave the interview yesterday and I must've talked to the reporter for a good 15 to 20 minutes. I don't know why, but I'm always surprised at the amount of stuff that gets left on the cutting room floor.

Certainly, a lot of the responses to interview questions don't make compelling radio or aren't profoundly insightful or, in the end, don't have a direct bearing on the topic at hand.

Nevertheless, I'd love to see news organizations, as a standard practice, also post the full, uncut interviews they conduct for the benefit of anyone who wants to dig deeper into the story.

More Thoughts About Citizen Media During Minneapolis Bridge Collapse Disaster

  collapse 
  Originally uploaded by ebrandt78

I'd like to add to the conclusions I made last week at the end of my Minneapolis Bridge Collapse & Citizen Journalism post.

I'm beginning to wonder if the explosion of citizen journalism produced by Minneapolitans in the aftermath of the collapse was atypical. I wonder if Minnesota and Minneapolis merely enjoy certain traditions, characteristics and capabilities that, combined, create an ideal environment for citizen journalism to thrive.

I mentioned some of them in my previous post, but I didn't tie them together. Let me try.

Traditions

The social scientist Robert Putnam once observed that if Minnesota has a problem, there's likely a group of Minnesotans who have spontaneously gathered together to try and solve it. We have a high degree of social capital and a genuine sense of civic duty. That tradition helps make such activities as citizen journalism seem natural to us.

With E-democracy's email list forums and our thriving blogging community, we are at home communicating online.

Technology

We also have a high technology tradition. From Engineering Research Associates to Seymour Cray, the "father of supercomputing," and Control Data Corporation to the Gopher protocol to the birth of electronic democracy, Minnesota has been on the leading edge of technological innovation.

As Pioneer Press technology reporter Julio Ojeda-Zapata points out, Minneapolis' municipal wifi had recently been rolled out and actually played a crucial role in the emergency personnel's ability to respond to the crisis.

With broadband wireless access across most of the city, the prime technological component was in place for immediate, on-the-scene citizen reporting.

Creativity

Minnesota has a long tradition of supporting the arts, so it is no surprise that the state in general enjoys a large artistic community, and Minneapolis has a particularly thriving arts scene. The community, therefore, has an abundant pool of creative talent from which to draw.

Those talents--writing, photographic and videographic, specifically--lend themselves perfectly to journalistic pursuits.

Climate

Perhaps because of our harsh winters, Minnesotans have learned the value of helping one another out. If your car stalls on a long stretch of road in January with mercury at ten below and the wind chill making it even more brutal, that approaching car could be literally the difference between life and death. Knowing this, Minnesotans are more likely than not to lend a helping hand.

That attitude is required for the collaborative journalism on display at the MNSpeak thread about the bridge collapse.

Is the explosion of citizen media resulting from the 35W bridge collapse a confluence of factors unique to Minnesota or can we expect to see the same variety, quality, and volume of content elsewhere?

Only time will tell.

Mobile, Broadband, RSS & High Definition

Several trends bode well for citizen journalism:

• Mobile devices will eventually come standard with wifi Internet capability;
• Municipalities will discover that citywide wifi access is an economic imperative;
• Partly as a result, broadband adoption will approach ubiquity;
• With falling prices, HDTV technology will be widely adopted, both in the form of television and video cameras;
• Broadband Internet access will become standard on televisions;
• RSS will become a standard information distribution technology;
• And RSS readers will be standard on televisions.

Combine all these trends and suddenly you have the ability for one citizen with a blog and a high-def video camera to be an on-the-scene reporter who can upload her video footage to her blog right from the scene and through the magic of RSS, stream the report directly to the televisions of her subscribers.

Aggregators & Editors

The problem with citizen journalism is that much of it is spread over disparate sources; blog posts here, Flickr and YouTube uploads there, and microblog posts over here.

In a disasters such as the Minneapolis bridge collapse, finding all these citizen reports is problematic absent a system that aggregates and consolidates them. You either have to already know about a particular source of citizen media, or you need to know where to look and how discover such sources.

Currently, there is not one central source you can go to consume citizen media. We need an infrastructure that formally aggregates such sources with a function--perhaps a digg-like feature--that would bring the quality content to the fore.

Minneapolis Bridge Collapse & Citizen Journalism

Because I live in Saint Paul and Internet communication is my profession, I have watched the aftermath of the Minneapolis bridge collapse with the horror and sorrow of a Minnesotan who loves my community, but also as a communications professional who observes online behavior daily.

  wreckage 
  Originally uploaded by ebrandt78

It was from that point of view, then, that I was endlessly fascinated with the role that citizen journalism and citizen generated media played in the coverage of the Minneapolis bridge collapse.

I did not have television news on Wednesday afternoon, a rarity for this news junkie. I did have the windows open and the first thing I heard that was related to the bridge collapse, though I didn't know it at the time, were the sirens of the Saint Paul first-responders rushing to the scene.

Twittering The Minneapolis Bridge Collapse

The first time I became aware that something was going on was on Twitter.

I missed the first tweet about it from Chuck Olsen, a.k.a. Chuckumentary, a local documentary filmmaker and video blogger, who got the Twitterverse scoop on the Star Tribune, who subsequently posted a tweet about the bridge collapse. I first heard about it indirectly on Twitter from posts that commented on the effects of the disaster, like cell phone lines being clogged.

CLARIFICATION ON 8/5: The first actual tweet about the disaster that I read, was from Chuckumentary and that was because he was a Twitterer I was following. Minneapolis blogger Aaron Landry posted a tweet about the disaster before Chuckumunetary. Unfortunately, because of Twitter's lack of data mining tools, it may not be possible to find out who had the first post.

Instant Messaging The Bridge Collapse

But I still didn't know that the bridge had collapsed until a friend IMed me:

Friend: OMG!
Me: ??
Friend: are you watching tv?

And thanks to KSTP TV's 24 hour coverage, it was on all night long.

Bloggers Provide Eyewitness Accounts Of The Minneapolis Bridge Collapse

The most fascinating citizen media was at a discussion thread that went up immediately at MNSpeak, a site frequented by many Minnesota bloggers. The thread was used  to discuss the disaster, disseminate news links, post "I'm okay" messages, and give first-person accounts. Such discussions also took place at Metafilter.

Eyewitness accounts began appearing on local blogs:

• This blogger watched the collapse from Mississippi Queen River Boat
• This is another account from the river
• The perspective of a local political blogger who lives right next to the bridge and helped in the rescue effort
• Post from a man who works four blocks from the bridge
• Photoblogger
• Metroblogging open thread
• WCCO TV's most active blogger, Jason DeRusha on what it is like covering the disaster
• Rich G blogs his eyewitness account with photos from his office overlooking the bridge
• Ms. Minneapolis talks about her work as a member of the Red Cross response team
• Inner Joe Joe's photo blog post

And, of course, the blogosphere exploded worldwide with posts (bridge collapse, minneapolis bridge, minneapolis) about the disaster.

Email Discussion Lists About The Bridge Collapse

Minnesota has an extremely active online political environment, dating back to the early days of the web: In 1994, E-democracy, a nonprofit dedicated to promoting electronic democracy, held the first -ever email debate in the nation.

E-democracy hosts many email discussion lists including one called Minneapolis Issues, in which the bridge collapse was discussed. Some list members emailed their first-person accounts.

Members of the St. Paul Issues list worried about their city's bridges, discussed transportation engineering, and conducted a list roll call to ensure the members were safe.

The Minnesota Politics list debated the political and policy aspects of the collapse.

Political Blogging About The Bridge Collapse

In light of our tradition of online political debate, it is no surprise that Minnesota has a vibrant political blogging community. The spin game exploded on both the liberal and conservative  blogs.

Podcasting The Minneapolis Bridge Collapse

Minnesota podcasters were busy, too. Mike's Hotdish posted a musical tribute to the victims. Inside Minnesota Politics posted a video of Congressman Oberstar discussing the collapse.

The aforementioned Chuck Olsen grabbed his video camera and went to the scene to record the aftermath.

Citizen Journalism Coverage Of The Bridge Collapse

More formal citizen journalism sites also covered the bridge collapse. The Minnesota Monitor is run by local bloggers, freelance writers, and professional journalists and primarily covers politics from a left-of-center perspective. The Monitor's coverage was as diverse and comprehensive as any mainstream media source, from reaction from political figures such as an MP3 of Congressman Oberstar's press conference, to MNDoT video of the collapse, to a story about the missing.

UPDATED 8/6: Twin Cities Daily Planet is "conceived as an experiment in participatory journalism, built on a partnership between professional journalists and individual citizens." Their coverage included a mix of professional and citizen journalism.

Citizen Photo Journalism Of The Bridge Collapse

Flickr has become a repository of absolutely remarkable photographs of the disaster taken by ordinary citizens. The quality of most of these photos are extremely good:

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  Originally uploaded by ebrandt78

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