Fireside21 is happy to announce that we are offering telephone town halls in 2009! Like our Fireside Web™ and Fireside Email™ services, Fireside Phones™ will help you connect and engage with your constituents.
These town halls allow your boss to speak with constituents about current legislative issues and events in your district.
Utilizing a voice over IP telephone connection, thousands of phone numbers from a pre-selected list are dialed. Each person who answers the phone is played a pre-recorded message that functions as an automated operator inviting them to participate in a live phone conference with your Congressman.
Once the phone meeting is underway, it can be managed via a simple web interface that provides information and statistics of the event. Your office is always in control of the call.
YouTube has made a number of changes lately. First of all, videos can now be uploaded in a wide-screen and HD format that significantly improves video resolution. Also, the big news in DC is the launch a new “official” congressional channel.
The “House Hub” has been developed to make it easy for constituents to find their representative’s videos. Having a channel on the “House Hub” gives you expanded branding options including the ability to upload a custom banner and remove related videos.
This PDF will help you set-up a channel for your office and demonstrates the expanded options (Thanks to YouTube for their permission to publish this PDF!).
After you have set-up your account, contact me and we can assist to get your channel added to the official “house Hub” section of YouTube. We can also help in customizing the look and feel of your channel to match the banner and color scheme of your web site!
There is an ever expanding list of Senators and Representatives who are communicating with Twitter. There are now cool services that let you track all the tweets and statistics about activity and followers. So what is Twitter and why should you care?
David Pogue, well-know technology columnist for the the New York Times, recently jumped on the bandwagon and posted his Twittering Tips for Beginners. At first, even he was skeptical:
I’ll admit that, for the longest time, I was exasperated by the Twitter hype. Like the world needs ANOTHER ego-massaging, social-networking time drain? Between e-mail and blogs and Web sites and Facebook and chat and text messages, who on earth has the bandwidth to keep interrupting the day to visit a Web site and type in, “I’m now having lunch”? And to read the same stuff being broadcast by a hundred other people?
What follows is a pretty good primer on what Twitter can do and some tips to get started. There are a lot of conversations going on out there, and some members of Congress are right in the middle of it all. It surprises me that offices spend so much time on mail and keeping up with their constituents that this real-time one-on-one method of communication is largely overlooked.
Of course, that might be the very reason more don’t participate. It’s too fast and offices too often work to insulate their boss from constituents.
I say the same thing to every client who ask if their boss should be on Twitter: Yes, but be authentic. For me the best thing about these folks on Twitter is the authenticity. Unlike press releases and many “member” blogs, it is clear that this is a member of Congress and not a staffer posting clips (in most cases!).
As a matter of fact, authenticity is is what social media is all about and it is exactly why it works!