INDEX: Your blog / Rules of engagement / Twitter / Facebook / Other social media / Scribd and Slideshare

(Note: This toolkit is a work in progress. I invite comments and suggestions. I’m trying to keep it simple — just a few key tools and tips to get people started with basic online engagement.)

1. Home base: Your blog

Links make the web go round, so first things first: You’ll need an easily findable home base on the web that people can link to. This is the most important way to gain search visibility and improve your search ranking.

Your home base should be entirely under your control, easy for search engines to index and understand what’s new, and easy for you to update.

This means you need a blog. If you don’t already have one, I recommend you sign up for a free blog at WordPress.com, and then pay the extra $17/year to register a domain name and “map” (apply) it to your blog.

Getting your own domain name right from the start helps substantially. In the long run you’ll get better search engine visibility, faster, compared to using a subdomain from a service like myblog.blogspot.com. Also, if you end up not liking your blog host (WordPress.com, in this case), you can move your blog elsewhere without breaking inbound links. (That’s not necessarily easy or trouble free, but it’s important to have that option)

You can also use a custom domain with a blog on Tumblr, another popular free blogging platform — but the process is a just little bit more technical.

You don’t need to post often to your blog. But anytime you have something to say that’s more than a tweet or two in length, consider posting it to your blog and then linking to that from social media. This encourages people not just to engage with you, but to share links to your blog — which helps improve your search visibility.

If you already have your own blog, and it’s not under your own domain, don’t panic. If you’ve had that blog for more than a couple of years, and it’s been at least occasionally active, just keep it and use it more frequently. That usually helps more than starting over with a new blog from scratch.

Allow moderated comments. If you publish a blog, it’s a good idea to allow people to comment on your posts. This demonstrates you’re open to discourse. However, do use a comment spam filter like Akismet (which comes with WordPress.com blogs). And if you’re writing about a controversial or sensitive topic, use the WordPress comment moderation feature. To encourage conversation, set up e-mail notifications so you’ll know when you get a comment, and then review and approve/deny them quickly.

You don’t have to take abuse or approve off-topic ramblings, but being willing to engage politely with people who disagree with you is one of the best ways to boost your credibility and visibility.

Make it easy to post to your blog. Install and configure the WordPress Press this bookmarklet in your web browser toolbar. (Other blogging platforms usually have similar posting bookmarklets.) This allows you to blog something you see on the web, and add some commentary, just by pushing one button. Whenever you make something fast and easy, you’re likely to do it more often.

2. General rules of engagement

Whenever you’re interacting with people online — whether in public discussion or private/semiprivate conversation, use these guidelines:

1. Create a useful profile for every service you join. People will want to know who you are before they engage with you. Clarify who you are, what you do or what roles you play, and where you work or other important organizational affiliations. Post at least one picture. It’s helpful to try to use the same, or a similar, username or handle across as many services as possible. But if you use a handle, I recommend also giving your real name to aid credibility.
2. Listen first — a lot! It’s always easier, and more effective. to join a conversation than start one. Also, listening forces you to question your assumptions about what other people think or want.
3. When you do post, respond to or amplify others more than you speak up, self promote, or advocate. Prove that you’re listening, and that you care what others say, and they’ll return the favor. This is basically socially appropriate ingratiation. To see it in action, Aaron Williams just did it here! And hey, so did I, just now
4. Always be helpful, useful, interesting, and supportive — or at the very least, be civil and not creepy. Adding context, clarifying, or clearing up misconceptions (politely, without scolding) with links to supporting material (on your blog or elsewhere) is a great approach to public engagement.
5. Use your blog first. If you have something important to say, or an important question to ask or issue/concern to raise, say it on your blog first and then link to it via social media. This gets you maximum visibility and gets around some of the limitations of services like Twitter or Facebook.
6. Be careful with humor. People are touchy and it’s easy to seem sarcastic online. If you offend someone by accident, apologize, even if you think they’re being thin-skinned.
7. Disagreement and criticism are good — as long as it’s civil. They are opportunities to learn, explore, and extend your reach beyond your existing circle. Engage with your critics, and be humble (but not self-denigrating). You don’t have to agree with them to treat them with respect.
8. Don’t be a jerk. Resist the temptation to defend yourself, argue with people, or demean/ridicule/bait others. That behavior not only discourages positive engagement; it attracts trolls.
9. Do not feed the trolls. There will always be trolls. Just ignore them. If they’re overly aggressive or persistent, then block/unfriend them. But do not respond to them or engage them.

3. Use Twitter

Once you grasp the rules of online engagement, it’s time to put them to use. Twitter is a good place to start.

If you haven’t done so already, sign up for Twitter. I recommend just using one account so you present a coherent and nuanced identity, which is inherently more credible and engaging. If you try to be all professional all the time on Twitter, that tends to discourage engagement. And maintaining multiple Twitter accounts can get really confusing.

Who to follow? Follow the people you want to engage on Twitter, see what they’re talking about and who they’re engaging with on topics that interest you. Don’t just automatically follow everyone you know, or anyone who follows you. That quickly makes Twitter seem too chaotic and less useful.

Another way to find good people to follow is to search Twitter for relevant keywords or hashtags (keywords that start with “#”, a Twitter convention that makes it easier to follow topics or events rather than people).

If you’re highly focused on discussion of certain topics or events, I recommend using a column-based Twitter application such as Tweetdeckor Hootsuite so that you can more easily filter the firehose of incoming tweets into more understandable streams.

What to tweet. I recommend that 2/3 of your tweets should be either responses to other people’s tweets, or retweets of tweets you find especially useful or engaging. The people you’re responding to or retweeting will see that (Twitter makes that obvious). If you’re being helpful, useful, supportive, complimentary — or at least polite, fun, or interesting — they’ll probably think well of you and may follow you.

If you’re tweeting regularly about a topic, look for relevant current hashtags that people are using and include them in your tweets. This will expand your community, making you visible to people who aren’t yet directly following you.

Monitor your replies and direct messages. When someone tries to address you directly, respond as quickly as possible.

4. Use Facebook

While Twitter is useful for reaching almost any group of people about any topic, Facebook is sometimes useful and sometimes not. It depends on who you’re trying to reach, whether those people tend to hang out on Facebook, and what they tend to use Facebook for. But Facebook is so popular that it’s important to learn how to use it, in case you need it.

In my experience, Facebook is generally not the best venue for high-level conversations among specialists, such as utility engineers discussing power grid management strategies. But it might be a very good place to engage a consumer-level audience in a discussion about energy efficiency, or renewable power, or the smart grid.

I recommend that you search Facebook for groups and pages that would seem to attract the kind of people you wish to engage. Join the discussions there — but only stay with the groups that seem most relevant or useful.

Use your Facebook wall to post things that you think might interest the people you’re trying to engage — and occasionally tag items with the names of specific Facebook friends if you’re pretty sure they’d be interested.

Separate accounts? If, after you learn how to use Facebook, you decide you should seriously use it to engage people for professional or issue-related purposes, it’s a good idea to set up a separate Facebook account for that. (The people you friend on Facebook to interest in protecting your watershed probably would get annoyed by your photos of your kitchen renovation — although your actual friends might really like those photos.). This gets a little complicated, because Facebook accounts are about people, not organizations.

However, if you aren’t using Facebook much for professional/issue-related outreach or advocacy, you can probably get by well enough with using your personal Facebook account. If you’re not sure, just use your personal account to learn and experiment.

Facebook apps, pages, groups, and events. Facebook offers lots of ways to connect with people. In general, it’s a good idea to use your personal account to experiment with using things like pages and groups that other people have already set up, before you try it yourself. And in general, don’t try to create something new when an existing effort is already going strong. Just try to be a constructive, visible part of what people are already doing.

4. E-mail lists, forums, and other social media

People talk in all kinds of ways online besides Twitter and Facebook. In general, figure out where the people you need to engage already are, and go there. E-mail lists and forums are still very popular, especially on niche topics. Sometimes you might need to get permission from the group leader to join.

Depending on your goals, strengths, and who you need to reach, other kinds of social media such as Flickr (photos), YouTube (videos), SoundCloud (audio), etc. can also be useful.

Social bookmarking services such as Delicious and Diigo can help you engage for some communities, on some topics. They generally aren’t a venue for direct discussion, for the most part, but they’re valuable for sharing links to information and resources. If you’re already using one of these tools as a “backup brain,” why not get some more mileage out of that effort? Generally you can set up groups, lists, and other modes of sharing on these services.

Sometimes communities form around tags or other features of social bookmarking services. For example, lots of smart, influential technologists follow the nonprofit technology (NPtech) tag on Delicious.

5. Scribd and Slideshare

Scribd and Slideshare are especially useful services for publishing or sharing documents or presentations.

Both allow you to post the full document and create a YouTube-style embeddable player, which you (or others) can then add to blog posts, event invitations, or other online media. These players also include a “download” button.

Make sure you’re only publishing content that you own the rights to, is not subject to copyright, or that you have permission from the copyright holder to post.

The advantage of using these services to host documents is that they allow you to easily bundle substantial content into a blog post, so people don’t have to follow a link somewhere to get it. Also, if you annotate or highlight a document, you can post a version of the document with those additions.

So for instance, if you’re a chemist and you have the right to publish your latest journal article about mercury pollution in rivers, you could annotate the pdf of that article to highlight points that would be important to non-experts, and explain what they mean in plain language.

But also, these services get very good search visibility in their own right. So when you post documents to these sites, make sure each document includes a link back to the relevant post on your blog (or at least to your blog’s home page) so people who discover you there can connect to you via your online home base.

…These are just a few very basic tools to start your online engagement strategy. There are plenty more, but based on my extensive experience these are the best places to start. Learn how to use these tools — and how to use them together — to cultivate the kind of online engagement you seek.

IF YOU’RE REALLY SERIOUS ABOUT ACTIVISM or advocacy of any kind, I highly recommend Deanna Zandt’s recent book Share This: How you will change the world with social networking. I bow to her greatness

But I’ve been logging a lot of cool mobile stuff for CNN.com Tech. So here’s a quick list of what I’ve been covering there…

My picks for the most significant posts:

• March 4: Why Amazon would be smart to give away the Kindle. I read some posts advocating this move, so I pulled them together and added my own thoughts. This post attracted a surprising amount of attention — I’ll have to revisit it.
• March 16: Local news, information are going mobile big time, Pew survey says. This post didn’t get a ton of attention or comment, but because I’m a cofounder of Oakland Local, this topic was near and dear to me. This also presented an important opportunity to discuss the local impact of the mobile digital divide.
• April 5: Facebook reaching out to feature-phone users. Facebook’s upgrade and consolidation of its mobile web sites is its second recent major move to improve access and user experience for feature phone users. Smart strategy for this company. I explain why.
• March 28: BlackBerry’s PlayBook tablet may face uphill battle. Oh yeah, this post brought me tremendous grief from BlackBerry fanboys and trolls. To be fair, I should have clarified that with this device, BlackBerry will debut the QNX operating system it just acquired. But this is targeted as a consumer device — and among consumers, the BlackBerry brand has a pretty bad rep for user experience. It’s a great brand for messaging-minded business users, but the consumer market is different. I think BlackBerry will have to do a hell of a lot of expensive marketing to communicate about the new OS and overcome that preconception. Furthermore, I expect that most consumers will misunderstand how the Playbook will really handle Android apps, and may end up feeling misled. We’ll see. I plan to talk to some developers of Android apps to see how eager they are to port to the Playbook.

My other recent CNN.com Tech posts:

• April 5: Boost Mobile scores highest among no-contract phone owners. I pay a fortune for my Verizon Droid Incredible plan, but when I bought it last summer there weren’t any good Android options on month-to-month no-contract plans. That’s starting to change, and when I upgrade my phone when this contract runs out, I’ll probably go this route. Useful to see how customers are rating these carriers.
• March 30: Android is the Windows of mobile platforms. I wrote this soon after my controversial BlackBerry Playbook post, so I was a bit fed up with tech fanboys and trolls. I’d been meaning to write this post for awhile, but I’ve gotta admit — I decided to go for it in part as a “bring it on!” to the tech trolls. But it attracted relatively civil comments and little criticism. The best laid plans…
• March 29: Mobile banking is booming, survey shows. I was especially intrigued by this finding: a quarter of smartphone users reported, “Accessing my account through my cell phone is too slow.” Yet only 9% of feature phone users had the same complaint! Really different expectations among these two user groups. I think that’s worth further research.
• March 21: Only one in four mobile apps engages user, study says. The results of this research didn’t surprise me — but it’s yet another reason why you should only build a native app when that’s the best way to offer a compelling experience. For the vast majority of content offerings, the mobile web is a better strategy.
• March 21: More apps may be coming for feature phones, too. Facebook bought Snaptu, a major platform for Java-based apps that run on most feature phones. I think this has wider implications — including that in the long run, as smartphone browsers improve, apps might become more of a feature phone phenomenon. Will keep an eye on this.
• March 18: What a Sprint-T-Mobile merger could mean for wireless users. Yeah, like a lot of tech reporters, I was on the wrong track here. While I was researching it, I remember thinking “Why the hell would a CDMA-based carrier buy a GSM network? That’d be a tech nightmare!” Wish I’d followed that thought further. A couple of weeks later, news broke that AT&T is trying to buy T-Mobile. Oh well.
• March 18: Google Maps’ Android app now routes drivers around traffic. As a car-free person, living in an urban area, I want this for biking directions. Maybe later…
• March 14: Adobe caves in to Apple: fewer blank spots on i-devices?. Yes, anytime I mention Apple, it gets a ton of attention and criticism. Couple that with a mention of a long-standing and confusing tech industry controversy, and it’s a flamefest. Despite the high troll potential, I’ll probably revisit this at some point. I will say that Adobe’s PR has been very constructive in how they’ve been reaching out to me on this.
• March 4: More U.S. consumers buying Android phones than iPhones, BlackBerrys. New data from Nielsen showed that slightly more U.S. consumers are buying Android phones than any other type of smartphone. Yeah, this post brought out lots of tech fanboys and trolls.
• Feb 28: Immigrants more inclined to use tablet computers, study shows. This was a small study, but an interesting one. Possible explanation suggested by a commenter: “The reason for the disparity is because a tablet can boot up a keyboard in any language you want — while on a laptop you’re stuck with a QWERTY keyboard.”
• Feb 25: Android users wait and wait for OS updates. At the time, owners of the Samsung Captivate (AT&T’s flavor of the Galaxy S series) were still waiting to get updated to Android 2.2 (Froyo). They’ve since gotten that update — but I learned that Samsung has a pretty bad repuation regarding firmware updates. Bear that in mind if you’re shopping for a smartphone
• Feb 18: One-third of U.S. households lack broadband Web access. About the newNational Broadband Map, and a major year-end roundup report on the wireless industry, both from the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA).

NOTE: This list represents only the pieces I authored. My colleagues Adam Glenn and Michele McLellan wrote several other posts. You can find everything on the News for Digital Journalists blog.

Most important post: March 14: Pew research points to mobile opportunities for local news, info. There’s a lot to learn from in this Pew report. I spotted these strategic implications:

• Attract more young people to your news brand. Tomorrow’s audience has to come from somewhere. The research indicates that news orgs could promote long-term growth of their local news market via mobile offerings.
• Native apps not really such a great revenue strategy. In fact, Pews numbers paint a pretty dismal picture for trying to generate much revenue from getting people to pay for content. Now, if news apps became more service-oriented, that could change the picture…
• Embrace the spectrum of mobile technology, not just smartphones. OK, Pew, didn’t look at this directly, but when you look at their numbers you can see that feature phones are a big part of the picture. And the news business mostly thrives based on audience size. Ignoring feature phones means leaving money on the table and alienating potential allies.

Other posts…

Feb. 22: Disaster news prep: Google Person Finder. I wrote this after the Christchurch, NZ earthquake but before the big Japan earthquake/tsunami. Goal here is to tell news orgs how they can leverage this tool by embedding it in their own pages. Also, if your region gets hits by a disaster, I tell how to ask Google to spin off a new instance of Person Finder. You can spin off your own instance, but it’s better to see if Google will do it first to avoid confusion.

Feb 28: Engaging tomorrow’s news audience today: Report. Research from the Newspaper Association of America takes a closer look at sub-groups within the youth demographic for news audiences. I’d like to see more research like this. More importantly, I’d like to see some evidence that news organizations are actually using this research in their strategies.

March 8: Knight Community Info Toolkit: Help make your community stronger with better info. Summary of a new planning tool for community activists. This is the kind of effort I’d love to see news organizations get involved in, but it’s interesting that the toolkit is not really intended for news organizations.

March 9: Knight names new VP of Journalism and Media Innovation: Michael Maness. Pretty significant shift of leadership at the Knight Foundation. It’ll be interesting to see what direction Maness wants to take Knight’s programs. Especially now that the Knight News Challenge is in its fifth and possibly final year. (It was originally intended as a five-year contest program.)

March 11: Texas Tribune, Bay Citizen win Knight grant to build open-source news platform. I’m curious about this project — especially whether it will build upon existing open-source platforms (hopefully WordPress rather than Drupal, if so), and what kind of mobile functionality, if any, it will include.

March 17: New York Times launches paywall — and why most news orgs shouldn’t. Most people who watch the media business are pretty down on this strategy. Frankly, I’m also pessimistic — although I suspect the Times may be able to pull it off, for a while, without really hurting its audience size or search visibility. But there are so many loopholes, and so few real benefits to paying subscribers, that I’ve got to wonder why they’re even bothering with this. It seems almost like a philosophical exercise. They should be putting these resources into offering services that they can sell, if you ask me. As for the vast majority of news orgs: Don’t try this at home. The Times is a very special case.

March 22: Why “data journalism” is good for the news business. My UK colleague Paul Bradshaw wrote an excellent analysis of the many ways that data-focused content (such as interactive databases) and services (such as APIs of metadata from a news org’s content) can help build a news business.

This week I’m speaking at several sessions about the implications of mobile media at the Annenberg school for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles. Their event is Mobile News Week 2011.

On Feb. 28 I’m addressing two PR classes. I’ve done a little research to spot some trends and resources, in addition to the mobile overview I posted earlier: The mobile landscape: 10 things media pros should know.

Here are some interesting tidbits about mobile and PR…

Unpack “PR” to spot mobile opportunities

Several disciplines fall under the “PR” label: media relations, crisis communication, public affairs, campaign outreach, and crossover with marketing communications. When you’re planning a mobile strategy, get specific about which PR hat you’re wearing in a particular project, and then parse out your overall goals. Only then can you figure out whether, and how, to achieve those goals — including determining which mobile devices and channels are popular among the people you wish to reach.

Keep your audience’s sensibilities in mind. For instance, if the people you need to reach are journalists, think carefully about how to contact them via mobile media. E-mail is a powerful channel for mobile as well as computers, and journalists are more likely to check their e-mail on their phone than launch your app or visit your web site. And they’ll probably really hate it if you try to text them.

Get a shortcode for text messaging campaigns

Text messaging (opt-in only, of course) should play a key role in your mobile PR strategy, since it’s the common denominator among virtually all mobile devices. The The Common Shortcode (CSC) is the foundation of all commercial or promotional text message campaigns in the US. This system helps keep the mobile recipient in control of inbound messages, and it helps keep marketers, advertisers, PR pros, and others accountable and in compliance with anti-spam laws.

Owning your own shortcode isn’t cheap, it costs about $500/month. But if you’re using mobile in a serious, sustained way, if you’re working for a major org or brand, if it’s crucial to your communication strategy, it’s worth it to invest in your own shortcode.

There are services where you can use a shared shortcode for much cheaper, like MobilizeUS, which offer shared shortcodes. These are OK if your organization or group has very little budget, or if you just want to experiment first with text messaging before launching a big program.

You can get one from the US Common Shortcode Administration.

Mobile Marketing Association resources: CSC primer, and Consumer Best Practices (which includes information on how to comply with US anti-spam laws and other requirements).

Create a lean mobile-friendly web site

…Or at least mobile-friendly landing pages relevant to the communities you’re trying to reach. These URLs are the links you’ll want to promote via text messaging, e-mail alerts and newsletter, and social media — since people use these channels on their phones.

Use print and broadcast to support for mobile

Mobile is all about engagement, so it’s a natural (and more valuable) next step after someone encounters your brand or information.

Include QR codes in your print materials or advertising, and make sure they link to mobile-friendly landing pages. Mention your shortcode in broadcast ads. Make mobile a key funnel for guiding people through your engagement process.

What about apps?

In most cases, you’re better off creating a mobile web app than a native smartphone or tablet app. It’s less expensive to develop, and you don’t have to develop for multiple platforms. Its functionality may not be as rich or slick as a native app, but that just means you need to think extra hard about what you want to achieve and focus on that goal.

Mobile users usually want to DO stuff, rather than read or watch stuff (at least for very long). So if you make an app (web or native), don’t just use it to deliver content. Focus on actions, tasks, rewards.

PR Newswire has an iPhone app. Do you think many people, even journos, would really use it? I doubt it. Press releases are not compelling content.

If you do PR for a tech-heavy industry, such as software or gaming, then you might want to consider an app. But even then, be realistic. Who’s gonna want an app for your press releases or executive bios? No one. People want to DO stuff with apps. Focus on apps that allow people to do something that THEY value. Work within their interests and goals. You are not your audience.

More resources:

Global Results Communications: Example of mobile services offered by one PR company. Most of what they discuss here would work on most phones.

So a new slew of cheap handsets with much better browsers will be hitting the stores as early as this summer.

Over on the blog for House of Local (a media consultancy I work with), I wrote about why this is such a big deal:

See: Qualcomm, Opera deal means cheap phones will be doing LOTS more web surfing

And for the Knight Digital Media Center, I explained why news organizations should care about this development, and start taking lean mobile more seriously in their mobile and business strategy:

See: Qualcomm, Opera deal could dramatically boost mobile web audience

The point is: Do you want to get most of the mobile audience now? Or neglect that audience so much that they decide you’re not worth their time?

This year is the big opportunity for building mobile audience. Smart publishers should try to not get their heads stuck up their apps.

This is not the first discount wireless carrier to offer a no-contract smartphone. But it is the first such offering from a carrier that has already rolled out its high-speed LTE network in 13 metro areas.  And here’s why that’s interesting in terms of business strategy, and for consumers…

Even though this phone (The Samsung Galaxy Indulge) costs $400 up front (which is expensive compared to subsidized smartphones, but pretty cheap for a new unlocked Android phone), I suspect many people will be tempted to get this as a first-time smartphone because the monthly costs will be manageable and predictable, there’s no contract commitment, and no early termination fees. Plus they’ll be on a faster network than most other carriers can currently offer.

I mention in my CNN post a tidbit I picked up from CNET: MetroPCS never really had a 3G network, which is partly why they’ve had a reputation as a crappy carrier. But this company is rolling out LTE faster than any other US carrier — and they can do this largely because they did not invest in 3G.

Meanwhile, the major carriers are having to face the expense and considerable time and effort to install LTE networks. Also, their 3G networks are only a few years old, and they’ll need to keep those in service for a few more years, until LTE-enabled phones become the norm.

MetroPCS seems to be leapfrogging ahead of the major carriers in terms of US network technology. It reminds me of how cell phones took off so fast in rural Africa, India, and Asia, where landline networks never really got widely built out in the first place.

Sometimes not being an early adopter can be a good thing.

My key takeaways…

In my CNN.com Tech story, ComScore on the Future of Mobile, I noted that the big context is that as of December 2010, feature phones still comprise the vast majority (73%) of current US cell phone handsets in use.

Most other tech news outlets are crying triumphantly about how smartphones have passed the 25% penetration mark, and that is indeed siginificant — but in terms of what’s out in the field right now, feature phones still dominate the field.

I think that’s likely to remain the case for a few years yet, unless carriers quickly find ways to make the cost of smartphones and their data plans more attractive to the majority of cell users — and carriers don’t have much incentive to do that, especially since they need lots of money to build out their LTE networks to keep pace with the devices already sold.

Also, if and when smartphones do become the majority, I expect that for a long time a big part of the market will still simply prefer less complicated phones. So the low end of the mobile market will always be huge, and important.

Over on KDMC, I wrote: Mobile ads poised to hit big—are you ready? One interesting prediction for 2011 in ComScore’s report was that mobile ads will really take off in 2011. This means that right now is a key time for news organizations and other publishers to get a jump on the mobile market. And (due to the point I just mentioned above about current smartphone v. feature phone market penetration), this means including feature phones in your mobile ad strategy.

I offer five tips for news publishers about how to get a mobile strategy together, and prepare their site and ad delivery systems and sales.

I wrote two posts for the Knight Digital Media Center at USC explaining how news organizations can use this information to create more effective ways to engage and grow the audiences for their political coverage — and why they shouldn’t wait for the next election season to do this:

• Jan. 26, 2011: Social media should be part of your political news strategy, Pew research indicates
• Dec. 28, 2010: Political/election news should go mobile, Pew research indicates

Read: News publishers need to reach the 74% of Americans on feature phones

This has a lot of implications for any mobile strategy — and it means that both your e-mail alerts and the links included in them need to be mobile friendly.