Posts By Ines Mergel

Political cookies

Source: Sugar Mom Treats This election season, people started to talk about political cookies – a new expression for the already existing term previously used for targeted or customized ads. These are advertisements that are automatically pushed out based an Internet surfers searches or the history of websites s/he has visited. Computer cookies are filesRead… Read more »

“Convention Without Walls” banks on “cord cutters”

This election season social media is driving much of the conversation – whether real-time online fact checking during the GOP convention speeches or fast and furious responses to statements made on a candidate’s website: the online community crowd-sources responses and the candidates have trouble controlling the message. This should not come as a surprise toRead… Read more »

New publication: The Public Manager 2.0 – Preparing the social media generation for the networked workplace

The National Association of Schools of Public Affairs & Administration (NASPAA) just published a special issue of the Journal of Public Affairs Education titled “Social and technological innovations in teaching public affairs“. The special issue was edited by Thomas Bryer and Angie Eikenberry (thank you!). My paper is title “The Public Manager 2.0: Preparing theRead… Read more »

@Twitter Political Index

The next 100 days count – and Twitter is counting our sentiments and online interactions to gauge the potential outcome of the presidential campaign in the U.S.: Today, Twitter launched a new site called the Twitter Political Index. According to the Twitter blog, the @gov team is analyzing the +2 million tweets every week toRead… Read more »

@NRA_Rifleman’s faux pas during the CO #theatershooting resulted in deleted account

This morning in the chaotic hours after the #theatershooting in Denver, CO, the National Rifle Association‘s Twitter account @NRA_Rifleman tweeted a very cheerful tweet: sent 9:20 am EST: “@nra_rifleman: Good morning, shooters. Happy Friday! Weekend plans?— Edmund Lee (@edmundlee) July 20, 2012 The tweet was quickly retweeted and people responded in disbelief. Later this afternoonRead… Read more »

Twitter transparency report released

Twitter released its first Transparency Report highlighting the number of times they received: government requests for user information, government requests to withhold content, and DMCA takedown notices from copyright holders. The report shows that the U.S. government has asked Twitter 679 times to reveal user information since January 2012, followed by Japan with 98 andRead… Read more »

After online $h1tstorm German credit bureau drops Facebook research project

The German credit rating company Schufa announced this week the plan to start a research project analyzing citizen data posted on Facebook to triangulate it with their credit rating. Schufa, a corporation that works for large credit card companies, banks, merchants, etc., collects information about their clients’ clients (you and I) and basically rates theirRead… Read more »

Facebook’s new roles for pages

Facebook has introduced new roles for pages (see graphic). The manager of a page can assign the following roles: Content Creator Moderator Advertiser Insight Analyst What is unclear to me is that the manager of the page does not have the same rights as the other roles and is not able to create content, editsRead… Read more »

A tale of the social media one-way street: City of Manor reverts back to the dark ages…

Reposting this from my blog “Social Media in the Public Sector“: https://inesmergel.wordpress.com/2012/05/29/a-tale-of-the-social-media-one-way-street-city-of-manor-reverts-back-to-the-dark-ages/ Remember the unbelievable Government 2.0 and social media success story of the City of Manor – a small town in Texas? Dustin Haisler, former city manager & CIO of Manor, was the driving force behind the use of WordPress to redesign the city’sRead… Read more »