Monthly Archives: January 2011

RSS vs. Twitter? — Or Maintaining Both

Paris, VA — As someone whose livelihood depends on aggregating dozens and dozens of news sources, opinion outlets and every variety of information related to politics, the media and health care, I depend upon my RSS feed. And as more than 50% of my consulting work product depends upon writing, i use a four monitor setup to facilitate incorporating various speech, oped and news release drafts into new finals, and essentially using three of the monitors as a palette for words and writing. The words are thus the art. But the fourth monitor is solely for email and RSS.

But since adopting Twitter about six months ago, I have increasingly been shifting RSS feeds to Twitter, and attempting to rationalize how the Twitter stream and RSS feed differentiate, and how they should be different — or whether they even should be different.  First, I thought I’d keep Twitter more focused upon personal interests such as music, wine, sports and the like — and keep RSS for “hard news”. Yet, now my Twitter stream has evolved to include many of the outlets previously confined to my hard news RSS feed.

As the bottom line for me is maximizing the efficiency of news and information consumption, I’m considering dumping RSS altogether. The downside is that I despise returning to my office after being out for several hours and having nearly 1000 new tweets to consume, which i believe will be the case if I dump RSS completely. And while using TweetDeck off an iPhone, I don’t want to always be a slave to reviewing the stream every several minutes. If that’s my biggest professional dilemma, I’m surely lucky in the big scheme of things, but it’s a growing issue for my business and info assimilation necessities.

The good thing? I have the choice to work this out as I see fit, and in a manner that best suits my business needs. The bottom line is that the technology is fascinating, and it’s perversely rewarding to figure out the most efficient means by which to consume an ever-increasing volume of information. I have no choice, because the significant competitive advantage my niche communications business holds over other larger firms depends upon it. Gordon Hensley

Ben Nelson Faces Enormous 2012 Odds in Presidential Election Cycle

Alexandria, VA — As Senator Ben Nelson (D-NE) already faces an extremely challenging re-election environment, it will be even more difficult for him in a presidential election cycle, when he will be running alongside Barack Obama. In an off-year re-elect, extremely vulnerable incumbents like Nelson have a better opportunity to define their record and their brand unencumbered by top-of-the-ticket linkages.

But 2012 will ensure the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) and the aggressive third party groups who will again dominate the paid media landscape have an easy mark in tagging Nelson as a willing, leading partner of the “Obama team”. Is it fair? That will all get lost in the wash and the record itself will determine his survivability.

To be sure, the Nelson re-elect will be more complex than simplistic linkages, and can surely point to in-state successes and examples of breaking with Obama and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. But regardless, the structural parameters already framing the race and the dialogue to follow will make this a decidedly uphill contest — especially as Nebraska is a relatively cheap paid media state, which allows even marginal third party groups to get on the air with blunt advertising messages.

It was also interesting to note key Nelson staff are already leaving: it was recently reported that Mike Hogan, his deputy chief of staff on Capitol Hill, with a strong health care policy background, is joining Ogilvy as a senior Vice-President. Gordon Hensley