With the first big hurricane of the season touching down today, I knew we'd see some interesting news coverage. As I was scanning the chatter about Hurricane Dolly over lunch, a tweet by the Red Cross caught my eye.

My first reaction was, "the Red Cross uses Twitter?" I followed the link to its blog covering Hurricane Dolly. Although neither the blog nor the twitter feed is a great source for breaking news, I found it very interesting where they were directing folks to get updates on the storm: to the Flickr, Twitter, and Youtube feeds mentioning the hurricane from the public at large. Read more »

Sometimes monitoring blogs and mainstream news sources just isn’t enough. This can become very apparent when you’re trying to manage your company’s brand or image while an issue is exploding in your lap.

One example of this is the uproar that happened when Senator Obama decided to support the compromise bill on FISA immunity recently passed by the House. These tweets were posted on Twitter just as the group Senator Obama Please Vote NO on Telecom Immunity — Get FISA Right, was forming on my.barackobama.com to protest Obama’s stance on FISA.

The anger that caused people to post these tweets has helped the anti-FISA group become the singe largest in Obama’s own online community: a fact that has received significant media coverage from mainstream sources. Read more »