Provident Partners news

On this Election Day, MinnPost’s Christina Capecchi has a review of Meghan McCain’s “McCain Blogette,” the blog Meghan has been writing since 2007 to give readers a bit of an inside look at her father’s presidential campaign.

It’s difficult to judge the impact of one particular Web site in the mix of all other campaign-related communication, but with some help from Provident Partners’ Mike Keliher, Capecchi dissects the things Meghan’s site does well and not so well.

It’s difficult to pin down the Blogette’s political impact. Mike Keliher, 26, a social media consultant from St. Paul, assumes it’s minimal.

“There is probably a small set of people who find this incredibly impressive and very interesting and they really enjoy it, but they were going to vote for McCain anyway. And there’s probably a very small set of people who had their vote turned by something they saw on this blog,” Keliher said. “But in large part, it’s probably not going to have a very big impact. It strikes me as a website that was created in the era when it was simply cool to have a blog, and we are well past that phase.”

Read the full article here.

With a simple Twitter message during the Republican National Convention, Provident Partners’ Albert Maruggi caught the eye of some media-business news writers.

First, writing for MinnPost.com, David Brauer explains how Twitter is “the place to be” for folks trying to follow stories about protesters and police raids. In the article, Brauer quotes Maruggi’s Twitter message when he says that Twitter is like “the police scanner of the 21st Century newsroom.” Brauer’s piece received national attention from the popular journalism news machine Romenesko, from the Poynter Institute.

A few days later, another Poynter outlet, the E-Media Tidibts blog, carried a piece titled “Twitter: Surprise Star of RNC Coverage.” In that piece, writer Maryn McKenna quotes a bit more of the same message from Maruggi. She writes:

But Twitter was the secret weapon. Tweets (Twitter posts) by a huge array of users — 17,855 posts from 1389 accounts over the convention’s four days, according to a C-SPAN page tracking the Twitter hashtag #RNC08 — wove a multi-stranded conversation about where protests were coalescing, how police were responding, and where the story was moving next. Twitter user, social media expert, and former journalist Albert Maruggi observed: “[Twitter is] the police scanner of 21st century newsroom. This from a guy that used to rewrite AP copy for 11pm newscast.”

For more great ideas from Albert Maruggi, follow him on Twitter or send him an e-mail. He has an iPhone, so he’ll see it right away.