peterellis White House and Social Media

Posted on May 17, 2010 by Peter Ellis in Advertising, Social Media

I was doing research on current social media usage trends. Many will say that every business should use social networking (after all its a free tool). The questions is, can any business adopt social networking practices that will return on their investment? In my humble opinion, the answer is simple – it depends on the business. It’s different for everyone.

I was browsing around the internet to find out what type of business utilize social media and networking for their business benefit. News stations – yes, of course, they bring the news, social media is just another medium to deliver it. How about your local mechanic? Tweet, tweet, “Your car is ready!”, tweet, tweet, clank, clank, “You need a new muffler.” I am not sure that this will work. What if the owner of the car is not following them on Twitter, OOPS!

White House and Social Media

This is when I stumbled on an article from the White House’s official blog about Haiti’s relief. Click, click, scroll, scroll and I come to find out that this administration is the first one in history to utilize so many social media networks:

  • Blog
  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Flickr
  • MySpace
  • YouTube
  • Vimeo
  • iTunes
  • LinkedIn

This is a huge list. More networks that I belong to. More networks that some social networking gurus belong to. I guess this administration is doing something right (no politics intended)!

peterellis White House website is open for all

Posted on Apr 30, 2010 by Peter Ellis in IT, News, Web Design

I am not sure how much of this is going to be exciting for consumers out there, but this is pretty awesome for web developers. The White House official website (www.whitehouse.gov) is built on an open source platform called Drupal.

White House Website

Drupal, amoung other open source (another words, “free” code base platforms) such as WordPress and Joomla, is often used for a large-content websites to offer an administrator of that website a user-friendly way to edit/update/create content without any web programing knowledge.

These Content Management Systems (CMS) have years and years of development, along with thousands of developers world wide adding to them to make them better. Like with anything in life there are pros and cons about using an open source CMS, but this is not the time to open up that can of warms.

Anyway, representatives of White House official website made an announcement to release modules of Drupal code they have developed and customized as open source, i.e. are giving them away free.

Imagine your best website developer, the most expansive budget then multiply it times 10 (at least). This is how much time and money the White House has invested into their website, after all the do have to represent the nation on the internet. Now they are making all those custom changes available to other, this is amazing!