Many have credited Obama’s use of social media organize and communicate with supporters locally, get his message out and raise money. Indeed, MyBarackObama.com, and his use of blogging, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and YouTube, has arguably created a new precedence for how political and public interest campaigns will likely begin using the internet.

As many of you know, KickApps was approached by John McCain’s campaign about 3 months ago to host John McCain’s official social network, McCainSpace. (After abandoning their attempts to develop a site internally, they came asking for a solution that works out-of-the-box, could be easily customized and launched very quickly with all the bells & whistles.) The site’s user demographics are particularly interesting, with approximately 60% of members were 30 years or older. Additionally, many of the most active members claimed to be first time social networkers and bloggers. If anything, this election cycle showed that social media is very much firmly part of the mainstream.

What does this mean for the government and public interest organizations?

Most government and public interest organizations’ websites tend to be primarily used to provide information and educate people about a given topic. As a resource, these websites have become invaluable. That said, most are also pretty static and staid in their presentation of this information, and I’d argue, a pretty boring monologue presence in a multilogue world.

While changing government’s culture and bureaucracy is a daunting task, best left to people much brighter and more capable than those of us who work at KickApps, there are some easy opportunities for government agencies to leverage social media to better meet the needs of their constituents. Just as Obama successfully used social media to get his campaign messages out, government agencies and public interest organizations can very easily and cost effectively adopt similar tactics.

A good starting point for this are widgets. Easily shared and deployed throughout the web on social networks, blogs, etc., widgets could play a very important role in providing people with real-time information and news updates.

Here are some examples of crime bustin’ widgets that we created using the KickApps Widget Studio in a few minutes. Powered by information from the FBI’s RSS News Feeds, each are shareable with several clicks of the mouse and embeddable on any website.

Here’s one powered by an Amber Alert feed.

As you can see, the power of viral syndication could very easily be put to use to inform and even organize people very quickly. In fact, please consider taking a moment to embed any of these on your blog or website.

Like I said, this is just a start. Could there be a day when we join the IRS’ social network? Hmmmm…that thought may just be a little too exciting for a Friday afternoon.

Click here for more information about the KickApps Widget Studio and here for the latest updates from last night’s release.

Social media, online communities and customer participation are an obvious for sports (well…any ‘product’ where customers are passionate, really). We’ve seen a great deal of success with the Phoenix Suns’ PlanetOrange.net–they even won an EMMY award for the site, the San Francisco 49ers, New York Knicks and many others. You can learn more about our sports customers here.

As if we planned it, the bible of the sports industry, Sports Business Journal, published a special section this week about the intersection of social media and sports. One of the stories was: Five people to know in social media (subscription required). Eric Fisher of SBJ lists the usual suspects: Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, Chris DeWolfe of MySpace, Alex Blum of KickApps… (that’s right baby!).

If you’re in the sports industry and are trying to understand social media’s role in sports you should pick up the issue. Even better, give us a call: +1 (212) 730-4558 or drop us a note here.

The highlight of the event for me was helping lead a conversation on “User Generated Data” moderated by Esther Dyson.   Other panel members were;  Richard Cooperstein, Head of International Business Development & Strategy, Facebook; Matteo Fabiano, General Manager, TagLift; Auren Hoffman, CEO, Rapleaf; and Lisa Sounio, CEO, Dopplr.

It’s clear that most people are now truly beginning to understand the tremendous value in the profile and social graph data that comes readily from the natural interaction with social media applications like the ones provided by KickApps. The initial focus for use of the data has been to inform more intelligent ad serving but all acknowledged that the various ad solutions and ecosystem required to take full advantage have not materialized yet.

In many ways the advertising industry consists of some of the most creative, innovative minds but when it comes to process operational advances they tend to be stuck in the Stone Age.  There are very few positive things to be drawn from the current global economic crisis but if it causes the advertising industry to finally throw out its dated, inefficient methods and replace them with new and more effective approaches where relevance is informed by social graph data, and formats are highly engaging, interactive and viral, we have the chance of exiting this current crisis stronger than ever.

KickApps has been focused on delivering an approach for utilizing data which respects end-user rights and allows publishers to establish trusted relationships with their sites’ audience.  Additionally, with our approach, the publisher retains ownership of this trusted relationship, not KickApps, and this is an important key to the accelerated adoption of the KickApps platform. It’s also why I tend to believe that the data portability efforts from Google, Facebook, and MySpace and the branded namespace approach of Ning will never satisfy the needs of the serious publisher looking to add rich social media experiences to an existing web site or as part of a new niche oriented social network or UGC site.

KickApps makes it very easy to integrate social media experiences into your current CMS. As part of this, we also have single sign on plug ins and modules for Joomla, Drupal and WordPress. Go to KickDeveloper.com for more information about this.

Finally, thanks for the organizers of CMS Expo, we’re able to offer you a reduced registration rate: www.cmsexpo.net/kickapps.

Oh…btw…we’ll be making a BIG Joomla related announcement while Mitch is in Denver.

Wow!!! We’re humbled and SO happy!

Thank you to all our employees, customers, partners, friends and family. Can’t wait for an even better 2009!

Since this was built in the KickApps Widget Studio, you can also grab it and embed it on any blog, website, Facebook, MySpace, iGoogle, Netvibes, etc., with just a few clicks. Also, using our Feed Builder, this widget will be dynamically updated when we add new tutorials. This will happen automatically on any widget, regardless of where it lives on the web.

Learn how to build your own widgets and video players by checking out the videos below.

As with all our widgets, the content comes from an RSS feed of content in your KickApps website or any external content that is available via RSS 2.0. In this case, I found some amazing photos of my favorite city in the world on Flickr by Henry Roxas.

The carousel rotation is defaulted to 2 seconds but you can customize it to suit your needs. Also, clicking on the image enlarges it, clicking again shrinks it back and the rotation continues. Features include:

- Displays images and plays videos and audio
- Set the carousel to auto-rotate
- Set the rotation interval
- Set the camera angle
- Set the width/height of the images
- Turn reflections on/off
- Set the corner radius on the images
- Text components can be bound to the carousel
- Custom buttons to move the carousel left and right using click actions

For more information about the KickApps Widget Studio and Feed Builder, have a look at this screencast.

PlanetOrange.net has been a success from day one. In fact, it has attributes which any online community should aspire to. Its members are extremely active and engaged, not to mention, VERY passionate about the Suns (as a longtime Lakers fan, I do have to scratch my head on this one).

One of the things about PlanetOrange.net that stands out is the way leaders within the community have emerged and play a very important role in the community. LoriAnnSUPERFAN is a prime example of this. If you look at her profile and the way she interacts with others in the community, she’s very much the heart and soul of PlanetOrange.net. She’s even taken it on herself send welcome emails to new Citizens of Planet Orange.

Congrats to Jeramie and all the Citizens of PlanetOrange.net.

A very nice email we got from Jeramie about the win:

Wanted to let you know we won an Emmy Award in the southwest region for PlanetOrange.net. We won in the “Advanced Media: Interactivity” category, which is for web features that enhance live TV broadcasts. We showed the game-night message board threads, fan post-game blogs, and how we featured fans and the best videos during the Suns’ pre-game TV program. You guys obviously gave us the tools and support to make it happen, so thank you and congrats to you, as well!

Last week, USA Today included Budget Travel in a list of travel resources for bargain hunters:

BudgetTravel.com

The online incarnation of Arthur Frommer’s Budget Travel magazine mixes authoritative, expert-driven information with a growing social media component that includes reader tips and travel journals. Particularly noteworthy: Real Deals and This Just In, a daily blog.

In my first conversation with Stephen Merrill, general manager of BudgetTravel.com, we talked about why social media is such a great fit for Budget Travel. Part of the magazine’s mission is to build a community of readers that come together around their passion for travel. That passion and the community permeates every aspect of the magazine. In fact, Budget Travel features reader provided content in several sections of every issue.

In its June 2008 issue, Budget Travel took this a step further. The entire issue, their 10th Anniversary issue, comprised entirely of reader submitted content. Every story and photo was submitted by readers. Together with this, myBudgetTravel launched as a destination for travel enthusiasts to gather and share their stories, photos and videos.

Having a ‘presence’ in the multilogue is one thing, baking it into your business, product and culture is the so-called Holy Grail. The path that Budget Travel has forged is a terrific example of how this is happening.

For more from Stephen Merrill, check out our webinar which he co-presented: A Blueprint for a Successful Social Media Website, and our recap of FOLIO Magazine’s roundtable on social media.

National Geographic is using our APIs for both the video and community aspects of the website. Here’s the video and the link to the Beet.tv page.