Brad Rourke’s Blog
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How To Handle Overeager Posts On Your Facebook Public Page
Here’s a question I get asked often by organization managers considering getting more active in social media — Facebook in particular. One best practice when it comes to Facebook Pages is to set the default setting so that visitors are looking at posts not only by the page owner but also by fans. But: “What…
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Brickfair, An Example of Cognitive Surplus
Over the weekend, I accompanied my son to Brickfair 2010 at the Dulles Expo Center. Brickfair is a completely fan-driven annual conference. People come together to share their love of Legos, to show of scenes and models they have built, and to swap bricks. Daniel and his friend Jeremy had created a rock concert model,…
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How To Move Your WordPress Blog To A New Webhost
After many months of poor service, frequent timeouts, and half-loaded pages, I moved the local blog I founded, Rockville Central, to a new host. I guess my first clue that I would really need to do something about this mess happened in a new client interview, when I was touting the site. My prospect pulled…
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How The Road Warrior World Has Changed
Yesterday I was in an airport and ran into a bank of AT&T 2000 phone booths. The phones had been pulled out; there were four little private booths to sit and . . . well, I don’t know. Just sit. I did a great deal of air travel in the late 1990’s and early 2000’s.…
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Join Me for a Session with Seth Godin in DC – Free!
I was very excited when I learned that a singular thinker in marketing, Seth Godin, was planning a road trip where he would be leading all-day sessions that would be open to the public. I immediately signed up for the July 22 session in DC at the historic Warner Theater. Turns out that the theater…
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Join Me For A Webinar: 'An Emerging Relationship: The Executive Branch, Philanthropy and Civic Engagement'
As you may recall, in May my friends at PACE-Philanthropy for Active Civic Engagement released a white paper I authored. Titled An Evolving Relationship – Executive Branch Approaches to Civic Engagement and Philanthropy, it is based on a briefing paper I wrote for a White House meeting earlier this year between leaders of the philanthropic community…
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Things I Don't Understand
Just a few things I don’t understand: Why are 90% of beauty salons named with a pun? (“Shear Energy.” “The Mane Event.”) Why do real estate and insurance agents have their photos on their business cards, when it actually makes them seem less trustworthy? Why do bureaucrats (and people who aspire to bureaucratism) say “at…
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New Collaborative Governance Council Mandated By Law in MN
One of my very first clients when I started working independently (I hung out my own shingle back in November 2003) was a group called the Policy Consensus Initiative, along with its sister organization the National Policy Consensus Center. I will always be grateful to PCI’s founder Chris Carlson and NPCC’s director Greg Wolf for…
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Cognitive And Civic Surplus
Andrea Jarrell drew my attention to this talk by one of the deepest thinkers about the new structures in society, Clay Shirky. In this talk, Shirky describes the idea of cognitive surplus, and relates it to the way media gets produced and consumed. I urge you to watch the whole fifteen minutes, it is chock…
Brad Rourke 