Meerkats and Dan Pfeiffer

Your new favorite social media application has arrived! Meerkat, an application that allows users to livestream video footage to their Twitter followers, debuted at last week's South by Southwest Music Festival in Austin, Texas. It quickly caught the attention of 2016 contenders Martin O'Malley, Jeb Bush, and others, including the mainstream media. Politico dubbed 2016 the "Meerkat Election" and CBS raised concerns about privacy. Buzzfeed's Political Editor Katherine Miller took a more pragmatic approach in reminding readers of the inane and boring nature of most election events, making Meerkat not all that exciting and revolutionary most of the time. Regardless, it should be interesting to see how the app makes its way into media coverage and candidates' personal media outreach.   

Additionally, here is an interview with WH Communications Czar Dan Pfeiffer in Medium on media and modern communications strategy in the White House. One particularly interesting quote is below. 

I think that—and this one is tricky—a White House will have to have many more resources dedicated to producing content. We have a lot of people around here who write written words—speeches, talking points, press releases—and you will need people who are creating visual, graphical and video images to communicate the same message. It’s tricky because you don’t want to be in a world where it is propaganda. You’re going to have to vet this and give it scrutiny, but there is an insatiable appetite for content out there. Your traditional news outlets don’t have the resources to produce the amount of content that the Internet requires on a 24/7 basis.

There’s this funny thing where it’s like, if we put out a press release, it is accepted as a proper form of Presidential communication. But if we put out a video, that’s somehow propaganda. The mentality is going have to shift [to acknowledge that] a video is just a more shareable, more enjoyable way of communicating the same information as the press release. Everyone is going to have to adjust to that.