I griped a little yesterday about this, and Elana over at Wellstone Action asked me what advice I’d give candidates running for office. Here’s a quick, handy-dandy list of pointers for candidates, from the position of a voter:

• Talk with me, not to me. Twitter is a media platform for conversation, not broadcast. A rule of thumb that’s used for organizations also applies to candidates: only about 20-30% of your tweets should be about you. The rest should be about what your community cares about. Which leads me to…
• Find out what your community cares about. Read what your followers are tweeting and respond with helpful information. It doesn’t just have to be related to the office you’re running for, either… in fact, it’s better if you mix it up a little. For example, someone you follow tweets about heading to a restaurant you love. Respond and say you go there often, too, and be sure to try the blackened sea bass.
• Stay on top of hot topics. Look for people talking about issues you care about with Twitter search. You can either save them as saved search in your Twitter app (Tweetie, Tweetdeck, Twitterific, etc.), or as an RSS feed for your news reader (Google Reader, Netvibes, etc.) Then respond to those tweets, even if you’re not following each other.
• Give back to the community. Retweeting others’ ideas and suggestions is a great way to show appreciation, and to spead the good word.
• Use your own, authentic voice, not a press release voice. I’m a voter, a human, and I want you to be a human too. Robots don’t do so well in the voting booth.
• If you don’t have time, assign a staff person to monitor and respond to items — just make sure they’re clear that they’re your staff person, and not you. For example, NYC mayoral candidate Reverend Billy Talen has a personal account, as well as his campaign staff’s group account. If your staff person uses your account, ask them to note that they’re a staffer.

In short, act like a normal person who cares about the people around them, because we know you do!

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Note: Bill de Blasio was the only public advocate candidate who responded to my gripe, and he gets extra Twitter points for both that and at least retweeting people once in a while. Go Bill!

Amazon is blaming their PR nightmare on their French brethren. While this still sounds sort of suspicious to me — it reeks of, “I totally have a girlfriend; you just haven’t met her because she lives in FRANCE” — I’ll run with it for the sake of the teaching moment that we have. Let me sooth my own inner conspirist, though, by saying that I find it extremely bizarre that this swath of books were all taken down together, at the same time.

So, you’re a global corporate giant, and you’ve got a PR nightmare on your hands. You learn quickly that the storming of your castle is happening on social networks and media like Twitter and Facebook. If you’re looking to make the situation exponentially worse, here’s what you should do:

• Stay silent. You know that you have a corporate blog, and a Twitter feed, and pages on Facebook, but you should ignore them. People aren’t there to talk to you, they’re there to wait patiently for your pearls of wisdom when you deem it time to do so. Preferably wait at least 36 hours before making any kind of statement.
• Go old-school. When you’ve finally got something to say, choose old PR strategies and apply them to new media. Get your entire communications team to talk to “authoritative” voices that the masses will clearly listen to, and be quieted by.
• Make it up. Don’t know have any control over your inner situation, or have any idea what’s happening? Come up with a really flimsy excuse, like, I don’t know, a “glitch.” Your consumer base, especially the sector that’s raving luny, is clearly not savvy enough to understand the complicated nature of your big business. Don’t admit, ever, that you are not 100% in control of the situation.

There ya have it. And for you folks working the #sorryamazon hashtag? Please. Don’t let those jokers off the hook so easily. This is a  giant FAIL on the part of Amazon– everyone makes mistakes (though again, mistakes that affect LGBT, feminist and disability-themed books? I don’t know), but there are a myriad of things Amazon could have done to remedy the ripple effect.