Be sure to read the Washington Post’s Tom Heath’s latest column on Washington’s entrepreneurial set.  Topic: our employer and publisher, New Media Strategies.
Excerpts:

There are three arms to NMS: entertainment, corporate and the fast-growing public affairs division.

Example: NMS workers troll blogs that are talking about its clients, including SciFi Channel to the Walt Disney Co. to Pepsi — and sometimes knocking them. When Burger King recalled 25 million Pokemon toys because they were dangerous, NMS employees dug into chat rooms and blogs to tell the Burger King story. They identify themselves as working for their clients.

Example: When the SciFi Channel desperately wanted to energize the hardcore audience base for its “Battlestar Gallactica,” NMS found the blogs the audience inhabited and started dishing. Influential bloggers were invited to attend backstage visits where they were able to meet actors and writers.

Example: When Fred Thompson (remember him?) was gearing up to run for the Republican nomination for president, NMS laid the groundwork online.

“We have bloggers who specialize in the enlistment of online intelligence,” said Pete Snyder, sitting in his 14th-floor office overlooking the Potomac. A framed poster of late singer Johnny Cash sits on a wall. Outside are posters of “The Dark Knight” and “Step Brothers,” both current film projects that NMS helped create buzz for. There’s a hockey shirt from the work NMS did trying to gin up viewers for last year’s NHL playoffs.

What’s better than sitting through all the negative ads we’ll soon be seeing?  Sitting through this funny promotional ad for the upcoming movie “Swing Vote”…

What does New Media Strategies — the kind and gracious publisher of this blog — look like?

Here’s one exclusive view from inside our 14th floor conference room in our Rosslyn World Headquarters.

That’s Virginia Technology Secretary Aneesh Chopra speakiing to bloggers, our staff, and Virginia political officials on May 8, 2008.

Brace yourself.

Ready?

You won’t want to miss it.

The technological innovation of a lifetime.

The White House Correspondents Association Dinner — live via Twitter.

Brought to you by Extreme Mortman and our sensational New Media Strategies colleague Leslie Bradshaw.

All Saturday night long, live from the fabulous and well-appointed Washington Hilton International Ballroom.

On this special WHCA Dinner Twitter channel:  https://twitter.com/Leslieann44

We’ll bring you all the Passover action: live interviews with B and C level celebrities and guests, fried food reviews, silly wardrobe reviews, pre and post party observations, expected wait in bathroom lines.  And so on.  Twitter Snark like you’ve never seen.

Stay tuned.  You won’t want to miss a moment of our Tweets.
We begin broadcasting at 5:30 p.m. Saturday — live from the lower level entrance of the Washington Hilton.

Remember: what you don’t know immediately about the White House Correspondents Dinner Association might kill you.

Always like to share brilliance, particularly when it appears on AP:

For a generation that’s come of age with shows like “American Idol,” the idea of creating a countrywide political phenom from the ground up is right up their alley. And this year’s presidential election is giving them that chance.

The days of authoritative, hierarchical campaigns are waning. Now reaching the masses, particularly the younger masses, means putting the power in their hands.

Thousands of messages flooded Meredith Segal’s inbox in 2006, responding to her Facebook petition to get Barack Obama into the presidential race. “I was absolutely amazed. What I was most amazed about was the number of messages I got from young people saying, `I want to do more.’”

“This campaign has been a campaign about regular Americans getting involved,” said Segal, 22, a senior at Bowdoin College in Maine. “This is a very real movement.”

Campaign spokespeople are no longer the only ones delivering the candidate’s message, said Pete Snyder, CEO of New Media Strategies, which specializes in online and word-of-mouth marketing. “It’s not one press secretary, it’s hundreds or tens of thousands if you look at all the comments out there on blogs. It’s a much more collaborative way to run a campaign.”

You may have noticed the extra security getting added to these streets of Washington these days. Manhole covers being sealed, sniper roosts getting shut down, lengthier pat downs at points of entry.

Why the extra steps — a visiting dignitary from a member of the Coalition of the Willing? An impromptu civil defense exercise for the after-effects of NAFTA? Perhaps the media doing a dry run through for its inauguration salute to President Obama?

None of the above. It’s The Institute for Politics, Democracy and the Internet’s annual Politics Online Conference on Tuesday and Wednesday. The premier, must-attend political and Internet event of the year.

This year’s conference, we are thrilled and proud to say, features our New Media Strategies colleague Patrick Ottenhoff.

Patrick will lead a discussion on — drum roll, applause sign please — Political Cartography 2.0. Patrick runs the most excellent blog The Electoral Map.

We’re looking forward to Patrick’s presentation. Political cartography, alas, is a dying art. Like Yiddish.

Travel through the Midwest these days and you’ll see the decaying empty factories which once pumped out political maps by the hundreds, even thousands. Now they sit empty — a searing reminder of what happens when we outsource our political maps to Bangalore. Nowhere is that mourned louder than at Patrick Ottenhoff’s blog — where the memories of generations of Ottenhoffs who worked in the political map mills of Ohio, Michigan, and South Carolina are getting mustier and dustier with every passing day.

We think the government needs to subsidize political maps — or at least provide an electoral map tax credit. Until those glorious reforms happen — and yes, we will judge our presidential candidates on their capability to answer that 3 a.m. call on the red phone by saying, “Send in the maps” — we will settle for Patrick Ottenhoff’s discussion at the IPDI conference.

And we’ll continue to be flooded by cheap electoral map knock-offs, like this one by Jake Tapper.

You, you the American people — you’re the big winners.  Today marks the second anniversary of Extreme Mortman.  We mark it today because we forgot about it yesterday, the actual anniversary.

We launched this blog sometime around Valentine’s Day.  With adequate love in the air, it’s probably an ideal time to quote Lieutenant Frank Drebin of Police Squad:

Jane, if you don’t love me, you might as well pull that trigger, because without you, I wouldn’t want to live anyway.

I’ve finally found someone l can love - a good, clean love… without utensils.

It’s a topsy-turvy world, Jane, and maybe the problems of two people don’t amount to a hill of beans, but this is our hill and these, these are our beans.

Since I met you, I’ve noticed things I never knew where there - birds singing, dew glistening on a newly-formed leaf, stop lights.

Jane, this morning I bought something for you.  lt’s not very much, but pretty good for an honest policeman’s salary.

It’s an engagement ring.  I’d have given it to you earlier, but l wanted to wait until we were alone.

Likewise, while we’re alone, I thank you, I thank the good folks in the glass-enclosed publisher’s suite at New Media Strategies, and of course I thank the late great John Ritter.

The Washington Post’s “Reliable Source” column strikes again with unparalleled brilliance.  Here’s what they reveal today in their spectacular State of the Union coverage:

What will be this year’s viral-video moment?

At press time, a clip of the GOP side standing to cheer Bush’s call for tax relief while Dems stay seated is outpacing a reaction shot of Clinton frowning, according to YouTube stats tracked by New Media Strategies. Remains to be seen whether either can compete with John McCain dozing during the ‘07 SOTU (281,000 views) or Clinton laughing during the ‘06 speech (67,000 views).

Here are the videos…

GOP standing for Bush’s call for tax relief:

Hillary Clinton frowning:

John McCain dozing:

Hillary Clinton laughing:

Hillary Clinton’s been talking about the ill-effects of “sleep deprivation.”

No kidding.

Bill Clinton:

John McCain:

Conrad Burns:

Robert Byrd:

And even these guys (Pepsi is an NMS client):

Oh, the Louis XIVTH cut of prime rib of beef, virtually indistinguishable from the regular cut, other than price.  Oh, the oven-roasted potatoes or french fries or rice pilaf.  Oh, the riverboat salad bar featuring the, oh my, glow-in-the-dark light green salad dressing.

Oh, the memories.

A rare night out — actually, a medium rare night out — for Extreme Mortman yesterday to join our New Media Strategies colleagues for the last meals and drinks served at Tom Sarris’ Orleans House in Rosslyn.  How could we miss the January 15 closing?  After all, the equal parts earnest and festive steak house was located right across the street from our glass-enclosed nerve center.  And it was home to so many personal moments.  You may not know this unless you’re a true collector of all Mortman biographical facts, but growing up in DC, many Mortman family special occasions were marked at the Orleans House, from the fun salad-infused glorious beginning right down to the annoying and painful conclusion of wondering where our check was.

But oh, the salad bar.  The saddest part of the salad bar shutting down with the restaurant?  All those poor cans of three-bean salad will now go homeless.  Ba-dum!  No, seriously, I swear those cherry tomatoes were first brought out during the Johnson administration — Andrew Johnson.  Ba-dum!  No, seriously, there’s good news — wondering what will happen to all the unused vats of green salad dressing?  Apparently they can fuel the new generation of hybrid SUVs.  Ba-dum!  No, seriously: if you ordered the salad with the green dressing on top, you just had to look at the waitress and say, “I’ll have the Chernobyl!”

For now, though, nothing but memories.  Sweet memories.  I’ll never be able to look at a bowl of stale croutons again without getting a wee bit misty-eyed for the glory days.

But one final happy thought: At least we were joined by Yasser Arafat and his bodyguards.