If you head over to DailyKos, you can see the newest twist the SEIU is putting on their Tweet ads.

The recommended tweets, which appear on posts about healthcare like this one, include not only the SEIU, but peer organizations and even individuals like @owillis and @punditmom playing on the true potlatch spirit of Twitter and Follow-Fridays. You can see 3 variations below.

When are people going to get serious about Huffpo’s unseriousness?

Every day brings another round of accolades for Huffpo’s contributions to journalism. Maybe a Pulitzer, pant pant.

But beneath the skin (of buxom beauties) on Huffpo, there’s less beef than many (and Huffpo’s PR machine) give Huffpo credit for.

Take this post titled “Huffington Post Traffic Blows Past LA Times, Washington Post” from the Silicon Valley Insider, for example:

The Huffington Post has now blown past the sites of both the LA Times and the Washington Post, says Compete.com.

Huffington Post had 8.4 million uniques in September, up from 7 million in August. The LA Times site had 8.3 million uniques in September, versus 8.2 in August. The Washington Post took the hardest fall, going to 8.1 million uniques in September from 9.3 million in August.

The post ends by asking “What was that Mayor Michael Bloomberg was just saying about how print publications aren’t writing stuff people want to read?”

Read?

Maybe if the LA Times and Washington Post included lots of “content” like “Shauna Sand’s SEX TAPE: Lorenzo Lamas’ Ex’s Explicit VIDEO ONLINE” and “The 10 Creepiest Unintentionally-Sexual Ads Of All Time (VIDEO PHOTOS)” and “January Jones Drinks Beer, Dons Leather, Says Ex-Boyfriend Ashton Thought She’d Fail” their readership (or viewership) would be higher.

And BTW, those happen to be posts 2, 3 and 4 on Huffpo’s list of most popular stories today.

And here’s another recent set of Huffpo’s stunning contributions to journalism. As folks used to say about Playboy, no doubt lots of people read Huffpo “for the stories.”

Pulitzer, anyone?

If you’re a DailyKos reader, you’ve probably seen some new ads by the SEIU today appearing at the bottom of posts about health-care.

The ads look like this…

The images I’ve posted here aren’t actionable, but if you were looking at the real thing as a reader on DailyKos, you’d be able to edit the tweet and post it.

The ads offer a nimble advertiser a quick and easy way to fan the flames of a hot topic, co-joining blog reader passion and a timely topic to trigger a bonfire of tweets. Shazam!

More fun stuff on the way…

Update: PC Magazine chimes in: “If you’re like me, you’ve been losing sleep at night, worrying that third-party companies haven’t been able to effectively leverage the Twitter platform for their advertising benefit. Have no fear! Check out the admittedly clever ad above from the Service Employees International Union.”

A new survey seems to undermine reports of Twitter’s impact on movies by looking at the decision-making of individual users. Unfortunately, focusing on individual relationships, the analysis doesn’t take into account the structure of the network that actually generates the stimuli that individuals receive. First, the survey:

“Our research found a significant overestimation of the Twitter Effect,” Kevin Goetz, the president of OTX’s worldwide motion picture group, told me. “The number of people who use Twitter are only about 10% to 12% of all moviegoers. And when we asked people what was the most influential source of moviegoing word of mouth, Twitter finished last, at the bottom of the list.”

OTX did an online survey of nearly 1,500 moviegoers in mid- September, the bulk of the sample being moviegoers from age 13 to 49, the key moviegoing demographic group. When asked what was the most influential source for word of mouth, most respondents picked “family and friends and coworkers,” which scored 40%, followed by Facebook (31%), MySpace (9%), IMDB (8%), with Twitter and online message boards bringing up the rear with 6% each.

“The data suggests that all the media play for the Twitter Effect is really jumping the gun,” says Vinnie Bruzzese, the exec VP of OTX’s motion picture group. “It has an impact, but it’s coming much later on, not as initial reaction. There may be people with a lot of followers on Twitter, but the most influential people in terms of word of mouth are still the people you’re talking to every day — your friends and co-workers.”

But the science of networks dictates that the etiology of infection/influence for individual final users/consumers isn’t as important as the influence on the people in the center of the network, the hub.

As the great new book “Connected” explains, most natural human networks aren’t shaped like this:

But this:

In short, all nodes (aka consumers) are not created equally. As the caption notes, “even though C and D both have six friends, they have very different locations in the social network. C is much more central, and D is more peripheral; C’s friends have many friends themselves, whereas D’s friends tend to have few or no friends.”

Twitter users are, by definition, like person C in this graph — they’re hyper-communicators who are highly networked both online and off.

In a brilliant piece of arm-chair reportage, Clay Shirky dissects (literally and literarily) his local paper and discovers that out of an editorial staff of 59, only 6 folks actually report on local news.

Shirky concludes:

There are dozen or so reporters and editors in Columbia, Missouri, whose daily and public work is critical to the orderly functioning of that town, and those people are trapped inside a burning business model.

Shirky’s entire analysis, like just about everything else he does, is brilliant.

But logically flawed? We’d like to believe that local papers make a difference. But has anyone proven that they do? Do towns with newspapers function better? As Shirky himself notes, “Ann Arbor, another midwestern college town and just a bit larger than Columbia, doesn’t have a newspaper at all.” Is corruption or mayhem rampant in Ann Arbor?

Health Care for America Now (HCAN) launched a bunch of cool blogads this morning promoting their “sick of it” campaign.

The best, in my opinion, does the very clever trick of pulling into the ads recent tweets that use the #sickofit tag.

If you look closely, you can see that all the clickable elements — tweeter’s nickname, hashtags, any URLs — are visible within the ad.

And if you go look at the ad live on Talkleft (or 100+ other blogs) you can see that each of those elements is separately clickable. This ad has not only the virtue of providing users with more information, timely information, but making the community part of the message. And isn’t that what social media is all about? Maybe we should start a #socialads4socialmedia tag?

Here are a couple of other ad versions running at the same time:

Working with Dynamic Logic, Doubleclick finds:

When you add up performance across all the brand metrics studied, simple Flash ads provide less brand impact than any other format – even GIFs and JPEGs. It turns out all those advertisers who served simple Flash ads through DoubleClick last year could’ve saved themselves some time and hassle by simply producing animated GIFs. 

Taking this a step further, don’t forget, we’ve found animation usually reduces clicks.

Congratulations to HCAN for kicking off the autumn ad season with a genius ad.

The ad, placed on the the epic FAILBLOG, touts a Twitter hashtag campaign (#failephant) attacking GOP healthcare policies. Here’s a copy of the current ad.

Now if we can just get HCAN to feature a feed of the #failephant tweets in their ad, this will be an unFAIL home-run. (See example at left.)

A colleague just saw this ad on Facebook promoting an SXSW panel. Clever.

There seems to be something of a cover-up going on at the HuffingtonPost.

Apparently embarrassed by the importance of sex-driven stories in powering its traffic, Huffpo has recently changed its “most popular stories” feature to obscure how many page impressions each story gets.

The stories now seem to be ranked according to # of comments (see example of the new format at the bottom of the post) but earlier this summer, you could see the number of raw impressions each story was getting.

While serious policy-related “politics” stories, which Huffpo pretends are its bread and butter, got 50k impressions, stories like “When your Boob tape is showing” and “Women’s Iconic Swimsuit movie moments” got millions.

For the record, here are screen grabs of the most popular Huffpo stories, as ranked by page views, for three different days earlier this summer, just before Huffpo decided to hide its skin-fixation:

And here the new format, which obscures but not entirely hides, the Huffpo readers’ hormonal urges: