Exactly how far does a political misstep travel in the world of social media? Thanks to a number of emerging analytics tools-newsrooms, campaigns and their respective staffs can spend time picking apart the ramifications of a candidate's actions in the ever-exploding social sphere. Cory Booker's appearance on Meet the Press this Sunday provided an excellent opportunity to gauge just how much a gaffe resonates, and how long it lives.

Using VoterTide Pro, a social analytics dashboard focused solely on tracking the every move of politicians across social networks, websites and blogs, it appears that Booker's critique of President Obama's attack ads blew up on Twitter. But like so much on the social Web, the gaffe burned hot, only to fade away.

Tracking the number of Twitter '@ mentions' can typically provide a solid indicator of social buzz. Booker is known as a prolific Twitter user. Boasting of well over a million followers, he averages more than 3,000 mentions a day.

That number spiked last Sunday (May 20) as Booker's Twitter handle was mentioned 12,546 times, according to VoterTide's data. On Monday, the conversation then exploded with the opening of the weekly news cycle as Booker's handle received 28,360 mentions. The pace has since cooled, however, with Booker receiving nearly 17,000 mentions on Tuesday and only 3,000 as of Wednesday evening.

But the real question still remains, what exactly does this kind of social media bounce mean? The answer to that is far more complicated. Social media monitoring alone reveals only so much, but early indications are that the mayor's presence online is undamaged. Since Sunday, Booker has gained 6,190 Twitter followers and 1,083 Facebook fans-only a 1.5 percent increase, but a bigger jump than usual. As political gaffes and flare-ups seem to live more on Twitter, it makes sense that Booker would receive a larger bump (he also boasts far more Twitter followers than Facebook fans), but neither increase is much to write home about.

In Booker's case this flare-up seems to illustrate a bigger point about the online political news cycle-namely, that most people outside the Beltway don't seem to pay attention and the big news of the day will be forgotten tomorrow. The real consequences of these actions will only reverberate behind closed doors at Obama campaign headquarters and throughout hallways in Washington. While Booker's comment earned him a great deal of press (his official YouTube follow-up to his Meet the Press appearance generated over 60,000 views in a little over three days), the news cycle will swallow up his remarks, and Booker can get back to saving people from burning buildings.

With bikini season approaching, Yahoo's all about trimming the fat. Last month the company announced that it would lay off 2,000 employees as part of then-CEO Scott Thompson's plan to create a "smaller, nimbler, more profitable" company. Now the company has opted to close its digital magazine iPad app Livestand, which was billed as the company's answer to tablet reading platforms like Flipboard.

In a blog post announcing the news, Yahoo doesn't specify why it's fingered Livestand as one of the first in what will be a series of product discontinuations, but the app was a pet project of Blake Irving, who stepped down as chief product officer in April. So there's that. (in early 2012, Irving delivered a memorable keynote address at the Interactive Advertising Bureau's annual meeting during which he showcased Livestand).

Yahoo said it's transitioning towards a mobile-first product strategy, pointing to the Axis search browser unveiled earlier this week as an example, but that doesn't explain why a mobile product like Livestand is among the first to go. At one point, Yahoo touted Livestand as both the vehicle via which Yahoo's own sites would translate best to tablets, as well as a platform for magazine companies like Surf magazine to transport their titles to the iPad. But the product was plagued by delays, and failed to capture much interest among publishers outside of Yahoo.

Cold comfort for Livestand fans (anyone out there?) is that Yahoo will put insights from Livestand toward future mobile products.

"With all the great things we learned from people's interactions with Livestand, we know we can create beautiful, easy-to-use HTML5 media properties that give the richest experiences to the most people," the company said.

Simultaneous with the launch of Livestand, Yahoo rolled out an interactive ad unit called Living Ads which Toyota used to promote its Prius model. Yahoo's director of mobile and tablet advertising Alex Linde described Living Ads to Adweek as "like the Harry Potter newspapers" shortly after the product launched last November.

At the time Yahoo said readers were twice as likely to spend time with the ad as with a static ad. Living Ads were part of a bundled Livestand buy offered advertisers that could run up to $500,000 depending on the brand's involvement and length of the sponsorship. It's unclear what happens to Living Ads going forward.

The elimination of Livestand somewhat declutters an otherwise crowded digital newsstand market for iPads, with Flipboard perceived as the leader trailed by others like CNN's Zite, Google's Currents and AOL's Editions.

Small Web publishers will descend on Washington in the first week of June (June 4-5) to play the economic hero card. They hope to make the case to politicians that they should consider the impact new Internet laws may have on the small businesses that are the drivers of job creation and the engine of economic recovery.

Most of the 50 publishers are members of the Interactive Advertising Bureau's Long Tail Alliance, a group formed four years ago to give Web entrepreneurs a voice on the Hill. And unlike Google, Facebook, and Microsoft, they don't have millions to spend on lobbying.

"These are people that can't pivot their business model on a dime. Certain law proposals could decimate their business models," said Alison Pepper, senior director of public policy for the IAB.

"The Internet has always been about leveling the playing field. But if you start to put all these regulations on the Internet without thinking it through, we'll be going back to information that is controlled by a small number of entities," said Rick Jaworski, who has published the Joy of Baking website for 15 years.

Privacy is at the top of the list for small Web publishers that rely on behaviorally targeted advertising from Google's AdSense and other ad networks. An overly restrictive definition of "Do Not Track" could really cripple their businesses.

"I'm worried that in the name of privacy, ads would have to become more intrusive," said Rogers Cadenhead, the publisher of The Drudge Retort, the political opposite of The Drudge Report. "I'm able to run this news site as a business because of these ads. There are a lot of people making money on this business model."

"When we started out it was a hobby; we didn't depend on ad revenue, but when AdSense came long, we felt it be a business," added Jaworski. "If ads aren't targeted, the ads won't pay as well.

Publishers are also worried about bills like SOPA, that are aimed at tightening intellectual property enforcement on the Internet. A recent tussle Jaworski had with a big publisher who wanted him to take down a page on his site over a recipe drove home the kind of unintended consequences a bill like SOPA could have had on his business. "SOPA would have meant I would have to take down the site and go to court to get it back, even though recipes aren't copyrightable," he said.

"It's a fast and furious 48 hours. None of us are familiar with Washington or the dozens of bills that might impact our business. We cram for the test and then we go in," said Cadenhead, who has made this trip three years running.

If you blinked you may have missed it, but President Obama held a small, impromptu Twitter town hall yesterday in Iowa to answer questions and help craft a to-do list for Congress. The event is part of an ongoing White House initiative headed up by its digital strategy team to connect with voters and concerned citizens-and hopefully blur the lines between online and offline activism.

The president is no stranger to this format-he did his first town hall with Twitter's Jack Dorsey last July and has tried to stay one step ahead of most politicians in the digital game, participating in Google hangouts and even joining Spotify. Yet, while Obama decided to (quite literally) roll up his sleeves and get his hands dirty responding to tweets in real time, it begs the question, just how effective is this type of engagement?

Have a question about the #CongressToDoList & the president's plan to bring jobs back to the U.S.? Ask now with #WHChat twitter.com/whitehouse/sta…

- The White House (@whitehouse) May 24, 2012

While one-to-one engagement between any citizen and sitting president creates an invaluable connection with the executive and a concerned potential voter, Twitter remains a peculiar format for policy engagement. The questions posed to President Obama throughout the town hall were complex in nature, meriting equally complex responses, not exactly the perfect format for the 140 character burst.

President Obama did as well as he could: "Facts are that a modest increase in taxes for wealthiest doesn't hurt economy; 90s boom, 2000s slowed. Not like we haven't tested," but the engagement rate for the event appears modest in terms of retweet engagement (typically a sign of successful message outreach).

The event averaged just 107 retweets, as reported by 140elect.com, a firm tracking political trends on Twitter. To be fair, the localized Twitter meet-up was not highly publicized; but its viral impact could have been a lot stronger, argued 140elect co-founder Zach Green, who blames poor tweet messaging.

On his blog, Green argued that context surrounding a tweet is the most important factor of engagement and that a string of contiguous policy tweets might get lost in the scrum of one's crowded Twitter feed. "Each tweet must stand alone," Green wrote on his blog. "Twitter is about placing ideas into discrete packages."

You may have heard that Facebook had its IPO last week. Of course you did-because Facebook notched 329,565 mentions online last Friday when the company went public, according to an analysis for Adweek done by social media analysis firm NetBase. While the IPO was a win for Facebook-at least in terms of word-of-mouth, if not stock performance-it was also a coup for Twitter.

Of the 5,200,587 mentions Facebook received between May 1 and 21, 45 percent came from Twitter, and 36 percent from Facebook. NetBase CMO Lisa Joy Rosner said Twitter usually contributes an even larger share of the mentions related to breaking news, but since the news in this case involved Facebook, she wasn't surprised to see Facebook account for such a big piece. "Facebook users are so into Facebook they are talking about something they don't normally talk about on Facebook, which is an IPO," she said.

But folks weren't just talking about Facebook. Twitter and even Yahoo also received word-of-mouth boosts, albeit for different reasons. The Twitter mentions mostly fell along the lines of users saying they prefer the platform to Facebook, said Rosner, whereas the Yahoo mentions were mixed bag with folks comparing Yahoo's IPO performance to Facebook's or decrying Yahoo's patent suit against the company.

On IPO day sentiment was net positive for Facebook, with 41,425 mentions deemed by NetBase as positive versus 25,278 that were negative (the remaining share didn't indicate enough sentiment to be judged either way). But in the weeks leading up to and the days following the IPO, issues such as Zuckerberg wearing a hoodie into investor meetings, news that GM would stop running ads on Facebook "and people's perception that [Facebook's value] was falling flat pulled the sentiment down and created a collection of negative commentary," Rosner said.

Twitter scored a lot of points in Washington recently when it publicly came out in support of the government's Do Not Track policy recommendation for Web companies. But that doesn't mean the social networking and micro-blogging company can rest easy.

While praising Twitter for its Do Not Track commitment, Reps. Cliff Stearns (R-Fla.) and Joe Barton (D-Texas), members of the Congressional Bipartisan Privacy Caucus and Energy and Commerce Committee, fired off a dozen of questions Thursday to Twitter's Dick Costolo about the company's data collection and tracking practices, especially as those operations relate to Twitter's new "tailored suggestions" feature it is testing.

Twitter announced it would experiment with the feature that gives more relevant suggestions about "who to follow" the same day the company said it would honor Do Not Track features on Web browsers. In a blog post, Twitter said that if a user elects Do Not Track, it would not be able to enjoy the feature.

Among the questions the lawmakers ask Twitter is what kind of personally identifiable information Twitter is collecting, how the data is collected, and how long it will be kept. Stearns and Barton also want to know how Twitter will implement the new "who to follow" feature, how it will honor opt-out requests across mobile devices, and if Twitter is planning more experiments.

Twitter has until June 15 to respond.

The company did not comment except to say that it received the letter and would respond to it.

Zynga's recently acquired game, Draw Something, which has come under some scrutiny lately for losing 5 million users last April, is focusing on the future and partnering with DreamWorks on a launch campaign for Madagascar 3.

The partnership might just be exactly what Zynga needs. The popular DreamWorks property has grossed a combined $1 billion plus worldwide, making it one of the biggest global movie franchises in history-one with a dedicated fanbase. While some critics have been skeptical of Draw Something's staying power, the numbers for the Pictionary-style game are still excellent. According to Zynga, Draw Something is still seeing 10 million or more daily act users.

Anne Globe, chief marketing officer at DreamWorks Animation, said that the studio expects Madagascar to resonate with the Draw Something audience. "The real value for us is the extensive engagement you get in a unique way with this kind of promotion rather than buying a 30-second ad, which also works. However, we see a real opportunity for longer engagement here with this audience," Globe said.

The campaign, which starts today in preparation for Memorial Day weekend and runs for a week, will feature Madagascar advertisements as well as unique film-insipired words for users to choose and draw. Zynga CMO Jeff Karp believes the campaign will help to "blur the lines between the virtual and the physical world" for users and says that the DreamWorks partnership is one of a few digital brand initiatives that will be announced in the near future.

When asked whether integrating brands into such a popular game could devalue a platform that has become a serious cult sensation, Karp argued that the partnerships are carefully crafted. "We have to earn each player's respect every day and ulimtately they have to be the ones to come back tomorrow," he said.

While both sides feel the integration will be beneficial, questions remain about the demographic matchup. Draw Something attracts a majority of users over the age of 18 and Madagascar 3 is a film likely to be popular with younger audiences. It is hard, however, to argue with the brand name recognition that DreamWorks and Madagascar bring to the relationship.

Critics of Verizon Wireless' $3.9 billion spectrum purchase and marketing and joint venture deals with the nation's largest cable companies may have just won a powerful ally in their fight to persuade regulators to either block or condition the deals. Sen. Herb Kohl (D-Wis..), the powerful chairman of the Senate Antitrust Subcommittee, said today that the deals "present serious competition concerns."

Though Congress has no authority over a particular deal's outcome, lawmakers like Kohl (who came out against the AT&T-T-Mobile merger that eventually failed) carry influence and provide regulators with political backup should they want to block or impose restrictions.

However, while Kohl called on regulators to block the AT&T and T-Mobile deal, he stopped short of making that same recommendation in his letter about the Verizon Wireless' cable deals to the Department of Justice and the Federal Communications Commission. Instead, Kohl, who held a hearing in March on the issues raised by the proposed deals, asked regulators to "carefully scrutinize" the transactions for its "potential impact on competition and consumers."

"There is a real concern these agreements transform Verizon and the cable companies from fierce competitors into business partners because they lessen the incentive for Verizon and the cable companies to compete aggressively against each other," Kohl wrote.

For critics, Kohl's eight-page missive to regulators was enough to cheer.

"[Kohl] hit all the right points in the letter," said Gigi Sohn, president and CEO of Public Knowledge, one of the public interest groups opposing the deals. "[He] was right to raise serious issues surrounding AT&T's proposed takeover of T-Mobile, and he is right again now to raise serious issues surrounding Verizon and the cable companies. The DOJ and FCC would be wise to pay attention."

Verizon Wireless saw nothing to worry about in Kohl's letter, interpreting it as confirmation that the deals will be cleared.

"Because these transactions present unique issues that will deliver major consumer benefits, it is appropriate for Senator Kohl to carefully examine the issues that are also being studied by the appropriate agencies. While Senator Kohl's letter recounts the arguments reviewed at the Senate hearing, it is another indication that this transaction is on the road toward approval this summer," said Tom Tauke, Verizon's executive vp of public affairs, policy and communications, in a statement.

Coming to Verizon's defense and splitting the debate along party lines, the ranking member of the subcommittee, Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) drew the opposite conclusion than Kohl, calling the Verizon-cable deals "procompetitive." In a letter sent within hours of Kohl's to the DOJ and FCC, Lee points out that the spectrum Verizon wants to purchase hasn't been in use since 2006 and that the side agreements with the cable companies are "essential to a vibrant economy."

"Government may sometimes have a proper role in ensuring that businesses compete fairly and do not collude. But it is improper for government agencies to pick winners and lowers in the marketplace or to interfere with private enterprise where robust market forces are in operation," Lee wrote.

For those of you who were getting a little tired of Zooey Deschanel's iPhone commercial with Siri-you know who you are-here's a breath of fresh air. John Malkovich has stepped into the campaign, by TBWA\Media Arts Lab, in a pair of commercials that broke Wednesday night-the 58-year-old actor's first U.S. ads. Malkovich and Siri actually make a pretty hilarious team. They're both equally quirky, and with their matching stilted speech, you get the sense that they really do understand each other. "I enjoyed this chat immensely. You are very eloquent," he tells Siri at the end of the "Life" spot. Is Malkovich falling in love? While these are his first American commercials, Malkovich has done plenty of overseas work, the most amusing of which is probably this promo for the Karlovy Vary film festival.

In April you may have tweeted how much you hate doing taxes. Sometime later you may have been browsing the Web and noticed ads for TurboTax popping up. That probably wasn't an accident.

That's because TurboTax-maker Intuit was testing New York-based startup LocalResponse's new Intent Targeted ad product, which uses publicly available social data to target mobile and desktop display ads.

"We found over a million people that tweeted the week before tax day ‘I hate doing taxes' [or] ‘Taxes suck'...and when these people actually came to the Web, the desktop Web, we actually displayed to them a TurboTax banner ad," said LocalResponse CEO Nihal Mehta. "This is revolutionary because literally we've done tons of research in the space, and we don't think there's anybody else doing this."

Creepy? Yeah, a little. But LocalResponse limits itself to only publicly available content. So while most tweets are fair game, a Facebook status post is shielded, provided users' privacy settings block anyone from being able to see it.

Here's how it works: LocalResponse combs through public social media content from the likes of Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram and Foursquare and identifies a social ID, like a Twitter handle, connected to that content. The company then partners with third-party data providers to connect that social ID to a cookie that will identify the user the next time he or she visits a website and logs in with his or her Twitter account.

At that point a cookie is dropped on the user's browser, so that if he or she navigates to a site where a Twitter log-in isn't required, LocalResponse can recognize that person's cookie within an advertising exchange-and then deliver an ad relevant to that user's social media posts.

Mehta said LocalResponse is able to target up to 100 million unique users on a monthly basis through its partnerships with numerous data providers and online publishers. Company president and co-founder Kathy Leake added that LocalResponse expects to encounter zero privacy issues with this kind of targeting because it only uses publicly available social data such as tweets that can already surface from searching on Google or Bing.

LocalResponse says it can also employ natural language processing, which enables it to infer things such as a person's location. For example, a user could tweet, "There's a sale at Retailer X," with Twitter geo-location settings turned on, and LocalResponse could identify the words "at" and "Retailer X" and correlate that with the longitude and latitude of the tweet's location to determine that the user was in Retailer X's store when the given tweet was posted.

And if Retailer X is a LocalResponse customer, the brand could access the company's self-serve dashboard and launch a display campaign targeted at that user. That's about as precise as it gets, according to Leake.

"If you're broadcasting intent-whether that's sentiment or your location-that's pretty much the strongest signal there is. It's not look-alike targeting. It's not traditional segmentation or behavioral targeting or contextual targeting. It's actually intent that you yourself have declared," asserted Leake.