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Archives par mot-clé : markering
Why Doctor Video Marketing?
Doctors are facing financial challenges just like other types businesses who are having difficulties in today’s economy to remain successful. Such as other businesses that promote or market their corporations to get new customers, doctors are now also being forced to market their services. Essentially the fable of the warm and friendly country doctor who had a whole town along with a whole encircling country side filled of patients no longer exists. The troubles that doctors are struggling with these days include: extra HIPAA regulations, greater scrutiny by insurance companies, all round decrease in reimbursements, and competition with bigger medical clinics and hospitals.
Doctors must market place their products and services to increase and maintain a profitable medical practice. One of the the majority of productive marketing tools with high rate product sales returns is internet video promoting. To take edge of this unique marketing program the doctor has to produce a film marketing picture showcasing their products and services, medical expertise and awareness, and his medical specialty. The doctor and his medical practice demand to remain portrayed in a good light that will attract new patients.
Doctor video marketing brings many health benefits for doctors and potential patients. That include: 1) Will save you time by allowing the doctor to meet with potential patients who want the doctor’s products and services. 2) Gives the doctor creditability in his geographical area along with the area when his medical practice is located. 3) Allow potential patients to become informed and decide whether they want to remain a patient of the doctor. 4) Patients can E-mail the doctor concerns about their medical issues, as well as the doctor can respond back with a movie E-mail answering the patients’ concerns and instruct the patient about their health problem. 5) Doctors can most effectively and efficiently treat and educate them while using use of videos. 6) Once the doctor has a video promoting plan he can be free of worry from financial worries. 7) Doctor video marketing frees up the doctor’s time from promoting issues permitting him to put more time in supplying patient care.
The doctor has two choices on how he can put with each other a film promoting prepare. The first taste is to employ a seasoned professional doctor video marketing specialist and enable them to develop his promoting film. The second choice is he can employ a company who will develop the doctor video marketing prepare for him/her. How do these movie producing companies offer pros for the doctor?
1) The doctor can contend with more substantial medical practices at a fraction of the expense. 2) Create agency excellent quality ads that are ready to run locally or nationally on cable or broadcast TV and look as beneficial as higher costing ads. 3) Easily produce picture ads on the web with all required designing tools and information and facts provided including: Video templates, images, customized with their own picture clips and images. 4) The doctor can run his TV ad locally or nationally. 5) Test new ad versions with Spot Mixer which delivers an effortless way to create new add versions, and test new versions, networks, schedule, and budgets anytime.
Photo
By geralt from Pixabay
Why Musical.ly Is a Go-To Destination for Influencer Marketing
As a digital media brand or publisher, you’re already familiar with the importance of being where your audience is online if you want to spread brand awareness, share your message, and grow sales. You know creating branded content and influencer marketing campaigns on select platforms is the best way to reach the audiences you’re targeting.
For most brands, an influencer marketing campaign is usually relegated to popular social destinations like Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Snapchat, and Twitter. But new platforms keep popping up every year which attract hordes of online audiences and which brands shouldn’t ignore; one such platform is the social video sharing app Musical.ly.
What Is Musical.ly?
Launched in 2014 in China, musical.ly started as a way for users to create 15- to 60-second videos of themselves lip-syncing to popular songs, which they could then edit with proprietary tools and share with friends and family. Musical.ly took off in Asia before making its way to the United States and the rest of the world; by July 2015, it hit #1 in the Apple App Store in 19 countries. The app now boasts over 130 million users (known as “musers”) as of December 2016.
Out of these 130 million musers, 40 million of them are active each month, with 20 million of them in the U.S. alone. Roughly 12 million new videos per day are uploaded to the app, where users are more than happy to spend an average of 3.5 minutes per session viewing this content. At least 60% of the app’s musers are between the ages of 13 and 24, a figure which is equivalent to half of the teenagers in the whole of the U.S.
Musical.ly’s success convinced its founders to launch a live streaming companion app dubbed (appropriately) Live.ly. Many of you might remember this app’s official launch at VidCon in 2016; within a few days, Live.ly saw over 500,000 downloads and beat out apps like Facebook Messenger, Snapchat, and Instagram for the top position in the App Store.
Why Musical.ly Is a Go-To Destination for Influencer Marketing
Musical.ly provides a wealth of opportunity for brand-influencer collaborations, maybe even more so right now than on any other platform as the social video app is still finding a way to sustainably monetize its platform (which usually means there aren’t as many restrictions or requirements in place for branded content, advertising, and influencer marketing campaigns).
Brands and publishers who specialize in music are, of course, the best fit for conducting branded content and influencer marketing campaigns on Musical.ly. The app’s focus on lip syncing means its users are predisposed to liking any tune-based initiative, whether it be a contest, reveal, or special offer. But your brand doesn’t need to be musically-inclined to utilize the app. Alex Hofman, president of Musical.ly’s North America division, told Variety how musers who tell jokes or perform their own songs are starting to grow in popularity, too.
Clearly, musical.ly isn’t a platform brands should be ignoring if they want to reach younger audiences, either. Initially, the app’s teen demographic claimed around 90% of its user base; while that percentage is now at 60%, musical.ly is still an important up-and-coming platform for connecting with highly-engaged, young Gen Z’ers. Additionally, the majority of musical.ly’s users are female, which provides even more opportunity for brands looking to reach a young, female-skewing audience.
How to Leverage the App for Influencer Marketing
Brands looking to push a branded influencer campaign on Musical.ly have a few places to start. As musers begin to make names for themselves on the app, brands can reach out to them to offer a branded deal or sponsored post opportunity. For example, Musical.ly star Jacob Sartorius released his own song “Sweatshirt,” which hit the top ten in iTunes; these digital celebrities are excellent collaborator candidates for brands readying influencer marketing pushes on Musical.ly.
And remember, if your brand works in an area outside of music, other entertainment genres are quickly growing in popularity on the app, as well. Look for stars with engaged fan bases who might be able to show off your next fashion or beauty product, or who might be able to use their dancing skills for an artistic promotional piece.
Digital publishers and brands can also take a cue from Coca-Cola, which in June 2016 with Musical.ly stars like Baby Ariel (13 million subscribers as of September 2016) to produce sponsored posts, encouraging fans to upload their own videos with the hashtag #ShareaCoke to win a FaceTime session with musician Jason Derulo. Good Morning America also hosted its own contest on the lip sync app to win a chance to meet singer Demi Lovato; this initiative pulled in 244,000 entries and around 12.5 million likes on Musical.ly.
Musical.ly’s success is evident, and the app doesn’t seem to be going anywhere anytime soon. As such, brands would do well to take advantage of the platform’s current popularity and conduct branded influencer campaigns sure to attract plenty of raving tween and teen fans.
EPA head Scott Pruitt defends Paris exit
Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt. (Melina Mara/The Washington Post)
Scott Pruitt, head of the Environmental Protection Agency, on Sunday defended the United States’ exit from the Paris climate accord, saying it will benefit the country and create more jobs. He also repeated his refrain that questions about President Trump’s personal views on climate change are beside the point.
“When we joined Paris, the rest of the world applauded … because it put this country at disadvantage,” Pruitt told Fox News’s Chris Wallace on Sunday morning. “It’s a bad deal for this country. We’re going to make sure as we make deals we’re going to put the interests of America first.”
Pruitt, who stood beside Trump as he announced the decision Thursday, faced a grilling on several Sunday-morning shows. Viewed as a huge influencer in the decision, the 49-year-old former Oklahoma attorney general has taken a lead role in undoing environmental regulations imposed under the Obama administration.
[Scott Pruitt, outspoken and forceful, moves to the center of power within the Trump administration]
Pruitt has previously refused to say whether Trump remains skeptical of global warming — and he dug in on Sunday when pressed repeatedly by Wallace to say whether he has discussed the topic of climate change with Trump.
“As the president’s EPA administrator, isn’t that a conversation you need to have?” Wallace asked.
“The focus in the last several weeks was centered on the merits and demerits of the Paris climate agreement,” Pruitt responded. “The president has indicated the climate is changing; it’s always changing. I’ve indicated the same.”
[Scientists just published an entire study refuting Scott Pruitt on climate change]
When asked whether he knows what the president believes, Pruitt told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos that the question is “off the point.”
“Well, frankly, George, I think the whole question is an effort of trying to get it off the point,” Pruitt said. The bottom line, he said, is that the Paris agreement cost the U.S. jobs.
“We’ve had over 50,000 … coal jobs, mining jobs created in this country” in the last few months, Pruitt said. “This president’s deregulation agenda, particularly in the energy space, is making a substantial impact around the country.”
Wallace challenged Pruitt on appearing to prioritize coal-sector jobs over green-energy jobs. “Aren’t you and the president talking about protecting the horse and buggy just as cars come online,” Wallace asked.
“No,” Pruitt responded. “I think what’s also being missed here is when you look at how we generate power in this country, we need fuel diversity.”
David Fahrenthold contributed to this report.
Warner calls reports about Trump ‘very, very troubling’
« Clearly it would be very, very troubling if the president of the United States is interfering in investigations, » Sen. Mark Warner said. | AP Photo
Sen. Mark Warner declined to say Sunday whether allegations that President Donald Trump has attempted to influence the ongoing investigation into his campaign’s relationship with Russia could, if proved true, qualify as an obstruction of justice, but he said “it would be very, very troubling.”
“I went to law school, but I’m not a practicing attorney,” Warner (D-Va.), the vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, told host Jake Tapper on CNN’s « State of the Union. » “I’ll leave that for much better attorneys than I. But clearly, it would be very, very troubling if the president of the United States is interfering in investigations that … affect, potentially, the president and his closest associates.”
Story Continued Below
Former FBI Director James Comey, whom Trump abruptly fired last month, is scheduled to testify in an open hearing on Capitol Hill on Thursday. Trump has acknowledged that he fired him at least in part because of the FBI’s investigation into whether Trump’s campaign colluded with the Russian government’s suspected attempts to interfere in the election last year through cyberattacks.
Warner said he plans to ask Comey, as well as Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats and National Security Agency Director Michael Rogers, whether Trump pressured them to downplay the Russia investigation, as has been reported in news outlets. Also on Sunday, Warner told John Dickerson, host of CBS’s « Face the Nation, » that he wants to hear from Comey « what kind of pressure appropriate, inappropriate, how many conversations he had with the president about this topic, did some of these conversations take place even before the president was sworn in? »
According to multiple news reports, Comey is expected to testify that Trump asked him to stop the bureau’s investigation into his first national security adviser, Michael Flynn.
Sen. Susan Collins, a Maine Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee, similarly told Dickerson on Sunday that she is « eager » to question Comey about his interactions with Trump, including whether the former FBI director had told the president that he was not the subject of the bureau’s investigation, as Trump has claimed repeatedly.
Asked on CNN Sunday whether he has seen any evidence of collusion between the Russians and the Trump campaign, Warner said, « There is a lot of smoke, » but « we have no smoking gun at this point. »
London terror attack: Police fired ‘unprecedented’ number of rounds
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5 Best Ways of Effective Video Marketing and Social Media …
Video Marketing: With the increased awareness of online channels and applications, Video Marketing is on the rise. There are many studies and stats that substantiate the fact that videos have been aggressively used as an online marketing tool to meet marketing objectives. Following are some tips that can help you in building effective online video marketing:
1. Inculcate great content which compels viewers to share the video among their friends. Great content is like a soul which is then compressed in rich media format.
2. Make your title count by lending attractive and short titles to your videos. Title is the very first thing that catches the eyes of online users and if the Title is attractive and give the idea of the video content then it attracts a large number of relevant online audience.
3. From online marketing point of view, include your website URL in the text box of the video, otherwise what would be the use of taking all that pain?
4. For effective video marketing and gaining high ‘views’ stats, it is imperative to include relevant keywords in your video text box body content, title and tags so that the video can be listed on search results.
5. Interact and respond quickly to any query, question or comment made by your audience.
Social Media Marketing:
1. Do not always go after sales. Serve your community by sharing and creating valuable content that educate your society and help in betterment. People will adore your brand.
2. Your main social media marketing objective is to pass traffic to your website; therefore create engaging content from your website and share it on your social media channels.
3. Social media optimization is an integral part of social media marketing because it is of no use if the content is limited to only one or two social platforms.
4. For optimum results, find niche social media channel for your industry type. For instance, arts, paintings and interior designing industry has a huge scope on social sites like Pinterest and Facebook.
5. For effective social media marketing results, Interact with your audience, make them feel like an integral part of your brand so that they promote your brand and not you. Respond to every relevant query, acknowledge good comments and opinions, etc.
Follow all the above mentioned tips to see drastic results and meet your online marketing objective with the help of two most crucial tools: Video Marketing and Social Media Marketing.
Photo
By bigblockbobber from Pixabay
A Well-composed Video Marketing Campaign Can Take a Business …
With Video Marketing Commercials, video services is still the same message, just in a different but more effective format. Like I said before engaging into Video Commercials at first can be somehow overwhelming at first. All what you need is some explanation and guides so as to walk through the process step by step until you will have comfortably made sizeable video content for your niche and products, and then you’ll look like a pro.
Video marketing is absolutely necessary for any business in today’s digital, social, and visual world. There’s a lot to do, but taking a step-by-step approach to creating an effective video and building a great campaign over time will give you a real advantage over your competitors.
Here are four tools to help you get there in an organized
manner. Video marketing is more than just the video and its components.
In order to make it successful you must;
.Optimize it for social media marketing.
. Make sure everyone can share the
video and the video landing page to their social media networks.
. Use your own social networks to promote the video relentlessly in all social media networks.
Video marketing is great for boosting profits and business. Provide your niche with helpful information, expand your site, and promote your services or products.
This article is a great place to start. Keep reading to learn how to get started with video marketing. Video marketing is exploding in popularity, and with good reason: According to a report from Vidyard, more than 70% of marketers say that video produces conversions better than any other type of content.
Additionally, an Animoto survey last year showed that 73% of U.S. adults are more likely to make a purchase after watching an online video explaining a product or service. Video marketing is a new trend, and companies are putting together cool videos to put their brands on the map.
Norman Mike M, our Content Marketing Specialist, hung out with CEOs of top agencies, to learn more about video marketing. These agencies have a great platform for connecting companies with video producers. Video Marketing is big:
You may get a sense of unsettlement at first here but video marketing is key to your market growth. Video marketing and advertising — when done right – has the ability to increase audience engagement and allows you to reach audiences more efficiently gain greater returns.
Video marketing didn’t take huge leaps in 2014 though, a lot of attorneys used videos as a means of marketing to their potential clients, a sign of Video Marketing breaking through some non-explored niches by video services. And a lot of these attorneys have continued to improve from in their use of Video services in their potential clients.
While there’s no doubt that video ranks well and will continue to do so in 2015 and beyond, law firms interested in shooting videos this year should keep conversions in mind throughout every step of the process.
Additionally, when marketing these videos on the internet, a sound strategy needs to be drawn out beforehand in order to get the absolute most out of your video efforts. If video marketing is going to grab viewers’ attention and keep their interest, it has to be engaging from the start.
Video analytics tracking enables you to know who viewed your videos, how long they watched and where they clicked. That information lets you target your video marketing efforts better. If you haven’t already begun implementing a video marketing strategy, now’s the time to start.
Remember those engagement and lead-conversion figures – and remember how easy it is to get professionally produced videos made. That should be enough to get anybody animated! Are you considering adding video to your marketing mix?
The reasons to jump on top of video marketing far exceed any of the perceived negatives. Modern video marketing is nothing like it was in the style we’re all more familiar with – television. YouTube is not a place to upload commercials and walk away.
It’s a place to share content that your users want to watch – rather than TV, which forces people to watch commercials while trying to watch the content that they actually want to see. Online video marketing is attractive to many businesses today for numerous reasons.
Making videos and posting them online is fairly inexpensive. Plus, online videos stay online forever. If you s pend the money to record once, your video could still be getting views a year from now . The standard length of video commercials is either 30 or 60 seconds. You have just enough time to communicate a product benefit and call to action.
Aside from being able to be passed around, Internet video commercials and advertisements are also easier to evaluate. For example, marketers can see how many people have watched the video, how many have downloaded it, how many tweeted about it or how many have shared it in social networks.
It makes it easier for advertisers to evaluate if their video advertising campaign is working or not, and allows them to change it instantly. Some new features will even indicate at which point the viewer became bored and when the viewer stopped watching.
This offers a powerful way to evaluate the effectiveness of a certain video advertisement on the Internet. Since customers tend to listen to other customers, you can use online video commercials as a way to showcase the opinions satisfied customers have about your business.
Ask your customers to provide you with their honest feedback about the products and services you provides, as well as your customer service. Select customers with various personalities for variety in your testimonial-based online video commercials.
Since the dawn of the Internet age, a lot of marketing efforts have turned to advertising with Internet video commercials. It is a very similar concept as providing video commercials for the television market.
Studies have proven that people tend to remember products or services better when they are presented live or in the form of video. Many experts feel that this may be even more true when using video advertisements on the Internet.
How to evaluate the effect of commercials is significantly important in neuromarketing. In this paper, we proposed an electronic way to evaluate the influence of video commercials on consumers by impression index. The impression index combines both the memorization and attention index during consumers observing video commercials by tracking the EEG activity.
It extracts features from scalp EEG to evaluate the effectiveness of video commercials in terms of time in 2013. And, the general global field power was used as an impression index for evaluation of video commercial scenes as time series.
Results of experiment demonstrate that the proposed approach is able to track variations of the cerebral activity related to cognitive task such as observing video commercials, and help to judge whether the scene in video commercials is impressive or not by EEG signals.
It is because people are geared to respond and act more rapidly with what they see. Videos do not require a lot of thinking as visual advertising relays faster to your customers’ minds. In fact, video commercials makes the customers’ decision for them, which will turn into positive business dollars for the businessman.
Reading about a product or service requires an minimum amount of time to process information about the product or service, and time IS critical to the decision-making process of your customers. By the time your customers learn more about the product, the time spent on thinking about the product may incur hesitancy on your customers’ part to buy, of which in turn will generate a more negative response to your product or service.
In today’s world the promotional activities of any company is very important in establishing the credibility of the products and services offered by the company. The paramount importance of promotional activities have pushed the companies to innovate new ways to promote their products and services.
There is a visible trend observed where the companies have started to promote their business using video commercials. There has been a paradigm shift in advertising industry. With web universe becoming the primary channel for advertising, more and more businesses are focusing towards online video advertising.
If you have a business or a website which needs some amount of advertising to get more customers or website visitors, videos are very effective tools to draw the attention and showcase products and services. Video commercials on websites easily establish the overall credibility of the business and its product and services. Videos for your business add believability of the products and services and the customers get confidence in the company.
A well-composed video marketing campaign can take a business to a different level altogether. Video commercials are advertisements-the same types you see on television-which you broadcast on your website. The basic function of a video commercial is to create and sustain awareness of your products and services.
A video commercial can also help you create your brand image. Viral video commercials on the Internet are something that cannot be replicated by regular TV advertisement. You cannot pass around a television commercial, unless of course you ask other people to actually wait in front of the television for that particular ad, or you have a copy of the TV ad to give around.
This is where online video advertising’s effect mainly lays — the ability to be passed around in almost any kind of correspondence and communications to other people, effectively stamping in the memories of its viewers.
Humorous online video commercials have the potential to attract your target market, showcase the personality of your business and increase your visibility. Develop a story line for your commercial that showcases the features and benefits of your business while entertaining viewers.
Photo
By WikimediaImages from Pixabay
Michael Bloomberg pledges his own money to help UN after Trump pulls out of Paris climate deal
Former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg has promised to provide up to $15 million in funding that he says the United Nations will lose because of President Trump’s decision to pull out from the landmark Paris climate deal.
The billionaire’s charitable organization, Bloomberg Philanthropies, on Thursday pledged to shoulder the United States’ share in the operating costs of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, the organization’s climate negotiating body in charge of helping developing countries fulfill environmental requirements under the 2015 pact.
“Americans are not walking away from the Paris Climate Agreement. Just the opposite — we are forging ahead,” Bloomberg said in a statement. “Mayors, governors, and business leaders from both political parties are signing onto a statement of support that we will submit to the UN — and together, we will reach the emission reduction goals that the U.S. made in Paris in 2015.”
Trump announced Thursday that he is withdrawing from the Paris deal, a signature diplomatic achievement by the Obama administration. The move set off criticism worldwide, but fulfills a campaign promise to end Obama-era regulations that Trump claimed were harming industries and killing jobs.
[Fact-checking President Trump’s claims on the Paris climate change deal]
Patricia Espinosa, executive secretary of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, applauded Bloomberg for the contribution.
“While funding from governments remains central to our work, this kind of support is crucial for the work of the Secretariat to assist nations in their efforts to implement their commitments under the Paris Climate Change Agreement,” Espinosa said in a statement.
Bloomberg’s pledge comes as the U.S. Conference of Mayors, a bipartisan group of more than 1,000 mayors, denounced Trump’s decision and affirmed their cities’ commitment to meet climate-change goals by reducing greenhouse gas emissions locally — even without the participation of the federal government.
“We see the withdrawal from the Paris Climate Accord as an abdication of American leadership and America’s mayors will certainly fill that void,” Phoenix Mayor Greg Stanton said in a statement. “We will symbolically sign on and take actions necessary so that America meets its obligations under the Paris Accord, despite actions of this Administration.”
Nearly 200 countries reached an agreement in 2015 to, among other things, collectively work to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and limit the rise in global temperature to 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit (2 degrees Celsius). Only two other countries, Nicaragua and Syria, were not part of the deal.
[Trump announces U.S. will exit Paris climate deal, sparking criticism at home and abroad]
In his speech Thursday, Trump said the agreement would put the United States at a “permanent disadvantage” with China, India and other rising powers, and keeping the country in the climate deal would cost millions of jobs. Washington Post fact-checkers, however, reported that Trump, who has labeled climate change a “hoax,” relied on dubious facts and unbalanced claims to make the case that the deal would hurt the U.S. economy.
The president’s decision also meant the United States will not be providing the money it previously promised for the Green Climate Fund. More than 40 countries, including the United States, have pledged to pay a total of about $10 billion into the fund to help developing nations reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Trump said that under the Paris deal, the United States would have to commit “tens of billions of dollars” to the fund. The U.S. share, however, is only $3 billion, of which $1 billion was already paid. The full amount would have been equivalent to a little less than $10 per American.
Bloomberg, whose net worth is about $50 billion, has been a vocal critic of Trump and a supporter of Democrat Hillary Clinton.
During a speech at the Democratic National Convention last year, he described the then-Republican presidential candidate as a “dangerous demagogue.”
“Trump says he wants to run the nation like he’s run his business. God help us,” said Bloomberg, who had considered running for president as an independent. “I’m a New Yorker, and New Yorkers know a con when we see one! … Truth be told, the richest thing about Donald Trump is his hypocrisy.”
Philip Rucker and Jenna Johnson contributed to this story.
READ MORE:
Why Nicaragua and Syria didn’t join the Paris climate accord
Donald Trump now hates Michael Bloomberg because Bloomberg was mean to him
Democrats see political opportunity in Trump’s decision to abandon Paris climate deal
Nunes-led House Intelligence Committee asked for ‘unmaskings’ of Americans
The Republican-controlled House Intelligence Committee asked U.S. spy agencies late last year to reveal the names of U.S. individuals or organizations contained in classified intelligence on Russia’s meddling in the 2016 election, engaging in the same practice that President Trump has accused the Obama administration of abusing, current and former officials said.
The chairman of the committee, Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), has since cast the practice of “unmasking” of U.S. individuals and organizations mentioned in classified reports as an abuse of surveillance powers by the outgoing Obama administration.
Trump has argued that investigators should focus their attention on former officials leaking names from intelligence reports, rather than whether the Kremlin coordinated its activities with the Trump campaign, an allegation he has denied. “The big story is the ‘unmasking and surveillance’ of people that took place during the Obama administration,” Trump tweeted Thursday.
According to a tally by U.S. spy agencies, the House Intelligence Committee requested five to six unmaskings of U.S. organizations or individuals related to Trump or Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton between June 2016 and January 2017. Officials familiar with the matter said that the committee’s requests focused on the identities of U.S. organizations that had been hacked by the Russians in 2016. Officials declined to say how many of the requests came from Democrats vs. Republicans.
The chairman of the committee wields enormous control over the actions of its members and requests for more information from intelligence agencies. Officials said that committee rules require the chairman to sign off on the requests, even ones that are not his own.
A spokesman for Republicans on Nunes’s committee declined to comment on whether the panel made any requests for unmasking.
He added, “It is standard operating procedure for the House Intelligence Committee to forward all committee members’ questions from both parties to the appropriate agencies, whether or not they are answered. I refer you to committee Democrats for further questions on this subject.”
Every day, U.S. intelligence agencies sweep up vast quantities of foreign communications. Sometimes, they pick up communications involving U.S. individuals or organizations. In reports based on those communications, intelligence agencies “mask” the identities of the Americans, part of an effort to protect their privacy.
Senior government officials, however, can ask spy agencies to reveal the names of Americans or U.S. organizations in the reports if they believe that doing so will help them better understand the underlying intelligence. They must have a legitimate need to know, and National Security Agency unmaskings are reviewed by the Justice Department and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, known as the ODNI.
Some officials said that House Intelligence Committee members may not have realized spy agencies would count their requests as unmaskings. These officials said lawmakers submitted questions that intelligence officers could answer only by revealing the identities of U.S. individuals.
Nunes served subpoenas this week to the CIA, the NSA and the FBI asking for information about unmaskings requested by three former officials: national security adviser Susan E. Rice, CIA director John Brennan and U.N. ambassador Samantha Power.
On Thursday, Nunes tweeted, “Seeing a lot of fake news from media elites and others who have no interest in violations of Americans’ civil liberties via unmaskings.”
Democrats on the panel say they believe the latest direction of Nunes’s investigation is designed to deflect attention from the Russia probe. In April, Nunes was forced to recuse himself from the committee’s probe of Russia because of allegations he may have inappropriately disclosed classified information. Nunes has denied any wrongdoing.
Current and former U.S. intelligence officials say requests for unmaskings are a routine and necessary part of their national security work. After requests are made, spy agencies decide whether to provide the names. Officials say few requests are rejected because most are legitimate.
Still, senior officials know that unmaskings can be controversial and are often reluctant to submit large numbers of requests. To protect themselves from any allegations of abuse, spy agencies track unmasking requests closely.
Rice and Brennan declined to comment. During an appearance on MSNBC’s “Andrea Mitchell Reports” in April, Rice denied that she sought to improperly unveil the names of Trump campaign or transition officials for political purposes. In recent congressional testimony, Brennan also has denied that he made any improper unmaskings.
Power did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Nunes first called for his committee to investigate alleged Obama administration-era surveillance of Trump and his associates after the president, in a March 4 tweet, accused Obama of wiretapping Trump Tower. Officials said at the time that Trump’s wiretap allegations were false.
On March 15, Nunes and the committee’s ranking Democrat, Rep. Adam B. Schiff of California, sent a joint letter to the CIA, the NSA and the FBI asking them to provide the names of any intelligence and law enforcement agencies, as well as senior executive branch officials, who requested or authorized the unmasking of any U.S. persons or organizations between June 2016 and January 2017 related to “presidential candidates Donald J. Trump and Hillary Rodham Clinton and their associates in 2016.”
While the House Intelligence Committee asked only for the names of administration officials who requested unmaskings related to Trump and Clinton, intelligence agencies responded to the request by providing a tally that included requests by lawmakers.
The tally showed several requests from the House Intelligence Committee — requests that one official said were no different than those made by Obama administration officials. “This notion that there are these politically motivated unmaskings is just nonsense,” said the official.
In contrast to the committee’s handful of unmasking requests, officials said the tally showed that Rice requested a single unmasking related to Trump’s activities between June and January.
The Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee made no requests for unmaskings related to either Trump or Clinton during that time frame, according to the tally.
At a House Intelligence Committee briefing in May, Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) pressed Brennan on whether he had ever requested the unmasking of a U.S. person’s identity. Brennan responded that he had.
Gowdy then pressed Brennan on whether he was aware of any requests made by any “U.S. ambassadors,” a possible reference to Power.
Brennan said he was not aware of any unmasking requests by ambassadors.
According to the ODNI, last year the NSA unmasked at least 1,934 identities of U.S. persons at the request of government officials. That figure relates to a certain court-authorized program of foreign intelligence gathering inside the United States.