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2010-07-23T11:26:00.005-04:00

"Iranian Cyber Army" Takes Down Twitter

2009-12-18T12:47:00.001-05:00

Those who tried to access Twitter were redirected to a site that had a green flag and proclaimed "This site has been hacked by Iranian Cyber Army."

The Web site was down for nearly an hour. Representatives from Twitter could not be immediately reached for comment, but the company spoke about the issue on its official Twitter page.

"Twitter's DNS records were temporarily compromised but have now been fixed. We will update with more information soon," the company posted at about 2:30 a.m. ET Friday.
It was unclear who the group Iranian Cyber Army was and if it is connected to Iran.

CNN has the graphic.

Personally, I find it highly doubtful that an organization actually affiliated with the Iranian government would take a step as bold as this. The Iranian regime is many things, but I doubt they're stupid enough to risk the backlash that an official, claimed attack on Twitter would provoke among their populace - especially given the prominence the microblogging site has played during their political upheaval over the past year. But who knows - perhaps they have a fundamental misunderstanding of how this action would be received.

If you ask me, though, it is far more likely that this is a group of hackers either within Iran proving their savvy, or a group outside of Iran hoping to stir things up. Either way, Twitter clearly needs to beef up on their cyber-security (not to mention their capacity), especially if they hope to monetize it as they continue to grow.

Prevent Facebook from Publishing Photos to Your Wall Automatically

2009-12-16T23:24:00.004-05:00

Every time I am tagged in a photo on Facebook, it automatically publishes a set of thumbnails to my wall before I've had the chance to look at them. This is a supremely annoying feature, as it allows my friends ultimate control over what photos of me are provided on the web - a freedom I'm not willing to give up. Since I allow more people access to my wall than to my photos, I'd rather this feature be turned off completely.

Well, thanks to a Gawker reader, there is an answer. From the article:

UPDATE: According to a helpful tipster, this can be disabled by going to the Settings menu at the top right of your Facebook home page, then to "Application Settings," then the "Photos" application, then click "Edit settings." Then click the "Additional Permissions tab," and there is an option to "Publish to streams." Uncheck this.

The post is complete with graphics to help enable the privacy controls. Very nice resource. The tweak prevents photos from ever having access to my feed unless I choose to share them myself. Much preferable to an automatic update that I may or may not want people to see.

Ultimately, though, it would be nice if Facebook gave me the option of how I categorized photos as I uploaded them. Photos I'd like to share I could guide to my wall as well as an album, while those I didn't could simply be put in another place. Yes, I could do this by categorizing photos into different albums with different privacy permissions and uploading them accordingly...but that is a pain. It seems like it would be much easier to just have a check box that says "publish to wall" or "don't publish to wall." Please, Facebook?

Operation Chokehold: Suffocating AT&T

2009-12-14T10:44:00.003-05:00

As an iPhone user that is frequently frustrated with lousy network coverage and dropped calls, this post from the Secret Diary of Steve Jobs outlining Operation Chokehold seems like a pretty fun idea:

Subject: Operation Chokehold
On Friday, December 18, at noon Pacific time, we will attempt to overwhelm the AT&T data network and bring it to its knees. The goal is to have every iPhone user (or as many as we can) turn on a data intensive app and run that app for one solid hour. Send the message to AT&T that we are sick of their substandard network and sick of their abusive comments. THe idea is we’ll create a digital flash mob. We’re calling it in Operation Chokehold. Join us and speak truth to power!

Digital flash mob!!?? I love it. Think this idea has any traction? Any prayer of success? I wonder how many iPhone users it would take participating to seriously clog the network. I doubt this could ever actually work, but at least the idea gives me some satisfaction as an annoyed AT&T customer...

And seriously, Apple: get some new network providers. AT&T may be giving you huge subsidies on the phone, but they're not doing you any favors when it comes to actual service.

UPDATE: Well, I just saw this in the New York Times. Perhaps it is time to reconsider my iPhone as the other providers catch up. Anybody have a Droid yet?

When I set about looking for independent data, however, to confirm the superior performance of Verizon’s network, I was astonished to discover that I had managed to get things exactly wrong. Despite the well-publicized problems in New York and San Francisco, AT&T seems to have the superior network nationwide.

And the iPhone itself may not be so great after all. Its design is contributing to performance problems.

Twitter Across Ethnicity and Dayparts

2009-11-30T15:30:00.000-05:00

Simply wanted to share this post from the Awl, titled "What Were Black People Talking About on Twitter Last Night?" The author notes the fact that he might get some flack for noting the trend - but I've certainly noticed the tendency of Twitter's trending topics to change in both subject and user base over the course of the day. Last night around 8:30, for example, the top trending topics were #isitme and the Soul Train Awards, with a quick look at the posts indicating that the majority of people involved in the conversations were indeed black. The Awl provides some stats, and asks the question:

...according to Pew, 26% of African-Americans online use Twitter; only 19% of white Internet people use Twitter. So really the question is: why does Twitter get so white and boring during the day?

At least worth a look. And worth thinking - perhaps organizations looking to reach specific groups on Twitter - ethnic, racial, or otherwise - need to do quite a bit more research on their target audience's usage to effectively use the technology.

Twitter's Integration with LinkedIn: Why?

2009-11-30T13:00:00.000-05:00

I admit that I feel like I've never fully understood the appeal of LinkedIn, apart from its ability to help job seekers and providers find one another. A social Monster.com, essentially, with some additional features like Groups that allow for further networking. I know very few people that use the site's introduction features that allow individuals to help their contacts network with each other, but perhaps that is a result of the circles that I run in.

I'm a member of a few LinkedIn Groups, and from the digests that I receive, I can also see it as a new community for professional message boards to discuss focused industries. I think it basically serves as a new aggregation point - a sorting mechanism, essentially, that allows for message boards organized by industry. The social capability of the job services the site provides makes it a natural spot for professional discussions. A public intranet, almost, for industry wide debate and conversation. Again - this I get. And I think organizations can harness this power effectively for a variety of purposes, be it establishing authority on a topic, monitoring discussion and sentiments on a subject, or simply becoming an active member of a community related to an organization's mission.

But why would Twitter and LinkedIn integrate with one another? Aside from the publicity it gains for both companies, of course? Aren't these networks used in fundamentally different ways, and for fundamentally different reasons? Do people post updates to LinkedIn the way that they do to Twitter and I'm just completely unaware of it? And if so, who actually does this? What demographics? What people? Don't most people sign up for LinkedIn to advance their career, while using Twitter for much more personal or message based reasons? The obvious exceptions are those working in the digital field, but still - who will use this functionality, and why?

In general, I'd love to hear more of what people see as the function of LinkedIn beyond the message boards and listservs. If any readers out there have any thoughts, please hit the comments.

Book Review: The Cluetrain Manifesto Gives Marketing a Clue

2009-11-30T11:00:00.000-05:00

I realized about halfway into the Cluetrain Manifesto that I had probably purchased the wrong copy of the book that my class required; the edition that I have my hands on is a 2009 10th Anniversary version, which includes roughly 70 pages of new material current through November 2008. As such, I wanted to focus in my posting on the comments the authors provided on the updates to the book, as these updates touch on the main themes of the original publication while also providing insights more relevant to the modern web culture.

Originally published in 1999, the Cluetrain Manifesto serves as a sort of blueprint for corporate marketers to understand the new reality of the web-based world. With 95 theses, the Manifesto serves as a great summation of many of the concepts discussed on this blog and in my course: that markets are conversations, and that businesses must adapt to become a part of this conversation or face extinction.

In that respect, I wish we'd read this book toward the beginning of the term, as I feel it provides a great overview of the concepts illuminated by the authors that have come since. That said, there are some phenomenal nuggets of information in here, largely because the Cluetrain Manifesto - unlike most of the books we've read - focuses on marketing and corporate culture primarily, with politics and government getting secondary mention. The corporate world is likely to be ahead of the political realm when it comes to the adoption of new techniques and strategies - after all, they have a profit motive to do so.

But in reality, what the authors of the Cluetrain Manifesto really point to is a dynamic shift in the way in which we view our every day world - be it in government, the private sector, or in our own lives. The authors discuss the Internet's fundamental ability to reopen discussions and promote interaction - and emphasize that the true point of the web is to become whatever its users determine it to be. As such, marketers, governments, strategists - all of us that try to find ways to use the web to achieve an end are really working in an old world. The Cluetrain Manifesto suggests that the Internet has the power to ultimately bring about the end of the old world of top-down, corporate influence over culture, and replace it with something more organic, more determined by the masses.

In the updated version, the authors admit that their original vision has not come to fruition in quite the way that they expected. They note the rapid adoption of the web and the vast strides it has taken since 1999 - discussing blogs, comment sections, reviews on Amazon.com, and even Barack Obama's election to the presidency. They emphasize that the Internet continues to give people real power that they did not have before, and has served to make corporations more accountable to the people they are supposed to ultimately exist for.

But at the same time, the authors point out that the web has also served to promote authority figures; to give new and old figures alike new powers over new marketplaces. These figures - be them individuals like Oprah or mega-media companies that seek to control the web for their own purposes - possess only a limited understanding of what the authors of the Cluetrain Manifesto believe the Internet can and should be. What's worse, they manipulate this understanding in an effort to quash a lot of the development that can bring about the ultimate transformation that the original Cluetrain had foreseen.

This vision is particularly interesting - and it is fitting that "Manifesto" is the term used here, as it reminds me a bit of Marx in the loosest sense. In essence, it seems that Cluetrain vision of the Internet is a truly level playing field, where any individual or company with savvy, an honest voice, and a willingness to engage the public can and should succeed. Trying to move away from this vision is no less than despicable to the authors - they view the old push media messages with scorn, and abhor the thought that the old players may co-opt the Internet for their own purposes. Manipulations of the Internet for traditional marketing purposes ultimately kill the very adaptability and openness that makes the Internet so exciting in the first place.

I was particularly fascinated in the new version's discussion of the goal of a semantic web, in which users would ultimately determine what was provided to them by the Internet. A notable example came in the form of a customer seeking a given product, at a given price. In this ideal future version of the web, that customer would simply post what they need, and companies would then bid to provide it to them. It is a fascinating idea - and one that could certainly be possible, if difficult, to achieve.

I have mixed feelings on the ultimate messages in this book - but it is one of the few in this semester that I would recommend to just about anybody. The ideas - agree or disagree - are essential. The book easily and succinctly sums up the new reality that the Internet demonstrates, and despite the fact that the scope of predictions offered by the 1999 version haven't yet come to fruition, the grander themes suggested are being played out each and every day in the modern world.

Case Study: The Pickens Plan and Facebook

2009-11-16T11:17:00.000-05:00

As I've been doing some work for a client in the electricity field, I decided to take a look at what another prominent player - the Pickens Plan - was doing on Facebook. The organization has a fan page set up - I was interested to note that they categorized themselves as a website when starting their presence. This makes sense - though I could also have seen them listing themselves as a service.

In any case, the Pickens Plan is very active on their fan page, providing multiple updates a day and generating a fair amount of discussion. They currently have 31,067 fans, which provides a great base for getting people to interact with one another. Site administrators do a good job of updating with interactive content. Wall posts regularly include videos, photos, or links to other reading on the topic. The textual updates are concise and to the point, serving to inform and occasionally to call supporters to action. I was surprised at how much they do on the wall; I would have expected less frequent updates with more specific purposes in mind.

What's more, the Pickens Plan also makes use of the "causes" application for fan pages, which gives it an avenue to raise money. Not surprisingly, from what I've heard of the difficulty in getting people to donate on Facebook, the Plan hasn't raised any money. But I was interested to see that the Plan had employed this technique. I wonder how aggressively they've tried to utilize it. I suspect it has been a fairly passive effort; only 266 people have been recruited to the cause. Out of the 31,000+ fans, that isn't very many.

The page has a message board that isn't hugely active, though it does have a shade over 30 topics posted. The most popular, however, only has 15 posts in it. Again, I wonder what specific efforts the page administrators have taken to push the forum. While people are regularly commenting on wall posts, they seem less involved in the deeper options available on the page. What's more, there doesn't seem to be a full utilization of the options available. The events page lists only six, with none upcoming. I find it hard to believe that an organization as sizable as the Pickens Plan has nothing that they can list in their upcoming events.

All in all, I'm impressed with the amount of content Pickens is placing on Facebook, but I wonder what more they might be able to do to generate a more active community. It seems they have a prime opportunity to push discussion and promote action - but more organization would be needed to shepherd this in. In general, I wonder how effective this type of outreach is on Facebook these days, as I suspect more people are feeling overwhelmed by the amount of information coming at them on the network.

Article Review: Best Practices for Political Advertising Online

2009-11-15T21:43:00.001-05:00

Produced by George Washington University's Institute for Politics, Democracy & The Internet, "Best Practices for Political Advertising Online" is a primer for all parties interested in using the internet for political advertising purposes. Split into six chapters, the article gives a strong overview of the different elements of online political advertising, including general themes, voter identification, reaching voters, and varying advertising options.

As somebody who has done a fair bit of internet ad buying, I was interested to see how this article would address online advertising related to politics. My background is is some very specific ad platforms - like Facebook - as well as working with a larger online ad agency and brokering specific ad buys with varying outlets. As such, I was very interested in the section on search engine marketing. It is the field where I'm least experienced, so I hoped the article would provide both key justifications for search marketing, as well as some specific practices to employ when going about it.

Most relevant in this section was their discussion on choice of keywords, which I find interesting both for its online advertising ramifications, as well as its applicability to SEO practices. The particular note that click throughs are less valuable than conversions is a simple idea, but nice to have spelled out. In music, I was just as happy to have an impression on a visitor, so clicks were a good metric. In that sense it was much more comparable to a political information campaign. Identifying that narrower keywords will apply more directly to a specific audience is important, as it increases the likelihood for conversions from the advertising. All told, however, I wanted some more guidance. They note the well-known maxim that SEO is part art, part science - but fail to give specific strategic tips to help advance either the art or the science. What types of words should you consider? Is it good to have longer keyword strings, or shorter ones? Are using single words valuable?

In general, I think search advertising could be extremely powerful if you have the time and ability to figure out how to make it work best for you. More so than some more traditional marketing avenues, effective search requires a lot of knowledge about the impact of your campaign. You have to track a lot of information to optimize how well the campaign functions, and there are virtually endless ways that you can set up a campaign. Thankfully, there are a lot of tools that can provide metrics on your campaign; it just takes time and training to understand what the metrics mean. As such, political campaigns would be well advised to devote substantial resources to online advertising - both in staff and finances. The targeting power afforded by search and display ads is simply too much for any advocacy or political campaign to ignore.

Finally, I wanted to discuss the article's section on lead generation. Noting that lead generation results from users completing online forms, author Josh Gray outlines best practices for creating leads online. Vendors create campaigns designed to get people to fill out information which can in turn result in actionable leads for organizations to follow up on. Like all online advertising, targeting is key. Gray notes that lead generation can have multiple benefits - both to collect information about potential voters or supporters, but also, to use in tandem with other online advertising to actively measure how effective it is. The flexibility the online platform provides allows campaigns to easily and quickly adjust both their online advertising strategies and their lead generation questions to optimize results. The result are more effective ad campaigns and leads that are more likely to generate desired action.

Ultimately, the flexibility of online advertising is perhaps its biggest strength. As online ads remain comparatively cheap, political campaigns have the ability to experiment and figure out exactly what works for them. Once they do, the opportunities to reach large amounts of people for relatively little money is enormous.

techPresident is Essential Reading

2009-11-09T14:12:00.001-05:00

I found techPresident just before starting my masters program at Hopkins. I was forwarded their email newsletter and promptly signed up; that first issue (September 11) had great coverage on the money raised in the aftermath of Rep. Joe Wilson's outburst during President Obama's speech on health care. Since then, the stories techPresident covers have been consistently interesting, cutting edge, and with a strong pulse for the national political dialogue and how technology factors into it. It has also lived on my blogroll since starting the Strategerist.

That said, I'm not as familiar with the website itself, as I've largely been a consumer of their coverage via email. I click through to stories that I find interesting, but I hadn't spent a great deal of time perusing the depth of the site until now. They have some great material housed there - I'm particularly interested in their charts tracking Facebook and Technorati activity (the YouTube link appears to be broken), as well as the database of candidate blogs. All of these are useful tools to get a gauge for what is happening on the web, and it is very helpful to have it living in one, easily reachable place. A little digging about techPresident reveals that it is "crosspartisan" (wonk-alert) and dedicated to covering the use of the internet in political campaigns, as well as how existing government organizations are using the web. Personally, I've been more interested in the latter; techPresident is where I first heard of the White House's switchover to a Drupal platform for their website.

techPresident has done a great job of staying on top of these developments, and consistently provides deep, insightful analysis on a wide range of internet politics issues. I'm constantly impressed with just how much they have to talk about. The daily email regularly has a huge deal of content, reflecting their ability to keep the site up to date. Kudos to techPresident to providing such comprehensive coverage. Resources like these are just one more indicator that we're really only scratching the surface of how the internet will impact politics. If this much material is being generated each day right now, I can't even imagine how much there will be to analyze in five years - or, for that matter, by the time of the next presidential election.

MySpace and the Major Players

2009-11-09T11:00:00.000-05:00

As part of a research project, I had to stop by the MySpace pages of Organizing for America and the Republican National Committee. As these are two of the largest political organizations in the country, I expected both to have a robust presence on the previously dominant social networking website - but I was shocked to learn that neither have been posting meaningful updates. While the groups Twitter and Facebook pages were filled with activity and issue-specific content, it was completely absent from the MySpace profiles.

Barack Obama hasn't updated its blog or content on MySpace, apart from adding information about their health care video contest - but the link itself is broken. This is rather surprising for Obama and Organizing for America, as they're regularly hailed for their web savvy communications strategy. But what's more, if you look at the page, they haven't approved a comment since March 26; the videos that are posted are older and outdated. They haven't updated their message for the issues driving the current political debate: there is only the broken link about health care, and nothing about Afghanistan or the ongoing economic situation.

The Republican National Committee is far worse. There is - quite literally - nothing noteworthy about their MySpace profile. They have NINE friends. NINE. Explain to me how the RNC has nine friends on MySpace. I honestly have no idea how that's possible. I guarantee you more than nine people were involved with getting the GOP on MySpace in the first place. Seriously - would it be better for the RNC to be off MySpace entirely than it would for them to have a profile with nine friends? MySpace is a network that is built off friend collection; status on MySpace is often tied to how many people you are connected to (just ask Tila Tequila). So nine friends? How does that happen? Well, the fact that there isn't any content might have something to do with it; but I've seen bands without songs on their pages end up with more than nine friends. Christ, my mom would have more than nine friends if she joined MySpace.

So what does this mean for Rupert Murdoch's social network? Well, when you couple it with the latest news that the drop in digital traffic for MySpace is likely going to shave $100 million off the deal they cut with Google for advertising, it seems to mean that MySpace is a quickly sinking ship. When two of the largest political organizations in the country don't see your platform as meaningful, odds are, it isn't. Especially when one of them is the most savvy online political networker of all time. Perhaps it is time to abandon the idea of MySpace entirely when considering what digital strategies to utilize - it seems the major players already have. Hell, even Tila Tequila is now using MySpace simply to advertise another website. The ship, it seems, has sailed.

Live Blog: Constituent Relationship Management | Digital Political Strategy Course, November 2

2009-11-02T17:27:00.026-05:00

This is a live blog of notes from my Digital Political Strategy course - largely for my own notes, but also for anybody interested - from November 2. Today's topic focuses on CRM - constituent relationship management, as well as customer relationship management.

As with all live blogs, I am paraphrasing and these notes should be taken in that context.

5:32 - Karmaloop and Threadless have reached a point where the metric of their success is not revenue, it is connectivity.

5:37 - SalesForce is the leading software platform to do customer relations. They're making a big play in the non-profit and political space in the last couple of years. You have your list of customers, audience - all of the people you have relationships with. And for each of them, you have records of what interactions you've had with them - so when you've called that person, the person on the phone should be able to pull up your record and see the entire history of your interaction with the organization or company. Then the conversation is a conversation between people that know each other on some fundamental level.

5:41 - Something on the order of 300 million emails are sent to Congress every year. What shows up in the office is 120-200 million emails a year in each office. It is something like 5,000 per day per office on the House side - but its a lot.
...
When I submit a comment on a regulation as its being considered, the regulatory agency must by law consider my comment. That doesn't mean they have to do what I asked, but they have to be able to document the fact that they read it, they considered it, and why they accepted or rejected it. On the Congressional side, there isn't a whole lot in the Constitution that says that offices must read [our messages].

The concern on the regulatory side to ensure that they never miss an email is huge. All of a sudden the regulatory side was faced with a large deluge of emails - often form emails - that they had to legally consider. When you have thousands of of emails that are coming in as form emails, and some 30-40 people are modifying parts of that email, the regulatory agency is legally obligated to catch those 30-40 emails.

5:44 - The e-Rulemaking Project is working with a National Science Foundation grant with a group of scholars to start doing focus groups and research to try and develop what was necessary to process all of these incoming e-Rulemaking comments. So [they] built a system that the email comes in - and it reads all of the emails and groups them into those that are identical, those that are similar and have modest changes, and those that are unique. It allows you to sort through them spreadsheet wise, in an online interface.
***
This system would be fantastic for Congress to sort their emails coming through.

5:47 - Congress.org - which is the public site that you can go to to contact Congress - is powered by Capwiz. Capwiz is a software that allows you from the user-side to put in your zip code to send an email or print a letter to send to your member of Congress. If you send an email, the interface is set up so that it interfaces correctly with the form requirement on your Congressman's website.

5:50 - Aside from how hard it is to monitor [social media], you don't know where the person posting it comes from.

5:53 - The culture on Capitol Hill is to discourage pen pals. Constituents that write you all the time - they try and discourage that. In business, those are the people you cultivate. Those are your bread and butter people. Those are the people that are going to go out and tell people to buy your product.

5:55 - We live in a world now where any one of the people you piss off could organize a huge counter campaign in the District or the State of the member.

5:57 - One of my favorite points that Paul Greenberg often says is that Congress has long been under the impression that we need to bring in the private sector and companies because they're better at using this technology than the government. The truth of the matter is that the private sector companies and the public sector government are both trailing the audience in terms of the technologies and what it is used for. Both of them are playing catch up with their customers and their constituents.

5:58 - The audience is more sophisticated at using communications technology than the company or political figure, and that's a very different reality.

6:00 - Social CRM is about the relationships you have with your customers, with your constituents, which is the thing you're trying to manage. When it first came out CRM was all about the technology. Now its back to being about the relations.

6:03 - YouTube is way to take that product, that exchange, that interaction and take it out to the entire world.

Note: This whole CRM discussion reminds me VERY much of my experiences dealing with Dell via Twitter. Read here and here.

6:07 - Every single Congressional office is like a business in its own right. Each one must come in and spend their budget to build their office from scratch. When Obama came into the White House, the entire White House was set up with computers that were so old that they couldn't run social media.

6:09 - They typically say that a freshman member of Congress takes office in early January and is unable to process email until August.

6:12 - The Defense Department still has four branches of the military that has computers that can't talk to each other.

6:22 - In the political space, with cycles of two, four, six years, you don't see the lag and the damage the lag is causing you until it is really bad.

6:30 - When it comes to a social network strategy when we have to rely on our audience to put things in their own words, the deeper the relationship you have with your audience, the more they understand the issue, why the issue is important to them as well as to you, the more they realize that you have shared goals, and the more you can rely on them to use words that are equally reflective of your message - they're authentic, from the heart expression of their own desires.

6:56 - Even after they figure out what's allowable and what's not under the rules as they're written, there is a further debate over whether they need to update them. [Related to rules governing messages put out and received by members of Congress and government officials]

Live Blog: Digital Media Strategy Course Guest Speaker, Katrin Verclas

2009-10-26T18:34:00.018-04:00

Katrin Verclas, the co-founder and editor of MobileActive.org, also joined our class today. Going to live blog her speech as well, as long as my typing can keep up...hands are getting tired!

Note: Katrin speaks faster than Dan; again, doing my best to be as accurate as possible, but please take these as paraphrases rather than direct quotes.

Note again: Katrin also references a slide show, so I apologize if some of these have references that are unclear. I can't keep up unless I just write everything...

6:34 - Watching an introductory video from the Economist...

6:36 - Because there is such ubiquity of mobile phones internationally, people are very excited.

6:37 - The mobile phone has outpaced the Guttenberg printing press and certainly the Internet.

6:38 - Even though I am excited about all of these developments, we have to come to a very realistic understanding of what mobile technology is good at and what it can do for social development and social change, and where it falls flat.

6:40 - A lot of people have phones, but they don't necessarily have airtime - or have very little airtime.

6:41 - Globally, in terms of media access, mobile phones outpace at this point pretty much every other medium.

6:45 - Even though they're still expensive in most of the world, I think we're going to see a move away from SMS strictly as a communications tool to richer forms of data services. It's going to take awhile.

6:50 - Katrin highlights the efforts and mobile offerings of the Blue Ocean Institute, with their Guide to Ocean Friendly Seafood, which has a mobile interface.

6:54 - Katrin mentions TXTual Healing, "interesting experiments with mobile interactivity on the street."

6:58 - There is this huge social component [to mobile technology]. We're all so interested in delivering health services and activists communicating with one another, but for many people in the world its the one way that they can transcend their social isolation.

7:05 - We don't know how people are using mobile technology.

7:08 - The fact that everybody has a phone, does that make societies more open, more accountable, more fair? Is all of the attention that has been focused on it in health making anybody healthy or live longer? Who knows.

7:11 - Open systems in mobile need to be talked about. We have the most ubiquitous communication device on the face of the earth, but they're all privately held. Its not working like the internet; private commercial players control access to mobile technology.

7:12 - A message to the carriers: we love you and we hate you. We are where we are today because of you. But we need to have a better conversation about the role mobile phones play in human development.

7:15 - If you're trying to reach teenagers, texting is really a great way. And a lot of Latinos don't necessarily have data or data phones, so SMS is an effective way to reach those constituencies if done well.
...
In so many ways, you have to really know your audience, and you have to know how they use a particular piece of technology, and what their MO is in regard to that technology.
...
On the mobile side, we have a fair amount of data on [who is using it].
...
Interestingly, for African Americans, voice is the best way of reaching them on mobile.
...
These are broad generalizations, admittedly.

7:20 - Question: for those people that aren't using computers as a rule, will people who are using phones for SMS be able to jump to using mobile phones computers without using personal computers in the interim?

Yes, to some extent. I guess I would say, because I do a lot of work in developing countries, that there are literacy issues that are huge. Even though many, many people have a phone, not everybody is comfortable texting. It requires you to be literate.
...
It will be a different form of computing. What we consider today computing is going to be different. It is different on a mobile platform. It will be different for the billion people that can't read or write. It is a very different type of computing experience. Even though you're seeing convergences there, and phones becoming more and more powerful, you're going to see a divide there from human capabilities.

Live Blog: Digital Media Strategy Course Guest Speaker, Dan Gillmor

2009-10-26T17:44:00.010-04:00

I'm going to be live blogging Dan Gillmor's appearance via Skype in my Digital Media Strategy course here at Johns Hopkins. I'll include questions where I can, but I'm paying attention as well as blogging, so forgive any lacking information...

Note: these are quotes from Gillmor, as close as I can report them in real time. I'm not using formal quotation marks - so please assume a certain degree of paraphrasing.

5:43 - People do want to be part of helping communities, virtual or otherwise, know things they need to know, and people will collaborate like this. Traditional journalists should be doing more of this, not ignoring it, which is what they've done.

5:47 - I want to see all journalism meet a good standard, and I want to see things that appear in community based media meet the standard of factual truth and other things.

5:49 - The standards that are going to really matter are going to be the ones that are held by the people who in the last half century have let themselves become passive consumers of media and journalism who are going to have to turn themselves into active users of media and demand better. Supply doesn't worry me; demand does. We have terrible demand for quality of media.

5:54 - Clay Shirky, whose work I hope you're including in your class, sent me a note the other day that I thought was really just amazing. He was talking about that crazy situation in Colorado with the balloon boy, which there are lessons on so many levels from that one. What he said was that fact checking by journalists of all stripes is declining. But after the fact checking is rising. And that was really interesting and incredibly insightful point. What that gets to is this notion where we have to start off skeptical. We have to start off understanding whoever got it first quite possibly got it wrong, and the context is going to mean everything.

5:57 - Clay Shirky did a brilliant essay a few months ago about what was happening [with declining news organizations]. It was the best explanation - the best context - of what he and a lot of other people collectively have been saying that I've seen yet. In fact, I was jealous because it was so good - Clay really framed it beautifully. And that piece got probably over a thousand inbound links already. It is setting a standard for what people know. Is that, in the end, more valuable than 100 random posts or Tweets by people who want to say "media is dying"? Its arguable that what he did has much more value, but this is something we're going to have to sort out. At the moment, the put it up first crowd is winning the page view battle.

6:03 - If you go to the supermarket, and that best selling newspaper which sells more than the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and Washington Post put together with an article about Obama's alien love child, we're pretty sure that's wrong. We're pretty sure from experience that the supermarket tabloids are kinda frothy bullshit. And we go outside and we put fifty cents or a dollar into the machine for the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, and we're fairly sure that its not bullshit - even though they get things wrong, sometimes catastrophically wrong. Again, we're going to be developing this over time.

6:06 - Slate and Salon are very traditional publications, they just happen to be on the web. They're magazines.

6:09 - There are different ways to describe the open source piece of [open source journalism] but one that is kind of being used widely has been called crowd sourcing - asking people in a community online to help report a story. In fact, Josh Marshall does that all the time, asking his readers for help in looking into things. I don't think there is any dispute that that can work. People are still figuring out how to do it well. People are still wondering what's the line between an appropriate request to an audience for help and one that gets into that area that I described earlier as sort of pure Tom Sawyer approach - they do all the work and your fence gets painted, and you get all of the benefit from it. When there is some value for everyone, I think it is great. We haven't seen this used in the kinds of ways that this could go really deep.

I'll give you an example of the kind of thing I'd love to see happen. About two years ago, if you follow the stock market and business issues, the Wall Street Journal wrote a lot about scandals with companies that were issuing stock options to executives and the timing of the grant dates of the stock options was really suspicious. In many cases, the dates of the stock option grants was when the stock was at its lowest during the quarter or during the year. The Journal, with the help of a mathematician at Yale, showed that the odds that these were coincidences were almost zero. This was not coincidence, they were being backdated, and that's like stealing from shareholders. When its not disclosed, its against the law.

What if the Journal had put up a thing that said here are instructions of how to look into this in your community; here's a calculator where you can put in the numbers and we can see if its a coincidence for that company. We could have done that for every company in America, and figured out how widespread this was - and we still don't know. We can do that with all kinds of questions if you pick things that a lot of people can answer one relatively simple question, or do one little bit of homework, and then aggregate the responses, you can come up with some pretty spectacular things.

Another example is something the Bakersfield California newspaper has done. They put up a map and said "tell us where the potholes are," and now they have a big pothole map. There are not enough journalists to drive the streets and locate all of the potholes, but there are enough people.

Another kind of open source journalism that is done a little bit here and there is the whole idea of putting just a community bulletin board online. Again, this does not have to be a business. My old neighborhood in California had a mailing list on Yahoo, just for our neighborhood of about three hundred houses, where people regularly posted things that I would call journalism. For example, when one day the tap water got cloudy int he nieghborhood, and a bunch of people said yeah, ours is cloudy too. Now, this is something a local newspaper would never have done, but one of the poeple in the nieghborhood called the city utilities department and said "what's going on," and the utilities department said we're just doing a repair, its not dangerous, and here's a website explaining what we're doing. Please tell everybody in your neighborhood. That's open source journalism.

When there's breaking news about somebody that's famous, or a major issue, one of the places turn to first is Wikipedia, and that's for very good reason because what goes on there in breaking news is often some of the best background you'll find on any top. Yes, Wikipedia has flaws, and some pretty serious ones. But while there is a chance that what you'll see may have an error at that second, the point of Wikipedia is not the place to stop - its a pretty bad place to stop, but a great place to start.

6:21 - There is no silver bullet to fix the business issues [of traditional journalism].

6:22 - I think the possibilities now, for a more diverse and vibrant and valuable ecosystem of news and information - I think the possibilities for that are growing, not shrinking. I tell my students here that I'm jealous of them, and I'm serious. There has never been a more open world to them. It has nothing to do with the career ladder that I jumped on. But it has never been so open to be creative. No one says this is going to be easy. Its going to be really hard. But its so early in this process, in this change. And that's why I'm optimistic, because we're already seeing hundreds, thousands of experiments. And most start-ups in new industries or reconfiguring ones - most startups fail. But the volume of experiments is amazing to me. The fact that there is no barrier to entry in digital media is incredibly exciting to me because it means we may see tens or hundreds of thousands of experiments.

The Pocket Broadcasters: What Phish Can Teach Us About the Future of New Media

2009-10-26T13:30:00.004-04:00

I've long been a big fan of the jam band, Phish. They were one of the first bands I saw in concert, and I credit them to this day as the band that got me into seeing live music. There isn't anything quite like seeing - or hearing - Phish live. And thankfully for me, Phish fans have become what I'm calling Pocket Broadcasters.

Phish fans have always been intrepid users of the internet to help other fans get access to live recordings for download. The band has always encouraged this, asking fans only to avoid trading audio for shows they release officially. This hasn't really held up, as the fact that Phish has started releasing all of their concerts hasn't dissuaded them. Tapers still trade and offer their downloads for free - but nobody really tries to put a stop to it, as far as I'm aware.

This year, Phish reunited after a five year split - and unsurprisingly, fans brought their new technology along with them when they returned to see the band live. And unsurprisingly, music fans are once again paving the way for the rest of us to use technology that already exists in unexpected ways.

This year, Phish fans tapped into smart phones to broadcast live video of concerts over the website USTREAM. Using iPhones primarily, users found ways to turn the still camera on the 3G iPhone to transmit live video and audio to USTREAM as it happened. Some users brought small tripods into the shows, while others simply held them aloft by hand. The video and audio quality weren't great - but for a community of fans used to listening to bootlegs recorded on cassette tapes, it is certainly passable. Imagine that - using USTREAM, I was able to watch Phish perform in St. Louis this summer, live, as it happened, with passable audio and video that enabled me to enjoy the show. All broadcast via a cell phone. Most importantly, this was all done organically from the community of Phish fans themselves, without express the permission from the band, the promoters, or the venues.

Fans used the Twitter hashtag #phish to let other fans know of the best streams available, informing one another of the best camera angles and sound quality. Fans discussed buying better equipment for the streamers so video quality would improve. They traded notes about the setlist in real time, as they watched the stream from all over the world. As the tour went on, more and more people began broadcasting. I expect you'll be able to watch Phish's Halloween Festival 8 on USTREAM this coming weekend. The most popular streamer is phishtube. Check it out if you have the time; you can also follow Festival discussions on Twitter with the hashtag #fest8 - both will likely have many recommendations on live streams.

Though I haven't watched recently, the iPhone 3GS has certainly improved video and audio quality for these streams. This expands a bit on Gillmor's discussion of mobile phones in We the Media. Not only can everybody have a camera in their pocket - but everybody can have a video camera that broadcasts live to the world. That's an extraordinarily powerful tool that could revolutionize news media.

Will USTREAM become the next YouTube? I don't know - but as mobile phones develop greater video capability, the quality of this streaming video will only increase. The application for politics and advocacy is clear - people will not only be able to take video and photos of everything you do, but they will be able to broadcast it out in real time. Candidates and campaigns can use this to their advantage - organizations could further online discussions about speeches or events by providing inexpensive streaming to people around the world. By coupling broadcasts with social media like Facebook or Twitter, this is remarkably simple - the Phish broadcasters simply embedded the Twitter feed in the video page alongside the stream. But easily broadcast video also has obvious pitfalls - it could also provide for "macaca moments," but occurring in real time.

Undoubtedly, however, this is technology in its most nascent phases. Phish fans and others like them are only seen the beginning of the pocket broadcasters.

New Media Matters - Book Review: We the Media

2009-10-26T10:00:00.000-04:00

As an avid reader of blogs and somebody who has dipped a toe into blogging in the past, I read Dan Gillmor's We the Media: Grassroots Journalism By the People, For the People with a great deal of interest. The corresponding web outlet mentioned in the book has not been updated since April of 2005. Bummer.

First and foremost, compared to many of the authors reviewed on this blog, Gillmor is a superior writer. He's clearly a journalist, and conveys his argument with clarity and support. Gillmor touches on not only the phenomenon of "new media" and how that technology impacts journalism, but also explores the concept of open source technology and the efforts of corporations and government to control these outlets. I was surprised to find the reach of this book extending into a lot of familiar topics - including the Dean campaign*, the revolution in the Philippines, and Korea's elections - as I expected it to focus more solely on journalism. He also identified some examples that I had not yet heard of - most interesting was ohmynews.com. I'm actually very this model hasn't been created in the United States yet (though some similar models exist).

Most of what is written in We the Media echoes most of the content of the other books reviewed herein. Gillmor notes how the Internet has created enormous opportunities for personal and group publishing, breaking down barriers to allow any individual with a computer to publish. He - like Shirky, Rigby, and others - note that the digital media creates multiple layers of communication: one-to-one, one-to-many, many-to-many, and few-to-few. Gillmor identifies the power of mobile cameras and instant, on the ground reporting. He, like others, notes the proliferation of SMS technology in other countries, and his belief that the United States will follow suit with adoption before too long.

Most noteworthy is Gillmor's discussion of how traditional media outlets are adapting to the new media world. Gillmor's status as tech-savvy journalist makes him a particularly good voice to tell this story, and he provides extensive examples from papers all over the country. I was impressed with his specificity - something I've felt is lacking in other readings. Gillmor professes a belief that traditional media and new media will coexist - but also repeatedly raises concerns that investigative reporting will suffer. These are concerns he never fully allays, and concerns that I share.

Gillmor's book was originally published in July 2004, with the paperback edition arriving in January 2006. Of course, nobody predicted the financial crisis that rocked the United States economy, but newspapers have taken considerable hits this year, with many newspapers facing bankruptcy or going under. Part of this is due to the unique economic circumstances, but the increasing prevalence of citizen journalists and new media resources certainly doesn't help the situation. Additionally, smart phones are becoming more popular than ever, pushing more and more people to receive and digest their news online or on the go. If newspapers and magazines can't afford to stay open, how can they possibly manage to maintain the research and investigative standards that has long been central to their mission? Gillmor notes his concern over this threat to democracy, and its one I share.

Gillmor's discussion of open source concepts might be an answer here. If investigative journalism and research into stories can be an open source project, perhaps there is potential to create very in depth, nuanced journalism through new media outlets. Indeed, Gillmor notes the idea of open source journalism in We the Media; he also used it to help him write his book, according to the epilogue. Of course, these techniques aren't going to work for investigative reporting where confidentiality is important - but it does show ways that opening journalism up in the same ways that many technologies are provides unique opportunities to benefit from the online conversation.

Finally, Gillmor has a VERY strong voice when it comes to government and corporate involvement with the web. He objects soundly to any regulation that is discussed, and I feel he does so rather unfairly. While I believe that the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, for example, contains the provisions that he discusses, it also enabled musicians to be paid royalties for performances for the first time ever in the United States. Gillmor notes it in passing, mentioning that the recording industry has essentially killed online radio broadcasting by creating prohibitive royalties - but for artists and creators, copyright and intellectual property are very real, very threatening concerns. I recognize the need for temperance in these policies - but Gillmor's reaction to anything related to copyright and intellectual property seemed to miss the larger point.

Of course nobody wants the big businesses of music or film to make money than they already do - but if those big businesses don't figure out a way to make new media profitable, then there won't be many musicians/camera men/photographers/journalists that can make a viable living. We need to find some kind of middle ground. I don't think we can have the wild wild west that Gillmor seems to advocate in terms of regulation - but at the same time, I think over-regulation and control is dangerous for many of the reasons outlined in We the Media.

Ultimately, this is a very content rich book. I could pick out any number of things to discuss at length. Gillmor does an impressive job of identifying the current and future state of the media without making We the Media immediately dated - and that's an incredibly difficult thing to do given how fast technology moves.

*Sidenote: can somebody PLEASE discuss the Dean campaign in one of these books by actually talking about what the Dean campaign did and how they did it? I'm tired of hearing this same missive about "Dean made great use of the Internet and Meetup to engage his supporters," but that's generally where the analysis ends. I want more meat! Give me more details on what Dean did that worked and what didn't. Simply telling me he used a platform is fine and good - but everybody tells me that. Tell me how Dean used Meetup. Did the campaign create their own groups? Did they find their own? What materials did they provide to people that were organizing Meetups? How did they stay in touch with the leaders of these groups? There have been small bits of all of this in each of these books, but given how often Dean is cited as an enormous influence in online politics, I'm still woefully under informed about the specifics of how he actually did it.

Cutting Through the Noise to Get to Dell: Update!

2009-10-20T15:49:00.003-04:00

Well, this officially worked better than I expected.

After reaching out to Dell on Twitter and receiving two replies, the company has officially made things right in my mind. @LisaG_atDell went the extra mile for me as a Dell customer, and put another customer service representative in touch with me today. Here is their message:

Thank you for your recent Dell purchase. I sincerely regret that your purchase has not gone smoothly for you. I am emailing on behalf of Lisa Gxxxx and am eager to speak with you. I was unable to reach you at xxx-xxx-xxxx. If it is satisfactory to you I would like to place your order for the Xbox 360 Elite Holiday bundle for $220.29 (plus applicable taxes) with free next business day shipping. I will have a final total for you when we complete your order.

Kudos, Dell. You've done the right thing and offered to replace my purchase at the price I had intended to buy it at, and gone out of your way to ensure my satisfaction as a customer. I'm VERY impressed with your willingness to respond to customers via new media avenues. I only wish your original customer service team had been as responsive - but hey, you made it right in the end.

And let this be a further lesson: Twitter can do more than you might think.

Twitter as Tactic: Cutting Through the Noise to Get to Dell

2009-10-19T00:00:00.002-04:00

About a month ago, a friend posted a deal on Google Reader from Dell: an XBox 360 Elite sold, after rebate, at about a $90 discount from any other outlet online. As somebody that got addicted to a friend's Netflix streaming account (which you can interface through XBox Live), I had been shopping for an XBox and jumped at the deal. A month later, I still haven't received my XBox.

Essentially, Dell shipped the XBox without requiring a signature via FedEx, without allowing me to request that option. As I live in the heart of Washington D.C., leaving a big box that says "Dell" somewhere on it at my front door isn't a great idea. Long story short: FedEx claimed to deliver the package, and I never received it. So I called Dell, who told me that there was nothing they could do, that they couldn't ship me another XBox Elite (with the customer service representative claiming they no longer manufactured them - ha!) and refunded my money (after offering to upsell me to a Playstation 3 or another product...).

This left a bitter taste in my mouth for a few reasons. One, had I been able to request a signature upon delivery, it wouldn't have happened. Two, I was still without my product. Three, I now have to miss out on the $90 discount - $50 of which was due to a manufacturer's rebate that is no longer being offered as I've missed the purchase window. I felt Dell owed me more than an attempt to sell me another product or a simple "hey, sorry, here's your money back, see ya later." At the very least, I hoped they would offer to find a replacement product for the same price, or offer store credit to make up the difference and for my inconvenience in being out almost $300 for a few weeks. I made no headway in calling their service line - so I took my case to Twitter.

Dell has had some of the greatest success in selling products via Twitter using their @DellOutlet handle. As such, I knew that they were active and responsive to customers online - so I started sending messages to the @DellOutlet handle detailing my dissatisfaction with the way Dell had handled the incident, tagging my posts with the hashtag #fail - a known internet meme. I did this knowing a few things. One, Twitter is a public forum, so anybody searching for "#fail," "DellOutlet" or "Dell" would come across my posts detailing my issues with the company. Two, Twitter has amazing potential to organize groups of people - so my complaint could quickly find other complaints, creating a bigger problem for the company if we were able to organize. Three, I had nothing to lose, and it didn't cost me anything to do.

Within hours, two representatives from Dell had contacted me via Twitter, encouraged me to follow them so we could move to direct messages, and finally, requested that I email them details of my order and my complaint so that they could look into it in greater detail. This all occurred on Friday - so I'm still waiting to see what the final outcome of this experiment will be. But I've already learned a very important lesson: Twitter worked like a charm to get to a person with authority and capability to help me with my problem. The public nature of the medium pushed a quicker response. No longer was Dell simply dealing with somebody on a closed phone line, but a customer voicing discontent in public for everybody to see. That gives them a much greater incentive to help me resolve my issues as soon as possible.

The reason for bringing this all up here is as an application to advocacy or political campaigns. Once you enter the Twittersphere, you have to respond to its users - even if you wouldn't have done so the same way in other mediums. I got NOWHERE on the phone with Dell. But the minute I made my complaints public for the world to see, I had multiple higher level employees asking to work with me to make things right. It was the only option they had, really - the potential damage that even one critical voice can cause on Twitter is too great, especially given the ability to easily organize other users. Dell has carved out an important, profitable business on Twitter, and negative posts on the network can impact that reputation. Political campaigns and advocacy organizations have to keep this in mind at all times - or they risk turning one angry or upset supporter or critic into an organizer that can cause much greater damage without much effort. Concurrently, the flip side is also true - political and advocacy campaigns can USE Twitter to impact other organizations or companies to provoke action.

Once things get resolved with Dell, I'll post back here on the final verdict...but for now, I'm very impressed with the ability of Twitter to cut through the noise and get results.

Article Review: The Politics-To-Go Handbook

2009-10-18T23:38:00.000-04:00

The Politics-To-Go Handbook provides an overview of the use of mobile phones for advocacy and marketing campaigns. Touching on everything from a general overview of the technology, the use of mobile for canvassing, privacy, security, and specific case studies, the manual is a one-stop shop for information related to mobile phones. And to be perfectly honest, I found most of it useless.

I hate to go off on a bit of a rant here, but I've found this reading and others to be painfully lacking in any sort of actual guidance. So much of the reading is surface level - take, for example, this excerpt, from page 47:

Hire the right staff. - The best strategy for any mobile campaign is to employ a good copy writer. Hire someone who knows how to use the space effectively.

So basically: use mobile campaigns, but hire somebody to do it for you. This completely rubs me the wrong way. Isn't the point of this manual to demonstrate HOW to use the space effectively?

My biggest complaint with this reading - and with some of the others that we've touched on - is a lack of real world demonstration and application to teach you the ins and outs of ACTUALLY using these technological advances. It is fine and good to discuss the overall ideas - use mobile to reach people while they're out and about; use double opt-in strategies; don't spam; have a call to action - but without demonstrating the best methods to actually do this, we're still wandering in the dark. So much of this manual and some of the others we've read simply restate many key themes over and over again - so much so, in fact, that the manual is summed in in a page of takeaways on page two. I could have simply read page two and walked away with much of the same insight that I did having read over 100 pages of material.

C'mon people - if you're experts, show us your expertise. Demonstrate successful campaigns. Give us some examples of things that didn't or don't work. Don't just spout off generalizations that are true of most marketing and communications mediums, no matter what the technology is. Knowing your audience, engaging them, finding ways to appeal to them...these are pretty generic realities.

Rant about the manual itself aside, I want to tackle the idea of mobile as a larger concept. Personally, I don't believe that mobile marketing is going to catch on in the United States as it has in the rest of the world. The reason for this is simple: technology is going to surpass it very quickly. This reading was published September 13, 2005, and focused largely on technology and usages from 2004 and years previous. To date, over four years later, mobile marketing remains an outlier in the United States, and hasn't shown significant signs of making huge inroads in the corporate, political, or non-profit world. If it doesn't do so soon, there will be no reason for it to do so.

Why? Simple: the technology will surpass SMS. The third point in the "Top Ten Takeaways" is that text is king. Well, that isn't going to be the case for long. SMS will still be used - but as was mentioned throughout the manual, Americans came to email and computing before they came to SMS. We use it more generally and are more accustomed to it than we are SMS. In 2005, when this was published, the iPhone wasn't even a concept yet. Smart phones are increasingly popular, inexpensive, and dominant in the market, and are only going to become moreso as the technology gets cheaper. My feeling is that this will relegate SMS messaging as a permanent second class citizen. Why limit your message to a text when you can email somebody and still reach them wherever they are?

This is not to say that I don't think mobile marketing or messaging is important. The section on VRM was outstanding, and will likely be a key component of canvassing forever more. But the handbook explicitly makes a point that I fundamentally disagree with (p. 26): "The mobile phone is not the new computer; it is the new phone." It is not just the new phone - it is ALSO the new computer, especially given the rise of smart phones and the increasingly complex tasks they can accomplish. This is why more computing companies are becoming active in mobile - because computers and computer operating systems are able to accomplish more tasks than mobile platforms.

At this juncture, I think mobile is more likely to become an extension of your online strategy than it will be a standalone, independent tool. There are certainly interesting uses of mobile technology available - and it can be a useful extension of other campaigns. But if you'll note - in the domestic examples given in Politics-To-Go, total respondents are never mentioned. My suspicion is that this is due to low total numbers of response rates - even if the click throughs, open rates, or success rates are high. Sure, its great that it works a high percentage of the time - but if your overall penetration into a community or target group is very low to begin with, is it really worth the time, money and infrastructure needed to get the campaign off the ground?

If widespread mobile campaigning hasn't happened already - and it seems that it has not - by the time Americans are ready to adopt SMS for advocacy and organization, the technology will enable us to do far more with our mobile devices than has been imagined to date. This reading seemed dated to me, and thus, not terribly useful.

The Human Rights Campaign Asks Facebook Users to "Donate Your Status"

2009-10-12T13:33:00.001-04:00

To coincide with their annual dinner - this year featuring President Obama and Lady Gaga - the Human Rights Campaign kicked off a Facebook campaign to help raise awareness for National Coming Out Day, which occurred yesterday, October 11th.

Using the popular applications platform, the Human Rights Campaign Facebook page encouraged Facebook users to "donate your status" to National Coming Out Day. The "Conversations from the Heart" application functioned to update users status messages on Facebook to broadcast a countdown to National Coming Out Day. The application broadcast some variation of the following message, depending on how you set it up in your application preferences:

"[Facebook User] is a straight ally. There are 5 days until National Coming Out Day and I pledge to have heartfelt conversations for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender equality. Donate your status and join me by clicking here: http://apps.facebook.com/equalityconversation/"

This is an excellent, simple application that allows users to spread a message to their friends easily. Not only that, the application was supported with information on the HRC website that encouraged visitors to spread the message to their other social networks, including Twitter and Facebook, as well as options to email the information to friends. The status update itself has a built in viral component that encourages friends of any user to install the application themselves. With a call to action and a clear message that promotes conversation around their issue, the application is well-designed to raise awareness about National Coming Out Day. Since status updates broadcast to users' "News Feeds," which displays in friends' Facebook homepages, this is a great tool to spread a message widely. Judging by 8,602 active users for the application, it seems to have been a successful campaign in the days leading up to National Coming Out Day.

On the application installation page itself, HRC provided options as to how often the message was broadcast to friends, including a daily, bi-weekly, weekly, and one-time update (the day before National Coming Out Day) choices. Users could further identify their own sexuality as part of the displayed message. Additionally, HRC made use of the application homepage to include video message, options to share information with friends on other networks, opportunities to join HRC, connect to their other Facebook pages, and even order a t-shirt. The page was clearly set up with a grander web strategy in mind.

One thought as related to how this application could have been better designed. The application could have allowed users to personalize their status updates through the software platform, thus enabling the messaging to be tailored more specifically to the user and audience that user was reaching. If the application had provided evergreen language with the ability to further customize and expand a message, it could have proved even more engaging.

Still, this seems like an innovative, inexpensive idea to take advantage of Facebook for messaging. Kudos to HRC for their creative strategy, and the success it enjoyed.

Book Review: The Argument

2009-10-11T22:11:00.002-04:00

When I first checked the syllabus for my Digital Political Strategy course, I was pleasantly surprised to find The Argument: Inside the Battle to Remake Democratic Politics as required reading - both because I was already reading it, and because I thought it provided key insights into the obstacles facing both modern progressives and those seeking to apply the web for political gains. As this class focuses on digital strategy, my writing here will focus on the latter - but I wanted to say upfront that I found Bai's analysis of the Democratic ideological conflict impressive and illuminating.

Bai's focus is less on the strategy inherent in online tools as it is a grander view of party. What's more, Bai often draws attention to the fact that a focus on tactics seems to do a disservice to the Democrats; he seems to side with those in his book that advocate for a greater focus on purpose and vision than those focused on political gamesmanship. Interestingly, this divide is not one that was between the netroots and the establishment. Instead, Bai finds individuals - like Andy Stern and Pat Caddell - that have a grip on the larger scale challenges the Democratic party faces in identifying a new message. However, these individuals drawn almost exclusively from the existing Democratic establishment - Bai didn't identify a member of the netroots (with the possible exception of Tom Matzzie at MoveOn) with a core focus on big ideas. Instead, Bai often spent time illustrating the lack of political awareness the netroots actually had. It became very aware that they were simply citizens voicing their thoughts, without the knowledge to inform them of political realities or challenges.

But what was most interesting to me about The Argument was not the core argument itself - that between the netroots and the big power brokers in the Democratic party. Instead, what was striking was the similarity between the two groups. The Democracy Alliance and MoveOn, for example, faced similar difficulty in articulating their vision and that of their members. The reasons for this were wildly different - but the end result was the same: a set of principles that lacked a clear path forward. The personal viewpoints of the high-powered donors to the Democracy Alliance were not very different from those of Markos Moulitsas Zuniga or Jerome Armstrong - they simply had different tools in their kits to articulate their opinions. And very, very few of them had anything new to offer to the debate. This is an important lesson. Just because the netroots has opened up political discourse to a whole new set of voices doesn't necessarily mean that those voices have anything new to say - and just because a set of donors has a lot of money doesn't mean they can buy vision.

But this is the promise of the web: even without a cohesive, unifying message, Bai sees the ability of the web to organize and bring people together - perhaps more effectively than the uber-rich organized under the Democracy Alliance. From his coverage of MoveOn house parties to his time spent at YearlyKos, it is clear that online politics is an extraordinary outlet for people to become active and involved. The application of this power is displayed with the success of Howard Dean's 50-state strategy - even if it was undoubtedly helped along by the severe dissatisfaction with the Bush administration. New tools gave people the ability to organize themselves on the ground, and help pit candidates against Republicans wherever they might be competitive.

In the end, I think the most important thing to take from The Argument is a grander point about digital political strategy. On this Sunday evening, I'll articulate it with a football metaphor: the netroots is a new, fan-elected coach joining the staff, offering up new formations and opening offense and defense up to a whole range of new possibilities. But the game - and the rest of the coaching staff - remains the same. The question becomes how to integrate this new expertise into the overall system in a way that helps the team win the game - the game, in this instance, not being elections, but a new direction for the party.

Indeed, I think there is a danger in giving too much weight to the netroots political movement - just as there is danger in ignoring it. Things that are new often attract attention by virtue of their newness alone - but in politics, ideas still need to be judged on their merits. I'm glad to see that the Democratic Party is giving time to the bloggers and online campaigners that are helping to drive their future - but I'm equally glad to see that these opinions and values are balanced against a more fundamental understanding of political reality. This, perhaps, is the true argument within The Argument: how does one run an organization when everybody in that organization has the power, means and motivation to organize themselves?

Tip to Burglars: Wait To Update Facebook Until You Get Home

2009-10-06T09:47:00.001-04:00

In a story that could only happen in 2009, NPR has the scoop on a burglar who...well...just read:

Investigators looking into a burglary outside Rome were able to track down the intruder, who had paused while stealing cash and jewelry to write Facebook messages. He was traced after police found the Facebook homepage up on a computer in the house. The victim isn't a member.

I just wish we knew what his update was. My suggestions:

(Burglar) is tired after a long night's work.
(Burglar) can't believe what a steal this necklace was.
(Burglar) is stoked I got away with it!
(Burglar) can't wait to give my girl her gifts...
(Burglar) is lmao! 4realz!

Okay, they're lame. Can you do better? Hit the comments.

Hat tip to Alice for sharing the story.

MySpace and Diminishing Returns

2009-10-05T15:16:00.003-04:00

As I work in digital strategy, I've wondered about the use for MySpace. Traditionally, MySpace has been considered a mechanism based in the music industry, and its strongest application has been for music. But in my work in concert promotion, we had largely abandoned it as a fading technological platform. We still had a MySpace page, but our attention was geared much more toward Facebook and Twitter.

So as I think about applications of MySpace for political or advocacy campaigns, I arrive at a more fundamental question: is there really a purpose in investing time in a technological platform that seems to be on the way out? Creating content for and updating social networking websites takes time. Replying to emails, approving friend requests, moderating comments, changing photos, posting videos, and interacting with other users: these are activities that are relatively easy, but that also chew up time. MySpace, in particular, doesn't have a very user friendly interface, and getting it to cooperate with what you want it to do can further delay things.

So with this in mind, and knowing that MySpace is declining in influence, is it worth it to devote time to it? Or would limited resources be better spent in other locations where you can reach your audience, or looking to find the next potential network that could benefit an organization? Two points dissuade me from using MySpace:

Message Crowding
The biggest issue that MySpace faces is that messages are far too crowded. With my private MySpace profile, I only log in once every couple of weeks at this point - and inevitably, despite the fact that I have 275 friends and was once a very active user, the only messages or comments that I find in my inbox come from bands, authors, record labels, or other groups focused solely on marketing. And if I'm ensured that is all that I'm going to find, why bother using it?

I don't believe my profile is unique in this; in fact, people who have remained more active users on MySpace probably face far more messages bombarding them from every angle. For me, it became too much and I just backed away from it, focusing instead on platforms where I had more control.

Poor Advertising
I did a great deal of internet advertising as a concert promoter, and I never had worse experiences than I did with MySpace. The page is incredibly busy as it is - and the ability of users to endlessly tweak their layouts - while nice for personalization - makes cutting through the din incredibly difficult. Attention is so divided on MySpace profiles that advertising seems useless. Add in the fact that large corporations regularly take over the entire thematic homepage of MySpace, and it further seemed like a lost dollar.

Once MySpace saw the success of Facebook advertising, they tried to implement a similar platform - except it didn't work nearly as well. I'll never forget getting chewed out by a client for underspending their budget - and part of the reason for that was MySpace failed to deliver a $2,000 campaign that I had booked. This was not a technical fault on my end - their platform simply malfunctioned and didn't deliver promised impressions.

I don't know why MySpace has declined; I suspect it has a lot to do with the fact that it was bought by a traditional media company, and traditional media companies have proven incredibly slow to understand the internet. I don't really think that News Corp is going to have an epiphany in online media and turn MySpace around...and thus, it is all the more likely that it will continue to decline.

I know I risk losing access to certain demographics if I forego the usage of MySpace - but if I'm advising a client with limited resources, I find it hard to believe I can't better reach those demographics with less effort and more success by using another outlet. For example, texting campaigns have enormous applicability to younger, less wealthy individuals - an audience that MySpace has an advantage in. I'd prefer to develop a great text campaign with the time and resources that I have than create a MySpace page that could be useless in a couple of years.

So, my readers, what say you? Is MySpace worth it, or not? Am I fool for not giving it more consideration?

Article Reviews: Person-to-Person-to-Person & Dr. Digipol

2009-10-05T14:41:00.001-04:00

Throughout both readings this week, I was struck by the common themes that emerged through most of the articles in Person-to-Person-to-Person (P2P2P) and in Organizing on the Social Web - many of which echo the lessons I learned by being in a band. In fact, I was amused to see the article in P2P2P that suggested thinking like a rock band.

That said, the themes remained constant, and I wanted to touch on a few of them here:

Giving Up Control
The number one piece of advice that emerged over and over again from P2P2P was the fact that new web based communications tools require a willingness to give up control over message and content. Whether you're using crowdsourcing to develop content or simply allowing users to comment on posts and information, the only way to ensure activity online is to allow users autonomy.

Interestingly, this is also the area that organizations are apt to be most resistant to, as control over message is a central tenant of political campaigns and advocacy work. My biggest frustration with this and most of the readings thus far, however, is that while there is a recognition that this is important, no authors have really offered suggestions on how to convince organizations, politicians, or non-profits of this fact. Simply telling them that this is how the social web works often isn't enough, as decision makers are rooted in more traditional communications methods. It is a fundamental obstacle to implementing successful social web campaigns - so why aren't there more demonstrations of how to take traditional messaging into a more modern era?

In any case, I want revisit control later, as I see it as a key distinction between the discussion in P2P2P and Organizing.

Authenticity
Many authors touched on the fact that traditional advertising and marketing techniques do not work on the web. Stress was given to creating an authentic online identity and populating social networks with content unique to that network, but also, content that revealed a personality. In my experience, this is absolutely essential to using social web tools. If people don't believe that a person - and emphasis on a person, and not a team - are behind a web portal, they won't interact with that outlet nearly as often or with as much enthusiasm as they will if they feel they are talking with a friend.

This creates an interesting question. If multiple people are managing an account, how do you ensure that the online voice utilized is consistent? I've found myself managing Twitter accounts, for example, with a team of folks - and each of us use it in a different way. Perhaps the key is simply making sure that everybody uses a web friendly, natural tone, and it is less important that the tone is 100% consistent.

Calls to Action Online
I was a bit surprised to see how many authors recommended specifically asking supporters or top networkers to rebroadcast messages out to supporters. My feeling has always been that this is a bit intrusive or a faux pas on the web. I worried that explicit calls to action would be a turn off to networks, as it imposes an expectation on the relationship.

Upon reflection, though, this seems like the best way to expand a presence online. But I would have liked to see more explanation of how to go about making these requests. Simply saying "ask your supporters to spread your message" is a bit vague, especially since new rules govern web interactions. How does one remain authentic and personable online while essentially asking people to market on your behalf? How do you keep that request from being too overt? And what is the best thing to ask supporters to do? Email friends? Post content on their own websites? What tactics work the best?

Calls to Action Offline
Naturally, the cross-population of online and offline properties is essential to using the social web. It almost goes without saying that the goals of using the web is to get people to do something. No band would have ever started using MySpace or social networks if they didn't have a goal of getting people to attend shows or buy albums. What would be the point of putting in all of that work if there wasn't a reason for it?

Acknowledging Effort and Granting Responsibility
Acknowledging effort of online supporters is mentioned over and over again - and it dovetails well with my personal style of management. I've long thought that providing positive feedback is much more useful than criticizing what people do not do. The internet solidifies this, in a sense - if you manage internet supporters harshly, they can simply tune out and ignore you. But if you praise their work and encourage them to do more, they often will. Flattery, as they say, will get you everywhere.

Additionally, pushing supporters to take on specific responsibilities within the online world also makes a lot of sense. Just like with the real world, people appreciate the implicit acknowledgement of their talents that comes when they are granted responsibilities.

A Note About Web 2.0
I wanted to conclude with a quick discussion of the term web 2.0, as we touched on it in class this past week. I understand the reasons why some bristle at the term - it is rather ambiguous, and many of the tools that are part of it have existed in certain forms for years. After all, how is a chat room or message board really all that different from a social network like MySpace or Facebook? If groups like the white supremacists described in Organizing can utilize the web with such similar strategies as we do today, has the web really changed into some new iteration?

My feeling is yes, for two reasons. First, technologies and general computing familiarity have enabled far more people to use the web effectively. There isn't a real learning barrier to using Blogger or Facebook or YouTube. The web has developed to the point where these things are easy and intuitive, while previous iterations of the internet, modems and computers made using the internet difficult. That is no longer the case. So I believe this is part of what "web 2.0" is - an internet that is far more accessible and usable.

Second touches on the reasoning described in class: the internet has become a two way conversation. There is an attitudinal shift in how the web is used. No longer is it about using the internet as a "push" marketing mechanism, but rather, it is about using the web to enable other people to use your marketing mechanisms for themselves, allowing them to interact and respond to you, and finding ways to engage communities of people.

Again, I know Web 2.0 as a term is ambiguous...but I think it is useful for describing both the internet itself and people's familiarity with it. Perhaps a useful research study would actually attempt to define the term explicitly - or perhaps such a study already exists?

Live Blogging: Person-to-Person-to-Person Article Review

2009-10-02T19:47:00.001-04:00

Decided to try something different this week in my article review of Person-to-Person-to-Person. Rather than only doing a post at the end that applies the lessons learned from the article, I'm also going to post some live notes on the content here as I read it. These won't necessarily be fully formed thoughts, but will give some instant feedback on the specifics.

You can download the text by going here.

p. 5 - 6: Appreciate the synopsis of the content that is contained within the article. Nice to have this upfront to get a preview of what I'm going to be reading and to hit on the major points. Also nice to see that we're going to be looking at some more specific tactics and strategies as a part of this reading.

p. 8: A lot of the Delaney material seems pretty similar to what was contained in his Online Politics 101 document, which isn't surprising. I do like his suggestions on boosting MySpace results, though I wonder how dated this is at this point. MySpace seems to have become particularly bogged down due to the sheer amount of people that only use it to market themselves, their band, their book, or whatever else they might be pushing at this point. Is it still viable to expand a base on MySpace by being aggressive in these ways?

p. 14: "we do know that interactivity with your message...breeds intimacy with your organization. People feel closer to you, and they become less susceptible to being seduced by other messages." Interesting that they also see an effect on reaction to other messaging.

p. 15: Discussion of rules for your community seems a bit odd to me - I feel like this is something that shakes itself out more often than not. I guess having base level requirements and expectations is important and will work, but how do you balance this?

p. 16: I like the emphasis on teaching supporters how to best use social media tools to benefit the campaign. Training combined with outreach seems to be a great idea...

p. 19: The four M's: message, momentum, media, and mobilization. Nice summation; momentum seems to be a huge factor in social networking.

p. 21: Foreshadowing of the socio-economic divide between Facebook and MySpace users: "Some argue, however, that Facebook users may be more likely to vote than MySpace users, given its connection to colleges and the fact that college-educated Americans are more likely to vote than those with less education."

p. 24: First Dean "Meetups" occurred without the candidate knowing - this is a key point. It contributes to my strong suspicion that you're much better tapping into groups and people that already have a tendency to organize themselves, rather than trying to act as an external organizing force. Indeed, it sounds like the role of the Dean staff became supporting existing groups. By identifying the Meetup groups as a priority, the Dean campaign was then able to direct everything to it: website, phone calls, etc - and it gave them a local action item to take part in.

I love the idea of creating web tools to allow supporters to start their own local Meetups if they don't exist near them. Again, this can be created from looking at what other groups are already doing, and what tools and techniques they are utilizing in order to be effective. From there, a campaign can simply fill in the gaps and help people get started.

Another nice touch: "almost every e-mail message encouraged supporters to pass the message along to five friends, and every Meetup agenda encouraged leaders to bring one or two new friends with them to the next Meetup." This should be an integral part of just about any outreach campaign, of any sort.

p. 25: Identifying supporters that might lead organizations on the ground by starting with those that were donors or more active - this is a great idea as well. Gives you an automatic edge; reminds me of the discussions we've had in class about the Maryland comptroller race and the Facebook outreach.

p. 26: Great emphasis on offline follow ups with supporters. Phone calls, personal meetings, etc.

p. 27: "over-communicate to ensure that your message points are conveyed effectively." Good point. I think message fatigue is really hard to arrive at online when people are opting into your message. The same is true of things like Twitter or Facebook.

p. 29: Is it really a big surprise that using a conservative radio platform with millions of listeners will help drive visitors and growth of a conservative online community? Isn't this a given? If you put a lot of media resources into pushing a platform to the exact audience you're trying to reach, it certainly SHOULD grow...

p. 30: Acknowledging effort is repeatedly brought up by all authors. Positive reinforcement of online activity will promote further activity.

p. 36: "Post content twice weekly to spark dialogue and to act as a catalyst for conversation." I wonder where the "twice weekly" metric came from.

p. 41: Exploring how podcasting can drive social networks and vice versa is an impressive, specific article that I think is valuable. Glad to see this in here. Podcast demographic information (p. 43) is particularly interesting.

p. 43: Podcast outreach is a strategy I haven't considered at all. I wonder how difficult it is to reach the producers of podcast content. Also explore how best to tag the metadata of podcasts (p. 44), as I have no idea what is really involved in doing this...

p. 46: "Bloggers, by definition, act as a proxy for their readers." Is this really true? Or to bloggers act as a catalyst to generate conversation with their readers? Just because people are reading doesn't mean that the blogger speaks for them.

p. 47: "Give the community some responsibility." The more I read about blogging and online social media in general, this theme reoccurs in just about every suggestion. I already believed this to be central to any online strategy efforts, and now, I only believe it more fully.

p. 49: "The easier it is for you to send a message, the harder it is for you to get my attention." Great point, very true; people often ignore messages without even realize that they're doing it.

p. 50: Interesting analysis of Dean, especially since most of what I've read about Dean puts such a large stress on the fact that he used the web to generate face to face meetings through Meetup. The emphasis in this reading of the facts is that they lacked an understanding of the type of face to face meetings that they needed to generate, and the way in which their followers could take the message and make it their own. However, the comparative analysis with the Republicans is poor. I don't see any evidence of how the GOP used the web here, actually. This talks mainly about normal, ground leve campaigning, in which the Republicans are truly experts. But what about their web tactics?

p. 52: The insert on closing triangles is great; I like the idea of strengthening communities by taking the opportunities to introduce connections to one another.

p. 57: The most interesting section of this part of the reading is the discussion of online identity. In many ways, I think this has come to provide one of the most interesting advantages of online social networks. Online identities are often created by supplying information that you don't offer up every day: favorite films, favorite books, movies and music, along with preferred activities, quotes, heroes and so forth. This is information we rarely have about our friends unless you've known them for some time, and even then, remembering this information is difficult. Now, with avenues like Facebook and MySpace - or even Match.com as mentioned in the article - this information is readily available about our friends and acquaintances. For strangers, it creates some form of identity - but for people that we know offline, it is invaluable reference material, for lack of a better term. I believe it helps to bring us closer together.

p. 60: Decision to sponsor progressive blogs is a truly innovative idea. Love it. Leads me to wonder - what kind of success has there been in reaching out to bloggers after deciding to advertise on their website via Blogads? Does the risk of backlash of appearing to "buy" coverage outweigh the potential benefits of developing a stronger relationship with that writer? Or is this entirely determined by how you go about it?

p. 62: For the record, the whole Terry Schiavo fiasco disgusts me. That said: the point made about reacting quickly to the news is a good one. Online leaders definitely pride themselves on being the first to act or to share news with one another - being proactive and getting them that message as soon as it is available can help you create stronger relationships with online connectors.

p. 64: Figures about networks of moms are unreal.

p. 65: Influencers are the connectors discussed before - and they are everywhere. But the question I have is how you identify them online. Is it purely based on the size of their network, or is the activity within that network more important? The point regarding message, however, is strong: avoiding overtly partisan messages should help a message to spread more easily online.

p. 71: These definitions of networks are appropriate, I suppose, but I question their usefulness. Aren't they somewhat intuitive?

p. 72: Finally the key distinction: "Where Solution organizations start with issues and use power maps to identify the decision makers and influencers they need to engage to solve that issue, People Organizations start with clearly defined audiences, work to build their power, and then apply that power to a variety of issues."

p. 76: Information about how people are connected to one another is key to promoting their involvement in a social network. This is an intuitive concept; I wonder why more websites didn't make use of it? Why didn't MySpace, for example, display friends you had in common with other users?

p. 77: The "resolve" system on essembly seems to be a perfect application for political and advocacy campaigns. What more information could you ask for about potential users? I wonder if you can advertise to members of this site based on their resolve information...

p. 88: The recommendation that a website or e-voter space "must have the hottest new tools" seems counterintuitive to me. Shouldn't the focus be on having the tools that people are most comfortable using to achieve your organization's goals?

p. 89-91: First: Drinking Liberally = awesome. The breakdown of how Fred used MySpace to find and recuit supporters is very useful. A lot of it is similar to how I recruited new fans back when I was using MySpace for my band. But he also came up with some solid ideas that I hadn't thought of - MySpace captains, for example, is a nice thought. Giving some actual authority through MySpace could absolutely be effective. I wonder if he took this a step further by offering his captains pre-made MySpace templates or images that were unique to the captains so they had the ability to broadcast and brag about their position.

p. 96: Have to say, it doesn't really seem like Phil Sheldon knows what he is talking about when it comes to social media...

Okay, thus concludes my real-time reactions to the reading. I'll do a post that has some bigger picture thoughts on this and the other reading before too long.