The Politics/Technology Discussion Is Going In The Wrong Direction

(This is cross posted on the EchoDitto SXSW blog) 

I have been in politics all my life. For most of that time I have been very optimistic about the potential for politics to have a positive impact on the world. And that optimism increased as I saw the potential for using technology to educate, engage, and mobilize audiences increase and become more integrated. It’s a fairly simple equation in my mind. Better politics help better people get elected and better people do a better job running the country (at whatever level they were elected - local, state, federal, etc.). And technology can help facilitate that on many different levels.

Of late, however, I have been down on politics — I am frustrated that the media and various other people talk about all the innovation and evolution in our political process, but the reality is far from that. I am saddened by the fact that our government fails to serve most of our population well, and some people not at all - and that tools are available to help expand the reach of government, but those in power don’t seem interested in using them in any meaningful way. I’m cranky about the fact that so many people look at technology as the solution, when there are obviously so many more more important factors.

Politics is exciting to watch and occasionally fun to participate in, but its not fulfilling its role in our society right now. Worse than that, our democracy is broken. And the rate at which change is occurring so that technology can play a meaningful role in fixing these problems is painfully slow.

What made me so frustrated today?
I was at a panel discussion this morning with a group of very smart political operatives from the internet space (several of whom are friends of mine). They were talking all about Facebook (one of the panelists was from Facebook) and user-generated videos that appeared on YouTube, list building and GOTV. Frankly, there wasn’t any new ground broken in the discussion.

So, I stepped up and asked the panel if they felt the shifting nature of politics, which increasingly recognizes the role of the community and gives some (though still not very much) voice to the grassroots community will spill over into better functioning of government, greater access for citizens, and an increased likelihood of real solutions being found for the problems facing our society. I think it was a good question.

The responses were not very good. Panelist answer ranged from “government doesn’t understand technology and has no interest in using it that way” to “the campaigns haven’t really achieved anything of significance, so there isn’t a model to transfer over to the operation of government anyway.” (Those aren’t direct quotes, FYI…)

So, I’m frustrated on a couple levels. First, I’m frustrated that the media (and people at a panel like the one this morning) obsess over the ‘paradigm shift’ happening in politics, when really very little, if anything, has changed at all. Second, I’m frustrated that nobody in the political space seems to look past the end of the campaign cycle to the job that ultimately their candidate/party will have to do when elected. I was in the political space for a long time (and am not that far outside of it now) so I understand the mentality, but I got into politics with the goal of helping improve our society and I feel as if the industry is just navel gazing far too much about this technology stuff. And lastly, I’m frustrated that you can get so many smart people together on a panel, or at a conference like SXSW for that matter, and not even begin to scratch the surface of the serious issues that need addressing.

I’ll keep hoping to find a panel, or a group of political professionals, who want to realize the true world changing opportunities that technology offers and how to actually improve our society.

Can Science Deliver The Answer To the Measurement Challenge?

(This is cross-posted at the EchoDitto Blog and the SXSW EchoDitto Blog)
Ahhhh, science.  The prospect of finding the answers to life’s most vexing challenges always seem to come from science (or faith, which in the case of online marketing and communications is important, but certainly not for everyone).  So, this morning I sat in on a panel about the ’science of designing interactions’ in the hope of getting some additional clarity on this whole measurement debate.

The panel featured two folks, either professor types or PhDs, with thick accents — usually a good sign when you are talking about a complex subject (ok, totally unfair generalization, but tell me that you don’t agree with the statement at least in part)  And, like so many other panels, this one promised metrics for determining the success of your social media/marketing efforts.

Sadly, like so many other panels, no metrics emerged.  But, all was not lost.  The moderator presented an interesting framework for ‘designing interactions,’ — seven patterns as he put it.  Those patterns are:

1 Focus on designing interactions (the goal is to have people engage - with content, with each other, etc.)

2. Build experiment and measure (there is no single answer, no right answer, no way of knowing when you are done - so keep going)

3.  Give user metrics of his standing (if you know that you are only 75% complete with a task, you will proceed through and complete the remaining 25%.  If you don’t know, how do you know if you should go forward)?

4. Help the user decide actions (guide them, explain the meaning of what they are doing)

5. Frame interactions and costs, rewards risk (give the user an opportunity to understand the implications of his/her decisions, don’t decide for them)

6. Introduce currency for interactions (reward and incentivize people to take whatever action you want)

7. Create mechanism for discovery (collect data constantly, always be learning what your audience is doing and what it means to you)

What I learned?

Try not to tackle everything at once. Break down a big problem into many smaller problems and then look to various audiences/sources for help in solving those little problems.  (The example of Amazon Turk was used to represent this concept).  This seems to be a strategic blind spot for most people trying to communicate online — they try to create the ultimate experience, the ‘do everything’ technical solution, and inevitably they fall short somewhere.  But, if you look at the individual attributes of various platforms (Twitter, Facebook, whatever) you will see lots of little successes.

There is a spectrum of activity that any user falls on — it stretches from interacting with just content (save, annotte for self, privately star, etc) moves to “mostly content” (comment, amazon review, share to audience) “some balance of both” (twitter, forward) and on the far right you get “interact with other people (wall, fan)”

And finally, focus metrics on users - at the end of the day, it is engagement we are interested in, not just activity.  We want to know where the audience stands, how to improve, and how to contribute more.  If you keep the focus narrow and deliver on  the expectations of the user, you’ll discover your metrics in there somewhere.

Getting closer to the answer.  I think.

SXSW: The Discussion About Metrics That Never Happened

(This is cross-posted at the EchoDitto SXSW blog)

The last panel discussion of the day promised a discussion of social marketing strategy and metrics.  It featured some heavy hitters - Rohit Bhargava from Ogilvy, Brian Magierski from BSG — and others.  The moderator said the discussion would be at the ‘intermediate’ level, meaning they were going to skip past the basic stuff.  The room was packed and buzzing about the possibility of solving this vexing challenge once and for all.

Big let down.  Same old discussion.  No new ground broken.

I won’t quote from the panel, it really isn’t worth the effort.  But I will share a few quick insights that I gained while listening from the back of the room.

1) People are looking for a simple solution.  There isn’t one.  One panelist suggested the problem was that we knew there was an ROI for social media but we couldn’t demonstrate it to our boss/client.  Their solution? If someone could just create a tool, a piece of technology, that could measure all the different elements of social media conversation then we could demonstrate the value.  Um, no, that’s not the right answer.  A piece of technology will not solve this problem.  We can measure most everything that happens online.  But people haven’t spent the time to figure out what it means, how it relates to their goals and the work they are doing.

Why is that?

2) People are lazy.  The benefit of the online world is that everything (or nearly everything) is measurable.  The drawback of course, is the same thing - that everything (or nearly everything) is measurable.  And when you measure everything, reams and reams of data are produced — data about every person on the web, what they are doing, the content they are promoting, and everything else.  But nobody, it seems, reads all that data, they just look at the summaries.  Nobody it seems, is asking the tough questions about what the data says, instead of just passing along the numbers and suggesting they represent the answer.  Nobody, it seems, is wiling to take a stand on what something means, for fear that they will be wrong.

What is missing is analysis, opinion, perspective, insight.  If we are so smart about how people use technology to communicate, how people use the web, what works and what doesn’t, and we truly understand the people we are talking with online (or are even representative of those people ourselves), then we should be able to look at the numbers and understand what they mean.  We should be able to offer opinions and insights that inform real actions.

Why don’t we?

I think I do (and I demand that the people I work with do the same).  I love numbers as much as anyone.  I geek out over the crosstabs when I do polling; The summary memo isn’t nearly as interesting to me.   I wade into the comments when my client has a blog or similar and listen to what people are saying; counting how many people are commenting is not enough.

So, I challenge my fellow marketers to embrace the data and spend the time learning what it means.  I challenge my fellow marketers to provide their opinions, their informed insights drawn from years and years of experience communicating online, about what to do and how to do it.  I challenge my fellow marketers to use their brain, to trust their gut, to take a stand, and to use the process of measuring and analyzing to try something every day until we feel good about what we know.

Then we can come back and have a better discussion about this issue and what we have all learned in the process.

SXSW: What Teens Want Online & On Their Phone

(I am at the SXSW Interactive Conference in Austin, TX. I will be posting updates from here over the next few days.  I will cross post to the EchoDitto SXSW Blog as well).

The first panel of the day was ‘What Teens Want Online and On Their Phones.” It was moderated/hosted by Anastasia Goodstein, editor of YPulse (a blog that tracks teen culture), and featured seven local Austin teenagers sharing their personal reflections on technology.

The discussion started with the obvious things:

- What are your favorite sites (A: MySpace, various music sites, etc.)?
- Why do you like them (A: because I can build my own lists, I can see what’s cool)?
- Do you still use email (A: “I created my email so I could get on MySpace”)?
- What kind of cell phone do you have (A: LG, Blackberry Pearl, Sony Excursion - slide phone, Verizon LG Camera Phone)?
- What do you do with your phone (A: play Tetris and PacMan or other ‘emergency games’ if I get really bored, get ‘official SAT question of the day’, ringtones, send/receive text messages, take pictures, ‘just slide my phone - when I am bored or nervous’, listen to music)?
- Do you hang out on virtual worlds (A: Zwiki, Gaia, various MMOs, but overall not too much)

Then we got into audience questions.

Here are my observations/insights.

First of all, this was a good panel By having a group of actual users talk about what they want/expect from the internet and mobile phones, we got an honest assessment of whether the web, mobile, and other related industries actually do a good job. The consensus seems to be - sort of. There is a lot more understanding the people who create technology, and content, geared towards teens could do to attract greater interest and participation.

- Money is clearly an issue. These kids did not seem to be rich or poor, so probably pretty middle of the road in terms of the money they have (or the money their families have). With limited funds, they have to make choices. They don’t want ‘pay to play’ (with games for example). Only some of the kids have phones, and those who do have limitations on their text messaging and none use the internet (”because its too expensive”)

- Content and News. There is some tracking of news (the war in Iraq, presidential elections) but its not universal. For those who are tracking news, they aren’t using mainstream sources — instead, focusing on Digg, YouTube political news, Wikipedia, the Onion (which they know is a spoof newspaper), etc. There is a desire for opinion and perspective - just reporting what is going on, not providing anything but basic facts is considered boring, even depressing.

- Causes: While involvement in causes wasn’t high, there was definitely some awareness. One of the kids is signed up for the Human Rights Campaign Fund — she said “I’m not gay, and I’m not saying its bad — just that if you can get over people being gay, people being a different color, you can get over anything” - so HRC is an important group. One participated in the Grain of Rice game (because you hid the cause in a game), another is doing a project at school that benefits Heifer. Interestingly, none wanted to take real offline action - instead, one said that she thought her friends wanted to feel like they were having an impact without having to actually do anything (”they are looking for the easy out”).

- TV and Movies: There is plenty of TV and movie watching — those who do watch regular TV use a DVR. There is also a lot of watching online, through Veoh or directly to a something like the Disney Channel online (which hosts special episodes of Hannah Montana for example). There are a few shows that they have to watch in real-time — mostly the shows that if you miss something by not watching on time, you’ll be totally out of the discussion. One added that she ‘has to watch wrestling when it is actually on.”

- Advertising: Someone asked if the kids would participate in an anti-marketing effort, to try and keep ads away from kids. Nobody seemed all that interested. They seem resigned to the fact that advertising was a part of the online experience. More importantly, they want better advertising… stuff that relates to the content on the site. And, advertising should stay on the sites where you are trying to buy things (and not be on the entertainment sites, or the social networks - when it distracts from the experience).

- Games. They like games — play on AddictiveGames.com, NewGrounds, BlackSheep, for example, but don’t really play the advertising-driven flash games. There is some mobile game playing as well (see above). Flash (or flash games) seem to be blocked at school, so they either look for the games that aren’t blocked or they figure out how to get around it (set up proxies, etc)

- Other activities: A teen stepped up and asked everyone, including the panel, if anyone goes outside — experiences real stuff, puts their laptop down. One of the kids is on a basketball team. One has a job at Sonic (”which is a carhop, so I have to go outside.’) Another was surprised that they weren’t obese (because they love to play on the computer. In terms of making plans to go out with friends, most of it is done via text message (though they meet up in real life) and they talk to each other. Nobody uses Facebook or MySpace because its not direct or personal enough.

- Marketing: What don’t marketers get about the web? And if you could have a greater say in how marketers appear on the web, what would you want? The kids don’t seem to like advertisements, mostly because they aren’t in context, aren’t directed enough. They don’t like ‘free’ offers that require you to fill out lots of forms and such.

Good discussion, very interesting..

SRI In the Rockies: The Big Picture

I spent the weekend in Colorado Springs, CO attending SRI in the Rockies, the annual gathering of the socially responsible investment industry in the United States.  I was there to participate in a panel about online marketing and host a topic table at lunch on the same topic.  I also had an opportunity to attend some of the speeches and sessions — and learned some new things about climate change its impact on disease, micro-finance and, perhaps most interestingly, the future of the internet.

Bob Veres, an author, speaker, and one of the most influential people in the financial services industry (socially responsible or otherwise) gave a talk entitled ‘’The Next Society.’  The focus of his talk was how the world of sustainable investments has changed, and continues to evolve, and how the world is now following the lead of SRI - for the better.  He noted that a decade ago, social screens were seen as a depressant on fund performance while today, social screens are the very best way to evaluate corporate character and avoid surprises in your portfolio. 

Then he launched into a commentary on the changing nature of communications and how it relates to the tough work of changing the world.  Here are my (rough) notes:

- The media industry is in crisis.  Stories are covered and then disappear.  Stories are covered by people who don’t know much about the subject and who have a very short attention span.  The future of news will be an environment where you can access a lot more information, a lot better information, from people who know a lot more than reporters.  And it will make everything more focused, more meaningful, and more actionable.

- The web has created a hostile world for advertising.  As we move towards the web as a content delivery vehicle, corporate america will not be able to artificially create demand for their products and services.  It is harder and harder for advertisers to gain interest and traction.  That is why TV advertising is suffering and that is why the future of communications will be information/content-centric, and not marketer driven.

- We are experiencing the death of the consumer economic system.  Why?  It doesn’t relate to the issues that people actually care about most.  That has also given rise to the concept of “Life Planning.”  People are finding they don’t want more stuff.  They want more fulfillment from their lives.  How do they know? 

Ask yourself, if you had one day left to live, what would be your biggest regret?  Write down 30 goals you want to achieve this year (the first ten will be easy, the second ten more difficult, the third ten will make you did deep).  If you had all the money in the world, what would you want to do?   

- How can we change the world?  He offered two directives:

1) Operate in your zone of personal genius.  Imagine a circle, with a circle inside that, and a circle in side that.  At the center of that innermost circle is a  blue dot that represents your greatest energy, focus, and passion.  That is where we must all operate - get rid of the distractions and just work within our blue dot.

2) Hire a coach to help you get there.  They will help you put aside all of the work you do for others and help you focus on just what you need.  The coach will nag you because they will present your own goals back to you in such a compelling way that you will do for them what you can’t seem to find a way to do for yourself.

- The way we work is changing.  You are going to see most of the world’s work being done by ad hoc teams who are experts in their field and who are operating within their blue dot.  You will see corporations (who right now have office buildings filled with generalists and inefficient information flow based in hierarchy not expertise) “melt like sugar cubes in the rain.” The people who own the assets will control them - you won’t need marketers, etc.

- The internet will become the superconductor of human and financial capital.
The speech made me think.  Not sure quite yet what it all means, but rarely does a conference speech make me think like this one did, so that must mean something.

Read for the Record

Jumpstart will make history today!

[Disclosure: Jumpstart is a client and my wife is the Senior Director of Operations for Jumpstart.] 

August 24th marks Jumpstart’s Read for the Record day, where thousands of adults and kids will join together to read The Little Engine that Could, setting a world record for that activity.

The campaign is already a huge success:

- They are about to surpass sales of 50,000 books through Starbucks and have already received donations for 50,000 books to be distributed to at-risk children (via the website).

- They have over 150,000 people registered to read (in 46 states and 30 countries).

- 1,200 public events are planned nationwide to share the spirit in libraries, malls, Starbucks stores.

- The event will be featured on the Today Show, with national spokesman, Matt Lauer, reading to kids on the Plaza at Rockefeller Center.

I am in San Antonio where my wife, Karen, will be the Jumpstart representative at an event with over 600 children (and simulcast to the schools with 30,000 more children) reading The Little Engine That Could together with state representatives, local celebrities, and the Coyote mascot from the Spurs (how cool is that?).

There is still time to get involved, show your support, and be a part of this fantastic new record.  If you are interested to participate, go to the Read for the Record at www.readfortherecord.org and look up one of the many local events that have been organized near you. 

Update: The video of Karen on San Antonio Living is up online.  (If you have trouble viewing this clip, surf to www.woai.com/mediacenter, type “read for the record” in the search box and click “go.”  The top search result will be titled “More with Maclovio and the Big Read for the Record.”  Click on that).

At the Citizen Media Unconference

I am at the Citizen Media UnConference in Cambridge, MA today.

What does the unconference mean?
We are the panel.  The thought is that the collective intelligence in the room far exceeds what anyone could put onto a panel.  The opportunity is to learn what the audience knows and give us an opportunity to interact with each other.

That said, the agenda (full of moderators) is as follows:

• Lisa Williams, who runs H20Town, a local blog covering Watertown, MA, will organize a conversation about local sites and how they work best.
• Andrew Lih, a major Wikipedian and former Columbia and Honk Kong University new media professor, will organize a conversation about what would be the ideal toolset for citizen journalism and what is missing.
• Steve Garfield, a top videoblogger, on using multimedia tools for better citizen journalism. Here’s his summary of what he plans to cover.
• Tom Stites, whose recent speech on media and democracy has raised such interest, on how (and if) citizen journalists can fill the enormous gaps being left by traditional media organizations.
• Phil Malone, co-director of the Clinical Program in Cyberlaw at Harvard Law School, will lead a conversation about citizen journalists and the law, including seeking to better understand areas in which the activities of citizen journalists are being chilled by legal concerns and ways in which they could benefit most from help in avoiding legal trouble.  

And rounding things out…

• Ethan Zuckerman, co-founder of Global Voices Online, which helps “amplify, curate and aggregate the global conversation online.” Ethan will lead a discussion on how citizen media people can make themselves heard amid all the online noise. AbovetheNoise session description…

In betweeen we’ll have some brainstorming sessions, a ‘role model’ lightning round, etc.

I will post my notes as often as possible.  Doc Searls is live-blogging the event if you want to follow along.
 

Take Back The Capitol

Sim Sadler, a filmmaker, video artist and editor, has launched Take Back The Capitol, an open-source political and video clip contest.  The goal is to support the Democrats’ efforts to win back control of Congress from the Republicans.

Its pretty simple:

• Anyone can submit a short video clip (a sound bite, a slogan, a gesture, a dance step, etc.) in response to the question “Why must we overturn Republican control of Congress?”.
• The 3 best clips will receive cash prizes of $500, $250, and $100 as chosen by a panel of judges (to be determined). All other clips used in the final video will receive an honorarium of $20. Prizes will be awarded by October 15, 2006.
• Upload your video clips to YouTube, join the TBTC YouTube group, and add your video to the group.
• There are also some guidelines you must follow, but nothing unreasonable - check the site for details.

This is a great use of video sharing tools on the internet — sort of a v2.0 of Bushin30Seconds, the MoveOn sponsored anti-Bush ad contest from the 2004 election cycle.  More importantly, it will give political organizations a better understanding of how to use social media tools to talk about serious issues, something we can all use some additional insights on.

[Via The Hotline On Call]

Notes from New Orleans (Part 2)

As you know, I spoke last week at the PRDMC conference in New Orleans.  I was on a panel with Deb Ashmore from WXPN in Philadelphia about how to leverage RSS, podcasting, mobile, and other new media tools to raise funds and generate revenue for public radio stations.  Over the next few days I will share some thoughts on the conference.  Here are some general ones to start things off:

- The conference brought together nearly 700 public radio marketers and development professionals together for four days of trainings and planning sessions.  Make no mistake about it, the people who attended this conference are responsible for keeping public radio on the air.  The credit often goes to the talent — the voices behind the microphones and the reporters covering stories in the field – but public radio is listener and sponsor supported and all those dollars come in because these folks get up and go to work every morning.  Public radio deserves our support and the passion and dedication that the people I met at this conference display for their work, and public media in general, is evidence enough of that.

- I expected the level of knowledge and comfort with new media to be very limited at this conference.  I was dead wrong.  The public radio folks are no slouches when it comes to the understanding how and why to use the internet, and related technologies - especially for fundraising.  The challenge for these stations is that they simply don’t have large budgets to experiment with.  There is so much potential to grow their listener base, build community and even expand their programming online — they know it, they want to do it, but they are limited by dollars. 

- I met dozens of people from stations all over the country, including representatives from the stations I have grown up listening to and supporting — WBUR and WGBH in Boston (where I live now), KPLU in Seattle (where I grew up and learned to love public radio), Michigan Radio in Ann Arbor (where I went to college - Go Blue!) and Minnesota Public Radio – and every single one of them had done innovative things online.  KPLU piloted a section on their web devoted to home renovation and got a local sponsor to not only provide financial support, but content as well.  Minnesota Public Radio has launched a series of online discussions using Gather.com, a relatively new social networking platform (with its roots in Cambridge, MA).  No joke, I have been trying to convince many members of the conventional media, entertainment, sports, and public affairs worlds to pursue these kinds of projects, to put their available dollars (which in most cases far exceed what the public radio community is able to invest), and it has been an uphill battle.

I came away from this conference energized by the people I met and things I learned.  I am excited to help stations push new opportunities online, and to help leverage new media to raise money and generate revenue to support public media.  I hope they will call on me, give me a chance.

More thoughts later…

Notes from New Orleans

I spoke last week at the Public Radio Develment and Marketing Conference in New Orleans.  With nearly 700 development professionals and station managers, it is considered the “premiere educational event for fundraisers within public broadcasting.”

First, a thank you to Betsy Harmon, a consultant and advisor to DEI (the conference organizers) for online fundraising and e-mail marketing, who organized the panel and invited me to join.  Second, a thank you and an apology to my co-panelist was Deb Ashmore, the Director of Individual Giving, WXPN in Philadelphia.  XPN is a pretty innovative station when it comes to the use of the web and Deb had a lot of good information to share.  I went first in our presentation and most of the questions from the audience that followed focused on elements that I had raised (I think, because a lot of what I talked about was new, and probably outside the comfort zone of the audience).  We had planned for the session to generate a brainstorm for how to use new tools to raise money, and instead we spent much of our time explaining and advocating.  I am hoping this is just the first of many panels where Deb, Betsy and I can collaborate - there was such a tremendous amount of energy in the room about the use of new media that I know there is a lot of interest in finding ways to get hands on with this stuff.

Here is a copy of the powerpoint from my PRDMC Presentation.  I will offer some observations in another post.