The Network 2008: “There IS Nothing So Powerful As An Idea Whose Time Has Come”
We are in the final countdown in the campaign that has eaten us whole over the past two years and it seems a foregone conclusion that Barack Obama will be our next President.
To some, this is a deferred dream, finally fulfilled; to others it is a nightmare of constitutional proportions. If nothing else, Mr. Cool evokes passion in his supporters as well as his detractors while McRage, the candidate formerly known “as a man of character and experience“, evokes passion in his detractors and something more like frustration in his begrudging supporters.
So, how did we get here? To quote Henry Jenkins “Obama has constructed not so much a campaign as a movement.” To quote me, McCain didn’t really even construct much of a campaign. He even let what at the time seemed to be a stroke of genius, his choice of Sarah Palin as VP be re-framed as a kind of csenior moment. Nothing was more illustrative of this than last nights SNL.
And a slight digression since I mentioned Governor Palin….and the is she “ready” to be President question? Perhaps we would all be better off if there was a job description for both the Presidency and the Vice Presidency…with a paragraph called “job requirements”. Maybe there should even be a qualifying exam. Some psychological testing? I mean after all, these are jobs and “we the people” are doing the hiring.
In my opinion, George H.W. Bush was the last VP that I can recall who had the resume for the top job….businessman, Congressman, head of the CIA, Ambassador to the UN. He should have been a distinguished president but I am hard pressed to recall much about his single term that would qualify.
OK, with a tip of the hat to Victor Hugo, let’s return to the thought that there IS nothing so powerful as an idea whose time has come…..because I think that statement defines this election. No, not to worry my friends…I am not talking about the campaign itself, I am talking about the construction of the campaign.
Back in the dawn of this campaign, I wrote a blog post titled, “President John McCain Delivers the State of the Blogosphere.” Yeah John Edwards. When I am wrong, I am wrong. Well, wrong guy. Barack Obama has driven the use of the social web all he way to the White House (I will issue a retraction tomorrow if the outcome is different).
We will be told by the pundits and likely come to believe that Barack Obama’s message of change is what propelled him to victory. Just like conventional wisdom says that JFK’s message propelled him to victory rather than Cook County, Illinois. But it is the medium that delivered the message that made the real difference in Obama’s message of change versus Hilary Clinton’s or John McCain’s. And that is not meant to detract from Obama’s achievement rather it is said in admiration of the fact that he put it ALL together and did something that few believed could happen when he began.
Joe Trippi saw the power of the networks when he managed Howard Dean’s campaign in 2004 however Dean self destructed and social networks was just an idea without an infrastructure, not an idea whose time had come. Actually, thanks in large part to the Dean campaign, it was the year 2004 when Merriam Webster named “blog” the word of the year…how quaint. Obama as my kids would say, dominates social….Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and YouTube.
David Talbot writing in the MIT Technology Review on the topic of Obama’s social networking strategy quotes Trippi paraphrasing James Carville, “This year it was the Network stupid.”
As Talbot explains, Throughout the political season, the Obama campaign has dominated new media, capitalizing on a confluence of trends. Americans are more able to access media-rich content online; 55 percent have broadband Internet connections at home, double the figure for spring 2004. Social-networking technologies have matured, and more Americans are comfortable with them. Although the 2004 Dean campaign broke ground with its online meeting technologies and blogging, “people didn’t quite have the facility,” says Lawrence Lessig, a Stanford law professor who has given the Obama campaign Internet policy advice, “The world has now caught up with the technology.” The Obama campaign, he adds, recognized this early: “The key networking advance in the Obama field operation was really deploying community-building tools in a smart way from the very beginning.”
And not only did he use the network….he “got” the essence of the network: The people formerly known as the audience. The candidate formerly known as a community organizer understood a few things about community organizing. As we in social media know, community is not online versus offline. And the flow is not top down. Everyone is a publisher and as Obama knows, participation is powerful….the enlisted five thousand $5 donors, versus the one $5000 donor.
Both The Machinery of Hope in Rolling Stone and The MIT article referenced above provide great details of the power of an idea whose time has come. And see Social Media Lessons from the 2008 election.
This Truth Is Not Inconvenient: Girlfriend, Use Your Purse, Your Peers, & Your Posts To Co-create A Happier Sustainable, World
Mary Hunt, author of In Women We Trust and Ecolutionary Selling and blogger at In Women We Trust and Smart Solutions for Sustainable Business has written the definitive piece on how we can really (REALLY) change the world just by directing the power women already have towards a “happier, sustainable world.”
#1 “the majority of the US Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is made up of consumer goods and over 80% of them are purchased or influenced by women.”
#2 Women form groups; group of influencers: Big Green Purse author Diane MacEachern launched a one million women site.
EcoMom Alliance is organizing and educating the 82 million mothers in the US into a change agents.
The EcoMom Challenge: “making small changes in the way we shop, eat, drive and even clean, we can help stop global warming. ”
#3 Women are online, voicing their opinions, positive and negatice, on blogs, social network and online groups all over the web. In fact, according to a recent Pew Internet & American Life Survey on Content Creation, girls and young women are the most prolific online content creators.
So make your way over to In Women We Trust and see what Mary has to say about Changing Products, Changing Services and Changing the World and download Purse, Peers, Posts and the Power to Move Markets purses_peers_posts_and_the_power_to_move_green_markets_32508.pdf and send it to your girlfriends!
And catch Mary at Blogher Business in NYC next week along with other awesome women to trust, Toby Bloomberg, Yvonne DiVita, Susan Getgood, Connie Reece and many others.
Forrester Consumer Forum, The Transformation Was Live
This year’s Forrester Consumer Forum personified at least part of the conference theme, Transformed by Social Technologies. Indeed the transformation was everywhere.
I say this based upon both the Forrester analysts, invited speakers and panelists who provided enough rock solid data, how-to’s, best practices, advice and experience to forever kill that sacred cow….
but also because of the Creators who not only live blogged, but Twittered, streamed, and drove the Groundswell into living rooms and offices around the Globe. This is the future in real time, this is permanent Beta.
Think that the Critical Mass Beta Cam was cool enough where it was?
It was, until David Armano pushed the innovation curve a little further and took it live live. Mo’ live?
photo Deb Schultz
What’s live live?
As Henry Jenkins noted, “in a world of media convergence, every story gets told’….and in a culture of participation, not everyone is at the top of the ladder. 
At this conference though, the creators never stopped…..
If you are a marketer and understand that the world has been transformed by social technologies and are not participating, start your climb up the ladder….you can’t win, if you don’t climb.
More posts forthcoming….
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