Cool….one of my Facebook friends is now President-elect of the United States
Kelli asked whether or not President elect Barack Obama will keep his Facebook page or provide updates on Twitter. Farhad Manjoo at Slate asks what will become of candidate Barack Obama’s social networking sites now that he is President-elect Obama.
I think it is not hyperbole to say that one change you can believe in will be that the 44th President of the United States use of the social web will forever change the relationship between the American people and our government.
Obama was elected on November 4th. On November 6th, Change.gov from the Office of the President Elect was live. Less than 2 days. And by the way, has any other President-elect so effectively used the words and the visuals of the office of the President elect to communicate leadership? Not that I recall.
Oh sure change.gov is an ordinary government web site in many ways. As noted by ArsTechnica you can read bios of the transition team and updates on cabinet positions. But there is a link to a blog and the post for November 11th has a Flickr slideshow.
There is a request to submit “your story”
and the About page ends with an invitation to “Come back often as we define new programs and possibilities to engage and be part of this administration.” Yes, “be a part of this administration.”
And the first link right under “be part of” is a contact form for the transition team. So, you really want to be a part of the transition team. Maybe you think you would like a little seat on the President-elect’s cabinet.
There are lots of jobs open through out the new administration apparently but remember, if you have an illegal nanny or smoked pot in college, “Some positions will require Senate confirmation….financial disclosure….and may include FBI background checks.
Besides “your story” you can share “your vision” Well you can share you story and you can share your vision with the President-elects transition team. But you can’t share your opinions with your fellow Americans, at least on this site. There is not a place for Comments on the blog. At least not right now. Notwithstanding, the lines of communication are open and it will be virtually impossible for future Presidents to shut them down or to just push out information via newsletters.
Yes, the site has more social “like” than social at this point….response is sought to specific issues and questions rather than open comments. “Share your story” feels social and in fact allows you to tell whatever story you want to…same with vision. Obama’s last tweet was November 5th. But then again, this is a transition period.
Perhaps the most important dynamic that could potentially be changed by social media would be diminishing the influence of lobbyists and special interests over time.. although I will emphasize the words “potential” and “over time.” It would be difficult to disregard the will of the people in favor of the desire of the powerful if the people pick up the available social media tools and start wielding them.
According to Farhad Manjoo of Slate there are “there are online petitions and Facebook groups calling on him {Barack Obama} to skip over Larry Summers and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for Cabinet positions.”
I also believe that if the American people communicate their “stories” to the president and to their fellow Americans…whether it is on the President’s site or on their own blogs or social network it will go a long way in keeping President Obama in touch with the way that what happens on Wall Street and/or in the Beltway really plays out, day to day, on Main Street.
When I graduated from college, I spent a summer working as a caseworker for the Missouri Department of Social Services as a re-investigation caseworker. Our jobs were to make sure that the mothers receiving what was then called Aid For Dependent Children (AFDC) and is now called Temporary Assistance For Needy Families (TANF) were abiding by the “guidlines” in order to continue receiving aid. Well. when I was brand new on this job, I took the “guidelines” to heart and during an investigation I “discovered” that one of my clients who had several very young children, was receiving benefits from another agency which disqualified her to continue receiving her AFDC stipend so I cancelled her benefit without giving it much of a second thought.
A few days later I received a phone call from a community agency that forever changed the way that I looked at my job or the welfare system in general….the voice on the phone confirmed my name and that I was the caseworker for Miss X. I confirmed it and then the person said well, she is here with her two babies and you cut off her support and she doesn’t have any food or milk to feed these babies. They are hungry, so we are feeding them…but you need to get them back in the program so Miss X can feed her babies.
Well I hadn’t been thinking about those babies…I had been thinking about the “law” which had been set by someone who had never been hungry and had never come face to face with any of the hungry babies when they passed the law.
So my point is? We the people are on the front lines of high gas prices, unaffordable health insurance, layoffs, usurious credit card interest rate practices, and home foreclosures. These are the stories that our elected officials need to stay in touch with…..and this day to day of life is the side of politics that we should blog about and we need to use those contact forms the same way the mortgage bankers, credit card issuers, insurance companies do their telephones and checkbooks: to influence legislation and votes. Now that’s social media.
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.
State of the Blogosphere ‘08 Released: Who Cares? {About the Report}
You know you have been blogging for a long time if you can remember when Technorati’s State of the Blogosphere meant something and influential bloggers announced its release and listed the results with few questions asked.
A new State of the Blogosphere was released today and things are a little different in the land of Technorati….missing is Dave Sifry, although he did write about the report. Also missing is matter….as in, does it matter?
Technorati is just not reliable enough to be relevant. Tish Grier expounded on this back in July. Mack Collier switched to Feesburner to tally his weekly Top 25 Marketing Blogs. In years past, Techmeme would feature the story and dozens upon dozens of bloggers would be listed as past of the discussions and/or related.
This year, Techmeme has aggregated 5 posts about the report and Marshall Kirkpatrick, who states that the report is a great service and that he appreciates the data, also questions the Technorati conclusion that blogging is “mainstream.” Both Marshall and Mark Hopkins writing at Mashable! use the word “interesting” to describe the data. Interesting.
Duncan Riley, also using the word “interesting” espouses the opinion that Technorati is actually more reliable today than it has been for awhile. Now that I find interesting!
Duncan makes another interesting point, an important point that is a huge flaw in the Technorati data now and in the past; blogging in the classic sense may have “slowed”….He calls it “stand alone” blogging; but participation on social media has not slowed. Technorati does not track social network content sharing…they don’t even track social network blogs.
Technorati says there are 133 blogs. There are approximately the same number of people who visit MySpace or Facebook every day.and share content…..and some of them write a blog, on MySpace, a MySpace blog. Do they know they are not part of the blogosphere? As tracked by Technorati.
There are an additional myriad of niched social networks from Dogster to Saavy Auntie. some with blogs some without but all social. To not track these people in a so called “state of the blogosphere” simply does not track.
Micro-blogging such as Twitter is also not tracked by Technorati. I would float the theory that for those of us who blog and Twitter, the more we Twitter, the less we blog but yet we still “identify” as bloggers. Further, I would say that starting a blog right now almost requires Twitter, if not also a presence on several social networking sites.
So, yes it is interesting to know some stats about blogging in 2008. Stats, not state.
OK, the “State” was always lots of hype and the “number of new blogs” stat never quite made sense; but now more even than in prior years, there just isn’t enough there there to make it important. Interesting maybe….
And I don’t even have to write about method and accuracy of links and pings to know that even if they were completely accurate, that data only about blogs is infinitely limited.
Must Read: Groundswell (Con’t)
So, back to Groundswell and the reasons why I said, “must read.”
Groundswell is well researched (Forrester research data from around the world, 65 corporate examples and 25 full case studies), written by two great, knowledgeable writers and fellow particpants, Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff, and is exceptionally readable at the same time.
Readability in a business book is of course a relative measure, but for me it relevance and time=value.
“Has value” means it is relevant to my work in real time (applicable right now, today; not 15 minutes ago) and therefore is a good (another relative measure and highly contextual) use of my time because yes, I have time deficit disorder that seems to never disappear regardless of which Circa or Hipster PDA strategy I deploy.
This translates into usefulness: I can use the information to support a recommendation to a client, add to a presentation, and/or as a catalyst for an idea or concept. Maybe even to write a blog post.
At the moment, I am writing a proposal for a client and using the social technographics ladder to support a recommended target for a program and to demonstrate how users will become involved and participate. Charlene and Josh have made this tool available on line.
I am also using their POST method as a framework for the strategy I am recommending. I find that for whatever reason, marketers seem to think that social media doesn’t need a strategy or a well defined target and is driven by technology. POST which stands for People, Objectives, Strategy, and Technology…in that order, please, really puts this perspective.
I have a client company whose marketing folks have been setting up Facebook pages. So, of course there is no cost other than their time for doing this. It seems to make them feel like social media participants. We are on Facebook, they say. They friend each other and their agencies and consultants. Add several wall posts and away they go. But where are they going?
And then of course there is ROI. Yes, Virginia, there is an ROI for social media. Remember the objectives and strategy? A recruiting blog? How many applications did you get? A private community? What was the value for that new product idea? Start there. Add out of pocket costs (platform, creative, moderation etc).
Speaking of ROI, buy the Groundswell. Buy a copy for your clients. Buy a copy for your prospects. It will provide many returns.
The Helicopter Circles Facebook and the Landing Isn’t Pretty
ABC News reported yesterday that an increasing number of {helicopter} parents were contacting college officials to request roommate changes for their freshman children because they found the prospective roommate’s Facebook profile objectionable.
And what exactly do they find objectionable?
According to the article “party related content and photos” concerns parents at The College of New Jersey while parents at Syracuse University apparently are more concerned with race, religion and sexual orientation; the parents at Suffolk University ranked “sexual orientation” as a top concern.
Facebook began allowing high school students in to the previously college students only social network in September of 2005. By the onset of the next school year, the New York Times reported a new phenomena at various colleges and universities….parents checking out Facebook to see “who” their child’s college roommate was as expressed by their Facebook profile. Ah, but it didn’t start and stop with mere curiosity.
It also didn’t start or stop with concerns that a Facebook party animal would make an inappropriate roommate…. “race, religion, and sexual orientation are the top three concerns?”
Parents, into your helicopters; man your stations. Call the school! Our child can’t have a roommate that is ummmm, well, different from us.
What’s up with that?
Should we Blame Mr. Rogers?
According to Jeffrey Zaslow of the Wall Street Journal, Mr. Rogers’ message that children were special just for being whoever they were, is to blame for the sense of entitlement he believes young people seem to have. He quotes a finance professor, Don Chance, at Louisiana State University, who decided that Mr. Rogers was responsible for the students who came to his office feeling entitled to a better grade, “He {Mr. Rogers} is representative of a culture of excessive doting.”
OK, maybe that explains the parental interference, but Mr. Rogers welcomed everyone to his neighborhood.
Research on Millennials (born 1977-1998) indicates that these kids are closer to their parents than any previous generation.Their parents hovered early and hovered often and there has always been constant connection via mobiles and email. OK, let’s blame technology.
An article in Duke Magazine titled Helicopter Parents, indicated that according to a survey by the College Parents of America, 74% of parents talked to their kids 2-3 times a week and one third talked to their kids once a day; 90% used cell phones and 58% used email. From being buckled into car seats and bike helmets, to scheduled play dates, the Millenials have been constantly supervised and instead of feeling smothered, they apparently report that they feel very close to their parents.
In fact, these helicopter parents are landing everywhere…colleges, grad schools and work. The Wall Street Journal reported in March 2006 that the same parents who “mowed down the guidance and admissions offices” are increasingly seeking to intercede on their children’s behalves in the workplace….calling to negotiate pay and inquire about the working environment.
Anastasia Goodstein, writing in the Huffington Post about parents monitoring college roommates on Facebook calls it, Helicopter Parents Gone Wild. Indeed.
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