Great, no pressure

So I'm giving a talk next month in Kentucky.  Nothing too out of the ordinary there, right? Lots of PR folks give lots of presentations in lots of places.

Except this talk is called "What Women Want" and I'm supposed to go on local radio next week to talk about it. So I'm doing exhaustive research on the topic, using the most sophisticated tools and approaching the most credible sources.  Here's a glimpse of the sheer genius I've unearthed:

Make sure you tune in to the live online stream on May 3 at 1pm...  And may @almightygod have mercy on my soul. 

Rewiring the World

This TED talk by Ethan Zuckerman is worth watching.



From his talk:

We look at the internet, we think we’re getting this wide view of the globe, we occasionally stumble on to a page in Chinese and we decide we do in fact have the greatest technology ever built to connect us to the rest of the world, and we forget that most of the time we’re checking Boston Red Sox scores.
So this a real problem – not just because the Red Sox are having a bad year – but it’s a real problem because as we’re discussing here at TED, the real problems in the world, the interesting problems to solve are global in scale and scope, they require global conversations to get to global solutions this is a problem we have to solve.

I appreciate the Sox references - pretty sure he calls Massachusetts home, at least some of the time - but the great thing about this talk is he discusses what he's doing to fix it and he asks for help.

Open for Questions... Who's Asking?

I've noticed that scientists are dusting off some decent ideas to gain greater acceptance among the general public - there's a flurry of "ask me" going on.  First, a UK-based group of paleontologists and biologists has relaunched Ask a Scientist, where anyone can submit a question about science, and someone from their rather impressive list of scientists tries to answer it.  In principle, this is an outstanding idea.  Arizona State University has a similar program, designed mainly for kids. Nice, engaging website.

The White House has launched "Ask the President's Science Advisor" that follows roughly the same concept - email a question to OSTP Director John Holdren and, starting tomorrow, he will respond each Friday to one of the questions he gets by writing a brief blog post about it.  It seems to be more casual than technical:

So now is your chance to ask America’s scientist-in-chief for his personal take on anything with an arguably scientific or technological bent: why some wines tickle his fancy more than others (and what are the chemicals that explain those preferences) or what subjects in school left him cold? How about whether he prefers academia or government, or which installment of Star Wars or episode of Star Trek says the most about modern scientific society. We want you to have fun with this and, frankly, ask some of the tough questions about Dr. Holdren that the staff here at OSTP would like to know the answers to but, well, hasn't quite gotten around to asking.

To be honest I think this is important, but I'd rather have the President's science advisor focusing less on telling me what wines he likes or his favorite Star Trek episode and more on, you know, advising the President on science issues.  Still, there is a place for advocating the importance and relevance of science, and I'm pleased that there's at least some attempt by the White House to give it some priority.

Bora Zivkovic wrote about the relaunch of Seed Media's "Ask a Scienceblogger," which also is impressive in principle. Real scientists who like to write, answering real questions from real people.

This is a very important first step.  There's a very important next step, however, and it goes back to what I said about science having a PR problem: 

Science has a serious PR problem, and it's this: Critics of science are searching people out and talking with them in the simplest terms possible. Scientists and "science writers," if they talk at all, are basically talking with each other.

So I asked Bora - a very smart and very thoughtful guy who definitely gets this - a question in the comments:

Bora, how are people who don't necessarily read scienceblogs learning about this? It sounds very VERY cool, but if I don't know about scienceblogs already, how do I know I even have the opportunity to ask?

 And Bora - again, because he really gets this - responded:

Well, this is an internal Scienceblogs.com thing, revived again after about a year or so of silence. It is targeted at regular Sb readers, but there is always hope that our links on social networks and feeds will bring in new readers as well. There is no special effort with this to bring in new readers - it is up to us bloggers to promote within and outside the network as we see fit.

So Bora is definitely out there, actively promoting this effort on his blog and through his social networks - of scientists. But how does one promote outside one's network?  If it's just for existing readers, don't they already know they can ask questions in the comments?  I know I have.  I don't want to sound like I'm dissing this idea - I think it's actually quite awesome.  I'm just saying it's important to let everyone know what you're doing.  And by everyone, I mean EVERYONE.

The people who read the Office of Science and Technology Policy blog are people who probably already know a lot about science and technology policy.  The people who read Scienceblogs - according to their own market research - are far more likely to have graduate degrees in science than the general public.   Where did I learn about Ask A Biologist?  On Scienceblogs.

The science writing community is chock full of talented people who know how to make science engaging, interesting, cool, even relatively simple for the lay audience.  But they're still preaching to the converted - they're really only speaking to people who already have an interest.  Science needs better PR - it needs people who have the ability to find bridge figures to introduce scientists to new communities and find new points of relevance.  It needs people who can identify opportunities to introduce important scientific ideas into ongoing discussions.  It needs people to connect the dots.

I want to be one of those people.

Saving Journalism Through Business Incubation

President Obama has been thinking about the fate of journalism lately:

"Journalistic integrity, you know, fact-based reporting, serious investigative reporting, how to retain those ethics in all these different new media and how to make sure that it's paid for, is really a challenge," Mr. Obama said. "But it's something that I think is absolutely critical to the health of our democracy."

I've said it before - the traditional news business is working its way through the Kubler-Ross five stages of grief. It's dying, and nobody has figured out a way to make it profitable in the digital media age - at least not yet.

We can't expect every media outlet to go non-profit, and we shouldn't expect journalists to work for free. What we need is something that will give entrepreneurs in technology and journalism some initial support to allow their ideas to get off the ground - help them reach some semblance of sustainability so we can really see if new business models and technologies can work.

That's called a business incubator.

The ethical code professional journalists strive to maintain and use to define themselves really hasn't changed. However, we all know the conditions under which journalists work and compete has shifted dramatically. It's more local and more global at the same time. It's much more reliant on the Internet and multimedia. It's more user-driven than ever. And it increasingly competes with people who may not even be aware of that ethical code but still have news to share, and can do so at little or no cost.

A global, virtual business incubator for the journalism industry can help entrepreneurs with things like bandwidth, server space, and equipment. It can provide some IT expertise to help people translate their ideas into computer code. It can provide business expertise to help people who write a great story but don't speak spreadsheet. It can connect entrepreneurial journalists and editors with other reporters worldwide. And finally, it can help these nascent firms "graduate" to the point where they're ready to redefine the industry and deliver a quality product at a fair price.

An incubator with a strong affiliation with a college or university - perhaps schools of business, computer science, and journalism - can provide these businesses with a wealth of information and perspectives to get the product AND the process right. When I worked for Senator Kennedy I helped him write the LEADERS Act, which provided federal resources for business incubators with strong academic affiliations. The bill had bipartisan support and was endorsed by the National Business Incubation Association, but never made it through the Senate. It's been reintroduced several times by Congressman John Tierney in the House. (There's a great business incubator at Salem State College in his district.)

This idea is a bit different than the legislation, but the economic benefits of incubation are not disputed. The contributions academia can provide are limitless. And the changing nature of the industry demands conditions to let new models develop.

I've been kicking this idea around for some time with a few very good friends. I've thought of a few others I want to invite to this discussion. I'm sharing these thoughts now because I'd love to see this go "open source" and see who's interested in playing along. There's no way I or a small group of folks will crack this nut. But we can help create the conditions necessary to help entrepreneurial journalists share new ideas, grow their businesses, and thrive.

Seriously, this can be done.

"I don't want the computer to be part of the performance. It's just a pencil."

The same goes for what I do with my colleagues. One of the reasons I think Zoe Keating is so interesting.

The Perils Of Nomenclature

My wife is a social science researcher, and a damn good one. As I've listened to her talk about her work from time to time, I've learned a little bit about quantitative versus qualitative research. She is a stickler for rigorous methodology - she takes the time to learn things like "structural equation modeling" and "growth curve modeling" and she pays close attention to the methodology sections of the gazillions of journal articles that cross her desk, and she makes it a priority in her own work. However, it's unfair to describe my wife as a "number cruncher." I've learned from her that qualitative research - the kind of research that can't always be summed up in a formula output - is also incredibly valuable.

So it's interesting to watch social scientists build the research base for the "nascent" field of online social media, and to watch companies develop tools and systems that try to peg a value to online communication. It's really a relentless and sometimes reckless exercise in nomenclature, and it almost completely ignores qualitative research.

The smart folks at Forrester wrote a book called Groundswell (and there's a blog with the same name) that had a lot of interesting and valuable information about social media, especially as it pertains to marketing. The one thing that most people repeat about it, however, is the authors' attempts to classify people in to six categories of "audience engagement," with category names such as "spectators" and "critics." I'm pretty sure the authors stress that a person can be in one category for one topic (or product) and another category for something else, but that's a level of nuance that seems to be lost on too many of my flackitudinous brethren and sistren. (Yes, I know I'm making words up here. Just roll with it.)

Then of course I've seen countless posts from smart people trying to "define" and classify social media from their own commercial perspectives - is it marketing or public relations? Is there a "right" way or a "wrong" way to use certain tools? I've seen heated arguments that really boil down to nothing more than nomenclature - if you don't do a certain thing, you don't fit my definition, and therefore you're not... something. And these are reasonably smart people doing this. Maybe I just don't get it.

I've also seen a blog called shouting loudly from another group of smart people and one particular post caught my eye - "A Few Things Political Scientists Need To Stop Getting Wrong About The Blogosphere." In it, one smart academic type essentially disagrees with another smart academic type about a calculation of authority. Go read it yourself. The post author, David Karpf, has even gone so far as to create a "Blogosphere Authority Index" for political blogs that strikes me as somewhat similar to the Todd Andrlik's "Power 150" algorithm for marketing blogs.

These are some of the tools that PR flacks use to determine what a "top" blog is. But they're using only quantitative tools, and questionable ones at that. I could jack up my blog's "technorati authority" simply by creating a bunch of single-post blogs that link to it. I could get into a flame war with a reader and write 500 comments on one post, but it would only be two people virtually shouting at each other. Just about every measure used in calculations like these can be (and often are) manipulated.

There are people on Karpf's BAI that I'd consider enormously influential in politics, and then there are people on that same list with virtually no real influence at all. It doesn't matter how many posts they write or how many comments or links they get. If you REALLY know the political blogosphere, you know that bloggers get inbound links all the time from other bloggers MOCKING them. The political blogosphere is a nasty place, with plenty of arguments via comments and trackback links - but while these online arguments will inflate a blog's technical measures of "authority," they certainly don't equate to political influence. Verbosity is not a true indicator of political influence, at least in my opinon.

Sometimes I look at the Power 150 - apparently so awesome that AdAge decided to buy it - and I scratch my head. Again, there are some people on that list with enormous credibility and influence, and then there are people high on that list who are almost universally recognized as being unable to strategize their way out of a paper bag. Putting a hashtag at the end of your tweet doesn't make you smart if the tweet says "still stuck in this damn paper bag." And I don't care how often you use the word "Facebook" in public - being a panelist or a keynote speaker at big conferences usually just means your firm ponied up a lot of money.

You want to know influence? Don't just look at the blog, look at the blogger. Does he or she work in the industry they write about? How educated are they? Do they discuss their projects and the concepts they're grappling with? Do they publish in other platforms? Are they raising money for candidates or making more money than their competitors? And is what they're writing actually smart, or is it just a bunch of metaphors describing the trendy new social media platform? Are they appearing at conferences that AREN'T just social media marketing gigs? I'm not convinced you can combine this all into a number, though I'm sure someone will try. I think it's better to write a profile of someone than assign a technorati rank to them.

It's never been that hard to determine who's smart and who's not.

Knowing Where To Look - And Who To Know

I've been having a series of discussions with colleagues and others about getting the most accurate and complete assessment of an issues-based online conversation. This isn't the same thing as a keyword search for a product name or a company name, and it isn't the same as categorizing blog posts as "positive," "negative" or "neutral." It's about revealing the layers of nuance in a multi-faceted issue that can't break along the lines of "for" or "against."

Let's say you're a company executive with an interest in what the federal government may change in the regulation of health care. No one opposes "reform," but everyone has a different idea of what "reform" means. For example, there are those who oppose a "public option" in the health care debate but don't use those words. Most of those who support a "public option" don't agree on the details. For doctors, the idea of reform centers around how and what a "payer" (i.e., an insurance company or the government) compensates a doctor for particular services. For consumers, the concept of "reimbursement" is essentially absent from the discussion - it centers on how much you pay an insurance company and what you have to pay for after that.

Go to Google and type in "health care reform" and you get 19,600,000 results, plus a list of sponsored links that provide language that has probably been so focus-grouped that all the meaning has been filtered out of it. Further, the "top results" provide a lot of positional rhetoric but not a lot of analysis or projection.

Go to uber-human-search engine Mahalo and type in "health care reform" and Mahalo asks you a question - "Is 'health care reform' a person, place, thing, event, how to, or other?" Of course, you could argue that "health care reform" is "other," but how helpful is that? And by the way, who likes having their question answered with a question?

Now realize that the people actually making the decisions about America's health care system have never seen about 19,599,800 of the 19,600,000 of the search results you found at Google. Further, references to the most important discussions these people have had about health care - if you can find them on the Internet at all - are very likely buried between search results 15 and 16 million. They're not in the newspaper, they're not on tv or radio.

The most critical discussions are taking place in closed rooms among participants who don't want to be watched. I don't mean that in the conspiracy-theory, crypto-clearance, oh-my-God-they're-plotting-to-take-over-your-body way. I mean that many of the sensitive and complicated discussions about health care (and many other issues) require a quiet and deliberative environment.

There's a difference between "quiet" and "secret," however. These are not secret discussions; in fact, most of the details are available to anyone who wants to know them. It's just that there aren't many people with the education, experience and patience to pay attention to them - or even realize that's what they're looking at. There's an even smaller subset of people in that group who know how to translate health-policy-speak into plain English. And an even smaller subset of those who operate online.

If we apply the measures most commonly used in the social media world, most of these people aren't "influential" at all - if they write a blog or appear online, not many people read it or link to it. They write pieces that aren't optimized for search engines. Many barely show up on the radar. But they wield enormous influence in the areas that truly matter. They walk in the same circles as those who make the decisions that affect everyone. Sometimes they ARE the people who make the decisions.

So to me, this is where social media search must evolve. We need to move from keywords and hashtags to PEOPLE. Google and Technorati and all the shiny "dashboard" tools PR firms build that just look at Google and Technorati only take you so far. I need to do the simple keyword search, sure. But if I want the real picture, I have to find the people who really know, who have really read up on this, who influence the process and the outcome of a given issue. I have to know them ahead of time.

It's very difficult to automate that. It's easier to find people who truly know where to look.

Adding My Voice

It's no secret that I've been singing the praises of Global Voices Online and its advocacy arm for some time now. So when I saw this - even though it's a contest run by organization that's working closely with a competitor - I thought it was important to add my voice to a global chorus in support of Global Voices Advocacy.

Zemanta has a new add-on tool for blogs, and they're trying to promote blogging for a cause. The cause that gets the most blog posts will win $3,000.

I vote for Global Voices Advocacy, because they represent the future of activism and communication in a newly-wired developing world.

There are dozens of great causes participating in this contest, and each deserves support. For at least part of my career I spent time focusing on the developing world and trying to find solutions through trade and intellectual property rules to the enormous public health challenges in the poorest countries. I quickly learned that there are far more urgent priorities than a rulebook and a tariff schedule updated regularly in Geneva, and the top priority can be summed up in a single word: infrastructure.

When most people hear the word "infrastructure" they think roads and bridges and ports. When they hear "communications infrastructure" they usually think about fiber-optic cables or cellphone towers. And they're right. But infrastructure is also about people. It's about people with the right training, in the right place, at the right time. Bridges don't get built without engineers and construction workers. Communications networks don't get utilized without people who know how to use them.

You could make medicines for HIV, tuberculosis and malaria available for free, but they're useless if there isn't a system in place to distribute and administer those medicines. That means you need working ports to unload the vaccines and the medical supplies, but you also need everyone from the person who knows how to drive a truck on rough terrain without tipping over to the person who knows how to give a vaccine to the person who knows how to convince others to come back regularly for care. In too many places that's all the same person, and if anything happens to her or him, the entire infrastructure is gone.

History has shown that the key to preventing disease - as well as addressing any number of injustices - is the free flow of information.

Global Voices Advocacy is providing that channel for information to flow both ways - they're quite literally building and training a network of advocates and communicators where they're needed most, and they're helping those whose voices haven't been heard before share their stories and solutions. They're building the links between those "in the field" and those in the boardrooms and the broadcast booth. Global Voices Advocacy is the human global communications infrastructure of the 21st century. It is the foundation upon which large-scale grassroots campaigns will be built.

On top of that, they're redefining the "business of journalism." The global news network of the future is going to look a lot more like Global Voices than it will BBC or CNN - a loose coalition of smart people leveraging low-cost technology for high-concept results with sound production values. They'll circumvent censorship and oppression with flip-phones and portable solar chargers. They'll download data and conduct research from internet cafes in Ghana. They'll produce compelling, high-definition content with laptops and $200 cameras. Language barriers will be virtually meaningless. Most importantly, they'll be constantly growing their ranks as people understand the value of telling their own stories and learning from others.

How can you raise awareness about a specific disease, or recruit people to address a tragedy, or offer a solution to a problem, if there's no way to tell your story to the world in your own words?

This blog post is part of Zemanta's “Blogging For a Cause” (http://www.zemanta.com/bloggingforacause/) campaign to raise awareness and funds for worthy causes that bloggers care about.

Great Idea, Madam Secretary

I like Secretary Clinton. I've always liked her. There, I said it.

But you have to admit, this is really cool. Have a great weekend.

The Mom-O-Sphere Goes Corporate and Cultures Clash

I've been watching with interest some of the discussions taking place in the Mom-o-sphere. (hey, it's my job.)

Specifically, I'm interested in a couple of posts from Kristen Chase and Liz Gumbinner - you may have heard of them as the co-founders of Cool Mom Picks. In a very real sense, they represent an important case study in next-gen online entrepreneurship.

In addition to CMP, Kristen and Liz have built strong online platforms (i.e., personal blogs) that have attracted a significant readership - and in doing so, they've gained the attention of marketing and PR firms. No surprise there. Further, beyond the raw numbers of unique visitors and inbound links, the above-average flacks will see the value that Kristen and Liz demonstrate as credible and influential members of an important community. I still remember Liz essentially shutting up an executive from the Conference Board who questioned the validity of social media metrics with a single line - "how do you measure the value of placing a can of Diet Coke in George Clooney's hand?"

(WARNING: I'm gonna get all PR-speak for a second. I'm even gonna use pictures. Don't worry, though - we'll get through this.)

However, I think Kristen and Liz (and dozens of other online moms) are frustrated right now because they thrive in a multi-directional communications environment that depends on transparency and encourages people to participate in multiple community discussions. (You know, SOCIAL media. It's SOCIAL.) The environment they and other online moms have entered - the world where you get paid essentially for what you do and what you write - is still largely transactional and one-way, tends to be more opaque, and emphasizes hitting a very specific demographic and staying there. To me, the old PR/marketing world looks like this:

THE OLD LECTURE



So a company's message gets shaped and filtered through media to an audience, who simply receives it and acts accordingly. Companies and their PR firms simply expect bloggers to serve as one of those intermediate media outlets in the middle. It's much easier for them, because they've done this forever and really aren't interested in doing it differently because that would cost time and money. But then there's...

THE NEW CONVERSATION



Today's reality simply shows that companies are just one player in a larger group discussion. Yes, the traditional media is there and they still wield disproportionate influence on opinion and behavior. But in this world, everybody talks and (hopefully) everybody listens. I could put any number of communities up here and even more arrows, but I hope you get the picture.

(OK, I got that out of my system. It's ridiculous, I know.)

Call it whatever you want - new media rules vs. old media rules, the people who "get it" vs. the people who don't, or even good vs. evil - the bottom line is the two worlds operate on different terms and it's an enormous struggle to find a situation where both companies and bloggers are completely comfortable.

So Liz gets frustrated when she sees other moms who don't necessarily assert their position in the new communications environment, or worse, disclose that they're getting compensated for what they publish. And Kristen gets frustrated when the organizers of a marketing conference choose to introduce her with a "dramatic reading" of one of her sassier posts - positioning her as the "prominent mom" that transactional marketers value - and not with a rundown of her entrepreneurial endeavors or her expertise. That's more than a "personal branding" issue - it's a reflection of conflicting corporate cultures.

And they both get demonstrably upset when PR flacks treat them as they'd treat any other media outlet, only with less attention to detail.

I can say that some of us in the PR/social media world are struggling with the same issues that Kristen and Liz are. As they try to explain the new reality to flacks, we're trying to do the same to some of our clients, and even some of our colleagues.

Moving forward, I see three options:

• the moms (and everyone else) do everything they can to accomodate the institutional flackitude, since PR firms have the money and the stuff they want;
• the PR/marketing world moves to accomodate bloggers and other social media mavens; or
  
• the two groups meet somewhere in the middle.

This is typically where the "meet in the middle" option presents itself as the moderate and essentially preferable model, but I tend to lean toward the flacks accomodating the bloggers. The larger communications environment continues to evolve toward the social media model. Even mainstream media is starting to adopt social media tools, even if they're not yet completely embracing the concept of multi-directional communication - so we should try to get ahead of it . The cost of publishing high-quality multimedia continues to decline, giving more people a voice and the ability to persuade larger groups of people. Finally, I've found that the more you can accomodate people where they are, on their terms, the more success you have. If someone wants to try to accomodate me, that's great - but I can't and shouldn't expect it.

President Obama On The "Bloggers vs. Journalists" Question: I DON'T CARE

Last night President Obama held his first press conference as President in prime time. All the usual suspects were present - Helen Thomas was as feisty as ever. ABC, CNN, Reuters, Bloomberg, NBC, all the titans of media were there.

Sitting in the front row was Sam Stein of Huffington Post, who was called on to ask a question. Also present was Joe Sudbay of Americablog.

No, they're not the first bloggers to attend a White House press conference. But I think they're the first ones who attended in such a high-profile way and nobody made a big deal that they were there. By calling on Stein, the Obama Administration sent a very clear message that whether you call bloggers journalists or not, their impact is real and the White House needs to reach their readers.

The press conference also demonstrated that some in the mainstream media might want to look in the mirror before they charge that bloggers are "unprofessional" or can't be taken seriously.

Before you take a look at the transcript here, take a look at these two questions and try to guess which was asked by a blogger and which was asked by the Washington Post:

Today, Sen. Patrick Leahy [D-Vermont] announced that he wants to set up a truth and reconciliation committee to investigate the misdeeds of the Bush administration. He said that, before you turn the page, you have to read the page first.

Do you agree with such a proposal? And are you willing to rule out right here and now any prosecution of Bush administration officials?

OR:

What is your reaction to Alex Rodriguez's admission that he used steroids as a member of the Texas Rangers?

Now, you could argue that both questions are "off topic" at a press conference designed to spotlight the economy and the President's proposed stimulus package. But seriously, A-Rod? You get one chance to ask the President of the United States a question at a time when the economy is in free-fall, the armed forces are engaged with the enemy in two countries and rest of the world is hanging on every word the President utters, and you ask him about a juiced infielder?

So are bloggers journalists? Like President Obama, I don't care. They're important, and that's good enough for me. But if you're looking for opinions from the bloggers themselves, Greg Sargent asked Markos "Daily Kos" Moulitsas about the newfound clout of the blogosphere and the attention bloggers are getting from the White House, and he said simply

We are media, and should be treated as communications outlets.

Notice he said MEDIA and not JOURNALIST. Maybe because he sees the difference, but I suspect it's because he realizes the difference just doesn't matter as much anymore. Yes, you absolutely need to know if you're dealing with a journalist or not when you work in communications, but media is media. I think John "Americablog" Aravosis added more detail to where the bloggers - at least the liberal political bloggers - are coming from:

While we are media, we're more than media. We are activists and advocates too - akin to the ACLU, the unions, the gay lobby, and more. We're not even partisan media, such as the Nation, in my view. We're far more activist-oriented, and, I'd argue, many of us are long-time political operatives as well (though I've also worked as a professional journalist).

All that is to say that bloggers are a bit of a mutt, and should be treated as such (after all, am I a blogger, a liberal activist, a 24-year-Washington-insider, a gay rights leader, a prominent Greek-American, or a journalist?) . If you corner us off with the mainstream media, you'll be missing out on harnessing our advocacy. But if you treat us simply as activists, you miss out on our media megaphone. In the end, the one thing that would hamper Jesse's job, in my view, is to treat him as a techie. Blog outreach long-since graduated from the days when it was the domain of the computer guy. The computer guy is a genius, but he's not a political genius. The blog outreach person in any organization has to have political and media savvy, and good 'ole activist/organizing sense. He has to be multi-disciplinary, and thus needs to straddle several departments, with a leg in media, political, and even tech (I know, 3 legs).

And most importantly, he has to be connected to what's going on in the White House. It's of no use, to us or the WH, having someone work with us who isn't really authorized to speak on behalf, negotiate on behalf, of the administration. We are here to help, when our interests coincide. But we need someone who's truly part of the WH team, and not simply passing us press releases.

To me, this is why you can't just treat "blogger outreach" as if it were just another PR or marketing exercise. Bloggers don't exist for the convenience of flacks and we shouldn't expect them to adhere to a set of rules simply because they're familiar or convenient to us. They have special interests and special needs. Bloggers have their own turf and it's our job to adapt to them, not the other way around.

"New Economy States" are Blue States

This caught my eye:

Massachusetts is the state best positioned for growth when the current economic turmoil recedes, according to the 2008 State New Economy Index released Tuesday.

So sayeth the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a think tank that works with the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation to produce the "State New Economy Index" each year.

They use 29 variables, grouped in five categories: knowledge jobs, globalization, transformation into a digital economy, "technological innovation capacity," and "economic dynamism." To be honest I don't really know the details of what goes into this, but I worked with people at the Kauffman Foundation when I was on the Hill and I know they're smart on issues of entrepreneurship.

I took a look at the rankings of states and noticed something interesting: the highest-ranking "new economy" states are overwhelmingly blue, while the lowest ranking states are overwhelmingly red.

The top 11 states in the index all voted for Barack Obama this year. So did 17 of the top 20. The bottom 8 states - and 15 of the bottom 20 - voted for John McCain.

The state where I was born, raised and educated ranks first. My current home? 45th.

Beltway Pundits Just Don't Get It

Every now and then I read an op-ed that demonstrates a profound disconnect with the way the world works today - and I can't help but think if these pundits took the time to understand how social media works they might do a better job.

Last year I took aim at Thomas Friedman's op-ed "Generation Q" suggesting all this crazy social-media stuff was breeding apathy in our youngsters and they'd never get off their butts and vote. (They did, in record numbers, thanks in no small part to social media.)

This time it's David Brooks, lamenting the demise of a permanent ruling class in Washington in a piece he called "Missing Dean Acheson." Among the more outlandish passages:

Today power is dispersed. There is no permanent bipartisan governing class in Washington. Globally, power has gone multipolar, with the rise of China, India, Brazil and the rest.

This dispersion should, in theory, be a good thing, but in practice, multipolarity means that more groups have effective veto power over collective action. In practice, this new pluralistic world has given rise to globosclerosis, an inability to solve problem after problem...

Moreover, in a multipolar world, there is no way to referee disagreements among competing factions. In a democratic nation, the majority rules and members of the minority understand that they must accede to the wishes of those who win elections.

He then goes on to imply this new affliction - where citizens of the world for the first time have a chance to substantively rebuff the decisions of Brooks' beloved governing elites - is responsible for the downfall of the Doha round of trade talks, as well as our inability to stop genocide in Darfur, impose sanctions on Zimbabwe, and prevent an Iranian nuclear weapons program.

ummmm... NO.

First, do we really have to re-hash the mind-numbingly long list of colonialist and non-democratic injustices, committed in all areas of the globe, that were either ignored, condoned or even caused by this "permanent bipartisan governing class" in Washington from the 40's to the 80's?

Second, the laundry list of global failures Brooks cites exists precisely BECAUSE a small group of people who think they know what's best for everyone else tries to assert its will on a majority. There's no better example of this than the World Trade Organization. Like it or not, the WTO has earned a reputation as one of the most insulated and least transparent multinational organizations ever created. The agreements negotiated there (by unelected bureaucrats, no less) rarely have the majority support of the people they are intended to serve.

If David Brooks expects Indian farmers (or American steelworkers or anyone else) to simply let themselves go bankrupt in the face of overwhelming, subsidized competition, then he's missing one of the most basic rules of capitalism - the system works best when people act in their own interest. In a few decades perhaps free trade will even out economic conditions and improve everyone's lot in life - I certainly hope so. But when the best answer you have for people who will certainly lose their livelihoods is "we'll have to get back to you," you can't expect those farmers to tell their starving kids that David Brooks says it's all for the best.

Brooks' rhetoric about democracy and trade also raises an eyebrow. In the United States, once a major trade agreement is finalized, the President invariably asks the Congress to give him "fast-track" authority - i.e., cede Congress' right to amend legislation and agree to an up-or-down vote by a date certain. Fast Track has been called a lot of things, good and bad - but as a former legislative assistant to a Senator for trade issues, I've never heard it called "more democratic."

Brooks isn't about to change his world view but could learn about how the world works in 2008 by participating in a few global online discussions. The days of a permanent governing class with one-way decision-making are coming to an end - just as the days of an elite beltway pundit corps with one-way communication have already ended. The days of trade deals negotiated behind closed doors are coming to an end, just as the days of non-transparent online communication have already ended.

Interestingly enough, the people Tom Friedman was completely wrong about - young people who use social media aggressively and participate in the political process - will finalize the downfall of the permanent governing class David Brooks laments.

Meta-Green Tweeting...

Big Kudos to Kim Woodbridge for taking the Green Twitter idea she had to the next level, taking the opml file she created and the twitter RSS feed I built and pushing each through a cloud generator and comparing the two clouds:

There is quite a difference between the clouds. The cloud for Green Blog feeds is primarily about environmental issues wheareas the cloud for Green Twitter feeds contains tags for a variety of topics. The second cloud, however, gives insight into the personalities of the tweeters interested in the environment.

Seriously, you should check it out.

I touched on this a few months back when I took 5 "social media guru" types and did kinda the same thing. It's also related to what we do at Virtual Vantage Points - taking the discussions of the top bloggers in one online community and examining it over time, or comparing that discussion with that of another online community (like US liberals vs. US conservatives, UK Labour vs. UK Tories vs. UK Liberal Democrats vs. UK Greens, etc.), but VVP focuses squarely on blogs right now (though that may change) and applies subjective analysis from prominent political thinkers.

But Kim's clouds are important because they show how people in the sustainability community use social media tools differently. It's not all the same conversation. I'm taken by the diversity of expression via twitter vs. blogs. Now, maybe if we just took the twitter streams of the bloggers we'd see a more similar cloud, but I don't think so since that's what I did with the social media types. It seems to me that Twitter is used for different purposes and with different results. And it also seems to me that you learn a lot more about the green bloggers by following them on Twitter.

As the marketing/PR crowd starts pitching people via twitter we should keep these fundamental differences in mind.

We interrupt this presidential campaign...

First, many thanks to PunditMom and One Plus Two for naming my most recent rant about Facebook a "just post" for February. It's very rewarding when people from different walks of life can get together in some way and salute ideas.

Speaking of diversity and unity, It's no secret that the Democratic Party is having some serious difficulty speaking with one voice these days. So it's not surprising that this fissure has shown up in the blogs, and that online grassroots activists are having serious disagreements. I see Micah Sifry is on top of it. The online and offline discussions are integrating more each day, and that online discussions have a significant impact on mainstream debates. That's what that other blog examines, but it's an important point to make here as well.

Today, I'm much more interested in what the blogosphere has to say about Bear Stearns. I don't think I'd necessarily call this a "crisis," but it's sure sumthin', ain't it?

That blue line with the huge spike at the end of it represents online discussions about Bear Stearns. The green line is the talk about the Federal Reserve. The yellow/orange line you don't see is the talk about JP Morgan. It's very clear that the big story over the weekend and leading into this morning is the surprise negotiated sale of Bear Stearns to JP Morgan for less than ten percent of its listed price at the stock market's close on Friday - and the unprecedented action from the Federal Reserve to essentially guarantee the sale and to cut interest rates on a Sunday night.

Of course, the online discussion is mirroring the reporting in the mainstream and business trade media right now, and I think it's only going to pick up more.

I'd bet the blogosphere is pretty low on Bear Stearns' list of priorities right now. But if they ignore it they're ignoring a very important communications channel. Bear Stearns doesn't own its brand, its reputation, or its issues right now. That's not a slam on them - it's just their turn to be the focus of the news cycle. But if they're willing to look they'll find a wealth of opinion leaders and discussion drivers who are already talking about what's happening. If they had the foresight to build relationships with them earlier, they'd have a number of opportunities to get their messages quickly and efficiently into a place that we already know has some influence on the "big league" financial media.

I expect the market bloggers to do most of the writing today to talk about fallout, then the political bloggers will probably weigh in more - assigning blame, which is what they do best - and then the economists will try to explain to everyone what this all means. At each step in this story cycle, Bear Stearns and JP Morgan should be weighing in online. And frankly, so should the Federal Reserve's communications team.

Thoughts on Iowa from someone who's done it before

Craig Fuller looks at the political blogosphere's reaction to the Iowa caucuses - and adds his own thoughts on what it's like in a campaign immediately after the votes are in.

Craig is a colleague at APCO - he's also former Chief of Staff to George H.W. Bush.

Just the latest reason I love Virtual Vantage Points.

If I were a congressional staffer...

I had a nice chat this week with a colleague from my Capitol Hill days, and it made me think about what I'd be doing if I still worked for a Democratic Senator.

I've mentioned before that I worked on the Senator's economic policy team and one of the things I enjoyed preparing the most was a "weekly economic update" every Friday. It was just a quick, one-page list of facts and brief commentary on that week's data - weekly jobless claims, housing starts, consumer confidence numbers, and so on. Typically I would find data and explain how it was relevant to the Senator's positions on issues and proposals for the future.

The one thing I often liked to do with this weekly note was find a morsel of data that didn't necessarily fit into the economists' toolbox but really illustrated how working families were getting by in the current economy.

Recently the talk in some PR circles is about "recession" - and more specifically, what will happen to both the web2.0 startups that need VC and the larger PR/marketing firms that depend on available cash from large companies.

Communications firms will get through a recession by showing they "get it." We must demonstrate that we understand the issues companies and consumers face in hard economic times and we know how to leverage available tools to help clients address those issues. They could start by putting together something like one of my old weekly notes.

Of course, some PR folks need a little economics glossary to help them do this. For example, "Leading Economic Indicators" is not a collection of the best or most important indicators. It's a set of data the Conference Board collects to help predict economic activity in the next 6 to 9 months - but just about all of those data, like initial jobless claims and housing permits, are already public by the time the Conference Board reports it. There are also "coincident indicators," like GDP, which are data that move as the economy or business cycle moves. "Lagging indicators" are NOT indicators that can't seem to keep up with the leading ones. They're data such as the value of commercial loans or the changes in consumer prices that help confirm economic activity of the last few months.

All this stuff is important and I would share it regularly with the Senator. But when you're in politics, or communications, you need to find the information that humanizes the economy. Afer all, on paper the economy grew 4.9 percent in Q3 2007 - that's pretty fast - and will still probably grow a smidge in Q4. But that number doesn't seem to jibe with how people are living these days. So the bits of data I'd give the Senator tomorrow would probably include the following:

Home forclosures rose 68 percent in November from the previous November. We've all heard about the "sub-prime" lending mess that the "housing bubble blogs" (there are a lot of them) have been predicting for literally years now. We've also heard about the major multi-national banks writing down billions in debt because they issued unaffordable loans. But the foreclosure number is what will have the real impact on voters in November. Because the US savings rate is so low, people have been relying on their houses as a source of wealth and equity. When adjustable rate mortgages reset, wages remained relatively stagnant, and other costs (like healthcare) continued to rise, people lost their houses. That's a financial and emotional hit that most people won't ever forget.

20 million Americans will use credit cards to pay for home heating this winter. This is obviously a double-whammy. Energy costs are up - frankly, due to demand more than anything else - and people don't have the available cash to make up the difference. This cash flow issue (probably caused by higher mortgage and rent costs, higher health care costs, and stagnant wages) will effectively increase home heating costs by up to 20 percent when you consider interest carried over a few months, putting many Americans even further behind trying to pay for life's necessities.

More Americans will have catastrophic health expenses in 2008. Nearly 1 in 4 Americans under the age of 65 live in a family that will spend more than 10 percent of that family's pre-tax income on health expenses. More than 80 percent of these people have health insurance. This sounds like a health statistic, but it's unquestionably an "economic indicator" in my book. Poor health affects a family's ability to make money, and it reduces the amount it can pay for anything else. Parents - especially poor, single parents - will often pay for healthcare for their kids before they'll pay for healthcare for themselves. This is ultimately a long-term loser, since mom gets sicker, longer, and can't work for an extended amount of time.

Companies have to understand that this is the reality for many if not most of the people they're trying to reach. Since the current conventional wisdom is the Democrats will increase their power in Congress, companies also have to understand that this is the political context in which they'll have to communicate to "opinion elites." Smart, experienced communications professionals - with the perspective of working with Democrats - can help.

More social media smartness from Forrester

I saw a tweet from Jeremiah Owyang a couple weeks back (I'd link to it but they're still spackling drywall or something at twitter) promoting a new report from his shop (specifically Josh Bernoff, Charlene Li, Cynthia Pflaum, and Scott Wright) called the POST method - People, Objectives, Strategy and Technology. The intro really resonated with me:

Executives are going about social strategy backwards: picking technologies like blogs or communities first instead of focusing on what they want to accomplish. This document introduces our four-step method for social strategy. First, examine the Social Technographics Profile of your customers. Second, choose your objective: listening to, talking with, energizing, supporting, or embracing your customersand their ideas. Third, build a strategy around changing your relationship with your customers. Finally, pick the appropriate technologies to implement. Companies that take these four steps in order and then put success metrics in place are the most likely to succeed.

The report then goes through an example of how a company (LL Bean) actually paid attention to who it wanted to reach and went about reaching that community using the tools that the community uses - not focusing on a particular technology first and trying to shoehorn a strategy that uses it.

"Social Technographics Profile" sounds a little jargony to me, but I found the report useful. It's similar to the approach I recommend for most clients. It reminded me a bit of the "snackers" meme Jeremiah pushed out there - I actually thought my response to it is pretty much aligned with what they're saying. It also reminded me of the very first post I ever wrote here.

Again, I'm not really a marketing guy, but the concepts still apply.

Nobody Reads Anymore

No, I don't simply mean the PR folks who still, for some inexplicable reason, manage to send the most irrelevant, impersonal, and downright stupid emails EVAH.

I mean these crazy kids today:

We know what young people are doing more of: watching television, surfing the Web, listening to their iPods, talking on cellphones, and instant-messaging their friends. But a new report released today by the National Endowment for the Arts makes clear what they're doing a lot less of: reading.

The report - a 99-page compendium of more than 40 studies by universities, foundations, business groups, and government agencies since 2004 - paints a dire picture of plummeting levels of reading among young people over the past two decades. Among the findings:

Only 30 percent of 13-year-olds read almost every day.
The number of 17-year-olds who never read for pleasure increased from 9 percent in 1984 to 19 percent in 2004.
Almost half of Americans between ages 18 and 24 never read books for pleasure.
The average person between ages 15 and 24 spends 2 to 2 1/2 hours a day watching TV and 7 minutes reading.

"This is a massive social problem," NEA chairman Dana Gioia, said by phone from Washington. "We are losing the majority of the new generation. They will not achieve anything close to their potential because of poor reading."

One of the reasons cited for the dramatic decline in reading proficiency is the "all in the background" media consumption trends we're seeing among youth (and everyone else):

Indeed, the report suggests that multitasking is a factor. It found that more than half of middle and high school students use other media most or some of the time while reading, and that 20 percent of the time they spend reading they are also watching TV, playing video games, sending messages, or otherwise using a computer.

As communications professionals seek to strategically place their messages in all of these background sources of media we should also do our part to ensure that true literacy is not sacrificed as a result. We all know that reading skills are directly linked to writing and critical thinking skills. These are the skills people need to excel in this industry and countless others.

There are a lot of people in the "social media elite" who write incessantly about the many tools they use to consume and share information, and how they're now struggling with managing all this content and trying to filter out the noise to find what's truly valuable. Part of this discussion is just silly and a little vain, at least to me - they're trying to show that they can master all these tools and they're managing all this crazy stuff. But part of it is really sad as well - it's a veiled admission that some otherwise very smart people have lost some focus.

The people at the top of our profession shouldn't need a self-help book to develop a 7-point action plan to powerful greatness so they can outsource their lives. (Of course, at least it's a book.) They shouldn't need a 2.0-powered statistical thingamabob to show them where they spend their time and where they don't. And for Pete's sake, they shouldn't feel compelled to tell the world that they're active on a dozen different social networks and have a dozen different tools working at the same time. All that tells me is they have no idea what they should be doing, and they fail to see the difference between "clever" and "strategic."

With 100 percent of precincts reporting...

Kentucky has a new Governor, and Virginia became a shade more blue overnight as the Democrats gained control of the State Senate by the slimmest of margins. Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour was re-elected easily.

I was taken by two things - a story in the Washington Post suggesting the immigration issue wasn't the silver bullet some Republicans hoped it would be, and a piece by the Cyber Hillbilly on the importance of blogs in state elections.

On immigration, I think the results are meaningful but I'm not sure Virginia is the state where immigration is the top issue. I suspect there are other states that look at the issue more closely. However, this is clearly an issue that has migrated to the state level, and I think this is where the issue will be influenced by more personal and less abstract perspectives.

As for the CH piece on blogs and politics, he's clearly right. We already know more people are turning to blogs for information about everything. More importantly, people are turning to bloggers who share their world view as a more trusted source of information - call it the Fox News effect if you want, but it's real and that trend will only strengthen.