Facebook Updates

I’ve been monitoring how often certain campaigns update their Facebook status.

Flu.gov updates about 4-5 times a day.

Komen for the Cure only updates about once a day if that.

Interesting.

If you are friends with flu.gov, ostensibly you already are aware of the H1N1 epidemic.  So this begs the question: why so many updates?  Is this overload?  Maybe, but if flu.gov using Facebook as a key one-way communication tool, then it is getting key information to those who have asked for it.

Komen, on the other hand, is clearly using their Facebook page for online community purposes.  There are far more friends publically posting to the Komen page.  So they don’t really need to give constant updates.  (They use Twitter for that.)  When they do give an update, it’s pretty good information, whereas, flu.gov updates so much that you could kind of zone it out.

Markets are Conversations

The main premise of The Cluetrain Manifesto, a marketing polemic (among other things) by Christopher Locke, Rich Levine, David Wienberger, and Doc Searls is that at their core, markets are conversations.  The authors contend that corporate culture in the postindustrial age has done all in its power to destroy the conversation.  Marketing/PR people represent the embodiment of the corporation sucking the lifeblood out of conversation and tirelessly working to keep everything monotone on a common theme or position.

The stuff of corporate speak is indeed lots of nonsense, and it’s refreshing to hear that reinforced by those who are on the inside of it.  The manifesto essentially discusses how this old model of corporate speak will not be able to survive in the Internet age.  Press releases, press conferences, flyers, one-pages, etc. don’t ever provide real information.  For that, people can go on the Internet and read review, talk to other customers, get hard data, etc.  

This point is well taken.  I see this a lot today between companies that have really embraced the conversational method of interaction with customers and those that are still clinging to the old world model.  Lee LeFever of Common Craft talks a lot about “lightweight” business models, and I think this applies quite nicely here--as it describe the difference between new and old marketing strategies. 

Lightweight marketing explains things in helpful ways, listen to people, and proactively engages.  Most importantly, the conversation always continues.  Lightweight companies not only allow customers to easily evaluate products and services, but also act on those suggestions.  It’s a type of democratic process that ultimately leads to be best product or service for everyone.  Companies are lightweight because they can respond and adapt with relative ease. 

Lots of old world mega corporations are doing everything they can to adapt to the lightweight model, but this is difficult for companies that have revenues higher than the GPD of many smaller nations.  Starbucks now seeks out the advise from customers in online forums, online communities, and old school reaching out and asking directly.  This has led to some nice improvement at Starbucks.  Other companies are using online communities in similar ways: to get valuable feedback and to engage with the customer.

How does this relate to campaigns?

Well, everyone is still figuring that out, but I think it’s safe to say that lightweight campaigns will be more successful from this point forward.  Campaigns that can quickly and genuinely react to the public will trump those that require top-down approval for every communication.  In short, deputize the right people and the right amount of people to speak for the campaign and let them go to task.  Furthermore, encourage the public to discuss the candidate and the issues, regardless of what they say.  Inevitably this leads to more trust and a better feeling about the campaign—that supposedly will help lead to success. 

Twitter at the Conference

I spent last week at the National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC) annual conference.  It was a big event at the Walter Washington Convention Center with about 20,000 attendees.

They had a very active Twitter presence throughout the show.  They created a hash tag #naeycac; the “ac” stands for annual conference.  All the tweets from the show had that hash tag, and NAEYC put up big monitors all around the convention center with live feeds from Twitter. 

I was tweeting for my organization, and it was cool to put out a tweet and immediately see it on the big screen.

There were a lot of early childhood education bloggers and tweeters at the show, so it made for an interesting online conversation.  I quickly learned where good tech savvy sessions were being held and got a feel for sessions that I could not attend.

Lesson here is to create a hash tag for any big live event that your organization holds.  It makes the conversation simple, quick, and fun.  

Millennial Makeover

Morley Winograd and Michael Hais’s (2008) Millennial Makeover offers an interesting and prescient look at macro level political shifts.  They argue that major political shifts happen at the intersection of a triggering event and new communication technologies.  They site several examples starting at the Civil War through 9/11.  They identify these shifts with generational transitions as well.  In fact, the whole first third of the book is about generational theory.  (Who knew this existed?  But it’s really cool).

The authors focus on a generational theory that places whole generations into four broad archetypes: 

1. Idealist (Boomers)

2. Reactive (Gen Xers)

3. Civic (Millennials)

4. Adaptive (The Silent Generation)

Their argument is that as the Millennials come into their own, a civic movement will sweep through the country.  People will be less focused on their selves and more on improving institutions. Where the Boomers looked to break the establishment and create a new one, the Millennials will look to perfect what has already been created.  And indeed, if the last election was any indication, that is happening.  Although Obama was elected by all generations, as Winograd and Hais point out, his message was fundamentally Millennial.  They highlight Obama’s reference to the Joshua Generation at a Selma, Alabama church during an annual remembrance of the fateful Pettis bridge crossing and beating of black marchers by Alabama State Troopers.  (A service which I happened to attend). 

Obama’s point echoes Winograd and Hais’s generational theories—namely, the Moses Generation (Boomers) gave us the Civil Right Movement and the Joshua Generation (Millennials) will realize MLK’s dream. 

So how does this all fit in with digital strategy?

Winograd and Hais: “[Technology has] oscillated in harmony with [America’s] generational cycles, so that as the nation finds the need to confront new challenges, the ability to debate those questions in wider and wider circle with more and more information has also been possible.”

Today we see just this.  Social networking and social media have exploded communication and information sharing like never before.  Just as the civic generation takes hold of things, communication technologies now allow people to collect just about any information they need.   Large open and democratic groups have emerged as far more influential and powerful than the cabal of protected, moneyed interests.  Open source software is a perfect example of this—its free and its usually better (if not completely sufficient) than its proprietary counterparts.  All of this is based on the idea that together we can accomplish more than alone.

Unfortunately, Winograd and Hais don’t quite address timeframe.  In order to create a valid working generational theory, you need to have a lot of time and data to look at.  Their timeline is limited as it only goes back about 100 years with any real accuracy.  Indeed, the civic generations (the Greatest Gen and the Millennials) certainly have a lot in common.  However, who’s to say that the next generation will be modeled off the Silent Generation.  Perhaps in the long view, “generations” will model a much longer time frame such as the Chinese Zodiac, or, more likely, a much shorter one.   If it’s the latter, then digital strategy will have to adapt to something quite new just as people begin to master what is becoming the status quo.

The right number of emails

Since signing up for Komen.org and giving some money to the cause, I have only received one additional email from them.  I must think this is a calculated move, and I really appreciate it.   I care enough about the topic to give money, and I can go to the site when I like.  I don’t need to be assaulted with emails.

The DNC takes the opposite approach.  I gave money to pol running for Senate a few years ago, and ever since have been triangulated by the DNC multiple times a week.  I get emails from Biden, Obama, Kerry, you name it.  Leave me alone please.

In a similar experience, my wife gave to the Southern Poverty Law Center a few years ago, and that proved to be a big mistake.  Ever since, our home has become the repository for dead trees.  We get so much mail from SPLC and other organizations like it, that whatever she initially gave certainly has been for a net loss for SPLC in the cost of all the mail we have gotten since then.

 

I Want the Leads! The Glen Garry Leads!

It seems that online political advertising is here to stay.  That’s not really a revelation since, the Internet is increasingly the primary mode of media communication. Best Practices for Online Political Advertising  has some interesting articles about the subject.

What I’d like to focus on a bit is sales, because when we cut all of the fat off this thing, political advertising is just Sales 101.  Different political machines are trying to get you to buy their product, which, in this case is a politician.  And as any good salesman knows, good leads lead to more conversions. 

Lead generation seems to be big business now in the political sphere.  The more you can micro-target the right leads, the more success you will have getting votes.  But bartering and trading leads seems disingenuous.  If I put my name on a list it’s because I am interested in that product.  I really don’t want my information sold to someone else.  If we want to talk about best practices, political organization should stop selling/sharing information to each other.

In the Best Practices piece, Karen Jagoda quotes Nick Nyman, CEO of Dynamic Logic, “…Consumers, needing ways to deal with [the] advertising onslaught, have developed mental and technical firewalls to help filter it all. Keeping that context in mind, the challenge for online advertisers is to understand what techniques are likely to penetrate these fire-walls to engage consumers.”

I see this as a problem.  If I put a firewall up, I don’t want someone to slyly figure out how to penetrate it.  That’s exactly what gave the salesman of yesterday such a bad rap.  It’s why we have bad associations with car dealerships—and why Carmax has been so successful (no pushy salemen).

So what’s the solution?  If I’m a politician, how can I best the message out without buying leads and acting like a salesman?  Well, let’s look back to the commercial sector for some more clues.  Companies that are having incredible success are doing so because they have incredible products.  Apple has a cool music player.  Google has lots of information.  Carmax has inexpensive cars without pushy salesman.  Each of these companies also have great websites.  When you need the product, you go to the website; you have a good experience; you tell your friends.

The political solution is to be a great politician, get great SEO optimization and a killer website.  Those who want to find you will.  Those who don’t want to find you, don’t need to be bothered by you.  This might seem to fly in the face of traditional marketing, but if you stay in the press (hopefully in a good way) people will hear about you on their terms, which is what they want.  People don’t want to be force-fed political speak.  And there’s nothing more disingenuous that a smiling pol on an internet banner ad.

Online Advocacy and the Social Net

Learned from Techpresident about a report on social media tools and major DC advocacy groups by Marc Ross, Christine Stineman, and Chris Lisi of 2ndSix, Tribe Effect and Chris Lisi Communications.

The basic conclusion is that major advocacy organizations have really only embraced email.  Many of the big ones aren’t even on Facebook, which is really like entry-level at this point.  And, of course, all the analysts/experts say you need a blog, but very few have one.

This could be a result of the fact that these groups are not savvy to the power of social media and how it could benefit them. 

BUT it could also be that they just don’t think it will work for them.

Until someone can get some good data, I’m not sure when we will know the answer to this.  While the social net worked great for Obama, can it really work for a campaign that doesn’t have that type of passionate energy behind it?  I’m not sure.  More later…

Social Mediaesque Design

I’m curious how long this design trend will last.  You know what I mean: the clouds, the curved corners, the module/widget look, the large slightly-cartoonish fonts, the in-your-face buttons. Examples: GOP.gov OR  Whitehouse.gov.

These designs, which I assume are user-friendly (they seem so), are certainly better than what preceded it.  But the time seems ripe for a creative designer to start doing something a bit different.

You know it’s about to change when all the political sites start to jump on the bandwagon.

Great widget on GOP.com

On of the blog posts on techpresident.com talked about the new GOP.com.   

The widget that caught my attention was a little dohicky on the home page that allows users to seamlessly glance at the feeds from Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Flickr.  On the Facebook feed, it showed a selection of people who support GOP.com.  Of course, I recognized some of them, as they came from my friend list.  Always interesting to learn who supports GOP.com—particularly, when it’s unexpected.

techpresident.com....sweet.

Thanks to Allan Rosenblatt, I just looked at techpresident.com for this first time.  Interesting site with some cool features and cooler information.   Particularly nice that it attempts to be non-partisan.

This site integrates and integrates and then integrates some more.  Specifically, it integrates data from social networks directly into modules on its site.  For example, it collects data directly from Facebook and plots it on a colorful graph.  This instant visual perspective of “friend” supporters of different presidential candidates is informative, but, more importantly, shows how far ahead of the field Obama actually is.  (Although we need to admit, that Obama’s popularity is far more a function of who he is rather than his ass-kicking digital strategy).

Another nice integration feature is the Politickr which—on one page—shows the feeds from different social media outlets (YouTube, Twitter, blogs, etc.).  In quick glance, you can get a sense of what each campaign (or at this time, I suppose I should say campaign in remission) is writing about.

Another great integration is with Technorati.  On a series of charts, you see a graphical depiction of how often the candidates are mentioned in the blogosphere.