Convention Thoughts

This is the first year since 1992 that I haven’t attended the Democratic Convention — and the first time since 2000 that I haven’t attended both the Democratic and Republican Conventions.  I have watched hours of live coverage, read pages and pages of commentary and analysis.  I even hosted a radio show discussing the role of digital and social media in this year’s conventions.

Here are some quick thoughts about the first night of the Democratic Convention:

The Democrats have, thus far, orchestrated a far better convention than the Republicans (and we are only one day into the event).  Barring some sort of disaster, inside or outside of the arena/stadium in Charlotte, President Obama is likely to enjoy a far better bounce coming out of the convention that Mitt Romney.  A benefit for sure of scheduling your convention a) after Labor Day (when people are back, preparing to return to school and work, and generally focused again on things that matter in the world), and b) after the Republicans (so you can see how their speakers lacked energy and failed to mention their candidate by name enough — and make adjustments before you take the stage).  Factoid: Michelle Obama’s speech generated more tweets-per-minute than Mitt Romney (a measure of nothing beyond how many tweets people posted, not as some suggest a reflection of voter intent or similar, but still). 
 
I have been asked why Deval Patrick didn’t give the keynote. Answer: Because a) he is from Massachusetts, b) he doesn’t represent a voting block (African Americans) that the President needs help to win (compared to Hispanics), and c) he’s not an up-and-coming star in the party, he is already a star.  That said, he gave the best speech of the night — Michelle had the best delivery, but she needed a few more substantive points to knock it out of the park.
 
Bill Clinton will be the main attraction tonight… but, the Giants and Cowboys also kick off the NFL season. Unless Clinton’s speech falls during half time, I would expect the audience for football to dwarf the convention audience.  I hope I am wrong.

Deja Vu All Over Again: PDF Edition

Earlier this week, while attending the Personal Democracy Forum conference, I heard the head digital strategist for the Romney Campaign, Zac Moffatt, talk about his job.  The most striking thing he said was that he was still working to make sure that digital strategy was considered a key part of the campaign’s overall plan, that the digital team had a pro-active budget to work with, and that he and his team had a seat at the table when big decisions were being made.

Really?  I heard the same thing from the folks responsible for driving digital campaign strategy in 2004 and 2008.  This is 2012.  This is supposed to be the most technologically savvy, social-media-fueled election in the history of politics… and the Republican nominee still needs to be convinced to give digital its rightful place in his campaign?

Forget partisanship for a moment… if a politician doesn’t recognize the importance of using digital technology and media to engage with voters, I don’t trust that person to hold office.  Digital technology and media are central to our lives, whether we like it or not, and its long past time that the political world truly figured that out. 

Tonya Hall Show: Friday, May 11, 2012

I have the honor and privilege of guest-hosting the Tonya Hall Show again today.  The show is all about embracing the power of social media, everything happening on the world wide web and how the internet is changing our lives.

On today’s show we’ll be talking about three topics: 1) the 2012 election… and how this cycle is shaping up to be different (beyond just the tools that people are using).  2) Obama vs. Romney… and what each campaign can/should be doing to use digital/social media to gain an advantage, and 3) the online influence of outside groups (including the media)… and how the accessibility of social media to everyone impacts how the election will be decided. 

My guest is David Almacy.  David is a senior vice president for Edelman.  Prior to joining Edelman, David was the White House Internet and E-Communications director under President George W. Bush.  In that role, he managed online communications strategy, served as an official spokesman for Internet press and bloggers and acted as a liaison to the federal government Web manager community. He was also the primary owner of the White House Website (WhiteHouse.gov) and spearheaded its comprehensive redesign in March 2007.

Just last week, David was named one of the top 50 people in politics to follow by the Huffington Post. 

For more information about David, read his blog - CapitalGig - or follow him on Twitter.

I will post notes and links about the topics we discussed after the show…

Tonya Hall Show: Thursday, May 10, 2012

[Updated]

I had the honor and privilege of guest-hosting the Tonya Hall Show today.  The show is all about embracing the power of social media, everything happening on the world wide web and how the internet is changing our lives.

On today’s show we talked about two topics: 1) sports and society — and what digital and social media are doing to help extend the impact that sports is having on our culture, and 2) the evolution of sports media — and how the role and impact of journalists who cover sports, and related issues, is changing in the digital age.

My guest was Tom Farrey, a veteran investigative journalist, Emmy Award-winning correspondent for ESPN, and the author of Game On: The All-American Race to Make Champions of Our Children. Tom’s work over the years has explored the connections between sports and the largest themes in society — education, globalization, technology, race, gender, poverty and ethics, among others.



In 2011, Tom also became director of the Aspen Institute’s Sports & Society program, a vehicle for convening leaders and fostering dialogue around topics of critical importance. The program helps inspire solutions to major issues so that sport can best serve the public interest, starting with the health needs of children and communities.



you can follow Tom on Twitter: @TomFarrey

Some notes/thoughts from the show…



The way we view sports is changing.  Clearly there are a lot of people using digital and social media to access information about sports - watch games, follow teams and athletes, discuss happenings (81% of people prefer the Internet for their sports news over radio and other traditional sources, during a televised game that they are watching, 83% of people will check game updates online…).  The sports media world is changing — there are more voices, more noise as well.  But, Tom noted that there is also a new appreciation for investigative journalism related to sports, and interest in the connection between sports and society, because of the range of ways people can get information and connect to different issues.  

For more  substantive issues to gain traction, Tom suggested, the focus needs to be right.  The issue of steroids in sports, for example, wasn’t of immediate interest to most casual sports fans.  But something like concussions, which has a more direct impact on people’s lives, has generated significant interest and discussion online.

Title IX. As a part of the Sports & Society project, Tom is organizing an event (May 31 - Washington, DC) focused on Title IX, the landmark legislation that greatly expanded access to sports participation opportunities for many girls and women, Title IX celebrates its 40th anniversary in June, but most girls still do not play sports. The deficits are most pronounced in urban and other low-income communities. And Tom suggested that addressing the participation rates is a matter of national consequence for reasons that include social development and public health.  Check out hashtag #T9andbeyond for more information.

Must-reads: At the end of the show I highlighted a few must-reads related to the discussion, including:




There was so much more discussed on the show that just can’t be adequately summarized here, but if you want to listen, the archived recording is available here.

Still more notes from #ActivateNYC12

I spent yesterday at the Guardian Active Summit.  Here is my last round of observations/thoughts from the afternoon sessions:

Questions. Om Malik, the founder and editor in Chief, GigaOM Network, talked about how important it is to be constantly learning.  He explained: “If I start the day with five questions and I end the day with five questions I have failed. If I start the day with five questions and I end it with ten I have succeeded.”  He added that the media industry, in particular, has a lot to figure out right now, that it is even more important that they ask questions (and have questions asked of them).

Numbers.  Andrew Rasiej, the founder of Personal Democracy Forum, shared three numbers that caught my attention:

  • 56.8%… the percentage of eligible voters who actually voted in 2008 campaign.  That number isn’t very high when you consider how many people chose not to exercise their right to vote (and how important participation is to a functioning democracy). Sadly, the number who participate in the 2012 election is expected to be lower.
  • 390,000… As a part of its commitment to open government, the Obama Administration has released 390,000 data sets to date.  As Rasiej noted, a lot of that data may be useless, but people are building interesting things on top of some of the data, and its creating opportunities – for government and non-government folks alike – that weren’t there when that information was not being shared.
  • 5.9 billion… the number of mobile phones in the world (roughly 87% of the world’s population).  The majority of those phones, right now, are not smartphones – but its only a matter of time before the computing power of the devices that people across the globe carry makes our current smartphones look like those old-school brick phones (that Zack Morris used to use on Saved by the Bell).

More numbers. Nancy Lublin, the Chief Old Person at DoSomething.org, shared a few more eye-popping numbers:

  • 100%… text messaging has a 100% open rate.  And, texting actually over-indexes for minorities and urban youth.
  • 3330… the average teenager gets 3330 texts a month (and for teenage girls that number is closer to 4500 per month).
  • 1/3… one-third of all homeless in the United States are under the age of 18. 

Mark Every Death.  Clay Shirky introduced a site called Homicide Watch D.C. (http://homicidewatch.org) which provides a listing of every homicide in the nation’s capital.  No exceptions. Every victim is featured on the site and has their own URL – allowing family and friends to access, or share, information that relates to the murder.  As Shirky put it, “the site is designed as if the web exists.”  No editorial choices are made about what to feature on the site, because everything gets covered.

That’s it for now.

Still more notes from #ActivateNYC12

I am spending the day at the Guardian Active Summit.

Here are a few observations/thoughts from the afternoon sessions:


Relentlessness. Arianna Huffington said one of the best things that the digital age invites, and that HuffPo is focused on, is the ability to bring ‘relentlessness’ to the coverage of issues.  Gone are the days when media covered a story and then moved on to something else, leaving the issues unresolved.  Today, the access to information and communities feeds a much deeper and richer form of journalism, allowing a media property like HuffPo to use their narrative powers to tell stories AND change things. [I actually think she is wrong – you need to blow up the strictly narrative way of telling stories if you actually want to change things.]  The latest demonstration of this view of media is the HuffPo’s soon to be released ‘GPS for the Soul’ section (and in two-months time app) that will track stress related data – breath rate, heart rate – and then be programmable to offer customized information ‘that helps you get back to your zone.’  I am always inspired after hearing Arianna Huffington speak, and I agree that media should be in the business of helping to improve lives – still, I’m not convinced that HuffPo really know how to make that happen, or that their guidance on how to lead a better life is the kind of guidance we need.


Emotional Intelligence.  Jonah Peretti, the founder of BuzzFeed, talked about the shift from search to social and how that changes the information experience that media (and brands and everyone else) offers.  Google connects you with the information you want. Facebook is helping you express yourself and your feelings and connect with friends (Less about informational value).  But Buzzfeed treats social as the new starting point, taking the idea that people get news and information from social sources – and thus you need to think differently about how to create content for a social world.  At the heart of his strategy is the idea that ‘something that works really well on the internet is telling people something they don’t know already.”  Ultimately, Peretti suggested, its necessary to consider the social dynamics of content, and having this ‘emotional intelligence’ is sometimes more important than traditional IQ.  He also said that content can be about emotion, and is capable of changing the way people think and feel - citing the post ‘13 Simple Steps To Get Through A Rough Day’ as proof.


Does Age Matter? One of the heads of business strategy for PwC said that the average age of employees at PwC is 27.  The average age of people in the US Navy is 21. A


More Gooder vs. Less Bad.  Hannah Jones, the VP of sustainable business and innovation at Nike, did two things as part of a panel discussion on collaboration and change that were notable.  First, she took off her shoes and passed them around the audience (at the urging of the moderator) – this was notable because she was wearing the first pair of Nike shoes made in the United States and stitched with a single thread.  These light-weight, high-tech shoes will be worn by Team USA at the Olympics later this summer.  She then went on to talk about the motivation for Nike being committed to sustainability and positive social change.  She noted that Nike had, essentially, exhausted the options for making things less bad.  “Retrofitting the past is not very easy – and does not equal making something good,” she explained.”  Obviously, innovation has been at the roots of what Nike has always done, so they decided to think about the idea of sustainability as the world’s greatest innovation challenge.  Every day Nike challenges itself to get the words sustainability, innovation and performance into the same sentence when people describe their products.  Just do it.

More later.

More Notes from #ActivateNYC12

I am spending the day at the Guardian Active Summit.

Here are a few more observations/thoughts from the morning sessions:

Back to Basics. Adam Sharp, the senior manager for government, news and social innovation at Twitter outlined three trends in a Twitter-powered political world: 1) the democratization of access, 2) the impact of everything being real-time, and… most interestingly, 3) a return to retail politics.  Its not every day you hear someone from a tech company talk about the importance of getting offline and connecting with people in a more direct and personal way.  Politics has always been local, and platforms like Twitter make it possible for people to find and engage with others who share their interest in new and powerful ways. But we can’t forget what is actually required when we want to connect, and stay connected, to other people in a meaningful way and for a sustained period of time.

Filter for Good. Eli Pariser, the author of Filter Bubble and CEO Upworthy.com, talked about the tension between attention and relevance in a world of information.  When the focus is on attention, content publishers (media, brands, everyone) compete using whatever methods they can dream up.  But, as Pariser explained it “if you can engineer relevance, design algorithms that create relevance, you can get people coming back to your site and that means you have happy advertisers.  It’s a win-win.’  One opportunity for relevance is to ‘Filter for Good’ – make it possible for information that is important for people to understand (and not just ‘like’ as in the case of the button on Facebook) to get shared.  Pariser suggested Facebook consider adding an ‘important’ button that users could click when a non-likeable, but still relevant story appears in their news feed.

More later.

Notes from #ActivateNYC12

I am spending the day at the Guardian Activate Summit. 

Here are a few observations/thoughts from the morning sessions:

Publicness. There are lots of different to describe the idea of being open and connected.  Jeff Jarvis uses the word publicness, by which he means you operate in public, for the public, and with the public.  Jarvis suggested that the internet is our greatest tool for encouraging and advancing publicness, but cautioned that both publicness and the internet require a lot of experimentation.   He argued that we, as a society, are experiencing a lot of change – most believe that change is happening at a very rapid pace, but Jarvis argues the opposite, believing the actual change is happening very slowly. “We are at the very beginning,’ he said, and “we still have a lot of work to do to figure it out.’


Attitude isn’t enough.  When Jeff Jarvis interviewed Reid Hoffman, the co-founder and executive chairman of LinkedIn, a clear theme emerged: Openness is not just an attitude, but a reflection of your relationship to the world. Hoffman noted there are still verticals (and thus, inevitably some information won’t be shared, some people won’t interact) but they exist on top of platforms.  So the key to openness and sharing, and thus collaboration and progress, is to make the platforms more open.  As the platforms open, the different verticals have more opportunity to exchange ideas and interact with different people and ideas.  In the end, Hoffman suggested, the goal of organizations/institutions the opportunity is to make the information we need to lead our lives easier to find, easier to make sense of, and easier to work with.


Responsibility to provide. G. Edward DeSeve, the president of the Global Public Leadership Institute and a former special advisor to President Obama, gave a brief talk about how government could become more open, and the role that tools and data play in supporting that transformation.  His message: data and tools don’t solve problems on their own, but the availability of data and more tools ultimately can be used to help government do a better job serving its constituents. I raised my hand and asked whether we were likely to see the social norms and behaviors that people in government bring to these conversations update, or how to accelerate that change in thinking.  DeSeve acknowledged that the people within government are not thinking openly enough, and that change will be difficult and slow to realize.  Then he told a story about the CIA and how that they now operate under a mindset of ‘responsibility to provide’ – the idea that intelligence and data should be open and shared, as much as possible, unless there is a legal or security reason for keeping it closed.  Interesting.


NOTE: The CIA has a long, detailed overview of how information sharing with Congress has evolved over time but the timeline stops in the 1990s, so I’ll have to do some more digging before I can make sense of this concept.


More later.

Think before you give

The New York Times cites a study that challenges the business model of some nonprofit organizations.  Here is a blurb from the article:

Giving used eyeglasses to poor countries may please the donors, but it is not worth the high delivery costs, a new study has concluded, and a $10 donation would do more good.

The study, led by Australian scientists and published in March in Optometry and Vision Science, found that only 7 percent of a test sample of 275 donated spectacles were usable. That raised the delivery cost to over $20 per usable pair. A simple eye exam and a set of ready-made glasses from China can be provided for just $10, the authors said.

The rejected glasses in the study had scratched lenses, damaged frames or prescriptions so specifically aligned to the original owners’ pupils that finding a match was unlikely.

Used glasses also must be cleaned, assessed and shipped, adding to the cost. Then potential recipients often reject them as castoffs, dirty, unfashionable or designed for the opposite sex.

I recognize that this is just one study and the research only applies to one type of organization/charitable model.  Still, there is an important lesson here as we start to think differently about how to address serious issues in a connected society.  All actions are not created equal.  All donations are not good donations.

Overall, the idea of recycling used goods to serve another societal need seems to make sense.  It certainly sets up a great story — and, as the study cites, makes donors feel good about their simple actions.  But a good story and a happy donor base aren’t the goal, or shouldn’t be the goal.  The goal is to give people access to quality eyeglasses… and if that goal isn’t being achieved, or could be achieved in a more efficient and effective way, then the organization is failing at its mission.

I routinely counsel organizations not to seek contributions — to not ask for money. Why not?  Because money is probably the least interesting thing that someone can offer - compared to their time, expertise, access to their network, and so on.  But in this case, it seems clear that raising money can more towards helping address a societal need (the lack of access to eyeglasses) than anything else.  In that case, dollars trump everything else.

Just because we have established that organizations whose goal is to provide eyeglasses to people who don’t have them should seek financial contributions instead of donations of used goods (that was easy!), doesn’t mean our work is done. We still have an abundance of used eyeglasses.  That begs the question: what other ways might old eyeglasses be used to solve a societal problem? 

Answer that…

Lessons from a Pitch (It) Competition

[Cross-posted at WeMedia]

I didn’t win the big prize at the We Media PitchIt! competition, but I walked away with something potentially more valuable: honest and constructive feedback that will help to shape the future trajectory of my project. Here is a quick recap and some lessons learned:

Eight minutes is awkward

Each of the eight finalists was given eight minutes to present their project, plus another four-or-so minutes for questions from the judges. Of course, eight minutes is more time than you would need to provide a simple elevator pitch, but not enough time to get into sufficient detail about a platform or plan. If you think that preparing for an eight minute pitch simply requires adjusting your cadence, or offering more/less detail, you are wrong. A specialized deck, and script, for that length of a pitch is required. I
settled on 15 slides and finished with 5 seconds to spare – managing mostly even pacing through my key points and still time for a quick back-and-forth with one of the judges.

Questions have many answers

I prepared for the Q&A portion of the competition by anticipating questions that might be posed by the judges and preparing and practicing some stock answers. Still, when my moment in the hot seat arrived I found myself scrambling. When one of the judges asked how I would integrate an existing platform into my plans, I assumed he wanted me to explain how I would make that work. I had an answer for that, as well as an answer for why my plans were superior to the existing options in the marketplace. I mis-read the tone of his question and provided the wrong answer, thus missing an opportunity to clearly distinguish my plans. I didn’t harm my pitch significantly, but I didn’t do myself any favors either.

Eight minutes is awkward

Each of the eight finalists was given eight minutes to present their project, plus another four-or-so minutes for questions from the judges. Of course, eight minutes is more time than you would need to provide a simple elevator pitch, but not enough time to get into sufficient detail about a platform or plan. If you think that preparing for an eight minute pitch simply requires adjusting your cadence, or offering more/less detail, you are wrong. A specialized deck, and script, for that length of a pitch is required. I
settled on 15 slides and finished with 5 seconds to spare – managing mostly even pacing through my key points and still time for a quick back-and-forth with one of the judges.

Questions have many answers

I prepared for the Q&A portion of the competition by anticipating questions that might be posed by the judges and preparing and practicing some stock answers. Still, when my moment in the hot seat arrived I found myself scrambling. When one of the judges asked how I would integrate an existing platform into my plans, I assumed he wanted me to explain how I would make that work. I had an answer for that, as well as an answer for why my plans were superior to the existing options in the marketplace. I mis-read the tone of his question and provided the wrong answer, thus missing an opportunity to clearly distinguish my plans. I didn’t harm my pitch significantly, but I didn’t do myself any favors either.

[Cross-posted at WeMedia]