New on YouTube: Citizen journalism and civic action

June 30, 2009 ~ Jim Eltringham ~ Leave a comment

As many social networks as exist, YouTube still has the greatest potential for driving action for the simple reason that video is a powerful medium for communication – and short videos are even more so.

By offering a platform where people could host and share their videos easily, YouTube has had no small role in advancing the citizen journalism; if blogs gave everyone a printing press, YouTube has given everyone a TV news station. YouTube is taking its role in this media re-alignment seriously, too, by creating a Reporters’ Center – a resource page with various videos to help people produce better news stories.

While some corners of the media landscape like to harp on bloggers and internet news as “unofficial” and “unprofessional”, this offers a real solution to those somewhat apt criticisms. While there will always be muckrakers and yellow journalists in any media, these resources will help increase the amount of well-researched coverage through channels that news consumers are increasingly turning to.

Another new development from YouTube – that actually interests me a bit more personally – are the “call to action overlays” that launch today. If you’re a YouTube advertiser, you can now run a link on your video that points viewers to another website.

Virally popular commercials – like the McDonald’s Filet-o-Fish commercial from this past Lent – can now link directly to the products they hawk. But more importantly, political videos can do more than simply raise awareness and frame issues. Imaging the now-infamous “macaca video” with a link directing you to a page where you could contact then-Senator George Allen’s office. (Of course, mass emails to Allen’s office may not be the most effective way to contact the Senator, but it would build a heck of a nice email list.) Having videos that directly inspire action will make YouTube an advocacy tool for campaigns that may have, previously, only looked at it as a messaging tool.

Proficient in Facebook, working knowledge of Twitter

June 22, 2009June 22, 2009 ~ Jim Eltringham ~ Leave a comment

A few weeks back, my office was going through a search process for hiring interns. One resume item caught my eye: under special skills, one applicant had listed his familiarity with various blogging and social media platforms.

Three years ago, the last time I had a job search, I could not have boasted in an interview – let alone in writing on my resume – about my expertise at looking up old high school friends, joining online groups, and staring at videos of portly adolescents staging lightsaber duels. In 2009, that’s an asset.

Via TechRepublican, I stumbled across a Path101 post that discusses this very phenomenon – and draws what I think is an apt parallel. While there are workers who refuse to learn these tools but recognize their importance, there’s a generation of college graduates who use social networks every day the way other people use telephones – meaning, according to Path, that in five or ten years knowledge of certain online environments could become as standard among job seekers as knowledge of standard word processing software is today.

That also puts a short life span on the “social media expert” occupation that many in the consulting world are looking to carve out as their own.

Iranians can still Tweet – thanks, W!

June 18, 2009June 18, 2009 ~ Jim Eltringham ~ 2 Comments

Maybe Hillary Clinton “wouldn’t know a twitter from a tweeter,” but Jared Cohen does. He’s the 27-year-old State Department official who, realizing the need to keep lines of communication open among Iran’s protest movement, picked up the phone and asked Twitter to delay their scheduled service interruption. He had established a relationship with Twitter executives at least since he organized a State Department envoy of new media crepresentatives earlier this year.

MTV lauded the foresight with the headline, “Iranians Keep Twittering Thanks To Young Obama Official.” Unfortunately, MTV disproves its own headline with its story, revealing the shocking truth that Cohen was actually hired by Condoleeza Rice three years ago.

The guy hired by George W. Bush’s administration kept Iran talking using technology and new media. The Obama appointee doesn’t even know the name of the technology.

Work for Google – for FREE!

June 16, 2009June 16, 2009 ~ Jim Eltringham ~ Leave a comment

Artists are bristling at Google’s invitation to help design skins for their Chrome browser, since Google is offering them the chance to work for free. Critics are pointing to Google’s $1.4 billion profit margin in the first quarter of 2009 as evidence that they can afford to pay artists.

Google, of course, makes that profit from GMail, Google docs, Google Calendar, Blogger, YouTube, and a host of useful online tools that consumers have to pay for… right? Actually, all of those are free services. In fact, Google offers any web user an awful lot for free.

It’s not altruistic – Google does it for exposure, because the more you use their products the more they can advertise to you – and the more likely they can put an ad in front of your face.

Google, which started as a humble search engine, realized years ago that the availability of online tools meant the market would eventually set the price for certain things at $0. Given a changing technological environment, Google changed their business model.

Good for the artists who have proclaimed that they don’t need Google for exposure – it means they are doing well enough that they don’t need to sacrifice salary for experience, the way an intern might.

The fact is, Google doesn’t need to pay for their services, either and will get their browser skin designed one way or another. The big winners are artists seeking exposure who are willing to sacrifice payment for their core services in exchange for a chance to be in front of more eyeballs – appropriately enough, the artists who think like Google.

Frum bad to worse

June 11, 2009June 11, 2009 ~ Jim Eltringham ~ Leave a comment

David Frum makes a great point on the need for intellectualism in the conservative movement during a Bloggingheads diavlog – then provides an excellent example by senselessly deriding Matt Lewis as non-intellectual for using common online tools to advance ideas.

The comment to which Frum takes exception was a suggestion that those looking for an introduction to conservative thought start at the Wikipedia entry for Russel Kirk’s The Conservative Mind. Wikipedia, Frum rightly points out, is a flawed informational resource – and thus, he concludes, Matt Lewis promotes a lightweight, pop-culture conservatism.

This completely ignores the strategic value of Wikipedia.

Have you ever read The Conservative Mind? My grandfather gave it to me for Christmas a few years back. It’s not a pamphlet; I’m relatively sure the third little pig could have gotten away with building his house out of several copies without worrying about the big bad wolf’s lungs. If I’m trying to convince someone of my political philosophy, I wouldn’t give them a volume that they need a pushcart to carry.

I might, however, start them off on a place like Wikipedia, which is a familiar, non-threatening environment for a political novice. It also contains links and citations to more reputable resources. As a gateway to information, Wikipedia is a very good resource.

And, as any communications professional will tell you, a Wikipedia entry has value. Many people – rightly or wrongly – use it as as their first read on a subject which is unfamiliar to them. (Lewis’s comment on learning conservatism might even be interpreted as advice on which Wikipedia entry to start with – and recommending an entry about Russell Kirk over a more generic “conservative” entry is actually quite learned.) Given the way most voters consume information, Frum’s criticism seems a little dated.

In the interest of full disclosure, I’ve known Matt Lewis for a while and worked with him at two different companies – so I can understand a bit better than Frum how much Lewis reads, and the variety of sources he consults to educate himself. Of course, when I think of an intellectual conservative, Matt Lewis’s name is not the first that pops into my head. That distinction belongs to another former colleague, Dan Flynn (who points out flaws in Frum’s own brand of “intellectualism”).

But as with any political movement, ideas are only half the battle; the other half is convincing people to buy into those ideas and vote for candidates that support them.

To Høyre and back

June 10, 2009June 10, 2009 ~ Jim Eltringham ~ 1 Comment

I’m just back stateside after an all too brief trip to Oslo, Norway, where I spoke to activists from the Norwegian Conservative Party, Høyre, about online campaigning. With parliamentary elections approaching this September – and the party performing poorly in recent polls – they had the same question being asked right now by any American campaigns, companies, and brands: How can we capture the wave of online excitement that Barack Obama rode to the White House?

One of the conference attendees asked a particularly helpful question: when deciding how to budget time, how should time be divided between online outreach and good old-fashioned knocking on doors. The answer, of course, is that there is no substitute for the things that get you votes – offline actions like knocking on doors and physically bringing people to the polls so they can vote for your candidate.

Online tools should be implemented because they can help you do that, by creating relationships between a candidate and a voter or allowing the campaign to identify potential sources for volunteer hours, money, and of course votes.

The Obama campaign smartly did this, as the research for my presentation reminded me. All online properties fed a database, and communication through email, on Facebook, or through text messaging was always designed to spur supporters to vote, give money, and recruit their friends to do the same. You can communicate online, but votes are counted in real life – so online excitement is only good if it translates to offline action.

Speaking of communication, another lesson that was illustrated nicely by my Norway trip was the unimportance of words in political speeches. I sat in on several party leaders’ addresses to the group of activists, and found it remarkably easy to follow each speech despite not speaking a word in Norwegian. I’ve always heard that communication is 55% visual, 38% vocal (the tone and inflection of your voice), and just 7% verbal (the words you use). The crowd reactions certainly help too, but I’ve never believed these percentages more strongly than I do now.

As further evidence, check out this activist-created (and wholly unofficial) video shown to me by my colleagues across the water. Even if the original issue isn’t quite clear(a controversy over a policewoman in training questioning whether she could wear a burqa with her uniform) the producer’s take on the political response is pretty clear:

All the news that’s fit to crib

May 18, 2009 ~ Jim Eltringham ~ Leave a comment

Maureen Dowd lifting language from a blog post for use in her column is proof that, as it has been for decades, the New York Times is the defining example of print journalism in America. After all, this news comes less than two weeks after reporters at various papers were exposed for relying too heavily on Wikipedia to write obituaries for composer Maurice Jarre. With the mainstream media becomes reliant on digital sources, what’s to stop the media consumer from doing the same?

Consider a short, oversimplified summary of the development of our modern media:

Media evolved as a way to let us know what the most important events of they day are; the people who owned the printing press would learn as much as they could and summarize it for the masses. Then, to get as much information as possible, the press owners hired reporters who cultivated sources, from whom they collected information and distilled the most important parts – which was, again, summarized for the masses.

In this model, the journalist is an extremely important link in the chain of information. There’s far too much news out there tucked away in the nooks and crannies of politics, government, sports teams, companies, movie studios, or anything other institution for the average citizen to find it all on his or her own. Unfortunately for the journalist, this model is no longer the case.

Today, most reporters get their news from RSS feeds. I make this point often whenever I’m asked to talk about either public relations or building a digital strategy for an organization (since nowadays, the two really go hand-in-hand). Therefore, if you are in PR – in other words, if you want to be a reporter’s source – you have to make sure your organization distributes information over RSS feeds. In essence, RSS feeds are the new “sources.”

And since you can go around the web signing up for just about any RSS feed you want, you have access to those sources as well. And instead of reading about President Obama’s next Supreme Court nominee in your local paper, you can instantly see what The National Review, Daily Kos, the Huffington Post, Human Events, and a host of other media outlets from all over the political spectrum have to say about him.

All of this makes the reporter or the columnist much less useful than he or she used to be – especially when he or she is sloppy and cribs almost directly from his or her source.

Of course, this isn’t the end of journalism – the information has to come from somewhere, after all. But it does mean that a journalist has to work harder and report information that his or her readers wouldn’t be able to find otherwise. Like many other industries, the media must find new ways to generate value.

Dot-com 2.0?

May 8, 2009May 8, 2009 ~ Jim Eltringham ~ Leave a comment

I talking about social networks and online environments with a colleague this week, the 400-pound gorilla of the web 2.0 world came up: nobody is making any real money yet. “What people don’t realize,” he said, “is that YouTube has a lot of views, but has been losing its shirt. Facebook doesn’t make money. Twitter doesn’t make money.”

It’s a good point. Just as the “dot-com” craze launched a bubble and an eventual bust in the late 1990s and early 2000s, the Web 2.0 industry has a bubble of its own. Outside of Google – who has made tons of money, but is seeing their business model coming under attack from privacy groups – most companies have been supported by venture capital.

For all their popularity, Facebook and Twitter will have to figure out some way to make money off the masses who use them or they could find themselves endangered. And while some recent innovations (like Facebook opening up it’s back-end programming) make these sites more useful to more people paradoxically make it harder to make money.

For the past year and a half especially, people have tracked and managed Twitter accounts via third-party programs either on their laptop or mobile phone – people rarely go to Twitter.com. With Facebook opening up their programming, it invites the same pattern of usage. In other words, both these sites promise to offer infrastructure for people to use for sharing content – but without having eyeballs on their actual sites, they can’t rely on the advertising revenue stream that so many other online companies have used as their bread and butter. That’s why there’s some speculation that browser companies might take over social networking as an attractive add-on to Firefox, Chrome, or Internet Explorer.

At the same time, outside groups have an interest in keeping these services afloat. Politicians and advocacy campaigns come to mind immediately as entities who have benefited from online networks. But wherever monetization ultimately comes from, at some point the monied interests who have supported the web 2.0 bubble will look for a return on their investment. If that return isn’t there, this bubble may burst, too.

Building the GOP’s future on five pillars

May 4, 2009May 4, 2009 ~ Jim Eltringham ~ Leave a comment

TechRepublican’s new editor, Meghann Parlett, reported on a conference call held by the GOP’s new New Media Director, Todd Herman. Amid all the newness was Herman’s five (new) strategic pillars for online organizing, which are pretty good:

1. Use New Media Properties to Expand GOP Reach.

2. Acquire Actionable Data.

3. Broadcast Impeccable Logic. (This involves creating a repository of online conservative thought.)

4. Curate Passionate Stories.

5. Establish Real Connections with Voters.

I suppose #3 might be a load-bearing pillar – a nod to conservative activists who feel the national party is out-of-touch with the rank-and-file activists. But I don’t like it. First off, the party should avoid getting into the business of defining conservatism, because Arlen Specter does have a point: what plays in Tuscaloosa may not play in Philadelphia, or vice versa.

The Republican Party has enjoyed success when it leaves power in decentralized hands. The 1994 takeover of Congress and subsequent policies were great examples. The 1994 campaign had no national figurehead, and battles fought and won on a district-by-district basis added up to a large national victory. Similarly, a recurring policy theme involved pushing responsibility – and freedom – out to the states to ease the over-burdened Federal government, a theme which resulted in a reformed welfars system and budget surpluses.

A “central library of conservatism” may be asking the RNC to do too much. Of course, I suspect this will be window dressing – a spot on the website with links to conservative think tanks while the rest of the team focuses on doing what a political part should: getting people elected.

Many of the others are good, basic ideas that encompass the “blocking and tackling” of what a party should be doing – such as fostering communication with potential voters and amassing as much data on the electorate as is possible. These are things the Republican party has done well when their famous microtargeting and 72-hour get out the vote strategies were in full display in 2002 and 2004; Herman is wisely updating them to reflect the technology available today.

One of Herman’s pillars, however, strikes a particularly innovative chord: the concept of amassing “stories.” Logic wins a debate but emotion wins elections. Stockpiling stories will help create that emotional appeal – and since online media is probably the most efficient way to do it, Herman has apparently recognized that it’s a task that he’s uniquely positioned to help out with.