Otter has 1,000 Facebook friends - and it isn't even beloved Muppet Emmit Otter

Last week I was talking with a colleague about Facebook campaigns- or, more accurately, about campaign applications for Facebook. We talked about how easy it seems to now be to gain hundreds - if not thousands - of people for a cause, but how difficult it is to turn those people into activists. Today I read about a sea otter whose Facebook fan page has 1,000 follower.

Now, to be fair the otter in question - who goes by the name "Olive" - was a bit of a charity case: she was in rehab after wading through a nasty patch of oil, so many of her followers wanted updates on her treatment and re-release into the wild. However, it begs the ever-present question on social network sensations: now what? Will the folks behind the Facebook site use it as a platform to further inform Olive's followers on the dangers sea animals face from pollutants? Will it be used to raise money for clean-up efforts? Without a good strategy, te goodwill Olive promoted may not go as far as it could.

It reminds me of a story I heard once about a 1972 campaign event for Richard Nixon, who was seeking re-election in a campaign that would, eventually, mean the end of his Presidency. Eager to show that young people supported the President, buses were chartered and high-profile entertainment talent was paid to perform. It was a giant event that cost a lot of money, but no one thought to collect the contact information of the hundreds of participants - participants who, though the outcome of the Presidential contest was nearly certain, could have helped with many Congressional or other down-ballot races.

It's relatively easy to pack a concert hall with people or amass thousands of Facebook friends with the right amount of resources. But those resources will be wasted if the next step - the answer to the question, "Then What?" - is not fully thought out.

Instant Karma in Moldova

Over the past few years, there has been no shortage of media stories about the use of the internet - whether it was hailing the Obama campaign's vaunted online tactics or the role of social media in modern communication.

The dirty little secret of "viral" campaigns is that, often, they are anything but. Massive national campaigns and corporate communications departments rarely produce content or platforms for participation without some kind of backup plan to encourage membership. Obama campaign staffers followed up by phone with people who signed up online to make sure their online support translated into offline action; McDonald's nearly ubiquitous Filet-o-Fish commercial has passed from email to email largely because it started with a national media buy and had broad exposure during the NCAA tournament telecast.

From the tiny European nation of Moldova this week, however, came a flash mob that started as 20 people and wound up over 10,000.

The success of the protest - measured by the sheer numbers of participants - is a result of using communications avenues to stoke emotions that already existed. A dozen or so young Moldovans, upset with elections that maintained a Communist government, took to the streets.

The failure of the protest - like so many web 2.0 failures - can be found in the question, "Then what?"

Having 10,000 fans on Facebook, or followers on Twitter, or friends on any of hundreds of social networks online is no big trick anymore; with online advertising those numbers can be bought. There must be some action so that those numbers actually mean something.

In Moldova, that lack of forethought turned ugly. The crowd evolved into a mob, and the mob became violent. People were arrested, 43 police officers wound up in the hospital, and the parliament building was looted and destroyed (and is no longer as funkadelic as it was even last week). The demonstration was a display of emotion, but far from an effective campaign for freedom.

Where's the happy medium between joining and forgetting a Facebook cause and buring down parliament? Phone calls, letters, and votes are a good place to start. Depending on who is behind the strategy, the end goal may be product sales or market share, or testimonials from satisfied customers. Whatever that goal is, though, online strategies must be a way there, or else they are only opportunities for distraction.

Politically speaking, freedom-lovers in America eager to answer Obama's online campaign would do well to think through their own strategies to determine the most effective path to change. There's a big crowd out there, and without some form of leadership, they may just start throwing rocks.

Washington: Hollywood for Ugly People

Cole Abaius at Film School Rejects probably thought he was posting about entertainment media when he answered critics of Hollywood blogs. But the points he raises about the evolving media culture - that ethics are often skewed for the sake of the scoop, even beyond the blogosphere - dovetail into some similar criticisms leveled by former RNC head Ed Gillespie.

Gillespie illustrates his point about media bias by telling the story of a reporter - with whom he had a longstanding working relationship - appearing on Hardball. The reporter called an open letter penned by Gillespie "disingenuous," though he later privately admitted he hadn't even read it. But the immediacy of television forced some type of response to a Chris Matthews question.

Part of Gillespie's advice for handling the slanted media is to simply avoid the slanted media through the use of technology - a tactic embraced even by those politicians most beloved by the slanted media.

Scranton 2.0

The city that gave us Steamtown, Dunder-Mifflin Paper, and me is updating it's online presence. Scranton, Pa. has appropriated $15,000 to give RediscoverScranton.com a facelift in an attempt to lure young professionals to the area.

The effort will include a drive to connect Scranton natives via online social networks like Facebook. It's a savvy move, and $15,000 is not really that much to pay for a web site as involved as the one Scranton is talking about. Plus, my favorite part of the story, though, is that unlike most municipal sites, the new Rediscover Scranton will not include needless pictures of local politicians. This is a good idea - since the site is aimed at people outside the Electric City, there's no reason for such gratuitous vote-grabs.

Rediscover Scranton may need a spokesperson, though. Luckily, there's a champion of the people and a native son of Northeastern Pennsylvania who would be perfect:

The newspaper is IN the computer?

More on the possible digital transition of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer - check out this 1981 San Francisco local news story about the possibility of getting your morning newspaper online:

I stumbled on the clip reading Patrick Hynes's theory that mobile phones may make some web sites irrelevant.

Post Intelligencer, post-print

With news coming this week that the Seattle Post-Intelligencer's print version may go the way of the Rocky Mountain News, we may be at the cusp of a new era in local news reporting.

The Post-Intelligencer (P-I) looks like it will shut down it's printing presses and release an online-only version. Aside from printing and delivery, it means the P-I will also cut out reporter travel - national stories will be covered by wire services or by other sister papers in the Hearst network.

(Sidebar: Since it's in the Hearst network, will the last printed word in the P-I have to be "rosebud"?)

There's no dwindling market for local news, as the TV ratings show. But local daily newspapers are dinosaurs - slow-moving and cumbersome. The question is how the old media outlets adjust in a new media world. Will they see the online world as a way to stave off extinction for a few years, or will they find a way to evolve?

Chances are, the P-I - and other similar papers around the country - could do very well writing stories and posting them online. But why stop there? Online, they won't be confined as they were on the printed page. They have multiple forms of media - audio, video, and everything in between - at their fingertips.

The dangerous trap here is thinking in terms of "media buckets" on a local level, as people have thought for decades: the TV stations are in the video bucket, the radio stations in the audio bucket, and the newspapers in the printed word bucket. There are no buckets online, so it doesn't translate.

The end of the P-I's print version isn't necessarily an ending, but a liberation. The P-I can now combine printed stories about Seattle with short video news segments and podcasts. It can exist on its website as well as Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Ning, and everywhere else. It can serve the people of Seattle, and be the authority on Seattle to everyone else.

The dinosaurs didn't die out overnight, but eventually time caught up with most of them. Except for the smart ones; they learned to fly.

They were going to call it O-Tube, but that sounds dirty

The weekly White House "YouTube" addresses aren't going to be on YouTube anymore. Instead, the videos will be hosted by a customized player. In the absence of a formal explanation, some are suggesting conflicts over YouTube's privacy policies.

As Cnet chronicles, the White House has been under criticism since the beginning for choosing Google-owned YouTube as its video hosting platform. The change may silence criticism of the White House, but it won't solve any of the root privacy concerns circling around Google and YouTube.

Could the White House have used its bully pulpit to make YouTube more secure? It certainly would have been a better service to internet users - after all, the folks who follow the President's weekly addresses probably view hundreds of other videos on YouTube as well. President Obama could have been vocal in calling on YouTube to change its policies to better serve its users.

Of course, it may not be about privacy. YouTube is more than just a video site - it is an online community. The President's Weekly Address is just one of millions of videos; and being on a site like YouTube invites comments and video responses. Maybe YouTube is too public a forum; perhaps the White House is unwilling to sacrifice their message monopoly to engage in a legitimate back-and-forth debate.

Novel concepts from the 30s

Mashable mentioned an interesting trend yesterday: businesses are building blogs that are focused on their area of expertise, but not necessarily on their products. The idea is simple: by building a media outlet that interests their target demographic, businesses hope to lure more customers.

As the post notes, some journalists would argue that private companies are not credible sources. You can probably find these journalists' stories on the pages of your favorite newspaper - right next to the ads that fund those pages. Mass media has always relied on sponsorship - entertainment or information nestled around product pitches. Why take offense when the same thing happens on the internet that happened on the DuMont network in the 50s?

From the companies' perspective, using online media makes perfect sense. There are few better ways to extend your brand - for instance, Whole Foods runs a blog about food and recipes to help establish itself as an expert in groceries. And it's cheap to do - all the company really needs is the mental discipline to update a blog daily.

With ventures like this cheaper, easier, and more effective than traditional advertising, you can see why advertising revenues are declining. It's another way the business community will have to adapt to a changing world.

Does this mean my Mom has to read a liberal blog, too?

I can't imagine it actually coming to pass, but rumblings about reviving the inappropriately named "Fairness Doctrine" have sprung up around Capitol Hill. The Fairness Doctrine would be an FCC regulation that would force radio stations to balance their programming - so that station that plays Rush Limbaugh for three hours would have to balance it out with... um... well, whoever it is that liberals and Democrats listen to.

The impetus for the rule change is clear. Senator Debbie Stabenow claims that talk radio "overwhelms people's opinions - and, unfortunately, incorrectly." In other words, she's worried about opinions she disagrees with being more persuasive. It's completely antithetical to everything our country is founded on, but quelling dissent makes sense.

Beyond principle, though, the problems are in the details. For instance, who determines what "balance" entails? If Sean Hannity is in favor of invading Iran, is he effectively balanced by someone who is against invading Iran because they would rather invade North Korea? And how does a fairness doctrine account for "do-it-yourself" media?

The great thing about free speech is, if you disagree with what someone else is saying, you have every right to answer them and attempt to make a compelling case. Sometimes the other side has the advantage of experience and establishment - just ask any conservative reading the New York Times or watching CNN. (And incidentally - if the fairness doctrine is passed, it opens a can of worms for mainstream media.)

More avenues exist now than ever before to get a message out - which makes the fairness obsolete as well as being, well, unfair.

Saving money and living better

The silver lining to tough economic times is creativity. Wal-mart - whose cost-cutting business model makes the company seem like they are in permanent recession mode - has branched out beyond traditional advertising with some creative modern media projects. In doing so (and crowing a little bit about it) they give a pretty good playbook for advancing a cause or issue in online social networks.

Welcome to the online home of Hope and Change

Hours after his inauguration, Barack Obama has already re-launched Whitehouse.gov. The site features a blog, facts about the executive branch, and other informational links. It also includes an indexed policy agenda and a page for the Office of Public Liaison and Intergovernmental Affairs. These two items will, in all likelihood, operate hand-in-hand in the new administration: as the President pursues the agenda, look for the Office of Public Liaison to mobilize public support to publicly lobby Congress. This office may also act as a way to run instantaneous focus groups to identify agenda items that will resonate most among the President's "standing army" of supporters.

Imagine no possessions

As I alluded to previously, YouTube is cracking down on videos that use copyrighted tracks. This has led to some backlash. Rick Hodgin at TGDaily posed the question, "What if intellectual property laws were rolled back - so there were no copyrights, patents, or digital rights management (DRM) software?"

In discussing the upside of this ideal, Hodgin paints the same picture as John Lennon's "Imagine": "Imagine all the people / sharing all the world." The problem is that taking away the financial incentive for creativity will, because of human nature, reduce the number of people who attempt to be creative. And where financial interests are concerned, a no-intellectual-property policy favors those with money. Hodgin illustrates this with a flawed example:

"Suppose you're into model airplanes and would like to build and sell those craft for a living, but don't know as much as you should about design? Why not take someone else's design, copy it and sell it? They have just as much opportunity to sell it as you do."

In this scenario, the "Big Corporation" is more likely to be the party that takes someone else's design, copies it, and sells it. An independent engineer may come up with a good design, but may could not finance mass production as easily as Boeing or some Lockheed-Martin.

There are reasons that companies who own the rights to music should want their music to appear - even unlicensed - on YouTube. And there are many creative ways that music is used.

You can't force someone to give up his or her property for others to use, even if it's in the owner's best interest. (Well, sometimes you can, but you shouldn't be able to.) The good news, though, is that an owner's best interest is usually a good enough selling point. It's happening in the music world, where companies like Amazon and eMusic have become extraordinarily successful selling DRM-free music. Even Apple's iTunes - for years a symbol of limiting the use of downloaded music - has relaxed its DRM policies.

So it's that financial incentive for creativity which will spur more creativity for distribution - which, in the digital world, will eventually mean more materials available for wider use.

Imagine that. I wonder if you can.

PelosiRoll'd

To celebrate the launch of the Congressional YouTube channels, Nancy Pelosi Rickroll'd Your Nation's Capital this week. Here's the video that has Washington talking:

You may not be able to see it by the time this post is up - YouTube has been cracking down on the use of copyrighted music, and it has already been removed once from Pelosi's official YouTube channel. But it doesn't matter. The video - which started with a couple of cats frolicking in the Capitol before launching into Rick Astley's "Never Gonna Give You Up" - has already made a media splash.

Aside from being funny and a good media hook, it shows the Speaker's office understands the folks who use modern media - Rickrolling is an older prank, but new enough to be relevant (it's no Dancing Jesus) and wholly unexpected from a federal officeholder. Kudos to Pelosi for running with what was probably the suggestion of a younger staffer.

That said, it's telling that the Democrats in Congress are harnessing the awesome power of online video to bring us images of kittens and Rick Astley.

From the folks deciding who gets bailout money...

YouTube is trying to encourage Congress to use its service by launching pages that aggregate channels from Representatives and Senators.

You read that right: a free video service has to find ways to encourage people to use its product – people who, every 2-6 years, spend hundreds of thousands (and at times millions) to buy time on television stations.

"Boss? I'd like a new title..."

Whether professionally or extra-curricularly, it seems I've been having lots of discussions with people about the role of "new media" in politics or business. Maybe a change in job title is in order:

(Found at RightWingVideo.)

New Year's Revolution

As 2008 ends, the story of the year is obviously Barack Obama's election - and in tactical political circles, the talk is of the online tactics used by Team Obama. It's a big theme in the current race for the RNC chair, and various Republican organizations - such as Rebuild The Party - are calling on new party leadership to embrace technology.

In this rush to keep up with the Democrats, The Next Right blogger Dale Franks adds an important perspective about technology in politics. Franks points out that the whistles and bells of online activity are worthless if they do not produce offline results.

As conservatives start putting together their plans for 2009, they should heed Franks's advice: technology can be a tool to deliver strong messages, but without those messages it's just a way to make noise.

Radio Nowhere

With Washington DC run by avowed liberals, the New York Times predicts an upswing in conservative talk radio. Fred Thompson, Mike Huckabee, and Rudy Giuliani are expected to join the ranks of Limbaugh and Hannity in stoking America's unrest with inside-the-beltway politics.

It's a start, and these voices will have their place. But make no mistake: they represent an old guard and an old medium.

The problem with radio is that, like television, it's passive. So as millions tune in, it becomes easy for the so-called "main stream media" to dismiss Rush Limbaugh as a single voice delivering soliloquies from the fringe of American politics. They don't want to see the millions of heads nodding in agreement.

But what if those nodding heads used their voice to speak out? That would be hard to ignore. That's where a medium like the internet can go beyond where talk radio has gone before.

Twitter is the new internet

Republican online guru Patrick Ruffini makes an apt analogy on TechPresident about Twitter. A decade ago, the Internet was the revolutionary media frontier compared to TV; today Twitter is a new niche frontier on an increasingly mainstream world wide web.

Of note, Ruffini points out that Republicans are ahead of Democrats in terms of using this software; projects like the #dontgo movement have shown the utility of this rapidly growing communications vehicle.

The more I thought about it, the less surprised I was - recall that it was conservative bloggers who, in 2004, made the first big splash with blogs by exposing shoddy CBS News reporting that ultimately cost Dan Rather his job. At the time, blogs were relative newcomers to the political scene, and members of the more traditional media establishment complained that bloggers weren't "real" journalists and couldn't be trusted for news.

The internet and blogs have become more mainstream, Team Obama was able to harness online enthusiasm and the narrative has developed that conservatives are a step behind. One could just as easily point to the use of technology like Twitter to suggest conservatives are ahead of the curve - but using technology that mainstream media outlets haven't quite wrapped their head around yet.

Like we needed a study to tell us this

A Nielsen study has revealed that most YouTube viewing happens at work. No surprise there: cubicle life offers a high-speed internet connection and plenty of co-workers to forward hilarious emails.

If you're trying to get a message out through online video, this is something to consider deeply. If most people are watching at work, what does that mean you have to do to make your video effective?

It certainly means that the shorter your video is, the better. If someone is watching at work, it's probably while taking a short break from their job. By keeping your videos to around 90-120 seconds, your viewers will be able to concentrate without looking over their shoulder for the boss. Sometimes it's tough to make your point in such a condensed time frame, but that's one of the challenges if you want to be an effective communicator.

Content and language are also considerations. Most people love an obscenity-laced tirade delivered at the top of one's lungs, but some clips would take on a whole different meaning at work:

And when you're developing your content, it's worth remembering that people who watch videos at work often receive them from a friend or co-worker. What reason are you giving for someone to click "forward" and send your email to someone else? Why is your video interesting and/or funny?

Online video is a critical medium to deliver political messages. But writing, filming, and editing is a time-consuming process; you might as well keep your audience in mind so you can realize the rewards of your work.

Writing your Congressman in 2009

Some light reading for the previous evening: the Congressional Management Foundation's study on Communicating with Congress. I didn't get through it all but started with the parts for grassroots organizers - that's the part that directly applies to my day job.

Lots of discussion about communicating with Congress online deals with opportunities; the CMF deals with realities. For instance, email to Capitol Hill is so routine that it has lost almost all effect. If you're a constituent hoping to make an impact, it's better to put pen to paper than finger to keyboard; yet citizens are eager to communicate with their elected leaders online because, well, citizens communicate with everyone else online, as well.

It presents daunting challenges for Capitol Hill. A well-funded grassroots campaign can generate calls or letters; an organic movement is more likely to be online. The study offers some solutions, but 535 offices will have to come up with answers of their own.