Initiative. Voice. Democracy.

We got'em.

We're gonna use'em.

John Kerry's Media Corps is a new site on JK.com.

http://www.johnkerry.com/onlinehq/mediacorps/

From HQ to volunteers to the mediasphere.

Talking points.

Issues of the day.

Attacks recorded.

And the tools to put them to use.

We have five months
    to bring the message
        through the volunteers
            to the voters.

So let me tell you about the Rapid Response Model, how Kerry's Media Corps builds on it, and what makes this a beta release.

The John Kerry Media Corps

Embracing the decentralization message, volunteers put together the Dean Rapid Response Network in 2003. Last week John Kerry's staff launched the Media Corps, their first cut at rapid response.

Components:

• For each message (presumed weekly)
  • An assignment
  • A deadline
  • Background
  • Feedback email link
• Other tools
  • Research materials on the assignment
  • Recent television ads
  • Link to the D-Bunker (removed after the first week)
  • Tips for writers and callers

That's the anatomy. What's the whole?

1. Media Corps is a boundary communication channel. It pushes memes to volunteers. The campaign's politics and communications teams design messages. Media Corps throws them over the wall.
2. Media Corps is an end run past the political press corps. It tells volunteers to take the memes and run with them. To local media. To audience participation channels. To letter writing and other P2P channels. Can you spell disintermediation?
3. Media Corps is a memetic amplifier, making messages louder and reaching further. No longer are TV ads the only place you're likely to experience the campaign's message. The community reinforces broadcast memes with their own versions. This improves what advertisers call reach and penetration. 
4. Media Corps minimizes memetic drift, keeping volunteers on point. Its centralized and standardized seed message is the reference version. Unlike a game of "telephone" where messengers garble the message, Media Corps always gives a public point of origin.
5. Media Corps is a localization strategy, tailoring messages. Politics remains local. No national message works everywhere. Most advertising is wasted just trying to find its audience, let alone delivering the right message. Volunteers translate
6. Media Corps is a memetic biodiversity play, a lab for new ideas. Media Corps pushes its memes through thousands of channels, each reinventing the message. Some versions will spread further, survive longer, and have more impact than others. No single campaign office or market research firm can imagine or test all the variations the way the Media Corps can.

Why does it matter?

• Money. Every minute of "free media" is a minute more trusted than advertising. But the payoff is dollars that don't have to be raised.
• Message Innovation. Marketing sciences are all about developing the right sequence, timing, and presentation of the right messages for the right people. The right message is the hard part. Media Corps is a force multiplier for the communication team.  
• Measurable Results. Powering the feedback loop. Managerial gold. 

The Rapid Response Model

Most of the money in this election will be spent on television ads.

Every presidential campaign staff has a political director and a communications director. Typically a political director picks the ideas, issues, facts, and positions that will win voters to the candidate and money for the campaign. Then the communications staff wraps them up in events for the media to cover, things for voters to read, oratory for the candidate to propound, and all the other stuff that gets the word out. Advertising and branding, product management and media relations. Promotion.

Campaign communications are dynamic.

Hot items in the press change a campaign's message strategy hourly. For example, right now Rumsfeld is defending his performance in Iraq instead of attacking Kerry's war record. While a candidate's staff is small and agile enough to respond to attacks, it's not enough. Once leveled, an attack can fester in the air for weeks. And character attacks are best fought by anyone but the candidate.

That brings us to "rapid response."

Rapid Response has four parts:

1. Prepare
2. Detect
3. Respond
4. Feedback

Preparations include:

• Write, edit and test talking points
• Recruit a cadre of first responders
• List traditional media channels by locale
• Write procedures for responding to each channel/program/publication.
• Building training materials for effective response
• Set up a database of responders

Detection in three steps:

1. Notice an attack, through surveillance.
2. Report the attack to your rapid response network
3. Prioritize the attack.

The US has about 300 million citizens, about 106 million voted in the 2000 general election [US Census Bureau]. There are tens of thousands of newspapers, radio stations, television channels, mailing lists, and web sites. Two "free" strategies:

• Volunteers adopt a program/publication. "Mike will read the Business Section of the Miami Herald."
• Automated clipping services, like Google News Alerts.

Response. Every attack should be met with a swift and effective response. Prioritize only when you don't have the resources to respond everywhere. When you choose among multiple attacks, watch for the attacks which:

• are coordinated,
• reach a bigger audience,
• are authentic,
• are more potent, or
• open a new channel or issue.

Join fights:

• You can win.
• Where you can be seen or heard.
• Where you need to learn something from the engagement.

Response has three steps:

1. Assign. It doesn't make sense for everyone to respond to the same thing. Make sure your response team covers all the attacks worthy of response, and that people are matched to the assignment.
2. Draft. Every attack is a little different. So tailor your response.
3. Engage. Mail the letter, call the show, post to the bulletin board.

Feedback serves four goals:

• Risk assessment. Attacks going unchallenged? Attacks with disruptive potential?
• Message improvement. What's working? What isn't?
• Resource allocation. Where should we drive volunteer time and attention?
• Channel/medium profiling. What can we learn about media outlets to improve our effectiveness?

Prepare. Detect. Respond. Learn.

Challenges?

• Deeper-memes. Can you build a sequence of messages that assert an underlying value or point? For example, can "competence" and "character" be built in to how we talk about economy, environment, security?  
• Listen well to feedback. Listening doesn't scale, that's why we vote. And why we summarize. You need a combination of structured ("on a scale of 1 to 5...") and unstructured ("What did you say?") input.
• Positive Reinforcement. Bring volunteers back for new message cycles. Acknowledge people and teams for effort, creativity, and results.
• Experiment with the Process. This means consciously trying messages and talking points with different characteristics. How many words can fit in the bumpersticker version? What's the best day of the week to launch a campaign? Best time of day? Can we run two at once? Four at once? Does it have to be a whole week, or can we run one from start to finish in 48 hours? Test. Measure. Test again.
• Tailored Experiences. Support both high and low energy volunteers.
• Speed. Keep the cycles short. Look to IM and SMS for alerting to new threats.
• Memory. Help volunteers expose successes and failures to each other.
• Quick Help. Attacks aren't homogenous. In addition to research for this week's campaign, put response research for the 25 most common attacks, and 5 responses on each issue.
• Training. Build volunteer knowledge and skill. It's summer: recruit 50 high school teachers to craft tutorials on each issue, on each medium. Interview successful writers and callers for their story. Feed lessons learned back to the volunteers. 
• Attack. Initiate an issue. Seed the conversation. See how long it takes for big media to pick up a meme. See how long other groups take to respond, both friends and foes. Change the rhythm, put opponents off-balance.

I wrote Rapid Response: Memetic Engineering in the 2004 Presidential Campaign, my assessment of a new project from the John Kerry campaign. It's a recap of the political Rapid Response model, an analysis of the John Kerry Media Corps version of that model, and a checklist of things for the JK campaign to work on.

Not included: the idea of the grassroots web site network.

When you blend:

• "all politics is local" with
• "the edge of the network has the power" and
• "nobody trusts campaign commercials" 

You turn to free media.

John Kerry HQ is doing it with Media Corps, but not to weblogs.

Both the Dem and GOP professional staffs are resisting publishing decentralization.

Otherwise they'd host the biggest network of blogs in the world. Blogs for each county, each precinct, every meetup, each working committee. Aggregators that tie local groups together. Both content and event/activity syndication. And promotion of those sites to the local news media, community groups, and political clubs.

The ROI? Better communication, coordination, cohesion, and collaboration. We need it as groups form, as citizens swell their ranks, as we commit time and energy to making momentum. Tools to help them follow the campaign's lead while making local sense of issues and messages.  

But they're not. The people who understood and supported this vision are no longer part of the Kerry staff. Instead, we're seeing incremental marketing. 3 of 5 Cluetrain Points.

Maybe next time.

[aka public policy]

What's a "Why Sayer"? LEO says:

I suspect it may be an attempt at a play on 'nay-sayers' -- people who never do anything but criticize. 'Why-sayers' is a coinage that emphasizes positive thinking, creativity, and questioning authority. (Go Ikea!)

On a flyer at Ikea:

We're Hiring
Why
Sayers

People who want to make things better. Make things more fun. More clever. People who aren't restricted by convention, but challenged by it. People who fit perfectly at Ikea. Because it's the why that makes us successful. Just give us a call and submit a voice application. We'll be in touch with you as soon as possible.

Call (866) 831-8611
or visit us on the web at
www. IKEA.com.

On the reverse...

Tied together by a hand-drawn triangle:

The Dream
to create a better everyday life for the many people

The Business Idea
by offering a wide range of well-designed, functional home furnishing products at prices so low that as many people as possible will be able to afford them

The Human Resource Idea
by giving down-to-earth, straightforward people the possibility to grow, both as individuals and in their professional roles, so that together we are strongly committed to creating a better everyday life for ourselves and our customers

Followed by:

The Realization
it takes a dream to create a successful business idea
it takes people to make dreams a reality

Things I love about this: 

1. The inner rhetoric of the organization, plainly exposed to the public. Values, goals, the mental model holding things together. Do you speak our language?
2. Psychographic positioning. Being stark about who you are improves the quality of the inquiry pool. Are you in or are you out?
3. Simple action directions. Call us.  
4. The promise of prompt human contact. Competitive advantage in an era of form-letter-non-response.

[aka staffing]

I edit EastBayKerry.com , a TypePad weblog. It's a dual-use site: evangelism with a public face for our group and political cause, and a work coordination site. From a September 2003 help desk ticket to TypePad support:

I'd like an event typelist.

First, I want the fields described by vCalendar, RFCs 2445 (iCalendar), 2445 (iTIP), and 2447 (iMIP).

I want to be able to import events from my desktop calendars (outlook, palm).

I want to display upcoming events in my sidebar.

I also want to be able to show recent events or events in a time range.

Each event should have a permalink.

I want to sort by date/time of the event, not the date/time the link was posted.

I should be able to control day/date/time displays.

I should be able to emphasize some events as important, so they get an alternative CSS style (so I can pick them out of a longer list of events).

I want to be able to group or categorize events.

I want the option of providing a link to a .cal file so I can drag an event link from a page into a desktop app. Outlook and the Palm Desktop and most PIM packages support drag and drop.

When I create a new blog post, I want to be able to point to one or more events the way I point to categories.

I want to syndicate an event list, as with RSS/RDF/XML.

I want to show another person's list on my blog.

I want to combine several events lists (mine and/or others) into one list.

I want to be able to see events in calendar formats. See calendar.yahoo.com for various layouts.

Also: TypeLists should be accessible to guest authors too, with permission.

It's still on the wishlist.

[aka design]

Grassroots  journalism, meet grassroots fundraising. It took 1 form and about 5 minutes. Now I'm on my way to raising $10,000 for John Kerry by inviting other bloggers to join my Citizen Journalists Kerry 100 Club: 100 people at $100 each.

Take a moment to grok this.

A handful of volunteers in the beach resort of Santa Cruz, California, adopted an offline fundraising practice. Work your circle of friends. Colleagues from work, fellow students, the gardening club. Ask them to match your $100. It worked fast and easy on the ground.

So they took it to the web. A quick Deanspace installation, a little screen scraping of the JohnKerry.com donation site, some writing and graphics, and they're helping people give.

What they're not doing is just as important. No money kept; money goes straight to the campaign. No incorporation. No federal election rules to worry over. Frictionless. And two weeks from idea to go-live, maybe?

What can we learn from this?

1. Test human behavior before designing tools.
2. Free platforms that do 90% of the job speed everyone's time to market.
3. Open code platforms invite innovation and adaptation that create new kinds of value.
4. Campaign architectures can become hubs for innovators, leveraging prior financial, regulatory, branding, and systems investments. I can't wait for the DNC APIs.

While you're pondering, pull out your credit card and click here, why don't you. It's for a good cause and in a good name. Or create your own club.

Virality, anyone?

[aka community]

TechNoir: "I met this man years and years ago and I have seen him repeatedly over the years even had dinner with him. If you really knew your comic history and you were on the con circuit you knew Julie Schwartz."

ABC reported the death of Julius Schwartz, Editor, DC Comics. He "rescued the superhero genre from near extinction in the 1950s. Revived and modernized Batman, The Flash, Green Lantern." Hawkman, Atom, The Justice League of America, and Superman too.

Maggie Thompson: This is the man who, more than any other, can take credit for the fact that we can still buy comic books today. The field continues to evolve — and maybe he’s been better equipped to handle that evolution, simply because science fiction was old stuff to him by the time he entered our field six decades ago. But — no matter how much we do admire the writers and artists who have entertained us — it’s Editor Julius Schwartz who came up with a formula that turned out to be a winning equation for our field.

This was important.

His rework of character, plot, theme, and visual design showed that each stupid little work can be reincarnated. Adapted to the times. Repurposed for other media. Giving power to authors and artists, and birth to entire media industries.

Where do you think West Side Story came from? Hollywood and Broadway made Romeo and Juliet over and over for decades. Then Julie showed that something old can be made new again. 

If you haven't followed graphic novels and comics for the last twenty years, you may not know that Batman has been interpreted and reinterpreted by more than a hundred different creative teams. Schwartz paved the road so we can enjoy the Caped Crusader set in times Edwardian and apocolyptic, as a boy and an old man, broken hearted or beyond vicious, political or anarchic, isolated or a family man. All being true to Bob Kane's central character while infusing their own imaginations and visions.

So what?

When the American masses stopped reading literary classics and listening to opera, the storytellers of Hollywood and Rockefeller Center turned for stories to the franchises of the dime novel, the genres of the comic book. Westerns. Science Fiction. True Romance.

Before Disney opened theme parks, DC Comics proved even little cartoons have enormous market potential. Properties long dead can breathe new cash flow.

So we have media conglomerates. And a war for the intellectual property commons. I can repurpose Beowulf and Icelandic sagas, and Shakespeare. But when does Time Warner's Batman franchise enter the public domain? When can I put on a Batman school play or write a short Silver Surfer story without their permission, without paying for the privelege? 

I love that storytellers renew and reinvigorate modern myths. So when you see Spiderman 2 and the Punisher this summer, or Hellboy, Starsky & Hutch, The Stepford Wives, Man-Thing, Catwoman, Alien vs. Predator, Astroboy, or Scooby Doo, give a nod to Julius Schwartz.

[a klog apart]

You may try to model me, but you can't define me. I'm larger than a tidy form.

That's why God and evolution gave us the ability to lie. And posture. And pretend. And choose our words and body language.  

I am not my business card. Or my resumé. Or my orkut profile.

They are merely shorthands, placeholders, for the real thing.

And you never get the real thing.

The closest you come is by interacting with me: self as black box. Not by description.

Second best to getting the real thing: ethnographic observation of my real life behavior.

Third best: following my narrative.  

Fourth best: analysis of my online behavior.

That hamstrings YASNs.

The prob, of course is that I am many people in one skin and we all change who's in charge with the ebb and flow of blood sugar, brain chemistry, and the damned cat that peed on the carpet and I'm one way in A's company, another in B's company, and some awkward way when in the company of both A & B since I'm working with B, dating A, but had horribly bad sex with B but I can't remember whose fault it was.

I am complex, not one persona but many, changing over time. 

We become self aware of this in puberty.

And spend adolescence learning to navigate ourselves, to choose, to actively dream versions of ourselves into being. For the objects of our infatuation. For our authority figures. For our parents. For strangers. Hopefully for ourselves.

Then adulthood calls for settling upon an outer persona. We simplify, most of us, at least our outer affect.

But the other me's are still inside.

And each of the million other Ryzers/YASNSers are the same way.  

If I'm that messy and convoluted, can you imagine the relationship complexity? personas*(personas-1).

I have a few broad suggestions for social network improvements.

Model sociology. Not just nice stuff but all the icky horrible interactions we see in the office, in school, in gangs. Rites of passage. Flirting. Insults. Combat. Cliques. Authority. Power.

Model psychology. Squeeze in Maslow's Hierarchy. Piaget or someone else who models childhood development, especially arrested development.

Let me do more. Solve real life problems virtually. Design tools for tasks I really need. Group formation. Group destruction. Group work. Better meetings. Prioritization of communication. Help people be useful to each other.

Do less. Email, texting, http, phone calls are all pretty dumb systems. They just move content, so the human content becomes paramount, richer, engaging. Find your core and strip away the rest.  

Admit your limitations and open up the plumbing. We need APIs so programmers can extend the models and tools. 

I should be able to write an extension that lets you see a combined orkut profile and Google references.

Or find what the people in my virtual sub-community are buying on Amazon.

Or authenticate access to my calendar using friendship degrees.  

Or sync my mobile phone behavior (who I text and who texts me) with my buddy list.

Or turn orkut into my smart phone's Caller ID system.  

Or bounce new friends-of-friends against my interest profiles and nominate a few for acquaintanceship.

Or whatever. The world knows more than you do, so let them in.

If you want social software to endure, ...  

 

A guy asked what it takes to scale your rolodex to 100,000 people. Then built Ryze to find out.

What's your question?

[a klog apart]

1. Fresh stuff is prominent. Unlike other sites, readers always know where to look for updates and top of mind. Contrast with your typical corporate site of a thousand pages and no trusted way to know what is new. The old rule that fresh content attracts return visitors remains true.
2. Writing precedes organization. In wikis and most web sites, you first decide where in the site you are going to add or revise content. Blogging says "write first, worry about filing later." This has the benefit of shortening the distance between thought and captured utterance. It also frees the blogger from squeezing an idea into an existing box.
3. Write once, Save to everywhere. Not only is the distance from thought to paper shortened, blogging (and other [CMS] tools) also lets you route your post. Depending on the tool, you can distribute your post to multiple blogs, to email distribution lists, to [RSS] subscribers. You can also make the post visible to readers navigating by broad categories, by finely keyworded topics, and by criteria inferred from the post's content. So routing can be an afterthought. And bloggers know that their first impulse should be to open the blank page and write.

p.s. I originally posted this on Saturday, 3 January, but I somehow lost it (operator error). I noticed it was gone when Michael Boyink mentioned it (well considered comments, Michael). I recovered it from a copy kept by eVectors' k-collector (gracie).

[a klog apart]

Gary Secondino is one of the first bloggers I read regularly. He's looking for a gig. Gary does a nice job of keeping links to his quals front and center on his blog (upper left, actually). 

A weblog or blog
this is iSee iSay.

My Card
Hire Me
I'm an ESTJ
My Resumé

[Bloggers for Hire]

I really want a standalone autodetection tool. As I surf, it will:

• live in the Windows system tray
• parse pages for urls pointing to syndication formats like RSS and Atom
• verify those feeds exist and collect their metadata
• write a log file of the detection and verification info, in OPML
• display the number of new discoveries when hovering over the system tray icon
• push the file to a server, periodically and optionally.

By being a separate application from the RSS newsreader, the autodetective will be:

• Smaller, consuming fewer system resources than a newsreader
• Focused on the craft of detection, becoming smarter about finding things on the pages I read
• Independent of a newsreader, so I can have more than one newsreader (including browser-based ones) without having every page I read parsed for each tool.
• Diverse, detecting tidbits in my emails, chats, IRC sessions, etc.

If we wanted to get fatter about the client, it could spider to discover deeper (crawl this site) or discover wider (crawl the blogrolls you see). Less relevance than pages you've actually seen, but more context - especially as you revisit favorite blogs and services.

I'd also like the detective to discover more kinds of things and make sense of them:

• Contact information (emails, phone numbers, postal addresses)
• Physical locations (postal addresses, city names, geocoding)
• Calendar events (dates, times, durations, descriptions)
• Rich media (sound, video, flash files)  

so I can review and bring them into other software.

There should be programming specs, so they know how to find the detective's journals, and check if they've been updated with fresh discoveries. I didn't include a "new headlines" balloon or ticker in the detective's features. The detective isn't a newsreader.

The detective should listen to your newsreaders too. Your newsreaders should also push the locations of your subscription lists ("you can find what Phil is reading at http://...") to the detective. This way the detective can optimize its reports by checking your subscriptions, then excluding them from discoveries. 

Let me browse and edit my discoveries in a human-usable form. I may want to delete items from my history before sharing them with a newsreader.  

I have an identity that lives across multiple computers and cell phones. I'll have detectives on each. My detectives should be able to confer and harmonize their discoveries. I may have multiple users on any computer, so detection prefs and journals should be aware of user profiles.

What's the business case?

• Strategy: Environmental Awareness. What's the cost of missing that a trusted feed has moved? That a key customer/competitor/regulator has a new feed? What if we made our collective surfing of the Internet into a competitive analysis tool, each person contributing their view of the world? With detectives on everyone's desk, we're less likely to be surprised, more likely to catch new opportunities, and be smarter as a group than our competitors.
• IT: Enterprise System Integration with Newsreaders. We're creating feeds of all sorts of information, including RSS of our SAP transactions. Many of these feeds will be customized for a specific context ("here's the RSS for orders Mary should approve.") The detective does away with error-prone cutting and pasting, automating the process of "I want to follow up on this". These feeds will drive attention to workflow and process. Some of the feeds will trigger people to write about specific items in team and project weblogs, improving communication.

I'll pay $20 retail for this.

Assuming you have an intranet blog server and either a server based news aggregator or desktop newsreaders, what would you pay for a 100 user site license?

Do you want one?