Phil Wolff: strategy

Phil's summer of F2F - Part 1

Tue, 08 Jun 2004 18:26:20 GMT

Dear Phil -
Why should we conference in person when the virtual has been so enriched?

The virtual's not that rich.
The virtual's mainly broadcast.
And you miss the interactions that occur during breaks, meals, pub crawls, and the other cracks in an official programme.

So I leave my computer, my home, my city, my country.

Recently, AD:TECH ("Eyeballs for sale! Fresh steaming eyeballs!") and PlaNetwork (Kumbaya embraces digital identity), both in San Francisco.

Coming up:

I'm going to try for the Bio 2004 conference exhibit hall, this week. Especially interested in new bioinformatics and the publications systems that try to promote innovation without giving away secrets. Innovation World's Michael Boland and Mary Kate Stimmler are blogging from the conference.

This week and next are full of East Bay Kerry stuff. A Democratic Party Meetup where East Bay Kerry recruits volunteers. Committee meetings for Fundraising, Chairs, Media Relations, Visibility and GOTV, and Writers. We're having our first Speaker Training & Kerry Teach-In. And a big bunch of us are going to the Oakland A's vs. Pittsburgh Pirates game to show Kerry love to all those Pennsylvanians watching the game. Gary Hart is signing his latest book. And we're sending envoys to other political meetings, like the Lamorinda Democratic Club and the MGO Dem Club. All the time compression of a startup, none of the cash flow, and hard deadlines.

I've started going to Mark Finnern's Future Salons. Smart people, challenging topics. Next one June 18th at SAP Palo Alto. Saw him at Planetwork, first time in daylight. You owe yourself a venue to talk about 10, 20, and 50 years out. Great context and fodder for work and life planning.

In two weeks I'll attend the first day of Supernova, blogging a technical and policy discussion of today's convergence. Time to bone up on spectrum allocation, grid computing, WiMax, and more. I'm glad the wiki (thank you, SocialText) and rss feed (thank you, TypePad) are up.

I'm spending July 4th in Vienna, Austria, for BlogTalk 2.0, the conference by Thomas Burg and the Center for New Media at Danube University. Getting there a little early to spend time with the Actionable Sense Troupe ("How do you switch between Discussion and Action?") and BlogWalk 3.0 in beautiful Krems.

Then to Bloomsbury Square for the first London Symposium on Social Tools For The Enterprise, 12 July. This scans like etiquette and finishing school. It's really about blogs, wikis, social networks, IM'ing, and the like. And turning them into workplace tools. Matt Mower of Evectors Software put it together. Stowe Boyd's there too. I'll have a week in London. Favourite pubs, bookstores, museums, clubs, bordellos? Blogger events?

Back in town for the BlogOn conference. Read Susan Mernit's post. They have a boot camp, similar to workshops I proposed for London. What do bloggers know that others don't? To understand social software, managers need the insights that make blogging and other social tools "click" for users, and to frame those "Aha! moments" into a useful context.

What should I do this fall?

Rapid Response: Memetic Engineering in the 2004 Presidential Campaign (full text)

Thu, 20 May 2004 19:39:15 GMT

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?

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.
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?
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.
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.
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
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:

Prepare
Detect
Respond
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:

Notice an attack, through surveillance.
Report the attack to your rapid response network
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:

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.
Draft. Every attack is a little different. So tailor your response.
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.

Rapid Response: Memetic Engineering in the 2004 Presidential Campaign

Mon, 17 May 2004 01:24:49 GMT

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]

Corporate Blogging - Blog as your Front Porch

Sat, 15 May 2004 05:45:11 GMT

Other metaphors I like...

California bans smoking in office buildings. People slip out for a smoke and huddle around the doors or the ashtrays in smoker exile. For those 5-15 minutes, your small group of fellow addicts shares the moment. Sometimes you break out in conversation. Usually casual, sometimes deep, occasionally the start of a labor union or a new product or a lawsuit. Despite yourselves, repetition of exposure fosters trust. And people take it from there.

Sometimes I think of blogging like amateur night at a comedy club. You step up on stage for your five minutes, probably at one in the morning, greeted by a random audience who laughs at you and maybe your painful story told in a funny way. You thank the audience, who were just barely awake anyway and who were never vested in your barely coherent ramblings, and you leave the stage. Until tomorrow. When you come back for more. And the next day you look at the world a little differently, noticing things that could be material for your set, and you rush home, write them down, and that night you try it out on a mostly different audience. And your material gets better, and you start to build a reputation, and you relax into the doing of it and start to pay attention to the two-way conversation that takes place between a performer and those cheering and jeering on the other side of the microphone. From utterance to rapport.

Company cafeterias or regular happy-hour spots are as much about being seen, and with whom, as it is about the conversations you have. Food? It's a heartbeat check, a status reinforcer, a clique definer. Depending on your role, it may not matter at all, or it may be everything. Presence is everything.

An automotive supply store (tires, I think) had a big sign by the street. Each night the owner put a new witticism, twisted proverb, or insightful comment on the sign. And commuters on Atlantic Ave chuckled or thought on the way to school or work each morning. 10 words or less, but those "posts" became a landmark amid the drab clutter of an interchangeable commercial district. Now in Oakland, California, about 500 miles away, the owners of the Grand Lake movie palace put one side of their historic marquis into the hands of their movie programmer. He writes strong messages about blackbox voting, the Patriot Act, a possible military draft, the Iraq war. Some people think he's an ass, others applaud, but everyone slows down to see it on the way to the market. In both cases, the author had no control over readership. A consistent voice, regular updating, and strong points of view defined both personal and corporate identities.

Dina, Ton, Peter, Gary, Scott, Drakaal, back to you.

Why Sayers Wanted.

Sat, 15 May 2004 01:14:48 GMT

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:

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

[aka staffing]

Seven questions from Cleveland

Mon, 03 May 2004 21:50:02 GMT

I received this email from Anne Collingwood this morning.

Phil,

I am frustrated about the lack of attention the Internet is being given by the national campaign.

I see the need, but I am clueless. I am interested in your thoughts about both the following questions and about how to improve the Kerry Internet Effort.

Best, Anne

I’m working in Ohio with a grassroots organization called Cleveland for Kerry. My friend Matt is working in California with East Bay for Kerry.

The following issues came up during a phone conversation we had tonight. Would you be able to help us think through the solutions?

1. Is it too early to see the (state-of-the-art) potential of the Internet realized? How significantly can the power of the Internet diminish the need for television ads in this election? In 2008? In 2012?

2. Are bloggers more rigid in their thinking than others? Would you equate it to letters-to-the-editor in real time? Can there be actual debate online?

3. Are moderated discussions valid? Can a moderator censor some comments and still claim that they are listening to the people?

4. Did the Internet help facilitate the apparent cult of personality with the Dean folks? If so, was that kind of emotional investment wise; did it alienate folks not previously on the bandwagon?

5. Do bloggers feel betrayed if their advice is not used? Do they tend to extend trust to the candidate? How can a trustworthy candidate gain trust with new folks through use of the Internet?

6. What were the differences between young people attracted to Dean during the primary and attracted to Kerry during the primary?

7. The Internet offers campaigns the posting of data, mail, conversations, live broadcasts, tax revenue (just kidding :), and…?

There is no paid staff in Ohio. There is no staff that Matt knows of in the East Bay other than professional fundraisers. We see the Kerry Internet team working on live webcasts, fundraising drives, and the website. There are, however, "local websites" popping up all over the place, and we have no clue about what we can do with them.

If you don't have time to respond directly, we certainly understand. If you can refer us to someone or to websites, we'd appreciate it.

Thank you for your help.

Sincerely,

Anne Collingwood

What are your answers to these questions?

LeFever wins first Weblog Perfect Pitch Competition.

Thu, 29 Apr 2004 19:41:31 GMT

I'm sure the folks at Pyra and MoveableType were winners with their own elevator pitches, but those were for tools. Lee LeFever won for the internal pitch, for the hey, boss, let's try this thing.

First, think about the value of the Wall Street Journal to business leaders. The value it provides is context — the Journal allows readers to see themselves in the context of the financial world each day, which enables more informed decision making.

With this in mind, think about your company as a microcosm of the financial world. Can your employees see themselves in the context of the whole company? Would more informed decisions be made if employees and leaders had access to internal news sources?

Weblogs serve this need. By making internal websites simple to update, weblogs allow individuals and teams to maintain online journals that chronicle projects inside the company. These professional journals make it easy to produce and access internal news, providing context to the company — context that can profoundly affect decision making. In this way, weblogs allow employees and leaders to make more informed decisions through increasing their awareness of internal news and events.

First off, read it out loud. Take a moment.

This is an OK pitch. Say what you propose, frame it, and say why it matters to the listener. Use the language of the pitchee. Terse language is good, flowing is better. This pitch hangs together.

LeFever's pitch does some things well. It explains what weblogs are. How they're used. How they affect daily life and the bottom line. It's focused on the workplace and the specific problems of harnessing intellectual capital, of herding cats, of decentralizing decisions. There's a nice analogy to the Wall Street Journal as a context baseline, and that you need one of your own.

Do you think LeFeber made his case? Is this the right case to make? Would you buy a blognet from this man?

Social Networking Technology Forum, 28-April @ 7pm, Berkeley

Tue, 13 Apr 2004 02:52:51 GMT

Brian Sarrazin turned me on to this Social Networking Forum at Cal. Wednesday, April 28th, 2004, 7p-9:15 pm. Wells Fargo Room on the Haas Campus. Topics look worthwhile:

the economic incentives of SNT and the concept of “incrementalism”
the efficacy of SNT in building long-term relationships
the opportunities of ubiquitous computing, efficient user interfaces, database scaling and more intelligent query engines
the global marketplace as facilitated by SNT; market consolidation

The poor sods roped onto the panel: Eytan Adar of HP, Bobby Chao of Chinese friendster YeeYoo.com, VC Skip Fleshman, Andy Halliday of Spoke (formerly of In-Q-Tel), and Marti Hearst of Cal SIMS. Bonus: PhD Research Presentation by Harvard's Wayne Lim. $15 includes a quick dinner; rui@berkeley.edu for tickets. Bring Bullfighter but listen to voices of skepticism and experience, to what isn't said.

[aka community]

Encouraging the sniffles to spread.

Sat, 10 Apr 2004 02:13:58 GMT

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?

Test human behavior before designing tools.
Free platforms that do 90% of the job speed everyone's time to market.
Open code platforms invite innovation and adaptation that create new kinds of value.
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]

Blogging's Three Cores: Discover, Read, and Write

Thu, 08 Apr 2004 12:45:19 GMT

I'm judging Judith Meskill's 'Perfect' Corporate Weblogging 'Elevator Pitch' Competition. Here's how I've been thinking about it.

Look to the three cores of blogging for inspiration.

Discovery - finding interesting sources and posts
Reading - what, where, when, and how you want
Writing - what's relevant to you and your audiences

When we talk about blogging and the blogosphere, we're talking about these three activities. Nearly all the blogosphere's tools support one or more of them.

Your challenge in any justification is to:

Tie investment in your blogging project (time, people, tools, attention) to any of these three activities (what people will do with your project's outputs) and
Tie the activities to business benefits
While catering to your stakeholder's common sins (Pride, Envy, Gluttony, Lust, Anger, Greed, Sloth) or to appealing to their virutes (humility, kindness, abstinence, chastity, patience, liberality, diligence, prudence, temperance, courage, justice, love, hope, faith).

For example, "If we spend just a thousand bucks on a blog server for the MarCom department, we'll get better press than the competition and that cute PR guy will be putty in your hands, Maam."

Let's just talk about reading for a moment. No blogging environment is complete without tools to help you read blogs. For example, Rocketinfo offers an enterprise newsreader. They pitch:

The Value to You:

Increase the breadth of news you look at

Improve the research and dissemination process

Leverage and maximize your existing information investments

Increase and/or measure the consumption of research across your organization

Increase the efficiency of your research department, enabling you to do more with less

You get the idea. Read more, save time, and get info to the right people.

Implicit:

Discover/Don't-be-surprised-by new threats and opportunities
Don't be the last one to know among your company's competitors, or your internal competitors
Get credit for solving the problem

Please don't tell me about your contest submissions until the contest is over: Judging is blind. Good luck on the competition.

[aka klogs]

Justify your social network software: fun doesn't count.

Thu, 08 Apr 2004 12:22:51 GMT

Judith Meskill tipped me that Silicon Valley Web Guild is hosting a panel on social network systems, another evening of YASNS puffery. May 6. Four smart people are speaking for their products. Tribe's Mark Pincus, LinkedIn's Reid Hoffman (whom Marc Canter says I must get to know; Hi, Reid!), Adrian Scott (who preceded Ryze with an insightful essay on why you must scale your address book), and Spoke's Andy Halliday.

I have a challenge for moderator Rosemary Remacle:

Channel danah boyd.

The honeymoon's over. Ask tough questions.

All these systems depend on people volunteering time and attention, on their pimping friends into the system, on believing you can turn virtual connections into social capital, web pages into gold.

What's in it for me?
Do social network systems (SNS) get you love, sex, or friendship? get you competitive career advantage? get you elected? get you productive?
What's in it for the person who only has a few "friends"?
Do SNS's turn into anything more than a slightly smarter address book?
What is your early conversion rate, the proportion of people who try your system and stick with it after 30 days? after 90?
How do you avoid the Geocities problem of web page tombstones, profiles grown stale and abandoned?
Why do you think your forms are a useful representation of me as a person?
Are you modeling how people really interact or some oversimplification?
Can I leave my contacts to my children?
How do you turn my contacts into action?
Aren't you making it easier for bad actors to be more effective at identity theft, stalking, and emotional abuse?
Don't your systems burn my contacts, expending my social capital without real benefit?

Then ask about the enterprise version.

How will this create value within a mid to large organization?
Why is this more urgent than, say, spending another $100 per head on social skill training or antispam software or giving everyone a news portal?
Will your system work within firewalls?
How will your system work across firewalls? How do you expose just some of the profile of some of the people in an organization to some of the public?
If my company has Spoke inside and my customer has the Google Orkut Appliance, how will they work together?
What about cultural boundaries?
Why should employees invest their time and trust in an enterprise SNS when they know their profiles will be left behind when they move on?
Why is your explicit declaration of relationships better than their tacit discovery?
With what other enterprise IT systems will you integrate your SNS?

Then speak for those of us who invest:

How will you make money now?
How will you compete when AOL, Yahoo!, Microsoft follow Google into social networks? You know they're going to turn their buddy lists, email groups, blogrolls, and discussion forums into some version of an SNS. What will you do better and differently?
Orkut was one programmer's side project. Where's the barrier to entry?

This should be a trial by fire, Rosemary. They're smart and have been on the road for more than a year, bored to their gills. Do them a favor. Pull teeth until they give up the answers. Be the skeptical interrogator I know you can be.

[aka community]

Mail is part of Google's enterprise strategy.

Sat, 03 Apr 2004 17:46:24 GMT

Jeff Jarvis says Google email (gmail) is just another portal me-too.

I don't think so, Jeff.

Email has juice. Only telephones are used more.

40% of a company's knowledge is stored in its email boxes, hidden from intranet search engines, locked away on desktops. Email is rich with:

social information (who is asked about what, who redistributes information to whom),
time signatures (sent, received, read, forwarded, printed),
threading and propagation clues (A sent it to B who replied while copying it C who forwarded it to...),
urls pointing to the web,
enclosures passed along, and
entry points, from mobile devices to robots to business software.

evectors' ZOË demonstrates the value of combing through your mail to fuel search and reveal context.

For Google, this has three strategic benefits:

Better Google scoring. There's no reason Google can't collect a billion emails by this time next year. A million users times a thousand messages. The urls will inform PageRank™, and in near real time. If you thought weblogs got you Google juice, wait for email.
Ad Revenue. Either you'll pay for ad-free viewing or you'll get Google text ads tailored to your emails. A billion page reads of additional targeted inventory to sell.
Appliance sales. With Google search, weblogs, and email, Google will give Microsoft mail service a run for its money. Watch Google roll out Blogger in a Box this year, the better to clue the Google search engine to intranet content. A year from now, watch the microcontent of email and weblogs continue to converge, especially behind the firewall.

How does Yahoo differ from Google?

Where Yahoo sells communication, Google sells context.

Where Yahoo brings integration, Google leads with relevance.

Where Yahoo! lets you type up a "buddy list", watch Google tweak your orkut social network with clues from your mailing behavior, and vice versa.

Where Yahoo uses their toolbar to access their many services/properties, Google's toolbar will observe your browser experiences. And that includes now sending and reading email, surfing, news watching, reading and writing weblogs, following and posting to usenet, and shopping. With email, orkut and your toolbar, they now can create a compound profile of your interests.

Context, relevance, experience. Tough to beat.

[a klog apart]

Emergent disorganization: lessons from East Bay Kerry.

Fri, 02 Apr 2004 01:17:48 GMT

I've been rationalizing the 30-50 hours a week of grassroots campaigning I've been investing in the local Kerry campaign since last summer. Changing the world is great, and we're doing that. My takeaway is what I learn from it, how the work itself changes me. Here are a few lessons learned.

EQ is more important than IQ.

Everything in campaigns is about emotion. Values trigger emotions, as do symbols of those values. And emotions get you money, volunteers, votes.

Campaigns are tough on the emotions.

A local DFA leader said "Anger Unifies" at the last Democratic Unity Meetup. Lots of adrenalin. Ups and downs. I went to three Dean meetups the night after the California primary, the day Dr. Dean withdrew from the race. I saw frustration, despair, anger, denial, and loss. But I also saw resolve, support, and bonds with their fellow Dean faithful. In a race that lasts six weeks, you can turn up the emotional volume. But what do you do with a race that lasts 100 weeks?

You can't pick your comrades.

We encounter every "people problem" that HR pros prepare for, that social workers encounter, that psychiatrists commit for, in grassroots campaigning. The persistently off-topic person. Trolls. The person who thinks everything is interesting and emails you about it, and your 500 fellow volunteers. Fair weather friends. The craven mercenary. The paranoid. The narrowly obsessed (we almost started a John Kerry's Hair weblog back in September '03). The person who picks fights. The lonely. The shy. It takes centered, socially adept people to work with these people.

Burnout is a huge problem.

We're lucky to have any active volunteers survive the primary season. It's expensive to volunteer. You're giving up recreation that might have been keeping you sane. You're spending less time on friends, family, and your love life. You may even trade off time you could be working or looking for work, dipping into savings or living frugally. I know volunteers who put off graduation, that lost a job, that neglected their health. So recruiting well rises to the top 5 issues every week.

When grassroots groups pay for their own expenses, they go to jail or embarrass their candidate/cause.

My group, East Bay Kerry, is unincorporated and not a PAC and not recognized by the FEC or IRS. If we take money from an organization to print fliers or buy buttons, we're breaking the law. If we sell buttons at a table, we're breaking the law. If we keep a few bucks from a house party to pay for the party's pizzas, we're breaking the law. It's paralyzing.

We need ways to legally raise and spend money without screwing John Kerry for President or the DNC.

Hoisting: those higher on the scale of commitment recruit those lower on that ladder, and work to bring them up.

There's a clear ladder of political engagement. It runs from "I can vote?" to elected official. At each step of the ladder, we pull up those behind us. If you volunteer for 2 hours every two years, you call someone to vote this year. If you're leading a writers bureau, you recruit new members from those who were previously interested but not volunteering.

How much does that happen in the workplace?

Rarely.

Self-interest doesn't often lead to such seemingly altruistic behavior.

But if it is in the campaign's interest (or the enterprise's), how can you institutionalize pulling folks behind you up the ladder? How do you make each leader's success dependent on the growth of replacement leaders and fresh blood?

The new labor market features increased competition for great talent, increased employee turnover and shorter tenures. So hoisting becomes a competitive advantage. How well do you align incentives with hoisting behavior? How well do you incorporate

There is no organizing software that thinks of the user as the voter or volunteer.

All the commercial tools for running electoral or advocacy campaigns is top down, center out. CRM for politics. Clueless, in the Cluetrain Manifesto sense.

Keep all that stuff, though. It works.

Add new edge-powered stuff. Let anyone say "Hey, kids, let's put on a show!" Without approval from a hierarchy. Decentralized authority and the tools to act on it. And then help that nugget of energy flourish internally, and in interaction with others.

There are no tools for committee-scale organizations to be productive.

I want to put on a lecture series for John Kerry. Or host a bowling league fundraiser. Or mentor a Swing State grassroots team. Or coordinate high school students in growing Or coordinate 75 Earth Day activities.

Where are the tools that let me plan, staff, fund, schedule, coordinate, train, account, syndicate, dunn, manage, remind, and otherwise get things done?

Where are the recipes for getting things done? And the place to post my own?

We need team-scale productivity tools.

No grassroots organization is an island.

This is from some analysis I did for ActivistTech or DemTech or whatever it's called: A hypothetical bridge commission.

My speakers bureau in East Bay - West of the Tunnel works with other committees

Fundraising
Media relations
Writers
Swing state

Both ours, and those of East Bay East of the Tunnel, San Francisco's grassroots Kerryfolks, local union organizations, the Wellstone Club's speakers bureau, the official campaign, venue hosts, etc. More than 200 political and activist groups are players in the Bay Area's East Bay. Each committee in my organization needs to be able to manage the life cycle of relationships with each of the others. To get things done: events, money, recruiting, media, etc.

Where are the tools for identifying potential relationships, making them real, sustaining them, and gracefully retiring them?

Blogging remains absurdly difficult.

And the tools don't make it any easier.

Information overload is a real problem without practices or tools for managing it.

Just before the California primary, I was receiving more than 500 political emails daily. I didn't even get to look at my thousand RSS feeds.

When we got to 10 daily emails on our local Yahoo! group, people started unsubscribing faster than they were joining.

We're experimenting with multiple email channels (high and low volume, broad and niched, ad hoc and scheduled) but it's all confusing to our volunteers.

How much fatigue will the average voter feel in 200 days, if this keeps up? How can we lower the political noise? Does tuning out mean voters stay home?

Ok, so I'm off to a meeting of the Speakers Bureau.

The Well-Heeled Dean CIO Quiz

Mon, 16 Feb 2004 20:14:03 GMT

I've heard it said by Dave Winer and many many others: if only Dean had reinvested half the money raised into the Internet, then ...

OK, so you're the Dean Campaign Chief Information Officer in August 2003. The money starts to roll in. $20 million over six months, $2-4 million per month.

What would you spend the money on?

What does your monthly budget look like?
What is your application and infrastructure portfolio?
How much will you allocate to maintenance?
You're building from scratch, so what problems do you hope to avoid through wise architecture?
What are your big milestones?
Who are your key vendors?

How do you spend in consonance with the campaign strategy?

How will you use the Internet to bring offline voters into the campaign at the same numbers as radio or television broadcasts?
What is your online strategy for responding to attack ads and opposition pundits in radio, television and print?
Online community takes time to build and is very hard to organize geographically. What will you do to match the state-by-state primary schedule?
What can you do with online services to serve the campaign in caucus states?
You are preparing for Bush to launch in Spring 2004. What are your countermeasures to reach out to moderate Republicans online while the GOP uses its advanced voter email systems to barrage 200 million validated email addresses?
How will you lower the cost-per-vote vs. the GOP?

A consulting and strategic market research firm swallows the blog pill.

Sun, 15 Feb 2004 17:29:40 GMT

Christopher Ireland writes up Cheskin's move from blog pilots to mainstream business blogging. Guided by Stuart Henshall.

We had no idea what a smart idea that was. It's taken two months, and we've been aching to blog, so I was very impatient and grouchy. He moved us from Blogger to Moveable Type, taught us the importance of category tags, blog rolls, news readers and a host of other useful concepts and tools. He's coached us how to use blogging as both an internal as well as an external tool. And he's excited a whole new group of bloggers here at Cheskin.

I invite you to visit our blogs again--we promise to keep them very up to date and to continue exploring this fascinating space.

Blogging in public can be a distraction. And an irritating change. But for a firm like Cheskin whose value lies in its own branding, few media are more intimate.

John F. Kerry wins in Iowa. 1 down. 49 to go.

Wed, 21 Jan 2004 05:02:39 GMT

OK, I gloated for an hour.

I'm only a little surprised.

A few factors contributed to the success.

The big management change in the Kerry camp in November. Strong organization on the ground.
All the candidates spent a year turning up voter turnout. With high turnout, a GOTV machine isn't a competitive advantage.
Kerry put all of his energy behind one punch. Can he keep his balance and sustain that level of effort? Will the same tactics that worked in a 2.9 million person state scale to one with 35 million people?
The whole message thing changed then too: They Let Kerry Be Kerry. He's great with people. Great on discussing issues. Totally affirms my view that campaigns are conversations.
Bush bagging Saddam elevates warrior status. Kerry served in combat, highly decorated. Served on the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee for 20 years. A long time architect of America's war on narcoterror and political terrorism.
Dean and Gephardt nuked each other. Not civil, and Iowans punished them for it. It's to Dean's credit he survived.
Kerry and Edwards have a higher Emotional Quotient (EQ) than Dean. Dean wasn't very likeable in the debates or in interviews. One long note of derision, frustration, just ready to burst out of his skin. Other candidates, like Kerry and Edwards, showed many emotional notes, in appropriate circumstances.
By process of elimination (angry Dean, babyfaced Edwards, civilian Gephardt) you're left with Kerry.

What should Dean do?

Keep on plugging, the machine was working.
Work on yourself. Get high, drunk, a massage or something so surgeons can expose your warm fuzzy side, the side that laughs, giggles, cries. Your true believers know it's in there.
Go two weeks without mentioning Iraq. It'll scare the bejeezzus out of Clark.

What should Kerry do?

Franchise your HQ. Start building tools so your volunteers can do more kinds of things. "Franchising" your headquarters roles lets each metro area lay solid groundwork before you come to town. (Call me. 510 444 8234)
Get six hours of sleep and keep eating your oatmeal.
Money follows support. Put supporter enrollment above donor armtwisting.

All said, I'm proud of my local team. Our small crew has five people on the road in Iowa and New Hampshire. We're actively working on our campaign craft, studying from old hands. We're doing the basics badly but learning from each experience, better each week. We're communicating well with each other, despite our circle growing.

Slowly those of us who were afraid to commit are becoming true believers. We can say things like:

John Kerry is the Real Deal.

We're sending a president to Washington, not a message.

He's the one we want on the podium opposite Bush.

and believe them.

And we have the nerve to ask people to join us.

Come to a Kerry meetup this Thursday night.
I'm shopping for a media relations strategist for the Bay Area, to help us take back the White House.
I need a team that understands precinct, CRM profiling, and direct marketing software, so all Americans can have health care at least as good as Federal employees.
Curriculum developer wanted, so we can build the Opportunity America we all deserve.
Speech communications professor, to give voice to the average American instead of powerful interests.
I need a conversation with someone who can coach newbies on project templating, so 20% of our children don't go to bed hungry.
A digital artist, to bring sunshine and transparency back to government service.

Call me. Or write: phil@dijest.com.

You're not seeing a lot of me here. I'm doing most of my blogging over on EastBayKerry.com (all politics is local). And spreading myself thin in bulletin boards, other people's blogs and doing campaign related stuff. My apartment flooded, throwing off my schedule and keeping me away from my computer for a week. Small stuff.

"akasig"

German blog books.

Mon, 05 Jan 2004 21:23:41 GMT

generation neXt reports that three new blogging books (auf deutsche) are coming out.

BLOGS! Die Weblogs – Literatur und Journalismus im Internet by a Who's Who of the blogosphere (Weblogwelt, actually).
Das Blog-Buch by Dirk Olbertz
Generation Blogger by Markus Christian Koch and Astrid Haarland

Still room for a manager's guide to blogging. Must get back to that...

I wonder if there's a readership for an annual best blog posts of 2003 book. I know they do it for poetry and short stories.

Hospital intranet blogging.

Mon, 05 Jan 2004 21:13:18 GMT

Working notes from D. Keith Robinson's project of moving most of the hospital's intranet into Moveable Type. Useful observations on deployment, template design, new uses (project coordination). "Don’t let anyone tell you that you need to spend thousands of dollars to do distributed authorship or content management the right way. It’s simply not true." (Staff time excluded, of course.)

Blogging for Associations

Mon, 05 Jan 2004 21:02:15 GMT

David Gammel:

I'll be leading a presentation on using weblogs as a knowledge sharing tool on January 8, 2004 in Washington DC. The event is sponsored by the American Society of Association Executives, an association I am active with, and can be attended in person or via conference call. While the content will be spun toward the pecularities of membership organizations, I think it will be useful for anyone interested in learning about klogging. It is very much an entry level session, so it may not cover new ground for many of you.
You can view our presentations notes and resources. This is a set of wiki pages, so feel free to add resources to the relevant pages if you know of something/sell something related to knowledge blogging. I'll continue to update the pages right up until the presentation, which is why some of the lists are a little thin at the moment. The main registration page for the session.

A lot of the presentation builds on discussions held here in the past as well as on the numerous blogs writing about knowledge management/sharing.

Looks good, the kind of briefing lots of us are giving.

British and Asian Weblog Awards.

Tue, 09 Dec 2003 23:52:54 GMT

You may know about the Wizbang Weblog Awards 2003. But there's more.

Royby tipped me to the coming British Blog awards:

Guardian Unlimited is launching a competition to promote and reward the best of British blogging. The panel of 22 judges will pick winners for five different categories: best design, best specialist, best use of photography, best under 18 and best written. You can enter your blog in as many categories as you like. The deadline for entries is November 21. The winners will be announced on December 18. The winner of each category will receive a cheque for £500.

We also have Phil Ingram's Asia Blog Awards. Blogs compete for Best Of region/language (Best Hong Kong blog, Mainland China blog, Taiwanese blog, Singapore, Malaysian, Thai, Indonesian, Japanese, Korean, Philippines, Indian, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Asian blog in English as a second language, Asian blog in an Asian language as a second language) and for Best Foreign (non Asian) blog, Funniest blog, Best political blog, Best designed blog, Best Newcomer in 2003, Best Essayist, Best journal/diary, Best Photoblog. I really like that Phil recognizes the value of gateway bloggers who bridge the blogosphere's language islands.

Blogging's a global meme. It's maturing. How do awards figure in?

These awards pick the great read from the millions. The awards are fun. Sort of the

But as blogging becomes more important to more people, so will blogging awards. Awards can direct attention to what is meaningful, important, improved, and other factors that affect the quality and health of the blogosphere. This year, blogging awards are novelty blogrolls. I'd like to see them evolve. Become the Pulitzer. Become the Time Person of the Year. Become the Clio. Become the Man Booker Prize. Become the Fields Medal. Become the Nobel. Challenge bloggers everywhere to excel, to find their voice, to turn reading and writing into action.

I'm available for nominations.

Executive blogging issues.

Wed, 03 Dec 2003 09:06:21 GMT

Robert Scoble wrote:

I keep asking executives "when you gonna start a weblog?" But, quite consistently get an answer of "way too busy." I asked Sanjay and Dan'l that about a week ago. They both ran down what their schedules look like. Nearly every minute of every day is scheduled. Dan'l told me he often is traveling and already rarely gets to see his family.

It's a tough problem. Since I don't think executives will get the time to weblog (at least not until it's so important that they are forced to by market conditions -- and we're several years away from that, if ever since they can get more leverage simply by calling up the Wall Street Journal or USA Today and asking for a chat) then internal bloggers will need to build better ties to execs and PR and marketing so that we can help solve the problem. I'm trying to do just that, and I've had some success, but my time is limited too. So, we need to figure out how to get some scale. One guy can't do it all.

The blogdev community has an opportunity to treat this as a challenge, an opportunity. What behavior, what facilities, will let someone as harried as a Microsoft executive or a single mom working two jobs squeeze blog writing, reading, and discovery into their lives?

Is it audblogging on the run? A quick speed dial on your cell for a note. Maybe audio or sms blogfodder? Great if it can be transcribed into searchable text. Blog as stream of experience.

Or do you make 200 phone calls a week? Maybe your phone bill as RSS becomes blog fodder. Basic analysis can show who has your attention (frequency, average length, total time). Further analysis could detect patterns among your network (Bob on Tuesday mornings; talks with Mary seem to follow Tim most of the time). Blog as phone pad.

Do you live in Outlook? Maybe you can default that all your outbound mail is cc'd as a draft to your weblog. That might cut blogging time to picking and choosing from the queue. Blogging as backup brain.

Maybe you live in your calendar, all meetings, all the time. Turn your calendar into blogfodder, provoking the posts before, during, and after meetings. Reverse chronology should come naturally here. Blogging as technography.

Before performance, executive culture is about trust. Execs limit conversation to trusted cliques, chains of command, and other social circles. LiveJournal-style control of who gets to read specific posts may overcome inhibitions about using the blog interface to capture your thoughts. Socially informed blogspace.

You also mentioned the role of PR. Here's a new role: beat journalist. Be the Dan Gillmor of the Microsoft marketing veeps, a development programme, of M&A. Get on their calendars for 10-15 minutes a week, ask routine and provocative questions, transcribe and post to internal blogs. Canvas internal blognets for related posts and tie the threads together. Blogs as reportage.

Are we getting closer?

Where does IT go from here?

Mon, 03 Nov 2003 17:04:03 GMT

Shelley Powers' Burningbird essay The State of Geek: Part 1 -- Temp Job, No Health says the IT labor market sucks and ain't gonna improve much. But says it better. She closes saying she wouldn't encourage kids to go into IT. My take...

Temps first. I used to be vp for strategy and technology of the world's largest staffing company. You're right about employers using temps/contractors to minimize risk at the early stages of an economic recovery. Watch quarterly reports from Manpower and Kelly for upticks in temp hiring. btw, contractors and temps are the first to go too.

Barriers to entry. In tough times it is very common for employers to raise barriers to entry since they can do so and still meet their staffing needs. Project management certification books are flying off the shelves at Amazon. And employers aren't just looking for code warriors when they can get someone with a masters or PhD in compsci for the same price. The low barrier to entry that permitted millions of "accidental" programmers to enter the workforce has let millions more continue to enter around the world. At the same time, the enterprise need for code-level customization fell through the floor.

After the offshorin'. So you're already in IT. What should you be studying now? In this economic model, what's left for US IT are jobs that require:

"high touch", like requirements professionals;
cultural sensitivity, like localization and UX pros;
proximity to systems, like the overnight sysadmin who has to physically touch a box, but with skills not much more than a cable installer;
world class niche specialists, being the world's best in corrosion algorithms, or the only people who understand documentation of military control systems in a Czech, Russian, and Spanish blend;
content creatives that use IT for artistic and aesthetic expression that resonate with world markets;
teams that use proprietary tools to achieve 10-fold leaps in productivity over developers using off-the-shelf and open source tools;
work allotted via nepotism, pork, graft;
legacy system specialists, caring for dinosaurs until the business need for them evaporates;
coordinators that can rapidly assemble the talent needed for a project and provision them with the tools to work together; and
managers that plan and deliver outsourced projects.

It shouldn't surprise you that most of these roles have steel industry counterparts.

If I had kids in school, I'd be telling them:

The future lies in molecular manufacturing (chem, physics, materials science), pharma and cognitive sciences (neurochem) all informed by IT.
Assume you need postdoc work for job security.
Learn Mandarin, Spanish, and Hindi. Along with English you'll be able to speak with more than half the world.
And start your professional networking early (Can you leave your Ryze friends list to your kids?).

"akasig"

Software Developer's Legal Defense Fund.

Sat, 01 Nov 2003 19:44:55 GMT

Scoble asked: "I'd love to hear your ideas on how to make small ISVs comfortable with doing business with us. Is it getting you legal help?"

How about something like a Public Defenders Office, but offering legal services to small developers? Think of it as a legal defense fund, with strength in relevant law, busines negotiation, startup organization, etc. Set it up as a not-for-profit, Microsoft funds it, inviting other industry firms and Darpa to join. Conflicts of interest? The lawyers can manage that. Basic benefits? Trust (more new relationships), speed (faster time to market), endurance (relationships persisting multiple encounters).

Dinner with Dina and Friends.

Thu, 30 Oct 2003 17:05:27 GMT

It felt like an acid trip and swings in blood sugar and the five seconds of a family reunion that are sheer delight.

Stuart Henshall, always gracious, hosted Dina Mehta at Boobo di Beppy where staple busting portions stun you with their fat content. More on the restaurant later.

We talked about Skype, blog uptake, and other things until I realized that I was at the social scientists' table. Michele Chang is an ubicomp goddess researcher. Dina is a behaviorist. danah boyd (no caps for typographical balance) is getting doctored in social network behavior. Denise Cheskin comes at behavior from a marketing view, and I'm a demoblographer (I blog demography) and labor market analyst. Clynton Taylor is a full tyme ethnographer for business (from where do I know him?). And Stuart has x-ray vision when it comes to models, business and management models I mean.

We were a worldly bunch. Dina from India. danah originally from England but sans accent? Stuart from NZ but with a courteous American drawl. I'm from New York but work has taken me to strange places like Houston and Lausanne. Liz Goodman's from the Big Apple too, an ~~actress~~ artist become ubicomp sociologist en route to Oregon. Denise went to grad school in France. It felt so cosmopolitan to be in such a faked up Italian joint.

My local campaign blogging is coming along.

Mon, 27 Oct 2003 22:49:57 GMT

The domain came in over the weekend: EastBayKerry.com. Strong resistance by getting the local committee to blog. "I've never blogged before" is common. It's a little scary before it becomes routine. It helps when I explain (a) nobody's reading us, (b) it's just writing, like email, and (c) it's OK to muck it up.

They are coming aboard. More folks are reading, commenting, and signing up to be authors, a hierarchy of comfort. For example, see today's The Dems best hope in '04, a fantastic analysis by Harold Lowe, running for Oakland's city council. He explains why pairing John Kerry with Clark or Gephardt to win MidWest swing vote states could tip the scales.

Right now we're communicating via phone calls, email, a Yahoo! Group, the blog, and frequent meetings. I'm overly optimistic about my SMS announcement service, but hope it will become useful as we continue to reach people who have cell phones but no email. Everything remains too hard, including TypePad. I put the blog together myself but I can't imagine non-IT people doing it.

Cam Barret, Clark's blogger in chief, is earning his pay. Beyond the official Clark blog, Cam's folks rolled out local web presence en masse. East Bay for Clark is a feature-rich generic site. Good strategy. Like the Kerry camp, they have to populate the local blogs, but that's manageable.

The local Kerry team is growing, more than doubling each month. But how fast can you activate and ramp up a political network proportional to the 2.4 million people in Alameda and Contra Costa counties? The California primary election is in 126 days (18 weeks). Not much time to organize.

The centralization challenge is non-trivial. Headquarters staffs in most of the campaigns want to control the message through a network of volunteer flacks. To date, only the Dean campaign has

Longer term, after the elections, what are the lessons of mass produced weblogs? What motivators worked best to attract newbies into using mailing lists and blogs? How fast can people learn the blogging mode: the observe, write, feedback loop? What accelerates that cognitive shift? What sustains blogging through a long campaign? How important is visual design to creating a sense of locality? of affiliation? What does political blogfodder look like? And how do we make all this work for the offline? For the mobile phone user? "akasig"