Can mandatory social media service save America?
America has lots of problems: unemployment, poverty, obesity, urban violence. But there’s actually a more pressing problem. It’s the “us versus them” mindset that permeates our country and our politics.
Our communities of concern have become too narrow
Before the Occupy Movement even launched, I heard Robert Reich speak at Google’s Zeitgeist 11 Conference. In a brilliant talk he clarified how our communities of concern are shrinking. We don’t do everything as a country to solve unemployment because those in power don’t really care. Why? Because they are college graduates. And the unemployment rate, while 35 percent for high school dropouts, hovers at a mere five percent for college graduates. High school dropouts are not in the community that matters.
Reich extended his argument to rationalize why the poverty rate for senior citizens in America has been reduced significantly (from 20 percent to five percent) while poverty rates for families with small children has sky rocketed (an appalling 37 percent of US families with small children now live in poverty). The former reside comfortably in the community that congressmen care about (powerful voting block; closer in age) while the latter sits outside it.
Whether his assessment is right or not, two facts emerges as crystal clear. Each of us – blue, red, old, young, urban, rural, black, white, gay, straight – tends to care disproportionately about those with whom we share empathy and interdependency. And as our country becomes more fragmented rather than unified, our communities of concern get narrower. In fact, even the Occupy Movement, which has effectively called attention to the most obvious “us and them” gap, has been criticized for its lack of diversity, particularly in southern cities where there are large African American populations.
This is ironic in an age of social media when we have remarkable tools to connect us to each other. But what do we use them for? To find more people just like us. Take a look at your Facebook friends, your Twitter followers, your Google + circles. Chances are they are a mirror reflection of your upbringing, your background and your profession. When I went to college, 30-plus years ago, even unimaginative housing administrators worked hard to match you up with someone from a different background. Now our kids use Facebook to find roommates whose tastes match theirs, reinforcing a tendency for both parties to stay in their mutual comfort zone.
As I thought about Reich’s argument, something else struck me. There are two places where we create “communities” that do work — juries and military service. Granted in the case of the latter, people’s lives depend on one another. But think about juries.* We stick 12 strangers in a room, present them with a very serious responsibility, and in most cases they fulfill their duty with the utmost of diligence.
So here’s my idea for saving America in case the Occupy Movement doesn’t work. It’s an idea that could help us increase empathy. It takes full advantage of social media’s true potential. It’s a program that steals from the military and juries — practices that do work — when it comes to creating interdependency.
Mandatory social media service
- We require every 18-year-old in America to participate in mandatory social media service as part of a daily or weekly routine for one year.
- We assign our young adults to a racially diverse online social group comprised of 12 people from different regions, backgrounds, income brackets. (Google+ is a potential platform.)
- We present each group with a social challenge – obesity, jobs, poverty, high cost of education, even the problem of young men getting their sex education from watching online porn – and we ask them to solve the problem.
- We give them benchmarks, goals, and require an outcome in the form of an idea, a program, a new policy or maybe just a video.
- Finally we aggregate all of the solutions on one public website where the press, our legislatures, businesses and educators can access, rate and maybe even implement the ideas.
No doubt there are details to work out. Does each group have an official moderator, someone to coach and keep track? What happens when partisan differences challenge collaboration? How do we make technology and Internet access available to everyone? Is there translation software good enough to serve multi-lingual users? But these are all solvable through trial and error in the course of developing the program.
More importantly, we’re not asking anyone to give up an entire year of his or her life or make a significant sacrifice. We’re simply asking them to work together, as a community of concern, to find some kind of common ground that might yield a solution to a problem or an idea worth pursuing further.
Will a group of strangers on a social platform really solve big issues like unemployment, poverty, obesity, and urban violence? Maybe not. But as a society, we might solve our most pressing problem. The need to create greater empathy and understanding between and among people who are different but share a vested interest in America.
Think this idea has potential? Send a link to this post to your congressman or woman. Got a better idea? Please share.
Photograph courtesy of: Konstantin Sergeyev, who has some great images of the Occupy Movement on his Flickr page.
* A thought put in my head when Esther Dyson asked Sandra Day O’Connor a question about their effectiveness.
Get Ready for FutureM Boston
Last year's TNGG FutureM event played to a packed house.
It’s less than a week away. Boston’s second annual week long, multi-location, future of marketing event takes over the city starting Monday, September 12. My week looks insane. Besides attending opening night to hear friends Frank Rose, author of Art of Immersion (you should read it) and Rishadt Tobaccowala (his one word bio simply reads Reinventing) here’s what I’ve got going on.
Tap Into Gen-Y
Monday, September 12
2:00pm–4:00pm
Microsoft Nerd Center
I’ve been invited by FutureM’s student group to moderate a live focus group of Gen-Y doers and thinkers, including student body presidents from schools that include Harvard, Boston College and BU along with young professionals now making their mark in Boston’s startup community. Intended for both marketers who want to get better at engaging with this digital savvy generation and young professionals eager to market themselves, we’ll talk about how to connect with Gen-Y using social media and inbound marketing, the basics of personal branding, and Millennial’s perspectives on what does and doesn’t work as far as their generation is concerned. I figure I’ll learn a lot. Want to know more in advance? Check in with organizer Harvey Simmons on Twitter.
Digital Media Convergence: Startups, VC’s and Agencies
Tuesday, September 13
2:00pm — 4:00pm
Microsoft NerdCenter
As advertising becomes more about technology and technology becomes more about social media and connecting people, it makes sense to explore the world from from both sides. BostInnovation has put together a half-day event that brings startups, digital agencies and VCs together to inspire a new kind of collaboration among the three. I’ll be part of a panel on the future of advertising. Comprised of agency leaders and tech-startup CEOs and moderated by the sage Mike Troiano, we’ll talk about the changing digital landscape, how advertisers are (or aren’t) keeping up, and what seems to be effective. More information here.
Start Something: Speed Networking for Innovators and Change-Makers
Tuesday, September 13
6:30pm –8:30pm
Mullen
40 Broad St.
I’m really excited about our TNGG event where we’re connecting entrepreneurs who have launched and built something with students and recent grads who aspire to start a company, initiate a movement or simply create something new and meaningful. We have a great list of 15 entrepreneurs — Laura Fitton of OneForty, Dianne Hesson of Communispace, Jeff Janer of Springpad, and Jules Pieri of Daily Grommet are but a few — and a format that should be awesome. Speed networking. Startup aspirants get three minutes to share their idea with and hear feedback from five different C-level leaders. I’ll be joining my TNGG friends Alex Pearlman and Christine Peterson as a co-host of the event. It’s invitation only but if you want to come and haven’t been invited contact Christine on Twitter and if there are any slots left (and you have a good idea) we’ll try and get you in or put you on the wait list.
From Neo to Trinity: The Matrix Re-invented
Wednesday, September 14
11:30 am to 1:30 pm
Christian Science Monitor Building
177 Huntington Ave. 24th Floor
I guess you could say I helped bring this one to FutureM. Three rock star women — the inimitable Cindy Gallop, the brilliant Farrah Bostic and Mullen’s own mobile maven Brenna Hanly – are conducting this very cool mobile workshop where attendees actually invent something for the mobile space. If you have ever seen Cindy speak, engaged with one of Farrah’s presentations, or been inspired by Brenna’s energy, you will want to be there.
A description for the event:
Cindy Gallop, co-hosts from Neo to Trinity with Farrah Bostic and Brenna Hanly
It’s time to reboot our understanding and use of mobile as a platform for engaging audiences and customers. WHAT mobile can do and HOW people use it demands a completely new approach to designing digital and social experiences and the abandonment of some of our old habits; WHO uses mobile technology is rapidly changing beyond the early adopters (we’re way past that now!), the tech enthusiasts, the stereotypical young adult male who loves gadgets – forcing us to reappraise who we design these new digital and social experiences for and open up our clients to new prospects and previously underserved customers. In this action-packed, hands-on workshop, we’re going to demonstrate how all the old digital divides melt away with mobile, and engage thought leaders and emerging talent in a ‘status quo hackathon’. Get ready to reimagine brands, products or services -using mobile tech – to reach valuable, underserved audiences and shake up the way you think about mobile.
I had hoped to join a couple of other great ones as a speaker, discussion leader or judge, — including The Future of Cause Marketing 2011 and College Faceoff: Social Media for Social Good — but alas, too many other conflicts.
Should be a great week. Hope to see you there.
When software and design are better than advertising
Skype in the Classroom from Made By Many on Vimeo.
I’m a pretty big fan of Made by Many. As the London based company of renegades likes to say, they “make new things out of the Internet.” That alone is reason to like them.
Note that MxM is not an ad agency. Nor are they a digital shop in the vein of an R/GA or Big Spaceship. They’re somewhere in between a software company, an IDEO-like design shop and a marketing firm.
If you believe as I do that a big part of our (the advertising industry) future will also be about making new things, there’s much you can learn from this small, but growing company: everything from their space (totally open with people sitting at benches to foster collaboration); to the kinds of people they hire (developers); to their willingness to share so much of what they know (read their blog); to their commitment to learning (they once took 30-plus employees – 95 percent of the company — to SxSW for a week).
They also embrace a very different approach to making what they make than a typical agency would practice. Instead of employing a linear process that sees a project migrate from research to strategy to creative to approval to production to media buy, they apply lean start-up techniques — testing, learning and iterating their way to a solution that they know will work by the time it’s ready for prime time.
Consider their relatively recent Skype in the Classroom project, which just won a mention at the Core 77 design awards. (Open IDEO won.) We all know what a typical ad agency would do if challenged by Skype to get more teachers to use its video conferencing service. They’d create an ad campaign espousing the virtues of the service and run it in trades targeted at educators.
But if you’re a software company (or a design thinker) it never dawns on you to create an ad campaign. Instead you focus on building something worthy of being advertised. Which is exactly what Made by Many did. Sure they started with the premise that more teachers need to learn about Skype and how or why to use it. But they quickly discovered, through lots of interviews with teachers, that familiarity wasn’t the problem at all. Teachers already knew and loved the service. They simply needed more people to Skype with. So what did Made by Many make? A directory that invited teachers to post the subjects, topics or projects around which they wanted to connect with other teachers or experts.
Skype in the classroom brings together a community of people and information to save teachers time and help them make the most of Skype and the international teaching community.
Teachers could post what they were working on or looking for. Then from anywhere and everywhere around the world other teachers with similar projects or useful expertise could identify opportunities for sharing and collaborating. Taking advantage of the network effect – the more users use it the more people are attracted and excited to join – the project quickly grew to over 14,000 teachers and nearly 700 projects.
It’s innovation, crowdsourcing and the power of social media all rolled into one very cool idea that spread quickly with little more than word of mouth and some well deserved press coverage.
To me, projects like this are what we should all want to create. When you think about the potential of Skype in the Classroom – connecting teachers and students in the U.S. with their counterparts in the Middle East for example, or teaching kids about each other’s respective cultures – it has huge implications for learning and even international relations.
We might also want to learn how to make conceive and execute ideas like this. Many of us get our inspiration from the same places over and over again – other ad agencies, recent campaigns, award shows. But expand the list of places you go for inspiration and take the time to learn some of the new ways of creating, and who knows, maybe you’ll be competing against IDEO for design awards. And impressing the hell out of your clients in the process.
Google+ and the benefit of time
Jaron Lanier must be rolling his eyes. Google + has been out all of two weeks and we have already seen paid seminars on how to use it; thousands, if not millions, of blog posts espousing its virtues and condemning its shortcomings; gushing praise for circles and the ability to organize our friends and acquaintances; and now, after less than a month, when most of us haven’t even figured out how to use our circles efficiently comes the latest assessment – circle fatigue. Really? To call circles “the dark side of Google +” does seem a little over the top. (Read the comments.)
Maybe we should all take a breath, restrain our need to decide/conclude/declare in realtime, before we actually know anything, and see where this all goes. Ever think that maybe it’s still too soon to tell?
We have no idea whether Google’s momentum – 10 million users in practically no time – will continue. No way of knowing how long, if ever, it will take to reach Facebook’s volume.
Will Sparks turn out to be as useful a filtering device as we can imagine – feeding us new content based on what we’ve clicked on, liked or interacted with from previous results that it’s added to our stream? If so, will it become one of our favorite features of G+?
In early questions I posed to heavy social users, many were ready to make Google + their de facto platform, but others had no intention of bailing on Twitter. Is it an either or? Or might we, over time, find that certain networks play different roles in our desire to connect, share, discover content and organize news and entertainment via the influence and recommendations of our own carefully curated communities. Leading to the question of what role will Google + play?
And all of that’s before we even consider brands and companies. Right now Google has asked companies to stay off until they get the experience right and can select some subset of the 36,000 companies who applied to get on. That will inevitably raise more questions.
Will brands use circles intelligently, organizing small groups of advocates and loyalists in one circle, coupon cutters in another, prospects in a third?
Will Google + afford marketers better interaction and listening than Facebook does, even if the number of +’s are fewer?
What about early reports that the men to women ratio of G+ users was 90:10? Apparently that was a false assessment, but Google’s new site still weighs more in favor of the less influential consumer. Will that change?
Regarding brand interaction, there’s user behavior to consider. With the ability to isolate brands into circles we can easily organize brands by category, by coupons, or by other preferences and have far easier control over a brand’s stream than they might have elsewhere. Need a new sweater? Click on the circle of all your favorite online retailers to see who’s sending you discounts.
Finally, there’s a lot of talk about SEO results. Presumably now that Google has put an end to real time search, Google + content will have an advantage. But we still don’t know, and may never know, how that works. Right now a link that gets shared publicy has a URL (back to the Google+ post), so presumably it can be searched and found. But what about a link shared with a limited number of circles that’s not public? Does that link even count toward the page rank of the article being shared? And does it matter how influential the person who shared it?
Maybe you know the answers to all of these questions. I don’t. But I do think that for anything to work for us we have to work at it. Which recalls a whole other argument – Douglas Rushkoff’s Program or be Programmed. Having everything laid out for us might be convenient. But control and choice might be better thing. I’m giving it time.
Idea overload via SxSWi
Clockwise from top left: digital code for music; NY Times Editor Jennifer Preston; with the exceptional Cindy Gallop; Austin at night
I’m back today from five days at SxSWi. Unlike the crowd that hangs in the blogger lounge, anxious to peck out a news story about whatever new product or feature or booked gets launched in Austin, I’m usually way to busy to do much more than check-in, post a few updates or share some Instagrams. Hence the hiatus here. So over the next week I’ll try to share some thoughts and reactions from a week of information overload.
SxSW continues to amaze. This year there were 20,000 people, nearly 2000 presenters and hundreds of sessions to consider. Obviously it’s impossible to get through more than a fraction of them. (Would love to see the data visualization on beers consumed versus sessions attended by each attendee. I’m willing to bet that the higher the former the lower the latter.)
I have a number of things I want to share and write about, but for starters, here are some random thoughts and sound bites.
Journalism’s newest source is Twitter
Reporters for many of the major news outlets, from the New York Times to NPR now rely on Twitter, as much as they do on their own correspondents and traditional sources, for news, especially from the danger zones where on-the-ground reports from citizens can be more timely (if not always reliable.) While it creates all kinds of challenges — verifying reports, protecting the identity of sources — it also shows the incredible power of social media, from text messages and Twitter to camera phones and YouTube. Without it, given all the bureaus that have shut down in recent years, we’d have much less timely information.
In fact, during a session with Jennifer Preston of the New York Times and Andy Carvin of NPR, reports started to circulate via Twitter that Al Jazeera camera man Ali Hassan Al-Jaber had been killed. In real time, while the conversation went on, Carvin verified sources and informed that room that the reports were, in fact, true.
Scale is not the most important objective
If you’re in the marketing, advertising or social media business, you confront this all the time. Brands want more followers. More likes. More views. All of which is good but may have far less long term value than building a community via true engagement. For evidence look no further than Christopher Poole. Moot shared a story of 4Chan’s growth and how it was the community of users whose content and interaction built the web’s largest English image-board. You may have no interest in replicating either the content or the user community, but the idea of fostering and enabling a community that connects people to each other around shared interests should be your real focus. Focus on that and the scale will come. Game the numbers with a gimmick or quick campaign and you may achieve them, but long-term they might offer less of a return.
Influence is getting more dispersed
I saw one slide at a session on social media data visualization (honest, it’s the only session I went to with SoMe in the title) that was quite telling. The image compared sources of content (influence) from the Iran green movement in 2009 with the recent uprising in Eqypt.
In Iran there were four or five central nodes of influence: key people whose content was read, re-tweeted and then spread. But a look at the same chart regarding Eqypt shows a proliferation in nodes of influence, suggesting that today, there are many more individuals whose content is followed and that large communities are comprised not just of individuals but of sub-communities. No doubt the same effect can be seen across the entire social web.
The lines are blurring faster than ever
We have a tendency to compartmentalize. Retail stores are physical. Websites are where we shop on line. Mobile is that phone in our pocket. But really they are all blurring together. Soon we’ll shop simply by grabbing an image of a garment we see someone wearing. We’ll find it on our smartphone and make a purchase. Or we’ll save it, assemble a digital wardrobe, then send it off to a third site that might shop for us, securing the best deals the web has to offer while we sit back and play some new game.
The gap between technology and user adoption widens
We invent new technologies faster than we embrace them. No real surprise, but as the pace of change accelerates even further, we’ll see the gap widen. Mice will give way to touch; touch to gesture; gesture to bio-signals. But we won’t embrace any of these with the same speed at which they become available. Consider your own habits. Even if you’re an early adopter of all things digital, you’re probably finding it harder and harder to keep up. And I bet you’re not one of the 80,000 people who has a chip implanted in your head, helping you think, get around, or simply remember stuff.
We can all learn from start-ups
Admittedly I didn’t get to the lean-start up sessions, a full day program that took place on Saturday. But everyone I talked to who did attend raved about it and took away valuable lessons about agile, iterating and learning to pivot at lightning speed.
I full expect that the idea of MVP (minimum viable product) will work its way into everything from ad campaigns and digital platforms, to the launching of new divisions or skunk works.
On a related note, Pepsi shared its commitment to try virtually every new social platform that comes along, experimenting with how they work and exploring their potential value. More importantly the marketing giant wants to work with and learn from every one of the startups that launches a new platform or app in hopes of importing the techniques and processes that enable young start-ups to iterate so quickly. Who says you can’ teach an old dog (slow) to learn new tricks (how to be fast.)
More to come in a day or two. Hope this gives you something to think about.
