Leveraging social media in politics

June 24, 2009

yes we did

Book Review
Yes We Did
An inside look at how social media built the Obama brand
By Rahaf Harfoush
New Riders/Voices that Matter. 2009. 199 p.

WASHINGTON (AFP) — The White House provided a live stream on Tuesday of President Barack Obama’s press conference on Facebook allowing users to give instant feedback on his remarks about Iran, health care other topics.

Hundreds of Facebook members from around the world posted their comments on a message board next to a video of the news conference while it was being shown live by the White House at apps.facebook.com/whitehouselive.

This happened yesterday. And it’s nothing new.

Among the things helped Obama win the national election last fall were the campaign’s savvy use of social media.

Author Rahaf Harfoush disclaims any intent to provide a how-to manual, but you can bet that many of Obama’s online communication strategies will be common in all political campaigns from this point forward.

Harfoush says the campaign’s success resulted from refinement—not invention. The team improved on social media tools to build a scalable organization with national reach. That allowed Democrats to compete in areas they had been unable to penetrate before.

This book offers a behind-the-scenes look at the 2008 presidential election and was written by an enthusiastic Democratic activist. So you may (or may not) need to set your politics aside.

The hub of the campaign’s communications was the web site, my.barackobama.com. Early supporters adopted the platform to continue and extend the organizing they had already been doing. They connected with Obama supporters outside their personal networks and amplified their organizational efforts.

“Nothing is more convincing or more powerful than hearing a story from someone just like you,”  Harfoush says. “Keep it real and keep it local.” The MyBO web site allowed users to create events, exchange information, raise funds, and connect with voters nearby.  More than 3 million people created an account on MyBO. They uploaded contacts from their Outlook and Gmail address books and invited their extended social network to joining MyBO. They created special interest groups like Electricians for Obama,  Texas for Obama, and Women for Obama.  They used the site to organize more than 200,000 offline events.

Supporters from across the country could log in and write a note of encouragement to precinct captains and volunteers. Through a unique fundraising campaign, previous donors were asked to match someone’s first-time donation.

Howard Dean’s presidential campaign was notable for its online fund raising success, yet was unable to convert online enthusiasm into actual votes, Harfoush says. When the Obama camp built their online grassroots movement, they ensured that online organizing translated into offline action.

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Create presentations that inspire

June 1, 2009

beyond bullet points

Book review
Beyond bullet points:
Using Microsoft Office Powerpoint 2007 to create presentations that inform, motivate, and inspire.
By Cliff Atkinson
Microsoft Press, 2008. 349 p.

“We don’t live our lives in bullet points,” Cliff Atkinson says, “we live in images and stories.”

Beyond Bullet Points is not a quick fix for your current approach to presenting with PowerPoint. Atkinson’s book challenges all us presenters to set aside our old habits and assumptions, especially if we have been using PowerPoint for years.

Time and again, reading this book reminded me of family slide shows. Dad set up his slide projector and a huge screen. In a darkened room he showed gorgeous color photos of our latest travel adventure. His narrative and the visuals produced a seamless entertainment.

Little did we know that years later, this approach would be endorsed by experts on how people learn. Without getting too technical, Atkinson artfully weaves cognitive science into the how-tos of using PowerPoint. Slides should complement the narrative, not try to duplicate it. Many presentations fail because the speaker’s slides are, well, too verbal.

Atkinson shares research realities that dispel the myths and break the habits that stand in the way of effective presentations.
Research reality #1: respect the limits of working memory. The limits of working memory have been acknowledged for decades, but our presentations often don’t honor those limits. People learn better when information is broken up into digestible pieces. Help your audience by “chunking” new information.

Research reality #2: address two channels: visual and verbal. People receive and process new visual and verbal information in two separate channels. PowerPoint presentations do not occur in a paper medium. They are like a movie, with a visual track and an audio track. The two streams of information don’t try to reproduce each other, rather, they complement each other.

Research reality #3. guide audience attention.  Your slides should guide your audience’s working memory. When preparing your show, give each slide a headline, then write out your full narration in the off-screen text box in Notes Page view. Finally, add a graphic in Normal view.

Use a story structure
Dad’s vacation slides illustrated a story about traveling. But whatever your subject, you can use a ‘story’ approach to guide you as you plan and produce your show. Your presentation should have a beginning, middle, and end. This powerful structure ties everything together and keeps one idea flowing to the next. No idea—or slide—is without specific meaning, context, and sequence.

The main character in the story should be your audience. Not your company, not your research. Your presentation asks your audience to take some action, or to believe something.  You create dramatic tension in your presentation by showing a gap between Point A (the status quo; your audience’s problem to be resolved) and Point B (problem solved, because your audience collaborated with your company).

Granted:  On the surface, making a business presentation may seem to have little in common with narrating a slide show about a family vacation. You have lots of money at stake, or you must use lots of numbers. You’re trying to persuade an audience to do something, or to believe something.

But what better way to keep their attention, and guide their decision-making, than by structuring your presentation as a well-illustrated and narrated story?

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Solving problems with pictures

May 22, 2009

back of the napkin

Book Review
The back of the napkin:
Solving problems and selling ideas with pictures.
Dan Roam.
Penguin/ Portfolio, 2008.   278 p.
http://www.thebackofthenapkin.com/

Whether or not you rated highly on the analytical skills section of the Graduate Record Exam, you can learn to take an immensely complicated problem, break it down into constituent parts, explain how things work, identify what is missing, and develop an elegant solution.

Dan Roam insists that we all have have the ability to think visually. From the beginning of our lives we learn to look, see, imagine, and show. And almost all kinds of problems can be solved with pictures: business issues, political deadlocks, technical complexities, and organizational dilemmas. That’s because pictures can represent complex concepts and summarize vast sets of information in ways that are easy to see and understand.

Roam presents a case study, spread across six chapters, each showcasing one visual framework.  Here’s the scenario:  “Our latest product release a year ago introduced many new features, making our software the most feature-rich available, but our customers’ reception has been lukewarm. Our sales reps complain that they’re having an increasingly hard time selling our expensive software, given the rise of open source freeware over the past year.”

He walks us through the process of determining why that’s the case. To introduce his concept of visual thinking, he applies the 6 W questions we were taught to ask in journalism class:

‘Who’ and ‘what’ problems relate to things, people and roles.
‘When’ problems relate to scheduling and timing.
‘Where’ problems related to direction and how things fit together
‘Why’ problems relate to seeing the big picture.
‘How’ problems relate to how things influence one another
‘How much’ problems involve measuring and counting.

When presenting data, Roam says, there are thousands of possible charts we could make, but all are derived from just six basic “showing frameworks” or a combination of those six.  Learning when to apply these six frameworks and how to draw them gives us the ability to create a pictorial representation of almost any problem we can see.

He then walks us through a visual imagination activation tool he calls SQVID, a series of 5 questions that brings an initial idea to visual clarity and to refine its focus:

S: Simple vs. Elaborate
Q:  Quality vs. Quantity
V:  Vision vs. Execution
I: Individual attributes vs. Comparison
D: Delta (or change) vs. Status quo.

Combining the six ‘W’ questions and the 5 imagination-focusing SQVID questions creates a powerful analytical tool. Before we know it, solutions begin to appear on the page.

VENI   VIDI   IMAGINI.

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What is your personal brand?

April 23, 2009

Me 2.0

Book review
Me 2.0: Build a powerful brand to achieve career success
Dan Schwabel
Kaplan Publishing, 2009. 236 pp.

This book aims to help readers manage their careers in the Web 2.0 world and to use emerging media to achieve their goals.

A personal branding expert, Dan Schwabel helps his fellow Generation Y professionals find their way into the world of work through his Personal Branding blog and Personal Branding Magazine.

Schwabel corrects the misconception that personal branding means changing who you are to fit others’ expectations. While image management is typically a product of conscious manipulation, he says, personal branding is about sincerity.

In a world where technology is changing the way we manage our careers, express our value, and communicate with one another, successful personal branding will “grant you real meaning and opportunities for success in your life” if you embrace your passion in the workplace and socially.

How did he do it? When he began his career there were maybe 5 blogs about personal branding, but no Gen Y bloggers were among them. He took the opportunity jump in and differentiate his own personal brand.

Once you’re in the workplace, he says, you will thrive not through ruthless competition with your co-workers, but by positioning yourself as a natural leader and by gaining visibility. Gen X and Gen Y can benefit from each other, he says. Gen X has real-world experience and corporate seniority, while Gen Y has a level of technical savvy that can benefit their older colleagues.

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PRs must reshape the profession

April 23, 2009

public relations

Book review
Putting the Public Back in Public Relations:
How Social Media is Reinventing the Aging Business of PR
Brian Solis and Deirdre Breakenridge
Pearson Education, 2009. 314 pp.

The Problem: PR has slipped into complacency. Many PR practitioners still blast news releases and spam everyone with pitches. The same old tired marketing ethics and tactics.

The Opportunity: Social Media allows PRs to overhear relevant conversations. They can adopt a less-is-more, focused, and human approach to share information.

We PR people can embrace Social Media (after we’ve participated as a person and not as a marketer).

Brian Solis and Deirdre Breakenridge wrote Putting the Public Back in Public Relations “to show you how to take advantage of the socialization of media, whether you are just starting out or you’ve been in the communications industry for years.”

Solis is Principal of FutureWorks, a PR and New Media agency. Breakenridge is president and director of communications at PFS Marketwyse.

We now have an opportunity to reshape a worn and beaten profession and transform it into something much bigger and more meaningful, they say. PR 2.0 can thrive in today’s ever-evolving and highly competitive online social climate. Although the technology is new, the principles driving the New PR movement are not foreign; they’re rooted in customer service, the social sciences, and community participation.

These conversations that we can listen to, and eventually participate in, take the form of videos, podcasts, bookmarks, blog posts and comments, tweets, pictures, reviews, meetups and events, and news aggregation. PR needs to follow the authoritative dialogue, wherever it takes place.

One of the most important tips of their book: To be a true member of the online community, you must humanize your intent and story, and learn how, where, and why to participate. By doing so, you abandon top-down engagement and embrace one-on-one interaction.

The way to succeed with New PR is to become a reliable resource of information and knowledge for those who either directly or indirectly affect your brand’s success.

Technology is important, and there will always be new tools. But even though the tools continually change, PR professionals will always start the conversation, facilitate that conversation and then, of course, monitor the conversation.

Twitter, Facebook, and other social networking platforms encourage communicators to condense our stories into a focused package that is specific to each community. This, the authors say, is how we put the PUBLIC back in Public Relations. This is how we start to reshape a 100-year-old-history that has coasted along without resistance until now.

Other tips:

Rather than creating profiles on every popular social platform and befriending everyone across the networks, first identify meaningful conversations, comprehend them, then feed that collective insight back into the organization for positive change.

Measuring the frequency and tone of conversations is the new frontier for PR and marketing, with many solutions launching even now.

Who we are today is not who we will be tomorrow. Embrace the changes outlined in this book and remain open to future learning and growth. Transcend traditional roles and exemplify the new hybrid of Public Relations professionals.

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A Qwiki Guide to Wikipedia

March 2, 2009

wikipedia readers guide

Book Review
Wikipedia Reader’s Guide
By John Broughton
Pogue Press/O’Reilly. 2008. 56 pages.

Why do people contribute to Wikipedia?
It’s a way to help other people understand the world
It’s a way to give back to the online resource by contributing to it.
Working with others on improving Wikipedia articles can be intrinsically rewarding.

This little guidebook contains two chapters. The first, The Reader’s Guide to Wikipedia, discusses navigating within Wikipedia, reading Wikipedia articles from a mobile device, what Wikipedia is not, and Wikipedia in other languages.

Chapter two discusses editing for the first time: practicing in the sandbox; using templates, previewing and saving your edit, wiki markup, and editing article sections, for example.

The author, John Broughton, has been a registered editor at Wikipedia since 2005. He is responsible for the Editor’s Index to Wikipedia and many off-Wikipedia web pages with useful information and tools for Wikipedia editors.

The text in this booklet is largely adapted from the book Wikipedia: The Missing Manual. That book is a how-to manual for people who want to edit Wikipedia articles and become more active in the Wikipedia community. This pocket guide is mostly about understanding and making the most of Wikipedia as a reader.

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New edition full of tips

February 23, 2009

ipod manual 7th

Book Review
iPod: The Missing Manual. 7th Edition.
By J.D. Biersdorfer with David Pogue
Pogue Press/O’Reilly. 2009. 284 pages.

Around Thanksgiving time I upgraded my iPod Mini (remember those?) to a new Nano. That’s like waking up today after having been in a coma since mid-2005. Hey, everything is different now.

The Missing Manual helped get me up to speed. It showed me, for example, how to

  • change a song’s file format, for example, from mp3 to AAC or AIFF
  • set the iPod’s more than 20 EQ presets
  • find and add lyrics to song files
  • import address book contacts, calendar information, and text files, and
  • customize the Nano’s main menu

No matter which model you have, you’ll find help here. The iPod classic, Nano, Shuffle, and iPod Touch all receive lots of discussion.

Author J.D. Biersdorfer is co-author of The Internet: The Missing Manual and the second edition of Google: The Missing Manual. She has written the weekly computer Q&A column for the New York Times since 1998. Co-author David Pogue is the weekly tech columnist for the NY Times, a correspondent for CBS News Sunday Morning, and creator of the Missing Manual series.

Their writing is clear, friendly, and sometimes humorous. Page layout is quite attractive and screen shots and illustrations big and colorful.

The 21st-century incarnation of the juke box, iTunes, receives five chapters, including discussions of ‘power moves,” playlists, navigating the iTunes store, and viewing videos.

Other chapters discuss viewing photos on the iPod, using the iPod as personal assistant, surfing the Web with iPod touch, connecting the iPod to external speakers and home entertainment system, and what to do when the iPod doesn’t work.

More information is available online as well. Go to MissingManuals.com, click on the “Missing CD” link, to find a list of links to resources including shareware and freeware mentioned in this book.

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Facebook, TOS, and other good things

February 18, 2009

facebook me missing manual

Book Review

Facebook me! A guide to having fun with your friends and promoting your projects on Facebook.
By Dave Awl.
Peachpit Press, 2009. 205 pages.

Facebook: The Missing Manual.
By E.A. Vander Veer.
Pogue Press/O’Reilly, 2008. 268 pages.

Again, Facebook makes a policy change that sends shivers down the spine of its millions of members and sets blogger tongues (and fingers) a-wagging. Facebook’s recent change in its Terms of Service has inflamed discussions about exactly who owns the content we all post there, and under what conditions.

See Razzed, the Consumerist, Nathan Gilliatt, RiverScrap, and even the NY Times.

Both books reviewed here offer good general introduction to using Facebook, and each devotes 20 pages to issues of privacy and security.

The Missing Manual emphasizes thinking clearly about how much private information to share and how to control access to your account. Think about it: Although you post personal information online in various places, FB brings together in one convenient location intimate details including your views on politics and religion, your relationships, and your smiling mug shot.

Facebook Me! discusses opting out of appearing in social ads, opting out of Beacon advertising, how to control what gets announced on your news feed and Wall, how to keep applications you don’t use from accessing your information, phishing attempts, and watching out for links bearing Trojans.

But there’s much more to these books than discussions of privacy and security.

Both books cover, with different levels of emphasis, setting up a profile, finding friends, how to use the Wall, news feeds, communication options, applications & add-ons, joining and setting up groups, buying and selling via ads, going mobile, shopping & marketplace, and job hunting.

Facebook Me! offers more information about sharing photos & videos, using FB’s calendar, setting up Pages, and setting up Events. The Missing Manual is stronger on business uses of FB, including hiring, collaborating on projects, and file sharing.

Facebook Me! offers a 5-page essay on the Politics of Friending and a 3-page essay on The Fine Art of Not Being Obnoxious. Author Dave Awl goes deep into FB  Applications and discusses authorizing apps, blocking them, managing them, book marking them, how to find them. He’s particularly enthusiastic about using photos and videos to promote your interests. For example, a theater company with a show about to open might post shots of rehearsals in progress. Or if you make handcrafted jewelry or furniture, post some samples of your work.

I really like the book’s attractive page layout with color screen shots and illustrations.

O’Reilly’s series of  Missing Manual books serve as guides to Access, digital photography, Dreamweaver, Excel, flash, Garageband, iMovie, iPhone, Mac OS X, Photoshop Elements, and Quicken, to name a few.

Facebook: The Missing Manual *reads* like a manual: procedures are spelled out in detail. Compared to Awl’s breezy, chatty style, the writing here is somwehat dry.

Author Vander Veer devotes a chapter to using FB to collaborate on projects, including using messaging and subscription tools to keep team members in the loop and projects on track.  She discusses setting up FB Events to organize get-togethers for co-workers and clients.  This book is particularly strong in covering Facebook Marketplace, where you can “buy or sell just about anything,” and in discussing how to use FB to find employees and to find employment.

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Networking with LinkedIn

February 5, 2009

Book Review

LinkedIn for Recruiting. Bill Vick and Des Walsh. HappyAbout Books, 2006/ 2008. 109 p.

42 Rules for 24-hour Success on LinkedIn.  Chris Muccio with David Burns & Peggy Murrah. Superstar Books, 2009. 117 p.

I’m On LinkedIn: Now What? Jason Alba. HappyAbout Books, 2008. 133 p.

About 30 million professionals use LinkedIn to network, exchange information, hunt for jobs, and recruit. Setting up a free profile allows you to strut your professional stuff and to ask and answer questions of practice. According to author Chris Muccio, LinkedIn’s average user is 41 years old and has a household income of $109,000.

LinkedIn reports that the typical user has about 80 connections and an extended network of about 30,000. Upgrading from a free to a premium account provides access to the whole 30 million–plus network.  Businesses use LinkedIn too. They research prospective partners, find industry experts, locate and get background information on potential employees, perform research on competitors, contact media, and close sales.

LinkedIn for Recruiting

Of the three titles reviewed here, LinkedIn for Recruiting is possibly the most valuable. Nearly 50 professional recruiters contributed comments, short case studies, and testimonials about using LinkedIn to place job candidates. Even if you’re not a recruiter, this book is interesting as it provides insight into how recruiters think.

Recruiter Shally Steckerl recommends posting a LinkedIn profile that goes beyond a standard resume. Rather than listing the highlights of your career, he recommends telling your story: what you are like, what makes you who you are, every job you have ever had.

Some recruiters use LinkedIn to collaborate and to arrange “splits,” in which two or more recruiters agree to share the search for candidates and split the fees. Recruiters remark on its value for finding people in really specialized positions, who may be “deep down” in a company and not readily located.

42 Rules for 24-hour Success on LinkedIn

Here’s a good starter book for general readers as well as recruiters. In 7 sections, Muccio and colleagues discuss what LinkedIn offers, how to create a strong profile, how to build your network, how to manage recommendations, how to raise awareness of yourself by posting and answering questions, how to search the LinkedIn database, and how to create or join an affinity group.

Muccio recommends setting aside at least an hour each week to nourish and build your network. He also recommends choosing your contacts judiciously: Fifty quality contacts are more valuable than 500 people you really don’t communicate with. The quality of your network should be measured by quality of the resources available from your network.

LinkedIn for the individual user

Jason Alba’s “I’m on LinkedIn, Now What?” aims generally at the individual user. He discusses LinkedIn contacts as a source of knowledge about business and political issues, career management, job leads, and consulting opportunities.

Alba recommends using LinkedIn for “your personal branding strategy,” a theme that informs the book. He shares some thoughts on netiquette and discusses using LinkedIn alongside Facebook, Twitter, blogs, and Yahoo! Groups.

Alba highly recommends participating in LinkedIn “Answers” service, and mentions the section called This Week’s Top Experts. A particularly helpful hint is his pointer to Guy Kawasaki’s essay called “LinkedIn Profile Extreme Makeover”

This book’s pace is sometimes slowed by numbing technical details and a tendency to be pedantic, e.g., “LinkedIn has over 90,000 Groups. When you join a group you get access to the other Group members.” Nevertheless, it’s chock-full of information for users new to the service.

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Don’t knock it ’til you try it

January 22, 2009

twitter means business

Book Review
Twitter Means Business: How Microblogging can help or hurt your company
By Julio Ojeda-Zapata. HappyAbout Books, 2008. 141 pages.

Just about the time some people have gotten comfortable blogging, along comes the next new thing, blowing people away and making blogs look, well, old hat.

In fact, that new thing, microblogging, isn’t all that new. It’s just that Twitter has exploded onto the communication scene, grabbing major mind share and many eyeballs.

Whether you’re a seasoned Twitter user or a newcomer, this book will pump you up and lead you to new resources.

The author, Julio Ojeda-Zapata, is a Minnesota-based tech columnist and reporter for the Pioneer-Press. He packs this book with examples of why people and companies Tweet, and how they do it.

He documents dozens of corporate Twitter users including Best Buy, Home Depot, Starbucks, Sprint Nextel, Comcast, JetBlue, and Whole Foods. H&R Block uses Twitter as a customer-support tool, a public-relations tool, and a product-development tool. Customers tweet about what they like and don’t like about the company’s online services and desktop software.

But Ojeda-Zapata holds up the e-tailer Zappos as his Twitter poster child. “No company has embraced the service more fully and enthusiastically,” he says.

One tactical decision to make before moving forward: Will you engage in two-way conversations as a rule, or mostly push information outward? It is a common dilemma when firms set up Twitter accounts. Some use them for conversation, others for distribution.

You can use Twitter’s standard page template, or opt for free alternatives that offer more bells and whistles, including Twhirl, TweetDeck, Twitterific, mobile phone apps, and add-ons for the Firefox browser.

I found really helpful Ojeda-Zapata’s descriptions of Twitter-related services:
Tweet Scan is a general purpose Twitter search engine that offers several automated-delivery options.
Twellow is a sort of Yellow Pages of the Twitterverse that groups users by categories.
TwitScoop scours the Twitterverse and analyzes which words and phrases are hot.
The Social Brand Index (formerly the Twitter Brand Index) is a directory of brands in the corporate, media, and academic spheres, among others.
Twitterati features many of the major Twitter users including social media gurus.

A “Twitter lesson” follows each case studies in the book, for example:
Obsessing about what your customers are saying about you in he Twitterverse could be one of the keys to a thriving business. Wake up and pay attention!
Find the conversations that mention you, join them, and turn negatives into positives with zero spin and lots of love.
Enter the Twitterverse on your own terms, but with customers in mind. Celebrate their creativity, reward it, and they’ll love you for it.
Share information that can others enjoy themselves and make better consumer decisions.

In fact, Albert Maruggi’s Afterword observes that Twitter is popular because it taps human needs—the desire we have to connect, to be curious, to seek recognition, to be part of something, and to share.

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