PdF Morning Sessions: Social Media Marathon
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Written By Kate Zimmermann | May 21, 2007 | Share This
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Like a speed dating session for the Who’s Who of Online Media, eight headliner panelists rotated through 20 minute presentations for the morning session of Friday’s Personal Democracy Forum. Below is my attempt to condense this two and a half hour marathon into a single post:
“Online Politics: A Demographic Look at Who’s Doing What.”
Lee Rainie from the Pew Internet & American Life Project gave an overview of the online political sphere. The spread of politics online can be partly attributed to broadband, said Rainie, and to the growing importance of the Internet as a source of news among young people. The Under-36 demographic is largely attracted to the forensic quality of the Internet; they want transparent primary sources (ie: YouTube), but also demand that information be easy to find. According to recent data from The Pew, 21 million people have watched political videos online as of February 2007. Rainie believes that political candidates should look to wireless as the next-gen technology revolution, and that future voters will consider the Internet an integral part of their everyday lives. The Internet is no longer in competition with old media, it’s just becoming more integrated.
“Politics is Flat I: What Happens When a Billion People Own the Means of Production of Ideas?”
Yochai Benkler, a law professor at Yale, spoke next, with more words per minute than I thought was humanly possible (I can only hope that his students use tape recorders to take notes). Benkler opened with a discussion of the startup costs for newspapers. He noted that computation, storage, and communications capacity are becoming decentralized. Large groups of collaborators and free/open-source software are changing the market. Social networks are eschewing the paradigms of government altogether, by forcing a previously exclusive sphere to embrace mass participation. The “networked public sphere” is causing the power of money to change, as it becomes easier for citizens to act as professional journalists at virtually no cost. Likewise, the notion of “superstars” has been broken down. Benkler is extremely interested in following the progression of journalism (and economics?) into a decentralized system, as the Internet continues to offer people visibility with almost zero financial constraints.
“Politics is Flat II: What Happens When We All Have a Dog’s Hearing?”
Thomas Friedman, famous author of The World is Flat, read a passage from the third iteration of his book. Friedman discussed the sway of citizen activism, the proliferation of media consumption, and new social chasms being caused by digital media. Said Friedman, “Technology can make the far feel very near, but it can also make the near feel very far.” What’s more, as the tools to create internet media become cheaper and easier to use, the old rules of journalism are falling apart. There is no system of lawyers and editors in place to sort out fact from fiction on the internet, which has consequently turned everyone into a simultaneous contributor to and victim of the “virtual paparazzi”. No less, Friedman is hopeful about the economic power afforded to individuals by the Internet, and he anticipates that global change will be stimulated by social entrepreneurs moving online.
“Digital Handshakes on Virtual Receiving Lines”
Danah Boyd followed with a conversation about different types of Social Media. She related the instigation of conversations in social media to a politician’s handshake with potential voters. For many of the under-30 crowd, she said, the Internet is the only public space they have access to. The same way that a politician would meet and greet at a campaign rally, they should be commenting on people’s Facebook profiles, inviting “friends” on Myspace, and so on. Boyd believes that comments online are as valuable as meeting someone in person, because both are representations of a real relationship made in the public sphere. Boyd attests, however, that a “digital handshake” is fundamentally unique in four key ways: 1) Content online is persistent, 2) content online is searchable, 3) Anything online can be replicated out of context, and 4) The audience online is invisible.
“Taking Facebook by Storm: The Million Strong for Barack Story”
This past January, Farouk Olu Aregbe started the ‘Million Strong for Barack‘ group on Facebook. The group quickly spiraled into an unofficial meeting spot for college-aged Barack Obama enthusiasts. Aregbe’s presentation was mostly a personal account of how the group started as a single visual idea, and evolved into a thriving organizational center for political activities. The key transition, said Aregbe, was when the group decided not to become a PAC, but to raise money by breaking into topically-focused subgroups that would support their own offline events.
“The Making of NetRoots”
Matt Stoller from MyDD.com followed Aregbe’s presentation. “This is a story of betrayal”, he began, as he launched into a history of liberal activity online. Starting with Jesse Ventura and Ross Perot, the first people to make a hit online were the “crazy uncles” - aka, the people not afraid to say radical things that made people just a little uncomfortable. These candidates had two things in common: 1) unlike broadcast politicians, they got people talking to each other, and 2) They appealed to voters who felt betrayed by the system. This betrayal of the system is what motivated the origins of internet politics on the left. Today, liberal politics is so entrenched in the Internet that social media has evolved as it’s own political structure with unique funding mechanisms and systems for allocating credibility.
“Is it Time to Flip the Funnel?”
Finally, Seth Godin presented his very funny diatribe on broadcast vs. new media. He said the “push” model of marketing that uses media to interrupt people (as with broadcast tv) is broken. Today, the inundation of media content (online and elsewhere) has trained people to tune out push-driven messages. As a result, our voices are getting lost in the clutter. How do marketers and politicians fix this? Godin says that we have to focus less on the broadcast of the message, and more on the relationships cultivated with individual buyers. Relationships are assets, he says, that reveal themselves in the conversations between consumers. What’s more, Godin thinks that we should be more concerned with targeting innovators and early adopters - aka, the “conversation starters”. Most importantly, marketers have to turn their product into a story that people will choose to talk about.
“In Conclusion…”
The overarching theme of this morning’s presentations was that “new media is a conversation”. I was especially surprised to hear only one panelist (Godin) mention search marketing as a way to seed conversations online. Though politicians are clearly getting savvy to YouTube and blogging (likely because social media has been the subject of political discussion since 2004) it seems like few of them have caught onto search. Before YouTube, before Facebook, people use search engines to find more information about the candidates. What’s more, the majority of traffic from search is from undecided voters - aka, people actively looking for a candidate’s marketing message.
So why no mention of search at the PdF? Well, with 8 panelists and dozens more still yet to present, I guess they had to fit our lunch break in somewhere.
Topics: Conferences & Events, Media Convergence, Publishing, Social Media |