Archive for the 'Bloggers' category

The Essence of Online Communications

Mar 26 2008 Published by under Bloggers, Business, John McCain, News Media, Politics, Technology, The Internet

The Washington Post today has a (far too) long piece about Meghan McCain and her blog. The piece is fairly unremarkable in its writing, and the blog, from what I’ve seen is fairly unremarkable with the exception of the angle.

There is, however, one passage that jumped out at me as I was reading.

There’s a genius, too, to Meghan McCain’s style of saying so much without divulging anything truly intimate — a balancing act perfected by her dad on his Straight Talk Express. The more you talk, the more people start to feel as if they know you. The more you talk, the more you minimize the reverberations of any one thing you say.

The disdain the reporter has for McCain (both Meghan and her dad) is barely masked. Lines like the first one above are an example, as is the piece’s title – a take off on Credence Clearwater Revival’s famous song Fortunate Son. Given John McCain’s staunchly pro-war position, it’s obvious the writer is mocking Meghan’s similarity to the child in the song.

Some folks are born made to wave the flag,
Ooh, they’re red, white and blue.
And when the band plays hail to the chief,
Ooh, they point the cannon at you, lord,

It ain’t me, it ain’t me, I ain’t no senator’s son, son.
It ain’t me, it ain’t me; I ain’t no fortunate one, no,

Ignoring the subtle digs at her and her dad, the reporter did, in that brief passage above, capture one fascinating aspect of the Internet. It’s the piece that most politicians and corporate clients don’t get and it bears repeating.

The more you talk, the more people start to feel as if they know you. The more you talk, the more you minimize the reverberations of any one thing you say.

Communications types who do not spend a lot of time online fail to get this. They assume that every word you say is going to be twisted, distorted, and manipulated. They worry that some random blog post will send stock prices or poll standings plummeting downward.

Yet that statement is the essence of this new era of Internet communications. Allowing people to see you, and to understand you, actually protects you from the random out of context quote. As your comfort with exposure increases, and you open your dialog more and more, you will guard against the misstatement. Your allies will have more ammunition to protect your back and your enemies will have less of a vacuum to fill with an errant remark.

For anyone interested in communications, I would suggest you read the McCain article for two reasons. First, it’s a perfect example of the veiled hostility visited upon anyone Republican by the mainstream media. Second, it does illustrate someone taking the right approach to their online brand – be who you are and accept the fact that not everyone is going to like you.

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Funniest Conversation Ever

Mar 11 2008 Published by under Bloggers, Business, Craziness, Free Speech, Miscellany, The Internet

I thought I’d share a conversation I had with a lawyer a few minutes ago. It was particularly amusing for what it reveals about the view some people have of what we do.

Me: Hey, did you get a chance to review that document I sent you yesterday.

Lawyer: I sent it to a couple of other people for some additional feedback. I’ll get it back to you shortly. Refresh my memory, what was this for again?

Me: It’s a post for the blog.

Lawyer: Oh, yeah. Right. I forgot about that. That’s a really stupid idea – that blog. People parse every word in legal filings that nobody ever reads and then we go say any damn thing on a blog. (Apparently he senses my shock at his comment) Sorry… I know the blog wasn’t your idea.

Me: Actually, it was.

Lawyer: Oh. Forget it. What do I care. I’m retiring anyway.

So there you have it. The world we occupy and the way the rest of the establishment sees it. Damn the man! Save the empire!

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Fred08.com: An Outside Insider’s View

Jan 24 2008 Published by under Bloggers, Candidates, Elections, News Media, Operatives, Politics, Republicans, The Internet

(cross-posted from TechPresident)

A lot has been written about the Thompson campaign in the past two days. I have read a bunch of post-mortems all focused on what went wrong, but I thought I would spend a little time telling you what went right. For people interested in online politics and the way candidates use the web, the Thompson campaign is a great case study in what can go well, and go badly in our world.

On May 22nd, I was sitting at Inova Fairfax hospital as my wife was rehydrated. A vicious stomach flu was circulating through the house and had brought my wife and son down. As we sat there that evening, I received an e-mail on my Blackberry from the brother of a friend of the Thompson’s. A few days earlier, they had seen an article in the Washington Post wherein I chastised my party for not using the Internet effectively.

I had been sweating the fallout from that article for two days. I was not exactly loved by the RNC for my critical assessment of their online operation. That article, which was about 180 degrees removed from the series of conversations I had with the reporter, was not going to help.

The Thompson team, however, agreed with my assessment that campaigns could use the Internet differently and wanted me to come out to “The House” to chat about it. We agreed to meet the next day despite what would become a full-blown case of the flu. The Thompson team, it seems, had circulated that same flu about a week earlier and none of them were afraid of catching it again.

On May 23rd, I met with Team Fred and after a three hour discussion of new and innovative ways you could use the Internet to supplement a traditional campaign, I left with an assignment – build a Presidential website in the height of a media storm, that would withstand a huge rush of traffic the moment it launched, and do it all in 10 days.

The Launch

On June 5, 2007, we launched ImWithFred.com. The site was originally envisioned as a simple splash page that would gather low hanging fruit – early donors and supporters looking to sign up. A requirement that all forms be pre-populated so visitors would not have to fill in information more than once threw in a wrinkle and we ended up building personalization into a splash page – not something most people would do. We also ended up building tools that would allow viral recruitment for both donors and volunteers.

Now these tools were hardly new or innovative, but the combination of designing the data architecture, doing the graphic design work, cutting up the site, coding it all, and allowing time to test for bugs in 10 days (over Memorial Day weekend, no less) was about the craziest thing I have ever tried. The data architecture alone had to support huge traffic, and getting the servers provisioned, hardened and tested would eat into our ability to deploy a test environment. Doing all of this over the holiday made me very popular with the development team.

Speaking of the team, I have to give credit to Dan Hopkins, Blaise Hazelwood, Todd Zeigler, Ken Smith, Brian Lyle and the gang that pulled this together. They did an outstanding job getting the site launched under those conditions and rarely complained (to me at least).

On Hannity and Colmes, Fred announced his website url and the flood came in. We took a lot of heat for the thin site, but we didn’t have time for much else. Had we had a month to design, build and test, we could have done more. Given the time we had, and the limitations of working under the “Testing the Waters” rules, I thought we did fine. We attracted over 100,000 unique visitors, raised over a quarter million dollars, and added nearly 30,000 names to our list in the first 24 hours.

On June 12, we rolled out the Fred File, added Fred’s bio, and added tools to spread the word through traditional media by contacting talk radio and newspapers. I was traveling back from a meeting in Colorado that night on a flight that was seriously delayed. I ended up doing the go-live countdown from a seat just inside the arrival gate at Dulles airport on their wi-fi connection. We made the rollout about 30 minutes ahead of Fred’s appearance on Leno that night.

The blog was a hit almost instantly and led me to believe the path we had chosen was right. Fred’s commentaries were getting a lot of comments and I saw the beginning of an online community I’ve never seen around a GOP candidate’s online operation. What’s more, nobody wrote a single word about what supporters were saying online. Nobody accused us of endorsing the random beliefs espoused by the occasional nut, and nobody on the campaign had to answer a single press call (that I am aware of) about the blog or anything said on it.

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A New Endeavor

Jan 08 2008 Published by under Bloggers, Broadband Policy, Cable, Debates, Gadgets, Legislation, Self-Promotion, Technology, Television, The FCC, The Internet

Between work, travel, the holidays, the caucuses and primaries, and another project I’ve been trying to launch, I just haven’t had a lot of time to write, but I wanted to share a new endeavor I’ve undertaken. NCTA (the day job) has launched a new telecom policy blog at CableTechTalk.com.

CableTechTalk will give the industry a voice in the ongoing discussion and debate over telecom policy discussions. Debate over the direction of our nation’s telecom laws increasingly takes place online. This blog seeks to be an active player in that conversation, but it won’t be one-sided. Far from a typical press release and talking points blog, CableTechTalk will invite people with whom we disagree to engage in cross posted debates on the issues – sharing both sides of the argument and letting readers draw their own conclusion.

The blog also gives us the opportunity to share developments in the gadgets that attach to and leverage our voice, video and data platform. This week we’re in Las Vegas looking at the new tech toys on display at CES. We’re looking at the new TVs and set-top boxes, personal entertainment devices, gaming and broadband applications, and all the other things that make life fun.

If you get a chance, I hope you’ll take a look.

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Drawing Analogies

Nov 05 2007 Published by under Bloggers, Craziness, Terrorism, The Internet, War, Writing

I love reading blogs. I also have a particular fondness for columnists. The reason goes beyond a general sense of curiosity about other people, what they think, and why they behave the way they do – which is often tied to how they perceive the world and illustrated in their writing. The reason I love to read people’s personal opinions and thoughts is to be a better communicator myself. This “learning by witness” takes two forms – being provoked into thought by someone else and trying to verbalize my response, or by seeing something that strikes me as abusrd, and not knowing how to respond.

A Wired article titled Suicide Bombing Makes Sick Sense in Halo 3 falls into the second category.

I used to find it hard to fully imagine the mind-set of a terrorist.

That is, until I played Halo 3 online, where I found myself adopting — with great success — terrorist tactics. Including a form of suicide bombing. …

I know I’m the underdog; I know I’m probably going to get killed anyway. I am never going to advance up the Halo 3 rankings, because in the political economy of Halo, I’m poor.

Specifically, I’m poor in time. The best players have dozens of free hours a week to hone their talents, and I don’t have that luxury. This changes the relative meaning of death for the two of us. For me, dying will not penalize me in the way it penalizes them, because I have almost no chance of improving my state. I might as well take people down with me.

Or to put it another way: The structure of Xbox Live creates a world composed of two classes — haves and have-nots. And, just as in the real world, some of the disgruntled have-nots are all too willing to toss their lives away — just for the satisfaction of momentarily halting the progress of the haves. Since the game instantly resurrects me, I have no real dread of death in Halo 3.

The author does specifically state that he is not trying to “trivialize the ghastly, horrific impact of real-life suicide bombing” or to “gloss over the incredible complexity of the real-life personal, geopolitical and spiritual reasons why suicide bombers are willing to kill themselves” because this is “impossibly more nuanced and perverse than what’s happening inside a trifling, low-stakes videogame.”

And yet he follows that disclaimer with this statement:

I’ve read scores of articles, white papers and books on the psychology of terrorists in recent years, and even though I have (I think) a strong intellectual grasp of the roots of suicide terrorism, something about playing the game gave me an “aha” moment that I’d never had before: an ability to feel, in whatever tiny fashion, the strategic logic and emotional calculus behind the act.

This may be one of the strangest pieces of ‘journalism’ I have seen in some time. To argue that you understand terrorism because you have “read scores of articles, white papers and books” and have a “strong intellectual grasp” betrays your completely egocentric worldview. I have read books on terrorism, have taken courses on the subject from renowned experts in the field, and studied the subject with great vigor, but I claim to have no sense of what causes someone to take another person’s life for a political goal.

The one clear difference the writer ignores is the fact the person he’s fragging “from beyond the grave” in Halo was actually trying to kill him in the game. Most often terrorists in real life do not strike directly at other combatants. They strike at innocent women and children.

Thompson’s piece might make sense if terrorism were confined to attacks on military targets (as they sometimes are in Iraq), but falls desperately short of anything approaching a rationale conclusion when weighed against the actions of terrorists who strike at families dining at Sbarro.

Drawing analogies is dangerous if it’s easy to poke holes in your comparison. In this case, it’s all too easy. To compare, in any way, the irrational acts of depraved terrorists bent on killing innocents to make a political point and the spastic tactics of poor video game players does little to make a point. It does more to teach others how not to make a case.

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