Voter-Generated Content

The democratic ideal of voters being in charge of elections might, in general, be an illusion but social media offers a tool to fulfilling the ideal. Robert Scoble wrote more than a year ago when the campaigns took off: “Any one of us can post a video that´ll change the outcome of this election. That video will get found thanks to the much more efficient word-of-mouth network that is social media.” Besides video, voters are generating everything from t-shirts, blogs, news, to bumper-stickers, but what does it mean?

 

Videos such as YouTube have been predicted to take over this campaign. Hundred thousands of videos are uploaded everyday. So far, none of the candidates have “suffered” from a Macaca moment as George Allen did in the Senate race in Virginia in 2006. Researching for this blog entry, I stumbled upon a debate on TechPresident in the fall 2007 about who is running the best Web campaign – Mike Huckabee or Ron Paul? In the end, everyone agrees that Ron Paul ran the best campaign online. I got curious to check out what Huckabee did. Unfortunately, Zephyr Teachout did not link to any of the sites she is mentioning, and I could not find the videos on the campaign site (now turned into a PAC site with only archives going back to March) – except for the YouTube channel that the campaign had created. Huckabee shared voter-generated videos on a daily basis on his campaign website – Obama, Clinton, or McCain do (did) not encourage or share voter-generated videos on their sites. What does it mean? According to Teachout:

“Video images are a central syntax of elections, and unless you encourage people to use their power to join the creation of the moving-image election, you are limiting their reach. I believe people who create video will be better critics of ads, being better able to understand how they are being manipulated; its not the only step, but its a critical step into the circle of creating your own politics. All of these candidates have enough supporters that they could choose to encourage this kind of activity, but they aren’t.“

Pictures are easy to produce on cell phone or digital cameras and easy to share on cell phones, blogs, or photo sharing/social networking sites like Flickr. Today, 60,087 pictures have been uploaded on Flickr of or related to Barack Obama, 5,730 on McCain. A lot of pictures are from rallies around the country, most are taken in a positive light, and some are “hate messages.” I am not a photo expert, but I am amazed by the quality of the photos. Some of them could be official campaign photos but there are produced by supporters. Some of these unofficial pictures might be used later in official campaign material. Or, they might already have been used.

 

Blogs have been part of U.S. elections for the last couple of cycles. There are tons of political blogs out there. Just like YouTube videos, some of them get a lot of attention, spread through the concentric circles and become part of the conversation for quite some time online as well as offline. Obama´s campaign experienced this mechanism, when Mayhill Fowler who is the voter and citizen-journalist behind the so called Bitter-gate. Fowler published a blog on Off the Bus about Obama´s comment on white, bitter voters in Pennsylvania, said during a closed fundraising. This caused a lot of fuzz and buzz in the media and Obama had to spend a lot of resources fighting this gate right before the important primary in Pennsylvania. The lesson learned is that a candidate can never talk “off the record”.   

 

 

Barack Obama is the king of voter-generated content. Check out the numbers – for t-shirts, My Space groups, Facebook members or apps. He is generating hope and thereby support (online). On his campaign site, you’ll find the social networking site MyBarackObama where you can blog, find friends, find events, or raise money. Never the less, I found this interesting post on epolitics quoting Clay Shirky from PDF 2008: “it seems like a social network but it actually contains relatively little lateral conversation. I.e., it’s portrayed as a social network, but people aren’t using it as one — it’s not as much of a person-to-person communications tool as we normally think of social networks as being. So, does that make it a top-down tool masquerading as a bottom-up tool?

Conversations in Concentric Circles

Last night, Michael Silberman, Deans’s National Meetup Director visited our class and lectured us about his experiences at the Dean Campaign in 2003 and 2004. Blogging It In sums up the wisdom of crowds behind the Dean Campaign or you can read Silberman’s detailed account in the anthology; Mousepads, Shoe Leather, and Hope (chapter nine). Here’re a few of my thoughts after class.

 

I might be repeating my blogging from the spring semester but it is getting more and more obvious to me that Dean’s use of the internet was not just a purely strategic choice. Well, there were no other choices because of the lack of money, resources, and staffers according to Garrett Graff. But it was also a strategic choice aimed at cultivating a more transparent and collaborative process. I am fascinated by Joe Trippi’s understanding or idea of trusting the base and let the campaign come out from their efforts. Instead of perceiving a campaign as a traditional command-demand hierarchy he approached the campaign as concentric circles. Collaboration and conversations spread through these concentric circles. The base owned the campaign was the message as well as the fact.

 

However, Garrett Graff pointed out that Dean could only do this because he was behind. Frontrunners will never give up control like this  -  because they cannot afford it. As much as I admire Trippi´s approach, I agree (not just because Graff is my professor). Sey and Castells explain in the reflections part of Mousepads, Shoe Leather, and Hope (chapter eightteen) that politicians are afraid of opening up the process because it will be time consuming and “erode representative democracy” (p.227). Furthermore, Sey and Castells note that controlling the message is an obsession just like money for any campaign. Zephyr Teachout and Thomas Streeter (part of the Dean Campaign) are also uncertain that politics will become more open (see p. 240). They make the distinction between distributed work and decentralized power. For instance, if I send a suggestion to Starbucks it is not “transforming my lack of power in the organization into a fact of power” (p.241). Though, there is a tension between using the internet as a strategic tool to win the next election by any means and using the internet to cultivate a democratic society (p. 234).

 

Where do Obama’s and McCain’s campaigns fit into the appraoch of concentric conversations?

Politics are conversations too

Markets are conversations and the same holds true for politics. Politics are conversations too. The authors of the Cluetrain Manifesto argued that we have to go back and recreate the conversation that happened on the marketplaces in the good old days. I will argue that politicians need to do the same.

 

Hillary Clinton entered the presidential election in January 2007 with the video “I’m In” where she said: “I am not just starting a campaign though, I am beginning a conversation with you”. But what she is learning with the rest of us is that it is not enough just to use the Web 2.0 platforms for social networking and collaboration. You have to leave the top-down approach to running a campaign like the Dean campaign did in 2003 and 2004. Even Barack Obama is accused of being top down too. Or maybe that is the learned lesson of 2008. Is the key to a successful campaign to mix the top down approach with collaboration?

 

We are witnessing a shift from one-way campaigns to two-way campaigns. Especially the Democratic candidates are experimenting with Web 2.0 platforms like blogs, twitter, and video “where the views and opinions of the American people have an impact on the leadership, so leaders are with the people instead of seeking to lead folks that aren’t interested in being led by them” (Howard Dean quoted in First Campaign, p.283).

 

Bloggers like Ruffini and TechRepublicans from “the Rightosphere” are calling for better strategies for debating, fundraising, and mobilizing on the Republican side. Jon Henke argues:

 

“The Leftroots can deliver messaging, money and mobilization, so Democratic candidates become path-dependent on them. They have sufficient power to move politicians to their ideas. The Right does not. Meanwhile, what is the Right passionate about right now? Not much. To build an online infrastructure as effective as the Leftosphere, the Right must find its own story to tell – an organic story, relevant to current grievances, with politically viable solutions – about which people can be passionate, around which a coalition can rally.”

 

 

Can everybody turn their culture around? To me, the Republicans are not really that grass root oriented. But the lesson learned this semester, I will argue political parties as well as corporations have to turn around and choose ”the new way” if they want to succeed in the future.  

 

The political conversation after the presidential campaign

Politics are conversations also in between presidential campaigns. As Garrett Graff, my professor points out in his book First Campaign there are important issues in the United States that call for action – and debate like education, health care, and infrastructure. Maybe politicians and governments on all levels can learn something from Dell’s Ideastorm and Starbucks’ MyStarbucksIdea.

 

 

PS. Read more about Garret Graff’s book here, here, and here.

I´m twittering

Just like Justin I agreed with Rosie when she said in class who cares? I signed up last week but I did not twitter until an hour ago when I read Justin’s entry. And I guess I signed up for two reasons. Just as Rosie explained in her blog, I do not want to be totally off twitter when it takes off. (OK I was). And one of  my friends recommended me to start twittering. And when she says it I know I have to.

 

Justin makes a interesting point in saying that “If people were to like a political candidate more for her sharing the random tidbits of information that make up her day and ultimately shine a light on who she is as a living, breathing, human being, then perhaps our own relationships can likewise be enhanced by taking a few seconds to drop (literally) a line about a funny argument we witnessed, an amazing cupcake we tasted or a beautiful flower that caught our eye.”       

 

I guess, we (voters) are looking for someone we like to drink a beer with (as they said about Bush) or maybe have breakfast with. I will sign up for Obama’s and Hillary’s twit and see what it will get me. But I do expect a bit more than just favorite dishes, colors, and cupcakes.

 

I also expect to get news on this microblogging site. Twitter has shortened the news cycle again. I can get the news from witnesses or other sources, if I want. Witnesses can share updates on major events. And Twittering can be used to organize protests or other events like teamtibet twittered to organize protests.

Internationally savvy Americans?

Rosie tells a story here about one of her European friend who thought “Americans myopic and that people in European and Middle Eastern countries tend to have much more informed world views.” Well, that is actually one of the European prejudices against the Americans. You can always find good examples of this. I remember a former classmate (at another American university) asking me to write my name in my own language (Danish) so she could see the characters. She realized Danish was not like Arabic or Chinese but more similar to English. She had never heard about the European Union or other basic things about Europe.

 

Rosie also points to the fact that it had not occurred to her that war and propaganda had a long history, way longer than the history of the United States. In a recent blog about war and propaganda I talked about Thucydides and the Bayex Tapestry that are part of my European background. 

 

Isn’t this exactly what America is about? The first settlers left Europe because they wanted to dissolve the ties and build another society. Part of the foreign policy debate in United States is aimed at the schism isolationism versus anti-isolationism. And I guess for a long time, it has not been necessary for the average American citizen to bother about the rest of the world as long as the United States was a leader in the world on foreign policy, technology, and trade.

 

Is it changing now because of the wars on Iraq and Afghanistan? And because United States position is challenged (see Graff’s First Campaign). In my journalism class at American University in 2001, my professor talked about how few correspondents American media outlets have overseas. Garrett Graff also talked about this (class 4), and nothing has really changed. Rosie sent me to Gregg’s interesting blog entry about the war and social media. I am not sure that social media will get Americans more interested in foreign relations and welfare. Social media is a tool for those who are already interested and want to be part of the conversation. But as Gregg notes that is data and not information, someone has to put the facts into context.

 

The Frozen Pea Fund

 Three stories about social media and networking have captured my attention the last month. First, it was Kiva, second, the Frozen Pea Fund, and third, St. Baldrick’s. Kiva is social networking site where everyone can lend entrepreneurs money. The Frozen Pea Fund raises money for research in breast cancer the American Cancer Society. St. Baldrick’s is also a social network raising funds and awareness to conquer kid’s cancer. They are all working for the good cause in trying to help better life for someone in need. The tools are there, and I wonder what the effects of campaigning in these environments are. For my Social Media Report I took a dive into social media and breast cancer to see how the tools are used. I´ve got the impression that the main American (breast) cancer organizations do not promote their causes more by using these tools.

 But The Frozen Pea Fund is an example of a fundraising effort using the social media tools. It is a grass root organization started by Connie Reeze when her friend Susan Reynolds was diagnosed with breast cancer in December 2007. (The American Cancer Society supports the initiative.) The fund uses a social media site, the blog Boobs on Ice, Twitter, and a wiki. It has got a lot of attention (like here and here), and when I heard an interview with the founder on the Hobson and Holz Report, I was actually a bit surprised that they had not raised more money. Maybe my expectations are too high. Furthermore, the fund does not get good ratings in either Quantcast or Technorati. Since I have done my report I can see that a lot of things are going on. The website and the wiki are undergoing some changes. I can also see that Susan Reynolds has some problems by being recognized by Technorati. I cross my fingers that the Frozen Pea Fund will continue its work because it is a good cause, and I am sure other women diagnosed with breast cancer will learn a lot from reading Boobs on Ice. I did – also as the daughter of a breast cancer survivor.  PS. The Frozen Pea Fund has directed my attention to a video project by the American Cancer Society that I did not find in my research for my paper, and I might have to adjust my first impression of the American Cancer Society.