What Company Will Be the eHarmony of Microblogging?

A New York Times article by David Carr rehashing common knowledge on "why Twitter will endure" got me thinking about the ways in which it will not endure, or the ways in which it may endure via which no one will really care about it.

So, what does it mean to "endure"? To stay in business? So what - Lord and Taylor is still in business, but there are so many better stores if you ask me. L&T is in big trouble in my opinion as it is getting killed on the low end by Target and other retailers, in the middle by Macy's, and on the high end by stores like Neiman Marcus and Nordstrom.

RC Cola has endured. The company has a website and everything. It's owned by an entity called the Cott Corporation, now - I can hardly contain my excitement over that. We always think of Coke and Pepsi when we think of soft drinks, and maybe now we even think of carbonated things like Perrier or some sports drinks. But, still, RC Cola endures.

Classmates.com is still enduring - but when was the last time anyone cared? I'm still somewhat of fan of MySpace for connecting people, though certainly Facebook is better in its functional capacity. And LinkedIn has the business niche going on still. But no, Classmates.com endures. I'm proud of those guys. They're connecting people, one high school classmate I don't care about at a time.

So what does it mean to say that Twitter will endure?

"Endure" has a number of definitions: to undergo without giving in, to regard with tolerance, to continue in the same state, and to remain firm under misfortune without yielding. None of those sound very positive to me. I'm trying to imagine Bill Gates in an early Microsoft meeting with some guys around a table, giving a pitch about the future of the brand: "Thanks for coming, the title of this presentation is: MICROSOFT WILL ENDURE" - inspiring!

I'm not really interested in the question of whether "Twitter will endure" or not. They have $100 million from investors - unless they're burning wads of cash building a replacement for the space shuttle, they will endure for quite a while. So, we have an answer to a question that was borderline stupid to ask in the first place, certainly in a post-Ashton Kutcher post-Oprah twitterverse.

The real question is, what will the future of the microsharing ecosystem look like? The ecosystems of department stores, soft drinks, and social networks have changed drastically over differing time periods. Some businesses still endure in various forms, but there's only room at the top for one big one, one second place, and maybe a few niche players. Will Twitter be #1 or #2? Maybe, maybe not. No one knows.

It's interesting to think about microsharing in the framework of dating websites. Some dating websites try to be a catch-all, like Match.com does; it's a good site that has barely evolved since it started, and they try to appeal to everyone while simultaneously doing nothing special for hardly anyone. Marriage? Match.com Hookups? Match.com Newly divorced? Match.com Old? Young? Match.com

Match.com has about 15 million users last I checked. They will endure. But eHarmony (how can you escape the commericals?) has about 20 million. Why? They're hitting a more marriage-minded, wholesome-dating niche. (Chemistry.com is also in that niche, at about 5 million members.)

On the raunchier side of the equation, AdultFriendFinder.com has about 32 million users, roughly the size of Match and eHarmony combined. Wow.

In principle they will all endure. But who's making money, and who are people talking about the most, and which brands do people trust? I'm not sure I can answer that question for dating websites, but those are certainly the right questions.

So how does Twitter play into this? Well, Twitter is like the Match.com of microsharing - everything to everyone and nothing to no one. But who will be the eHarmony and AdultFriendFinder of microsharing?

It strikes me that while many articles have been written about Microsoft, Google, IBM, and others thinking and plotting about buying Twitter, that that's the wrong ultimate move. The real strong move is to create your own in a big niche that Twitter's ignoring. Take Microsoft for the sake of argument. They use the open source identi.ca (or similar) as a base for creating "microsharing for serious business people" and market it that way, as a free online service. I can see the commericals: "Twitter is for kids. MicroShare is for your business." That's the kind of thing my parents would react to.

On the flip side, why doesn't some edgy youth company like Abercrombie & Fitch or Guess or Forever 21 start a "skanky" version of Twitter for teens to meet other teens and hook up for burgers, drinks, and more? Make it no holds barred, fun, engaging. Maybe you can even pretend to be a vampire or something, and "bite" people you have a crush on. I don't know, whatever's cool these days. And it should be all neon colors or something rad.

Predictions? My guess (1) is that people would rather participate in large niche sites. And my guess (2) is that advertisers would rather advertise there because they know the audience a little better. And my guess (3) is that these niche microsharing sites would provide more relevant information when linked up with Google and Bing search results, and would provide more relevant trending topics and other features to users.

Twitter will probably endure. The question is, will you care?

What Would Always-On-The-Record Government Look Like?

Recently, I wrote a post about Government 2.0 predictions for 2010-12, and one of them was that government would "always be on-the-record."

By that I meant that the combination of (1) the proliferation of tech-savvy citizens with mobile camera/video devices, (2) the prevalence of wi-fi or other Web connections, (3) the massive number of people using social networks like MySpace, Facebook, and Twitter, and (4) the great interest that people have right now in a number of controversial issues like our current wars, health care, and climate change that people could and probably would start documenting everything that government officials do and say, where they go, who they meet with, for how long, what their staffers eat for lunch and with whom, and so on.

And you don't need to be a professional journalist to do this, or even to do it well. An entire site along the lines of Gawker.com could be started around this, in fact. GovernmentGawker.com, anyone?

Well, I was doing some research to look at planes versus trains to get home for the holidays (in light of the recent blizzard that's affected transport in the DC-NY-Boston corridor), and I came across a fantastic video that essentially puts the Amtrak Acela First Class service on the record for the trip between New York and Boston (7 min edited clip). Check it out.

Now, imagine if someone did the same thing, but wanted to document a day in the life of Senator Ben Nelson, currently in the middle of heated debate about health care legislation. It's not hard. You check the general schedules of his committees and such beforehand, research powerful, under-the-radar staff and other relevant people on the Washington Post's WhoRunsGov.com, go through simple security at the Capitol (far easier than an airport), find Nelson's office in the Hart building, camp out in his waiting area, maybe ask the person at the front desk some questions, find some press in the hallways and ask some questions (maybe visit the Russell rotunda, where the television crews do their spots), stalk the cafeteria (there's a great coffee shop called Cups in the basement) and listen for people saying "Nelson," go back to his office and see him leaving to walk down the hall to a committee hearing, take photos of the staff with him on your Samsung ST-1000 with wi-fi and geo-tagging and upload the pics to Bing Maps and Facebook, go to the sub-committee hearing and tape it from a Flip in your coat pocket while you tweet live notes, upload your Flip video to YouTube while you follow Nelson to his next meeting, and so forth.

(Note: This post has nothing to do with Sen. Nelson or health care, it's just an example "ripped from the headlines" - I've even met and chatted with him when he spoke about energy at the Defense Department, he's a nice person.)

You can surely imagine at this point many variations on this for political appointees you don't like, lobbyists you're interested in, principal deputy assistant secretaries that make important decisions but don't necessarily travel in armored vehicles with bodyguards, various members of the press who might be meeting with sources at Capitol Hill bars, etc. Trust me, this isn't hard. If you live in Washington, DC, you probably realize how very easy this is, in fact, when combined with some good traditional news sources like the Post, Times, The Hill, and Politico. (If you live in Washington, DC, you also know that it's incredibly common to know where various officials live, eat, and so forth - I used to live about two blocks from Senator Obama's pad.)

But why would someone want to create an "ambient stream" of Senator Nelson or anybody else's life? (Besides it being fascinating in a lowbrow Gossip Girl kind of way, of course.) Well, most people wouldn't. But so what? It's just like Wikipedia - only about 1% of people who use Wikipedia actively edit it; about 9% do sometimes, and 90% just read it. Twitter is not unlike that either - only about 10% of users contribute 90% of the tweets.

So what if 1% of U.S. citizens started doing this? Roughly there are 300 million people in the U.S., say half of them are adults, so we have 1% of 150 million as 1.5 million. Now, if everyone just did this at the state, local, or federal level one day a year, and generated one "amateur journalism piece" from that day, that's about 4,100 videos/blog posts/tweet sets generated PER DAY. That's a lot of government on-the-record.

Government 2.0: Five Predictions for 2010-12

Under no pressure from anyone, I’ve forced this obligatory “end of year predictions” post upon myself. People always ask me where I think Government 2.0 is going anyway, I may as well get some writing mileage out of it, right? So, here are some non-exhaustive, somewhat creative, and entirely debatable trends and ideas that I foresee taking shape in the next three years or so. Why the next three years? Well, it's hard to predict what will happen within a year - there are too many strange short-term factors, like natural disasters and Congressional behavior (but I repeat myself). Plus, the next three years is the remainder of Obama's current term in office, so these are things we can expect to see either before his second term, or before the new President's first term. So, that said, here are my five predictions for 2010-12:

Local governments as experiments - Increasingly some of the most innovative ideas are being independently developed in small communities. For example, the tiny city of Manor, TX has launched Manor Labs to improve services. Citizens sign up and suggest ideas for local services like law enforcement, and their ideas are ranked by the community. Good suggestions are rewarded with “Innobucks” that can be redeemed for prizes. Innovative thinking plus government-citizen interactions plus individual incentives can result in big wins for everyone involved. How can the Federal government best keep track of local innovation, and how can everyone best keep track of Government 2.0 news in general? Where's the TechCrunch of Gov 2.0?

The rise of Citizen 2.0 - Just as governments are adopting new media communications, cloud computing mentalities, and social networking skills, so are the citizens they represent. The implication is that if citizens want a website that mashes up environmental and tourist data, or desire open chat and dating platforms for soldiers stationed overseas, or find out what their Member of Congress does every minute of the day, they might just find a way to do it themselves. Early examples like ChicagoCrime.org showed that it was possible, but with people flocking to smart phones, niche social networks, and unconferences, how long will it be before the citizens are beating the government at its own game? (I think that a lot of what we call Government 2.0 is in actuality Citizen 2.0...)

Mobile devices as primary devices - Most discussion I hear about everything from social media to cybersecurity concentrates on desktop computers plugged into a wall. Sure, those are important, and the average government-issued BlackBerry is a little out of date. But soon those mobile devices will be replaced and upgraded, and employees will increasingly demand advanced capabilities like access to social networks like LinkedIn and Facebook, embedded cameras, and customized applications (“apps”) for news and other functions. What are the implications for government when an iPhone becomes more powerful than a Dell desktop running all the Microsoft that money can buy?

Ubiquitous crude video content - High production value for Internet-only video is overrated. Sometimes, if a video targets a highly specific niche audience, great content is good enough. A small company named Demand Media, valued at $1 billion, creates thousands of videos a day and posts them on YouTube and other places - more than many other “media companies” combined. Their business model involves a specific algorithm that predicts highly specific questions people are likely to ask - “What’s the best color to repaint a red Camaro?” - and then assigns freelancers to film crude videos as appropriate. People have a lot of questions about their government - could they in part be answered using Demand Media's somewhat controversial techniques? I've written about this in a post about "proactive social media."

Always on-the-record - When you combine the ideas above (local innovation + citizen 2.0 + mobile as primary + crude content) a fifth prediction emerges. I think that more and more, politicians and government officials will always be on-the-record. By this I mean that the multiplication of inquisitive citizens with mobile devices, wi-fi, and social networking know-how implies that everything from local government hearings to Senators' travel habits can easily be documented, published, and shared. Imagine if you had a group of 20 "health care legislation enthusiasts" - what if each of them took one business day a month to follow (stalk?) members of (say) the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee around? In this episode of The Right Idea, I discuss this notion of always-on-the-record with some political experts. Think "George Allen's macaca meets Code Pink."

In the way of an open-ended conclusion, let me quote Clay Johnson, Director of Sunlight Labs in Washington, DC: "What if there was as much data about John Barrow (D-GA) as there was about Manny Ramirez (LF-Dodgers). There are 750 players in Major League Baseball, and only 535 Members of Congress. Most of the data [about government] exists and what doesn't we need to demand. The answer to healthy democracy lies not in rhetoric, but in our data." (from Seth Godin's new e-book, What Matters Now, p. 35)

Government data doesn't get me hot and bothered, but Clay's writing made me ask: Why exactly do we collect, analyze, and share more data on baseball than on our own government? To some degree, it's a combination of interest and ease. Bonus prediction, an easy one: It will be much easier to collect, analyze, and share government information in 2010-12 than it was in 2009. And we only need about one percent of citizens to be interested for something big to happen.

Watching the Retweeted Get Retweeted-er: Power User Secret Retweetist Love

When Twitter decided to slowly roll out a new, official retweeting feature, people waited in anticipation. When they let their users know what it might look like, people debated whether that was the right way to deploy it. When it actually became available, people almost universally disliked it.

But my post is about why I love the new Twitter retweet feature, without ever having to think about it. The reason is that official retweeting represents the new-new arms race for authority among power users. The new-new arms race, you say? Yes, because the new arms race was to get on as many lists as possible, with the most-followed lists having a special significance.

The new-new arms race is the race to get officially retweeted the most. The idea is that in a sea of boring or useless or narrow-topic tweets, people who have "authority" will get retweeted the most. And finally, Twitter has built its own system for keeping track of that - officially. Think of that silly "RT" thing that users generated as a wristwatch at a track meet; Twitter operates the official Rolex timeclock.

Getting officially retweeted has two huge benefits for users that disproportionately benefit the already popular. One, the already popular gain even more authority that will enable their profiles or tweets to be featured, for example, higher in Google and Bing search results. Two, their profile link, photo, and original tweet appear in other people's tweet streams, even if those people don't follow the already very popular person.

Both of these have the potential to drive a tremendous amount of traffic to a person's Twitter account, and the people with the most official retweets will become recommended-users-list version 2.0, I believe (see the ninth paragraph of this story). With all the hub-bub about advertising within one's Twitter stream, driving traffiic is becoming more important to more users than ever before. Who isn't tempted to sign up to push one ad a day and make $30,000 per month in bonus cash?

But not everyone will make $30,000 or $3,000 or even $300 a month. The official retweet system tends to disproportionately favor the already-massively popular. Their authority, already very high, will only become higher relative to that of the average user. To modify the common saying, the common person will watch the retweeted will get retweeted-er.

Not sure if you are part of the retweeted-er class? It's easy to find out. Go to your account on Twitter.com, click the "Retweets" tab, then click on the "Your tweets, retweeted" tab. Is almost every single one of your original tweets in there? Didn't even realize that was happening? Welcome to the club.

Of course, it's not really the fault of the massively popular Twitter users (I don't think Twitter consulted many of them before creating this feature), so don't blame them for trading in on their fame. The petit-bourgeois wealth of authority no doubt creates opportunities for the working-class Twitter users, under the theory of trickle-down tweetonomics. The real question is, will Twitter's proletariat class stand by and watch this happen, or form an uprising?

Addendum: Shortly after I wrote this I came across a Valleywag post with a similar theme.

What Does Innovative Social Engagement Look Like For Businesses and Governments?

I've been thinking about the topic of Government 2.0 a lot lately. Part of this topic deals with the multi-directional engagement between government and citizens. This is what the White House and others have termed a more transparent, collaborative, and participatory government.

Unfortunately, the engagement for the most part is not very authentic nor meaningful. Boring "fan pages" on Facebook are one example I've written about, but there are many others. Often, engagement, when it does happen has so many rules associated with it, or such a high barrier to entry, or such a limited window as to be practically meaningless.

It seems to me that everyone can celebrate the fact that government entities merely have a YouTube channel here, a Twitter account there, or a Blogger profile some other place (the so-called "TGIF revolution"), or we can think a little harder about what the goals of citizen engagement really might be, and how to go about achieving them. But first, a personal example of responsiveness and engagement from the private sector.

On the evening of Nov 2nd, I tweeted from my phone about a local DC restaurant, Co Co Sala, just as I was leaving. We had a nice experience, but the hostess had been a little, shall we say, disinterested in helping us? So I commented as much.

Less than a week later, the co-owner of Co Co Sala sent me an email and cc'd his general manager. He apologized for the treatment I experienced, assured me it was not policy, introduced me to the manager, and said he'd talk to his staff. It was a four-paragraph email. I've never met him before, and furthermore, my personal email is discoverable but not the most easy thing to find.

This is what real social innovation looks like. This is what customer service looks like. This is what true engagement with stakeholders looks like. I want to give this great lounge Co Co Sala a hearty shout-out for not only having a great product, but also really caring about their customers.

Now, imagine we weren't talking about a restaurant here. Imagine we are talking about the Department of Motor Vehicles, or the Patent and Trademark Office, or your Congressman. If you tweeted, would they see it? Would they care? Would they react in any way? I think the answer in many cases is no. And when was the last time you gave the DMV a shout-out for a job well done?

Let's look at a sliver of data. According to TweetStats.com, the people behind the White House Twitter account reply to individuals less than 2% of the time, and seem to have never @ replied to any single more than once (i.e., they have never come close to a conversation). They re-tweet others' tweets about 6.5% of the time, but they only seem to re-tweet other government accounts and the New York Times. Granted, there are more people tweeting about White House issues than Co Co Sala, but does the above data represent any caring in any way, shape or form?

The terrific techPresident blog recently noted that actor Vin Diesel is the single most followed living person on Facebook - and that he recently passed up President Obama. Perhaps that's because Vin Diesel's Facebook fan page is awesome. He is engaged, his fans are engaged, and the tone is informal and fun. There are also many other high-profile people who have taken the plunge into innovative social engagement; my favorite at the moment is Alyssa Milano.

So when exactly did "serious and formal" become a substitute for "informative and meaningful" in government circles? And why is everyone scared of letting their guard down in public? People and entities that innovate and use new social networking tools to engage with stakeholders will be winners. The ones that don't will be losers in the long run. It's that simple.

If a goal of Government 2.0 is to provide citizens better services, and a strategy towards reaching that goal is to use social media tools to communicate better with citizens on multiple channels, it seems to me that listening and responding better to comments and complaints would be a great tactic.

The reason why people still cite the TSA's blog as a good example of citizen engagement is because few other outstanding examples of federal government social media engagement seem to have emerged in 2009. What does 2010 have in store?

It is somewhat outside the scope of this post, but my guess is that more and more local government responsiveness and engagement is happening. We heard some of those stories at the Gov 2.0 Expo Showcase in September. What are some new ones that the feds should hear about?

Quarantined Conferences: Claustrophobic Technophiles or Attentive Audiences?

Loren Feldman. 1938 Media. Audience Conference.

That’s about as much of a summary as you’ll find about the Audience Conference held in New York last Friday. That’s because there were no open laptops allowed during the performances. There was also no Wi-Fi, no video streaming, no tweeting, and no blogging. Something akin to omertà joined the members of the Audience Conference together.

This bond of silence was at the core of the Audience Conference, and it goes against everything that technology and Web 2.0 events normally stand for: openness, transparency, and participation. You would be hard-pressed to find any information anywhere on the web about any of the Audience Conference content. Tweets during the event were generic (“just arrived at the Audience Conference”) and posts after the event were vague (“loved the conference, got to meet Calacanis”). Nobody knows what happened unless you were a genuine member of the audience.

Many other features of the event were also unfamiliar. There were no sponsor booths, banners, and signs all over the place, the speakers had no slideshows, internet connections, or videos to keep us interested, and there were no press or even questions from the audience allowed. No problem.

That’s because the content and experience was so damn good. It was technology. It was performance. It was even culinary. Loren Feldman, our MC for the day, treated the event not as a conference so much as a 20-act play that he directed from start to finish. Inside the historic Hudson Theatre in New York, the members of the audience acted like precisely that - an audience. We watched, listened, and learned. We didn’t talk, text, or tweet. We sat in comfortable chairs facing the stage, not at round tables facing at all different angles to it. We retained the information we heard instead of regurgitating it for our own audiences. We learned that the essence of having an audience is performing for them on a stage - perhaps a digital one - and telling great stories.

What was the Audience Conference? From the website: "Audience is a conference aimed at those who recognize the need to reach engage and influence audiences of all kinds, an investigation into how this is changing, and a look at how technology has in the past and is now, through new media tools and the social web, changing audience participation and interaction." I would love to tell you about what I learned from Jason Calacanis and Rachel Marsden and Rae Hoffman and Andrew Keen and Jeremy Schoemaker and Joe Jaffe and Melanie Notkin and others. But I won’t. Half the philosophy of the Audience Conference was that events are ephemeral experiences that people attending can share with each other - and people not there cannot experience.

In my opinion, casually live-tweeting conferences is overrated because to a large degree it doesn’t serve an external audience very well. When 30 people are tweeting 10 times during each of 10 talks at a conference, and then people re-tweet the tweets (on a delay, naturally), the hashtag stream is a jumbled mess of disjointed quotations that don’t tell a coherent story. I’ve written about why I think tools like Posterous might be better for summarizing thoughts from events; they serve the audience better.

That said, I disagree with the notion that everything needs to be live streamed, live blogged, and live tweeted merely because we can. I recently attended a conference that was about the size of the Audience Conference, and I had a fine experience there so there’s no need to call them out. But strange to me in hindsight was that the audience’s tables were arranged at 90 degrees to the stage, and furthermore that nearly everybody at the tables was staring into a laptop nearly the entire event. Who is that a great experience for?

Now, I am not going to start calling for a ban on Twitter at conferences. I do it sometimes when I think it provides unique value and perspective. I’ve live-blogged some events myself. Furthermore, banning these technologies at an event like the upcoming Gov 2.0 Expo would probably result in an all-out revolt. But what Audience Conference taught me was a new perspective on the actual value that all of the technology adds; if you’re planning an event and you’re more worried about power strips and Wi-Fi than content and experience, you’ve got a problem in my opinion.

The comments on Nicole Ferraro’s blog about Audience Conference might lead you to believe that being able to film and tweet from a private, closed door event was some God-given right of Those Who Possess An iPhone. Sorry, it’s not. Loren Feldman took video of the entire event from six different angles (including a small cam pointed at, you guessed it, the audience) and he will decide how and what and when you get to see anything. Why not? It’s his show, not yours. Can you stream video from a live production of Wicked?

The other half of the philosophy of the Audience Conference was that it’s okay that people are better than you at something. And it’s perfectly alright to just sit back and watch them perform. And we watched performances, to be sure - not just tech talks but also personal stories, poetry readings, and musical acts. (Yeah, musical acts.) Not everyone is good enough to be the best financial blogger, or best personality, or best musical act - that’s a dream. Maybe you’re great at something, but can’t you sit back and relax the rest of the time?

I liked this too. With all the talk about how everyone is a citizen journalist and everyone is a content producer and everyone needs a digital media strategy it’s easy to forget that most people are horrible at all of this stuff. And that’s not necessarily because people don’t understand whatever shiny object has come along, it’s because many people are not gifted communicators. New media, at its core, is old-fashioned because the instinct to communicate with other individuals predates man. But some are way better than others at it. And that’s okay.

So are quarantined conferences more likely to result in claustrophobic technophiles or attentive audiences? While some in the tech community clearly think that a lack of engagement is a violation of some imaginary social media code and in an age where even live music isn’t sacred it may seem like heresy to sequester people participating in your event away from their new media toolbox. And maybe sometimes it is. But having experienced the Audience Conference myself, I can also say that in some situations people are not entitled to break out the social media toolbox, because they will genuinely gain a more valuable experience without it. In my opinion, if one event wants to encourage new media use and another discourages it, who are we to argue? We’re only the audience.

What do you think? Were people at the Audience Conference correct to obey Loren Feldman’s requests? Should they deliberately continue “hiding” the content of the event from people that chose not to attend? Should other Web 2.0 events disallow Web 2.0 usage in real time??

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The Emerging Twitter List Arms Race

I use Twitter a lot, but I was not among the very first to see the new Lists feature. I can now, though. And what I find much more interesting than actually using the feature myself is the fact that I woke up this morning to find that I was on dozens of other people's lists. (In fact, while I was writing this, I turned up on four more!)

Even though the irony is that Twitter introduced lists about a year after I stopped wanting such a feature, I do think there is some value in having other people put me on their lists. Braggadocio. Oh yes, braggadocio. I'm talking about the incredible hubris that comes from knowing I'm on Ezra Butler's list of people he'd take a rubber bullet for, the chutzpah of telling everyone that luminary Tim O'Reilly's list of Government 2.0 people includes me among its few members, and the extra swagger in my step that comes from the radiant energy of being on professor Jay Rosen's list of the best mindcasters he knows. I always knew I was awesome, but now I can prove it.

I'm joking a bit, of course. But when getting retweeted has been boiled down to a science ("Adding 'please' increases retweets by 12.3%!"), every maven is in search of a social media metric that shows who has "authority." Being on someone's Twitter list is a difficult thing to game because it's about organic usefulness to a community. I recently read Gary Vaynerchuk's inspiring book Crush It, and to me, Twitter lists have the potential to be a metric that measures how generous you are to the communities you're a member of.

So forget about counting your number of followers, or how many retweets you get, or the many "Follow Friday" mentions you land - Those metrics have been blown out for a long time now. The new high fidelity for my vanity is the Twitter list.

Why Posterous Is a Smart Tool For Informal Government Blogging

For a few weeks, I've been testing a tool called Posterous, and I've come to like it a lot. You can see my account here. If you're not familiar with Posterous, it is essentially a very simple blogging platform. It may in fact be the most simple one; yet it is very feature-laden. And it has one relatively unique feature that could make it the most powerful tool for informal blogging by government employees.

That simple, amazing, singular feature is email as a primary interface. In other words, you can post blogs simply by emailing post@posterous.com or a similar address - you don't even need an "account" or a "login" or a "password." Even in the private sector, this is considered a cool feature. But for government employees, it could be a breath of life in an otherwise locked-down state of cybersecurity affairs.

You see, many government computer systems block domains like YouTube.com, Facebook.com, Twitter.com, and so forth. There's a current debate about the degree to which government employees can access such sites because of cybersecurity and other reasonable concerns - after all, there have been some very recent instances of bad things being passed through these social media tools and onto your computer. But when you can interact with a blogging platform through email - and in principle even through your official government email account accessed through a traditional program like Microsoft Outlook - you can get the functionality without the risk, and without needing permission from the IT shop.

As information is more decentralized and as more computing is done on mobile devices, quickly communicating information will be more commonplace - and more in demand by consumers of it. So to citizens, government content will still be king, but the speed at which it travels to them may be queen. And being able to blog on-the-go can increase that speed. Recently I've experimented with blogging while walking eight blocks to a date, blogging incredibly fast in reaction to breaking news, and blogging during a conference and posting my "journalism-style" article precisely at the end of a talk. There are innumerable other tactical applications of this tool.

Posterous has a lot of great features that I like. Perhaps most important among them is that links to the content you post can be instantly pushed to other social services like Twitter and Facebook - even if they're blocked in your office. Another great feature is that if you attach photos, videos, or documents to your email, Posterous automatically embeds them in your blog - and will also push them to services like Flickr, YouTube, and Scribd (which may also be blocked in your government office). Still another great feature is that multiple people from multiple email addresses can contribute to one Posterous page (say, for an office), and conversely one email can be associated with multiple Posterous pages (say, a formal public affairs page, and an informal tech thoughts page). In brief, you can be very powerful from your BlackBerry.

Posterous has been described by a Mashable writer as "unremarkable," but frankly, that's what a lot of government employees are interested in. The government has a lot of outstanding content, and their primary mission in many cases is to get it out; customizing the blog theme is definitely secondary. A standardized, simple blog platform controlled through email sounds like just what the doctor ordered, and it offers numerous advantages over something more complicated like WordPress; for example, it's easier to teach people how to use! Oh, and did I mention it's free?

Posterous would probably love it if people in the government wanted to jump on this bandwagon in a more official manner, too. If I understand the numbers correctly, Posterous currently only has about one million unique visitors a month - total. The U.S. Government has more employees than that. I'm not picking on Posterous - it's only been available since June 2008 and has some tough competition in the blog platform world - but my guess is that they'd be very willing to work with the General Services Administration and other appropriate people (as have companies like YouTube) to make Posterous work with official government interests and missions. And the same goes for local and state government employees too, who often deal with IT situations similar to those of their Fed counterparts.

Many agencies are working on social media policies and guidelines for employees, and education and training are no doubt part of successful use of tools like blogs by government employees. But assuming that people are trained and empowered to create online content, can you imagine if even 5% of Postal Service or FEMA or Army employees had a Posterous blog, and citizens and journalists could mine that information about what was happening in the country, or the world? It would be amazing.

So, for the 99% of government employees that can blog in their private lives and informally talk about their careers and more generally about their lives, I recommend getting a personal Posterous account. And because many of the things I said about the government also apply to large corporations, I think there's a huge opportunity there, too. Everyone's workplace has different rules about what you can and cannot use your computer and mobile devices for, and you shouldn't break them. But if you can interface with Posterous via email and help to achieve workplace goals by mobile live-blogging of conferences you attend, or posting photos of critical emergency situations, or provoking discussion over the issue-of-the-day, I say: Go for it.

(If you work in government or closely with it and use Posterous, I'd especially like to listen to your feedback as I help prepare content for the upcoming Gov 2.0 Expo in May 2010.)

Social Networking is the Means to Achieve Workplace Collaboration

Yesterday I live-blogged a bit from the terrific Government 2.0 event produced by FedScoop.com at the Newseum in Washington, DC. I wrote a post about how collaboration was not the means, but rather an end made possible by the means of social networking tools. You can read my original writing and some initial comments here. Below, I expand a bit on these ideas.

My post was initially inspired by one speaker's (WFED's Chris Dorobek) notion, shared by some others (Justin Houk commented that, "Taxpayers don't want to think about those in government sitting around on Twitter all day even thought that might be an effective way to collaborate."), that social networking tools come across as too social or "fun" and that being social is not what people are truly doing (in the government) when they use them - they're collaborating. Thus, when marketing Government 2.0 to wider audiences, he feels that a term like "collaboration tools" is more appropriate.

In my opinion, while this might sound better to a more traditionalist, untrained ear, I think it is factually wrong to say that things like Facebook or Intellipedia are collaboration tools. True, collaboration often happens with these tools. And perhaps one could argue that collaboration is mainly what people hope to accomplish with them in the workplace. Fair enough. But I think that collaboration is the end result of leveraging social networks, which is in actuality what the social networking tools are for.

In other words, social networks are a means by which to accomplish something. This something might very well be collaboration. It might also be putting together an office softball team, or a study group of employees all learning Arabic. Is arranging players on a softball team "collaboration"? I don't think so. Is it an important part of a coherent, productive workplace? Perhaps. There are many important things that happen in workplaces based around social networks that are not strictly collaboration on work projects.

One big thing I've been thinking about lately is "leveraging social networks to accomplish important stuff" and no one can deny that personal relationships can influence collaboration. How well you know someone, how much you identify with them, how much you trust them, their level of reliability or transparency - all of these are values derived from social networking that then, when leveraged, can influence collaboration. Collaboration is not an end in itself, of course - it is a means to accomplish some end (finishing a draft report, etc.). So, social networking is a means to collaboration, which is a means to achieving some work or personal goal.

I also reject the notion that there is something wrong with having some fun at work. The idea that having fun with social software shouldn't be allowed in serious workplaces is ridiculous. And of course, anyone who's ever passed around a joke-of-the-week email, celebrated a colleague's birthday with a cake in the break room, or ended work at 4pm for an informal happy hour with the office (i.e., effectively every government and corporate employee) would surely agree with me on this. Work can be fun and be productive, too. The director of the Office of Personnel Management recently visited Google for a reason.

So, briefly, I think social networking tools are not necessarily collaboration tools. They are social software that allows social networks to be leveraged to accomplish things you find important. That might be collaboration on a National Intelligence Estimate (protecting America, earning your paycheck), or arranging a carpool with people in your agency (getting to work on time, being more green), or finding a racquetball partner (staying healthy, living well, bonding) - all of which postitively influence the workplace, in government and in the private sector as well.

As Fred Wellman commented on my original post, "I can't help but wonder if Chris [Dorobek] is seeking a more politically correct or business sounding name of the same tools with the goal of breaking down barriers to implementation and usage as opposed to a lack of understanding of the power of social networking applications in the business of government." I think there's a lot of truth to that. But I also think that, as an academic, this is actually not what we are doing.

This may sound a bit esoteric, but from an academic standpoint I think pointing out that using social networks - online and off - is at the very core of what we are doing is an important thing to point out. When we are "collaborating," we are leveraging social networks to accomplish important stuff.

Government Ambassadors For Citizen Engagement

To the average person, government is represented by an anonymous person on the other end of the phone, a pile of mandatory paperwork, and perhaps at best a friendly neighborhood postal carrier. If you ask the average American not living inside the Beltway to name a single individual who works in the federal government, how would they reply? My guess is that the broad majority of them couldn’t give you the first and last name of a federal government employee; In reality they would find it much easier to name their local pharmacist, garage owner, or supermarket manager. And from the perspective of the government, this is a shame. How might emerging social technologies help to bridge that gap, in combination with a modification in thinking about government public relations?

The ideal end state when a citizen is asked to name a government employee would be that a person working in a micro-niche of interest to them - finance, farming, foot-and-mouth disease - immediately comes to mind. Unfortunately though, interesting and talented people working at Treasury, USDA, NIH and other places are not well-known to the public, despite the great effects their work has on everyday life in America. Why is this? Partly, it is a vestige from the days when communications were controlled by professionally trained public relations staff and mainstream journalism teams. This was understandable - equipment was expensive, channels were few, and citizens trusted authenticated, official sources for their information. But this media structure that worked well for 40 years is now outdated.

In the Web 2.0 world, every individual is empowered to be not only a consumer of information, but a producer of it. Writing is searchable, discoverable, sharable, usable, and yes, even alterable. The proverbial “pajama mafia” of bloggers has morphed into a powerful society class of listeners, questioners, writers, editors, publishers, and distributors. And in some outlying examples from the federal government, such as the TSA’s blog, we see this same power being harnessed by individual employees (with their agency’s approval, naturally) - Individuals from the TSA not only blog, but interact with citizens who comment on the articles. But this form of government-citizen interaction is, honestly, a primitive version of how social technologies can empower citizen engagement with government.

The modern citizen is not a vessel waiting to receive press releases and government website updates. Even a sophisticated government website like the White House’s new blog can only expect to attract a subset of citizens a subset of the time. Why? Simply, there are simply too many avenues of information flowing towards these people formerly known as a captive audience. No matter how compelling your government information, they are not waiting to hear from you about it. Nor are they necessarily waiting to hear from the New York Times, MSNBC, or any other mainstream organization.

(continue reading)

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