Building off of previous lessons we have learned in this class, the report showed that successful online tools engage users and make them feel part of the action.  For example, the OFA campaign used tools that encouraged two-way communication and invited people in to be part of the campaign. David Plouffe, Obama’s campaign manager explained his tactics by saying, “We talked to people like they were adults” (6). The campaign’s videos specifically talked to people, not at them, which follows exactly what Li and Bernoff recommended in “Groundswell”; your marketing should not shout at your customers but engage them in conversation. The report sums this point up nicely when it suggests “Don’t just tell your supporters they are important, treat them like they are” (33).

The OFA report also emphasized the importance of “being authentic” and showing subscribers what is going on behind the scenes.  In many of our readings we have seen that the new user will be treated in many sites as part of the team, whether through crowdsourcing, open-source technology, or communicating through blogs and discussion forums.  To compete with these sites you need to treat the user as part of your team.

Other readings of the week emphasized the importance of using a supporter’s past actions as predictors of their future actions.  In this way you can target emails towards the most active responders.  For example, the 2009 eNonprofit Benchmark Study also by M+R, reported that previous donors are three times more likely to respond to a new email solicitation then those who did not donate previously. The Study also remarkably reported that for most of the organizations they studied, the top 7% of active subscribers were responsible for one-third of subscriber advocacy activity.  This means organizations should make sure that that 7% stays happy, while trying to encourage new activity from the currently less active.

Finally, the readings for me had important lessons in which I wish I could go back to past organizations I worked for and recommend we change how we did some things.  The analysis of Obama’s campaign showed me the importance of parts of your strategy that seem small but can make a big difference.  For example the increased effectiveness of using the phrases “Join the Movement” and “Learn More” for getting people to join the email list vs. using, just “sign up”.  An organization I used to work for used “sign up” and did not do a good job of putting this button prominently on every page of our website, which I now realize even more due to the emphasis on how important your mailing list is, was such a missed opportunity.

Also in a department I worked for we often sent out information emails, without, as advice implied in the eNonprofit Benchmark report suggests, asking subscribers to take additional actions that will further engage them. This was another missed opportunity.

As I finished today’s readings, I mentally told myself that I need to make sure I remember these lessons so I can implement them in the next place I work.  Luckily, I also told myself, I will have the archives of this blog to help lead the way.

First the book defines the groundswell as: “A social trend in which people get things they need from each other, rather than from traditional institutions like corporations”.  I have personally experienced this as I increasingly get my books from places like half.com, and information from personal online blogs. Then the book explains how this does not mean that institutions are doomed, but rather provides an opportunity for institutions to join the groundswell.

The first major thing I appreciated from this book was all the concrete advice it gave.  Start with a social technographics profile that will show you if your users are online and if so if they are creating online contact, critiquing online content or just reading it? Then you should match your online strategy to the type of activities your users are doing, keeping in mind that it is often most beneficial to reach the users who are critics and creators of content because they can spread the word about your product to everyone else.

A really crucial point that comes up in Groundswell that builds upon concepts we have already learned is now that consumers have more power in the way they get information and who they get that information from, to effectively market to these new consumers, you need to engage them. This means allowing them to be more active participants in your company through asking for their feedback, giving them more transparent information, and giving them additional benefits they did not get before, like the ability to join an online community you created of people who share their interests. There is also so much information you can gain by listening to what your consumers are saying about you through their blogs, online discussion forums and other mediums.

One of my favorite themes of this book is that shouting advertisements or information at your customers no longer works, conversations work.  Going back to my analysis on public diplomacy, this implies that effective public diplomacy in today’s era needs to change to engage citizens, actively listen to them and actively connect in online conversations with them.  If you set up a blog, you need staff that will answer all the comments that the blog receives, if you set up a facebook page, you need to make sure there are plenty of ways for users to interact with the page, through posting comments, watching videos, downloading widgets. You can no longer just expect citizens to listen to what you have to say, without them wanting to join the conversation.

All in all my biggest take-away from the book so far is that it drives home the point that internet users must be treated with respect, must be encouraged to interact with you and must feel like they are interacting with real people, not just big institutions.  The more this occurs, the better an institution’s chances of surviving the groundswell.

In this article, Raymond praises the open source method of software design and development, which allows users to access a product’s source code and report any problems they find in it and possible solutions to these problems. Raymond described that in at least two instances, when users were able to access the beta versions of open source programming, they were able to quickly find the source and then solution to almost any bug in the software. This occurred partly because users each looked at the problem and looked for solutions in different ways, which increased the chance that at least one of them would find a quick route to finding and/or solving a bug in the software. Raymond’s idea can be summed up in a statement he gives early in the article, “Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow”.

It is very interesting how this idea of increasing collaboration from Internet users has led to so much social good. For example in my last post, you will remember that I commented on the rise of citizen journalism, which is, among other things, helping solve the public problem of a current dearth of investigative reporting. Raymond states in his article. “If you treat your beta-testers as if they’re your most valuable resource, they will respond by becoming your most valuable resource”. More broadly we are seeing that if we treat citizen internet users as if they are valuable resources, there is potential for them to be just that.

In terms of ways I may be able to utilize this information in the future, I tried to think about a group of organizations I have worked for in the past, particularly Jewish and Israel organizations, and think of ways that if I return to working for them, I can help them capitalize on these concepts. I know that there are plenty of Jewish people, or people interested in Jewish issues, who would like to more actively help and contribute to Jewish causes, they just do not know how.  Applying the Cathedral and Bazaar lessons, opens up tons of opportunities for them to contribute.

First there are many organizations that believe there is a strong anti-Israel bias in certain media outlets.  These organizations can post transcripts of news programs in question or articles from newspapers in question and ask their subscribers to identify and report any bias they see.  This will save staff members tons of time while engaging subscribers on a whole new level.  This is similar to a campaign led by the Guardian that we read about in an earlier reading “Four Crowdsourcing Lessons from the Guardian’s (spectacular) expenses – scandal experiment”. Organizations can similarly post speeches in Arabic or Farsi by leaders of Hamas or Iran that are inflammatory, and ask its linguistically skilled volunteer users to translate them so they can better utilize them in their materials.

Jewish organizations can also use a wiki for different problems facing the community.  Organizations can post a problem, such as poverty, or the rise in tuition for Jewish day schools and ask their users to offer solutions.  Users may suggest ideas that staff never would have thought of and then can capitilize on.

Finally, this type of user-interaction could perhaps make one of the greatest contributions when it comes to Jewish learning.  One of the most challenging aspects of Jewish learning is trying to link all the ancient Jewish texts that are discussing similar topics, to each other. An organization could post tons of sources on the web and then ask knowledgeable users to start hyperlinking sources that relate to each other, they could even hyperlink specific words that reference each other.  Organizations could also post tons of ancient texts in Aramaic, Hebrew, and even Arabic, that have not yet been translated into English, and ask users to supply translations, similar to how facebook and google are asking users to help them translate their content.  The results could open whole new areas of Jewish learning to the non-Aramaic, Hebrew or Arabic-speaking, interested readers.

In sum upon further reflection of the concepts in the Cathedral and the Bazaar, I realize that there are lots of issues that are currently “bugging” the Jewish and Israel organizational community; by implementing some of Raymond’s concepts, perhaps on whole new levels we will see that “Given enough eyeballs” perhaps most “bugs are” really “shallow”.

This realization started to come to me as I read the chapter “When Everyone Has A Blog” in Say Everything.  Rosenberg described how many people were scared in the early days of the internet that the internet would bring in an era where machines controlled men.  However most people began to realize eventually that “what we found on the other side of the screen was other people, typing away. The machine was just making it possible for us to connect to them” (305). Up until I read those lines, I had always viewed the internet as a place to get information.  Sure I could connect with others through facebook and gmail, but the main point of the internet was to go to websites like NYTimes.com and Amazon.com and get whatever information I was looking for.  Now I see things differently.  The internet is a forum where people all over the world can communicate with each other in a myriad of ways.  There is communication through blogs, videos, wikis. Tons of people are all coming to the same place called “http://” and trying their best to communicate.

The article readings reinforced this message for me, only they went a step further.  Almost all of the readings gave examples of how citizens all over the world are taking the place of newspaper journalists in helping to uncover news stories.  In the Entrepreneur article, “Get off the bus: the future of pro-am journalism” for example, Amanda Michel reports that over 12,000 people participated in Get Off the Bus’ collaborative journalism assignments. These citizen volunteers were often able to cover the grass-roots side of the story in ways newspaper journalists rarely did. In the Wired Magazine’s article, “Owner Mark Cuban Trades Stocks on Sharesleuth’s Findings Before They’re Published”, Patricia Gray reports how Mark Cuban and Chris Carey (in a questionable way) are embarking on a form of investigative journalism that they feel has been “abandoned” by newspapers.

All of these readings point to the fact that not only are people now more connected than ever because of the internet, but now that they realize their voice can reach millions, they want a much more participatory role in media then they ever had before.  Even the article “1,000 True Fans” by Kevin Kelly emphasizes that the true way to cultivate fans is through “relationship generating”.  We are no longer satisfied with passivity, even when it comes to our entertainment, which for years for many people consisted of passively sitting on the couch waiting to be entertained by TV. Now if you want us to buy all your CDs, you better start building connections with us.

After realizing all this I then tried to think about how this all relates to government public diplomacy (PD), the issue I brought up in my last post. I believe these new trends  have positive and negative ramifications for PD, particularly for a country like the one I worked for that is often stereotyped against by people who know little about it. On the positive side the government can enlist citizens from its own country to tell stories on the web that could counter typical stereotypes, which would give credence to messages the government is trying to spread.  On the negative side, however, people with little knowledge, can now have big soapboxes and they can circulate and recirculate biased information to much greater audiences.  Those that stereotype can also more easily find each other, reinforce each other’s beleifs and form greater acts of cooperation without embracing information that counters their beliefs. This is why countries who feel they are often misrepresented must act immediately to start information campaigns that utilize public engagement, that will pre-empt aggressive actions on the other side.  They must do this before they are hit hard by collaborative, participatory, potentially inflammatory campaigns.

Various themes repeat throughout these eight chapters.  They include: individuals and/or companies inventing a great product only to find out that there is no business plan for their product;  individuals hoping that blogs will increase productive dialogue and foster community-building through the polite exchange of ideas, only for those individuals to realize that blogs have become yet another outlet for hostility and feuding; and individuals or companies creating blog-products as tools designed for the tech-savy, only for those products to soon became tools for the masses. This last theme came across, for example, when Pyra Labs built Blogger as a tool for techies and when early political bloggers intended their posts almost exclusively for political junkies.

The aspects from this reading that I found personally most interesting were those that made me think about using blogs for government Public Diplomacy efforts. Before beginning my Masters studies I worked for a foreign Embassy in Washington, D.C. in the Public Affairs Department.  It was my role to engage and teach the public about the policies of the government through all sorts of medium including lectures and newsletters. During my time at the Embassy my department experimented with using Social Media for our public diplomacy efforts.  We opened a facebook page, set up a youtube account etc…, We made significant progress, though I believe we were just beginning to learn how to use social media effectively for our goals.

“Say Everything” has so far reinforced for me many of the benefits of using blogs and other forms of social media for public diplomacy efforts.  For example, using blogs, like other social media, can be a relatively inexpensive form of public relations.  The story of Evan Williams operating Blogger for tons of users single-handedly from his basement is a clear illustration of this point.  Say Everything also reinforced that blogs, and I would include other social media, can add a personal dimension when an organization is trying to reach out to the public.  For example, when workers at Microsoft began blogging, Robinson relates that it “put human features on a hitherto faceless corporation” (p. 167), he continues,”in a way no high-cost public relations campaign could match” (p.170).  Blogging can serve to put a more human, informal and personal voice to a much larger government.

Robinson was quick also though to list some of the dangers of blogging which could include in the extreme case stalking or dangerous threats by those who disagree with you, and in a less extreme case the danger of hurting those close to you by revealing their personal details, or the way you “truly” feel about them, in your blog. I can see as I am typing how easy it is to get lost in the “diary-like” feeling of a blog and get carried away by the energy created by self-expression, only to have reality smack you in the face when you realize you just publicized your diary in a way that gives almost the whole world the diary’s key.

Batelle explains some fascinating things in language that makes people with little technical background able to comprehend.  For example, he explains that google began as Larry Page’s desire to allow websites to know who has linked to them.  Page conceptualized that just as in academic research papers, a paper is considered authorotative by how many people have cited it and how many other papers it cites, a websites’ authority should be judged by who it is linking to and who links to it.  The more authorotative those links to it are, which again is measured by how many outside websites are linking to that website, the more authorotative the original website.  Once Page developed this technology, however, he realized that he had just developed a new way to search websites – i.e. by their authorotative relevance and hence was born one of the most defining elements of google search: PageRank. Amazing.

Batelle does a great job of explaining the thoughts behind the technology and of giving the reader a good feel for the pressure/excitement surrounding decisions that the founders and execs of early searche companies found themselves in.  The layout of the chapters is a little confusing as Batelle tells the story of different companies seperately, he is not telling a straight chronology of the history of search. He will then mention a fact about one company tangentially that happened in for example 2004, and then in the next chapter when he profiles that company he goes back to years before that fact took place.  This layout leaves the reader a little confused as to the overally chronology of events.  However, it does give the book a faster pace which leaves the reader with a sense of the hustle and speed these companies were operating in.

The reading fits in extremely well with the class discussions we have had thus far.  Batelle’s technology explanations compliment the technology explanations we have received in class, of for example PageRank, and learning about Search helps us, the students, better understand the power and magnitude of the internet and all of its potential, which is one of the first topics we are studying.

I’m Jen and I’ll be using this blog for the purpose of my media, politics and power class, but if all goes well hopefully I’ll be using it way after the class is over too.

The name of the blog comes from my husband Mordechai.  He thinks I tend to analyze things a lot (I may have to agree with him here) and has come to call my (over)analysis: Jenalysis. I like to think that my analysis is so unique that it earned itself its own word.  I hope to put those analyzing skills to excellent use here as I analyze the class readings and beyond.

I hope you enjoy!