iPlot

Live from the White House: Governance 2.0

On the occasion of Barack Obama’s nationwide TV prime time infomercials last night, Fast Company’s Ellen McGirt reviewed the campaign’s media strategy and in particular its innovative use of amateur (or “professional” amateur a.k.a. promateur) video. While the Obama camp has heaped millions of dollars on traditional TV broadcasters, setting a new record for ad spending ($250 million), McGirt believes that the true winners in this campaign are amateurs and democracy

To get an insider’s perspective, McGirt interviewed Obama’s director of field video, Arun Chaudhary, in a frog design mind event in July in New York. Some of the insights Arun shared were pretty amazing. You thought we’d live in an age of snack-size media? Think again!

One thing is clear: the Obama campaign - just awarded "marketer of the year" by AdAge -- has raised the bar for political communications and has created new ways of citizen engagement. During the last presidential election I was working towards a masters' degree in communications at the Annenberg School, and I remember that I wrote a lofty paper about “super-democracy,” in which I drafted a radically idealistic vision of a media-driven democracy in real-time. It’s amazing to see that four years later this has become a reality beyond my boldest imagination. Leveraging the power of new web technologies, the Obama campaign has transformed political media from something to watch to something to do.

This means of course that we citizens expect this form of participatory democracy, transparency, and authenticity to extend to the White House. Interactive visualizations of federal budgets and tax dollar spending, open platforms for public deliberation and collaborative decision-making, instant polling via mobile apps, RSS feeds with policy updates, and fireside video chats with the President are just some of the possible formats that come to mind for the New Governance Media Platform – McGirt is right: Obama and team are on the hook.

Campaign Moments

There has been no shortage of YouTube moments during this campaign:

Two conservative commentators on MSNBC, after they're off the air, say what they really think about McCain's VP choice.

CNN's Campbell Brown grills McCain spokesperson Tucker Bounds.

Obama on Video: A New Way for New Media

In a very special design mind event at NYU last week, we featured Arun Chaudhary, who is traveling with the Obama campaign as director of video field production. The conversation between him and Fast Company senior writer Ellen McGirt brought forth some surprising insights into the emergence of online video (and new media in general) as a crucial component of political campaigning.

Although Chaudhary is a NYU film school graduate, the venue didn't provide a home court advantage. The audience -- a cross-section of New York's media community -- was attentive but critical. As became clear in the ensuing Q&A session, the openness that has become such hallmark of the Obama campaign doesn't go far enough for some of the attendees. A representative from RemixAmerica.org -- a project that invites users to mash up the whole content library of America's history of politics (speeches, debates, campaign ads, etc.) -- argued that while masterfully utilizing the "engagement" potential of social media the campaign would ultimately fall short of walking the walk, shying away from including users in (co-)creating content and losing message control. In Obama's media universe, the "clickocracy" (The Washington Post) remains a meritocracy: Not "everybody is a media outlet" (Clay Shirky). But then again, why would the campaign open the flood gates for mash-ups when YouTube is already over-populated with them? Just search for Obama's recent Berlin speech and you'll see what I mean.

The fact that Chaudhary admitted that it's still a long way towards a campaign created "by the people for the people" ("we are just scratching the surface of this") supported the notion of openness more than revealing the lack thereof as a weakness (I wrote a while ago that one of the Obama brand's magic formulas is that it can turn weaknesses into strengths). Chaudhary was as genuine, smart, and eloquent as the candidate himself and not overly prepped with talking points for this speaking gig. The campaign didn't seem too concerned and controlling. If this implicit trust in their staff members as spokespeople was "by design," then Obama's spin doctors must really be exceptionally smart.

The other key takeaways of the evening were on demographics and viewing behavior. According to Chaudhary, the average viewer of videos on BarackObama.com and YouTube.BarackObama.com is 45-55 years old (not the pups you would expect in the heydays of the YouTube generation). Furthermore, and maybe even more surprising, those viewers prefer long-form content over the snippets everyone nowadays hails as the future of media. June Cohen, Executive Producer of TED.com, confirmed Chaudhary's stats by referring to her own TED Talks series -- a big online hit despite (or because of!) the typical running time of 30-45 min.

So, substance over style? Well, style matters, too. It is remarkable how Chaudhary's Obama videos are embracing a Jon Stewart-esque irony (as in "sovereign distance to subject"), using the instruments of satire and spoof (without ever drifting into caricature) to validate and enhance the intended message. Chaudhary not only deconstructs the opponent's videos (as he did with a fast response to Clinton's fear-mongering "3:00 AM" ad, starring the exact same girl that Clinton had used for her clip -- revealing her as an all-grown-up and fearless Obama supporter) but also his own. By doing so, he preempts any scrutiny of the medium's propagandistic intentions -- almost like clearing the air before you breathe.

This is a major difference to the use of online video in previous campaigns and only possible since video has become such a widely accepted part of mainstream media consumption. Precisely because everyone is now used to the authenticity of amateur videos on YouTube, and professional marketers have begun to mimic it for their own purposes, Chaudhary can make fun of it (this is, by the way, as Lee Siegel pointed out in the New York Times, the exact reason why the New Yorker's Obama cover did not work as a satire: the caricatured presumption was simply not part of US mainstream). Carefully curating Obama's not-so-funny jokes and stand-offish moments, Chaudhary's videos provide evidence that this candidate is real. The very questioning of authenticity verifies the authenticity. It's early nouvelle vague applied to new media: what you see is not what you get; it is already the reflection thereof. It's film-making that is fully aware of its persuasive power and thus carefully calibrates its messages.

It will be interesting to see whether Obama (and Chaudhary) can maintain this level of meta, irony, and self-deprecation once the candidate is in the White House. Campaigning by video is one thing, governing by video is another. When the campaign is over, Obama will have more than 700,000 friends on his Facebook page and still millions of eyeballs to his web sites. What will he do with them? Chaudhary hinted at the possibilities of "fireside video chats" and other public video forums. We shall see.

I will post a full-length video of the event later this week. In the meantime, enjoy some highlights:

...and some media and blog coverage:

Silicon Alley Insider: Obama's Video Guru Speaks: How We Owned the YouTube Primary, re-posted on CNET: Obama’s Web Video Strategy Revealed and The Huffington Post
TechPresident: Obama & Politics 2.0 Documenting History in Real Time
Mediabistro FishBowlNY: Live Twitter Stream from the design mind event
Disruptology: Everything You Know About Viral Video is Wrong
The Lessnau Lounge: Twitter Tweets about Obama as of July 16, 2008
Some random thoughts on design: Politics 2.0 and the Thirst for Content

frog Design Mind Event with Barack Obama's Director of Video Field Production

In a recent blog post on the upcoming Fortune Tech summit, Fortune's senior editor David Kirckpatrick hinted at the possibility of having "a super-amazing special guest from outside the industry who we aren't yet able to announce. (Joining us at the original Brainstorms were Bill Clinton, Shimon Peres, Jordan's King Abdullah, and John McCain.) This visitor could make things really rock."

Hmm…who might that be? The magazine, in its current print issue, just examined both candidates' economic policies in a 1-to-1 comparison, and, in a not so subtle endorsement, chose to display Obama on the cover….

While we at frog design won't be able to feature Obama himself, we will provide a look behind the scenes of his campaign. On July 16, at NYU, we'll host a very special Design Mind event with Arun Chaudhary, Obama's director of video field production. I just looked at the guest list so far, and it's going to be a fantastic crowd. EllenMcGirt from our co-host Fast Company, who wrote the magazine's April cover story on the "Brand Obama," is going to interview Arun -- about the impact of new media on this year's election, the new rules of political communication, and life on the campaign trail. Really looking forward to it.

frog Design Mind Speaker Series Featuring Barack Obama's Videographer

The National Journal writes that when Arun Chaudhary was a teenager, his father asked him why he didn’t want to get into politics. "I can't, Dad," he recalled saying. "I have a funny name." Now Arun Chaudhary, the son of an immigrant Indian father and a Jewish mother, is as close to politics as one can be: He took leave from his day job -- professor at the NYU film school -- to become Barack Obama's videographer (or, so the official title, director of field production).

After 10 months on the campaign trail, Chaudhary has more than 850 videos posted (three of them below) on the BarackObama.com website and on YouTube. His short clips from Obama's town hall meetings, big rallies, and on-the-road moments draw an average of 10,000 viewers each, and they have become a main tenet of a campaign that has successfully translated the concept of web 2.0 (or however you want to call it), with its collaborative formats, micro-crowds, public deliberation, and social aggregation, into the realm of political communication.

A new type of political auteur in the age of YouTube, the 32-year old filmmaker has developed a unique style that is innovative, fresh, and -- like the candidate -- challenges convention. Obama's campaign is a networked, open-sourced, and interactive effort, as Henry Jenkins observed, and in this spirit of "from me to we," Chaudhary playfully (and with distinct irony) remixes elements of amateur-style video, traditional polit-documentary, CNN-b-roll, slick TV commercial, cinematic production, and behind-the-scene outtakes into a vibrant, eclectic, and authentic voice of the campaign that is bigger than the sum of its parts. As the maker of moving pictures of a movement, he achieves what every great documentary filmmaker wants to achieve: To document and write history at the same time.

Arun Chaudhary will speak about his work for Obama and his experiences traveling with the campaign in a special edition of frog's Design Mind speaker series on July 16 in New York. The event will be videotaped, of course.

More details soon. Save the date!

The Future of Business is Social

Notes from the Milken Institute's Global Conference 2008

"The difference between the optimist and the pessimist is that the pessimist has more facts," said Jean-Paul Betbèze, Chief Economist and Head of Economic Research Department, Crédit Agricole S.A., in a panel at the Millken Institute's Global Conference 2008 in Los Angeles a couple of weeks ago. True as this may be, his statement stood in sharp contrast to the overall vibe of the event: Yes, we can, was the prevailing sentiment, and the overwhelming majority of attendees would probably have outed themselves as fervent optimists, despite an abundance of fact-featuring PowerPoint slides supporting each of the panel discussions (I've never seen so many pie charts in my whole life). In fact, the gathered crowd was comprised of optimists with lots of money to spend on the world’s most pressing problems (poverty; terrorism; population; resources; energy; environment; human rights; social justice; etc.) and may well have the power and means to solve most of them if they wanted to. Muhammad Yunus, Nobel Peace Prize laureate and micro-lending pioneer, pointed out: "We wanted to go to the moon, and we went to the moon. If we really wanted to end poverty, we would have ended it a long time ago."

After listening to him and some other brilliant minds, I felt over-inspired and under-accomplished, ready to change the world or at least my life. It was indeed a humbling experience. And yet, it stunned me to realize that many members of the powerful elite are struggling to cope with the new realities of business and society. The difference between being on top and being ahead, between being innovator and pioneer, became obvious in several of the panel discussions, particularly those that addressed the changing media landscape, the ongoing digital revolution, changing consumer behavior, and the new business paradigms that come with it.

These trends include:

- A surge in broadband penetration enabling ubiquitous content distribution and hyper-social connectivity
- The explosion of user-generated content: every minute 10 hours of video are being uploaded to YouTube
- The collection and the friction-less, platform-independent distribution of content as the next big challenge for media and communication companies
- Mobile as the new container and memory device: 85 years of video (a whole lifetime) will be able to be stored on any new iPhone in a few years
- The power shift from content providers to media distribution platforms (Comcast, Hulu, etc.)
- The consumer consuming on his own terms
- The "prosumer" as a market force to reckon with
- The wisdom of the crowds as a source of innovation ("we are smarter than me")

Lex Fenwick, the CEO of Bloomberg LP, exemplified the old guard's awakening almost in real-time. First he boasted that he invented email and created the world's most valuable user community (of 350,000 customers) "by mistake," then he warned of giving users too much control ("they may join forces to challenge your prices"). Barry Libert, CEO of collaboration software provider Mzinga, nailed him on this: "If you have something to hide from your customers, or you are afraid of giving them too much power, you have a problem." At the end, Fenwick had converted from Saulus to Paulus, from "From Me to We," and, in a cathartic turn of events, he admitted he had learned quite a bit from the panel: "Thank you for your insights. I am inspired to make a few changes to the Bloomberg community based on this discussion."

Other companies have made this leap before him: Amazon, Netflix, Virgin Mobile, P&G, Dell, and recently Starbucks are all moving from a firm-centric to a network-centric organization, building and leveraging their community of users by giving them a voice in strategy, product development, and marketing decisions. They understand that crowdsourced and peer-to-peer business intelligence helps them overcome the "not-invented-here" syndrome, reconciling "inside-out" and "outside-in" innovation. Libert: "If customers cut the red tape and re-connect with customers, that's making it easier for them to find out what they really need." Of course it's always easier to proclaim a new paradigm than defending an old one, or as someone noted on another panel: "If you’re a futurist and you think ten years ahead, by the time you're wrong, no one will notice."

Jason Calacanis, founder and CEO of Mahalo and in-character as enfant terrible, thrived in the devilish charm of the futurist. In a panel on "The New Rules of PR," he joyfully exposed the insecurity of his audience. It was not so much his co-panelists -- some old-school PR pros who bravely defended their profession against his "PR is dead" claim -- but rather the ensuing Q&A that demonstrated how disturbing the new rules still are for many who have held the power in organizations for decades and find it difficult now to grasp and embrace some of the earth-shattering changes happening these days. "Should our CEO blog?" -- Yes. "How do I stay in control of my brand if our CEO gets critical comments to his blog posts?" -- Well, the truth is, you don't. Just let go. Brands are assets in the public domain. With production capabilities and financial assets off-shored and out-sourced, brands are ever more important as the only remaining indispensable value of a company, and yet they are ever more volatile. In this open-sourced, hyper-transparent economy, your customer owns your brand, and no brand platform, no brand book, no rigid compliance guidelines designed to protect your idea of your brand, can change that. Brands are social funds. Your mission is to raise their intellectual and emotional capital. The creation of brand equity is a cooperative act based on the values that you share with your customers. And, by the way, marketing's job is to promote these values, not to invent them.

In a panel on "Business Innovations that are Changing the World," Google Chairman and CEO Eric Schmidt said: "Let's not forget that the fundamental goal of any corporation is to change the world and not just to satisfy the interests of particular stakeholders." Indeed, this was the overarching theme of an economic summit that was all about social: social innovation, social media, social networks, social web, and social capitalism. What once was a noble mission is now a mandate for CEOs: the future of business is social, both in terms of raison d'etre and modus operandi. Companies that open themselves up to promoting and fully leveraging the social dimension of human beings in order to create smarter and more effective solutions for social problems will be the winners of this new social economy.

SXSW Interactive 2008: Who Will Be This Year's Twitter?

Next weekend, just a couple of days after the dust of the primary campaigns will have settled, national media attention will return to Texas as Austin is turning into party central for the annual South by Southwest Festival (SXSW, March 7-16). SXSW Interactive, added in 1994 to the music festival, has evolved into one of the most influential tech conferences in the country and beyond. While somewhat geeky in its first years, SXSW Interactive is now considered a must-attend venue for big tech players (Google, Microsoft, Seagate, etc. all have a strong presence at the show), start-ups, creative agencies, software developers, futurists, designers, artists, media, and bloggers alike, all of whom are chasing the next big digital thing. A key contributing factor for SXSW's success may have been that the initially narrow meaning of "interactive" has expanded its relevance to more industries, media, and platforms over the past few years and now serves as the modus operandi of all business, no matter how creative or digital it is. With its more solid business underpinning, SXSW Interactive has overtaken both the Push conference in Minneapolis and Wired's Nextfest in terms of relevance and commercial success.

The Soul of the Machine

Yet despite its explosive growth (16,000 overall attendees are expected in Austin this year), "South By," as conference goers dub it, has done a good job evading all attempts to be easily categorized. The interactive part, in particular, has somehow managed to remain its cutting edge. It still offers a wildly eclectic bazaar of topics, trends, opinions, and applications, and one can truly say that all of the tech conferences out there it is the one best positioned to explore "the soul of the machine."

The organization is professional but there is still a lot of room for the unexpected, below-the-line, grassroots eccentricity that gives the conference its special flavor. A big part of this can be attributed to Austin, which has emerged as a thriving hub for creative people and embeds SXSW in the kind of community fabric that doesn't tolerate any over-spin or sell-out. The organizers have also made a point to add many community elements to the event: web 2.0 for web 2.0sters, if you will. For example, this year, they pioneered a "panel picker" that allowed users to vote on submitted panel proposals and essentially democratized the entire programming. I'm not entirely sure if this is the best application for the "wisdom of crowds" since there is a real danger that the panel selection turns into a popularity contest or an easy target for PR professionals and speaker bureaus. I, for my part, am old-fashioned and prefer conference programs to be curated by a curator, simply because it is otherwise daunting to ensure the right balance between diversity and cohesion. Anyway, it's too early to tell -- we'll see how it turns out.

In addition to the panel picker, SXSW has teamed up with Microsoft and frog design to create a rich, interactive online community hub for the conference. The application features premium content from SXSW Interactive, including video clips from keynotes and panels, as well as user-generated videos, Flickr images, and social networking content. At the same time, aggregators from Technorati and del.icio.us comb the Internet for relevant information, keeping the site dynamic.

But not everything at SXSW will be user-driven. In fact, some of the program highlights were carefully chosen: Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Facebook, will give the keynote on March 9. Other keynotes include Frank Warren (March 10) and Jane McGonigal (March 11). Opening Remarks (March 8) will be delivered by Henry Jenkins and Steven Johnson, and Michael Eisner, former head of Disney, will be interviewed in a special session on March 11.

Searching for the Killer App

As eyeballs wander towards Austin, it will be interesting to see which digital innovations this year's conference will bring. Google's Dodgeball blew up at SXSW Interactive in 2006, and last year, a hitherto unknown service called Twitter enabled attendees to chat about panels in real-time and in public, and as instant as the format was its proliferation in the blogosphere: Twitter became the app de jour at SXSW and then, quickly, the rage of all digerati.

So who will be this year's Twitter? Practically speaking: Meebo. The instant messaging service is the official sponsor for live chat at SXSW 2008 and has stepped into Twitter's footsteps, which is kind of ironic. Meebo as Me-too. And philosophically speaking? Who knows. It seems safe to place a few bets on models around the new "Digital Green." The conference will be hosting five panels devoted exclusively to sustainability issues (five more than in previous years, if you're counting), among them "10 Ways to Green-ify Your Digital Life" and "Green Software -- Really?" Another big topic will be how gaming, virtual worlds, mobile and contextual web will converge (yes, convergence is resilient!) in the "Age of Engage," including discussions on OpenID and hardware mash-ups ("the long tail of gadgets"). And then there are interesting sociological tangents such as "Sexual Privacy Online," "Self-Branding," or the existential question for the attention junkie: "Do You Have to Disappear Completely to Get Things Done?" The most exciting domain for disruptive innovation right now is probably news (which, as we know, is broken), and several panels will discuss the future of Internet radio, Internet TV, as well as crowdsourced, hyper-localized models of news production and aggregation.

Or maybe, after five days of "geekspasm" and partying, ReadWriteWeb's prediction may come to pass: "The killer app in Austin might just be beer."

Links

Here are a few helpful links to get you in the mood:

Official SXSW Festival Site: http://www.sxsw.com
Interactive SXSW Schedule/Calendar: http://sched.org/
Official SXSW Live Chat: http://www.meebo.com/sxsw
SXSW Insider Guide: http://sxsw.ning.com/
SXSW Facebook Page: http://www.facebook.com/pages/SXSW-Festival/7826953993?ref=s

Online Video Consumption is Growing Fast; Google has 31% Market Share

According to comScore's Video Metrix report, more than 75 percent of US internet users watched a video online (either streaming video or progressive downloads) in November, up 29 percent from January 2007. In total numbers, this means that 138 million Americans -- approximately three in four US internet users -- viewed online video during that month. The average online video viewer consumed 69 videos, spending a total time of 3.25 hours (195 minutes) and 2.8 minutes per video.

The report further states that Google continues to capture the lion's share of the online video market as its share went up to 31%, with 3.0 billion videos viewed, 2.9 billion of which occurred at YouTube.com (30.6 percent share of all videos viewed). Fox Interactive Media ranked second, with 419 million videos viewed (4.4 percent), followed by Yahoo Sites with 328 million (3.5 percent), and Viacom Digital with 304 million (2.6 percent).

iMedia has a good piece on "misfit content" as the centerpiece of an effective video-strategy for marketers: "As more and more traffic is directed to niche content -- whether edgier, lower budget, user-generated or just off-beat -- you need to know why and how to market in this content category."

Robert Scoble to Launch FastCompany.TV

Everyone knew it, now it's official:

Fast Company yesterday announced the launch of FastCompany.TV, "a new online video network featuring coverage of bleeding edge technology trends, interviews with leading executives and business people, reviews of the latest technology products, and lifestyle programming." Robert Scoble, who has left Podtech, will serve as Managing Director of the site, slated to launch in March. FastCompany.TV will debut several programs over the course of 2008 featuring Scoble and other well known personalities.

Scoble about why's he joining Fast Company: http://scobleizer.com/2008/01/16/why-were-going-to-fastcompanytv/

The Fast Company blog: "When Scoble talks about our innovation in the social media space, he's referring to how we plan to integrate viewer participation into FastCompany.TV, as well as Mansueto Digital's open-source build in Drupal of IncBizNet, an online business networking community and database created exclusively for private companies. He's also talking about the Company of Friends, one of the first online business networks that debuted in November of 1997. Unlike other social networks, where it's about showcasing your resume and playing games, the Company of Friends has always been about bringing people together to share ideas -- both online and offline -- about the core themes central to our magazine, such as innovation and social responsibility. We'll announce more news about how we plan to grow our social media efforts later this month. And don't forget to look out for FastCompany.TV in March."

Smart move for Fast Company, which is really having a second spring these days and will significantly expand its content distribution platform with the addition of this proprietary (IP)TV channel.

Want to Have Lunch? No, Video!

Snack-size media are on the rise -- the smaller the form, the bigger the impact! I've already blogged about the tech news round-up WebbAlert, and now the New York Times reports on more companies' efforts to offer daily short video clips (three minutes or less) in response to the known spike in web traffic from office workers during lunch break. Here are some excerpts:

"In cubicles across the country, lunchtime has become the new prime time, as workers click aside their spreadsheets to watch videos on YouTube, news highlights on CNN.com or other Web offerings. The midday spike in Web traffic is not a new phenomenon, but media companies have started responding in a meaningful way over the last year. They are creating new shows, timing the posts to coincide with hunger pangs. And they are rejiggering the way they sell advertising online, recognizing that noontime programs can command a premium."

"The trend has swept across large as well as small independent sites. Yahoo’s daily best-of-the-Web segment, called The 9 and sponsored by Pepsi, is produced every morning in time for lunch. At MyDamnChannel.com, a showcase for offbeat videos, programmers have been instructed to promote new videos around noon, right when the two-hour traffic spike starts."

"Sticking to a set schedule turns out to be almost as important on the Web as it is on television. At blip.TV, a video-sharing site, Mike Hudack, the chief executive, encourages his producers to post videos at the same time each day or week. 'Continuity and consistency is incredibly important,' Mr. Hudack said. 'If you want to attract a loyal audience, you have to give them what they expect when they expect it.'"