Foursquare adds C-SPAN to its team
C-SPAN is the latest network to team up with Foursquare, as Mashable reports. This attempt to boost political education and C-SPAN’s mobile presence will allow visitors checking in to be provided with tips geared towards politics.
For example, they will be presented to watch a documentary on the federal budget when they check in at the capital building in Washington, D.C. Also, a check in at the Supreme Court will afford visitors the opportunity to watch Supreme Court Justice interviews via C-SPAN. Soon, these political education tips will expand to cities outside the D.C. area. This is a great opportunity to use social media to increase the public’s general knowledge about U.S. politics. 
Almost every time a major election comes around, the media constantly points out how low voter-turn out there is and how generally, many people do not have a great deal of knowledge about politics in America. By reaching out through social media, I believe this can be changed, especially by using location-based apps when consumers check in at politically relevant locations.
Obama and Politics 2.0: Documenting History in Real Time
In July of 2008, Nancy Scola wrote a really insightful post documenting a critical aspect of the Obama Social Media Campaign – Video. Enjoy!
I’m taking a crack at liveblogging an event tonight [ed. -- now last night] at NYU featuring Arun Chaudhary, director of video field production for the Obama campaign, in conversation with Ellen McGirt, senior writer at Fast Company and author of magazine’s April 2008 cover story “The Brand Called Obama.” Arun left his job as an adjunct film professor at NYU to produce video that pulls from public events, behind the scenes, and one-on-ones — unique creative content that populates BarackObama.com and a YouTube channel. Let’s get started.
Asked about the new media team, Arun describes at least 50 people crammed into one corner of an office building floor with with “pictures of JFK and graph paper tacked up on the wall.” Arun says the new media team spends a fair amount of money, but they’re buying fishing poles rather than fish; the broadcast quality footage they capture, for example, can be used for advertising in addition to online video. Asked about past campaigns he tried working with, Arun says they saw media as “too precious” to take creative risks with.
Arun explains his hire by the campaign by saying ‘you can learn the politics. You can learn how to navigate these worlds. But you can’t really learn the trades very quickly.’ The campaign has been attracting successful people that way, he says, naming Facebook’s Chris Hughes, who came on to handle social-networking. Arun then screens a well-crafted mock movie trailer calling people to a rally in New York’s Washington Square Park that features Obama in slightly goofy situations. Ellen: “We’ve never seen anything like this before”:
Ellen asks if the technology was in place three years ago to make video like this. “The technology was there three years ago, but I don’t think the right audience was,” says Arun. Back then, he jokes, there were just six hundred of the same people commenting on political blogs and that’s it; online participation today spans a wider segment of the population.* Ellen ask how he managed to get approval for the trailer video from the campaign and the candidate. Arun laughs a bit nervously, “I don’t know if the candidate saw it,” but says that it made its way, he believes, to the level of campaign manager.
The next video was crafted to call people to the pre-Jefferson-Jackson dinner in Iowa, as, Arun says, showing organizational strength was the key to getting attention and momentum in that state. Ellen asks if there was a concern that Obama and guest attendee John Legend were the only African-Americans seen in the clip. Arun pointed to the Internet Archive’s Prelinger Archives as the source of the overly white footage. (At the actual event, the video team had five cameras and five videographers in place capturing footage.):
Next video. An Iowa call-to-caucus piece, says Arun, is a campaign classic. It both asks Iowans to caucus for their particular candidate and educates voters on how to actually go through the confusing caucusing process. Both the Obama campaign and the Edwards campaign went the route of a dated instructional-style video, he says. (Arun praises the Hillary Clinton campaign’s call-to-caucus video which featured Bill Clinton eating a cheeseburger and saying something along the lines of “exercising is hard, but caucusing is easy.”):
It was the campaign’s “traditional media” team, says Arun, that whipped together a quick response to the Clinton campaign’s 3 a.m. phone call ad. But the new media team tracked down the young girl in the stock footage, Casey Knowles, an Obama precinct captain in Washington State. In the one-minute video, Casey deconstructs the techniques in the Clinton ad — the blue tint to the footage, the “scratchy voice” — and slams the “politics of fear.” An ad like that, says Arun, would never make on air, but works well online:
The candidate was in Terre Haute, Arun says, when the news broke that Obama had earlier made remarks in California concerning “bitter” Americans. Obama inserted a response to the incident in his Indiana speech. The new media team, says Arun, edited, packaged, and released the candidate’s own words within 19 minutes of the speech’s delivery. A lesson learned, says Arun, is that people are actually interested in the “sound blast,” and will watch long clips in their entirety:
He also cites Obama’s speech at their Chicago headquarters.The 14 minute clip shows the candidate addressing his staff, both in person and through a conference call (which creates a few minutes of less-than-thrilling footage when the call goes dead and Obama has to stall while it’s reconnected). It wasn’t deliberately shot low-fi for an extra dose of authenticity, Arun says, as some people suggested. There was no intention to create some sort of “Tanner 88″ moment. It was just, he says, that there was an intern manning the camera:
Asked by Emily about what an Obama administration might bring, Arun says that the role of video in an administration would be even more powerful than in a campaign. He mentions the broadcasting of health care meetings — creating a broader base of people who are able to keep an eye on the proceedings. The idea, Arun says, is not ‘telling people who tell people to tell people,’ but to use video to tell people directly. The role of video in governing, he says, is to achieve the goal of “cutting out the middleman.”
Q&A
Question: There’s a discontinuity in your work with high video quality and no sound mixing. Why?
Arun: We shoot as high quality as we can because it might be used for broadcast, but get used to it — a lot of the networks are going so broke that they’re getting rid of their “sound guys.”Question: What role with user-generated content play in presidential campaigns?
Arun: Using voter-generated content while probably remain “an unrealized ideal.” Much of the content that gets sent to them is “a little strange.”
Question: Why is new media going to make young people come out and vote?
Arun: It isn’t. Barack Obama is what is going to make people come out and vote.
Question: If you embrace an interactive politics 2.0, how do you avoid politicizing governing?
Arun: I think we’re ready for 1.5. We’ll [ed. -- a clarification: "we" here is a reference to political campaigns in general, and to the tools that might come into common use -- not a reference to the Obama campaign in particular] have virtual townhalls, for sure.
* Updated to correct: The original line referenced political blogs; in making the joke, Arun was referencing hard-core blog commenters.
Connectivity, Politics, & Diplomacy
Here is a great post by Rob Paterson on Connectivity, Politics, & Diplomacy.
Roger Cohen writes today in the Times about the cultural split between a world view that is all about division and one that is about connectivity.
Surely this is the heart of the 2.0 adoption cycle for anyone or any organization. Is it all about “me” and my tribe or is it about “us” and how we fit into the larger world and affect each other?
My sense is that what ever your politics “Me” or “Us” is the great divide.
So how do we get from “Me” to “Us”? Maybe results will help many decide:
This cultural failure has been devastating for Clinton. As Joshua Green chronicles in an important piece in The Atlantic, Obama has used social networking and his user-friendly Web site to develop the money machine, and the youthful engagement, that has swept him forward.
Green notes, “Obama’s claim of 1,276,000 donors is so large that Clinton doesn’t bother to compete.” He gives some other Obama campaign numbers: 750,000 active volunteers and 8,000 affinity groups. In February, a month in which he raised $55 million ($45 million over the Internet), 94 percent of donations were of $200 or less, a number dwarfing small contributions to Clinton and John McCain.
Obama has been a classic Internet-start up, a movement spreading with viral intensity and propelled by some of Silicon Valley’s most creative minds. As with any online phenomenon, he has jumped national borders, stirring as much buzz in Berlin as he does back home.
If you choose the “Me” you cannot compete with another who chooses “Us”. Also if you choose me – you miss the point that the larger world cares about you:
Her most crippling blindness has been to networks, national and global, the threads that bind and have changed society. As David Singh Grewal writes in his excellent new book, “Network Power,” a core tension in the world is that: “Everything is being globalized except politics.”
Grewal continues: “We live in a world in which our relations of sociability — our commerce, culture, ideas, manners — are increasingly shared, coordinated by newly global conversations in these domains, but in which our politics remains inescapably national, centered in the nation states that are the only loci of sovereign decision making.”
The Bush administration has accentuated global awareness of this disjuncture. Connected people around the world were appalled by Bush policies — from the trashing of habeas corpus to renditions — but felt powerless to influence them.
The overwhelming global interest in the current U.S. election is tied in part to a spreading belief that America’s leader may be as important to French lives, for example, as the incumbent in the Élysée Palace.
The Web & The Election – Intitial Conditions and the Web
Here is a great post by Rob Paterson on the 2008 Presidential Elections
This is the Fibonacci Curve – it is the ideal growth to full potential curve that Nature uses in all systems. There is a lesson here for all politicians and it is established by the dynamics of the Obama campaign.
In Nature – as shown in the curve – the key to reaching your design potential as a system (as a Kid, as an oak forest, as a disease) are the “initial conditions”. These are in the early part of the curve from figure 0 – 8.
If the acorn, the baby, the flu virus experience the ideal conditions and can track this tight early part of the curve, the the momentum and the trajectory give the entity an excellent chance of going the whole way.
The acorn grows to a tree and then to a forest. The baby is competent and flexible enough to reach adulthood and attract a good mate. The flu virus can get critical mass in a host.
If you don’t track the curve early – as time goes on – you fail more and more. Think of a rocket leaving Earth’s orbit. Too much power and you go off into space never to return. Too little and you have to fall to Earth.
So what has this to do with Politics and with Senator Obama?
Iowa and New Hampshire are the key states that set “Initial Conditions” for the race. Both are retail politics states. You have to have a great retail operation to win them. If you do, you get momentum. And what is new today in the web era – you have set up a retail fund raising process that will trump the corporate donation process.
At the heart Obama’s campaign was the decision to be great at retail. At the heart of the Clinton campaign as the call to be great at corporate.
The key? The personality of the candidate. The Candidate who is good with people will be good at the web. Obama built a web based retail platform based not just on the tools but on himself. He is pre-disposed to be engaging personally. His early career has been grass roots.
Clinton is the ideal corporate candidate. She is well integrated into that world – this is where her vaunted 35 years of experience take her. Until the advent of the web – this too was a winning strategy for it cost too much in time and in money to fund raise retail conventionally.This weekend, Senator Clinton has just fired her manager – part of the stated reason was that her manager had failed to deliver the online support that she needs. BUT – the issue is less the manager and more Senator Clinton’s inability to connect personally. It is more that the initial conditions of the Clinton Campaign were based on her personality and a call to focus on the corporate. Her heart was never really in retail or the web. She is more comfortable in the cozy world of elites.
So now, as in all natural systems, the differences are widening. Small differences in the curve by figure 8 widen exponentially over time. They widen because of the shape of the curve. A small change in the curve has to be expressed by an ever wider differential over time. If Columbus had sailed 5 degrees further north, by the time he crossed the Atlantic he would have discovered Nova Scotia!As we have seen this weekend. Obama’s base in his personality and his choice to go retail early will pay off more and more. Clinton’s cold personality and her choice to go corporate will fail more and more.
The key now will be momentum and money. Obama is equipped to get more of both. Clinton is going to fall back to Earth as she can regain neither – she cannot go back to her initial conditions. It is now too late for her.
I think that this is a turning point in politics. Sure money is still important but it is how and where you get it that is the key.
For the first time since the early years of the republic, it is possible with the right candidate to have a president who is not beholden to the lobbyists! It is now possible to raise more money via the web than from the lobbyists.
Such a new reality will affect in the end all politicians and all races everywhere. The web will enable retail politics again.
We are seeing early signs of this in Alberta where bloggers are giving the Premier a shellacking.
A warning to all who think that the backroom is still the key to power.
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