Blog of Cheeky Geeky

Most people who use Twitter have just one personal account. And that’s fine. But over the almost two years I’ve used Twitter, I have seen some creative uses of more than one personal account. For example, Chris Cillizza from the Washington Post tweets at The Fix and speaks authentically as himself. But when there’s a press conference or something like the State of the Union address, he rapidly live-tweets everything at a second, supplementary account: The Hyper Fix.  No less authentic, just a different way of conveying a different kind of information.

Another example is former Apple evangelist and now founder of AllTop.com, Guy Kawasaki.  His personal account is a bit impersonal, by design – it’s an information fire hose that points to whatever he thinks is interesting (and often routed through one of his own sites). But what if he wants to reply to someone’s question – he can’t disrupt the information hose, right? No problem. He has a second account, named Guy’s Replies, where he writes back to people.  Another cool social hack, in my opinion.

Some of you may have seen my blog post announcing that I’ve joined Microsoft as Director of Innovative Social Engagement for their U.S. Public Sector division in Washington, D.C.  As part of that effort, I’m reading more than I previously had been about Microsoft business and products and services, and also those of companies like Google, IBM, Apple, Cisco, Adobe, and so forth. Often my philosophy has been to take the best of what I’m reading and thinking about and tweet it on my personal account, but I’ve come to think that overwhelming my personal stream with tons of Microsoft links would start to become inauthentic to some degree – or just annoying to the people who have come to like the diversity of my postings.

Thus, I’ve started a new Twitter account named “Microsoft Mark.” If you’re interested in science, technology, innovation, communications, the future, and particularly news, opinion, and events in the information technology and Web space, I encourage you to follow my new account. It will be a high-quality fire hose of the best information I find (and to some degree, produce myself) for the communities I’m a part of and care about. It will not be a company marketing stream with Microsoft-only information (those already exist), and it will not be impersonal. It will merely be specialized.

And I’ll continue tweeting as Cheeky Geeky. That account won’t change at all, save for the fact that my life in 2010 will be a bit different than it was in 2009. But that’s just an authentic change that I hope you and I both enjoy. I think that Chris and Guy are good examples of social hacks whose tactics can make both your professional and personal lives work just a little better. As I wrote in my original post,  I want to use my position with Microsoft as not just a job, but as a thought leadership platform where I can continue to personally innovate and contribute ideas and tactics to the larger community. I hope that the evolving way I will be using Twitter this year is part of that contribution.

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The relatively new Federal government website Data.gov has made a lot of waves and gotten many people excited as part of a larger government transparency movement. But who really wants all this data? Primarily, the people I see excited about Data.gov and similar efforts are what I call “tech elites.” Bloggers, evangelists, startup companies, software developers, former CTO’s, large tech company execs, and the like. They hold apps contests, they run BarCAmps on weekends, they create new websites with open data, they get consulting contracts with local, state, and federal government. I see nothing wrong with tech elites or their behavior per se. But I wonder if a larger community - average citizens - has been ignored to some degree.

Ellen Miller related to me that the Sunlight Foundation did a poll which showed 80% of citizens were in favor of more government transparency. Interesting, but that could mean many different things. I’m interested in knowing if there’s a poll, or even some man-on-the-street type video, asking citizens if they want more government data, and if so, what - specifically and individually - they would do with it. I suspect that few people want more data. The data might benefit them indirectly, through websites and tools that others develop, no doubt about it. But what citizens - the real community the government serves - really want is information. They want news. They want analysis. They want content. Not XML, a tool catalog, or geodata. To me, this begs the question of whether the government should have an Information.gov site full of compelling, immediately useful, simple content for average citizens. What do you think?

It’s great that the government can check some boxes on a form and say, yes, we have a new “open” website, and yes, we have made more data public and available (counting the number of data sets per agency has become a bit of an amateur sport). But if the citizens don’t care, who is it helping? Forget the lobbyists people love to complain about - While they’re enjoying their eggs benedict, have tech elites stealthily become the newest powerful special interest group in Washington, DC?

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Christina Gagnier wrote a post about the Gov 2.0 Camp held in LA this past weekend, focusing on one speaker, Bill Grundfest, the creator of Mad About You. The essence of the post is that Government 2.0 innovators are not using the right language to discuss the topic with their “intended audience, citizens.” He criticizes the amount of jargon used as well. I have two major critiques of this criticism by Citizen Grundfest.

One, the current audience for Government 2.0 conversations is currently not the American people; it is the tech and government elite. For better or worse, that’s mainly who’s interested in contributing blogs, attending events, and so forth, and so that is what the conversation reflects. This might change in the future, but currently these are the people who care most about data.gov, who the next CTO will be, and so forth. Citizens are the intended recipients of Government 2.0, but not usually participants in how it should come about, what the policies governing it should be, which technologies should be utilized, and so forth. One might ask, how many “average citizens” attended Gov 2.0 Camp LA? I suspect that most attendees by far were the self-selected ones who know and use the jargon. That’s the point. Events like that are created for the people who know the jargon to discuss things with each other, not the public, even if the public is the ultimate beneficiary of the discussion.

Two, if there is one niche in society that is well known for its piles of incomprehensible jargon, it is government. There is so much jargon in government that one cannot possibly criticize government for having it; That would be like criticising people for having skin. The notion that somehow people working on Government 2.0 use too much jargon, yet the rest of government is immune from this criticism is ridiculous. Jargon isn’t great, but it is a fact of life in government. What is one to do except bang one’s head up against the proverbial wall? Further, every specialized field - especially emerging fields involving science and technology - has its own jargon. Surely, Grundfest wouldn’t deny this is true of Hollywood itself, where jargon rules the land, with no attempt whatsoever to make it comprehensible to the average Mad About You viewer. And why should they? Back to point one - the viewer is related to the topic but not the intended audience for the discussion.

Does the public currently need to understand what Government 2.0 is? Do they need to understand the jargon, or must the specialized language of this burgeoning field go away to satiate the many common citizens who want to know more? I say, no. Few citizens are interested in attending barcamps, few download data from data.gov, and few read what the CTO is up to in Washington, DC. Rather, citizens want goods and services and information from their government. I suspect they don’t care much how that comes about. So, I think that the Government 2.0 enthusiasts - the goverati - are doing just what they should be doing: trying to wrap their heads around a rapidly changing, very complicated field of study. If a little jargon gets in the way, so what? No one ever said they wouldn’t see a movie on a date because they didn’t understand what a Key Grip does.

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The initial deadline for Federal agencies to meet the Open Government Directive (OGD) has come and gone, and many of them have checked the necessary boxes to prove that they are more “open” and transparent. They have new websites with new features and some new data that new people can use if they choose. And there’s more new things to come in 2010. But, as I noted in a quote within this Federal Computer Week article on the OGD,

“What concerns me about the Open Government Directive is the notion of ‘check-box government’ it seems to encourage. Very little emphasis seems to be on the actual engaging, or even on the strategy for doing so. The focus is on the technology. Where’s the focus on the humans?”

Knowing that these new websites, user interfaces, and datasets are what the public wants and needs, and that the new forms of public engagement are actually, truly effective is far more important than merely peacocking them on the Web. Where is, in fact, the focus on the human side of the equation? I haven’t studied every single open website in depth, but generally the emphasis is on new technology or new data, and not new engagement.

FCW also quoted me as saying,

“Engagement is hard, very hard, and it doesn’t happen completely from behind a computer terminal in a cubicle on Independence Avenue,” he said. “It happens through genuine, human interactions with people, and through caring about the communities your agency is supposed to be supporting.”

When you hear Gary Vaynerchuk speaking about openness and engagement in the video above (possibly the single best video I’ve ever seen on social engagement with stakeholders in your organization), you don’t hear about putting more options on a website, nor about this or that technology very often. You hear an awful lot about people - talking to people, listening to people, providing content that people want, and generally caring about people. And a lot of it is very one-on-one, not email blasts and blog posts. It’s human and authentic.

In a talk long ago, I heard Gary use an acronym that I still use to this day, one that should be at play in all the discussion about the OGD. The acronym is RAT. RAT means Real, Authentic, and Transparent. RATs win. RATs use technology, but aren’t focused on it. They’re focused on people. How the new open government websites and tools are used to interact with individual people, to engage citizens around topics (not agencies, topics), and act as platforms to build communities around those topics remains to be seen. But there’s one thing anyone involved in communities already knows - these things take time and are not subject to artificial deadlines.

Joseph Jaffe recently wrote a truly excellent post about the Toyota recall, and their engagement with customers and other people online. He’s fairly critical of their efforts. And what I couldn’t help thinking about as I read it was the OGD. In Toyota’s case, they seem to be doing all the right things (i.e., checking off all the boxes): apology in the newspaper, some of their website devoted to the crisis, 15k Twitter followers, an official Fan Page on Facebook, and more. But they’re not engaging, because there’s more to engaging than having a presence. It’s about being alive within that presence. (Read the post for details on how Jaffe thinks they can “flip the funnel” on their communications crisis.) Deadlines are good for checking off boxes in some kind of scientific manner. Engaging people is an art, a true street-smart craft that few are good at. Can one mandate such an art?

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Through my online and offline activities, a lot of people have begun to hear about me. Some of them find my blogs useful, maybe they think my tweets are funny, perhaps they were in the audience at an event I spoke at. I really appreciate hearing positive, and even negative, feedback from this audience. One interesting development is that now with me traveling more, with an audience spread all over the place, a lot of people say things like, “When are you going to visit Miami/Nashville/Minneapolis/Portland/Boston/etc.?” Well, be careful what you wish for, because it might just come true. Something I’ve noticed is when I do actually visit one of these places (that I might only visit once every two years or something) is that some people hustle to meet me, and some people don’t. I try REALLY hard to reach out to people on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, email, and phone to tell them when I’ll be in town, where I’ll be, and when I’m available and what I’m thinking. It’s a hustle. I try to pack tons of engagements and activations into a trip (people who have seen me dashing around Manhattan know this well).

Back to the hustle; it goes both ways. It’s illegit to feign wanting to meet me very badly, and then not hustle to make it happen when I’m in your city for two or three days. It gives me a bad impression of you, if I haven’t met you previously. Everyone is busy, no doubt - but if you’re the kind of person to take 15 minutes and meet me in the hotel lobby for a cup of coffee, you’re making that BIG impression on me. And if you have this thing on Thursday and that other thing on Friday and you’re busy on Saturday…yeah, that doesn’t impress me. You can’t say you badly want to meet me when I’m in town and then not make it happen. I try to meet everyone who wants to meet me, within reason. But it goes both ways. Want to make a GREAT impression in real life? Hustle. You can only do so much from behind a keyboard.

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There was an article in the New York Times on Friday about a “social” search engine that taps into the social graph to get answers to questions, as opposed to simply pointing you to a website based on keywords. This might be a big part of the future. The social search engine in question is called Aardvark, and it’s really interesting. You have to sign up, like on Facebook or LinkedIn, with a real name, DOB, and so forth - very brief, not too onerous. You can also use Facebook Connect to interface the search engine with your Facebook interests, contacts, groups, etc. You can also interface with an IM program you use (I used my Gchat account for this). Finally, you can click on either “Answer” or “Ask” to do either of those two behaviors.

First, I clicked on Answer. A few questions were there that I didn’t know how to answer, but one person (25 y/o from PA) asked about where she might get historical items checked out. I recommended the Smithsonian as a resource (oversimplifying a bit here for the sake of space). Next, I asked a question about learning to cook as a couple in DC. Within 5 min I had an IM and two emails with answers from different people. Very specific answers (XXX in YYY place has wonderful evening classes for couples), location-specific, reasonable, even with good grammar. The answers were actually very helpful to me. The normal route would have taken me to the website of a local magazine, where I would have then searched for stories about cooking, where I would have then… you get the point. Currently we have search engines like Google and Bing which break your query down into keywords and give you “relevant” websites. Sometimes that works well (“Pamela Anderson Baywatch pics”), and sometimes it doesn’t (“Where’s a good place to take my vegetarian date on a Sunday night in Chicago?”). So-called “organic” search engines like Twitter and Digg allow the most popular items to bubble to the top, and to some degree that’s interfaced with location and contacts to give you more specifics.

With Aardvark, you seem to get the best of all of this for specific questions. I’m excited to see where this leads.

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Stop asking me to be a “Fan” of you (who I hardly talk to), your hobbies (which I don’t share with you), or your small business (that I do no business with). I’m not a fan of your mundane life. I’m not even a fan of Vin Diesel, the most popular person on Facebook. Why would I care about your real estate dealings? Not only do I not give a crap about being your “Fan” (whatever that means), your in-your-face tactics just make your numbers inauthentic, and therefore, meaningless. So basically, your actions are meaningless. Is that any way to go through life?

Instead of asking me to be your Fan, why don’t you just un-friend me? Then, we can have an authentic interaction. Thanks, Mark

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This morning I woke up to find that Twitter was down. They tell you in a really cute way, with a little “fail whale” - it’s so sweet. But why is this lack of reliability tolerated by governments, large corporations, emergency workers, and other serious people? Mashable.com reports that the best theory for the downtime was a deluge of tweets caused by a second Haiti earthquake. A second earthquake in Haiti? No offense to Haiti, that is a horrible situation, but imagine if we had a really, really serious situation (say, the Pentagon the Golden Gate Bridge get hit by drones controlled by terrorists) - could you rely on Twitter?

I’m still surprised that no serious competitor to Twitter has arisen. Sure, someone like Google or Microsoft or others could just buy it, but they’d at present be purchasing an unreliable product with questionable customer service and a cute children’s language and a steep learning curve. Where’s the competitive product for 50 year old insurance salesmen? For UN relief workers?

Sure, Twitter could improve. I use it. I don’t really want to see them fail. But if, as they claim, they want to make it “communications infrastructure” (a lofty goal to think they will be the next AT&T), then it needs to be decentralized and partially redundant. Email doesn’t just “go down” and neither does RSS. People like Dave Winer can write much better about this than I can, but here’s one brief post by entrepreneur Andrew Baron about decentralizing Twitter for you. Two years ago, when I first started using Twitter to study its use for the government, I thought that it was a great new tool which was potentially useful for unified communications in a crisis. Two years later, little has changed. It’s useful when it works.

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This morning I woke up to find that Twitter was down. They tell you in a really cute way, with a little “fail whale” - it’s so sweet. But why is this lack of reliability tolerated by governments, large corporations, emergency workers, and other serious people? Mashable.com reports that the best theory for the downtime was a deluge of tweets caused by a second Haiti earthquake. A second earthquake in Haiti? No offense to Haiti, that is a horrible situation, but imagine if we had a really, really serious situation (say, the Pentagon the Golden Gate Bridge get hit by drones controlled by terrorists) - could you rely on Twitter?

I’m still surprised that no serious competitor to Twitter has arisen. Sure, someone like Google or Microsoft or others could just buy it, but they’d at present be purchasing an unreliable product with questionable customer service and a cute children’s language and a steep learning curve. Where’s the competitive product for 50 year old insurance salesmen? For UN relief workers?

Sure, Twitter could improve. I use it. I don’t really want to see them fail. But if, as they claim, they want to make it “communications infrastructure” (a lofty goal to think they will be the next AT&T), then it needs to be decentralized and partially redundant. Email doesn’t just “go down” and neither does RSS. People like Dave Winer can write much better about this than I can, but here’s one brief post by entrepreneur Andrew Baron about decentralizing Twitter for you. Two years ago, when I first started using Twitter to study its use for the government, I thought that it was a great new tool which was potentially useful for unified communications in a crisis. Two years later, little has changed. It’s useful when it works.

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All federal government agencies are currently under pressure to respond on strict timelines to the Open Government Directive (OGD) that recently came down from the Office of Management and Budget. Agencies are directed to take steps to create a more open, transparent, and participatory government. What these steps look like, and the trajectory they take, is still largely open. Recently, I saw one take on the issue, which was phrased by a Department of Transportation contractor as “the Google approach.” Let’s see what that looks like.

Jenn Gustetic, an Associate at Phase One Consulting Group in Washington, tweeted that their “Google approach” was to “build as they go.” Well, that’s an understatement. Their site, dot.gov/open, has nothing in it. That’s not open - that’s empty. Sunlight Labs has a theoretically resource called Open Watcher, in which they keep track of which of the 14 major federal agencies have debuted an open government website. Department of Transportation gets a green checkmark for deploying a page. Open government standards in Washington seem to be lower those we apply to the Redskins. They have tried to do something, and made it public, so they get a checkmark. Everyone else has a big red X - and that means they’re bad.

How ridiculous is this? Some pundits, like Chris Dorobek of Federal News Radio, have also commented on the emptiness of the DOT page. More than the emptiness of the website, though, I worry about the emptiness of this extreme version of the “build it as you go” approach. I’m all for deploying an imperfect website and getting user feedback, but celebrating a web address, as another Phase One Associate, Heather Miller, wishes us to do, falls somewhere between wishful and giddy.

Where does the “Google approach” to open government leave us? It leaves us with an approach of “check the box government,” in which being open means (1) deploying a website that claims to do something, (2) linking its updates to a Twitter account so you’re “social,” (3) creating a fan page on Facebook so that you can count “fans” and have another metric for your weekly report, and (4) coasting, knowing that you have succesfully made the government more “open.” Checking boxes has nothing to do with being social, collaborating, or engaging public audiences. It has everything to do with bureaucrats and contractors. Open government is not so much a directive to be responded to but rather a state of mind that needs to be reached.  Maybe we should rebrand it “Yoga Government.”

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The Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) of Kodak, Jeffrey Hayzlett, is ubiquitous and seemingly knows everyone. Well, on Twitter. He’s always tweeting about where he is and what he’s doing, and he’s become a fixture at something called the “140 Conference,” which celebrates Twitter as a communications method. As somewhat of a joke, I recently commented: “I didn’t think it was possible to increase sales just by tweeting and speaking at every #140conf, but @JeffreyHayzlett is proving me wrong.”

His almost immediate, teen-just-read-adult-book reply was interesting: “:) Power of the crowd #140conf it works. and is powerful.”  Besides the grammar issues, and buzzwords, and hype in this response, what’s interesting about this is asking whether it really has done Eastman Kodak Co. any good in the last year. Keep in mind, Hayzlett isn’t some customer service guy in the bowels of the company - he’s a corporate VP reporting to the CEO.

How has Kodak done over the last year? Just a simple glance at articles like this and this show that Kodak is a company in trouble, losing money and losing it consistently. Over the last 12 months, their stock (EK) is down. Over the past five years, the stock is way down. They’ve debuted new products, like the very nice Kodak zi8 camera (which I own), but all the buzz is about other companies - and presumably to some degree, sales follow the buzz. Social media is nice and I use it a lot. But how it is tied to organizational goals is the important issue. Maybe Kodak seems a little more hip with a tweeting CMO, but that does relatively little to get me to buy a product from them; it just lays a little groundwork. Tweets like, “break-at my NYC fav diner having some smoked whitefish on crackers. Wonder if I can shove some in my pockets for later?” do little for me personally. And Hayzlett’s tweetstream consists of little more than that, frankly.

Today, Hayzlett is, “heading over to do a keynote at 2010 CMO Leadership Forum #cmony will see my friend @ecava and others” Well, I hope that speaking engagements at 140 Conference, the CMO Leadership Forum, and The Apprentice are helping to sell Kodak stuff. But I doubt it. My tweet back: “@JeffreyHayzlett Your stock went down over the last 12 months, and the company lost millions last year. Social media worked…how?”

I think that’s all there is to say.

Disclaimer: I’m a graduate of the University of Rochester, which George Eastman practically built with his generosity. Kodak is based in Rochester, NY. The music school is named after Eastman.

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NBC, in all it’s complete lack of wisdom, moved Jay Leno to 10pm (wrong time), Conan O’Brien into the Tonight Show (wrong fit), and hired Jimmy Fallon (wrong person). Now, its got a problem, namely that Conan is getting beat by David Letterman, and Jay might be out of place where he is slotted, and Jimmy Fallon is about half as funny as an Alec Baldwin voicemail message.

So, what to do? Here’s an easy solution. Put Jay Leno back where he was, then put Conan O’Brien after him for 30 minutes and then Jimmy Fallon after him for another 30 minutes. It might be temporary, but they all get to keep their jobs, be on the air, and attempt to make people laugh.

Like much of their humor, this is a no-brainer.

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Vanity Fair, one of my favorite regular reads, recently published a short article about “America’s Tweethearts” - young women who have a lot of followers on Twitter…and are not coincidentally very attractive. Not that they’re popular only because they’re attractive - they are some talented people (I know about half of them personally, and adore and respect them) - but Vanity Fair is not exactly in the business of profiling the ugly of society. So, the magazine chose a number of undeniably attractive, Twitter-popular (the value of this is highly questionable too, though no one seems outraged at this aspect of the article) young business women, and wrote what amounts to a quick blog post for a well-respected magazine. I’ll say up front, as someone who knows some of the women, knows about the others, and knows quite a bit about Twitter - this is a stupid fucking article. Okay?? Got it? I think it’s idiotic.  It’s dumb, it’s horrible, it’s amateur. I would be embarrassed to have my name on that byline. The article has almost zero useful content to me and to most of the ladies’ tech-savvy fans, I’m sure. But so what? What does that mean? Should there really be outrage? There have been innumerable critiques and comments on the Vanity Fair piece (here’s one from Salon), and I’m not going to link to them ad nausem. But generally the mood was “disappointed,” as one of the photographed, Felicia Day, commented on her in post, which has already garnered about 200 comments.

Disappointed about what? That Vanity Fair doesn’t cover technology well? (It ain’t TechCrunch.) That it wasn’t an article focused on the ladies’ business skills? (It ain’t the Wall Street Journal.) That they treated the subjects like cheerleaders? (After they posed together in trench coats in a photo that can only suggest to viewers that they’re naked underneath.) Give me a break. It’s a silly article about a technology, that while very useful, people still find silly. And the average tweet is silly. The name Twitter is silly. The article reflects society and the magazine’s readers, who probably don’t use Twitter, and probably think it’s silly. WHO CARES. I don’t see how this is offensive to Twitter users - I’m fine with less people understanding a technology that I know how to take advantage of. That’s a good thing. So let’s get real about this non-situation. These ladies were the focus of an article published in a print magazine about people and vanity. The magazine doesn’t have a track record of understanding technology very well, or using it themselves. The article wasn’t guest written by Pete Cashmore, it was written by an author with less than 200 followers on Twitter. What did everyone expect would happen? I suspect that some, like Felicia, were blinded by the idea of being in Vanity Fair and put high hopes above rational expectations. Ladies, disappointed or not, you’re in Vanity Fair. I don’t care if they made fun of your tweeples and twosses, and focused on your legs, that’s still cool. Don’t worry about this article - start plotting your next one. You’re clearly all talented and going places. Maybe one of you will even end up running social media operations at Conde Nast - they need help.

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