Blog of Cheeky Geeky

When Did Government Become a Business?

When did government become a business? I keep hearing government called a business, and business terms like “efficiency” creeps into the lexicon here among progressive Washington folk. Sorry, government is not a business any more than the Boy Scouts, the Red Cross, or a public high school. Yes, they have some things in common, but so what? Governments do not even meet the most basic definition of a business. From Wikipedia: Besides the fact that governments generally don’t have customers and aren’t designed to compete within a market sector and usually don’t generate a profit, there’s a bigger problem with applying terms like “efficiency” to government. Governments are purposely designed to be inefficient! Do you really think that the whole checks-and-balances idea was done in the interest of efficiency? That the way the Senate operates is done in the interest of efficiency? One of the smartest things I heard after I moved to Washington, DC was from a senior person at the Library of Congress. She asked the room, “How many of you think Congress is designed to pass laws?” Everybody raised their hand. She said, “Wrong. Congress is designed to not pass bad laws.”

Congress is inefficient for a reason, and to some degree all parts of government are. For all the complaining about gigantic, evil corporations not caring about their customers or the public at large, and in the middle of a recession in which greedy businesspeople nearly destroyed a global financial system, I can’t imagine why anyone would be eager to associate the word “business” with government. The government has enough issues, thanks.

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What You Should Read About Monetizing Your Tweetstream

There’s been a lot of discussion about the authority of Twitter users, and how users with many followers, or authority, or subject-matter expertise, might monetize their tweetstream via inserting paid advertisements. Here are the most important articles I’ve seen about this debate. I recommend reading them in the order below. The New York Times has a piece that makes it sound cool and neat-o.

Paul Carr has a piece at TechCrunch that makes it sound like the end of civilization. A venture capitalist investor in one of the services wrote a piece defending the idea.

Robert Scoble crunches some numbers and writes a good piece that digs deeper. Finally, read this piece about the hypothetical SuperTweet with a “metadata payload.”

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IBM Knows How To Monetize Your Friends

IBM researcher Ching Yun Lin gave an interesting talk about the monetary value of having friends today at Web 2.0 Expo in New York. IBM is a gigantic company with thousands of people, mobile, global, and moving around. How do you find the right person to answer a unique question or problem? How does one unlock the power of existing social networks? Where within networks does knowledge actually reside? I can’t hope to summarize the talk, injected with math and graphics and jargon as it was. But here’s the big takeaway: Your friends are worth money to your organization. Somehow, IBM scientists have not only determined that network size is positively correlated with performance, they also somehow know that every email in an address book is worth 948 dollars!

Researchers also found that stuctural diverse networks within which few people are connected are correlated with higher performance, and that having strong social links to managers also was positively correlated with performance. Some of the research information should be available here: http://smallblue.research.ibm.com To me, this is really cool because I am an advocate of social networking as a positive influence on the workplace, even if such networking is not strictly work-related. IBM seems to have data that back up my more anecdotal and street-smart notions about this, which I’ve been speaking about lately under the guide of “Social Networking: The Two Dirtiest Words in Government 2.0” - and I will continue to do so!

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White House Deputy CTO Beth Noveck Wants MORE LOBBYISTS!!

New York, NY - Far from reducing the power of lobbyists in Washington, DC, it seems that one of the goals of Government 2.0 is to create more lobbyists. Millions of them, in fact. “We want to make sure that everybody has the opportunity to advise government,” Deputy Federal CTO Beth Noveck remarked while being interviewed this morning by tech publisher Tim O’Reilly at the latter’s Web 2.0 Expo in Manhattan.

One might term this “democratizing Gucci Gulch,” playing off a phrase commonly used to describe the K St. corridor where many of Washington’s lobbyists have offices. Tapping the expertise of people living outside DC is a common theme of Government 2.0, one that will certainly be discussed at O’Reilly’s upcoming Gov 2.0 Expo in 2010. The reality of how 150 million people get meaningfully involved in their government is a little fuzzy, however. Tech blogger Anil Dash perhaps summed it up best to me as, “How can I work for my country without working for my government?”

Noveck’s answers to some of O’Reilly’s excellent and probing questions were generally vague and political, in thr sense that she tried to answer questions that she wanted to be asked rather than the ones she was actually asked. She was on her talking points, which was disappointing. I’d like to ignore her (largely forgettable) answers here, and instead print some of Tim O’Reilly’s questions, which will continue to be asked in and around government, at the Gov 2.0 Expo, and at other events.

“In the private sector, if an entrpreneur has a great idea, it can rapidly spread and become a standard. Why does stuff in the public sector have to be reinvented in every agency or city?” “In the private sector, someone who has the ‘best’ product wins. In the public sector, how does the best project ‘win’?”

“Let’s say that someone has an app that’s useful for the government. Is there a way that someone can get that into the Apps.gov catalog?” (Paraphrasing a conversation with CTO Aneesh Chopra) “A friend can get something done in an hour for free, but an official government procurement gets the same thing done in a year and costs a million dollars. How do we get developers like the ones in the Web 2.0 Expo ‘in the loop’ without having them move to DC and get on the GSA Schedule?”

“Is the President exempt from the Open Government Directive?” “What can we do to open up Congress?”

Tim O’Reilly, despite being a self-described “newbie in Washington,” is clearly asking some of the most interesting and thoughtful questions around the topics of transparency, data, citizen-government interaction, and networking with regard to Government 2.0 today.

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Anil Dash creates Expert Labs to connect government policymakers with citizen-expert networks

New York, NY - Earlier this afternoon at the Web 2.0 Expo, techie Anil
Dash announced the creation of Expert Labs, which will work to connect
government policymakers with science and technology experts from the
public. Working under the assumption that the government doesn’t have all the
knowledge it needs from its internal experts nor from a handful of
industry leaders, Expert Labs will work with the American Association
for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in Washington to network
government employees crafting new policies with the people who
understand the relevant technologies.

Anil is perhaps best known as a person behind the successful tech
company Six Apart. My creative juices flowed a bit when Anil discussed an early iteration
of Expert Labs with me at the O’Reilly/Techweb-produced Gov 2.0 Summit
in Washington, DC this past September. I’m really pleased that he’s
followed up on his initial thoughts in such a thoughtful and
meaningful way.

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Why Weird Al Is the Best Video Blogger Ever (And Other NSFW Favorites)

The term “blogging” has become nearly meaningless because blogs have gotten so simple and so complex they can look like nearly anything these days. Is Twitter a blog? Yes. Is MarkDrapeau.com a blog? Yup. Is Mashable a blog? That too. So is Gawker. So is WashingtonLife.com, which is technically a magazine hosted on WordPress. Looks kind of like MarkDrapeau.com. So I argue that anything with continuously updated content, particularly if it’s hosted on WordPress, Blogger, TypePad, Posterous, etc. is a “blog” no matter what it is marketed as. Not really a profound idea. But I want to argue here that having a blog means that you are performing on a digital stage for an audience. Your readers, or viewers, or fans or whatever are your audience. And the content you provide for them - text, audio, data, video - is your performance that keeps them engaged. And especially in a time when people are selling advertising based on eyeballs and engagement, keeping your audience engaged in your performance is important.

So I’d like to point out that Weird Al is the best video blogger ever. Why not? His performances of parody videos post well to YouTube and other online video platforms, and many are so good that not only do you watch them, remember them, talk about them - you watch them again and again and again. How many times can you watch a Cheerios commercial? What about that “Chocolate Rain” video guy? This is the quality stuff that separates the talented from the talentless within the “cult of the amateur” in which everyone can produce content but very few tell a great story and craft a wonderful performance for an audience. The quality is poor, the storyline makes no sense, the message doesn’t resonate, it’s too long, or too short, and so forth. There’s a reason Scorsese makes so much money.

So relax as I explain what I love about Weird Al and some of my other favorite nouveaux video bloggers. Weird Al’s “White and Nerdy” video is genius. He takes Chamillionaire’s original “Ridin’ Dirty” video and not only parodies it but inserts a lot of fun comedy extensions (like Donny Osmond and Seth Green). This is about as good as a one-man show on YouTube gets.

The boys at Lonely Island (the Andy Samburg-led subcontractors to Saturday Night Live) come really close. The “J*zz in My Pants” video is two-and-a-half-minutes of painfully funny stuff (plus great cameos including Justin Timberlake). No one ever forgets this once they’ve seen it.

Finally, a pair of classic videos from Jimmy Kimmel and Sarah Silverman. In case you didn’t know, they’ve been dating Matt Damon and Ben Affleck.

Sarah and Matt

Jimmy and Ben (note Josh Groban cameo)

Finally, my new bud Taryn Southern and her crew (including Scott Baio!) has a video that’s slightly dirtier and almost as funny as the above video. This is what I’m talking about. New faces, great humor, high production value. It’s called “Wrong Hole” (NSFW).

See a pattern emerging? Yes, they’re all a bit dirty, each one more than the last. That’s just good online humor. And they all have cameos you’re not expecting (did you catch Brad Pitt as a FedEx delivery guy?). But most importantly, they all tell a coherent “story” with a beginning, middle, and end, that keeps the audience engaged until the finish. They’re interesting, they’re funny, they’re surprising, and you don’t forget them easily. Wouldn’t you like people to think that about your company, or your cause, or your public service announcement? Yes, you would. Watching something for two or three minutes straight - that’s something. How long do you spend reading an average written blog post or newspaper article? If time equals money, eyeballs mean cash. This kind of long engagement is hugely significant for online journalism, marketing and advertising, and generally making money in business. It’s also important for the government interacting with citizens. No, not everyone should start making raunchy videos. But if you aren’t at least watching these videos and thinking about what lessons you might learn from them to apply to your own work, you’re missing out.

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Gov 2.0 Event - "Open Government: Pages From the Playbook" #gov20

Today I’m attending a Government 2.0 unconference called Open Government: Pages From the Playbook (http://3.ly/31a) at the MLK library in DC. If you’re not here, you’re missing out. Attendees are hearing from govies and contractors about how they are adopting the Administration’s directive on open government. I hear and read a lot in this area, and I’ve definitely heard some new stuff. My favorite five-minute talk so far was from Virginia Hill of NIH-NIDA, who spoke about a project called “Drugs Facts Chat Day,” which leverages the brand and scientific expertise of the National Institute on Drug Abuse to answer teens’ questions about substance abuse. It’s hard to reach audiences (of citizens) that are, shall we say, “shy” but they seem to be doing a great job. Primary organizer Lucas Cioffi tells me that many govies who wanted to speak couldn’t make it for this initial event, and so there almost certainly will be another one. This is not only a great opportunity to hear a lot of quick talks from people working on open government in the trenches, but also a great opportunity for sponsors to get involved at a modest level.

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What Does Innovative Social Engagement Look Like?

As many of you know, I’ve been thinking about the topic of Government 2.0 a lot lately. Part of this topic deals with the multi-directional engagement between government and citizens. This is what the White House and others have termed a more transparent, collaborative, and participatory government. Unfortunately, the engagement for the most part is not very authentic nor meaningful. Boring “fan pages” on Facebook are one example I’ve written about, but there are many others. Often, engagement, when it does happen has so many rules associated with it, or such a high barrier to entry, or such a limited window as to be practically meaningless.

It seems to me that everyone can celebrate the fact that government entities merely have a YouTube channel here, a Twitter account there, or a Blogger profile some other place (the so-called “TGIF revolution”), or we can think a little harder about what the goals of citizen engagement really might be. On the evening of Nov 2nd, I tweeted from my phone about a local restaurant, Co Co Sala, just as I was leaving. We had a nice experience, but the hostess had been a little, shall we say, disinterested in helping us? So I commented as much.

Less than a week later, the co-owner of Co Co Sala sent me an email and cc’d his general manager. He apologized for the treatment I experienced, assured me it was not policy, introduced me to the manager, and said he’d talk to his staff. It was a four-paragraph email. I’ve never met him before, and furthermore, my personal email is discoverable but not the most easy thing to find. This is what real social innovation looks like. This is what customer service looks like. This is what true engagement with stakeholders looks like. I want to give this great lounge Co Co Sala a hearty shout-out for not only having a great product, but also really caring about their customers.

Now, imagine we weren’t talking about a restaurant here. Imagine we are talking about the Department of Motor Vehicles, or the Patent and Trademark Office, or your Congressman. If you tweeted, would they see it? Would they care? Would they react in any way? I think the answer in many cases is no. Let’s look at a sliver of data. According to TweetStats.com, the people behind the White House Twitter account reply to individuals less than 2% of the time, and seem to have never @ replied to any single more than once (i.e., they have never come close to a conversation). They re-tweet others’ tweets about 6.5% of the time, but they only seem to re-tweet other government accounts and the New York Times. Granted, there are more people tweeting about White House issues than Co Co Sala, but does the above data represent any caring in any way, shape or form?

The terrific TechPresident blog recently noted that actor Vin Diesel is the single most followed living person on Facebook - and that he recently passed up President Obama. Perhaps that’s because Vin Diesel’s Facebook fan page is awesome. He is engaged, his fans are engaged, and the tone is informal and fun. When did “serious and formal” become a substitute for “informative and meaningful” in government circles? Why is everyone scared of letting their guard down in public?

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Do you think Andrew Ross Sorkin worries about his quarterlife crisis?

I just finished reading a great New York magazine article about New York Times writer and now book author Andrew Ross Sorkin. There’s a lot of interesting information in the article about Wall Street’s evolution during the past year, the tensions between Sorkin and other financial reporters (even at his own paper), and questions about where you draw the line of being too close to your sources. But what was really interesting to me was the depiction of Sorkin (who’s about my age, by the way) as a breathe of fresh air with an entrepreneurial spirit working within (some might say, trapped within) a traditional business that’s losing money. From very aggressively and socially courting valuable sources, to capitalizing on his personal brand and news trends to get into management at the Times and get a 600 page book published, to devising new ways to drive traffic and make money (like a daily morning newsletter for finance and mergers and acquisitions geeks), he’s a killer. He hustles.

There’s a growing trend I see in the blogosphere, particularly among women (not sure why that is), of talking about a so-called “quarterlife crisis” that people have in their late twenties. Just because someone writes a book about something - especially something bad or depressing - doesn’t mean you have to believe it! And just because someone generalizes about your gender or race or place where you live or age group or career path - doesn’t mean you have to be part of that stereotype! So: Boo hoo. If everybody spent the time they think, talk, and blog about their perceived quarterlife crises and put it instead into doing something productive, maybe you’d be a little more like Andrew Ross Sorkin or Gary Vaynerchuk. You know, successful people who have built personal brands through hard work, talent, and marketing that open doors they never thought possible. Vaynerchuk signed a ten-book deal for eight figures. Sorkin has a standing offer to move to Vanity Fair. Who had really heard of these guys three years ago?

Sorkin hustles to crush it every day, and when he’s not doing that, he’s probably thinking up new ways he can do it tomorrow. He outflanks his boring competition. He exceeds people’s expectations. Sure, he steps on some toes, and sure, he takes a few wrong turns. But to quote one of his (presumed) Wall Street sources, Jamie Dimon, “It’s better to do ten things and get eight right, than to do five things and get them all right.” If you don’t believe that, enjoy your quarterlife crisis.

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Tweetup: The Term Is Played Out

Do you know what a “tweetup” is? If you don’t, trust me, that’s okay. Don’t bother learning it. The term is already played out. A tweetup is a meet up that is planned on Twitter, or at least it’s supposed to be. At first it was a cool, insider thing. Now it’s an uncool, wannabe thing.

In 2009, I was invited to “tweetups” in person, on EventBrite, on Facebook, by email, and by e-newsletter. Guess what - that’s a meet up, not a tweetup, folks. Just because you use Twitter and are having a gathering of people who may happen to use it to does not mean you’ve having a tweetup. Just call it a happy hour, or a fundraiser, or a gathering, or a salon, or just a bunch of techies having drinks. Stop calling it a tweetup. The word has become meaningless.

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My Philosophical Review of the Audience Conference

Loren Feldman. 1938 Media. Audience Conference.

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

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

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

Read the rest of my new post, “Quarantined Conferences: Claustrophobic Technophiles or Attentive Audiences,” at O’Reilly Radar today!

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Don't Understand New Media? Maybe You're Not Old-Fashioned Enough

Yesterday I wrote a post contrasting Twitter with the ancient honeybee “waggle dance” that is used by a single forager bee to signal where food resources are located to the hive. It was my little metaphor to explain the larger point that the instinct to tell a group of people that a cafe you got to first doesn’t have wi-fi, or that the line at the nightclub is too long so we should rendezvous somewhere else is an ancient as, well, humans. Sure, cavemen applied it differently (probably more like bees - “Big. Animals. There.”) but it’s the same instinct. Well, a newcomer to the Government 2.0 space, Strategic Social (who I am an advisor to as they are “leveraging the social web for national security”), is actually studying this notion more formally. In a recent post on their website, they outline a new project in which they will study online “tribes” of people in combination with anthropology studies in South America and Africa. I wholeheartedly believe in their approach:

New media is not about “new” and not really about “media” either (see Gary Vaynerchuk’s vlog on the latter point here). It’s about behavioral communications, instincts that pre-date man. As a behavioral neurogeneticist I studied some genes that are very similar in insects and man, and indeed virtually all animals, that similarly affect behavior instincts. This stuff is old-fashioned.

What is new is the shiny objects in the so-called “TGIF Revolution” (Twitter, Google, Internet, Facebook). Yes, the tools are new. They are exciting. But what we do with them is not.

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Don't Thank Your Famous Fans

Frequently, when I start following a new blog or Twitter account, I get a note that says something like, “Thanks so much for following me! I’ve read your stuff for a while and I love it - look forward to chatting!!” That’s flattering, but truly unnecessary. The fact is, I (and I suspect that this is true among many others) don’t follow you because we want to chat, or because we want to boost your ego. I follow something you’re doing because you have information and I want it.

It’s as simple as that. I think that your blog might help me learn, I think that your Facebook page may have interesting events I should know about, I think that your Twitter feed may have local news before someone else’s, I think that your YouTube channel will make me laugh. You see, it’s all about me. I think, I want, I need. People are selfish. They do things that benefit them. Now sure, I become friends with people I interact with on the Web, and sure, I chat with people, and sure, I can be generous to them. But there’s no need to thank me. I’ve already rewarded me by following you.

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The Latest Twitter Chairty-For-Followers Scam

Ben Parr, a co-editor of Mashable, tonight became the latest in a series of indistinguished charity-for-followers scam artists on Twitter. Here’s a recent tweet of his: “I’ve decided that I’m going to donate 10,000 pennies ($100) to charity, one chosen by whoever is my 10,000th follower.”

This charity scam is disingenuous for three reasons. First, why develop a person marketing campaign in order to get $100 into a charity’s hands? Give privately and thoughtfully like so many others. There’s no useful need to advertise. Second, why benefit personally? The notion of not giving $100 to charity without getting something (followers) in return is selfish. Why not just give money to the best crowdsourced charity idea from current followers? Third, why not get others involved? Rather than follow Ben Parr, why not have them follow the benefiting charity? Then, money is given and new followers are involved in the charity’s story - not Ben Parr’s. Selfish social scams suck. And there are enough bad actors giving social media tools a bad name without getting charities all wrapped up in a nice story that amounts to just another way to inflate influence scores. People may argue that this is just hunky-dory - at least a charity is getting money! - but style points count too. Ben Parr and your social media charity scam brethren: Get off the charity runway.

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Animal Behavior: How Microsharing is Like the Honeybee Waggle Dance

Some of my readers may know that my background is in scientific research, and more specifically on the neurogenetics of animal behavior. One of the projects I was fortunate to be involved with was the International Honeybee Genome Project, within which I analyzed a family of proteins that likely underlies some of the social instincts that species exhibits. One behavior that honeybees perform is the “waggle dance,” in which a forgaging bee leaves the hive in search of a food resource, finds it, and then returns to the hive to report the good news via dancing. The speed of the dance is inversely related to the distance to the food, and the angle at which the dance is performed is directly related to the placement of the food in relation to the sun’s place in the sky (amazing, right?). Honeybees have been doing this for a long time, long before humans invented these “new” social media tools. Twitter and similar microsharing services like Identi.ca perform the same basic function. Twitter caught fire at the SXSW conference, where people would report that a certain afterparty was awesome, or too crowded, and attract or repel others to/from the location with the “resources” (free booze). Is this really so different from a waggle dance? I had an interesting discussion about digital communication today at the international marketing and communications firm Fleishman-Hillard (thanks Rachelle Lacroix!) today, and one thing we discussed was why so many people seemingly still know very little about social media, generally speaking. Related to that, I’m fascinated by people’s fascination with the fact that I’m a scientist who’s gotten interested in social media and Government 2.0 - to me it just makes sense. It’s just one big animal behavior problem.

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