A while back, TechCrunch ran an intriguing article on Obama's use of social media and its possible implications for what could be a game-changing presidency:
Is Obama Ready To Be a Two-Way President?
The article poses a what-if question: what if Obama, rather than simply using services like Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter to broadcast to voters, actually allowed people like you and me to communicate with him by the same means?
"If Obama dedicates a team aside from the outbound crew that "pushes" content through social channels in order to strategically reach, listen to, and embrace the 46% who voted against him, he might be able to run a truly democratic term. It could also curtail the necessity to campaign as much while in office in order to focus on the issues we elected him to fix."
The author (Brian Solis) proposes that Obama should use sites like Change.gov to really open up the communications between President and constituent, going so far as to solicit policy suggestions from individual visitors and allow the community to vote these ideas up and down.
It's a powerful idea. Anyone who has lived through more than one presidential election is familiar with the process of candidates struggling to appear like men (or women) of the people while on campaign, only then to disappear behind closed doors in Washington once the election is won. The idea that Obama would set a new trend in which high elected representatives would remain in touch with the man on the street is a powerful evocation of the American political myth, as if it were a scene from an updated version of "Mister Smith Goes to Washington." The manager in me can't resist pointing out some parts of the idea that seem unrealistic -- does a sitting president really have the time to regularly record podcasts and engage in live exchanges with voters via the Web? Does the mystique of the presidency allow for candid, behind-the-scenes webcasts? -- but I can't deny the basic appeal of the idea.
I'd like to believe it can happen, too, but then I also read Newsweek's issue on the campaign. The "How He Did It" series of articles is an excellent account of the candidates and their campaign staffs, and I came away disappointed in how little I heard of Obama's social-networking efforts. They were mentioned -- Obama's digital team gets about three-fourths of a page in one of the articles -- but those mentions did not convey a sense that the Web was viewed as particularly important by the people running the campaign. Having read those articles, I now know more about David Axelrod's taste in soft drinks than I do about the campaigns' core digital strategy. Of course, there's a chance that old-school reporters simply don't understand what is happening right in front of them, but you have to ask: if social media were really that important to the Obama campaign, if the campaign's managers valued their digital strategy all that highly, would that not have eventually become apparent to the people who followed that campaign for months at a time?
I don't doubt that the Internet changed American politics for good this time out. If there's one thing politicians understand, it's money, and Obama outspent his opponent three-to-one on the basis of small contributions from individual donors. That's a game-changer right there, and every serious presidential candidate in the next campaign will reach out to web properties in an attempt to duplicate Obama's success. Crowd-sourcing the American government, though, is a much more radical step, one which raises very serious questions about practicality and proper implementation. It is also one which we have as of yet no reason to think that Obama will embrace.
I appreciate the passion of the TechCrunch piece -- and "passion" is a word I'd like to apply to TechCrunch more often -- but it describes a dream, not a reality. I look forward to seeing that dream represented in the updated "Mr. Smith" -- starring Wil Smith, no doubt, and coming soon to a theater near you.
There's a good post today on Publishing 2.0, on the virtues of link journalism:
Link Journalism Drives Page Views and Engagement
"Link journalism," in a nutshell, is publishing content that consists almost entirely of links to other content. Usually this sort of thing attracts two types of criticism: that it's a lazy substitute for actual content generation, and that it's a suicidal surrender of visitors to a competitor's site. I can attest to many meetings I've attended in which one idea or another was shot down for the sole reason that it would send visitors away from the site, rather than keeping them around. Let's call this the flypaper model of site design: it seeks to trap visitors on the site, whether they want to be there or not.
The article above notes how wrong-headed this was: it talks about a page on a Tennessee Volunteers fan site that gets twice as many page views as any other page, despite the fact that it consists entirely of links to stories on other sites. Partly this is due to the fact that the page in question focuses on a breaking-news topic of great interest to the site's readers, but to explain it away as an exceptional case would miss a valuable point:
Aggregating links to content on other sites solves a problem for your readers.
We work in an attention economy. There is far too much information out there for anyone to assimilate on their own. For people who are interested in following news in general or even developments within a specific topic, this creates anxiety: maybe something important or interesting is happening RIGHT NOW and they won't hear about it. That's a problem, and the site that solves that problem will immediately go into their list of favorite web destinations. We can call this the banquet model of site design, since it presents visitors with a tasty spread of content that tempts them to return the next time they feel hungry for information.
In short, there are two ways to send visitors away, one good and one bad. You can send them away in a fashion that leaves a lasting negative impression of your site, or you can send them away feeling that your site is a good thing that gave them what they wanted. If you're in the latter category, the visitors who leave your site via external links will probably come back in time. Solve a big or pressing problem, and they'll come back repeatedly (and maybe even bring their friends).
I've been working my way through the Razorfish vision document that I referenced in a previous post. At 84 pages, it's a weighty PDF download and not something that you really want to force your way through in one go. There are some good ideas scattered amongst those pages, though, and I'll be blogging on a few of them here. The first comes as a useful insight into building a site around individual experience:
"People want to feel special and tend to reach out to the things that make them feel that way. So, it's no surprise that people flock to social networks in droves; they make users feel like the star of their own lives. The same desires extend to companies, products and even TV networks. The lesson here is that socially-aware companies put customers and audiences at the center of their world, or at least make them a part-owner in it. The New York Times and most newspapers do this by simply highlighting the "most popular" articles other site visitors have read, searched or shared. CNN goes a step further and gives broadcast and digital airtime to user-generated, citizen journalist iReports. Nike does it too, by centering its Nike+ site on the user's profiles and the community's interactions, instead of its shoes. And Yahoo!, Google, and Coca-Cola go full bore--giving their entire home pages over to each user to "trick out" with their own MyYahoo! and iGoogle controls or Coke bottle designs. In all cases, the key is they make sure the spotlight is on the customers and not on themselves."
This is a critical insight, and one which I wish I had kept in mind when helping build video game websites over the past two years. On some level I think I already knew this, but it's easy to forget in a corporate environment where everyone knows the company's goals going in, and the developers come to the table with a list of features they're eager/willing to build, and the designers come with a vision for how the site should look and behave, and the marketing and product people have clear expectations of what messages should be pushed and where. The result is you end up with a site that's built to please developers, designers, product managers, and marketers. Is it really all that surprising, then, that customers find the results considerably less appealing?
But now imagine that you do the whole thing over, this time starting with a very simple premise: the site should make each visitor feel like a star. What does that mean in practical terms? Right off the bat, it means that when a visitor comes to the site for the first time, s/he should be asked to sign in, and every time after that the first thing s/he sees should be a personalized home page full of content that s/he has chosen. In my previous position we suggested that sites should include personalized home pages, but we never got anywhere because that was never a high enough priority. In the world where every visitor is a star, though, it's the highest priority of all.
Second, we should have been thinking of every visitor as the star of their own life. That means designing the site in such a way that they can bring aspects of their life onto the site, starting with a friends list that is platform-agnostic. We never discussed implementing OpenSocial or Facebook Connect, but we should have. Sure, not all of a visitor's friends are video game players, but it's his friends list, not ours. The universe revolves around the user, and the list of friends should not have been limited to the ones we were willing to display.
The third way we missed the boat was in displaying stats and leaderboards on our gaming sites that weren't focused on individual experience. We put up leaderboards that displayed the top-ranked players without really thinking about how that diminishes a person who is and never will be good enough at the game to be displayed there. On a site where you're the star, stats and leaderboards should tell your story; they should focus on what you're good at and highlight the areas where you have excelled. So you just completed your first online match and you finished fourth? That's great. You rock. Here's what you'll want to do next, and when you do, we'll help you brag about it, feel good about it, and have fun with it. Because it's all about you.
You begin to think completely differently about marketing when you imagine a site this way. In the old way of thinking, marketing was a general-purpose club used to bash every visitor over the head. The home page crawls with it: "Buy Now!" links, branded images, trademark bugs, and "news stories" that are actually warmed-over press releases. But a truly user-centered design might dispense with that home page altogether and redefine marketing as moments that occur within a customer's personal narrative:
"Don't have the game yet? When you're done viewing the trailer, we can introduce you to other people like you who are really enjoying it. If it sounds like fun, you can buy the game directly from this website."
"Just getting started? Struggling a bit? There are how-to videos in the media section, or you can buy this official strategy guide. Click here to download a free preview."
"Welcome back -- you originally signed up months ago, but you haven't visited in a while (and our records show that you haven't played online in nearly as long). Here's another game in the same genre that might prove more of a challenge, but don't forget that the sequel to this game is coming out in ten months -- click here to add that event to your personal calendar, and we'll send you an email when the demo is available for download."
I'm not a marketer, but I bet that would work pretty well. A one-size-fits-all marketing strategy never fits anyone for long, and in using it we train our visitors to ignore what we're saying. Marketing messages that address specific moments within a customer's personal narrative, though, are an actual value: they offer products to a visitor at a moment when s/he might really want those things. That's an effective strategy, and it starts with treating every user as a star.
