The Cluetrain Manifesto is quite the classic. I got several comments on it from people who saw me holding it as I was reading. Although a little outdated, its copyright is 2000, its an interesting package of 95 "theses" organized into a coherent manifesto for any businessman, business owner struggling to make sense of the Internet boom and the digital arena.

I wish everyone in my organization could read this book. Although it starts off with some pretty obvious observations - the Internet has changed the way we communicate, markets need to adapt, blah blah blah - it does present some interesting solutions on how to adapt. If only people were willing to adapt. I work in an organization comprised of ex-government employees -- former Foreign Service Officers, ex-CIA employees, etc etc and for some reason, this particular breed of Washingtonian is incredibly stuck in their ways. They refuse to recognize the power that the Internet holds to radically change the way they conduct their work. They even fail to recognize the power the Internet holds in changing the political landscape - facilitating peace and negotiation and garnering support for political issues.

The 95 theses, I would say, center around a few major themes: The Internet as a virtual marketplace, the role of organizations in this transformative communications environment, the impact of this technology internally on organziations and employee communications, and how organizations can connect with this virtual marketplace. Rather than attempting to predict the future, the authors of the Cluetrain Manifesto actually set the path for the future, making this book remarkable and important for any digital strategist to read.

In other readings I came across on the Web about this book, it seems as though many unanimously agree that this book just "won't die" and the principles it proposed ten years ago are still highly debated and considered today. What's shockingly weird though is how BAD the cluetrain's website is! For a book that imparts so much information about Internet strategy, etc, the website is an absurdly bad display of design principles and strategy. Go figure.

Millenial Makeover

No wonder "Millenial Makeover" is one of the NYT Favorite Books of 2008 - it discusses some of the most pressing issues of our time: how social media affects elections and politics. The book discusses how the winning party will successfully use and keep up with technology. This technology, according to the book, is rapidly changing the political environment.

It does a fairly decent job of describing the current political environment, and predicting the future - tracing how technology changed everything from pop culture, such as music and movies, to national politics. I'd like to think of myself as a "millenial," the way the book describes them - the early adopters of society, the optimistic politically and economically, the ultimate group that every marketer wants to reach because they are the movers and shakers. It's the ultimate book for anyone wanting to learn more about and understand this millenial generation - how to reach them, identify what they want, and give it to them. It provides surprising insight into the 2008 elections -- which set a precedent for using technology to gain support quickly and efficiently. The book also discusses how campaign techniques - fundraising, advertising, etc - have been revolutionized by millenial thinkers and technology.

The insights offered in this book are valuable to anyone wanting to understand domestic politics and their correlation with the technological world.

Online Political Advertising

Yet another reading in the series edited by Julie Barko Germany from the Institute for Politics, Democracy and the Internet at George Washington University, "Best Practices for Political Advertising Online" again brings together the best in the field to contribute chapters on how the Internet is changing the political landscape. Focusing on one of the tools with the most potential for generating profit, paid advertising through search engines and other marketing tactics online, this publication shows that developing an Internet marketing strategy is both beneficial and necessary in today's media environment.

Because online advertising eliminates the physical costs of print and production, political advocacy groups can save time and money through online advertising. Search engine optimization has become more of a profession these days, and hiring someone to optimize your website to drive traffic to it and managae and maintain your online ad campaigns such as Google AdWords could be a valuable investment. Although online advertising is a relatively new field, this publication points out "best practices" in the field and advises groups to plan ahead and budget accordingly. The report also makes a good case for using online advertising and shows how a group can target a particular demographic, and reach voters online.

I compared the search engine marketing, online display advertising, and online lead generation best practices from this report to what we're doing at my organization, the U.S. Institute of Peace. Search engine marketing is perhaps the most important strategy, as it drives users back to your Web site and points them to the content you'd like them to see based on keywords. SEO (search engine optimization) uses meta-tags that are embedded in the code of the website and tell search engines what type of content appears on the page. While at USIP we concentrate heavily on this, we have failed to develop a good set of metrics in order to judge our success. SEO will become more interesting with Web 3.0 - where taxonomy, a standard set of key words to describe a page, will be replaced by folksonomy, a set of words that users develop to describe a page. Tagging and tag clouds will also be an important part of SEO.

USIP has not yet developed a strategy for using online display advertising, although this paper makes a good case for using banners and flash ads across the web to target particular demographics. Creating an online advertising network can help expand the reach of an organization or political candidate's website.

And lastly, the paper talks about using lead generation, or recruitment to gain donors and supporters. Using a CRM like Salesforce can help with this strategy because it will help organizations track people's interests and keep a record of their interactions with the organization, such as by phone, or email, or physical mailings. Although this paper describes lead generation as cost-effective -- in reality, purchasing a CRM database like Salesforce is very expensive and requires an administrator - it is a crucial aspect of reaching and retaining constituents in any political advertising campaign.

Online advertising should also be important to traditional media outlets today -- as more and more are migrating to the web, they will have to look to the Internet for ways to generate profits.