I'm taking two classes this semester at Johns Hopkins - International Public Diplomacy and Public Relations in the Age of Digital Influence. This weekend, I've been immersed in Emanuel Rosen's book, "The Anatomy of Buzz Revisited," in what seems like the first moment of quiet I've had to just read and think in ages (thanks, blizzard!). I realized that a concept was beginning to emerge that was important, if not vital, to success in both public diplomacy and social media strategies: listening. Yep, listening.

A concept that seems so native to us is so difficult to put into practice. Listening is the silver lining of the successful case-studies that Rosen presents; the companies that listened to what their audiences wanted, whether it was to solve their grievances, answer questions, or even just to provide a way to easily contact the organization, were successful in their attempts to control the message they wanted to deliver to their audiences. Listening is the elusive task that any corporation wanting to make the most of word of mouth marketing or take advantage of the social media groundswell needs to master in order to craft a successful marketing strategy. But no one really does it.

My organization is a prime example of this. We set up both Facebook and Twitter pages just to be "involved" in the social media groundswell, without really listening to what our users wanted from us on these networks. How were these networks different from our website? Would they offer new, original content, or would they simply serve to expand the reach of the content on our website? Did our users expect us to talk to them, to engage them, to interact act with them, or to just pump out information? What did they want to know about us? Was social media important enough for us to allocate staff time and resources to it? Not having the answers to these questions is costing us to miss a prime opportunity to generate buzz around our organization using these incredibly powerful tools, especially in light of our new headquarters project that is beginning to become a visible part of the national mall's landscape.

Because of this, we can't quite call our presence on these sites a success yet, because we haven't even begun to do the initial listening and research. Stephen Colbert, the host of this year's Grammy's, asked his daughter several times during the show, "am I cool now?" She kept shaking her head. And I keep shaking mine because just having a presence on these sites, just like being present at the Grammy's, does in no way make us "cool." We have to actually do something - interact, become part of the the community, and give our users what they're looking for, just like how an artist at the Grammy's who performs something or wins something engages audiences and gives them something to talk about, to have a successful presence.

Similarly, listening is a vital, yet underused tool in public diplomacy. So many campaigns fail because they don't address what people want, or don't answer the questions people are looking for. Take the State Department's failed Shared Values campaign, for example. The undersecretary of public diplomacy commissioned a series of videos showing Muslims happily living in America. The videos were shown to Muslim audiences abroad in an effort to help combat growing anti-American sentiment. In the end, the campaign was deemed a failure. Anti-American sentiment was growing out of a dislike of U.S. foreign policies, and not out of a dislike of American culture or Muslims living in America. State department officials had failed to listen, and therefore, failed to address the root of a growing international problem.

Listening is essential to any marketing strategy. And because the Internet is identified as an important facilitator of buzz, companies and organizations should use the myriad of tools available to them online - RSS readers, search engines, newsletters, forums, etc - to listen to what their audiences are discussing and how they are doing it before attempting a strategy. Listening will help organizations identify what triggers conversation, what people are reacting to positively and negatively, and what the best ways are to engage audiences online and will help ensure an organization's success. We also shouldn't forget what Rosen points out in his book: listening is just the first part of a process. It must be in tandem with some type of action for it to be successful.

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.

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.

We the Media: The Death of Professional Journalism?

I think my greatest fear was realized last semester in a class I took called "Journalism in the Digital Age." My undergraduate degree is obsolete.

I was a dual major in broadcast journalism and international relations at Syracuse University - graduating from one of the top communications schools in the country, The Newhouse School.

Sadly, everything I learned culminating in my top-rate (and very expensive) degree was shot down by my last class and by Dan Gillmor's book "We the Media: Grassroots Journalism By the People, For the People" which sadly realizes the demise of professional journalism and applauds citizen journalism as the future of journalism.

All the standards of professional journalism, the inverted pyramid method of writing, the ethics and morals that journalists should hold when reporting a story are no longer reserved for a trained elite group of "journalists". Today, anyone can be a journalist without any sort of formal training. This brings about an interesting debate of journalism as an activity vs journalism as a profession. Which is it? I graduated thinking that it is a profession - but today's media landscape, and Gillmor's book are undoubtedly proving me wrong. Citizen journalists are proving that journalism is an activity that anyone can participate in.

I'm not denying the power of citizen journalism. In fact, I am a citizen journalist, spreading news and coming up with original ideas through my blog and my Twitter page. But citizen journalism also brings up many complex questions: what about the ethics, morals, and standards that are associated with journalism as a profession? How do laws that protect journalists and freedom of the press apply to citizen journalists, such as a bloggers? While I agree with Gillmor that citizen journalism - "grassroots journalism" - is changing the media landscape and changing the power and influence that "Big Media" companies have held throughout history, I still believe that a business model outlining a symbiotic relationship between grassroots and professional journalism will be the successful one moving forward. Gillmor outlines several business models including the "tip jar" (paying bloggers and other independent writers to cover stories that people want to hear), advertising, paid/content/subscription models, and niche publishing, or "nano publishing" - sites that target very small specific users. Niche groups can appeal to advertisers wanting to reach a particular demographic.

Take the example of OhMyNews, the South Korean news site that's based on citizen journalism that Gillmor looks at as a case-study in his book. Their model is based on the symbiotic relationship described above - they employ a core of professional editors and journalists and then solicit articles, columns, interviews and more from a cadre of citizen journalists. The professional editors then select the stories from the citizen journalists based on their meeting journalistic standards such as integrity, factual accuracy, style, etc. This "collision of journalism and technology" as Gillmor says, is helping to facilitate the rise of citizen journalism: giving citizens the power to select and create the news they digest.

I spend most of my time at work touting the benefits of technology and how empowering it can be. Similarly, Gillmor takes us on a quick trip through the evolution of the Internet, where he explains how the "read only" web developed into the "read/write" web that calls for active participation among users through wikis, blogs, etc. This type of technology is the vehicle for grassroots journalism and can help us understand the direction journalism is moving in and can help us devise successful models for the future.

The Argument: Inside the Battle to Remake Democratic Politics

You can tell when an author is a journalist. Their books are smooth, easy to read pieces that make sense and somehow make complicated topics easy to digest. Matt Bai, author of "The Argument: Inside the Battle to Remake Democratic Politics" and a journalist covering American politics for the New York Times Sunday Magazine accomplishes the task of showing how grassroots organizations are becoming major political movements and are reshaping a major political party in this country through mechanisms such as the Internet. He portrays a brilliant inside look at the inner workings of the Democratic party.

His behind-the-scenes look at the relationship between grassroots movements like MoveOn.org and blogs such as The Huffington Post and The Daily Kos (both of which I read weekly, if not daily), and huge political players like Howard Dean, Bill Clinton, the Democracy Alliance clearly shows the internal power struggles, obsession with the Republican party, and the clash of egos that have prevented the Democratic party from expanding, succeeding, and become a coherent party with a coherent "argument". While politics are clearly more complex than simple partisanship, Bai points out that the agonizing blows dealt by a cohesive and strong Republican party and the disaster left behind by the Bush administration gave the progressive party the right motivation it needed to regroup and reorganize. The election of Obama was only the first taste of sweet victory for the Democratic party; how he will actually implement his coherent message of "change" has yet to be seen. But the opportunity is there.

This type of comparison kind of reminds me of the organization of the Israeli lobby and the progress they have made through their strategic organization and leadership, as compared to other groups who could benefit from such structure and organization and a clear communications message, such as the Palestinians. Has anyone ever read The Israel Lobby? If not, you definitely should. It's an amazing look into the organization and structure and power of AIPAC (The America Israel Public Affairs Committee). It proves that having a coherent message (or an "argument") will help you succeed. It proves that new ideas backed by effective strategies also help you succeed. It's precisely what the Democratic party needs, according to Bai.

Perhaps most interesting is Bai's account of a MoveOn.org party/bbq he attended that was organized by someone energized by his disdain for FOX news and his Republican neighbor. What Bai noticed at this party was a critical notion to understanding political movements online: the participants were not young, tech savvy kids who are stereotypically known to be the ones controlling the Internet Age; but they were middle-class suburban adults who, for some time now, have felt disenfranchised by American politics, as Bai points out. MoveOn.org helps organize these people and provides a forum to connect with one another and allow their voices to be heard.

After reading the book, I decided to do some research about Matt Bai and his book and discovered that the book was quite controversial, and was actually the only political book in 2007 to be named a New York Times Notable book. I was really impressed by this book - I think Bai has an interesting take on progressive politics and I think he highlights the challenges facing American politics accurately.

Care2 and Online Advocacy

Care2 is an online advocacy group that I first heard about in Rigby's book (see posts below). The do some pretty cool stuff, so I've decided to get involved by following them on Twitter, and attending a release of an e-campaigning benchmark report they are hosting with Advocacy Online. The event is actually an exclusive simultaneous live webcast in Washington, Toronto and London. I'm hoping to learn a bit more about what works with online advocacy and campaigning, the most effective ways to organize people in a virtual world, and hopefully, this report will also be able to lay out best practices. I'm starting to really get into the strategy behind these campaigns. I'll report back on what I learn. The event is on October 13.

Person-to-Person-to-Person

It really doesn't seem so hard to use social networking to your advantage - but in reality, it is.

A group of leading expert thinkers on the strategy and the how-to behind maximizing the benefits from social networking sites teamed up to write Person-to-Person-to-Person: Harnessing the Political Power of Online Social Networks and User Generated Content (PDF), published by the Institute for Politics, Democracy and the Internet at George Washington University, and they say that social networks should be a part of a multi-faceted Internet strategy.

This stuff is so interesting to me because it's so new and the rules of the game on the Internet are so flexible. While bringing up some very salient points that all users of social media should remember in order to be successful (keep your information up-to-date, be active in an online community, and build trust among users), the report also suggests very interesting ideas for success such as promoting more user-generated content (letting go of the reigns of control seems to be a difficult thing for many organizations, including mine!) and using the Internet to research and learn more about your demographics and audiences before attempting to target them (the report offers gather.com, asianavenue.com, momsrising.com and more as good research sites). Another measure of success is the ability to translate online action into offline action, or even vice versa, such as in the case of townhall.com. A conservative talk radio company purchased the community website to harness the power of their listeners; the website has now become a place for interactivity, conversation, discussion, and blogging. They therefore turned a passive activity such as listening into activism through Internet technology.

The report also discusses the importance of youth, a historically forgotten demographic. Youth have proven to be strong social movers and shakers and, according to this report, social media strategies should be geared toward attracting and energizing youth as a primary audience. They're the ones who are more likely to use the Internet as a part of their daily lives because they are more accustomed to it, having grown up during the Internet boom.

Another key point that this report makes that I thought was interesting is the role of the "influencer" or the "leader". Finding these people are essential to online success using social networks. Influencers and leaders aren't necessarily people with big jobs or big titles, according to the report, or even people with big names. They are the people with established networks who helps to inform people and successfully changes their minds. Spending time and effort finding and talking to these people is not only beneficial but important in reaching others. These people can also help move online information offline easily.

Why has the Internet been so successful with "bringing grassroots back" as the report says? I think its simply because of convenience. We're in the information-overload age. We are too busy, too tired, and have too many people in our lives to take care of and worry about. Many of us aren't financially or physically able to participate in live demonstrations, protests, or other methods of real-life activism on issues we care about.

The Internet solves this dilemma. We can be contributing citizens, we can rally and organize groups, we can socialize with one another, we can inform each other, we can serve as the highest form of checks and balance for our government and we can bring down corrupt politicians, journalists and others by never leaving our desks.

We just have to let go of our controls and let the audiences speak.

Twitter Strategy for Gov Departments

Found an awesome template outlining a strategy for governments using Twitter:

http://blogs.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/digitalengagement/post/2009/07/21/Template-Twitter-strategy-for-Government-Departments.aspx

These points seem especially critical to me:

• To set clear objectives and metrics to make sure there's a return on the investment of staff time (and if there isn’t, we’ll stop doing it)
• To make sure the channel is used consistently and carefully, to protect corporate reputation from silly mistakes or inappropriate use
• To plan varied and interesting content, and enthuse those who will provide it into actively wanting to do so.

Using Social Networking: Twitter and USIP

The U.S. Institute of Peace is a Congressionally funded think-tank that I've worked at for nearly 4 years now. It's an interesting paradox because we're not a federal agency, but we're funded by Congress. We're not an advocacy group, but our goal is to share our research and tools for peacebuilding and peacekeeping. Here's our mission statement:

The United States Institute of Peace is an independent, nonpartisan, national institution established and funded by Congress. Its goals are to help:

• Prevent and resolve violent international conflicts
• Promote post-conflict stability and development
• Increase conflict management capacity, tools, and intellectual capital worldwide

The Institute does this by empowering others with knowledge, skills, and resources, as well as by directly engaging in peacebuilding efforts around the globe.

Therefore, in order to be effective and continue to receive funding, engaging people with our work is essential to our success. One of the primary strategies is using the web to disseminate and share our work. I manage and help create the online strategy for USIP.org.

Social networking is becoming an increasingly important part of the strategy of USIP.org, which I help craft. This strategy is a continual process that grows and evolves with trends and the needs of our audiences.

Recently, we've improved the webcasting capabilities of USIP.org. USIP often convenes public events relevant to current political issues. We've had to come up with innovative ways to reach our global audience that aren't always able to attend events in Washington. One of the ways we've chosen to do this, in addition to webcasting, is through social networking tools on the web.

On Monday, (9/21) we'll be hosting a live webcast of one of our events on preventing mass atrocities. Should be quite interesting. During the live stream, I'll be able to monitor how many people are logged in watching. In addition to advertising this event through email blasts and on our site's homepage, we've also looked at interactive ways to promote this event. USIP hosts a twitter page that I manage and am involved in. It has about 700 followers. We've advertised there too - and on Friday, I discovered that Twitter offers a neat little widget that allows you to embed live Twitter updates into your website. I'm trying to experiment and discover the best ways to maximize our visibility on Twitter, and how engaging in dialogue with users of the Twitter network can help my organization better understand what type of information interests our audiences.

We've assigned someone to tweet live during the event and assigned the event a hash tag to engage our followers in a discussion. I've also embedded the Twitter widget onto our event webpage so that users can watch the live webcast and read our tweets during the event simultaneously in one place.

Like Ben Rigby says in his book Mobilizing Generation 2.0: A Practical Guide to Using the Web, using Web 2.0 tools appropriately is a successful method of engaging the public - especially youth. Rigby calls the Twitter service "microblogging": a short, informal way to have a conversation with an audience. Our ultimate goal is to engage people on policy issues related to peacebuilding through Web 2.0 tools such as microblogging.

My next posts - on Sunday and Monday - will be review the Ribgy book in more detail (so far, I highly recommend it as a go-to beginner's handbook on Web 2.0 tools. It's perfect for someone who's looking for background information to convince their organization to use Web 2.o, or who just wants to have a basic understanding of the tools) and I'll be reporting back on the success of using USIP.org's Web 2.0 strategies to engage in a two-way conversation with our audiences. I'll be monitoring how many people are logged in to the live webcast to see if our online marketing efforts paid off and I'll also be monitoring our Twitter status to see how many people engage us in conversation, how many people "retweet" our tweets, or mention us in their own posts (this would have a desirable viral effect.. more on that later), and I'll be working with our specialist who is tweeting live during the event to ensure that we are following the instructions carefully outlined in Rigby's book: keeping the messages short, conversational, and most of all, human.

Happy weekend.