Final Project - Suggestions for a New Social Media Plan for President Obama

The following is the basis for a plan for a new social media presence for President Obama. It is not a comprehensive plan but rather what I think is most important for him to do. It is essentially an attitude shift, from seeing the role of the President as dispensing facts and generic official opinions to wading deeply into the national debate and inviting citizens to engage the President.

Response 3

It seems to me that everything the authors are excited about is illustrated in the Chapter 12 section, "a day in the life of the ubiquitous groundswell." It also illustrated everything that I am fearful of.

When I picture myself in this picture, I see a frenetic and unrelenting lifestyle where I must start my work as soon as I wake up, without time to bring myself into the day; the day bombards me with itself before the crust is out of my eyes. Perhaps breakfast is a quick banana and lunch will be a quick sandwich, never wanting to be distracted from the all-consuming responsibility of whatever product I am trying to popularize. "Drop[ping] off the grid" and knowing that "the groundswell can wait for a moment" entails only shopping for someone else and a rushed meal.

And my mind would be inundated by numbers. Twenty-five percent of this, 13 of that. Will I really know what it means? If 75% of comments are positive, are those tentatively positive or solidly positive? How many of those comments are negative or neutral but are mistaken by machines as positive because those machines pick up an extraneous word or cannot detect sarcasm? For that matter, how many positive comments are missed? I will act on that number because I do not have time to check the results but how accurate was my information?

It scares me because I know that employers would expect me to lead this lifestyle and I know that fellow employees would encourage it by complementing my hard work. But where is the time to relax? Can I hike without checking the reach of my product or spend a weekend away without wondering what the newest color is? Everything changes so fast that even a camping trip or "off-the-grid" trip to Toronto from New York would put myself and my company at a disadvantage. If checking stats as soon as I wake up and rushing a sandwich to check comments is necessary, than I'm not sure I ever could disconnect from the grid.

I guess what I learned from this class is that I am wary of working in the groundswell. I find it fascinating and challenging and I love when I get a chance to work on my blog. I was excited when I created a Twitter feed for my blog and when I re-organized the design but I don't think any of it is worth the sacrifice of full immersion and I do think that working in the groundswell requires full immersion. Everything changes too fast and there is too much information to not be fully immersed.

The thing is, I would never be able to think or relax. I'd be worried about wasting time if I were on vacation and my boss would be worrying about lost business when I didn't check my email over the weekend. If I lived such a frenetic lifestyle for my whole life, I don't think I would enjoy myself.

Social O #2

I've started recording the strength, sentiment, passion, and reach for Obama on Social Mention, as well as the same for Boehner and Palin. After the jump are graphs, the first of which is of stats for Obama and the other four are for each stat individually, tracking all three terms (Obama, Boehner, Palin). It is difficult to draw conclusions from these findings yet, as I have only been tracking the stats for five days. However, there are some trends that I see.

Social O #1

President Obama sailed into office in part on his and his staff's ability to understand the proclivities of the young and the plugged in. Playing no small part was his web presence. However, his web presence is decidedly, predictably, and understandably no longer as compelling now that he is President. How is he faring the web's infinite jungle?


So this is Part 1 and it is going to address my opinion of President Obama's social media presence. It will study how the President's presence affects voters' proclivities rather than how well it informs citizens. It is neither a definitive study nor a purely statistical analysis. It is primarily how I, as a voter and Obama supporter, feel about the President's presence, although there is research to support my biased opinions. In future analyses, I will take a more objective approach, but I feel that to introduce this study to myself and yourself, it is important to understand this as a member of the target audience rather than as a theoretical outside observer.

Argument Key (in case you get lost):

1. Introduction

2. First impression after Addictomatic etc... searches

3. Why the President's social media isn't permeating the most common debate threads

4. Is this lack of permeation good, bad, or in between?


5. Potential for improvement

$$$ (Original #2)

Social media is used for more than the furtherance of brands. Social media websites are brands unto themselves and owners of these sites are beginning to sell them to make money. They use themselves to create value.

The Huffington Post is selling for $315m. Twitter is valued at $3.7b, may have been offered $500m by Facebook in a sale proposal, and  is seeing JP Morgan look to use some of its growth fund to acquire a 10 percent minority stake in the company. Facebook has been valued at $50b and Goldman Sachs has invested $450m while trying to attract another $1.5b from investors.

Where does this money come from? How are these sites able to make enough money to justify the billions in value and millions in investment? Twitter is expected to post $50m and Facebook $2b in revenue for the 2010 financial year, while the Huffington Post earned $30m, presumably from selling ad space. Twitter has an uncertain revenue model but has a rough plan to make money off "Promoted Tweets," or tweets that will be more prominent under certain search terms (it reminds me of Google adwords). Facebook's revenue model is a multi-faceted one based on ads, applications and credits. An attractive graphical explanation of Facebook's model can be found here. Given that these sites are expected to grow, it seems reasonable to assume that large investments can be recouped and profits made after a couple of years.

However, these profits haven't yet been justified. As the companies are private, there is no public and definite proof of revenue. More important though, even if the figures above are correct, these companies may be overvalued. Facebook for instance, is trading shares without being a public company but those shares are trading at 25-30 times its annual revenue, so that the writer of the former link declares it the most overvalued company and calls for us to remember the tech bubble and Amazon's steep devaluation. As the writer of the latter article says, the secondary markets on which these values are being determined are mercurial and prone to trendy exaggeration. Oh, and that writer also says that Twitter may soon be traded at 45 times its annual revenue.

So where will this go? Personally, I don't see how Twitter could be worth billions off an adwords-like option alone. Facebook is certainly innovative but what it offers seems to me to be so disposable that its pay-for-service features will always be on the precipice of relevance. As for the Huffington Post, read my post on it to see why I think readership (and therefore ad revenue) will fall. But none of this is to say I don't think these companies are worthless. I just think they are benefiting from the financial world being taken with the latest fad.

Do you think these companies are - or could be - worth as much as they are believed to be worth?

The Mess on HuffPo (Original #3)

It seems to me that the current trend in design is to keep things simple. We are bombarded by so much information that it is important for organizations to tell us exactly where to focus and to keep multiple ideas conveniently organized. For example, Barack Obama's presidential campaign used simple and sleek designs, like the famous "O," as well as simple words and phrases like "change," "hope," and "yes, we can."

Social media in general tends to embrace simplicity, with strict character limits on tweets and the easy white and light blue of Facebook. What comes to mind is Jesse Eisenberg in "The Social Network" saying "nice and simple" (or something like that, I saw the movie a while ago) when explaining to Eduardo why the soon-to-be-launched Facebook relied on minimalism of design. I also think of Twitter's character limits that reduce all thoughts to the bare minimum, at-replies and hashtags that rely on old short symbols to add an entire layer of context, and the icons websites like Digg use as buttons on webpages to reference those webpages on said websites. Simplicity is key in today's world and social media has naturally picked up on (and driven?) this trend.

So it confuses me that the Huffington Post has such a messy homepage (at least in my opinion). The first thing you see when you click onto the website is usually a large headline and picture about the latest development in whatever issue is currently trending. It is harsh and very in-your-face, where Twitter and other popular sites tend to be quieter.

Then you notice a jumble of text under the picture and your mind doesn't know where to focus. As you scroll down, you see three columns, only the leftmost of which seems to have a unifying theme (featured writers and/or posts). The other two cover a plethora of topics, and again there isn't an obvious place to focus. In general, the page seems messy and I think that is unappealing.

Now, it would seem that I am wrong in saying that this is a big problem, given that the Huffington Post is so popular. It is considered one of, if not the, most popular political website and just sold for $315m. However, an audience profile reveals that HuffPo is increasingly popular as you move up age demographics. In fact, 68% of readers are 35 and older and only in the 35-49 and 50+ age groups does HuffPo exceed total internet population. To me, this means that it is older readers who are driving the site's popularity and that the site may have an uncertain future as it struggles to adapt to emerging reader proclivities.

Given that blogs are declining in popularity and that people increasingly have shorter attention spans that make it difficult to even read moderately length-ed  online articles, those who run the Huffington Post may need to temper their expectations for HuffPo and determine whether they even want to bend to the demands of emerging consumers. I think that if they do want to bend to those demands, they should start by redesigning the homepage.

It is important to focus the attention of people bombarded with stimuli and organize information presented in an increasingly complex and stressful world. Other blogs, like Daily Kos, are neater. I personally like the design of The Atlantic Wire and SB Nation. The Wire is clean and simple and both websites are well-organized, avoid excessive clutter, and ensure that you always know the theme of the column you are looking at.  It may mean reducing the number of features but HuffPo may be wise to trim around the edges and look more like one of these sites.

Do you think HuffPo should change its look?

Balancing the Formal and the Informal (Reflection #2)

I feel that the reading didn't delve into how to regulate use social media. I don't think it went beyond stating that it is very useful and it seems to me that using it effectively is complex. What I wonder about the most is how companies trying to use social media balance the informality of the medium and the formality of being a professional organization. A big reason for the popularity of social media is its democratizing effect, where the relationship between entities becomes more familiar and consequently less formal (or possibly it's the other way around).

However, large organizations such as the New York Times or even Twitter must appear professional so as to avoid alienating segments of their audience. By doing so, they may be less appealing to some but at least they are not driving others away. For example, and similar to Lesley's point, Tweeters such as Shaq can harness informality in part by taking grammatical liberties but organizations like the Peace Corps or Starbucks cannot. Of course, organizations are also inhibited by the need to stay on-message.

I think news organizations have the easiest time with this because they can simply tweet recently released stories and employ bloggers to write more opinions. The New York Times, for instance, tweets only news stories while having some of its better-known journalists maintain Twitter feeds. The latter is a way of providing breaking news and allowing people to follow specific journalists who interest them, i.e. Nicholas Kristof, and the former creates a place for the loyal reader to find a simple and organized list of the latest pieces to read. The NY Times also employs people who write only online pieces (or people who write both online and print pieces), so that their opinion section is more substantive, easier to lose yourself in, and generally more engaging.

It gets more complicated with companies like Dell, which primarily engage with consumers through product sales rather than something like writing, which is inherently more personal. While there was still an opportunity to benefit from the "groundswell," while Dell realized, as the authors point out, that "authenticity was crucial," (pg. 211), the organization still felt a need to "delete [comments] that were considered inappropriate" (pg. 204). This top-down regulation presents the risk of negatively impacting authenticity, especially in an environment where managers "aren't used to sharing at that level [of transparency]" (pg. 209). One might worry, for example, that his/her company will miss its "flaming laptop" moment for fear of over-exposure or filter a comment like Jeff Jarvis's for offensive language.

I know that companies have a need for formality but I would have liked for the authors to delve deeper into effective ways of dealing with such issues. For example: what rules might a company put in place to regulate comments and commentary so as to filter useless and/or offensive opinions without missing a "flaming laptop" or "Dell hell moment?" Such questions seem to me to me to be present but never answered in the chapter.