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William Ayers when he was young, idealistic & dangerous

If you were even remotely paying attention to the mud-slinging prior to the election, there’s no way you missed the Bill Ayers controversy - you know, the one that Sarah Palin latched on to to say that Obama was hanging around with terrorists. I have a lot to say about that, but I won’t. Instead, I point you to an Op-Ed piece written by Bill Ayers in Saturday’s NYTimes to illustrate an amazing display of restraint in these “pay attention to me” times.

There’s alot of conversation about responding quickly to negative posts online, particularly ones that have to do with personal or brand reputation (see the Motrin Moms controversy - anyone remember that?). The Bill Ayers story offers an opposing viewpoint. It posits that sometimes, the right decision is no response - avoiding the spotlight, take no calls from the media, make no comments on a blog. Total silence.

Instead of jumping into the fray, he let his personal reputation be battered, knowing that anything he said would be twisted and perhaps create worse problems for the Obama campaign. He stuck with this decision even though he received death threats. Even though it was probably very upsetting to read, hear and watch what was being said about him. He waited until after the election was over:

“With the mainstream news media and the blogosphere caught in the pre-election excitement, I saw no viable path to a rational discussion. Rather than step clumsily into the sound-bite culture, I turned away whenever the microphones were thrust into my face. I sat it out.”

Whether you agree with Bill Ayers or not, his decision, and the Op-Ed, show a grace and media skill not easily come by. He stated his ideals, apologized for indiscretions, and explained what he did (with the hindsight of more than 35 years as reflection). He defended his reputation now, when frankly, no one is paying attention. And he used one small paragraph to explain his limited association with President-elect Obama- plainly and simply.

In today’s wonder of instant media (and instant access to many viewpoints), it takes great courage to leave open the door of controversy and let vitriol die its own death. How would things have turned out if he had jumped in? What would have been the impact on the Obama campaign? Would Bill Ayers have opened himself up to an escalation of death threats?

What do you think? Would it have been better for him to speak out during the campaign?

Last night’s Mile High Social Media Club at The Whisky Bar in Denver was quite a happening. It’s great to see repeat attendees, plus many new ones as well. And, to top it off, the panel was terrific too.

Bryan Person did a great job of moderating the conversation about community. The focus of the evening was understanding community from the perspective of a community manager of a public community (not a private branded community). TIm Poindexter, from Disaboom, and Tiffany Childs from Denver’s Yelp community gave some interesting perspectives on:

• growing a young community and making it vibrant and engaging enough for members and others to want to participate
• managing a member who is trying to hijack a discussion
• dealing with people who violate the terms of service
• how companies can stay authentic within these communities (by being honest about who you are, good advice for anyone in a community)

It’s always interesting to hear what questions people have. Being as there were many PR people in the crowd, they got a number of questions about how to handle bad reviews (on Yelp), how to pitch story ideas to community bloggers and the community managers, and how to sponsor or advertise in the community without offending the members.

Thanks to the people at Flock for the T-shirts we were able to give to each of our speakers.

Our December event is in the process of being finalized, and is expected to be a breakfast in Broomfield, possible at Sun Microsystem’s offices at Interlocken - close enough to Boulder for those of you who find driving all the way to Denver just too much.

Stay tuned for details within the next week.

Though I am really sick of the whole #Motrinmoms controversy, here’s what I will say about it: Brands have treated women and moms the same way for a while - Motrin isn’t doing anything different than the folks at Mr. Clean, Swiffer, Fruit Loops or many others have done and continue to do. I wrote a post about this in August, after David Alston fumed about an ad pushing Fruit Loops as nutritious.

The reality is that brand perceptions of women consumers hasn’t progressed.

The suggested responses seem to me dull at best. What if Motrin served up a little self-deprecating humor? How quickly could a video be pulled together where the people at Motrin maybe stop taking themselves so seriously and poke fun at their own mistake?

Humor can be the best medicine.

November’s Mile High SMC promises to be fun, entertaining and educational:

What: Mile High SMC: Its all about Community - a panel of community managers on how to build community

When: November 19th, 2008, 5:30pm (preso starts at 6pm)

Where: Whiskey Bar in Denver

Featuring a converation with:

Moderator: Bryan Person

Panelists:

Tim Poindexter, Community Manager for Disaboom

Tiffany Childs, Yelp Denver Community Manager

Visit our Ning site to RSVP, or you can also access the Facebook event page if you prefer.

Great post today on copyblogger about the effects of social influence on the value of messages online - specifically, in social media. The gist of it, is, how you say it (your message) ends up being your message, so make sure to frame your initial message carefully. Read more, its worth the read: How to Change the World Using Social Media

Image via Wikipedia

The campaign is over. There are no more doors to knock on, no more registered voters to call. The sense of hope and accomplishment felt by the team I worked with at 372 Main Street in Longmont, Colorado, was very moving. It’s clear that our work in Longmont made a difference, not just for Barack Obama but for the congressional race as well. We helped sway the tide to enormous numbers of mail-in ballots and early voters, so the lines were sporadic at every polling place in Longmont. We got more people activated and out to vote.

Volunteering

Working with these dedicated volunteers was an absolute pleasure, and it reminded me how critical volunteerism is to the future of our country. In other efforts where I volunteer, it has become more and more of a struggle, in the past 5 years or so, to get people to commit time to volunteering, leaving fewer people to shoulder the work that would be more fun and rewarding if shared by more people. I truly hope that many of you who volunteered for the campaign will now spend time volunteering again in your local communities, helping out causes you believe in. Try it. You might be surprised at how it changes your outlook on life.

We live in a country where more and more people are unhappy and feel disconnected. Taking part in your local community is a good way to counter that disconnection.

The campaign

From the first day I volunteered with the Obama campaign, it felt different. The philosophy of voter activation was built on respect of people’s ideas. We were asked to never argue with people about their beliefs. The goal being that even if we disagree, its ok, and we can still be friendly and respectful. This worked well, as I was even thanked by some McCain supporters who just wanted to talk to someone about what they believed.

We were never to use any scare tactics, but try to engage people in a discussion on issues that were important to them. I have to say, even though there were some angry people we spoke to — yesterday, one of our canvassers got chased by a woman swatting a broom around — generally speaking, the experience was worthwhile, and made an impact for Obama. Even on nights where I would have a few people hang-up on me, others on the phone bank would tell heartening stories from their night, so we’d all leave feeling good about what we were doing, whether we had a good or a bad night.

What I learned

Sure, everything didn’t go smoothly. I’d get 5 reminder calls to come in and volunteer for shifts I didn’t sign up for. We ran out of literature. The data entry forms were prone to errors. But, the efforts were organized and created opportunities for a lot of people to help, like:

• Shawna, the school teacher who ran 3 canvass trainings a day every weekend, then went out and canvassed too
• Will, the Brit who came here on his own dime months ago to volunteer for the campaign and spent every day there
• the anonymous guy who’d drop off bags of Burger King hamburgers at lunch and dinner time
• Padma, who quit her job to volunteer full time for the campaign, running phone banks and being the resident trouble shooter
• the woman who coordinated all the food, providing us with delicious, home-cooked meals for lunch and dinner every day during the last weeks of the campaign
• all the people who canvassed, phone banked, did lit drops, drove people to the polls. Some did one shift, some did one shift a day, one shift a week
• June and the rest of the people who came from California last week to help with whatever was needed

It’s a testament to the inclusiveness of the campaign that this was a very diverse group of people - white and black, immigrants, English and Spanish speaking, gay and straight, high school and college students, young families, retirees, doctors, tech workers, single parents, people who work 2 jobs and people who don’t have a job.

The campaign is over, but the hard work is really just beginning. Don’t forget what Obama said last night — that we have to do this together. That means we all have to stop thinking about ourselves. Reach out and help others. Some can do the heavy lifting, some can do the smaller stuff (like buying the hamburgers). But everyone has to pitch in.

Rohit Bhargava shares his experiences as one of the 25 — and his take on its effectiveness - plus, there’s some good conversation in the comments as well:

Influential Marketing Blog: Unpacking The “Pepsi 25″ Social Media Rebranding Campaign.

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Embarq is in the thick of a launch of their YouTube channel. I know this because my friend Alisa, who works for iCrossing, told me about it.

The idea behind it is to post some how-to support videos for Embarq customers, and make them readily accessible on the web. I am not completely sure that I get the promo for it. The idea is that if you use Embarq for Internet access, your page downloads happen 48 seconds faster than dial-up (I know, dial-up? really? but, Embarq serves a more rural population that has less access to high-speed Internet). The promo is a contest. Make a video of what you would do with that 48 seconds, then submit it. They will award prizes soon to the winner. The disconnect for me is: what does the gained 48 seconds have to do with the customer support videos?

All the support videos are longer than 48 seconds. Hey, maybe that would have been a better gimmick - 48 second customer support videos to take you through various steps in signing up and troubleshooting. Anyway, from what I can see, if you submit a video, you probably have a good chance of winning, for two reasons:

1. not too many people have submitted videos
2. the bulk of the ones up there are not very good

What I want to know is, has it drawn attention to Embarq’s customer support videos? Are people viewing them more? Has it reduced the number of calls into tech or customer support? Has it improved customer opinion of Embarq? I know full well that the market for broadband services is filled with negative commentaries from unhappy customers — there are whole sites dedicated to this kind of customer-to-customer experience. I have no personl experience with Embarq, but know the problems faced by the players in this market.

The YouTube channel itself is very much promotion focused, and the videos with the most views are the “48 seconds” videos. I’ll be curious to see how this plays after the contest is over. How will Embarq direct traffic there? How will they continue to make use of this channel to support a customer service strategy?

Image via Wikipedia

I, as well as some other folks, have been thinking alot lately about influencer lists. Top 50 this, most influential that, etc. Are they a sham, do they have some value, what is the constant fascination and desire to be on one of these lists?

Then, yesterday, Pepsi sent out promo kits to 25 “influential” personalities in the social media space, to drum up discussion of Pepsi’s new logos. Now, certainly, there aren’t Pepsi influencers in social media. And, there’s no saying that Charlene Li, Chris Brogan, Peter Shankman and others have any interest in, or even drink Pepsi. In fact, I’d reason that perhaps one of the reasons these folks received these packages has to do with their personal/professional relationship with Pepsi’s new global social media strategist, my friend Bonin Bough. Or, their relationship with Steve Rubel, who’s PR firm does work with Pepsi.

So, does influence matter here, or really, is this more about personal connection? And, other than the blip from blog posts, flickr pix and tweets from yesterday, what will Pepsi gain from the experience? They’ve got 100+ subscribers to their pepsi cooler Friendfeed group. What’s that doing for them? Is the goal good will, warm fuzzies from the online community?

Thinking about this reminds me of when I went to pitch a measurement account to Crispin, Porter & Bogusky. Talking about influencer marketing when you’re pitching people who hawk french fries is, well, just a bit silly. There are no french fry influencers. The only people who might regularly talk about Burger King french fries are the food pundits, and they are not saying nice things about those french fries. So, trying to influence them as a way to sell more french fries isn’t a good strategy.

Pepsi has a deep challenge — like other mass market producers and big brands — how can they be highly targeted in social media, which is all about building connections, when they pitch a product with mass appeal? We’ve heard about many of the experiments that larger brands are making in social media, many of them failures or showing few tangible results. Smaller companies seem to do better, at least anecdotally, because they don’t have the scalability problem of big brands.

Maybe Pepsi will figure out the magic bullet in all this for the rest of the big brand marketers. Then again, maybe its just a cool experiment.

Mass market companies will continue to be challenged by the social media need (desire? opportunity?) to go small scale and targeted. It’s not a model they understand or are comfortable with.

Over the years that I’ve written this blog, one article consistently brings people to my site via search. What is it? A how-to post on how to write a multimedia script and storyboard. I’ve made a few minor updates to the article and corrected some weird text errors that must be from a recent Wordpress update. Follow the text link above to learn for yourself what’s worked for me in creating compelling multimedia and video scripts.