Peter Hirshberg's weblog on disruptive culture and technology

Summer of Smart: A San Francisco Experiment in Digital Democracy

 

Nine SF mayoral candidates debating.  Four months of innovative projects and prototypes. Three hackathons.  And an unconfernece.  Together they are the "Summer of Smart " [http://www.summerofsmart.org/home/] a four-month experiment in urban innovation led by the team at San Francisco's Gray Area Foundation for the Arts [www.gaffta.org] along with terrific partners. 

Over the course of this summer, urbanists of many disciplines -- developers, designers, planners, journalists, civic leaders, community activists -- are coming together to address some of the most pressing issues facing cities today. We're creating prototypes and projects in collaboration with San Francisco City Department of Technology and many of the candidates running for mayor here.  By inspiring innovation at the edges -- of disciplines, of skill sets, of communities -- we hope to show what San Francisco's creative capacity can accomplish using the emerging tools and techniques in government 2.0 and open data.  

There are three themes for the summer:  Community development and public art (June); energy, sustainability, transportation (July); and nutrition and public health  (August).   The formula: Brining talented people together for a too short period of time, with too big a goal leads to fast idea generation, fast compromise to get to the essence of those ideas, and original projects.  Candidates learn what Gov 2.0 thinking can actually do in a city and how to work with it. Technologists  immerse themselves in real urban problems and priorities.  

Summer of Smart began on Thursday June 16th with a debate among nine mayoral candidates on technology and open government. http://bit.ly/ig9y7a  

The next day TechCentral SF hosted a program  on Gamification for Food which explored how to influence  behavior change at urban scale. http://www.meetup.com/TechCentralSF/events/21593981/   

On Saturday it was onto CityCamp --- an unconfernece where where 200 urbanists came together and set the agenda for Summer of Smart.  (See article "Want to fix you're city? There's a camp for that! http://bit.ly/lNVets )  The conversation bubbled with the tweeting of ideas, candidates responding, and people around the world chiming in. To get a sense for all the energy, check out the twitter stream here: http://www.summerofsmart.org/ideas/  

We were joined by two candidates at CityCamp:

City Attorney Dennis Herrera showed off the San Francisco Fire App (It applies a crowdsource model to first responders: CPR trained individuals register with the app; in an emergency if they are nearby they can often respond well before first responders. App also stores the exact location of all public defribulators in the city. Cardiac patients often can't be saved because in an emergency its diffuclt to know where the nearest defibrilator is) 

And Joanna Rees talked citizen driven transportation planning http://vimeo.com/25337034

The following week saw our first hackathon and urban development weekend! About 100 creative technologies came together for 36 hours to create several projects in the realm of Community Development and Public Art.  On Friday night the group split into seven teams; by saturday night they had posted seven projects on the web. All the work is on the Summer of Smart project site http://www.summerofsmart.org/projects/

Some of the projects teams worked on included:

PUBLIC ART SPACES -Facilitating open and found spaces for creative culture.

PUBLIC ART MAPPER-Finding and cataloging San Francisco’s public art from the street.

BETWEEN THE STOPS-Every bus stop has a story.

GETVOLUNTEERED-What if volunteering could be as simple as going to the movies?

THE POST-The Post is a neighborhood bulletin board that bridges the online and street community for democratized expression.

We heard from three speakers to inspire us that weekend:  John Gage was Sun's Chief Scientist and created NetDay; he spoke on the blossoming role of citizen, artists, developer, data observer in creating a better civil society. http://vimeo.com/25843772  And Stanford's Margarita Quihuis talked of her pioneering work in the application of persuasive technologies for behavior change at urban scale.  http://vimeo.com/25839084 

Code for America CEO Jen PAHLKA was our closing speaker saturday-- she shared lots of practical urban examples. 

The project has brought together great partners and funders who are fascinated to explore citizen participation and digital democracy in an urban environment. The San Francisco Foundation is our lead foundation: they have deep connections with many community organizations and issues and provide a natural bridge between our creative technology community and SF based organizations. We are thrilled to be working with Code For America, Change.org, Govfresh SPUR, and Craig Newmark (of Craig's list), Serious Energy and  The San Francisco Department of Innovation.  

In the few weeks we've been at this I've come to realize that Government 2.0 is as much about citizens, engagement and innovation as it is about  the formal government itself.  Yes there are great swaths of government to modernize, automate and open up. But the most exciting bit is how much service and value can be created in a city by people and organizations that aren't the government but come together to focus on civic problems, often using public data, often setting leadership examples for the City's leadership.

In San Francisco no one gets this more than Jay Nath, Director of the SF Department of Innovation who observes, "The city is a bureaucracy and a monopoly without competition. So its not going to innovate very fast on its own. Government 2.0 provides that innovation."  Here's a great clip of Jay discussing some of these ideas with me:

One of the reasons we chose to do this in the summer run-up to the mayoral election is that a campaign is a season for new ideas. We have well over a dozen candidates battling each other over who has the best ideas for the city. Introduce to this mix passionate citizens coming up with ideas and prototyping them, then engaging candidates in the process, and there is a much greater likelihood that new ideas and innovation will become part of the campaign conversation and ultimately part the new administration's DNA.

A few months ago I was talking to one of the candidates who complained, "the problem with this race is the minute any of us has a good idea, another candidate steals that idea the next day." That helped inspire Summer of Smart: Lets generate a lot of good ideas (and prototypes) the candidates can call their own. That helps set the agenda. And improve our city!  During our first Summer of Smart weekend former mayor Gavin Newsom, who launched many of SF's open data initiatives dropped by and reinforced this, pointing it really citizen organizations driving this movement   

Summer of Smart continues on July 23-24th with a focus  on energy, sustainability and transportation. We are working with many of the city's green, building and environmental groups and companies to prepare for this next weekend. Tweet ideas and suggestions with the hashtag #sosidea  On August 20-21 we'll will turn to public health, nutrition and food issues. Former Secretary of Agriculture  Ann Veneman and Esther Dyson will be keynote speakers In September, the best of the ideas will be presented and discussed with candidates in a pre election forum. 

Ultimately we expect three things to come of this. 1) Great new ideas get prototyped and create new possibilities for San Francisco and beyond 2)The whole gov 2.0/bottoms up innovation meme becomes part of the broader urban conversation. Right now its the province of geeks and some wonks. As candidates, the press and community organizations engage, the whole idea gets a broader constituency. And as candidates race to adopt cool new ideas (which they are already doing) this all becomes part of the fabric of the city. Or, in activistese: in the 60's we protested the establishment. Today we're building an API to it. 3) The two cultures understand one another better. What could be more real than candidates, activist and geeks building real stuff aimed at real problems during a long hot summer.  Soon we'll know a lot more about how to apply gov 2.0 in the real world. 

A funny thing about this world of social media. Since all candidates now have to generate content and act like news channels on their web sites we don't have to pitch them, they pitch us. They read the tweets, make our ideas their campaign ideas, help us set priorities. The day we announced this candidate phil ting, the SF assessor, put me on his weekly video podcast ( http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/15275777 ) Imagine that: a solid hour on the record wrestling with how to create a more open government!

Its been a fascinating, step and fun learning curve.And we're only one month into The Summer of Smart. 

 

Kodak launches Social Purging App; Unwanted people disappear forever!

Kodak today launched an app that lets you purge people from photo collections "As if they never existed."

Back in the cold war, communist leaders would regularly air brush away leaders who were inconvenient. Molotov? Politburo today, gone tomorrow.  Secret Police Chief Beria? Was he with us in Red Square last year? Doesn't seem that way.

The soviets had Apparatchiks to handle this.  On Facebook we're stuck with people we wish didn't exist,and no scalable process to make them go away. Until now.

The  Kodak Relationshiffft app is fast and accurate and is evidently finding a following in state security institutions, as well as high school. Now when you change your relationship status, your ex will magically disappear from all those Halloween and stupid bar-b-que  pictures.  Finally!   App is expected to be widely available April 1st. 

During the cold war propagandists reliably reconciled state photography with the ministry of truth's approved social graph. With 500mm members, Facebook users have been forced to manually purge unwanted people out of history's record manually. No longer. Kodak, who's brand is all about memories, is now deftly helping us make sure that the memories we don't want, never happened.

Nastrovia Kodak!

 

Not to be missed: Next Week's EG Conference in Monterey

 
Its one of the most eye-opening few days you can spend. Next week (April 7-9) is the 5th annual EG (entertainment gathering) conference in Monterey. Host Michael Hawley (Media Lab Professor. Musician. Impresario) pulls together a remarkable group of presenters from the worlds of design, arts, music, technology, education, performance, film making, and leaders. Its a celebration of creativity and whats possible!

EG has great dynamic range--- impassioned talks, evenings of performance,  parties,  creativity in all its forms  and always great conversations.  The conference is a was crated by the originator of the TED Conference, Richard Wurman, and maintains the intimacy that TED had when it had only few hundred attendees. 

I was trying to think of what you call such a thing since "conference" is such a pedestrian term. Mike, I'd say you created a kaleidoscopic phantasmagoria! (1)

There are a few seats left. Register & learn more here:   http://the-eg.com

This Preview Video gives you a sense for the experience.

Some details from an email Michael sent me:

It is a truly wonderful group. I hate to single out highlights, but, gosh: private premieres of the new BBC epic HUMAN PLANET — and of Pat Metheny's new 3D "Orchestrion" movie. An evening at the Monterey Bay Aquarium. A full evening, live, with FROM THE TOP. A sneak launch of Discovery's CURIOSITY project — the most ambitious effort they've ever undertaken. Incomparable talents, like RIta Moreno; household names, like Scott Simon; true heroes, like Somaly Mam (who has rescued more than 6,000 girls from the horrid world of human trafficking). The world's dominant ultramarathon runner. The curatorial genius who brings the Museum of Natural History to life. The inventor of Google's AI-driven cars. An amateur pilot who has flown his little Cessna to most of the countries on Earth. A full evening designed by some of the most inventive magicians in the world. Incredible animators, including stars from Pixar. The first female director of DARPA.

It is really a mistake to rattle on about this because it leaves out so many incredible, industrious, passionate talents. Even by EG standards, this is one of the most wonderful programs we've seen. Browse the presenters for yourself: http://the-eg.com/presenters

 

(1) Note: I stole kaleidoscopic phantasmagoria. NBC President Pat Weavercoined the term in 1955 when he created Monitor, a spectacular radio show that went on all weekend, every weekend with contributors from all over the world. It thew out everything that was known about radio formats, did what TV couldn't, and aggregated such a large audience over such a large time period  (which 15 minute network radio shows were really bad at by then) that advertisers loved it and it saved NBC radio for another 20 years. Many say it presaged the web and NPR. But that's another story. Though I touched on at when I spoke at EG a few years ago in a talk called," How The Computer Ambushed Televsion"

 

World's Dumbest Product Launch, Week Three

The NYtimes breathlessly sends me an email with a special offer: a free two week online subscription.  Just as they are also offering a free year's on line subscription to longtime Digital users. (Times to Hirshberg: Drop Dead)

 
Unless I'm lucky enough to get the offer they and Lincoln are making for a free subscription till the end of the year: 

Only online they've been pushing me on four weeks for 99 cents. 

All against the background that their overall pricing is practically the highest ever for online subscription anything.  

This seems particularly strategically risky: Rupert Murdoch and Newscorp have played their hand. We know the pricing of the WSJ and the Daily. And armed with this market intelligence, the Times launches a product priced 2x the cost of the Journal and Daily combined. I was rooting for the Times. But really, is this an intelligence test?

I'm all for offers and test markets, but this seems like the most confused, desperate, flailing product launch ive seen in years. They seem to be saying "If you're a valued reader, we'll make you an introductory offer of a year. " Along with, "Hirshberg, you're so valuable, for you two weeks. Then we're really gonna get you."   So they've managed to turn my good will into ire, and confused me with all these options and non-options. The whole point of this paywall launch is how to deftly transition their loyal users to a subscription model. People, this is not deft marketing. This is not simple. Part of their communication has been, "sure the pricing is a bit ridiculous, but we can make up for that with pricing offers over time." But adjusting the price weekly based on market dynamics doesn't seem like a reliable way to build a trusted brand. I know pork bellies are priced that way, but really, the Grey Lady?

I'm conflicted here. I understand how tough online news business models are. And how valuable the Times is. And how much readers undervalue online journalism. But against the realities of how marketing works, how to motivate consumers, how to speak clearly to the market and how to make tactical decisions based on competitive behavior, it looks like so much of what the Times is doing is a complete dud. And thats bad for all of us.   

Everything I Know About The Beauty Business I Learned at Apple Computer. Or, Why Steve Jobs is the Best Cosmetics Executive of All.

Recently New York celebrated Fashion Week.  A time when we are called forth to reflect on the fashion business and the technology business.

Several years ago I was CEO of Gloss.com, the multi-brand online retailer owned by Estee Lauder, Chanel and Clarins.  I also had responsibility for a dozen Estee Lauder brand sites. Concerned friends used to say to me, “Pete, you used to be at Apple Computer managing Enterprise Marketing. Now you’re selling mascara. Explain.”

One of the strangest things about entering the beauty business was the language. Everything was “Fabulous!” Or,  ”Genius!” Software people didn’t talk this way. Network performance was a rather precise thing measured in kilobytes per second and overhead percentages.

Screaming “genius!” at the latest creation from Bobbi Brown seemed a little disconcerting. Until I looked at the margins, which are pretty healthy in the world of prestige beauty. And then I realized: if it was fabulous, that was a fashion code word for it was never, ever, don’t even think about it, going to be sold on discount.

I was enlightened. 

The consumer electronics world was full of price comparisons. Here women were lusting over little tubes of… goo… and thinking nothing of spending 40 or 100 bucks. During an interview a New York Times tech reporter told me, “Peter, this business will never work.” I asked why. “You’ll never get women to spend all that money on cosmetics.” I explained to him that as a geek it might not make a lot of sense, but Mrs. Lauder solved that problem long ago, and women, the beauty companies, and the retailers seemed to be just fine with it.

I also realized that about the only place in the tech world that actually understood the beauty play-book was where I had come from: Apple. In fact the way we both went about marketing was pretty similar. Then it occurred to me that the brand similarity was downright uncanny.

One of the most brilliantly marketed Lauder brands is M.A.C. cosmetics. It’s the exciting brand for creative types. The brand image was ruled with stentorian discipline by the creative director, James Gager, who wore jeans and a black shirt and left no detail untended too. It was a brand built on a base of enthusiasts who would spread the word. It was a brand that attracted celebrities. In a word, it was fabulous.

And it was all sounding mighty familiar. Hadn’t I worked for this brand before? I started giving a talk called, “Everything I know about the beauty business I learned at Apple Computer; or why Steve Jobs is the greatest cosmetics executive of all!”

In the years since it has only become more true. Apple is in the business of creating desire and lust for a category that hitherto had been utilitarian and functional. A playbook the beauty business had pioneered. Except that when the beauty business first went online, it hit a speed bump.  On the internet, in the thumbnail images that show up in search results, a $30 Chanel lipstick looks an awful lot like the $3.00 product from Maybelline. Fabulous it is not! Not to mention an order of magnitude difference in price.

In the early days of e-tailing we spent our time trying to figure out how to transform this from a medium that simply pulled for price comparison to one that could communicate and evoke brand value and excitement. We worked with Yahoo! to gain control over the size and quality of images that showed up in search results. Our online merchants taught us how to evolve our simple master / detail e-commerce pages into sites that could at once merchandize and tell a brand story. Our warehouse and distribution firm was aghast that our industry would launch a seasonal product only to intentionally sell out in a matter of days just to create excitement, scarcity and lust.

About this time I decided that if we were to make the online experience more fabulous we had to really deconstruct the retail experience. So I went shopping. I brought along a video recorder and two people who could help me understand both M.A.C. and the Mac. For my visit to the M.A.C. cosmetics store in New York’s Soho and the Apple store just around the corner I invited advertising legend Steve Hayden, who created the original Macintosh “1984″ commercial, and beauty editor Lisa Gabor, who was a founder of Allure magazine and later ran inStyle.com. Here’s a record of that visit to two very different brands that are so much the same.

MAC and M.A.C from peter hirshberg on Vimeo.

New York's "Raise Your Pants!" Marketing Campaign. April Fools Prank. Or not?

Memo to self: some marketing campaigns are best not launched on April Fools day. 

 After watching a bunch of pranks today (Goolge ,er,  Topekia being my favorite), I saw a story about a New York State Senator launching a campaign to tell kids not to wear pants that sag. No more "Pants on the ground." 

In the midst of a financial and governance crisis, a state senator seeks to galvanize  the public about... pants.  That would be  April Fools fodder, right?  Senators and Pants. Those very words together are the stuff comedians live for. And then there is his YouTube "Stop The Sag" Video. I watched it waiting for the punch line... and wondering," is it Saturday Night Live?" or is it real?

Ok, turns out its a serious campaign. State Senator Eric Adams thinks that one of the stupidest and most demeaning things African American kids can do is wear their pants down by their knees and turn this into fashion. Its bad enough for someone else to   demean you, but to dress up like a fool and demean yourself messes with your self image and sends out the message that its ok if others think less of you. It perpetuates stereotypes. He's right. The video does a good job of tying the current pants silliness to historic racist images. Senator Adams gives a great history lesson on the relationship of design, icons and propaganda to discrimination and self-deprication. 

If his campaign had been about girls not dressing in a too provocative  manner I would have instantly recognized it as a serious education campaign. Whats truly staggering is that our nation has a "pants on the ground" public health problem in the first place.  Its a strange "Jim Crow meets Monthy Python" mash-up thats spreading as a not so subtle form of racism and lack of self respect.

I think launching the campaign on April Fools Day only confused their important effort. . On the other hand, we live in such ironic times that you just can't tell whether its a joke or damn serious when the State throws a massive fashion fit over pants. And thats the kind of thing that commands a lot of popular culture attention!

TEDx Silicon Valley: Art, Technology & Open Culture. Creating The Grey Area Foundation for the Arts.

TEDx Silicon Valley: Art, Technology and the creation of GAFFTA from peter hirshberg on Vimeo.

Recently Josette Melcohor and I gave a talk at TEDx Silicon Valley on the uneasy relationship the art world has had with new technology and why we created the Grey Area Foundation for the Arts here in San Francisco. I take a look at art and technology over the last couple hundred years (Why did the French Avant-garde throw a fit worthy of Rush Limbaugh when photography was introduced?), how that relationship has evolved (Warning: art history according to me!)  and the many projects we're involved in at GAFFTA that reflect open culture,collaboration and code/creativity. Its a nice overvoew of what were up to and features some of the most engaging projects today by artists like C.E.B Reas  ,  Aaron Koblin,  Stamen Design, and Gray Area resident artists Gabriel Dunne, Ryan Alexander and Daniel Massey.

The art world is learning a lot from silicon valley values and culture, more than a lot of us may realize as we're focused on new products and companies. And there is a lot the tech world can learn in open collaboration and dialogue with artists who are pushing tech culture.

Interested to hear more? Contact us at GAFFTA

Edward R Murrow, Hurricane Bill, and the iPhone.

Edward R Murrow was describing the London Blitz and the fierce resistance of the British people as Hurricane Bill attacked me not once, but twice yesterday. Amidst  steely grey skies and giant sea swells in Brigehampton, the waves ultimately  engulfed  my iPod shuffle, sunglasses and me in a first surprise attack as I was running.  Seconds later and 1.5 miles away the waves washed up on the entire beach where my friends were, claiming beach towels,  Conde Nast magazines whose only possible  purpose in life is Hamptons beach reading, and... my  brand new iPhone 3G . The  iPod Shuffle hung on through Bob Edwards' audiobook description of Murrow on the courage of pensioners and flower ladies during the blitz. And while telling the story of brave resistance of 1941,  the shuffle finally gave way, its valor not lost on me.

And then, silence.  I was without communication and humbled. But also awed by the power of nature who was merely playing around and not serious at all.  (The hurricane, after all, was 500 miles  to the east...)

Minutes later, I see it. Amazingly, improbably buried in the sand-- one wet, sandy iPhone.  And remarkably, still displaying incoming texts though otherwise going haywire (Intermittent RF electronics, warnings flashing constantly.) And sand in every orifice preventing any connections at all. I won't go into the ensuing unpleasantness.

Yet now,  22 hours and a big bottle of compressed CO2 air blast cleaner later, the iPhone and iPod recover. Completely, it seems.  I'm left wondering: did they really just  survive an encounter with a sandy, briny Atlantic? Or is this just borrowed time, and a good time to schedule an appointment at the Genius Bar? Either way, I'm impressed!

Comcast and Me: a Twitter tale, in seven (little) acts

Comcast has achieved renown for how they respond to customer service problems on Twitter.  An interesting social media case study, until it happened to me. 

9:45 AM. Internet and phone crash, just before a big client call. I'm a Comcast triple play customer. I got no data, only TV. Fortunately a colleague has a draft of the prezo so I'm able to call in changes from my iPhone and she sends it off before the meeting.


10:00 AM. Service is back. We start the call.  


Over-the-next-hour AM Comcast service craps out twice more. Good thing for cell phones. They make everyone (including ISPs) think "land lines, who cares?"


11:00 AM I call Comcast to complain, asking elegantly "WTF?" Comcast informs me, "We can get to it in 48 hours. If you were a business customer, we could do it sooner. But you're not."  Worse, until they send the repair guy out to investigate, they can't have their network people look into whether there is a problem in my neighborhood. 


My response? "NOOOOOOOO." (Cue SFX: guy throwing a fit)  "That's a terrible way to run a carrier. Even the phone company of yore was more on the ball." The customer service rep assures me TINMWCD (There Is Nothing More We Can Do. Why does Jarvis get all the nice acronyms?)


And then it dawns on me:  I am An Empowered Consumer. In the Post Mass Media World. In the wake of the Jarvis Playbook I don't need to threaten to throw a stink, I already stink! I've got 1,132 Twitter followers . So I wonder, if I Tweet, will anything come of it?


What follows is tweets,  with commentary in red. 


1. 
   hirshbergComcastFAIL: "Since ur a 'residential' subscriber, Comcast can't fix your internet/phone service for 48 hours." I feel so 2nd class!27 minutes ago from web    

1. 
   ComcastBonnie@hirshberg we fix folks based upon the available quota alloted to the techs in your area. not based on type of customer26 minutes ago from Seesmic Desktop
2. Yikes That was fast! Less than a minute. And it wasn't automated, Bonnie was talking to me! But what she said didn't square at all with what Comcast told me on the phone.
1. 1.     
   2. 
      hirshberg@ComcastBonnieThanks,but the comcast rep specifically told me, "if you were a business customer, we could get to you faster. But ur not."25 minutes ago from web in reply to ComcastBonnie
    
1. 
   hirshberg@ComcastBonnie As distressing as the service problem is, i appreciate your rapid attention to my tweet!25 minutes ago from web in reply to ComcastBonnie
2. I'm torn between their virtual attentiveness and their inattentiveness. I'm just delighted. And unhappy. 
3. 1.     
   2. 
      ComcastBonnie@hirshberg most areas have SLA's in contracts with business accounts, that's why.25 minutes ago from Seesmic Desktop in reply to hirshberg

   3. Holy contradiction, phone man! How can you "not distinguish based on type of customer" and simultaneously serve "business accounts" better because they contract for good service? That's what I'm talking about. I'm feeling distinctly steerage about being a residential customer. Even AT&T didn't say this to me before I threw them out last year!
      

      1. 
         
         hirshberg@ComcastBonnie So u do base service on customer type. Residential = no SLA = much slower repair time than AT&T or other LECs24 minutes ago from web in reply to ComcastBonnie
      2. 1. 
            ComcastBonnie@hirshberg o_O my parent's had verizon, who took three weeks to fix a no dialtone issue on their phone. it happens everywhere. manpower etc.22 minutes ago from Seesmic Desktop in reply to hirshberg

      So in the space of a few tweets we've gone from the lofty possibility of customer service in the era of transparency to "Dude, don't you know, phone service can suck. Just call my mom. Help in today's world...."
      

   4.   
   5. My takeaways: 
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   7. 1. Its just amazing you can complain and they are on it so fast! 
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   9. 2. Comcast is in a world of hurt about what kind of service they guarantee mere residential customers. Beyond the "we can fix it in 48 hours," silliness there is the fact that residential customers can use only so much high speed data, or else. Or that if you actually transfer data for more than 15 minutes continuously at the maximum speed you signed up for, they'll put you in the slow lane  
   10.   
   11. 3. I heart transparency.  Tell me what service level I do or don't get as a residential customer. When you tell me that triple play is such a deal, let me know that you are the cheap carrier with less service unless I'm a business customer. Tell me what I gotta pay for you not to cap my speed or throughput. 
   12.   
   13. 4. Of course we do have more transparency than before. When i was a kid in New York in the '70s both phone lines went out one day and mom had a fit! She looked at me, then outside (at manhattan, mind you)  and yelled, "We've lost communication with the outside world!" Back then she had no one to complain to but me and the wall. I was sent down the street to call New York Telephone from a pay phone and then hope they'd show up.  Which may explain why mom, in addition to using the phone more than anyone I know, is so damn curious about twitter. 
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Aspen Ideas Festival: Tweetup & Tweetorial 7:45 AM Friday

On Monday we set a goal of 140 people using the Aspen Ideas Festival Tag #aif09. We put out the word, threw a tweetorial, published our how to tweet guide... and wondered what would happen.

It worked: We've blew through 269 unique people using our #aif09 tag (for detail, chick on the chart to the left), and as of now there have been over 1500 tweets.

Crains Chicago Business took note, tweeting, "Wonky Ideas Festival gets sexy with Twitter." And wrote this article.

Today Lews Black recorded this urgent message to Ideas Festival  tweeters:

You can follow tweets in real time here via twazzup, and tweets by speaker here in a great page built for us by Adam Hertz at Tweebase.

Friday Morning I'll be giving the tweetorial talk again at 7:45 AM in the Greenwald Pavillion. Festival Attendees, please come! (Best comment on the  first talk was from Gawker's Nick Denton, who in his best British Tabloid sensibility told me, "I came by to make fun of the Tweetorial, but you actually explained Twitter better than the Twitter guys.")

Friday's  tweetorial is part tutorial and part tweetup. So #aif09 tweeters, please come! I'll spend the first part of the talk on why this unlikeliest of mediums works and run through some great use cases for our audience. I'll also look at how twitter has been been used here in Aspen, and then go through how-to's . Finally, we'll break into groups where the twitter activated (which probably means you, if this link reached you) can help teach the rest how it all works.

The last tweetorial was standing room only... I was amazed by how many people (many my mom's age) came out, learned, and tweeted.

Here's text of the message we've shared with Ideas Festival Attendees just a couple days ago:

The Aspen 140
Engaging the World in 140 Characters at a time

The Aspen Ideas Festival gathers leaders to do the best thing you can do with ideas: share them. In years past all the action was on campus, aided by media (and bloggers) who reported on what was said. This year we're adding a new dimension: extending our reach by tapping the community of speakers and attendees to participate in open conversation about the ideas that are generated and shared here. We call this the Open Ideas Project, and the people who will make it happen at The Aspen 140.

How does it work? The Aspen Ideas Festival is teaming up with The Conversation Group to recruit at least 140 attendees to participate in reporting the Festival using a number of social media tools, and linking and distributing the content via Twitter. The guide on the other side of this handout tells how. The Ideas Festival will present a Friday morning "tweetorial" with Peter Hirshberg on the hows and whys of Twitter. We'll be aggregating all of the content originating from the Ideas Festival and posting daily a recap (a twecap?) of the best.

Our request: join twitter and share your Ideas Festival experience. Recruit your friends and speakers. Amp up the conversation! More than ever tools exist to weave the Aspen Institute Community into a global conversation. And that's something each of us can do!

Following & tweeting the Aspen Ideas Festival on Twitter

Remember, if you tweet, be sure to use our hashtag: #aif09

A friend in aspen asked me, "How can my friends who aren't in Aspen follow the ideas festival? 

Joan, here are three great ways!

1. Click here for Twitter search results on Aspen Ideas Festival

2. Check here for twazzup's page that gives results that update in real time & related media

3. Tweebase built this great page that lets you follow tweets writtnen about each speaker. What are folks saying about Eric Schmit's talk? Or Andrew Sullivan's Remarks

And here are three ways to tweet other from mobile devices:

1. For blackberry download twitterberry for blackberry

2. For iPhone,  Twitter works directly from your browser
or, purchase Tweetie from the iphone store ($2.99)

3. You can tweet from any cellphones that can send texts. You  tell twitter your phone number and then send tweets as text messages. Click here for how

The Aspen 140: Engaging the world 140 characters at a time

I'm at the Aspen Ideas Festival  working with the Aspen Institute and our Conversation Group team on a project to get great swaths of Ideas Festival attendees and speakers to tweet the festival and thus share the conversation broadly. The Festival hits many broad topics--- Media, Environment, Health Care, Science, International Relations--- of interest to many on line communities, and thus a real opportunity make this event more open and globally engaging than it has been before. 

On Tuesday at 4:00 PM I'll be giving a Tweetorial with Jeff Jarvis to share the hows and whys of Twitter. Whats great about the Aspen community is they've all heard about Twtitter, see how its changing politics, news, brands, conferences... so there is a lot of interest in learning how to do it. And getting such a smart, connected group online really furthers the purpose of the Ideas Festival. We're also telling everyone to use our hashtag: #aif09

Here's the message we're sharing with Festival Attendees: 

The Aspen 140

 Engaging the World 140 Characters at a Time 

The Aspen Ideas Festivals gathers leaders to do the best thing you can do with ideas: share them.  In years past all the action was on campus, aided by media (and bloggers) who reported on what was said. This year we're adding a new dimension: extending our reach by tapping the community of speakers and attendees to participate in open conversation about the ideas that are generated and shared here. We call this the Open Ideas Project, and the people who will make it happen are The Aspen 140. 

How does it work?  The Aspen Ideas Festival is teaming up with The Conversation Group to recruit at least 140 attendees to participate in reporting the Festival using any number of social media tools, and linking and distributing the content via Twitter. The  attached "how to tweet the conference" guide tells how.  The Ideas Festival will present a Tuesday afternoon "tweetorial" with Peter Hirshberg and Jeff Jarvis on the hows and whys of Twitter.  We'll be aggregating all of the content originating from the Ideas Festival and posting daily a recap (a tweecap") of the best .

Our request: join Twitter and share your experience of the Ideas Festival. Recruit your friends and speakers. Amp up the conversation.  More than ever tools exist to  weave the Aspen Institute Community into a global conversation. And that’s something each of us can do.

We also wrote a brief "how to tweet guide" which itself looks like a bunch of tweets. Download Aspen Ideas Festival Twitter

Download the pdf , above. Its fun. For those who are bandwidth challenged , the text of the how to guide is below:

The Aspen 12-Step Great Ideas Program

Sharing the Ideas Festival With The World

In 140 Characters or Less Using Twitter

 

1. Admit there is a higher power: sign up for a free Twitter account: www.twitter.com

2. Tweets are (very) short messages: 140 characters or less.

3. Always include #AIF09 in your tweet. That's our unique Ideas Festival tag

4. Tweet from your laptop, Blackberry, iPhone ... or any phone that can text

5. Full how-to instructions at www.www.aifestival.org/HowToTweet

6. A good format: idea, speaker, where you are. As in an idea from a session:

Now listening to @hirshberg at the Aspen Ideas Tweetorial. What a riot.   #aif09

 (a quote, the speaker, the conference)

7. Tweet the essence of a session. Memorable quotes. Big ideas

8. Tweet what moves you. What makes sense. What's bunk

9. Tweet the sessions you're going to

10. Tweet ideas from your conversations

11. If you blog or upload video, be sure to tweet the link

12. Learn more at the TWEETorial 4:00PM Tuesday, Mcnulty Room, Doerr-Hosier Center

 

Why all this? Newsies, bloggers, people who follow ideas will see all these thoughts coming from Aspen. They will take note. This will make the Ideas Festival more open, more accessible, and more connected to more people.

Iran 2.0: Thirty Years of Social Media Revoutionaries

Before the Social Media Revolution, before Twitter, before blogging, before even the internet itself there was the Iranian Revolution.

 In 1979  Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini  was able to mobilize his supporters and fire the Islamic shot heard round the world with the subversive, emergent media of the day--- cassette tapes and the telephone. The Shah may have had complete control over mainstream media, but nobody was in charge of all the cassette machines that copied Khomeini's  message of Islamic fundamentalism  from France to Iran  and ultimately into mosques across the country. So there is some irony that the revolutionaries of that era who now run the place are cast as today's  reactionaries,  on the receiving end of uncontrollable social media which relentlessly and inevitably are spreading the word, despite the state's  desperate effort  write  history in its image and control the message. Honestly, Stalin would have been just as annoyed at Twitter and would have dispatched the KGB to shoot up the internet.

Back in the day the United States was on the wrong side of history as we watched the Shah's power crumble and then endured revolutionaries occupying our embassy and holding Americans  hostage. Today things are flipped as the Iranians are outraged at a regime backed by Fundamentalists Gone Wild.  Or to quote the 1968  Chicago Yippies who were the media influence for the 1979 Iranian radicals,  "the whole world is watching" as the credibility of the Iranian state and its elections  are challenged. Which raises a tempting question: are the forces that led to Islamic fundamentalism in the first place now about to self-organize once again and begin to lead to its undoing? After all, the first great manifestation of the Fundamentalist Islamic state was Iran 30 years ago. Al Queda and the Taliban simply open-sourced the Khomeini idea and extended it.   The greatest challenge to fundamentalist  Islam ever seen is being witnessed  right now, in Iran as its people question the legitimacy of their  ruling regime.

Well, almost. After 9/11 the USA mounted he greatest, most intense challenge to Islamic fundimentlaism ever. But that took untold billions of dollars, thousands of lives and ultimately ended up picking a fight with a non-fundamentalist regime that wasn't responsible  for 9/11 in the first place. Which  hurt us at home, hurt us in the eyes of many people of the Middle East, and will take us years to clean up. One could argue that what  has been accomplished in the name  of self determination , freedom and the power of democracy  in the last 100 hours by the thoroughly  pissed-off  and energized people of Iran is more leveraged, sustainable  and likely to spread virally that the efforts of the  USA over the past 100 months in its endeavor to bring democracy to Iraq by force. This is not to diminish the  valiant effort of our armed forces or our diplomatic successes.  But it does point out that the top down, were gonna impose it approach we took is incredibly  expensive  and has a lot of annoying side effects that you don't have to worry about in bottoms-up people led movement. Many a CEO might note that top down imposed change in a corporation is a lot tougher to make stick effectively  than engendering a bottoms-up movement among employees. This seems to be part of the fundamental grammar of the distribution media of our day.

President Ahmadinejad would like the world to believe that the forces opposing him are so much American  and western hooligan meddling (Has any state that blamed hooliganism for its woes ever been anything other than a bad joke?)  Its true that we Americans are  contributing  to the Iranian proto-revolution, but not in the state led manner that Ahmadinejad imagines.  His problems stem from the modern version of the cassette tape. A set of thoroughly western,  nee  American, nee practically Northern Californian innovations: Twitter, the blogosphere and the Internet. There is a certain symmetry that the very nation that ushered in the Islamic revolution a generation ago with bits of subversive  western technology  may be returning to their playbook to remake themselves today. So, viva la revolution! Viva open media! And viva the first mass self-determination movement made possible by APIs! ( Okay,  Obama used a lot of these techniques last year. But he had the advantage of operating on the home turf of a great  Democracy. So watching all this play out in Iran is particularly stunning. )

Outsourcing Fabuluous: The Personal Brand Assistant

I've been part of an email thread at Monitor Talent about "Personal Brand Assistants," a term I never heard of until today.  Think folks who might help you manage your online presence. At first I thought, "How absurd." But this was a serious thread that demanded a serious response.

So I decided to write a  job description. Which I posted on Craig's list. It was flagged and removed as fast as you can say, "Whoa, that's not in our terms of service."

I can't believe Craig is killing new job opportunities at this moment in history. (And I'm not even gonna make the cheap  Craig's List joke that comes to mind...)   So for an economy that sorely needs new jobs, here is the  newest of all:

Personal Brand Assistant
Can you help make this brand fabulous?

Wanted: someone with the unique talents and drive to help build one of the most important brands of all, me. The brief:  in order to be me,  to do a really good job of being me, I need to twit, blog, respond, post pictures and engage with the market 27 hours a day. You see the problem. In the age of television being me was a relatively mindless thing to do. No longer. And that's where you come in. Now that I realize that I'm a brand, the matter of brand development, Search Engine Optimization, beating the competition, and looming large in the loomisphere has become of utmost importance. As a Personal Brand Assistant you'll be a key contributor to the team that is the digital me. You'll report  on parties and post  embarrassing photos.  Respond to events in technology and media in real time while minting status updates in Facebook.  You'll make my twitter followers feel special,  because they are special. You'll help insure that my 2,100 facebook friends have a friend. One that cares. Listens. Is authentic.

And because authenticity is so important in this era of social media, you'll receive ongoing training on the finer points of being me. Training that will serve you well for the rest of your life, even offline. Whatever that is.

You'll work in programming, content development and partnerships helping to insure that I not only don't forget to eat breakfast, but that I remain relevant to today's audiences and delight sponsors. Over time, you'll drive strategy monitoring the blogosphere 24/7, refreshing and refining the brand to meet the changing tastes and requirements of my followers.

Is this necessary you ask? As necessary as the air we breathe. Vital for our species development. A couple million years ago humans didn't even exist. All we had was Homo Erectus. He walked, but didn't friend. A half million years ago humans were born: Homo Sapien, man the wise. Just like your parents. Today we, you, I are beyond that. Today we are all individual brands, connected, in need of brand management and ongoing global engagement. Homo Brandus, man the brand. Only we're evolving so quickly we can't quite do it alone. Which is why I look forward to interviewing you as my personal brand assistant.

100 Days: FDR's thank-you letters to Congress for the New Deal leglislation

Much has been made of FDR's and Obama's first hundred days in office. It was Roosevelt who popularized the hundred day milestone: it marked the passage of the initial New Deal legislation and the conclusion of the special session of Congress that accomplished all that. One thing Roosevelt got that Obama didn't was broad bipartisan support. Obama aimed for that goal. Instead the left is leftier and the right plays to its base more than ever. 

Here is an fascinating piece of history that illuminates the Roosevelt administration at the same moment in its history: FDR's twin thank-you letters to congress upon completion of the 100-days legislative initiative. FDR was inaugurated on March 4th, so his hundred days occurred in June. 

 

On June 15th he sent these letters to Congress as it completed its special session: the document (above) which  Speaker Henry R. Rainey  read to the special session, and a brief handwritten note to the speaker asking him to thank the congress.

FDR writes:

Before the adjournment of the Special Session, I want to convey to you and the members of the House of Representatives, and expression of my thanks for making possible, on the broad average, a more sincere and more whole hearted cooperation between the Legislative and the Executive branches of the United States Government than has been witnessed by the American people in many a long year.

This spirit of team-work has in most cases transcended party lines. It has taken cognizance of a crisis in the affairs of our nation and of the world. It has grasped the need for a new approach to our problems both new and old. It has proved that our form of government can rise to an emergency and carry through a broad program in record time.

My grandfather, Modie Spiegel, was an avid collector of American historical letters and acquired these in the 1960s. I was a tot back then, but even as a kid I realized this was pretty cool historic stuff. And history it was until history began repeating itself. Suddenly we found ourselves in uncomfortably similar circumstances with a similar need for extraordinary leadership.  FDR's words went from  a piece of history to timely --- and a playbook to learn from. My friend (and grade school classmate!) Jonathan Alter at Newsweek  has chronicled FDR's leadership efforts as he came to office. He points out that only three Presidents in our history accomplished so much in so little time: FDR, LBJ and Obam.  Alter writes:

"Crisis leadership is, above all, about restoring confidence. Just as FDR got the country believing again in capitalism and democracy, Obama is so far making good on his pledge to navigate in a new direction. The people are responding. From January to April, the percentage of Americans saying the country is on the "right track" went up 23 points under Obama." 

And, one could add, Obama is connecting with the American people despite a legislative environment more polarized than ever. Roosevelt pulled off his hundred days with a 72% Democratic Congress. Obama has only 60%. Its a testament to the Presdient's leadership and to the strengths of our system that   Obama can claim,  as Roosevelt wrote 76 years ago, "That our form of government can rise to an emergency and carry through a broad program in record time..." 

The Company as Wiki: A Conversation with Best Buy CEO Brad Anderson

At the Google Zeitgeist conference this September I interviewed Best Buy CEO Brad Anderson about his efforts to accelerate the company’s growth strategies through the use of social media. We often think of social networks, wikis and the like as impacting only  marketing or the media, but Best Buy is a great example of how they can fundamentally transform the enterprise and the art of management. And in so doing unleash new productivity, creativity and a smarter customer experience. I think Best Buy is a leading indicator what businesses will start to look like in the near future, which is why I found  Anderson's insights so relevant.

I’ve been fortunate to have a front row seat to many of these developments: our company, The Conversation Group, has worked closely with Best Buy’s VP of Internet Strategy Michele Azar over the last year on implementing some of these changes and fostering an open, collaborative approach to partners, employees, customers and developers. The talk with Brad opened with a short video highlighting much of what Best Buy has been up to: click on the player below to view my entire conversation with Brad Anderson, starting with “the company as Wiki.”

 

Best Buy CEO Brad Anderson in conversation with Peter Hirshberg at Google Zeitgeist from peter hirshberg on Vimeo.

 

I first asked Anderson  how a company that grew up in the distribution and product availability world came to adopt social networks, predictive markets, and an open approach to innovation and cooperation. Traditionally, we associate companies like this with classic top-down management approaches. Brad points out that as their business challenge shifted from simply distributing product to insuring customer delight under countless usage scenarios, only a method that tapped the wisdom of everybody made sense.

click here to view

Flips The Role Of Leadership

Next we discussed the impact all this had on traditional management and managers. Brad told me that it “absolutely flips the role leadership” since great ideas often come from the edge, not the brass. And, all this “ can be murder on middle management” 

click here for Brad's comments

The Perfect Storm

One reason Best Buy provides insight into management to come is the perfect storm of a workforce and business challenge faced by Best Buy.  The company has 170,000 employees, most of them of the under 30 net-generation that grew up with collaborative technology. They go to work every day solving technology problems for customers, where they are all potential experts. In retail, Brad told me, “You are exactly as motivated to deliver service as you feel like you are engaged in the work… so if you can create your job, you’re a lot better off!”

click here for Brad's comments

Marketplaces

Next we discussed some specific projects:  the “Loop Marketplace” which replaces the suggestion box with a market where employees can submit and share ideas…and often get them funded. And a prediction market (like a stock market simulation) that was dead-on in predicating Christmas sales because, “It reveals insights in the system that aren’t captured by the hierarchy.”

click here for this part of the conversation

Blue Shirt Nation: The Best Buy Social Network  

Here we discuss Blue Shirt Nation…the employee social network which was build by Steve Bendt and Gary Koelling in the advertising department to garner customer insight from employees. But from the moment it was turned on it was clear that employees would call the shots on this system and define how it would  be used.

Click here for brad's comments

Self Organizing Work

One of the most dramatic examples of using a social network like Blue Shirt Nation to surface employee talents and enthusiasm is the case of The Employee Tooklit. When the IT system that employees used in store was getting tired and old, six employees (who turned out to be very talented computer geeks and coders) came to corporate and rewrote the system themselves in six week for a couple hundred thousand dollars (spent on pizza, coke, and hotel rooms.) All to the astonishment of the company’s IT consultant who said the project should cost $6,000,000 and take the better part of a year. Talk about unearthing hidden talent and  creating new career paths for your employees!

Chick here as Brad discusses the Employee Toolkit 

Brad talks about the fact that when you start using social technology to connect employees, everyone  become a lot more aware of each individuals talents and stories. And this can lead to a lot more productivity and creativity. This has become something of a mantra  at the company, under the mantle of I Am Best Buy. This thinking is beginning to affect strategy company wide. For example, this year's Holiday TV campaign is all about the highlighting the individual stories of Best Buy employees. It was shot by documentary film maker Errol Morris and blogged about here by Best Buy CMO Barry Judge. This is a direct example of how the "Company as Wiki" thinking is impacting the company's brand. By making the brand a lot more about people, it opens up up  avenues for more social marketing in the future. 

This theme of using the social network to tap unexpected employee talents shows up repeatedly. When employee participation in the company’s 401k plan was sub par, it was the employees themselves who took on the problem in a way that an HR department never could.

Click here for the  the Case of The 410k Program

This has all lead to half the employee turnover Best Buy used to experience, and its also highlighted the importance  of culture and values in management. In the days of top-down command and control, you could get away with telling employees what to do via procedures. When so many employees are collaborating, creating content, and inventing things only a shared culture to can deliver aligned behavior. Now, corporate values serve as boundaries and management tools the way process used to.

Brad's observations here

Mobile and The Customer Experience

The same activities that are being used internally, are now driving external customer experience, growth, and revenue generating activities. Best Buy employee Ben Hedrington articulates how the company's mobile strategy might evolve, and Brad comments on why Best Buy is increasingly in the customer experience business. 

View the conversation here

Brad observed that while Best Buy is just at the beginning of deploying systems that tap the networked wisdom of its people, this is clearly one of the most powerful growth strategies he's ever encountered. The collective knowledge of customers, suppliers, and employees can lead to both a more informed customer support and relationship experience, as well as a better retail experience. The company initially grew by opening several thousand stores. Now there is the opportunity to open thousands of virtual stores, tapping the experiences, networks, and insights of its many people.

My question to Brad here

As we wrapped up, I showed brad a clip an employee at the Best Buy call center as she used Twitter to monitor the lousy experience a customer was having at a competitor, and how Best Buy intervened. Brad talks about the future and about how much more fun and productive enterprises will become as they move from top down, command and control to actually tapping the capabilities and networks of employees and customers. 

Watch here

In spending time with Best Buy over the last year, its been interesting to watch how consciously they've been wrestling with the meaning and impact of collaborative technologies. They've realized that the best ideas bubble up, emergently.So management doesn't dictate what's gonna work, it has to listen for it. And then nurture it. There is also a darwinian aspect to all this: Best Buy has allowed for a large number of experiments to happen and then resources the ones that work. Not quite ever having enough resources forces collaboration between the various teams working on projects as they need to come together in a broader strategy. And the CEO himself has been recognizing and highlighting this success, which creates a culture if innovation even in a company facing the incredible challenges of today's retail environment.

 

Its the Plumbers, Stupid.

Richard Nixon was ultimately done in by the White House Plumbers who botched an operation during his reelection campaign and got him thrown out of office. For McCain, it was simpler. It took only one unreliable plumber to help McCain botch Ohio and ultimately the election. Proving again that American presidential politics is never kind phony plumbers. And that in both cases the winner was America herself, which despite it all, has a nose for talent. And, evidently, knows phonies. 

Why Macy's wedding registry is an idiot. And Amazon rules even when it doesn't know who's getting married.

You have to be especially clueless to run an online wedding registry and piss off both bride and wedding guest alike. But Macy's and its partner the Wedding Channel seem to know the magic formula to deliver both a hostile site and 1995 style web marketing in a 2.0 world where merchants can and must do so much better.

I went online last night to buy Andreia and Justin a wedding gift. Ahh: they want an espresso maker from Macy's! And its on sale! How perfect. But before I buy the thing, I figure I should ask Andreia about it. A decent espresso machine is a considered purchase, and since this is a gift I figured I ought to hit pause  and ask some questions of the coffee-drinkers-to-be: would they prefer a machine that grinds its own coffee, or do they really prefer the one that uses pods? Did anyone else give them one? Were they considering another model? Standard stuff before you buy something.

I reach the bride a few hours later and we  conclude yes, this is the perfect machine. So I go back to Macy's... and the price just went up 20%. I'm suddenly not so happy about coffee. Sure sale prices end, but it helps to post things like, "Hurry... its the last day...buy me now."  Isn't this the first thing they teach you in merchandising school?  If you don't tell someone the sale is ending you loose both the urgency of the close and you create an unhappy prospect a moment later. Plus, when you're buying a gift for someone and you wanna check with them and make sure its a good thing, there's a bit more going on in the sales cycle. I fire off an email to Macy's asking if they'll extend the sale price to me. I get back a form letter telling me how to use the wedding registry function at any of the many merchants owned by Macy's. Retail demerits are rapidly stacking up.

So I Google the item and find that the Macy's (now expired) sale price is everybody else's retail price.  Amazon has it for a whole lot less than Macy's sale price; $100 less when you include no tax and no shipping. And then I realize that all those Amazon reviews are even more useful when you're buying a gift in a category you know little about. All the questions I discussed with the bride are covered in the Amazon user reviews.  More than ever before I realize, "Why do business with some merchant who only gives you a teensy product description when smart web merchants tell you what the world thinks of a product and items like it."

These days great cataloging and merchandising is no longer just about a product detail page with a picture,  brief description  and a brand like Macy's that says, "Ask no more questions. Were Macy's. Buy the thing.  Trust us!" No, I'm not going to.  Not only do you have a deceptively bad price and about the worst sale price merchandising practice imaginable,  but you are cutting me off from the oxygen of the whole social conversation of what people think about the product. So please, go back to 1961 and leave me alone.

Long story short, Amazon is delivering the espresso machine Monday. I'm happy. Andreia is happy. Amazon is doing its thing. And I've got no time for Macy's.

Sure these issues aren't an issue if you're helping a couple complete a set of Champagne flutes, but there is no reason for gift registries to be the low IQ end of online  retailing.

But it gets worse. Because really,  what could be worse than a  bride scorned?  I  call up Andreia to tell her about my Macy's experiece . And she exclaims, " Those guys are so lame I never want to deal with them again!"

Item: Andreia wanted to return a wedding gift from Macy's registry  because she got the same thing from someone who bought it elsewhere. Macy's would only credit the return back to the original purchaser, not to the bride's account. In other words, the system made it impossible to exchange a wedding  gift if the transaction started on line and ended up in the store. Which is where most gift exchanges do end up.  Great for CFO's, lazy IT guys and rigid policy makers. Enough to recuse yourself from the wedding registry business if you want to delight your customer. After talking to three different people Andreia finally got what she was after. Sure this is a multichannel sale--- online transaction, in store return--- but these days that's a lousy excuse for lousy service. After all, retailers had at least ten e-years to fix problems like this.

Item: Andrea wanted to remove some knives from the registry. This requires a call to customer service to get it right. And the customer service person manages to mark the knives as purchased rather than deleting them.  Sure this means no one will get her the knives she doesn't want. But it also means folks will think she already has the cutlery she needs, so she'll end up with no knives at all. I don't want to tell you what Andreia wanted to do with her knives when she finally got them.

Before posting this I wanted to check with a couple of other very savvy friends whose weddings I attended  to make sure these weren't one off experiences. From Donna: "The whole experience was arduous at best. Wait until the part where crappy wares rip, rust and tarnish in week one of the marriage and they tell you to mail a microwave back to the manufacturer! " And for my benefit she adds, "Just get us a Home Depot gift certificate. Thats what we really need!" I got the most succinct response from Ali, who must have done her research: "Did not register at lame Macy's or Bloomingdales!"

Note to Macy's CEO Terry J. Lundgren: unaided two out of three brides used the word lame to describe your service. The other called it arduous. At best.

A big part of the problem is Macy's and the Wedding Channel (which operates the Macy's and many merchant's wedding registries ) are separate companies.  And Macy's stores and its online operations are operated separately. But if you're a busy bride-to-be you don't want all this separateness,  you'd like a little seamless integration to make life easy.  And in a world of API's, mash-ups, social media and the rapid development of systems that keep up with customers, this seems like so much corporate cluelessness. If   I were Macy's I'd appoint a wedding czar--- probably a bride with a lot of friends--- and ask her to come up with something that worked better for brides and wedding guests alike.

If you're a bride or groom and have had similar experiences, I'd love to hear about them.

Separated At Birth?

 
The glasses. The closed mouth resolve. The angle. The military pageantry of it all.  Yahoo news runs this shot of VP prospect Joe Biden today. Did the photographer know what a  "leader who knows his military stuff" money shot looks like? Did he think, "I've seen this picture  in the history books. I gotta get one too!"  

My first reaction was one of familiarity. Then i realized I had General Douglas MacArthur, some one I don't usually think about, on my mind. And in this week of geopolitical saber rattling and jockeying, I felt "yea, we could use a little Doug MacArthur in an Obama administration." One guy wears a fancy hat, the other  a big-ass military transport. Its all good.

Did Joe Biden know exactly whose glasses he was pulling from history? Who told him about that facial expression?  I duuno. But it seems like a very timely and evocative shot to show up hours before Obama has to pick his running mate. And make the single biggest brand development decision of the campaign.

Joe's overseas now. But he will return.

Friday Night: Aaron Koblin and Computer Art @ Grey Area Beacon S.F.

Last month my friend Josette Melchor and I opened a gallery space in San Francisco to celebrate computer-based art. We're having an opening and gallery talk tomorrow, and things will continue well into the night with DJ Cosmo Vitelli whose come in from Paris for the occasion. Details here Grey Area Beacon event details.

We're featuring the work of Aaron Koblin. His work is participatory, data driven, intriguing and immersive. We're projecting the work onto special frames that are 10' x 10' (thats ten feet square!).

The evening begins at 6pm with cocktails. From 7-8pm I'll be giving a talk on the history of computers and art and Aaron will be speaking about his work. We'll have a reception with music at 8pm. And starting at 10pm and well into the night it's an after party featuring DJ Cosmo Vitelli.

I love the way Aaron's work show the underlying meaning in data and explores how web services can be used in the creative process. His work is...

Participatory ---- SheepMarket is a work created by 10,000 people using Amazon's mechanical  turk  web service. In this case all 10,000 were paid two cents each to create a sheep facing left. Some were delighted others outraged; hear Aaron tell the story tomorrow night.

Data Driven---  Flight Patters (pictured above) is a visualization of all air traffic above the United States in a 24 hour period. New York Talk Exchange uses real time IP and Telephone call data to illustrate global conversations. 

These and other works we're showing were also recently featured in the NY Museum of Modern Art's Design and The Elastic Mind exhibition. 

In addition to all this being "Art," I think visualizations like these point towards new kinds of creative and communications opportunities for all of us to understand a world rich in data and connections. 

See you tomorrow!

Flixwagon: The End Of Privacy

Remember the good old days when you saw something and decided whether or not to post about it? Or when you took all those pictures at a party and got up the next morning and thought about which ones were appropriate for Flickr? Or all that stuff you went through editing video and deciding what to post? All that is so loaded with 20th century values. Flixwagon lets you turn on your Nokia N95 camera phone (in the U.S.), click the "broadcast now" soft button and anything you see or say... anyone can see or hear! In this interview
Xen from Flixwagon tells me about the time she made a pocket broadcast. Like an unintended pocket call, except the video stream when out--live from her life---unintended. And there is the story about the Hillary Clinton event that was closed to the broadcast press... except it was broadcast. And through the combo of Flixwagon and Twitter the press tuned in live via camera phone.

I suggested to Xen they post set of best practices or warnings, like all the stuff we ignore about operating potentially dangerous machinery. My list might include:

-Warning broadcasts are live. Use with discretion when you're inebriated.
-Warning. You're not likely to have much discretion when you're inebriated.
-The Golden Rule of Broadcast: Ask permission to broadcast others as you'd hope they'd ask permission of you
-If your are under 18, read the warnings.
-Warning: No one under 18 heeds warnings.

I'm actually delighted that all the stuff that sat in the way of shooting video and posting it has gone away. Now everything's a post, life's a broadcast, and going live has also been completely democratized.

Things will never be the same. Sure its a cliche, but here's a place it applies. Or, as I said just a moment ago:

News Not Fit To Print: AP Tries to Stuff Paris Hilton Gossip Back In A Bottle.

At 12:32 today the Associated Press attempted an act of social alchemy : they tried to make Paris Hilton gossip go away. Seriously.

This item ran over the AP broadcast wire to radio and tv stations:

      

Stations: KILL the following cuts fed on the 12:32 P.M.

     11-13-07-take 1 network feed:
      
      
Cut 233, 234 and 235
A publicist for Paris Hilton says Hilton never made any comments
about helping drunken elephants in India.

A kill is mandatory. Make certain this material is not aired.
A sub will not be filed.

AP Broadcast News Center

Way to go AP;  keeping those mainstream media clients in line!

Meanwhile, over  in the Blogosphere Technorati reports 1,976 blog posts on "Paris Hilton" AND "Elephant."

So either its a bogus rumor, or its goofy, true and real... in which case the news is more about silly publicists and the power they yield.  As in,  "Kill the following: A publicist for Paris Hilton says Hilton never made any comments about helping drunken elephants in India."

Remember the old saw about you cant make this stuff up?

Conversational Marketing

I'm at a conference in Athens put on by the WPP group on the future of advertising, media and technology.

A session on online advertising inspired me to post links to two documents:

The Memo on Monday Morning, a white paper written by Steve Hayden (Vice-Chairman, Ogilvy), Doc Searls (Cluetrain Co-author) and myself on conversational marketing. I also posted on the topic at Technorati.

Digital Interactivity: Unanticipated Consequences for Markets, Marketing and Consumers a draft paper from two professors at the Harvard Business School presents a great framework to understand how online marketing is moving from the direct response model to a community model.

Meme gone wrong: conservatives not buying Bush commuting Libby's sentence

Andrew Sullivan nails the conservative meme, "They keep repeating the line that only the "left" will be angry. And links to some posts that (rather lamely it seems) make the point here and here.

If you look at the conservative blogosphere as a whole, and not just the few who reliably spread the party line the meme doesn't seem to be playing out particurlarly well. A Technorati search of blogs tagged "conservative" that use the term Libby shows a lot of anger and disbelief from the rank and file.

At 5:28 PDT as I write this some of the headlines are: Outrage Fatigue, the rather exasperated "I Do Not Favor Impeachment", Equal Justice Under Bush and Contempt of Court

Here is an additional Technorati seach that further constrains the results to more authorative conservative bloggers. Folks aren't much happier here either.

Earlier in the day, before this news broke, the Washington Post ran an article on the increasingly detached bunker mentality of Bush Presidency headlined, "A President Besieged and Isolated, Yet at Ease." It provides a prety good explanation of the tone deaf thinking that led to the Libby decision. The founders granted our President extrodinary powers of clemency and pardon, but when the collective reaction to their use is, "what an awful decision from a clueless guy" the political fallout can be equally extraordinary.

Postscript: best headline yet. Even Paris Hilton Served SOME of Her Time

Post Post Script: The last time I got riled up with such clarity was Watergate. For years it seemed like we were living in ambiguous times. No longer. If there is one thing this President is doing well, its helping to unite the country in realizing that things are going very wrong--- and with little ambiguity about who to hold accountable.

Only this president could mange to pack the equivalent of the tragedy of the Vietnam war and the hubris of Wategate into a single administration.

The White House Talks Science!

Newsweek has discovered that the President Of The United States has a science advisor, and they are asking readers to submit questions!

Not only is it encouraging to hear that the President is aware of science, but the fact that they are listening to the audience shows what an enlightened democracy we really are. I'm patriotic, so I've fired off my questions for Newsweek to take to the White House and learn more about science. In the off chance that my questions and the answers from Science Advisor Marburger don't make it back to Newsweek, I'm reproducing my letter here:

Dear Dr. Marburger,

I'm excited to hear from the White House on issues of science, especially given how controversial this has become in Washington. A lot of the President's supporters have pointed out recently how suspect science is, and how science has not really been too supportive of the facts as the Administration would like them to be. So here are my questions:

I understand the earth is only 8,000 years old and this geologic time stuff is so much liberal hooey. What is Genisis, chopped liver? As supporters of the President we really need your help here. Can you please help explain why science keeps coming up with million year old rocks and then puts all this in text books?

This bit about mankind evolving from alge and apes. Why isn't the white house doing more about this? Science is getting in the way again, and isn't this your job to fix ?

Global warming. Isn't it scientifically proven that there is co2 in soda pop? Our GI's live for soda. We take away co2 and the soda's flat. Flat soda and you have a bunch of demoralized GI's. We have enough of that already (damn scientific polls telling us its an unpopular war, but I won't hold you responsbible for that, Dr. Marburger.) So the more we push this global warming stuff the more lakluster we Americans become and then we just poop off and loose our mojo. Dr. Marburger this is no way for a great people to be!

So can't we just put science in its place, in a museum perhaps, and get on with a more convienient truth.

Yours Truly,

Peter Hirshberg

Technorati and Paramount Classics Bring Blog Conversation to Film Sites

I'm posting this both on my blog, and on the Technorati weblog.

This is a great example of how brands can really engage their audience. Here you have the Hollywood--- home of the ultimate media companies. And film marketing--- which has been about posters and junkets. Amazing things happen when you let the brand side of a media company go beyond traditional marketing behavior and actually engage in conversation--- and act like a media company itself.

Technorati and Paramount Classics have announced an eighteen-month relationship to bring blogosphere discussion about each of their upcoming films directly to each film's web site. We've begun with An Inconvenient Truth, the global warming documentary starring Al Gore, which will be in select theaters beginning May 24th. The site, with live blogger commentary, is here. Here's a link to our official press release.

Film sites have traditionally been one-way marketing vehicles. A place to find trailers, synopsis, actors' pictures, and bling for fans to download. But seldom a big tent for conversation and ideas. Paramount Classics recognizes that their film site will be more vibrant and authentic if the unfettered conversation about a film plays out on the film home page. Its a terrific way to shine attention on the word of mouth about a film--- which is traditionally difficult to find since blog discussion is spread out over thousands of blogs, but never in one place. The studio is both making word of mouth about their film easy to find, and creating traffic for bloggers who are writing about the picture.

The Inconvenient Truth site highlights both posts about the film, and posts about climate change and global warming which may never mention the film. About an hour after the site went live I dropped by and found a fascinating post that led to an oil-industry funded organization that is starting to run TV spots proclaiming that global warming is bogus. Throughout the weekend I checked back to watch the blogosphere's reaction to that drama. A film site that tunes into the live web really is a lot more lively than the alternative.

By the way, this is a well crafted film. Unlike Fahrenheit 9/11, which was a polemic and made the left act left-ier and the right behave right-ier, this picture does a great job of laying out its argument and --- just when you're wondering if an argument holds weight-- coming back with evidence to make its point. In many ways this film and the blogosphere were made for each other. Its going to be fascinating to watch how the left and right, the energy industry and environmentalists speak to one another in the coming weeks. No matter where you stand on the issue, go see the film. Blog about it. Its going to be a quite a consequential discussion!

Art: Giant Dice Take On Aspen Colorado!

Sunday February 19, 2006: show day for a giant performance art happening in oh-so-chichi Aspen, Colorado. Japanese-born artist Yutaka Sone worked with the Aspen Art Museum to build a pair of Giant Dice (8 feet square) and then roll them down the halfpipe of Buttermilk Mountain. In the name of Art I hightailed it over to Buttermilk just in time to record the festivities.... Click Here to see the video

This Is Not A Joke: Pope Sues To Prevent Spreading The Good Word.

The Vatican has announced that is is enforcing copyright on the Pope's writings and encyclicals. You heard that right, if you spread the word... you now have to pay a 15% royalty to the Church. And you thought the whole point of the Church was to Spread The Word. Forget it... Now its, "If you quote the Pope, you pay the Man." This isn't evangelism, its antivangelism. The Vatican seems to have learned a bit of "this ain't no fooling around" from the RIAA, Disney, and the New York Subway System:

A Milanese publishing house that had issued an anthology containing 30 lines from Pope Benedict’s speech to the conclave that elected him and an extract from his enthronement speech is reported to have been sent a bill for €15,000 (£10,000). This was made up of 15 per cent of the cover price of each copy sold plus “legal expenses” of €3,500.

At first I thought this was an Onion comedy piece. "Pope Sues To Prevent Spreading the Good Word," is a very funny gag. But.. its true! And further proof that calcified old institutions can act incredibly stupid when it comes to understanding a world where publishing isn't about control but about spreading ideas through a network of influencers. The Times article is full of quotes from the Italian versions of Doc Searls, Jeff Jarvis and Jay Rosen expressing outrage and confusion at all this.

The article goes on to say that if the Church approves of how and when you use the Pope's words, they would be willing to waive the fees, but only by "prior agreement." This is an egregious mashup of bad copyright policy, bad free speech policy, and Nixonesque strong-arm tactics.

But in the end its only fair to give Vatican the last word:

"A Vatican spokesman said that the Holy See had to defend itself against “pirated editions.”

No, come to think of it, I get the last word. "The Cluetrain will not be making any stops in Vatican City anytime soon."

Transit Union Squelches Angry Bloggers

The Transport Workers Union Local 100 has a blog. The Blog had comments. But no longer. Fortunately the comments were cached before the union tried to make all those angry New Yorkers go away. Bloggers wrote a lot about the strike, but the comments on the union site really seemed to catch the enmity of a lot of New Yorkers towards the union.

Sample Quote: "You guys really have a lot of balls. All you do is drive around in circles. Your job isn't hard at all. You get paid as much as cops and firemen, while much more as teachers. Something is wrong. You're asking for way too much here. Back down and know your roll. You guys aren't as high and as mighty as you think."

Thanks to Bill for finding this cache!

Hey, Local 100: you guys weighed the options, asked for support and chose to go on strike. So you ought to own and acknowledge citizen's reaction. Censorship is so lame.

The fact that your leadership---which wrapped itself in Rosa Parks, dignity, and Dr. Martin Luther King--- also embraces censorship and revisionism says more than a little bit about their openness and ethics.

Live8 Blogs: Uncovering the Real Story

With all the attention on Live8 and Africa relief, its jarring how little content there is on the official Live8 site about the  underlying Africa issues and what actually needs to be done to help people on that continent.

The take away from Live8 seems to be its the G8's job to fix Africa and that George Bush is the main bad guy. You're left thinking these poor Africans are helpless, can't do a damn thing for themselves, and are just lying around waiting for the Rich Countries to come on in and clean up the mess. The whole thing is vaguely reminiscent of some LBJ, Really Big Government Approach and of 60's idealism, but not necessarily in good way. So come on people now, lets all get together and try and love one another right now.