Part 1: The Policies

One of the most important things to know about how the federal government functions, is that there are dozens of different agencies, bureaus, branches, departments, divisions, offices, etc. that each, at times, shape its own social media policy. It’s not uncommon in an agency setting, say the Department of Justice, for there to be multiple policies and areas responsible for shaping how social media can be used. Here’s an example from the Department of Justice. First, the hierarchy of power. Let’s assume we work for the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS). BJS reports to the Office of Justice Programs (OJP) who reports to the Office of the Assistant Attorney General (AAG) who reports to the Attorney General (AG) and finally who reports to the President. Now that we understand the chain of command, here’s how it breaks down in policy creation/enforcement.

BJS themselves has the ability to set some policies, but most policies will come on the office level with OJP. OJP will also need to work in coordination with the AAG and AG offices to ensure its policies align with the policies of Agency. While Justice is on Twitter (@thejusticedept), OJP may restrict the adoption of Twitter at the office level. If OJP allows Twitter to be used in the Office, then BJS would be able to set policies on practice and participation. In this example, three different areas of Justice can set policies to quickly declare support (or restriction) of Twitter within the Agency.

In addition to the simple look at the hierarchy behind an agency, policies can be handed down from two main areas within each area: the CIO office and the communications office. Usually the CIO office has the power to trump communications, but the communications office can still say that Twitter isn’t the medium we want our message out on – and just restrict it (that’s another post). There needs to be a healthy balance (and lots of interoffice communication) on how to adopt policies which breach through multiple areas of responsibility.

How do you work with in this environment? Easy – you need to figure out who’s calling the shots and then work with them and educate them on the power of Twitter, how it can benefit the department/agency, and walk them through their concerns and work on risk mitigation strategies. IT offices are concerned about security breaches and communication offices are concerned about gaffes and bad messages going out. Building a process which incorporates the objectives and concerns of an office is key (yet another post).

Policies drive the government, change with each new administration/official, and need to be honed and examined regularly to ensure they meet the current expectations and demands of the times. The primary tool in the Twitter toolbox is education. Sit down and work with offices and officials on how Twitter can work for them and why it’s not something to fear. The Whitehouse uses it – why can’t every office? Even the Department of Defense has a social media policy – and to top it off, you can comment on the Department’s site, including news articles! Now that’s adoption! (Just a note: DoD has ~45 Twitter accounts for its various branches and divisions and hundreds of accounts for personnel and officials (partial list).)

This notion applies not only to Justice but to almost all areas of the federal government – and trickles quite easily into state-level government. Congress, for example, has policies set by each chamber, by each office, and sometimes a caucus will encourage policy adoption.

To conclude: there’s always room for adoption of Twitter (and social media) policies in the federal government. If the Department of Defense can have a policy that allows for Twitter, then we can work with the federal government so all agencies/branches/etc. can utilize Twitter effectively.

Google verified this through an internal project called, Google Predictive Markets (GPM) – no link provided cause I can find one accessible to outsiders (not that I’m an insider…yet). I think the genius in this is the use of the 20% time to work on validating theories out in the world. Google is known for wanting to organize the world’s information. Now we’re taking that to the next level – predicting the world’s information. If we can get enough people together to focus on one thing and put thoughts towards it, we can pool that data and predict, with great accuracy, what will happen (almost noetic in nature). Perhaps that isn’t worded the best. Take a straw poll on tons of people on a given topic, and the majority is likely to give you a more accurate answer than the experts in the field.

I can’t believe: a) how cool this is, and 2) how i didn’t know this was going on in the GooglePlex. If we could do this on a larger scale (note: I was planning a website around a similar topic about 2 years ago) and get hundreds of thousands of people involved, this type of data would have such a profound impact on the way the world is run. If people started believing in things that were about to happen – there actions would start pushing that belief to come true (personal philosophy, backed by some research somewhere I’m sure). That could mean people could have more control in their lives and in the world around them – leaving bigger impacts and doing greater things.

I’ve said too much, but remember this: if Google can organize the information, they can predict it too. (If you don’t believe me, just watch your next search – they’re guessing what you’re searching for…and they’re probably almost right on target.)

For those wanting a little audio, check out BOL #1198 for a good discussion regarding prediction markets (including the Hollywood Stock Exchange) — you should listen to the whole thing as it’s a great podcast, but at about 33:30 is where it starts.

Threadless has one of the most innovative business models and communities to hit the net in quite some time. Get designers to design tshirts, have people vote on the best designs, then produce only those which the community loves. Why is this so great? You don’t waste resources on tshirts no one likes — all the designs are winners in the eyes of the community.

Woot!, my BFF, has a similar concept: they host what they call a Derby with a given theme to have designers design around. People vote, shirts, win, blah blah blah.

Why design and give these people free money when you can go to CafePress and do it yourself? Cash Money. Screw it – it’s battle royal time. Today: Shirt.Woot! takes on Threadless, site v. site, shirt v. shirt. Today, from the designer’s view on why to submit your design. Note: Shirt.Woot! has two agreements based on how exclusive the design rights are to Woot!

It’s all about how well your shirt sells. If you can bear through a contest, Threadless is a good up-front win. If you have the design that sells over time, Woot will win you the most. But, if your design is just pure genius, then Threadless is again the way to go because of their contests.

The million dollar question my dearest friends at Harrrrvard ask, would you take these shirts to department stores? Hell no. Quick win for the company (Threadless or Woot in this case), but long term destruction of the core business. The key behind both of these sites is one key thing: community. People love these sites and it’s the community that keeps it running and alive. People strive to win a Threadless contest and get their shirt produced. People on Woot! die to be the first to buy a deal that day and crave the cleverness of the designs. Last I checked, I really don’t feel the sense of community when I go shopping at Target, Macys, JCPennys, Kohls, etc. All nice places, don’t confuse that – but I go to get stuff and leave, not to hang out, see what else is there, comment on things so others can comment as well.

Could you imagine going to somewhere like Kohls and there would be a computer display by a rack of shirts, and people would post their comments on the shirt right there – you could comment and interact. Crazy!?! Note: I’m officially patenting this idea and concept and reserve all rights to it. If you’re a major (or minor) retail store, please contact me for the rights to this idea. This was posted was drafted on April 10, 2010. I throw in an interface wireframe as well as thoughts on the mobile app that goes with it.

Facebook v. LinkedIn. Personal v. Professional. Friday night pics v. Weekday resume. It all faces off here, today.

It’s no mystery that I’ve done extensive research on Facebook.  Facebook is where we spend our nights, and LinkedIn is where we spend our days. They aren’t competitors. So everyone who thinks this, STOP! Two different purposes and people won’t mix them. There are more pictures on Facebook than Flickr. There are more resumes on LinkedIn than career sites. Even Bill has a LinkedIn profile (though only 5 connections). Facebook has more people than the entire population of the USA.

So, how do they make money? Let’s discuss:

Not a bad quick shot at Facebook v. LinkedIn. I use both. One for personal, one for professional — so let’s keep it that way.

Wikis are an amazing thing. There’s no doubt in the view of the world, that Wikipedia is the best known wiki online – heck, it’s the first step for any research paper for anyone under 35 (I assume others are using libraries and other “research techniques). The Telegraph reported that Wikipedia has seen the plateau of growth and is in the mature stage of a business life-cycle. The challenge comes in getting content on to a site and building a community around it. (And kudos to Jimmy for keeping Wikipedia alive as a non-profit!)

Wikis are easy to use as a reader, but I think the challenge comes in setting them up and getting an active community involved in editing and publishing. Creating and editing a wiki is a language of its own. Wikis have built a new programming language that’s meant to be accessible to the masses — even more accessible than HTML. Click on any most Wikipedia page and you can edit away (unless Stephen Colbert got there first). Learning how to create links to pages that don’t exist – then build around it takes time and organization.

Many services are out there to help ease the adoption. Wikia, probably the largest collection, is a branch of Wikipedia. They have several thousand wikis from Harry Potter to World of Warcraft to Lost. Dozens have entered as well, like PBWiki (yah – it’s like a PB&J, but wiki-style — (now known as PBWorks)), WikiDot, and TWiki.

Wikis are cool, don’t get me wrong, but even as a web developer I find a learning curve with editing them. I have worked on setting up wikis before, and it takes time and planning. How are you going organize the site? What will the homepage feature and who will moderate that? (Not to mention moderation is a whole other topic — see Colbert article above for great example.)

For the record, I do try contribute to a few wikis (of which I won’t mention here as it’ll show my geekness). Wikis bring with them a few main things:

1. A community of people contributing towards common knowledge.
2. A way for anyone, regardless of who they are, to add, edit, and delete without discrimination (most times).
3. An organized, indexed, and searchable way to find content.
4. Things link, and link, and link. You can always dig deeper or go higher up. The variety of levels allow you to decide how much you want to know and control the level at which you consume data.

Like the title suggests – wikis rock. The more ways we can put data/content out there and have it be contributed to by those who know the better. (And please, if you’re making a wiki edit, submit comments on your change and always cite where possible.)

I’ve been running my own blog for quite some time now, over 7 years. The question at hand here is the value of corporate blogging. BzzAgent ran Bzz.com for quite some time (it was an on-again off-again relationship, currently off-again) as their corporate blog. Major companies have blogs to say what’s going on: Microsoft’s Channel 9, Google, Dell, and even universities pushing blogs. What makes a blog successful for a company is better described by Joel Spolsky:

…an entrepreneur’s blog has to be about something bigger than his or her company and his or her product. [via]

BzzAgent can learn from this simple, yet complex concept. People don’t want to read a blog to just find out what’s going on in a company – they want  to get involved and have a personal connection. Joel provides a few great examples (same source):

If you’re opening a restaurant, don’t blog about your menu. Blog about great food. You’ll attract foodies who don’t care about your restaurant yet.

If you make superior, single-source chocolate, don’t write about that great trip you took to the Dominican Republic to source cocoa beans. That’s all about you. Instead, write the definitive article about making chocolate-covered strawberries.

Why do this? Because people will care more about these things and build associations with you – rather than your random rants/banter online. Ryan Bates provides free (and amazing) tutorials (Railscasts) on Ruby on Rails (a programming language). Ryan is providing useful information while setting himself up for success. I don’t care if Ryan goes out and gets a dog or travels to India – but if I have a question or need a great developer, I know that he’s there and I know he’s dedicated to his work.

The key to success is not easy – it takes time and devotion. Just writing this blogs eats a good hour weekly — finding great links, relevant info, citing sources, etc. Take the time, develop great content, and the people will come.

Let’s dive, for five minutes or less, into online TV. Tons of players who came to the table: Joost, Google Video, Yahoo Video, and let’s just throw in AOL Video for kicks. (I know there are a few more, but let’s face it, there aren’t.) Yup, you’ve heard of all those above…and how they died a slow and painful death (or are currently doing so). Brightcove (today’s focus), is no different.

Brightcove aims to be the YouTube of commercial video, the Hulu for things businesses want to show off, the College Humor of not-funny things. (clip links were selected for their quality.) Brightcove has a chance, don’t misunderstand my lack of support for them. They have some heavy hitters as clients, including the US Army.

What’s the future: a CDN network (that just happens to play videos on a site for the heck of it but no one will go there but they’ll put them up anyhow). This is how they need to monetize and promote themselves. They have an infrastructure that can support thousands of simultaneous hits on a video while giving the people behind it the stats and analytics to drive corporate minds into crazy goodness.

If I were at Brightcove – I’d upgrade the homepage and show off some of the features — maybe a video? (he says suggestively as if it would make perfect sense for a video platform site.) They are doing the classic push to get people on a free trial and show the cost – but the real money is going to come through the corporate accounts and large contracts. Jeremy Allaire (still CEO btw) should take some time to refocus on what the core of his business is. Now, I don’t have access to financial reports, but I have to imagine the heavy corporate hitters are the ones bankrolling the operations while the mom & pops hitting up the site for a monthly fee are just spending money for Brightcove.

That’s my take. There are way too many people out there playing the online video game for a small fish to do something spectacular unless it’s niche. Go niche, go corporate, or go home.

Kristen from my MBA class provides a bit of case insight on this issue as well.

Google made a big announcement with their jump into organizing personal energy consumption with Google.org’s (the non-profit end of Google) PowerMeter. It’s no mystery that Google has a strong interest in being green (the photo above is of their Mountain View campus – note all the solar panels on the buildings) and that Google is a large consumer of energy. It was also big news last month when Google was granted the rights to buy and sell energy from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. It appears that Google is not only generating enough energy for their needs via their various green installations, but is ready to start making some money by selling excess energy back to local cities.

Take the localization aspects of this and tie it in with Google dumping their own ISP-like network out into cities, and we have ourselves a mini-utility being formed. Cities are vying to have Google come to their town: the city formally known as Topeka, Kansas is now Google, Kansas (just for March). Topeka Google, Kansas isn’t alone. Greenville, South Carolina has also jumped on board with the launch of We are Feeling Lucky, a website devoted to getting Google to come to Greenville and lay down some dark fiber there. (They even have social media and hashtags working for them.)

Other cities playing the game:

• Duluth, Minnesota – probably the coolest website out of the bunch
• Columbia, Missouri

So – where is Google going? To your city. Anytown, USA is now about to be Googletown, USA.