techPresident - Authenticity in Social Media - Comments

Thanks for the great comments

Fred Stutzman — Wed, 23 May 2007 12:22:37 -0400

There are some great points raised in the comment thread, and I think Micah really hits the nail on the head.

First, I expected more criticism that concentrating on social media is actually "missing the point." When it comes to winning elections, the power to motivate sheer numbers (often to donate) is very powerful, and social media has not proven its case quite yet. And while I generally agree with this characterization, I'm glad we were able to look past this point. Like it or not, over the next one or five or ten years, we are going to become opt-in media consumers. We are going to select our messages and gatekeep based on interests. The social media audience will eventually become a prime audience, especially as the younger generation of today are being socialized on these tools.

But the greater point is Micah's Wineberger reference. When I get a message from a candidate, that message is usually couched in the one-to-one. The candidate is making an appeal to me, and through personalization technology, the email often has my name or reflects my interests. However, there's generally false pretense here - the candidate doesn't know me, the candidate doesn't want me to respond to him or her. So instead of this one-to-one communication, what if the candidate was simply a proxy for enabling many-to-many conversation. This would involve acknowledging the role of the supporter (a grunt in a vast army), and maybe I wouldn't feel so much like a unique snowflake, but isn't that reality?

I guess my main notion is that when we are communicating with social media, the pretense is less than useful. Rather than trying to trick me to think that I'm the candidate's friend, why not actually leverage the affordances of the media and get me connecting, working, and establishing the many-to-many conversations that are truly influential and useful.

Politicians and/or Citizens on YouTube

SonjaBaumer — Tue, 22 May 2007 23:51:34 -0400

I am a researcher studying American youth's political engagement on YouTube, so my comment will focus mostly on self-presentations and authenticity on this media.

YouTube is a citizen media, inhabited by users who negotiate their reputation by creating and sharing contents (videos, comments, profile pages etc.). However presidential candidates are not really citizens, but public personas, who have access to mainstream media and substantial monetary and social capital. They are YouTube users, but they “use” YouTube in order to boost their popularity and reputation outside of YouTube. This by itself raises suspicion in the eyes of other YouTube users who embrace authenticity as one of the main value of their community. Although there already are YouTube channels that are associated with public entities (mainly in the area of entertainment), those entities do not pose as citizens. Indeed other studies have also shown that highly managed self-presentations are less appealing to all audiences. So yes more authenticity on the side of presidential candidates would definitely help reach YouTubers. Politicians should not pretend to be younger or more jovial, but act as sincere as they could in creating their self-presentations on YouTube.

YouTube is also a social networking site and if presidential candidates want to become members of YouTube community(ies), they should be leaving comments, subscribing to other people’s videos and getting YouTube celebrities to subscribe to their videos and/or put them on their contact lists, as a form of "celebrity endorsement". But on the other hand, the “Long Tail” may not be so enthusiastic to embrace its “Head”, and attempts to recruit YouTube celebrities in presidential campaigns (which is probably already happening!) may backfire. Both politicians and YouTube celebrities may be renounced as "cheaters" and lose their online and/or offline reputations.

Sorry for such a long comment – I am writing an essay about a similar topic and am using this dialogue to refine my own thoughts.

SonjaBaumer

Right on Micah

Luigi Montanez — Tue, 22 May 2007 23:23:44 -0400

Great point in that last paragraph. Facebook and MySpace are social networks. They're great for outreach and, well, socializing. Yes, they can be bent to do some organizing (Facebook in particular with the events and groups features), but they're not actual activism networks.

DFA-Link, the DNC's PartyBuilder, My.BarackObama, Edwards' OneCorps -- these are activism networks, and they are the places where supporters can network together most effectively.

If I were in the campaigns, I would have the top widget on my MySpace page sign my supporters up directly into my activism network, not just to my email list.

Both avenues need to be explored.

drowsy — Tue, 22 May 2007 23:11:21 -0400

I get your point about generating good lateral connections. But authentication and authenticity are huge points that should take a large chunk of our attention between PdF2007 and PdF2008.

I took danah boyd's talk to heart. If a candidate bothers with whistlestops then he/she has to be ready to address small virtual crowds too, in an asynchronous or semi-synchronous way, and pull it off! Add to that Seth Godin's point that amplifying a person's coolness may make them into a transmitter for a candidate to pull along others, and then the main article's point reinforces your strategic goal.

To address a point in the main article, there are a small band of effective surrogates in the campaigns I follow, they represent the inner circle, or what we'd like to think was a group with more access who would share it with us, using our language, and passing on our concerns. You had a few of them as presenters, and there are more out there that serve as trusted voices for an online campaign.

They get access and ask the questions their readers care about, and in exchange we grant the the candidate a little bit of cred - that exchange grants authenticity to the candidate via the BS filters we know and trust. Folks like Tim Tagaris fill that role per candidate, and the myDD and FDL crowd do that for their readership.

Perhaps this is the wrong question

Micah L. Sifry — Tue, 22 May 2007 20:43:46 -0400

Maybe, instead of pondering how a candidate can effectively connect with thousands or millions of supporters by "friending" or "poking" or "twittering" them, we should turn the funnel on its side (as Seth Godin puts it) and pay more attention to how these networking tools allows voters and activists to better coalesce around a cause or a candidate.

Once again, let's drink from the well of experience that was the
Dean campaign. I remember Nicco Mele, Dean's webmaster, telling me that if 10% of the people on their 600K supporter list hit reply in response to an email, the campaign would be overwhelmed for days, so they actually made it harder for people to find the campaign's email address on the web. I then asked David Weinberger, who was advising the campaign, who any candidate could possibly communicate in a meaningful way online with such a huge list. His answer was brilliant: You can't scale a conversation from one person up top to many, but lateral conversations among supporters can scale almost infinitely.

So, rather than imagine that campaigns are going to collectively "represent" a candidate in online social networks, maybe we should pay more attention to tools that help large communities have effective lateral conversations and filter the best ideas/actions to the attention of all.

If we frame the question that way, then I suspect we may want to conclude that the whole current focus on online social networks like Facebook and MySpace has been a big distraction from what may really make a difference this cycle--the ability of large numbers of supporters to network together most effectively.

Micah

Authenticity in Social Media

Fred Stutzman — Tue, 22 May 2007 17:40:11 -0400

In Mike Turk and Zack Exley's session at PDF 2007, a topic that came up frequently was the creation of perception with social media tools. The discussion explored methods for humanizing the candidate; dropping in on the comments of a blog post seemed a common and popular strategy. The outcome of this type of action is simple - it creates the perception that candidates are actively engaging with digital supporters. Of course, the problem is that this strategy isn't scalable or realistic; if we don't have enough time to read all of the blogs in our newsreader every day, one can only imagine how little time candidates have.

The connections fostered by social media are unique and context-specific. A blog comment is not the same as a Twitter or text message or Facebook share; all of these tools have their own rules and expectations. Perhaps this is why Barack Obama's first Twitter seemed so strange - his avatar seemed to not understand the complexities or expectations of the medium. Of course, once you understand the rules of the medium, it's not hard to create authentic persona for the candidates (though I'm still not sure about Obama's Twitters).