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the chance for ordinary citizens to talk back.
The real reason, however, was that Obama wasn't actually trying to have a conversation with Americans via YouTube. Like every president before him, he was simply harnessing the latest tools to talk to them, one-way.
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- Technophiles who watched the campaign closely expected more, and now they are putting pressure on the White House to govern with unparalleled transparency and citizen interaction. Dan Froomkin of the Niemen Watchdog Journalism Project and The Washington Post summed up expectations in a blog post calling for Obama to embrace "wiki culture" in which "major policy proposals have public collaborative workspaces."
- Obama has himself to blame for raising such expectations. During the campaign, he embraced every form of social media.
- Obama had four times the number of Facebook supporters, 24 times the Twitter devotees, and three times the visitors to his site in the final campaign week. The public watched about 15 million hours of Obama campaign videos on YouTube. Along the way, Obama collected 13 million email addresses, more than a million cell phone numbers, and a half-billion dollars in online donations.
- But turning his innovative campaign and transition into Government 2.0 won't be easy. The nimble Obama startup is about to be absorbed into a stodgy, technologically backward behemoth: the federal government.
- Terry Richardson/CPI Syndication
  
  
  
  There's also another reason to expect a tech-driven presidency: Obama promised it. He said he would expand government transparency by putting more data up on the Web, streaming meetings live, and letting the public comment on most legislation for five days before he signs it. He said he would bring blogs, wikis, and social networking tools with him into the executive branch—all overseen by a new national chief technology officer.
- he is listening to them
- "But we're going to have to change how government thinks about the Internet before we can do the things we want to do."
- For starters, the federal government operates more than 24,000 separate sites, many of them years out of date.
- Don't worry about trying wild stuff, like setting up federal social networks. Many agencies bar employees from even looking at sites like Facebook at work, much less building their own versions.
- Progress has been achingly slow. There have been some notable exceptions—like a blog on the Transportation Security Administration Web site, open to comments and manned by five agency staffers, and NASA.gov's numerous social media initiatives, including Twitter feeds from 20 missions and projects. But the successes are rare and isolated.
- For example, many of Obama's online campaign techniques would be impeded by a collection of obscure and well-intentioned rules.
- Obama or his CTO can lift some of the Internet restrictions with the stroke of a pen. Others will require congressional action or clever technology.
- To that end, the transition team served up small accountability stuff first. Change .gov supplemented Obama's weekly YouTube addresses with periodic videos from inside the transition process, everything from staff meetings to vlog-type updates from advisers.
- no matter how vibrant—doesn't represent all of the American public.
- it's hard to solve the actual problems" without effort from regular people
- And a presidential Twitter feed, Flickr photos, or WhiteHouse.gov video Q&A sessions may not vastly increase transparency or deeply inform policy, but they create a valuable intimacy with citizens. "People who think they are being listened to tend to respect more the person talking," says Rasiej.
- Obama's campaign was never a bottom-up endeavor
- didn't crowdsource
- one of the most tightly controlled, top-down campaigns in modern history
- Obama's best shot at rebooting the government is to remember how he got there: making people feel that they were part of the solution and then enabling them to talk to one another and take action.

The Global Human Capital Journal » Web 2.0 Case Study: Barack Obama’s Use of Social Media

globalhumancapital.org/?p=216 - Preview

socialmedia marketing business

These supporters will bring their changed expectations of action and collaboration to their vendors. That means your company.
Right now, ask yourself what emerging competitors or substitutes could emerge in your market space by using social media to change some of the assumptions about your industry, sector or company. This disruption is either percolating or actively happening right now, even though many executives are not aware of it yet.
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- The Obama campaign epitomizes the opportunities and threats posed by disruptive technology in its early market:
  
  The campaign was contending with established players that had far greater resources
  There were few alternatives to putting emerging social media technology and processes in the front lines of the contest (they were desperate)
  The campaign had little chance of success if it had only used legacy processes
  Obama was not on the radar screen at first because he didn’t look like a serious contender according to traditional metrics
  By using the technology, the Obama campaign was able to engage customers in fundamentally new ways
  Customers (voters) used the same technology to amplify the effect
- the Obama campaign knitted together emerging processes with “traditional” political domain knowledge to create the winning bid
- He understood the promise and acted decisively to leverage it. His experience as a political organizer stressed community, and social media is mostly about creating online P2P communities in which people can connect and act
- serving people by designing a digital environment that helps them to do what they want to do especially when their actions are aligned with your goals; it becomes a win-win
- the site supported key business processes such as:
- This harnesses emergent organization
- Obama made it possible for people to participate where they wanted, how they wanted, using the tools and friendships they wanted.
- And social media enables them to use lower transaction costs to do it.
- I am one click away from the U.S. president elect.
- The point is that all these men have extensive domain knowledge in legacy politics, and the Obama campaign’s success was due to an optimal mix of using the old and the new.
- Obama would not have won the election if he had not used social media, this is far from meaning that he won because of social media. Executives of established businesses can likewise combine the power and influence of “legacy” domain knowledge with the new social media, but this is only effective when they unlearn past assumptions that are no longer true, or that may be partially true but in different ways.
- “authenticity” often means lower production values
- they focused on selling leadership, not policies
- More profound, leadership and personal qualities and beliefs inspire more easily than policies.
- the campaign’s combination of sophisticated data modeling techniques (Bill Clinton was a pioneer here) with on-the-ground implementation powered by social media.
- social media enables people to self-organize and focus on what’s important to them when they have the tools and the candidate gives them actionable ways to interact in a meaningful way.
- Social media also enabled the campaign to bring a far more unified message to market because “we were the main actor,”
- the Internet enabled Obama to organize supporters far more quickly and inexpensively than ever
- “emergent organization,
- going direct to the people.
- Obama campaign’s presence in social media venues encouraged people to bond with the man, the ideas and the movement, and to participate more.
- Give people tools. Yet the logo also can unify.
- A big lesson for brands: make it easy for people to make you their own.
- Executives have to be rabidly focused on what will happen when their stakeholders self-organize, mirror each other’s interests, magnify the interests into passions and make a lot of noise. This can change expectations fast. Think it as “grassroots” on steroids.” It is likely very applicable to your business.
- Web 2.0’s profound impact on the election and the political process happened far more quickly than political and Web 2.0 experts predicted, including yours truly. Even the Obama team was surprised at the results. This is clearly an emergent phenomenon. I think it likely that change to business will unfold more quickly than expected as well. I will advise my clients to prepare for significant disruption in 2009. This is a no-lose scenario; Web 2.0/social media adoption will be pervasive, and organizations will have to learn how to realign their operations to prosumers. Why not do it earlier than required and derive more relationship capital from the effort? Doing so will increase your credibility with stakeholders.
- Beware legacy thinking in your organization; disruptive change virtually always presents as a fringe activity at first, as the Internet did in the mid-1990s.
- people increasingly trust “someone like me” over some expert or organization representative.
- Think packaging and distribution options.
- Social media is global and getting things done will increasingly require global collaboration.
- Established interests that think of themselves first and don’t add value will be disintermediated. We already learned during Web 1.0 that transparency and communication tools and processes drive disintermediation.
- Realize that Web 2.0 will prove to be far more disruptive than Web 1.0 because it changes how people find and relate to each other—and the speed of mobilization. It will prove core to relating to many of your stakeholder groups. Keep in mind that, just like the Internet, you will eventually move communications to social media, and you will let customers and other stakeholders participate in “your” brand in new ways. The how, when, why are unknown to most executives, but you need to make it a priority to understand adoption milestones, so you don’t get caught by surprise.
- Carefully select a top member of your firm to champion Web 2.0.
- Social media digitizes word of mouth, and people talk most about exceptions, what bothers them most or what inspires them. Think about ways that you can:
  Make it easier for people to talk by using social media to lower the cost for people to find others with their interests
  Help them communicate at a low cost (social networks are largely asynchronous, so they fit busy schedules)
  Act in remarkable ways, and give people tools to make it easy to talk about it. Participate in discussions, but enable stakeholders to own them.
- Adopt an ecosystem mindset.
- Trust your stakeholders to discover and do the right thing.
- Social media is its O/S (operating system)
- As soon as possible get to transparency and cooperativeness with stakeholders. The more transparent and collaborative, the stronger your organization will be as a competitor. You can change your market position significantly by adopting faster than competitors and substitutes, but the window to be a market leader in many industries is closing fast.
- Many people doing small things can have a big impact when they are using digital social media because it affords so much leverage.
- Lastly, think small.