Tag: media

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Is Viral Video Marketing Like Retirement Planning Based on Buying Lottery Tickets?

Marketing firms (and some of us) are trying to crack the viral video code. To the extent there is a solution, it is like buying lottery tickets. You cannot win if you don’t play. If you buy a lot of tickets, you increase your chances by a little, but any system for picking the right combination of numbers is just superstition.  And the only way to guarantee a win at the lottery is not to play. 

But people win just enough to keep the suckers piling in the cash.  The winners always have a plausible story to tell.   They often report that they were sure they were going to win that day, or at least they had a feeling.   Many have some kind of lucky number system, some quite complicated.   If you look at a group of lottery winners you can indeed find (or create) patterns among them.    (This is “survivor bias.”   In any kind of random event, somebody is going to win.   It doesn’t mean anything, but people will impose reasons ex-post facto.   The winner may even write a book explaining his system.   People following his precepts will have the same chances the lucky winner had of winning before he won.)

Besides the usually urgent need in need of dental work & gym memberships, most lottery winners are regular players with some sort of system.  Statistically this makes sense.   Regular players buy more tickets so they have a greater chance of winning as a group and most of them develop some sort of system.   But the group odds often don’t make sense when reduced to the individual level.  The odds of winning the big jackpot are so small that the actual difference between a person who buys a thousand tickets and the person who buys only one doesn’t add up to much for any individual.

Anyway, the chances that you can create a video that goes viral are a lot like your chances of winning the lottery.  And the odds will only get worse as more people enter the contest.    Millions of people are trying to crack this code because it would mean millions of dollars to any individual or firm that figured it out. But if they did, others would quickly pile on and pull the odds of success back up to astronomical.   The system is reactive & self-correcting.

It gets worse.  Most successful viral videos are – in a word – dopey.   Let me make a few distinctions.  There are three types of viral videos.   The first results if you happen to be on the spot to get a video of something truly spectacular, such as a plane crash or meteor strike.  The second involves celebrities, who command attention because of their fame.  The video rides on them, not the other way around.   The third type is the miscellaneous or the manufactured, which is the only kind available to non-celebrities who don’t happen to be near a plane crash or meteor strike. 

If you are trying to manufacture the viral part, you increase your odds mostly by doing something silly, humiliating, prurient or shocking.    This is not something most individual or organizations want to do.  It might be better to remain unknown than to be known for your ability to pass gas to the tune of Beethoven’s 5th Symphony. 

So let’s treat the great viral video quest the way a reasonable person treats the lottery.  We should do it because it is fun.  Almost everybody has bought a lottery ticket.  You are buying a little piece of a dream and it is a good thing.   But if you are spending too much, even neglecting other things & taking out loans or planning your retirement around your lottery winnings, you are unlikely to have a happy ending.

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The Four Ps of Marketing (and Public Diplomacy)

I was talking to some marketing guys the other day who told me that we should market America like a brand.  We should listen to our customers and make sure we create products the market wants.   I understand this, but there are a few problems with this formulation, not least of which is that America is greater than any brand.  We are something special and we should not prim and trim ourselves to win ephemeral popularity. But that aside, government, especially the U.S. government has fewer “marketing” options.    

Marketers used to talk about the Four Ps: product, price, promotion and place.  Executives supposedly control those four things and can deploy them and rearrange them to maximize the attractiveness and sales of their products.    As a government “executive” I control none of those things. 

Our “product” the U.S. and its policies, is determined by forces way beyond our small ability to add or detract.  I don’t have the ability to alter it to suit changing or local conditions and probably would not want to.   Our product will not always be popular and sometimes very unpopular.  People engaged in actual armed conflict against us or our interests are probably signaling that they are not happy with the “product” on offer, which illustrates the other important difference in the product category.  A marketer never has to appeal to everybody while government is stuck with everybody in the marketing universe.  The private sector supports many options and people can choose.  If you don’t like Coke Zero, don’t drink it. Opting out of government is not so easy.

How about price?  We don’t have one.  We usually think of price as something that limits or stimulates demand, but its most important function is the information it conveys about relative scarcity and attractiveness of the product and its components.  People can easily lie to pollster and often deceive themselves, but when they have to put down the cash, they tend to reveal their true preferences.  Price is a better indicator than polling but we just don’t have that information and have to look to proxies and polls, which are always imperfect and usually behind the curve.

Place is determined by policies (above) and geography.  Conditions and adversaries often determine where we have to engage.  But we do have some flexibility in location.   We can choose to emphasize particular things in particular places.  Of course, we suffer significant leakage.    Information markets are not separate and we rarely have the luxury of being ignored by those not in the target audience.    We also have the problem of having actual enemies who refuse to stay in the places we would prefer of them.    In fact, a significant amount of overall governmental energy involves fixing some of these guys in place (often followed by neutralizing them, but that is not my department).

Promotion is what is left most for us and that is closest to what we do.  Of course, we are not unconstrained even here, but this is the area of greatest freedom of action. Public diplomacy could be included as a subset of national promotion.   

So we are essentially left with two of the four Ps (place & promotion) and not even in firm control of either of them.  Next time you hear somebody talk about the the American image as something that can be branded or marketed as a product, remind them of how real marketing works and the real marketing constraints.   Despite it all,  we still manage to produce some successes. It reminds me of the Samuel Johnson saying about a dog walking on two legs.  “It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all.”

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Hierarchy & Order

Hierarchy has long been unpopular – even among those who benefit most and enforce it most enthusiastically on others – and it is especially loathed by those who see themselves as low men on the totem pole (and even high men feel like that sometimes). It violates our fundamental feelings of fairness and equality. 

Besides, none of us really likes being told what to do or when to do it and that is what hierarchy implies.  Being against hierarchy also brings with it the appealing opportunity of “sticking it to the man.” 

We all enjoy that, since even the most timid and conventional people think of themselves as free spirits or rebels. Hierarchy is easily abused, easily ridiculed and easily hated, but you have to have some of it because we have to choose priorities and we have to set standards.

The establishment of a type of hierarchical order is part of all human & natural systems.  After some kind of disturbance or radical change there is a lot of chaos and experimentation.   It is an exciting time.   It is also full of uncertainty and waste, since many of the experiments will fail and many of the paths chosen will lead to dead ends.   After a while, a pattern asserts or reasserts itself.   Some patterns may be very persistent, lasting a long time until knocked down by outside forces or sometimes they just kind of wear out on their own.   I won’t go into the principles of natural succession or various theories of historical dynamics.  Suffice to say that this is what happens and this is what we are now experiencing.

I have written a lot about the new media being applied to public diplomacy because we are currently in one of those exciting transition times.   Lots of people are trying lots of things and even more people are talking about, pretending to or “going to” try lots of things.   We are reaching out in many directions and in many of those directions it is becoming clear that our reach is exceeding our grasp.   And as the management guru James March wrote, “The protections for the imagination are indiscriminate. They shield bad ideas as well as good ones—and there are many more of the former than the latter. Most fantasies lead us astray, and most of the consequences of imagination for individuals and individual organisations are disastrous.”Now comes the hard part of trying to create some patterns and order in the chaos w/o choking off the imagination and initiative that fuels all this innovation.

This is a rough and narrow path to walk, especially for us.  Government is not especially relaxed about innovation but is exceedingly comfortable with hierarchy.  Government, after all, is hierarchical by nature because its main function is to determine who is in charge with the power to set priories and limit options.  If you don’t believe me, think of why we have laws, rules and regulations and what institution is the final legitimate authority in creating and enforcing them.

Anyway, I hope that we (and I am referring very broadly.  I don’t have much overall influence on this) have the wisdom to pull off this important transition change and can expand the use of new media to promote our country’s interests, but I fear that there will be less total life in the system a year from today than there is now.

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New Media: Exceeding the Carrying Capacity

I have the repetitive task of trying to find the various types of new media outreach. The constant change means the job is never done and it is getting bigger all the time.   But it is like the expanding area of a balloon as you blow it up.  As we expand the area we cover, we are simultaneously thinning out coverage.   This goes for any kind of new media and, in fact, for any media in general.   It is a broadly applicable formulation.  But I am observing this most with wikis, so I will talk mostly about them, with the stipulation that it is more broadly related to any attempts to aggregate knowledge. 

Everybody seems to have discovered the wiki concept and is trying to put this useful model to work in the service of aggregating their particular knowledge and making it useful to the members of their organizations.   But there is a problem with the proliferation of wiki style systems.  A wiki exists in a kind of ecological relationship with its customers.   In order to be healthy, each wiki requires enough interested and knowledgeable people to contribute their experience.    If the population of potential contributors is too thin, or there are too many wikis competing for their attention, wikis will be unhealthy.    (It is like too many zebras eating the too little grass & too many lions trying to eat them) Articles will not be updated.  Not enough will be contributed and the advantages of the wisdom of the crowds will be lost.

Most people are passive consumers who do not contribute to wikis and the smaller number of contributors passes through stages of enthusiasm and burnout.   Even if they retain their desire to write, they may exhaust their store of useful knowledge they have to share.  That is why you need a much larger population of potential contributors than most parts of any organization or even most entire organization can provide.   

Of course, we are assuming we even have passive consumers.   Many wikis are imposed by a boss who has just read some management literature about the necessity of becomes a learning organization or by someone trying to impress that boss.  They may start out well, with a few good postings, but w/o the large community using them, they quickly atrophy.     A wiki is a network good that increases in value as more people sign on.  If users wander off after a few visits, or never come at all, there is no living wiki. 

I don’t think we should try to eliminate little wikis or interfere with their proliferation, but we should break down the barriers among them.  Some people might prefer to contribute on a specialized platform.  This is okay, as long as there are no difficult walls to climb walls that keep some participants out and others in.   In this case, I believe that wikis will merge.  The specialized ones will not become extinct, but rather be subsumed into the larger ones. 

One of the most formidable walls is mere ignorance.   It may be that a specialized or small wiki doesn’t actually wall out potential users, but others just don’t know that it exists.  I frequently find that smaller groups boast that their wikis are so great but unnoticed … that exist for a time in splendid isolation and soon pass, still unnoticed into oblivion.

It is like that doomsday device in Dr. Strangelove.   You have to tell people about it or it doesn’t work.

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New Media: Common Sense & Walled Gardens

Lots of things are easy when you don’t have to do them yourself.  In theory it is easy to lose weight (eat less/move more), save money (just say no) and be reasonably successful (work hard/avoid bad habits).Nobody should be fat, sad or poor, but it doesn’t always work out that way. The same is true of using the new media.It is really easy, as long as you don’t have to produce results.As with most good v bad habits, the solution to all our problems is simple, just not easy.

I include the caveat paragraph since I am about to proffer some of the advice and lessons I took away from the new media workshop and everybody will know it already.  They are actually about all communications.   The new media just amplifies them. (To err is human, but to really screw up you need computer or government support.  We have both.)  Like the good advice about eating less and moving more in order to lose weight, these are not profound thoughts, but they bear repeating because they are the simple things that everybody knows we should do, but not many people really do.  Here are a few.  They overlap. 

·    Engage before you explain.  This is the simple idea of tuning in to your audience. I talked about it more extensively in my post a couple days ago. I don’t think I have ever met anybody who doesn’t “know” this, but most communications efforts remain inwardly driven.   We are telling them what we (or our bosses) want them to hear in the manner and on the media that we like best.    

·    Use information you gather about your audience or don’t bother to gather it. This is a corollary to the first point. I have observed that organizations often do not fail to gather information, but the fail to gather useful information.  If you cannot or will not change your approach based on the information you obtained from research, it is worse than useless, since you have wasted the time and money you spent on the study AND lulled yourself into a false feeling of security. ·    Connect all the parts of your organization, but leave them autonomy.  This is a variation on the “In Search of Excellence” formula or simultaneous loose and tight controls in a learning organization. It is made more relevant in the new media age by the various technologies, such as wikis and blogs that leadership can use to communicate with a light or heavy hand. 

·    Don’t build walled gardens. It is tempting to create your own systems or groups using technologies and techniques perfectly suited to your own unique situation. Don’t. You are probably less unique than you think you are and beyond that you almost certainly cannot keep up with technical improvements that will make even the most exquisite made-to-order system obsolete in a few months. Besides building a walled garden will almost certainly keep out other ideas (see the first point above.) 

·    Leverage existing systems and products. You can still have a great garden w/o the walls.  There are always existing communities where you can participate and after you have participated maybe invite others into your own system to participate with you.   Remember that there are always more smart people outside the organization than within it.

·    Be platform flexible.   Your message is important, not the medium it is delivered on. You have to be flexible enough to choose the appropriate delivery mechanisms and not fall in love with any one of them. They pass quickly.  Just ask Jeeves.  ·    Give up some control.  If you want to influence others, you have to be prepared to be influenced by them.  My way or the highway works only in rare instances and if you demand what you think is perfection; you may soon find that you have that perfection all to yourself, since everybody else has wandered away from you.   

·    Try lots of things and know that most of what you try will fail, usually publicly, sometimes spectacularly.  Revel in it.  Embrace it. It is impossible to predict outcomes in the new media. Even if you had perfect knowledge of the current situation, it will change in unexpected and unknowable ways. The best strategy is a statistical one of spreading your bets and then responding to changes as they happen, rather than try to set out with certainty in advance. Those who try nothing, get nothing and it is small consolation that they are never wrong.  

Have I written anything that wasn’t simple or that you didn’t know already?  Why don’t we do it? 

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Engagement: Seek First to Understand

It is habit # 5 of the Seven Habits of Highly Effective people and it is highly effective when communicating with others. Seek first to understand and then be understood.   We need to be reminded of this simple rule and encouraged to apply it to different situations.  When trying to communicate in the new media, it is especially important because the age of the semi-captive media audience is over. People have options beyond three channels and the hometown newspaper.   

Organizations and individuals accustomed to wielding power are particularly likely to forget the necessity of seeking first to understand. Government organizations can compel attention and we usually think our messages are so important that we have the right to interrupt and just start telling our story. This can bring short term results in terms of notice and attention, but it just doesn’t work for long term persuasion. People learn to filter out what they don’t want. We have to get into the subjects & venues where our potential audiences are already interested in participating. After we build trust, or at least after they get used to us, we can make more useful & credible contributions. 

As you can see from my recent posts, I am back thinking about on the new media. This time it is because I just finished a very good course on new media at FSI. We discussed some practical how-to topics like how to properly use hash tags in Twitter or the strategic use of key-terms. I also learned a few fascinating things about commonly used technologies such as Google. For example, I had no idea that there was a function called “wonder wheel” where you can see the types of subjects associated with a term you Google. I did myself and found that the associated terms made general sense.

All this is related to search engine optimization that makes it more likely that your information will come near the top of a Google or Yahoo search.   No matter what you think of the social media, most people probably still find you based on search engines. Google is the most successful search engine – for now – but it keeps it algorithm for determining ranks a secret and changes it when anybody starts to figure it out.   The basic structure, however, is that it is a kind of information market mechanism.  As in a market, not all the inputs are equal. In Google it matters if a lot of people read your posts, but it is much more complicated. It matters more who links to your posts AND who they are.   So if you want to be high on the search engine, you need to be popular and credible (or notorious) enough that people link to you. 

Anyway, it was more a seminar than technical training. You can figure out how to do most of the new media by yourself, so you don’t really need “hands-on training.  You mainly need to discuss the appropriate mix of media and what they are good for in public affairs and that is what we got. this was the first rendition of this particular course and it was one of the best FSI courses I ever attended.   We had a very good instructor called Eric Schwartzman. Do click on the link and read about him.   He was passionate about the subject, engaged and very interesting, and he brought some insights from the private sector to our government mindsets, as you see above, but I also think he was impressed with how much we in State Department have been using the new media.

The more I see what others are doing (or not) I really think that State is a leader in applying new media to public affairs. We did a live webcast of a presidential visit from Warsaw in 2001 and I know others were there before us.  (We were probably TOO early on this one and it went largely unnoticed.)  We have been building our social networks using webchats and outreach for several years and we got into Facebook and Twitter almost as soon as they were generally available.  I am very interested in our internal Wiki, called Diplopedia. It is really getting good and I have been using it to find out things I need to know about our activities and the Department. As I have been writing in other posts, we have been working on these things for long time, but they are now reaching critical mass and takeoff stages, phase shifts. 

My picture, BTW, is the Church of Hagia Sophia in Istanbul.  It was built by the Eastern Roman Emperor Justinian the Great.  Istanbul is one of my favorite places.  It is a place of wonder with its mix of Turkey with the lost civilizations of the Greeks and Romans who were there for thousands of years before … and then were gone.  It is a place think about understanding.

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New Media: No Garden w/o the Gardener

New media, social media, no matter what we call it everybody loves it. It is revolutionizing communications with the public and within organizations.  Whole theories of management are developing on how leaders have to use new media tools to run their organizations. 

But there is a flaw in how it is usually portrayed and I fear how it is understood. New media is often treated as a technique, section or method that is separable from the rest of the organization.    Organizations have computing and IT departments, why not a new media department?  Create a capacity, put some specialists in charge of it, and then let it work on its own.   

The problem is that the new media already permeates everything & cannot be separated or put on autopilot. It cannot be deployed by management and then left to do its work because communication is the essence of management and the new media has become integral to communications. If leadership gives the new media to someone else, they will also be giving them the real leadership. 

I am not saying that the boss will need to master all the nuts-and-bolts of the technologies.  The beauty of the new media is that the applications have become much simpler as the technologies have become more complicated. Most people do not understand how their car or their telephones work – technically – but they can use them just fine.   

I remember hearing a story about a guy who wanted a garden that would just take care of itself while he would get the benefit of flowers, fruits and vegetables. It just doesn’t work that way.   The gardener can pass some of the digging and hoeing to others but he has to specify the types of produce he wants and has to understand enough about the system to know what results he can expect.    The analogy with new media is that leadership has to be using the new media.   You cannot get the advantages of real time, hands-on experience by reading the report a couple of weeks later.   You cannot just deploy and forget. There is no garden w/o a gardener.   

I did recently find this somewhat contrary opinion, however.  

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That’s a Fact

The printing press created facts by mass producing books and papers that were relatively difficult to alter w/o detection and could be traced more or less to a printer.  Lots of what appeared in print was wrong, but it came with some authority and some authorities became the authorities that most people agreed to accept.    We had the Encyclopedia Britannica for the almost erudite and the Guinness Book of Records to settle barroom disputes about the facts.

You could never be sure of a fact in the pre-print age.  Most information passed by word of mouth.  It was oral history, susceptible to unreliable memories, wishful thinking and ordinary mendacity.   The written word was literally written.  Each copy was different.   Specialists can date manuscripts by the errors that have entered them.   Think of it.   You say something; I hear something else.  We dispute what you said and neither of us remembers correctly.   This is the pre-print world where everything is a matter of opinion and subject to interpretation.

Welcome back to this old world, brought about by new media.   The Internet lets everybody “print” anything.   Finding the facts on Internet may require a kind of triangulation.   You have to compare different sources and then decide which version you believe.    You can also alter what appears on the web.   Well, technically there is a record somewhere, but you can “update” and perhaps overwhelm that.   Truth often means what appears on the first screen of a Google search.

The general level of information has greatly improved.   I am amazed at the extent of what you can find on Wikipedia and the accuracy is very good in many cases.    Wikipedia is essentially an information market.    It works very well when there are lots of participants w/o very much controversy.   Where it falls down is where the market is thin (i.e. few participants to check and correct) or where there is enough controversy to attract lots of people with their own deceptive agendas.   It never stands still.

I have a set of Encyclopedia Britannica.   I used to love those books.  I would just pull one out and read what I found, a kind of a random walk.   I used to like to have the true facts.    I am looking at my Britannica from my chair.  They are nice books to look at, but they are no longer accurate.  Populations have changed since this edition was printed nearly thirty years ago.   Some whole countries have been created or disappeared.   New things have been invented.    My Britannica’s certainly are not worthless, but it would be very foolish to trust them on science, politics or current affairs.   Actually, the only thing they are really good for is history.   I am sure that they have not changed since I got them, so I can trust that those were the “facts” of around 1980.   But overall I am better off with Wikipedia.

This makes me sad.  I liked the idea that I had all the accumulated knowledge on my bookshelves, which now contain facts of antiquarian interest and opinion.   On the other hand, I have the information of the world a few key strokes away.   Decent trade, IMO.

But it is still cool to have the real book, printed at the real time and touched by real people.  Below is from my Britannica Atlas, which is older than I am.  When this map was printed, during WWII, the editors did not know what the map of Europe would look like before the ink was dry, so they went back to the pre-war map, which was only valid for a few months.  This map points to another print v Internet difference.  This obsolete map is in my book unaltered.  I can find the same map on the Internet, but I have to look for it.  The Internet piles new information on old, like a sediment w/o outcropping.  In a book, you might just find something intriguing like a map that doesn’t make sense and bids you learn more.  In the Internet age, if you don’t dig, you don’t find.

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Punctuated Equilibrium & Phase Transitions

It is a type of evolutionary theory.   I won’t vouch for my grasp of  the biological details, but I think it well applies metaphorically to societies and lots of things in life.   Events seem to go along more or less the same for a long time and then they jump to something else.  In fact, little changes are building up over time, but they are not apparent and counterbalanced until the system just cannot hold.   This is what happened in the old Soviet Empire and it may be what is happening in Iran today.    It is hard to understand how people of the time could have not anticipated the change because it is so easy to see … looking back. Prediction is a lot harder.

The concept that goes with this is “phase transition.”  The standard example of this is water.  It is a solid ice until it reaches 32 degrees.   Then it turns to liquid. This doesn’t happen gradually.  20 below zero looks like 31 degrees above, but get above 32 and it is completely different.  After that it stays the same from 32 until 212 degrees, when it suddenly turns into steam. 

No matter what you call it, I feel like I have just experienced it with the new media.  All those webchats, twitter, Facebook, Flickr, webpages etc have been kicking around IIP for a long time.  Some people were working on them.   But today I noticed that we have made a kind of phase transition.   We are a new media organization.  President Obama is speaking in Ghana today.   We at IIP are supporting with SMS, Twitter, Facebook, and Flickr.  We even have a place on Second Life, where avatars will discuss President Obama’s words … and it all seems natural, business as usual, NBD to everybody but me. 

And I am feeling like I just missed a train. I liked blogs. I felt reasonably comfortable with Facebook.  But I really don’t have much use for SMS or Twitter and I positively don’t like Second Life.   I used to be kind of a leader in new tech methods of public diplomacy.  I was a pioneer, a mapper of strange new waters – at least that is what it seemed to me.   Now colleagues are swimming effortlessly in the new media ocean, while I am looking out after them like a beached whale.    The wonder is that this all happened in the course of about a month.  The world I have known for some years have shifted, hence my thoughts of punctuated equilibrium and phased transitions.

I am not sure I can go along on this phased transition. Maybe I walked along this trail as far as it can take me and I need to leave further progress to others. Maybe it is just that it is almost 3am and I can’t sleep. Maybe things will look clearer in the light of day. President Obama will speak on a from a far away continent in just a few hours and our new media will shrink the distance to something inconsequential. What a wonder.

Anyway, I suppose there are other things I can do. 

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New Media For the President

My colleagues at IIP did a superb job of supporting President Obama’s address in Ghana on all new media platforms.   

The center of the program was sending SMS highlights of the President’s speech as he delivered them.   Three of our colleagues watched the live coverage and released the highlights at the appropriate time.    Computer penetration in Africa is not as extensive as it is in most of the rest of the world, but Africans have innovatively connected themselves to the world with cell phones, so SMS is a way to go there.  I thought President Obama gave an excellent speech.    It helps to have good and interesting content. 

BTW – I feel no compunction in bragging about this shamelessly because I had almost nothing to do with the success except that I was standing nearby. That was the beauty of this operation. It was largely self organizing, with everybody not only doing their jobs but being proactive in taking leadership roles where appropriate and following the lead when it made sense.  In my time in government, I have rarely seen such a large operation run with so little tension and so much good humor. Life doesn’t have to be tough.  You can usually get better results with happy and engaged people.

Chrissy asked me why I thought it worked so well.   It might be too soon to tell, but I think there are several things that have been working and growing, as I mentioned the previous post, that are now flowering.   IIP has been building new media skills for years now.   It takes years to grow people, acquire skills as an organization and build trust.  We have grown people with skills and more importantly the innovative attitude that overcomes obstacles and finds opportunity.     Into this mix, we have added some really great young people, who have grown up using the new technologies.   They feel as comfortable with the various new media as I do watching television.   By a combination of foresight, planning and luck, we just have the right kind of people for what we are trying to do right now.

On the cynical side, IIP currently has no political appointees, which is rare enough, but even more remarkable is that our big boss is a career FSO who has been in charge at IIP for about three years, so we have had stable, non-political leadership across two administrations.  This meant that our programs could continue to develop w/o the transition hiccups.   Don’t get me wrong.  We all love the energy, enthusiasm and skills brought by political appointees, but sometimes the reach of their enthusiasm exceeds their grasp of the realities of the situation.

What was so remarkable? Lots of things just worked.  When everything works as it should, you really have achieved excellence. And some things were outstanding.

I am not a big fan of Second Life, but I have to admit that it worked well in this case.   Our colleague Bill May had some friends who organized a virtual discussion group that featured viewing of the speech and discussion by/with experts.  IIP let them use our “island” in Second Life (for those unfamiliar with it, Second Life is a virtual world, where you can set up virtual events and build your own online communities on your own virtual islands.) but interested individuals carried the load.   The new media requires that you relinquish some control in order to achieve better results, and our leadership was wise enough to let it be.

Beyond that, IIP’s bloggers blogged and twitted the program.  CO.NX did their usual interactive good work.   We distributed translations in English, Portuguese, French & Swahili important for Africa, and of course the usual Persian, Arabic, Spanish, Chinese & Russian.   And everything got out and posted almost immediately. 

Of course, our overseas posts, especially those in Africa, localized our products and did their own programs. I understand that our post in South Africa got 250,000 participants in their own SMS outreach in the first 24 hours.   

It was just excellent all around. It worked. I am proud to have been standing nearby.