360DigitalInfluence

On November 23, 1787 James Madison wrote:
“A pure democracy is a society consisting of a small number of citizens, who assemble and administer the government in person.”

When he wrote those words, social media was nowhere on the horizon, nor was the telephone. At that time, getting messages out in a timely manner was much more challenging than it is today… significantly more challenging. The smaller the society, the easier it was to make sure everyone was informed. Today’s technologies make reaching thousands of people in real time no challenge at all.

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In recent weeks, many of our government clients have been asking if they should incorporate QR codes into their educational materials. This is great news as QR codes can be an excellent tool for connect citizens to government services and educational information while they are on the go.  However, as with all new communication vehicles it is important to take a few things into consideration before deciding if QR codes are right for your agency.  continue reading

We wear a mask that grins and lies
It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes
This debt we pay to human guile
With torn and bleeding hearts we smile

- Paul Lawrence Dunbar

It begins when we are children. As Steve Hein of EQI.org points out, “Children start out emotionally honest. They express their true feelings freely and spontaneously. But the training to be emotionally dishonest begins at an early age. The child is told to smile when actually she is sad. She is told to apologize when she feels no regret. She may be told to kiss people good night when she would never do so voluntarily.” In short, she will slowly be influenced to conform to a social structure that attempts to control what feels true.

But what does emotional honesty have to do with WikiLeaks and Digital Influence, you ask?

It’s simple really. We are still struggling – as individuals and as countries - to break down the walls of ‘protection’ that we have been brought up to believe we must build. We have not yet replaced those walls with the bridges necessary to fully transform society.

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Last week I was lucky enough to interview former Ambassador Robert Weisberg* on how social media has affected the Foreign Service. Ambassador Weisberg has a particularly interesting perspective due to his 26 year career in the Foreign Service, and his current position as Ethics Officer for Nokia Siemens Networks.  Over Ambassador Weisberg’s career as a U.S. Diplomat he was stationed at 12 very different posts, ranging from the most technologically connected country in the world, Finland, to one of the least, The Republic of the Congo. He was kind enough to explain his views and experience with me.

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The rise of the internet over the last fifteen years has resulted in remarkable new possibilities for government and citizen engagement. Leaders inside and outside government are using social media tools to realize the principles of participation, collaboration, transparency and efficiency to address the challenges facing our country. This movement, often called Gov 2.0., is explored each year at a two day event I attended called the Gov 2.0 Summit.

Jules Polonetsky, Co-chair and Director of the Future of Privacy Forum, led a session titled “the Future of Privacy” and he shared a particularly interesting point of view on responsible data practices. Throughout the Summit, there was disagreement regarding the use of data; some demanded privacy while others advocated openness and easy distribution. Jules, however, had a more unique perspective: citizens will be more comfortable with their data being shared as long as there is an obvious and relevant purpose that benefits that citizen — what he calls “featurizing data use.”

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Who doesn’t love a dramatic finale to a TV series? I’m particularly partial to Top Chef and Top Chef Masters finales where finalists on both shows are often faced with the challenge of preparing a complicated bevy of courses intended to tell stories about who they are as chefs. Such challenges speak to favorite childhood memories and what inspired contestants to become professional chefs. The personal stories are often incredibly moving and include pictures and/or videos of the chefs as children and in their first professional kitchens.

I could not get enough of Chef Hubert Keller as he transformed viewers back in time to his parents’ European bakery, where I could practically smell the baguettes baking in the oven. I even imagined myself harvesting clams with a young Rick Moonen and his father, inhaling the salty air of the New York seashore where they talked about life and their futures. Watching and hearing these esteemed chefs share their heartfelt stories not only made them more accessible (after watching weeks of cutthroat competition), but also prompted me to seek out more information about them and how they were inspired.

In my quest for chefly knowledge, little did I know that Bravo TV had already provided me with biographies of all of the chefs, recipes, blog posts by several of the judges and chefs, photos, recipes, recaps and the ability to live chat (using Cover it Live) with other fans during the show. Like Bravo TV, many brands and organizations are embracing different forms of storytelling to better connect with their potential customers and incorporate more human elements into their outbound communications.
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It would be impossible to wrap up the first day of TED in 1 post.  Themes emerged around the power of diet (to do everything from prevent angiogenesis leading to cancer to reversing childhood obesity), taking scientific lessons from space and spiders to improve our daily lives, and the Nobel-winner-documented delta between happiness and economics (hint: means, not end).

The theme that is most relevant to our ongoing discussion here, however, is the possible societal echoes of the transparency that social media facilitates.   continue reading

Several weeks ago, what some might consider the most unlikely government agency to embrace social media decided to launch a blog. The FDA Transparency Blog was aimed at bringing a level of transparency to an agency that its own leader FDA Commissioner Margaret Hamburg recently described as a “black box that makes important decisions without explaining them.” Central to this effort for transparency was the creation of a “task force” of individuals that would examine the inner workings of the agency and provide recommendations on how to make it more transparent by the end of this year (2009).

To do this, they have posed 6 big questions:

1. How can the agency better explain its operations, activities, processes and decision making?
2. What specific information should FDA provide about agency operations, activities, processes, and decision making, including enforcement actions, product approvals, recalls and other actions?
3. What tools, techniques, processes, or other mechanisms should FDA use to be more effective in providing useful and understandable information?
4. What, if any, legislative or regulatory changes are needed to improve FDA’s ability to provide useful and understandable information to the public?
5. As FDA becomes more transparent, what information should remain confidential in order to promote key internal and external policy goals, such as preserving patient privacy, and how, in these cases, should FDA explain the importance of confidentiality?
6. What metrics should FDA use to gauge the effectiveness of its transparency efforts?

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Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is headed to Trinidad and Tobago later this week to participate in the Summit of the Americas - a somewhat annual gathering of the 34 democratically elected leaders from the Western Hemisphere. In preparation for the meeting, the State Department has launched a Digital Town Hall microsite, allowing users to submit questions to be answered by Secretary Clinton live from the Dominican Republic on April 17th.

There’s kind of quirky thing about the Summit of Americas site: it uses Howcast to power much of the content. From the URL (townhall.howcast.com) to the “How Tos” section on the top nav, it’s clear the State Dept adopted the instructional video sharing site’s format for presenting much of the content.

Howcast is best known for its simple, informative style for how-to videos - from How to Paint a Portrait to How to Hang Hooks in Your Closet.  (I admit to using the site myself; remembering how to tie a necktie is not, as it turns out, like riding a bike.)

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