9:00- 10:00am Did Obama Revolutionize Campaigning?

9:00-
10:00am
Did Obama Revolutionize Campaigning? A Conversation with Joe Rospars (Obama ‘08) and Mark McKinnon (McCain ‘08)

It was put forward an organized minority is more powerful, both online and offline, than an organized majority. [my take is economies of scale make smaller organizations more nimble, and that includes voting groups).

Mark McKinnon asked how many Republicans were present, and only 20% of the audience, were. Joe Rospars says Republicans need new leaders and technology, alone, will not help them. Joe doesn’t see any Republican, now, or on the horizon, who could embrace new leadership.

Mark brought up technology and the Iran Election, and we’re willing, because we’re so hungry for information, to accept any information we get, without verifying if it’s accurate, or not. On the other had, Andrew, who put together PDF2009, thinks technology, while being more and more control Internet communications, can not overpower the human need to share information.

Andrew also posed the term “Public” ought to be redefined in the context of the technologies we have, today (all public information is “searchable”, and Senate donations ought to be searchable immediately instead of 3 months to take digital info and tranfering to paper, which then gets transfered back to digital, after the election, usually).

Joe mentioned, in relation to a question from a street organizer, who is shell shocked from the technology, it’s possible to get meetings with your voters, on a regular basis, and mobilze those supporters, to reach the rest of the voters.

For every organization, according to Joe, technology ought to be fitted to the goals and needs of the organization. Mark feels technology enables participation in the democratic process much easier.

Another question revolved around “privacy” and what it means in a connected age. Mark believes as technology advances people are going to be willing to be more open. However, Andrew, thinks our own technology created Big Brother, and it’s us (YouTube, mobile devices everywhere, no where to hide and all kinds of stories coming out, stories spreading quickly). Joe postulates the technology advanced even faster than the Obama 08 campaign could respond, and that is now, also, the challange of the government.

Andrew mentioned there’s 200,000 datafeeds that will eventually be made public and as that date begins to become more public, manipulatable, and searchable, will fundamentally transform government. Andrew was part of Obama’s Transition Team and Change.org had information posted where there was a 5 day comment period, but there were so many comments, the search technology was not able to effectively segment it, so it could be acted on, in real time.

My observation is that tools such as Radian6, Retooled to process massive numbers of comments, doing the things I mentioned to Marcel LeBrun, in my last Radian6 post on Saturday morning, might provide the best solution for processing massive amounts of public commentary, and act, intelligently, in real time.

In a way, consider my post about WebTrends and code executing slowly, read that post, and consider the right technologies are the solution (in this case, using Google Chrome cut down execution time for a complex task by 800%).

Read the rest here: 
PDF2009 Did Obama Revolutionize Campaigning?

Popularity: 4% [?]

After writing my earlier post today on Iran Mainstream Media Coverage and the Fifth Estate - thought that SM2 Techrigy platform might provide interesting view of the social media coverage that isn’t generally seen - I know I’m only scratching the surface here, and I only set up SM2 to cover the last week - but I wanted to see what kind of data it picked out of all the tweets, blog posts, message boards and also focus by country. First, it’s been a busy week, don’t you think?  A lot of commentary happened as the election took place and soon after..

After writing my earlier post today on Iran Mainstream Media Coverage and the Fifth Estate - thought that SM2 Techrigy platform might provide interesting view of the social media coverage that isn’t generally seen - I know I’m only scratching the surface here, and I only set up SM2 to cover the last week - but I wanted to see what kind of data it picked out of all the tweets, blog posts, message boards and also focus by country.

First, it’s been a busy week, don’t you think?  A lot of commentary happened as the election took place and soon after..

Over the last week, using the advanced searches on Iran and the Election, there was a variety of content created about the Iranian Election.

Of the results SM2Techrigy can track, close to 80% of the Social Media commentary is from 35-49 year old men.

A Cloud Tag what the keywords ought to be for someone who’d want to write about the Iranian Election.  In a way, the Tag Cloud makes many of SM2 Techrigy’s charts, superfluous, since most of the information you’ll get, is actually in this tag cloud - but not in as pretty form.

And I’m not sure why there are more “positive” references than “negative” references to the Iranian election

Or why the “Tone” of the content is “neutral”

While i was impressed by SM2 Techrigy’s coverage on another project, more positive commentary than negative is not what I expected to find, certainly not over the last week.  I need to investigate, but not tonight.

I would expect that Anger would be one of the strongest emotions connected with Iran right now and sure enough, Anger is right up there (see the far left in the chart below).

I can’t do more tonight but I wanted to touch on the idea that we need to start looking at how people react to  events  and SM2 is a good tool and it’s available as Freemimum software, too.

View post: 
Iran Elections Social Media Analytics from SM2 Techrigy

Popularity: 19% [?]

The Nominating Committee Announces Candidates for Election to the WAA Board of Directors! OR as the official message goes: “ A month ago we put out the Call for Nominations to fill the vacant seat on the WAA Board of Directors . We were delighted by the enthusiastic response we received, and are pleased to announce six qualified and committed nominees for the Board.

The Nominating Committee Announces Candidates for Election to the WAA Board of Directors! OR as the official message goes:

“A month ago we put out the Call for Nominations to fill the vacant seat on the WAA Board of Directors. We were delighted by the enthusiastic response we received, and are pleased to announce six qualified and committed nominees for the Board.”

Find the complete message here: http://www.webanalyticsassociation.org/aboutus/specialelection2008

The slate:

• Dennis R. Mortensen, Director of Data Insights, Yahoo!
• Akin Arikan, Senior Segment Manager for Internet Marketing, Unica Corporation
• Nicolas Babin, Executive Vice President, International & Marketing, AT Internet – publishing XiTi
• Matthew Langie, Senior Director, Product Marketing, Omniture
• John Payne, VP of Product Management & General Manager, Coremetrics
• Mark Wachen, CEO, Optimost

All adult people, with adult pictures and adult titles and goals - and with that in mind, I would probably vote for Akin, as he seems very much like an entrepreneurial doer! Which is something I believe this organization could benefit from. They asked me two question:

What major contribution will Dennis R. Mortensen bring to Web Analytics Association and its membership?
A positive attitude for one global united WAA, with strong local distribution of power and resources. A possibility to set and execute on standards, beyond just chatting about them! — Clear vision on where the industry is going and what the tasks of the WAA should be.

Where do you think the Web Analytics Association should be in the next two years?
I believe the WAA is in a position to become a much larger and more prominent voice in the industry on such items as: Privacy, Standards and Member Qualification and Certifications.

Where we today have initiated a lot of good initiatives, but perhaps lack in execution and realization of some of them. Cheers … and have a great time voting. Oh. There’s free Red Bull’s and Y! accounts for votes on Dennis

Dennis R. Mortensen, Director of Data Insights at Yahoo!

See the original post:
Candidates for Election to the WAA Board of Directors

Popularity: 100% [?]