Grassroots Leadership

Posted on March 22, 2009 by Barry Welford

Barack Obama relied on grassroots leadership to support him in his path to the White House. Not surprisingly he is now re-enlisting volunteers to build support for his bold approach for renewing America’s economy.

Democrats mounted a nationwide effort Saturday to try to harness the grassroots support that helped propel President Obama’s campaign and use it to push for his administration’s initiatives. Volunteers met in 1,200 to 1,300 locations across the country, organizers said — from a library in Arlington, Virginia, to a park in Brooklyn, New York, and to homes and restaurants in California.

In some, participants discussed the president’s agenda. In others, they set out to homes, subway stations and farmers’ markets, asking people to sign forms in which they pledge support for “President Obama’s bold approach for renewing America’s economy” and commit to asking friends, family and neighbors to do the same.

This is the first large-scale effort by the Democratic Party’s new “Organizing for America” initiative to use the network of volunteers to help build and push the administration’s agenda, although in February the group did host house parties where the proposed stimulus bill was discussed. The objective is that organizers can continue growing the vast database of supporters’ e-mail and text addresses, which will include the Obama presidential campaign’s list of supporters.

The success of this type of initiative will greatly depend on the energy and determination of grassroots leaders like Sergio Salmeron, who energize their friends and team-mates to spread the word.

Sergio Salmeron, who started a Washington-area club after the election for supporters of the president’s policies. His effort Saturday afternoon brought together about 16 people, discussing everything from health care reform and whether the president is being inclusive, to foreign policy and whether the administration is on the right track, to the economy. “Obama will need your help to win this fight,” Signer said. Then about half of that group set out to seek signatures at subway stops.

Grassroots leadership works well when hierarchies are downplayed and there is strong mutual respect. Activities like Barack Obama’s appearance on the Tonight Show with Jay Leno this week are clearly signs that the president is reaching out to his fellow citizens.

Grassroots leaders were always powerful forces in their own local settings. What the Internet supports with the increasing popularity of social media is an enormous leverage of the power of their examples.

Democracy is a political system in which the supreme power lies in a body of citizens who can elect people to represent them. Now those same citizens at the grassroots can also make their own impact on how things get done by involving their friends and colleagues.

President Barack Obama on Tonight Show Full Interview Video (binside.typepad.com)
Obama hangs out with Leno (thenewspundit.com)

Technorati Tags: Barack Obama, grassroots, leadership, social media, White House

Reputation Management and Social Media

Posted on November 29, 2008 by Barry Welford

When Does Reputation Management Become Unethical? That is an interesting question posed by Jeff Quipp of Search Engine People.

There is obviously a great deal of power in being able to hide certain search results from the majority of searchers. With this power however, comes great responsibility. This responsibility becomes even more important if one considers that there are currently no guidelines to help guide us through the murky waters of morality.

It is certainly true that by careful SEO (Search Engine Optimization) one can push negative references down the Google search page, or with sufficient other online properties perhaps even off the top 10 page. however you cannot make them disappear. Now with the rise of social media, it is even harder to still all those dissident voices.

The words of Katie Delahaye Paine as recorded by Liana ‘Li’ Evans reflect current reality.

Trying to manage your reputation in a social media environment of today, is just plain silly (and futile), you just can’t.

Both PR Coverage and Social Media (it’s better when they are working together) have a big effect on how companies are perceived and in the end a big effect on what they are doing. The key though, is to measure both what is working and what is not working. Companies also need to understand that people are talking online, they are saying and doing things with brands, products & services, whether you are active in the conversation or not.

The first imperative of course is to try to make sure that the actions of your company are blameless, as far as you can achieve that. With such a policy you no longer need to hide but can become active in the conversations. You probably need a blog and may well decide to be active on Twitter.

One example among many is the CPA advertising network, ClickBooth. Early in the year, there were a number of negative comments from disgruntled affiliates that could be found through search. Now there is a ClickBooth blog and you can also follow ClickBooth through Twitter. The two approaches provide the best possible channels for dialoguing with any who may be dissatisfied. Now that is the way to do reputation management.

Technorati Tags: reputation management, search engine optimization, SEO, social media, Twitter

Social Media: Please Keep The Noise Down

Posted on November 14, 2008 by Barry Welford

Despite the fact that Barak Obama seems to have done so well with social media, others seem to have more problems. It is all a question of signal to noise ratio. Two contrasting discussion threads this morning typify this.

The most heated one centers around Live Blogging at PubCon Vegas 2008. There was somewhat strong criticism of this in a blog post and since then the chatter has been incessant. Search Engine Roundtable has done some excellent live blogging of Internet Marketing events for several years. Barry Schwartz (aka rustybrick), the owner of SER, has asked the question, I’m Insulted But Should We Give Up Live Blogging?

The other side of that equation of course is what is noise and what is signal. Ruud Hein, a moderator at Cre8asite Forums, poses the question of how one should share news, views, hopes, and fears around the social media world. Some services such as FriendFeed provide multiple messages to many social media for each item. How does one separate the grains of wheat from all this chaff?

The question is not new. Yvonne Russell suggested ways of keeping the noise down earlier in the year. Marshall Kirkpatrick on the other hand seemed to suggest that Online “Noise” is Good For You. Peter Da Vanzo has now suggested that the noise level is so high that Social Media Marketing may well be A Waste Of Time.

Perhaps an item in this morning’s paper suggests why people may come to different views. It was entitled SFU biologist’s theory called one of greatest since Freud’s.

Bernard Crespi, an evolutionary biologist at SFU, has developed a theory — with the help of Christopher Badcock, a sociologist at the London School of Economics — that suggests a “genetic tug of war” could be behind mental disorders such as autism and schizophrenia.

The theory, first published in Behavioural and Brain Sciences, suggests autism and schizophrenia are at opposite ends of a spectrum of mental disorders. Each is an extreme outcome of a battle between the mother’s and father’s genes, which can steer brain development in one of two directions.

The article goes on to say that it is all linked with how sociable any individual is. Too sociable and you are schizophrenic: not sociable enough and you are autistic. Most of us will fall somewhere in the middle.

I am sure we all have our own particular position on that axis and that may well explain why what some people regard as noise others may regard as signal. My own picture of the social media scene is like a crowded shopping mall. As you wander around, you bump into people and may dialogue for a little while. Then you move on and may bump into other people. Some people like shopping malls and others hate them. I believe each of us has to find the appropriate balance so that we can still achieve our goals and have the amount of social interaction that works for us. That is why some may find live blogging provides a signal but others hear it mostly as noise.

Technorati Tags: Bernard Crespi, Christopher Badcock, FriendFeed, Search Engine Roundtable, Signal-to-noise ratio

Barack Obama And Grassroots Leadership

Posted on November 10, 2008 by Barry Welford

The nomination of Barack Obama as President elect clearly signals a new era. Finally African-Americans can take their rightful place in the United States. It has taken much longer than one might have hoped, but in some ways has happened much earlier than many expected.

Much has been written on that and one of the best is in a New York Times blog by Judith Warner entitled Tears To Remember. This moment of triumph marks the end of such a long period of pain, of indignity and injustice for African-Americans.

A Business Week article by Bill George brings out another important aspect: Barack Obama: A Leader for the ‘We’ Generation.

Leaders can learn a lot from Obama about power that comes from the bottom up, not just from the top down. The sweeping victory of Barack Obama ushers in a new era of leadership that will affect every aspect of American institutions and that sounds a death knell for the top-down, power-oriented leadership prevalent in the 20th century.

A new style of "bottom-up, empowering" leadership focusing on collaboration will sweep the country. A new wave of 21st century authentic leaders will take oversee U.S. institutions of every type: business, education, health care, religion, and nonprofits. These new leaders recognize that an organization of empowered leaders at every level will outperform "command-and-control" organizations every time.

Some might regard those words as overblown rhetoric. However they are supported by an enabling technology: the Internet. For confirmation just check out the Obama Delegates website with its strong emphasis on the grassroots movement.

This is more than just Barak Obama using social media well as some have commented. Just check out MoveOn�s very clever election video. This was just one of many viral activities. Clearly Barack�s Youth Vote Was Energized by Social Media.

According to CIRCLE, a nonpartisan research center studying youth engagement and civic education, without the youth vote, Barack Obama might have had one heck of a time winning this year�s election. That�s just how energized and how active a part in the campaign the youth vote has became. The youth overall turned out in record numbers this year.

The Stats on McCain vs. Obama Online and the Buzz as reflected in Google Trends showed just how wide the gap was between the two campaigns. This had been apparent for some time as Bryan Eisenberg pointed out in August. He saw Obama as someone who was doing online marketing extremely well.

A New York Times article pointed out that this had been in the making for some time: How Obama Tapped Into Social Networks� Power

In February 2007, a friend called Marc Andreessen, a founder of Netscape and a board member of Facebook, and asked if he wanted to meet with a man with an idea that sounded preposterous on its face. Mr. Andreessen agreed to hear the guy out. A junior member of a large and powerful organization with a thin, but impressive, r�sum�, he was about to take on far more powerful forces in a battle for leadership.

He wondered if social networking, with its tremendous communication capabilities and aggressive database development, might help him beat the overwhelming odds facing him. And as it turned out, President-elect Barack Obama was right.

Now it is time for the transition from DotCom to DotGov. In particular Obama’s new website is change.gov. As might be expected it includes a blog. It seems quite clear that at least in the political field grassroots leadership is being adopted with vigor.

The Internet – Tidal Wave Or Grassroots Movement

Technorati Tags: Barack Obama, grassroots leadership, social media

Exponential Marketing .. And She Told Two Friends

Posted on October 2, 2008 by Barry Welford

Tell A Friend Spreads The Word

Everyone is talking about viral marketing. However a better description may be exponential Marketing. It is all that old Breck shampoo commercial, “She told 2 friends, who told 2 friends, who told 2 friends….” What we are talking about here is exponential growth of the number of people who are in on the secret.

All this is by way of introduction to the new button you will see below on this blog and on the other two SMM blogs. You will see there a Tell A Friend button. In a way it is a bit of a misnomer, since the button helps you tell a number of friends in one go. The button is provided by Social Twist who suggest that with the Tell-a-Friend button you can Leverage Word of Mouth Marketing.

: Image by tychay via Flickr

Tell a Friend widget helps websites and blogs to popularize their content through word of mouth marketing. Users can access their address book to email friends or tell a friend through blogs, Instant Messengers and social networking sites.

It is available as a widget for blogging software such as WordPress or as HTML code that can be inserted in a regular HTML webpage. It really is a very effective process. That is perhaps why the Social Twist Blog records such exponential growth in its adoption.

10 million more reasons to tell a friend
Posted on 1 Oct
We are overwhelmed with the response we have got. Within a few weeks of our official launch, we have already reached a milestone: 10 million widget serves� and counting! We are exploding the number of registered users. Plus there are so many thousands who are using the Express edition of Tell-a-Friend which requires no sign up.

Since other Send To A Friend code may only pass on the recommendation one friend at the time, this new button really does leverage the process. Truly exponential.

Technorati Tags: blog, Social network, Tell A Friend, widget, Word of mouth, WordPress

End Breast Cancer

Posted on May 4, 2008 by Barry Welford

1 in 9 women end up with breast cancer

Ending breast cancer is a cause we can and should all support. So many families are affected by it. It’s not surprising that a great number of people get involved in trying to help. One very powerful way is in raising donations. Many thousands do it through the Weekend to End Breast Cancer?. If you check out their website, you will find that 60-kilometres weekend runs are being arranged again this year right across the country.

Ottawa June 6-8
Calgary July 25-27
Edmonton August 8-10
Halifax August 15-17
Montreal August 22-24
Toronto September 5-7
Vancouver September 5-7

BC Cancer Run
You can get an idea of what has been achieved by looking at the 2007 results in Vancouver. As is noted, over 2,000 participants walked 60-kilometres through several neighbourhoods around Vancouver during the Weekend to End Breast Cancer and raised $5.1 million. Proceeds benefit the BC Cancer Foundation, funding important breast cancer research, education, services and care.

If you want to get involved here in Vancouver, then the Vancouver End Cancer website provides full information. More immediately you could look at a short Video, which opens in a new window, by clicking on this button:

I’m proud to say my wife Vivianne has decided to take part in this. If you would like to support her, then you can visit her website and make a donation. Any amount, large or small, will be much appreciated. If you like what you read for free on this and the other SMM blogs and newsletters, then this could be a good way to show your appreciation. It certainly beats those [Buy Me A Beer] buttons that some blogs carry.

If you know of someone else who is participating and would like to support them, or wish to make a donation directly, then this link will get you there.

Technorati Tags: breast cancer, donations, research, support

Earth Day Tough Decisions

Posted on April 22, 2008 by Barry Welford

Earth Day is for everyone on Earth

Today is Earth Day: a day that requires us all to do some thinking. Earth Day certainly grabs attention now to an extent that Gaylord Nelson could hardly have imagined in 1969:

I was satisfied that if we could tap into the environmental concerns of the general public and infuse the student anti-war energy into the environmental cause, we could generate a demonstration that would force this issue onto the political agenda. It was a big gamble, but worth a try.

Google Earth Day
The method for getting the message across has certainly evolved. As Reuters points out, Google has gone green and so have dozens of comic strips while President George W. Bush opted for a traditional tree-planting on Tuesday to mark Earth Day, an environmental event that has become increasingly political and corporate. Google.com’s online search site features a lush logo with letters made of moss-covered boulders, a tree sprouting from the “L” and a waterfall flowing beneath it.

A great many people are getting involved. For example, Earth Day Canada is a national environmental communications organization mandated to improve the state of the environment by empowering Canadians to achieve local solutions. However the Rockford Register Star of Rockford, IL raises a provocative question,

Wouldn?t Gaylord Nelson be proud of all the fuss made about Earth Day?
Not really. Nelson, the founder of Earth Day, never meant for today to be the Hallmark holiday of the environmental movement. He never meant for Wal-Mart to adopt the slogan ?Earth-friendly. Budget-friendly.?

Even tougher issues come up when you remember that it’s not just your corner of the Earth. We’ve really got to try to find solutions that work for all of Earth’s inhabitants. The production of biofuels, often suggested for a green planet, illustrates the difficulties. The Gazette suggests it’s time to scrap the ethanol boondoggle.

Government-funded conversion to “biofuels” such as ethanol is scarcely helping with energy efficiency and is exacerbating a global food crisis. It’s time for Canada to reverse course on this failed approach.

The pendulum is swinging strongly in the other direction. Last fall Jean Ziegler, the UN’s “special rapporteur on the right to food,” claimed it was a “crime against humanity” to divert corn from food to fuel. That claim resonates more loudly this spring, because of fast-rising grain prices – and resulting unrest – around the world. The enormous investment in biofuels in the U.S., the European Union, Canada and elsewhere is fuelling a food crisis in poor countries.

The Telegraph highlights Food shortages and asks how will we feed the world?

A global food shortage threatens the lives of millions. Steep rises in the price of staples such as wheat and rice are having an even bigger impact on poor countries.

Venezuela’s oil minister might be accused of bias in proclaiming in Rome that Using Food to Make Fuel Is `Criminal’. However he may well be right.

“Look at the effect it has, the craziness,” Rafael Ramirez told reporters today in the Italian capital, where he is attending the three-day International Energy Forum. “All countries, and particularly in Latin America, have problems with food stuffs. It is such a bad idea to use foodstuffs for fuel, it is criminal.”

As each of us does our bit for Earth Day today, we should not forget all our neighbors in this global village.

Technorati Tags: climate, Earth Day, energy, food, global village, water

Voice Recognition Technology To Stop Hospital Cross-Infections

Posted on February 15, 2008 by Barry Welford

Hospitals like our homes are becoming increasingly filled with computers. There are clearly many benefits but the computers bring with them certain risks. As a recent article by Steven Reinberg pointed out, Stomach Flu Is Spread By Contaminated Computer Keyboards. As a U.S. health officials report stated, the highly contagious norovirus, often called the stomach flu, can be passed from one person to another through contact with commonly shared items such as computer keyboards and computer mice.

Steven Davidson and Gregg Malkary even go so far as to call mobile computers Dangerous Devices. They advise that:

Hospitals should explore opportunities to invest in mobile computing devices that can be more easily cleaned and sanitized at point of care with standard commercial cleansers. These devices ideally would be water resistant and hermetically sealed to prevent the entry of microorganisms.

Developing such devices represents some real challenges. Mobile computers in hospitals are in some cases called COWs: that stands for computers on wheels. Perhaps there’s more in the acronym that meets the eye.

Let your voice do the walking.

Another medical announcement this week may suggest another complementary approach. The Pembroke Regional Hospital Board recently approved the purchase of a new voice recognition dictation system for its diagnostic imaging department. Catherine Junop, vice-president of human resources and organizational services at the hospital, said such systems are becoming the standard in hospital used by radiologists to file their reports. The chief advantage of course is that the System speeds medical information sharing. It also incidentally means that less fingers need to touch keyboards. Perhaps a small side benefit of voice recognition technology in hospitals will be less opportunity for the transfer of infectious diseases.

Technorati Tags: hospital, infection, speech technology, voice recognition

Boomer Mobile Health

Posted on August 10, 2006 by Barry Welford

Hot Mobile News

Hauppauge offers mobile TV on the go
Hauppauge has launched a sub-?100 device that transmits TV captured on your home PC to a remote device. TV Anywhere is a USB2 digital TV receiver and PVR that plugs into your home PC and TV antenna socket allowing you to record television programmes. The software then uses the home broadband connection to deliver live TV or recordings to any device with an Internet connection. That could include a Wi-Fi equipped laptop sitting in a hotspot or mobile phone.

The Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab as part of its Mobile Persuasion programme has a Boomer Mobile Health Project. This assumes that the considerable development of mobile health devices, applications and services will influence changes in the behaviors of older adults in the area of physical and mental fitness, disease management and education.

Today they describe the Nike + ipod Sport Kit. With the kit, as you run or walk, the sensor sends information to your iPod nano, tracking your time, distance, pace, and calories burned. If you choose, real-time, spoken feedback can even alert you to milestones throughout your workout. This information can then be synced with a desktop computer, stored and compared.

It sounds most interesting. I wonder if they’ll check which spoken feedback works best.

Tags: Mobile, persuasion

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