The Intersection of Online and Offline

I have found an outlet for my other passion in life:  my beloved Boston Red Sox. 

My pal and all-around good guy/Media Magnate, Chip Griffin, has revived his all-things-Boston-sports blog, Boston Hardball.  Yours truly will be opining, whining and teeth-grinding like only New England sports fans can.

Chip is a great writer and I will be chiming in from time to time.

Someone once told me to find what I love doing in life and try to make it my profession and then I will be rich.  Let’s see where this takes me.  NESN:  are you listening?  Does Heidi Watney need a partner?

I’ll volunteer.

Mark

Wrote an article for my pals at Media Bullseye today, questioning if the political conventions are any indications if social media will be game changing or just red meat for the right and the left.

And yes, I know I am going to get hate mail on this calling me either a right-wing fascist or a lefty commie pinko.  But here’s the article:

#RNC08 #DNC08 - Does it Really Matter?

This is the year. Everything changes. The Internet will make a difference in political races. I have blogged in the past that I do, indeed, think that the Internet will finally have the long-predicted impact on the presidential race this year, getting people to cross over from the online to the offline world and get off their duffs and meet up in the “first life.” Maybe.

I still need to be convinced, however, that the plethora of social media tools surrounding this year’s political conventions do anything except provide red meat for the people who really care anyway.

Text messaging

I am not on Obama’s text message list. I am not on anyone’s text message list, hopefully because it costs me ten cents every time someone sends me one (and thanks to my friends texting me from bars at all hours of the night). But to “walk the walk,” Obama announced some time ago that he was going to announce his choice for running mate FIRST via text message. This is a cool concept. It bet it got a lot of people signed up for Obama’s text list.

But, like other predictions that “the Internet is going to change everything!” The story broke before that Obama had chosen Joe Biden before he could send out his text message. Was this a real victory in convincing a whole heck of a lot of people to sign up for Obama’s text, to feel “in the loop?” Sure. Was it a great tactic to connect with younger voters (who have not shown up for the Dems in numbers that they would like in the last few elections) in a way that suits them? You bet your bippy (there goes that archaic comment from my last article again).

But was this “game changing?” No way. I live and work in Washington and have for more than 20 years and this place leaks like a sieve. If Obama thought that he would keep the secret before his announcement, he was naïve. If he and his advisers saw it as an opportunity to connect with potential voters is what will be a tight race, he was dead on.

Twitter

This has been the Twitter Week From Hell for me. I am fortunate enough to have friends on both sides of the political aisle (including far left and far right) and have seen WAY too many breathless posts directed to #dnc08 (for the Democratic convention and Obama supporters), #rnc08 (for the Republican convention and McCain supporters). Reading some of the Tweets, you would think that there were two different Obama acceptance speeches that took place on Thursday night. Here are a few of my favorite tweets (leaving them anonymous):

• “Just filed my last #dnc08 dispatch via Blackberry en route to the airport. What a night! I was lucky to be at Invesco.”
• “This is why McCain wanted to wait. Less than 12 hours after Obama’s speech, the cable networks are focused on the veepstakes. #rnc08″
• “Eight is enough! . #dnc08″
• “C-SPAN caller says Obama is a socialist. Says he didn’t spend his life fighting communism to watch America go down this path. #dnc08″
• “Drudge now showing picture of McCain and Lieberman. That would be cruel. #rnc08″

Let’s think about Twitter and the conventions right now. Most of the tweets for the Dems were coming from folks on the ground in Denver and were being read by people who are interested in the knowing what’s going on on the ground in Denver. Good for them.

Most of the #rn08 tweets were either slamming Obama’s speech or talking up McCain’s “Veepstakes.” Good for them too. (Ed. note: This article was written prior to McCain’s announcement of Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska as his running mate.)

My main point is for this to be the year in which the Internet does actually have an impact on the elections, it needs to be more than feeding red meat to your supporters. It’s great to have a bunch of echo chambers for each party as well as extra vehicles to rally supporters and increase voter turnout, but my political instincts tell me that what really matters is the middle - the people who have yet to decide in the states that are toss-ups. According to Real Clear Politics’ delegate count, there are 125 electoral votes up for grabs.

Are those people tweeting? Are those people texting? Maybe. But traditionally, most voters make up their minds in the last few weeks of the elections largely through a barrage of earned and paid media as well as presidential debates.

This year may be different, but I can’t wait to get my Twitter back and return to the serious business of who went out where last night and who forgot to feed their cat.

Mark

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With apologies to others who read this blog, I will be interspersing my regular commentary with information for my students this fall in our class at Georgetown: MPPR-750 - the Intersection of Online and Offline Public Relations.  More often than not, after a lecture, I will ask you to use this blog to post your thoughts, ideas and questions as well as respond to each other.

While I usually tweak the slides before a lecture, I have pasted below what we will go over this week.  We will be meeting in Walsh 390 at 7:40.

Slides are below;  I look forward to meeting everyone on Wednesday.

Mark

Way too many public relations practitioners forget their own principles and/or advice that they give clients when faced with tough times.  Stonewall.  Obfuscate.  Spin. Happens way too often.

That’s why I was simultaneously proud and a little sad when Geoff Livingston and Maggie Fox announced that their companies were, in fact, not going to merge.  Not only did they announce it, but they both blogged about it and even did a call-in with Shel Holtz as part of his “For Immediate Release” series.

I know Geoff, but I do not know Maggie (yet), but I have to give kudos to them for a) having the business sense to explore the deal, b) giving serious thought to it, c) having the guts to call it off, and d) most impressively, being open, honest and transparent about the fact that the acquistion was off.

I urge everyone to give the interview a listen.  It’s isn’t always pretty — and breakups never are — but to anyone considering hiring a social media or communications firm that tells the truth - even when it hurts — can know that Maggie of the Social Media Group and Geoff Livingston of Livingston communications walk the walk.

That counts for a lot.

Mark

David Armano of the excellent Logic+Emotion blog recently wrote about one of the most universally frustrating experiences:  dealing with an ISP when you have an outage.  My own ISP, Verizon (Fios) provides excellent service when it is running, but when it goes down, Verizon actually asks you to run a diagnostic tools THAT IS THEN SENT TO THEM OVER THE INTERNET.  That’s hard to do when your freaking connection is out.

I won’t even get into the fact that I once seached the Verizon site for 30 minutes looking for a tech support number and then finally Googled it and found it posted by some other equally frustrated person who posted the right number on his/blog.

But enough about me.  David has a good story to tell because when he returned home from vacation, the service from his ISP, Comcast, was out.   So after trying the traditional routes David discovered that Comcast has a Twitter account — and a real guy, Frank, behind it.

David wrote:

Within a few minutes on a Sunday evening, Frank responded to my complaint letting me know that it was most likely not an outage in my area, but a problem at my house. He also guided me through a process that would have fixed it (if I had a amplifier vs. a splitter), but it was still nice to get the education on the difference, not to mention the personal touch delivered through what is supposed to be an impersonal medium.”

Amen.  Does Comcast still get a bazillion complaints?  Probably.  But this again validates the fact that increasingly, and at a very low cost, companies can provide services to their customers in the manner in which the customers want to receive it. I, for one, would get on a plane to Bangalore before I have to call Verizon again.  Twitter can be a highly personal experience.

And David even did a screen capture of the conversation  Very cool:

Great post, David.

Mark