Letters to the President
Reply
From The Huffington Post: “In his first week as president, Obama asked his staff to select 10 letters a day for him to read from among the tens of thousands that were flooding into the White House. … Fourteen months later, Obama still takes 10 letters (including e-mails and faxes) with him when he heads upstairs at the end of each weekday. He personally writes back to three or four.”
My suggestion posted here in March of 2008:
“President Obama reads, answers and acts on one email –from an American citizen– every week. Let’s say, on Friday. Here’s how it might work:
Anybody can email the president once a week. Yes, people will try to find ways to scam this but you can deal with that. On Friday morning, 10 emails are selected at random and forwarded to President Obama’s in-box. He looks through them, picks one and responds –personally– to the sender. If action is required, the email is forwarded to the appropriate subordinate who has to DO something because the president –and the country– will be watching.
My suggestion goes a bit further but the two are eerily close. And, yes, I did email my suggestion to the Obama campaign.
Video Affiliate Advisory
I love this idea. The head of affiliate relations for Learfield Sports (Keith Kowalski) posts a brief (60 sec) video, explaining a new text alert service for keeping radio affiliates up to the minute on changes to broadcast times due to weather. Nothing fancy here. Just pointed the Flip camera and popped the advisory up on YouTube. Our sports ops folks are making excellent use of their website (WordPress) which serves 40+ networks.
The Rainmaker: “You must be stupid, stupid, stupid.”
I don’t own a suit
I bought my first suits in 1971. A gray one and and brown one, both in a nice polyester blend. I was getting ready to start my ill-fated career as a U. S. Postal Inspector and the suits were exactly what you’d expect a fed to wear.
A year later I was a small town radio guy and the suits were traded for Hawaiian shirts and Levis. It was a dozen years before I again needed a suit. All the managers at Learfield wore suits in 1984. Even when calling on an affiliate radio station in Tarkio, MO.
Over the next 15 years or so, I accumulated about a dozen suits that you’d have to examine closely to tell one from the other. They’ve been hanging in my closet since I tunneled out of the executive suite and into cyberspace several years ago.
Today I loaded them up and took them to the local Goodwill. And it felt great. Oh, I’ll probably need a suit again some day (can you rent a suit?) But for now, it’s business casual on the dressy end and Hawaiian shirts and Levis the rest of the time.
“Some things need to be believed to be seen”
Excerpts from Adam Bryant’s interview with Guy Kawasaki:
- “I learned from Steve Jobs that people can change the world. Maybe we didn’t get 95 percent market share, but we did make the world a better place. I learned from Steve that some things need to be believed to be seen.”
- “We believed in the Mac division that we were making the world a better place by making people more creative and productive. Google, at its core, probably believes it’s making the world a better place by democratizing information.”
- “Make yourself dispensable — what greater accomplishment is there than the organization running well without you?”
- “You should conduct first- and second-round (hiring) interviews by phone, not in person.”
- “(Business schools) should teach students how to communicate in five-sentence e-mails and with 10-slide PowerPoint presentations.”
That last bullet is my new objective. If you get a longer email from me, remind me of this post.
Truth 2.0
Arianna Huffington makes some predictions of what comes next for the Internet and I sure hope she’s right. A few excerpts:
- “An online tool that makes it possible to instantly fact-check a story as you are reading it — or watching it on video. Picture this: It’s last summer and you are reading or watching a story about health care, and Sarah Palin or Betsy McCaughey is prattling on about death panels. Instantly, a box pops up with the actual language from the bill or a tape rolls with a factual explanation of what the provision in question really does. And this is a non-partisan tool. So when, in the midst of the legislative debate, President Obama says “I didn’t campaign on the public option,” the software will fire up and instantly show you where support for the public option appeared in his campaign plan, and clips of all the times he mentioned it in public after he got elected.
- A .com innovation that immediately provides a reader or viewer with the background knowledge needed to better understand the data and information being delivered as news. The powers-that-be — both political and corporate — have mastered the dark art of making information deliberately convoluted and indecipherable. For them, complexity is not a bug, it’s a feature.
- Our future tool will also automatically simplify needlessly complicated laws, contracts, and linguistic smoke screens. So when a politician or Wall Street CEO performs the usual verbal gymnastics in an attempt to befuddle and bamboozle us, his words will immediately be translated into clear and precise language. It will be Truth 2.0.
- In the future, software will be created that allows us to pull the curtain back on the corridors of power and see who is really pulling the levers. A great early iteration of this was provided by the Sunlight Foundation during the recent health care summit. During its live streaming of the discussion, the Foundation offered a dose of transparency by showing, as each of our elected officials was speaking, a list of his or her major campaign contributors. It was simple, powerful, and spoke volumes about the extent to which many players in the summit were bought and paid for.
I think this will happen because it can happen. I hope this scares the shit out of the politicians and power-brokers.
Some won’t make it to the new world
Michael Wolff speaking at MediaGuardian’s Changing Media Summit in London:
“The chickens are coming home to roost. Most of the people who run traditional media will not be the people to step in to this new world.
“There is a line and people are not going to get over it. It used to be, up until 18 months ago, ‘there is a line but I hope I get to retirement before I cross that line’. This recession has meant people really understand that they won’t.
“It’s been happening since before the internet – it’s not because of it.
“Every big-city newspaper in the U.S. is either in bankruptcy or will be in bankruptcy in the foreseeable future – that’s 12 months. The newspaper industry in the U.S. is over.
“This has happened again and again and again in every industry – new technology has come along, and you just can’t make the change; it almost inevitably never happens. It’s easier to start with people who have no historical bias.
“If you’ve spent your career in one technology, in one business model, it’s just not efficient to have to undo that.“
I think Mr. Wolff is right and his comments [emphasis mine] remind me of a post by Jay Rosen from 5 years ago.
“An industry that won’t move until it is certain of days as good as its golden past is effectively dead, from a strategic point of view. Besides, there is an alternative if you don’t have the faith or will or courage needed to accept reality and deal. The alternative is to drive the property to a profitable demise.
Revolutions invent and destroy and only go one way
Seth Godin on the internet revolution:
“The internet is like Ice 9. It changes what it touches, probably forever. We keep discovering firsts, the biggest viral video ever, the most twitter followers ever, the fastest bestseller ever… And we constantly discover nevers as well. There’s never going to be a mass market TV show that rivals the ones that came before. There’s never going to be a worldwide brand built by advertising ever again either. And Michael Jackson’s record deal is the last one of its kind… And there may never be a job like that job you used to have either.
Revolutions are like that. They invent and destroy and they only go one way. It’s like watching a confused person in a revolving door for the first time. They push backwards, try to slow it down, fight the rotation… and then they embrace the process and just walk and it works.”
Know anybody fighting that revolving door? Yeah, me too. And there’s no way to help them. I guess a revolution is good or bad depending on where you are. The Czar and the French aristocrats thought their revolutions sucked. The people on the ramparts had a different view.
“My head is in the cloud”
Dave Pell (“Tweetage Wasteland”) describes a condition in which more of us are finding ourselves:
“My phone tells me numbers, Facebook reminds me of birthdays, my nav system gives me directions, Google tells me how to spell, my bookmarks remind me of what I’ve read, my inbox tells me who I’m having a conversation with – my mind has been distributed across several devices and services.
My head is in the cloud.
Now, after a few years of this, I realize that when I look up from the screen I know almost nothing. And maybe that would be fine if the absent phone numbers and upcoming dates were freeing space for deeper and more introspective thought. But I sense that my addiction to the realtime stream is only making room for the consumption of a faster stream.”
Yeah, I think about that, too. But I’m not sure I would have remembered all of that stuff without the cloud and my connections to it.
On a somewhat related note… my Facebook “cancellation” takes effect on Sunday. I canceled my account a few weeks ago. FB gave me the option of “deactivation” but I said, no, please delete my account. Seems FB makes you wait a few weeks, in hopes you will come to your senses.
I wouldn’t normally give such a decision a second thought but Facebook has become The Place (for the time being) and I should probably be there. But I’m not. And don’t expect to be. But I’ve come up with a rationalization:
We have a finite amount of time and attention. It’s impossible to be in every social space. Assuming that everyone on the planet is –or soon will be– on Facebook, taking a pass will protect the little attention I have left.