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Speech Clouds - Joint Session of Congress Edition

You knew it was coming - the speech cloud for President Obama's Address Before the Joint Session of Congress:


And for comparison, President Obama's Inaugural Address:
And President Bush's SOTU from 2008:

Hello, I'm a Mac - and I'm a... Cello

Zoe Keating at Pop!Tech 2007. Cultures collide. Have a great weekend.

David's Green Picks of the Week

I need to catch up on this. My picks:

What the stimulus means for EcoGeeks by Yoni Levinson. A nice rundown of some of the green provisions in the rather large bill. Of course, I'll be watching the action at recovery.gov to see my tax dollars (and those of my great-grandchildren) go green.

Understanding the Gort Cloud by Preston Koerner. The "Gort Cloud" is a term coined by Richard Seireeni that describes the web of influencers that shape the decisions of green businesses. Preston is in the Gort Cloud as a "trendspotter," but frankly I just think he's cool generally.

Welcome to the New World by Charles Morand. Morand explains the "smart grid" that the stimulus package made famous and outlines some potential winning "Smart Grid Stocks." Now THAT'S change I can believe in.

Beyond Food Deserts: Mapping Racial Disparities in Access to Healthy Food by Rhonda Winter. This is definitely an issue that deserves much greater attention. There's a dearth of supermarkets (and therefore access to healthy produce) in communities of color, but there is a network of smaller stores in many of these communities that can do the job if they get the right support.

Speech Clouds - Again, The Issue Is Race

It's nice to be back to blogging, even briefly.

On Wednesday Attorney General Eric Holder gave a speech at the Department of Justice African American History Month Program. The mainstream media picked up on a signature line - that we're a "nation of cowards" when it comes to discussing race. I thought I'd go back to Wordle to see what the speech was really about, and to see how it matched up with President Obama's speech back in March 2008 in Philadelphia.

Here's Attorney General Holder's speech:

And again, President Obama's speech:

Interesting to me that the word "cowards" doesn't show up in the first cloud - it was the money line and apparently it only needed to be mentioned once for people to get it. As the cloud shows, it's obvious Attorney General Holder was speaking in the context of Black History Month.

I've shown a different cloud version of President Obama's "A More Perfect Union" speech before; I think that's the speech that truly won my vote.

One interesting observation - the word I see rather prominently in Obama's speech that I don't see in Holder's - "white."

Discuss.

President Obama On The "Bloggers vs. Journalists" Question: I DON'T CARE

Last night President Obama held his first press conference as President in prime time. All the usual suspects were present - Helen Thomas was as feisty as ever. ABC, CNN, Reuters, Bloomberg, NBC, all the titans of media were there.

Sitting in the front row was Sam Stein of Huffington Post, who was called on to ask a question. Also present was Joe Sudbay of Americablog.

No, they're not the first bloggers to attend a White House press conference. But I think they're the first ones who attended in such a high-profile way and nobody made a big deal that they were there. By calling on Stein, the Obama Administration sent a very clear message that whether you call bloggers journalists or not, their impact is real and the White House needs to reach their readers.

The press conference also demonstrated that some in the mainstream media might want to look in the mirror before they charge that bloggers are "unprofessional" or can't be taken seriously.

Before you take a look at the transcript here, take a look at these two questions and try to guess which was asked by a blogger and which was asked by the Washington Post:

Today, Sen. Patrick Leahy [D-Vermont] announced that he wants to set up a truth and reconciliation committee to investigate the misdeeds of the Bush administration. He said that, before you turn the page, you have to read the page first.

Do you agree with such a proposal? And are you willing to rule out right here and now any prosecution of Bush administration officials?

OR:

What is your reaction to Alex Rodriguez's admission that he used steroids as a member of the Texas Rangers?

Now, you could argue that both questions are "off topic" at a press conference designed to spotlight the economy and the President's proposed stimulus package. But seriously, A-Rod? You get one chance to ask the President of the United States a question at a time when the economy is in free-fall, the armed forces are engaged with the enemy in two countries and rest of the world is hanging on every word the President utters, and you ask him about a juiced infielder?

So are bloggers journalists? Like President Obama, I don't care. They're important, and that's good enough for me. But if you're looking for opinions from the bloggers themselves, Greg Sargent asked Markos "Daily Kos" Moulitsas about the newfound clout of the blogosphere and the attention bloggers are getting from the White House, and he said simply

We are media, and should be treated as communications outlets.

Notice he said MEDIA and not JOURNALIST. Maybe because he sees the difference, but I suspect it's because he realizes the difference just doesn't matter as much anymore. Yes, you absolutely need to know if you're dealing with a journalist or not when you work in communications, but media is media. I think John "Americablog" Aravosis added more detail to where the bloggers - at least the liberal political bloggers - are coming from:

While we are media, we're more than media. We are activists and advocates too - akin to the ACLU, the unions, the gay lobby, and more. We're not even partisan media, such as the Nation, in my view. We're far more activist-oriented, and, I'd argue, many of us are long-time political operatives as well (though I've also worked as a professional journalist).

All that is to say that bloggers are a bit of a mutt, and should be treated as such (after all, am I a blogger, a liberal activist, a 24-year-Washington-insider, a gay rights leader, a prominent Greek-American, or a journalist?) . If you corner us off with the mainstream media, you'll be missing out on harnessing our advocacy. But if you treat us simply as activists, you miss out on our media megaphone. In the end, the one thing that would hamper Jesse's job, in my view, is to treat him as a techie. Blog outreach long-since graduated from the days when it was the domain of the computer guy. The computer guy is a genius, but he's not a political genius. The blog outreach person in any organization has to have political and media savvy, and good 'ole activist/organizing sense. He has to be multi-disciplinary, and thus needs to straddle several departments, with a leg in media, political, and even tech (I know, 3 legs).

And most importantly, he has to be connected to what's going on in the White House. It's of no use, to us or the WH, having someone work with us who isn't really authorized to speak on behalf, negotiate on behalf, of the administration. We are here to help, when our interests coincide. But we need someone who's truly part of the WH team, and not simply passing us press releases.

To me, this is why you can't just treat "blogger outreach" as if it were just another PR or marketing exercise. Bloggers don't exist for the convenience of flacks and we shouldn't expect them to adhere to a set of rules simply because they're familiar or convenient to us. They have special interests and special needs. Bloggers have their own turf and it's our job to adapt to them, not the other way around.

David's Green Pick of the Week

Yes, that's PICK, singular, because I thought this one deserves some thought.

I found a rather interesting discussion on Climate Progress, where lead blogger Joseph Romm asked his readers what they thought about placing ads on the site, including one from the (GASP!) Nuclear Energy Institute. Romm gave some fairly straightforward and honest reasons for including ads:

These are tough economic times all around, including for foundations and other donors who have most of their money in the stock market. My father was editor-in-chief of a medium-sized newspaper for 30 years, so I grew up understanding that ads are part of doing business for the media.

Bloggers - especially the more popular ones - are monetizing their blogs more aggressively. Companies like mine can't and shouldn't rely on a purely "earned media" online strategy anymore. Ads are one way to state your case on a blog where you're being criticized - they have the benefit of transparency and "guaranteed placement." Other bloggers and social media mavens are developing their own innovative solutions as well, and I've worked with a few of them. These paid-media approaches will also bring about the development of better communications metrics.

So I was fascinated to read the responses to Romm's invitation to comment. Someone named "Karl" offered the most succinct response that I thought captured the consensus:

If Big Nuke and Big Coal want to pay you to discredit them then I say let them go right ahead!

I suspect Romm may have asked the question of his readers because he was sensitive to the appearance of "selling out" and hoped his readers would understand his thinking (and maybe give him a little "political cover").

But Karl's answer makes a slightly different point to those who would give Romm the resources he needs to keep the blog running in a challenging economy: We're not listening to what you have to say.

To be candid, I figure my positions on energy and environment policy are probably closer to Romm and his readers than to NEI or the coal industry. I did work on energy issues for a liberal Democratic senator. But I've worked on more than a few projects now where I try to connect companies with critics. Social media channels are the best opportunity we have right now to spark candid and constructive discussions that lead to consensus AND change.

Furthermore, climate change is one of those issues where the sides seem fairly intractible. But it's one of only a handful of issues where a meeting of the minds is absolutely critical to the preservation of the planet.

I know that for years environmentalists complained that no one in power would listen to them, and they were essentially right about that. Now the green movement has righfully gained some power as they've demonstrated the data on climate change are unquestionably on their side. Still, companies and advocates have to work together to solve pressing, common problems. This requires conversations and the most efficient and effective way to do that on a global scale is online. Are activists really going to tell companies to talk to the hand?

I'm not suggesting that industry is without responsibility here either. It's very easy, perhaps too easy, to make the short-term decision that a 5K or 10K ad buy on Climate Progress won't move the needle. What NEI (and others) must do is convince Romm and his readers that they're actually listening. They have to be ready to build relationships.

I'm not convinced we're there yet.

Talking Points Don't Always Cross Cultures Well

Back in November 2007 Craig Fuller said something on Virtual Vantage Points that sticks with me to this day. Our social media team was built on a community-centric philosophy - we identify opinion leaders in online communities and help clients build relationships with them - so we've always paid close attention to what was discussed in specific communities.

Craig took a look at the "community clouds" of the day - essentially we blended the rss feeds of the most authoritative blogs in well-defined online communities and pushed the blended feeds through a text cloud generator - and noticed that none of the communities were discussing the same things. Each of the communities we tracked at the time had different top-ranked keywords. You'd expect a difference in, say, personal finance bloggers and military bloggers, but you'd at least expect liberals and conservatives to be discussing the same issues, albeit from different perspectives.

Not really. The point is online communities, even to this day, remain somewhat isolated from one another. The reason this isolation exists is fairly simple - it's really just a reflection of the isolation that exists in the offline world as well.

We're seeing an important exception of sorts to this play out in a political context today. Two completely separate communities are essentially saying the same thing, for essentially the same reasons. But both communities remain as isolated from one another as ever. Not surprisingly, one is having measured success in policy debates while the other is struggling and seeing its reputation savaged. The nature of each community is such that they can say almost exactly the same thing and watch their message get received in completely different ways.

I'm talking about entrepreneurs who sell handmade toys - you know, the entrepreneurial moms - and bankers.

You may not be aware of the fairly robust debate that took place over the implementation of the Consumer Products Safety Improvement Act, which would have imposed fairly rigorous testing standards for toys and other products. The goal was to keep things like phthalates and lead out of toys - makes sense to me.

However, the people who make these toys and other products aren't usually millionaires. We're talking about home-based businesses or single-workshop outfits run by people who do what they can, when they can, because they love it. And we're talking about very slim profit margins.

Testing for this stuff is kinda complicated and expensive. The independent, sole-proprietor types - most of whom, by the way, don't even use materials with phthalates or lead to make their products - can't afford to do all the testing the law requires. For small business owners, this law sounds nice at first but it's downright draconian. It's a door-closer. The New York Post had this to say in defense of the small-business crowd:

Dozens of small, family-owned New York businesses, already struggling, will shut down and/or lay off their workers. The city could lose a quarter to a half of its 8,000 garment-industry jobs within weeks.

So the mom-trepreneurs got active in the social media channel and encouraged these small business owners (and their customers) to contact their Members of Congress to figure out a fix. And it worked. The Consumer Product Safety Commission delayed implementation of the new rules for a year so they could work out a plan to help small businesses comply.

Now we come to bankers. We're all aware that President Obama has imposed a compensation cap on the top executives of financial services companies that are accepting TARP II bailout funds. The cap is set at $500,000 annually. The reaction from some in the banking industry?

“That is pretty draconian — $500,000 is not a lot of money, particularly if there is no bonus,” said James F. Reda, founder and managing director of James F. Reda & Associates, a compensation consulting firm. “And you know these companies that are in trouble are not going to pay much of an annual dividend.”

So we have people in two communities making basically the same argument - that burdensome government regulation is draconian for business people facing hard times.

Do you think one community has more credibility than the other?

Resurfacing

Kentucky is still digging out from a crippling ice storm that knocked out power (and internet access) for days. I got back from traveling a day late and the scene was absolutely surreal - downed power lines and ice-coated trees, slumped to the ground from the weight of the ice.

Power seems to be restored (intermittent outages still plague the area) just in time for another snowfall and cold snap.

I'm still working on that traditional communications project, but I hope to have something soon to share from the social media world.