In each case, I had been invited —and cheerfully [...]]]> Different venues, different audiences, but the same query: Six times in as many months, I stood in front of a group asking (perhaps demanding) that I answer the same question. Audiences can be scary — and the question pointed to the heart of the matter.

In each case, I had been invited —and cheerfully agreed — to talk about web 2.0 and online networks, these new fangled “social” technologies. But, the audiences wanted brass tacks — my academic musings and observations from on high were not enough. The crowd was hungry. They wanted the secret answer.

Folks listened patiently — but only up to a point. I, no doubt, had waxed idiotically on about social technologies being “messy, fast, and casual” — generally ill suited to any sort of organizational context. They are designed to be “personal.” They don’t adapt well to the organizational context, and I don’t think they ever will.

To that, well… I’ve always felt Marion Barry, the former Washington DC mayor, put it eloquently (in three little words): “Get over it.” The fact of the matter is, with social media, an organization no longer can speak with a single voice, or deliver a single message. We need to get over it. It’s all about one-to-one personal communications, only it’s one-to-one with thousands or hundreds of thousands, of people. Sounding silly, I’ve said that since the ‘net began and it’s truer today than ever.

But, such answers have not been enough for hungry audiences, waving netbooks, iPhones, torches and pitchforks.

Folks know there is a secret; what’s worse, they want the secret. They’re unabashed. After all, Obama’s campaign had proven it, right? The virtual cat was out of the digital bag, and it was time for me to come clean. (Pitchforks and torches not withstanding —obviously, I’ve a bit of a love-hate relationship with these presentation things.)

The question on the lips and placards of the angry villagers, the Question with a capital “Q”, is simple: “How can we raise money with these new social networking things?”

I suppose I could blame Election ’08 — specifically Barack Obama — for setting the stage. His campaign’s success was evident. They had raised money, apparently with online social networks. They had also rewritten the rules of politics, and perhaps changed the world forever.

Unfortunately, the answer is not so simple. Moreover, deep down inside, that question is tinged with an underlying belief, a belief that more “friends,” more “followers” equals $uccess. (That’s bull, by the way, pure and simple.)

Nevertheless, nonprofits are nonplussed; they want to raise money with Facebook, or Twitter, or whatever. In the end, it’s the ends. It’s dollars, not donuts, not even the euphemistic “constituent building.” It’s about money, filthy lucre— and deep down inside they know that they’re missing the boat. (So, it’s damn the Tweets, and full speed ahead.)

This belief persists, despite the facts. The facts are clear: social networks are much better “friend raisers” than they’ll ever be “fund raisers.” But, believe is difficult to fight, logically or otherwise. Social networks are the big thing, like direct mail, or telephones, or fax, or email before them. (And, like those that have come before, we are rapidly filling up web 2.0 with random streams of amazing stupidity – but that’s another discussion.)

The “Social Networks = $uccess” belief is ubiquitous. Recently, I reviewed more than 90 grant applications, proposals focused on the intersection of jazz and technology, a far cry from my typical business. However, the same threads were there — a remarkable and overwhelming percentage cited the same holy trinity: Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter. I read it so often I started to refer to it by acronym (FYT — pronounced Pffufft).

‘Till now, I’ve had no ready answer for the Question. Nothing I say seems to satisfy — folks want the secret code.

Lean in a little closer. Today I’m going to tell you that answer.

Here it is: the secret decoder ring, the magic ingredient, the answer to the Question of how to raise money with online social networks. Ready?

Step One… First, you get yourself an Obama.

Wait… Don’t hit that big “X” …

I say this with all seriousness. First you get yourself an Obama. That’s the secret of the Obama campaign. It was Obama — not Facebook, not Twitter, and not the bevy of would-be Dick “Bite-me” Morrises or the myriad of MoveOn’s anxious to fill up your inbox, dance across your Facebook page, or displace Ashton Kutcher in the Twitterstream of useless things in 140 characters.

The real secret is this: It’s never the tools, it’s the content. It’s never the medium, it’s the message.

The tools can make it easier to deliver the “ask,” and they can surely smooth the logistics of it all, but it’s still all about the message; it’s the content, stupid. More followers does not equal $uccess, unless you’re Ashton Kutcher. And that only works because Ashton Kutcher is selling Ashton Kutchers. (Or maybe he’s selling Demi Moores? I’m never sure.)

There you have it, the message in the cryptex, the answer to the Question. Tools only streamline the process. Today’s fancy network tools, social or otherwise, can move mountains, remove the barriers, streamline the donation, facilitate the transaction, and instantaneously validate the act of giving, relaying thanks, community, appreciation, and a receipt.

But, fundraising is about content; it’s about the Obama-factor. Facebook? YouTube? Twitter? Pffufft… Tools don’t create community. Get over it.

The question was: “Are splash pages effective.” I thought about it for a few days and I posted a response. [...]]]> I hate splash pages. I hate being held hostage. The topic came up recently on the “Information Systems Forum” listserv. It’s a listserv of diverse participants, gracefully managed by the indefatigable Deborah Elizabeth Finn.

The question was: “Are splash pages effective.” I thought about it for a few days and I posted a response. Michael Gilbert (who I think of as my own personal Perry White) suggested I repost my response here, on the Diner. (I think he’s worried that I haven’t posted much stuff in the last few months. Not to worry Michael, it was just a dry spell caused by excessive time travel.)

On this particular list, the recent conversations have drifted into the rights and wrongs of collecting (and using) personal information (like one’s birthday) for fundraising, and, more recently, the efficacy of “splash” pages — especially by nonprofits. While musing over the thread, I was reminded by an early example — a pre-internet example — of an attempt to hold an audience hostage.

You’ll find my original post below, (slightly edited and embellished to make me look more thoughtful):

I’m equal opportunity: I hate pop-ups, pop-unders, pop-overs, fly-bys, and those cutesy floating windows too. Oh, and those “Do you want to take our survey” windows, I hate them too. Most of the time, if I can, I ignore them.

To be honest, I think, quite frankly, so does everyone else. Bottom line, if I can’t ignore such things — worse, if they try to hold me hostage — I’ll probably never return.

For the life of me, I can’t figure out how advertizing on web pages actually results in anything but ad sales to Google. In all truthfulness, I can’t even remember “seeing” the ads on most pages. My mind has learned to filter them out. Strangely, with hardcopy magazines, the adverts are half the fun of reading.

Quite on the side: It reminds me that there is a not-so-subtle schizophrenia to today’s internets — a crazy wackiness that seems to pit us against ourselves. It’s everywhere. It’s the ongoing drive to, on one hand, figure out how all this stuff might pay for itself, juxtaposed, on the other hand, with the almost universal hatred of all the ways people try to make this stuff pay for itself.

Sometimes the madness manifests itself in a particular ironic fashion. My favorite example is the use of banner ads to advertize software designed to stop banner ads. Clearly, there is a particular self-loathing paradox to that concept.

Even more clearly, there is some sort of dynamic tension between free and not free. Moreover, it’s a tension that manifests itself in the seemingly endless conversations about “monetization” that sneaks into the otherwise idealism of the bevy of entrepreneurs-two-dot-oh. I don’t have an answer, but I can tell you that the answer is definitely not irritating your members, customers, constituents, or patrons. There lies madness.

Here’s my example: It was the late 70’s. It was the pledge drive on KPFT – the Houston (Texas) Pacifica station I listened to (religiously) in graduate school.  It was a rather wild and unruly radio station.  I loved it.  Until.  That day.  That fateful day.

One day, that day, someone got the wise idea of holding the listeners ransom – they decided to play “Disco Duck” nonstop until they hit their pledge goals.

Now, rest assured, I have tremendous tolerance, and as a grad student, I was known to listen to just about anything from Neal Diamond, to Mott the Hoople, on through Coltrane, and Monk, and Miles, and to the gravely grumbles of Tom Waits, and beyond, to Zappa (turned up so loud that the nails would pop out of drywall…) all politely tempered with Elvis Costello (Elvis is King)… and, well, I admit it, maybe a little Little Feat… It was Texas, after all. (No Manilow, and for gawd’s sake, no Debby Boone — one has to draw the line somewhere.)

but…  but… but… Disco Duck … nonstop Disco Duck! Oh, the humanity.

To me, splash screens – especially ones that force you to watch some piece of, ahem… content… Well, they’re a bit like Disco Duck, played nonstop.

My rule is never, ever, ever, put a barrier between your members, customers, disciples, acolytes, or whatever, and the silver plate. Being alienated or irritating does not make you friends, and, IMHO, it most definitely does not raise money. Raising money is about message, involvement, community, and — lord love a duck —follow-on action.  At best, people learn to ignore the silly and irritating tricks (maybe they unconsciously start humming “Disco Duck” too often), at worst they hate you and never come back again.

Years later, when working with a member cooperative, I was reminded of similar mistakes made by the early food-coop movement. Someone, somewhere, came up with the hair-brained idea that members of a food-coop should volunteer time working — shinning the crystals, pricing cheese curd, or just pressing the tofu. Whoever it was should be bonked on the head, repeatedly, with a loaf of organic spelt hippy-bread.

Luckily, that thinking has gone the way of disco. But, it’s still a classic (and painful) example of creating an unneeded barrier between you and a sale, a member, a donation, or whatever. Good fundraising is about breaking down the barriers, not putting up new, technological ones. Keep the duck, and the splash, in the tub (with the fat man and the blues) where it belongs.

It was the [...]]]> Naming an epoch using the superlative prefix of “post” — as in post-industrial, or post-modern, or the particularly unsatisfying post-millennial — is the one true indicator that we haven’t a clue. When I hear it, I tend to silently grumble the opening lines from A Tale of Two Cities:

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to heaven, we were all going direct the other way. — In short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

Wisely or foolishly, I think of this particular moment as a “time in between” – we’re no longer where we were and not yet where we’re going — both an age of foolishness and an age of wisdom.

It’s a time of great shifts; the rules of the great game are changing and the players are all different. Hell, I’m not even sure it’s the same game. The world may be “flat,” as Tom Friedman says, but it’s also very very bumpy.

Ok, “ho-hum,” you say. It’s no news to you that the forces of globalization, instantaneous and ubiquitous communications, and unparalleled technological innovation are tearing markets apart, changing global dynamics, and redefining almost every aspect of our lives — but, what may be news is that we “ain’t seen nothing yet.” There’s a revolution brewing in this epoch of incredulity.

I used to blame it all on the two seemingly contradictory effects of the Internet: the forces of disintermediation and the forces of aggregation. Simply put:

• The Net is a powerful disintermediating force, smashing the Taylor pyramid, revolutionizing “participation” and communications, and generally destroying the value of “brokers” and traditional intermediaries of all variety from travel agents to stock brokers to librarians. It’s all about removing the distance between markets, customers, politics, and people.

Simultaneously (and somewhat contradictorily)

• The Net is a powerful, anti-entropic force, aggregating the disaggregate, creating new “markets” – social, financial, and political – where previously they were too small or too distributed to matter — making collecting PEZ dispensers into a global marketplace, and increasing the value of so-called “infomediaries.”

But there’s another force at work here, a third force. It’s a force I’ve been trying to put my finger on for a while now, since I was part of the research team for the book Megatrends, about the ten trends that would shape the future. Then this third force was something I called the “Eleventh Megatrend.” It didn’t make the cut. It wasn’t that it wasn’t “mega” enough, or “trendy” enough; I think I just wasn’t able to articulate it well enough. Whatever the reason, author John Naisbitt said we only had room for ten anyway.

[I did once ask him once: "Why only ten?" He replied, "It was good enough for Moses." I was young and had no snappy come-back. I should have said something about the Code of Hammurabi. There were over 280 of those!]

Undaunted, I’ve always held this one in the back of my mind. Deep down, it seemed important. Now it’s here. In the last few years, it has started to shape and mold this bumpy world.

I see this third force everywhere. I see it hiding inside the inaccurately named thing called “social networking. I see it embedded in “American Idol.” It follows me to the grocery store. It wakes me up at night. It’s busy working away on web pages and formatting RSS feeds. It’s reading your electric meter. It’s even there when you drive into a parking lot. It’s monitoring air quality, or temperature, and it’s in that vending machine down the hall tracking the ever-so-important availability of cheese-doodles.

The third force is all about the network and it’s all about the collapse of time. It’s all about a new network of machines, sensors, monitors, and even some humans, that spend their days tasting the world, and talking to other machines about what they’ve tasted. Sometimes it’s frightening.

I once characterized the third force as the move “from sampling to monitoring.” I figured soon we wouldn’t need things like statistical sampling to measure our world. I argued that we were increasingly moving to “real-time” measurements to understand the world. The time and distance between action and feedback would disappear. It’s come true.

Day by day, step-by-step, we are closer and closer to having our grubby little metaphorical fingers on the pulse of the world, a live wire tapped straight into a global, wired, world nervous system —pulling out the real-time flow of public opinion, or market penetration, or product usage, or the number of parking spaces left in a parking garage.

This sort of stuff, this sort of information – and the underlying tools that let us manipulate it – makes possible real-time feedback about markets, or electricity consumption, or seats on an airplane. It also makes possible real-time plebiscites, voting on this or that idea or candidate, participatory democracy at its finest—or, at a slightly less noble end of the spectrum, “American Idol.”

So, what’s does this have to do with social networking?

People hear the wrong thing when they hear “social networking.” They hear the first word, and miss the second. They hear “social” and stop listening. Then they start thinking MySpace, or Friendster, or something weird like Twitter. That’s bad branding at work. It belies its power, masks its pervasiveness and importance, and makes it seem all together kind of silly. It’s not silly, but it’s also not that social.

We all know what happens once you start ambling down the mental road towards MySpace, you start thinking of pictures of people barfing at keg parties. I know I do. Now, don’t get me wrong, truly such photos are a gift to the world. But let’s not be fooled by this red herring. It’s not about the barf — herring or otherwise —it’s the “network.” Don’t mistake the application for the revolution. It’s also about the network.

Sure, part of social networking is about people being social, working together, and connecting for common purposes, sharing, barfing, mixing, and mashing and mapping. But, the true revolution is about network, and the true revolution is about the machines. It’s the machines that are social – and they are apparently real party animals, constant keggers.

Through their diligence, they’re delivering an increasingly real-time flow of data about the tiniest aspects of our world. They are the essence of the third force, my eleventh megatrend, the move from “sampling to monitoring.” These talkative, social machines are collapsing time, eliminating the distance between data collection, analysis, and reporting.

Moreover, the network is being potentiated this mystical thing called the “mashup” — machine-to-machine structured (and open) data exchange. It’s stuff like voting information from Catalist seamlessly “mashed” and mixed with DemocracyInAction’s magic advocacy engine – one system sharing with another, where the sum, and the power, if done right, is greater than the collective parts, heralding either the spring of hope or, perhaps, the winter of our despair.

It’s Google Maps and apparently just about everything in the universe. It’s my own true love, sweet Jane the GPS lady, loaded and locked with the locations of every Starbucks in the galactic federation. The revolution is all about the real-time flow of information about our world. We’re diving into that flow like we’ve never dived before. Hopefully it’s headfirst into the season of light.

Here’s a mundane, yet telling example: right now, like it or not, traffic congestion is being measured by monitoring your cell-phone. You’re just a little node, my friend, a simple single data point on the net. Unknown to you, your fancy-pants iPhone or your sleek Blackberry, is secretly working for Traffic.com. It, and thousands like it, they’re part of an active social network, busily creating their own “user generated content,” day in and day out, in the form of tiny data points that measure the traffic “flow” through our transportation veins.

Taken in aggregate, all that content, mixed and mashed with some mathematical magic and a map or two, becomes a real-time picture of vehicular time, speed, and distance. There is no wisdom to this crowd; it’s simply the ebb and flow that adds value. The wisdom of this crowd is the crowd itself.

What’s the end result of all this social networking? Well, the result is my Blackberry moans (kind of like a cow on Prozac). Up pops an email message telling me that my particular highway home is jammed — all before I’ve left the office. As a result, I sigh and work late once again. Heisenberg is now happy, as observation has once again changed reality. Meanwhile, “Captain Jack and SkyTeam Traffic Copter” — the old sampling system that had to wait politely for its broadcast time on the six o’clock news — is a relic of the past.

Here’s another: a social network that gets to the essence of this age of wisdom, and proves, in reality, that it ain’t really all that “social.” Like all social networks, this one is built around a common goal — the simple goal of not getting lost in Yonkers. In this case, TomTom has done it by turning their customers into thousands of tiny (or not so tiny) data collection robots.

I, Robot; I work for TomTom – more accurately — I volunteer for them. (Either that or my paychecks have gone missing in the mail.) I’m part of their distributed robotic army of sensors and monitors. Through my minute and irregular contributions, I maintain and update their database of roads and bridges and Starbuck locations. When I find a road closed, or a bridge under repair, Jane (the GPS lady) and I flag it, and the world is wiser.

Automagically, that data speeds its way (via Bluetooth) across my own tiny personal area network, into my cell phone. From there, it hops and jumps and snuggles its way through the ‘Net, eventually wending its way into the Borg-like shared collective machine consciousness. My contribution feeds the giant GPS Wiki, and benefits the collective.

I am but a social node on the network, helping monitor the ebb and flow of the reality called road repair (also called “summer” in Michigan). If they added pictures of people mooning me along my route, I might even contribute more often – social networking comes full circle. Well, maybe not.

With TomTom, once again, it’s not so much crowd-based wisdom as it is simply recognizing, enabling, and capitalizing on commonly held needs, and having the wisdom to know that your customers or constituents are your greatest asset. They’re the networkers feeding the machines that provide real-time data collection, real-time analysis and reporting, and innovative mashups between previously disconnected things, like pictures and maps, or voting records and campaign donations, or your membership, national or state voter files, census data, and, who knows, perhaps their petroleum purchasing habits. Together, we’re collapsing time.

This third force is all about collapsing the time between action and effect, between impact and reporting. Once collapsed, it’s about being able to mash that data up to show you new things, in new ways, or just so it lets you keep track of it a wee bit easier. It’s about turning data into information, and information into wisdom or foolishness, lightness or dark.

This third force is about our radical move from sampling our world in little bits and pieces to monitoring our lives in near-real-time, gulping it down in great big chunks, as it happens. And, it’s also about the distribution and representation of this new world of information – these great chunks of stuff – in ways that that change lives, change markets, or simply change the length of your workday. It’s about the network. We were all going direct to heaven, we were all going direct the other way. Whichever way we’re going, the traffic is moving briskly, or so says Jane the GPS lady.

The litany goes [...]]]> I was recently asked to dream up all the ways these new fangled information and communications technologies can save us from the carbon-based perils of flying. Flying dumps tons of carbon into the atmosphere. Not good, that. Technology, of course, that’s the answer, or so they say (who ever they are).

The litany goes something like this: “With video conferencing, broadband, and Second Life, well, we can all safely stay ensconced in our own virtual-reality-sensory-deprivation-tanks and just digitally dance the salsa at the next NTEN gathering.” In fact, I recall a posting on some blog, or some listserv, just before the last NTEN conference. It took NTEN to task for being so “20^th century” as to hold a conference people actually attended. I grumbled at the time, muttering to myself that people that think technology is a replacement for face-to-face meetings and conferences are missing the point, and forgetting that tech is never a replacement.

To put it personally — and curmudgeonly — there was no way in hell I’d be willing to attend a conference where I really wanted to be, with a virtual substitute. There are just some things you can’t do in WebEx. Those things are the reasons I actually go to conferences. If it weren’t for those things, I’d just spend my days curled up with a good book, dog at my feet, and a glass of Domaine de Berane in my hand.

It reminded me of a story about what’s important and what’s not — one of my professors in grad school was on the horns of a dilemma. He had been offered a new professorship at another university and couldn’t make up his mind of whether to stay or go. I found this ironic and said as much:

“But Doc,” I said, staring him squarely in the eyes. “Don’t you teach decision theory? Aren’t you one of the world’s experts on how to make this kind of decision? Didn’t you help develop some of the decision thingies that helped keep the Cold War from turning nuclear? Can’t you just throw this into some sort of quadratic matrix, push the magic buttons, and crank out the absolute right answer?” I queried.

“Yeah, I could do that,” he said, “but this is important.”

The important things don’t necessarily lend themselves to the virtual or the technological. Some things can’t be easily boiled down to a set of equations or business rules. I run into this all the time when I try to develop workflows around grantmaking. It’s the subtleties that count. And, it’s the subtleties in interpersonal communications that make a conference a conference, and a meeting more than talking heads on an LCD screen.

Nevertheless, I had an article to write. I had run into an editor for the Alliance Online (at a conference no less) and offered up my pen — I think I said, any topic, any time. It must have been the jet lag, but now I had to pay the piper. She wanted 400 words or so. I sat down, stared into space, and when I looked up I had 3,200 words on the screen. (Those that read this blog with any regularity will not be surprised. I do seem to wax on.)

When I looked at it, I basically said the same thing over and over again… it was a cascade of things like:

• “Well, yes you can use video conferencing…, but it’s no substitute…”
• “There’s WebEx, but… it’s no substitute
• Skype video… It’s great, but it’s nothing like being there…

With axe (actually red pen) in hand, I chopped and chopped, and got it down to less than a thousand. I invite you all to take a look. The theme is simple: technology is no answer; it’s an answer, but not the answer. The context is interesting as well. I invite you to start here with the original Alliance article that interviews a number of people in the nonprofit space. Then find my “no answer” here.

With most important decisions, there are no easy answers. And, this one is important.

The author of [...]]]> There was a recent posting on the Information Systems Manager’s forum that has me dredging up the past. There, the question was posed as to the value of blogs – more specifically do they lead or follow, or are they relevant at all. Should one read ‘em or ignore ‘em?

The author of the note postulated that, aside from politics and technology, they tended to be reactions to either traditional media, to other web sites, or just so much tripe about relatively inconsequential things like the babies of hyphenated or concatenated movie stars.

At first blush, I kind of agreed – after all most are pretty much regurgitated thoughts about stuff and junk found elsewhere on the web, a few notable examples aside. This got me thinking about two things: first, the birth of so-called “citizen journalism” and second, how the media universe has changed over the last few years.

While some pundits have postulated a new era of “citizen journalism,” it really seems to me that we’re seeing the birth of “citizen wonkism” or maybe the “citizen editorialist.” The idea of the citizen journalist, I think, is wishful thinking, something brought on by the rapid descent of traditional journalism into vapid sensationalism and outright propaganda. What passes for journalism today is rapidly losing the long and fine traditions of something called “reporting” and objectivism.

Despite the demise of decent journalism and despite our wishful thinking, most blogs don’t report either. Many blogs just regurgitate, or nitpick. Some are just incomprehensible blather. Others are entertaining, but insipid. A few are worth their salt. So, while the blogosphere and journalism seem to share some commonalities, they are not attributes to be proud of.

I temper these thoughts by remembering Sturgeon’s Law: “90 percent of everything is crud.” So it stands to reason that 90 percent of blog content would also be cruddy stuff. But the remaining 10 percent provide reason for hope.

[I should note that there is one exception to the "90 percent of everything is crud" rule — namely crud itself. 100 percent of crud is usually crud. There are always exceptions.]

Nevertheless, as I mentioned, the question about blogs also got me thinking: Where do the 10 percent that are useful fall in the general scheme of things? Are they useful sources of information about what’s going on in the world, what’s important, and what’s relevant? In general, do they lead, follow, or meander around in between? .

My question stems from my past. I used to pay a lot of attention to the media, lots of media; something on the order of 200 local papers a day, and over 150 trade journals a month. As I said, lots of media. Then, I read, daily, everything from the Wichita Eagle Beacon to the San Jose Mercury News; Chemical Week to Ad Week, and a little Industrial Distribution just for variety. Whew, was I fun at parties!

“Why?” you might ask. Well, simply put, it was believed that you could use the MEDIA — in the aggregate — to tell you about what might be, predict the future so to speak, track it, or at least consider the big “what if’s” and “suppose’s.”

In fact, my never-finished dissertation was all about how to spot and track trends, important political or social issues, and the like, by closely watching ideas and issues as they moved through various media – a quasi-science called “Early Issue Analysis” or sometimes “Emerging Issue Analysis” or sometimes just called “bull.”

It’s a fairly simple model — commonsensical even. It’s an expansion of some early OSS work during WWII and a refinement of something called the “Molitar Model.” The names used to describe it are many, depending on the marketing hipster involved. You may even see it bandied about today: sometimes called “Precursor Monitoring Model” or “Environmental Scanning;” or sometimes it’s just emerging issue analysis or, my favorite oxymoron, “Issues Management.”

I spent several years of my life applying, expanding, and testing that “emerging issues” model. I authored an extremely boring study [at least that dissertation got some use] examining how to use some fancy new things called “online databases” to automate the tracking and analysis of social issues through media. Somewhere in the archives of the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) you’ll find it, no doubt dusty, unread and unloved. Que lastima.

All-in-all, it’s a couple of hundred pages of testing and validating that “Emerging Issues” model; first historically against a fairly well documented set of issues (acid rain specifically), and then looking forward at some so-called emerging issues for the time (global warming, thermal pollution, deforestation, etc).

It was a variation of the same techniques we used on Megatrends – but using online databases. The truth is I was tired of reading all those newspapers and magazines and figured we could automate some of the process using these new fangled things called “databases.” And, given the power of technology, I finally had a way to see if the model held true looking backward. If it did, I wanted to try to apply it looking forward.

All in all, my colleagues and I started experimenting with some interesting tricks that one might use to spot and track emerging issues using high-speed, structured, scans through online collections of media — trade press, legislative press, local and national newspapers, etc. etc. High-speed content analysis of online media — fun stuff really. There were no words for it then. Today, I think, we’d call it “data mining,” but that doesn’t do it justice. Nevertheless, it was all based on the same “emerging issues” model.

Here’s a picture of the basic concept. I’ve dropped a few familiar names into the various quadrants to give you an idea of what falls where.

Da Media is Da Message?

Basically, the model said that if you watch the left side of the equation, and if you’re good, you can spot things as they “emerge” and before they hit the mainstream consciousness. The very classic example is Sir Arthur C. Clarke’s “invention” of the satellite in science fiction way before it was a reality.

Did the model work? Yep, it did. And, proving it with historic data, where you know the outcome, is a breeze. The difficult part is to use it looking forward. By the way, the question you should be asking right now is: “How long is the X-axis?” In other words, how long does it take for an issue to, first emerge, and then make it to the general public consciousness on the far-right side of the graph? The answer is: it varies by issue and by sector.

But I can also tell you that the X-axis is shrinking. What used to take decades no longer does. The time from the left to the right of the chart is now measured in just a few years, if not a few months.

To look forward, the trick is to separate “signal” from “noise.” There is a lot of stuff out on the fringes — a lot of noise — spotting what’s important is not easy. While surprisingly accurate on known issues, looking forward remains a problem — there is just too much noise to filter.

Filtering requires genius, and that is the essence of what is known affectionately and officially as “genius forecasting.” Most of the great futurists were, first and foremost, great genius forecasters. They just had a knack for spotting the important issue of the day, the next great technology, or the next bit controversy. I include in the list folks like John Naisbitt (who I then worked with), as well as Alvin Toffler (Future Shock, The Third Wave), and Herman Kahn (Thinking the Unthinkable). M. Kahn, just so you know, was supposedly the inspiration for Peter Seller’s rendition of “Dr. Strangelove.” Although M. Kahn was a wee bit larger. Strangely, in recent years, we’ve seen very few great futurists, or even lousy ones. I think it’s because the X-axis is so short now, and the future so seemingly unpredictable in a predictable way.

Just between you and me, I think half the trick to good “genius forecasting” is to hire a bevy of bright, young, starving innocents; fill their heads, five days a week, with a select collection of stuff from “precursor” media, and then force them to tell you what’s “important” every month or so. Hell, make’em read science fiction, fan-zines, and a half-dozen blogs, and you’d probably do better than most of today’s economists and other soothsayers.

Mind you, it’s the “innocence” that’s important. The last thing you want is “experts” — they’re way too involved in whatever topic they’re an expert in, to see reality. After five years of so, rent out your now-not-so-innocents as consultants, and get a new flock.

When “trend spotting” there are several key phases to look for, by the way:

First is the “naming.” It’s when the issue enters the lexicon. It is, for example, when the issue of coal fired power plants and air pollution came together in a single term called “Acid Rain.” Acid Rain first entered the lexicon — made its first appearance as a single descriptive term, in around 1854 according to my dusty research. Naming is very important. Controlling the naming gives you power, and can make or break an issue in the public lexicon, and in the public consciousness.

Second is the emergence of the “champion.” That’s the individual or group that takes the issue and makes it heard. Acid Rain’s champion, for example, was a fellow named Gene Likens studying the forests in the Finger Lakes region of up-state New York. In more recent history, I’d say Granny D is/was the champion for the campaign finance reform movement, and Cindy Sheehan for the current anti-war movement; perhaps — a slightly ironic choice — Michael Moore for health-care reform. Perhaps too, we can throw in Al Gore for global warming, Lou Dobbs for immigration reform, and Thomas Friedman for globalization.

I am sure this model would still work— with appropriate modifications for the Web2.0 world — if you could figure out what falls where. The ‘net has messed things up. Sorting out what goes where — what media leads, what media follows — would be the trick. Nevertheless, I had put the whole concept aside as no longer applicable in a wired world.

In fact, when I really thought about it, I figured a much more interesting approach would be to try and aggregate, quantify and track the questions people were asking on Google. The idea was to group generic questions into categories and then track the ebb and flow of the nation’s attention — as represented by those categories. It seems you can do that to some extent with Google Trends. Not quite, but close. If there were a way to close the universe, to track the questions as they ebb and flow as a percentage of a total zeitgeist, then you might have something. What I am not sure. Perhaps this is a million dollar idea, perhaps not. Either way, I digress.

When the “Precursor Monitoring” model was developed, there was no Internet to speak of. On and off, over the last ten years, I’ve noodled a bit about just how and where such a model could apply to all the “raw” stuff one now finds on the ‘net. And, that gets me to the point of this discussion: Where would blogs fall?

The answer is, obviously — and consequently difficult — everywhere. Blogs are a generic thing, just like a print magazine — some lead, some follow and some are way, way out in space. Many are crud.

That, by the way, is the big change between now and then. No, not the crud — 90-percent of everything has always been crud. It still is. The big change, the difference between the pre-Internet media universe and today is that media no longer fall into nice neat categories.

Pre-Internet, one could reasonably lump leading and trailing publications by type: fringe media first (including science fiction), followed by low-circulation newsletters and the alternative press, followed by local papers (for local events), followed by trade journals and specialty journals, followed by the national newspapers, followed by the national magazines, and, lastly, followed by various government records and congressional publications.

Science fiction probably still leads, somewhat, but the rest of that categorization is shot to hell. Everything is all over the block. “Big” media is bigger and more monolithic than ever, yet audiences are fracturing into smaller and smaller demographics. Simultaneously, independent and “personal” publishing — of all variety — are experiencing a renaissance the likes of which we’ve never seen.

Given that, to use this model today, one would have to individually categorize various media, including blogs and web sites and e-newsletters, and assign them, uniquely, to a particular quadrant. That would be the trick: to find and track the sites, online publications, e-newsletters, and blogs that cover first quadrant things, namely, what I would call leading ideas, events, authorities, advocates, and literature.

I would argue that we could use something similar to Molitor’s Model in today’s world, but, but we need to, first, expand it to include many more types and genres of media, and second, refine it by actually cataloging various sites, bytes, blogs, newsletters, magazines, ‘zines, and the like, and place them in the appropriate quadrant.

Finally, since we’re wishing, you could combine that with a good “first use” system, a kind of “reverse Google,” that tracked the appearance of new terms in the global lexicon and you’d have a decent environmental scanning model. Wouldn’t that be cool.