Kissing the Frog

Kermit’s a liar. You can’t trust a frog (and any princess worth her salt could tell you that). It’s easy being green, at least a pale sort of green.

Lying frogs aside, I can finally answer the pesky perennial question, that question that’s troubled techie types for the last decade or two. That question: Should you turn your PC off at night or over the weekend?

If you’ve been in with the IT crowd, the answer to this question has always been a hearty “Nope!” (No kisses, no frogs, no princesses.) Leave them on. (Go away.)

Enterprise-wise, you see, we need those beasts on and working; even at home, you’re screwed if you don’t let them have their way. It’s the updates you see. Miss an update and the zombies come calling.

If you turn your PC off… well, then all those nice automated things don’t get done — important things, like updates, and bug patches, and virus signatures, and disk defragging, and other gobbledygook sort of technical things. They’re necessary, unfortunately. They’re important.

When confronted, I typically explain the simple trade-offs: It’s a choice between “leave them on” or you’ll be responsible for immanentizing the eschaton, triggering the inevitable zombie apocalypse or another Republican administration — to some, no doubt, one in the same.

Moreover, you’ll suffer! If your PC is off at night; well then, all those pesky updates will have to run while you are actually trying to work, trying to finish your radically over-due dissertation about Romance in America: The Myths of the Frog Prince, or trying to put those ever-so-important final touches on your resume, or, perhaps you’re writing the great-American-time-travel novel about relativity and love across the space-time continuum. Whatever it is, it’s important stuff all, right?

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Dumb Blobs

Email — you may be addicted to it, you may hate it, abuse it, love it, or eschew it. Whatever your relationship, troubled or otherwise, email is and continues to be one of the world’s few, new, great things. When it comes to “killer-apps,” it is the undefeated heavy-weight champion of the world. Email is the backbone of social and commercial intercourse. Commerce flows through it, along with pain and joy, and work and play, and many of the hours of my day.

While you may order that inflatable, remote-controlled zeppelin online, the acknowledgement nevertheless comes via email, as does the receipt, and the shipping updates.

Email is the truck that moves freight – light and heavy – on the information-super-goat-trail. Plain, simple, elegant, boring, your-grandma-has-an-AOL-address-type email remains the venerable heavy lifter of the online world.

Strangely, it has also become the de facto identity management tool. It is universally used to authenticate just who we are, on everything from my bank to the myriad of social and anti-social real-time networking sites. When we forget just who we are, it’s the delivery method of choice to jog the memory or to trigger a reset — ironically, given how totally insecure it really is, likened to a postcard.]

But, the core problem with email is not security. The real problem with email is it’s really stupid. It’s dumb as a bucket of overripe bananas. I mean it. It’s really god-awful stupid. It can’t help it. It was designed that way.

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The Message in the Cryptex

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?

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