Now that Barack Obama has appointed YouTube as his “Secretary of Video,” as CNET commented, it raises the question: What does Generation O’s new transparency mean for businesses?

At first glance, it can mean trouble. The airlines British Airways and Virgin Atlantic experienced this firsthand. The Economist reported recently that several flight crew members were fired after making derogatory comments on the airlines’ Facebook forums about safety standards and passengers. The staff gushed about cockroaches on board the planes and shared other juicy details that, if true, were less than flattering for their employers. Public relations experts, such as Aedhmar Hynes from Text 100, were quick to point out in the article that online transparency can only be as radical as its regulation is regimented, and that employee empowerment needs to go hand in hand with employee education.

Yet Hymes’ recommendation sounds like radical transparency that is not quite so radical. Moderated radical transparency sounds as oxymoronic as, say, risk-averse hedge funds. Does this episode mark the beginning of the end of radical transparency? It’s all a matter of managing expectations. For starters, it’s worth acknowledging that radical transparency can have radical implications. In fact, collateral damage should almost always be assumed; it is part of the game. If you’re not willing to take that risk, don’t take it! But note that in most cases — unless you’re a military defense contractor, the CIA, or another organization that needs to respect strict legal requirements — your customers may then assume you have something to hide. 

Airlines and other travel industry companies are especially vulnerable when it comes to bad PR because the perception of their service is so critical. Customer expectations are high, and every little interaction — and there are hundreds of thousands of these little interactions every day — is closely scrutinized. See Untied, the customer forum for rants about United. Airlines are also impacted by variables that are often beyond their control, at least partly. Remember JetBlue’s winter storm fiasco in 2007? The brouhaha around BA’s and Virgin Atlantic’s Facebook woes does not make for a case against radical transparency; it instead highlights an inconvenient truth. Airlines, as well as the majority of service brands, are radically transparent by the very nature of their business.

If flight attendants complain about unpleasant passengers, it reveals a bigger issue at stake that transcends the sole PR dimension: Radical transparency may bring out the skeletons in your closet. If the bond between your customers and your brand is just a bit flawed, you’re not only facing a PR issue; you’re facing a fundamental issue at the very foundation of your brand promise that can severely threaten your business. Staff members who don’t think highly about their customers are the problem, not the fact that they are sharing their opinions on Facebook. BA and Virgin Atlantic did the right thing, and it was not a “fiasco,” as The Economist labeled it, but rather a cleaning of the system. Exposing black sheep among your personnel may hurt in the short term, but can serve as a real benefit to your brand in the long term. When your business is in the service industry, those ticking reputation bombs need to be dealt with anyway. Promoting transparency is a valuable concept to pre-empt them and promote the truth. The truth will come out anyway, sooner or later. And then radical transparency is not a strategy but the only real option left.

Reputation protection is only one side of the equation, and it is the defensive one. As much as radical transparency can underscore that you have nothing to hide, it can also highlight that you have a lot to show. In this respect, it presents a huge opportunity for marketers. Dave Balter, founder and CEO of the word-of-mouth marketing firm BzzAgent, made a compelling case for corporate transparency in a recent interview with the Harvard Business Review: “[C]ompanies put rules into place to hide their ideas. They think the rules give them control over people and markets. But that’s totally untrue today. There are so many communication routes that you can’t possibly control the information flowing through them. Furthermore, attempts at secrecy prevent the company from making use of those information flows. You can’t always foresee the benefits of letting ideas out into the world, but they often far outweigh any harm that may result.”

Indeed, in the brave new world of always-on social media, companies may need to share everything about their business, including complaints, profit margins on particular products, and specific corporate strategies. And they may increasingly turn to proprietary channels to do so, bypassing traditional media and becoming media companies themselves. Add to that the fact that customers “own” and manage brands and not companies, and it is time for a fundamentally new concept of “brand presence.” Proactive radical transparency can not only become the mandatory platform for authentic, trust-building interactions with all stakeholders (or “brandholders”), but also open a new avenue for marketers who understand that effective marketing needs to be conversational and open-sourced.

So, here’s an audacious future vision of what radical transparency in corporate communications could look like. Taking social instant messaging one step further than existing formats (such as the micro-blogging service Yammer that applies the Twitter model to enterprise), companies could make their live email correspondence public. Let’s call it Reality Email. An open and interactive email feed may propel knowledge-sharing and collaboration, but also an ongoing conversation that customers, partners, and media worldwide can join. Remember the book The Cluetrain Manifesto? “Markets are conversations” — and so are organizations and brands. Reality Email would take this literally. Companies “going public” with live email might create a powerful new marketing broadcasting channel for brand-building in the new age of radical transparency. Does this sound radical? Perhaps. Will it happen? You bet.

I’m dazzled by the website We Feel Fine, but a bit flummoxed at how best to describe it. The site states that it’s “an exploration of human emotion on a global scale,” but that doesn’t quite describe the uniqueness of the content, and the addictive nature of the interface.

Created by Brooklyn-based artist Jonathan Harris — who spoke at Pop!Tech in 2007 — and Stanford computational math professor and former Google employee Sep Kamvar, it’s a bit like a more interactive version of PostSecret.

Here’s more from their site:

Every few minutes, the system searches the world’s newly posted blog entries for occurrences of the phrases “I feel” and “I am feeling.” When it finds such a phrase, it records the full sentence, up to the period, and identifies the “feeling” expressed in that sentence (e.g. sad, happy, depressed, etc.)

Because blogs are structured in largely standard ways, the age, gender, and geographical location of the author can often be extracted and saved along with the sentence, as can the local weather conditions at the time the sentence was written. The result is a database of several million human feelings, increasing by 15,000 - 20,000 new feelings per day.

The site then takes this data, separates it into six “movements,” and launches an applet that allows you to sort, display and play with the information. “Madness,” for instance, lets you click on colored dots that burst open to reveal someone’s thoughts (and sometimes an image); “Murmurs” allow the stated feelings to float up the screen as if in a dream; “Montage” contains feelings that have correlating images, which visitors can then sort to curate and share their own galleries. I could easily spend hours on the site, and I’m sure fellow data/design junkies will agree.

“We cannot meet 21st-century challenges with a 20th-century bureaucracy,” said Barack Obama in his speech in Denver to accept the Democratic nomination. Based on his campaign and his policies, Obama seems well in tune with new models with which to face our current challenges.

Peter Leyden, director of the New Politics Institute, is one of several commentators who have argued that Obama’s campaign represents a deep political paradigm shift. Beyond the nature of the campaign, Leyden views Obama’s election as a catalyzing force for “an explosive period of political and social innovation,” having the ability to mobilize new tools to take on 21st century challenges. Here’s Leyden giving a prescient analysis of the Obama campaign:

On the day after Election Day, I happened to finish reading a book called Leadership and the New Science, written in the early 1990s by Margaret Wheatley. In the book, she discusses how ideas from modern science — particularly quantum physics, molecular biology, and chaos theory — can offer us new models of how to organize and lead human endeavor.

The timing was such that I couldn’t help but apply her line of thinking to a recent shift in leadership, and the need for significant change in how our organizations operate.

“Our concept of organizations is moving away from the mechanistic creations that flourished in the age of bureaucracy,” Wheatley writes. “We have begun to speak in earnest of more fluid, organic structures, even boundary-less organizations. We are beginning to recognize organizations as systems, construing them as “learning organization” and crediting them with some type of self-renewing capacity.”

Without getting mired in the scientific controversies or stretching metaphors too far, Wheatley’s work is valuable in showing how our models of leadership (in the workplace, institutions, government and other public agencies) can create limited and sometimes oppressive organizations, and that we can look to new worldviews and new theories to better understand the dynamics of human systems. She offers a model for leadership and organizations that is profoundly positive. “As we let go of the machine models of work,” she writes, “we begin to step back and see ourselves in new ways, to appreciate our wholeness, and to design organizations that honor and make use of the totality of who we are.”

That a book about change and leadership in human organizations (from companies, to communities and countries) would lead me to think about the newly elected president is no surprise. But I can’t help but see parallel messages of hope and inclusivity in Wheatley’s writing and the words of our President-Elect. The election of Barack Obama as President was a culmination of our nation’s profound desire to move into a new era — after an administration that has provided what the Pulitzer Prize-winning author Junot Diaz once described as an “authoritative narrative that simplifies the world.” Last week, Americans collectively moved to choose a leader that acknowledges the complexity of the world we live in and wants active and progressive change in a clearly chaotic time.

It doesn’t seem to be too much a leap to say that come January we will have an administration receptive to innovation and ready to lead fundamental change, while acknowledging the ways in which we are all necessary parts of the process. The key to Obama’s success — and why it seems viable that he could indeed lead this change for which we are perfectly poised — is how he has articulated that each citizen is important, but more important still are the networks each individual creates, and the relationships between people and between institutions that make change possible.

Photo via Flickr by Charis Tsevis

What do Napster, a Josh Groban charity fansite, and online tech support forums have in common? A lot, according to Clay Shirky. At Pop!Tech this year, he spoke of how people get motivated to give large amounts of their time and expertise for free on the Web. Shirky is the author of the recent book Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, part of a growing class of books — from Yochai Benkler’s The Wealth of Networks to James Surowiecki’s The Wisdom of Crowds — that examine the power of groups.

In Shirky’s talk, he illustrated some examples of online generosity, such as cell phone users who donate their time to troubleshoot others’ phone problems on an obscure discussion board. He then offered some pointers for designing for generosity on the Web. There’s no exact recipe, Shirky says, but there are some basic guidelines that he has observed over the years.

The first rule is to design for intrinsic motivation. “Design an environment where people can feel good at what they’re doing,” he says. If you design an environment where they can be appreciated, they will flock to your venture. He is quick to distinguish between the dual motivators of love and fame. “Being appreciated by a small number of people who know you well is a different kind of emotion than being appreciated by a large group of people who don’t know you well,” Shirky says. “Everyone who says ‘Come here and participate and you’ll get famous’ may think they’re appealing to intrinsic motivations, but they actually aren’t.”

The second guideline he offers is to make a system that encourages autonomy. The third is to build a system that encourages openness. “Everyone understands that closing down a system, locking it down…will kill this kind of generosity,” he says. But what’s less well-understood, he argues, is the importance of making a system that has some basic constraints, too. There need to be some guidelines in place to ensure that a website doesn’t get taken over by trolls, for example. “Designing systems that have the right mix of freedom and constraints — very often constraints enforced on the users by one another — is really the art.” Wikipedia is one sterling example of this; it’s an encyclopedia that anyone can edit, but still has basic guidelines to abide by.

Finally, Shirky says that we should not treat users as simply idle generators of content, arguing that it’s important to view an online audience “not just as an aggregated bag of individual motivations, but thinking of us as participants in social systems,” emphasizing that these systems have their own unique and important logic that’s greater than the sum of its users. “Once you switch to that view of the world,” he says, “I think really incredible things can start happening.”

His presentation shares key themes with his upcoming book Outliers: The Story of Success, which will be released early next week. Gladwell examines why some people succeed and seem to reach their full potential, while so many others are mired in mediocrity.

Are intellect, athletic ability, and math aptitude products of nature or nurture? Watch this Pop!Cast to find out what one forward-thinking theorist has to say.

“Motivating the committed outperforms persuading the uncommitted” (Seth Godin)

Now that we have a President-elect Obama, it’s time to reflect on how this was possible. The web is full of thoughtful analyses that examine Obama’s victory as one made possible through state-of-the-art marketing — from Tomi T. Ahonen’s For a We species, a We president: Yes we can, to John Quech’s How Better Marketing Elected Barack Obama in Harvard Business Online, to Seth Godin’s Marketing Lessons from the US Election, to The New York Times and, of course, the all-inclusive, behind-the-scenes “How He Did It” account in Newsweek.

Yet Obama’s victory is not only a victory through marketing; it is also a victory for marketing, and for the profession as a whole. It not only restored America’s political capital, but also America’s reputation as the spiritual home of marketing. It proved all those wrong who asserted the end of American brands and branding in general, and it has given more support to marketers who passionately believe that smart marketing can indeed change the world. And so it goes that I was not only a happy American last week, but also a happy marketer.

Every history of marketing must also be a history of America –- see the TV series Mad Men –- and one might even posit that America’s history is a history of marketing. Seth Godin describes it this way: “The lesson that society should take away about all marketing is a simple one. When you buy a product, you’re also buying the marketing. Buy something from a phone telemarketer, you get more phone telemarketers, guaranteed. Buy a gas guzzler and they’ll build more. Marketers are simple people… they make what sells. Our culture has purchased (and voted) itself into the place we are today.” Arthur Miller put this more optimistically when he said, “America’s biggest asset is its promise.” The same can be said about marketing.

“Change we can believe in” is the motto of each and every transaction between a brand and its consumers

The Obama campaign leveraged its promise with maximum effect: “Change we can believe in” is the motto of each and every transaction between a brand and its consumers. Buying or buying in always implies the expectation of a positive change — a change in someone’s well-being, household, and financial situation or at any other levels of Maslow’s pyramid. But with “change” as the ultimate promise and “hope” as the ultimate motivation, the Obama campaign didn’t just generate leads; it created believers. The seven million names on its lists (email addresses, mobile phone numbers, Facebook and MySpace pages) represent a staggering 11 percent of the approximately 64 million votes the President-elect received. The loyalty of these supporters is of long-term value. Tomi T. Ahonen writes: “The Obama presidency can continue to engage with this active part of his core supporters, return to them at the re-election bid, and even use this support base to help in the elections of his successor in 2016 (assuming Obama is re-elected in 2012).” And in fact, Obama and team are not wasting any time and launched a new site, change.gov, right after the election to keep in touch with existing and new supporters during the transition.

All of this illustrates the power of community, and provides further evidence that identity trumps utility. A great brand is one that diverts attention away from itself and towards an even greater purpose. That’s exactly what Obama did for the Generation O, which was in it to make history and be part of a movement, a new “we species” with Obama as its first we president.” Combine this political tribalism with an unprecedented level of grassroots participation, and you have a powerful collaborative platform that outperforms that of any opponent. Obama won because his supporters were more passionate, more dedicated, and more engaged. And it didn’t hurt that he was a candidate they loved.

But what makes the Obama campaign truly unique is how it complemented its open community nature with remarkable on-message rigor. While large components of the action were decentralized, the campaign headquarters provided the central discipline needed to align them when necessary. For the most part it was not, and it felt as if an unwritten code, an impressive self-discipline had ensured notable collective focus and the absence of any drama on the trail.

Disciplined Decentralism

This “Disciplined Decentralism,” as you might call it, is the major takeaway for marketers from the election. It was the foundation of a nationwide (and even global, if you consider the “moral” vote from non US-citizens around the world) campaign that became the first in an age of audience fragmentation to succeed in not only raising maximum awareness for a hitherto unknown brand, but also bringing about radical behavioral change. It has restored the American soft power overnight, as Joseph Nye noted, and it has also rebuilt marketer confidence. Can we marketers orchestrate social media, amateur content, and crowdsourced platforms with utmost message discipline on a large scale? Yes we can. Can we reconcile authenticity and consistency? Yes we can. Can we combine traditional broadcasting ads with low-fi video clips without diluting the message? Yes we can. Can we be our own media channel and bypass media without alienating them? Yes we can. Can we design campaigns that cultivate the small in the big and the big in the small — in other words, campaigns that use direct marketing (phonebanking, fundraising) but use them bottom-up and not top-down? Yes we can. Can we be hyper-targeted and still be inclusive and reach out to everyone? Yes we can.

Marketing for the people, with the people, and by the people

Obama has radically altered the marketing playbook, and the astonishing rise of the Obama brand is a template for all marketers from this point on. Weaving together data and human intelligence, collective wisdom and individual charisma, strategic calculus and enthusiasm, the Obama campaign reestablished marketing as marketing for the people, with the people, and by the people. When charismatic leadership meets organizational prowess meets community, the result is marketing that is truly Presidential.

What advice do you have for the incoming U.S. president? Pop!Tech recently teamed up with Reuters as part of its effort to compile thoughts from people worldwide. Readers from Sydney to Baghdad have chimed in with their video “postcards,” delivered via Youtube. The broadcasts thus far have been intriguing, to say the least; pictured above is the thought-provoking postcard from Nairobi. A reader from Beijing recommends that Obama should work to increase understanding about Chinese culture and issues among the American public. A denizen of Moscow hopes for more friendly relations between the U.S. and Russia. A British citizen offers his support, with the words, “Good luck, Mr. Obama. It’s a tough job ahead but the British people are behind you.” All in all, the messages reflect hopes for a more peaceful future. Click here to see the postcards. You can also submit your own.

You’ve probably seen the picture of Oprah Winfrey, overcome with emotion at Barack Obama’s acceptance speech, leaning on a person unknown to her whom she referred to later only as “Mr. Man.”

It turns out that Oprah’s pillar of support was none other than Sam Perry, the Obama campaign’s communications director in Silicon Valley and frequent Pop!Techer. Perry couldn’t join us in Camden this year because he was busy fundraising and helping out with the campaign.

From the Chicago Sun-Times, who originally identified Mr. Man:

Perry is apparently an Obama volunteer, listed as the communications director for Silicon Valley for Obama. Giselle Schmitz, regional field director for the Obama campaign, described Perry as “a great guy” and “tremendous asset to the organization. He’s a great, great supporter,” she said. “He did a ton of work on the campaign.”

Oprah will be interviewing Perry on her show today. I’m interested in hearing how he managed to look so serene while OPRAH WINFREY sobbed on his shoulder. I guess collective joy trumps celebrity.

You can watch a short video of Perry being interviewed at last year’s Pop!Tech, talking about transcendentalism, Thoreau, and taking action in the world. Looks like Oprah unknowingly chose someone with very broad shoulders indeed.