The 463: Inside Tech

Visualizing a .Com Nation

(David McGuire) When the first few .com addresses were registered in 1985, you could have kept track of where they were based with a handful of pushpins and a paper wall map. Twenty-five years - and tens of millions of registrations - later, we need a little more technological oomph to demonstrate the massive saturation of .com Web sites throughout the nation.

This map depicts the distribution of .com Web sites throughout the lower 48 states, as determined by the contact information listed on those sites. Predictably enough, Silicon Valley and the Eastern Seaboard glow brilliant orange with the sheer density of Web sites, while bright orange slashes from Utah to Georgia demonstrate the ubiquity of .com businesses. Indeed, with .com businesses registered in every ZIP code, the entire nation bears an aura of activity.

Tonight in San Francisco, VeriSign, the company that operates .com, will continue its yearlong celebration of the 25th Anniversary of the first .com address with a gala event at City Hall. The map above reminds us exactly what we're celebrating.

Will Coca-Cola’s World Cup Campaign be a Win for U.S. Soccer?

(Devon Rosenberry) Gone are the days when companies spoon fed their marketing jingles to consumers via television—instead, they’ve gotten really smart about how to engage consumers via personalized social media advertising. Just think of all the things, or people who, in part, owe their fame to Facebook or Twitter—American Idol (Susan Boyle), Zappos, Barack Obama, Grey’s Anatomy, Lost, Perez Hilton, Lady Gaga, Tila Tequila, Lindsay Lohan…and the list goes on.

YouTube is another social marketing craze and Coca-Cola is now using it to unite the world for the 2010 FIFA World Cup.  Through their “Longest Celebration” campaign, Coca-Cola encourages people from around the world to upload videos of their “goal celebration” dances (the dance fans make when their team scores a goal) to YouTube.  The campaign was inspired by a memorable celebration dance preformed over 20 years ago by footballer Roger Milla during the 1990 World Cup.  

In terms of U.S. audiences, Obama may have convinced via Twitter that “yes we can,” however, Coca-Cola has a much more daunting task at hand.  As an American born company, Coca-Cola must convince American’s that soccer—one of the least popular U.S. sports—is cool.  What’s so hard about that? While football is just as important as a morning cup of coffee to people in other countries, it is usually considered the overlooked sport in the U.S.  Case in point: Americans completely changed the name of the sport to soccer and created a new one in its place.

To get around this issue, instead of simply telling American’s to watch the games, Coca-Cola has decided to approach their initiative in a new way through contests and prizes.  The grand prize isn’t half bad either.  The winners of “The Longest Celebration” will win World Cup themed prizes, including tickets to attend a match in South Africa.  So who will dance their way to South Africa?  And will Coca-Cola be able to make the 2010 World Cup a memorable moment in social media history?  Tune into the Coca-Cola YouTube channel to find out.

A Brilliant Use of Communications: Heineken

(Jim Hock) Public relations and the communications oftentimes gets a bad "rap" from many, but not long ago in Europe Heineken launched a brilliant multifaceted PR event on the same night as a championship football (OK, as we call soccer) match on the continent.  They brilliantly put together a "fake" string concert and were able to get roughly 1,000 people to attend.  This video captures the effect well.

Well done.  

Jon Friedman: Brilliance Defined

(Jim Hock) This evening my wife and I had the great pleasure of going to a reception for the renowned artist Jon Friedman, who just happens to be the son of our amazing 95-year old neighbor Gertrude Friedman.  Jon was honored tonight for a mural done in his Arlington, VA high school in the 60s memorializing former President Kennedy. His work is simply amazing and his portraits dazzle, those of former NIH Director Harold Varmus and many others. One that particularly struck me -- It was a portrait (which Jon makes look like photographs) of Harold Goldstine, who was one of the inventors of the first ENIAC computer during World War II.  Here's Jon's take on the photo:

"I wanted to find a way to make the mental life of the mathmatician part of the portrait. I asked Herman to lend me some of his original working notebooks. I photographed various pages from the notebooks, projected the images onto the frame, and incised Herman's scribbled notations and equations into the surface with an engraving tool before finishing the whole gold leaf."

Even the frame itself captures the man and his devotion to discovery.  Looking at these photos made me think a lot tonight of the connection of art and science (as Jon's father was one of America's pioneering rocket scientists). The precision with which both work on these supposed right brain and left brain disciplines underscore the need to support math and science education and as important, the arts. Check out his website.  

Spokeo or Creep-eo: Hello, FTC?

Katie Hallen -- Imagine a website that pulls from various sources to create a profile of your household – intimate details that you keep private, some under lock in a file cabinet, suddenly aggregated and available by simple search online.  Search for your name and you find next to your address a catalog of the following: your age, salary estimate, credit rating, employer, the names of those living in your household, and even your hobbies. 

The fact that this information is displayed on a public website available to anyone would send many privacy-cautious people into a panic attack.  So, here’s the bad news: this website is for real.  Called Spokeo (pronounced Spoke-eo), I prefer to think of it as Creep-eo.

Spokeo.com claims to be a modern-day phonebook for the social-networking age, but it’s approach is something closer to that hideous late-night reality show Cheaters, where suspicious girlfriends hire a camera crew to dig up dirt on their significant others.  In the same vein, Spokeo lets you pay money to see photos of the people in its search database, and you get the idea that its creators would love to tap into cell-phone mapping records so it could show you someone’s exact location at the moment of your search.

A lot of the data seems inaccurate but some of it is close enough to send chills down the spine.  At a recent dinner party, a group of us tested it out and got very mixed results, which accurate or not, made us universally unhappy.  Some were concerned for their personal safety.

While Spokeo claims that it is pulling data across various public sources, one must wonder if the result is disturbing enough to rally supporters for a federal privacy law.  If not to that end, it’s only a matter of time before someone files a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission.

 

Good Night, and Good Luck

Katie Hallen -- CNN and CBS News have kicked off talks to begin sharing reporting resources and information for their news programs, according to several news reports this week. Most notably, this would include a partnership between “Anderson Cooper: 360” and the “CBS Evening News with Katie Couric.” While rumors have been swirling for months that CBS News was courting Cooper to replace Couric when her contract comes up for negotiation next year, I think a CNN-CBS partnership hints at another trend in broadcast news – consolidation.

Faced with dismal advertising and declining viewership, the TV news business from network to cable is looking to innovate – and fast.  One of the problems they face is a lack of clear differentiation. With Couric, Brian Williams and Diane Sawyer, the trio of network news, essentially covering the same five stories night after night, viewers are getting tired of picking based on personality alone.  But, at least, all of the network personalities are generally likeable.

The personality problem is far worse over on cable, with viewers forced to decide: which unlikeable personality do I like the most?  The content and perspective may be radically different, but are the personalities of Keith Olbermann and Bill O’Reilly so unalike?  Which one can shout the loudest, or cut a source down to size the fastest?

It should be no surprise that the ratings are down across the board. Over at CNN, one anonymous producer recently told Tom Shales at The Washington Post that things were so bad at “John King, USA” that the show was only watched by King’s “friends and relatives.” Good thing King has a lot of friends. Meanwhile, Couric’s program, despite a few election-season boosts, has remained a distant third.

Hence, a CNN-CBS model is one to watch.  For one, it’s one of the most innovative moves we’ve seen recently from TV news.  If it succeeds at keeping costs down and content fresh, we should expect to see other entities move in this direction, similar to what we have been seeing on the print side for some time now.  If they don’t innovate fast, I am afraid we will be down one major news network in the next five years.

Lessons in Coalition Building: Balancing the Rider and the Elephant

Katie Hallen -- As a first-year undergraduate at the University of Virginia, I took a psychology class from a young professor named Jonathan Haidt.  Haidt, whose research interests largely focus on morality, was memorable in more ways than one. Being that he was easy on the eyes and ears largely forgave him for wearing the same green tweed jacket every single day of class.  Thanks also to him, I still mimic his shorthand for “morality” by circling the letter “m.”

Recently, I have been revisiting Haidt’s research via his new book The Happiness Hypothesis, which contains important lessons for us Washington policy and communications types interested in coalition building and campaign management.

In building in an army of supporters, we must grapple with the issues and messages that motivate them to join a cause.  If we are looking to change their behavior in some way, we must look beyond the politics of reason to the politics of emotion.  This is no easy task. 

Haidt uses a wonderful metaphor to describe how our brains are often torn between reason and emotion: the Rider and the Elephant.  The Rider, representing the rational side, has the reigns of the Elephant and is controlling his path.  But the Elephant is very large and from time to time easily overpowers the Rider and takes him down a different route.

Why is it that the rational side of the brain knows that we should not eat the second cookie but we almost always give in to the emotional craving?  Why is it that a white paper packed with compelling data persuades our logical selves to support a piece of legislation but our emotional side keeps thinking of our one friend Chip whose job could be impacted?  That’s the Elephant overpowering the Rider. 

“To understand most important ideas in psychology, you need to understand how the mind is divided into parts that sometimes conflict,” Haidt writes. “We assume that there is one person in each body, but in some ways we are each more like a committee whose members have been thrown together to do a job, but who often find themselves working at cross purposes.”

It’s an important lesson for coalition building and campaign management.  If we want people to join our cause, and if we are asking them to make a commitment, take action or even change their behavior – buy energy-efficient light bulbs, fasten the seat belt, vote for the first time, whatever it may be – we must be aware of the brain’s competing demands.

Brothers Chip and Dan Heath further explain the competing brain in their new book Switch, which I’ll discuss in greater detail in a future post.  For now, take a look at Haidt’s book and let us know what you think.