EchoDitto

The Obama campaign's plan to announce their V.P. pick via SMS was a brilliant stroke, and the sheer number of people engaged with the campaign via text has already earned the campaign a place in political history (not that there was any question).

Unfortunately, the announcement didn't go as planned. Both the campaign as well as their most connected supporters have reason to be frustrated, and there are lessons here for all of us in the worlds of online politics, campaigning, organizing, and communications (keep reading!).

I'm quoted in two AP stories yesterday (here and here) about Obama's Biden pick as saying, "This is like finding out from your neighbor instead of your sister that she's engaged: not how you want or expect the news to be delivered."

There's a bit more to the overall story that didn't make its way into the coverage (surprise!), so i'll elaborate below. But for those still bitter about not receiving their text message, I think we'll need to give the campaign a pass on this one, after what was surely a long and bumpy night largely outside of their control.

I'm just back from co-leading a 3-day social technology training in Toronto for some incredible nonprofits and social enterprises across North America. And almost everyone attending could be described as their organization's lonely internet person, struggling to get web strategies implemented. If this sounds like you, read on.

Refreshingly, after the strategy and tools conversations on day one and two, we spent almost a full day on the organizational dynamics and "change management" needed to implement smart web strategies.

Here are some key take-aways from a workshop I led entitled, "Getting Web 2.0 Resourced at Your Brick-and-Mortar Organization."  As I see it, the biggest challenge with all this new media and technology stuff is getting it implemented; there are too many smart and well-meaning staffers at organizations and businesses who have their car but can't seem to get the engine started or shift into the fast lane.  

Just before the holiday weekend, I had the honor of facilitating a call with Bill McKibben and an incredible group of almost a dozen bloggers -- from Julia at WorldChanging to Kristen at Motherhood Uncensored to Dave Roberts at Grist, and others. I'm pasting the audio of the call at the end of this post, so you can listen to the entire conversation with Bill.

Produced by our friends at Brighter Planet, the roundtable was a chance to dig into everything from carbon offsets to federal policy to personal carbon-cutting lifestyle changes.

Quick! Got a TV near you? Our latest project, MyCommitment.org, is going to be on TV today! Oh, and President Bill Clinton will be introducing it. Along with Martha Stewart. On her TV show. For almost a full hour. I'm not kidding, and, as you can imagine, it's making all of us a bit giddy.

MyCommitment.org launched this morning in conjunction with the Clinton Global Initiative annual meeting in New York City. The idea is simple: Global leaders, CEOs, organizations, and heads of state all come together each year to make massive commitments to help solve the world's greatest problems. But rather than letting the big whigs have all the fun, MyCommitment.org invites everyday citizens to participate in the pledging process with their own ways to make the world a better place. And just like at the CGI summit, every commitment that an individual makes must be specific, relevant, and trackable.

I spent part of Saturday at the Berkeley farmer's market (well, one of them) visiting with a good friend and enjoying some truly perfect weather. One of our first stops was, of course, for coffee. The Blue Bottle Coffee Company had a booth where they were slow-brewing coffee cup by cup, as it was ordered, slow-food style. I ordered a special New Orleans iced coffee that was roasted with chicory and cane sugar -- it was pretty amazing. Something about the scene was particularly poignant, so I whipped out my Treo, snapped a pic, and dutifully emailed it up to Flickr with a simple caption before i forgot where i was.

My last greenish post here was almost a year ago, where I outlined a few of things we did to lessen EchoDitto's environmental footprint as we moved into our own new digs.

At first, we thought we were in the clear given that we're not in the business of manufacturing or shipping lawn ornaments or other products. But then our rough self-assessment quickly revealed that our extensive aerial globe-trotting was easily our largest contribution to global warming. As would probably be true for other consultants, technologists, or similar organizations, our flight emissions were more than negating any good we were doing to limit our footprint in other areas.

Great news! On Thursday night, two EchoDitto projects were recognized at the 2007 Golden Dot Awards Ceremony, sponsored by GWU's Institute for Politics, Democracy, and the Internet.

We tend to get shy around here when it comes to talking about our work, but we couldn't hold back on this one. The Golden Dot Awards honor "innovative, revolutionary uses of the Internet as a political tool. The 2007 Golden Dot award winners truly represent the movers and shakers of cutting-edge campaigning.” Alright!

Just announced moments ago, we're not yet entirely sure yet what this means for everyone, but we know two things:

1. Twenty-five percent of the fully integrated eCRM/CMS market just disappeared, reducing options to three very different providers: Convio, Blue State Digital, and Kintera (not counting open-source solutions and a myriad of other tools of course)

2. This is likely to have a pretty dramatic impact on the nonprofit and social change technology space. Will this encourage more healthy competition from the other vendors and providers? (I hope so.) Or will Convio innovate less due to their massive new market share and potential perceived lack of competition? (I hope not.) And will this make open source solutions even more attractive to potential clients and users? (I think yes.)

We changed our phone greeting, and our email auto-responders are on! We're all off in The Woods of West Virginia for our annual staff retreat. Some of our non-Ditto colleagues and clients have been making jabs about trust falls and such, but that's only 'cause they're jealous and probably don't get a staff retreat of their own. Right?

We have a ton of inward-facing work ahead of us over the next two and a half days, but it should also be a blast. There's a lot remarkable about this. First, with all of the crazy travel schedules going on and two different offices, it's rare that we're all ever in the same place at once. Second, this is also the last drop of internet we'll see until we return and plug back in later in the weekend. For an organization and group of people parading around telling people that "we live online," going offline for this long is a pretty big deal.

Was just catching up on last night's Daily Show and heard Tom Vilsack sneak in a plug for his website at the very end of his appearance. Truly impressive -- congrats to you, Tom, as well as the staff who did whatever they did to convince you of the importance of this.

This must seem obvious to some of you, but for some reason it's near impossible to get most traditional PR and comms people to make this a priority when prepping their candidate or spokesperson for TV. The exceptions are those who understand that mentioning the URL on air makes the gift of the TV appearance keep on giving by sending viewers to a medium where they can do a lot more than watch...