Are You Listening?

Last Sunday President Barack Obama gave a commencement speech at Hampton University and took a swipe at iPods, iPads and Play Stations. I applaud the president for taking on our entertainment-saturated culture.

However he didn't stop there. He also took on the 24/7 news cycle and social media.

"And meanwhile, you're coming of age in a 24/7 media environment that bombards us with all kinds of content and exposes us to all kinds of arguments, some of which don't always rank that high on the truth meter. And with iPods and iPads, and Xboxes and Play Stations -- none of which I know how to work -- information becomes a distraction, a diversion, a form of entertainment, rather than a tool of empowerment, rather than the means of emancipation. So all of this is not only putting pressure on you; it's putting new pressure on our country and on our democracy."

I find it ironic that our president is complaining about the 24/7 media environment that exposes us to all kinds of content. And worse yet, our president says that information becomes a distraction and diversion rather than a tool of empowerment.

It appears that our president has changed his view of social media since being elected. Here are the facts according to the "truth meter."

Here is what Fast Company has to say about Barack Obama and his social media strategy during the campaign.

I'm obviously not the only one aware of Obama's comfort-level with technology: he had 3 million online donors during the election and 2 million people were passionate enough to create profiles on my.barackobama.com. Barack Obama gets the Internet and social media the way that Kennedy got TV. You've heard the story of how radio listeners thought Nixon won the debates but televsion viewers saw it the other way around? Kennedy was built for TV and Obama is built for the Internet age.

Here is what the New York Times has to say about how Obama tapped into the power of social networks.

In February 2007, a friend called Marc Andreessen, a founder of Netscape and a board member of Facebook, and asked if he wanted to meet with a man with an idea that sounded preposterous on its face.

Always game for something new, Mr. Andreessen headed to the San Francisco airport late one night to hear the guy out. He wondered if social networking, with its tremendous communication capabilities and aggressive database development, might help him beat the overwhelming odds facing him.

“It was like a guy in a garage who was thinking of taking on the biggest names in the business,” Mr. Andreessen recalled. “What he was doing shouldn’t have been possible, but we see a lot of that out here and then something clicks. He was clearly supersmart and very entrepreneurial, a person who saw the world and the status quo as malleable.”

And as it turned out, President-elect Barack Obama was right.

Like a lot of Web innovators, the Obama campaign did not invent anything completely new. Instead, by bolting together social networking applications under the banner of a movement, they created an unforeseen force to raise money, organize locally, fight smear campaigns and get out the vote that helped them topple the Clinton machine and then John McCain and the Republicans.

You can read this report called The Social Pulpit - Barack Obama's Social Media Toolkit.

And finally, you really need to read this article, How Chris Hughes Helped Launch Facebook and the Barack Obama Campaign. Chris Hughes was one of the co-founders of Facebook and he developed the MyBarackObama.com website that "allowed Obama supporters to create groups, plan events, raise funds, download tools, and connect with one another -- not unlike a more focused, activist Facebook. MyBO also let the campaign reach its most passionate supporters cheaply and effectively. By the time the campaign was over, volunteers had created more than 2 million profiles on the site, planned 200,000 offline events, formed 35,000 groups, posted 400,000 blogs, and raised $30 million on 70,000 personal fund-raising pages."

Here is what Chris Hughes did for Barack and his campaign.

He helped develop the most robust set of Web-based social-networking tools ever used in a political campaign, enabling energized citizens to turn themselves into activists, long before a single human field staffer arrived to show them how.

"Technology has always been used as a net to capture people in a campaign or cause, but not to organize," says Obama campaign manager David Plouffe. "Chris saw what was possible before anyone else." Hughes built something the candidate said he wanted but didn't yet know was possible: a virtual mechanism for scaling and supporting community action. Then that community turned around and elected his boss president. "I still can't quite wrap my mind around it," Hughes says.

Our president is learning that taking your message directly to the people works both ways. President Obama would like us to believe that information is a distraction and diversion, that content can confound and obscure the truth, and that media needs to be tuned out and turned off.

But I think what is really happening is that our president is learning that in this new age of social media, information flows two ways, that content can't be easily spun and that media is now 24/7.

And he's also learning that dialog requires a two-way conversation. The American people have learned that they have a voice. Mr. President, the people are speaking. You would do well to listen.