No words for me to quote in the title of this week’s post like I usually do. But the epic choral and instrumental music is a perfect soundtrack for this awesome video as Shea and I are down to around a month or so until our baby comes!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qm8vrt2ebnk
The WWE is currently running an angle where a couple of bad guy wrestlers (“heels” in wrestling jargon) are acting like members of a quasi-Tea Party-like group while a Mexican wrestler is the good guy (“babyface”) standing up to their bigotry.
This is unique for a couple reasons – wrestling is not known for being politically correct at the best of times and the bad guys have traditionally been the foreigners – Russians, Sudanese and yes, even Canadians! (Well, except all three people I linked to *are* Canadians by birth – but that’s just another element of how the sport is scripted.)
Although wrestling has played with the line between fantasy and reality forever with both its characters and storylines, the other unique thing about this angle is that the two bad guys completely broke character during a promo to explain exactly what they were doing – to say that they weren’t actually racists but played these characters to maximize crowd reaction.
Speculation is that this storyline was created as a jab against the Tea Party by Linda McMahon who didn’t receive strong support from that group during either of her failed Senate campaigns.
Glenn Beck is among the conservative radio hosts attacking the WWE for this angle and there is also speculation that the WWE is trying to point out that Beck is just like their wrestlers – an entertainer who doesn’t even believe what he’s saying but who is playing a character with the goal of maximizing crowd reactions – with the only difference being that WWE fans are in on the joke while fans of Glenn Beck (and Limbaugh and others like that) aren’t.
The irony is that, in wrestling, you often have to assume everything is an angle and this whole storyline just makes me think we’ll probably see Glenn Beck show up at Wrestlemania next month! 😉
Baby’s room is coming together…
A new vlogger combines a couple of my favourite things – books and booze – in her Literarily Drunk reviews.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWcxnUh4JjY
(Well, the title of this post is 144 characters anyhow. The body of this thing will be *much* longer!)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bl-FpuehWGA
Twitter is celebrating the seventh anniversary of the first tweet ever which means today is as good of time as any to look back at what role social media played in the recent Sask NDP Leadership campaign with a focus on what I know best, the campaign of Ryan Meili.
The analysis of what had happened and why began immediately after the race ended:
On Twitter, a user named Michael Couros tweeted this the day after the Leadership convention:
Least active on Twitter
@cambroten Most active@ryanmeili Proving once again Twitter means shit in the real world#skpoli#skndpldr“
…with the implication that social media hadn’t helped (and perhaps even hurt?) Ryan Meili’s campaign. Because I’m a masochist, I also went back and listened to the John Gormley show from the Monday after convention and again, heard someone saying something similar: “If you watched Twitter and Facebook, you’d think it was going to be a landslide for Meili. Yet he lost.”
(Side note: Michael Couros’ dismissal of Twitter is especially surprising if he’s any relation to noted advocate for technology-in-education, Alec Couros!)
Now I’m completely biased as both a Ryan Meili supporter and as someone who was responsible for overseeing much of the social media activity for his campaign. But, with all due respect, if Couros and Gormley believe social media played no role or even somehow made Ryan lose the leadership race, I echo what one of our trolls said when I tell them “GTFO Connies!” (That’s a bit of an inside joke for our campaign!) 😉
Why is it wrong to dismiss the importance of social media in this or any campaign?
First off, comments like those above imply that we focused too heavily on social media at the expense of other more important activities. But that’s clearly not true when you look at other metrics from the race. Social media activity may have indicated a coming landslide to *people following the race on social media* but really, the metric that should’ve seemed to indicate a coming landslide much more clearly to *anyone* paying attention was fundraising. Ryan ended up raising $136 000 to Cam’s $83,000 (and Trent came in second in fundraising with $103,000). Yet the two candidates who broke six figures in fundraising ended up placing 2nd and 3rd. Or you could look at who sold the most new memberships – again, that area was dominated by the Meili campaign from what I understand. (Of course, this isn’t as good of an indicator of a campaign’s success as fundraising since new members are notoriously more difficult to get to vote than a party member who’s been around for 50 years and voted in all kinds of leadership races and other elections in that time.)
Another problem with this dismissal of social media is that it implies an either/or dichotomy that didn’t really exist. To put it another way, anytime you place things in binary, you are doing a disservice to what you are talking about. I would never say the Sask Party is completely evil and the NDP is completely perfect. The same applies to social media – it is neither the downfall of an entire campaign nor its saviour – social media is just one part of the entire package – fundraising, policy development, outreach, communications, etc. etc. etc. Meili may have been the campaign that was most focused on social media but I don’t think that came at the expense of any other area – again as our success in fundraising, selling new memberships, positive response to our policies and so on show. In fact, I’d argue that we were *as dominant* in those other areas as we were in social media.
Contrary to what some may believe, perhaps the heavy social media focus of the Meili campaign actually helped more than it hurt? Maybe it allowed us to reach younger, less political but more tech-savvy and a wider number of people than we may have otherwise? In reality, perhaps our social media focus actually meant the race ended up being as tight as it was in the end and the margin of victory was only 44 votes instead of 144?
True, the (mostly accurate) perception about social media is a bunch of people just clicking “Like” and walking away. Or tweeting something snarky and going on with their day. I would argue that Ryan’s campaign recognized people do this so made very concerted efforts not to let potential supporters get away so easily. We had a formal “Likes to Loves” program internally where our volunteers reached out to people who indicated their support on social media to encourage them to join the party, donate, volunteer or otherwise increase their engagement.
Our Facebook advertising strategy was similar – instead of just throwing money at Facebook and requesting ads show up for anybody who’d, for example, Liked the Sask NDP but not our candidate or who’d Liked an opponent but not our candidate, we had very strategic ideas of who we were targeting with our ads, a variety of ads which we analysed and tweaked based on which got the greatest response rates, and specific goals for how many Likes we were trying to achieve at different points in the campaign. In hindsight, of course, I wish we’d been even more successful with the “Likes to Loves” program. If we’d converted another 2% of Ryan’s 2500 Likes into new party members who voted, that would’ve been enough to turn the race. (But everybody on Team Meili – whether they were on our social media team or not – probably did the same thing in hindsight after the final result was known – “if I only called 44 more people”, “if I only sold 44 more memberships”, “If I only had 44 more cousins!”)
Speaking of Facebook, advertising on that platform is, *by* far, the most cost-effective way to spend limited advertising dollars/resources to reach people compared to phoning, mailing and other more traditional contact methods. It still can’t replace the connection of an in-person contact but there’s always going to be a trade-off between costs and impact – if there wasn’t, every candidate would make a personal visit to every member to explain their positions and answer any questions. But obviously that doesn’t happen.
I’ll concede that social media still can’t win or lose a campaign by itself – at least not yet [2019-08-14 – arguably, a big part of Donald Trump’s 2016 victory was powered by barely legal effective social media outreach.] But social media also grows in importance with every year that goes by. (I often check this by using the “Mom Test” as a measure of where we might reach general users as opposed to early adopters – is my mom on Facebook? Yes. Is my mom on Twitter? No. Is my mom comfortable using her credit card online? Sort of. And so on.)
As I said at the start of this post, Twitter is celebrating its seventh anniversary which means it was in its infancy in the 2009 race and all but non-existent during the 2007 provincial election. Who knows what role social media tools of today (or ones that have yet to be invented!) will play in a couple years’ time?
That’s part of why the Meili campaign was so focused on social media – we weren’t just thinking about how to win the leadership race but, at the same time, we were also trying to lay the groundwork for winning other elections in the future. A big part of this included learning and understanding the latest technologies – whether that was creating and releasing smartphone apps, livestreaming events, encouraging people to use SMS to let us know when they voted, experimenting with a variety of cutting-edge techniques and tools from Tout to Google Hangouts to the Reddit AMA we did.
There are numerous other reasons social media should be and is a growing and vital part of any modern political campaign…
Did social media cost Ryan Meili the election? No, and to think otherwise is to be purposely obtuse and/or willfully uninformed.
There are numerous reasons why the result ended up being so close (playing off our losing margin, I’ve even written a list of “44 Reasons We Lost” although I think that one’s going to stay in my personal journal as therapy rather than go public!). For me, social media is actually one of many reasons why Ryan’s campaign was as successful as it was and garnered as much interest – again, within the province and beyond – as it did.
And further to that, I still firmly believe that increased use of all aspects of technology – including social media but also data mining, modeling different scenarios, targeted voter contact, etc. etc. – has a huge and growing role to play in political campaigns. You just have to look at the capabilities and ease-of-use of a tool like NationBuilder and how it combines these different functions – by pulling in information from social media and matching it to a membership database, allowing for crunching and analysis of all kinds of data, reaching out to people who you might not otherwise encounter and so on, its importance will only grow.
The gold-standard for combining technology, data analysis and social media is the Obama campaign in the US. No one would deny that this combination of data/technology/social media played a HUGE role in Obama’s victory last November. Team Meili didn’t have full-time paid experts and millions of dollars at our disposal to replicate that campaign’s success of course. But we did have a team of (volunteer) experts, a lot of creative ideas and a set goal which meant that, based on some of the feedback I heard after the convention from some high-placed observers, many felt we made a great show in our attempt to use a similar model to what Obama did on a “Saskatchewan” scale.
So perhaps the problem isn’t that Ryan’s campaign was running a great social media campaign for 2013. The problem is that we were running a great social media that was ahead of its time – at least by Saskatchewan political standards – and it’s just that @mcouros, John Gormley and others don’t realise it…yet.
—
The race is over but our team is still using social media outlets and the Internet to communicate and share our thoughts. For that reason, this post would be the perfect place to collect some of their work. If you’ve written or created something you want added to this list, let me know! And I humbly suggest that with the amount of great work done by various members of Team Meili in social media, graphic design and other areas, they should be entitled to at least 49.7% of all patronage jobs and contracts! 😉
Although it can seem dire sometimes, according to this graphic from MacLean’s (via Ken Haycock’s shiny new Facebook page), librarians will be one of the highest demand professions over the next decade.
(I’m going to ignore that the actual wording doesn’t specify “librarians” and actually says “Technical Jobs in Libraries…” which could mean a lot of different things. But as long as I never have to go to my back-up plan of becoming a forestry machinery operator, I’m happy. Whew!)
I attended the 2013 Stapleford Lecture at the U of R last night which featured Dr. Toni Samek from the U of A’s Library School. Her topic was: “Librarians Unplugged: How and Why Librarians Are Speaking Out About Crucial Social Issues”.
My first swelled head moment came when I got the invitation to attend the lecture a few weeks back. In addition to an invite to attend the lecture, there was also an invitation to a pre-event supper with Dr. Samek. Although I’ve known Dr. Samek through CLA and her work with the CLA’s Intellectual Freedom committee for a number of years, I assumed the supper must be an open invitation to a bunch of librarians in Regina or maybe to ones who would be on some U of R mailing list (which I could be an as alum and/or as someone who’s done business with the U of R a few times since coming to RPL.)
But nope, the invitation was just for little ol’ me (along with a few select others) which was a nice surprise. That was the appetizer for me getting a swelled head – the main course was yet to come.
In the course of dinner conversation, I reminded Dr. Samek of how we met – I had driven a van load of students from UWO in London to Ottawa for the 2006 CLA conference. I was introduced to Dr. Samek at one of the conference’s social events and when we first introduced, she said “Jason Hammond! I’ve read your paper!”
This was quite a shock considering I was mid-way through my second semester of library school and hadn’t actually published or even disseminated any of my papers. Turns out that the prof who I wrote the paper in my first semester “Foundations of Library Science” course had passed it on to Dr. Samek since the paper, “Cash Cow: User Fees in Alberta Public Libraries” touched on many of her areas of interest, all within an Alberta context.
That gave me a bit of a swelled head at the time but that feeling had long since dissipated. So what gave me a swelled head last night? (No, not too much free wine!) I went on to publish that paper partly due to encouragement from the original prof I wrote it for and from Dr. Samek and in the course of discussing it last night, she said it is NOW USED AS ONE OF THE REQUIRED READINGS IN HER OWN FOUNDATIONS OF LIBRARY SCIENCE CLASS!
Now, for my more academically minded readers, this probably doesn’t seem like a big deal. But I think it’s pretty frickin’ cool (er, there’s probably a more respected academic way to phrase that!) that a paper I wrote is now being used in the development of the next generation of librarians (er, being the elder statesman that I am.) 😉
It wasn’t exactly on my bucket list but it’s still cool that this is another fairly unique experience in this life (again, at least for the non-academics among us) that I can claim to have experienced. Back when I was failing out of Economics 101 in first year University, I never would’ve guessed my work would end up being part of the required reading list for a Masters-level course! 😉
Cool video by Buck 65 covering Leonard Cohen…
Ryan Meili has posted his concession speech from the day after the Leadership Convention and it didn’t make my Top 10 list of reasons I was supporting Ryan Meili but the fact that I’ve always found Ryan to be beyond classy, in good times and bad, was another reason I supported his candidacy. Truly a rarity in today’s political culture…
There were dozens of reasons I supported Ryan. Another one that didn’t make my list happened way back in October. At that early point in the campaign, Ryan made a passing reference to Servant Leadership in a longer essay he wrote about his own philosophy of leadership:
Coming back to the question before us – electing the next leader of the Saskatchewan New Democratic Party – this understanding of a shift in leadership style is an important consideration. The task before us is to choose someone who will demonstrate the kind of servant leadership that will set the tone for the party – not just for the next election, but for the next generation. The world is changing rapidly, and the challenges we face as a party and a province are greater than any one person’s skills and abilities. We need to do more than change the leader, we need to change the conversation.
…and I thought it was yet another indication he was the perfect person for the job.
I first heard about the concept of Servant Leadership (sometimes called Humble Leadership) from a former boss. Although this boss is/was quite religious and the idea of Servant Leadership can be traced back to ancient religious beliefs including obviously Captain Christmas – Jesus Christ himself, the concept still resonates with me and my atheist brain.
The basic essence of the concept is that when you’re the boss, that doesn’t mean you have to *be* a boss. Instead, your goal should be to *serve* the people you work with – whether as subordinates, colleagues or superiors – by ensuring they have what they need to maximize their success (which in turn, guarantees your success.)
(A related element of Servant Leadership is that you really shouldn’t even see people in terms of power relationships and try, as much as possible, to view everyone you interact with as someone you are an equal colleague with, to maximize effectiveness of this technique.)
People can embrace Servant Leadership (whether at work or not and whether you’re a “boss” or not) by exhibiting a few qualities that aren’t often associated with our traditional understanding of leadership:
Dangerous Trust – Humility always demands a certain level of trust. A humble leader is willing to take a risk on others, trusting them with the sacredness of the vision, even at the chance they may be disappointed with the outcome.
Sincere Investment – Humble leaders know the vision is bigger and will last longer than they will, so they willingly invest in others, raising up and maturing new leaders.
Gentle, but Strong – One can’t be a leader and be weak. Every position of leadership will provide a challenge to the leader, but humble leaders have learned the balance between being gentle and remaining strong. (Think Jesus!)
Readily Admits Mistakes – Everyone makes mistakes. In fact, we often learn more through failure than through success. The humble leader is quick to admit when he or she has done wrong and deals with the fault-out without casting blame or making excuses.
Forgives easily – Leadership is filled with disappointment; often at the expense of other’s mistakes. A humble leader forgives easily, remembering how many times he or she has been forgiven.
Quickly diverts attention – We all like to be recognized for accomplishments, but a humble leader is quick to divert attention to others, sharing the limelight for successes with those, who many times, may have even had more to do with the success than the leader did. They celebrate the success of others louder than personal success
Remains thankful – A humble leader is appreciative of the input of others into his or her leadership. So much so, that a humble leader naturally praises the actions of others far more than the time spent patting themselves on the back for personal accomplishments. Humble leaders recognize that all good gifts come from above.
Recognizes Limitations – No one can do everything. A humble has the ability to say, “I can’t do that or I’m not the one who should”.
Shares authority – Humble leaders don’t take all the key assignments for themselves, but gives out prime responsibility and authority to people he or she is leading.
Invites feedback – A humble leader wants to learn from his or her mistakes and wants to continually see improvement. Humble leaders initiate other’s suggestions and feedback, not waiting until complaints come, but personally asking for the input.
Why is this concept a perfect match for the political world? Two big reasons – one general and one specific to politics.
The general reason is that the nature of leadership is changing and numerous organizations – private, public and other – are shifting from having traditional command-and-control, autocratic, hierarchical leaders to organizational leaders that empower people, decentralize authority and invert pyramids.
The more specific reason that applies to politics is that, unlike a traditional workplace, the majority of people involved in politics (eg. the members rather than those limited few who work for the party in some capacity) have the ability to walk away if they don’t feel that the party leadership is serving them in the way that they expect.
This was very clearly the case when Dwain Lingenfelter was elected Leader in 2009. He brought a very old-school approach to leadership that clearly turned people off – within the membership and beyond. When I was door-knocking and calling during the last provincial election, it quickly became clear that many members – new and long-term – were choosing to either minimize their involvement or even to leave the party rather than work for a leader who clearly didn’t see his role as one of serving the membership (or to be fair, if he did, it didn’t translate well – indicating that making sure people understand your intentions and approach is as important as the actions you take.)
I have to admit I had the same thoughts about leaving the party myself when Link was elected. I mean, I’d only bought a membership to support Ryan and other than a previous leadership race in 2001, had never held a membership any other time.
But for a variety of reasons – belief in the party, belief in my local candidate (who, like Ryan, took a classy, positive approach to politics), belief in so many of the people I’d met in the party who opened up to me with their knowledge, ideas and opportunities – I stayed involved. In fact, I consider myself as someone who has transitioned from an uncertain, uncommitted member to a PAC-holding, constituency association-serving, election-working member.
Not everyone who joins the party will get as involved as I have (and with the Leadership Race over and a baby on the way in two months, I expect that my own level of involvement will drop off significantly).
But for the party’s greatest long-term success, transitioning people from “toe in the water” involvement to “doing laps in the deep end” involvement is vital. And servant leadership is an ideal way to make that happen!
I’d rather have a shot of a future Prime Minister than a past Prime Minister anyhow. 😉
