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Here Come the Millennials

At my last agency -- Eastwick Communications, where I joined full time in 2002 -- I used to joke that I was old enough to be the father of my staff.  Seemed strange to some folks, but it was true -- I would remind people that I am Puerto Rican, and many Puerto Ricans of my generation began breeding much, much younger.   In 2002, I was 44, and that was the year that my son Isaac was born.  That same year, my cousin Yvette (same age as me) had a granddaughter ... her third.   

Just so happens that Isaac belongs to a new generation recently dubbed as the "millennials," people born between the years 1982 and 2003 and who have been entering the professional workforce over the past five-six years.  They are, of course, the children of the people in my generation (and the one following).   So it's no longer even a question that I'm old enough to be father of my staff -- even a late-bloomer/baby boomer like me should expect to see our young-un's knocking down our doors. As far as I can tell, there are at least three millennials at The Conversation Group, and I am sure there will be many more, soon.   

But I gotta tell you, this generational shift feels great.  And as much as I loathe  big conceits (and "millennials" is a big one), I'm impressed with how this generation has been defined, most intelligently by Morley Winograd and Michael Hais in a new book that's getting a lot of press: 

--like many of their parents, millennials are idealistic.

--unlike many of their parents, the are less likely to become idealogues; they are doers and problem solvers, not dreamers.

--on the whole, they are progressive.  According to the authors, they are "the first generation in at least three or four in which there are more self-identified liberals than conservatives."

--they grew up on Macs and PCs, and they are the principal drivers of the collaborative Internet.   People from my generation may have  helped to invent the idea, but the millennials are the first to truly embrace its potential, en masse.

--they like to mix play with work, an observation Don Tapscott made in Wikinomics.  And who can blame them?  This generation is always working, on some level.

OK, big generalizations, but here's one more (my own):  they like playing music in the office.   It makes all the difference at a busy place like The Conversation Group.  Retails stores, coffee shops, and other "experience-based" businesses figured it out a long time ago.  I was wondering when the rest of the business world would catch up.  Must have been dreaming when it finally happened.

We Are Blogtropol.us

After many pass-through's, assists, and co-productions, The Conversation Group is finally producing its own blogger lounge, and this one is at Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco.   To get the details, go here.

But, alas,  the solo flight is an illusion.  We could not have done it without a lot of help, most of all from our partners:  Snap, Mzinga, Something Simpler Systems, BottleNotes, Pandora, drop.io, Socialtext, Radian6, Joyent, Six Apart, Elephant Pharmacy, Web of Trust, Get Satisfaction, Flixwagon, Ustream, AMD and CNET Webware. 

Yes, we've been in this business for quite some time now, and there's one thing we learned that's worth sharing:  it takes a frikkin' village -- I mean city -- to pull off a blogger lounge.   We've got a city, and it's quite nice.  Come join us this week, in you're in town.

Annals of Communications: Spitzer "Hoisted on His Own Petard"

Annals of Communications -- How Public Officials Communicate, and What Everyone Can Learn From Them

"Hoisted on his own petard" -- that's the favorite line that pundits and bloggers are plying today in their many dissections of the Eliot Spitzer prostitution-ring scandal.  The quote is attributed to Shakespeare -- our timeless interpreter of tragedy -- who, as Johnny once noted, said just about everything. 

But what does the phrase mean?  Simply:  that the weapon you yield (the petard) can be used against you; in other words, "live by the sword, die by the sword," which is one of the oldest, cruellest, but most enduring laws of leadership and communication.  Which is why today's scandal is generating so little sympathy for the Governor of New York -- a public official who rose to fame for rooting out the evil, corrupt, and weak in government -- and creating a "bull market in schadenfreude" in an otherwise dull and depressing day on Wall Street.

But what really caught my attention today was how poorly the  governor and his administration handled the crisis today.   Common wisdom:  when there's a crisis, there are at least three things you must do, and do them quickly:  (1) acknowledge fault, fully and completely; (2) apologize to all the people you have harmed; (3) make amends with the people you have harmed.  While Spitzer's sixty-second press conference today (way too short) touched on all three, the narrative was vague, incomplete, and left too many points unanswered.   Was he apologizing to his family only (big sympathy for them today), or to the people who elected him as well (he said sorry to both, but there was little emphasis on the latter).   Was he making the argument that the personal can really be separated from the political ("I do not believe that politics in the long run is about individuals. It is about ideas, the public good, and doing what is best for the state of New York.")  And what did he mean at the close, when he said "I will report back to you in short order"?  It was an odd note, as if he had just been reprimanded by a commanding officer. I'm hearing that the lawyers helped to write this speech -- Spitzer may be holding onto his job to negotiate a deal with prosecutors -- so we should not be surprised.

Not that it would have helped Spitzer very much to repair his reputation (that will take some time), but the questions that remain are only likely to fuel the darkest (the shade in schadenfreude) speculations from both friends and enemies.  Better to come completely out of the shadows and into the light.  In hard times, half measures don't work.  Unless, of course, it's all over, and the final curtain on your public life is dropping.  I believe Shakespeare said that, too.

Annals of Communications: Clinton's Hubcap Strategy

Annals of Communications -- How Public Officials Communicate, and What Everyone Can Learn From Them

If you grew up in a 60's inner-city neighborhood -- I did -- you're probably familiar with the pitch.  A few tough kids knock on your apartment door and ask if you need hubcaps.  You say "no, I don't need hubcaps," and they answer, "um -- I think you do, mister.  Go look out the window."

I was reminded of the hubcap business this week when trying to make sense of the Clinton campaign's incessant attacks on Barack Obama's integrity, readiness, and most important of all, electability.  The real power of the hubcap pitch is that it is based on a simple but timeless economic principle:  scarcity.  Like the hubcap pitch, the campaign to cripple Obama creates a real scarcity in the Democratic primary -- if Obama is destroyed, the party's superdelegates will have no choice but to go with the only candidate left standing.   

But the resemblance doesn't end just there.  Like the hubcap pitch, the Clinton campaign against Obama is a clever act of misdirection that distracts the buyer (the voter) from the fact that a crime has been committed by the seller.   Might makes right in the ghetto, and perhaps that's true of intra-party politics, too.  The buzz is that there are many superdelegates who are way impressed with the Clinton campaign's ruthlessness and determination to win.   And I have to say, I am impressed, too.  But only in a way that a tenement dweller might feel when he realizes he's been mugged in the most clever of ways.  Impressed, but really pissed off, too. 

For many Democrats who support Obama, it may be very hard to get over that anger, even if the party elders do.  This is something that the elders will need to worry about, because the market for hubcaps may not be that great in November.   

Jhally Good

I am listening to/watching/learning from Sut Jhally, professor of communications at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.  Funny that it's Jhally's work that inspired me to re-engage on my blog -- he is a brilliant critic of the media industry, and its ill effects (yet he calls himself a teacher).  I have been quiet on this blog because I have been busy.  But I have also been on a too-long journey, examining my beliefs about the good and the bad that our industry does for people -- for individuals, for families, for cultures, for societies.  I thank the good professor for the awakening.

My first Utter

Mobile post sent by giorodriguez using Utterz. Replies.  mp3

Clinton/Post-Iowa: The Poverty of Mope

For me, the most remarkable thing about the Clinton-Obama battle since Iowa is the emerging study in contrasts. 

The Clinton campaign, as one Chicago writer has noted, admittedly has gone to the dark side and is now waging a negative campaign against her opponent.  In the meantime -- as many  Americans will soon learn (it's the cover story in Newsweek) Obama's campaign philosophy is a studied and  deliberate rejection of negative campaigning.   It's an approach that invites his supporters and critics to end dirty-politics-as-usual -- the political campaign equivalent of non-violent resistance.  As history has shown,  that approach works beautifully when the practitioner understands that resistance is not only a shield, but also a sword.   The more your opponents attack you, the better you look because you have called attention to the cheap weapons they are using.

But it begs the question:  doesn't negative campaigning work, regardless of the harm done to the attacker's reputation?  No doubt, negative campaigns do work -- sometimes.  But there are three things that make Clinton's attack on Obama very risky. 

First, you need to consider Obama's core base of voters.  As many journalists covering the campaign have noted, Obama's crowd is largely an educated, sophisticated crowd -- folks who are savvy enough to question or discount the argument in negative campaigns, or reject the tactic outright.   For a shocking dose of evidence of that phenomenon, see Frank Luntz's "focus group" on Fox (yes, the same Frank Luntz that has helped many a Republican to frame a tough campaign against a Democrat).   Second, while Clinton's attack has been Obama's alleged inconsistencies, one thing that he has done fairly consistently(no one is perfect) is to refrain from negative campaigning.  He's disciplined about resistance, and it's part of his brand.  What about Clinton's brand?  As John Edwards gamely noted during the New Hampshire debate, Clinton appears to have gone negative only after slipping in the polls.  The negative campaigning does not become her -- it's not the true Hillary -- and it looks desperate.

But there's a bigger reason why this particular negative campaign might not work.   Obama has struck a chord with citizens from different political persuasions.  While the New Hampshire debate neatly framed the Obama/Clinton contest as one between change and experience, the frame simplifies to the point it obscures the reality of Obama's appeal.  There are specific contours to the kind change that Obama is talking about:  the coming together of folks who have been long divided on sectarian issues, but are all in agreement that the U.S. must look at things fresh and perhaps rethink the divides that have made politics so ineffective and, yes, ugly.  And it's not enough for Clinton to say that she too is "for change."  The coalition that Obama is talking about is a different idea, and as more and more people who are telling the story (e.g., Andrew Sullivan, on the right) and participating in the story (e.g., Bill Bradley, on the left) agree, Obama might be unusually -- if not just surprisingly -- well suited to do something with this idea.  That's a tough thing to compete with even if it is naive, as Clinton complains.  My guess is that Clinton will continue to struggle unless she comes up with a compelling, competing idea of her own.

See also:  Katie Paine.

How Does the Iowa Caucus Work?

Ever wonder about this?  The New York Times has a great little video.

Obama's Got Game in New Hampshire

Wired says that Obama has better traffic than Clinton in New Hampshire.  Must be thrilling news to the digital set. 

Scoble vs. Facebook: Man Versus Machine

By now you have probably heard the news (and rants) about Robert Scoble's peremptory "disablement" on the Facebook network.   Seems like the company froze his account after learning he violated the "terms of  service" by using a script that grabbed his data so he could export it to other networks. 

Whether you believe that the data belongs exclusively to Robert, or whether some of that data belongs to Facebook and others, there's a bigger lesson for Facebook in this latest tussle in the blogosphere.   It appears that the offending note from Facebook was a machine-generated message (or faceless message from a real human being) to one of the world's most respected and influential bloggers.   In an age where even old-school business leaders are learning to speak with their customers in a human voice, Facebook left this important job to a "machine":  a cold, legalistic communique from corporate.  A phone call might have been a better idea.  Looks like there are several sides to this story that a real conversation would have cleared up.

Reminds me of an earlier breach in customer relations involving the editor of an in-world newsletter (the first of its kind) that covered EA's The Sims Online, one of the first virtual-world communities.  The editor of that publication (who retells the story in excruciating detail -- excruciating for EA, I am sure -- in a recent book) got a similar form-letter email when he was dismissed from the community (also for allegedly violating the  TOS).   The result of that action:  not good for EA. 

There's an old saying -- never pick a fight with someone who buys ink -- or stink -- by the barrel.   But if you must, give the job to a human being.   At least they can talk back.