Robi Ganguly’s Big Ideas

As most of you already know, Haiti was devastated by a 7.0 earthquake on Tuesday of this week. The damage assessments continue to roll in and the death tolls are still rising at this point, with the country’s limited infrastructure presenting massive obstacles in the relief effort. As I’ve been following the news on this earthquake, I’ve been struck by how my friends and others are using the Internet to voice their concern and to join in the call to take action. The sheer number of Tweets, blog posts and Facebook status updates imploring people to do something has been simply staggering (more on this here). It’s inspired me to try and play a small role in helping the people of Haiti (it’s estimated that up to 1/3 of the population is going to be in need of aid).

Before I get into the details, however, I want to highlight some things that you can do, yourself, to give to the relief effort:

• Text "Haiti" to 90999 in order to donate $10 to the Red Cross relief effort via your mobile phone bill
• Text "Haiti" to 20222 to donate $10 to the U.N. relief efforts via your mobile phone bill
• Donate through the Clinton Foundation’s dedicated page
• Donate through UNICEF
• Text "Yele" to 501501 to donate $5 to Wyclef Jean’s nonprofit organization

Now, in addition to sharing several ways that YOU can take action to help the people of Haiti, here’s what I’m going to do (and you can help me with it):

• I’m running a half marathon tomorrow, up in Bellingham, WA. It’s my first half marathon.
• My plan is to tweet every mile that I finish
• For every response or retweet that I get through Twitter, Facebook or on this blog, I’ll be making a donation through the U.N.
• My donation is going to be based on:  The # of responses/retweets X $.25 X the mile that the response comes in on.

That might sound confusing, so here’s a bit of an example: If I get 2 responses after mile 1, I’ll be making a donation of $.50. If I get 4 responses after mile 12, then I’ll be making a donation of $12.00. After finishing the race (I hope!) I’ll be adding all of this activity together to determine how much I’m giving to the U.N. So, a potential outcome could be the following:

In drumming this idea up, I wanted to see if I could play a part in sparking a fire amongst my circle of friends. In theory, if you choose to interact with me during this race, you’ll be more likely to take some action in your own life to donate to the Haiti relief efforts and potentially, you’ll decide to act to get others involved as well. This is where the retweets and shares will come in to play, I suspect.

Regardless of how many of you choose to participate with me, I’m excited to have a cause to run for tomorrow. I haven’t been actively training for this race for very long (this is my first long race since my marathon in 2008), so I’m a bit nervous about my ability to finish. Holding this cause in my head and hearing from a few of you is going to be a big motivator for me to focus on the most important part of the half marathon: finishing.

So, what do you all think? Anyone in?

**One caveat: there is the very small potential that this gets really "viral", which would be incredible. Given that I’m not independently wealthy (I’m a struggling entrepreneur after all..), I’m going to have to put a cap on how much I end up giving. Hopefully that doesn’t dissuade you from participating in any way, but if it does, I understand. I’ve told 2 people I trust what the cap is (well above the scenario modeled above), so this is something that I take seriously, but I’m keeping the number private because the focus here is really to engender personal participation.**

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If you’re out there, thinking to yourself that the poll numbers look great and this election is in the bag, STOP.

Stop thinking that you don’t have anything to do in the next 3 weeks. 

I admit, the situation looks rather rosy at the moment, but if you really want to see a President Obama in the White House, I urge you to listen to what the man is saying:

THIS IS OUR TIME 

What do you think that means folks? OUR time.. WE need to be involved. 

"Be the change you want to see in the world."

                         -Mahatma Gandhi

From one of mankind’s greatest philosophers AND one of our most effective leaders comes a reminder for us all: we must make this election go the way we would like.

It’s important to me to see Barack Obama elected. I’ve been doing a number of things to play a part in his candidacy and I have many friends who have been doing the same. Have you?

Some ideas about what you can do to get Barack Obama elected over the next 3 weeks:

1. Familiarize yourself with the "battleground states" of this election: Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, North Carolina, Florida, Colorado, Nevada, Michigan.
2. Talk to your friends in those swing states about the election: Don’t be pushy, but create conversations, have meaningful, in-depth discussions of the issues that matter to you. Avoid hyperbole and emotional, pithy remarks and engage in behavior that is required of a CITIZEN:
   • Look at your phone’s address book and scroll through it. Do you have any friends in those states? Have you not talked to them in a while? Give them a ring. Talk about the election.
   • Open up your email address book and do the same thing – look to see who among your friends are in these swing states. Email them, start a dialogue. Share digital media that you’ve watched, read, listened to or even created about the election that you find interesting and useful in making your decisions.
   • Are you on MySpace/Facebook/Bebo/iMeem/Friendster/LinkedIn/Plaxo? If so, the tools aren’t great, but you can use these services to identify friends who are in the battleground states – take 30 mins and make a list of 10, 15, 20 friends. Reach out to them.
3. Share your enthusiasm for action with other like-minded friends: It’s always more fun to work as a part of a team. Create your own small team of friends who are taking actions to share, discuss and promote the Obama campaign. Pass this blog post on, recruit people to come up with more ideas than the ones I’ve listed here.
4. Donate to the campaign: Here is the link to my donations page (get me past $0 folks!), but you can just as easily go to the main donation page, located here.
5. Volunteer for the campaign: (sign up at: http://action.barackobama.com/page/s/volunteer)
   • Make calls in the coming weeks with local supporters and contact your neighbors: http://my.barackobama.com/page/votercontact/details
   • Hop in your car and head to a nearby battleground state, if it’s feasible for you (SF friends, there are several trips to Nevada planned).
6. Create your own media for the campaign:
   • If you have a blog, write on it.
   • If you go to a rally, take pictures and video of it and share with your friends.
   • If you have artistic inclinations, create your own Obama logo and put it in your email signatures, on your social network profile, in your IM profiles etc.. If you don’t, go find logos here
7. Wear your support for the campaign: t-shirts, bumper stickers, pins, signs.. all of these will help show your support and remind others.
8. Remind all of your friends to vote on election day!

These are just my ideas, please add your own in the comments.

Also, here are some interesting sites to check out along these lines:

http://www.returntoohio.com/ 

http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2008/09/on-road-grand-junction-colorado.html 

http://thegreatschlep.com/

Finally, for those who are trying to figure out what media to share with their friends, here are some of my favorite speeches/ads/media/articles:

Articles and links:

Attack Tactics backfiring on McCain

Obama’s career timeline, detailing why the experience question is pretty silly

New Yorker on Barack Obama back in 2007

Lengthy piece on "Obamanomics" from August

Ads and Videos:

A recent ad that tells us more about Obama’s background

Obama’s speech on 10/13/08 about the economic crisis.

Inspiring video created for the convention.

Obama’s Speech on Race – "A More Perfect Union": one of the most amazing speeches I’ve ever seen.

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In my last post, I talked about why I thought that picking Joe Biden was both a smart hire and a poor strategic decision. I made the point that I think it’s left the door open for the Republicans to counter and make some pretty aggressive attacks against Obama and Biden’s records.  So, how will John McCain react?

In short, I think he’s going to pursue the strategy and the messaging that the Obama camp could have used in selecting Hillary….

Let me explain

I think that McCain will be highly pragmatic and select Mitt Romney.

• Not because Romney and McCain work together well and have a lot of mutual respect
• Not because Romney brings an extraordinary amount of balance to the Republican ticket

But rather, because McCain knows that he needs to mobilize the “Republican base”. It is because he needs to fully utilize the “Fall into Line and do as we say” mentality that defines Republican politics. Often overlooked in the landscape of recent American politics is the stark contrast in discipline between our two major political parties:

• The Republicans make decisions from the top down and demand obedience. You’re either with them or against them. This is why the ongoing argument that McCain is a maverick is laughable; throughout the past 8 years he has consistently proven that he knows his political future rests on his ability to fall into line when necessary.
• The Democrats abhor that kind of homogenous philosophy and prefer to argue, in public, over their differing stances on major issues. Obama’s continued refrain about “change coming from the bottom up” really resonates with the party for this reason.

Both stances have their benefits and their drawbacks, but one thing is for sure: the discipline of the Republican party offers them a very substantial organizational advantage (I talked about this more in depth in my post about supporting Hillary in the primaries). When your political leaders can consistently be counted on to quote the party line, word for word, you have a lot more control over your message and the “brand message” that voters will consume. In politics, as in marketing, a consistent message is a VERY powerful thing.

So, what I expect McCain to do is the following:

1. Pick a candidate with Executive experience (a current or former Governor)
2. Pick a candidate with strong “Conservative” brand awareness. This will help round out the ticket’s image in Republican voters’ minds, given that McCain’s image is carefully crafted as a “maverick”.
3. Pick a candidate who is known to be pro-business

The most likely candidates for this job, with those criteria, are Mitt Romney and Minnesota Governor Pawlenty.

I think that the McCain campaign will pick Mitt Romney and in doing so, say something along the lines of the following:

“American people, we heard you loud and clear during the primaries. You like McCain’s independence, his experience, his strong domestic and foreign policy capabilities. But you want us to remember our Conservative roots and to make sure we’re continuing on our path of building the American economy through the strengths of small business. Mitt Romney is here to tell you that those voices are heard.”

Now, let me re-state what I mentioned above: I think that this is basically the same messaging that the Obama camp could have used in selecting Hillary. The message could have been, “American people, you shouted at the tops of your lungs that you liked both of our platforms. So, it is natural that the strongest platform will combine the voices of your two public servants.”

Obviously, this isn’t the path that has been taken and I’m not going to cry over it, but I do think it leaves the McCain camp salivating over their ability to exploit the decision.

Let’s see how this plays out. In the best scenario for Obama fans, McCain’s camp will get too cute with its strategy and pick Joe Lieberman, trying too hard to woo the centrists  and swing voters. I’m highly doubtful that’s what we’re going to hear, however.

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From my buddy Jim comes this news item from Philadelphia:

Nation & World | Thousands of black men to help patrol violent city | Seattle Times Newspaper

This is truly amazing. I’m crossing my fingers for these folks, I really hope that it does something to stem the tide of violence in their city. When I read about something like this, it makes me think that the truth of the matter is that we have to police ourselves.

Whether it’s in “real life” or online, what needs to be understood is that no one central authority could ever hope to truly stop all bad behavior. In the communities that you’re a participant, you need to band together with others to curtail unacceptable behavior. Stand up, call people out on their inability to participate in productive ways and lend your voice to others who are willing to do the same. We should be able to navigate our differences in a manner that doesn’t rip to shreds the communities that we exist in. Whether it’s the comments section of your blog or your neighborhood, it’s high time that we recognized that the minority who choose to act anonymously, in secret, with hate and ill will are just that – the minority. We all can take a stand against them. Make sure you’re one of the people standing up.

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From the NY Times blog, Tracking the California Wildfires, I came across this YouTube timelapse video of the fires in Southern California.

Wow.

My thoughts go out to all of those who have had to evacuate or have lost their homes in the fires. Hopefully, the winds will ease and this will get contained soon.

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Wow, the past few days have seen a noticeable increase in traffic here, which says to me that some of you subscribers are more actively engaged and are maybe even passing on my posts to friends of yours. Thanks!

A quick shout out to a few folks who’ve been commenting:

Valeria - for always taking the time to comment when I link to you. Very impressive.  Mark -  I always appreciate that you take the time to leave a quick note when you like something. Thanks bud.  Jim – Wow. Awesome comment on my “Go Fail Yourself” post. Between the comments from you and Ben on that post, that has to be one of my personal favorite posts so far.  Ian – For sharing your little javascript code on my “Proactive Discovery” post. Amazingly, you were the only one to contribute something there

So, on to the networks version of my “Things I’m thinking about right now” series (here are Part 1 and Part 2):

Web Worker Daily brings us back to the point of networking: remembering that it’s not just a series of transactions is important.

Fred Wilson hits on something near and dear to my heart - he’s unsure of where this is going and about the difference between what users want and what developers will seek out. I believe that I have a very good idea of where it should go. Let’s talk Fred. 

He also links to Dave Winer, who gets provocative in Fred’s comments (Scott Rafer also adds in his useful pragmatic view). I think that he’s right on here – real platforms look different from Facebook F8, folks.

Scoble points me to:

Jason Calacanis’s post which spins the discussion around and essentially asks, “Does this stuff have any substance?” He also continues on in a second post, lightly touching on something that I think is being left under-discussed: the younger generations are being raised, at least in the U.S., with the expectation that they have to market themselves.

Proving that he really is a portal, Scoble also points me over to new stuff coming out of Plaxo. I’m  hoping to make it to Lunchaxo tomorrow, to see what’s going on.

The NY Times does a piece on how the businesses who create networks impact real-life relationships in significant and negative ways.

Ok, I’m realizing this could be a bit of overload for people, so I’m going to stop now. As promised, I’m working on a more coherent piece that will hopefully pull these things together better.

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By way of my friend Damon’s blog comes this amazing video of a home crowd at a basketball game. It’s incredible to watch how into the game they are and the lack of social fear.

That’s right, social fear. Maybe you should think about that for a moment. Do you have social fear? Are you afraid of being yourself in public?

The digitization of our lives is happening. Whether it’s Flickr, YouTube, your blog or whatever’s coming next, we’re becoming more digitally entwined. That scares people. A ton. But it’s also good, because you can share these experiences. Watch this video and then think about it like this:

- Imagine that you go to school here and you’re trying to tell a friend who doesn’t go there about your freshman year. You’re telling them how cohesive the student body is, how tied together everyone feels and how much they love basketball. Your friend listens intently, but they don’t “get” it. Not just with your words.

- You send them this video.

Then what happens? Maybe your friend picks up the phone and calls you with 5 questions about your school. Maybe they want to transfer there. Or think you should leave.

But, all of a sudden, they’ve gotten to experience your life more intimately than ever before.

Isn’t that what we’re really seeking with this stuff? The ability to more fully share who we are, what we think, what we do? Aren’t we really try to share the experiences of our lives?

I think so.

You tell me. Tell me what you want out of blogs, flickr, youtube, twitter etc. I’m dying to know.

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I don’t know about you all, but I have yet to come up with a good way to queue up stuff to read for later / blog about later. To date, the best approach for me has been to create a draft blog post in Live Writer, but I’m finding that even that isn’t efficient enough for me. Saving to MyWeb kind of works, but it’s not integrated enough into my daily habits that I go and check a specific tag on a regular basis… Anyhow, tips are definitely appreciated, if you have any. In the meanwhile, here are some tabs I’ve been keeping open in Firefox that I can now close and get my computer to stop whining (why the hell is FF such a resource hog!?!?!):

Brody Jenner is either the biggest tool ever or a genius.. : I stopped watching “The Hills”. I just couldn’t take the idiocy of the two “stars”, Lauren and Heidi. But reading this back story on the two toolbag boyfriends, Spencer and Brody, almost makes me want to put it back on my Tivo, just so I can follow them a bit more. I haven’t even processed what this says for us as a society..

P&G understands “conversation marketing”: A very short piece in Ad Age, but an important one. Jim Stengel of P&G understands that there is no ability to control someone else and that a company can actually build relationships with its consumers. “This business is personal” – great line from the video. This stuff gets me so excited about the future that I scare myself sometimes.

Google’s advertising product development reaches out: Maybe this is about trying to determine the priority of its ad product development, but my gut says this is something a bit more savvy. I think this “survey” is actually intelligently positioned marketing. I think Google’s trying to get big, slow, old advertisers to understand that they don’t have much in the way of metrics from the majority of their buys.

A reminder that not all great companies are public: This quick blurb on REI from the Motley Fool reminded me that I really need to get my series on Seattle companies going. I heart REI.

The Starbucks memo from Howard Schultz: Speaking of Seattle companies that I love, here’s a link to a memo from Howard Schultz that illustrates just how different of a company it is. “Let’s get back to the core” he says. By the way, the fact that there’s a “Starbucks Gossip” blog that is obviously frequented by baristas is not only unsurprising, I actually thought to myself “holy crap, I’m an idiot for not finding this before” when I came across it.

Social shopping is alive!: I might get more into this later, in its own post, but it looks like some folks are making real progress on social shopping (something I first brought up here) in a variety of ways. Sounds like the National Retail Federation is getting after this with some big tech partners. Awesome.

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In my former life as an i-banker, there would always be a viral sensation or two during the recruiting process. It seemed that as technology became more widely adopted, people would experiment with clip art and other capabilities in order to try and stand out from the crowd. I must say that a few were pretty interesting, but the ones that bombed really stood out and were passed on in the industry very quickly. This one, however, takes the cake:

How Not to Apply for a Job in I-Banking – IvyGate, the Ivy League blog

Shame on him/his friends for not realizing how viral this could become and how perfectly assinine it is. 

Technorati Tags: jobs, i-banking, hubris, stupid recruiting tricks, how not to apply for a job

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Check out this great piece from last year on Bill Gates and his foundation’s work around the world, particularly with the problem of malaria: http://www.michaelspecter.com/ny/2005/2005_10_24_gates.html

Seems particularly relevant given his recent announcement of priority shifts. As many of you know, I’m mostly a fan of his – I think his business acumen is terrific and he’s built a terrific company. It shocks me how many people can take his announcement and bash him for being self-serving when he’s devoting all of his time and much of his money to incredibly important and underserved causes. Not only that, he’s bringing an extremely effective mindset to it in order to be as effective as possible. How is this bad? *sigh* I suppose that the truth is that many people can’t help but bash the leaders, no matter what they do. That’s pretty sad.

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