Ever wonder how the polls and mainstream news coverage of the US presidential race stack up against the social media conversation? Then you’ll want to check out this ingenious dashboard (pictured above in the highest res I can muster right now).

Its charts showcase side-by-side comparisons of news, blogosphere and Twitter mentions of the candidates and more, providing an interesting mash up of perspectives–from the mainstream media down to to the individual opinions of lifestreaming micromedia. The up-to-the-minute Twitter and blog feeds of all things mentioning the candidates give you an unvarnished (and, caution, un-edited) taste of what people are talking about and linking to in the dynamic world of social media. Where do they find all that spare time?!? There’s even a Widget!

This is truly America’s first Web 2.0 powered presidential election (in terms of everything from fundraising to announcing a Vice Presidential pick via text message). So tools like this dashboard are a useful way for voters to take the pulse of the conversation themselves. Don’t know how long this one will remain up for. Let us know if you have found others. Maybe someone has created one for the iPhone already, available in an app store near you…

Special thanks: to Guy Kawasaki for tweeting this our way (along with the 18,000 plus other people who follow him on Twitter)

Image credit: perspctv

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Just read some interesting news about Google’s “Big Tent” plans for the Democratic and Republican conventions — which will have 500 and 200 credentialled bloggers working onsite, respectively. For $100 each, Google will provide Net access, workspace, couches, candy buffet, smoothies and massages — which is almost like working at the Googleplex for a day!

 It’s a smart move for Google, of course, but John Murrell’s comment below really got me thinking:

>>> With all that coddling, the bloggers should be in fine form to try to do what mainstream media outlets have trouble doing at such carefully scripted events — dig up some news. <<<

On the surface, that sounds fairly traditional. Simply the difference between mainstream/broadcast news and microstream/narrowcast news coverage. But with 500 or 200 “embedded” bloggers — and traditional media likely following their lead as much as the reverse — could it actually impact the nature of the event? Could it turn the stodgy, overly scripted, boring conventions of recent history into a more raucous old-school debate with real issues being argued and discussed in the light of day by real people?

As a political junkie and a news junkie, I’ll hold out some hope that social media might help — or more likely, force — the parties to “loosen up” a bit at the conventions. If not, maybe we can get some of the rule-breaking social engineers who gave us “un-conferences” in business to apply their talents to create the country’s first “un-conventions” for 2012.

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One is dark the other golden. One falls from the sky the other knifes through water. One is brought to you from a Hollywood studio. The other by way of a newcomer on the world pop culture stage, the Chinese politburo.

But, perhaps in a way, the differences stop there. Because the world can’t get enough of them. These two masked, high-tech superheroes of summer. And neither can the organizations and brands that placed such big bets on their muscular shoulders in hopes of that rarest of phenomena: the blockbuster summer success.

As given away up front by the pics, I’m of course talking about the latest Batman movie “The Dark Knight,” starring Christian Bale and Heath Ledger in his final completed performance. And American Olympic-swimming wunderkind, Michael Phelps. Who today impossibly won his sixth gold medal and set his sixth world record in the Beijing games. His 12th career gold overall. More than any Olympic athlete in any sport. Ever.

When International Olympic Committee president Jacques Rogge was talking to reporters yesterday about Phelps’ impact, he could just as well have been talking about Hollywood:

“The Olympic Games live around superheroes. You had Jesse Owens, you had Paavo Nurmi, Carl Lewis and now you have Phelps. And that’s what we need to have.”

Batman, Spiderman, Ironman… Phelps, Lewis, Retton… or how about iPhone, iPod, Google to throw some phenom brands into the mix (oh just go with it, it’s summer). All are Supermen–some literally. All are icons. Heroes that defy the impossible. And break through the quotidian clutter to inspire outsized imagination and advocacy.

And it’s not just their feats that are heroic. It’s how they are saving business (and rescuing the rest of us in the US from the wasteland of reality TV and campaign coverage). Just look at Batman. According to boxofficemojo.com, the US Domestic box office total for “The Dark Night” as of August 13 was, as Robin Leach of “Lifestyles of the Rich & Famous” used to say, a hefty little $451 million. That’s nothing compared to the worldwide box office. It now stands at $715 million! Can you say ka-ching?

Back in Beijing, polls estimated that the opening ceremonies were viewed by 1 billion worldwide. That’s 15% of tout le monde. In the US, the broadcast averaged 34.2 million viewers and received an 18.6 national household rating, according to the Hollywood Reporter. Impressive to be sure.

But Phelps himself is drawing a tidal wave of eyeballs. According to the International Herald Tribune, he’s shattering Web traffic records just on NBCOlympics.com alone:

More than 2 million people have clicked on NBCOlympics.com to watch a video replay of the thrilling men’s 4×100 swimming relay, where the Americans scored a come-from-behind victory over the French… That race alone accounts for more than 40 percent of the nearly 5 million video on demand orders from the Web site, NBC Universal said on Thursday… Three of the next four most-ordered clips were also Phelps gold medal races, with his 400-meter victory called up 492,000 times. The only non-Phelps video in the top five was a collection of highlights from last Friday’s opening ceremony… Web site users have also called up Phelps’ profile 3.7 million times, far and away the most of any other athlete.

Fortunately, this is one story it won’t be difficult to find great stats on, as it will be endlessly written about, talked about, and analyzed. Which after all is the point. An astonishing aside, in what has otherwise been an impressive use of digital media by both the producers of Batman and the Olympics broadcast to engage vast audiences, was the whack-a-mole-like efforts of the latter to keep images of the tape-delayed opening ceremonies from leaking out in the age of broadband. Check please.

Even as we all marvel at and enjoy the great success of these Summer Knights, Batman and Phelps, we’d do well to remember that every Superman has his kryptonite. As observed by the New York Times today, that might simply come down to what home team you root for. Phelps it appears is not quite yet a universal hero. He’s ours here in America, splashed everywhere across our screens and imaginations. But virtually unknown and relegated to the back of the local media coverage in China!

That’s just the way it works with heroes. Or villains for the matter. After all, it was the Joker who stole the spotlight in “The Dark Knight!”

Image credits: FilmSchoolRejects and Telegraph.co.uk

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Move over Queen bee. That consumer who expressed her status through the clothes, homes, and cars she purchased. Even through career and family. A new force for the new media age has arrived: the Gamma woman, or girl as the case may be.

Who is she? Using Hollywood as a guidepost (with all the caveats that apply), forget Meryl Streep in “The Devil Wears Prada”– major Alpha. Think the hip and tech-savvy Ellen Page in “Juno.”

The new hero/archetype on the silver screen may also be the new prize for marketers. At least that’s one of the implications of the latest news from media powerhouse Meredith, publisher of such established and far-reaching women’s titles as Better Homes and Gardens, Family Circle, Ladies’ Home Journal, MORE, Parents, Fitness, and American Baby.

A Gamma, the company reports on its new microsite, is one of 55 million American women whose “choices are about expressing their creativity and personal style… and doing their part to preserve the environment.” She is guided by her “internal beliefs, passions, and priorities… [and] motivated by the desire to interact, rather than to impress.” Take that alphas.

Now if Juno is not who leaps to mind when you read about Gammas (especially in light of that, um, teen pregnancy thing), that’s OK. What stands out for me is the emphasis on expression of creativity and personal style. As it apparently does for the ever increasing number of women and moms publishing blogs and Twitter tweets. In this sense, the difference between Alpha and Gamma does feel a lot like the difference between Anna Wintour’s Vogue and, say, a Heather Armstrong of dooce.com. (see previous post Mom as the Truman Show for more about dooce)

Gammas are “creating a groundswell in today’s new media and marketing landscape,” says Meredith on its microsite and materials. “Using multiple media—both online and off—to share ideas, information, and recommendations with her vast network.”

Perhaps not totally new news to some consumer marketers who’ve followed this emerging discussion over the past years. But the deeper dive they provide gives shape to what looks like a trend–if not a conversational or a cultural shift–that’s worth a harder look at. Particularly the social networking virtues Gamma women possess.

Sounds like another part of the new wave of advocacy to me. And whether it’s a Greek letter like Gamma that helps define your audience mindset or something else, the key is to understand the conversation that engages them. And if your audience is anything like Juno, what she’ll tell you is that: “I could so go for like a huge cookie right now like with a lamb kabob simultaneously.” I’m hungry how about you?

Image: Sheryl Nields

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Rogue word-of-mouth for rock band Van Halen (whose song lyrics adorn the label) or an altogether better marketing cheddar? We honestly may never know.

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The year was 1995. The then first-term mayor of New York city Rudy Giuliani was making his third nationally televised appearance on the CBS program “Late Show With David Letterman.” They were doing this bit where Mr. Letterman offered the mayor a chance to select a new slogan to increase tourism in New York City. Speaking to camera with great gusto, Mr. Giuliani picked from among the slogans and famously uttered these words, which were simultaneously flashed live on the Jumbotron in Times Square: “We can kick your city’s ass.” This, as David Firestone wrote in the New York Times at the time, was one of those moments that helped to “burnish [Rudy Giuliani’s] reputation for creative political pugilism.”

Of course, as is the stock and trade of late night television, this was all just “schtick.” A joking motto. Yet it captured, in Mayor Giuliani’s own words, “the spirit of the city.”

What’s up with the throwback trivia? This recent post from Heather Dougherty, director of research at Hitwise, about the geographic divide of social networks caught my eye. And, as you will soon see, gives the mayor’s famous quote brand new meaning for today’s MySpace and Facebook crowd.

While it’s never taken much to fan the flames of local city pride, not least between New York City on the East Coast and Los Angeles on the West, it now appears top social network sites MySpace and Facebook are not as borderless or as untethered to the offline world as we might have thunk. Especially when it comes to the big US cities.

To review, MySpace continues to be the largest social network in the US, according to Hitwise. It’s market share of visits was 3.5x that of Facebook for the week ending July 19, 2008. But Facebook is gaining. It’s traffic grew 23% when compared to the same week last year while MySpace was down 29%. But size is one thing. Where the users are located, blogs Heather, is another:

We have recently launched a tool at Hitwise where our clients can access DMA® level data for both websites and categories to understand the share of traffic from local regions. As an example… for the 4 weeks ending July 19, 2008… the top DMA for MySpace is LA while the top DMA for Facebook is NYC- which is not surprising considering that these two cities are the 2 largest DMAs in overall size and tend to be significant for most national websites.

When comparing the DMAs of the 2 websites to one another, an interesting trend pops out – MySpace visitors are more likely to be located on the west coast while Facebook has heavier representation on the East Coast (the coasts where each company was started). The 20 DMAs with the highest representation index for MySpace when compared to Facebook, meaning the likelihood of the visitor to go to MySpace vs. Facebook… are all located on the west coast. The trend is also illustrated… when looking at the top 10 DMAs for MySpace, where the West Coast DMAs dominate. When the situation is reversed to compare Facebook to MySpace, the East Coast and Midwest becomes more prevalent.

Does this mean MySpace is a social network that is like, omg, totally hot and Facebook is a place where it’s better to fuggetaboutit? Could Facebook make good on the former mayor’s motto and kick, in a digital minute, some MySpace gluteus maximus? Me, I’m a New Yorker and a Facebook member. So how you doin’?

Wherever your networking takes you, the Hitwise’s DMA research helps to underscore a point that often gets missed in the social media discussion today: how there’s actually a strong link between offline social networks and their online counterparts. Between citizens and netizens. Grassroots and netroots. Between those we friend and those who simply are our friends.

And while I couldn’t agree more that the world is increasingly flat, it’s clear our burgeoning digital shoots still have some very real world roots–and possibly some geographic limitations. Even for the top social networking sites going in the US today.

For more background on the inter-relationship between offline and online social networks, see Now that you’re blogging, don’t forget face-to-face. And let us know your thoughts about MySpace and Facebook. I’ll be doing some friends-and-family research of my own in the meantime starting with our New York and LA offices. Now how do you think that will go? Fuggetaboutit!

Image credit: www.thephoenix.com

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We’ve all heard the story of schools that collapsed. But the most destructive case of badvocacy comes from a school that remained intact.

Students in Dujiangyan, 100 km from the epicenter, emerged from their school without a scratch. But the student’s teacher, surnamed Fan, made an ill-fated escape minutes before them. As soon as the ground started shaking, Teacher Fan had ran out of the classroom screaming “earthquake,” leaving his middle-school pupils paralyzed at their desks.

Then came the aftershocks.

As millions of Chinese went online for the latest quake coverage, the tale of Teacher Fan spread across the Internet — where netizens gave him the nickname “Runner Fan.”

In response to an online jury of his peers, Runner Fan wrote on popular Chinese BBS, Tianya, that neither his students nor his mother merited self-sacrifice, only his own daughter. Netizens, and presumably his mother, were outraged.

That Runner Fan will receive a fair trial by China’s netizens is doubtful. He probably did not break any laws — especially the law of evolution — by ensuring his own survival. But his cowardice and unconvincing comeback can teach students of advocacy (and badvocacy) something about the “cloud of witnesses” that now surround us.

Someone once told me that integrity is doing the right thing when no one is watching. But in the Internet age, integrity is obsolete. With everyone logging on, there’s always someone watching. And the sharing abilities of social networks, blogs and BBS means that any tale — true of false — can have a destructive ripple effect.

How one responds that will determine the damage.

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Click here for a brief history of digital history to present day. It is very interesting and describes how far we have come as digital advocates and believers. Digital advocacy had just about reached the White House until the secret service put a stop to it. Watch and learn why.

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