Thomas Jefferson used newspapers to win the presidency; F.D.R. used radio to change the way he governed; J.F.K. was to first president to understand television. Obama was the first to exploit the internet.
In the ongoing series leading up to Inauguration (after which we promise to find another area of interest to blog on - promise!), Honestly Lay Bare has been walking the hall ways of social networking.
The 2008 Presidential Election will be viewed as the moment when social networking as an organising tool came of age.
It was the backbone to one of the most successful political campaigns in United States history and was the basis for the largest known political fundraising effort.
But that isnt what interests Honestly Lay Bare.
What can risk management and internal audit learn from the social networking journey of the last 22 months?
Firstly, the Obama social networking journey.
**
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.
A junior member of a large and powerful organization with a thin, but impressive, résumé, he was about to take on far more powerful forces in a battle for leadership.
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,” 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.
As a result, when he arrives at 1600 Pennsylvania, Mr. Obama will have not just a political base, but a database, millions of names of supporters who can be engaged almost instantly.
The juxtaposition of a networked, open-source campaign and a historically imperial office will have profound implications and raise significant questions. Special-interest groups and lobbyists will now contend with an environment of transparency and a president who owes them nothing.
The news media will now contend with an administration that can take its case directly to its base without even booking time on the networks.
More profoundly, while many people think that President-elect Obama is a gift to the Democratic Party, he could actually hasten its demise. Political parties supply brand, ground troops, money and relationships, all things that Mr. Obama already owns.
And his relationships are not the just traditional ties of Democrats — teachers’ unions, party faithful and Hollywood moneybags — but a network of supporters who used a distributed model of phone banking to organize and get out the vote, helped raise a record-breaking $600 million, and created all manner of media clips that were viewed millions of times.
It was an online movement that begot offline behavior, including producing youth voter turnout that may have supplied the margin of victory.
Obama understood that you could use the Web to lower the cost of building a political brand, create a sense of connection and engagement, and dispense with the command and control method of governing to allow people to self-organize to do the work.
All of the Obama supporters who traded their personal information for a ticket to a rally or an e-mail alert about the vice presidential choice, or opted in on Facebook or MyBarackObama can now be mass e-mailed at a cost of close to zero.
And instead of the constant polling that has been a motor of presidential governance, an Obama White House can use the Web to measure voter attitudes.
**
The campaign's use of social networking is a great case study of rethinking an existing technology.
And perhaps that is what organisations should be doing if that want to improve their control environment in an era of cost consciousness.
Why?
A strong internal control environment is one where there is strong communication.
There would be no stronger demonstration by a company in the trust that it places in its employees to communicate appropriately than to create and foster communities of interest on its own social networking platforms.
Rather than debating whether we should be firewalling this or that site or whether we should be allowing our employees to blog, consideration could be given to emulating the Obama approach.
It has worked once - who is to say it won't work in a company.
0 comments:
Post a Comment