As large organizations struggle to come to grips with whether to use Social Media and then how to use it – the world watches its power in the Arab world and America’s political system gets ready to deploy it in full force in the 2012 election.

This is how important Social Media is to the regime in Egypt. They shut it down knowing its power. We don’t know how events will unfold, but there is no doubt that the autocrats that run most of the Middle East are in grave peril and that both the spark and then the fire that has been unleashed has been carried by Social Media. The real power has been given to the people.

Now think of your organization. Just as the power in a nation has now been given to the people, the real power of your Brand has also been given to the people. If you are not listening to the people who use Social Media and then interacting with them, you are in the same kind of peril. If you think that you can fool the people about the quality of your offering, you are in peril.

The new era is here for organizations and for all of us. You can’t hide anymore. Your life and work is now public. If your life or work don’t fit, then you will be exposed.

Think that this is just a Middle East issue? Well our politicians don’t.

The 2012 election will be the Social Media Election. Why? Because, the politicians know that they will not get a second chance – they know that they will have to be in the stream. Proof? Who is the most popular man in Washington right now? Twitter’s Rep on the Hill.

This is only a start. The election coverage will be dominated by the web.

The New Hampshire primary is over a year away, and the first major candidate has yet to formally declare. Just don’t tell that to outlets like Politico, Talking Points Memo and RealClearPolitics, which are already planning to smother the 2012 campaign trail in a way they could never have imagined four years ago when they had far smaller staffs of bloggers and shoestring budgets.

With an eye toward earning greater respectability, this crop of political Web sites is hoping for more than just page views and traffic-driving links from the Drudge Report. They want to establish themselves as the Blogs on the Bus.

“We were a garage band in 2008, riffing on the fly,” said Jim VandeHei, Politico’s executive editor and co-founder. “Now we’re a 200-person production, with a precise feel and plan.”

Politico will host, with NBC News and Telemundo, the first debate of the campaign season on May 2, getting a head start on a season of face-offs that is already remarkably busy. (Politico edged ahead of Fox News, which scheduled a debate for May 5.)

This is how the new news organizations will do it but now even a citizen can do as good a job – have a look here at how one person, Andy Carvin, covered the Tuscon events while looking after his 2 children that Saturday

You will see that one well connected person can use their network and a few tools to offer up an insight to rival any offered by even the New York Times.

So in this context, where does your organization stand. I am sure that you are doing something now. But what is the relative importance that you have put on becoming expert at this? When I say expert I don’t mean by having a Twitter or Facebook strategy to simply push out your message. I mean this:

• Have you been able to accept what all of this means to your culture – that you can no longer control the message or your brand or that you can hide problems?
• That your number 1 job is to “Listen in Real Time” to what people are saying and oing abut things that matter to you. Research is transformed by this into a need for “Intelligence”. Think now like a General at war. You can and must know minute by minute what is going on.
• Your second job is to interact in a human way with both your allies out there and with those that have problems with you. No more Corporate Speak – No more “Your call is important to us”. You have to be authentic at the SM interface – in fact you have to lose that language and approach in every part of your external interaction
• The hardest job of all is that you have to make the new relationship with those outside your organization the same as the one that you have inside. And here is where the challenge lies.

Getting good at using Social Media is not about using the tools. They are easy to use as tools. They are cheap to install. They are the cheapest tools you have ever deployed.

But to use them well demands a revolution in organizational culture and this is not hard – it is very very very very hard to pull off.

It is as hard as any real life change such as eating in an entirely different way that is based on a new lifestyle. Or not marrying a clone of your first failed partner.

Using Social Media is all about giving up your old identity of control. The old you has to die, before you can do this well.

So there can be no cookie cutter – 5 best steps – template – Best Practice approach. There can’t be for giving up alcohol either.

But there is an approach to making great life changes that does have a high success rate. It is based in these steps:

• You – the CEO – have to “know” in your gut that it is a life or death decision. That your organization will never amount to anything now unless you can make this life change. If you don’t feel this – you are not serious.
• You have to know that you cannot demand this of your self or of anyone else. You cannot part the Red Sea with your command. if you still think you can “Drive Change” – you are not serious.
• You have to make the change in relationship and how you use power yourself. How you are will be the virus. If you don’t understand that this is all about you how you are  - you are not serious
• It helps to have a someone close to you who has done this – in AA it is a sponsor – in late 16th Century Europe it may have been your Jesuit confessor – someone close who will not judge you – who has shared all you doubts – who will never reveal to anyone what they have learned from you – someone you can call at any time. A true friend who cares about YOU. If you don’t understand that this is the model of the relationships that you will have to make your own with others – you are not serious.
• It helps to start small – for all will learn by creating new habits. Our work creates new habits and new habits create a new “Normal”  and our new Normal is the new culture. If you want to start big, you don’t understand yet.
• Small experiments also create other evangelists in your organization and so give you the network power top spread the change – again – not because you have commanded it but because – you planted the seed in your own persona – you have been your own “Inception”. If you don’t understand how much you need willing partners – you have missed it all!

There is now work that is more difficult than this. But what choice do you have?

How did you follow the events as the story of Re Gabby Giffords shooting unfolded?

What I saw was even more evidence that Social Media is how breaking news like this can best be followed both by the news organization and by us the public.

Confusion: Naturally at first, things are confusing. Traditionally news organizations try and scoop each other with the lead. Here is where NPR and then most traditional news fell over. NPR announced that Rep Giffords was dead and all the rest followed. She was not and later NPR apologized. It’s an easy mistake to make at the outset in a crisis like this. BUT is this war of the Official Scoop the best way forward now?

A better way? Coincidentally, just as the NPR newsroom and other traditional newsrooms were fumbling because of the culture of the “Scoop” – Andy Carvin, who is NPR’s Social Media Strategist was at home looking after his two kids. On his own, while parenting, Andy set up what I found was the best single site to follow the breaking story.

He used Storify as his tool. Storify enables you to be the Newspaper in times like these. Here is how Andy’s coverage unfolded in real time. He relied on his own use of Twitter and his very plugged in friends to feed him news from all over as it broke.

At the same time that Andy was doing this and looking after the kids – the New York Times and Huffington Post also set up pages that were updated in real time. Here is how the Times covered it live.

The Times did a good job – BUT Andy knocked it out of the park. There is real drama in Andy’s feed that is not there in the Times. Why is this?

I think that Andy was:

• Unconstrained – He was just doing his best without an editor looking over his every comment – He did not rely on any one source
• Very much better connected than the Times – or anyone else for that matter – so he got the best feeds – many people who trust Andy were all combing the feed to find material for him – so his story is comprehensive, timely, and has energy
• He knows how to comb the feed himself – Andy is a long time pro at all the tools and how best to use them
• He also injects his own humanity – he stopped for a while when the news of the girl’s death came out – for he too is a parent of small children and had them by his side while he was doing this

Are there not lessons here for all media organizations? Lesson for any organization really?

A well placed, experienced person who has a trusted network can on their own keep ahead of the most well equipped formal new organization.

That Breaking News need not be a Scoop Race but is best handled as a emergent story. Andy carried a tweet from NPR that said that Giffords was dead at 15.12. A new one from NPR at 15.36 that there was now doubt and one from AP that she was alive at 15.34 – In other words Andy offered us the reality of the real mess that always attends such an event. BTW he also end with the NPR apology and comment from Jeff Jarvis on this apology.

I can see many news organizations going here. But what about the business and the government sector?

Bad things happen. You have a product problem. Your campus is shut by a fire. A storm has shut your airport.

Most organizations do a news Organization thing. You wait until you are sure. But that is often too late. Get a voice going and YOU curate all the stories coming in. What people dislike the most is silence in these situations. You have the tools and the power to get a broad story out and to be a major influence on how people react to it.

Now it helps to have an Andy – but you should have one anyway. No organization can be professional now if they don’t have someone like Andy on the payroll.

Most organizations know that the web is important today – even the most dinosauric. But for most, the web is an up and coming “channel” and most still don’t have a clue about social media – they do it because they have to and they do it without much understanding about how it works and how different it is from their old “Normal”.

The final arrival of the Beatles on the web – mainly as we see boosted by social media – shows the new reality. That the web amplified by good use of social media is now the primary way of connecting what you have to the public.

Billboard magazine reports that The Beatles sold more than two million individual songs worldwide and in excess of 450,000 albums in its first week on Apple’s iTunes Music Store. (The Beatles’ catalog was added to iTunes on November 16th.)

According to Experian Hitwise, it was social media — not search — that drove a lot of the online interest and, more importantly, the online traffic surrounding The Beatles addition to iTunes. Consider this stat: On November 16, the first day Beatles songs were available on iTunes, 26% of UK traffic to Apple.com came from social media, about double the amount that came from search.

This nail in the coffin of old marketing is what NPR discovered. When I worked for NPR back in 2005 – attracting a younger audience was thought to be vital. But at the time this meant that somehow the content should be changed. But what they found was that if you changed the medium for connection to Social Media – the young came – they loved the content – they just will not access it in the old way.

In a survey of more than 10,000 respondents, NPR found that its Twitter followers are younger, more connected to the social web, and more likely to access content through digital platforms such as NPR’s website, podcasts, mobile apps and more.

NPR has more than one Twitter account; its survey found that most respondents followed between two and five NPR accounts, including topical account, show-specific accounts and on-air staff accounts.

The data on age is hardly surprising. The median age of an NPR Twitter follower is 35 — around 15 years younger than the average NPR radio listener. This lines up with data we recently found about other traditional news media; the average Facebook user reading and “liking” content on a news website is two decades younger than the average print newspaper subscriber.

Isn’t this what has happened to the Beatles? Good content is good. If you have a product or a service or cintent that is good and is not available on the web via social media – you are punishing your business.

So what does this mean? The jury is no longer out. If you are not using the web and social media well – you are no longer cautious but stupid. You are refusing to see the world as it is. Now I know why you won’t move. Because this is all new and you are not any good at it. It’s like me taking up skiing in my forties. What had held me back was how awkward and stupid I would look and feel. But you know – no one cared about how awkward I was and learning to ski then allowed me to spend 10 winters with my kids having a hell of a time. I am 60. I started blogging back in 2002. I was utterly pathetic at it. But over time, I got ok. You can be too.

The real question is do you want your TV station, store, business to survive? It’s still not too late but it is getting close.

Who can help you? Well there are a lot of shysters out there. “Self proclaimed” Social Media Experts who have been involved for a year or so. So here are a few questions to ask to ensure that you are getting someone who can help for real:

• Tell us about who you have worked for in the past that you have helped make the shift in mindset? They must have been able to help another make this shift in POV
• Tell us who your friends and network are? The shysters know shysters, the real folks know others who know their stuff and their network is as valuable as anything that they know.
• Show us what you have written that moves the cheese! Shysters pound on about Facebook etc, the real deal is part of a larger deeper conversation about what all of this means.
• Show us how knowing what you do has helped you in your own life? Most Shysters still live in the 1.0 world themselves. The real deal don’t – living this life has changed them radically – they have been made different by this and you will know this when you compare the 2 types. PS relentless self promotion is a give away!

Some advice about process:

• There is no formula/cookie cutter – it is not about using Facebook next week – it is about changing your own mindset. So start with lots of conversation about what is going on and where you can start – you cannot know where you will end up right now – don’t try and go there.
• Our mindset is changed not by will but by new habits – try a few smallish experiments and label them as such – look at at others who have done well and see how this may give you a start – Have a look here at how Boingo have used listening or look here about how Kotex have used a deep question. These are powerful places to start to help you be different for in the 1.0 world we don’t listen, we shout. In the 1.0 world we don’t ask tough questions, we live instead in a clean, fun, smooth fantasy world where periods are the best part of the month.
• Hire one or two great young folks. Andy Carvin - just one person has done more for NPR than an army of consultants. Same with Baochi at Boingo who enjoys the confidence of the CEO.
• Persevere!!! This is really really hard to execute – the tools are simple – it is the shift in mindset that is so painful. I have found that as much as I and others know the direction the day to day part of the journey is stressful. Think of Christopher Columbus on his first voyage. He “knew” that there would be land if he sailed long enough west. But his crew did not. They also had to deal with storms etc, When they arrived, it was land but not the Indies – the destination was different. People got upset. When you do this – all of the trials of Columbus will come your way – Doubt, fear mutiny, disappointment – the lot. But there is no going back – you just have to push through.
• Last point – anyone who tells you that this is easy and they can show you a step by step formula is a Shyster

So stand up for our species. Be a Sapiens and not a Sap and good luck to you.

One of the Holy Grails of the Public Radio system when I worked there back in 2005/6 was to attract a younger audience. At the time – even though the context of my involvement was the web – the CW on the solution was to add more younger programming – Hence Bryant Park. Of course this failed as what station manager was going to give up the BlockBuster Morning Edition to have an alternative that the mainstream would not like. The CBC has gone full on to find a younger audience by changing the POV of its programs. I wonder how they are doing? They have largely driven me away.

But the guys at NPR are smart and they learn. They went full on into the use of Social Media. New data out shows that their drive into social media – Twitter in particular – has given them what they wanted a new and younger and larger “audience” that have been attracted to NPR’s programming – not because of a content shift but because they made it easier for a younger audience to connect to content on their terms! The secret was in the flexibility of the new connection NOT the content.

In a survey of more than 10,000 respondents, NPR found that its Twitter followers are younger, more connected to the social web, and more likely to access content through digital platforms such as NPR’s website, podcasts, mobile apps and more.

NPR has more than one Twitter account; its survey found that most respondents followed between two and five NPR accounts, including topical account, show-specific accounts and on-air staff accounts.

The data on age is hardly surprising. The median age of an NPR Twitter follower is 35 — around 15 years younger than the average NPR radio listener. This lines up with data we recently found about other traditional news media; the average Facebook user reading and “liking” content on a news website is two decades younger than the average print newspaper subscriber.

Not to put too fine a point on it, the future of news media lies in successful integration of social media to get the attention (and click-throughs) of a younger generation — a generation whose news needs are vastly different than those of the generations that preceded it. (My emphasis)

Of NPR’s Twitter followers, the majority (67%) still do listen to NPR on the radio. But the other ways they access NPR’s content are indicative of a growing trend:

Of survey respondents, 59% said they use NPR.org, 39% listen to NPR’s podcasts, around half use an NPR mobile app and 28% say they access NPR via Facebook. All told, 77% of NPR’s Twitter followers said they get all or most of their news online.

And Twitter followers are more likely to expect breaking news, too, likely because of the real-time nature of the medium.

At KETC we found the same thing when we ran out project to help people find a safer more trustworthy route to help in the Mortgage Crisis. KETC helped many people who never watch our programming and who never will. They got connected to KETC because they found what they needed on the web. It was how we connected that was the key.

When NPR hosted the New Realities Project back in 2006/6 – the intent was to imagine our value in 2009 and beyond. We did this. Most saw that one of the things we had to do was to do a Burger King and offer our content up “Your Way”

The guys even wrote a song – but while some – mainly at NPR really got this – of course as we know today about adoption – most did not and have not and still hope that all of this will go away.

Want a larger and more committed “audience” – let them find you “Their Way” – Integrate the web into what you do fully.

Dan Schorr seems an unlikely Social Media coach. But following the laws of adoption he is ideal.

He is influential

He is connected

He is a peer of the reluctant

All people really need to know is that this is OK and useful. Only people in your organization like Dan can help

So at NPR, where it is vital that most people adopt – what do the folks do – they tell the story of Dan the Coach.

Before this, Andy Carvin got Dan and Scott Simon on air to try this. Scott is also very influential and is younger than Dan dut he is not a kid.

Andy, the NPR Social Media Guy, is being very shrewd and clever – What is your plan?

Social Media came of age after the Tsunami. It showed its power to provide vital information very quickly when the official channels could not.

With Gustav a day away from landfall many of the most experienced people in the field are coalescing on a Ning site that will aggregate as much information as possible in one place. Wiki, Twets, RSS feeds from Blogs, Video – everything.

Here is the address of the site

One of the aspects that I love about NPR’s new morning Show Bryant Park is that the show shows you what is going on behind the scenes with their Twitter feed and a daily video showing what will be on the show the next day.

BPP was tested in beta by allowing a lot of interaction – real time research.

Now NPR are going further – they are starting a blog whose purpose is to get behind the scenes, under the hood, open the kimono. What people like Andy and Dennis understand is that the more human NPR is, the greater the attachment.

Here is the fist key post:

On behalf of the NPR Digital Media team, we’d like to welcome you to Inside NPR.org, a new blog that will serve as our official headquarters for new features and services we’re developing for the NPR Web site. It’s a chance for you to explore some of the many projects we’re working on, and help us make them more useful as we roll them out.

The idea behind this blog has its roots in our two newest shows – Tell Me More and The Bryant Park Project. Both of them were rolled out as blogs many months before they were ready to go on air, in the hopes of getting as much public feedback as possible. Historically, it’s common to develop a show behind the scenes, only giving listeners a chance to hear it when it was ready for prime time. By creating online communities for each show while they were still “rough cuts,” we were able to build better programs because of it.

Now, we’d like to apply the same rough cuts idea to our online services in general. Whether it’s rolling out social networking, building new mobile products or improving our online strategy in general, we’re hoping we can develop better tools if you’re a part of the conversation.

In the coming weeks and months, you’ll hear from a variety of people from behind the scenes at NPR.org – software developers, product managers, online producers and others who are working on new Web site features. We hope that talking about these activities more openly will help create a virtuous cycle of product development and feedback.

Thanks for joining us; we look forward to brainstorming with you!

— Andy Carvin and Daniel Jacobson

Jeff at NPR with Andy Carvin, me and David Weinberger taken by Doc Searls

Jeff Jarvis writes today about the value of his blog – He says that it has got him all his work over the last few years. The same is true for me. NPR, all my work in New Media, Blackwater, Education – all my paying gigs have come through this medium.

Our money comes largely as a side effect: Here is Seth on that -

At a seminar at the local library, someone asked, “how do I make a lot of money blogging?”

My guess is that at least week’s seminar, the one on growing orchids, no one raised his hand and said, “how do I make a lot of money growing orchids?”

Sure, people make money growing orchids. Some people probably get rich growing orchids. Not many though. And my guess is that the people who do make money gardening probably didn’t set out to do so.

Blogging is much the same way. The best bloggers make money, but mostly as a side effect, not as a direct result of setting out to use a blog to make a profit. It’s just too long a ramp up time, too frustrating and too uncertain to be the best path to make a living.

If it makes you happy (and your readers happy) it’s a great place to start. Step by step you get better at it, and then you discover the ancillary benefits. But the benefits kick in best when you don’t set out to achieve them.

What about you?

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NPR are on a roll. Recently NPR Music, now politics. Here is a new “world”that is not simply site. It is a new platform called “Get My Vote“. Here you can add your views on what would get youir vote and you can check out and talk about other’s all under the brand of NPR.

If you look at the Cloud, you can also get a feel for how a national agenda might emerge. Imagine a politician partcipating here – could be municipal, state or national. This is what I mean by a platform. This has the potential to become a force for democracy. If not in its present form with a few tweaks it will.

This door way into the “World of Politics” is a bit like WOW. You enter as an unknown with few powers. But if you work hard here – you could become a somebody.

I think that this represents a breakthrough in thinking away from the NewsRoom knows best and the NewsRoom defines what is important and what is quality.

This is a platform and not merely content. As such it has the potential to grow and to become ever more complex and hence interesting.

Platforms will be the future of the social web.

Well done Andy and the gang:

As the name suggests, the project is based around a basic premise: what will it take for political candidates to get my vote? Every person has their own reasons for selecting a particular candidate, their own litmus tests, and we’re asking the public to articulate this in the form of open letters to the candidates. Using Get My Vote, you can upload your own commentary – audio, video or text – and talk about what issues or concerns will drive you to the ballot box. NPR is then planning to incorporate these commentaries into our shows throughout the rest of the election cycle.

We’ve also designed the project in such a way that local stations – both NPR and PBS stations – can create their own Get My Vote initiatives on their websites by embedding Get My Vote widgets. That way, a station can localize the project. A station in Arizona, for example, might create a local version of Get My Vote focusing on immigration perspectives, while a station in Massachusetts might challenge users talk about what it would take for local mayoral candidates to get their vote. So while most users might end up talking about the presidential candidates, I’m hoping it’s used for state and local races as well.

On the Get My Vote homepage, you’ll see that we’re using a tag cloud prominently. These tags are submitted by users when they upload their commentaries. For example, a commentary from an Iraq war vet about healthcare for vets might include tags like “Iraq,” “healthcare” and “Walter Reed.” The more often a particular tag is used by commentators, the larger it appears in the tag cloud. That way, you can get a sense of what topics and ideas are being referenced most often by commentators. Clicking any tag also will show you all commentaries associated with that word or phrase.

We’ve also ensured that the commentaries are embeddable on other websites and social networks – a first for an NPR project. There’s an embed code available for commentaries that you can grab and place in your website. You can also click an option to post on another blog or network, giving you a list of more than 20 sites where you can upload your own Get My Vote commentary, or someone else’s.

The site is now in public beta. This means that anyone can now access the site, upload their own commentaries and explore the site in general, but we’re still working out a few bugs and other minor fixes. We’re hoping that if you have any problems with the site you’ll alert us through the contact form. Over the next few weeks we’ll continue to tweak the site, and soon after that, we expect some of our shows to begin using it on air.

So when you get a chance, please visit npr.org/getmyvote, upload your own commentary and please let us know what you think. Our team is really eager to hear what you have to say. -andy

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The Bryant Park Project (Twitter feed here)now has an inner core of over 200 “Diners” – this in a week. As Twitter gains a hold, BPP are also looking at how Twitter affects the political process. Here is the Twitter reality of the Primaries as compiled by Laura C <!– –>

I’m scrounging around for legitimate Twitter feeds from the presidential candidates. So far, my list looks like this:

Ron Paul, @RonPaul2008, with 822 followers
John Edwards, @johnedwards, with 4,282 followers
Barack Obama, @BarackObama, with 6,654 followers
Hillary Clinton, @hillaryclinton, with 197 followers

What do make of the Obama/Clinton result here?

What could Twitter do to bring younger voters back?

How might Twitter affect politics?

Update – Here is Lee Siegel talking about how BPP is using social media – Lee talks about how the “Cup Cake” is a refuge. Don’t understand – check the link

Update – Here is Andy Carvin with more on the Diner