It’s not 2.0bama. It’s You.0

I’m surprised that so many social media professionals are discussing how the Obama administration can “use” social media to govern, how it can engage in “two-way” conversation with The People.

The very formulation, which posits a top-down approach to government, misses the whole point.

Let me explain this from the viewpoint of how I advise clients–some publishers, big companies, small ones, non-profits, bloggers and so on–to deal with social media. I believe the approach applies to governments and political machines too.

1. What the new social platforms have changed, in ways we’ve hardly begun to appreciate, is how people now communicate among themselves, without the permission, endorsement or encouragement of major institutions. There is now a digital infrastructure that allows a transparent, global, real-time, multimedia conversation moderated by. . .nobody.

People are not being organized on the social web as much as they are self-organizing.

2. Social media tools are lousy “broadcast” media, and most people who interact on social platforms freaking hate marketing, advertising or commercially-self-interested messages. Some of them enthusiastically punish the perps in public, god love ‘em, with disastrous results to the messengers.

3. So: The primary values of social media to institutions are mainly the following:

a. They provide the opportunity to listen to the unmoderated public conversation. With the right tools, anyone can monitor what’s being said, in near real-time, about them, their niche, their people, their competitors, their mommas, etc. This information can simply be taken in, circulated to interested parties, or analyzed like other kinds of customer or polling data.

b. They provide the opportunity to join that conversation as public-minded, engaged, thinking, generous, accessible contributors [assuming they are truly like that], allowing them to create a social web presence that reflects well on them and inevitably leads to many new relationships, some of which turn out to have real value. The social media formulation for this: “Participation is marketing.”

c. They provide opportunities for tactical, respectful, measured, medium-appropriate responses in these social platforms which represent the institution well and allow the entity to respond to “negative” content.

d. They provide the opportunity to create platforms for hosting certain interactions–a high-risk, high-stakes strategy since the conversation cannot, must not, be controlled in a heavy-handed, self-interested way. Despite what the high-end social media firms tell you, it’s hard to make these work and difficult to predict results. Remember, if you build it, people may come. But if they do, they are likely to self-organize and behave as they wish, not as you wish. The results may or may not be valuable. They may or may not be disastrous. This is one key point some social media critics are missing–Obama’s team cannot, must not, try to control the conversation.

e. They provide the opportunity to place medium-appropriate content in places around the social web where people who have shown an interest can see it. Which is to say: An institution can put stuff up on YouTube and Facebook pages and reach a self-selected crowd–and occasionally see the stuff go viral. This is as close to traditional publishing and broadcasting as social media should get. Obama’s political team was great at this.

So how does this mean to 2.0bama, which was put into office partly via social media used primarily as a broadcast medium?

That it’s now a very different ballgame, and — at least from where I sit — a lot of the ideas about “two-way” communication between The People and The Administration are just off the point.

Hey, fellow Americans, send Obama your ideas by e-mail! Good luck with having those ideas listened to.

Hey, gang, Obama’s set up an IdeaStorm public policy page where great, user-generated ideas can surface thanks to wisdom-of-the-crowds! Good luck with that too.

Citizens: Give money in response to crises the Administration identifies as worthy, like the California wildfires! Etc.

Frankly this all seems to be more like finding ways to keep Obama supporters “involved” in low-value activities until it’s time to ask them for money again.

Now that The Administration is an institution, I believe, it finds itself in a position no different from any other seeking to “use” social media to its advantage.

The most important, disruptive fact about social media is that it allows people to self-organize and to communicate in public, however they want. The transparent, global, real-time, multimedia conversation is moderated by. . .nobody. Not by the Obama administration, not by a handful of acolytes or tacticians, even the brilliant ones who work for Obama.

From now on, the question isn’t how an administration can leverage social tools. It’s about how the self-organizing, unruly, passionate people in constant communication with each other use social tools among themselves in relation to the emerging government.

As the action shifts from political campaign to government administration, it’s less about what Obama does with social media than it is what you do with it.

Which is to say: It’s not about 2.Obama. It’s time for You.0.

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