At the Intersection of Marketing and Politics - Political Candidates

These days, politics and current events weigh heavily on my thoughts. Perhaps you find yourself feeling similarly. Since I try to avoid writing about political topics on this blog, the nature of current events kind of puts a damper on other topics rising to the level of a blog post. Recently though, there's been an interesting aspect of politics that keeps reminding me of important marketing themes, so I thought I would share some thoughts.

In many ways, political candidates and elections are similar to the product marketplace. Candidates position themselves and their ideas, they try to differentiate themselves from the others on the market, and an election is a kind of purchase decision. Viewed through that lens, you can learn some interesting lessons about politics

One of the great themes of political positioning is this idea that candidates start out with more extreme, polarizing positions -- essentially, strong differentiation in certain areas -- particularly in the primary elections, then "move towards the center" as they move toward a general election. This softening of their positions is, theoretically, designed to expand their audience as they approach a more common denominator.

But there's a fundamental problem with this approach; the epitome of center, the lowest common denominator is boring.

In a somewhat broader framing of this process, the candidate is a supposed to build a broader appeal by not having any elements that might serve as barriers to people liking them -- the, "I don't see anything that I don't like about this candidate, so I'll vote for them" notion.

The reality is that products don't work this way, and I don't think that candidates actually succeed this way either. Nobody chooses a product because they believe that it's mediocre or that it's the least objectionable. Safe, qualified candidates frequently lose to incompetent candidates who can build excitement around themselves, positions they hold, or issues they're trying to advance.

Perhaps the easiest example to reference was the California governor election between Arnold Schwarzenegger and Gray Davis. While Davis was more experienced in government processes and arguably more competent, Schwarzenegger was able to leverage his celebrity status and generate excitement around the issue of the "car tax", vehicle registration fees.

Exciting products and new ideas are risky. While it can be really easy to find people to tear down or minimize a new approach, it's easy to underestimate the appeal of some of these ideas. For example, consider when New York representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez talked about a 70% tax on income above $10 million. While there was some outrage raised about the idea in the media, when polled, they found that 59% of people supported the idea. What's more, that support spanned many traditionally perceived political demographic borders.

The Problem with "Electability"
Another related political concept is the idea of electability. This concept is often used in an effort to drive this positional shift toward the lowest common denominator. It's also used to skew the true market-nature of some primary elections, pushing voters to try and select the candidate that they think that most other people would be willing to vote for, rather than selecting who they think is the best.

At the core, the problem with this is when people try to make calculations based on what they think that other people think.

Instead of thinking of electability in terms of specific candidates or perceived "reasons why some larger group the electorate might not vote for a specific candidate", it might be better to think about this in product terms. Often, electability is that pre-judgement of a product's marketability, usually wrapped in FUD (fear, uncertainty, doubt). It's like the thinking that says that the iPhone will fail because it doesn't have a physical keyboard, that people really want a physical keyboard. It's the kind of thinking that speculates people won't buy iPhones because they don't have user-serviceable batteries. What we know from history is that, when it came to buying iPhones, these factors didn't keep people from buying iPhones.

Similarly, perhaps you remember when people said nobody cared about what color their computer was -- you could pick any color, as long as it was beige. When the iMac came out, suddenly color mattered. Suddenly, the external design of the personal computer mattered. And, for a period of time, color was important. Then, as many computer manufacturers began copying Apple and making color computers, color became less important again. In the context of electability, just because something used to seem important or exciting, it doesn't mean that it's still an influential consideration.

What's more, when you think about those products that tried to leverage 'tired' features to help sell their product, there were probably a few seemingly knowledgeable product marketers who thought the idea was good enough and important enough to have it included in the product. These people knew -- or thought that they knew -- what the market wanted, and they got it wrong. They over-weighted the significance of a feature (or features) and the product failed.


Anyway, that's probably enough on this political topic for a while.

Salesforce.com Brand Identity in Conflict over Relationship with US Customs & Border Protection

If you've seen any Salesforce company presentation over the years, you'll most certainly have seen them promote their corporate culture of philanthropy, community and equality. Not only do they frequently promote aspects of these values at Salesforce events (from their work with non-profits to their community service efforts), CEO Marc Benioff got a lot of visibility in recent years directing the company's stance on gender equality and gay rights in a fight against some repressive state laws. But now Salesforce's idealistic brand identity is coming into conflict over it's relationship with US Customs and Border Protection.

This story from Gizmodo, Salesforce Faces Boycott Threat as RAICES Rejects $250,000 Donation Over CBP Contract, has a great overview of the controversy.

This will be an interesting one to watch and see how it plays out.

Almost 2, Our Son, aka @comcast 's Littlest Data Hog

I'd like to introduce you to our son. He's almost two.

Within the walls of Comcast, he's probably also known as The Littlest Data Hog. He loves to watch YouTube and Netflix. His never-ending desire to watch videos of cars and trucks probably contributed to Comcast extorting added fees from us with their stupid data usage cap. They say you should really limit your kid's screen time. We try. Sometimes being a parent is hard.

I don't write much about our son because he doesn't really have much interest in marketing. In fact, the ads that interrupt his YouTube videos are probably one of his greatest frustrations. But one thing that we've learned is that it's hard to empathize with the people that "can't figure out how to use the iPad". Our son has been able to navigate the interface, get to YouTube and choose videos for nearly a year.

Before he was born, we imagined taking him with us frequently when we travel, particularly since bringing a child under two is free on most airlines. Because my wife and I have to travel a lot, we imagined that our son would be one of those expert traveler-kids that you sometimes see in the airport. Often, they have their own little suitcase and they seem to be very practiced at going through airport security. Once he was born, we gained a better understanding of how much care he required, how important a predictable routine can be for kids. Considering all of the things that we needed to bring just to go out to a restaurant, going on a business trip with an infant seemed like something best avoided.

This past May, we finally took our son on a trip, flying back to Florida for a conference and an opportunity for him to meet his grandfather. Overall, our son did well and we did okay. We were a little worried about how he'd deal with the different locations and environment. But, apart from an increased sense of making sure that he knew where Dad and Mom were -- and not letting us get out of sight -- he did okay. He made himself at home in each of the hotel rooms we stayed in. He found places to sit, places to hide, places he liked to play.

I'm writing this now because, over the past week or so, I've been haunted by the image of the little Honduran girl crying while the border patrol searches her mom. You know the image, it's the one that Time Magazine used on their cover, the one referenced in this article, The crying Honduran girl on the cover of Time was not separated from her mother. She's 2-years old. The look, that look of distress, is all too familiar to me. Sometimes you can see that same sad face, that same posture, on minor things -- like turning off YouTube or that the battery is all gone. But even if it's not unusual to reach that state, it's not the kid's default state and it's not the state that you want them to be in. An upset infant is an alarm for parental action.

If you don't have kids, aspects of raising kids can be difficult to imagine. Like our lofty dreams of a jet-setting baby, reality didn't quite match our theoretical imagination. And so, for those that may not understand, let me share a few things about our son at age almost two. He can't say his name. He knows Mama and Dada by our names, Mama and Dada. He says these names a lot.

He doesn't know his last name. He doesn't know his birthday. In fact, he can't really provide any identifying information about himself. This is part of why, if my wife and I go to the store with our son and one of us runs off to a different area of the store, our son frequently spends most of his time crying out for the missing parent. Without us, he feels lost.

There are immigrant children being separated from their parents. From the descriptions in the news, this includes children as young as my son, and younger. The image of that little Honduran girl serves as reminder of just how lost those kids are without their parents. When you experience a child's primal need for their parents, feel them cling to you for safety and protection in new, strange environments, you can begin to understand how truly cruel this separation is.

While politics, the news, and the state of the country are often on my mind these days, I try to avoid writing about politics here. Wading into politically sensitive topics has the potential to alienate and infuriate a segment of your audience or your customer base. These days, reactions can escalate far beyond what might have been imaginable in years past. That being said, every day, when I see my son, I can't help thinking about those families that are separated. I can't stop thinking about those little boys and girls who, probably more than anything else, just want to be with their mom or dad.

This is not who we are. Not as a country. Not as a people. Our government should not be separating families.  

I chose the above image because I thought his posture is evocative of the crying Honduran girl in the photo. But there is a difference. At this moment, our son was happy, holding a wooden airplane puzzle piece "up in the sky". He seems to remember his trip to Florida fondly.

When I think about our considerations and concerns prior to our trip, I'm reminded that traveling like this isn't something you don't do without deep consideration. And when I reflect on the challenges we faced -- and contrast that with the challenges that these immigrant families deal with on their journey to our border -- it begins to put asylum seeker into a contextual frame. This was not a trip that they chose to make because they wanted to, this was a trip that they had to make. After all of that, to be separated from your family? It's horrific.

This separation policy must stop.

Facebook vs. Google and Your Data

This morning, Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo had this thoughtful editorial post about Facebook, Facebook Acts Like a Law Unto Itself. The gist of it is that Facebook is and has been exceptionally reckless with their user's personal data.

As I read through his piece, the thing that came to mind for me is a bit of the contrast between Facebook and some of the other tech companies out there that often get painted with the same broad brush. Take Google as an example. While we often here about how much data Google has on everyone, historically, I don't think Google has shared or exposed that personal user data in the same way that Facebook has built it's business doing. Sure, advertising represents a huge portion of Google's business and you can now do more specific audience targeting, but I think Google has been far more protective when it comes to access of user's personal data.

The Roots of Their Business Model
When I think about the history of Google, it always seems more like the story of a organization of software engineers that fumbled it's way into a successful business as opposed to a team of people trying to build a successful, dominating business. Google's search engine was doing it's thing and growing it's base well before they ever rolled out their Adwords experiment. Adwords made their company, but it's success was in no small part enabled by the accessibility that they built into the core of the program. But ultimately, Adwords was really an experiment. And remember the values that they espoused in those early days -- that they wouldn't simply place ads or rank results based on dollars spent, a quality relationship to the results needed to be maintained?

Over the years, even as Google has experimented in many directions and had their fair share of encounters with regulators and legal systems, for the most part (to my knowledge), they have made an effort to keep their user data secure. Perhaps that may have crossed some bounds when they pushed toward Google Plus and their efforts to compete with Facebook -- and as the company began to run more like a business and less like a collective of engineers sitting on a magic money-making machine -- but even then, I think Google has behaved differently.

Contrast that with Facebook's origins as, essentially, something more like a dating site. Facebook has essentially sold it's user base on the notion that sharing as much personal data with them as possible is a good thing. I remember a story from years ago about how Facebook manipulated your feed algorithm in order to help drive your engagement. The methodology anecdote went something like this: if you are a guy and your engagement metrics were dropping off, Facebook's algorithm knows that you were more likely to be engaged if you posted a pic - so they would push a woman in your friends list to post a pic which would, apparently, increase the likelihood that you would post a pic. And be more active on their platform.

Try and think of an analogous behavior from Google.

Yesterday on Twitter, I came across this thread from Francis Chollet that I think summarized some of the real danger underlying Facebook.

The problem with Facebook is not *just* the loss of your privacy and the fact that it can be used as a totalitarian panopticon. The more worrying issue, in my opinion, is its use of digital information consumption as a psychological control vector. Time for a thread

It's definitely worth your time to take a read through his thread.

More on Facebook Manipulating the 2016 Election

As I wrote about back in 2014 in this post, Facebook Can (and has) Manipulated You With Their Feed Algorithm, we already know that Facebook can manipulate it's audience just by tweaking their algorithm regarding what's displayed. In much of the discussion regarding Russian advertising during the election and the various fake accounts that were being run by these Russian interests, I haven't seen this referenced once in the media.

And yet, after I wrote this post on online advertising the other day (and after I had a chance to see some of the ads and other Russian programs released by Congress), a broader realization occurred to me.

While the 2014 research by Facebook involved Facebook tweaking their algorithm, what if, instead of tweaking the algorithm, you simply changed the nature of many of the resources that the algorithm drew from? In other words, if the core algorithm behaved neutrally, but the assets that it presented were broadly colored, it would probably have the same effect as changing the algorithm.

Again, back to the point that I wrote in the previous post -- it doesn't really matter whether people clicked on Russian ads or not. Their presence there worked to change the color of their target audience's feed on a much broader scale.

Underestimating the Impact of Facebook and Political Ads

I happened to catch this story on Talking Points Memo, Rosenstein: Americans Not ‘Influenced By Ads Posted By Foreign Governments’. In the post, here's the key quote from Deputy Attorney General Rosenstein.

“American citizens are pretty savvy, and they decide who to vote for,” he said in a podcast interview on the Target USA network. “I don’t think they’d be influenced by ads posted by foreign governments.”

Previously, I've also seen a similar quote from House Speaker Paul Ryan. The general theme is sort of a play to the vanity of an audience as a way to psychologically put a thumb on the scale of perception. Phrased a different way, it's sort of like, "come on, millions of people see infomercials every day, but people like you and I are smart enough not to actually order those products."

Of course, the obvious extension of that is that, some people do order these products. In the same way, it's easy to assume that no one would click on an attachment in a strange email or no one would fall for a Nigerian prince scam. But they do. In pure advertising terms, you can call these conversions. And while it's easy to say that well over a majority of people viewing ads, impressions, wouldn't convert, that's normal. With Adwords, Google considers 5% a good conversion rate. That means that 95% of the people who searched a specific term will see ads on that term without clicking on them. That's a successful ad.

The Impact May Have Been Much Greater Than A Conversion Rate Implies
The impact of these Facebook ads may have been far greater than the specific dollar amount sited or that any conversion rate implies. There are a couple of reasons behind this.

First, one aspect that hasn't really highlighted in the media coverage of these ads is the nature of the campaigns being run. For example, if the ads were running on a cost-per-click (CPC) model, then it's possible that the optimal cost result (for the people placing the ads) would have been few clicks, but many impressions. Essentially, this is like a brand identity campaign -- you don't necessarily need clicks, just the impressions can build mind share.

Another element might have used re-marketing campaign techniques to only show ads to people who had visited other specific content in the past. Using this technique, you could help identify and heavily target the ones who were most likely to buy into your message.

But perhaps the most important thing to keep in mind is related to this story from back in 2014, Facebook Can (and has) Manipulated You With Their Feed Algorithm. In summary, what Facebook posted a paper detailing how they modified the algorithm that delivers the feed to users, and for one set, they delivered more negative, less positive emotionally colored results, and for the other set, they delivered more positive, less negative emotionally colored results. As you might imagine, both groups essentially began echoing and amplifying the tone of their feed -- the negative group producing more negative content while the positive group produced more positive emotions.

As I wrote back in 2014,

For me, I see a much bigger danger implied by the Facebook study reference here. If you think of the ability to influence in this way, then the Facebook "scientific" paper is potentially a press release announcing their offering of an entirely new type of advertising. Imagine if you wanted to broadly shift public option. With the right amount of money and access to the right platform, you could pay for shifting the filter of the algorithm.  

What if you didn't need to broadly shift public opinion, you just needed a marginal push? What's more, you probably don't need to change the whole algorithm -- the algorithm already responds to a certain level of political polarization. Instead, perhaps all you need to do is color in some of the spaces...

In summary, I'd say, don't buy into the notion that these ads had no impact, that there's no there there.

Facebook and the Problem of 'Bots'

Recently, there has been growing coverage in the media about Russian advertising (and influence) during the run up to the 2016 election. Some of this was driven by fake users (bots) on Facebook. While I'm thinking about writing a longer post about the election influence operation and online marketing in a broader context, one thing jumped out at me recently that I think is worth highlighting as it's somewhat misrepresented in the media.

In this USA Today article, the author wants Facebook to "Guarantee that bots will no longer be able to impersonate humans on the platform."

This fundamentally misunderstands the problem with "Bots". It's not like Facebook ever sat down and invited Bots onto the platform. Bots are carefully crafted bits of code that are scripted to mimic humans as you go through typical online activities. Bots are not obviously bots.

On one of the web sites I run, over the years I've had bots submitting inquiry forms thousands of times (Dear Salesforce.com: Web-to-Lead/Case Spam Sucks). Often, the form submission is some form of Spam. Even an inquiry form on a site in a niche industry can be a target for this type of activity. But what was actually interesting, in a way, was watching the form bots evolve. Essentially, when even when you make it more difficult for the bot to fill out the form, the bot kept exploring the parameters and requirements until you'd see it coming through again.

In that way, initally, my best defense against the form spam bots were to look for aspects that made them seem not human and try to filter against those. But eventually, you get to a point where if the bot fills out the form like a human would, you can't tell the different between an automated form engine and a human.

As you'll note in my Spam Post, at the time, Salesforce.com recommended that I install a Captcha, one of those image recognition test tools on the form. You know the tests, sometimes they're difficult to solve, even as a human. Sure, they provide an increased barrier for bot traffic, but they also provide a significant barrier to user engagement. Imagine if every time you wanted to post something on Facebook, you had to face a Captcha test?

And this is the fundamental problem with the "don't allow bots on your platform" arguement. It's just BS. Something being promoted by someone with a very simplistic view of the problem.

Facebook Fake News, Scamville goes Election Influence and More

So I came across this article earlier today, Just how partisan is Facebook's fake news? We tested it, from the folks at PC World. The long and short of it is, if you like some Republican elements like Donald Trump, your feed will include fake and misleading news. Oh, and the amount of this is significantly higher than a similar Democrat feed.

The post is worth a read. But this, and much of the other stories about fake news on Facebook, reminded me of this from back in 2009, Scamville: The Social Gaming Ecosystem Of Hell. For me, the point that came to mind was something that I started writing about this back in 2009, but it looks like I didn't publish. Here's a snippet from that:

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What I see is not necessarily what you get...
It's no secret that the core technology of the Internet enables one party to personalize a message for another. From the moment that you're client computer sends a request for content to a web server, that server is able to shape the content that it sends back to you based on who you are, what you were requesting, and where you came from. With modern internet marketing, we use this capability all the time, and futurists suggest that everything we experience will only become more personalized.

The problem is that, even for those of us that get it, it can be difficult to fully grasp the scope of "what I'm seeing may not be what you are seeing" means. This issue is magnified when organizations deliberately use these capabilities to essentially hide their worst practices:

From the Video Professor post

What you see when you first hit the site depends on how you got there -- directly or via an advertising partner. The least scammy version is what you see if you go to videoprofessor.com directly. On the home page in very small font is a statement that you are going to be charged $290 if you engage in a transaction with them. But that’s the only on-screen disclosure you’ll see.

From the How To Spam Facebook Like A Pro post

Cloaking: This is when you show a different page based on IP address. We and most other ad networks would geo-block northern California -- showing different ads to Facebook employees than to other users around the world. One of the largest Facebook advertisers (I’m not going to out you, but you know who you are) employs this technique to this day, using a white-listed account. Our supposition is that it makes too much money for Facebook to stop him. Believe me, we have brought this to Facebook’s attention on several occasions. Here’s what this fellow does -- he submits tame ads for approval, and once approved, redirects the url to the spammy page. To be fair, players like Google AdWords have had years more experience in this game to close such loopholes.

The thing is, compliance and auditing is all about third party perspective -- that the reviewer sees what you or I see. What happens when the regulator doesn't seeing the same thing that the customer sees? From restaurant reviews to personalized customer experiences, on some levels, people expect that the average customer experience will not be equal to the 'reviewer' experience. VIPs often get special treatment. But, if that VIP experience is built around circumventing rules or laws, what kind of label do you put on it?

The same can be said of shaped experiences in order to increase the likelihood of a transaction. Remember the movie, The Sting? The scam is all about creating an illusory experience for the mark, shaping reality into an environment that's favorable for a transaction. So where does optimization end and scam begin? To quote from Arrington's post:

Here’s an easy way to determine if something is a scam – would users pay for it if they knew exactly what they were buying? In Video Professor’s case, the answer is no, and the company has to resort to tricking the user into paying nearly $300 for a bunch of CDs.

As we move down the path of personalized experiences, the capability to use technology to manipulate consumers through shaped reality is getting easier. Even with today's technology, it's possible for two computer users sitting right next to each other to be visit a site (or series of sites), and receive a completely different content experience. In The Sting, the mark is convinced of the manipulated reality through the introduction of a host of actors that help endorse the experience, but on the computer there it's easy to get sucked into the idea that what you are seeing is the same thing as everyone else sees.

What's more, most of our defenses against this revolve around the idea that for our reality to be manipulated, we need to be in a 'closed' environment that prevents third party validation. You might think, "If I Google the Video Professor guy, perhaps I can find out if it's legitimate." Or, perhaps you take it one step further and Google "Video Professor Scam", you might expect to find a series of top ranked pages detailing customer complaints or other news. Instead, the top result from my most recent search returns a link to a press release archive site that includes a link to a 50% off discount off of the Video Professor product.

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So back to the election and fake news -- later this morning, I came across this post on Recode, Let’s get real. Facebook is not to blame for Trump, by Joshua R. Williams. Okay, so here's the emphasis in this one:

Much of the coverage and outrage has been directed toward social media, its echo chambers, and specifically those of the Facebook platform. While, to be sure, much of the fake or inaccurate news is found and circulated on Facebook, Facebook is not a news outlet; it is a communication medium to be utilized as its users so choose. It is not the job of Facebook’s employees, or its algorithms, to edit or censor the content that is shared; in fact it would be more detrimental to do so. This is for two very good reasons:

One, either human editors, or artificial intelligence editors, by removing one item or another will appear to introduce bias into the system. The group who’s content is being removed or edited will feel targeted by the platform and claim, rightly or wrongly, it is biased against their cause. Even if the content is vetted and found to be true or false.

Two, censorship in any form is bad for the national discourse.

So rather than blaming Facebook or other platforms for the trouble in which we find ourselves, let’s give credit where credit is due: The American people.

The emphasis has been added by me, because this point is fundamentally wrong. Facebook is a marketing platform that makes the majority of it's revenue connecting businesses that have promotional goals to the "users" on the platform. To quote from this post, Why You Should Sponsor Your Social Media Posts, (emphasis added by me)...

Because of all this, Facebook is usually the first place business marketers turn to for the distribution, promotion, and amplification of their ad content and campaigns, which makes it hard for businesses, especially new or small businesses, to find a place among all the clamor and competition for their posts to find an audience. Keep in mind, Facebook is no longer a good source for organic marketing outreach. It is now a pay-to-play network, or a network that gives special preference and advertising priority to businesses that can pay the most to be the first result viewers see on their social media pages, which can be bad for small or new businesses trying to find sponsorship for their own social media posts.

Well, it's pay-to-play unless you can work your way organically into the feed. In broader terms, you might consider that, "native advertising." To quote from wikipedia,

Native advertising is a type of disguised advertising, usually online, that matches the form and function of the platform upon which it appears. In many cases, it manifests as either an article or video, produced by an advertiser with the specific intent to promote a product, while matching the form and style which would otherwise be seen in the work of the platform's editorial staff. The word "native" refers to this coherence of the content with the other media that appears on the platform. 

The thing is, Facebook has already built marketing personas for these demographics. This happens through the content that's delivered in the feed. And similar to the Scamville era issue, if you can target the gullible, the likely to be scammed, and significantly increase your ROI.

The reality is that there are some broader fundamental problems with Facebook and the manipulation of it's "user" base. Much like the happy-feeds-make-people-post-more-happy-stuff, sad-feeds-make-them-post-more-sad-stuff tests, the reality of the impact of the "feed" is probably far more frightening that most would choose to admit. At some level, review and regulation should probably be considered -- but that probably won't happen as a result of the election that was probably manipulated in some part by the platform.

Brexit: Micro Decisions in a Macro Economy

With the Brexit vote and the surprise decision of the UK to leave the EU, for most of us here in the states, the biggest immediate impact is probably the market trouble and the financial uncertainty. And yet, as you watch your 401k value drop, like many macro economic shifts, there's not much you can really do. But over the past couple of days as I've had time to reflect on Brexit, I've discovered a really significant business impact for myself and, depending upon the size of the business that you work with, you may find yourself in a similar circumstance.

We run multiple web sites on Rackspace Cloud. We have also discussed building a globally centralized web site architecture, something that would enable us to centrally manage a number of localized regional sites. At the same time, running sites for different global regions can present some legal challenges, specifically in the areas of privacy and data retention -- the difference between European and US laws. One approach to help address the European legal restrictions is to operate the European web site in Europe.

For us, this was an advantage with Rackspace Cloud. Rackspace has multiple data centers here in the US, and they also maintain a data center in the UK. Initially, when we looked at this international architecture, our strategy was to simply replicate the core framework of the site across to the UK data center and, in a matter of minutes, have a European compliant site up and running.

Brexit calls that whole plan into question.

Sure, the UK is part of the EU right now. Sure it may take a couple of years for the change to take place. It's even possible that the UK may negotiate the to maintain a similar level of legal equity on privacy issues. However, and this is the big one, with the Brexit vote they've created an environment of uncertainty. Uncertainty makes a poor foundation for architecture.

Net Neutrality and Obamacare: Are There Similarities?

So Senator Ted Cruz claimed that Net Neutrality was like Obamacare. That spawned a number of comments about how he wrong. I even read one article "hoping" that he was right because Obamacare was a success.

Not to wade too much into the polarized politics of it, I suspect that whatever comes out of the current Net Neutrality debate will actually be a lot like Obamacare -- but I mean that in an entirely different way. When Sen. Cruz talks references Obamacare, what he's talking about is government involvement in health care, the regulation bogeyman, and "government overreaching". Remember the message, "regulation bad. Evil." with the subtext of, "our friends can't make as much money." When I reference Obamacare, I'm thinking more about the evolution of the legislation and the interests that must be addressed.

If you remember back in the early negotiations around Obamacare, one of the first things that they did was to sign an agreement with the big pharmaceutical companies to limit the impact of the legislation on drug companies. Why? Well, for the drug companies, this "concession" meant that they could count on their profits even if the legislation went through. Big pharma has big pockets, and they were part of the reason that healthcare reform was quashed back in the 1990s. This agreement was an attempt to take them out of the game.

Then there was another aspect of healthcare reform -- a single payer universal system. Medicare for all. It never even got to sniff the paper the legislation was printed on because most people understand that it would kneecap the for-profit health insurance industry. Instead, they kept it off the table and pushed through "everyone must buy health insurance", a broad concession to the insurance industry. Not that those guys weren't making money before, and not that they didn't complain through the process. The net effect was designed to be, we give you guys more business so you don't lose money.

What these two aspects of Obamacare have in common is the idea of finding ways to appease the moneyed lobbying interest while putting a public "we're taking care of you" wrapper on it. For years now, that's the same solution that they've been trying to find for Net Neutrality. To find a way to support the telecom and cable lobbying, to ensure that they can take whatever profits they want, all while finding enough of the right words to make you feel like you got things reeled back from Comcast being able to say, "whatever, I do what I want".

This is why they floated the more recent regulation saying in essence, "mostly net neutrality for the stuff that goes into your house, but big money companies like Comcast and Netflix can negotiate fast lanes." See Mom and Dad, you won't have to pay a premium to send grandma and grandpa that video of the school play. It just may take a couple of hours.

So when Ted Cruz says Net Neutrality is like Obamacare, he's not far off. That being said, Cruz isn't really playing to your interest -- unless your name is Comcast, Verizon, or AT&T.

And how about President Obama -- why weigh in on this now? I think that this was a, "we've crossed the threshold of the midterm elections, it's not like I have anything to lose one some of these issues." Thus, net neutrality and immigration.

Meanwhile, back at the "independent" FCC, they're going to have to look for some sort of path that can answer the issue while keeping "the industry" happy.

Celebrity News: Lessons for a Polarlized World

Some time ago I was thinking about politics, our news media, and the stupider aspects of polarization. In politics, the news about politics, and the media that surrounds it, everything seems to pull to one pole or another. Often, this need to align with a pole will transform positions and reasoning into an idiotic farce. What I mean by that is, if you start with a basic story like "President Obama Kisses Baby", before ink has hit the presses groups of people will find the need to author "How dare he kiss a baby", "Presidential baby kissing is destroying our economy", or perhaps even "Obama kisses baby and ignores the dangers of Ebola pandemic". It's a constant game of "I'm Rubber, Your Glue" and for most of us, it can be exhausting.

It's particularly relevant as we swirl through the election season. As election season nears, the madness of all of this polarity comes to a boil. If one candidate uses a serial comma, there will be widespread backlash against serial commas and anyone that uses them. Soon you'll find yourself needing to align with the comma users or against them -- but choose carefully, because the other side is hell-bent on evil.

What makes it worse is that there are ecosystems devoted to echoing and amplifying the two poles. From the cable channels to the papers and the radio stations, the media aligns with an audience and, before you know it, your feed is saturated with one pole or the other. And these ideologies live like religions, with us in the midst of an epic, never-ending holy war. It's so pervasive, that it seems almost a natural part of our existence.

But it's not.

I realized that one day while reflecting on lessons from the celebrity/gossip media. In the celebrity gossip world, you don't really have poles. There is no liberal/conservative split in the news about celebrities. When you get "Justin Bieber Arrested for DUI in Florida," you don't see a knee-jerk response from some other side. There are lots of "Bieber is an asshole/jerk/idiot" stories. Perhaps some teen girls with the "Leave Justin Alone". Even a certain number of publicist-driven, "Ah come-on guys, it wasn't like that" stories. But there is no "other half" of the media saying, "Justin Bieber is not an asshole/jerk/idiot" or "Why do they always bust white Canadian men, nobody says anything about Rihanna being drunk" stories. Or even the "They're just trying to destroy our traditional street racing culture. This is a classic American value. Did everyone forget about American Graffiti? American Graffiti should be mandatory in every high school."

Regardless of where you look in the celebrity media coverage -- if you parse it by celebrity, by communications outlet, or even as a broader sort of survey -- you won't see the kind of polarization that you see in anything that touches politics. That's probably why politics and political news is so disheartening. Put a different way, if every time you opened a story about your favorite celebrity, you knew that somewhere, there was a corresponding series of stories from the side of a "competitive" celebrity" saying that you were an idiot for showing interest in the first celebrity. Odds are, you'd probably buy less product, go to fewer movies, download fewer songs -- and you'd certainly only want to buy, download, or support the appropriate side.

The world we live in... strange, but not as polar as you've been lead to believe.

Personal Values and Your Consumer Behavior

How much do your values impact your own personal consumer behavior? Take the Supreme Court ruling on Hobby Lobby versus providing contraception to their employees as an example. Would you consider yourself more or less likely to shop at the place based on the business participation in this legal battle? Regardless of the specific side of the issue you find yourself on, the root question is more about whether, by participating in this legal battle over "values" issues affects your decision to engage in a relationship with the business.

Perhaps it's the circles that I run in, but my friends consumer activities have long been shaped by many of these issues. Back in the nineties, many of my friends used to avoid buying Exxon gas. These days, even as Chick-fil-A restaurants have began popping up all around the south bay, we haven't been to a single one. There are no Hobby Lobby stores here, but if there were, I guarantee you that I, for one, would not be a customer.

Back when I lived in the bible-belt south, I once worked for a music store that, essentially, has a religious test for employment. After I quit working there, they eventually got to a point where they held mandatory prayer meetings with their employees. The idea that, as an employee you might have to participate in a mandatory prayer meeting offended me to the core -- I didn't want to pray, I just wanted to be employed in the music business. For the owners, perhaps it was a moral issue, but for many of the people that worked there, it was more about them exerting their power over employees than it was about shared values. The acceptance of practices like that is one of the reasons why I left the region and found myself much happier here in California where that type of business behavior wasn't tolerated.

Our everyday choices are governed by our own values.

In all, the silent embargo against businesses who cross your moral threshold may not significantly impact their bottom line. But, as a consumer, you have a choice, and when businesses engage in polarizing public activities, they should expect to see a cost associated with that. When I don't buy Exxon gas or Chick-fil-A sandwiches, there is no analytic that measures that. There is no survey that says, I didn't come in because your business behavior and my political views don't match. But I represent a percentage of potential business that is lost because of that.

But this isn't completely a this-side-that-side kind of situation. There are business behaviors that are apolitically positive. Compare the Hobby Lobby case to Starbucks recent announcement that it would pay for college for all of it's employees. It's hard to imagine an opposition to their position. It's an example of a business doing something more for employees, versus fighting to do less. So which public activity makes you feel better about doing business with the company?

Facebook Can (and has) Manipulated You With Their Feed Algorithm

I came across this post from David Holmes over on Pando. It may have been in the news previously, but this was the first time that I'd seen anything about it. What happened, specifically, is that people over at Facebook undertook some basic experiments on their users. They modified the algorithm that delivers the feed to users, and for one set, they delivered more negative, less positive emotionally colored results, and for the other set, they delivered more positive, less negative emotionally colored results. As you might imagine, both groups essentially began echoing and amplifying the tone of their feed -- the negative group producing more negative content while the positive group produced more positive emotions.

The Pando post calls into question the idea that Facebook would simply experiment on it's user base like that, without any permission beyond the basic terms of service. And, while I appreciate the sentiment and feel that, at some level, there ought to be a deeper underlying set of online rights of self, I find the idea that businesses experimenting with algorithms without the consent of their user base to be wholly unsurprising. After all, much of this is the essence of serving online content -- A/B and multi-variant testing has been a common practice in online marketing for several years.

People want to believe that the content they are seeing is the same for everyone, that it's like a book. Once it's printed, that is what it is. But dynamic content, by it's fundamental nature, is manipulated.

For me, I see a much bigger danger implied by the Facebook study reference here. If you think of the ability to influence in this way, then the Facebook "scientific" paper is potentially a press release announcing their offering of an entirely new type of advertising. Imagine if you wanted to broadly shift public option. With the right amount of money and access to the right platform, you could pay for shifting the filter of the algorithm. This is not an Adwords type of program, accessible to anyone. Instead, it's a much more exclusive, strategic type of marketing. Probably expensive, with very limited availability -- like product placement.

Perhaps the scariest place for it, and it's most likely target, is with politics and political advertising. Consider how this type of behavior manipulation might be used for political influence. Depending upon who is operating the platform, how sophisticated they are with their manipulation, and what kinds of limits or controls that they place on this type of influence, the not-entirely-offbase conspiracy thinking can set your brain on fire. It makes you suspicious of any political content in the social media context; except, as Facebook has shown, people are manipulated without even knowing.

Clearly, it's an eye-opener and some serious food for thought. Is this where Facebook finally announces the real influence of the platform that they've been building, the platform that everyone has believed to be worth so much more than social media advertising has proven to be worth, to date?

Marijuana and Messaging Strategy: Insights that left me giddy

As you probably already know, PandoDaily is one of my favorite reads. And since they acquired Paul Carr's NSFW company earlier this year, they've added some great writers and really boosted their content. One piece that I came across recently is an incredible article by David Sirota.

How Colorado disrupted the Drug War is a deep dive into the messaging strategy that empowered what might seem like one of the least likely states to reform their marijuana laws to disrupt the status quo and change the narrative on drug law reform. It's particularly interesting when you think about the inter-relationship between fear and the messaging surrounding the issue.

Fear is an extremely powerful message driver. Even now, if you were to consider discussing this article with your colleagues at work, you'll probably find yourself feeling anxious with your internal Safe-For-Work alarms going off. This isn't sex, politics or religion, but in some ways it's worse -- it's drugs. And 'pro-drugs' is just about as third rail as it gets.

I would put Sirota's piece in the category of Must Reads.

Insurance Companies Suck: Core Strategy Undermines the ACA

In all of the back and forth over the Affordable Care Act that you find in the media, one of the things that I've never seen addressed relates to inherent problems with the fundamental strategy behind the law. In the media, you may see concerns about the lack of a single-payer, medicare-for-all option or, on the other side of the spectrum, people complaining about the mandate requiring people to buy health insurance. While these two examples deal with opposite sides of the political spectrum, in one respect, they share a common underlying issue -- insurance companies suck.

Anyone who has had to deal with health insurance over a doctor's bill knows how frustrating it can be. And it's just gotten worse and worse over time.

Insurance companies use layers of contractual complexity to make treatment and treatment reimbursement horribly conditional. Why? Because, fundamentally, the way that an insurance company maximizes their profits is by paying out as little of the money as possible. Insurance is a wager that you, as the gambler, wants to be as safe and as predictable as possible -- I am sick, I go to the doctor, and the treatment is paid.

In the midst of the storm of the healthcare.gov site problems, I read one post on Talking Points Memo that pointed to one of the challenges of individuals purchasing health insurance was that it was so complicated. And the entire reason it is so complicated is that insurance companies benefit from that complexity. They write policies that create a range of caveats to the "I am sick" equation in order to reduce the likelihood of a payout -- like saying that the roll of the dice doesn't count if they didn't hit the back wall of the craps table. Sometimes, they make these caveats deceptive so that you think that you're covered when you aren't. It's like playing 3-card Monte with some guy on the street -- you have a great chance of winning until you actually start playing.

This is why most states have insurance regulators and why we are forced to turn to "experts" in our HR department to help us navigate the contracts and, hopefully, prevent fraud. And yet, despite the existence of a regulation infrastructure in the states, the system has gotten progressively worse since I can remember.

The Pre-existing Condition
Perhaps the biggest sticking point surrounding health insurance was the pre-existing condition. This was the escape clause that would allow an insurance company to skip out on paying for various medical bills that might get too large and cut into their profits. Over the past decade or so, it also seems like they used it, increasingly, as leverage against churn. By that what I mean is, if you were unhappy with your insurance or you lost your job, the insurance companies forced you to keep paying for insurance coverage lest you be hit with the pre-existing condition clause when you get a new job or sign up for a new policy.

This use of the pre-existing condition was another driver for crappy health-insurance-in-name-only plans. If you were out of work or working at a job that didn't provide health insurance, you could get one of these plans and be able to say that you had maintained insurance coverage.

Underlying Fallacies of the Health Care Debate
I think that the think that pisses me off the most when I listen to a debate about health care is this idea that we make choices about the level of care that we want to pay for. Given the choice, it's hard for me to imagine somebody saying, "just give me half of what's required to make me well." Or, like the snippet from the Michael Moore film healthcare, "I know I lost three fingers in the accident, just repair one." These aren't decisions made by choice. In the same way, the decision to not participate in the healthcare system -- to not have coverage -- is not something somebody chooses. They may choose between having shelter or healthcare coverage, having food or healthcare coverage, or even -- like I might have back in my college days -- having beer or healthcare coverage, but it isn't healthcare or not.

Similarly, there is this notion that the reason that health care is expensive is because people with health insurance use too much healthcare because they don't realize how much it costs. It's as though we are choosing to take Vioxx instead of aspirin because we make decadent choices as opposed to the reality -- we take it because they, the experts, tell us it's better and more effective. In the old days of a lifetime relationship with a family doctor, efficacy might be measured by long term patient health. These days, profit plays a significant role.

I Don't Like My Existing Healthcare Plan
Which brings us to the issue behind the most recent round of controversies. I don't think that anyone actually likes their existing healthcare plan; rather, they probably prefer it over the idea that the available options are worse. Or more expensive for, essentially, the same crappy service. Because, like most of the airlines, we have been subjected to a historical degradation of service and the majority of the incumbents essentially offer minor variations of the same service, we don't see any upgrade in change.

The bottom line: insurance companies suck. And this is, fundamentally, what's wrong with the ACA. Rather than crippling an industry that most people have had terrible experiences with, the government essentially said, "heck-of-a-job insurance companies, let's give you more customers and more business." For many people, this would be the equivalent of handing over Social Security to the same corrupt financial industry that crashed the economy with the sub-prime mortgage crisis. Rather than stopping all of this "your surgeon was covered, but your anesthesiologist wasn't in network and so he wasn't covered' mess, they stomped on the gas and pointed all of us straight into the heart of darkness.

The Paradox of Choice
Here's a great link to psychologist Barry Schwartz's Ted Talk where he talks about how having more choices makes us less happy with our choice and also makes it more difficult to choose. In that way, another difficult aspect of the ACA is, inherently, one of the things that is supposed to be better about it -- more choices. The paradox of choice also plays into the health insurance offering -- with so many nuanced aspects to compare and options to segment, they can move you into a state of selection paralysis. This is another way that they are able to control the transaction.

In many respects, the importance of choice in health care is overstated. If we're sick and we need antibiotics, we don't choose which medicine to prescribe. We think we want choices, but, like a menu with too many options, more is not better.  

While the idea of more choices pays lip service to freedom, if you couple some of the themes in the Paradox of Choice with the idea that all of the choices are deal-with-the-devil options from businesses that many people have had negative experiences with, you're in for a high level of customer dissatisfaction, even if the product has been reformed and is actually improved. The reformed system may be better, but we are primed for not liking it.

Data, Relationships and Story: Marketing and NSA Monitoring

As the Snowden data monitoring story continues to live in the news, one theme that gets a lot of visibility is whether or not, by providing public visibility to these programs, he has exposed the secret inner-workings of a spying infrastructure, and that by exposing that, he has somehow weakened the protections it provides -- or provided, as the case may be.

On one level, this story sounds like yet another one of those Internet privacy stories -- Facebook is watching you online, Google is reading your email, or your computer may actually be a zombie in a bot net. For much of the technology-challenged world, the headline embodies all of the frightening possibility of a campfire ghost story. But, as with other big stories with complexity and depth, this story is far more nuanced than a simple black and white, right and wrong.

The reality is that we live in a data driven world. From the moment you turn on a device and it connects to a network, there is an electronic discussion that takes place. Some of the communications may be innocuous, like a device handshake with the network to give it identity or your computer asking a server what time it is. Or when you pull up a web page in your browser, your computer talks to a server that then sends back the data that your computer needs to build a web page. In the process of sending you data, that server may verify who you are, then call a bunch of it's friends, tell them your name, and ask them to send you data as well. And in a world full of servers and electronic logs, each of these transactions is logged in journals, and your history in each may affect the other.

This is the electronic ecosystem. Fundamentally, some of these things need to work like this in order for things to operate. Below the web sessions or the phone calls, the core back and forth of devices and interacting requires identity, memory and structure.

Anonymity on a network is not true anonymity, what it really is is a disconnect between identities. In the brick and mortar world, it is possible to have essentially anonymous transactions. You can have a conversation with another person in an isolated room. You can go to a store in a different area and purchase something in cash. But electronic transactions are different. Each electronic communication is like a phone call from one location to another. Electronic payments are essentially promises to transfer funds with a number used to identify the person writing the IOU. While we might want to imagine electronic activities conforming to the realities of our experiential world, they don't. This can have both costs and benefits.

Logs, Logs Everywhere - In Pursuit of Real Identity
Web marketers have long known that, while it's interesting to see what pages people visit, it can be even more interesting if you know where somebody came from and where they go after they visit your site. Is this someone interested in your product? Are they comparing your product to a competitive one? Have they been to your site multiple times? This is the type of data that can be extracted from a simple cross-site tracking cookie. Within that, typically, we try to weave together a tapestry of data points. Can we get the visitor to complete a form and give us some identity or contact info? Did they download files?

In it's simplest way, these are elements that can be tracked from a basic web log on one site. Or, using something like Eloqua, Marketo or Pardot, tracked across multiple sites and marketing deliverables. As marketers, we look for every bit of data that we can get, every touch point, in an effort to build an identity. We want to invest all of our selling resources into the process of converting that potential customer into revenue.

And yet, for all of our efforts, our tracking and our analysis, our best efforts are still just a sketch. Our simple tracking can easily be fooled by someone doing research at home, then going into the office or maybe using a different email address.

This problem of identity has always been an aspect of the web that's been both celebrated and loathed. While we're happy to be 'anonymous' when we're looking at things we might not want people to know about -- competitor's web sites, job listings, embarrassing medical conditions or even online porn -- anyone who has been in a chat room, a forum or the comments section of a blog knows the evil of anonymous trolls posting irrelevant or hateful comments. Real identity is often a thematic solution for these issues, sort of a, "you wouldn't post that if everyone knew who you were" approach.

But in that way, you can see where a government program that reaches across services and joins the various data streams is not particularly mind-blowing in terms of technical scope. For an organization like the NSA, being able to sort through different emails and identify that even though the email address for crazy voice in the alt.discussion.terrorist-bombing-plans isn't the same one as the guy who just ordered 10 pressure cookers on Amazon.com, and even though one uses Gmail and the other uses Yahoo, they both actually originate from the same IP address.

Crafting Persona and The Importance of Story
If you were to look at your typical web site log, what you have is a series of events. Data points. But they are nothing without a story. Consider a typical goal path through your web site ending in someone filling out a registration form and downloading an electronic asset. If you have 100 people visiting the page with the registration form but only 50 downloading the file, you need to build a story that explains the two pools. For those that didn't download, maybe the form was too long. Maybe they just wanted to see browse. Maybe they were competitors.

While it may seem like an arbitrary process and difficult to imagine, we actually do this all time in real life -- it's how we build an understanding of events. Think about when you're driving and you see another car use a turn signal. In simple terms, it's a directional indicator, a single data point that tells you that this car is planning to shift in that direction. But, in order to really understand what they intend to do, you need to put it into context of a larger story.

• Do they intend to change lanes?
• Are they planning to exit the freeway?
• Are they making a turn?
• Did they forget their blinker and are driving down the road with their turn signal on?

That same story framework helps make sense of traffic patterns -- in the morning, there are a lot of cars trying to get off at this exit -- and creates stress when people behave unusually: Why is this person driving 20mph in a 45mph zone? Why are they shifting across three lanes now? While driving has a reality framework that makes it relatively easy to map cognitively, ultimately, you are still making guesses about what's going on in the other car, about what's going on in the engine inside the other driver's head. We analyze and we predict, but we don't know.

Understanding can be particularly challenging when you're looking at similar behaviors. Is this person weaving because they are drunk, dialing on their cell phone, or just being buffeted by crosswinds? In this context, one might be an ongoing threat, one a short term threat, and the other a broad-scale operational concern.

Building a story about online activity requires a much broader understanding of the landscape that the person is interacting in. Imagine the example of a single data point in your own system log, one where your system connected to an IP address in China. When your system connected to a server in China, did it go there because you loaded a web page with an ad network that pulled a file or a script from a server there? Did it connect there because your system has some advertising or tracking cookies on it from a previous visit? Did it go there because your system has malware running and it's compromised? Or did it just connect there because you're running Skype and there's a peer-to-peer link that connected there? Without having a broader tapestry of the transaction, this single data point is unintelligible.

Story and Data Correlation
In real life face-to-face interaction, understanding what's inside of someone's head can be difficult. It's potentially more problematic using electronic data. Even with a broad set of data points, algorithmically understanding intent and motivation often fall short. Consider Amazon. A visit to Amazon will get you follow-up emails with pricing deals on the things that you looked at. While this type of remarketing has higher clickthroughs than other programs, how often does it feel like you're being spammed? And, when those items that you searched appear on your 'My Amazon' page, how often do they actually help you get to the thing that you were interested in? On the marketer's side of the equation, that value is greater than zero so it counts as a win, but on you, the customer's side, it's far from a perfect match. If just having lots of personal tracking data was a slam dunk for understanding motivation, Facebook's advertising programs would be far more effective.

Ultimately, our story constructions are shaped by a variation of A/B testing and validation. First, there is the story, the hypothesis -- since this guy just activated his turn signal, I think he's going to exit the freeway. Next, we have the test -- does he get off at the exit? Once we've completed the test, we now have to evaluate the results and reinterpret our story.
Observations about data -- like the correlation between purchasing habits and pregnancy -- don't just bubble up from the data. They require a hypothesis and a framework for analysis. Consider this great article, In Head-Hunting, Big Data May Not Be Such a Big Deal, in the New York Times interviewing Laszlo Bock, senior vice president of people operations at Google. In the interview, Bock talks about some of the practices that Google used during the hiring process, and how well they correlated to their actual job performance. Essentially, he shoots down the value of famous Google practices like 'brain teasers' and asking all candidates for their GPA (I know what you're thinking, tell me something I didn't already know). Keep in mind, before they could evaluate this to see if it actually correlated to performance, somebody came up with the hypothesis that these things mattered. Google wanted to hire the smartest, best employees, so they defined a hypothetical profile of what those people should look like, then ran interview screening processes based on those. It's only after years of running this experiment that we see their hypothesis is being shot down.

Secrets, Lies, and the World of Cyberspying
Arguably, the most sensitive point in this whole Snowden story surrounds the secret, classified nature of the programs. Admittedly, it's difficult to measure a secret program. On the one hand, you have this big reveal that the government monitors electronic communications and activities, the great NSA version of Eloqua. Yawn. On the other hand, you have the government claiming that it is a national secret and officials saying that they didn't monitor communications.

The government's interest in having access to this kind of data is not new. While it seems like a rather simplistic idea now, remember the clipper chip? This was basically the government saying we can help American businesses with encryption, but we'll keep a key to the back door open so that we can monitor the bad guys using it. After the Bush-era telecom monitoring stories, are you really surprised that the government has an ear on the Internet and is hoovering up your electronic communications?

At the same time, remember the environment that you live in. There are malware exploits out there in the wild that allow non-government entities to monitor your computer, log your keystrokes, even turn on the camera and microphone in your computer -- some criminal or 15-year old pervert could be watching you through your laptop as you read your morning email. There are foreign governments that have exploited your electronic systems to gather intelligence on you, on your business, and on your technology. And the other day, as you drove home chatting with your significant other, you actually broadcast all of those secrets over the radio. Admittedly, it was a cellular radio designed with controls to make it more secure and more private, but did you really think that it was equivalent to the two of you speaking intimately in your bedroom?

This is the reality of the environment that we live in. The fundamental nature of these technologies means that electronic data is available and it can be monitored. But just as in the real world where you're unlikely to physically prevent an armed police officer from entering into your house and searching your premises if he wants to force his way in -- saying "you can't come in" doesn't actually prevent a search. Instead, historically, we have opted to disincentivize forced entry behavior by making any evidence collected without a warrant be inadmissible in legal proceedings. With electronic data right now, we've essentially handing the review of this over to a secret process. Rather than simply handing over the decisions surrounding the implications of this to secret, hidden elements of the government, we need a more open discussion of the potential and the impact of these types of programs. We need to define a framework for what we establish and rights and protections in this modern data environment. Otherwise, what happens when the government starts sending you Target-like coupon books because you might be guilty of a thought-crime?

Again, the real problem here isn't the data, it's the application of the data and the potential for abuse. It's not the terrorist plots that you stop, it's what happens if you know what porn site Mitt Romney looked at. It's not just the government that you fear; instead, it's what happens if the non-profit that you work for finds out that you 'anonymously' publish a blog about your sex life. Or what will your neighbors think if you order birth control from an online pharmacy because your local pharmacist has moral reservations and doesn't fill those orders?

In the vast and expanding world of our digital breadcrumbs, we all have moments that would rather not share with our friends, our colleagues, or our government. In the court that governs shame and embarrassment, there is no way to disincentivize moral outrage. There is no statute of limitations. Whether you're Paula Deen, Lance Armstrong, or (one of my favorite controversies) Sasha Grey, the perception of who you are and what you stand for lives in a sliding scale world that changes over time. Sometimes that time period can be short, sometimes decades.

Our electronic data is a lot like our DNA. With the evolving understanding of DNA, increasingly we know more and more about a person from their DNA. We can understand their genealogy, we can diagnose what's wrong with them, and we can even make predictions about their future. This type of information is so powerful that, as a culture, we attempt to be very careful with the availability, distribution, and use of it. We fear -- and probably rightly so -- discrimination, exclusion, or a wide range of potential limitations to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Because we can imagine the dark potential inherent in all of this, we are cautious. In that same way, we need to approach our digital data in the same way. 

Deathstar Fail: How the White House Laughed at Serious Economics

With the recent news of the White House's response to the petition to build a Death Star, perhaps -- if you're like me -- you got a chuckle over aspects of the actual response. What started out as something that might have seemed like an Onion news story turned out to be real. With everything from the title of the response, This isn't the petition response you're looking for, to quotes like:

• The Administration does not support blowing up planets.
• Why would we spend countless taxpayer dollars on a Death Star with a fundamental flaw that can be exploited by a one-man starship?

It's hard not to find humor in the response. Still, there's an aspect of the response that fundamentally missed the mark -- the underlying economic argument.

If you just touch the surface of most of the stories on this topic, the petition and response were all about placating some crazy Star Wars fans who assembled enough online interest. But what's missing from this story, both in the White House's response and in the lack of follow up in the media, is a deeper look at the underlying premise that drove this.

If this was simply an exercise in Star Wars fan fun, you'd probably see lots of petitions for things like protecting endangered wookies on Endor or Star Trek fans requesting research into transparent aluminum. But you don't. While I'm sure that some people might have signed the petition for fan fun, I think that you have to recognize that there was something deeper driving this thing.

Prepare for the Alien Invasion
At the heart of this proposal is it's re-spin of one path that economists like Paul Krugman say is the path out of the economic depression that we are in. His recipe to escape the current economic malaise revolves around government spending on stuff -- any stuff -- to help reignite the economy. Notably in this case, if scientists predicted that we were about to be attacked by aliens and we began spending to prepare for an alien invasion, that spending would revive the economy. Of course, that premise created some level of outrage that Krugman later addressed on his blog.

Doesn't all of this sound remarkably similar to 'building a Death Star'? Could it be, could it possibly be that this petition was about macro-economics and addressing the broader issues of the economy?

So while on some level, the White House deserves credit for elements of humor, redirecting the focus of the response to a half-assed promo for the space station and for a career in science strikes me as bad enough to warrant this post. To me, it's almost as if a woman walks into a hardware store and asks for directions to the power tools and the clerk responds with, "vacuum cleaners are on aisle 7 and housewares are on aisle 8, but we don't have any power-mops."

The title of their response is, This Isn't the Petition Response You're Looking For. At least that part was on mark.

The Economics of Austerity, Silicon Valley Style

The election is over and, for those of us that haven't been making mad money on all of the campaign advertising, we're back to the realities of our current economic situation. And while many now associate Silicon Valley with software companies like Google, Facebook and Twitter, there are still some of those old school businesses that design and produce actual silicon. Unfortunately, the economy is not really smiling on the semiconductor industry these days.

Semi is notoriously cyclical, but what we're seeing now is in many ways part of a larger evolution that is reshaping the industry. Over the past year and a half, there's been some consolidation among the larger manufacturing equipment players -- the merger of Lam Research and Novellus, the acquisition of Varian by Applied Materials -- that speaks to the dwindling opportunities at the root of the ecosystem.

There are fewer fabs. CapEx news releases are sporadic. There are still a lot of questions about when, if, and how much these manufacturing facilities will invest in next generation process technologies. Further upstream, you don't have the pull of a Moore's Law fueled PC industry driving waves of new system purchases each year. Sure, there are ICs being designed, chips being sold and devices being built, but there isn't the same momentum.

But the biggest boon to the industry in the past five years has been things associated with green technology. While the technology for photovoltaics and LEDs have been around for a long time, the push for innovation and broad scale implementation spurred a host of new businesses, new equipment and industry transformation. All of those things meant investment, spending, and new opportunities.

So here's a quick history refresher. In 2008, we had the collapse of the economy courtesy of the financial markets, the sub-prime and all of that. Then 2009 was a bleak year -- everything was down. That was also the year when the government pushed through the stimulus with a push towards green tech. But things started to come back in 2010 and by midway through the year, the Semi industry motor (and emerging green tech) was going. In 2011, you started to see some shake-out, consolidation and the collapse of Solyndra, price wars happening in solar panels, and the market starting to pucker. And now 2012 has been another year of poor performance.

So what happened? Well, on the one hand, if we look at things from the not-a-big-enough-stimulus perspective, it looks like we poured gasoline in the carburetor for a few minutes of action, but we didn't getting the car running. Add to that the Congressional Republican's efforts to bring government to a halt and make Obama a one-term president, and you basically have limited government incentives to drive the market for green tech. Instead, you had conservative media pushing climate change as a hoax and Solyndra being pumped as a scandal. Green tech became a political liability.

However you want to frame it, the simple reality is that the economics of austerity -- the cut, cut, cut, and cut that we've been subjected to since 2010 -- has choked the life out of our economy. Instead of investing in growth and a strategic future, we've been railroaded down a path of zero investment wrapped in 'thrifty, debt-conscious' packaging.

Governments have unique powers to influence markets. By defining incentives for strategic goals, they drive fuel from the investment tank into the engine of the economy. By establishing incentives like mandating that all buildings meet certain levels of green compliance or all residences add solar panels, governments establish a pull that draws energy and investment into the market. In the same way, if the government codified a mandated goal of having 1 Gbps universal broadband, it would spawn a surge in many tech markets.

Keep in mind that this is not like the government saying, "we need a million Justin Bieber dolls". Nobody is pushing for frivolous investments. Things like green technology, broadband, and transportation infrastructure are CapEx investments in the future of the country and in the future of the economy.

Post-election Marketing: Why Politics and Business Don't Mix

In the days following the election, there have been a number of anti-Obama business owners that have been in the press for essentially thrown miniature temper tantrums over the results of the election. A collection of these guys, including the CEO of Papa John's Pizza, a guy that owns a bunch of Applebee's franchises in the New York area and another guy that runs a bunch of Denny's franchises in Florida, have come used the election results as a justification for 'applying a surcharge for Obama-care' to 'cutting employee hours so that they aren't eligible for health care'. There are also reports of some businesses firing employees.

If we were doing a new round of high school yearbooks right now, it's not hard to imagine these guys as being candidates for the 'most likely to through their golf clubs in the lake after a bad shot'.

If there is one lesson to take away from stories like the recent Chick-fil-A meets gay marriage blow-up, it's that bringing your politics to work has the potential to cause a PR storm. It probably goes without saying, but customers are partners in your business. While we might want to believe that everyone thinks like we do or that we are enlightened by some higher truth, they don't. Evangelism can be divisive. Divisive statements and practices will alienate parts of your base and potentially drive them to action.

The potential negative energy is even worse when you operate a consumer-facing business. When consumers participate in your business, they have a much more significant vote. So while Robert Murray, the CEO for Murray Energy, can throw his post-election tantrum by holding a prayer meeting with his employees and then firing 156 of them, consumers don't really have an outlet for outrage. But when businesses like Papa Johns, Applebee's and Denny's are involved, they make their voices heard. The result is the PR walk-of-shame.

• From the Papa John's CEO, a piece at Huffington Post on how he was misquoted.
• From Applebee's corporate offices, an attempt to explain the separation between franchise owners and the larger brand.
• And from Denny's, a corporate smack-down for the franchise owner who spoke out.

In some ways, rules of business are simple. It's kind of like a holiday dinner -- there are certain conversation topics that you try to avoid. Politics, sex and religion are all likely to get you into hot water. But in some ways, it's broader than that. Advocacy and evangelism have the potential to create backlash, particularly in our modern media environment that finds energy (links, clicks, and views) from conflict and controversy.

Disconnected Arrogance and the Moral Imperative
It's one thing to operate a business based on moral principles, but when your business takes a public stand, you need to consider it's relationship to your brand and the impact on your broader business. For example, when Patagonia aligns with environmental projects, that's also aligned with their brand. Gay marriage probably has little to do with chicken sandwiches.

Some people might claim that Chick-fil-A found it's way into a controversy as a backlash to the CEO was simply following his moral priniciples, but if Chick-fil-A had just operated quietly on it's principles, it probably wouldn't have found itself in the firestorm. Contrast Chick-fil-A with In-N-Out. In-N-Out prints Bible verses on their cups and wrappers, but just the number notations, not even the text. Controversy score: Chick-fil-A=1, In-N-Out=0.

The reality is that these controversies don't typically result from businesses operating on principles, they tend to be sparked by the arrogant behavior of an individual. Principled businesses express their principles through their operation and their brand. They communicate their values through their ongoing operations. In that same way, successful principled businesses harmonize with their customers and their partner community. During ongoing operations, the business connects with some constituents and they alienate others. These controversies tend to be sharp turns or tangents.

Is there a take-away here? The only suggestion that I have is a repetition of something that I've said a number of times in the past.

The man with the microphone must maintain a modicum of taste at all times.

When you have the microphone, you need to be conscientious of the potential impact of every sound you make. 

Weekend Leftovers: Politics, Surveys, and Interpreted Data

Just a quick post with some reading that caught my eye and rattled around in my brain for more that a few seconds over the weekend. Admittedly, it was politics, but with a dash of survey interpretation and analysis that stuck with me.

First, this piece by Maurene Dowd for the New York Times, Romney is President. Simply, it's an amusing read.

Next, this post by Greg Dworkin for Daily Kos, From debates to Sandy: Things "everyone knows" aren't always true. This is a nice dive into exit poll analysis and the contrast between the 'conventional wisdom' stories told by the web contrasted against the data.

One aspect of this post that I found amusing -- if you look at how most people had decided how they were going to vote much earlier in the process, think about how much hype and money was devoted to the idea of trying to influence the final moments of the game. Often, the media portrayed the campaign and the election as a game that was coming down to the wire as though one desperate fling of the ball would decide it in the end. And who benefits from this narrative? The political media industry.

On a related note, another thing I was thinking about over the weekend. With how much some of those wealthy Republican donors gave to Superpacs -- essentially with the idea of buying the election -- do you think that their ultimate takeaway is that spending big money in elections like that is a waste? If so, what next?