Jonathan Trenn popped this insightful article about Yelp over on Marketing Conversation, The contorversy about Yelp (and be sure to check out David Gelles’ article on a similar topic over at the Financial Times, Yelp rejects claims of extortion):

Ah, controversy.

Now, it’s with Yelp, the mega online review site.  On Wednesday, the East Bay Express, an alternative newspaper that covers Alameda and Contra Costa counties in California, published a very provocative article , “Yelp and the business of extortion 2.0″ on the sales operations and tactics of Yelp.  The paper made some very pointed accusations, some of them seemingly legitimate while others sounding too nebulous.  They state that Yelp is both maniupulating the placements of restaurants reviews as sales tools and then using scare tactics to then solicit advertising sales from these same restaurants.

The accusations are alarming but, because I think the article was poorly presented, it’s left me thinking that Yelp perhaps had a major sales problem in one office as opposed to a company wide sleaze factor policy.

Yelp’s initial response, written on the company blog by CEO Jeremy Stoppleman is inept and insufficient.  He’s likely satisfied that his blog posts are enough…and it may appear to be just that for the time being…but controversies such as this, be they true or just speculation, have a way of undermining a company’s integrity in a hurry.  Especially a site that 1)  is about user generated online reviews, and 2) has trust as a hallmark of its standing.

Oddly, the Yelp blog doesn’t allow comments.  That’s not a good idea…especially for a site that’s about online reviews and citizen participation.

Here’s the gist of the article.  Writer Kathleen Richards talked to “dozens” of business owners over the “past several months” and found that six of them said that Yelp sales reps promised to remove or move bad reviews if the business chose to advertise.  And these businesses would often get sales calls from Yelp reps soon after they mysteriously started getting a rash of negative reviews.  The theory here is that Yelp employees would start to or enlist others to write negative reviews on a company, those reviews would then appear at the top of a company’s page, and the company would get a phone call from a rep looking for an advertising by so those reviews can “go away”…usually to the tune of $300 a month.

For those that declined, positive reviews seemed to begin to disappear.  For those that did manage to buy, negative ones began disappearing.

This is pretty damning stuff.  If true, it shows a coordinted effort between people in sales those on the back end tech team.  It made some establishments feel as if Yelp was acting as if it was the “mafia” in that Yelp was threatening establishments to pay (advertise) in order to not be damaged.  That’s called “protection money” in organized crime.

But as I red between the lines I ended up scratching my head.   Over several months, after talking to “dozens” of businesses, Richards found six restaurants that felt that either they were being offered a quid-pro-qo for advertising to reduce or eliminate bad reviews; or some felt that this extended to manipulative threats of the placement of poor reviews and the elimination of postive reviews.

“Dozens.  “What does that mean?  36?  60?  84?  How did Richards find these restaurants?  Did she talk to one and then ask the owner/manager if he or she knew of any others that had similar stories?  Both questions are important.   The first because it leads to how widespread the problem actually is in the Bay Area and the second, because if there is a lack or randomness to all this, then the sample restaurants are self selected by the reporter.

The article relies on the how some of the restaurant owners “feel”.  These feelings may be completely legitimate.  But it is hard to counter a “feelings”e of another is the one with the feelings remain anonymous.  I fully believe in using anonymous sources, but there should be greater evidence used.  That is, if one is trying to prove that this is a consistent sales tactic used by the company as a whole.

And speaking of as a whole.  This article seems to be focusing soley on the East Bay restaurant seen.  True, it is an East Bay pub, but the article is written as if it is a widespread problem and the issue here is “the business of extortion”.  It fully damns the Yelp based on a small sample of local business’ feelings.

Stoppleman has since written a few more blog posts, but he could use a change of attitude.  There’s been enough discussion on the net about this article denigrating Yelp.  Hundreds of tweets on Twitter, negative mentions on Technorati, and articles in substantial online pubs.

The reason why I say that Stoppleman could use a change of attitude is because he’s treating all of this as an illegitimate attack.  The accusations, regardless of their veracity, at least sound reasonable.  And his defensiveness doesn’t really address the issue.

He does have on post that does work, at bit, in my opinion.  “Nine Myths About Yelp” is designed to negate what he feels are falsehoods.  The most important one he lists is #3 (it should be #1, but he doesn’t seem to realize it).  It is stated here:

Myth #3: Yelp salespeople manipulate reviews for prospective advertisers (for example, offers to remove a negative review if a new client signs up, or a threat to remove positive reviews if the business owner does not choose to advertise with Yelp)

Reality: We have every reason to trust the smart, hard-working and ethical salespeople who work at Yelp.  Beyond this, to avoid even an appearance of impropriety, we’ve taken several steps to ensure no member of our team is tempted to game the system.  Specifically:
1. Yelp salespeople do not have access to the system that deletes reviews; only a few members of Yelp engineering and user support team have this access, and they literally work on different floors within the office.
2. Every Yelp salesperson signs an agreement that s/he will not write reviews of any business while employed by Yelp.  We trust our teammates in sales to live up to this commitment.  We also have several monitoring systems in place to ensure nobody (accidentally or otherwise) crosses this line.
3. Through our vigilance, we once did find a salesperson who encouraged a friend to write a positive review for a prospective client (that the friend had actually patronized). The salesperson’s role at Yelp ended that day.
4. When a new advertiser signs up with Yelp, the relationship is handed off to an Account Manager.  The Account Manager then takes the client through a 30 minute phone training session — and confirms that reviews have nothing to do with advertising.
5. After the training call, the Account Manager sends a follow up survey that asks each client how much s/he agrees with the following statement: “I understand that Reviews are completely separate from the Yelp Ad Program, and that there is an automated filter that may suppress some of my reviews whether or not I am a client.”  Any client who does not click “Completely Agree” in this case gets yet another follow-up call for clarification.

Myth #4: Yelp removes positive reviews from businesses its staff does not like, or from businesses that do not pay for advertising

Reality: A review you may have seen on Yelp previously is no longer there; this happens.  The review in question may have “disappeared” for one of three reasons:
1. The review may have been suppressed by Yelp’s automated Review Filter, which is always out there looking for suspicious reviewing activity (like those anonymous rants and raves you see on other sites).
2. The writer may have removed her own review; she has the right to do that at any time
3. Another user believed the review violated Yelp’s Review Guidelines and sent it to our customer service team for review. The customer service team agreed, then manually removed the review.

Both our customer service team and the Review Filter work exactly the same way for advertisers as they do for non-advertisers.

This is how he should have addressed the issue at the very beginning.  Blown opportunity and his company has suffered and will continue to suffer as a result.  And he has to go beyond stating that the sales people and the tech people with access to placement of reviews work on different floors.

My guess is what happened is that a few sales reps in that particular office would scour the reviews on Yelp, and when they found some recent newly written negative ones, they then picked up the phone and made a sales call, offering the package that places a selected postive review on top – one that is visibly marked as being sponsored.  Some pitches probably went far beyond this…saying that they could make the negative one “disappear”.  Sales people will say sleazy things.  Stoppleman should understand this and not discount this.  He should then conduct some sort of internal audit that would show the public that he is trying to address the problem and root it out if it exists.  Retrain.  Resolve.

Now is it possible that some sales types had relationships with the tech people.  Absolutely.  Different floors – HA!  So the problem may have been more than a poorly written article.  Yelp needs to look into that because, as Yelp knows, online reputations matter.

And to Jeremy Stoppleman…you should allow people to comment on your blog posts.

Here’s a smashing list from Lee Odden over on Online Marketing Blog, Best and Worst Practices Social Media Marketing:

• Start with a plan, not tactics.  Research and build a Social Media Roadmap involving:  Audience, Objectives, Strategy, Tactics, Tools/Technology and Metrics.

• “Give to get” – Successful social media marketing programs involve listening and participation. That participation centers around giving value before expecting anything in return. This is not “sales” as you know it. But companies can definitely increase sales as a result.

• Commit resources & time to be successful or you may very well fail. It’s important to forecast labor hours, who, what, when, how and where with the intention of succeeding, not just experimenting. If a social media effort is successful, scalability will be an even bigger issue if you don’t plan for it.  Hiring a community manager for example, may not be justified when a social media monitoring program is started or with a new company, but a job req and understanding of the role should be ready in case it’s called for.

• Be transparent with intentions & your identity or you may alienate the very audiences you’re trying to connect with.  Objectives, strategy and doing your homework about a community should make it pretty obvious what types of commercial messages are appropriate.  Being transparent about intentions might come in the form of stating a purpose:  ”Brand XYZ has created this Facebook page to help consumers make better choices about Topic XYZ”.  It’s fine if goals are to increase sales, but participation should be focused on providing the kind of value that facilitates sales – not attempting to make sales directly. When is the last time you purchased something other than a virtual cupcake on Facebook?

• Understand, you do not control the message.  Old habits die hard and there’s a tendency to want to treat social media participation like advertising where the ability to control messaging is the norm. Once information or media is available on the social web, people will inevitably mash it up, stretch it, pull it and reshape it according to their interests. Brands need to protect their identities, copyright and intellectual property for sure, but rather than “controlling the message” marketers should encourage the mashup and creativity.

• Welcome participation, feedback and co-creation. As comfort levels rise with social web participation, companies will see opportunties to encourage participation with communications, especially with brand evangelists. Developing relationships and community within social communities on the web can facilitate buy in, provide invaluable feedback and crowdsourcing opportunities.

• Metrics should roll up to objectives and objectives should be relevant to the channel.  More than a few companies see evidence of other social media efforts ranging from Superbowl commercials on YouTube to social participation during and after President Obama’s campaign, and “want that too”.  Direct marketing is the lens through which many social media efforts are first viewed, with a tendency to focus on action “A” resulting in “B” outcome. Social media marketing is more like public relations than direct marketing. It’s more like providing resource “A” results in “action “B” that influences outcome “C”. Metrics for success need to consider the pre-goal performance indicators like number of “friends”, comments, links, etc as well as commercial outcomes influenced by social media participation.

Check out his worst practices as well over at: Best and Worst Practices Social Media Marketing.

The future of Social Network Services (SNS) can be discovered on High School and College campuses. I believe that topic-specific “vertical” SNS’s are very important, but I also think that the model needs to be University-like – a modularized SNS. There needs to be a campus “brand” (or University) within which the topic-specific “clubs,” “houses,” “fraternities,” “dorms,” and “interest groups” can interact – somewhere where crossovers, cross-fertilization, and aggregation are encouraged – no, needs – to happen. I hate SNS sites like boompa.com – a site devoted to your favorite cars – because I am not JUST a car guy.

I am a car guy for sure but I am also interested in rowing, in biking, in Thomas Pynchon, and in talk radio – Boompa might be successful in the short term, but in the long-term, the real power would come from creating a open, creative, resource-rich platform/campus/university/high school and maybe create a school of engineering, a liberal arts school, a law school, a dining hall, and so forth, but then allow the SNS to find itself.

To allow the SNS and its members to find their own voice, their own interests, and their own passions – which may well be very different from what is first assumed by the creator. Google gets this, though not yet within the construct of the SNS’s. What Google did do successfully was to buy USENET – the original newsgroups – and then build an superstructure on top of that – make it modern, sustainable, durable, and more readable.

Google returned USENET to relevance in a world that considered newsgroups and IRC to be dead or dying. Each and every one of communities on USENET is amazingly vertical, but they could all back up and back out to the larger USENET community – to the equivalent of the “welcome new students??? meetings and gatherings colleges offer to entering Freshmen.

Communities that are too vertical tend to shoe horn the “general topics??? conversations into hidden “off topic??? eddies. That is just the opposite of what should be done. The conversation should be general, cross-pollinating, and then move, after a conversation starts, into another room.

Start with an amazing platform, collect users, listen and watch them to see how they’re playing with the software application objects, widgets, and tools (are they playing with the toy or the box?), and then build for the users base, withholding judgment. Digg is a case study for this: start small, grow organically, and allow your members to find themselves.

The developers of Digg realized that after initial vertical growth based on the general members of Slashdot (techie, geeky, teens, boys), digg would suffer from the same sort of vulnerabilities that Slashdot suffered when Slashdot didn’t evolve and grow and broaden itself.

People love talking about Linux, but when happens when the Dow drops or the elections come? Where will the conversation happen? Where is the “kitchen??? at the party where every eventually goes to just talk about general interest stuff? Unless there are opportunities to express and share so-called “off-topic??? conversation right there, within the community in which members are already committed, with members to whom they’re already committed, then they are bound to go elsewhere.

Starting small and allowing the community to design itself is much different than starting big and losing one’s focus. Other mistakes happen when community builders make assumptions as to what participants, members, and lurkers want. Another mistake is putting a wall up around the community so that non-members cannot get a full feeling for the community from without.

The best SNS’s, virtual worlds, and online communities are honeypots. By honeypot, I am not suggesting, “a server that is configured to detect an intruder by mirroring a real production system. It appears as an ordinary server doing work, but all the data and transactions are phony. Located either in or outside the firewall, the honeypot is used to learn about an intruder’s techniques as well as determine vulnerabilities in the real system.” Although I am, sort of. The best SNS needs to be appealing, attractive, sweet, and compelling. Community-builders and SNS ASP developers need to be willing learn about member techniques, interests, processes, and needs, as well as determine “vulnerabilities” in the SNS platform that may repel, turn off, or limit the evolution and growth of the community.

To channel Chauncey Gardener for a second, one must do whatever one must to make sure that the earth in the garden is moist and well fed, one must seed well and completely, one must keep the garden in sun and water, one must encourage the garden to grow as it will for only in its growth will the garden be successful, and then, after rigorous growth, pruning and weeding must be done, only in order to allow the garden to be healthy, not to turn the garden into topiary. Okay, I am done.

Digg allows all of these things. Digg is perfectly useful and compelling even as an alien, but it is way more fun and interesting when you’re a citizen, that’s for sure. An SNS community needs to be as attractive as possible because exclusivity is no longer essential or even valuable. What is valuable is “useful,??? “interesting,??? and “authentic.??? They also have to have community buy-in and the best enjoy a certain fanatical devotion. Just like the best Universities and Colleges.

And Digg allowed its member to tell it when it was time to evolve past tech and geek news. Digg did not limit its scope or define itself too tightly with being “gear for geeks??? or “news for nerds.??? That would have ultimately been the death of Digg.

What the best Universities (such as Yale) understand is that it is not the student who is blessed and honored by being accepted by a top college (Yale College) but rather it is the college that should be blessed and honored (and should be grateful) that such a quality student is accepting its offers and actually attending – choosing – their particular school: Yale instead of Princeton, Brown, Harvard, Oxford, Cambridge, Dartmouth, Stanford, Columbia, Berkeley, etc…

Harvard, too, is aware that although in the short-term Harvard makes the Harvard Man, over the long term, it is Harvard Men who made Harvard and continue to make Harvard. “Who have you graduated recently???? Unless the quality and character of its students and alumni remain top-drawer, Harvard is not guaranteed its position as “top three??? in USA Today alongside Princeton and Yale. No matter how grand its endowment.

So, Harvard and Yale spoil their students rotten! My friends who attended Harvard or Yale college swoon over those 4 years like I swoon over my first love.

Likewise, SNS’s, virtual worlds, and virtual communities need to realize that at any one point, their brand is only as good as the collective that is manifest in the users, the members, the lurkers, the stewards, and the alumni of the property.

This isn’t only true in SNS’s. The same thing can be said of the most successful message boards and online communities. The most important distinction, I think, is that all of these “rooms” and all of these “clubs” and all of these spaces where (and are) defined and created by the communities themselves. Sui generis. And this sort of ownership – “for us by us,??? as the slogan goes over as Howard Rheingold’s Brainstorms community – should never be underestimated.

The Well has Howard Rheingold as a member and alumnus, for example, and the credibility of all that he has made and done; over time, more and more virtual communities, virtual worlds, and SNS will be known for their members as well: who studies, who studied, and who wants to join.

“What’s in it for me??? (WIIFM) and the concept of pride of ownership are important – essential – ingredients of a sustainable, deep, thriving, and healthy community. The success of MySpace and of Facebook is that the verticals are not (were not) defined for them by their grand architects – they are self-creating, self-forming, and also self-destructing. They form, reform, mutate and disperse after they hit a limit of general conversation and then either break off and reform into an “interest group” or “club” or they self-check and work to “get back on topic.”

SNS’s and communities in general tend to be formed in one of two ways: like Paris or like London. Intelligence Design (architecture) or Emergent Design. The later never looks very beautiful or the way people – or the creators, investors, and architects – expect (or want) it to look, because investors and designers tend to not be able to control it – and when they do try to impost order, often in a heavy-handed way, they also tend to scare off all of their members, too.

This organic revolution has proven its success online time and time again. The Internet does not respond (well or at all) to command and control. The smartest Web 2.0 platforms allow the “masses of asses” (yes, the customer; yes, us) to define the platform and the experience – their own and collective environment and experience.

MySpace does this amazingly well and so does Facebook. Until recently, Friendster suffered from a vision and used command and control tactics to try to coerce its users that “it didn’t really want to do things that way??? and Friendster members abandoned in droves to platforms and experiences not so monitored by “mom and dad.???

A command and control grand vision doesn’t work when you develop an environment that needs to be truly both attractive and compelling much more than it needs to be informational or instructional. An SNS needs to be attractive, diversional, compelling, amusing, and entertaining – never limiting.

My analogy of college and high school never mentioned classrooms or classes for training or learning. People do enough of that at school and at work. An SNS needs to give its users a university campus without any expectations or concepts of dropping out, getting judged, doing homework, or being held accountable for anything.

A good SNS should be all late-night wine-influenced discussions of Descartes and Plato and the summer afternoons on the quad and the time playing Xbox with your roommates.

When I go onto my long-term online communities, the Well, The Meta Network, USENET, and Brainstorms, there are many very deep and very vertical communities, discussing things as frivolous as fashion and video games and as deep as how to survive cancer, how to get a post doc grant, and very deep discussions on “spirit,” “chaos theory,” and “world politics.”

What makes this amazing and sustainable is that there are an infinite number of ways to get along, to move into a space of intense conversation, and then to pull back into common areas, just to see who’s around. In a university setting, this could be the dining hall, the quad, the commons, etc. These spaces are very important.

If you think about all of this in terms of evolution, then we can think about the way things evolve in the most perverse ways when isolated from others of its kinds. So, if there are impervious walls – gaps or voids, mountains or ridges – between these vertical markets, SNS’s, and communities, then there may be an initial success, but there can also be a terrible volatility. One plague or drought can decimate a population completely.

Having a commons allows members and visitors to have a place to meet new people, have new experiences, and learn of new clubs, new opportunities, and new places – inbreeding versus crossbreeding. Ultimately, a diversity of visitors helps build a more resilient, invested, and self-identifing community. They will become “students for life??? at best and proud alums at worst. They will carry the brand awareness, even if their lives become too busy to participate any more.

They will become life long brand ambassadors for your community. Proud alumni.

And, in terms of “viral marketing,” it is also important when it comes to a member of an SNS “inviting his friends” – not all of my friends have the same vertical interests that I do… They could have very different interests – but as I explore the “commons” of an SNS, I can note that there are things happening online that “friend x” and “friend y” would love, and that would be my incentive to invite them on board.

Boompa? I am the only person I know in my entire community – that is not true, my buddy has an Audi S4 – who is into cars. My buddy is an Audi driver and I am a BMW driver. Does that mean we’re both drivers? Does that mean we love cars or our particular car? Do we cross over on performance sedans? On German cars? On luxury cars?

You have to offer the tools to allow the market to choose for itself, otherwise, you might never find out that the SNS needs all three, or none at all.

A “Modularized SNS” should be neutral like a university (unlike MySpace, which is pretty pre-defined as to what the demographic is), and there are lots of “vertical niche SNS’s” (e.g. car enthusiasts, gourmet cooking, travel, Rolex fans, Republican politicos, etc.) That way, everyone can form a SNS experience that actually fits them by modularly assembling the groups of people who have similar interests, (not just friends-in-common!)

My buddy David Gelles writes for the Tech section of the FT, my favorite paper. Check out his latest article, New corporate firefighters. Sadly for me, he can’t shamelessly promote my company, Abraham Harrison LLC, because he has ‘journalistic integrity;’ however, it is awesome he works there because he writes awesomely-accessible articles about my space, including social media marketing, social media PR, blogger engagement, Twitter, and also the world of online and social media crisis-response.  It is amazing!  I beat up Pepsi Max over on AdAge and a couple weeks later, Gelles writes an article about the space.  I am both amazingly proud and a little paranoid!

New corporate firefighters By David Gelles

When advertisers launched a campaign last September for the pain reliever Motrin, they hoped to attract the attention of mothers whose backs might be sore from wearing baby-carriers. The advertisements implied that while baby-carriers might be fashionable, hauling a child around could be painful.

Mothers were not amused. Soon after the ads were released, anti-Motrin campaigns appeared on Facebook and blogs. Outraged mums, furious at the suggestion that their babies were a hassle, posted rebuttal videos on YouTube. Through Twitter, the micro-blogging service, thousands of people attacked the company.

Motrin was caught off-guard. For days, no company representative replied. Critics accused the company of being not only insensitive but also unresponsive.

Eventually a marketing executive at McNeil Consumer Healthcare, the subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson that markets Motrin, e-mailed individual bloggers to apologise for the campaign. But the damage was done.

Jeanette Gibson of CiscoThe “Motrin moms” episode illustrates the power of social media — the expanding network of websites that allow users to interact with each other and, increasingly, with companies. It also demonstrates the perils for enterprises that are unprepared to interact with social media.

But now a growing number of companies, including Ford Motor, PepsiCo, Wells Fargo and Dell, are creating new high-level jobs to ready themselves for engagement with social media, with titles such as director of social media, head of communities and conversation, vice-president of experiential marketing and digital communications manager. The role of these new executives is to monitor and influence what is being said about their companies on the internet.

Johnson & Johnson made its own appointment in the wake of the Motrin debacle. Having already dabbled in social media, in December the company promoted Marc Monseau, a 10-year company veteran and former director of media relations, to director of social media. “My responsibility is to work with the corporate office and the individual companies to better interact online,” Mr Monseau says. “It underscores the fact that we realise this is an important audience and one that we need to develop relationships with.”

These new jobs represent a broad shift in media relations strategy at large companies. “Corporate communications has radically changed,” says Andy Sernovitz, chief executive of the Blog Council, an organisation for heads of social media at big companies. “It’s no longer just companies talking to the press, and customer service talking to customers. All these other people showed up in the ­middle. They may not be press and they may not be customers, but suddenly their collective voice is bigger than the traditional channels.”

The essence of social media is conversation. Rather than a one-way stream of information, where companies make announcements to the press and customers, social media enables a great deal of interaction, where companies are in constant dialogue with the public. “We’ve seen a shift from doing things the old way to now having conversations with our customers,” says Jeanette Gibson, director of new media for Cisco Systems (pictured).

Ms Gibson, who began her job in 2007, says there is now a mandate at Cisco that all staff be attuned to what is being said about Cisco online. “It has definitely shifted how we’ve done communications,” she says. “Our executives are video blogging every day. Everybody’s job is now social media.”

Dell, the computer maker, has one of the most robust corporate social media programmes. Bob Pearson, former senior vice-president of corporate communications, became vice-president of communities and conversation for Dell in 2007.

He now has 45 people working for him. The core team works on “blog resolution” — trawling the web for dissatisfied customers, then attempting to contact them to make amends. Others on Dell’s social media team manage the company’s 80 Twitter accounts and 20 Facebook pages. Still others manage IdeaStorm, Dell’s forum for customer feedback.

Dell is taking its customer feedback seriously. When the company launched the Latitude laptop last summer, six of the features, including backlit keyboard and fingerprint reader, were ideas that came from IdeaStorm. “It’s always worth talking directly with your customers. It’s always worth listening to them,” says Mr Pearson. “It’s the wisdom of crowds.”

Peter Shankman, a social media expert and founder of Help a Reporter Out, a service that broadcasts reporters’ requests to a network of experts, says many companies are still reluctant to get involved: “Companies are slow to adapt because they’re still not 100 per cent sure they can make money with social media,” he says.

Yet Dell, for one, has made a business of it. By broadcasting discount alerts on Twitter, it says, it has generated more than $1m in sales. And in the US, 59 of the 100 leading retailers, including Best Buy and Wal-Mart, now have a fan page on Facebook, according to Rosetta, an interactive marketing agency.

Other savings can be realised through the Web’s ability to reach many people at once. “If you solve someone’s problem on the phone, nobody knows,” says Mr Sernovitz. “If you solve that same problem in writing on a blog, it costs you no more, but thousands of people are satisfied. And then, if 100 people never call because they found the answer, you very, very quickly get to multimillion-dollar savings.”

Other companies are using Twitter to douse public relations fires before they erupt. Scott Monty, head of social media for Ford Motors, used Twitter to appease users who were angry after the carmaker sued an enthusiast website that was selling unauthorised Ford merchandise. When fans of the enthusiast site posted angry messages, Mr Monty “tweeted back” to explain the company’s position.

Bonin Bough, who was appointed director of social media for PepsiCo last year, also used Twitter to defuse a brewing crisis after the company released a series of advertisements depicting a cartoon calorie character committing suicide.

“Social media is much more than getting out there and having conversations,” says Mr Pearson of Dell. “It transforms a business if you use it correctly.”

My buddy David Gelles is now a Technology reporter and blogger for the Financial Times and I was so happy to see David writing about Twitter PR, something very dear to my heart, Companies use Twitter to pack PR punch, including Scott Monty of Ford as well as the gang from PepsiCo’s Pepsi Max controversy:

Companies use Twitter to pack PR punch 
By David Gelles in San Francisco

Published: December 30 2008 19:16 | Last updated: December 30 2008 19:16

Twitter, a booming micro-blogging service, is inspiring business to manage its message in 140 characters or less.

Its streams of short text messages, publicly broadcast over the web, are being treated as the new frontline of internet conversation. Companies including Ford and PepsiCo have been dousing public relations fires with pithy communication bursts to the Twitter community.

“There’s a rapid-fire element to Twitter that causes conversations to go viral when something bad happens with a company,” says Jackie Huba, co-founder of the Society for Word of Mouth, an organisation that monitors social media. “Companies that have a Twitter account are prepared. If something goes wrong they can respond.”

PepsiCo turned to Twitter this month after users began posting criticisms of a Pepsi Max advertisement, which depicted a cartoon calorie committing suicide.

Huw Gilbert, communications manager for PepsiCo International, “tweeted”, or posted a public message, in reply. “Huw from Pepsi here,” he wrote. “We agree this creative is totally inappropriate; we apologise and please know it won’t run again.”

Critics saw Mr Gilbert’s post, with one “tweeting” back: “Thank you?.?.?.?for having the guts to get on Twitter on behalf of Pepsi and give us an update on the suicide ad.”

Such personal interaction from a company representative helps defuse a crisis, says Ms Huba. “People like feeling like they’re being heard,” she says.

Scott Monty, head of social media for Ford Motors, used Twitter to deflect criticism away from the carmaker after it filed suit against an enthusiast website that was selling unauthorised Ford decals. Fans of the site posted angry messages but Mr Monty used Twitter to explain the company’s position.

“Part of my job is to humanise the company – you want to interact,” Mr Monty says.

Starbucks, Comcast, JetBlue and Home Depot are among companies using Twitter accounts to promote products and provide customer service.

Bob Pearson, head of communities and conversation for Dell, said his company had generated $1m in computer-related sales through alerts posted to Twitter.

San Francisco-based Twitter is also becoming a platform for a range of media and social networking start-ups using its tools to develop communities and content rapidly, and at low cost.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008

I received this post to my Wall, “I fellow Kama’aina from Radford HS (not from Punahou or Iolani) wrote a really wonderful post about MyDataisMyData. Mahalo, Amy Jussel!” I don’t know if you knew it, but I grew up in Hawai`i-Nei and attended Saint Louis School and became Student Body President and wrestled and was a “Ranger” in JROTC and even visited Washington for the Government-study course, CLOSE-UP! Well, Saint Louis ’88, is the answer. Other than making me super-nostalgic, Amy Jussel wrote a really fantastic piece on MyDataIsMyData on her blog, Shaping Youth, “My Data is My Data:” Putting Choice Back into Social Media:

My Data is My Data.org is a plug-in for those of us who are not so wild about social media hubs tracking our every move for data-mining purposes like the infamous Facebook Beacon controversy I wrote about in those two posts.

Believe me, the irony doesn’t escape me that the development of this useful plug-in to bring ‘choice’ back to the internet from vested interests and corporate coffers is being sponsored by a MySpace meets CraigsList style-ad community called FlugPo. (as a name generation gal, I have to ask myself, where DO they get these names?!)

I love it when technologists and advertisers trump their own kind, offering solutions-based freebies that kids and parents can ALL benefit from in open-source good-guy style…

I’ve officially joined the My Data is My Data Facebook group to see where this is headed in the privacy/preferences arena. We’ll see. Created by Chris Abraham of Abraham Harrison (who also started ‘Facecrook’ to warn folks about the Beacon balderdash) the FB group is promoting customization of preferences to suit YOUR agenda, not the advertisers’.

Hmn. Sounds good to me…

You’d think Facebook would ‘get it’ that we want to control our own data…

…Especially after they got a strong bracer from 50,000 of us in 8 days using their own mobilization tools to tell them we were ticked about being blindsided, sending our friends our purchases and preferences without our permission.

Yet…after a few (forced) ‘mea culpas’ in the press, and shifting to an ‘opt-in’ format, Facebook still snoops, spies, tracks, and harvests our info on the back end (albeit much more stealthily) saving the info for gawdonlyknows what’s next…

Yep. I’m hoping this new My Data is My Data plug-in has some chops.

Granted, the last freakin’ thing I need is another free ‘toolbar,’ but it sounds like a logical, user-driven way to put the control of your private information back into your own hands with all kinds of alerts, notifications, and ‘cookie’ choices, (alas not the chocolate chip kind) to customize your digital footprint beyond the ‘all or nothing’ approach.

A little pop-up box warns, “you are trying to navigate a FB collaborating website, would you like to continue?” and the user can change preferences or turn off or on cookies accordingly. Seems fair.

My first instinct is to globalize it into a ‘yeah, what about Google and all the REALLY big search engine info-collectors…how can this be applied universally?’ dialog…

What about Double-Click? Double-Fusion? And every other integrated mega-mogul marketing play that’s out for kids’ eyeballs?

Even those of us who LOVE social media mobilization, HATE being sold out and commodified, especially without asking. And that’s not even counting the issue of kids! The arrogant gall of techno tools shipping data to ad partners on an “opt-out” or saturated eyeball/urban wallpaper basis is bound to have backlash…(if not from the parents, then from youth themselves!)

Guess THAT might fall into the policy arena on a much larger FCC and FTC privacy scale…

Or not. Those watchdogs haven’t been barking much…

Though today, the Center for a Digital Democracy (CDD) and members of the Children’s Media Policy Coalition, (specifically American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, the American Academy of Pediatrics, Children Now, etc.) called the feds on their lax-n-loose policies…asking the the FTC ‘powers that be’ to get with the program and update themselves regarding online behavioral advertising and the sorry state of self-regulation in the youth arena. Yay.

Self-regulation is great in theory, but let’s face it, COPPA, schmoppa…

Sure, advertisers are supposed to comply with COPPA but we all know the corporate claws have been out early on, insidiously working fast and furious to blitz tweens and teens with profiling and branding sans privacy protection, before parents, media and the snail-pace of governmental bigwigs even get a whiff of what’s goin’ on. (um, Neopets, anyone?)

Many parents are still at the ‘What is social media?’ stage, much less having any hint of awareness of data-mining kids’ behavioral patterns and online fingerprints.

Talk about a tipped scale of the fairness factor…

Even the kids themselves don’t know the degree of personal data-mining going on…

Judging by our own Shaping Youth tween and teen advisors, they get ticked off when they see their eyeballs are being harvested and sold as fast as those macabre ‘urban myth, donor kidney heists’ where someone falls asleep and wakes up with their organs gone! (ooh, a tub full of ice and kids’ eyeballs, ewww…got a horrific visual there)

On the flip side, when people DO want info tailored to them, it can be perceived as a benefit and ‘value-add’ (e.g. a coupon for a store they frequent, or sale on the same block served to them via their GPS mobile).

It’s all a matter of privacy-security, how ads are handled (opt in/opt out, invasive vs. requested, etc.) who it benefits, and how to engage consumers in the dialog to advocate for themselves, and put the power back in THEIR hands.

My data is my data outlines the FAQ very succinctly and clearly on the whole info-sharing issue, at least as it applies to Facebook.

But again…what about a more global policy here?

I’d like to know who’s capturing MY info in all arenas…ever since I read Nowhere to Hide and Generation Digital I’ve had my awareness at “level orange.”

This news report on CNET yesterday gives a glimpse of prelim industry response in this glib comment, “if you have an agenda to push, remember this phrase, ‘protect the children.”

Hmn. C’mon, now, folks. Be fair.

I’m not a child, but I deserve the right to control MY own information.

And yes, kids ARE in a ‘most vulnerable’ category, no matter how much advertisers want to ‘pooh-pooh’ it…

Besides, the Beacon outcry on FB was an amalgamation of collegiate, adult, teens of all ages, speaking to the “surveillance aspects” applicable to us ALL. Those privacy practices need disclosure for everyone…NOT just ‘for the children.’

That said, here’s today’s (14 pp pdf) from child advocates submitted to the FTC from the Institute of Public Representation at Georgetown University. And, here’s the official FTC filing (37pp) addressed to FTC Office of the Secretary, Donald Clark…

Finally, below is late-breaking news from Congressman Edward Markey’s office with an early-stage reaction to same. Perusing his site, it looks like last week he opened a hearing on virtual worlds too, so this lawmaker could be one to watch as these digital events begin to unfold.

Meanwhile, kids, teens, youth advocates, parents…What do YOU have to say on the data-mining/privacy front?

Is mandatory transparency the way to go? Plug-ins and pop-ups when you’re visiting a site that monitors you? Age-appropriate regulation? Walled-off regions within platforms that are commercial-free and/or non-traceable?

Can the ‘my data is my data’ concept be applied to a larger scale beyond social media applicable to mobile, VoIP, virtual worlds and virtual goods via cookie-setting that puts choice into the user’s hands?

What are your solutions and ideas?

Sound off…As I wrote here, the digital frontier is ‘unwritten’…

No matter what your views are, now’s the time to tap into your own gut instincts and best practices and begin to have your say, before others do it for you!

Visual Credits: eyeballs: WPClipart

Congressman Edward Markey’s comments on the FTC filing today:

MARKEY: NEW ONLINE PRIVACY SAFEGUARDS NEEDED TO PROTECT CHILDREN, TEENS

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Representative Edward J. Markey (D-MA), a senior member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee and co-Chairman of the Bi-Partisan Congressional Privacy Caucus, released the following statement this afternoon in response to the Federal Trade Commission’s proposed principles for industry self-regulation of online behavioral advertising:

“The FTC has appropriately recognized the pressing need for updated online privacy protections for children that reflect the sophisticated data collection and behavioral targeting practices now used widely across the Internet. Without stronger protections, including a prohibition on collecting data on children’s and teens’ online activities, young Internet users may become unwitting targets of the ‘hidden persuaders’ of the digital age. The evolution of online behavioral advertising since the enactment of the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act requires a commensurate rejuvenation of privacy safeguards. I look forward to monitoring the FTC’s work in this important area.”

Related Shaping Youth Posts on Internet Privacy/Kids’ Concerns:

Facebook: Can You Hear Me Now? Your Peepin’ is Creepin’ Me Out!

Dare to Share? What’s Your Beacon Story?

Related Posts Elsewhere:

Digital Natives/Harvard Law: Deleting Facebook (vs. Deactivating It )

Charlene Li’s Close Encounter with Facebook Beacon (Groundswell/Forrester Rsch)

Rough Seas Nearly Sink Facebook’s Beacon (CNET)

Lessons from the Beacon Backlash: iMediaConnection

Facebook Beacon Backlash Leads To Apology & Opt-Out Option: Laughing Squid blog

I have been working with Abraham Harrison, my firm, Flugpo, our client, and MyDataIsMyData.org to create a plugin, currently for IE, that would protect and alert browsers from any Facebook Beacon sneakiness. Check it out! The plugin is forthcoming but it’s not out just yet outside of the internal beta wall. We have some pretty amazing press so far, Mashable: Facebook Beacon Haters Get Their Own Plugin, and, TechCrunch: MyDataIsMyData: An Anti-Facebook Beacon Plug-In That Nobody Needs.

Mashable: Facebook Beacon Haters Get Their Own Plugin

Facebook Beacon has caught a lot of flack since its release, to the dismay of many advertisers out there. While the backlash hasn’t been as noticeable as some of Facebook’s other releases, there are still a good number of folks out there that would rather not see their faces on other people’s feeds as part of an advertisement.

My Data is My Data has beta-launched a browser plugin that will alert you when Facebook Beacon’s system tries to make a connection with a partner site, so you can determine when and where you’d like to share your third-party purchasing activity with your Facebook friends. While there are already a number of privacy options inserted into Facebook, and even more services out there that will rid you of cookie problems all together, Facebook Beacon’s mainstream press presence in itself may help My Data is My Data gain a good amount of users based on principle alone.

The plugin is still a bit buggy, but the team is working on it. Given Facebook’s restrictions to curb newsfeed abuse, and the limited growth of Beacon, there will surely be more tweaking on Facebook’s end in order to ensure that end users are more or less happy, whether this is through voluntary manipulation or oblivious bliss, with the Beacon’s implementation.

TechCrunch: MyDataIsMyData: An Anti-Facebook Beacon Plug-In That Nobody Needs

The Facebook Beacon controversy may not be making headlines any more, but the privacy concerns it raised still linger. According to this post about MyDataIsMyData, an upcoming privacy-monitoring service sponsored by classifieds site Flugpo, Beacon may still monitor traffic and personal data, even if a user has opted-out of the system. In response, MyDataIsMyData is creating a plugin for Internet Explorer that enables users to eliminate any traces of Beacon from their system.

Facebook Beacon tracks usage information by monitoring cookies on a client’s computer. As users browse various participating websites, such as Blockbuster and eBay, their activities are relayed back to Facebook, where it can be shared with friends. Many users find such notifications to be intrusive, and much of the original controversy stemmed from the automatic inclusion of all users in the system.

The MyDataIsMyData plug-in notifies users via their browser toolbar when Facebook or one of Beacon’s participating affiliates creates or accesses these cookies. The plug-in can automatically delete these cookies at regular intervals, and also allows for users to individually select which (if any) sites will still function with Beacon. Finally, the toolbar will feature a constantly-updated list of sites that participate in Beacon, allowing users to boycott them, should they choose to do so. MyDataIsMyData will soon be available for Internet Exporer, and plans to expand to offer functionality for both Firefox and Macintosh-based browsers.

It should be noted that while the plugin offers some value in terms of a sense of security, it is fairly easy to monitor cookies with a number of extensions using the Firefox browser. Furthermore, by installing the free toolbar, the users will be placing their trust in MyDataIsMyData—the same type of users who presumably would be put off by installing any sort of monitoring software on their computers.

My Data is My Data Social Media News Release

Flugpo Sponsors Development of My Data is My Data

Counters Growing Concern about the Privacy Rights of Social Network Users

News Facts

• In response to the growing concerns that users of social network sites have had over privacy, the growing social network site, MyDataIsMyData.org.

• This free plug-in (found at MyDataIsMyData.org)is a toolbar that will allow users several different options to monitor and delete cookies, offline content, and track visits to Facebook Beacon collaborator companies. Once downloaded, the toolbar allows users to decide how often he or she would like certain cookies deleted. The user can choose to delete Facebook cookies and Facebook Beacon collaborator companies’ cookies. It also includes the option to delete all cookies at once or none at all.

• Selling private information for profit unbeknownst to the users is an abuse of trust and MyDataIsMyData.org hopes to empower users by allowing them to control the amount of personal information that they make visible.

• MyDataIsMyData.org was created as a direct response to the Facebook Beacon uproar, which broached many privacy concerns for users of social network sites.

About the Facebook Beacon

The Facebook Beacon refers to the agreement that Facebook has with popular online retailers. This agreement allows Facebook to utilize their users’ private information in ways that violate their privacy. When a Facebook user purchases something with one of the participating online retailers a message is sent to the user’s “friends” on Facebook, notifying them of the his or her purchase or transaction with that online retailer.

Facebook Beacon was meant to be optional; a buyer/Facebook user could choose to opt out of letting their friends know about their latest purchase. However, several instances have emerged in which personal information from the Facebook Beacon network was sent to the user’s friends without his or her approval. This is just one example of many ways in which social network sites have been working to monetize their user’s experience.

About Flugpo

Flugpo was developed as a place where people can go to make friends, share photos, network professionally, share ideas, buy and sell items, and list and locate jobs. As an online resource for everyday people, Flugpo is a great community for people to make new friends, share common interests and reach out to like-minded individuals and discuss current topics, review top movies and share stories Flugpo also creates a space where businesses can promote their services.

Flugpo is often referred to as “Myspace meets Craigslist” by their members. Created in the 2007, Flugpo takes an interesting approach to classified listings by eliminating the anonymity features found with Craigslist and allowing the members to connect with one another. “The classifieds, as the world knows them now has no community, said David Metz, founder of Flugpo. Each classified posting is linked to the profile of the member posting the ad. Given the current landscape of Internet safety, Flugpo is quick to address safety concerns by connecting all classified listings with a “face and name.”

Contacts

For Press and PR Inquiries

Contact Dani Sevilla, Media and PR Strategist at dani@mydataismydata.us

For More Information About Flugpo

Visit http://www.flugpo.com or email David Metz, CEO at davidmetz@flugpo.com

Multimedia Elements

Download the Flugpo Logo

Download the My Data is My Data Logo (400 pixels)

Download a Screenshot of the Plug-In

Additional Resources

The My Data is My Data Group on Facebook

Information about My Data is My Data on the Flugpo Forums

The My Data is My Data Group on Flugpo

Social Media

Add to del.icio.us | Digg it | Google Bookmark | reddit | StumbleUpon | Twit This

Tags

Beacon | Facebook | Facebook Beacon | MDiMD | My Data is My Data | MyDataIsMyData.org | privacy | privacy advocates | privacy protection

Flugpo Sponsors Development of My Data is My Data

Counters Growing Concern about the Privacy Rights of Social Network Users

News Facts

• In response to the growing concerns that social network site user’s have had over privacy, growing social network, Flugpo, has sponsored the development of a plug-in to help counteract the collection and sale of personal information. This plug-in will be available through MyDataIsMyData.org

• MyDataIsMyData.org has created this free plug-in: a toolbar that will allow users several different options to monitor and delete Cookies, offline content and track visits to Facebook Beacon collaborator companies. Once downloaded, this toolbar allows a user to decide how often he or she would like certain Cookies deleted. The user can choose to delete Facebook cookies, Facebook Beacon collaborator companies’ cookies, both, all cookies, or none.

• Selling private information for profit unbeknownst to the user’s is an abuse of their trust and MyDataIsMyData.org hopes to empower these user’s by allowing them to control the amount of personal information that they make visible.

• MyDataIsMyData.org was created as a direct response to the Facebook Beacon uproar which broached many privacy concerns for users of social network sites. With this plug-in, MyDataIsMyData.org is hoping to empower the concerned social network site user by allowing them to control the amount of private information that can be seen by these sites and to stop the sale of his or her personal information.

About the Facebook Beacon

The Facebook Beacon refers to Facebook’s agreements with popular online retailers to facilitate the use of Facebook user’s information. When a Facebook user purchased something with one of the participating online retailers a message would be sent to the user’s “friends” on Facebook notifying them of the his or her endorsement of the retailer.

Facebook Beacon was meant to be optional; a buyer/Facebook user could choose to opt out of letting their friends know about their last purchase. However, several instances have emerged in which personal information from the Facebook Beacon network was sent to the user’s friends without his or her approval. This is just one example of many ways in which social network sites have been working to monetize their user’s experience.

About Flugpo

Flugpo was developed to be a place where people can go to make friends, share photos, network professionally, share ideas, buy and sell items & list and locate jobs. As an online resource for everyday people, Flugpo creates opportunities for businesses to promote their services. Aside from the professional aspect, Flugpo is a great community for people to make new friends, share common interests and reach out to like-minded individuals and discuss current topics, review top movies and share stories.

Flugpo is often referred to as “Myspace meets Craigslist” by their staff and members. Created in the 2007, Flugpo takes an interesting approach to classified listings by eliminating the anonymity features found with Craigslist and allowing the members to connect with one another. “The classifeds, as the world knows them now has no community, said David Metz, founder of Flugpo. Each classified posting is linked to the profile of the member posting the ad. Given the current landscape of Internet safety, Flugpo is quick to address safety concerns by connecting all classified listings with a “face and name.”

Contacts

For Press and PR Inquiries

Contact Dani Sevilla, Media and PR Strategist at dani@mydataismydata.us

For More Information About Flugpo

Visit http://www.flugpo.com or email David Metz, CEO at davidmetz@flugpo.com

Multimedia Elements

Download the Flugpo Logo

Download the My Data is My Data Logo (400 pixels)

Download a Screenshot of the Plug-In

Additional Resources

The My Data is My Data Group on Facebook

Information about My Data is My Data on the Flugpo Forums

The My Data is My Data Group on Flugpo

Social Media

Add to del.icio.us | Digg it | Google Bookmark | reddit | StumbleUpon | Twit This

Tags

Beacon | Facebook | Facebook Beacon | MDiMD | My Data is My Data | MyDataIsMyData.org | privacy | privacy advocates | privacy protection

I have been working with the gang over at Flugpo to put together a plug-in for Internet Explorer (IE) for Windows that will allow folks to be able to track what is going on with Facebook Beacon, your cookies, your JavaScript, and Facebook’s advertising partners. Thing is, it isn’t out of private alpha yet so if you’re interested, please join either the Flugpo MyDataisMyData group or the Facebook My Data is My Data group and we’ll let you know when it’s up! Via Memes.org and the Social Media News Room.

What is My Data is My Data?

• MyDataisMyData.org empowers users of social network sites by giving the user control over the personal information an SNS can surreptitiously collect and sell.
• Flugpo.com, an SNS that never has and never will collect or sell private information about its users, sponsored the development of a plug-in that will be available through MyDataIsMyData.org

Why Was My Data is My Data Created?

• MyDataIsMyData.org was created as a direct response to Facebook Beacon.
• Beacon is Facebook’s way of making a profit from your private information by selling it to online retailers (such as Amazon.com or Blockbuster)
• When Beacon was first introduced, whenever a Facebook user purchased something with one of the participating online retailers, a message would be sent to the users “friends” on Facebook notifying them of the his or her endorsement of the retailer

Facebook and its Advertisers are Spying on You Right Now

• Although Facebook has stopped publicizing their users personal information on purchases to their Facebook friends, it has not stopped spying on its users and selling their personal information for profit
• MyDataIsMyData.org wants to help the user be aware of which retailers are using this method of data collection so he or she can choose to avoid those retailers

Take Back Your Privacy with the My Data is My Data Plug-In

• The free plug-in is a toolbar that will allow users several different options to monitor and delete Cookies, offline content and track visits to Facebook Beacon collaborator companies.
• Once equipped with the plug-in, the user decides how often he or she would like certain Cookies deleted. The user can choose to delete Facebook cookies, Facebook Beacon collaborator companies’ cookies, both, all cookies, or none. The user may also choose to delete all or no offline content at various time intervals. The user can set up the toolbar to notify him or her of visits to Facebook Beacon collaborator website. It will also feature a drop-down list of these collaborators updated on a daily basis through the MyDataIsMyData.org website.

Protect your Own Privacy…and Help Other Victims Do the Same

• The features MyDataIsMyData.org is offering are meant to protect users privacy and allow them to be more conscious of the way their private information is being used. The plug-in is a work in progress and we need your feedback, bug reports and suggestions to make it better.
• Support for users of the toolbar will be provided though a forum on Flugpo.com.

About Flugpo

• Flugpo was developed to be a place where people can go to make friends, share photos, network professionally, share ideas, buy and sell items & list and locate jobs. As an online resource for eveyday people, Flugpo creates opportunities for businesses to promote their services. Aside from the professional aspect, Flugpo is a great community for people to make new friends, share common interests and reach out to like-minded individuals and discuss current topics, review top movies and share stories.
• Flugpo is often referred to as “Myspace meets Craigslist” by their staff and members. Created in the 2007, Flugpo takes an interesting approach to classified listings by eliminating the anonymity features found with Craigslist and allowing the members to connect with one another. “The classifeds, as the world knows them now has no community, said David Metz, founder of Flugpo. Each classified posting is linked to the profile of the member posting the ad. Given the current landscape of Internet safety, Flugpo is quick to address safety concerns by connecting all classified listings with a “face and name.”
• To learn more visit www.flugpo.com or email David Metz, CEO, at davidmetz@flugpo.com

Now that I have moved to Berlin, I get to hear VOA and NPR Worldwide and the European version of BBC Worldwide and I am pretty excited. I can finally hear US propaganda “outside the border” which is fascinating. As part of NPR Worldwide’s broadcast this AM (104.1 FM), I got to hear a show this morning about the history of Public Diplomacy, which I found amazingly interesting. From 1914, I think they said, the US has had a real desire to educate and engage the world, which ended abruptly once we won the cold war. And then it all went to pot, especially since the responsibility of Public Diplomacy has been rolled into the US Department of State. Well, I am all for Public Diplomacy as a strategy that is much more effective than either PR or a propaganda war. One of the most useful past strategies, which is being gutted because of post 9-11 paranoia, was the global encouragement of students to study in the USA. One lad from Egypt spoke of his experience in Washington State at the University of Washington, saying, “I got to experience that most Americans live the American Dream on two parents working two jobs, which is something I would never have known from my experience of the USA from TV from Cairo.” Amazingly interesting. Here’s some more info on Public Dimplomacy via Wikipedia via Memes.org

In international relations, the term public diplomacy is a term coined in the 1960s to describe aspects of international diplomacy other than the interactions between national governments. It has been closely associated with the United States Information Agency, which used the term to define its mission. It was originally a euphemism for purportedly truthful propaganda.

Standard diplomacy might be described as the ways in which government leaders communicate with each other at the highest levels, the elite diplomacy we are all familiar with. Public diplomacy, by contrast – according to the definition at the USC Center on Public Diplomacy – focuses on the ways in which a country (or multi-lateral organization such as the United Nations) communicates with citizens in other societies. A country may be acting deliberately or inadvertently, and through both official and private individuals and institutions. Effective public diplomacy starts from the premise that dialogue, rather than a sales pitch, is often central to achieving the goals of foreign policy: public diplomacy must be seen as a two-way street.

Film, television, music, sports, video games and other social/cultural activities are seen by public diplomacy advocates as enormously important avenues for otherwise diverse citizens to understand each other and integral to the international cultural understanding, which they state is a key goal of modern public diplomacy strategy. It involves not only shaping the message(s) that a country wishes to present abroad, but also analyzing and understanding the ways that the message is interpreted by diverse societies and developing the tools of listening and conversation as well as the tools of persuasion.

One of the most successful initiatives which embodies the principles of effective public diplomacy is the creation by international treaty in the 1950s of the European Coal and Steel Community which later became the European Union. Its original purpose after World War II was to tie the economies of Europe together so much that war would be impossible. Supporters of European integration see it as having achieved both this goal and the extra benefit of catalysing greater international understanding as European countries did more business together and the ties among member states’ citizens increased. Opponents of European integration are leery of a loss of national sovereignty and greater centralization of power.

Public diplomacy as beyond propaganda

After the dissolution of the USIA in 1999, the term has continued to be used within the US government, especially the US Department of State. It has been used most often as the foreign policy equivalent of the term public relations, but embodies a much broader frame than this.

Aside from the use of media like the Voice of America, it also includes other kinds of interaction with the public in other countries. Arranging student exchange programs, hosting seminars, and meeting with foreign business and academic leaders are all considered public diplomacy. Indirect public diplomacy includes the everyday activities of citizens internationally, such as everyday cultural activities and products such as films, tourism, theatre, and internet discussion.

The term public diplomacy clearly originated as a euphemism for propaganda. However, this definition is a somewhat dated definition, as more sensitive practitioners embody an intercultural, ‘learning’ approach to public diplomacy, with an emphasis on dialogue rather than propaganda.

A history of the term “public diplomacy”

Nicholas J. Cull of the USC Center on Public Diplomacy, wrote in his essay “‘Public Diplomacy’ Before Gullion: The Evolution of a Phrase:

The earliest use of the phrase “public diplomacy” to surface is actually not American at all but in a leader piece from The Times in January 1856. It is used merely as a synonym for civility in a piece criticizing the posturing of President Franklin Pierce.

According to publicdiplomacy.org, a website sponsored by the USIA Alumni Association,

The term public diplomacy was first used in 1965 by Edmund Gullion, a career diplomat, in connection with the foundation of the Edward R. Murrow Center at Tufts University‘s The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy.

The Murrow Center brochure described public diplomacy as:

the influence of public attitudes on the formation and execution of foreign policies. It encompasses dimensions of international relations beyond traditional diplomacy . . . [including] the cultivation by governments of public opinion in other countries; the interaction of private groups and interests in one country with those of another . . . (and) the transnational flow of information and ideas.

While Gullion and the Murrow Center were the first to use the term public diplomacy, their definition remains contested and controversial. Today, there is no one definition of public diplomacy, there are many definitions (links to other definitions).

The dictionary definition of the word propaganda is “The systematic propagation of a doctrine or cause or of information reflecting the views and interests of those advocating such a doctrine or cause.” Notice that the definition says nothing about whether the material is or is not true; the essence of propaganda is that it is distributed with the intention of supporting a cause. The word literally means “that which ought to be propagated” and originated in the Catholic Church to describe the church agency responsible for evangelising. See the article on propaganda for more detail.

In the United States, however, the word “propaganda” carried and carries the connotation of falsehood. The USIA has always maintained that its agencies, such as the Voice of America, are truthful. In a famous remark, Edward R. Murrow, then director of the USIA, said:

Truth is the best propaganda and lies are the worst. To be persuasive we must be believable; to be believable we must be credible; to be credible we must be truthful. It is as simple as that.

Nevertheless the Smith-Mundt Act of 1948 still prevents the distribution within the United States of official American information which was intended for foreign audiences, for example exempting Voice of America from releasing transcripts in response to FOIA requests.

Broadly speaking, then, until recent times, the term public diplomacy has traditionally been used by those supporting it to mean truthful propaganda. But critics, such as the editors of the National Security Archive at George Washington University, have viewed it in more nefarious terms, as a form of “covert propaganda.” They also report that “the bipartisan report of the Congressional Iran-Contra committees (November 1987, p. 34) found that ‘[i]n fact, “public diplomacy” turned out to mean public relations-lobbying, all at taxpayers’ expense.’”

See also

• Diplomacy Monitor, a tool for tracking Internet-based public diplomacy

References

• Fallows, James (2005) “Success without Victory,” The Atlantic Monthly, 295:1 p. 80 (Evera quotation)

Other relevant articles

• “A Clash of Professional Cultures:The David Kelly Affair” by Biljana Scott (Published in Hannah Slavik (ed.) Intercultural Communication and Diplomacy, DiploFoundation, 2004.)Also see conference slideshow presentation

• “Multiculturalism for the masses: social advertising and public diplomacy post 9/11″ by Biljana Scott (Published in Hannah Slavik (ed.) Intercultural Communication and Diplomacy, DiploFoundation, 2004.)

• “Public Diplomacy” by Pamela H. Smith, Minister-Counselor for Public Affairs, U.S. Embassy, London (Published in “Modern Diplomacy”)

• “Multistakeholder Public Diplomacy of Small and Medium-Sized States: Norway and Canada Compared” by Jozef Bátora (Paper presented to the International Conference on Multistakeholder Diplomacy,Malta, February 11-13, 2005)

External links

• How the World Sees America – Amar Bakshi on Washington Post/Newsweek on Public Diplomacy
• Example of term being used by President George W. Bush in relation to the Middle East – January 19, 2005 The Age
• Public Diplomacy Wiki maintained by the USC Center on Public Diplomacy
• Public Diplomacy (USIAAA)
• Journal of Place Branding and Public Diplomacy
• The Edward R. Murrow Center of Public Diplomacy at The Fletcher School
• Public Diplomacy Research Network

Let me first reveal that Abraham Harrison LLC, my employer and my company, is an online reputation management company — online reputation protection, promotion, defensive SEO, domain name strategy, and crisis management. That said, I could not be happier because online reputation management is apparently the new black, at least according to Techdirt, Forget Publicists, All The Cool Kids Have Online Reputation Managers…

It’s been well-documented that Google has become something of the mythical permanent record teachers warned you about as kids. There are plenty of stories about people losing jobs or discovering dubious information about dates using Google. A few years back, services popped up claiming that they could scrub your online record clean — though, how successful such services could be was certainly called into question. However, it appears that those services have morphed into a new, somewhat scary, category called online reputation management. While it’s to be expected that corporations might have people monitoring online reputations, it’s quite another thing to have individuals hire firms to do the same thing.

(Tip of the hat for the article to Scott Burns, via Marketing Conversation)

I have tried to explain defensive SEO to clients on pitches and here are a couple examples and analogies I have used in the past. I promise to come up with better analogies, but this is what I have at the moment!

Rockets on Israeli Settlements

Most of the time, defensive SEO is sort of like cleaning up a crime scene. There is a lot of manual labor involved in that cleaning. It requires pressurized water hoses, clorox, mops, panes of glass, lots of spackle, and some paint. The goal after a crime has been committed, is to return the scene to normalcy — as if nothing happened here.

Unfortunately, during a crisis situation, the crime is ongoing. I compare it to the daily rocket fire from Lebanon and the Gaza Strip falling randomly on Jewish settlements. Bombing of this sort is random and destructive and done not as a targeted attack but is known as “firing for effect,” which is to say as terrorism and a way of unsettling the settlers.

When it is the security and confidence of a community that is at stake and when there is no way to be sure that the attacks are ever over, returning these settlements in a state of destruction is unacceptable. There are Israeli task forces that have the single-minded job of responding to any and all rocket attacks immediately after the emergency responders leave. The trucks are mobile housing contractors. They have the ability to actively and quickly clean up any and all signs of a destructive attack within hours of the event.

All shrapnel pock marks are spackled, all burn marks are painted over, and all broken glass is replaced. While this may just be a futile act, it is essential for this kind of defensive strategy to continue and continue. Why? Well, this is a game of hearts and minds. This is a game of keeping up appearances to make sure that all the settlers feel safe in their every day life, day after day. This perceived safety is better than none at all. The reality of the day-to-day is enough; however, living in a home with broken windows and the pock marks of shrapnel is too close, especially for neighbors and new settlers.

Cleaning up these attacks daily and footing the bill and resources is the cost of doing business. It is a budgeted line-item, equally important to actually finding ways, both diplomatic and military, to stop the attacks some day.

If one were to wait for the attacks to be over, strategically, ignoring the tactical, then those same hearts and minds might very well decide that living in the settlements, living in Israel, or even moving to Israel is an unacceptable decision.

One must never underestimate perception of safety and its power over both settlers, government, citizens, visitors, tourists, and immigrants; same may be said with a company’s or person’s reputation: investors, employees, relationships, opportunities, and families may become insecure enough to abandon ship.

El Al Jumbo Jets Chaffing and Flaring the Skies

Unfortunately, one cannot hide El Al’s new Boeing 777, the world’s largest twinjet, when it takes off and lands. Not yet anyway. The 777 is a sitting target. One cannot do much about it. What can one do? Well, there are several things: you can have sensors that check to see if there are any service-to-air missiles either locked on or inbound — that’s a start. You can also make sure that your pilots have been trained in evasive maneuvers, which, unfortunately, are limited in jumbo jets. At the end of the day, however, you need to just make sure that the jet isn’t accessible to any SAMs.

El Al commercial aircraft are outfitted not with cloaks of invisibility but with “softkill” countermeasures. A countermeasure is a system (usually for a military application) designed to prevent sensor-based weapons from acquiring and/or destroying a target. Softkill measures generally interfere with the signature of the target to be protected. One or more of the following actions may be taken to provide softkill: reduction of the 777′s signature, augmentation of the 777′s signature, and the cloning or imitation of the 777′s signature. These techniques are used to generally prevent lock-on of a threat sensor to the commercial aircraft.

It is based on altering the signature of the target by either concealing the platform signature or enhancing the signature of the background, thus minimizing the contrast between the two. Some of these techniques include IR-decoy flares, serving to counter infrared-guided missiles (SAM), and radar decoys, in the form of chaff.

The Internet is very similar. Search engines are doubly so. It is impossible to stop flying. It is impossible to disappear the aircraft. And, it is impossible to delete, kill, or remove all threats in advance. Even if it is possible in the Internet to have an attack site brought down, it is simple enough to duplicate content, is simple for the attackers to create rally points, regroup, and then attack again. In fact, bringing a site down oftentimes results in redoubled enemy efforts.

Some of the only effective tools one can use to use “softkill countermeasures” — make sure there is enough chaff and there are enough enough flares in the search results so that when someone tries to attack your brand, their attack ends up getting lost on page 5+ of the returns while still allowing friendlies, “passengers,” and clients to easily and safely find their way to you.

How about them apples?

Last night I joined the party train with the Berlin English-speaking expatriot community at Marietta Bar. Met up with John Brownlee, met some very lovely girls — a German and a Romanian — beauties — who are courting Big Pharma and want to practice their English, and then I had some time to chat with Hasan Elahi, who I had met last Friday at Hairy Mary. Do you know who Hasan Elahi is? Hasan is the artist behind Tracking Transience!

I read WIRED and I listen to NPR every single day — even now in Berlin via podcasts. I think I first heard of Hasan Elahi on Studio 360 — maybe WIRED? However it may well just have been in the mediasphere.

Hasan is cool, hip, playful, fun-loving, and now a major player in the modern art scene. If he didn’t need to be a wanderer before, he needs to wander now. He has galleries around the world and needs to spend time popping around the globe doing seminars, talks, installations, panel discussions, and the like. He is also someone who lives life pretty well — last night, when I remembered I left my jacket liner at the bar and had to go back to look for it (and I got lost and ended up bailing for the night), it was after 3AM and the drunken American mob (well, Hasan and I were quiet but we’re in our 30s, but we were with college-age and early twenties merry pranksters — Europeans actually do open their windows and yell hateful things our of their windows at 3AM on a Thursday night when you’re being loud — it happened) were on our way from the closed Marietta Bar and headed back for more at the “we close whenever” Hairy Mary and Hasan Elahi was right there with him, a half-empty Budweiser Budvar in one hand and his camera phone in his right.

And yes, he does snap a new picture from his camera phone when he arrives in a new place. He tags the photos using names and cities and so forth, but the system is not GPS-based, it is tag-based: folksonomy based on a system he predefines. For example, the G4 server running the site receives his tagged images and parses it using PHP and then ties into the Google Maps API to render a real-time map of where he is.  Elegant, really — and simple, too.  So, let’s say he is going someplace new.  Well, he can put in the street name and number, and that is a good enough tag for Google Maps to find him.  So, for example, his PHP app is smart enough to understand the following:

• Hairy Mary
• Marietta Bar
• Office
• Berlin home
• Lehrter Strasse 5d Berlin

And since Google recognizes places as well, he can take a picture at Berlin Hauptbahnhof and tag the image “Berlin Hauptbahnhof” and it will find him and place him on a map.

So, working with Google Maps is elegant — he could arrive in Northern Virginia and just tag an image with “iota bar virginia” and it should work — and it does! And it really does for many restaurants, bars, stores, airports, and so forth — to it means that Hasan Elahi doesn’t require clunky GPS systems — that Google Earth and Google Maps go all of his heavy-lifting.

Brilliant, really.

The Visible Man: An FBI Target Puts His Whole Life Online on WIRED

Hasan Elahi whips out his Samsung Pocket PC phone and shows me how he’s keeping himself out of Guantanamo. He swivels the camera lens around and snaps a picture of the Manhattan Starbucks where we’re drinking coffee. Then he squints and pecks at the phone’s touchscreen. “OK! It’s uploading now,” says the cheery, 35-year-old artist and Rutgers professor, whose bleached-blond hair complements his fluorescent-green pants. “It’ll go public in a few seconds.” Sure enough, a moment later the shot appears on the front page of his Web site, TrackingTransience.net.

There are already tons of pictures there. Elahi will post about a hundred today — the rooms he sat in, the food he ate, the coffees he ordered. Poke around his site and you’ll find more than 20,000 images stretching back three years. Elahi has documented nearly every waking hour of his life during that time. He posts copies of every debit card transaction, so you can see what he bought, where, and when. A GPS device in his pocket reports his real-time physical location on a map.

Elahi’s site is the perfect alibi. Or an audacious art project. Or both. The Bangladeshi-born American says the US government mistakenly listed him on its terrorist watch list — and once you’re on, it’s hard to get off. To convince the Feds of his innocence, Elahi has made his life an open book. Whenever they want, officials can go to his site and see where he is and what he’s doing. Indeed, his server logs show hits from the Pentagon, the Secretary of Defense, and the Executive Office of the President, among others.

The globe-hopping prof says his overexposed life began in 2002, when he stepped off a flight from the Netherlands and was detained at the Detroit airport. He says FBI agents later told him they’d been tipped off that he was hoarding explosives in a Florida storage unit; subsequent lie detector tests convinced them he wasn’t their man. But with his frequent travel — Elahi logs more than 70,000 air miles a year exhibiting his art work and attending conferences — he figured it was only a matter of time before he got hauled in again. He might even be shipped off to Gitmo before anyone realized their mistake. The FBI agents had given him their phone number, so he decided to call before each trip; that way, they could alert the field offices. He hasn’t been detained since.

So it dawned on him: If being candid about his flights could clear his name, why not be open about everything? “I’ve discovered that the best way to protect your privacy is to give it away,” he says, grinning as he sips his venti Black Eye. Elahi relishes upending the received wisdom about surveillance. The government monitors your movements, but it gets things wrong. You can monitor yourself much more accurately. Plus, no ambitious agent is going to score a big intelligence triumph by snooping into your movements when there’s a Web page broadcasting the Big Mac you ate four minutes ago in Boise, Idaho. “It’s economics,” he says. “I flood the market.”

Elahi says his students get it immediately. They’ve grown up spilling their guts online — posting Flickr photo sets and confessing secrets on MySpace. He figures the day is coming when so many people shove so much personal data online that it will put Big Brother out of business.

For now, though, Big Brother is still on the case. At least according to Elahi’s server logs. “It’s really weird watching the government watch me,” he says. But it sure beats Guantanamo.

Speakers > Speaker Detail

Hasan Elahi
Assistant Professor, Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University

Hasan M. Elahi is an interdisciplinary artist with an emphasis on technology and media and their social implications. His research interests include issues of surveillance, simulated time, transport systems, and borders and frontiers. He has had numerous exhibitions nationally and internationally in venues such as PS122 and Exit Art in New York; the Kulturbahnhof in Kassel, Germany; the BBC Big Screen in Manchester, UK; and the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, Russia. He has also lectured at the American Association of Artificial Intelligence at Stanford University and the Tate Modern in London. His work has been supported with significant grants and numerous sponsorships from the Ford Foundation/Philip Morris, Creative Capital Foundation, DuPont Industries, the West Virginia Cultural Center and the Asociación Artetik Berrikuntzara in Donostia-San Sebastián in the Basque Country/Spain among others. Currently, he is an Assistant Professor at the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey.

Elahi’s Pop!Tech Appearances:
Pop!Tech 2006 “Dangerous Ideas”

Hasan Elahi on NPR’s Studio 360

Last weekend, new media artist and Pop!Tech 2006 speaker Hasan Elahi was interviewed on NPR’s Studio 360 hosted by Kurt Andersen about Hasan’s website art project, Tracking Transcience.

The website has tracked Hasan’s life in all its mundane glory, in real time, for more than 5 years now. He began the project in response to his experience in an airport where he was wrongly identified and detained as a terrorist and was constrained to report on all of his whereabouts and movements on the days around 9/11 to the FBI. After he was freed of all charges, he decided to voluntarily track his movements online.

Pop!Tech Host and Curator, Andrew Zolli is also on the program to discuss the impact of Hasan’s work and its context in a world with a changing view of privacy.

Listen to it here on iTunes, or visit the Studio 360 website and listen to the episode online.

AND stay tuned for Hasan’s upcoming Pop!Tech Pop!Cast of his 2006 presentation. Check Pop!Tech Pop!Casts for more information.

Hasan M. Elahi From Wikipedia

Hasan M. Elahi is an interdisciplinary media artist with an emphasis on technology and media and their social implications. His research interests include issues of surveillance, sousveillance, simulated time, transport systems, and borders and frontiers.

His recent work falls in the area of Sousveillance Culture together with artists Amy Alexander and Jill Magid], as recently presented at the Conflux Festival in New York.

Sousveillance

As reported in Wired (May 22, 2007), Elahi has put his entire life online:

Poke around his site and you'll find more than 20,000 images stretching back three years. Elahi has documented nearly every waking hour of his life during that time. He posts copies of every debit card transaction, so you can see what he bought, where, and when. A GPS device in his pocket reports his real-time physical location on a map.

Elahi's site is the perfect alibi. Or an audacious art project. Or both. The Bangladeshi-born American says the US government mistakenly listed him on its terrorist watch list — and once you're on, it's hard to get off. To convince the Feds of his innocence, Elahi has made his life an open book. Whenever they want, officials can go to his site and see where he is and what he's doing. Indeed, his server logs show hits from the Pentagon, the Secretary of Defense, and the Executive Office of the President, among others.

The globe-hopping prof says his overexposed life began in 2002, when he stepped off a flight from the Netherlands and was detained at the Detroit airport. He says FBI agents later told him they'd been tipped off that he was hoarding explosives in a Florida storage unit; subsequent lie detector tests convinced them he wasn't their man. But with his frequent travel — Elahi logs more than 70,000 air miles a year exhibiting his art work and attending conferences — he figured it was only a matter of time before he got hauled in again. He might even be shipped off to Gitmo before anyone realized their mistake. The FBI agents had given him their phone number, so he decided to call before each trip; that way, they could alert the field offices. He hasn't been detained since.

Exhibitions

He has had numerous exhibitions nationally and internationally in venues such as PS122, Exit Art, and Pace Digital Gallery in New York, the Kulturbahnhof in Kassel, Germany, the BBC Big Screen in Manchester, UK and The Hermitage in St. Petersburg, Russia. His work has been supported with significant grants and numerous sponsorships from The Ford Foundation/Philip Morris, Creative Capital Foundation, DuPont Industries, the West Virginia Cultural Center and the Asociación Artetik Berrikuntzara in Donostia-San Sebastián in the Basque Country/Spain among others.

Faculty positions

Prior to joining the faculty at Rutgers, he was an Assistant Professor at the University of South Florida in Tampa, Florida. He has also taught at West Virginia University; Wanganui School of Design, in Wanganui, New Zealand; and also in Houston, Texas.

See also

• Steve Mann (live 24/7 wireless video webcast starting 1994)
• Joi Ito (transmission of pictures from cameraphones)
• Justine Ezarik
• Justin Kan
• JenniCam
• Sophie Calle (surveillance artist)
• Julia Scher (surveillance and sousveillance artist)
• Sousveillance

External links

• • Tracking Transience
  • Hasan Elahi siteWired (May 22, 2007)
  • CBS Evening News (June 18, 2007)
  • Sousveillance culture
  • Sousveillance Culture with A. Alexander, J. Magid and H. Elahi

Art Criminal: Hasan M. Elahi

This story at We Make Money Not Art describes the artwork of Hasan M. Elahi who isn’t actually a criminal, but was supected of being a terrorist and was investigated and interrogated between June and November 2002 by the FBI. Elahi says the FBI wanted to know everything he had been doing while overseas, “What was I doing there? Who was I speaking with? What did I see? Where did I sleep? And even down to what I ate and drank. I was eventually cleared and to the relief of my friends, family and co-workers, I am officially no longer considered a terrorist – after a 3 hour long polygraph exam which was repeated 9 times.”

Mr. Elahi’s art is influenced by Orwell’s vision of a future state of total surveillance and control. In one piece he wears a device which uploads images tagged with exact GPS coordinates of where the image was taken to a server which then sends the GPS tag to the United States Geological Survey which returns an aerial surveillance image of the his location. The server compiles the returned map with the uploaded images and small thumbnails of the previously used images into the web based file which can then be accessed online.

Artist’s Statement:

I like to think about the appearance of technology rather than technology itself. More importantly how the technology is packaged or should I say, marketed into an appearance of desire and need for the consumer. This need I feel is more based on a social understanding and [social] function of the technology. Just as any other product that has a pioneering stage, an acceptance stage and an obsolescence stage, I feel that the timing of how a certain technology is adopted by society is far more important than the technology itself. It is in these human borders and frontiers that I am interested in…and also the traces that they leave behind. I have been attempting to bridge these virtual conditions with physical geopolitical parallels and have been fascinated at the translations and the mis-translations of them. I find the most potential in these mutual misunderstandings. I find states of designed obsolescence in structures and systems of power as a global citizen. I prefer lo-fi to hi-fi–and in these absurd realities, I find my works attempting to balance and tumble simultaneously.

I just finished watching a 2004 episode of John McLaughlin’s “One on One” and had by doors blown off by Amy Chua, author of World on Fire, a three-year-old book that is more relevant now than ever before. I agree with every word.

Amy Chua
John M. Duff, Jr. Professor of Law
Amy Chua is the John M. Duff, Jr. Professor of Law at Yale Law School. She came to Yale in 2001 after teaching at Duke and serving as a visiting professor at Columbia, Stanford, and NYU. Her expertise is in international business transactions, law and development, ethnic conflict, and globalization and the law. She recently published the book World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability. Professor Chua has an A.B. and a J.D. from Harvard University.

Education
J.D., Harvard, 1987
A.B., Harvard, 1984

JOHN MCLAUGHLIN’S “ONE ON ONE”
GUEST: AMY CHUA, AUTHOR AND LAW PROFESSOR
SUBJECT: DEMOCRACY AND INTERNATIONAL STABILITY
BROADCAST: WEEKEND OF MAY 22-23, 2004

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: Exporting chaos. Spreading democracy is the Bush administration’s answer to the perplexing problem of how to stabilize the Middle East. But what if democracy actually promotes instability under some conditions? From Indonesia to Zimbabwe to Bolivia, this author claims that democracy creates violent ethnic conflict. Iraq, she warns, is next. Is democracy our most lethal export? We’ll ask Yale Law School professor and noted author Amy Chua.

Professor Chua, welcome.

MS. CHUA: Thank you.

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: In the introduction there was mention that the Bush administration feels that the best way to stabilize Iraq and that part of the world is through democracy. Do you believe that to be the case?

MS. CHUA: Well, ultimately I am in favor of democracy as sort of the best long-term optimal solution. But as we’re learning sort of the hard way, developing non-Western countries have ethnic, religious and social structures completely different from what we are familiar with here in the United States.

And in fact, in many — you know, most Americans tend to assume that markets and democracy kind of naturally go together, just reinforce each other. And that makes perfect sense if you look at our own country today. But in fact in many non-Western countries democratization can lead to not the kinds of results that we expect and sometimes can result in anti-market, anti-American results.

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: We can get back to Iraq in a moment. But of those Western countries, would you think, for example, of Venezuela or Bolivia as instances where democracy has caused more problems than it actually relieved?

MS. CHUA: Yes. I would wouldn’t say that — I wouldn’t blame democracy. I think it’s an important point. It’s not democracy’s fault. But in both those countries, you had historically a situation where a tiny minority, basically a light-skinned, sort of Europeanized cosmopolitan elite –

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: Particularly Venezuela?

MS. CHUA: — particularly — well, in Venezuela — actually, just as much in Bolivia, really. The elite is very Europeanized, foreign-educated, elegant.

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: Why are they dominant?

MS. CHUA: There are many different reasons that these certain ethnic minorities come to dominate different countries.

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: Let’s speak about Venezuela specifically.

MS. CHUA: In that case, I think it’s really colonization. I think it’s — you know, the Spanish colonizers came over early on and basically, you know, took all the land. I don’t even think it was entrepreneurialism necessarily. Now that’s being a little bit unfair because there were subsequent waves of immigration. So you did have lots of, you know, small pools of immigration come in, and they were very entrepreneurial.

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: How is the one class differentiated from the other? Is one called pardos?

MS. CHUA: No, not exactly. In Venezuela, it’s not — the ethnicity isn’t so stark. That is, from — it’s — from the point of view of an American, North America, somebody in the United States, if you go and see Venezuela, it strikes us that the elite, the wealthy seem white; that is, light hair, green eyes. But in the consciousness of the Venezuelans, they don’t think of race in the same way, and lots of people will say we’re all Venezuelans. But so it’s not as stark as black and white, you know, in this country.

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: Chavez was elected in a free election?

MS. CHUA: Yes. Chavez came to power. He’s a very good example of a democratically elected anti-market leader; that is — he — how did he get to power? Not by proposing sound economic policies, but really by scapegoating both the United States and these oligarchs internally, and the masses voted for him.

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: So democracy brought us Chavez, and that is the problem?

MS. CHUA: That’s not the sole problem, but given the conditions that existed in Venezuela, yes. My point is that when you have overnight elections in countries with enormous poverty and a huge amount of frustration and wealth concentrated in the hands of a very, very small minority, democracy often brings to power leaders who may not be pro-market and, you know, observing the rule of law, and Chavez is a good example of that. He — it’s not entirely his fault, although I don’t think much of him at all. I mean, he’s a terrible president. The economy is tanking. But you also have to look at the underlying forces that led to the people voting for him, and I think that was — you know, he was able to capitalize on a huge amount of frustration and exclusion among the local population.

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: What about Bolivia?

MS. CHUA: Bolivia’s even a better example for the kinds of problems I’m interested in. There it’s different from Venezuela because the ethnic lines are more stark.

In Bolivia, like Ecuador and Peru, you have a country where almost a majority of the population are Amerindians, that is indigenous, principally Aymaran or Quechua Indians. And this majority, or near majority of indigenous peoples are extremely poor. They’ve been fatalistic — described as fatalistic for years. Many are extremely poorly educated, even illiterate. And then the wealth is concentrated in the hands of a very small, maybe 7 percent, you could call “white” — I mean, they would look white to people from the United States — a white elite that has very good connections to the British and United States foreign investors.

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: Who was elected president there?

MS. CHUA: Well, Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada was the president there for many years, until last fall when he had to flee by helicopter. And Conzalo Sanchez de Lozada was a white president. They actually all him “El Gringo.” He actually spent much of his life exiled in Connecticut, and speaks Spanish with an English accent.

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: What happened?

MS. CHUA: He was a pro-U.S., pro-free trade, pro-foreign investment, pro-IMF president and, you know, put in a lot of pro- market policies, including the privatization of water, which just led to an explosion of frustration and anger among the majority, who are so poor to begin with, and suddenly realized, you know, that with free-market policies they now had to pay for water and couldn’t afford it.

So in the fall, there were a series of very, very popularly supported, probably majority supported, I guess you could call it democratically produced Indian movements, populist movements, that led to escalating violence. And ultimately, President de Lozada had to flee for his life by helicopter.

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: Was the president an honorable man?

MS. CHUA: I think he was quite a good president in many ways; short-sighted in some ways, but I don’t think he was, you know, unusually corrupt. I think he had some sound free-market policies to propose.

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: But there was unleashed pent-up anti-his-class sentiment; correct?

MS. CHUA: Very much. And it was very explicitly –

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: Was it demagogued?

MS. CHUA: I think it was demagogue-fueled, although again, there was some — you have to realize, why do people go for these demagogues, what is these demagogues’ appeal?

Now, what’s interesting is that this is part of globalization. I mean, I had a student from Bolivia, about five years ago, who said we could never have an ethnic majority movement in our country, you know, it could be a class warfare, but we wouldn’t have an Indian-based kind of ethnic movement. And he wrote me an e-mail just a few years ago and said it’s changing; I take it back.

And this is part of — you know, one thing that globalization spreads that we don’t really focus on, which is it’s the spread of identity politics, ethnic demagogue –

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: Are you anti-globalist?

MS. CHUA: No. No. I’m — I see myself–

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: Are you anti-free market?

MS. CHUA: No. I’m a pro-globalization, a very much pro-market person.

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: Are you anti-democracy?

MS. CHUA: Actually no, I’m not. I’m not in that camp. I’m very concerned — my point is that there are many different versions of free-market democracy, and I think that we have been exporting the wrong version, a caricature, really.

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: Well, what would you have favored in Bolivia? What would you have favored?

MS. CHUA: Much — I would have favored — first of all, on the market side, you know what we’ve been doing for the last 20 years, since 1989? There’s no Western nation today that has anything close to a laissez-faire system, right? We have taxation –

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: You mean a primitive form of capitalism?

MS. CHUA: Yeah, we don’t — we have progressive taxation, unemployment — we have –

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: We have regulated democracy.

MS. CHUA: Yeah, anti-fraud laws, anti-insider trading laws.

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: So are you saying that — going back to Iraq — the imposition of democracy in Iraq would be a one-man one-vote and it might unleash the Sunnis against the Shi’ites and that it is unregulated, unsophisticated and this has to be a more gradual process?

MS. CHUA: In many ways, it’s not necessarily a timing process. But yes — so on the market side, we’ve been exporting a primitive sort of version of raw capitalism with no mechanism –

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: And laissez-fairism.

MS. CHUA: Yeah, and no mechanisms for regulating fraud and monopolies or redistributing wealth.

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: Did it take time for the United States to bring those mechanisms into existence?

MS. CHUA: Absolutely. We are not exporting the same kind of capitalism that we have now and it’s exactly the same with democracy. If you recall, our founding fathers — that is James Madison, many people who signed our Constitution — they were all terrified of overnight universal suffrage. They didn’t want the poor to be allowed to vote because they thought it would lead to chaos and, you know, the poor confiscating from the rich.

And in fact, what we’ve been exporting since 1989 is basically a really oversimplistic form of democracy — essentially, overnight elections with overnight universal suffrage at the national level. And I think that’s not what democracy is all about.

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: Is there criticism to go around? For example, aren’t you also critical of the IMF and the World Bank for doing the same thing?

MS. CHUA: Yes, on the market side, for sure.

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: But they’re not as insistent as we are on the implementation of a primitive form of capitalism, are they? Don’t they allow — don’t they have time frames that permit the introduction of regulatory mechanisms to control the growth of capitalists and markets?

MS. CHUA: I think not. I think this is revisionist history. I think things are changing slightly now, with all the –

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: We’re talking IMF and World Bank.

MS. CHUA: Yeah, but actually, in the late ’80s and ’90s, the United States and IMF and the World Bank shared very similar positions, and this makes sense to me. I mean, I’m critical, but I understand it. Look, after the Berlin Wall fell, you had the death of communism and everybody looked around and said, okay, we don’t want communism and we don’t like dictatorships, so the only thing left are markets and democracy. Let’s put these things in as fast as we can, and my point is that it’s just not that easy. You can’t plug in free-market democracy like a light bulb. But the IMF for sure in the ’80s and ’90s, their structural adjustment policies, their policies for Africa, the poorest countries of Southeast Asia was get rid of subsidies. It was a raw form of capitalism, nothing about redistributing wealth. It was, you know, let’s privatize everything; let’s let in foreign investment; remove the subsidies, resulting in unemployment; prices would go up.

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: But you don’t — for example, Zimbabwe is in such terrible shape because of Robert Mugabe. Do you see your view, your model, operating in Zimbabwe?

MS. CHUA: Perfectly. My view is that there are numerous non- Western countries around the world that have what I call a market- dominant minority. We don’t have this in the United States. There are countries where a very small outsider ethnic minority controls huge amounts of the nation’s wealth.

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: Indonesia’s a perfect example –

MS. CHUA: Chinese.

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: — where you have the Chinese.

MS. CHUA: Three percent of the population controlling 70 percent of the private economy.

But Zimbabwe’s a perfect example, too. For many, many years, really for decades, the white majority (sic) — just about 1 percent of the population — controlled 70 percent of the country’s best arable land in the form of very productive, very efficient commercial plantations. And you had, you know, poor, poor masses of black majority under apartheid.

Now what people like to forget — I mean, it’s easy to point the finger at Mugabe now, and I would be among those — he’s just a terrible disaster — but it’s important to remember that Mugabe himself is a product of democracy. He was elected in 1980 in very closely monitored free and fair elections. How did he come to power? What was his campaign slogan?

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: So he was democratically elected?

MS. CHUA: But do you know how he came to power? He campaigned — his campaign slogan was we need to take back the stolen land from the whites, and that’s why the black majority voted for him. He was as popular as Nelson Mandela under that platform. But he didn’t redistribute that land in the ensuing 20 years because of pressures — partly because of pressures from the IMF, the British government, the World Bank and the United States in foreign investment, and partly because of his own partly corrupt practice. He did not redistribute that land, and that’s why there was all this pent-up hostility among the majority. And every time elections came around, Robert Mugabe tried to play the race card by scapegoating the whites.

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: All right. Well, how do you explain the situation in South Africa, where none of this has occurred? Although you think you see signs of what’s happening in Zimbabwe there, namely the unleashing of a pent-up, anti-white sentiment which was held in check perhaps because of that forgiveness amnesty program.

MS. CHUA: South Africa –

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: Do you see something happening in South Africa similar to Zimbabwe?

MS. CHUA: I think South Africa has two very, very positive things going for it. One is the presence of Nelson Mandela, who from the beginning amazingly has never played the ethnic or racial card. He’s always been inclusive, and that’s a gift. The second thing that South Africa has going for it is neighboring Zimbabwe. Everybody in that country looks over at Zimbabwe and says, you know, we don’t want to go that way. So President Mbeki has something going for him. He basically — they also — this is a country where a tiny white majority (sic) still controls, I would say, 70 percent of the country’s best arable land. And until they –

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: But they have a constitution and they’re protected in their rights. The minority is protected, correct?

MS. CHUA: Well, it’s not so simple as that. With democracy –

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: Is there some give on that now taking place?

MS. CHUA: Very much so. The new black economic empowerment policy, which of course is majority-supported, is basically sort of like an affirmative action program for the majority. So it’s not affirmative action for the minority –

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: You mean they’re going to cut back on De Beers wines’ (sic) freedom of operation and maybe on some of its holdings?

MS. CHUA: Actually, yes. There was something called the Mining Nationalization Act that was just passed, and at first it was terrifying to the Oppenheimers and the whites. It called for something like 50 percent black ownership. But they negotiated that down, and now it’s a situation where, you know, the white minority, including the Oppenheimers and De Beers, are going to relinquish some of that — that is, bring in more black participation — and hopefully they are walking that line. I mean, they are trying to keep in markets, not scare away foreign investment, but also try to give the black majority more of a stake in markets.

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: So the United States is promoting, in Iraq and elsewhere, a caricature of democracy and market economics. I’ll put this in another way. We are using our dominant world position economically and militarily to dictate political structures to other countries that are inappropriate to their cultural and historical circumstances, and if it comes about as a consequence of our pressure, what will happen is a worse set of realities than would otherwise exist. For example, Sunnis and Shi’as, you believe, could be at each other’s throats.

MS. CHUA: Oh –

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: And motivation is not doctrinal; it’s commerce, and it’s material. Correct?

MS. CHUA: Not always. No, it’s not entirely material. And I wouldn’t quite have put it that way. I mean, I’m not a conspiracy theory person. I often think that — I think that in many ways the U.S. government has been driven by idealism as much as other factors.

But that’s exactly right. I think what you’re seeing in the administration now is they very idealistically, in some ways, said, “We’re going to put in democracy in Iraq” –

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: Have you heard of Robert Kaplan?

MS. CHUA: Yes. Sure –

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: Robert Kaplan, I think, holds the view that a benign autocracy is probably the best thing in some of these countries for a period of time.

MS. CHUA: Yes –

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: Do you agree with that?

MS. CHUA: No, I actually don’t.

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: Do you want — well, don’t you fight your own doctrine there –

MS. CHUA: No, I don’t.

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: — if you want an election now?

MS. CHUA: No. I respect his position very much, but the reason that I’m not in the anti-democracy camp is for the simple reason –

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: Well, he’s not in that camp, either, really –

MS. CHUA: No, he is in favor of just holding off on democracy and maybe trying to find a beneficent dictator –

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: Right.

MS. CHUA: — or at least having an autocratic system that, you know, might be liberal.

Now I understand why. You can get lucky. Look at Lee Quan Yew in Singapore.

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: Yes.

MS. CHUA: Perfect example for Robert Kaplan. And he’s right.

My problem — the reason I struggle with that position is because how can you ever ensure that you’re going to get a beneficent dictator?

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: We’ll be right back.

(Announcements.)

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: Is it arrogance or is it ignorance that makes America think that we can safely export our version of democracy to the rest of the world? We’ll put that question to our guest, but first, here is her distinguished profile.

Born: Champaign, Illinois. Forty-one years of age; husband Jed, two daughters. Reared Catholic. Politics: Independent.

Harvard University, B.A. Economics, Magna Cum Laude; Harvard University, Doctor of Laws, Cum Laude.

Cleary, Gottlieb, Steen and Hamilton, an international Wall Street law firm, where she represented, among other clients, Mexico in the privatization of its international telephone company, Telmex; four years.

Duke University, professor of law, seven years. Yale University, professor of law, three years and currently.

Author, a book, “World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability,” a best-seller now in paperback.

Hobbies: tennis, violin, piano.

Amy Lynn Chua.

Amy Lynn Chua, do you want to add to any of your biography? You were reared Catholic. That sounds like you are no longer Catholic?

MS. CHUA: Well, my husband is Jewish and my father was in a Protestant family and my mother’s parents were Buddhist. So I come from a very diverse background.

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: How did you work that out with your husband, in the practical order? The religion question.

MS. CHUA: It was complicated. My children speak Chinese but they’re raised Jewish.

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: What was that?

MS. CHUA: My children are fluent in Chinese but they are raised Jewish.

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: Was that a deal?

MS. CHUA: Yes. (Chuckles.)

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: And it’s working?

MS. CHUA: Appears to be.

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: What do you think of — to get back to Iraq, because we don’t have much time — what do you think is going to happen if we try to impose democracy here?

MS. CHUA: It’s a real disaster, actually, if you just look at the demographics. And it seems that anybody who had thought about this beforehand would have seen this. You have a 60 or 70 percent Shi’ite majority; that’s a fact. And this is why the U.S. government cancelled the elections in Najaf last June. They realized, look, if we hold free and fair elections, this could go fundamentalist, and that’s why they cancelled the elections. And then there was this popular outcry, everybody was outraged; and then the U.S. government said, ok, no, we are going to put in elections.

But in fact, what the U.S. administration wants is democracy without majority rule, and that is pretty hard to do — impossible in fact. You have the demographics where the Sunni — in fact, the Ba’athist party tends to be the ones, this minority — again, they’re –

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: Do you think we should just have an early departure and let them decide what sort of government they want and let them work it out? To what extent should we be intrusive in the process at this difficult time?

MS. CHUA: Well, we already were intrusive. So I think that it’s a — there is a question of responsibility at this point because –

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: For them in the selection of their government?

MS. CHUA: No, but to make sure that we don’t leave just utter chaos. One of the ideas that I’m toying around with is — really, I think that the way to go in Iraq is to be promoting local democracy first.

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: Are we talking about Kurds and Shi’as and Sunnis?

MS. CHUA: Everywhere. You know, in the United States or the U.K., our democracies started locally. It wasn’t imposed at the national level all of a sudden. So instead of — I think you shouldn’t — instead of having national elections where everybody is fighting over the oil, and you’ve got a 70 percent Shi’ite majority that is long-oppressed, long-humiliated — they feel it’s their time to take back the country. I think that the better way to go would be to start locally with cities, towns, villages. You know, local democracy is the best instruction for national democracy.

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: Is this a Bosnia model?

MS. CHUA: No. I’m not in favor of breaking up the country. I mean, I don’t think that would work. But the idea is that, you know, you need to learn how democracy works and to have other things that you –

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: And you think that should be a gradual process and it should be done on a sectoral basis.

MS. CHUA: I also think that if certain villages or certain towns go fundamentalist, we have to let that stand. We can’t just remove it and step in and intervene if we don’t like that result. But I think we need to secure other regions so that people can move with their feet and ultimately, you know, let democracy really play out.

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: We’ll be right back.

(Announcements.)

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: Professor Chua, thank you for being my guest.

MS. CHUA: Thank you for having me.

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: I have never read a book as complicated and as high-concept as your book that is so easy to read.

MS. CHUA: Thank you very much.

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: I really must commend you on it.

MS. CHUA: I appreciate it. Thank you very much.

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: And I hope you will come back.

MS. CHUA: It would be my pleasure.

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: Is there a final thought that you would give to the White House and the Congress?

MS. CHUA: I think it would help if we knew a little bit more about the countries that we’re supposedly trying to help. I think that would be a good first step. And to understand that you can’t just, you know, put in markets and democracy overnight. Our process took a long time. And we need to put a lot more thought into that.

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: Thanks so much.

MS. CHUA: Thank you.

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: Good luck.

MS. CHUA: Thanks very much.

END OF REGULAR SEGMENT

PBS SEGMENT

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: Amy Chua, talk to me about, if you would, talk to us about Russia.

MS. CHUA: Well, Russia is another country where, in the ’90s, in the sort of anarchic transition to capitalism, there were no laws. It was just a vacuum. And in this rapid transition from socialism to capitalism, basically seven men came to control about 50 percent of Russia’s massive natural resource wealth.

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: The oligarchs.

MS. CHUA: The oligarchs. And out of seven of them, six of them were well known to be Jewish. And this fact was not lost on the Russian population. And so you had this situation where markets produced this — or sort of un — primitive markets led to this enormous concentration of wealth. This produced tremendous resentment among the Russian people, who felt like they were just ripped off. They didn’t have anything.

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: Were they also feeding off the classic anti- Semitism that exists?

MS. CHUA: Yes, which has been in Russia for, you know, just hundreds of years. But yes, this actually produced — when you democratized there, it produced anti-Semitic political parties that explicitly called for expulsion of the Jews and taking back their assets. And so that’s partly the model. When you have markets with this kind of market-dominant minority, rapid democracy can give rise to ethnic scapegoating.

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: Well, do you think you really have here a dominant ethnic minority in the six who happened to be Jewish?

MORE

MS. CHUA: Well, it was certainly perceived as such. That’s the point. Ethnicity is not a science; it’s how people perceive it. And in this country Jews may not be an ethnic minority, but there –

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: Yeah, but also in Indonesia, when Suharto passed on that unleashed the killing of the Chinese, who owned 3 percent of the wealth over there.

MS. CHUA: Exactly, exactly. In –

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: But there was nothing like that in Russia.

MS. CHUA: No –

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: What you have now is Chechnya. You had a warlike situation for a while between Georgia and Azerbaijan.

MS. CHUA: Yes.

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: But that’s it. Otherwise everything is under control, remarkably enough, would you not say?

MS. CHUA: Remarkably. I think’s it’s under Putin. Putin is maybe a democratic leader in theory, but he has decidedly autocratic tendencies and he is keeping everything under his control right now. And in fact, specifically he’s targeted three of those Jewish oligarchs.

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: So he’s the benign autocrat?

MS. CHUA: At the moment, he’s viewing very much in that direction, cracking down on –

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: Talk to me about anti-Americanism around the world.

MS. CHUA: Well, most of my research focuses on the very small ethnic minorities in countries like Indonesia or the Indians in East Africa, Chinese throughout Southeast Asia, whites –

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: Do you think –

MS. CHUA: At the global level — I’m sorry?

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: Yeah, go — I want to get this point in because we’re running out of time. In 50 years — 2050, 45 years from now, you’ll live to see it, whites are going to be in the minority –

MS. CHUA: In the United States.

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: — in this country. Is there a problem with the whites assuming that status of a dominant minority, and could there be a rising up of the non-whites in this country — the Hispanics and the blacks — to do what happened in Indonesia, or is that just — is that just so far afield?

MS. CHUA: I think would be very –

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: What?

MS. CHUA: I think it would be very hard in this country to organize a movement that describes the whites in this country as outsiders, coming in to steal the wealth of the nation. That just doesn’t fit with our history if you look at our own history.

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: Even though they may be — they will be — in 45 years or so they will be in the minority?

MS. CHUA: It’s possible. I’ve discussed that; you know, the browning of America, and will — you know, will whites eventually reach that point. But the countries I look at, these ethnic minorities are viewed as outsiders, and I think it’s hard to view whites as outsiders.

Now at the global level, the United States has become, I think, a sort of global market-dominant minority. We’re perceived by the world — we’re just 4 percent of the world’s population, but we’re perceived everywhere as the principal engine and principal beneficiary of global (commerce ?) right now.

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: So we are minorities worldwide?

MS. CHUA: Yes, and in part as a result of that we are also the object of mass, often demagogue-fueled resentment and hatred, you know, of the same kind, that’s directed at so many other of these market-dominant minorities around the world.

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: And that accounts for widespread –

MS. CHUA: Partly. Not all. There are a lot of other things that we’ve done wrong to contribute to anti-Americanism. But certainly I think that’s part of the picture, the fact that we’re the world’s hyperpower. You know, we’re going to be held to a higher standard than everybody else.

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: What happens when China becomes a hyperpower?

MS. CHUA: That will be interesting if that happens. It will be interesting to see what happens.

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: What will happen to us then?

MS. CHUA: Well, it will be interesting to see. It will be interesting to see how our policies change.

The future of Social Network Services (SNS) can be discovered on High School and College campuses. I believe that topic-specific “vertical” SNS’s are very important, but I also think that the model needs to be University-like – a modularized SNS. There needs to be a campus “brand” (or University) within which the topic-specific “clubs,” “houses,” “fraternities,” “dorms,” and “interest groups” can interact – somewhere where crossovers, cross-fertilization, and aggregation are encouraged – no, needs – to happen. I hate SNS sites like boompa.com – a site devoted to your favorite cars – because I am not JUST a car guy.

I am a car guy for sure but I am also interested in rowing, in biking, in Thomas Pynchon, and in talk radio – Boompa might be successful in the short term, but in the long-term, the real power would come from creating a open, creative, resource-rich platform/campus/university/high school and maybe create a school of engineering, a liberal arts school, a law school, a dining hall, and so forth, but then allow the SNS to find itself.

To allow the SNS and its members to find their own voice, their own interests, and their own passions – which may well be very different from what is first assumed by the creator. Google gets this, though not yet within the construct of the SNS’s. What Google did do successfully was to buy USENET – the original newsgroups – and then build an superstructure on top of that – make it modern, sustainable, durable, and more readable.

Google returned USENET to relevance in a world that considered newsgroups and IRC to be dead or dying. Each and every one of communities on USENET is amazingly vertical, but they could all back up and back out to the larger USENET community – to the equivalent of the “welcome new students??? meetings and gatherings colleges offer to entering Freshmen.

Communities that are too vertical tend to shoe horn the “general topics??? conversations into hidden “off topic??? eddies. That is just the opposite of what should be done. The conversation should be general, cross-pollinating, and then move, after a conversation starts, into another room.

Start with an amazing platform, collect users, listen and watch them to see how they’re playing with the software application objects, widgets, and tools (are they playing with the toy or the box?), and then build for the users base, withholding judgment. Digg is a case study for this: start small, grow organically, and allow your members to find themselves.

The developers of Digg realized that after initial vertical growth based on the general members of Slashdot (techie, geeky, teens, boys), digg would suffer from the same sort of vulnerabilities that Slashdot suffered when Slashdot didn’t evolve and grow and broaden itself.

People love talking about Linux, but when happens when the Dow drops or the elections come? Where will the conversation happen? Where is the “kitchen??? at the party where every eventually goes to just talk about general interest stuff? Unless there are opportunities to express and share so-called “off-topic??? conversation right there, within the community in which members are already committed, with members to whom they’re already committed, then they are bound to go elsewhere.

Starting small and allowing the community to design itself is much different than starting big and losing one’s focus. Other mistakes happen when community builders make assumptions as to what participants, members, and lurkers want. Another mistake is putting a wall up around the community so that non-members cannot get a full feeling for the community from without.

The best SNS’s, virtual worlds, and online communities are honeypots. By honeypot, I am not suggesting, “a server that is configured to detect an intruder by mirroring a real production system. It appears as an ordinary server doing work, but all the data and transactions are phony. Located either in or outside the firewall, the honeypot is used to learn about an intruder’s techniques as well as determine vulnerabilities in the real system.” Although I am, sort of. The best SNS needs to be appealing, attractive, sweet, and compelling. Community-builders and SNS ASP developers need to be willing learn about member techniques, interests, processes, and needs, as well as determine “vulnerabilities” in the SNS platform that may repel, turn off, or limit the evolution and growth of the community.

To channel Chauncey Gardener for a second, one must do whatever one must to make sure that the earth in the garden is moist and well fed, one must seed well and completely, one must keep the garden in sun and water, one must encourage the garden to grow as it will for only in its growth will the garden be successful, and then, after rigorous growth, pruning and weeding must be done, only in order to allow the garden to be healthy, not to turn the garden into topiary. Okay, I am done.

Digg allows all of these things. Digg is perfectly useful and compelling even as an alien, but it is way more fun and interesting when you’re a citizen, that’s for sure. An SNS community needs to be as attractive as possible because exclusivity is no longer essential or even valuable. What is valuable is “useful,??? “interesting,??? and “authentic.??? They also have to have community buy-in and the best enjoy a certain fanatical devotion. Just like the best Universities and Colleges.

And Digg allowed its member to tell it when it was time to evolve past tech and geek news. Digg did not limit its scope or define itself too tightly with being “gear for geeks??? or “news for nerds.??? That would have ultimately been the death of Digg.

What the best Universities (such as Yale) understand is that it is not the student who is blessed and honored by being accepted by a top college (Yale College) but rather it is the college that should be blessed and honored (and should be grateful) that such a quality student is accepting its offers and actually attending – choosing – their particular school: Yale instead of Princeton, Brown, Harvard, Oxford, Cambridge, Dartmouth, Stanford, Columbia, Berkeley, etc…

Harvard, too, is aware that although in the short-term Harvard makes the Harvard Man, over the long term, it is Harvard Men who made Harvard and continue to make Harvard. “Who have you graduated recently???? Unless the quality and character of its students and alumni remain top-drawer, Harvard is not guaranteed its position as “top three??? in USA Today alongside Princeton and Yale. No matter how grand its endowment.

So, Harvard and Yale spoil their students rotten! My friends who attended Harvard or Yale college swoon over those 4 years like I swoon over my first love.

Likewise, SNS’s, virtual worlds, and virtual communities need to realize that at any one point, their brand is only as good as the collective that is manifest in the users, the members, the lurkers, the stewards, and the alumni of the property.

This isn’t only true in SNS’s. The same thing can be said of the most successful message boards and online communities. The most important distinction, I think, is that all of these “rooms” and all of these “clubs” and all of these spaces where (and are) defined and created by the communities themselves. Sui generis. And this sort of ownership – “for us by us,??? as the slogan goes over as Howard Rheingold’s Brainstorms community – should never be underestimated.

The Well has Howard Rheingold as a member and alumnus, for example, and the credibility of all that he has made and done; over time, more and more virtual communities, virtual worlds, and SNS will be known for their members as well: who studies, who studied, and who wants to join.

“What’s in it for me??? (WIIFM) and the concept of pride of ownership are important – essential – ingredients of a sustainable, deep, thriving, and healthy community. The success of MySpace and of Facebook is that the verticals are not (were not) defined for them by their grand architects – they are self-creating, self-forming, and also self-destructing. They form, reform, mutate and disperse after they hit a limit of general conversation and then either break off and reform into an “interest group” or “club” or they self-check and work to “get back on topic.”

SNS’s and communities in general tend to be formed in one of two ways: like Paris or like London. Intelligence Design (architecture) or Emergent Design. The later never looks very beautiful or the way people – or the creators, investors, and architects – expect (or want) it to look, because investors and designers tend to not be able to control it – and when they do try to impost order, often in a heavy-handed way, they also tend to scare off all of their members, too.

This organic revolution has proven its success online time and time again. The Internet does not respond (well or at all) to command and control. The smartest Web 2.0 platforms allow the “masses of asses” (yes, the customer; yes, us) to define the platform and the experience – their own and collective environment and experience.

MySpace does this amazingly well and so does Facebook. Until recently, Friendster suffered from a vision and used command and control tactics to try to coerce its users that “it didn’t really want to do things that way??? and Friendster members abandoned in droves to platforms and experiences not so monitored by “mom and dad.???

A command and control grand vision doesn’t work when you develop an environment that needs to be truly both attractive and compelling much more than it needs to be informational or instructional. An SNS needs to be attractive, diversional, compelling, amusing, and entertaining – never limiting.

My analogy of college and high school never mentioned classrooms or classes for training or learning. People do enough of that at school and at work. An SNS needs to give its users a university campus without any expectations or concepts of dropping out, getting judged, doing homework, or being held accountable for anything.

A good SNS should be all late-night wine-influenced discussions of Descartes and Plato and the summer afternoons on the quad and the time playing Xbox with your roommates.

When I go onto my long-term online communities, the Well, The Meta Network, USENET, and Brainstorms, there are many very deep and very vertical communities, discussing things as frivolous as fashion and video games and as deep as how to survive cancer, how to get a post doc grant, and very deep discussions on “spirit,” “chaos theory,” and “world politics.”

What makes this amazing and sustainable is that there are an infinite number of ways to get along, to move into a space of intense conversation, and then to pull back into common areas, just to see who’s around. In a university setting, this could be the dining hall, the quad, the commons, etc. These spaces are very important.

If you think about all of this in terms of evolution, then we can think about the way things evolve in the most perverse ways when isolated from others of its kinds. So, if there are impervious walls – gaps or voids, mountains or ridges – between these vertical markets, SNS’s, and communities, then there may be an initial success, but there can also be a terrible volatility. One plague or drought can decimate a population completely.

Having a commons allows members and visitors to have a place to meet new people, have new experiences, and learn of new clubs, new opportunities, and new places – inbreeding versus crossbreeding. Ultimately, a diversity of visitors helps build a more resilient, invested, and self-identifing community. They will become “students for life??? at best and proud alums at worst. They will carry the brand awareness, even if their lives become too busy to participate any more.

They will become life long brand ambassadors for your community. Proud alumni.

And, in terms of “viral marketing,” it is also important when it comes to a member of an SNS “inviting his friends” – not all of my friends have the same vertical interests that I do… They could have very different interests – but as I explore the “commons” of an SNS, I can note that there are things happening online that “friend x” and “friend y” would love, and that would be my incentive to invite them on board.

Boompa? I am the only person I know in my entire community – that is not true, my buddy has an Audi S4 – who is into cars. My buddy is an Audi driver and I am a BMW driver. Does that mean we’re both drivers? Does that mean we love cars or our particular car? Do we cross over on performance sedans? On German cars? On luxury cars?

You have to offer the tools to allow the market to choose for itself, otherwise, you might never find out that the SNS needs all three, or none at all.

A “Modularized SNS” should be neutral like a university (unlike MySpace, which is pretty pre-defined as to what the demographic is), and there are lots of “vertical niche SNS’s” (e.g. car enthusiasts, gourmet cooking, travel, Rolex fans, Republican politicos, etc.) That way, everyone can form a SNS experience that actually fits them by modularly assembling the groups of people who have similar interests, (not just friends-in-common!)

I spent nearly three-years living the life if an “NMSer.” It is where I got trained up in the art of new media strategy and new media marketing. I had an amazing experience working there and I am also happy to share the latest post-Meredith purchase in the form of a very nice article, Tracking Who’s Saying What About Whom: New Media Strategies’ ‘Online Analysts’ Scour the Web for Mentions of Opinion-Sensitive Clients, by Kim Hart, on the Washington Post. Simply put, co-founders Pete Snyder and Aaron Earls are truly visionaries, deserving of their notable success.

Tracking Who’s Saying What About WhomNew Media Strategies’ ‘Online Analysts’ Scour the Web for Mentions of Opinion-Sensitive Clients

By Kim Hart

Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, January 29, 2007; Page D01

Moira Curran starts her day at the office by skimming several dozen blogs, occasionally firing off instant messages to her co-workers with links to juicy bits of celebrity gossip.

Then she listens to podcasters chatting about the latest episodes of “Grey’s Anatomy” or “Lost.” In the afternoon, she keeps an eye on soap operas on the television set that hangs above her desk.

Ashley Duncan, left, Carrie O’Malley, center, and Jenni Collins are among the New Media Strategies employees who comb the Web for clients that want to protect their brands and public images. (By Ricky Carioti — The Washington Post)

About 70 colleagues, scattered across two floors of an Arlington high-rise, spend eight hours a day doing much of the same. Some of them are also playing video games, watching movies and cruising around MySpace.

That’s exactly what the clients of New Media Strategies, an online marketing company, pay the employees to do. Companies ranging from movie studios and television networks to automakers and burger chains hire these professional Web surfers to scour the Internet for any mention of their brands. Over the past few years, the “online analysts” have helped the companies track their reputations, found ways to get their products noticed and joined online conversations to help steer them the way clients want them to go.

More recently, as the explosion of blogs, social networks and video-sharing sites has driven big companies to recognize the role of Internet image in protecting their bottom lines, traditional media companies and private investors are seeking to buy Web-savvy start-ups that have a toehold in cyberspace.

That’s what happened to New Media Strategies this month, when it was acquired — with two Los Angeles-based online marketing firms — by Meredith Corp., a Des Moines-based media company known for its sturdy lineup of traditional magazines such as Better Homes and Gardens and Ladies’ Home Journal.

“I see the Internet as the world’s largest focus group,” said Pete Snyder, a former media consultant and political pollster who started the company out of his Capitol Hill apartment eight years ago. He had received a few casual offers to buy the company, but interest spiked in the past year. “So many companies have been so deeply entrenched in old media. . . . Now they’re looking to plow into the Web 2.0 world.”

Evidence of that world abounds in the Arlington office, brightly painted in red, orange and yellow. A podcast studio occupies a corner office, and conference rooms are named “.com,” “.net,” “.gov” and “.org.”

Posters from the movies the company has helped promote line the walls — so many that passersby sometimes ask if the office doubles as a theater. Framed albums from Black Sabbath and several seasons of “American Idol” hang next to a flat-screen television reserved for “product viewing.”

Many of the online analysts wear headphones all day and chat with bloggers via instant messages. Their job is to be the clients’ eyes and ears online, said Clay Dunn, 28, a brand manager who monitors what is said about video games and movies.

He watches for rumors and alerts his Hollywood clients if online coverage goes awry. Once, for example, backstage photos from a movie set surfaced and spoiled a sneak preview already in the works.

Curran, another brand manager who trolls the Web on behalf of television clients, corrects errors published in blogs. If rumors spread that someone’s been fired from the cast of HBO’s “Entourage,” for example, she’s there to set the record straight. If an angry viewer bashes a network for a violent scene in a prime-time show, she’s there to post a rebuttal. She watches soap operas so she’ll be able to chat knowledgably with the rest of the online audience.

“Every day, I’m an absolute sponge,” said Curran, 25.

Curran said she is careful to acknowledge her connection to clients when it’s required. All online marketers have to walk a fine line when they work the blogosphere. Federal Trade Commission rules require them to identify their roles when they’re making a point on behalf of a client, but if they’re gossiping about the latest episode of “Desperate Housewives” they can legally be as anonymous as anyone else.

Ashley Duncan, left, Carrie O’Malley, center, and Jenni Collins are among the New Media Strategies employees who comb the Web for clients that want to protect their brands and public images. (By Ricky Carioti — The Washington Post)

The New Media Strategies employees are young, self-identified tech geeks whose goal is to know the Internet inside and out — an increasingly daunting task as hundreds of new blogs and Web sites crop up every day. They try to stay a few strides ahead of online developments — or at least only a step or two behind.

“The Internet used to be our oyster,” Curran said of the days just a few years ago when there were only chat rooms and message boards to monitor. “It still is, but we have to reassess the things we pay the most attention to.”

New Media Strategies’ entertainment practice was the first to take off; Hollywood has long been willing to spend money to influence the online world. Over the past few years, Coca-Cola, Burger King, AT&T, Dodge and Ford joined the client roster. Most recently, public affairs has become the fastest-growing area for the company.

“Before, we could barely get a politician to spend money on a Web site, let alone a massive Web campaign,” Snyder said from his Arlington office. “The world across the river is waking up to this.”

So are buyers and investors. Media companies are starting to show strong interest in adding interactive firms to their portfolios, said Seth R. Alpert, managing director of AdMedia Partners, a New York investment bank that facilitates deals between advertising and marketing companies. AdMedia represented New Media Strategies in its recent acquisition.

“Serving advertisers is now seen as being more broad than putting ink on paper or building Web sites,” Alpert said.

British marketing giant WPP Group, which includes established advertising firms Ogilvy & Mather and Young & Rubicam, has acquired several interactive-media firms. Nielsen Media Research combined three online-research companies to create Nielsen BuzzMetrics, which analyzes online markets.

In the Washington area, private investors recently put money into another start-up — Clarabridge, a Reston company whose software crawls Web sites, recording what people say about specific products or brands and tabulating the occurrence of positive or negative words to help clients assess their cyberspace images. For example, it tracks recommendations and criticisms about certain airlines on travel sites.

The company calls the process “online intelligence.” It is currently working for pharmaceutical companies to get a sense of how consumers feel about the drugs the clients make.

“This can shape how they spend that million dollars to launch a product,” said Sid Banerjee, co-founder and chief executive of Clarabridge. “There are enough mainstream consumers making decisions on the Internet that they represent a meaningful sample of the market.”

Last week, the company took in $7.2 million in venture capital funding from Intersouth Partners, based in Durham, N.C., and Reston, bringing its total financing to $10 million since it started in 2005.

Cymfony, a Boston interactive-media firm and a competitor of New Media Strategies and Clarabridge, has received $24 million in venture capital cash in the past seven years.

Cymfony got its start doing research for intelligence agencies but decided to use its text-mining software to monitor the consumer-generated Web. Its business has doubled as advertisers take to the Internet, said chief executive Andrew Bernstein.

“There’s too much media online and no one knows where to turn,” he said. “So they turn to us.”

“Pete Snyder, Founder and CEO, New Media Strategies, Inc.: Pete is the Founder and CEO of New Media Strategies, the industry pioneer and market leader in online intelligence, brand promotion and brand protection, headquartered in Arlington, Virginia. Drawing on his background as a pollster and media consultant, Pete founded New Media Strategies in 1999, establishing a new industry in market research, brand marketing and communications. New Media Strategies uses technology to tap into the power of the Internet and the blogosphere, helping leading corporations and causes, including some of the biggest Hollywood brands, to promote and protect their brands and bottom lines, online. As CEO, Pete has guided New Media Strategies’ success and rapid organic growth. Over the past six years, New Media Strategies has built a blue-chip client base that features some of the best known brands and corporations in the world, including among others: ABC, AOL Time Warner, Atari, Boston Beer Company, Burger King Corporation, Dodge, Disney, EA, Elektra Records, HBO, Levi’s, McDonald’s, Monster, Northwest Airlines, Paramount Pictures, RCA Records, Red Bull, Reebok, Revlon, Sci-Fi Channel, Sony, USA Network, and Wyeth. Pete was recently honored as a finalist for the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year awards, and New Media Strategies was recently recognized on the “Inc. 500″ listing of the Fastest Growing Companies in America. Proving that a company can focus on fast growth, profitability, and fun, New Media Strategies has been recognized by Washingtonian Magazine as one of “50 Great Places to Work” in Washington, and the Washington Business Journal recently honored New Media Strategies as one of Washington’s Best Places to Work. A former political media consultant and a pollster to New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, Pete regularly appears as a commentator on the Fox News Channel and has served as a marketing and political expert on CNBC, The News with Brian Williams, CBS Evening News with Dan Rather, and Fox News Channel’s Your World with Neil Cavuto, Hannity and Colmes and Fox and Friends. New Media Strategies has appeared in national media publications including the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post and the Hollywood Reporter.”

After graduating from college, I found a job via my ASMP connections from Nathan Benn was starting up a company called Picture Network International (PNI). That was one hell of a cool job.PNI was the second “on line stock-photo shopping service” after Kodak Picture Exchange. I spent over two years there and loved it. That’s where I got my first email address (cabraham@media.sra.com) learned Gopher, FTP, command line, Unix (pre-Linix), Macintosh System 7 (my badass Quadra 900, Quadra 800)

Here’s some more coverage I have been able to find about PNI, online:

From Folio,

“Eight months after Eastman Kodak introduced Kodak Picture Exchange, the first on line stock-photo shopping service, Picture Network International of Arlington, Virginia, has brought out a rival offering dubbed Seymour. With 200,000 images from 26 agencies, including Impact Visuals Inc., Woodfin Camp & Associates and others, Seymour won high marks during its six-month beta test, which ended with its official launch last month.

Marjorie Graham, image archive manager at New York City textbook publisher John Wiley and Sons, and a Seymour beta-tester and KPX subscriber, rates the former’s image bank more appropriate for editorial use, adding that her staff prefers Seymour’s natural search language to KPX’s keyword system. KPX’s 100,000 images from 23 providers are, she finds, geared more toward ad agencies.) Yet, despite PNI’s attempt to find a common language for image retrieval – the perpetual stumbling block for electronic archiving systems – the search language still seems to need refining. Frances Borchardt, assistant photo editor at Nation’s Business and a PNI beta-tester, says that her searches often retrieve unwanted photos. She adds, “I would like to be able to eliminate certain stock agencies from the search upfront.”

Similar to KPX in concept and price, Seymour has the added functionality of calculating licensing fees and allowing users to place orders online. Images are then delivered to customers either as high-resolution digital files from PNI or as slides directly from the stock houses. Still, from a competitive point of view, KPX holds the chronological advantage. As Mike Harrigan, marketing development director at KPX, points out, “It’s out there and it’s working.” And it has 200 subscribers. KPX is also ahead with the release of a Windows version of its software: KPX’s is now available, while Seymour users will have to wait until late 1995. Harrigan also notes KPX’s 14.4 baud transmission speed. While Seymour works with 14.4, PNI recommends the faster, but less common, 28.8 bauds for best performance.

Indeed, KPX is somewhat more forgiving in all its hardware requirements. Though Seymour requires a Macintosh Quadra 610 or higher with at least 12MB RAM (16 to 32MB is recommended) and Macintosh System Software 7.1 or higher, KPX will run on a Macintosh IIci with 8MB RAM and at least the System 7 operating system.

As for viewing, both need a 24-bit video display card and a 14-inch (minimum) color monitor. At least 10MB of free space is needed on both hard drives for viewing images, although 20 or more is recommended. Seymour’s software and licensing package is $175 per computer and $1.50 per minute online charges; KPX runs $199 per station and $1.42 per minute.

Yet for all the advantages of online stock, and despite the burgeoning of virtually all electronic media, users say such systems pose no immediate threat to conventional stock photo agencies. They agree that online offerings are best and most economical for fast, limited searches. And, convenience aside, electronic stock stands to add extra duties to a photo editor’s workload. “When I need something quickly and know what I’m looking for, I can show pictures in a half-hour, not overnight,” says Borchardt. Otherwise, she leaves the heavy searching to agency researchers.”

Via Sun Microsystems about PNI by Bob Griffin, Sun CEO, “We had to be able to count on continued high performance and reliability even after orders of magnitude growth in our online business. That’s what scalability is all about, and that’s where Sun is unequaled.”

(My office was in the image server room. There were dozens of Pizza Box Sun SPARCs everywhere, all chained. One of my responsibilities was to batch upload 6-CD shuttles of Photo CDs of scans from the photo agencies and archives)

BMW M5 Love via Wikipedia

E28 M5 (1984-1987)

Main article: BMW M5 (E28)

The first M5, based on the E28 5-Series, made its debut at the 1984 Amsterdam Motor Show. It was the product of demand for an automobile with the carrying capacity of a saloon (sedan), but the overall performance of a sports car. It utilized the 535i chassis and an evolution of the engine from the BMW M1. The M5 was handbuilt by Motorsport technicians and at its launch was the fastest production saloon (sedan) in the world.

The M5 was offered in four different versions. The first version was the Left Hand Drive (LHD) Euro Spec M5. The second version was the Right Hand Drive (RHD) Spec M5. The third version was the North American Spec (NA or so-called 1988) M5. The fourth version was the South African (ZA) Spec M5.

The LHD, RHD Euro Spec M5s and the ZA spec M5s had the M88/3 powerplant which delivered 286 hp DIN (210 kW) whereas the North American 1988 M5 was equipped with a catalytic converter, which reduced the power output to 256 hp DIN (191 kW).

Specification

• (Euro) – 286 hp
• (USA) – 256 hp

Performance

At the time of sale, BMW quoted the following (relatively poor) 0-60 times to give the impression that the E28 M5 did not outperform the more expensive, heavier and top-of-the-range E24 M635csi.

• (Euro) – 286 hp 0-60 mph – 6.2 s. Top Speed: 153 mph
• (USA) – 256 hp 0-60 mph – 6.5 s. Top Speed: 148 mph

Special versions

• Whilst BMW Motorsport did not built any special versions of the E28 M5, the German tuner Hartge produced the Hartge H35S-24, a 330 PS (325 hp/243 kW) version of the E28 M5. Main modifications over and above the standard E28 M5 were revised cams, a modified exhaust, modified Motronic ECU programming and a revised (and lowered) suspension setup.
• Alpina limited their tuning efforts to the older M30 engine powered models.
• Alpina B7 Turbo 300-330hp (0-60: 4,7 sec, 168mph)

E34 M5 (1988-1995)

Main article: BMW M5 (E34)

The E34 M5 was produced from 1988 to 1995, although sales in North America started in 1991 and ended in 1993. It was produced at BMW M GmbH in Garching, Germany and like the previous M5, was entirely hand-built. It utilized the 535i chassis which was produced at BMW’s Dingolfing plant. Assembly was done either by a single M employee or a team of M employees and generally took about two weeks. It is rumored that the test drivers of the E34 M5 could determine who or what team made each specific M5, due to characteristic quirks of the handbuilt nature of the E34 M5. The engines were also built by hand by BMW M technicians. All of the E34 M5 powerplants were built to 5% of advertised output.

The early E34 M5 used an evolution of the 24-valve I6 found in the E28 M5 and E24 M635CSi/M6. Designated S38B36, the engine technically remains a 3.5 L, with a bore of 93.4 mm and stroke of 86 mm for a total capacity of 3535 cc. The added stroke is due to a new forged steel crankshaft, though the camshafts were also changed. Compression was up slightly (10:1 versus 9.8:1). Other adjustments made included an electronically controlled butterfly valve in the intake plenum which provided better low rpm and mid-range power. The engine also featured an improved flywheel, Bosch Motronic fuel injection, equal length stainless steel headers and three way ceramic catalysts.

The E34 M5 had a highly-tuned I6 engine called the S38B36. Originally it had a displacement of 3.6 L and produced 315 hp (235 kW), and 266 lb·ft @ 4750 RPM. Cars sold in North America and Switzerland which, due to a different catalytic converter, produced 310 hp (229 kW).

In may 1992, the engine displacement was increased to 3.8 L with the S38B38, except in North America, which continued with the 3.6 L engine. Power was now increased to 340 hp (250 kW) DIN. Also in 1992, a Touring version was introduced in LHD form only.

The M5 came with an unusual wheel design. From 1988-1992 the M5 featured the M-System wheels. These wheels were 8x17J, but came with a bolted-on wheel cover. Under the cover was a black 5-spoke alloy wheel. The press was critical of the design, often claming it gave the M5 the appearance of having “white-wall” tires. In 1992 BMW changed the design and a new cover was produced – the M-System II. The original intent of the M-System cover was to direct more air to the brake assembly to increase cooling. The cover actually integrated a fin assembly behind the cover. The M-System II covers, known as the “throwing stars” did not have as much capability to direct air to the brake assemblies. In late 1994, the M5 came with M Parallel wheels that did away with the cover.

Specification

• 89-92 (Euro) I6-24v 3.6 L – 232 kW/315 hp (only available with 5-speed manual transmission)
• 92-95 (Euro) I6-24v 3.8 L – 250 kW/340 hp (also available with 6-speed manual transmission)
• 91-93 (USA) I6-24v 3.6 L – 229 kW/310 hp (only available with 5-speed manual transmission)
• 89-95 (EU/USA) – (no automatic transmission available)

Performance

• 89-92 (Euro) I6-24v 3.6 L – 232 kW/315 hp 0-60 mph – 6.3 s. Top speed: 155 mph (electronic limited)
• 92-95 (Euro) I6-24v 3.8 L – 250 kW/340 hp 0-60 mph – 5.9/5.7 sec*. Top speed: 155 mph (electronic limited)
• 91-93 (USA) I6-24v 3.6 L – 229kW/311 hp 0-60 mph – 6.4 s. Top speed: 155 mph (electronic limited)

* (available only with 6-speed manual transmission)

Special versions

• Cecotto Edition — A total of 22 Cecotto E34 M5s were produced with options of having either Lagoon Green metallic (266) and Mauritius Blue metallic paint (287).
• Winkelhock Edition — A total of 51 Winkelhock E34 M5s were produced with the options of having Jet Black (668) with contrasting lower body panels in Sterling Silver metallic paint (244).
• 20 Jahre Motorsport Edition — To celebrate BMW Motorsport 20th anniversary, BMW had built 20 specially equipped Euro-spec M5s in late 1992.
• UK Limited Edition — To commemorate the end of right-hand drive E34 M5 production, 50 examples of the E34 M5 Limited Edition were assembled between March and June of 1995.
• Alpina B10 Bi-Turbo — standart 3.4l with twin Garrett T25 turbo – 265kW/360hp, 0-60mph 5.1, 182mph – only 507 have made.

E39 M5 (1998-2003)

Unlike its predecessors, the E39 M5 was not handbuilt at the BMW M GmbH factory; it was produced on the same assembly line as the normal E39 5-series at the Dingolfing factory in Germany.

Introduced in 1998 at the Geneva Motor Show, production did not begin until late October of that year. A total of 20,482 E39 M5s were made from 1998 to 2003. BMW M produced three versions of the E39 M5, the European LHD and RHD versions and the North American specification version.

The E39 M5 had a highly tuned V8 engine based on the M62 engine called the S62, which displaced 4.9 L and produced 400 bhp (294 kW). The engine featured a 7000 RPM redline, Double-VANOS, which varies the intake and exhaust valves for both cylinder banks, and individual throttle butterflies for each of the cylinders, allowing for a much faster engine response time.

All E39 M5s were equipped with a Getrag Type D six-speed manual transmission with the following gearing ratios:

4.23(1), 2.54(2), 1.62(3), 1.23(4), 1.00(5), 0.83(6)

It is the same transmission used in the E39 540i but some changes were made to cope with the extra power the S62 engine produced. A reinforced clutch, rear differential utilizing a shorter 3.15:1 ratio and a limited slip differential with 25% maximum locking.

The E39 M5 suspension shared its basic aluminium-intensive MacPherson strut/multi-link design of the V8 E39 5 series. However, several changes were made by BMW M. Reduced spring height, 0.9 inch (23 mm) lower. A specific shock valving, thicker front and rear anti-roll bars, polyurethane auxilliary springs and steel balljoints.

Like all V8-powered E39 models, the E39 M5 was equipped with a recirculating-ball steering system. Overall steering ratio was reduced to 14.7 from 17.9 it featured a servotronic vehicle-speed-sensitive power assist that provides two levels of resistance controlled via console mounted Sport button. The E39 M5 is equipped with four-wheel vented disc brakes measuring 13.6″ in diameter in front and 12.9″ in diameter in the rear. On European-specification models, the front rotors are of a “floating” two-piece design for better heat dissipation. Anti-lock brakes were standard.

During its 5 years in production, there were some cosmetic changes, these include:

• Revised headlight design incorporating illuminated “Angel Eye” rings
• Jeweled tail light design
• Park Distance Control sensors in the front bumper (previously in rear only)
• Thicker three-spoke M steering wheel identical to the one fitted to the E46 M3
• Grey instrument panel
• Improved solar sensor for standard automatic climate control
• Revised navigation/audio unit with larger (6.5-inch) monitor
• Rear head protection airbags added
• Second-generation M Mobility tire repair system in place of earlier version
• Available M Audio System with special tweeters, Kevlar/carbon coaxial speakers and two subwoofers behind the rear console
• Alcantara headliner included with Extended Leather interior (previously only included with Complete Leather)

For the subsequent two model years, changes were limited to the addition of new exterior colors (from 9/01 production) and the upgrade to a DVD-based navigation system (from 9/02 production).

The E39 M5 is capable of accelerating from 0-60 mph in 5.3 seconds* and electronically limited to a top speed of 155 mph*, making it the fastest 4-door sedan in the world at that time.

* (factory sheet)

Specification

• (Euro) 5.0 L V8-32 – 294 kW (400 hp)
• (USA) 5.0 L V8-32 – 290 kW (394bhp)

Performance

• 294 kW (400 hp) 0-60 mph – 4.7 s. Top Speed: 250 km/h (155 mph) (electronic limited), 298 km/h (186 mph) (without electronic limiter)

E60 M5 (2004-Present)

The E60 M5 was introduced in 2004. It has a naturally aspirated 5.0 L BMW V10 S85 engine redlining at 8250 RPM and developing a peak output of 507 PS (373 kW, 500 SAE hp). Other key features include a stiffened aluminum chassis and a 7-speed SMG III manual transmission. The car weighed the same as the E39 of 1800 kg.

The BMW M5, along with the new M6, were designed to use the new SMG III electrohydraulic manual transmission. Therefore, they will initially only be offered with this new transmission. There was a relative uproar amongst the fans and buyer-base when this was announced—however, BMW announced the eventual availability of a manual transmission in North American markets.

Specification

• 5.0 L 40v V10 – 373 kW (507 PS)

Performance

• 373 kW (507 PS) 0-60 mph – 4.5 s. Top speed: 250 km/h (155 mph) (electronic limited), 330 km/h (205 mph) (without electronic limiter)
• Road and Track Feb 2006 tested 0-60 in 4.1 seconds.

In a country that is constantly moving to the right, why do American drivers insist on camping in the passing lane so far to the left?

I will not go into it right now but my only real pet peeve is when drivers camp in the passing lane. Driving down here to Chapel Hill from DC, I have been relegated to doing what I have been doing for years but is illegal and unsafe, which is to use the underpopulated slow traffic lane as a passing lane. This would be ideal if we were in England where the far right lane is in fact the passing lane, but here in America, the left lane of a multi-lane motorway is for passing.

Larry Nolan calls these people “lane monitors.”

When I can actually pass on the left, the moment I pass, I signal and merge in with traffic, which is to say the next lane over. The left lane is not a traffic lane with the exception of the left turn exit.

This is done by indicating a left using the left turn signal while approaching the camper in the left lane. Invariably, this results in the camper merging right, allowing the flow of traffic to remain constant and safe.

The current American system doesn’t work, which is to say flashing the brights.

The only thing that does work but which is amazingly dangerous and I don’t recommend it, is bearing down on the camper and riding his bumper. This generally does one or both of two things:

2) Eventually makes him merge right, especially when you are driving a Very Tall Land Rover with a 2″ lift thanks to Old Man Emu shocks. In most cases, the drenching of light shakes the driver out of his diet soda haze, out of his DVD-watching, and out of his fiddling with the radio.

Sadly, both tactics work elegantly. But both are exceedingly illegal and unsafe. Generally behaving in this way results in scaring old ladies off the expressway, but it also results in making a lot of drivers indignant. Most lane monitors are indignant because they in fact truly believe that they are being mindful and lawful citizens.

But, all I can say is live free and drive.

Mind you, I am still considering what the solution may be. Any suggestions?