Surprise? What Surprise? Feedback on Obama's 100d Press Conference

Was watching last night while live tweeting - Thought Obama did an excellent presentation. Loved the New York Times' Jeff Zeleny's question: Obama's reaction when writing down 'enchanted' was dead priceless. But here's the thing: the one question that seemed frothy and light, was where I kind of freaked out a bit.. 

Thought the surprise answer was a spectacular fail. BO claimed surprise (35:10) at the number of critical issues that weren't apparent 18 months ago, particularly the financial crisis. What rubbish: the Bear Stearns fund bailout debacle kicked off in June 2007,  ultimately culminating in its Federal Reserve-brokered sale to JP Morgan Chase in March 2008 - with Lehman Brothers close on its heels. This was well before the presidential campaigns kicked off, all the candidates should've had a handle on this, and yes I do believe they should have seen this current crisis coming, especially a former candidate who was embraced quite warmly by the financial industry the way BO was.

While I think it's too early to judge the Administration, Obama's condescension towards partisanship and the politics of the Beltway seems petulant and beneath a sitting POTUS - especially coming from a former US Senator. That quirk only underscores how little his Senate career prepared him for his current role. It can't all be Bush's fault (were that it could...) or the fault of politics.

Makes me think of Ellis Cose's brilliant article, "12 Things", where he lists 12 rules of thumb on thriving in America. Number 9 talks about hard work, intelligence, competence not always being enough to get you the results you want. 

"...the general rule is that any organization (government, private business, educational or other) is essentially a social body that rewards those fully engaged in the game. To the extent we try to hold ourselves above that process, we end up losing..."

Obama would do well to commit that to memory. Or at least to his BlackBerry.

Twitter Follow Fever: Why The Numbers Don't Matter

Ahhhh, Back To Normal: 11 days after the Kutcher/CNN race, and Twitter hasn't crumbled, the Horsemen of the O-Prah-Colypse didn't show up, and the TwitterVerse is pretty much as it was Pre-Hoopla. Sure, Kutcher missed the point about Twitter: he's in no way the 'little guy' he portrayed himself to be, he's the Hollywood GoldenBoy he always was with a follow/follower profile that's textbook 'Celebrity' (e.g. he follows less than 0.007% of his follower population total). And sure, the Race was disruptive – hopefully those Tweeps who got caught up in the madness and inflicted their infectiousness on their follows can look back to that time as if from a fever dream and regret having been fooled into becoming a RSS feed on the behalf of someone whose overstated triumph wasn't quite the life-changing event they believed it was.

One quirk exposed by the Kutcher event to those outside the TwitterVerse and clarified for those within is this fixation on increasing follower volumes through whatever means necessary. Right now, a key TwitterVerse complaint is spamming promising “Get 30,000 followers in 30 days”, etc.

Follow The Leaders, But Which Ones?

But why is this important? The Twitter pundits who said that the 1 million follower mark made by a homegrown Twitterer would be a more meaningful event to the Internet than the @aplusk extravaganza were dead right. Some of the top candidates for that ribbon hover  around the 100,000 marker. But what does that really mean? Surely anyone with that many followers has lots of influence already with their followships...right? 

Well...I can think of at least 5 such Twitterers – all of whom I follow - whose ideologies or products I care absolutely nothing about. From my 10 weeks on Twitter (yes, I'm a relative newbie – but was on way before Oprah, thank you!), I get a sense that jacking up follower volumes is a serious commitment, but where's the benefit other than bragging rights. Something else: many of those Twitterers don't come across as distinctive personalities.  On the contrary, they can be rather benign, inoffensive, and just, you know, 'there'. NB: A notable exception is @brooksbayne: his ultra-conservative political tweeting can be polarising, but his followship numbers aren't necessarily an indicator of purist sympathetic tendencies (that an ideological agnostic such as myself follows him proves the point).

Enter the @Murnahan

An interesting Twitterer who has around 10,000 followers and is arguably more influential than most of the 100K Twitterers is Mark Murnahan. In the quest towards pulling out TwitterVerse's Excalibur sword, Murnahan's a candidate for a grass-roots King Arthur. According to @murnahan's bio, he's a SEO expert, and so far, has no plans for media domination. What's cool about Murnahan is that he truly engages his followers: as of today, he follows around 10,000, with a very high percentage of reciprocation. And his is a real, authentic personality: intelligent, inquisitive, communicative, and can be – on occasion – profoundly silly. His 'Dear Tweeps' love tweets are becoming the stuff of TwitterLore.

Murnahan: Dear Tweeps: I love you so much. If you were here I would hug you until you shart! http://bit.ly/kprDG (expand) #love

1 day ago from TweetDeck · Reply · View Tweet

(Charming! - Ed.)

Scatological insights aside, Murnahan 'gets' Twitter culture: his blog was an oasis of sanity during the Kutcher/CNN race, and his post-event analysis was quite possibly the Best In Show on the day. Being your authentic self on Twitter means that you risk alienating people, which I'm sure he does; he isn't some bland avatar precisely because he is himself. Equally, he isn't a politico-spammer or RSS feed either, he's well-rounded enough for people to connect with him. And it's this level of connection that shows what Twitter can be: a place to connect with others as well as develop a brand, where high numbers don't really count for as much as folks seem to think it does. Hopefully the TwitterVerse can get this lesson before I get yet another DM spammer promising Kutcher-like results – which brings me to my #TwitterTip for today: be yourself, don't worry about the numbers.  Especially if you wouldn't know what to do with them anyway! 

Bishop's Checkmate On a Parky Pawn

What was Parky thinking? The so-called 'Sir' Michael Parkinson - clearly with not enough activities to fill out his retirement schedule - took it upon himself to publicly disrespect the late Jade Goody as representing the worst in Britain. Goody - who lost her bout with cervical cancer at the age of 27 this Mother's Day - was buried this weekend.  Parky clearly didn't wait for the ground over her grave to harden - with ants in his pants he went to the papers and slammed a dead mother for being stupid, with 2 young children and a grieving family watching in shock. 

Was pleased to see Bishop Blake stand up for Goody in his blog for what was an astonishingly poor show of decency from the ParkBag. For all his derision of Goody's background, I was very surprised to read about Parky's own history - dishcloth roots and all.  Well, Goody achieved more by 27 in making the public aware of the devastation of cervical cancer - her battle has already saved lives.  Not sure if watching the likes of David Beckham on 'Parkinson' really matches up (NB: Posh and Becks??? Talk about working class Britain !).

Well, Parky - you may be called 'Sir' these days, but you're definitely no 'Gentleman'.