Presentation at “Cultura Democratica”

Presentation / Presentazione del 12/Sept/2009

English / Italiano (sotto il video)

The organisers had given me two hours to present on communication in politics (including campaigning through social media).

I settled upon a flexible road-map because I wanted to create an opportunity for the participants to express their opinions. Most presentations, espescially in continental Europe tend to be monologues where the audience sits passively and is expected to absorb dense and sometimes deliberately obscure.

In the end, the presentation was thus:

Part 1) “If you (the audience) were the communications team of your party’s candidate, and your candidate had to participate in a presidential debate in a month from now: what would you do; what would you suggest; what would your strategy be?

Part 2) Focus on www.mybarackobama.com, where I state that the genius of the campaign was to reduce the distance between “emotion” and “action”.

Part 3) At the request of the audience, we then focused on the French Presidential Debate between Ségolène Royal and Nicolas Sarkozy. In particular, I demonstrate how Mr Sarkozy was far more prepared and had a communications strategy to meet this challenge. (see an earlier post on Presidential Debates)

What you see in the video below are excerpts of the presentation (in Italian). For the entire 2-hours presentation click here.

Special thanks to my "mentor" Brunella Devoti who dealt with the logistics throughout the conference and introduced my talk.

Questo e’ il reso-conto del mio intervento a Cortona a l’occasione dell’evento “Cultura Democratica”

Come accade spesso (e a maggior ragione in Europa continentale), questo tipo di presentazione si trasforma in un diluvio di informazione che per il pubblico e’ difficile da gestire. C’e’ da scommettere che in certi casi, l’opacita’ e la densita’ della presentazione e’ il risultato, non di un presentatore che non a cura di chi lo ascolta, ma, che sono volute.

Decidetti dunque di far partecipare il pubblico; di dare lui l’opportunita’ di esprimersi, di rivelare quante opinioni contrastanti possano esserci e di diriggere il dibattito. Il meta-messaggio che volli trasmettere tramite l’interazione, e’ che la comunicazione in politica e’ un tema molto complesso.

Percio’, la sessione fu divisa in tre parti:

1) “Se voi foste i consiglieri di un candidato, e che questo candidato dovra’ affrontare il suo avversario in un dibattito televisivo in un mese da oggi; cosa gli consigliereste di fare?

2) Il caso di mybarackobama.com e come il sito ha accorciato le distanza tra “emozione” e “azione”.

3) Per decisione del pubblico, e’ stato approfondito e in fine dimostrato che Nicolas Sarkozy fu molto piu preparato di Segolene Royal durante il dibattito presidenziale del 2005. (Articolo sul tema Presidential Debates).

Tutta la presentazione (2 ore) puo’ essere vista cliccando qui (richiede quicktime).

Vorrei ringraziare Brunella Devoti, il mio "tutor" a Cortona per il suo aiuto e professionalismo. 

What is the ideal length of a presentation?

http://polls.linkedin.com/p/31087/mibfn

Using social media to advance your career

Earlier this month, I had hosted a panel discussion on how to use social media to get ahead in your professional career.

Here is the summary of that discussion.

Using Social Media To Find A Job

View more documents from WahydVannoni.

Finding a job through social media.

I will be hosting a panel discussion at The Speech Improvement Company, Inc., on how to use social media to find a job. This is aimed not only at job-seekers, but all those who would like to get to the next step in the career.

Link to press release:

Description: An increasing number of anecdotes are surfacing about people landing jobs using social networks, such as twitter (See “How Twitter can help at work by the New York Times http://shiftingcareers.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/09/07/how-twitter-can-help-at-work/)

What are the opportunities, threats and strategies job-seekers should be aware of when using social media?

There will be three short presentations from hiring and social media specialists to spur the conversation on. The discussion will be moderated by Wahyd Vannoni, director of new media at The Speech Improvement Company, Inc..

Please join us at our offices in Brookline, MA on Thursday, March 12th, from 10 AM to 12 PM.

Seating is limited.

RSVP:

Wahyd Vannoni
Director of New Media / Coach

wahyd.vannoni@speechimprovement.com

http://speechimprovement.com/pages/wahyd_vannoni.php

The Speech Improvement Company, Inc.

1614 Beacon Street

–
Wahyd Vannoni
Director of New Media / Coach

http://speechimprovement.com/pages/wahyd_vannoni.php

The Speech Improvement Company, Inc.

1614 Beacon Street
Brookline, MA  02446
USA

Phone:  +1 617-739-3330
Fax: +1  617-232-9430

The inevitability of video-résumés

I have argued for a while now that video-résumés or video c.v.’s are going to be the killer application of the recruitement industry.

Before I articulate the argument, I will highlight the following news from MassHighTech:

Corporate annual reports move to online video

“But the nature of that communication is changing. What was once reams of paper impersonally reflecting numbers, activities and attitudes is moving to a more personal and cheaper medium — online video.”

This is of course is also applicable to job applications and personal branding.

Video killed the text star

I do not believe that all of the sudden video will supplant the text version of a cover letter and résumé. However, I do believe that it will set-apart those applicants who will supplement their application with a video.

Depending on the job they are looking for, the will calibrate their video to project their personality. This is something that text-based documents cannot do.

In fact, this is already being done, and had been done in the world of music. In the end, musicians have to be heard and ideally seen performing.

The Berklee School of Music in Boston features many of its students on its home page. See bassist Ignacio Long.

As you can see, it is much more effective for you to form an opinion of somebody’s character by seeing him than by trying to reverse engineer from text.

In any event, all application always end-up with face-to-face interviews. This is time-consuming and recruiters may have missed a few potential hires because their application did not meet their criteria 100%.

So this is how it might work. Text-based documents will still be used as a first filter by using key words (CSS, Phd etc…) and other criteria such as work-permits. Once this is done, recruiters will look at the videos. This is more effective because within a few seconds, recruiters will know whether a candidate has the right personality for the job they are trying to fill.

There are of course legal considerations to be made. Yet, nothing prevents current applicants to include in their application a link to a website which may feature pictures and videos. Technology puts us in front of a fait-accompli and sooner or later, those who do not include a video of themselves will be at a disadvantage.

“In Search of Lost Time” in Mumbai

Slumdog Millionaire in Brookline, MA

Set and filmed in India, “Slumdog Millionaire” tells the story of a young uneducated man from the Dharavi slums of Mumbai who appears on the Indian version of “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?” (Kaun Banega Crorepati, mentioned in the Hindi version) and exceeds people’s expectations, arousing the suspicions of the game show host and of law enforcement officials.

Slumdog Millionaire won five of the six awards it was nominated for at the Critics’ Choice Awards and all four of the awards it was nominated for at the Golden Globes, including Best Drama Film. It has also been nominated for eleven BAFTA Awards and ten Academy Awards.

So what is it about the film that makes it such a hit? “It digs into India’s gritty depths, where it juxtaposes squalor, exploitation and corruption with humanity’s fight to overcome it. Elements are predictable, but the movie never is slight, in large part due to its superb cast” says one reviewer. “A spirited underdog fable marinated in modern India’s melting pot. Danny Boyle’s still the master of spices” says another. Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun Times gave the film four stars, stating that it is, “a breathless, exciting story, heartbreaking and exhilarating. Wall Street Journal critic Joe Morgenstern refers to Slumdog Millionaire as, “the film world’s first globalized masterpiece.

Indeed, many story-lines are intertwined and brought to conclusion with elegance and purpose. For instance, it could be said that the film is about finding several paths to redemption. The two brothers part way when the older, finds an opportunity to exact revenge while the younger advocates compassion. From there, their moral paths diverge though their fates are intertwined. In the end they both find find the peace they had been seeking.

Ultimately, this film is a success because, it is about memory, more exactly, the relationship between emotion and memory. In the novel “In Search of Lost Time”, Marcel Proust recounts an anodyne episode, that of the madeleine.

Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust (10 July 1871 – 18 November 1922)

“I raised to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had soaked a morsel of the cake. No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shudder ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, something isolated, detached, with no suggestion of its origin.”

The central theme in Proust’s opus is memory; likewise, “Jamal” the Slumdog, knows all the answers to the questions of the game, because each is associated with a particularly emotional episode. Until recently men thought that memory was akin to recording machine, a DVD player, a cassette player, a phonograph, depending on the epoch. Now we know that memory needs an emotion to capture an event and make sure it is recallable for as long as possible. This is why, you will be able to say where you were to your grandchildren the day and time Barak Obama became the 44th president of the United States.

Chasing lazy people on facebook: an Italian approach

Renato Brunetta, minister for innovation and public administration, has decided to use facebook to chase the “fanulloni”, literally “those-who-do-nothing”.

The Corriere della Sera reports that the minister’s reasoning is that civil servants in Italy spend, and therefore waste, a lot of their time on facebook.

Consequently, he decided to fight this war on the “fanulloni’s” turf and opened a page on facebook. So far he as attracted more than 15 000 followers. It is not clear though, how his presence on facebook will somehow halt the presumed downward spiral in productivity.

One comment reads:

a proposito di fannulloni: che è andato a fare su facebook, a perdere tempo?

Speaking of “fanulloni”: what is he doing on facebook: wasting time?

A minister with a social media mission!

Can Social Media help public radio

A report from WBUR’s december tweet-up.

The discussion centered around how, public radios such as WBUR can use social media.

Several proposals were made:

• Allow phone/PDA’s contributions and
• Encourage several low contributions ($1 to $5) in addition to the current four official fund-raisers
• Make the act of contributing seamless
• Any contribution, however low, should result in membership (currently the minimum is set at $60/year)
• Recognize contributors who referred other donors
• Distribute electronic badges (I pledged) in the form of a .gif that people/bloggers/twitterers can display on their social media platforms and…
• Create an electronic equivalent of membership donor card
• Open archives on a pay-per-download basis (though this might be tough to negotiate with NPR, CPB etc…)

Any other ideas?

Social Media Gathering at WBUR

Facebook/Twitter tie-up: have your say!

Who is the coolest person on twitter?

Social media sites are in some repects like playgrounds. There are people you want to avoid, but there are people you really want to be friends with.

Take Twitter, a place where people can post anything that goes throught their mind, in under 150 characters. Once you register, you can “follow” other people and entities to read what’s on their mind. Conversely, others can “follow” you and read what you are up to.

I had a feeling that if Warren Buffet were on twitter under his own name, most people would want to “follow” him but he may not necesarilly be interested in turn, in “following” them. From there, I posit that the coolest people on twitter are those whom everybody want to follow while they, chose more carefully whom they are following.

I therefore came-up with the “wer/wing” ratio which gives a score to everyone who is on twitter.

The formula is this: (Number of followers / Number following) multiplied by the Log of numbers of followers.

My twitter score is 0.96. I “follow” 141 people while only 73 “follow” me.

If you plug these numbers in the formula, you get:

(73/141) x Log (73) = 0.96

Let’s pretend for the time being that the formula were shortened to: number of followers / number of people you follow (in my case 73/141=0.518). WBUR on twitter scores 1.01 (759/763). The problem is that if you leave the formula as is, it doesn’t account for the order of magnitude; 2/1 gives the same score as 400 / 200. So to account for the order of magnitude I take the Log (base 10) of the number of followers and multiply to the previous score. (Here is a list of selected Logs to give you a sense of what it does to the formula)

Log 10 = 1

Log 100 = 2

Log 500 = 2.70

Log 1000 = 3

So here is the coolnest scores for following people:

Name->	Manifest_Mag	WBUR	Marketing Profs	NoOneYouKnow
Followers A	73	763	4477	435
Following B	141	759	4437	251
A / B	0.52	1.01	1.01	1.73
(A / B) X (Log A) =	0.96	2.90	3.68	4.57

So you now get a sense of how the ranking is possible through these scores.

However, there are refinements that can be brought. The most imporant to me is the quality of the “follower”. There should be a way to account for the “quality” of the link. In other words, if someone like Warren Buffet follows you how many other normal links is that worth?

This can be more relevant in a social, and more professional, network like Linkedin where your chances of getting ahead are improved by the quality of the links you have.