(note: You can look at the slides and text here; video will be posted as soon as I get it.)

A week and a half ago, I received an email asking me if I'd be willing to do an Ignite talk for the March 4 NYC event, part of Global Ignite Week. If you're not familiar with Ignite, here's the deal: You have 5 minutes to give your talk; you create a PowerPoint presentation to go with the talk, but here's the kicker: You must do 20 slides, and the slides will advance automatically every 15 seconds. Talk about creative restraint inspiration! Not only is it an amazing challenge and a great place to flex your speaker muscles, but the Ignite platform also reaches far and wide into multiple communities, and can be a huge opportunity to reach lots of audiences with your message. Was I up for it? Sure.

Then the panic set in. Oh my God, what I have I signed myself up for?

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This was shot in June 2009 in Toronto for GetInvolved. It was a really fun conversation with the producers… I talk about free-for-all organizing, how influence is changing, the importance of authenticity–and I start the first Twitter Anon meeting, to boot.

On Saturday, I gave a the closing keynote talk at Organizing 2.0 here in NYC, a one-day conference designed to bring together labor folks, community organizers and netroots people to work on strategies for integrating online and offline organizing. A fun time was had by all! Here's the video (thank you, Sum of Change!), and below are my notes from the talk.

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More and more, people are talking about the "attention economy." If you're new to the term, here's the basic idea: Attention is scarce, meaning it's a finite commodity that can be gathered and exhausted. Using economics as a model, we have to choose where we "spend" our attention, and those seeking to gain our attention have to use market-based tactics — a.k.a., "marketing!" aha! — to win us over.

Models like this are very attractive to us as a culture because we're so familiar with transaction-based economies. As I wrote in "Share This!," it's how we think of everything we do. If I pay you $5, you’ll give me a pint of Ben and Jerry’s. If I refinish your flooring, you’ll pay me for my labor. Even when we think of bartering, we still focus on the transactional moment: If I cook you dinner, you’ll show me how to set up a website.

When we apply transactions to how traditional media works (think: one-directional, few-to-many broadcast messages), it's easy to see how we ended up with the dismal state of affairs that exist: reality TV, infotainment news, etc. If, as a producer of content, I need to get the most bang for my buck out of each "transaction," I'm going to create something that will gain the most attention. I'll have to yell the loudest, create the most spectacle. It's not worth my time or money to create niche content that will draw in specific kinds of audiences; partly because this is one-directional, and I have all the control, I can blast people with content and hope for the best out of that transactional moment, when I print an article or air a show. The more outrageous that content is, the better chance I have of at least catching people's eye for a moment — take advantage of humanity's rubbernecking instinct.

As we enter a more social, and perhaps more holistic, way of interacting with the world around us, squeezing our attention span in this kind of transaction-based, market model is turning out to be fraught with problems. First, the transactional moment is more bi-directional (or even multi-directional) than ever. We're having conversations with one another, so it's not just about me producing content and you consuming it. It's about how we interact with what gets put out there, and how that content changes once we start interacting with it.

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I'm running a poll to help me and my publisher choose a cover for Share This! — go take it! Here are your choices…

BK wanted me to add a "how do you know the author" question to the survey, so of course, my friends decided to have a wee bit of fun. Here's a roundup of my favorite response so far (with necessary comments from me in italics):

• She's a pal.
• From the bar
• The series of tubes
• In college, we were making beds for the football team NY Giants. ask her. (true!)
• We share an ex-boyfriend, ha ha.
• It's complicated, but I've been a fan for years! (See: "We share an ex-boyfriend." No kidding, there's more than one)
• We went to psychic healer school together.
• She designed my site, and saved my life. (check is in the mail, Alice)
• I am her indentured servant (You are? Where's my dinner, muppet?)
• Schmoozing
• I mistook her for Jill from Jack & Jill Politics (true story, Cheryl.)
• We met in in jail. Or was it the Army?
• Her very favorite Uncle out of all her uncles living in NC (there's just one)
• Hair bleach and naughty conversations
• Osmosis (not far from the truth, on the Bowery)

UPDATE: More funny friends have chimed in…

• From a movie set, it's a long story (god help us, this one)
• secret president of her fan club (that check is going in the mail now)
• Sister; knew her before she got a sense of humor :) (thanks, bro!)
• friend/dog scratcher/chef (need you FT, see "indentured servant" above)
• great serendipity (the meaning of life, after "42" of course)

For Share This!, I'm trying to cover and answer some of the most common hesitant feelings when it comes to people getting fully on board with the social networking movement. If you're not active already, what are the questions you need answered, or the fears you have? For those that are in deep, what do you hear from the people around you who aren't?

Also, I'm doing a series of "Yeah, But…" sidebars to help answer questions. What are your "yeah, buts"?

Here are the fears and yeah-buts I've heard most (in no particular order):

• I don't want people to know about my private life
• I like using social networks to maintain my personal relationships, but I don't like blending the professional stuff in with it
• I feel like I have to get everything right/perfect before I join an online conversation (most often with blogging)
• I don't have time for any of this stuff.
• Yeah but… the corporations/government are gathering so much info about us.
• … everything moves too fast. I can't keep up.
• … media/journalism require money/investment. Social networks can't replace that.
• … these social networks are all closed/walled gardens. Why don't we all do something open source?

Maybe one more question, for intermediate and advanced folks: If you could look back at your pre-social-networking self and offer one piece of insight or wisdom, what would it be? Is there anything you wish you'd known before you joined into social networks?

Leave everything in the comments below; I'll let yous know which ones make it into the draft and the final versions of the book.

I've been following the NYC public advocate race for the past few weeks, and noticed a while ago that all of the candidates are on Twitter. As I started following each of them, it became clear that they might not understand the full potential of social media and networking, because most of their tweets have been one-way broadcast tweets–posting how they feel about an issue, where they're speaking that night, etc.

I griped a little yesterday about this, and Elana over at Wellstone Action asked me what advice I'd give candidates running for office. Here's a quick, handy-dandy list of pointers for candidates, from the position of a voter:

• Talk with me, not to me. Twitter is a media platform for conversation, not broadcast. A rule of thumb that's used for organizations also applies to candidates: only about 20-30% of your tweets should be about you. The rest should be about what your community cares about. Which leads me to…
• Find out what your community cares about. Read what your followers are tweeting and respond with helpful information. It doesn't just have to be related to the office you're running for, either… in fact, it's better if you mix it up a little. For example, someone you follow tweets about heading to a restaurant you love. Respond and say you go there often, too, and be sure to try the blackened sea bass.
• Stay on top of hot topics. Look for people talking about issues you care about with Twitter search. You can either save them as saved search in your Twitter app (Tweetie, Tweetdeck, Twitterific, etc.), or as an RSS feed for your news reader (Google Reader, Netvibes, etc.) Then respond to those tweets, even if you're not following each other.
• Give back to the community. Retweeting others' ideas and suggestions is a great way to show appreciation, and to spead the good word.
• Use your own, authentic voice, not a press release voice. I'm a voter, a human, and I want you to be a human too. Robots don't do so well in the voting booth.
• If you don't have time, assign a staff person to monitor and respond to items — just make sure they're clear that they're your staff person, and not you. For example, NYC mayoral candidate Reverend Billy Talen has a personal account, as well as his campaign staff's group account. If your staff person uses your account, ask them to note that they're a staffer.

In short, act like a normal person who cares about the people around them, because we know you do!

–

Note: Bill de Blasio was the only public advocate candidate who responded to my gripe, and he gets extra Twitter points for both that and at least retweeting people once in a while. Go Bill!