Shortly before Personal Democracy Forum this year, I wrote a blog post about keeping Personal Democracy Forum Personal. There were many great speakers at PDF this year, some big names, with important things to say. Yet for me, there were a few that stood out in terms of keeping it personal.

First, was Danah Boyd. She rocked. She spoke about online social networks, like Facebook and MySpace. She spoke about how when people listed someone as a friend, it didn’t mean that they were personal friends, it was more about respect and admiration, as well as a way for the individual to communicate to others who and what is important to them. She noted that teens today do not have the places to hang out the way I did when I was a teenager.

Back then, we all went and hung out on Spring Street. Depending on your social circle, you hung out at Pizza House or Colonial Pizza. Some kids slipped into the Purple Pub or the American Legion. Others would go to the Williams College Student Union and visit the snack bar or the coffeehouse or radio station in the basement. In college, there were similar places to hang out, much of it centered around the student union.

But for kids today, these sort of options are rapidly disappearing, and the places where kids hang out, Boyd asserted, are MySpace and Facebook. So, if a politician wants to reach this demographic, they need to visit these spaces. They need to stop by and do the equivalent of shaking hands, which is leaving notes on people’s walls.

Seth Godin takes the second Keeping It Personal award for posing the question of if it’s time to flip the funnel. He spoke about the TV industrial complex. They have been telling candidates for years that the way to get the message out is to buy ads to raise donations so you can buy more ads to get elected and then buy more ads to get re-elected, and so on. Flip the funnel. Instead of filtering dollars down to the campaign make the funnel a megaphone and get your supporters to spread your message virally. You give up a little control, but you get conversation and a cumulative advantage. Be remarkable so that your supporters will remark and spread your message.

The third Keeping It Personal award goes to the ‘Is Cyberspace Colorblind’ panel. Chris Rabb did his standard spiel about people owning the privilege that got them to where they are. Things got a bit heated between the panel and some of the privileged white male bloggers in the audience, but all in all it was a great reminder to everyone that everyone else you run into on the Internet, everyone you are trying to reach out to, might not look the same as you, might have different concerns and different ways of connecting. Could the discussion have gone further and explored more ways of addressing different communities online? Sure. But the bottom line that I took away from the discussion was a reaffirmation of one of my favorite points. Go out and read blogs from people who belong to communities different from your own. We will all better off if we do that.

The fourth Keeping It Personal award goes to the Social Networks, Tipping Points and Organizing. There was concrete data there and good and useful information about how to engage the social networks, particularly in terms of dealing with connectors to expand the size of the audience online. For me personally, it was probably the most useful session.

I was going to end with that, but then today, I went to an unconference session on online/offline integration and how we measure effectiveness of online campaigns. Beka from Greenpeace spoke about the house party program that she had done. She gave a detailed description of the program and what worked to make it effective. It was the sort of houseparty program that we need to see more of that empowered volunteers and invited them to become more active.

To me, the key idea of much of this is relates to the discussions I’ve been having about the Presidential elections. In 2004, the campaigns, with the Dean campaign as a prime example, invited supporters to be innovative. In 2008, so far, the campaigns are looking at the innovations from the 2004 cycle and seem to be thinking that if they repeat those innovations, they will be successful. Yet what made a difference in the 2004 cycle wasn’t the innovations that volunteers came up with. It was the invitation to innovate. It was making the campaigns personal through that invitation. It was great to see people who seemed to understand the importance of inviting everyone in, even if that isn’t as apparent in the 2008 Presidential campaigns.

(Tags: pdf2007)