October 2007 Archive

This morning, I saw an article that made my heart run slightly cold - which lead me to post it on my Facebook Notes. The response was quite intriguing that I decided to republish it here on my site.

So this morning, I see an article in the International Herald Tribune which made me stop cold (please, note the pun)

As temperatures rise, a greening of Greenland

NARSARSUAQ, Greenland: A strange thing is happening at the edge of Poul Bjerge’s forest, a place so minute and unexpected that it brings to mind the teeny piece of land that Woody Allen’s father carries around in the film “Love and Death.”

Its four oldest trees - in fact, the four oldest pine trees in Greenland, named Rosenvinge’s trees after the Dutch botanist who planted them in a mad experiment in 1893 - are waking up. After lapsing into stately, sleepy old age, they are exhibiting new sprinklings of green at their tops, as if someone had glued on fresh needles.

“The old ones, they’re having a second youth,” said Bjerge, 78, who has watched the forest, called Qanasiassat, come to life, in fits and starts, since planting most of the trees in it 50 years ago. He beamed like a proud grandson. “They’re growing again.”

When using the words “growing” in connection with Greenland in the same sentence, it is important to remember that although Greenland is about four times the size of France, it has only nine conifer forests like Bjerge’s, all of them cultivated. It has only 51 farms. (They are all sheep farms, although one man is trying to raise cattle. He has 22 cows.) Except for potatoes, the only vegetables most Greenlanders ever eat - to the extent that they eat vegetables at all - are imported, mostly from Denmark.

But now that the climate is warming, it is not just old trees that are growing. A Greenlandic supermarket is stocking locally grown cauliflower, broccoli and cabbage this year for the first time. Eight sheep farmers are growing potatoes commercially. Five more are experimenting with vegetables. And Kenneth Hoeg, the region’s chief agriculture adviser, says he does not see why southern Greenland cannot eventually be full of vegetable farms and viable forests.

As someone who recently read and watched Gore’s Inconvenient Truth, looks like the second canary is signaling…

On the 12th of September, it will be was the fourth anniversary of my involvement in US politics - from the presidential to the state level - and I have worked on campaigns from as lofty as JK’s 2004 Presidential effort to a local run (Jennifer Gottlieb’s run for an At-Large seat on the Broward County School Board). In this cycle, I find myself on the sidelines - due to forces beyond my control (thanks to the “speed and rapidity” of the NY Supreme Court System).

In 2003, I came into politics with the enthusiasm as any American school kid does - fed the stories of civic action, civic duty and the thinking that with good intention and hard work, you could make change happen in the political process. And, from my experiences, I think for the most part, you can - especially in the primaries or on the edges where the elephants (and donkeys) will not risk to play. But when risk is mitigated, the older, wiser “A-team” comes calling, and the younger, less-experienced are layered, transferred or simply pushed to the edges. The process teaches you valuable lessons for both politics and life in general - if properly seen in context.

But being on the outside of the campaign cycle this year has given me a chance to see if the hub-bub about this being the Year of the Internet is all that it is cracked up to be. From my vantage point, I think the hype is not going to make up for the lack of connectivity that people think the Internet (and social networks) are supposed to bring.

Will Social Networks Impact The Election?

I was asked this question last year by my friend from Wired, after I finished with another campaign, and I can STILL heartily say - even with techpresident’s MySpace, Facebook and YouTube counters - I believe that social networks will still NOT impact the coming 2008 election.

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After watching Mayor Bloomberg on the stage and looking at the candidates - I have been forming a greater interest in seeing a candidate like him step up to the plate. Even if he does not take the steps to become a candidate, at least he is causing a conversation to be engaged.

One of the challenges the mayor put to us was to outline what we were looking for in a President. And interestingly enough, I have had some thoughts on this. In a later post, I promise to outline these thoughts and put it to my faithful readers as to what you think should be some of the qualities that become our next President of the United States.

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You know, reading the news cycle, I was amused at what is the game of this season - portraying numbers as measures of success for future electability. Reading the news, I see that Obama generated $19M with 93K new donors and Hillary generated $22M with 100K new donors. But, as any economics professor knows, it isn’t the revenues that make a company - its profitability that’s important.

Campaign Marketing Spend
In the 90s, with the dotcom era running rampant, companies would spend extravagantly to generate buzz int he ever increasingly injured public. Nary a day went by without a new press release trying to tout why this company was going to be the market definer in X, the global solution in Y - all fueled by the largess of the venture capitalists that were looking to increase the interest of the IPO public - who, at that time, was the individual investor.

Flash forward to 2007. This year, the Internet is playing big - where the news is served via feeds, the video is captured on mobile phones and a rumor can fly with the speed of a google web crawl (or references from your friends). With so much happening in the world (credit crunch, Iraq war, global warming) and the election still only three months away, how does one make their mark - if they can not spend on advertising? Via earned media.

Public Relations = Earned Media

In the tech world, we spend money so people can learn about our product through magazines, conferences, and (perchance) a mention on an influential page - where a blog, a newspaper or even a news-magazine. This is the concept of earned media - and what PR professionals get paid to do ALL THE TIME. When you have a piece of news that is good - you trumpet that - disregarding those niggly things called “details”. But with an economist in the house, who is interested in profitability, we concern ourselves with those “details”.

In finance parlance, it is called Cost of Goods Sold or COGS - which is usually what it takes to make and market the product. In widget companies - you think of this cost as what determines the margin - profit which is money paid for the product by the consumer minus the costs into selling it to the consumer. In movies, this cost can often be much higher than the box office receipts (think Godzilla) since the marketing effort is not simply for the product (in-theater, domestic movie launch) alone. They consider the expense a long-term investment - keeping the brand in the mind of the consumer when it hits DVD rental and sales and pay-per-view and so on.

So, what does this have to do with these numbers? Well, in politics, rarely do people spend time evaluating COGS since the only number that matters are the ones you can trumpet. While the candidates trumpeted the receipts and numbers, did you notice that the cash on hand number was not discussed? Or even how much they spent on fundraising.

What if I told you that for every dollar collected, a candidate spent two or three to collect it? What if the value of slowing momentum in a race was more important that the actual amounts collected - and you had the money to spend, would it be worth trumpeting?

The Heinz Method

A friend of mine told me the story about Senator John Heinz who, when first running, had a bunch of money behind him (his own) but needed to build a “base” to show others that he had support from “the people”. So, as in all political campaigns, then Mr. Heinz spent a large amount of his own money to ask for donations - through fundraisers and particularly direct mail. While I do not have the numbers from that effort, you could see how someone could potentially generate X dollars in donations from Y supporters while spending 3X to 5X on acquiring those dollars and donors.

So, come October 15th - when the numbers come out from the campaigns, I am going to take a look at the CODC for the campaigns. And then I will see who really is generating “grassroots” support. Will anyone care then? Not sure. We may have moved onto some other major policy discussion.

In politics, the challenge for a candidate is making an efficient political “machine” - and the hype says Hillary has built it. Maybe yes, maybe no. If you are interested, check back on October 17th.

Tags: Campaign Fundraising, Campaign 2008, Presidential Campaign, Hillary Clinton, Obama Barack