Campaign information and Momentum

Campaign intelligence is one of the most fascinating things about politics. The fact that so much of it is based on voter research is something that anyone in politics must know. Now, many of the decisions that campaigns are from polls. At this point, many of them are done with surveys that are by phone or paper, but the trend of moving to an internet based system is progressing.

The internet is used heavily by campaigns to collect dirt on political oppositions. Campaigns will also study the skeletons in the closets of their own candidates as to make sure that the opposition does not discover anything vital.

Micro-targeting is a scary technology that can track the likes and dislikes of any person to better learn how to target a message. Thus, if some candidates care about one issue, while other candidates care about a different issue, two different messages can be sent to each potential voter that essentially was crafted to compel each of them to vote for the same candidate using the information collected in micro-targeting.

These elements are used to maintain momentum among other things in political campaigns. The new and traditional media is often used to accomplish this through micro-targeting on the internet. Campaigns can track whether some users are interested in an issue such as crime, and then send messages siting examples of the candidates actions on crime. Ads can even be targeted to these people that track their interest as the campaign progresses through the months. Some people may be more interested certain news stories, and the candidate will be able to tailor their message to the most up-to-date information on such stories in order to keep followers interested in the candidate.

Yammer

https://www.yammer.com/


Kind of like Facebook for businesses. At first, sounds kind of silly but it turns out, this kind of platform is very valuable to a company. Companies are based upon information and communication. The days of the manufacturing based companies are virtually gone, now bosses, staffs and shareholders work in a business of data and the more efficiently data can be handled the better. Yammer can change a company's entire organizational structure.

Yammer: used by Unicef, Reuters and Deloitte

Free or $5/User/Month (One sign-on/ multiple domains/ custom branding)

Yammer provides the following features:

Enterprise Microblogging - Start a conversation, read posts, and actively collaborate with your coworkers in real-time. The value is that workers can exchange ideas on projects quickly instead of waiting for meetings. This also cuts down on redundancy in operational tasks.

Groups - Create and join private or public groups and collaborate in small teams within your network. Workers who work in geographically far away locations can easily work together.

Files, Links, and Images - Upload and share documents with co-workers, groups, or your entire company. Now anyone can come up with a good idea, not just the boss or the guys in development.

Company Directory - Use Yammer to connect with employees in other departments.

Topics - Tag content and messages in your network to make content easy to organize and discover. This is invaluable because this means that anyone can access a file instantly, which would multiply efficiency

Mobile - Connect to your network anywhere, any time. Download free iPhone, BlackBerry, Android and Windows Mobile applications. Now you’re truly always at work.

Profiles - Upload a picture and fill in your expertise, past work experience and contact information to become discoverable across your organization. Personalizes everyone across an organization, thus making it smaller.

Direct Messaging - Create a private dialog with one or multiple co-workers.
Communities - Create communities for working with partners who are outside of your network.

Applications - Install third-party applications into Yammer to increase the functionality of your network. Integrate Yammer into applications so that ideas and data can be shared even more readily.

Security - Message privately and securely in the cloud. User passwords stored on our servers are encrypted by a strong salted hash algorithm.

The I-95 Coalition

Last week we talked about how Michael Carr left much to be desired in his article about how IT not giving much of competitive edge in the market place. This week I want to give a bit of information about the 95 coalition.

Interstate 95 runs the entire span of the US east coast and crosses through many jurisdictions. It is the most heavily traveled corridor in the US and plays a large part in the economy. One of the most difficult problems with this corridor is raising the necessary capital needed to do things such as allow double stacked freight cars to travel from one end of the corridor to the other or eliminate bottle neck regions. This is difficult because the the corridor spans so many different counties that have their own separate regulations and budgets. Thus, it is hard for one county to spend money fixing something that only benefits another county in another state. To solve this, alliances must be made in order to forms bounds and find common incentives among parties. The 95 coalition seeks to do this through many different means. Policy specialists and transportation personnel would benefit from the knowledge of this entity.

Please see the link to see the 95 coalition website: http://www.i95coalition.org/i95/Home/I95CorridorFacts/tabid/173/Default.aspx

Why Nicholas Carr doesn't seem to Know Much

In his article IT Doesn't Matter Carr argues that companies invest too much into IT under the impression that it will give them a competitive advantage in the market place all the while not realizing that nearly all advantages IT would have offered have come and gone and companies must be much more conservative in their IT expenditures.

While I believe businesses characterize themselves this way to the public, I don't see this reality actually playing out anywhere. We always here about the advances in computers and every company I see advertises about some high tech system that gets "me", the customer, an added benefit. ADT Home Security tells me about a more high tech system than the one they sold a decade ago, I know that's part of their sales pitch. It's the same system my parents used. The door opens and guess what... the alarm goes off.

There is a reason why no one from Home Depot uses a"segway" to roll around on and why I was never issued a "Palm" when I worked as a Pharma rep years ago. Companies are very prudent and they tend to only invest in technology that will have bankable returns. Not only do few if any offices hand out I-pads to their employees, but most of them still keep a typewriter on the shelf and frequently make use of their fax machines. Most of the companies I've worked for invest most of their money by way of the people that work for them and most of that goes to sales, marketing, management and healthcare. Organizations are most concerned with efficiency and will only invest in IT so much as they believe it will help them more of it. For instance, Home Depot's computers will tell them when to increase and decrease the prices of their products based on supply and demand in real time. This makes them more adaptive to the market. They don't seem to invest in technology for the sake of being more high tech in hopes of gaining an advantage of some kind as Carr would suggest.

Whether a company invests more tech dollars seems to depend upon the nature of their market, their organizational structure and the company's access to different applications. While I will agree with Carr that every once and a while their is someone in a tech department who is a bit too eager and some how succeeds in persuading the boss into investing in a neat, but useless piece of equipment such as a projector that allows one to edit the screen with the use of a high tech maker, by in large, too much tech investment does not seem to be as much of an issue as the author claims it to be.