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Social media upended traditional media by cutting out the middle man. No longer were "gatekeepers" needed to vet popular opinion: now, any Tom, Dick, or Harrietta can go online and write what they think. But traditional media—and some could argue, certain political parties that rhyme with Schmemocrat—seemed to have stopped listening to what their their potential readers are saying, creating a gap between the two. Michael Slaby worked with Obama on two election campaigns to figure out what groups of people are thinking. It's not easy work. But he posits that with the right kind of ears, some publications and brands (and, yes, even politicians) could one day make themselves 'of the people' once more.

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MICHAEL SLABY

Michael Slaby is a global leader in digital and social media strategy, technology and data analytics, and explores how together they can elevate mission-driven organizations. For Michael, it is not only about developing the necessary technological platform, but understanding what it is that brings people together to take action online, as well as offline. Currently, he is Managing Partner of Timshel—a new company working to help solve social, civic, and humanitarian problems via better technology, engagement capabilities development, and creative capital. Previously he was a Fellow at Shorenstein Center at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government.

In 2012, when the Obama administration began gearing up for re-election, one of the first calls went to Michael Slaby, who was chief technology officer in 2008—when the historical campaign leveraged the internet and social media to raise funds and organize volunteers in ways that had never been seen before.

Michael helped lead Obama for America as Chief Integration and Innovation Officer in 2012, overseeing the CTO, CIO, and CAO, in order to ensure effective implementation and integration of technology across the entire campaign.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Michael Slaby: Over the last decade or so I think the biggest shift we've seen is sort of the final breakdown of the traditional channel-based structure, the way we tend to think about communications as paid media, earned media, owned media, this sort of traditional silo-ed approach to communications that we still hear a lot from marketing textbooks in business school and that kind of thing.

I think what has happened is: the process of the 20 years preceding the last decade was about fragmentation, new types of channels, satellite TV and mobile networks, and just this incredible proliferation of types of content and channels within the silos that left people feeling like they had infinite choice but left communicators feeling like it was impossible to reach an audience.

What social media has done, particularly Facebook and Twitter, have created a glue to knit all these fragments back together into something that feels like one big graph, one big network of content moving between channels in unpredictable ways of engaging with people in ways that we can't necessarily predict, of creating more two directional conversational dialogues and communication between individuals and the people that we're trying to reach and inspire, which is new behavior for us.

It requires marketers and communicators and publishers to develop new skills like listening that we didn't used to have to do, we just picked the channel and we picked the right message and we said something to an audience that was mostly pretty passive, and I think this is the big shift in thinking and the real challenge for a lot of organizations is we are now part of a graph with the people that we're trying to inspire rather than them being a stable audience that we're trying to reach and us being in a stable position as inspirer or publisher, we now have to participate in this system.

People create content, we create content, they share content, we share content and that means that we have to think differently about how we communicate, how we tell stories, how much content we have to create. We can't reliably predict where that content is going to get consumed so it's really easy to get into a situation where if we're not really clear about our values and our identity and who we are and what we're trying to achieve where sort of our values and mission sit as an organization it can become really easy to sound schizophrenic to the communities that we'...

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