Vermont's First Social Media Election

Earlier this month, Vermont's largest city, Burlington, held a mayoral election that featured two non-incumbents vying for the top municipal job in the state. Voters went to the polls on March 6 to choose between Democrat Miro Weinberger and Republican Kurt Wright. When Weinberger won a decisive 57 percent to 37 percent victory, that ended a campaign that had run for six months and what should be described as Vermont's first social media election.

Just to be clear, other campaigns had used social media before in Vermont. And social media wasn't the only media: Classics like print and database marketing played a huge role in the campaign. No, what was different this time was the focus, engagement and the amount of activity. It's a role that will only grow over the coming years.

Social media has had a foothold in Burlington politics for three years. In early 2009, three city councilors Karen Paul (I), Nancy Kaplan (D) and Ed Adrian (D) set up Twitter accounts and started tweeting from city council meetings. It was a successful experiment. Since most of us here in town don't want to spend hours at those meetings, it gave residents a way to follow what was actually happening at these meetings from the comfort of their homes. More importantly, it gave people a chance to reach out or ask one of those councilors a question, in real time. From a democracy standpoint, it looked like a good way to increase citizen participation in municipal issues.

The act of using social media caused conflict within the city council itself. Some councilors didn't like the fact that their peers were sending social updates on their phones or computers. They felt that the social councilors were not showing proper respect to people who had actually shown up for the meetings. A number of the non-social councilors put forth a resolution banning electronics (and thus social media) from city council meetings. The resolution lost. One of sponsors of the resolution was Mayoral candidate Kurt Wright.

The mayoral social campaign started in earnest at one of the first Democratic primary debates in September 2011 when area journalists and tweeters agreed on using a singular hash tag, #btvmayor, for the campaign. What followed was a combination of reporting, campaigning, connections and tussles.

Of the six mayoral candidates (four Democrat primary contenders, one Republican, one Independent) only one had a credible presence in social media beforehand: Jason Lorber (D) who had set up and used his Twitter account as state representative (@VTJason) several years before. Once the others got into the race they, or their campaigns, quickly followed suit. For the primary months, most of the #btvmayor chatter was descriptions from the many public debates held between Democratic contenders.

Then at the Democratic caucus everything changed. The four round, single elimination primary battle between the contenders came down to the third round where, mano-a-mano, Miro Weinberger faced off with Tim Ashe. And the result was tie! The problem was that a ton of people had already left the premises, which meant that they couldn't vote in the unprecedented tie-breaking round.

Twitter and Facebook went wild. Those still in the building called out on social media, on email and on the phone to bring everyone back. Outside the building, traffic chaos ensued. In the end, the pols decided to reschedule the final round for another day. But that one, short crazy hour showed everyone that they ignored social in campaigns at their own risk.

As the two-man Weinberger/Wright campaign kicked in the social media activity ramped up (Wanda Hines was also a candidate, but she did very little campaigning, no social media work, and wound up with a very small percentage of the vote).

Weinberger's team was quick to start using and promoting its social channels. They made a big push into Facebook and used Twitter aggressively in order to dominate the #btvmayor stream. The Wright campaign jumped in too, finally setting up profiles for their candidate, although he had been an established politician on the state (representative) and local (city council) level for over a dozen years. They also started producing YouTube videos. On Twitter, the battle for hashtag dominance had begun.

The most interesting part of the #btvmayor hashtag was that it brought in people who normally weren't active or connected to the Burlington social media world. This included journalists, politically active citizen, and just regular Joes and Janes. To be clear, the political teams dominated the stream but that obscures a broader picture.

Another difference this time around was that we introduced social media as a key part to live debates. For the past three years, my organization #BTVSMB has hosted social media breakfast events here in Burlington. Now, we partnered with debate hosts to open up the social channels to increase debate participation. In the first debate we worked with the Burlington Business Association to take candidate questions from social media. In the penultimate debate, we helped the Burlington Free Press as the local paper hosted a complete social media debate where ALL of the questions came from social. That had never been done in Vermont before. I think it was the most interesting debate of the entire six-month campaign.

In the end, the candidate with the best social team won. Weinberger had surrounded himself with Internet professionals from the get-go as he realized how important online could be in his campaign. As he moved through the campaign, his staff beefed up participation from people with a strong social presence. Wright relied on a few young Web developers and interns. They faced an uphill battle online and never caught up.

Both teams desire to dominate the stream often led to pitched political battles. Most ended with personal insults and attacks. Which maybe proves the point that Twitter streams, like online message boards, are not always the best place for detailed, nuanced discussions. What the social streams did have was the political passion and engagement that was often lacking on both the street and in the candidate debates themselves.

One thing that's clear from the #btvmayor social campaign is that it did a great job in solidifying relationships within political teams. Whether it brought in any new votes is another question.

For once, though, the social media activity in the mayoral election accurately reflected the final Burlington vote tally. Perhaps that clearly points to social media moving away from early adopters and more solidly into the mainstream. At least in this little corner of Vermont. One thing is clear though: social media as a part of major Vermont political campaigns is here to stay. And that is a very good thing.

Is Your Web Site About You or Your Customers?

Whenever people complain about navigating Web sites, it’s usually because they can’t find what they’re looking for. Usually people have a specific idea in mind when they surf. Most often, Google has provided a list of sites based on idea or word. When people get to the recommended corporate or organizational sites, they’re stumped. While people surf with an idea in their heads, what they most often find are sites reflective of an internal organizational structure, rather than customer needs. 

Here’s a test: see how many corporate sites have navigation titles of Products and Services?

Let’s take a step back. Organizations start to serve specific customer needs. As they grow larger, they find they need more internal structure. They form divisions, sub-groups and other bureaucratic functions. They reason that they must do so in order to make the growing business more efficient.

The problem, as you can probably see, is that serving customer needs now takes a back seat to internal efficiencies. Perhaps this is a necessary evil. But when it comes to Web sites, too many organizations create one of their most important marketing channels to mirror their internal organization.

Most people really don’t give a hoot how companies organize themselves. What seems like a logical structure to people working inside a company can seem confusing and downright bizarre to outsiders.

One challenge is that companies often offer a variety of “products and services” to customers. Why not organize them that way?

Amazon.com offers a lot as well. But their navigation is very customer focused. They’re not talking about themselves. JetBlue.com, with a much simpler offering, has the same customer focus.

Here’s what I think is the biggest issue: Organizations who like to describe themselves usually have the worst Web sites. Organizations who focus on solving customers’ problems quickly, online, usually have the best Web sites. The latter are the ones moving into the social channels so well.

Rebuilding a corporate Web site with a new approach is a big task for many. Perhaps one way to start shifting the thinking within an organization is to take a leap into the social channels with the goal of quickly solving people’s problems. Organizations can then take that experience and knowledge and apply it to revamping the Web site.

While this may sound backwards, it may be the most efficient way to prove, internally, that focusing on your customer, not your structure, works.

Social Media Training is the Secret Ingredient

One thing that always strikes me at social media training and certification is seeing the reactions of experienced social marketers. Even though these people have spent months, some years, working on social channels, most of them have little opportunity to discuss what they do and even to ask some really basic questions.

For the newbies, I usually see a huge sigh of relief at the end of the trainings as if to recognize “I can do this. I know what’s expected of me.”

I’ve come to realize that ongoing social media training is the missing secret ingredient in most brands social efforts. Despite all of the buzz of “social business” most businesses are not. They are still siloed and focused. Social marketing is a key, growing part of their marketing, but it’s still not so well integrated.

Social training and certification serves two purposes. First, it sets the groundwork for the dos and don’ts for the brands social marketing. We talk about best practices and we talk about the company social policies. We look at case studies including a lot of negative ones. Most importantly, we give people on the team a chance to ask questions to each other or to internal company representatives, like the legal team.

For some clients we create an online test to make sure they’ve read through the materials. But I find the unscripted part of the training critical to a brands social success. We talk about the need of company integration for social media. But often there’s little integration among the social team itself or between the social team and other key parts of the business.

The training is in essence modeling a behavior we want social marketers to continue with once they go back to their “real jobs.”

Image from VariationsOnNormal.com

It doesn’t always work, though. I’ve had clients who did the exact opposite of what they were trained to do. I’ve had clients who almost copied to a T one of the negative case studies we reviewed.

Most succeed though. And they are able to also make personal connection that make the brands social marketing more successful. It helps when ongoing training brings these people back together to reinforce the in-person connections.

Social media isn’t rocket science. Social media training can fill a critical role if a brand is looking to have social play a key role in business success.

#btvsmb Social Hack Recap

What a day: 72 talented and creative people spent a Friday together at Champlain College’s Emergent Media Center trying to reimagine Vermont’s localvore world through the lens of mobile and social technology. With little or no preparation six teams of twelve people each had less than four hours to come up with an idea. And what ideas they came up with!

We started the day listening and watching Richard Ting of R/GA and Liz Gerber of Design for America. Richard took us through some amazing examples he and his team have worked on, such as USAID’s FWD or Nike+ GPS. It was heady stuff but it made us start thinking of raising the bar on our own ideas. Liz talked about the idea of design thinking and the approach to start reimagining, well, everything. It’s just amazing to see what her students are up to. And that laid down a challenge to all of us “professionals”: If her students could do it, shouldn’t we be able to?

After that, the Vermont Agency of Agriculture laid out some of the basic goals of the Farm to Plate initiative. A recurring theme was how far ahead we were in Vermont (Liz even claimed that Vermont was “perfect”) but that it still wasn’t good enough.

We then broke into groups and, using a design thinking process, had to come up with one group idea in less than four hours. Each group was a combination of designers, developers, businesspeople, students, social marketers and well, anyone else who got their ticket in time. Very few were Localvore experts (there were one or two in all). 

When the groups worked in small teams of two, the energy was through the roof. When they had to come to consensus and all work together, well some did better than others. It was interesting to see the effect of group dynamics on people and ideas. There was a LOT of learning moments all through this experiment, to be honest. One group actually splintered into two when they refused to agree on a common approach.

At the end of the day, we had some clear favorites. Team Arugula created a new business model, Beet Route, for delivering CSA farmshares to people too busy to prepare meals during the week. They reimagined the milkman, gave it a modern twist, and enabled it through mobile and social apps. The back end used the data to provide larger customer trends and preferences back to the farmers and producers. Don’t be surprised to see this one come to life in one form or another as a startup.

Team Kale went the gamification route, turning support of local farmers and consumption of local produced into a mobile and social game Ate02 (a play on our ONE Vermont area code 802). The idea was to allow people to compete (and brag) through their phone and to increase consumption of healthy, locally produced food.  There’s a good chance that we might see Champlain College produce that for the Agency of Agriculture.

Team Beet created a system called The Core Card. It turned healthy eating habits into points. The points then led to both rewards for consumers and data for employers and insurance companies. Our one representative from the insurance industry was on this team and you could feel his influence on this one.The idea was that the card would lead to better health and lower insurance costs through the use of mobile and social technology. 

There were LOTS of other great ideas. Right now we’re going through them and working on prioritizing the ideas with the Agency of Agriculture and Champlain College. We may end up extending this to some of the Startup Vermont initiatives. At least one break out group told me that they were so pissed that their idea wasn’t chosen by their group that they’re going to pitch it to the Agency of Ag themselves (Yay!) 

Liz Gerber told me before the event that in an experiment, 50% of what you do will fail, you just don’t know which 50%. I think our percentage of success was a lot higher. This was a great experiment and it showed:

1. We have a lot of cool people in Vermont
2. You can do great things when you get out of your own way
3. There should be enough smarts and energy to innovate our way into business growth. The big question is whether we have the structure for it.
4. Sometimes you have to plan randomness.

My plan is to figure out a way to do more of these. We asked a lot for all of these talented people to take the day off and think with each other. Most, but not all of course, had a blast.

My biggest regret? It was that I didn’t really get to participate in the actual ideation and work, since I was running the day. That’s where I spent my energy. And it was worth it.

#BTVSMB Social Hack

This Friday, February 3^rd, the Burlington Social Media Breakfast series takes a new twist. We’re still bringing in great, smart, national speakers, like R/GA’s social and mobile executive creative director Richard Ting, and Design for America founder Liz Gerber.  As with our past events, we want to inspire area marketers and digital folk. 

We also want to do something beside listening, learning and networking. While that’s good, it doesn’t feel like it’s enough. So on Friday, we’re combining the inspiration part with a Social Hack. We’re going to focus our collective brainpower on a key issue in Vermont and see if we can come up with a mobile or social technology solution to help.

You can’t do that without some smart, creative people around the table.  Luckily that’s what we have. Between 60 and 70 of us, with designers, developers and marketers from some of the most innovative companies in Vermont, will spend the day trying to hack a social issue. We have marketers and developers from My Web Grocer, Select Design, Green Mountain Coffee Roasters and Burton. We’re doing this event together with Champlain College’s emergent media center so we’ll have MFA and gaming students working with us as well.

Friday’s event is one of the smaller ones we’ve had, from a participant standpoint. But it should be the largest one from an idea standpoint. At the end of the day we’ll choose the best idea. Champlain College will look to fund and produce the idea so that we can give it to the people of Vermont to use.

My hope, though, is that there are a number of other ideas where people say, “screw it, this one was really the best, so I’m going to go create it on my own!”

Actually, that’s really the point of this #BTVSMB. We, like a lot of other organizations, want to make Vermont a better place for entrepreneurs and technical/creative people. We don’t have a lot of embedded industries here to drive that part of the economy. We also don’t have a natural feeder city for economic development, the way, say Boston supports southern New Hampshire, or the way Denver fed Boulder. The Montreal connection isn’t really working for us.

So we’re going to have to innovate and build our way out of this ourselves. I think the most exciting part of the event is the connections between all of these smart people; most have never met each other before. Typical Vermont! Hopefully we can sustain and support this day of creation and random connections with more events like this.

Actually, this event connects back to the first #BTVSMB. Back in June of 2009, Todd Defren and C.C. Chapman spoke to a packed house at Champlain College. Afterwards, we regrouped and worked at helping the non-profit Grounds for Health develop social media ideas. I think it’s important for those of us in the social marketing business to spend time using our ideas for people who need it, rather than those who just need us to help them sell things.

The idea for doing the hack came from a number of personal inspirations. Back in the summer I was one of the judges for My Web Grocer’s Vermont Hackathon. It was a very cool, odd collection of people and ideas. It was very different from what I’m used to seeing here in Vermont. I loved it.

The Cusp Conference in Chicago also inspired me around risk, design and social issues. It simply was the best conference I’ve ever been to. I left with the desire to have that same type of energy and passion at a Vermont event. I also met Liz Gerber there who turned out to have gone to the same high school and college as I did.

I also spent time talking to Edward Boches about the event. My goal was to get Edward to come up here but this time, #brandbowl got in the way. In any event, my brief, intermittent discussions with Edward helped me formulate the event both conceptually and practically. With a little luck, we’ll get him up here next time.

I’m glad to partner with Champlain College again. I think their Emergent Media and Gaming programs are some of the best-kept secrets in the industry. I believe that very soon, they’ll be on the level of Boulder Digital Works and Hyper Island. 

If you get a chance to come to this Friday’s #BTVSMB social hack, great. If not, keep your eyes open for more of these types of event throughout 2012, although various organizations will probably take turns hosting them.

Kill Them With Kindness

It’s election season and in the U.S. we’re getting ready for a good solid year of negative advertising. It’s sad that it works so well. The negativity so easily spreads to the social channels. There we end up with a cacophony of anger and insults rather than any interesting interaction. As a result, one ends up disliking all of the candidates (which may be a good description of what’s happening with the GOP voters this year).

But what about brand and product advertising? Does negative advertising work there as well? Most of the negative advertising we see today is clearly aimed at young males. We usually see competing products or behavior painted as weak and mostly feminine (think car and beer commercials). 

One notable exception was the oft-discussed “I’m a Mac” campaign where Apple instead killed Microsoft with kindness. This unexpected, slightly patronizing but always empathetic spin probably did more to damage Microsoft’s reputation that all of it’s software bloat combined.

If you look at many of the smart brands that have integrated social media into their operations, you see the same thing. Rage, frustration and displeasure are met with patience, understanding and kindness. Most of the time, it works. There’s something about the social channel that brings out the complainer in all of us. Why that is would be great topic for a doctoral thesis.

So try this for a strategy: whether you’re arguing with someone about politics, sports or brands, or attempting to convince customers to use your products over your competitors, try killing them with kindness rather than with clubs and arrows. My guess is you’ll be both more successful and less frustrated.

Sweden’s Social Experiment

For the last several weeks, the tourism and marketing arm of the Scandinavian country of Sweden has allowed various Swedish citizens to take over its Twitter account. Called “Curators of Sweden” The idea is:

“...that the curators, through their tweets, create interest and arouse curiosity for Sweden and the wide range the country has to offer. The expectation is that the curators will paint a picture of Sweden, different to that usually obtained through traditional media.”

The end goal, though unstated, is to attract more tourists to visit the country.

I’ve been following this experiment in social curation for a number of reasons. I’m always on the lookout for smart social marketing ideas. I also lived for many years in Sweden (and live with my half-Swedish family in Vermont). So I was very curious in how the curators would paint the picture of Sweden for the rest of us.

The first few weeks were disappointing. It seemed like @sweden started with a lot of check-ins at local bars and nightclubs, discussions about older American movies, and pictures of Sweden from the summer. There’s nothing wrong with those topics. What was missing, for me, was any sort of context.

I didn’t mind the bar hopping in Sweden (although I didn’t recognize any of the clubs from 15-20 years ago) but what I missed was any sort of description of the nightlife or the people in those places. There was no feel or texture. I liked the farmer tweeting from somewhere in the country but where was the story of what it was like to actually do that for a living in Sweden (did he get 5 weeks vacation, for example?). The discussion about watching American DVDs put me over the edge, though. How about talking about Swedish movies (yes, I’m biased, I used to work on them)?

More to the point, I wondered how any of those very topical tweets “painted a picture” or “aroused interest” for Sweden. They sounded just like very normal people from anywhere in the Western, industrialized world.

When a female Swedish priest took over, things started changing. She did a great job of describing different aspects and places in Sweden. Despite Twitter’s 140-character limitation, she allowed me to start recognizing places I’ve been, and imagine places I hadn’t been to. Leave it to a female Swedish priest. Everything about her set the bar high.

A Swedish female truck driver swiftly followed her. Another amazing opportunity, right? Again what followed lacked a story. I imagine that the truck driver gets to see more of the country of Sweden than 99% of Swedes. There’s very little of that here, yet. 

The big question for me is: Who curates the curators? We live in an era of citizen journalism and customer created content. The problem is that although we may be citizens, most of us are not journalists. Even though we are all customers, most of us have not developed our talents for content creation. 

Experiments and collaboration are great. But they need context. Social marketing will always trend to the banal and irrelevant without a story, structure or perspective to hold it together, and to hold our interest.

It’s as though social media has given rise to a corollary to Camus:

“I am, therefore I’m interesting.” Social has given us all a channel to prove it. But it still doesn’t make it true.

The biggest question is whether this campaign will increase tourism to Sweden or not. Based on the content to date, I would guess not. The uniqueness of the campaign, and even the publicity it generates, will probably not be enough to convince people, like Americans, to spend the big bucks to visit that beautiful country.

Marketing, social or not, needs to tell good stories. Perhaps the medium of Twitter is the culprit, limited as it is (sorry McLuhan). Perhaps Instagram was the way to go, since pictures always provide more context than words (although they’re not always better). I don’t really agree with either of those though.

Don’t get me wrong; I love the idea of Curators of Sweden. I just wished the execution lived up to the idea.  Johannes Karlsson, head of PR and Social Media at Visit Sweden tells me to give this experiment time. I will. 

I hope that @sweden can develop into a great social story telling platform that gives people the flavor of one of my favorite countries in the world.

Use Social Media to Connect Friends and Family

Brands want people to connect with them through social channels. Social media usage among U.S. Internet users has more than doubled in the last three years (28% to 65% between 2008 and 2011). So brands are increasing the time and money they spend in these channels with the hope of attracting people through deals, content and, in some cases, customer support. 

That’s what brands want. What do most people using social media want? They want to connect with family. They want to connect with their current friends. They want to find old friends. Only a small group of people wants to use social media to connect with other like-minded people around a common interest. 

If you only looked at the marketing efforts online, you might assume that most brands and marketers believe that last group to be bigger than it is. But you would be wrong.

I think a key question for brands in the next few years is this: What value or utility can they provide that makes it easier or better for people to connect with their friends or family?

A challenge for most is to refocus the gaze from internal needs to external, customer needs. And many times those external needs don’t necessarily have a direct connection to internal “goals” or “plans.” It means moving out of your internal business meetings into a state of empathy.

Here’s an example, imperfectly executed but with a clear value proposition behind it: ShopyCat scans your Facebook friends to recommend gift ideas. Right now the gift ideas aren’t very good, in my opinion. But they have started sending emails to remind me of upcoming birthdays, with those poor gift ideas. While ShopyCat is in the business of selling stuff, they’re doing it by tapping into something that’s very important to me: Remembering my family’s and my friend’s birthdays. They’re attempting to add a layer of utility to keep me connected (and make me look good).

There aren’t a lot of other good examples, to be honest, although I believe that the ones that support community and charity help will resonate with peoples’ close networks (think Patagonia’s Common Threads initiative). I think there’s a much bigger opportunity for any brand that deals with any kind of food, since that’s a stronger connective tissue between people than we understand.

So when your brand is evaluating your next social initiative, try asking yourself: How can your brand help friends and family connect?

Social Gift Shopping

Every year, we are continually challenged to find good gifts for our spouses/kids/parents/friends for the December holidays. I had one friend who kept a running list of things she wanted throughout the year. Every time she went shopping she made sure to add one or two things to her list. Whenever someone asked her what she wanted for Christmas/birthday/anniversary, she had a good answer! Most of us, unfortunately, aren’t like that. 

So I was interested to check out some of the new social gift finders this year, in the hope that they would make my life easier over the next few weeks. The two that caught my attention were Etsy's and Amazon’s Facebook integrated gift finders.

Both tap into your Facebook profile with the (as yet unmet) promise that they will scan your friends’ profiles and come up with unique gifts for them. Of the two, Etsy does a better job, since it looks like it’s more focused on keywords than actual products.

Etsy though looks at what you’ve said you’re interested in, rather than what you’re actually talking about on Facebook. So if you’ve loaded up your profile with lots of things you identify with, Etsy will search its catalogue for those keywords. Sometimes it gets a little funny. 

My wife Bella, for example, has only chose Sweden as a topic of interest. So when the Etsy gift finder cranks out its suggestion, guess what I get? Lots of Swedish, not much else.

Another friend, for some reason, has indicated she’s a fan of Red Bull (maybe because her two little boys are wearing her out). So the only thing she gets are Etsy products tagged with Red Bull!

I have to admit that while neither of the recommendations are perfect nor even close to being personal, the gift selection is certainly odd and entertaining, which is not always a bad thing when giving gifts. 

Amazon, on the other hand, looks to see what type of media you’ve liked in your profile, such as records, movies or books. It also searches its own site to see if you have a wish list. 

Unfortunately, it only works if you’re talking about specific titles. Which most of my family is not. It’s why the results can be somewhat absurd, since the last thing my wife would want for Christmas is the Steve Jobs book. 

One thing Amazon does have going for it is that it focuses primarily on birthdays! I’ve never understood why Facebook hasn’t trie to monetize this feature more. I think it’s the single most valuable tool Facebook (or any other social network, for that matter) offers. Remembering birthdays is something that Facebook has moved from my memory to its Web pages, a vast improvement. All they need to implement now is a one-click purchasing option.

While these are pretty good, they’re not perfect. I’ve created interactive gift finders for clients as well and all of these seem to make the mistake of looking for gifts based on expected or canned criteria. I’d like to see a more intelligent social tool that analyzes what you talk about with the most passion, in order to recommend GREAT presents. Maybe we’ll get there.

Or maybe that’s my next project. Happy Holidays.

UPDATE 12:30 PM:
Apparently I missed Shopycat, a gift finder created by Walmart Labs. It's actually be worse than the other two for personalized gifts. As for non-personalized, it suggested the George Foreman Grill to everyone (who wouldn't like that, right?).  While the app says it scans your updates, it's apparent from the list that it doesn't. And as for the suggestions for Bella? I think I'll stick with Etsy.

What we really need from Google, Facebook and Apple

As a parent indoctrinating his kids with all the things I liked when I was young, I was struck by a simple fact. While watching (re-watching) many of my favorite shows and movies with my children, like original Star Trek and Mission Impossible, Sean Connery James Bond movies, and Get Smart, I realized that what most of these shows talk or fight about is Science and Scientists. That idea was reinforced after this summer’s visit to the Spy Museum in Washington. The Cold War, and our future success as a nation, boiled down to one thing:

Those with the most, and best, geeks win.

Back then we competed in rockets, space travel and military technology. Men in white coats were prizes. The real power was locked in the brains of the smartest people.

We kids were weaned on that. Q was cool. Spock was, well just amazing. Scientists were heroes.

No wonder we produced a lot of them back then. NASA launchings caused everything to stop, all at once. Being a geek was chic. Our popular culture trained us and our schools supported us.

Fast forward to the 21^st century, where we need more engineers, technicians and scientists than ever before. We may have thought things were cool before, but they’re just mind-boggling today.

Right now, though, we’re not fighting over rocket designs, we’re fighting over code. The spy game of the 60’s has shifted from dead drops to hacking. Nano-technology, artificial and bio intelligence are just as sexy, more actually, than rockets. But they are much harder to visualize.

What we really need today is a way to visualize and popularize technology in the same way we did during the Cold War and space race. We need to pump up the techno-cool so kids will want to emulate it and follow it into practice. We need a Spock for the Social Age.

This is where we need Google, Facebook and Apple’s help. Unlike in the past, the government propaganda apparatus won’t help. Movies like Social Network end up glorifying the parties, not the coding. Google, Facebook, Apple (and others) are already the coolest companies in the world. We need them to help create a PR push or branded content that Hollywood (and others) will emulate.

We need them to help elevate the idea that technologists are still the diamonds in our society, worth fighting over and protecting. With their collective creativity, we need TV shows, movies and graphic novels promoting the amazing stuff only they can do.

In the end, this will help technology companies like Google, Facebook and Apple by providing a greater pool of technology talent. But it will help all of our country much more.

We need a new geek chic to go mainstream.