We are pretty comfortable figuring out how much a one minute story on the evening news is worth in paid advertising, but when it comes to online “hits” the conversion isn’t so obvious. In addition to the size of a website’s audience, we have to figure in, among other things, whether the site has tools to share the content out to the social web and whether or not its audience is likely to do so. It gets a little tricky figuring out what it is worth online.

I Am Progress is hosting its monthly Internet Advocacy Roundtable titled “What’s It Worth” on Thursday, January 15th from 3 PM to 5 PM.Speakers:
Glennette Clark, Senior Consultant, Community IT Innovators
Michael Bassik, Chief Digital Officer, Air America Media
Philip de Vellis, Vice President of New Media, Murphy Putnam Media
A. J. Schuler, Partner, Common Sense Media
Sam Huxley, VP of Marketing, New Media Strategies

Moderator: Alan Rosenblatt, Center for American Progress Action Fund

Location:
Center for American Progress Action Fund
1333 H St. NW, 10th Floor
Washington, DC 20005
Map & Directions

R.S.V.P. Here – Space is limited!

About the Internet Advocacy Roundtable:
The Internet Advocacy Roundtable is a monthly forum brought to you by I Am Progress, a project of the Center for American Progress Action Fund, the sister advocacy organization of the Center for American Progress. We feature in-depth discussions about digital technology strategies for advocacy and policy campaigns. We strive to help the advocacy community use digital technology more effectively and provide a gathering for those working in this space to network and learn from their peers. Our speakers are drawn from experts in the field and our audiences typically include many other experts, as well as people new to the field. The format is designed to maximize discussion time. As a result, we have consistently lived up to our reputation that our speakers will learn as much from the audience as the audience learns from the speakers. The Internet Advocacy Roundtable was launched in August 2005 and now carries on the tradition of our earlier Online Progressive Advocacy Network (OPAN) series.

Building on a rich body of research about political realignment in America, Hais and Winograd explained that a key driving force in realigning the political landscape is the arrival of new communications technology, and the coming of age of a new generation that embraces the technology and demands its incorporation into the political process. The rise of radio in the 1930’s and television in the 1960’s both reshaped politics in this country. And today, the rise of online social media is doing it once again.

While those past innovations surely transformed politics in their days, what is unique about the new media is that it is not just broadcast, or one to many, in how it communicates. It is not even just interactive, allowing the polity to connect with campaigns and organizations in a back and forth dialogue. But it also enables people to communicate with each other as they engage in the political process.

The days of pandering to isolated audiences are over.

The new political dynamic created by social media and a civic-minded generation is creating an enormous push towards transparency. Not just towards articulated transparency, but towards manifested transparency. In fact, given the record levels of attention by the people towards politics (as reported by the Pew Internet & American Life Project), the tools that allow anyone to break through privacy barriers (as evidenced by hackers cracking Governor Sarah Palin’s personsal email), and efforts by non-profit groups like the Sunlight Foundation to pull back the curtains on the engines of government, real transparency is inevitable because there are fewer places to hide.

I have long advocated that the rise of the internet, along with Google and smart mobile phones, is creating an envirnoment where those who try to hide behind veils in politics will be exposed and suffer for it. In the age of social media, authenticity trumps scripting every time. Politicians who always speak from the heart will always get more forgiveness when they gaffe than those who try to present a scripted facade.

And the Millennial Generation, 95 million strong, are eating this new world up. Nurtured by their parents as kids, embracing a cooperative view of the world as adults, they are using these new communications tools to force a transformation of politics. Read all about it in Winograd and Hais’s book, and then open your browser and gaze into the future.