Influentials as information filters

The idea of "influentials" has always fascinated me. It's one of those concepts that, upon learning about it, seems relevant to nearly every aspect of our information-saturated age. Of course, that's probably not quite true, but I think the concept of influentials is particularly relevant to those parts of our lives that require large amounts of detailed information in order to make a decision. Need to know what kind of mp3 player to buy? Well, my boyfriend knows a lot about computers and gadgets, and he loves his iPod, so it's probably a good one. Wondering who to vote for? Your daughter or friend who works in politics and follows the campaigns closely knows a lot about politics and has a lot of the same values as you, so might as well ask her.

In a way, influentials act as human information agreggators, not unlike a search engine. The internet exploded in both complexity and usefulness with the advent of search engines, especially Google, because they were a way to get only the information a web surfer was looking for. The best search engines are those that figure out what pages are relevant and which aren't, and deliver helpful information to the user. Influentials are those people that their friends and family members know that they can go to for useful information about everything from consumer electronics to politics. Influentials must be good at figuring out what information in relevant to the person looking for their advice, and must know the most helpful way to present it. In our information-saturated lives, people who can help us sort through it all play key roles in modern life.

Congressional Portals

One idea for making Congressional website more relevant and useful to their constituents is making them portals to the federal government's online presence. This is similar to the way congressional offices function in the real world--as advocates and guides for navigating the federal bureaucracy. A good congressional website should do the same thing in cyberspace, providing constituents guidance in finding information online from the federal government. This would encourage people to see congressional websites as places they can go for useful information.

Congressional email: an intern's view

Needless to say, Congress could do much to improve its handling and use of constituent email. When I was a congressional intern last year, I got to spend many quality hours with our office constituent email system. Two necessary changes jumped out at me:

• Take advantage of the paperless nature of email
  At our office, we printed out every email that came into the office through the constituent feedback form on the website and distributed the paper copy with the rest of the regular mail. The mail database system was set up in such a way that emails could be automatically filed electronically, but no, each one was printed out on paper and handed to an LA.


• Answer an email with an email
  These days, email is an acceptible way of communicating a message, even a formal one. A representative obviously shouldn't respond to a handwritten letter with an email; he would seem as if he couldn't take the time to make a proper reply to a letter. But it is perfectly polite to respond to an email with another email. At the office I worked in, however, we responded to every communication, even email, with an actual physical letter. We could have save a lot of time and money not printing, folding, sealing, and mailing a response to all of the emails that our office received. As email has become a common way of communicating, congressional offices should use the effeciency email provides to communicate with their constituents.

Effective Synergy

One thing that surprised me in the CNN piece about voter mobilization was the anecdote from the Kerry volunteer about having previously unknown volunteers show up at his office to phone bank. It turns out that the national campaign actually sent an email to the local volunteers and told them about this opportunity.

This blows my mind. I was signed up for Kerry's email list for at least 18 months, and never got a locally focused email. I definitely received announcements from the VA coordinated, but never anything from the national campaign targeted to me as a Virginia voter. Now granted, Virginia wasn't a swing state, but I would think that the DC area would be rich with volunteers for phone banking and road trips.

Perhaps things in Ohio were different, but I never saw any evidence of online-offline coordination during my time on the Kerry email list.