A valued network pointed me to a story about the Pentagon’s new love: Social Media. Consider.

The American intelligence and defense communities have become enthralled by the possibilities of social media. They’re looking to use the networks to forecast political unrest, spread friendly messages, spot emerging terror groups — and even predict the next natural disaster . . . A new project from U.S. Special Operations Command, on the other hand, looks to create something brand new: a “user-generated social media radio application powered by the human voice, available on the PC, Mac, Android, iPhone, and Nokia smart phones, that lets users share their thoughts and experiences.” And this voice-activated SOCOM network is being billed explicitly as a tool for “military information support operations” — shaping public attitudes.

Now. Let’s look at social media from a financial and investor perspective. How’s it going with Google+?

NEW YORK (TheStreet) — When it comes to web sites and apps, active users totals issued by companies are often hard to interpret, unreliable or just plain jacked up.

The writer then details the lack of details about Google+ and its success or failure. He notes that none of the social media monsters can produce a reliable metric of communication and persuasion impact. He cautions caution to investors about Google and by implication all other social media. So, I guess, if it’s your money, you might want to think about it, but if it is taxpayer money, you don’t?

And, we know the numbers don’t add up with Google+ along with the other gang of suspects. As noted recently, 80% of these IPO are trading below their opening day price. There is not as much there as some people thought and bought.

If You Cannot Count It, You Cannot Change It!

What’s the count? Sure you can count the number of devices and network links and data packets and on and on with measures of technology and reach, but what about counts on Changing the Other Guys and how They think, feel, or act?

Warfighting is different from persuasion even though both seek to Change the Other Guy. With warfighting, a new technology that reaches the Other Guy almost certainly also Changes the Other Guy. Bang! With persuasion, a new technology may reach without Change. Hello!

Realize the trap here. People are looking at devices and content for their persuasion when the maven realizes that persuasion produces its effect through function. An iGizmo is what it is, but has no inherent persuasion function. Just having it does not win hearts and minds.

Count the Change. Please.

Peace and prosperity bring many consequences. Time, for example.

With no consensus among the delegates, officials at the International Telecommunication Union, part of the United Nations, kicked the issue into the future and sent it back to a panel of experts for further study. A revised proposal will be introduced no earlier than 2015. Mr. Beaird characterized the delay as “a significant step forward” and said that the burst of interestgreater prominence in surrounding leap seconds “should allow for a decision that will have the widest possible backing.”

One second. Every four years. People meeting. Plane reservations. Hotel stays. Itineraries. Parlimentary procedure. Votes to delay. For three years.

I will credit President Obama for his openness to new media experiences. He will try anything at least once if it runs through some kind of iGizmo. Sure, it doesn’t always work very well the first time out of the gate, but he fails on small issues as he learns the communication technology. Consider the latest.

There’s no shortage of ways to connect with President Obama these days. He’s on Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. His public events are live-streamed on the White House website. He gives media interviews, holds press conferences and televised town hall meetings. Soon Obama plans to launch a bus tour through the Midwest. But the president and his re-election campaign proved Wednesday night that they are still interested in pushing their outreach to the technological edge, for the first time publicly showcasing a new video teleconferencing tool that exclusively connects Obama and his aides with thousands of supporters all across the country.

The real time screen during this event looked something like this.

The technology blends image, voice, and text from multiple sites in real time. Plus, it employs a password protection scheme that permits some control over access. Obama used this to talk with supporters during the Iowa caucuses. Notably, Obama made no public mention of this event prior to it and did not record the interaction for later public distribution.

Let’s start with the bad persuasion news. Sure, he reached a very small audience of supporters who will probably die fighting for him. He reached few and persuaded no one. And there were some technical glitches as the signal was dropped or sites fell out briefly.

Now, the good persuasion news. It actually worked. Obama created a new method that mashes up existing hardware and software into a live communication technology that links potentially millions of people in a limited two-way feedback system. He can control access into it. He can control the content. Think about that.

He could stage his own debates and townhalls with various parties and never leave his office. You need to read about Richard Nixon’s 1968 and 1972 campaigns to get a sense of the possibilities here. Nixon found ways to evade a hostile national media to present his message to millions of people without that media filter. Obama is doing the same thing with his various forays into Web 2.0.

This will aid fundraising enormously as he can engage grassroots donations in cheap and fast events while still doing traditional fat cat funding. He can distribute Talking Points and Counter Arguments instantly and face-to-face with his supporters. Potentially, it is one helluva thing for communication. One person with one controlled network that accesses millions of people.

Imagine if Al Gore had built this in 2000 and was now using it for Green Gore. Imagine Bill Clinton with this after office. Imagine what Mr. Obama can do with this network after office.

Now.

Imagine how you can build this for yourself.

All PR is shameless, but still.

JEFF HAMMERBACHER is a man of varied interests. The son of an auto assembly-line worker from Kalamazoo, Mich., the 29-year-old has tried his hand at poetry, philosophy, psychology, venture capital, baseball and, yes, automaking. He began his academic career as an English major, but ended up graduating from Harvard with a degree in mathematics. As a teen he’d been a star pitcher and looked set for a career in the major leagues; he ended up working as an analyst at Bear Stearns. You could call him hopelessly scattered, or you could say he’s a genius. Frankly, it’s a tough call. In 2006, with his stint at Bear Stearns but a memory, Hammerbacher was hired by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg (fittingly, in a friend-of-a-friend scenario), and developed a wondrously efficient system to handle the massive amounts of data coursing through the website. Not only was Hammerbacher fast becoming an important player in the rarefied world of Silicon Valley, but he was also on his way to becoming very well-off. Then, in 2008, he chucked it all.

Sounds like an interesting and talented guy. But, even more than you know!

While Hammerbacher is loath to portray himself as some sort of modern-day Marie Curie — he refuses to even comment on this aspect of his business — his talents are currently being applied to one of the greatest puzzles of human existence. The basic idea being this: If you can tell a half-billion social networkers which celebrity they most or least resemble, maybe you can do similar things with cancerous cells.

Wow. Whodda guessed that cancer is a social network? Whodda guessed there’s an app for that? Whodda guessed you can WATtap death?

This kind of PR is standard (see this earlier James Cameron puff piece as another exemplar), but we’ve become so tech-blind that we believe a software engineer working with bits and bytes of social flotsam from Facebook can transfer that engineering to DNA and End Cancer As We Know It. Good grief, why can’t Facebook engineers solve Global Warming, own the Stock Market, and rig all free Elections while they are Curing Cancer? Jeepers it’s the same data problem, isn’t it?

Hammerbacher is presented as a kind of Queen of Tomorrow who knows the Laws. It’s a constant conceit of human nature to believe that we can control life – remember only Frankenstein – and Web 2.0 is just the current exemplar. If you live long enough, you will see it in the next New New Thing beyond the wildest imaginings of today’s persuasion mavens.

P.S.  I found this story in the United Airlines flight magazine, Hemispheres, as I carried Melanie’s purse to the New Orleans NCA Conference.  Any research on the persuasion impact of these kind of information sources?  Millions of people, trapped in aluminum tubes read these stories every day.  I wonder what the WATTage is?

For those of a certain age, the experience of mass media appeared monolithic. In the Golden Age of the 1950s through the 1970s a small number of media sources whether print or broadcast drew stupendously large audiences of Other Guys. We knew a time when 50 million people were watching weekly the same episode of I Love Lucy or Gunsmoke or All In The Family or Ed Sullivan. Media stars looked omnipotent.

Today, we can see our illusion. Our destiny was never in those Stars, but in Their technology. If you owned a megaphone – rare, expensive, technical – you made the Stars. Now, with iGizmos and Internet connectivity, anyone can be a Star. See this in only the latest example: Oprah Winfrey.

About 1.1 million people watched Oprah Winfrey’s return to the talk-show format Sunday night, the second largest audience for any show on her year-old cable network OWN. But that audience was a fraction of the 6.5 million viewers Ms. Winfrey averaged in the final season of her daytime show on broadcast television, and it dwarfed most of what has been on OWN so far.

Notice several statistics related to the Reception stage of the Cascade with Winfrey. First, her premiere episode her OWN cable network attracted 1 million viewers. Second, her old show on a broadcast network averaged over 6 million. Third, her famous old show wasn’t close to the big number from the Golden Age. In the Winfrey’s declining audience share of Other Guys you see the fragmenting effects of new technologies. As more people acquire the new megaphone, the audience share declines for any one medium (the tech device), vehicle (type of programming), or show (specific titles). Technology drives the change in communication and persuasion.

This creates wonderful and interesting opportunities for persuasion mavens. To reach an old fashioned mass audience of hundreds of millions of Other Guys, you need to be more creative and thoughtful in your persuasion efforts. No one yet has seemed to master the new mediascape for getting that old school huge audience. Sure, some folks, with Hollywood as the great example, can mount a global push for one new movie for a month, but notice how specific and ephemeral the change here. The kind of imperialism that once seemed both inherent and eternal in American media is reduced to petty fiefs clamoring for attention – primitives playing as sophisticates.

For the next 10 to 20 years, you will live in a fragmented and diverse media message environment. Then, inevitably, you will see the move to concentration in media sources as a few mavens buy, destroy, or swallow other sources to create a few branded and controlled individual networks achieving again a new kind of Golden Media Age like Hollywood in the 1920s and 1930s and TV in those beloved 50s to 70s. Mavens abhor competition.

Thus, fragmentation gives and takes away. It is easier to get into the media game, giving anyone and everyone a shot at being a kind of Idol, no matter how briefly. But, your Reception will exceed your Reach and you will not achieve that massive impact we once knew.

You will be an Idol of the village, but not of the Global Village.