Making The Connection Christian Message

Weekly Standard: From Waterloo To The White House

If she'd fallen backward, she'd have been killed. It was September 2009, during her second term in Congress, and a magazine had sent a photographer to shoot Michele Bachmann. He escorted her to the third floor rotunda in the Cannon House Office Building on Capitol Hill, where he positioned a large orange crate next to the balustrade. He told her to stand on it. She reluctantly obliged. Behind her were three stories of empty air.

The magazine had also sent a videographer, who wanted Bachmann to gesture ecstatically for the camera. "And I said, 'That's not what I do,' " Bachmann remembered during a recent interview at her temporary campaign headquarters in downtown Washington. " 'I'm a serious member of Congress.' " So she got off the crate. The photo shoot soon ended, and the pictures were never published. "I think they didn't get what they wanted," Bachmann said. "They wanted this freak caricature."

We were speaking a few days after Bachmann's well-received performance at a Republican primary debate in Goffstown, New Hampshire, on June 13. Bachmann's poise and deft answers, and her announcement that she'd filed the paperwork to run for president, made her stand out from the other candidates. Perhaps the caricature has begun to fade.

Energetic, charismatic, intelligent, and attractive, the 55-year-old Bachmann is no stranger to publicity. Since she arrived on the national scene in 2007, her prominence in the conservative movement has skyrocketed. In the world of talk radio and cable news, she possesses something like Most Favored Guest status. She plays the outside game, using media appearances to further the right's agenda. She's been featured in calendars of female conservative superstars. There's even a Michele Bachmann action figure.

What Bachmann lacked until recently was mainstream credibility. And the skepticism was bipartisan. Democrats loathed her — and still do — because she's about as far from an apologetic conservative as you can get. But plenty of Republican officials and consultant types also didn't like Bachmann. Republican elites muttered that she was a show horse, not a work horse. Her fame alienated colleagues. One congressman recently told me that Bachmann had been upbraided during a House GOP conference meeting for undermining the leadership's message on fiscal issues. Bachmann's tendency to shoot from the hip is said to limit her appeal. "I think Bachmann's chances of landing on Jupiter are higher than her chances of being nominated," Republican strategist Mike Murphy told me in an April interview for Washingtonpost.com.

My 2011 Enterprise 2.0 Conference Notes: UC + Social Computing ...

Here is another in a series of notes on the 2011 Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston . This covers the session UC + Social Computing = Best of Both Worlds? Irwin Lazar, Analyst, Nemertes Research served as the moderator. Panelists include: Chris Morace, Senior Vice President of Business Development, Jive Software, Ted Stanton, Executive Consultant and Strategist, IBM Smart Work, Christian Finn, Director, SharePoint Product Management, Microsoft, and Mike Gotta, Senior Technical Solution Marketing Manager for Enterprise Social Software, Cisco.

The session description states, “Unified Communications,” the intersection of voice, video, messaging, and conferencing and social computing largely exists in silos. The former is largely driven by telecom managers looking to simplify services or better meet the needs of distributed workers, while the latter often evolves organically driven by individual line-of-business needs. But integrating social computing’s ability to help people locate subject matter experts, with UC’s ability to see availability in real-time represents the chocolate-meets-peanut butter moment in collaboration. During this session we’ll look at how enterprise collaboration strategies are evolving to integrate UC and social computing, and how vendors are increasingly adding real-time and social collaboration capabilities to their products.”

Irwin said a few years ago this topic did not seem relevant. Now it does. Mike began said the most interesting interaction of UC and social is in micro-blogging. It is similar to IM. Above that is getting people connected so they can get work done.  Christian said the future is now with UC and social and MicroSoft offers it in their products so you can move immediately from asynchronous social to instant communications. Ted said he agrees with all comments so far but also feels it is Important to integrate both of these into traditional business apps like CRM.  Chris said you can use social to set up real time conversationbu the issue is how do you make this seemless. Chris said that the social graph is integrating old lists of relationships and can support the UC social integration and the buddy list will disappear.

Mike said that the ability to have the underlying data on relationships to help us make connections through all the channels is key.  Christian said that there are a number of hurtles to get to Chris’s image of the social graph. Going beyond the enterprise relationships is where it gets harder to make the connections. The new levels of connections may spook some people when they get contacted out of the blue because of the greater connectivity. I find this with Skype when get out of context messages from people I do not know.

The Outlook

New Outlook

Josh McDowell's youth ministry handbook, making the connection

Christian literature: evidences, Consisting of Watson's Apology for Christianity [and other works]

Christian literature: evidences, consisting of, Watson's Apology for christianity, etc. ...