The Pew report highlights changes in social media over the first four years of Barack Obama’s presidency, showing how people are more likely to post to sites like Twitter and Facebook. However, these dramatic increases aren’t all that surprising. Twitter was barely a mainstream source for news in 2008, and Facebook wasn’t much older at that point. Now both sites have become much more accepted as major advertising and communications platforms, so the increased participation there makes sense.

However, it’s worth noting how people use these platforms around civic engagement, because these types of participation could impact the business models of companies like Twitter and Facebook as they grow. It’s also worth considering how social participation corresponds with income and education levels, and how it translates into life offline.

Here were some of the most interesting stats from the report, titled “Civic Engagement in the Digital Age,” which will become available on Pew’s site later Wednesday (Update: it’s now available on the site here.):

• Increased activity: More Americans used social networks for political activity (39 percent of all adults) in the 2012 race than used social media at all in 2008 (only 26 percent were using social media at the time.)
• Offline engagement: Those 39 percent of people who are politically active on social networks aren’t just limiting their activity to Facebook — they’re also really engaged offline as well. Sixty-three percent of the people who post political activity online then do something like attending a meeting in person, compared to the national average of 48 percent of people who take offline political action. They’re also more likely to contact their representative online than the average public.
• What they’re posting: In 2012, 17 percent of adults posted political stories to social media (up from 3 percent in 2008), and 12 percent friended or followed a candidate in 2012 (up from 3 percent in 2008.) Since more candidates now have active social accounts, this makes sense.
• Sparking an interest: It’s encouraging to note that 43 percent of people using social media said they were inspired to go learn more about something they saw on these channels. What exactly they went on to learn and where they learned it is not noted, but it does show that a Facebook post could spark greater civic interest.
• Demographics: Wealthy, better-educated individuals are more likely to become politically engaged both online and offline, although the disparity of participation between low-income and high-income groups was less pronounced on social media than in other capacities. However, the researchers said it doesn’t look like social media will be the political equalizer people thought it might be.
• The remaining power of offline: Americans are still three times more likely to discuss politics offline (in person or over the phone) than they are online, reminding users that political discourse hasn’t moved entirely to Facebook. And the same is true for political donations, 60 percent of which took place offline.

The Pew report was conducted in July and August of 2012 and interviewed 2,253 adults over the age of 18. The interviews took place on both landline phones and cell phones and in English and Spanish. The study’s margin of error is plus or minus 2.4 percentage points.

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The Associated Press’s Twitter account was hacked this morning, sending out updates saying that explosions had hit the White House and President Barack Obama had been injured. The AP’s account was immediately suspended and the tweets removed, but not before the Dow dropped about 200 points. It has since recovered, but that type of velocity makes it possible for someone to have made a lot of money.

Twitter has had security issues before, most recently when it notified users that a number of passwords had been compromised in February, but now with new SEC rules allowing analysts and traders to check tweets for market-moving information, it’s more important than ever for the company to give influential users as many security tools as possible.

Apple just added two-factor authentication to Apple IDs in March, Microsoft rolled it out last week, and Google has had it for much longer. Two-factor authentication is just one way that users can protect passwords, preventing an individual from hacking an account by requiring them to also have in their possession a second form of identification. For instance, Gmail users can set up their smartphones to work with two-factor authentication, requiring a PIN sent to their phone when they try to log in online.

It’s quickly becoming common practice among large web companies, and as the stakes increase for Twitter, it’s time for the company to consider adding the feature. Ars Technica reported in February that Twitter had posted jobs listings seeking engineers with experience in security, including “multifactor authentication and fraudulent login detection.”

Twitter has not yet responded to our request for comment on its current plans.

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Update: A spokesman from the FCC Chairman’s office declined to comment on the Journal story.

Genachowski replaced Kevin Martin (and interim FCC chairman Michael Copps) in 2009 after being nominated by Obama. Genachowski worked on Obama’s first presidential campaign as chairperson of his Technology, Media and Telecommunications Policy Working Group. The working group germinated the seeds of Obama’s National Broadband Plan, which Genachowski oversaw when he took over the reins of the commission.

Since then Genachowski has been in the spotlight on many occasions, advocating the need for more cellular spectrum and proposing the reallocation of TV airwaves for mobile broadband use. Some of those spectrum proposals, however, landed Genachowski and the commission in hot water, such as the conditional waiver -– later retracted — they granted LightSquared to use its satellite spectrum for a terrestrial LTE network.

Perhaps the most controversial period of his tenure, though, was the nearly one year that the FCC weighed and eventually quashed AT&T’s planned acquisition of T-Mobile. The decision is considered a victory for the competitive market and consumer choice after a long period of unfettered consolidation in the telecom industry.

Not all of the commission’s decisions have been so consumer friendly under Genachowski. The commission let pass Verizon’s spectrum deal with the cable operators, which has big implications for competition in the residential broadband market.

Genachowski’s retirement, if true, doesn’t come as a huge surprise. News reports have indicated that the forthcoming departure of Republican FCC Commissioner Robert McDowell clears the way for Genachowski’s departure as well, as it leaves the commission with a 2-1 Democratic majority.

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It’s not all that surprising that tweets aren’t a perfect indicator of public opinion, considering that only 13 percent of Americans are currently using the service. But the discrepancy is worth noting as Twitter continues its push for journalists and the public to consider its data a legitimate source of news and an accurate indicator of the national discussion.

Pew explained why evaluating tweets can be useful, but not necessarily definitive:

“Overall, the reaction to political events on Twitter reflects a combination of the unique profile of active Twitter users and the extent to which events engage different communities and draw the comments of active users. While this provides an interesting look into how communities of interest respond to different circumstances, it does not reliably correlate with the overall reaction of adults nationwide.”

The Pew data, released Monday, found that during the 2012 presidential election (when Twitter was quick to note the 31 million tweets on the big night), Twitter user reactions to President Obama and Mitt Romney weren’t exactly representative of American opinion at large. Twitter users were much more critical of Romney in the first debate and more positive about Obama’s electoral victory than the public as a whole. And while both candidates faced high levels of criticism on the site, Romney faced more than Obama did through the fall campaign.

However, Twitter doesn’t just lean left. Reaction to Obama’s inaugural and State of the Union addresses on Twitter were more critical than overal reactions.

As my colleague Derrick Harris has written before, there’s huge value in using tweets as part of a larger set of data to evaluate situations, but there are plenty of statistical reasons why measuring tweets is challenging. While Twitter is already having a significant impact on how we consume news and information and is relatively mainstream at this point, it’s important to remember that people who voice their opinion on the service are still just a tiny percentage, and who might have different reasons for wanting to share.

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The patent troll problem, widely exposed by NPR in 2011, has long infuriated real companies and the tech sector. And now people in high places are starting to notice.

This week, a young woman told President Obama in a Google Hangout that she and other entrepreneurs live in fear of patent trolls and asked if he planned to continue patent reform. In response, the president made his boldest statement to date on the issue:

“The folks that you’re talking about are a classic example; they don’t actually produce anything themselves. They’re just trying to essentially leverage and hijack somebody else’s idea and see if they can extort some money out of them.”

It looks like common sense has come even to the highest halls of power (see interview and transcript here via Patent Progress). The question now is whether President Obama will actually take charge and do something about the patent plague that is sucking money out of the most innovative sector of the economy.

In the past, the president has proved adept at throwing sops to his fans and fundraisers in the tech sector without doing much to help them. In 2011, for instance, he signed the America Invents Act, which was a milquetoast measure to fix the worst elements of the patent system. While the law made it easier to challenge bad patents, it didn’t reign in absurd jury verdicts or overly broad patents that enable the trolls in the first place.

It’s time for the president to try again. To do so, he will first need to get around the specific concerns of the pharmaceutical industry, which has blocked previous patent reform efforts; as Judge Richard Posner has noted, drug makers are among the few who may need the monopoly power of a patent in order to recoup their investments. This is not the case for software and tech where a first-mover advantage provides an adequate head start and technology rapidly becomes obsolete.

As for addressing the trolls, law professor Brian Love has proposed a very sensible solution. Love, a protege of IP godfather Mark Lemley, suggests changing the patent fee structure to create disincentives for hoarding the obsolete patents that trolls typically use to torment their targets. The advantage here is that this is something Obama can do directly. Meanwhile, in Congress, the president can push for legislation to eliminate billion dollar jury verdicts.

Finally, the president can also tap his executive power to increase antitrust scrutiny of giant patent trolls like Intellectual Ventures for imposing what is, essentially, a startup tax across the tech sector. If the Obama administration even attempted to impose such a tax, the political cost would be enormous; there’s no reason the private sector should get away with the same thing.

Enough talk. It’s time to act, Mr. President.

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In a blog post Friday, the company explained what happened:

This week, we detected unusual access patterns that led to us identifying unauthorized access attempts to Twitter user data. We discovered one live attack and were able to shut it down in process moments later. However, our investigation has thus far indicated that the attackers may have had access to limited user information – usernames, email addresses, session tokens and encrypted/salted versions of passwords – for approximately 250,000 users.

The company noted that there have been reports of several high-profile incidents of Chinese hackers targeting U.S. media companies this week including at The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times. Twitter noted that it wanted to publicize the incident because it doesn’t think it was an isolated or random event, but it stopped short of identifying any likely group or country behind the attacks:

This attack was not the work of amateurs, and we do not believe it was an isolated incident. The attackers were extremely sophisticated, and we believe other companies and organizations have also been recently similarly attacked. For that reason we felt that it was important to publicize this attack while we still gather information, and we are helping government and federal law enforcement in their effort to find and prosecute these attackers to make the Internet safer for all users.

While the hackers may have gained access to 250,000 accounts, that’s still only a small percentage of regular Twitter users. Twitter announced on Dec. 18 that it had more than 200 million active users. So the hacked accounts would make up less than one percent of monthly active users.

Back in 2010, Twitter settled with the FCC after hackers found they were able to access user accounts including President Barack Obama’s account by guessing passwords and were able to send fake tweets. The company downplayed the security risk at the time, although it wasn’t the first security lapse the company faced.

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The key was a model for determining who among its followers were the best messengers, who they might be able to persuade, and what actions they might be willing to take. So, rather than blast all of President Obama’s 30 million Facebook fans or 20 million Twitter followers with the same plea for cash or neighborhood organizers, the campaign was able to make informed decisions about whom it asked for what, and how it asked them.

Rayid Ghani, Obama for America Data Scientist

During a recent interview, Obama for America Chief Scientist Rayid Ghani compared his team’s social media approach in 2012 to the shift in web content from reposted print material to material designed for the web. For many organizations, he said, the prevailing strategy is “‘I used to use email, and now I’m just going to put the same information on a Facebook page.’” However, the president’s campaign used an abundance of online and offline data in order to hyper-personalize messages and get the most bang for its buck in terms of outreach.

Essentially, Ghani explained, the campaign was able to match up supporters’ friends against voting lists and determine how it should approach supporters to reach their friends. If someone was going to spread a message to 20 people, the campaign wanted to ensure they reached 20 people most likely to take action in some way. Because Ghani’s team had done so much work integrating its myriad data sets into a single view, it was better able to decide who could be most easily persuaded to vote for the first time, to donate money, to get active knocking on doors or perhaps even to switch sides.

That it was coming from friends rather than the campaign was critical to the strategy’s success, too. “The more local the contact is,” Ghani said, “the more likely [people] are to take action.”

Changing times call for changing communications

The effort to build an intelligent system like this was necessary because younger voters’ means of communication had shifted so greatly even since 2008. Then, Ghani explained, the Obama campaign relied primarily on phone calls and neighborhood canvassing in order to reach people. Now, many young people aren’t reachable on landlines at all, but they are always connected to some form of social media.

Not that the president’s campaign abandoned those traditional methods, though. Ghani said many older voters are still best reached via non-digital means, and even when his team was using volunteers to reach those demographics, it suggested they give them a call or talk in-person. It really was all about what was most effective for each individual.

Four years from now, however, Ghani sees a very different picture again in terms of how campaigns will reach their voters. Younger people will be even more difficult to reach via traditional telephones, and they might not even be watching a lot of over-the-air or cable television. On the other hand, he noted, older people will probably be more engaged online and perhaps with mobile apps, as well.

“Reaching [people] through the channels they’re most engaged in is going to have to become mainstream [in political campaigns],” Ghani said.

However, he reiterated, because there’s only so much money to spend on any given medium, it’s more important to inform those interactions with voter intelligence than just to make them. Speaking about increasingly targeted online advertising, Ghani explained, “You don’t want to waste impressions on people who are not in your target audience. … If you’re lactose-intolerant, there’s no point in showing you ads for yogurt and dairy products.”

And even on the campaign trail, data was making a difference. Ghani’s team wasn’t writing speeches or managing communications, but it was helping the people who did those things do them better. For example, he explained, Matthew Rattigan, an analyst on the team, built a tool for looking at the coverage of speeches in local newspapers so it could break down by geographic region how people reacted and which parts were quoted most. Speechwriters were therefore able to see how the messages they wanted to convey were actually the ones that were covered.

Very hard work, very short window

It’s pretty amazing to think about how much the Obama for America Tech team accomplished — not just Ghani’s data science team, but also CTO Harper Reed’s unit and the team led by Chris Wegrzyn responsible for building the analytics and data infrastructure — when you consider the short time frame in which they had to do it. Ghani considered himself lucky that he and his team inherited a handful of staff and techniques left over from the 2010 mid-term election, so the 2012 team didn’t have to begin with the cupboards bare when it got to work in mid-2011.

But, still, it had just a year and a half to recruit a team of data scientists (“finding people who were qualified was extremely hard,” Ghani said) and to get some foundational data-management systems in place. The campaign’s targeted outreach efforts on Facebook, for example, only got up and running in August following an extensive effort to integrate the campaign’s myriad online and offline data sources.

“Our biggest challenge this time around was getting all the [online and offline] data together in one place,” Ghani said. “We were basically a political campaign with the problems of a large enterprise.” However, he added, corporate data architecture is an ongoing concern — they don’t build systems for one-off jobs then abandon them.

Given all that work, he thinks it “would be a shame to let it go” when the next presidential campaign team is built. Not that what it did will still be totally relevant four — or even two — years from now. Data sources will change, as will technology, but having something in place is better than nothing.

This is especially true considering how little budget campaigns typically have between elections to focus on technology. Absent an abundance of money and the right people during election season, Ghani said, “You need to make sure you have people whose job it is to be thinking about this stuff all the time.

That’s because although the work Ghani’s team wasn’t enough to win an election on its own, it was very important. And in tight elections, any competitive edge is worth having (while failures can have harsh consequences). Reaching the right voters at the right time with the right message will become even more important in future elections, he said, and “we only scratched the surface of it.”

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The post, published Tuesday, details the evolution of the fundraising platform from a hosted service provided by Blue State Digital to a redundant, dual-platform API that had the lowest latency possible. Rush, who was the deputy director of front end web development at Obama for America, lays out how the six engineers working on the fundraising side created a web-based API for accepting donations for the Obama campaign in early 2012. The goals of the team were to make sure the API was always available (when a platform can take in $3 million in donations in a single hour, downtime is pricey), that it scaled and that it was fast, since millisecond delays make people second-guess their decision to spend/give money.

Rush detailed how the team used Amazon EC2, Akamai and its own hosted platform with a REST-based API on top of that. Anyone who wanted to access the API had redundant options and Akamai chose the fastest route as well as lowered latency. From Rush’s post:

To ensure that the platform was as stable as possible we worked with backend engineers on the campaign’s Tech team to make the Blue State API redundant. The Tech engineers built out a duplicate payment processor/API and hosted it on Amazon EC2 (itself redundant across data centers). At this point we had two APIs that we could switch between if one went down, but our Devops team had a great solution to make this automatic. They sprinkled a little Akamai magic and we had an Akamai health check which would automatically divert traffic to one API or the other based on the health check. By the time this was fully functional there was not a single moment in time that our new platform was not able to accept donations.

For more on the campaigns use of tech read Rush’s post, or check out the post by my colleague Derrick Harris on how the Obama team used tech as a “force multiplier,” to help win the election. It’s a good reminder that politics has transitioned from TV soundbites to scaled out web infrastructure and the cloud.

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In the most sophisticated (and expensive) campaign season in history, Harper and his team provided the highly targeted information that allowed the Democratic machine to reach potential donors and optimize the get-out-the-vote efforts across just about every communication channel possible.  It’s probably not an exaggeration to say that their analytics work changed the course of the election, giving Obama the edge over Mitt Romney and his SuperPAC donors …and four more years in the White House.

No matter what your politics, the power of personal data in the 2012 election season was undeniable.  And all over the world, c-level executives are salivating as they think about they will use the same quantitative analysis and personal data mining techniques to supercharge growth and revenue.

Just about every would-be pundit has been telling us this year that “Data is the new Oil”.  You can practically see them scratching off “Social Media Guru” from their business cards and replacing it with “Data Scientist”.

But without considering the ethical and best practices of personal data collection, you are more likely to end up as the Exxon Valdez or with a BP-sized sized disaster on your hands. If you’re serious about using customer personal data effectively in your business, build your data policies on solid ground from the beginning and focus on three key concepts:  permission, control, and transparency.

Permission

Always get explicit, opt-in permission to use personal data.  Opt-out models are deceptive and slimy. Only ask for the data you need to make your service work better for your customers. Storing more personal data than you actually use just opens you up to risk from malicious hackers or unscrupulous employees. 

Think twice about using personalized data when aggregate, non-identifiable data could just as effective — especially for advertising purposes. And while the temptation might come up to sell customer data to third parties when revenues are tight, it is never worth it.  Selling your customers to the highest bidder destroys the trust you established with every great interaction with your product.

Control

Start off with a simple rule of thumb:  You don’t own your customer’s personal data: they do. Increasingly, consumers know that the data they give you is valuable currency and when they deposit it with you, they expect a return on their investment. Make it as easy to view and change personal data or even remove it entirely as you did to collect it. Be clear on how each data field is used in your service and let customers decide what should be private and what should be public. Don’t make it hard for them to walk away from your service whenever they want.

Transparency

Be honest about how you use personal data in your services and explain this as you collect it. Educating people about what you do with their information and the benefits they get from depositing it with you creates better informed and more loyal customers.  Don’t write privacy policies in nine-point type or obscure them by burying them deep in your services dark corners.

And don’t listen to anyone who tells you that we’re in a post-privacy society.  It’s as important as ever to people and when the inevitable privacy screw-up happens, how transparent you are about what happened and how you are fixing the problem will be more important than the incident itself.

By focusing your policies and day-to-day communications on these concepts, you’ll build a more valuable asset with your customers:  Trust.  It’s more valuable than oil and much harder to refine. It’s what your reputation is based on and if you lose it, your customers go with it.

Matthew Hawn is product development and strategy consultant based in London, and previously VP of product at Last.fm

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This exec, who was stopped coming into the country at Boston’s Logan Airport because of an inconsistency of his title on a document,  was able to get one message out to a colleague before the chains went on. The tech community network was tapped, a “war room” was assembled where 5 people called lawyers and politicians, said Reed Sturtevant, an entrepreneur and investor recounted the tale at TechStars Boston Demo Day on Wednesday.  ”After a lot of work from these people, after two nights in jail, this founder was released and is back at work,” said Sturtevant, obviously emotional about the experience.

Sturtevant then introduced Ali Noorani of the National Immigration Forum who spoke of the need for real immigration reform, not just for the foreign-born PhDs, engineers, and blue-collar workers affected but also for the sake of law enforcement officials and for the business community that needs fresh ideas and talent at all levels.

Ali Noorani of the National Immigration Forum speaking at TechStars Boston Demo Day.

Noorani’s organization is trying to build consensus with constituencies that might surprise onlookers — law enforcement agencies and religious organizations. “Our theory is if you hold a Bible, wear a badge or own a business, you want a common-sense solution,” he said.

His organization has won support among southern Baptist churches in Missouri, from anti-tax advocate Grover Norquist and Utah Attorney General Mark Shurtleff, who wants police to “chase murderers, not landscapers and nannies,”  Noorani said.

This is a timely topic. Earlier in the day, at his first press conference since re-election,  President Barack Obama stressed the need for reform and said the public will is there for it now. The strong turnout of Latino voters has already encouraged some Republicans to reconsider their hardline stance about immigration, he said. (As a refresher,  Republican nominee Mitt Romney had been a pragmatist on immigration before taking a hard right., Romney suggested that illegal residents  ”self-deport” as part of the process of gaining legal status.)

In the past, Senator John McCain and former President George W. Bush, also supported immigration reform, evidence that this was not always a partisan issue. Now with so many votes at stake, the president thinks Republicans will be motivated to support change. “We need to seize the moment,” Obama said.

In addition, the president said:

“I am a believer that if you’ve got a PhD in physics, or computer science who wants to stay here, and start a business here, we shouldn’t make it harder for them to stay here, we should try to encourage him to contribute to this society. I think that the agricultural sector, obviously has very specific concerns about making sure that they’ve got a workforce that helps deliver food to our table. So there’re gonna be a bunch of components to it, but I think whatever process we have needs to make sure border security’s strong, needs to deal with employers effectively, needs to provide a pathway for the undocumented here, needs to deal with the DREAM Act kids.”

The Washington Post has the full transcript of the presidential press conference.

Feature photo courtesy of Flickr user DIAC Images

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