BY: Del F. Cowie

Former MuchMusic personality Juliette Powell may be a long way from hosting Electric Circus, but that doesn’t mean she has forsaken the media beat. The first black Miss Canada is now a very busy social media expert, consulting for a wide range of high-profile corporate clients, blogging for noted political website The Huffington Post and rubbing shoulders with the likes of Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales. Incidentally, Wales co-authored the foreword to Powell’s New York- and Montreal-based new book 33 Million People in the Room: How to Create, Influence and Run a Successful Business with Social Networking (FT Press) where she draws on her experience in traditional media and communications to assess social media strategies.

It really comes across that the ideas in the book are part of your everyday reality.
Essentially, I’m talking about patterns I’ve noticed in my own life. I realized that these are things that are constantly replicated in the businesses that I’ve been privy to because they’ve been my clients. So I’ve had kind of an insider’s view. And the patterns that constantly emerge are this idea of picking your people — surrounding yourself with great people who oftentimes are a lot smarter than you, who go that extra mile because they believe in you. [Barack] Obama really does embody that kind of ability to communicate a message that’s not about one person or one brand, but rather something that we can all believe in, so that you can then start building on your social capital and affecting the culture at large.

You have a specific section on Obama and his use of social networks in the book. What did Obama specifically do better in his social networking strategy than his opponents?
Essentially, Obama just built on [2004 Democratic presidential primary candidate] Howard Dean’s campaign strategy, with the exception that he was able to harmonize both his internal campaign structure with the outreach that was done, through social networking platforms and social media, to people that bought into this idea and decided to use the tools on mybarackobama.com. In other words, Obama was able to understand the internet’s amazing capacity for networking and for virally spreading a message; he invested far more than any of his opponents on the internet. There were no hard sells in terms of getting donations and there was a multi-step process before Obama ever reached out online and said “OK, I need you to give me money now” to build the campaign. He was able to leverage pre-existing tools that were free — not just to begin the campaign, but free to users — which made a huge difference. Hillary [Clinton] had a social networking site that took the opposite tact of the one that Obama took. His was really talking about the empowerment of being a part of a movement. Hers was about supporting her.

What do you think is the future of social networking?
There are many people that feel like it’s part of our human evolution. The impact that technology is having on us as human beings is a two-way street. As much as we’re the ones creating the technology, the technology is also shaping the way the way we think about our world, the way we think about ourselves and our capabilities within that world. It definitely has a strong impact on our capacity to accelerate change. So that’s not good or bad, it all depends on what we decide to do with it. “What’s our intention going to be?” [is one of the questions] and that’s one of the reasons why I wanted to write the book. There are so many people that think of socially connected technology as being a game.