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Kevin: "Jeff Israely, a Time magazine foreign correspondent in Europe, is in the planning stages of a news startup — a "new global news website." He lists lessons that he's learning. "Plan 'A' will not work". I've spoken to a lot of entrepreneurs, and one thing that is clear is that plans evolve. He suggests holding on to your day job, if for no other reason to stay on top of news (assuming your startup is news focused). Some good points.
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Kevin: Gawker is reporting a conflict between the print circulation folks and the digital folks at The New York Times over the pricing of the upcoming iPad subscription. The print circulation folks want to charge $20-$30 a month, fearing that people will cancel their print subs. The digital side is pushing for something more like $10.
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Kevin: Very interesting. The Federal Communications Commission in the US is going to offer a new broadband plan to the Congress. The plan aims to provide 100Mbps to 100m households by 2020. One thing that the FCC should be commended on is admitting currently the US doesn't have the spectrum to provide high-speed mobile broadband. There are some very good recommendations in the plan.
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Kevin: "Associated Northcliffe Digital (AND) wants its hyperlocal network of websites to reach 50 per cent of online households in its catchment areas by July." To increase their reach, they will look at both online and offline promotion.
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Kevin: The US Department of Homeland Security releases some information about the public sources of information that it is monitoring on the internet. Fascinating. They monitor the Danger Room and Threat Level blogs on Wired. "Other sites monitored by DHS include Wikileaks, Cryptome, Homeland Security Watch, and “Borderfire Report, an anti-immigration blog which includes postings related to internal frictions inside the Tea Party movement."
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Kevin: Adam Tinworth looks at the potentital for the iPad. He calls on the publishing industry to think of the device independent of what came before rather than trying to replicate a magazine experience on a digital device. However, with the track record of the publishing industry, he expects it to look more like the CD-ROMs of the early 1990s.
I expect he is right. We're still thinking in analogies, adapting what we do now to digital platforms rather than looking at the unique opportunities offered by these devices. -
Kevin: This is deeply geeky but very, very interesting. "RadioDNS is a collaborative project to enable the convergence of radio broadcasting and IP-delivered services." This is pulling together over-the-air radio with internet delivered services.
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Kevin: Harsh words from entrepreneur Patricia Handschiegel but words that the media should take notice of. "Media, media. You never get it. Value to yourself is eyeballs, value to your readers is something different. This is why your failure is so spectacular and constant."
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Kevin: Anthony Painter has posted a fascinating presentation about the 2008 Obama campaign and how the Tea Party movement in the US and compares it to the politics in the UK. I agree with him. In the UK, the internet and social media has changed the way that people who do politics do politics, but it's not changed the way that politics is organised to the extent that it has in the US.
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Kevin: Recently, Chris Condron, the head of digital strategy at the Press Association in the UK, said that there isn't one public on Twitter. It's a important thing to remember. Alan Wolk at AdAge looks at one of these publics, these subgroups on Twitter. "The main thing to note here is that, unlike many of the Silicon Valley and Alley Twitterati, who take themselves and their tweets oh-so-seriously, this crew is having fun. The tweets are meant to be funny, and the funniest and most outrageous of them will wind up getting retweeted."
One of the things about Twitter is that allows these different groups to carve out spaces for themselves with hashtags. The replies and direct messages allow for privacy gradients to be easily formed. The simplicity but extensibility of Twitter has been its strength. -
Kevin: Google has released its 'Living Stories' news topic pages technology as open-source. In the release, they say: "Since we launched this proof-of-concept test on Google Labs in December, 75% of people who sent us feedback said they preferred the Living Stories format to the traditional online news article."
Thursday, February 18, 2010
I stumbled across a blog post yesterday by Kristina Halvorsen about content strategy. The post looked at the difference between strategy and planning and was very interesting. But there was one small section that worried me:
But for a mid-sized or large organization, if social media content is conceived and created in a silo (or siloes) apart from the organization’s other content channels, it opens the door for inconsistent messaging, irrelevant content for current target audiences, and so on. So it’s important to understand that a blog, like all social media, is (among other things) a channel through which to distribute branded content.
This is an issue that needs untangling because, misinterpreted, it could result in a poor social media strategy.
The silo’d nature of many businesses is a significant problem and I entirely agree that a fragmented social media strategy, or content strategy, will result in a mess. A wise strategist will look at the business’ aims, understand its market, and will create a strategy that will help the business meet its goals within the context of its market.
But blogs and social media are not “a channel through which to distribute branded content”, they are a way for people within the company to form relationships with both other people outside the company and their own colleagues. These relationships create greater trust in the business, as potential customers feel that they have an ‘in’: access to a real person to whom they can take their troubles if they experience any. As trust increases, so does the likelihood that a transaction will occur between those trusted parties.
Branded content is inappropriate for social media because it’s impersonal, it’s not from the heart of the blogger (or Twitterer etc.) and so does not build trust because the recipient can see right through it. Indeed, one of the most common problems I am asked to fix is underperforming Twitter accounts, and they uniformly underperform because they are streams of branded content without a hint of humanity in sight. In fact, this comes up so often I may start offering Twitter Rehabilitation as a specific service to clients.
This doesn’t mean, however, that social media should not have a content strategy, but it needs a very different approach to the sort of strategy one would apply to traditional communications. Rather than focusing specifically on the content, one has to focus on the people who are active in social media and the communities that they are active in. My process would be this:
- Examine your markets and understand what topics your customers are interested in
- Find people in your business who are passionate about those same topics
- Pick people from that group who are happy using social tools
- Agree with the bloggers/Twitterers/etc. which topics they are going to cover
- Let them get on with it
- Review regularly to make sure that the bloggers/Twitterer/etc. feel happy with what they are doing and that everything’s going in the right direction
When we look at successful business bloggers, we don’t see branded content, we see personality, transparency, authenticity, honesty. Those keywords haven’t changed in over a decade and they aren’t going to change now because these are the attributes that people respond most positively to.
Social media comes from the heart and needs very light touch management. More than that, it needs passion, freedom and trust in order to truly work.
Last night, I went to a panel discussion at the Frontline Club here in London looking at the role that the internet and social media might play in the upcoming general election. I wrote a summary of the discussion on the Guardian politics blog. As I said there, the discussion was Twitter heavy, but as Paul Staines aka Guido Fawkes of Order-order.com said, Twitter is sexy right now.
The panel was good. Staines made some excellent points including how the Conservatives were focused on Facebook rather than Twitter for campaigning. Facebook has more reach and was “less inside the politics and media bubble“, Staines said.
Alberto Nardelli of British political Twitter tracker, Tweetminster, said that the election would be decided by candidates and campaigns not things like Twitter. No one on the panel thought the internet or the parties’ social networking strategies would decide the British election. Alberto said that Twitter’s impact would be more indirect. People are sharing news stories using Twitter, which is causing stories to “trickle up” the news agenda.
Chris Condron, head of digital strategy at the Press Association, made an excellent point that so many discussions of social media focus on its impact on journalism and not its impact on people. Facebook and Twitter allow people to organise around issues, which is another form of civic participation. As I said on my blog post at the Guardian, I would have liked for the panel to explore where this organisation around issues might have an impact in marginal constituencies.
Like so many of these discussions, I thought the questions were binary and missed opportunities to explore the nuance of several issues. The moderator, Sky News political correspondent Niall Paterson implied in his questions that if social media didn’t decide the election that it had no relevance. It was an all or nothing argument that I’ve heard before. Change is rarely that absolute. In the US, the role of the internet has been developing in politics for the past decade. Few people remember that John McCain was the first candidate to raise $1m online, not in 2008 but in 2000.
Paterson portrays himself as a social media sceptic, and I can appreciate that. I can appreciate taking a contrarian position for the sake of debate. However, some of his points last night came off as being ill-informed. The panel was good in correcting him, but he often strayed from moderating the discussion to filibustering.
His portrayal of the Obama campaign was simplistic. Alberto said at the Frontline Club that Obama had a campaign of top down and bottom up, grass-roots campaigning, and as British political analyst Anthony Painter pointed out, Obama’s campaign was a highly integrated mix of traditional campaigning, internet campaigning and mobile. (Little coverage focused on Obama’s innovative mobile phone efforts. Most people don’t see the US as a particularly innovative place in terms of mobile, but it was one of the more sophisticated uses of mobile phones in political campaigning I’m aware of.) I love how Anthony puts it, Obama’s operation was “an insurgent campaign that was utterly professional”.
Paterson also implied that Twitter would tie journalists to desks. The only thing tying journalists to desks are outdated working methods. I’ve been using mobile data for more than a decade to stay in the field close to stories. During the 2008 election in the US, my Nokia multimedia phone was my main newsgathering tool. It allowed me to aggregate the best stories via Twitter and use Twitpic to upload pictures from my 4000 mile roadtrip and from the celebrations outside the White House on election night. As I said on Twitter during the discussion:
moderator makes assumption that social media chains journalists to desk. Ever use a mobile phone? It’s mobile!
Sigh. Sometimes I feel like a broken record. Technology should be liberating for journalists, and more journalists should be exploring the opportunities provided by mobile phones and services like Twitpic, Qik, Bambuser and AudioBoo.
You can watch the entire discussion from the Frontline Club here, and here is Anthony Painter’s excellent presentation on the state of internet campaigning in the US and the UK:
The Web And Politics
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