LinkedIn gets a little bit more social

LinkedIn is one of those tools that I almost always showcase in my social media workshops and which often makes an appearance in the strategies I write. It’s a tool that, used cleverly, can go well beyond simply allowing people to build a professional network and can help businesses form relationships too. Launched in 2003, LinkedIn has always had a bit of an old-school feel to it, which is not in itself a bad thing, but it’s good to see them now providing more sophisticated functionality around sharing news items. This video explains all:

(Via Adam Tinworth)

links for 2010-04-22

  • Kevin: Alan Mutter dispenses some free advice for how newspapers could charge for content. He looks at the current ideas for paywalls but challenges publishers on their paid strategy. He says: "Pick a system, any system. Or make up your own. It won’t matter what pay model publishers choose, unless they produce unique and compelling content, tools or applications that readers can’t find anywhere else."

“Don’t moderate comments” message from High Court

According to Out-Law, Alex Hilton, who runs Labourhome.org, has failed to get a libel case brought against him by Johanna Kaschke over a post written about her by contributor John Gray thrown out by the High Court. Hilton argued that he had no control over Gray’s post and that he should enjoy the same ‘safe harbour’ protection afforded to companies like ISPs or search engines who are not responsible for the content that flows over their networks.

But the High Court ruled that, because Hilton did sometimes exercise editorial control over parts of his site, that his case needed to be heard by a court to fully examine the issue.

Mr Justice Stadlen said that even to fix the spelling in a post could cost the host the protection of Regulation 19 [safe harbour].

“Mr Hilton stated in terms that where a blog is promoted by him he may check the piece for spelling and grammar and make corrections. That in my view arguably goes beyond mere storage of information,” he wrote.

This should concern anyone who runs a blog or other site where users can add content, especially if they moderate contributions, even if just to fix the spelling or filter for spam.

Struan Robertson, a technology lawyer with Pinsent Masons, who publish OUT-LAW.COM, said:

“Even an attempt to filter for profanities or comment spam, if done manually, involves a risk for the publisher. If you want to be sure that you’re not liable for what your users say, the judge is basically saying you need to ignore user contributions completely until you get a complaint.”

“That’s not a new principle,” said Robertson, “but it’s a warning to site owners about how to interpret it. Some owners may think they have less responsibility for user comments than they really do, and they may wrongly assume that a post-moderation policy is completely safe.”

The impact of this ruling on high-volume comment sites and short-term high-volume projects such as a user-lead mash-up advertising campaign, could be huge. It may be that, once this case is heard fully, such sites would have to decide between full moderation and the huge financial costs that incurs, or no moderation at all and the cost in reputation that comes from leaving spam and offensive comments up until someone complains about them. Hm, which do we fancy? Scylla or Charybdis?

Designing for real world social networks

Paul Adams has a great post on how our social networks are comprised of a vast variety of people, but we mainly restrict our interactions to people we already know. Yet most social tools fail to treat these groups – our intimates and our acquaintances – differently. Paul then splits our relationships out into three types:

  • Strong ties: People we care deeply about.
  • Weak ties: People we are loosely connected to, like friends of friends.
  • Temporary ties: People we don’t know, and interact with temporarily.

and goes on to examine what these groups mean for social interaction design. These insights are just as relevant to business social networks as personal ones, yet I’d wager most people designing internal tools aren’t thinking in this much detail about the types of networks they are designing for.

Anyway, this is a really interesting post and well worth reading.

(Via Joshua Porter.)

links for 2010-04-19

  • Kevin: One of the issues that comes up time and again in discussions about online community is the issue of anonymity. Some believe that verified identity would automatically improve behaviour. I personally think that anonymity is only part of the problem and often used as a scapegoat for other problems including a lack of editorial vision for social media and editorial content that has little reason to be beyond 'let's start a fight'. However, there is another way beyond verified, real identity. Anonymous identity. This post looks at how such a system could work.
  • Kevin: Robert G. Picard fires a shot across the bow of publishers looking to stabilise their businesses by erecting paywalls. "Publishers keep asserting that things will be fine if they can erect pay walls and charge for news online and they argue that governments should provide legal protections for online news so they can make news a viable digital business product.

    Their approach is wrong and ignores the fundamental reality that news has never been a commercially viable product because most of the public has been, and remains, unwilling to pay for news. Consequently, news has always been funded with income based on its value for other things."

  • Kevin: Rick Martin is setting up a local news site, and he looks at potential revenue streams for the site including geo-targeted advertising (could be easier on mobile with more devices knowing where they are), selling ads against specific tags or categories, content as a way to sell other services such as social media consulting or highlighting sponsors as community supporters. Some good ideas here for people looking to pay for local news coverage.
  • Kevin: From the annual State of the (US) News Media report: "The numbers for 2009 reveal just how urgent these questions are becoming. Newspapers, including online, saw ad revenue fall 26% during the year, which brings the total loss over the last three years to 41%.

    Local television ad revenue fell 24% in 2009, triple the decline the year before. Radio was off 18%. Magazine ad pages dropped 19%, network TV 7% (and news alone probably more). Online ad revenue over all fell about 5%, and revenue to news sites most likely also fared much worse.

    Only cable news among the commercial news sectors did not suffer declining revenue last year."

  • Kevin: The Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism looks at how the mobile phones and the internet have affected news consumption. For me the key take-away and one which I've known for several years: "The days of loyalty to a particular news organization on a particular piece of technology in a particular form are gone." Print circulation continues to decline in this environment, and a minotirty of a news websites unique users (about 20% usually) account for 80% of a traffic to a site. "Some 46% of Americans say they get news from four to six media platforms on a typical day. Just 7% get their news from a single media platform on a typical day. "
  • Kevin: Vadim Lavrusik, a new media student at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, looks at 12 things newspapers could do to change their fortune. I definitely agree with his calls to go niche. The internet rewards depth, and while it would be difficult to justify a print product on a narrowly defined subject, the cost of production and distribution of digital content makes the economics work. There are some interesting ideas in the post to differentiate print. I think just as digital should be used more effectively by leveraging its unique strengths, there needs to be more thought about areas where print has unique selling points. There also needs to be thought about the time frames in which digital and print are relevant. Digital can be fast, but it can also be deep in ways that print isn't. Print can provide good medium term analysis or summary information (like The Economist or the The Week.)
  • Kevin: The New York Times reports how social media is actually driving TV ratings. It's a good look at the 'dual-screen' experience where people watch TV with either a laptop or a mobile phone. "Blogs and social Web sites like Facebook and Twitter enable an online water-cooler conversation, encouraging people to split their time between the computer screen and the big-screen TV."
  • Kevin: An interesting contrarian view about innovation from Andy Budd. It's actually as much about taking innovative ideas and transferring that thinking to effective product design and marketing. I think probably the most important point by Andy is that people point to innovation rather than changing their own behaviour. As Suw and I often say, you can have clever technology that is still hampered by cultural resistance to change. It's been my experience that most people don't want to change. They want to master a task because they believe that will ensure job security.

Will Eyjafjallajökull force business change?

There can’t be anyone left who’s not aware of the Eyjafjallajökull eruption in Iceland. Activity started on 20 March with a ‘curtain of fire‘ fissure eruption at Fimmvörðuháls, which sits in between two glaciers, then entered a second phase on 14h April with what’s known as a phreatomagmatic eruption actually under the Eyjafjallajökull ice cap. A phreatomagmatic eruption is one where magma reacts explosively with a water source, be it ground water, snow or ice, resulting in a plume of ash and steam.

I’ve been following the eruption closely since 20th March, mainly because my degree was in geology and volcanoes have always fascinated me. I love a good Hawai’i style eruption! When it was just a fissure eruption at Fimmvörðuháls it was basically a neat little tourist attraction, but things are much more serious now. This new phreatomagmatic eruption is a different kettle of North Atlantic cod, primarily because of the airspace closures that the ash cloud is causing.

 

Disrupted air travel is not just affecting tourists who are stuck abroad or whose holiday has been cancelled, it’s also affecting business travel and, much more importantly, airfreight movements. Airspace closure of a day or so is one thing, but it has been six days and that is going to cause some significant problems not just for the airlines who are currently haemorrhaging cash, but for any business relying on goods transported by air, whether as part of a just-in-time supply chain or not. We may soon start to notice this as perishables like fruit and veg become restricted to locally-available and in-season produce.

It seems unlikely to me that this current eruption is going to cease any time soon. It is, of course, impossible to predict with any certainty what is going to happen, but historically Eyjafjallajökull has shown itself capable of prolonged (two year) eruptions and we need to accept that we might just be at the beginning of such a period of volcanicity.

If that’s the case, then the main factor we need to keep an eye on is the weather. At the moment, the winds are bringing the ash right towards Europe, with Norway and the UK bearing the brunt of it. If the weather changes and a southerly starts to push the ash plume up towards polar regions, for example, then hopefully that’ll clear the air and we’ll be able to start flying. However, I think we should at the very least start to prepare for a future in which air travel is unreliable and where we suffer ongoing sporadic airspace closures. Even if the weather changes enough that we can start to fly again mid-week, there’s no guarantee that we’re not going to see more bans in future.

What does this have to do with social media? Well, if I were a CIO right now, I’d be looking at making sure that everyone in the company has access to video conferencing software such as iChat or Skype, particularly those who usually travel a lot. I’d also be looking at encouraging clients, partners and customers to ensure that they too have these tools installed. I would also provide everyone in my company with IM, would install one of the better wiki platforms and start encouraging people to ramp down their business travel and use social media and video calls instead.

Now, admittedly if I was a CIO I’d be doing that anyway. When people have a choice they tend to choice the status quo over change, but necessity is the mother of invention adoption. Continued sporadic air travel bans will take choice away, so it is in business’ best interests to prepare now for what could be a long period of unreliable travel.

Business travel – such as for meetings, conferences, training – is something we’ve taken for granted. But we haven’t always done business that way and there’s no reason why we have to rely on face-to-face meetings now. Social media can step in to fill the gap, providing a better solution than conference calls alone. I wonder if Eyjafjallajökull is going to force the wider adoption of social tools as air travel once again becomes rare.

links for 2010-04-17

links for 2010-04-16

  • Kevin: "A grim month for quality daily newspapers saw large across-the-board year-on-year circulation falls in March, although the comparisons with February were less dramatic." This is one of the major problems with the print business. Circulation is down, and at some point, the economics of the print business will shift, probably irreversibly. At the moment, the legacy of a monopoly has allowed major newspapers to set ad pricing to support the high capital costs of print. That is changing. The biggest problem is that the it's not just about jumping the chasm, it's that the chasm to transition from the current business to the business they need is growing bigger.