Monthly Archives: June 2009

06.09.09
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Hi. My name is Suw and I’m a social media expert

I’m getting increasingly fed up with a meme that’s been doing the rounds for the last several months, and I’m afraid this morning on Twitter I kinda snapped a bit. The idea that’s been spreading through the social media community is that no one in social media should ever call themselves an “expert”. There have been a number of blog posts and Twitter conversations about it, and although I can’t recall all of them (please leave links in the comments if you want), the one that pushed me over the edge was 6 Reasons You Shouldn’t Brand Yourself as a Social Media Expert by Dan Schawbel who is, I note, “the leading personal branding expert for Gen-Y”.

The big problem I have with this anti-expert meme is that it totally mischaracterises what it is to have expertise in the realm of social media. After five years of being a professional social media consultant, I can promise you that it takes a lot of hard work to really understand how social media functions in a business context – not just for marketing but for internal use too. It’s not just about understanding how the tools work, it’s about understanding the business context (doing gap analysis, for example), it’s about understanding how people work, both in relationship to the technology and each other (basic psychology and sociology), it’s about communication skills, management skills, analytical skills.

None of that is stuff that you can just pick up overnight. A super-user is not the same as an expert – it’s not about knowing how the tools work, how to make a new blog post or set up a new wiki. It’s a much more nuanced job and involves constant learning from sometimes unexpected sources. I never thought I’d end up talking to psychologists about email when I started as a consultant, but understanding why people are wedded to their inbox helps me to understand the problems I will face when trying to introduce them to a wiki. Being an expert in social media means that you are constantly pushing to understand the non-obvious, constantly questioning the assumptions and the so-called common sense explanations for why things happen the way they happen.

Frankly I feel that I and my peers all fit the definition of expert:

a person who has a comprehensive and authoritative knowledge of or skill in a particular area

And we should be able to call ourselves experts without being censured by the community for doing so.

I think some of that censure comes from the idea that the internet is a truly democratic space where everyone is equal and to decide to elevate oneself by using the term ‘expert’ is somehow repellant. Well, I’m afraid the idea that the internet is a level playing field is bunkum. The history of the internet is shot through with elites and the people they look down upon (AOL, anyone?). Humans naturally create hierarchies, it’s part of being human. Hierarchies exist everywhere one looks, and they exist on the net too.

Whilst social media is a great democratising force, I fear people are confusing equality of opportunity with equality of outcome. The important thing about the internet and about social media in particular is that everyone has an equal opportunity to use it, but the truth – unpalatable as it may seem – is that not everyone will use it equally as well. However you define success, whether it’s on a personal self-expression level or whether it’s on a professional earnings level, some people will be more successful than others. The outcomes are not, and can never be, equal.

Yet we’re not supposed to use the word ‘expert’, despite the fact that some people clearly are more expert than others. Why this squeamishness? Partly I think there’s a real hatred amongst social media types for the self-promotional excesses we see all about us on the web. We see people bigging themselves up and it makes us squirm in our seats. And we don’t want others to think that we are that egotistical, that far up ourselves. Instead we want the warm fuzzy feeling that comes from someone else’s praise of our work, those third-party accolades and testimonials.

I can understand that. I’m not particularly great at self-promotion. It makes me feel dirty and unhappy. But relying only on external validation for our work is unhealthy, not just for us and our own mental health, but also for our industry. By censuring anyone who says they are an expert, we imply that there are no leaders and that everyone is equal. That implication devalues everyone working in the area by bringing us down to the same common denominator, making us no better than the whippersnapper carpetbagger who’s been on Twitter six weeks and thinks they know it all.

It also seems to me that the desire to punish people for saying they are an expert may, in some quarters, come from our own insecurities about a profession that seems like it should be easy. “I don’t feel like an expert, so anyone else who says they are an expert has to be bullshitting.” I have some sympathy for this, given my own recurrent self-doubt, but it is wrong. Being a social media expert is not easy at all and anyone who is one knows that.

I can’t think of any other professional field where is is frowned up on to simply call oneself an expert. Indeed, in every other field I can think of, we actively seek out experts. If you have a bad problem with your drains, you call a drainage expert without even thinking about it. If you want to learn about the nuances of the Bard’s great works, you seek out an expert in Shakespeare. If your MacBook conks out, you take it to an Apple expert.

There’s nothing wrong with being an expert in these fields, so why is it wrong in social media?

In the Twitter conversation this morning, @BenjaminEllis said “@Suw It’s hard for the true experts when people with 6 months experience and no results to show for it call themselves experts too.”

That’s a fair point. We deal with false experts in other fields by assessing their claims about themselves in the light of the evidence we can gather about how well they perform. Recommendations, reviews, even our intuition as we talk to them about our problem, help us understand whether they are as good as they say they are. The same is true in social media. People, hopefully, don’t just judge a social media consultant based on what they say about themselves, but also delve into their past work and their reputation.

But we don’t help that process by denying people the right to call themselves experts. By doing that, we also deny ourselves the opportunity to tell stories about expertise that help people outside of our field understand what a genuine social media expert looks like. If I can’t talk about what I think makes me an expert in social media, how are we going to find out what other people think makes an expert? I can say that I think Leisa Reichelt is an expert in usability, and I can point to her work to illustrate my point, but Leisa knows better than I what it takes to be expert in usability. If we never have that conversation, I’m none the wiser about how to compare her expertise with other people’s. How can I tell if Mr X is as good as he says he is?

The number of people self-identifying as social media consultants has sky-rocketed in the last year or so, and we need to start having conversations about what makes an expert an expert. If we can’t talk about it, understand it, and communicate it, how on earth do we expect clients to make good decisions about who to hire? We all decry the carpetbaggers, but we can’t do that and decry the experts too! We have to let people say that they are experts and we have to talk about what that means and how to compare claims of expertise against evidence of expertise. We can’t go on pretending that we’re all equal, and that experts don’t exist (whatever reasoning you give for it), because we’re not and they do.

There’s more I could say, but I’m going to leave it at this for now:

My name is Suw and I’m a social media expert.

06.08.09
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links for 2009-06-08

06.06.09
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@DW Global Media Forum: Blogging, citizen journalism and politics

Deutsche Welle BOBs 2008 winners

Deutsche Welle Best of the Blogs 2008 winners

Bloggers were well represented at Deutsche Welle’s Global Media Forum, in part because it was the first time that they awarded their BOBs – Best of the Blogs – to the winning bloggers in person. The forum was a stark reminder of internet theorist Clay Shirky’s observation that technology that is often used to pass time in the West can be an essential tool for expression and democracy in repressive countries. Blogging has become a powerful means of expression, reporting and organisation in countries around the world.

Blogging and citizen journalism

During a panel on blogging and citizen journalism, Israel Yoroba Guebo from the Ivory Coast said that in his country, “We hope that our journalists don’t end up in prison.” There is only one television channel and opposition political parties have no way to communicate their positions. He used to work for a newspaper, but he wanted an outlet to tell about the everyday life of people in his country.

Ivory Coast was divided by conflict in 2002 as rebels held part of the country. The political conflict didn’t just divide the country but also its people. He wrote on his blog Le Blog de Yoro about life in all parts of the country and tried to show that people shared the same way of life in an effort to bring about reconciliation.

He was asked whether blogging could have prevented the conflict. He said:

“In Ivory Coast, we didn’t see a way to prevent crisis, but if we had the blog, maybe we could have prevented some of the massacres.”

Another person asked him who was the target audience of the blog. Was it Africans, many of whom don’t have access to the internet, or was it audiences in Europe and the US?

He said that it was important to let people in other countries know what was happening in the Ivory Coast, but maybe his blog would also encourage others to take up bloggin. “The more bloggers that we have, the greater opportunity we have to talk freely,” he said.

The problem is that blogging there is difficult and expensive. They don’t have broadband and have to go to internet cafes to post. However, he said:

“You can at least give the world the possibility to express themselves. Something that would never be accepted on the television.”

Iranians do not have to be encouraged to blog. It is often said that Persian is the fourth most common language for blogs. Four years ago, women in Iran gathered outside of parliament to protest a law that prevented women from becoming president, but it was one of many laws unfair to women. The women decided to protest every day of the year against one of these laws, said Nazli Farokhi.

“We realised that 365 days was not enough,” she said, so they started the blog 4equality. It gives a chance for women who support the campaign to write about their experiences. She was asked about the security of the bloggers. Police have arrested 50 of their members, and four remain in prison.

During the BOBs award ceremony, she played the group’s anthem which describes the discrimination that women in Iran face and the hope that one day women and men can be equal there.

Threats to bloggers

A climate of fear due to threats of violence, intimidation or arrest face bloggers in repressive countries. Bloggers from China and Cuba were not allowed to travel to accept their awards, but instead had to record video messages for the BOBs ceremony.

Cuban Yoani Sanchez’s Generación Y won the award for best blog 2008. Appearing via video message, she said that having a blog in Cuba “can drive one to madness”: There are no internet connections in people’s homes, and bloggers are forced to go internet cafes or hotels that cater to tourists. The cost of using the internet for one hour is equal to a third of the average Cuban’s salary.

Zeng Jinyan won the Reporters without Borders best blog award. She’s the wife of imprisoned Chinese human rights activist Hu Jia, and she began blogging after being put under house arrest. She writes about life under constant surveillance by the Chinese authorities. She couldn’t travel to accept the reward, but was able to get a video to the BOB organisers. In the video message, she said:

“Blogging has brought new hope to my life.”

Ahmad Abdalla won the award for best blog in Arabic. When he started writing the blog, he said that he was only writing “about small things” and didn’t think that anyone would care about it. But, he added:

“But these small things are affecting my generation, these small things that we’re missing.”

Blogging in Russia

Eugene Gorny said that two or three years ago, he wouldn’t have predicted that he would be interested in the link between politics and blogs in Russia, but now people who were not previously interested are getting involved in the political discussion.

Most popular media channels or national newspapers in Russia are controlled by the government. They have no chance to report about opposition political leaders, protests or anything that the government doesn’t want known or discussed.

Andrei Illarionov, the former chief economic advisor to Vladimir Putin, says of Russia, “People enjoy a tangible level of personal freedoms, but political rights are almost absent, civil liberties are severely restricted and there are significant limits on personal security.”

The regime is afraid of any political activity of the citizens, and brutally oppresses them, Gorny said.

Russians first started blogging seven or eight years ago, but it was mostly for fun and for the self-expression of the internet elite. As the Russian government has seized control of the media, blogs have become an important alternative to the state media for people to discuss issues that are important to them.

A 2009 report by Russian search engine Yandex found 7.4m blogs in Russian, of which about 1m are active. There are 1m posts in the Russian language every day. Russian bloggers are journalists, opposition politicians or “anyone who has a story or an opinion to share”, he said. Journalists blogging are able to write about issues more freely than in the traditional media. But it doesn’t matter whether a blogger is a journalist or not, Gorny said. Rather, bloggers were judged by their peers about their ability to write about significant topics.

Many blogs have a huge readership and reach in Russia. Free magazine F5 reviews the hottest topics in the Russian blogosphere, coming mostly from popular blogging service LiveJournal. The magazine boasts a circulation of 100,000.

Bloggers write reports on what they see, publish documents such as Amnesty International reports, commentary on current events, coverage of protests and quotes and links to other posts.

Their favourite topics are writing about:

  1. The “iIllegitimate, corrupted, aggressive and unjust regime”.
  2. The constant search for internal and external enemies.
  3. Human rights violation in Russia, Chechyna, Ingushetia,
  4. Police mayhem, extreme violence and the “outrageous breach of all limits”.
  5. Strategies of resistance.

The last has become important as the authorities criminalise new forms of resistance. Russian authorities have clamped down on flash mobs and, earlier this year, they even arrested members of a silent protest for using foul language. The protestors had tape over their mouths. As more protesters are jailed, blogs from prison are part of a growing trend in Russia.

Blogs are a significant and growing part of the media in Russian, and Gorny predicted that if the political situation gets worse, then that the role of blogs will only increase.

Blogs and democracy in the West

Of course, even in the West, blogs can still be used for democratic purposes. US transparency through technology group, the Sunlight Foundation, won the 2008 Best Blog in English for their Party Time blog. The blog aims to collect information on the lobbyists, corporations and other donors who pay for parties for US politicians.

Nancy Watzman said that anonymous sources, some even in the lobbying groups themselves, offer the group tickets to the parties. The tickets come from sources they trust. They post the information on the Party Time blog, helping to shed light on one of the poorly reported aspects of the game of money, access and influence in US politics. During the political conventions in 2008 ahead of the presidential elections, they went to many of the parties, taking videos and posting them to the blog.

They would like to take the project further and are looking for partners, including the Huffington Post.

Markus Beckedahl started blogging at Netzpolitik to discuss issues of digital rights, copyright and censorship on the internet, pulling together stories in German and from around the world on the subject. He does a lot of thinking about how to change politics. He said:

“Politicians do bills about internet and they don’t really know what they are talking about.”

About 70,000 people in Germany use Twitter, and Markus has found that it’s a good way to quickly oganise and mobilise people. Netzpolitik has its own YouTube channel and video podcasting channel, and this has led to reports in traditional media about their efforts and issues.

He discussed some of their political campaigns. In 2005, the German government began discussing whether to switch from Microsoft’s Windows XP to Linux. The software giant threw a party to lobby the government to stick with Windows, Beckedahl said. Netzpolitik crashed the party in penguin costumes, the penguin being the mascot of Linux. Some of the penguins even managed to send pictures from the party via MMS.

In recent months, Deutsche Bahn, the German rail giant, has been in a “spy scandal with their workers”, Beckedahl said. Someone sent him internal DB documents, which he posted on the internet. Their lawyers sent him a cease-and-desist letter. He posted the letter on the site, asking for advice. Soon, the letter and documents were spread across the internet, making it difficult for DB to get them removed.

Their most recent campaign is against a proposed law aimed at child pornography. Instead of seeking to shut down the sites, the German government is looking to use filtering software, but internet activists fear that government filtering efforts could be used by other industries such as the music industry against file-sharing sites or by the Hessen government to filter gambling sites. Activists would rather the government seek limited action to shut down sites operating outside of the law.

The German government has an online petition system. A successful petition has to get 50,000 signatures. Using Twitter and hundreds of blogs, Netzpolitik managed to get the necessary signatures in record time, getting 110,000 in all.

Final Thoughts on the Global Media Forum

I thought one of the best quotes of the forum came from Laura Pintos, who writes at the blog 233grados.com. (233 degrees being the temperature at which paper ignites.) She was asked during the BOBs awards ceremony what she saw as the future of journalism. She answered:

“It is the wrong question. it is the present. We are living in a digital moment. It is our present.”

It was nice to see that point of view represented at the conference, even if it probably represented a minority view amongst the speakers and attendees. While a lot of people are wringing their hands over what the future of journalism is, there are people Pintos and many of the bloggers and podcasters at the conference who aren’t worrying about the future of journalism and rather simply creating it.

06.05.09
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How right/wrong are my futures matrices?

The proof of the pudding is in the matrices, as they don’t say. I spent this afternoon gazing at my enormous mindmap in an attempt to try and see beyond the surface themes. What are the underlying issues? How do they fit together? What pretty 2 X 2 matrices can I create to help illustrate those relationships?

Well, here’s my first stab. Please do feel free to critique them thoroughly in the comments or in notes on the Flickr image if you want.

Matrices

I always say that social media is 20% tech and 80% people, and for me the important issues are human issues, not tech. Yes, there might be problems about resources such as energy and raw materials, but those can end up in arbitrage (buy where it’s cheap and sell where it’s expensive) and the market takes care of them. And for resources that can’t be controlled by the market, we’ll find ways to be more efficient, to do more with less, and to recycle.

So I ended up thinking about resources as not as important as they might seem, apart from one: human attention. We are in an attention economy (as the news, music and film industries seem not to have noticed yet), and that’s something that cannot be arbitraged, you cannot buy yourself more attention. Another theme that came out strongly was the human need to create and maintain relationships, and how that is changing as technology – particularly social technology – enables us to keep in touch with more people for longer.

The first matrix therefore juxtaposes the number of relationships a person has against the amount of attention they have to give. This will affect the way that civil society associations can benefit by affecting how hard it is for them to form relationship with new people, and how much attention they can expect to get from each person. I see a general trend from giving more attention to fewer organisations/people towards giving less attention to more organisations/people. Obviously it’s not as simple as that, because if you plot attention vs person you’d find a long-tail, with a minority of your relationships getting a majority of the attention, but averaged out over all relationships I think this is a valid trend.

The second matrix juxtaposes two other common undercurrents: Control and self-organisation. Many of the items on my mindmap, such as ‘regulation’, ‘marginalisation of dissent’ and ‘return to conservatism’ are really about controlling either people or the technology that they use. That seems to fit together with self-organisation, a theme expressed through items like ‘open source software’, ‘mass adoption’, and ‘skills move towards adaptive’, which all enable self-organisation.

The third matrix looks at privacy and trust, and how they combine to create different types and amounts of participation. Privacy was illustrated by items such as ‘face recognition’, ‘tracking’ and ‘mutually assured embarrassment’. Trust was a main theme that came out in my mind map’s first level branches.

The final matrix pits pervasiveness of technology and the web against the utility of the tools, and sees a movement from scarcity and a lack of utility, i.e. tech/the web as a minority sport, towards mass adoption and increased utility creating vibrant online cultures.

There are quite a few other issues that I am not sure where they fit, such as the diminishing media, inclusion/exclusion, changing demographics, and some of the other macro effects.

Some comments have already been left on the Flickr image of this diagram, so please do feel free to leave your thoughts there or in the comments below. What’s missing? What’s wrong? What’s right? What’s irrelevant? Please let me know!

06.03.09
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The future of social technology in one enormous mindmap

I have done quite a few hours of interviews, plus a workshop, to try and gather together ideas for how social technology might develop over the next 15 years. I’ve spoken to as wide a group of people as possible, from tech entrepreneurs to CTOs to activists to 3rd sector experts, and I’ve had a massive amount of information and ideas to process.

I’ve made a start with that processing by distilling everything down into keywords and phrases, and then grouping them together in a sensible manner and making the mother of all mindmaps to try and impose some order on it all. I’ve put aside for now the concept of type of change, e.g. predetermined or uncertain, and instead tried to find similarities in theme instead. It makes for an interesting view – you’ll need the full size image to read the text, though, or download the PDF.

Futures

There’s undoubtedly stuff that’s missing from this mindmap. It’s not supposed to be all encompassing – indeed, I don’t think that would be possible – but I did notice that no one really talked about gaming, for example. Now that may not ultimately affect the scenarios that I’m going to be writing because so much of what’s important on this map is not about specific technologies but more about behaviours, cultural shifts, etc. That said, if you’re into gaming and want to add your thoughts in the comments I would love to have my intuition double-checked! Equally, if you think I’ve missed anything else that you feel is crucial, please comment.

My next task is to try to pull out a sense of movement from these themes, and to come up with some scenarios. Expect another blog post soon!

06.02.09
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Congratulations to a friend: Bill McKenna

I just found via Twitter (of course) that a friend and former colleague at the BBC, Bill McKenna, has won White House News Photographers Association ‘Editor of the Year’ award. Bill is more of an artist than an editor, and it’s great to see his skills recognised like this. Watch this piece and you’ll get just a small sense of what an incredible video editor can do. His ability to tell a story in pictures is amazing, and he also breaks the mold of television news editing. Most of the time, news video is simply a disjointed collage of pieces to camera, a couple of poorly framed shots and agency footage. He uses pictures to make you stop and pay attention to something that might otherwise have passed too quickly.
Bill is also a musician, and it shows not only in the way that he uses music in his editing, how he starts, stops and slows the action to the beat of the soundtrack he’s chosen but also how he uses music to bring an emotion to news video that usually isn’t there. He works with the excellent camera men and women at the BBC bureau in Washington and creates stunning pieces that are a joy to watch. He spends hour after hour in the edit suites producing these pieces. I’ll let Bill and this small sample of his work speak for itself. I just wanted to say congratulations to a great friend! Bill, it’s so glad to see your talent and dedication recognised.

06.02.09
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How well is the third sector using social media?

It’s always hard to work out in the open, because it means exposing unfinished thoughts and expressions to public scrutiny, something which is, quite frankly intimidating. We are much more used to gathering up our information, hammering it into shape and producing, in the end, a nicely polished piece of work. But that’s not necessarily the best way to do things.

Not only do I not have the luxury of the time it would take me to properly go through that process, but I believe that the end product will be better if I, as my maths teacher used to say, show my workings. But it’s not without trepidation and caveats that I give you the first draft of my assessment of a small sample of third sector websites.

After the jump, you’ll find a description of what I did and what I found, and I’d very much like to know what questions it throws up for you. I know that it poses quite a few more questions than it answers for me, but I shan’t prejudice your reaction by stating them here.

To put it in context, this is only part of my assessment of the current state of play with third sector use of social tools. My survey is still open, and if you are in the third sector, please do take a look at it (or pass it on to anyone you know who might be able to fill it in). I’ll also be doing a literature review (so please send me links to anything you think I should be reading).

These are preliminary results – I can’t stress that enough. Please don’t start reporting these or writing blog post about them (not that I’m assuming you want to!), not only because in the course of refining the report things may change, but also because they are lifted out of the context of the rest of the report. But please do feel free to critique my work as extensively as you like, in the comments or on email if you want.

I want to do a little bit more research for this section, but I’d like that to be directed not just by my own judgement, but also by yours. What else do you want to know? What questions does it make you ask? I can’t promise to be able to find all the answers, but I will do my best. (And don’t worry so much about typos, but please do point out anywhere where my maths doesn’t add up!)

Right. *gulp* Have at it!

Continue reading →

06.02.09
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links for 2009-06-02

  • 50 Great Examples of Data Visualization | Webdesigner Depot
    Kevin: As the post says: "50 of the best data visualizations and tools for creating your own visualizations out there, covering everything from Digg activity to network connectivity to what’s currently happening on Twitter."
    (tags: visualization data statistics design tools web stats)
  • Welcome to a dying industry, journalism grads
    Kevin: Barbara Ehrenreich's commencement address to the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism class of 2009 on May 16. "We are not part of an elite. We are part of the working class, which is exactly how journalists have seen themselves through most of American history – as working stiffs. We can be underpaid, we can be jerked around, we can be laid off arbitrarily – just like any autoworker or mechanic or hotel housekeeper or flight attendant.

    But there is this difference: A laid-off autoworker doesn't go into his or her garage and assemble cars by hand. But we – journalists – we can't stop doing what we do."

    (tags: journalism future advice career tips newspapers media inspiration)
  • News matters so much more than what delivers it | Media | The Guardian
    Kevin: Jeff Jarvis makes an excellent observation in his latest Guardian column: "We care less about the form of news and more about the information it imparts. That is the key strategic problem for editors and publishers hoping to charge us online: once news is known, it is knowledge that can be spread through conversation, which means it can no longer be controlled behind a pay wall."
    (tags: newspapers trends kindle content ebooks paidcontent economics)
  • Reflections of a Newsosaur: Worst quarter for newspapers: Sales dive $2.6B
    Kevin: Grim reading for newspapers in the US as advertising revenue sees a record drop in the first quarter of 2009, falling "by an unprecedented 28.3%", blogs Alan Mutter. What is even more grim reading for US newspapers is that while the first three months of 2009 saw advertising revenue fall off of a cliff, the decline has started in 2006 and has been almost unabated since. That decline started long before the US went into recession, indicating that not all of the decline can be attributed to the economic downturn.
    (tags: business media data advertising revenue US newspapers)