Author Archives: Suw Charman-Anderson

07.07.08
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Transitions Online: Grzegorz Piechota, Gazeta Wyborcza

Gazeta Wyborcza is a national daily newspaper in Poland. First issue published in 1989, had 8 pages and was printed in black and white. Started by the Solidarity movement that discussed with the Communists how to transition to a democracy. The Communists had lots of newspapers, but the Solidarity movement had nothing, so they started Gazeta Wyborcza to provide information for the first elections. Decided to keep the newspaper going even after the elections. First office was in a kindergarten, so had editorial meetings in a playground sandpit.
Now has 6 million readers, selling 450k copies, per week. Has internet portal, 50 websites, 6m unique users. No longer just a newspaper – magazines, 24 radio stations, outdoor business (billboards).

Poland has changed in last 20 years, so going to tell some stories about the transitions. In 20 years, so many things happened, in media market, went through development of media that took the West 200 years. Same thing happening in Ukraine, but doing it in five years.

Polish media market by Grzegorz Piechota

GDP has grown 68% in 20 years, from 1990 to present. A lot of former Soviet countries had a strong slowdown after initial growth, but Poland kept growing, has about a third the wealth of Spain, so catching up. Ukraine as much more work to do.

In 1981, coal miners went on strike and the tanks came in and shot people. Now, protests involves voting. Press freedom in the 80s – censorship meant that stories about strikes were cut out. In more recent elections, they kept a percentage of the newspapers blank to illustrate the percentage of people who didn’t vote, trying to encourage voting. Published four versions of the paper with four headline slogans to encourage voting, as submitted by readers.

Shops have changed. In early 80s, shops were empty. Now there is a boom in shopping, and with it, massive amounts of billboard ads. Is some concern about how the massive billboards are hiding the bits of Warsaw that tourists might want to see, so published a guide to ‘what’s behind the hoardings’.

Need to look at the whole picture to see what are the chances and problems of digital media in your own country.

Post 1989, circulation is going down, not because of internet or TV, but because of a massive change in the situation. No one trusted newspapers in Communist times, so no one bought them after Communism collapsed. In magazines, massive growth. State used to control magazines, so when that opened up, suddenly there could be more variation in the magazine market. Newspaper market was overdeveloped, magazine market was underdeveloped.

Three points where something momentus happened: 1989, 1993, 2000.

Re-evaluation of media, 89-93. Trybuna Ludu, was official Communist paper, and it collapsed after the change, Gazeta became best-sellig daily, but real demand much lower than the artificial demand forced by adherence to Communism. Only a few state newspapers remained, and are not very popular now – mainly local dailies, and one business paper.

Lots of foreign publishing companies came to Poland to start newspapers, but they didn’t survive because they weren’t serving needs of the Polish. Market leaders were born just after the transition.

Was a crisis of readership after collapse of Communism. Got very high unemployment after transition, because companies closed that were hiring people under Communism but weren’t actually producing anything. Also psychological problems, a move from a non-compete environment, people were cheating the state if they could, and no one would complain about apathetic colleagues. After Communism, people did care, there was competition, so people didn’t buy newspapers so much because they had other things to worry about.

1994, first licenses for TV & Radio. Was three state-owned channels, and first open licences granted in ’94, and that really changed the market. Circulation of newspapers and magazines dropped dramatically.

1998, second waive of licences for TV & Radio, so there was more competition and that also affected the newspaper and magazine market negatively too.

Then in 2003, another change. In 94, a lot of new magazines launched and they stole readers from newspapers, but in 2003, new dailies stole readers from magazines.

Free dailies entered the market in 2004, and so circulation grew for newspapers and magazines. Could not have been launched earlier, because depend on advertising. Free newspapers are for rich countries.

Polish internet revolutions by Grzegorz Piechota

Then there were two internet revolutions. The bubble, 2000 – 2001, very bad because economy slowed down, and the internet slowed down, but it took off several years later in 2005.

98-93: Re-evalution of media
94-97: Invasion of mass media
97-02: Deathmatch
03-08: Newspaper innovations, silent digital revolution & marketing challenge

In 1994, Polish readers and media discovered mass media. Magazines and newspapers were very serious before then, even magazines for women were about how to find a better job. In 1994, invasion of foreign publishers with very down-market publication, nothing serious or difficult, they were telling a different stories: beautiful is better than ugly, funny better than serious, colour better than B&W, scandal is better than politics… a lot of readers stopped reading newspapers, especially women. Magazines grabbed those readers and newspapers didn’t recover for many years. But this type of content is now grabbed by digital media.

Another thing that happened was the first licences for commercial TV. They also discovered mass taste – was all about entertainment. Wasn’t about education or public mission, as state TV had been.

Advertising market developed. Newspapers had 17% of total ad market. When commercial TV arrives in a country, that’s the last moment to grow the market share of the newspapers and develop the ad market.

In 2006, newspapers had 13%, although net worth of total market is larger, so are getting more money, but share is not growing any more and it will not grow. When you look at Spain or Germany, newspapers have much larger share of advertising because they were developed before commercial TV changed the way that people spent time. If you can do something about it in your country, fight with commercial TV and do something so that it will be launched later!

In 1998, the competition strengthened. Second wave of national TV licences. More entertainment – Big Brother, people having sex in the bath, and it grabbed the attention from all the other media.

Growing competition for ads killed the market – was an ad price war between TV and the dailies. TV lowered their prices, and newspapers had to do something similar, so was losing share and losing revenue. TV broadcasts 24 hours, so the cheaper the ads are, the more they can run, which means they spend less on programming. More ads is cheap for TV. For newspapers, more ads means more pages, more paper, etc. So too much advertising is not good for newspapers.

So prices went down, competition stronger, so companies started to merge. Concentration of ownership became an issue. Four groups control 80% of market – Axel Springer (Germany), Mecom (UK), Verlagsgruppe Passau (Germany), Agora (only Polish group). After collapse of Communism, there was no money – no Polish companies had the money to buy the publishing companies. State gave companies to the journalists, but they had no money so they sold them to foreign companies. They then start merging titles. Got a very concentrated market, with a minor influence of Polish owned companies.

Polish media market by Grzegorz Piechota

But this isn’t necessarily bad – no evidence that German-owned newspapers force German-centrive views on Polish papers. Some evidence of German car reviews re-published from German sister titles, but no evidence of ideological views being forced on Polish press.

In 2003, newspapers still in an emergent market, and Polish papers responded with innovation. In Poland, no newspaper delivery, so you have to buy from a shop or stand. This is a valuable thing because 60k points of sale, which means can deliver any product to any place in Poland. So started to publish books, DVDs, games, maps, language courses. It’s a lot of money you can make on that. At one point 15% of revenue came from that.

At news stand you can decide if you want just a newspaper, or newspaper with a move, book, etc. It’s a cultural offer – you guide people to watch certain movies on TV, so can also guide them to buy a movie because you think it’s a good movie.

Other innovations, last five years have seen seven new national daily newspapers launched. When you read in US that newspaper industry is dying, well, it depends on the market, on how innovative is the industry. In Poland, very innovative. Lots of types of paper, from tabloid to quality to free dailies. So can still expand market and make money on it.

Because of competition, some newspapers co-operate with foriegn brands, so can buy translations of Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, The Times, and you can buy the NYT in English as an educational supplement to a Polish paper.

The silent digital revolution – not only internet. Digital TV. 20 years ago there were 3 channels, 10 years ago there were 7 channels, now you can connect to cable or satellite, and there is 150 Polish channels. Changes the way you spend time with TV. Means you cannot devote same amount of time to one channel. Say 10 years ago, 30% of people were watching one soap opera, now it’s not possible to have such a large percentage of the audience because there are so many soap operas. So TV cannot gather the audience to sell the ads; they promise the advertiser that they will show the ad to 2m people, so if they don’t get that on first showing they have to repeat the ad for free. Cannot broadcast more than 12 minutes of ads per hour, and they are full now so the money is going to newspapers.

Internet ad market share is 7%.

News TV is important – it is much more dangerous than internet to newspapers, because it gives more coverage to news than saw on TV before. Not watched by young people, but 40 – 80 yo, so newspaper readers. See connection between rise of newspapers and decline of readership. People wake up, turn on news channel automatically. People wait for every last bit of news, especially breaking news. TV gives a sense of urgency. People get excited.

Broadband is getting popular. 44% of Poles have access to the net, and 24% of total population have access to broadband. It’s very cheap, and it changes a lot, e.g. makes video possible.

When websites were launched in Poland, in 1995-ish, everyone thought the web was about information and the news. Between 2000 and now we discovered that it’s not about information and news, it could be about finding old schoolmates – 11m users from 38m national population a schoolmates website.

Community sites, worldwide and in Poland

This isn’t an area that newspapers have really been interested in, but now it’s a gold mine. The four students that launched the website, it was sold first for $4m, then for $100m.

In Poland, huge growth in community sites. Mobile services are emerging. Can surf with computer, connected via phone, with speed comparable to broadband. Mobile services becoming more sophisticated. Gazeta has a sport mobile portal, including news, movies, fantasy football, etc.

New mobile services educate customers, e.g. GPS service for cars, educates people in how to use technology. GPS navigation systems are getting ads, e.g. some petrol stations are paying to be shown on the map and for the GPS to not show the other petrol stations. So this services are competing with papers for ad revenue. No other real touch screen devices as iPod Touch and iPhone not really widely available.

Google estimate that 1 billion people have access to the net at least once a month. What do they do?

They look for information – 1 billion Google searches per day. Important factor.

They communicate – 80 billion emails and instant messages sent daily.

They buy/sell – EU e-commerce is worth 130 billion euros, not just shops but also online banking.

They join communities – 250m of users are on a social network of some sort.

They are looking for entertainment – 500 million YouTube playbacks per day.

How many hours people spent online, in any category, forecast by Google. Expect that community will grow from 1.5 hours today to 7 hours in 2012. Expect entertainment will grow from 2 hours to 6.5 hours per month.

See that happening in Poland. Entertainment is top, then news, both quite stable, but lifestyle information and communities are growing quickly. If, as a news company, all you do is provide news you will not be successful online. Other audiences beyond news are important because that’s here the growth is and they will quickly outstrip news.

50% of Polish internet users are younger than 25, so that affects the type of information that they will look for. Older readers are not so fast in adopting he internet.

It’s possible that in 20 years the current crop of under 25s will get interested in politics, but at the moment it doesn’t work. So the whole content of the newspaper is not good enough to be successful on he net because it only appeals to a niche audience.

So launched a lot of new websites with content that’s not at all suitable for the newspaper. Most of there content is for people under 25. Focused on soap operas designed for the net, or music listening. Have a joint venture with Bebo, so can blog, have profile, share, etc. Have a site like YouTube for funny movies. Have a site aimed at girls between 10 and 12. Site about fashion for 15 year olds. One for sports for boys at school, and separate one for sports aimed at girls. There are a lot of girls on the net and there haven’t been many websites for them.

If you compare Gazeta’s position on the net with other newspapers online, doesn’t compare at all. Gazeta trounces all the others. Has a specialised online news gathering team unrelated to the newspaper.

All the journalists had to work for the net, so total integration. It wasn’t growing as much as was needed. Noticed there are so many differences between newspaper or internet, we decided to break it apart. Integration didn’t work. Mistake – people think the internet is like newspaper but endless, but in fact internet behaves more like broadcast. 80% of your traffic comes to 20% of content. Have to produce very rich media content, with video, audio, photos. That’s what makes you successful. Because you need to make this content very rich, you have to put a lot of resources to do it in the right way.

Imagine you have a press conference. Years ago, they thought one good journalist could do everything, so can file braking news with a. laptop, then can write something longer, and later can investigate, so the story will develop. Then will also have camera so can do photography, and then maybe video too and can shoot the conference. That was the thinking at the time, but they found that whilst it could be done, the result was that the photos were not that good, the articles for the newspaper was poor because it was the same as the online article, so what’s the reason to publish it the next day? Don’t need breaking news during the event, but need them to think about what is behind it? Need more in depth thinking. Need journalist to stay around to ask questions. Expect him to think about the story, what’s really going on? What’s the angle?

Couldn’t find a way to effectively combine it. Better to send three journalists from website to press conference – one person shooting video, one person photos, one person write. They write more like broadcast, because also have a product to manage the team, have to have another person at HQ to look for background, t make infographics. etc.

So much better to have a team of journalists that can work in that way and will focus on a certain amount of news and will make it really rich. Those stories will ive us better traffic than poor stories written by journalists trying to do multimedia.

Have two newsrooms – one for the newspaper, and one for the portal which co-operates more with the radio journalists who work in a way that’s more useful to the online journalists, because their work is more about breaking news, and they are trained to do something in an hour. We could change the whole culture, but it was not effective. We are integrating the newsrooms for all the radio stations with the portal newsroom, and are creating a video newsroom, producing 300 news videos per week, each no longer than 2 minutes. Are also buying video from other sources. Probably 150 of these are about entertainment.

About 650 people in editorial at the newspaper, and online newsroom is no more than 30 people. Publish a national daily with 21 local sections, so those 650 are not just working on national paper but also the local inserts and for local websites.

Marketing team (readership, not ad sales) is about 20 people and half of those are journalists, because you can’t market the paper without thinking about editorial. Messages are created in a different way an the promotional thing are chosen in a different way than we would expect from a marketing manager from a product company. Tried to hire specialist from Coca Cola and they were trying to sell the paper like Coke, but it’s not Coke.

Polish economy still growing, but cannot achieve same growth in newspapers as can with internet. If we invest money now then will earn more later. Also focusing on outdoor and TV, in readiness for terrestrial digital to come to Poland, when they’ll be able to have their own TV station.

Some things online they do charge for, but not a huge revenue, so most of money comes from advertising. Why should advertisers still need newspapers as intermediaries. Advertisers can communicate directly and for free online. Reach is the key thing – getting in front of more people. Issue is justifying price.

Newspaper 24/7: breaks news and updates, adds background info, video audio content, interaction, invites users to become journalists.

But they were looking for a different idea, a different way of working and a different view of convergence. After they tried integration, and it failed, they tried to think about it differently. Didn’t think about integration, thought about the topic, about solving problems, then talking with internet people about how they could achieve results.

E.g.: Poland €70 billion to spend. Question – how should this money be spent. Asked the question in the newspaper. 21 regions, and used the local newspapers and journalists to write a front page commentary “Seven sins of my city”, and to list the worst things about their cities. Was quite a shaking experience, because most local editors believe they have to write nicely and kindly about their city. Launched an internal blog only editors in chief could see it, and did an online workshop on how to discuss their sins of their cities, and talking about their article. Then published articles after 3/4 weeks.

Organised local debate, but promoted it nationally. Result was amazing – 70k letters, emails and calls on this topic. Asked readers for feedback, and got it! People like to discuss it with the newspapers. Also had a focused blog just on this campaign, so people could discuss online too. Local TV and radio stations organised news shows about it, despite not being related to Gazeta.

Did a research study, 6332 people polled, asked about their needs, e.g. what would you pay more taxes for? Roads? More police? Playgrounds? Church? etc. People were deciding what they thought was most important.

Asked readers to make a snapshot of one day, from 12am to 12pm, and got 1000 photos, and published best photos, and got the stories behind it. Editorial project done together with readers.

Worked with PwC for professional strategy for seven largest cities. PwC did it pro bono.

Discovered that you have to find something around which people can rally, a period from history. The 1944 uprising was the one thing that people were proud of in Warsaw, despite the fact that failed and resulted in the the flattening of the city, but that wasn’t the sort of thing that people could celebrate. Need an intriguing target for the city to catch people’s imagination. Roads and bridges are boring, but saying “Let’s put our city forward for the Euro football tournament” captured people’s imagination. People need an understandable goal.

People need a common place, somewhere that people can go and gather and feel proud. Problem with that – after Communism, people gather in shopping centres. Need a forum for debate. After this campaign, newspapers started to organise local meetings to discuss future of their cities, and people are happy to attend. Anyone who can influence the city was involved – e.g. large employers.

07.05.08
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Going Solo Leeds announced

I shall be reprising my talk on how to draw a healthy line between work and play at Steph Booth‘s Going Solo conference in Leeds on 12 September. Registration is now open, but don’t delay – the first 25 tickets will be going at the early bird rate of £150, and some have already gone. Once they run out, the normal price is £220.

If you’re a freelance, or are thinking of starting out on your own, then Going Solo will be invaluable – it has a great atmosphere and some stonking speakers! So go straight to registration, do not pass go, and pick up an early bird ticket whilst they are still around.

07.03.08
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Why Identi.ca needs to look further afield than open source

There’s been a lot of buzz in the Twittersphere this morning – well, when Twitter behaves, that is – about a new Twitter-like service, Identi.ca. Launched yesterday, Identi.ca takes the Twitter idea and open sources it, and that alone makes it worth keeping an eye on not just because we can soon expect a world full of Identi.ca installations, but also because it means that business will be able to take the code and run it behind the firewall, finally bringing Twitter-like ambient intimacy to enterprise. (If any businesses are brave enough to experiment, that is!)

In my view, though, being open source isn’t going to be enough of a draw for most people. Even if you assume that the service will turn out to be stable, reliable, richly featured, able to easily import contact lists, and attracts the interest of third party clients like Twitterific and Twhirl, that still won’t be enough to draw people away from Twitter, unless Twitter catastrophically fails. Yes, Twitter’s having significant and annoying problems, but it’s important not to underestimate just how apathetic users can be when it comes to migrating from one social system to another.

What Identi.ca needs to do is to become a cross between Ping.fm, which allows you to posts to multiple social networks, and FriendFeed, which aggregates your output from a variety of tools such as Twitter, Flickr, and Del.icio.us… but with bells on. We need a ‘write once, post anywhere’ system, combined with an ‘aggregate and de-dupe’ system, so that we can all become tool agnostic. Such a system wouldn’t care where you wrote your update, it would distribute it to all the tools you use, and it would aggregate back responses from all your friends, regardless of which system they used at the time.

I think there are two key parts to such a service: De-duping will be essential if such a system is going to be at all usable. If you post the same message to Twitter, FriendFeed, Plurk and Jaiku, then I don’t want to see it showing up four times in my aggregated feed. Friend list management and grouping is going to be the other key issues. The tedious thing about Identi.ca – or any other such service – is recreating my Twitter friend list, or at least some part of the Twitter/Identi.ca friend lists Venn diagram. This is possibly where something like OpenSocial might come in very handy.

I doubt that such a tool would be simple, and relying on other people’s APIs creates multiple points of failure, but the nice thing would be that if I am posting to all ‘microblogging’ platforms and aggregating them all back again, it won’t matter if one tool goes down for a bit. If Twitter dies, but my update has gone to FriendFeed too, and then pushed back out to my friend’s account that they happen to access via Jaiku, who cares that one route in that network was out of action for a bit? On the other hand, if Identi.ca were to becomes that WOPA-AADD system, then you are rather creating a single point of failure… unless, of course, people were to run multiple installations as nodes in a Skype-like network, which would be possible with open source code. Just a thought.

Whilst I doubt that I’ll be deserting Twitter any time soon, if Identi.ca moves in the right direction it could really make a big difference to how we maintain our online presence.

07.01.08
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First Fruitful Seminar a success; three more in the pipeline

I’m delighted to say that the first Fruitful Seminar on the adoption of social media in enterprise, Making Social Tools Ubiquitous, last Friday was a bit of a hit! I had a fabulous time, and I got some great feedback on the day, so I’m looking forward to running it again. Quite a few people said that they were interested in coming but couldn’t make it that particular day, so I am going to repeat the same seminar, probably on 10th September. Put the date in your diary and keep an eye out for the registration page to go live!

I am also going to run two other seminars in September. One will be on The Email Problem: Email used to be a fantastically useful communications tool, but in recent years it has become more of a burden, with people struggling to read and respond to all of the email they receive. Some companies have tried “No Email Days”, but these put off the problem, they don’t solve it. If, however, you start to examine email as a psychological problem instead of a technological one, different solutions become apparent. This seminar, The Email Problem And How To Solve It will take an innovative look at email and the different ways that social media can reduce its use.

This leaves me with a slot free, and I’d like to put my seminar ideas to a popular vote. These are the options:

1. Social Media in Internal Communications: How can internal comms and HR departments use social media to help them effectively communicate with their constituency? How can you ensure that people have the information they need, when they need it? And how do you engage with your constituency and collect meaningful feedback?

2. Giving It Away – Open IP in Business: You’ve got some intellectual property, but how do you maximise its value to your business? Can giving it away actually earn you money? What is ‘Creative Commons’ and how do you choose a licence?

3. Using Social Tools in Journalism: Forget old-school arguments about bloggers vs. journalism – reality is much more interesting than that! How can you use social tools to organise your own information and help yourself work more efficiently? How can you engage with your audience using social tools? And how do you run a networked journalism project? (Maybe, just maybe, I might be able to persuade a famous journo-blogger to help me present this one!)

So…

And don’t forget, Lloyd Davis’ seminar, Mastering Social Media, is on 16 July and still has some places left, so sign up soon!

06.20.08
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Why isn’t social software spreading like wildfire through business?

Andrew McAfee asked a deceptively simple question to a panel at Enterprise 2.0 last week, “If Enterprise 2.0 tools and approaches really are so beneficial and powerful, why haven’t they spread like wildfire?” He was surprised that no one fingered management as the culprits.

In their initial responses all of them identified users, not bad managers or inadequate technologies, as the biggest barriers to faster and deeper adoption of Enterprise 2.0. Entrenched practices and mindsets, some degree of technophobia, busyness, and the 9X Problem of email as an incumbent technology combine, they said, to limit the pace of adoption. These factors slow the migration from channels to platforms and necessitate continued patience, evangelism, and training and coaching.

I didn’t expect the panelists to say that the Enterprise 2.0 tooklit is so incomplete as to hinder adoption, but I was a bit surprised that none of them identified management as a real impediment in their first round of comments. So I pressed the point by saying something like “I didn’t hear any of you point the finger at the managers in your organizations. Were you just being polite, or are they really not getting in the way of Enterprise 2.0? The new social software platforms are a bureaucrat’s worst nightmare because they remove his ability to filter information, or control its flow. I’d expect, then, that each of you would have some examples of managers overtly or covertly trying to stop the spread and use of these tools. Are you telling me this hasn’t happened?”

That is in fact what they were telling me, and I didn’t get the impression that they were just being diplomatic. They said that managers were just another category of users that needed to migrate over to new ways of working, and not anything more. In other words, the panelists hadn’t seen managers in their organizations actively trying to impede Enterprise 2.0.

I think the issue is far more complex than a simple “Is it the management?”. The IT department, for example, has become a common source of no, and issues around legal and compliance can scare people off. But management exert a strong and inescapable influence on how well social media is adopted in business.

Firstly, I have indeed come across managers who have refused point blank to use social software, who have actively campaigned against its use and have told their teams that they are not to use it. Whilst managers that vocal are rare, they do exist.

I have also seen managers who have damned the tools with faint praise, ostensibly supporting their use, but undermining them by planting seeds of doubt about things like how safe the data is or how long the tools will be around. These people talk up the tools in meetings, but never actually use them, so they give off mixed messages to their teams who then feel uncertain about what they should and shouldn’t do. If someone feels uncertain about a new tool, the chances are that they will avoid it or will interact with it only half-heartedly. This damages adoption just a surely as open hostility and is much more common.

More insidious – and much more common – are the indifferent managers. They are not vocal, and maybe not even all that negative about social media; they just aren’t interested in it. They may show up for coaching sessions, but they won’t bother using the tools, and they won’t encourage any of their team to use them either. They won’t complain, they’ll just ignore what they don’t want to engage with.

Now, in some ways these people are just “users” who need to be persuaded of value of using social tools, but to describe them that simply is to miss the point – managers have a subtle (and sometimes, not so subtle) power to either encourage or discourage their teams to behave in a certain way. They set the culture in their team, and the adoption of social media is about culture and behaviours rather than technology.

Managers who show disinterest are broadcasting a message to their team that new tools are of no value, and so they will dampen interest amongst people who actually are keen to learn and use new software, even to the point of stopping that person going to a training session or using the tool for their own work. This kills off grassroots adoption in a very quiet, subtle, almost unnoticeable way. You won’t here these people complaining. You won’t hear them talk about social software at all, but they can have a powerful effect on the success of a new tool.

But the main way that managers hobble the adoption of social tools is through simply not thinking it through, not considering what they are doing and why. They don’t provide the right sort of coaching or support, and then they wonder why people aren’t using the tools. They chuck up some blogs or wikis and hope that ‘nature will take its course’ and that people will just see the light and start using them. That, of course, doesn’t happen because not everyone has the time or the inclination to investigate new tools.

Once the early adopters – the people who are naturally curious and experimental – have discovered and started using social software, growth slows because just as in tech product marketing, there is a chasm between early adopters and the mainstream user than needs to be deliberately bridged. Businesses who have not thought about how to bridge this gap will find that adoption slows, stops, and then sometimes starts to contract. (Particularly if your key evangelists leave.)

Why doesn’t social media spread like wildfire in business? Because few people provide the tinder for a spark to ignite. Disinterested managers act like firebreaks, hostile managers act like rain, and managers giving off mixed messages act like firefighters pouring water on otherwise susceptible land. If you want a wildfire, the conditions have to be right for it to burn, which means thinking harder about what you’re doing.

Suw is holding a seminar on the adoption of social tools in business on June 27 2008. Deadline to sign up is June 25.

06.18.08
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Fruitful Seminars: Mastering Social Media with Lloyd Davis

The second Fruitful Seminar is going to be held on July 16th, and will be run by Lloyd Davis who I rate as being one of the best social media experts I’ve ever had the pleasure of working with. The blurb:

Social Media and Online Social Networking are transforming our business and personal lives. Few people can have escaped entirely from some exposure to the power and benefits of this revolution in how we communicate and collaborate. But even fewer can claim mastery over the tools and techniques or fully understand how to apply them to achieve specific business goals. Anyway, how on earth can you find the time? What about your “real work”?

In this masterclass you’ll get to work with Lloyd Davis, one of London’s most popular and experienced social media experts. Lloyd will help you understand what social media’s really all about and how to build rich and productive online relationships using simple tools. You will also gain some practical experience of creating some social media and get help with applying what you’ve learned to your personal business context.

The day is designed for marketing and communications professionals who want to understand better just how social media and online social networking can work for them. With no more than 9 participants, you’ll be assured of individual attention. Most participants will already have some experience of at least one aspect of social media, but will want to become more comfortable and confident with a wider range of tools. You should bring along an example of a business issue that you’d like help with.

If you’re interested in going along to Lloyd’s seminar, then sign up on Eventbrite.

06.17.08
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Q: What does promoting an event have in common with the adoption of social tools in the enterprise?

Steph Booth has written a great post over on Climb To The Stars, 5 Lessons in Promoting Events Using Social Media (Back to Basics), wherein she talks about the difficulties she faced when she was promoting her conference, Going Solo. Being in the process of promoting my seminar, Making Social Tools Ubiquitous, I can entirely sympathise, particularly with this:

Even though part of what I do for a living is explain social media and its uses in marketing to my clients, I found it quite a challenge when I actually had to jump in and do it. (Yes, I’m aware this may sound pretty lame. By concentrating on the big picture and the inspiring success stories, one tends to forget some very basic things. Sending managers back to the floor every now and then is a good thing.)

But the more I think about it, the more I see parallels between promoting an event, and promoting the adoption of social tools in business, so I’m going to take Steph’s five lessons one by one:

1. The absolute best channel to promote anything is one-on-one personal conversation with somebody you already have some sort of relationship with.
I’ve been very low-key in promoting my seminar, focusing on sending personal emails to people I know, and this has brought home a very important point: Even when you want to talk to lots of people at once, you can really only talk to one at a time, and talking to lots of people one by one takes a lot of energy and, yes, time.

Of course, promoting anything is a numbers game – the more people you can reach, the more likely you are to connect with someone who is interested in what you’re doing. And if you’re feeling impatient for success, the urge is to reach as many people as possible, as quickly as possible. But mass communication is a shortcut and shortcuts come at a cost. You can spam your entire workforce with an email telling them about the wonderful new wiki you’ve installed, but unless people understand how using a wiki will help them personally, they will just ignore it. That means you have to work with individuals to ensure they fully understand what it is that you’re proposing and how exactly it’s going to help them do their job.

This one-on-one (or at least, one-on-very-small-group-of-similar-people) approach always takes much longer to bear fruit than you might imagine, or might wish to accept. You’re essentially imparting information to people who are running on their own schedule and following their own agenda, which may not immediately mesh with yours. This doesn’t mean that they aren’t interested in attending your event or using the tool you are promoting, but that you may have to bide your time until your needs and their needs coincide.

2. Blogs and Twitter are essential, but don’t neglect less sexy forms of communication: newsletter, press release, printable material.
In enterprise, the same thing applies. Big companies especially often have printed newsletters or magazines, and talking about your project in these internal publications can help you to spread your message to people who might miss a blog post or ignore an email. Think about all the different channels of communication you have open to you, from newsletters to emails to printing posters to go up on the office walls, and think about how you can best use them. There are probably more opportunities to communicate with your colleagues open to you than you realise.

3. Don’t expect “viral” or “organic” spreading of your promotion to happen, but prepare the field so it can: the forwardable e-mail.
This point I’m going to take in two parts. First: “Don’t expect “viral” or “organic” spreading of your promotion to happen…”

Often people do expect social tools – and events – to promote themselves and are disappointed when they don’t. We’ve all heard about the runaway success of memes that seem to spread across the internet almost overnight, e.g. the way the band Arctic Monkeys stormed the charts by accruing fans from the web, but those events are rare on the internet and even rarer on intranets. In reality, success comes more like it did for 90s pop band Pulp, which lead singer Jarvis Cocker once described as “an overnight success that took 16 years”.

You have to take the long view. If a tool is worth adopting, if a behaviour is worth changing then it’s worth spending the time on it to ensure success. But if things do go nuts, make sure your infrastructure can scale quickly too. There’s nothing like ‘technical difficulties’ to kill someone’s enthusiasm for a new tool.

The second half of this piece of advice is “… but prepare the field so it can: the forwardable e-mail.” Steph’s talking about ensuring that the people you contact have something to send on to colleagues and friends who might be interested in what you’re doing. In the adoption of social tools, this doesn’t just mean creating a forwardable email talking about your project, it also means creating support materials that people can use to train their own colleagues.

Most social tools are really easy to use, and for the experienced digital native they are quick and simple to pick up. But as I have learnt from first-hand experience, lots of people do not find it trivial to learn how to use a new tool on their computer. They are still quite timid when it comes to computer-related matters, and they need help to understand both how the tool works and how it will help them. They need face-to-face coaching, access to simple and easy to understand support material, and they need someone available on demand to help them out when they get stuck.

In a big company it’s impossible to get everyone into a training session, so you have to provide keen early adopters with the advanced understanding, confidence and support materials they need to teach their own colleagues. Then the keen users in that second wave need to be able to train their colleagues, and so on. Without this ripple effect, the software’s dead in the water.

So it’s not just forwardable awareness of the tool you need to provide, but forwardable training too.

4. Go where people are. Be everywhere.
In events promotion, Steph’s talking about using many different social networks to get your message out. In business, this means spread your net beyond the obvious and make sure your project doesn’t get trapped in a single silo. Often, tech projects get started in tech-savvy departments by programmers and researchers, because they are the people who feel most comfortable with new tools. The risk of focusing on these groups in the early stages of your project is that the tool will fail to spread organically to the rest of the company because communications between, say, developers and HR, is inadequate to support the kind of dialogue required for ideas to migrate.

Many big companies are split into silos, with little communication and collaboration between them. Sometimes the silos are based on geography, often it is ‘business function’, but whatever the cause of these silos, you need to work hard to bridge the gaps between them. Work with people from every part of the company, from senior managers to developers to secretaries to HR. Scatter your seeds everywhere, and nurture those seedlings that grow.

5. It’s a full-time job.
This is more of a note to the senior executives that hold the purse strings than anyone. Social media projects don’t just “happen” spontaneously, out of thin air. Facebook didn’t “just happen” and neither did MySpace, Twitter, Seesmic, Wikipedia or any other socio-technological project. Each one took time, effort and nurturing by people whose job it was to work on attracting and retaining new users.

Business is no different. You really can’t just chuck up some software and expect people to use it, you have to think about what you’re doing, put together a sensible strategy and work to implement that strategy. And this means paying someone to do all that, whether it’s a consultant or a member of staff. Far too frequently I come across companies who want to change the way their people work, want to move away from email to more productive tools, want to increase collaboration and improve communication, but they don’t want to actually spend any money on making it happen.

It’s not enough to invest in servers and software licences and technical infrastructure. You have to invest in people too.

If you haven’t already, I strongly recommend popping over to Steph’s blog and reading her original post, because it’s spot on.

Suw is holding a seminar on the adoption of social tools in business on June 27 2008. Deadline to sign up is June 25.

05.29.08
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Fruitful Seminars: Making Social Tools Ubiquitous

Lloyd Davis, Leisa Reichelt and I have been spending a lot of time plotting just lately, and the result of our machinations was the creation, at midnight in a semi-derelict Gothic mansion and with the help of a bolt of lightening, of Fruitful Seminars. The three of us will be putting on a number of day-long seminars on various Web 2.0 subjects over the next few months, starting on 27 June with my session, Making Social Tools Ubiquitous:

Many companies have heard that social tools, such as wikis and blogs, can help them improve communications, increase collaboration and nurture innovation. As the best of breed tools are often open source, it is easy and cheap to experiment with pilot projects. But what do you do if you don’t get the level of engagement you’d like? And how do you progress from a small-scale pilot to widespread adoption?

This seminar, run by social media expert Suw Charman-Anderson, will take a practical look at the adoption of social tools within enterprise. During the day you will be lead through each stage of Suw’s renowned social media adoption strategy and will have the opportunity to discuss your own specific issues with the group. You will have access to one of the UK’s best known social media consultants in an intimate setting – with no more than 9 people attending – that will allow you to get the very most out of the day. By the end of the seminar you will have a clear set of next steps to take apply to your own blogs or wikis.

Perfect for CXO executives, managers, and social media practitioners who want to know how to foster widespread adoption of social tools in the enterprise. Perhaps you have already installed some blogs or wikis for internal communications and collaboration, but aren’t getting the take-up you had hoped for; or have successfully completed a pilot and want to roll-out to the rest of the company.

We’re keeping the sessions very small, with a maximum of nine people attending each one, so that everyone has the opportunity to fully take part in discussions. Sessions will be quite practical and participants will be able to really get into the nitty gritty. I think that’s something that’s really missing from conferences and the bigger workshops – you don’t get the chance to really get down and dirty with what’s relevant to you. I want people to come away from my seminar with a really clear idea of what they are going to do next, and how they are going to do it.

Registration is already open – it’s very easy to sign up and payment can be made by PayPal or cheque/bank transfer. The fee includes lunch, tea and coffee.

Any questions? Just ask!

UPDATE: We’ve also now got a Google Group mailing list for news, announcements and discussion of Fruitful Seminars topics and events. The group is open to everyone, so do join up if you’re curious or interested.

05.23.08
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The New New Journalism

Last night, Kevin and I went to the POLIS/LSE Media Group event, The New New Journalism, a panel discussion with Charlie Beckett, Founding Director of POLIS; Tessa Mayes, campaigning investigative journalist; Bill Thompson, journalist, commentator and technology critic; and Julia Whitney, Head of Designs & User Experience at the BBC. Nico Macdonald chaired.

I’m always wary of anything around the subject of how journalism is changing, particularly if it’s called “The New New Journalism”, but Nico assured us that that was irony. Unfortunately, it did rather set the tone for an evening of hashing over old ground and getting distracted from the real problems that journalists face. Whilst an introduction to each panellist’s thoughts is up on the website, one could probably summarise it like this:

  • Charlie Beckett: Optimistic and positive, although not quite sure how we get from where we are to where we could be.
  • Tessa Mayes: Over-enamoured of investigative journalism and distracted by concepts of The Truth and Objectivity.
  • Bill Thompson: Interestingly pragmatic, believing that the market will always want journalists and will find a way to pay for them whilst also acknowledging that journalism isn’t a necessary part of society.
  • Julia Whitney: We need to pay more attention to user experience and design, it’s all one big ecosystem.

Charlie was by far the most hopeful, saying that new technologies brought with them great opportunities, particularly for creating a partnership between journalists and the public. He said we need more networked journalism. He also pointed at some local blogs, such as Kings Cross Local Environment. But although he painted a fairly rosy picture, he also said that he wasn’t sure how things would pan out, or how we’d get to his vision of a networked future.

I found Bill’s comments interesting. He’s not just an entertaining speaker, but he’s also very thought-provoking, especially when he talked about how, when you get right down to it, society doesn’t need journalism to survive. It’s something that bugs Kevin and me – this sense of entitlement that many journalists have, the attitude that they are owed respect and a living because they are journalists. It’s an attitude that is massively out of proportion to reality.

Indicative of that view was a comment from one of the journalists in the audience that even if people didn’t trust reporters, they still need them. That comment alone speaks volumes about what is wrong with journalism. Arguing that standards set journalists apart from mere citizen journalists and bloggers, but then arguing that a measure of those standards – namely, the trust of our readers and viewers – is immaterial, is itself a measure of the double standards rife within the industry.

It would be an overly simplistic reading of Tessa’s argument to say that she represents the attitude that journalists are owed a living, but she was attempting to elevate journalism to a lofty cultural standing as if it was like opera, classical music or the works of Shakespeare. She argued that the pursuit of The Truth was a noble and necessary goal for professional journalists, as if the hundreds of words written on tight deadline were somehow in the same vein, or even had the same goal, as Plato’s Republic.

These arguments go beyond rationalisations for the profession and actually strive to become justification for state or civic support of journalism to shore up its broken business model. It raises journalism to such a position that state support becomes necessary because it is “too important” to be left to the tastes of the public and the pressures of the market. However, whether or not this was Tessa’s intention, the cultural argument takes journalism down a post-modern rabbit hole that doesn’t address the issues that face journalism and journalists: Dwindling audience, dwindling trust and dwindling revenues.

Julia’s comments I thought were interesting, but in many ways were a little lost in journalistic navel gazing that went on. One point she made that was interesting was a quote from a study of teen attitudes towards sex ed information. (She thought it was a Harvard University study but wasn’t sure about the sourcing.) The teens assessed the validity of the information based on the quality of its presentation.

But overall, I don’t think that the arguments we heard last night have moved us on very far from a discussion that I participated in at the LSE in February 2005, called The Fall and Fall of Jouranalism (notes from Mick Fealty).

The straw men put forth last night, some from the panellists, but many from the audience, included:

  • The one about quality, wherein journalists apparently are the only people capable of producing quality content. Obviously this is a selective definition of ‘journalist’ which doesn’t include any of the tabloid hacks.
  • The one about the truth, wherein everyone gets sucked into a pointless philosophical discussion about whether or not the truth is exists, and if so/not, what should we do about it.
  • The one about technology being subservient to information, which is really code for “geeks and designers should be subservient to journalists”

But there are a lot of monsters under the bed that didn’t get discussed at all:

  • Integration. In an ideal world, integration would mean cross-discipline teams learning about each other’s medium and finding ways in which they can work together to best tell a story and engage their audience. In reality, this is too often about senior management in the legacy business fighting to retain their primacy and pushing digital staff and managers aside. Online journalists often have their digital experience deemed irrelevant because it’s not seen as “journalism”, but production, which legacy managers believe can be taught to anyone.
  • Dysfunctional management. I made this point at the very end of the evening, that much of the problem in news organisations is down to broken management structures and dysfunctional management techniques. Bad decisions are being made by people unwilling to listen to those with the knowledge, but who are several paygrades down the food chain. Good journalists do not always make good managers and, ironically, are not always the best communicators.
  • Owning change. There’s way too much squabbling over who owns the change in news organisations. There’s not enough emphasis on what that change is, and too much focus on turf wars.

Unless we start honestly addressing these issues, journalism isn’t going to go anywhere. We’re not going to solve these problems overnight, because they are self-perpetuating. Bad managers don’t just suddenly learn how to manage well. Bad decisions and policies don’t just suddenly come good. What’s needed is a radical shake up, but who in the industry has both the nous and the political weight to do it? Who’s got the brains and the balls to turn round to senior management and tell them they are doing things wrong, and can get them to listen? There are some very talented and smart people chipping away at the problem, but I don’t know if they can make a significant difference before it’s too late.