Category Archives: Media 2.0

07.23.08
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Required reading for public media executives and programme makers

I have followed the trajectory of (US) National Public Radio’s Bryant Park Project because they were experimenting with so many social media tools and ideas, and more than that, they seemed to have grokked the ‘social’ in social media. Their Twitter feed wasn’t just an automated bland, bloodless promo for the programme but rather a way that the staff showed their humanity and personality as well as worked to engage people with the subjects on the programme. Just look at one of their latest Tweets:

Bryant Park Project Twitter

For those of you not familiar with the Bryant Park Project, I’d direct you to Robert Paterson’s post on BPP and their use of Twitter. I use Robert’s phrase ‘wrapping content in a community’ as the title of a presentation that I give on social media and journalism. (Looking through Robert’s recent posts, he and I are eerily on the same wavelength in asking why public media isn’t being successful in innovating. Like many media organisations now, the cultural and political conflict is increasing as organisations shift from considering change strategies to, in some cases, fighting for survival.)

I’ll give credit to NPR’s interim CEO, Dennis Haarsager, for going to the BPP blog to address some issues and share some of the lessons of the project.

We’ve/I’ve learned — or relearned — a lot in this process. For non-commercial media such as NPR, sustaining a new program of this financial magnitude requires attracting users from each of the platforms we can access. Ultimately, we recognized that wasn’t happening with BPP. Radio carriage didn’t materialize to any degree: right now, BPP airs on only five analog radio stations and 19 HD Radio digital channels. Web/podcasting usage was also hampered — here’s the relearning part — since we were offering an “appointment program” in a medium that doesn’t excel in that kind of usage.

I would love to be a fly on the wall and know why NPR stations didn’t pick up the programme, but I probably know why. I worked on World Have Your Say at the BBC, and NPR stations were resistant to that programme because they felt it to be too ‘talk radio’ even though we dealt with substantive international issues. However, the programme dealt with them from the point of view of people and not necessarily pundits and politicians. BPP was trying to attract younger listeners to public radio, but unfortunately, that might have been its undoing. Some NPR stations in the US can make the BBC’s Radio 4 look like Radio 1.

What Dennis Haarsager doesn’t talk about because he probably can’t is the organisational struggle that NPR is going through. John Proffitt who works for a non-profit company that operates a “public TV station, a public radio station and a statewide radio news network” is a little more candid:

For all those saying NPR should have raised money directly for BPP, there’s a political mess you’re not aware of here.

If NPR openly attempted to raise money for any program, with large or small station carriage, the nationwide collection of stations would revolt. And please note the Board of NPR is majority-controlled by stations.

In short, it would never be attempted and would certainly be killed if it were.

There are indeed structural and cultural problems within NPR that make a project like BPP fail and put all forms of new media engagements at risk. But never forget that many of NPR’s most anti-new media anti-innovation qualities are inherited from the codependent relationship with the stations. In a sense, it’s no one’s fault, yet it’s everyone’s fault. And that’s the center of the problem.

But I don’t want to focus on the specific organisational issues that NPR is struggling with. The comments on Haarsager’s post provide some of the clearest explanation of the power of social media. The producers and presenters of BPP tried to foster a community and develop a real sense of relationship with their listeners. I think they succeeded beyond anyone’s expectations. I can’t link to individual comments or I would. Here is a sample:

Sent by Matthew Trisler, Radio-Sweethearts.com | 3:54 PM ET | 07-22-2008

It’s been said already on Twitter today, but the thing about BPP that Haarsager misses is that it never served as a “portal,” but as an organic center for community involvement.

Sent by Carlo | 4:49 PM ET | 07-22-2008

People don’t want an API. They don’t want “tailored content delivery” or their “attention tracked.”

Those are buzz words.

It seems to me, somehow, your outlook on the BPP was more about the neat, shiny technology than anything else.

More focused on the “networks” than the “social.”

And that’s too bad.

Sent by Matthew C. Scallon @mattsteady | 5:11 PM ET | 07-22-2008

As a reverted NPR listener, a listener who came back to NPR because of the BPP, I understand that the average NPR listener treats their show as a member of the family. Believe or not, the BPP community has an even greater attachment than that, not just to the show but to each other. This isn’t simply a show; it’s a community. Staff and listeners exchange with one another, sometimes on news items and sometimes on more personal stuff. There are many examples of personal and intelligent exchanges between staff and listeners, examples that, if you take some time to look at on the blog, you will find have a depth of affection not found in anything else NPR produces on-line. This is not to disparage those other shows but to show how special the BPP is as a community.

The show looks like it was reaching outside of its youthful target market. Sent by John Riley | 5:48 PM ET | 07-22-2008

I am 74 and live alone. Local NPR stations are mostly music. I get on the net and listen to NPR talk. I just found BPP and enjoyed it very much, intelagent but not stiff. It gave me many smiles and was topical. I wish I could have been saved. The idea of internet show funding should be explored. The net lets me listen any time I wish. The way of the future.

Sent by ronbailey | 8:48 PM ET | 07-22-2008

That’s the sorriest dose of pablum I’ve ever had the misfortune of reading. If you say the audience isn’t there for an “appointment program” on the web, then why not focus on formats that allow listeners to time shift the content? Most days I listened to BPP via the podcast around noon Eastern time.

Good riddance, NPR. You guys have screwed the pooch, and you’ve lost me as a listener and a contributer, and more importantly as a supporter via my blogs, podcasts, Facebook, Twitter, and FriendFeed.

That’s just a teaser from a few hundred of the comments, but I think these listeners have said more about what social media means than most explanations I’ve heard. BPP was successful in using social media tools, a blog, a podcast and Twitter to connect with their audience.

BPP was not going to replace the venerable Morning Edition programme, which as one of the commenters said has been on air for more than 30-years and has some 30m listeners. That is the wrong metric for success, and frankly, that seems to be the problem. They tried to create a programme that would attract new audiences, but to succeed, it would have to displace one of its longest-running and most successful programmes in 9 months. I would never sign onto a project so designed to fail. And now I fear that obstructionists will use the programme as an example of the failure of social media and the internet. From the the comments, I think BPP succeeded as an experiment in social media. Too bad from a strategic standpoint and in terms of NPR’s own structure, it had little chance to succeed as a traditional radio programme.

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07.21.08
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Name calling isn’t going to get us anywhere

The discussion on how to save newspapers – or I would say newspaper-style reporting regardless of the platform – is getting bogged down in mutual recriminations and some good old-fashioned name-calling. Journalists are blaming management, saying that ‘they’ didn’t change quickly enough as if journalists bear no responsibility in the slow pace of change in the industry. ‘Curmudgeons’ and ‘dinosaurs‘ are fighting with ‘young journalists‘, digital enthusiasts and digital pioneers.

I agree with John Zhu that “stereotypes, labels, and close-mindedness” don’t produce a constructive debate. We know that we need get past this and get to work building a multi-platform business that will support quality journalism. However, I started hearing John’s argument in various forms about a year ago which run along the lines that digital pioneers can be as close-minded as the ‘curmudgeons’ that they rail against. A journalism professor put it to me that digital pioneers had been part of a start-up culture and now were resisting integration as much as the ‘curmudgeons’ were resisting a digital future.

I think something more complicated is going on, and I feel a false sense of objectivity and balance in John’s post. I think it obscures the political conflict taking place in newspapers as they struggle towards integration. As Steve Yelvington said to me last year, the people with the most digital experience have the least political capital in their organisations. As I’ve argued, real integration can’t be about traditional editors just folding digital divisions into their empires. That’s not to say that digital editors should be atop the org chart either. Multiple-platform journalism requires a different editorial organisation, and that is bound to create political conflict. Some of the conflict spilling out onto journalism blogs reflects these wrenching changes that news organisations are going through. You can see it in the recent ‘axing’ of three digital executives at the San-Diego Union Tribune.

Also, although John spends more time and slightly more emphasis on comments directed towards ‘curmudgeons’, I would say that the abuse that he saw hurled toward Jessica da Silva by veteran journalists isn’t isolated to comments on blogs. The commenter Robert Knilands (aka Wenalway) may seem your run-of-the-mill troll, but he expresses a virulent form of prejudice too frequently directed towards online and young journalists by some – and I stress, only some – print journalists. Robert Knilands says:

It can’t survive, though, as long as young journos are getting opportunities they are unqualified for and posting ignorant blog entries. All that does is destroy the present and the future.

We’re not going to get anywhere by eating our young. But seriously, I’ve heard this myself through the years in various forms implicit and explicit. I recently had a senior figure in British journalism ask me whether I was a production person or a ‘techie’ as if I couldn’t be both technically proficient and a competent journalist. If the ‘dinosaur’ label is used in anger, it has a context and a history. Sometimes it is used in the form of return of fire, not just a snipe coming out of nowhere.

Having said that, I agree with John. Name-calling only delays achieving the change that we need to prevent more newspapers from failing.

My best work has come in collaboration with print, radio and television journalists, and we collaborated well because we approached the work from a position of mutual respect. Let’s bury the hatchet and move on to the future together.

07.20.08
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What has prevented newspapers from being successful in the digital age?

In the daily flood of links that stream by me via RSS or Twitter, I noticed a post by Mark Schaver, the computer-assisted reporting director of the Louisville Kentucky Courier-Journal, in which he challenged the view of newspaper executives as short-sighted and out-of-touch. He pointed to a couple of projects in the US, Videotex and Knight-Ridder’s early investment in Netscape (then Mosaic). Mark said that calling news execs short-sighted and lacking in vision is overly simplistic.

What I am saying is that powerful economic forces, forces that are vastly more complicated than the simplistic drivel about newspaper curmudgeons and their resistance to change, are behind the news industry’s malaise today.

I agree with him. It is overly simplistic.

However, Videotex is a fine example of a disastrous technical project driven by the newspaper industry. The system was too slow, cost too much and didn’t provide anything that couldn’t be found easier in some other form. As often happens in the US, the FCC failed (or refused) to set a standard, hoping that the market would sort it out, and NTSC – the North American television standard – on which some of these projects were run provided too low of resolution to read text on televisions unlike the Ceefax system on the higher resolution PAL video standard in the UK. Maybe it was ahead of its time, and it’s definitely before my time. But I’ve never heard anyone in the industry hold up Videotex as an example of how to do a technical project.

Knight-Ridder was forward looking. They grasped a lot of the innovations early, partially because of their presence in San Jose. They even moved their headquarters from Miami to San Jose to plug into the new media revolution. In 1990, Robert Ingle, executive editor of the San Jose Mercury News wrote a memo that sounds eerily similar to the strategy that most newspapers are following now:

Give information to readers however they wanted it, integrate the print and online operations, and dream up new forms of advertising.

Knight-Ridder were part of the New Century Network, which was supposed to position the newspaper industry for the 21st Century. But there is a but. As BussinessWeek reported of the Network on its closure in 1998:

In a ballroom at the Newspaper Association of America convention in Chicago, a thousand bottles of champagne emblazoned with ”New Century Network: The Collective Intelligence of America’s Newspapers” awaited the hordes expected to come to toast the watershed new-media joint venture. When fewer than 100 people showed up, Chief Executive Lee de Boer made an abbreviated speech before retreating. ”They built a business and nobody came,” says David Morgan, president of the online ad agency Real Media Inc.

The reception was the first public humiliation for New Century Network, but only one in a series of blunders that culminated in the company’s abrupt shutdown on Mar. 10 (1998). Created in 1995 to unite newspapers against Microsoft Corp. and other competitors girding to woo electronically advertisers and readers, New Century Network came to embody everything that could go wrong when old-line newspapers converge with new media.

Knight-Ridder should have been leaders in how to do it right. As Matt Marshall wrote in 2006 as Knight-Ridder was on the eve of ceasing to exist:

The real irony of this situation is that for 15 years KRI was, by far, the most innovative newspaper company in the country, including its early experiments in teletext and having the first online newspaper (the Mercury News on AOL in the mid 90s).

But as Matt says in the title of his post, sometimes innovation is not enough. Newspapers continued to be newspapers, just online, as he and most of us have said over the last decade. It is proving for some newspapers a fatal mistake, although one that many of us saw years ago. And I’d agree with Matt that it’s easier to imagine a new entrant making the changes necessary to survive in this new world rather than an established newspaper.

As my friend and former colleague Alf Hermida points out from Readership Institute data, people do not have the same connection with their local newspaper websites that they do (or possibly did) with their local newspapers.

Obviously, something isn’t quite working when it comes to newspapers, ‘new’ media’ and innovation. As Mark Schaver is correct to point out, this is probably not for lack of trying at some newspapers. I know that a lot of journalists are exhausted and frustrated by reorganisations, restructurings and new strategies. I ask the following question not pretending that I have all of the answers but because I’d really like to hear people’s experience: What has prevented newspapers from being successful in the digital age?

Two years ago, Steve Yelvington wrote a post after hearing someone refer to “NCN nostalgia”, NCN being New Century Network. He said a few things that might speak to my question:

  • “But there was something else at work: technology was evolving faster than anyone’s business vision.”
  • “The notion that a we-tell-you news cartel would be relevant in a conversational universe may already be obsolete.”

The newspaper industry hasn’t adapted to the pace of news online or the pace of technological change. More than that, I think Steve is right that business vision hasn’t kept pace with technology. In the wake of the newspapers ‘are worth fighting for‘ discussion kicked off by Jessica DaSilva, Pulitzer winner John McQuaid said:

Meanwhile, the default attitude of newspaper management is still caution and probity. And if you point a gun to the head of caution and probity and say “innovate or die,” don’t expect wonderful things to happen. Instead, expect buzzwords.

Newspapers have only recently woken up that the real competitive threat isn’t from other newspapers or print media, not even from TV but from new digital businesses that might not have even existed a few years ago. Even though Robert Ingle and others saw the competitive threat 18 years ago, there has not been a sense of urgency until the last 18 to 24 months.

However, unlike John McQuaid, I would argue the over-cautious nature of journalism change is not just about boardroom conservatism. Print newsrooms are some of the most conservative places you’ll find. Journalists are paid sceptics (some might say cynics), and they approach their own business with that mix of scepticism and cynicism.

Some things have changed since Robert Ingle wrote his prescient memo on his Apple ][ in 1990. In the 1990s, tech was expensive, and I heard a lot of journalists argue that the internet was a money sink not a money maker. There was some truth to that, but very few disruptive technologies have a clear business model at the beginning. Did Google have a magical money-spinning idea with search? No, not until AdSense. But now, smart technology buys and clever use of open-source technologies can bring the cost of failure down to almost the petty cash level. Just look under the hood of Google’s massive data centres and you’ll find lots of commodity hardware lashed together with a lot of open-source technologies.

The newspaper industry also still seems to be thinking in industrial terms. Too many of the strategies I see are huge, heavy, expensive strategies instead of light-weight, nimble and low cost digital strategies. By the time the strategies are in place, the state of the art and, more importantly, audiences have already moved on. More importantly, you can attack the business model problem from two fronts. You can find new ways to make money, but you can also find new ways to make high-quality, compelling content with less money and not just with less staff.

Things are changing. A few newspaper companies are making the investments in flexible, scalable technology to prepare them for the future. They are getting serious about developing new income streams. They are freeing their content and taking it to where the audience is instead of forcing the audience to come to destination sites. But for some newspapers, it’s too late.

What would you do and what are you doing to ramp up the pace of change at your company?

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07.17.08
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Journalism That Matters: A Passion for Place video

Bill Densmore of the Media Giraffe Project dropped me a note about this.

What motivates people to launch a local online news community — a “placeblog” and what are their challenges, their successes, the opportunities, vision and passion which accompany this work?

With all of the talk about community, it’s worthwhile to hear from practitioners. It’s on the Internet Archive if you’d like to download it. The video is licenced under Creative Commons: Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States by the “The Media Giraffe Project’s
Journalism That Matters initiative”. More of the work from the Giraffe Project can be found at Journalism that Matters.

07.14.08
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Imagining the future of newspapers, but only every other week

jeffnaablog

The Newspaper Association of America’s Imagining the Future of Newspapers blog is indicative of too many mainstream media blogs, and sadly, I’m with Jeff that it’s hardly surprising. When I first started off in online journalism, one of the hardest habits to break was the idea that I had only one deadline a day. It was dictated by the press run. The internet, in general, and blogs in particular also have only one deadline: Now.

There is a vibrant, global, living conversation about the future of newspapers online with a lot of voices, but this blog not only neglects most of those voices (They do have a link to a Newsbytes piece by Shawn Smith from my former employer Mlive.com.), but unfortunately, if you read this blog, you’d get the feeling that the conversation only happens a couple of times a month.

Unwittingly, they highlight one of the biggest problems with many mainstream media blogs: Frequency. Blogs and internet media in general operate at a speed that outpaces traditional media. Most in traditional media still seem stuck in a quaint yesteryear when life progressed at a much more sedate pace, publishing only occasionally. They sneer at broadcasters, bloggers and wire reporters as slaves to sensationalism and the rolling deadline.

Certainly, speed is a cruel task master, but speed does not automatically mean sensationalism. Pace can be an editorial tool, with rapid fire posts during times of fast, key developments punctuated by longer, more thoughtful posts. Indeed, why not have a blog with two writers, a speed demon keeping on top of rolling developments and another blogging journalist freed to consider and present a broader view and context?

I guess at the pace of Imagining the Future blog that they will finally reach the future of newspapers sometime in April 2040.

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07.05.08
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Talking social media with Peter Shankman

Find more videos like this on PROpenMic

Michael O’Connor Clarke, a long-time friend of Suw who I only recently had the pleasure of meeting, provided a virtual introduction to Peter Shankman. Peter was on a whirlwind trip to London and wanted to meet some people to talk about social media. Peter wants to help PR and journalists have a better working relationship in the age of blogging, vlogging, Twittering and social networks.

We walked down the road from The Guardian to St Paul’s Cathedral, and Peter pulled out his Flip video camera. He asked me about where to get some lunch, the differences between social media in the US and Europe (and lots of differences between European countries) and cats. Well, the conversation veered off onto cats largely because of Suw’s (I have only written one post) side project, Kits and Mortar. I think Suw and I should start keeping a blog list of most irrelevant PR pitches we get by way of Kits and Mortar.

And as I mention in the chat with Peter, ‘social media press releases’ need to be more than a normal press release done with an old school mail merge from a list of bloggers. Social media is personal media, and if you spend just a few seconds finding a post that somehow relates to your product, you’re going to be more successful. Peter also caught up with video blogging David Brain, CEO of Edelman Europe so he got both the journalist’s view and a PR view during his visit to London.

I had a fun time chatting with Peter. But hey man, you said I wascorn fed? Just checked on that definition: “large and often muscular, but lacking in intelligence, refinement or sophistication”. Am I really that muscular?

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07.01.08
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Newsknitter: Knitting together the daily news agenda

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Ebru Kurbak / Mahir M. Yavuz: Newsknitter

It’s another day where I’m looking for ways to visualise huge bits of information for a project that I’m working on, and I stumbled upon the Newsknitter project.

News Knitter is a data visualization project which focuses on knitted garments as an alternative medium to visualize large scale data. ….

News Knitter converts information gathered from the daily political news into clothing. Live news feed from the Internet that is broadcasted within 24 hours or a particular period is analyzed, filtered and converted into a unique visual pattern for a knitted sweater.

It’s the brainchild of Turkish artists Ebru Kurbak and Mahir Yavuz. From the Generator.x website and conference:

The Newsknitter web site does not indicate whether custom garments will eventually be for sale, even though it would seem an obvious extension of the project. Too bad the daily news typically makes for a grim way to commemorate one’s birthday or other significant date.

It reminds me of CNN headline T-shirts, but this is much, much cooler. With such products easier to make, it’s odd that news organisations aren’t thinking more about interesting products based on their information. Oh well, back to looking for data visualisations.

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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!

06.17.08
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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.

06.12.08
by

Information is only scarce if you live in a bubble

Just back from a week with Suw and our families at my home in the US, and I’ve had some space and time to think about things in a more considered way that I usually have time to in London. Via FriendFeed and a room there on Digital Journalism set up by Adam Tinworth, I stumbled upon an interesting post by Kristine Lowe asking whether you would rather marry a blogger or a journalist. The post has kicked off a fascinating discussion raising a number of issues in journalism. Craig McGinty had this pithy observation:

There are still many journalists who live in the land of scarcity, where information is something to be controlled, unaware that 99% of the time it’s like water and many others are drinking from the same trough.

Journalists are under the misguided belief that information is scarce because they often live in informational silos of their own making. They only read “serious” journalism from other publications and seem to have completely missed the information explosion of the last 20 years with multi-channel television and the internet. It’s only down to their narrow professional focus that they miss the fundamental fact that most people are trying to cope with a dizzying choice for information.

Journalists have only belatedly woken up to this reality as their jobs are threatened, and the institutional response seems to have got bogged down in arguments about quality, fact versus opinion and a fundamentalist construction of what is news. For too many journalists, anything outside of a narrow, overly institutional definition of news is banal and unworthy of coverage. And just as Clyde Bentley of the University of Missouri says that most journalists are poor judges of banality, I’m increasingly of the view that they are also poor judges of fact versus opinion. For many journalists, “opinion” is pejorative shorthand for “something not written by a journalist”.

Once one realises that information scarcity isn’t the issue but attention is the new scarce resource, then the role of journalist as gatekeeper is irrelevant. The question then shifts to: What is the value that journalists add to this sea of information? The answer cannot simply be to add more information. The answer also can’t be that the journalist is simply a better or cleverer writer. Look at information choices, and quality and cleverness often don’t cut through the noise. What is the value that a journalist adds? Answer that question and maybe we can move beyond the rut that discussions about journalism are stuck in and develop a business model to support journalism and journalists.

(Want to see value added journalism? See the Des Moines Register excellent package on a tornado that devastated the town of Parkersburg on 25 May, 2008.)