05.05.10
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How to start a movement

Brilliant video here from Derek Sivers, who discusses with real insight what would otherwise have just been an amusing video of a guy dancing.

This makes me think a couple of disparate thoughts:

1. Nurture your early community members: They are the ones who will bring in new people to your community.

2. That explains why the early social media leaders are mainly now eclipsed by followers: later followers don’t follow the leaders, they follow the early followers. That says something strange about human nature, but I’m not quite sure what!

Hat tip to Johnnie Moore.

05.04.10
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Involving your community

I just spent five or so minutes reading Randall Munroe’s fascinating blog entry about the colour survey he recently ran. Randall writes and draws XKCD, “A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language,” which is a pretty popular amongst geeks.

XKCD’s popularity gave Randall a rather large pool of people to draw upon for his survey: In the end, “over five million colors were named across 222,500 user sessions.” That’s not bad going and certainly produced some interesting data to chew over. I rather liked this chart of dominant colour names:

Randall’s survey is a great reminder that your community, whether internal or external, are an amazing source of information that you can easily tap into. Services like Poll Daddy or Survey Monkey let you ask questions of your community, through which you could potentially be learning a lot about your business, your community’s needs, topics of interest… possible areas of enquiry are limited only by your imagination.

Well, in truth, you are limited by your imagination, your relationship with your community, and its size. There’s no getting away from the fact that if you have a tiny community, you won’t get a big enough response for the results of your survey to be meaningful. Equally, if your relationship with your community is poor, they won’t feel inclined to take the time to answer your questions. But if your survey answers questions they have themselves, taps into a vein of curiosity or, as in the case of Randall’s colour survey, provides a novel way of procrastinating, then you are much more likely to see success.

It’s worth having a think before you put any survey together on how best to do it. You have to get it right first time, because you can’t run the same survey twice and expect people to engage the second time round. I have learnt the hard way that you can read and read and read your questions over and over, and there will still be errors. So make sure you have time to do some test runs with friends and colleagues so that you can locate and fix errors. I’d also say that it’s important to understand how you’re going to analyse the answers before you formulate the questions. Services like Survey Monkey allow you to automatically create graphs to visualise your data, but if you get your questions wrong, the graphs won’t save you.

There’s so much potential for businesses who enter into dialogue with their customers and staff, and surveys/polls are just one way to realise some of that value. It just surprises me that more businesses aren’t nurturing their communities and collaborating with them to gather useful information that both parties can then benefit from.

05.01.10
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links for 2010-05-01

04.30.10
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links for 2010-04-30

  • Coders meet journalists; journalists meet coders | Journalism.co.uk Editors' Blog
    Judith Towend at journalism.co.uk talks about Ruby in the Pub, a meeting of developers and journalists. "The evening was also a meeting of cultures; as journalists explained their various work brick walls and developers explained the differences between various coding languages and platforms." It's really important for journalists and developers to work together. I've spent a lot of my career with feet in both camps, being a working journalist while testing new technology on the fly. It has been a rare position. There are misunderstandings in both camps, but hopefully, this type of cultural exchange can change that.

    Most useful for me was hearing about the projects developers are implementing in their respective organisations and the tools they are using.

    (tags: journalism coding programming ruby careers london)
  • Tim Ferriss: 7 Great Principles for Dealing with Haters
    Kevin: As a journalist, I found that engaging users around journalism was as much of an art as a science. It took an understanding on how online communities operate that isn't always intuitive or easily explained, especially to those not familiar with online community dynamics. I'm not sure that I agree with all of these points, especially the issue about being effective and having 95% of people hating you. I think that it confuses and inadequately explains what it means to be effective and what it means to have impact. However, there is a lot of good food for thought.
    (tags: communication psychology socialmedia advice blog management community engagement strategy)
  • The Huffington Post Starts To Give Out Badges To Readers
    Kevin: The Huffington Post takes another step in its journey to become a social media site by adding badges. It's really a recognition of the different roles that users play on the site, and it adds yet another bit of social functionality that if common on social networking sites. However, the focus of the HuffPo's social functionality is definitely around the concept of interaction around media as the social objects.
    (tags: socialmedia badges foursquare huffingtonpost engagement)
  • Does new media require new journalism ethics? | Reportr.net
    Kevin: A good brief overview from my former colleague Alf Hermida about whether some of the new foundation-funded journalism institutions in the US need new ethics. I think this is more about new institutions than the traditional definition of new media. However, it's a good look at whether new rules should apply in terms of transparency for these foundation-funded organisations and other new kinds of journalism organisations as they are launched.
    (tags: journalism ethics transparency foundations funding)
04.30.10
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Five counterintuitive rules for building community

“Communities aren’t built through grand visions,” says Julian Dobson his a great post about community building. A grand vision is nice ‘n all, but it takes action to build a community and there’s a skill in knowing which actions are the right ones. Julian runs through a list of five, and I think all of them are applicable to business communities as much as third sector communities. For example:

2. If you want to be a leader, start by serving.

Creating community, by definition, isn’t about ego. There’s no room for celebrities. Leaders prove their worth by mucking in and helping out. You win respect by being ready to serve. If you’re out to make a name for yourself, why should anyone trust you?

If you want to start a brand community or an internal community of interest, think about how you would engage with it and what you could do for others in that community. How would you serve others?

Julian’s post is very thought provoking, even more so when you put it in the context of enterprise community building.

04.29.10
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A game of email

Johnny Holland Stephen Anderson discusses in some considerable detail how it might be possible to add game-like behaviours to email to help people be more effective and achieve Inbox Zero more easily. It’s a very interesting post and I’d love someone to go ahead and build an email client that takes these ideas on board. I think it would be fascinating to see how we might remake our relationship to one of the most pervasive communications medium of the modern world.

But Holland Anderson doesn’t even mention the most important problem: That we send far too much unnecessary email for reasons which are emotional rather than logical. Encouraging people to process their email more effectively is only half the battle. We need to remove as much content as possible from the email system, especially newsletters, notices, FYIs and other forms of occupational spam. We need to empower people not to cover their ass, not to CC their entire department, and not to get sucked into endless and pointless – but very polite – conversations by email.

Until we learn to send less email, learning how to process it is only going to give us a false sense of success and may even encourage us to, well, send more email.

04.28.10
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links for 2010-04-28

  • Fitz & Jen: Top 25 Daily Circulation Newspapers
    Kevin: Apart from The Wall Street Journal which managed to eke out a small 0.5% increase in circulation in the last six months. The decline, for some titles precipitous, in newspaper circulation continues. LA Times, -14.74%; Washington Post -13.06%; Dallas Morning News -21.47%; and the San Diego Union-Tribune -22.68%. Ouch. Some newspaper groups are returning to profitability. The deep cuts have reduced their cost base, but without a stop to these circulation losses, they will need to do something else.
    (tags: US newspaper circulation economics)
  • Roy Greenslade: Official opening for Bureau of Investigative Journalism | Media | guardian.co.uk
    Kevin: Roy gives a good overview of the newly formed Bureau of Investigative Journalism here in the UK. "(Editor Iain) Overton stressed that there would be no political agenda. The bureau's main focus would be on scrutinising government and big business. So it's a high-minded exercise that emulates the pioneering ProPublica initiative in the US."
    (tags: investigative journalism non-profit ProPublic UK)
  • Remix the News: what news can learn from Last.fm and Pandora
    Kevin: While I think there are parallels between how the music and the news industry have responded to the disruptive affect of the internet on their businesses, I think there are important differences in terms of how to support their businesses going forward. One simple difference is that I listen to a song over and over if I like it. Breaking news has a very, very short shelf life. That being said, I do agree whole heartedly with one of the central tenets of this post that the news industry needs to sort its metadata out. This is a fundamental platform issue in terms of digital journalism and should be seen as an important area where the industry can and is cooperating on. The major agencies support NewsML for instance. However, too much of the news and information produced by news organisations is still unstructured and of less use than it should be for the digital age.
    (tags: news journalism metadata semanticweb web3.0)
  • Steve Rosenbaum: Is "Everyone" the Media now?
    Kevin: "(Clay) Shirky say find filters – or else." Skip down to the lower third and look at the issues around curation, frustration about search and algorithms.
    (tags: content algorithms curation web3.0 information)
04.28.10
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Do you want a community or a following?

Fabulous blog post from Richard Millington today. Richard asks a very important question of companies who are trying to do community building: Do you want a community or just a really big following? Most businesses, he says, just want (need?) a big following and aren’t really suited to having a community.

You only need a community when your audience has a desire to talk to each other and when there is a benefit (to the audience!) from talking to each other. Very, very, few organizations fit this criteria. Perhaps as low as 1 in 10.

If you don’t understand what you want or need, you won’t have the right strategy to achieve your aims. Read Richard’s whole post for more insights.

(Hat tip to Stephanie Booth.)

04.27.10
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Comparing non-profit news org models in the US

Alan Mutter is one of those rare creatures who has both editorial and business sense and writes lucidly, analytically and rationally about the business of news. Alan says this about himself:

Alan D. Mutter is perhaps the only CEO in Silicon Valley who knows how to set type one letter at a time, just like his hero, Benjamin Franklin.

He has a great post comparing the different funding and business models of non-profit news organisastions in the US. Several have started in the last few years to address the decline in traditional reporting capacity due to the turmoil in the US newspaper industry. Some are boot-strapped, scrappy operations that operate very leanly. Others, such as ProPublica and the Texas Tribune have very substantial foundation support.

The MinnPost in Minnesota is definitely in the lean and scrappy camp. Alan thinks that the MinnPost might just have a successful model for non-profits looking to operate without major foundational funding. That kind of funding can come with strings attached. How is the MinnPost succeeding:

First, by keeping costs low. Second, by raising money almost continuously through such diversified initiatives as advertising, NPR-style user contributions and even an annual gala featuring organic-vodka martinis.

From my point of view, the MinnPost as opposed to the Texas Tribune and  ProPublica are different editorial propositions, different funding models aside. The Texas Tribune is much more like a Politico for Texas.  Both the Texas Tribune and ProPublica are intended to support the high-end Porsche of public interest journalism: Investigations. Investigations are expensive,  time-intensive projects often with very little commercial return, and ProPublica currently gets “$10m a year from a single benefactor”. Investigations are the height of public service. They garner awards and attention but often are difficult to get a return on investment alone from a strictly business point of view. ProPublica is definitely doing good work and has just won its first Pulitzer.

The MinnPost is much more of a traditional news site, covering a range of issues including politics, sports and arts, just to name a few.

Alan points out a major difference between the big foundation-funded non-profit news operations and the MinnPost: Pay.

Although Kramer and his wife, Laurie (of the MinnPost), have worked tirelessly on the project since they launched it in 2007, neither ever has drawn a dime of pay. Their commitment, which includes personal donations in excess of $120,000, contrasts to the hefty six-figure salaries paid at Pro Publica, where editor Paul Steiger makes $570,000 per year; the Bay Citizen, where CEO Lisa Frazier earns $400,000 annually, and Texas Trib, where editor Evan Smith gets $315,000 a year.

Alan points out the the another foundation supported site, Bay Citizen just leased “stylish offices in downtown San Francisco” even before it publishes a single story.

Pay for journalists

Putting aside for a moment the different models at these non-profits, I have to admit that I’m really of two minds here about the pay at these large foundation funded non-profits.

I’ve never made a lot of money being a journalist. My first full-time reporting job was at a small newspaper in western Kansas, and I made $2000 less than a first year teacher in the town I lived. Fortunately, the cost of living was pretty low. Although I have written for newspapers and done radio and TV reporting and commentary, my main income has been as a digital journalist and editor. The pay has been low compared to my colleagues focused on the traditional media. I’ve managed to make a living wage, but there have been times when it took efforts to make ends meet even though I was employed full time. The idea of making six figures is just a completely foreign concept to me, as I’m sure it is for most journalists. (There is a myth that journalists make a lot of money. That’s only for TV anchors and well paid columnists. Most of the rest of us, especially those in local journalism, are paid poorly.)

When I started out as a journalist in the mid-1990s, I complained on a mailing list that I wouldn’t be able to pay my health care bills if I was injured. (I am a American, although I’ve worked for British journalism organisations for more than a decade.) I was told by senior editors and journalists on the list that ‘you didn’t get into journalism to make money’. No, I didn’t, but I also didn’t take a vow of poverty.

There is only so much foundation funding to go around, and I have applied for foundation funding in the past (largely through the Knight News Challenge). I have to say that it makes me feel more than a bit uncomfortable about some of the pay levels at these non-profits.

Whether in the non-profit or for profit world, I feel like one of the few journalists to care about costs. My view has always been that a every pound or dollar I save on travel costs, tech or accommodation is another pound or dollar we can spend on journalism. I care deeply about journalism and public engagement, and I have always sought ways to do that as inexpensively as possible while having the greatest impact.

I take on board that to get the best investigative journalists you have to pay a premium, and I’m pleased that the editors at these well funded non-profits have the resources to pay themselves well and pay for talented journalists. However, I do wonder if the foundation funding cannot be sustained at these levels whether these heavy cost structures at these non-profits can be supported in any other way.