Last year I wrote a report for the Carnegie UK Trust’s Inquiry into the Future of Civil Society in the UK and Ireland. Called Making the Connection: The use of social technologies in civil society, it’s now available for download. Although focused primarily on the use of social media by the charitable sector, there’s still a lot of interesting stuff in it for business, I think, not least future scenarios that try to imagine what the world might be like in 2025 and pose some questions for organisations about their ability to adapt to a rapidly changing environment. Please do take a look and let me know what you think!
The future of context and the future of journalism
Matt Thompson has been doing deep thinking about the future of journalism, since he and Robin Sloan created the EPIC flash animations while at Poynter at the urging of Howard Finberg. Matt has been thinking about context and ways that journalism can transcend shortcomings that were a product of linear platforms. He explored it during a Reynolds Fellowship at the University of Missouri and at the blog Newsless. Yesterday, he explored the topic at a panel with Jay Rosen and Tristan Harris of Apture. I’ve had the pleasure of meeting all three panelists in the past. This discussion did something I don’t see often in terms of future of journalism conversations, it actually moved things forward and has jump-started a very good discussion on specific action to take next.
I see a divide. Covering traditional media’s shift to digital media, I hear strategies for more content, strategies to optimise content and the production of content and ways to monetise content. Content. Content. Content. The content industries think that the recipe for digital success is to digitise and monetise content. It ignores the fact that more content is competing for a finite audience and a reduced advertising spend in the midst of a frail recovery. On the other side of the divide, you have digital companies that know the competition is not over content but attention. Who’s winning in the battle for attention? The average time spent reading news on local newspaper websites is 8-12 minutes a month. The average time spent on Facebook is seven hours a month.
Matt thinks the volume of “episodic” news, hundreds of headlines washing over us each day might be the problem. The media is drowning audiences in a flood of content of its own creating. Matt said:
But mounting evidence indicates that this approach to information is actually totally debilitating. Faced with a flood of headlines on an ever-increasing variety of topics, we shut off. We turn to news that doesn’t require much understanding – crime, traffic, weather – or we turn off the news altogether.
Matt was quoted on Twitter as saying: “People don’t want more info; they want the minimum info they need to understand a topic.”
Being inundated with information isn’t making us more informed. In fact, as Matt points out, it’s leading to a numbness, a negative feedback loop that sees news as a problem that needs solving. What are we as journalists doing to solve the problem? Creating more duplicative content is only reinforcing the problem, causing audiences to shut off. I transit through Kings Cross every day, people handing out freesheets of all descriptions are ignored only slight less than chuggers (charity muggers). Good luck with a paid content strategy based on content that people wish there was less of anyway.
Matt suggests that instead of “episodic news” and topic pages of links to these snippets of news that we need to produce “systemic understanding”.
Journalists spend a ton of time trying to acquire the systemic knowledge we need to report an issue, yet we dribble it out in stingy bits between lots and lots of worthless, episodic updates.
Matt asks some key questions on the how, what we can do digitally that overcomes some of these problems of journalism, structurally and also in terms of re-constituting journalism as a self-sustaining business built on delivering value to audiences. These are the questions that I’m asking right now, and what Suw and I have been thinking about from 5-9 over the last 18 months. We’ve got some pretty clear ideas on the how. (Yes, I’m being a bit cryptic, and unfortunately, I’m going to have to leave it at that dear reader.)
The great thing about having such a digitally native panel is that you can dive deep into their statements and continue the conversation on a site they set up for the purpose. Matt’s opening statement is at Newless. Jay has posted his opening statement on PressThink, and Tristan has posted his statement on his blog. Steve Myers did a great bit of live blogging at Poynter from the panel, and Elise Hu has a great summary of the panel as well.
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What does it mean to be busy?
I don’t think I can put it better than Scott Berkun does in The cult of busy:
The person who gets a job done in one hour will seem less busy than the guy who can only do it in five. How busy a person seems is not necessarily indicative of the quality of their results. Someone who is better at something might very well seem less busy, because they are more effective. Results matter more than the time spent to achieve them.
Great post from Scott, and definitely worth reading the rest of it.
How do you stop yourself getting busy? For me, the biggest challenge has been how to learn to say No to stuff, as there’s always the fear that if you say no once, you may never be asked again. Accurately judging how long something will take so that you don’t take on more work than you can manage is another key trick. But I’m still doing battle with the insidious culture of overwork that insinuates itself into even the most logical brains: Finishing my day’s work early means I’m effective, not lazy!
links for 2010-03-16
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Kevin: Interesting numbers from the iPad pre-orders. For the first day, Apple was processing 25,000 orders an hour. The dropped to 1,000 per hour over the weekend. More details, 70% of the orders were the WiFi model.
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Kevin: Great summary from Liz Gannes at GigaOm about comments from Clay Shirky about 'public sharing'.
* “How much value can we get out of civic sharing?”
That last point was Shirky’s main thrust — how can people use sharing information to effect change? Civic sharing, as Shirky described it, is “taking what the whole group knows tacitly and turning it into a public document.”
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Kevin: Adam Astrow at Mashable writes about changes coming up at Digg. He says: "The site is shifting towards a personalization model, where the homepage will be based on characters like a user’s interests, location, who they follow not only on Digg but services like Twitter (Twitter) and Facebook (Facebook), and other “signals” from around the web like retweets, Facebook shares, and more."
What does a social media consultant do anyway?
Quite a while ago I stumbled on this blog post, I am not a social media guru, by Jon Swanson. I think I know what Jon is trying to say, that it’s a mistake to focus on social tools rather than the goals you want to use social tools to achieve. But I think there’s a thread of misunderstanding rippling through the post that I’d like to unpick. Jon says:
[…] I am not a social media guru.
I’m not talking about the self-identified kind, the person who is selling themselves by proclaiming their expertise while not using technology. No, I’m talking about people who have made a discipline of knowing how to use social media effectively regardless of the message. I love them. I read them. But I’m not one of them.
When it comes to social media, I’m a social media chaplain. When I’m doing what I love to do, social media is a tool, not a subject. It’s the method, not the goal.
Genuine social media experts do not focus on the tools but on what the tools can achieve. When someone comes to me and says, “I want Facebook for my intranet”, my first question is always, “What are you trying to achieve?” Hopefully, that will lead us into an interesting conversation wherein I unpick what they need from what they want. That involves understanding where they are right now, where they want to be and whether social tools can help them get there.
Only after they have answered these questions to my satisfaction will I tell them Facebook-for-their-intranet is not what they actually need and we’ll start discussing more sensible possibilities. But every discussion about tools has to be preceded by a conversation about goals.
(This leads me to an aside: As a social media consultant, my job is not to know how every last little bit of social software works, or each and every last little bit of functionality that’s available. If I tried to amass that sort of knowledge with the vast array of tools – and versions of tools – currently available I’d go mad pretty quickly. Tools change faster than I can keep up, and it’s more important that I know that the best-of-breed blogging platform is WordPress, rather than the name of every last plug-in available on WordPress. That’s what Google is for.)
Knowing how to use social media effectively means understanding how to use the tools to achieve goals, it doesn’t mean focusing only on the tools. There are valuable conversations to be had about the tools, of course. With clients, once we’ve discussed goals we’ll discuss strategy, which includes which tools to use and when. Then we need to think about how we’re going to implement that strategy so that’s when we’ll talk in real depth about tools and how best to use them.
With other social media people, the conversation about tools is more about learning from other people’s experiences, trying to keep abreast of what’s new and good, what works, what problems we’ve faced and how we’ve solved them (if we’ve solved them!). So the conversation between social media people can on occasion get quite tools-y, when it’s not being strategy-y of course!
This division of conversation, this talking differently to clients than to colleagues, is no different in social media than any other profession. When you’re talking to other practitioners, you geek out a little bit.
But I think that there’s an underlying tension to Jon’s post that ripples through the comments and which I have seen in the wider social media world for years. Social media is supposed to be about egalitarianism. We are all equal, we all have an equal voice and our opinions are all equally valid. Under this model of social media, the guru or expert, is stepping outside of the egalitarian frame and taking on the mantle of superiority which is not supposed to exist.
The truth is that some people do know more than others. Specialisation is a fundamental aspect of human community, enabled by agriculture and now essential to a functioning society. The fact that I have spent six years working as a social media consultant and eight years blogging gives me an edge over people who’ve been doing this for six months. We accept this in every other walk of life, yet for some reason it makes people queasy when such separations being to emerge in social media.
We should not do people down because they have learnt more than others about a particular topic. Equally, we should not engage in false modesty by denying our expertise in social media. Experts are useful and being – or becoming – an expert in something is a laudable thing, not a mark of shame.
links for 2010-03-15
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Kevin: Ernst Poulsen writes about a Danish experiment with Google Wave, Bølgen. He says, "Despite the fact that "Bølgen" is just an experiment with a small target group, it may provide inspiration for niche-publications, where readers are often just as knowledgeable and may be just as willing to participate and showcase their own knowledge."
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Kevin: A great post on the MediaShift blog about how to 'live-stream' your newsroom. It's a very good, practical list of suggestions on how to incorporate social media into a newsroom workflow. One of the most important lessons from this post is about trying to capture intelligence and information at every stage of the newgathering workflow. Journalists are constantly reading background stories that inform their work. It's important not only from the point of transparency but also in capturing value for readers to use these methods
links for 2010-03-13
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Kevin: Robert Andrews writes: "Total annual revenue at just five of the UK’s leading regional newspaper groups fell from £2.05 billion to £1.54 billion through 2009, according to our calculations now that the results are in. That’s £509.7 million wiped off our local publishers during the downturn year." They responded by cutting their staff by about a fifth, cutting 5,000 jobs.
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Kevin: This is interesting. I think a lot of people talk about 'quality' or 'relevance' but their systems are geared for 'popularity', which isn't necessarily the same thing. Zemanta (a very useful blogging tool by the way) canvassed their users about 'What is the most important to you when choosing relevant articles?' Relevancy, popularity, recenty, authority. (A pollster might accuse them of a bit of priming because related primes the responsdent to choose relevancy, but that's a quibble.) The results showed: "It seems that our users don’t care about popularity of the sources, care a bit about authority and recency, but really mostly care a lot about relevancy."
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Kevin: 37signals looks at how conversation has changed on the site since they made changes to their sign up procedure to curb anonymity. Things have improved. Looking at what they have done, it doesn't seem that they have verified identity as much as trying to get people to provide a name. Maybe the speedbump was enough to increase the quality of conversation on the site.
U-shaped development in social media
I had a conversation on Twitter a few days ago with Roland Harwood in which I think I inadvertently hit on something:
@rolandharwood: Innovation is u-shaped. great fun at the start and great value at the end but you need to cross the valley of frustration and uncertainty
@Suw: @rolandharwood i like that analogy. reminds me of children’s linguistic dev: do well at first because they mimic, then they….
@Suw: @rolandharwood …crash & burn because they are trying to work out underlying rules, often failing, then rules are learnt & it’s all easy.
The U-shaped development pattern is one that’s well known and it applies not just to linguistics. This is how I’ve seen it play out in the social media realm:
- At first, people observe and mimic successful social media users. Because they limit their behaviour to just those actions that they see others doing, they initially look like they ‘get it’.
- Once the individual (or company) becomes comfortable with their mimicry, they start to branch out on their own. Because the rules of social media are not readily apparent – they can’t be easily intuited by people outside of the social media in-group – these new users push at what they perceive to be the boundaries, but instead of breaking new ground they just get it horribly wrong. They haven’t yet truly understood the underlying structure of social media, i.e. the culture, so they accidentally transgress social media behavioural norms. Businesses tend then to duck out of social media all together, concluding that it’s a fad, a waste of time or unsuitable for their sector, when really it was their implementation that was flawed.
- Those that persist and who learn their lessons, alter their behaviour to be more appropriate, and who pay attention to the culture slowly grasp how social media really works. They come to implicitly understand the underlying, unspoken rule-sets and absorb the cultural norms without necessarily being aware of what they are doing. They then, hopefully, inspire others to mimic their success and the cycle starts again.
I’ve certainly observed this journey that business users in particular seem to go on. Does it sound familiar to you?
How Twitter makes us more productive
Brendan Koerner writes over at Wired about How Twitter and Facebook Make Us More Productive. He says:
Last year, Nucleus Research warned that Facebook shaves 1.5 percent off total office productivity; a Morse survey estimated that on-the-job social networking costs British companies $2.2 billion a year.
But for knowledge workers charged with transforming ideas into products — whether gadgets, code, or even Wired articles — goofing off isn’t the enemy. In fact, regularly stepping back from the project at hand can be essential to success. And social networks are particularly well suited to stoking the creative mind.
Brendan makes the point that surveys like Nucleus Research’s or Morse’s, assume that all Twitter/Facebook activity is wasted, but in reality it is not. He then goes on to discuss the human creative process, highlighting the “need periodic breaks to relieve our conscious minds of the pressure to perform — pressure that can lock us into a single mode of thinking.”
Regular breaks, it turns out, are important for our brains to process information and the “conceptual collisions” that occur when we see nuggets of unrelated information can prompt us to make mental connections that we otherwise would not have. Twitter and Facebook are, of course, great at exposing us to unexpected information.
I’d add two more points to explain why Twitter, used well, isn’t a de facto waste of time:
Firstly, Twitter is amenable to sporadic checking, which means that users can check Twitter in otherwise dead moments, e.g. waiting for a web page to load, a file to save or a phone to be answered. Quite often I check Twitter whilst I’m waiting for my computer to do something else. What else would I do with that time? Stare at my screen and wait. So net win on the time saving there.
Secondly, Twitter saves me time by connecting me to people who have answers to my questions, including some questions I didn’t know I needed to ask. I get a lot of ideas for blog posts from links that my friends post to Twitter, for example. I also often get my answers from Twitter faster than Google can manage and those answers are often higher quality and contain insight Google just can’t provide.
These productivity research companies really do need to get a clue when it comes to Twitter and produce something a bit more nuanced and less scaremongery!
Two weeks to ALD10!
From the Ada Lovelace Day blog…
There are just two weeks to go until Ada Lovelace Day 2010, and we still have a fair few bloggers, Twitterers, podcasters, web comic artists, and videocasters to recruit. We have 1114 pledgers and need 1958 more people to sign up. That’s a challenge with only 14 days to go, but if everyone recruits just two more people, we’ll still make it!
There’s loads of stuff going on around Ada Lovelace Day this year. We have events in London and worldwide (Copenhagen, Dresden and Montreal, with the promise of others to come). The London Potluck Unconference, to be held at the Centre for Creative Collaboration in Kings Cross, 6.00pm onwards, still has some places left, so please nab yours now, whilst you can.
We have T-shirts on their way – we’re just polishing off the design and hope to get them up and ready for you to buy very soon. We also now have an Offers page which currently carries a 10% discount from the lovely people at AdaFruit Industries. Again, we hope to have more there for you soon!
If you’d like to get involved, then our main need at the moment is promotion. We need to get more people signed up, and here’s how you can help:
- Send a Tweet, update your Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn status
- Write a blog post about Ada Lovelace Day
- Email your friends and/or relevant mailing lists
- Post an item on LinkedIn or Facebook Groups
- Encourage other people to do something to promote Ada Lovelace Day!
There’s more info on how to help, including a Tweet you can just cut and paste, on the blog!
We do have more goodies in the pipeline, so stay tuned for more news!