03.15.10
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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.

03.15.10
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links for 2010-03-15

03.13.10
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links for 2010-03-13

  • Scorecard ‘09: UK’s Top Regional Papers Have Lost Half A Billion In Sales | paidContent:UK
    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.
    (tags: UK regionalpress 2009 business)
  • How relevant is popular authority? | Zemanta Ltd.
    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."
    (tags: blogging tools popularity relevance)
  • There is an inverse relationship between level of anonymity and quality of conversation – (37signals)
    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.
    (tags: socialmedia identity anonymity)
03.12.10
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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:

  1. 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’.
  2. 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.
  3. 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?

03.11.10
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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!

03.10.10
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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!

03.10.10
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links for 2010-03-10

  • Google’s Hal Varian to newspapers at FTC confab: “Experiment, experiment, experiment!” » Nieman Journalism Lab
    Kevin: This is a great summary of Google's economist-in-chief, Hal Varian's presentation on newspapers. There is so much good stuff packed in this presentation. I'll just highlight this one quote in terms of new devices for news consumption. Varian says: "The iPad, Kindle and other tablets introduce a “completely different ergonomics for accessing the news…so what I believe they’ll see is a merger of the TV, magazine, radio, and newspaper experience. You’ll have a device which will access all of the different medias. Give you a deeper — potentially deeper involvement with the news…So I would like to see this — this area develop and we’re doing what we can to help that happen"
    (tags: google newspapers journalism economics iPad mediaslate businessmodels)
  • News after Newspapers: iPad strategies for publishers
    Kevin: Some great thoughts from Martin Langeveld on what the iPad means for publishers. He identifies lots of opportunitis, but he also identifies this threat that should make the blood run cold of any existing newspaper publisher. He believes that the iPad and mobile devices in general threatens pre-print inserts – these are ads from big retailers that are packaged separately and then blown into newspapers. Langeveld says that this is the last bastion of monopolistic pricing power for publishers. Knock this out from newsapapers, and the business has very few places to hide.
    (tags: ipad strategy tablet apple newspapers mobile journalism advertising)
  • Is 2010 the Year Digital Will Eclipse Print Ad Spending? | Epicenter | Wired.com
    Kevin: Outsell in the US expects digital ad spending to eclipse print for the first time. The problem for publishers is that the digital budget is spread across a much wider range of players.
    (tags: digital advertising US trends)
  • Poynter Online – Mobile Media
    Kevin: Damon Kiesow writes at Poynter Institute: "The New York Times is planning to offer its Book Review as a separate digital e-reader product, disaggregated from the rest of the Times content on the mobile devices, according to James Dunn, director of marketing for The New York Times." He made the comments at an afternoon session at the Digital Publishing Alliance and E-Reader Symposium at the University of Missouri's Reynolds Journalism Institute.
    (tags: nytimes ipad newspapers ereader kindle mobile)
  • Dumb Like a Fox : CJR
    Kevin: From the Columbia Journalism Review, Terry McDermot looks at Fox News. "The perceived problem is not that Fox’s straight news is relatively bias-free and its opinion programming overwhelmingly conservative. The problem is that the news portion is very small and the opinion portion very large. It would indeed be like a traditional newspaper opinion-news division if the ratios were reversed."
    (tags: FoxNews journalism analysis cabletelevision US CNN MSNBC)
  • Multimedia aggregator Daylife to sell publishers cit-j images from Demotix
    Kevin: Laura Oliver reports: "Multimedia aggregator Daylife will now sell images from pro-am journalism site Demotix."
    (tags: aggregators pro-am journalism)
  • Social Media Statistics February 2010 | UK & Worldwide | Clicky Media | Clicky Media
    Kevin: A blockbuster collection of global social media statistics from February 2010 sourced from Hitwise, Nielsen, Comscore, Forrester, Royal Pingdom. Facebook is by far and away the most popular social networking site. Social networks and forums rank second in terms of UK internet visits, trailing only visits to search engines. That statistic is interesting in and of itself. At 121.6%, visits to search engines in the UK is almost twice that of visits to news and media sites. Another gem in this list of statistics: "Facebook and Twitter also both boasted a triple-digit growth in 2009 with social networking now accounting for 11% of all time spent online."
    (tags: 2010 stats facebook global uk socialmedia searchengines twitter research traffic)
03.10.10
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Asshole driven development

Scott Berkun has a great post entitled Asshole Driven Development, which expounds upon various software project management styles, including Cognitive Dissonance Development, Cover Your Ass Engineering and my favourite, Development By Denial. The eponymous management style is described as:

Asshole Driven development (ADD) – Any team where the biggest jerk makes all the big decisions is asshole driven development. All wisdom, logic or process goes out the window when Mr. Asshole is in the room, doing whatever idiotic, selfish thing he thinks is best. There may rules and processes, but Mr. A breaks them and people follow anyway.

Sound familiar? There are another couple of hundred management anti-patterns listed in the comments, from which I rather like Idiot MBA-Driven Development.

These aren’t just specific to software development, though, but are general management anti-patterns. I recognise both Asshole Driven Management and Idiot MBA-Driven Management, for example, from personal experience. Not to mention a wonderful case of Management by Denial that was so point-blank it was almost convincing, but when someone says, “Oh, no, we don’t have that problem here. We only hire smart people.” you just know there’s going to be trouble.

03.09.10
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links for 2010-03-09

03.09.10
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Do you have space for incubators?

Robert Biswas-Diener, who studies the psychology of happiness, writes on CNN.com about the difference between people who procrastinate and those who incubate:

Procrastinators may have a habit of putting off important work. They may not ever get to projects or leave projects half finished. Importantly, when they do complete projects, the quality might be mediocre as a result of their lack of engagement or inability to work well under pressure.

[…]

In a pilot study with 184 undergraduate university students, we were able to isolate specific items that distinguished incubators from the rest of the pack. Incubators were the only students who had superior-quality work but who also worked at the last moment, under pressure, motivated by a looming deadline.

This set them apart from the classic “good students,” the planners who strategically start working long before assignments are due, and from the procrastinators, who wait until the last minute but then hand in shoddy work or hand it in late.

I can certainly relate to the concept of the incubator. Whilst I like to have a long run up on important projects, they almost always end up left until the last minute.

This is problematic in a business context, where the slow-and-steady approach is the assumed default. Most project planning, for example, assumes that people will hit intermediary deadlines regularly throughout a project. Yet sometimes, particularly in areas where the ground is constantly shifting beneath your feet such as in tech, this can be a really bad thing because work done and decisions made early in the project can be out of date by the end of the project, ensuring the final deliverables are themselves obsolete as soon as completed.

I do think that social media can help with this, letting incubators share their thoughts, their incubation process with their team and manager without having to hit artificial deadlines that ultimately have a negative impact on the final result. I did this myself with a big report that I wrote last year. We agreed that I would not provide a “first draft”, but would instead put each section up on a wiki for the team to look at as it was completed. That meant that, come the “let’s assess your progress” meeting, I didn’t have anything much to show, but my final draft was something I was very proud of.

The major issue with that experience was that I was quite happy with the approach, it being one I am used to taking, but the people I was working with did not always seem to wrap their heads around it. Such an approach changes how the project should be managed, with ongoing communications the norm instead of sporadic, milestone-based catch-ups. If managers struggle with this different style, then they are unlikely to get the best out of incubator-type personalities.