03.03.10
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Event: Show Me The Change

Just stumbled across the Show Me The Change event in Melbourne, Australia, May 4 – 6, via Johnnie Moore. From one of the organisers:

Are you fascinated by human behaviour … and do you spend at least some of your time trying to influence and change others? When you do this, are you asked to ‘measure success’ or report on outcomes?

If you are in any way involved in social media in your business, the answer to those questions will be yes. Social media is all about behaviour change and not simple, measurable behaviours at that. This event looks like it will take a complex topic and find ways to treat it as just that, rather than assuming it can be made simple. I wish I could go, but sadly my travel budget just doesn’t extend that far.

Show Me The Change – Approach
03.02.10
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Report: ‘Digital Natives’: A Myth?

POLIS, the LSE and London College of Communications’ journalism research and policy initiative, recently released a report into the concept of ‘digital native’, examining whether young people really are imbued with an innate, and by implication superior, understanding of technology.

I wrote about this last year and my review of the literature led me to the conclusion that the idea of the ‘digital native’ was no more than a construction, created primarily it seems to provoke a sense of difference between the generations and, from that, a moral panic around how technology is allegedly affecting younger people.

In the introduction to his report, co-authored with Ranjana Das, Charlie Beckett says:

Myths can be useful ways for societies to tell stories about themselves. They can help us preserve our values and cope with change. So the idea that young people are particularly, even naturally adept at using new media technologies is comforting and perhaps even exciting. Even if older adults find digital devices and processes challenging we can reassure ourselves that the next generation will take to them effortlessly and creatively. I regularly hear from middle aged digital enthusiasts as well as the technophobes how their teenage children can do amazing and/or disturbing things online. They blog, game and network on a variety of platforms, often multi-tasking, producing sophisticated and rich patterns of communication and expression. This is wonderful and quite often true. But as the evidence and analysis of this report shows, it is a myth that this kind of youthful dexterity and literacy is somehow inevitable or ubiquitous. And this matters. As Professor Livingstone says, if we don’t understand the reality of young people’s use of the Internet, then we won’t realize how important it is to them and how vital it is to provide the skills and resources for them to make the myth a reality.

The fact is that young people experience the same opportunities and challenges as everyone else who uses digital technologies. The cultural and social barriers to conventional literacies appear to replicate themselves online. A young person who struggles to read a book will quite likely find online navigation difficult, too. There may be magical things that we can do online, but there is no miraculous power that changes intellectual frogs into digital princes. Those people growing up over the last decade or so may well be more familiar with a world of virtual and networked culture and communications. However, individual youths have not been endowed by some freakish evolutionary process with exceptional technological powers.

Furthering our understanding of how young people use, understand and relate to digital technology is essential to business. Too many times I have heard business people talk about how the ‘Facebook Generation will demand social tools’, when the anecdotal evidence I have is that the Facebook Generation doesn’t much see a need to use social tools in the workplace and would see the use of Facebook by their employers as an invasion of their personal space.

The truth is that all generations show a distribution of technological aptitude, and I’d put money on it being a normal distribution at that. There may be a difference in the width of the central hump of the bell curve, due simply to the increase in opportunity to interact with technology, but there no generation is born with an innate ability to grok tech.

This should ring alarm bells in any business whose HR policy has focused on attracting young employees with the assumption that those people will be better at technology. If you’re hoping that the youngsters will save your business from technological decline, you’re very much mistaken. Such a policy also ignores the vast pool of older tech-literate people who have grown up with the technology and who understand it in their bones.

03.01.10
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A web for introverts, privacy gradients and trust

Adam Tinworth draws attention to a blog post on GigaOM about how the social web is great for extroverts but not so good for introverts, whether or not that introversion is a general mindset or specific to the internet. From Kevin Kelleher on GigaOM:

Much less noticeable is another trend: the rise of the web introvert. But while some web introverts might be introverted in the classic sense — that is, uncomfortable in social settings — many of them aren’t shy at all. They are simply averse to having a public presence on the web. And in time, they are going to present a problem for social sites like Facebook and Twitter, whose potential growth will be limited unless they can successfully court them.

Web introversion isn’t a question of technophobia or security concerns. Anyone who has tried to build out their online networks on Facebook knows that there are a lot of people they know in real life that they can’t friend online. Many people who have been involved in technology for years — or who are entirely comfortable shopping at Amazon, paying bills online, buying songs from iTunes — will have nothing to do with social networks. Others see it as a chore necessary for their jobs. Still others have accounts languishing on all the major social networks.

Adam says:

Unless we can find a way to draw these people into the social web – and that probably means more thought around both privacy and data ownership – we’re only ever going to get a subset of a subset of people involved. And that, in turn, will massively limit its potential.

The main issue here is privacy. Many social networks haven’t really give that much thought to how people will emotionally respond to their progression through the site, i.e. along the privacy gradient.

The idea of a privacy gradient comes from architecture and refers to the way that public, common spaces are located by the entrance to a building and as you progress through the building the spaces become more private until you reach the most private ‘inner sanctum’. If you think of a house, then the most public part would be the porch (in the UK, a fully or semi-enclosed space around the front door, in the US, it’s often open or screened). The hallway is common space shared by everyone, and spaces like the kitchen and lounge are semi-private. As you progress deeper into the house you end up at the bedroom (and in some cases, the en-suite) which is the most private part of the house.

Understanding the privacy gradient is important, because when buildings ignore privacy gradients, they feel odd. Think about houses where there’s a bedroom directly off the lounge and how uncomfortable that can make visitors feel. I once had a friend who lived in one of the old tenements near Kings Cross, now torn down. To get to his bedroom and the kitchen you had to walk through his flatmate’s bedroom, a deeply uncomfortable act.

Websites work on the same principles, welcoming people via a publicly visible screen, and progressing into increasingly private spaces as the user’s interactions become more personal. A well developed and carefully considered privacy gradient is essential to social sites – even incredibly simple sites/services like Twitter do it, with the public timeline being like the front porch and the direct message like the bedroom.

Facebook, on the other hand, has gone for a walled garden model, which provides an illusion of security for users: even before they set their own privacy levels, they feel they are in a private space, despite the fact that it is shared by several million others and that information can quite easily leak out of it. Facebook’s recent changes to its privacy settings have made its walled garden a bit more like an old, knot-holed fence, letting people peek in through the holes and see glimpses of what goes on inside. This is problematic because it has exposed information that users used to think was private, blurring further the line between private and public.

The inability to see inside a walled garden can alienate people outside the system, who can’t see what or who is inside and may feel that they are being made unwelcome. This brings to mind certain shops (some Abercrombie and Fitch stores do this), that obscure the windows and ensure that one cannot ‘accidentally’ see inside when the door is opened by creating a shield around the doorway. They also have a privacy gradient internally, with more open public areas at the front and fitting rooms at the back.

As one moves along a privacy gradient, one is also moving along a parallel trust gradient. As you invite me deeper into your house, so you are displaying increasing trust in me. If you only talk to me at your front door and don’t invite me in, you’re displaying (in certain circumstances) a lack of trust, or that I have yet to earn your trust. Letting people move up the trust gradient too quickly can cause all sorts of problems, perhaps resulting in a betrayal of that trust.

The same, again, is true on websites. The more we communicate, the stronger our relationship becomes, the more I trust you, the more of myself I am willing to reveal and share. Different people, of course, feel comfortable in different areas of the trust/privacy gradient, so some people prefer to keep things private and require a lot of communication and relationship building before they are willing to trust someone. Others are happy to plunge in at the deep end, revealing everything about themselves to everyone, newcomer and old friend alike.

Both extremes can have negative repercussions. The shy user may fail to realise full utility of social sites because they cut themselves off from helpful strangers. The extrovert may find themselves swamped with many shallow relationships that they can’t maintain or strengthen and, sometimes, being hurt by people using their trusting nature against them.

What is key, though, is that people understand the repercussions of their behaviour and that their expectations of privacy and trust are met by the site they are using. When websites reveal items that were thought to be private, as Facebook and Twitter have both done, then people’s trust in the site is violated and the social consequences for them as individuals could be dire. Equally, when a website makes people feel as if their interactions are private when they are not, they will fail to understand who can observe them and may make mistakes that they would have avoided if there was no implication of privacy.

What I see in this discussion about web introverts is a reflection of the fact that most social sites have been built for gregarious people, often by gregarious people. The privacy gradients aren’t clear to the outsider, or simply haven’t been thought through in enough detail. Twitter, for example, makes it very easy to accidentally respond to a direct message via SMS with a public message instead of a private direct message: That’s a huge violation of privacy and potentially can be extremely embarrassing.

Until social sites get their act together and start to view the web from the point of view of the web-introvert, considering exactly how their sites embody the privacy gradient, shy people will just stay away. And every time companies like Google make mistakes of the magnitude of Buzz, trust in companies to respect our privacy is whittled away. Personally, I can’t blame people for wanting to keep themselves to themselves. With the social web the way it is, I would never attempt to persuade someone to use it if they felt uncomfortable with it. It’s much more important to respect their privacy.

02.26.10
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Online norms

It seems to be turning into Christian Crumlish Week here on The Social Enterprise, but the man’s on fire right now! If you’re not reading Mediajunkie, you really should.

Christian has been blogging recently about the various essays written by guest contributors to the book he co-authored with Erin Malone, Designing Social Interfaces. The most recent guest essay is by Gary Burnett, who writes about Explicit and implicit norms in online groups:

Social norms may be defined as a set of values particular to a group, the purpose of which is to provide a sense of balance, a mechanism by which people may gauge what is “normal” and acceptable in a specific context or situation. Such norms are not defined by outside factors; rather, they emerge directly from the activities, motives, and goals of the group itself. Social interfaces function as settings within which such a process may take place. The sociologist Robert K, Merton, in a classic formulation of social norms, distinguished between attitudinal and behavioral norms. However, since attitudes are visible in online settings only through visible behavior – only, that is, through the medium of textual production – it seems more appropriate to think of norms in online interactions in terms of a different distinction. Online social norms can be divided into two types: Explicit and implicit norms.

He then goes on to discuss explicit and implicit norms in more detail, explaining how they are formed and how they affect the community. Read the whole essay, it’s well worth it.

02.25.10
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FOR HIRE: I’m leaving the Guardian

FOR HIRE: That was the subject line of an email that I sent to Neil McIntosh, then of the Guardian, in the summer of 2006. I had met Neil at the Web+10 conference at the Poynter Institute in the US in 2005 before I came to London, and the email was a long shot. I wanted to stay in the UK with my then girlfriend, now wife, Suw, and my options were running out at the BBC. I had managed to extend my temporary assignment in London once, but now we were bracing for my return to the US to my old post, Washington correspondent of BBCNews.com. We expected to be separated by an ocean for months. Fortunately, that’s not what happened. A few days later I met with Emily Bell and, after what can be described more as a meeting of the minds than a job interview, I had an offer.

Now, three and a half years later, I’m joining many of my colleagues in accepting another offer from the Guardian, voluntary redundancy. My last day is 31 March. I don’t have a new position confirmed at this point, although Suw and I have a number of exciting possibilities. Like my colleague Bobbie Johnson, I’ve picked up a bit “entrepreneurial zeal” not only from the technology pioneers that I’ve covered, but also from the journalism pioneers that I’ve worked with both at the BBC and the Guardian. Suw and I want to continue to push the boundaries in our fields and we’re both open to new opportunities. If you’ve got a cutting edge journalism or social media project, get in touch.

It’s been a real honour to work at the Guardian and I’m grateful to everyone who helped me. We’ve achieved a lot in the past three and a half years, although it felt like we were always impatient to do more.

Despite the wrenching changes in journalism right now, I’m optimistic. Suw and I are excited about writing the next chapter of our careers. For me, I’m hoping it will be one that helps journalism make the transition to the future. I have almost 15 years of experience in digital, multi-platform journalism, both in strategy, implementation and just doing it, and I’m thrilled by some of the options that Suw and I have before us at the moment. Nothing is settled, though, so I’m still open to offers, as well as being available for short-term writing and freelancing. If you’ve got something exciting in the works and need one of the most experienced hands in digital journalism, get in touch.

02.25.10
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links for 2010-02-25

02.25.10
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Social network overload?

Are we getting swamped by social media? David Armano thinks so. I think that it’s a little bit more complicated than just trying to amp up the signal in the noise and has to do with a whole bunch of issues involved in, well, just being human:

1. We’re all interested in status

Actually, we’re all obsessed with status whether we realise it or not. Social networks make status explicit in some way, or at least they seem to. Number of followers on Twitter is a very bad proxy for our status within the different communities we inhabit, yet we can’t stop our status-obsessed brains from over-interpreting it.

2. We’re all interested in success

Status and success are two sides of the same coin: If you have success you probably also have status, although it very much depends on your definitions of success and whether others share them. We often don’t define success and can’t recognise it when it happens, so we use apparent status as a proxy for it. If you believe that in order to prove to yourself that you are successful you also need to have high status within your community, and your community is online, then you’re looking for high status there too… which means you’re looking at numbers which are a proxy for a proxy. Great stuff!

3. Phatic communication is as important as informational communication

Social media makes a lot of phatic communications, i.e. that stuff you say to show the world you’re not dead yet, explicit whereas we are used to them being almost unnoticeable. Those little grunts, sighs and snarfles you normally make to tell the people around you, “I’m still here” become “Making a cup of tea” on Twitter. Because we’re use to the written word containing useful information we get frustrated when it contains phatic information and fail to realise just how very useful that info actually is.

4. We’re completists

We evolved in a world where it was possible to know everything everyone else knew: Where to hunt, where to gather, how to cook, who’s in charge. Now there is so much information in the world that we can barely learn a tiny fraction of it, yet it feels like somehow we ought to know it all. Our dopamine system rewards us for seeking and there’s no end to what we can find. There is no end to the internet, so the seeking just goes on and on and on.

5. We’re stretching our wetware

Armano is right that we’re using tools that allow us to shatter Dunbar’s Number into tiny bits, and this is causing us some problems because we are trying to treat everyone as ‘friends’, instead of accepting that some people are closer than others. In actual fact, then number of close friends we maintain remains at around ten, or less. It’s the number of acquaintances that’s booming, and we’re not quite sure what the social etiquette is for our interactions with all these people we my well like but barely know.

This is problematic, to be sure. The technology is evolving faster than we are figuring out how it fits into our social natures. Manners and etiquette vary wildly between communities and society has not settled on a common ruleset. But I think a few simple guidelines can help us all:

  1. Don’t try to be everywhere
  2. Don’t try to know everyone
  3. Feel free to ignore content and people
  4. Don’t be offended if someone ignores you or what you write
  5. Accept that your brain is not the size of a planet and you can’t know everything. Yet.

Of course, all bets are off once the Singularity occurs.

02.24.10
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links for 2010-02-24

  • ABC’s Job Cut of 300: Throwing in the Towel on the Old Business Model | Newsonomics
    Kevin: Ken Doctor writes about the expected cuts of about 300 jobs at ABCNews in the US. (Out of a current headcount of 1400.) "I’ve placed ABC among the Digital Dozen companies, those with more than 500 news staffers, those with the potential of creating bigger digital businesses given their global distribution power — if they can restructure their costs in line with still-meager, but growing, digital revenues."
    (tags: television journalism digital restructuring us abc)
  • Games for Change (G4C) — home
    Kevin: A list of games 'with real world impact'.
    (tags: education social gaming simulations politics e-learning socialchange activism)
  • What does Foursquare mean for newspapers? – Editors Weblog
    Kevin: "At first glance, a start-up social media company with a focus on bar reviews and meeting up with friends might seem like an unlikely partner for newspapers as established as The New York Times, or as widely distributed as the freesheet Metro. But at this stage, the deal seems to be less about news and more about the restaurant reviews so key to Foursquare's appeal. "
    (tags: socialmedia foursquare geotagging journalism socialnetworking mobile newspapers)
  • 2010 Olympics Multimedia – NYTimes.com
    Kevin: The New York Times has collected all of their interactive graphics for the 2010 Winter Olympics on one page. It's a great collection showing off some excellent techniques in visual story-telling.
  • Breakdown of the Blogosphere |
    Kevin: Brilliant visual of 'blogosphere'. (I hate the term. It's not a monolith.) It's a very useful bookmark for relevant statistics about blogs. The one stat that surprises me is that the US represents 48% of the global blogging population. That really surprises me. I'd like to see the underlying data. That aside, still very useful.
    (tags: blogs web2.0 reference statistics)
  • Grey Cardigan: "We knew the the internet would eventually take away our ad revenue…"
    Kevin: In the satirical column Grey Cardigan about newspapers in the UK: “The daft thing is, we all knew that it was going to end. We knew that the internet would eventually take away our ad revenue; that classified would go first, followed by property and sits vac. And yet we did nothing about it. We didn’t plan for the future or invest in innovative content and means of delivery. We just carried on snuffling up the profits like pigs around a trough.” How close to reality is this? (Answer: Probably damn close.)
    (tags: newspapers internet economics business)
  • HOW TO: Deal With Negative Feedback in Social Media
    Kevin: This reminds me of the US Air Force social media strategy. It's important to be able to determine what kind of feedback you're getting. "The number one rule when responding to all criticism, even the negative type, is to stay positive. Adding more negativity to the conversation by letting yourself be drawn into a fight with a customer or user will only reflect poorly on your business."
    (tags: socialmedia strategy community)
  • Journalism is Not Publishing
    Kevin: Chris Brogan makes a really important distinction in this post, which he expands on in the comments. "First, let’s be clear: the pursuits of journalism and the pursuits of publishing aren’t the same.

    Journalists seek to create compelling information that is helpful and news-worthy.

    Publishing seeks to push more product, deliver higher circulation value, and create more value for sponsors/advertisers/money-holders."

    (tags: journalism publishing business economics)
  • iPad: Publishers look for the winning formula | Monday Note
    Kevin: Frédéric Filloux of the Monday Note looks at the issues surrounding the iPad for publishers. Publishers agree that Apple is difficult to work with, which Frédéric says Apple needs to reconsider. "nlike the iPhone, the iPad will leave or die by the content it will deliver." It needs to treat publishers better. Lots of good questions here. Will content providers subsidise the iPad as mobile phone operators subsidise the iPhone? What kind of market data will publishers be able to capture from the iPad?
    (tags: ipad businessmodel magazines publishing)
  • Charlie Beckett, POLIS Director » Blog Archive » Brown Bullying Story Is A Nightmare For Good Journalists
    Kevin: Charlie Beckett, the director of the journalism and politics think tank Polis at the London School of Economics, writes about th difficulty that serious journalists will have in covering allegations that Gordon Brown has 'bullied' his staff and has a volcanic temper. The journalists reporting the story have not been able to get their sources to go on the record. Charlies says: "If they don’t report these things then they stand accused of keeping secrets in the cozy club of the lobby. If they use journalistic conventions then they face the bluster of people like Prescott. You decide."
    (tags: journalism UK politics)
  • Is social media killing the election poster? | Journalist Profile | Reuters
    Kevin: Mark Jones of Reuters writes about the very interesting campaigns online in the UK that parody the political posters of the parties. He says: "t’s early days in the run-up to the general election and no-one is expecting this bout of social media satire to entirely kill off the art of political billboard posters. But something has changed and campaign managers have one more thing to think about — the scope for online corruption of their messaging. And might it at least add some fun to the campaign?"
    (tags: politics socialmedia election communications UK)
02.24.10
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The cost of inauthentic communities

Roger Martin has an excellent post on Harvard Business Review that looks back at how business executives used to be embedded in the community they served but are now disconnected from it, as are the businesses they work for. It is a must read.

In the 60s, business were smaller, executives knew their customers and their staff. Shareholders were in it for the long run so tolerated long-term planning. Companies had more loyalty to their home city, so “doing things to benefit the city made sense both corporately and personally.”

While not perfect, this structure enabled the executive to live a reasonably authentic life; the way he wanted to live personally was largely aligned with her corporate responsibilities. He wanted to make the customers — whom he was likely to know personally — happy. He wanted to support his employees’ well-being — employees who he and his family probably knew. He wanted to be a respected figure in the city, a city that was important to his company and his family. And he wanted to make his shareholders happy because he knew that they had placed a long-term bet behind his company. If he worked on all those aspects of his community, he could be successful and happy. And by serving customers and employees well, the corporation was likely to keep on prospering.

But now companies and the executives that work for them have become dissociated from their environs, their staff, their customers and, crucially, from long-term thinking. Martin says:

[T]he idea that shareholder value was a corporation’s principal objective function took hold, largely, I think, through the agency of business schools, whose dramatic rise coincided with the decline of the traditional business community.

This disintegration of community is not a good thing for the exec, his business, the community or frankly, anyone else. It leads to the sort of short-termist thinking that led to the Crash.

Martin paints a fairly bleak picture, but I think there is a cause for hope: Social media. Blogs, Twitter, LinkedIn and a host of other tools provide a way for the people in business, whether executive or not, to get back in touch with their wider community. It also allows customers to collaborate and to become a countervailing force to shareholders, Wall Street and analysts who encourage companies to make bad decisions.

The new community that businesses find themselves in isn’t a geographically constrained community, but a community of interest, or rather, a community of people who have an interest, whether they are customers, staff or curious onlookers.

And there’s nowhere to hide, either. The sunshine of the public’s attention can illuminate any previously hidden nook or cranny, and behaviour that businesses once got away with can now be exposed and challenged. The broader reach of businesses also frequently allows customers to swap away from the worst offenders, using their dollar or pound to vote against a company’s policy or behaviour.

I think we have a long way to go before we make real progress, and the largest of companies frequently have the longest journey, but I think the tide is finally on the turn.

02.23.10
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links for 2010-02-23

  • Footnoted.org: A solo investment news site gets acquired, but its founder says the web’s no sure bet » Nieman Journalism Lab
    Kevin: A fascinating interview with Michelle Leder of Footnoted.org, a financial news site that was recently acquired by Morningstar. Footnoted digs through securities filings to find nuggest of interesting information. She challenges a number of assertions made about the web and journalism. She challenged Jeff Jarvis on the sustainability of the advertising only model for blogs. For entreprenuers, she says that they need a safety net and a backup plan. Excellent advice based on some experience and success. One take away for me is that if you add value to information, you've got a product that you can sell. If you don't, you'll struggle.
    (tags: journalism businessmodels blogging advertising)
  • Q. and A. with Howard Owens of The Batavian | syracuse.com
    Kevin: If you're working on a hyperlocal project, you'll want to read this. Howard Owens, formerly of GateHouse Media launched a hyperlocal site in Batavia New York. It just won the New Frontier Award from the Inland Press Association. Very interesting. Look at the answer to the second question: "First, that online advertising works. Second, the way the typical newspaper.com handles online advertising doesn’t work.

    Ads are content."
    The other thing to do note is that this is a two-person flat out operation. He says he works 16 hours a day, which might be an exaggeration, but it still shows how lean the organisation is.

    (tags: hyperlocal journalism businessmodels advertising)
  • Five Strategies to Lower Your Site's Bounce Rate
    Kevin: If you look at your web stats, your site probably has a lot of 'drive-by' visitors. Visitors who either came from a search engine, an aggregator or your front page expecting one thing and getting something else. They stay a second and leave. This post has some good ideas on how to reduce the 'bounce rate', how to keep people on your site longer by showing them other things they might be interested in. Related content works, but it has to be more.
    (tags: webdesign bouncerate strategies)
  • The iPad Might Destroy the New York Times (NYT)
    Kevin: Tim Beyers says that the infighting at the New York Times Company "will be lucky" if infighting over pricing for its iPad edition doesn't destroy the venerable newspaper. Gawker has reported that the print subscription department wants to charge £20 to $30 a month for the Times iPad app. As Beyers points out, News Corp only charges $12.50 a month for web access to The Wall Street Journal and Barron's.
    (tags: analysis nytimes ipad pricing paidcontent)
  • Web tools for journalists
    Kevin: A good list of web data and visualisation tools from Matt Stiles of The Texas Tribune, a new news site and service focusing on Texas politics.
    (tags: journalism data visualisation tools)