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Kevin: My Guardian colleague Martin Belam has flagged up this excellent and very useful linked dataset cloud. He points out, "None of our major UK print-based news organisations featured on it, and that fact is yet to change".
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Kevin: Well known citizen journalism site, NowPublic, will recurit 1000 paid 'citizen producers' for a new 'select' editorial model. The pay model will give users 20% of ad revenue earned from the content, giving up to "30% with 'quality and quantity'".
ATA: What makes a good case study?
Every now and again I find myself searching for social media case studies, and whenever this happens it’s always a monumental pain in the proverbials. People aren’t great at interpreting a case study from outside of their own context, so I like to find something that they can immediately relate to. But it can be really hard to find something relevant on short notice so I often wind up going back to my old favourites and then having to tell the client “Well, this may not sound exactly like you, but trust me, it’s more relevant than it looks.”
Although there are loads of social case studies on the web, they aren’t particularly well organised. There are various lists kicking about, but many of them are poorly organised and it takes ages to plough through them. So I’m considering a quick and dirty solution in the form of a Google spreadsheet and form so that we can gather more detailed information together. What kind of information would be useful to you? Here are some possible ideas:
- Name of the company
- Whether the project was internal or external
- Date of case study
- Tools used
- Is this good practice or bad practice
- Overview
- Link to full write-up
- Name of person writing is up
- Style of case study (blog post, formal case study etc)
What else would you like to see? I’ll use your comments to create the spreadsheet and will post the form here when it’s ready.
links for 2010-02-18
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Kevin: "Jeff Israely, a Time magazine foreign correspondent in Europe, is in the planning stages of a news startup — a "new global news website." He lists lessons that he's learning. "Plan 'A' will not work". I've spoken to a lot of entrepreneurs, and one thing that is clear is that plans evolve. He suggests holding on to your day job, if for no other reason to stay on top of news (assuming your startup is news focused). Some good points.
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Kevin: Gawker is reporting a conflict between the print circulation folks and the digital folks at The New York Times over the pricing of the upcoming iPad subscription. The print circulation folks want to charge $20-$30 a month, fearing that people will cancel their print subs. The digital side is pushing for something more like $10.
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Kevin: Very interesting. The Federal Communications Commission in the US is going to offer a new broadband plan to the Congress. The plan aims to provide 100Mbps to 100m households by 2020. One thing that the FCC should be commended on is admitting currently the US doesn't have the spectrum to provide high-speed mobile broadband. There are some very good recommendations in the plan.
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Kevin: "Associated Northcliffe Digital (AND) wants its hyperlocal network of websites to reach 50 per cent of online households in its catchment areas by July." To increase their reach, they will look at both online and offline promotion.
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Kevin: The US Department of Homeland Security releases some information about the public sources of information that it is monitoring on the internet. Fascinating. They monitor the Danger Room and Threat Level blogs on Wired. "Other sites monitored by DHS include Wikileaks, Cryptome, Homeland Security Watch, and “Borderfire Report, an anti-immigration blog which includes postings related to internal frictions inside the Tea Party movement."
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Kevin: Adam Tinworth looks at the potentital for the iPad. He calls on the publishing industry to think of the device independent of what came before rather than trying to replicate a magazine experience on a digital device. However, with the track record of the publishing industry, he expects it to look more like the CD-ROMs of the early 1990s.
I expect he is right. We're still thinking in analogies, adapting what we do now to digital platforms rather than looking at the unique opportunities offered by these devices. -
Kevin: This is deeply geeky but very, very interesting. "RadioDNS is a collaborative project to enable the convergence of radio broadcasting and IP-delivered services." This is pulling together over-the-air radio with internet delivered services.
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Kevin: Harsh words from entrepreneur Patricia Handschiegel but words that the media should take notice of. "Media, media. You never get it. Value to yourself is eyeballs, value to your readers is something different. This is why your failure is so spectacular and constant."
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Kevin: Anthony Painter has posted a fascinating presentation about the 2008 Obama campaign and how the Tea Party movement in the US and compares it to the politics in the UK. I agree with him. In the UK, the internet and social media has changed the way that people who do politics do politics, but it's not changed the way that politics is organised to the extent that it has in the US.
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Kevin: Recently, Chris Condron, the head of digital strategy at the Press Association in the UK, said that there isn't one public on Twitter. It's a important thing to remember. Alan Wolk at AdAge looks at one of these publics, these subgroups on Twitter. "The main thing to note here is that, unlike many of the Silicon Valley and Alley Twitterati, who take themselves and their tweets oh-so-seriously, this crew is having fun. The tweets are meant to be funny, and the funniest and most outrageous of them will wind up getting retweeted."
One of the things about Twitter is that allows these different groups to carve out spaces for themselves with hashtags. The replies and direct messages allow for privacy gradients to be easily formed. The simplicity but extensibility of Twitter has been its strength. -
Kevin: Google has released its 'Living Stories' news topic pages technology as open-source. In the release, they say: "Since we launched this proof-of-concept test on Google Labs in December, 75% of people who sent us feedback said they preferred the Living Stories format to the traditional online news article."
What does “content strategy” mean for social media?
I stumbled across a blog post yesterday by Kristina Halvorsen about content strategy. The post looked at the difference between strategy and planning and was very interesting. But there was one small section that worried me:
But for a mid-sized or large organization, if social media content is conceived and created in a silo (or siloes) apart from the organization’s other content channels, it opens the door for inconsistent messaging, irrelevant content for current target audiences, and so on. So it’s important to understand that a blog, like all social media, is (among other things) a channel through which to distribute branded content.
This is an issue that needs untangling because, misinterpreted, it could result in a poor social media strategy.
The silo’d nature of many businesses is a significant problem and I entirely agree that a fragmented social media strategy, or content strategy, will result in a mess. A wise strategist will look at the business’ aims, understand its market, and will create a strategy that will help the business meet its goals within the context of its market.
But blogs and social media are not “a channel through which to distribute branded content”, they are a way for people within the company to form relationships with both other people outside the company and their own colleagues. These relationships create greater trust in the business, as potential customers feel that they have an ‘in’: access to a real person to whom they can take their troubles if they experience any. As trust increases, so does the likelihood that a transaction will occur between those trusted parties.
Branded content is inappropriate for social media because it’s impersonal, it’s not from the heart of the blogger (or Twitterer etc.) and so does not build trust because the recipient can see right through it. Indeed, one of the most common problems I am asked to fix is underperforming Twitter accounts, and they uniformly underperform because they are streams of branded content without a hint of humanity in sight. In fact, this comes up so often I may start offering Twitter Rehabilitation as a specific service to clients.
This doesn’t mean, however, that social media should not have a content strategy, but it needs a very different approach to the sort of strategy one would apply to traditional communications. Rather than focusing specifically on the content, one has to focus on the people who are active in social media and the communities that they are active in. My process would be this:
- Examine your markets and understand what topics your customers are interested in
- Find people in your business who are passionate about those same topics
- Pick people from that group who are happy using social tools
- Agree with the bloggers/Twitterers/etc. which topics they are going to cover
- Let them get on with it
- Review regularly to make sure that the bloggers/Twitterer/etc. feel happy with what they are doing and that everything’s going in the right direction
When we look at successful business bloggers, we don’t see branded content, we see personality, transparency, authenticity, honesty. Those keywords haven’t changed in over a decade and they aren’t going to change now because these are the attributes that people respond most positively to.
Social media comes from the heart and needs very light touch management. More than that, it needs passion, freedom and trust in order to truly work.
The media, the internet and the 2010 British election
Last night, I went to a panel discussion at the Frontline Club here in London looking at the role that the internet and social media might play in the upcoming general election. I wrote a summary of the discussion on the Guardian politics blog. As I said there, the discussion was Twitter heavy, but as Paul Staines aka Guido Fawkes of Order-order.com said, Twitter is sexy right now.
The panel was good. Staines made some excellent points including how the Conservatives were focused on Facebook rather than Twitter for campaigning. Facebook has more reach and was “less inside the politics and media bubble“, Staines said.
Alberto Nardelli of British political Twitter tracker, Tweetminster, said that the election would be decided by candidates and campaigns not things like Twitter. No one on the panel thought the internet or the parties’ social networking strategies would decide the British election. Alberto said that Twitter’s impact would be more indirect. People are sharing news stories using Twitter, which is causing stories to “trickle up” the news agenda.
Chris Condron, head of digital strategy at the Press Association, made an excellent point that so many discussions of social media focus on its impact on journalism and not its impact on people. Facebook and Twitter allow people to organise around issues, which is another form of civic participation. As I said on my blog post at the Guardian, I would have liked for the panel to explore where this organisation around issues might have an impact in marginal constituencies.
Like so many of these discussions, I thought the questions were binary and missed opportunities to explore the nuance of several issues. The moderator, Sky News political correspondent Niall Paterson implied in his questions that if social media didn’t decide the election that it had no relevance. It was an all or nothing argument that I’ve heard before. Change is rarely that absolute. In the US, the role of the internet has been developing in politics for the past decade. Few people remember that John McCain was the first candidate to raise $1m online, not in 2008 but in 2000.
Paterson portrays himself as a social media sceptic, and I can appreciate that. I can appreciate taking a contrarian position for the sake of debate. However, some of his points last night came off as being ill-informed. The panel was good in correcting him, but he often strayed from moderating the discussion to filibustering.
His portrayal of the Obama campaign was simplistic. Alberto said at the Frontline Club that Obama had a campaign of top down and bottom up, grass-roots campaigning, and as British political analyst Anthony Painter pointed out, Obama’s campaign was a highly integrated mix of traditional campaigning, internet campaigning and mobile. (Little coverage focused on Obama’s innovative mobile phone efforts. Most people don’t see the US as a particularly innovative place in terms of mobile, but it was one of the more sophisticated uses of mobile phones in political campaigning I’m aware of.) I love how Anthony puts it, Obama’s operation was “an insurgent campaign that was utterly professional”.
Paterson also implied that Twitter would tie journalists to desks. The only thing tying journalists to desks are outdated working methods. I’ve been using mobile data for more than a decade to stay in the field close to stories. During the 2008 election in the US, my Nokia multimedia phone was my main newsgathering tool. It allowed me to aggregate the best stories via Twitter and use Twitpic to upload pictures from my 4000 mile roadtrip and from the celebrations outside the White House on election night. As I said on Twitter during the discussion:
moderator makes assumption that social media chains journalists to desk. Ever use a mobile phone? It’s mobile!
Sigh. Sometimes I feel like a broken record. Technology should be liberating for journalists, and more journalists should be exploring the opportunities provided by mobile phones and services like Twitpic, Qik, Bambuser and AudioBoo.
You can watch the entire discussion from the Frontline Club here, and here is Anthony Painter’s excellent presentation on the state of internet campaigning in the US and the UK:
The Web And Politics
View more presentations from guestbbf565.
links for 2010-02-17
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Kevin: The New York based Committee to Protect Journalists said that freelancers and local reporters were more at risk of attack from dictators, oppressive governments and militant groups. They said that social media such as Twitter and blogs can help fight censorship, although they highlighted China as an exception.
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Kevin: Greg Sterling looks deeper into the numbers of whether Facebook is driving more traffic to major portals like Yahoo and MSN than Google. Well worth reading including the conclusion: "But before we can assess the meaning of the data above, we need to know a good deal more about consumer usage of Facebook and whether the Compete data are validated by others. It’s still premature to pronounce Facebook the top or most important traffic source on the internet."
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Kevin: John-Henry Barac is a former colleague of mine at the Guardian. He helped design the Guardian iPhone app. Joshua Benton with the Nieman Lab asks John-Henry about the iPad. Among the topics they discuss:
Among the topics we discuss:— Will a more print-like screen push designers to build more print-like interfaces?
— How can surprise and serendipity be brought back into the reading experience?
— Will the iPad make reading longer pieces more interesting — or tolerable? -
Kevin: From Jon Fildes at the BBC: "Google has admitted to BBC News that testing of its controversial social network Buzz was insufficient.
The firm has had to make a series of changes to the service after a ferocious backlash from users concerned about intrusions of privacy."
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Kevin: Panel discussion on Education of the Entrepreneurial Journalist. Jeff Jarvis as moderator. Rafat Ali, Editor/Publisher, ContentNext Media
Phil Balboni, President and CEO, GlobalPost.com
John Harris, Editor in Chief, Politico.com
Geneva Overholser, Director, School of Journalism, USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism
John Thornton, Chairman, The Texas Tribune.org
Social isn’t just online
The British Psychological Society’s Research Digest Blog carries a post about how much better we feel when we get absorbed in a social task than if we do the same task on our own. You’ve probably heard of ‘flow’, the feeling of being so absorbed in something that time stands still. Flow “is highly rewarding and usually provokes feelings of joy afterwards”, but Charles Walker has discovered that “social flow is associated with more joy than solitary flow – ‘that doing it together is better than doing it alone’.”
The ‘social enterprise’ isn’t just about using social media to make connections between people via technology, it’s also about using that technology to bolster face-to-face relationships. Wouldn’t it be great if we could provide people with opportunities to experience social flow on a regular basis as a part of getting their job done!
links for 2010-02-16
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Kevin: Panel discussion on Education of the Entrepreneurial Journalist. Jeff Jarvis as moderator. Rafat Ali, Editor/Publisher, ContentNext Media
Phil Balboni, President and CEO, GlobalPost.com
John Harris, Editor in Chief, Politico.com
Geneva Overholser, Director, School of Journalism, USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism
John Thornton, Chairman, The Texas Tribune.org -
Kevin: Showing my age, I've been thinking and writing about media convergence for coming up on two decades. However, it finally looks like it might happen. "Steve Plunkett explains how milestones such as Project Canvas will bring together broadcast television and online media." He says, "While the hybrid model has been discussed for some time, this year is when it is actually going to meet the public. Analysts are predicting that 20% of televisions sold in Europe in 2010 will be internet enabled. Combine this with the fast-growing range of digital receivers and games consoles that are starting to offer television and video content delivered via broadband and it becomes clear that a new model is emerging."
Data security vs agility and cost
Third party social media tools really are a two-edged sword. On the one hand, they allow you to get up and running almost instantaneously for little or no money, but on the other hand you have no data security or guarantee of uptime.
I’m reminded of this dichotomy by the recent closure of a number of music blogs by Google’s Blogger service. Despite the fact that these blogs were all operating legitimately and within the law, Google removed their content from Blogger without either a warning or an opportunity to back up. This appears to be bad behaviour from Google, but they are not alone. Yahoo! has a track record of closing down Cinderella services without much of a by-your-leave, resulting in confused and unhappy users whose data has been lost forever. And, of course, there was the catastrophic server meltdown at Ma.gnolia, a Delicious.com rival, which resulted in their entire bookmark repository being lost.
Whether it’s a company targeting a few users, closing down underachieving services, or suffering massive data loss, there is just no guarantee that the information you put online is still going to be there in the morning.
So does this mean that corporate information should never be entrusted to third party sites? Not at all. Firstly, it’s not always possible to run your own internal version of a third party tool, and often it’s not even desirable. You could never replicate the networked nature of a third party social network, for example.
Sometimes you can install software, such as WordPress, on your own servers, but if your IT department is maxed out or uncooperative, you may be forced on to WordPress.com instead. There could be a significant cost to the business if you have to wait months for your own installation to be set up and for your project to get started, in which case the hosted option becomes the most viable option.
The answer? Your social media tools should, where possible, be regularly backed up just as with your own servers. Recovery of your social media presence should be at the top of your disaster recovery plan, if only because if something serious happens to your company or any of your other data, your blog could be a key communications channel. (This is also a good reason not to host your own blog on the same servers as your main website, by the way! If everything else goes down, you need to have some way to communicate with the outside world.)
Perceived barriers to wiki adoption
Alan Porter writes a great blog post – one I wish I’d written! – over on Ars Technica examining some of the perceived barriers to wiki adoption that he has come across. He says:
As I continue to research and write my upcoming book on wikis, I keep hearing one word over and over again. That word is “BUT” (complete with all-caps), as in, “I would like to use a wiki, BUT…” or “We tried using a wiki, BUT…”
What follows is usually an excuse for why the speaker feels that a wiki isn’t a worthwhile tool for collaboration in his or her environment. I use the word “excuse” deliberately, because rarely does anyone articulate an actual business reason, such as a lack of need. When I ask deeper questions, I invariably find that the objection isn’t to the wiki technology itself, but instead to the concept of collaborative authoring and a perceived loss of control over the content.
Porter’s post is an excellent view into the cultural and technical barriers people erect in order to isolate themselves from change. Cultural excuses include:
- We tried one once and no one used it
- The cost/benefit ratio is too high
- I’m too busy doing actual work to try anything new
- It’s overwhelming, and I don’t know where to start
- If my management doesn’t care, why should I?
- It won’t be accurate
- I prefer meetings
Technical excuses include:
- I need to learn a mark-up language
- Search doesn’t work
- It’s a black hole
- It isn’t like (name your favorite application here)
- It’s a security nightmare
Porter debunks each myth with great care, and then poses a set of questions that everyone should ask themselves before they embark on a wiki project.
The whole post reminds me of the Why Don’t You/Yes, But… Game from Transactional Analysis where one person offers the other help, but that help is rejected every time with an excuse. I have certainly observed managers (even quite senior ones) playing Why Don’t You/Yes, But… around social technology, particularly wikis and blogs. Let me write you a sample script:
Manager: We need to improve collaboration and capture knowledge.
Consultant: Why don’t you use a wiki?
M: Yes, but it’ll take us 18 months to get it through IT.
C: Why don’t you use a hosted wiki?
M: Yes, but then our data won’t be secure.
C: Why don’t you create a regular back-up schedule?
M: Yes, but that’s too difficult.
C: Why don’t you go with a vendor that backs up for you?
M: Yes, but that’s too expensive.
C: Why don’t you install open source software on an under-the-desk server, Trojan Mouse style?
M: Yes, but if IT ever find out, they’ll kill me.
As Wikipedia says, “”Why Don’t You, Yes But” can proceed indefinitely, with any number of players in the [Manager] role, until [the Consultant’s] imagination is exhausted, and she can think of no other solutions. At this point, [the Manager] “wins” by having stumped [the Consultant].”
Every time I have found myself embroiled in this game, the project has stalled, often before anything has happened. It’s so easy to think of reasons why something won’t work and much harder to think of ways to make sure it does. And when I say Manager in the above example, I don’t just mean middle managers; I have played this game with CxOs, people you would think could just say, “Make it so”, people who are supposed to be the ones setting their company’s technology agenda.
We have to recognise that many companies behave like dysfunctional mega-personalities, with each member of the collective reinforcing each other’s bad behaviour. We can’t always use logic and evidence to deal with people playing these games, but instead must draw from other sources of inspiration such as psychology in order to understand how to move things forward. And that’s easier said than done!