Successful communication is … the clarification of complexity via the application of the filter of stupidity.
(generated whilst thinking about the success of the Sun and Daily Mail).
The Filter of Stupidity is a bit like The Wisdom of the Crowds – and its why the power of social media lies in its messiness and apparent stupidity – as per twitterings of a wit / witterings of a twit post
What is a bar? The obvious answer is that it is place that sells drinks. Wrong. Pubs and bars are not about drinking, they are all about – wait for it – process facilitation. A bar is simply an infrastructure or environment created to extract commercial value from the fact that people want to socialise and swap information. The drinks bit is simply the mechanic devised to extract value.
If news organisations are to survive they similarly need to recognise – in the same way a successful bar realises it is not in the business of selling drink – they are not in the business of selling news, but in creating environments within which people will want to share information. The issue of course is that this is like a bar where people bring their own drinks – so what is the mechanic that can extract value from provision of this environment?
If I really thought I knew the answer to that, I probably wouln’t be wasting time writting this blog. However, to take a stab at it, and further stretch the value of the analogy, it has to lie in either an entry charge, or selling nibbles.
A re-tweet by @ajkeen alerted me to this classic example of social media comprehension failure i.e. the inability to understand the future unless it is dressed in the clothes of the past. Everything about this article and the “No News” initiative is muddleheaded but I would focus on two aspects – its idea that there is such a thing as a Citizen Journalist and the quote of Albert R. Hunt that “Most scandals and revelations of corruption are exposed by newspapers.” with the assertion that this is because “internet outlets” (whatever they are) don’t have the resources to do this. Continue reading ‘There are no such things as Citizen Journalists’
(Note 19/10/09 – this post is getting a lot of hits at the moment, but I don’t know why. Its not generating any comments and its ceratainly not my best post – visitors please feel to leave a calling card in the comments and let me know why you are here).
This post is a follow-on to my previous post about stones and erosion. It is more practical, fortunately you might say, but still relies on analogy, if not stories. I like analogy.
So here is the analogy. We know that a diet high in fruit and vegetables is healthy. We now why it is healthy and we know roughly how much consumption of fruit and veg = healthy (five portions per day). However – you cannot take a single carrot and measure how much it adds to our healthiness. Consumption of one carrot cannot be correlated to an additional x milliseconds of life for example and any attempts to do so would be a classic example of misuse of statistical evidence. Likewise, we know that physical fitness correlates to health but we can’t measure the impact of one session at the gym. Continue reading ‘Social media measurement – think carrots’
Social media measurement and ROI is a hot subject. It was one of the issues debated recently at Social Media Influence 09 and listening to that debate and some of the frustrations and difficulties that people were expressing got me thinking. I developed the suspicion that we might be going about this the wrong way. Perhaps our approach to measuring social media is conditioned by the approaches and tools we used in the highly measurable web1.0 environment. Perhaps we are falling for the classic mistake, which is the failure to recognise the fundamental difference between the landscape of social media and the previous on-line, digital or traditional media environment. Perhaps we are trying to micro measure processes rather than understand the system as a whole. Continue reading ‘Social media measurement – are we staring at the stones?’
Yesterday I went to the Social Media Influence 09 conference (#SMI09) – a very good event.
Looking back – my impression of the day was productive confusion.
For example, YouTube seemed confused as to what they are. Benjamin Faes, their MD for EMEA could only describe YouTube as either a website or TV channel. Admittedly they have to do that to chase advertising revenue but there was no evidence in their forward planning that they really understand their role as a platform. They are focusing on better quality video, community (within YouTube) and rights management – i.e. the watcher / owner experience rather than the total user or contributor experience. Continue reading ‘SMI09 – productive confusion’
