Articles

This is where some of my longer opinion pieces on social media live.  That said, they don’t really live here because the places people find them tend to be ‘out there’ in social media space within the conversations that are relevant to the subjects they address.

Gutenberg and the social media revolution: and investigation of the world where it costs nothing to distribute information

• This is a bit like James Joyce’s Ulysses – something that a lot of people may have started to read (if my blog stats are to be believed) but which I suspect much less actually finish.  It is 8,000 words long and represents my best shot yet at capturing the whole social media revolution thing.  It is presented in a rather academic style, because this was a piece commissioned for the journal of Capco – a firm of management consultants specialising in financial services.  Those who have persisted and reached the end tell me it was worth it. (I keep meaning to do a shorter more accesible version).

The Rise of the Story or Why Social media may Kill P&G

• A look at the whole issue of storytelling and how social media is making the story critically important – both as a communications and management tool, but also as a framework for how business needs to be structured.

What gastronomy tells us about the future of newspapers

• A look at the future of newspapers, but framed within some favourite themes of mine, namely the fact that most journalists haven’t got a clue about what’s going on and are unable to see the evidence of what is happening because it doesn’t fit within the rules of the game as they would like them to be.  It also covers the issue of confusion between content and distribution and the fact that the output of the traditional media is not defined by its content (as journalists like to think) but by the means by which that content is distributed.

Alan Rusbridger, Dan Gillmor, the future of journalism and the Great Scism between the Ism and the Ist

• Essentially a critique of a speech by Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger on the future of journalism.  I maintain that the future of journalism and the future of journalists (and the institutions that employ them) is not the same thing.  Journalism is becoming a process that is not tied to, or shaped by, the institutions of the traditional media.  The only future for these institutions is to focus on the content ideally suited to their particular means of distribution – which in most cases will not be news.

The sanctity of publication

• This is a further pop at traditional journalists, or what I call the information elite.  It looks at the way in which we have become accustomed to assuming that the simple act of publication confers status (sanctity) on information.  Social media is changing all this and consequently really upsetting those who have been accustomed to having their opinions thus sanctified (journalists).

There are no such things as citizen journalists

• A final poke at journalists and sundry social media nay-sayers and their attempts to try and dismiss social media by applying a false set of criteria to the assesment of its worth.

Free content is not the issue – its free distribution

• My contribution to the debate on charging for content, which argues that this is just a distraction from the main issue, which isn’t that people are not prepared to pay for content, they are not prepared to pay for its distribution (when distribution is free).

Andrew Keen’s head and the shift from institutions to processes

• An outline of what I think is one of the major shifts inherent in the social media revolution – the fact that trust is moving from institutions to processes (in fact collective and collaborative processes are replacing the function of a lot of institutions).

The twitterings of a wit or the witterings of a twit – its all social media to me

• Expands a theme that is relevant to the institution versus process argument – namely the fact that information that many deride as nonsense is actually essential to processes that allow social media to be more balanced and informed than the output of institutionalised media.  A fact many social media experts themslves don’t really appreciate.

Of course Twitter is “pointless babble”

• Similar to the twitterings of a wit article – this addresses itself more forcefully to the misplaced assumption that the worth of social media content should be determined by how closely it accords with how we judge the worth of content in traditional mass media – ignoring in the process exactly how and why social media is completely different.

A request for Obi Onyeaso

• A response to a request to explain more about the institution / process argument and also a theme that I am increasingly seeing as perhaps more significant – that fact that influence is shifting from places to spaces.  Recognising this shift from place to space is cricial to understanding how to generate influence.  Very few people, even those who call themselves social media experts, have really grasped this yet and consequently most social media campaigns (and certainly most social media monitoring and measurement) are overly ‘place-centric’.

Google versus Facebook is a battle for today’s internet, not the internet of the future

• This picks up another of my gripes – namely the fact that even the established social media properties still don’t have the wit or wisdom to work out exactly what it is they do and construct a business model appropriate to that, defaulting instead to selling themsleves as traditional media ‘real estate’ platforms, rather than pieces of media infrastructure.

Using analogies to explain social media: its a bit like…

• This is just a bit of fun really – some of the analogies I drop into presentations to help illustrate how social media works and why it is different.

Facebook versus Google: a battle for social consent

This is becoming a favourite theme, especially as the big question of money comes to the fore as some of the Big Things head towards IPOs.  My take on this is that the money men are working from the wrong models, and that these Big Things may not be anywhere nearly as valuable as they first appear – because they break one of the fundamental economic principles of marginal revenue and marginal costs first established by David Ricardo.  It is the drive to live up to unrealistic valuations that will ultimately expose the hidden fault lines in the business models of the likes of LinkedIn and Facebook – namely they sell themselves as media platforms but are used as information infrastructures.  Their focus is increasingly being drawn away from understanding the needs of their users towards satisfying the needs of marketers.  They are becoming anti-social and this is likely to catch-up with them, once the normal rules of markets and economics re-assert themselves.  (See also LinkedIn: cashed-up and crash-ready)

Further thoughts on space, place and its implications for monitoring and measurement

• I have found myself drawn into a debate recently about monitoring and measurement.  It was this which prompted my original thoughts on space versus place, but also bigger picture thoughts on how we should go about the business of measuring social media (Social media measurement – are we staring at the stones) as well the competition between real-time monitoring and retrospective data crunching (Is much of social media monitoring snake oil, or have I missed something? and What social media monitoring and the English Channel have in common)

• As an aside to this space v place argument, I published a piece on Twitter making and destroying history which argued that our failure to realise that Twitter and specifically Twitter tags were spaces rather than places has meant that we are not preserving our digital record effectively- the historical record being the basis of history.  This was prompted by a realisation that Twitter only keeps Twitter tags open for a two week period even if the individual tweets are accessible for longer.  But it is the tag which gives the tweets their meaning and context and therefore the thing we need to preserve access to.  I am surprised that no-one else seems to think this whole question of digital record is important.

Finally, here is an article which I wish I had written.  Clay Shirky’s brilliant Newspapers and thinking the unthinkable.  There is so much in this article which is of relevance not just to newspapers, but to every organisation struggling to come to terms with how social media is changing the game.  I re-read it every couple of months.