Last week I was half listening to a BBC Radio 4 programme debating the issue of copyright in the digital age.  Present were the usual subjects: a legal type, a creative industry representative masquerading as a defender of the rights of artists (musicians in this instance), an actual practising artist (a poet in this instance – always a commercially marginal business) and a token naughty boy (someone who had been involved in bit torrent and movie sharing in this instance).  All chaired-over by some very emolient BBC presenter type.  However, at no point in this very civilised debate did anyone ask the fundamental question I have just posed.

We know the answer of course.  It is written upon no such stone.  If poetry dies because poets can’t make a buck – then what does this tell you about the value of poetry in the first place?   OK, so the likelihood is that some poets and musicians are going to find it harder to make a living.  The big question is “So What?”.  Who has the right to declare themselves a poet in any case?  Currently this right is conferred through the receipt of money.  I earn therefore I am.

We stand poised upon what could be the greatest explosion in human creative expression ever witnessed: the great unleashing of the cognitive surplus as identified by Clay Shirky in his most recent tome and here we are getting all upset because some already impoverished self-declared poet is finally going to have to get a day job.

We all know that Van Gough didn’t sell a single picture in his lifetime.  This may have been a bit tough on poor old Vincent, but it did nothing to dent the creative legacy he bequeathed to humanity.  One also suspects that money would not necessarily have made him either happier or more creative.  For sure, there have been many wealthy artists throughout history – but this wealth stemmed from patronage and thus their work was essentially PR and its current value stems as much from it being social commentary and a lens on society as from any independent creative value.  In the absence of many other well preserved historical lenses this was clearly an important role.  However, in today’s day and age we don’t lack for ways to record our history.

Imagine a world in which creative expression was driven by love, not money.  Would that really be such a terrible place?

This is because Ning is no longer free  and thus no longer an experimental  tool people can use to explore the potential for digital community formation.  This is happening right at the time when bespoke community formation is about to take off (in my opinion).

No  doubt Ning is doing this because some accountant has looked at the books with an eye to a future sale and predicted that the busiess will be more valuable with a dramatically smaller user base paying up to $500 for the service.  My instinct is that this is shortsighted.  The commercial dynamics of social media tend to favour models based on high volume and low price (often no cost to user, but with revenue from advertising or additional services or upgrades).   Not having a free entry level service if you still wish to attract a large user base is a problem.  I suspect it means that Ning is abandoning the mass and simply tring to squeeze a bit a revenue out of the base they have attracted.

This is a mistake.  In the future people  (i.e. the mass)  will form communities in order to manage their relationships with institutions rather than gather together in communities created for them by institutions.  Anyone who facilitates this process stands a chance of success.  Ning, unfortunately, is siding with the institutions and there are many better institutional products already out there.  It is probably making the classic mistake of being neither one thing nor the other and misunderstanding a gap between markets as a gap in the market.  However, accountants rarely understand markets and people – only numbers.

Forgive me for indulging in an analogy at the start of this post, but to start in any other way would be a bit like Gordon Ramsey launching a new restaurant and serving boil-in-the-bag ready meals (something that surely could never happen).

Analogies can be very useful communication and explanation tools, especially when trying to explain something that is new, different and where there are few real-life examples available.  They allow you to borrow from a store of familiar experiences and export them into the unknown.  A good example is the automobile.  Cars were first presented as an analogy – i.e. a horseless carriage – combining two things which were familiar to explain something that was new.  Likewise, North American Indians described the train as an iron horse.

For this reason I find analogies very useful in helping people understand social media.  Analogies also have an advantage in that they are very easy to illustrate and thus ideal for PowerPoint.  PowerPoint is, we are slowly realising, a visual medium and putting only words into it a visual medium is a bit like (insert your own analogy here).  The best analogies also have the potential to raise a smile, occasionally even a laugh, which is always a good thing.

Following are a selection I find particularly helpful – all of which are my own construction, with the exception of the first (which is probably the best).

Fireworks and bonfires

This I have borrowed from the excellent Slideshare presentation by John Willshire.

Traditional marketing and communication is about fireworks.  Single messages (or campaigns), designed to be seen by many people but which are expensive to launch and last for a very short time.  Social media is about bonfires, creating spaces that draw smaller numbers of people to them at any one time – but which can be kept alight almost indefinitely and help create conversation and engagement.  You can launch a firework to draw attention to your bonfire but putting fireworks on a bonfire is never a good idea.

The Land and the Sea

If traditional media is the land, then social media is the sea.  You can travel very easily across both – provided you understand the difference.  Which leads on to …

Floating cars

Most organisations approach social media in the same way that a motorist might approach the sea when they encounter it for the first time.  Their first instinct is to work out how to make their car drive across the water.  And when someone shows them a boat, their reaction will be “where’s the wheels on that then?”

Most attempts at social media currently are floating cars – i.e. traditional campaigns and approaches with crude  adjustments to try and make them float.

Stand-up comedian

Doing social media is a bit like being a stand-up comedian.  Understanding your audience and getting engagement is critical.  To do this you need to know if the audience is laughing at your jokes and you need to know that in real time.  This is pretty much all you need to know.  Knowing that the mother-in-law joke scored exactly 73.6 on the laughter (sentiment) scale or receiving a report after the performance that tells you that 35-45 year old males laughed 3 percent more than women of the same age doesn’t really help you that much.

I use this, of course, to illustrate that our whole approach to monitoring, measurement and metrics is often wrong.  Detailed metrics and demographic analysis were essential when we were crafting one-to-many mass messages or campaigns and investing huge amounts of money in one-shot launches.  We don’t need them in social media.  Try out a joke – if they laugh, build on it.  If they don’t, drop it and move on.

In a similar vein…

“Let them eat Twitter” – Louis XVI and the demographics of the mob

When Louis XVI saw the mob coming over his back garden fence – he didn’t ask his advisors for a demographic breakdown and a segmentation and targeting strategy.  Knowing that it was a large, angry, armed crowd was all he really needed to know to form an effective response – i.e. pack the family into a coach and head for the coast.

The connected crowd is a similar sort of thing – it may not always be large and angry, but it is pretty easy to get a sense for where it is at and how you need to respond.  Calling for more numbers usually just delays, and thus inhibits, your ability to respond.

Monitoring tools and video editing software

Most of the expensive social media monitoring tools out there are a bit like video editing software.  Simply buying the software isn’t going to give you the result you are looking for (or make you the video).  You need an expert technician who knows how to twiddle the knobs.  And you need guidance from the director as to what the end result should be.

This is the biggest barrier to purchase faced by the makers of monitoring products.  The more sophisticated the product, the more knowledge required to make it work effectively.  This has to be both a knowledge of the product and the users business and social media space – i.e. a combination they don’t have.  This is a business space waiting to be filled.

Facebook and carpentry (alternative title: I tweet therefore I am)

I often get asked – should we have a Facebook page (or a Twitter account, or a blog)?  To which I say, does a carpenter ever ask “should I have a hammer?”   These things are simply tools, you first need to work out what you want to build.  And even once you have done that, simply having the tools isn’t going to get it built.

Carpentry is a very good analogy space to help get a perspective on almost all the bright new thingies of social media.  A carpenter may have many tools but they all fall into one of only three categories – hitty things, chiselly things and sawy things.  Even a non-carpenter will be able to go into a carpenter’s workshop and get a reasonable idea as to what all of his tools do.  However – knowing about (or even having) all the tools doesn’t make you a carpenter.  Likewise within social media there are only three types of tools – publishing tools, sharing or distribution tools and community building tools.  And simply using them (or even understanding them) doesn’t make you an effective social media practitioner. It’s a bit like someone thinking that because they can hit a nail with a hammer they must therefore be a carpenter.

Answering questions

Content in social media – in fact possibly the future of content as a whole – is all about producing specific answers to specific questions.  The trouble with an ad (and most traditional mass message content) is that it is an answer to a question that no-one ever asked.  (I know that isn’t really an analogy, it’s more a soundbite, but I like it none-the-less)  It’s also a game you can try at home.  Take any TV ad, assume that is an answer to something and try and work-out the question for which the ad is the answer.  The ads that generate the most ridiculous questions are the ads that won’t be around in the not too distant future.  They also tend to be the ones which currently win awards.

Shop windows and warehouses

In the past content was all about shop windows – a representative or illustrative display designed to attract passing traffic.  You spent quite a lot of money crafting your display, but you didn’t try to put all your stuff in it (because display space was scare / expensive).

In the future, content is going to be about stocking and managing a virtual content warehouse.  This warehouse will contain lots of stuff: information on everything you are doing, information that illustrates your brand story and information that answers all of the questions a potential customer or stakeholder might have.  You won’t drive people to this warehouse to find the content – instead you will pluck it off the shelves when required and insert it (as links) into all the relevant digital spaces (conversations) you are within and let it then spread of its own accord.

Content as a raw material, not a finished product

This is one designed primarily for the media and publishing organisations – but it has implications for anyone with an aspiration to produce content (i.e. everyone).  At the moment, the media sees its role as being a producer of finished content products – a daily newspaper, a specific page, an individual article, a TV programme etc.  What is happening is that consumers of media (not producers) are assuming responsibility for assembling their own, individually tailored content product.  The future for media therefore lies either in understanding and supplying content as a raw material or through facilitating the process of individuals creating their own finished content product.  The Guardian / Alan Rusbridger please note: involving readers in producing your finished content product does not meet these criteria.

Social media and gardening

The whole area of gardening is very fertile territory for the growth of attractive analogies.  For starters: traditional digital approaches were all about creating walled gardens – expensive, highly crafted destinations to which we drove an audience (i.e. a website or any other form of web platform).  Social media, on the other hand, is all about gardening (not gardens) and therefore the commercial opportunities lie in creating plant nurseries – i.e. material (content) that gardeners can pick up and put into their own gardens.  This fundamental change in orientation is what lies at the heart of any successful social media strategy – launching content that will thrive in spaces, rather than driving people to places.

Next up – creating and managing a garden is a good analogy for what an organisation has to do if it wishes to enter the social media space.  It is possible (albeit highly expensive) to buy yourself a garden.  However, if you then don’t understand and participate in the process of gardening, that garden will deteriorate very quickly.  To do gardening, you can either hire a gardener (expensive) or start to develop knowledge on the basis of experimentation, research and possibly selective consultation with an expert.  If you have a small garden, you will probably be able to maintain it yourself.  If you have a large garden, you will probably end up getting a gardener in to do certain things that are either specialist (designing the garden in the first place and/or pruning your climbing roses once a year) or utility (mowing the grass once a week in the summer).  The rest you will do yourself.

This has implications for the role of agencies and outsourcing.  In the past you could hire an agency to do everything for you (make your ad, run your PR campaign etc).  In the future, the agency role will revolve around doing either specialist things (designing strategies, creating stories) or utility things (outsourced monitoring and basic response, maintenance of basic content streams).

Gardens also have to work in real world of wind and rain, hot and cold.  A greenhouse or a conservatory is not a real garden (albeit you can use them to propagate plants (ideas) for later transplant).  Traditional communication is the equivalent of gardening in a greenhouse – i.e. an environment that is managed and sheltered from reality.  Ads and all other forms of one-to-many mass messages are hothouse flowers – they rely on the construction of artificial environments (the world where women really do talk about what washes whiter) and they will wilt when put out into the real world.

Finally – developing successful gardens takes time and it is an ongoing process.  Not everything will work, constant maintenance is required, many things will take time to really become established and unpredictable events can sometimes give things a bit of a battering.  Likewise with social media.

Andrew Keen’s head

I use Andrew Keen’s head as an analogy to understand the difference between traditional institutionalised media versus a process-driven social media – the shift from institution to process (especially in relation to trust) being one of the tectonic shifts at the heart of social media.

It doesn’t have to be Andrew Keen, it can actually be anyone’s head, but I use Andrew because he is a high profile limpet clinging to the rotting timbers of traditional assiumptions (another analogy for you).

If you looked at the content of Andrew Keen’s head from an institutional perspective (much as we might look at a newspaper for example) what we would be presented with is a random mess of fragments of information, thoughts and experiences.  Fortunately we don’t assess Andrew simply through an analysis of what bits of information sit upon his mental shelves.  Instead we look at how Andrew gathers and then connects all this random information in order to generate intelligence.  Intelligence is a process and connectivity lies at its heart.  The same applies to social media.  You cannot assess its worth simply by looking at its bits (this is what people do when they say “Twitter or YouTube is all rubbish and nonsense”), you have instead to understand how these bits become connected to produce intelligence.  Social media is not about finding the needle in the haystack or screening out the signal from the noise.  Social media is the hay and it is the noise.  Of course most of Twitter is ‘pointless babble’ – that is its point.

The story of the two candle makers (I am sure I didn’t invent this one)

Once upon a time there were two candle makers in a town.  One candle maker saw his business as making candles, the other saw his business as providing light.  The oil-lamp was then invented – so who do you think went out of business and who prospered from a new opportunity?

I use this in two instances.  Firstly when trying to get ad agencies to understand how they can adapt to the world of social media – i.e. to think about narrative marketing – creating brand stories rather than brand propositions – and to apply their creativity to bringing stories alive rather than making ads or campaigns.  Secondly when talking to any organisation that performs some type of intermediary function in order to get them to focus on what they are doing, rather than how they are doing it (given the how they do it part is probably going to change significantly or become redundant).

Enough.  There are others.  I find myself inventing analogies all the time – in fact I sometimes apologise for the many mixed analogies within my presentations by saying I suffer from the clinical condition Multiple Analogy Disorder.  And the only good thing to be said about that is that it is better than suffering from Multiple Acronym Disorder – because that really makes you bonkers.

The Big Question is – what is it going to take for the reality, as outlined by Shirky, to replace the fantasy (masking as business models) being advanced by most in the newspaper world.  Probably it is going to take the demise of a player previously regarded as undemisable.  Could it be the Le Monde will be just such a player?  This analysis just published by Frédéric Filloux suggests it could be.

Laying aside the nature of the journalism and reporting that such an initiative is expected to preserve and also the arrogance in many of the assertions that Harding made that essentially implied that news just can’t happen unless some bloke with a notebook is there to ‘make sense of it’, there is a huge flaw in the thinking that upon which the whole paid-for content approach is based.  This flaw is the unquestioned assumption that journalism and journalist are one and the same.  Or to put it another way, the only way that journalism can be achieved is through the institutional structures of one-to-many mass media.

What is going on in social media is that what used to be called the reader or audience, but which I call the connected crowd, is working out ways to do journalism that don’t involve the function of institutionalised news provision.   And this isn’t about citizen journalism – citizen journalists don’t exist, this is simply a label that traditional journalists use to try and make sense of, and frequently denigrate, a phenomenon that they don’t understand.

The creeping redundancy of the concept of institutionalised news provision is the real problem Murdoch et al have to address.  It is not about free content, it is about free distribution.

This is not just happening with news.  It has already happened with music and it is starting to happen with financial services.  The social media space is not now simply a medium of information (content) – it is a medium of connection and action.  It is not a medium ruled by  institutions it is a medium ruled by processes.  Social media empowers the connected crowd to start to do new things or to do better the things which institutions used to do for them.  Thus the connected crowd has worked out a way to do music much better than the way the music business used to do it for them.  And it’s not just about the price of music (content), it is as much about the ability to share musical tastes and ideas as it is about sharing tracks.

Any institution which stands in the way of the connected crowd has a stark choice – it can either help them do what they want to do or it will be replaced by them.  There is no other choice. The real opportunity here is that an institution that understands this can harness the power of the connected crowd to help it do its business.  You can outsource operational cost to the connected crowd.

Listening to James Harding, and indeed to the more digitally enlightened such as The Guardian’s Alan Rusbridger, it is hard to know whether these people are ever going to  fully grasp what is going on.  There is so much invested in the old model, both in terms of capital but also prestige.  At its heart is the death of the concept of the sanctity of publication.  In the old world the simple act of publication conferred status upon content.  But this doesn’t exist in social media, indeed that act of publication itself barely exists in social media.  In this space, journalists are therefore no different or better that any other citizen and their content has to compete with everyone else’s.  It’s not so much about citizens becoming journalists – it is more about journalists becoming ‘merely’ citizens.  And they don’t like that.

More on this here.

The reason for this is that its ethos and economic model is still fundamentally rooted in Gutenberg economics.  It is still all about producing content – but in a way that doffs its cap to what editor Alan Rusbridger calls web2.0 by in his words “involving the readers in what we do“.

Clang!  What “we” do is not what it is about anymore.  In the social media world, content is not a finished product it is only a raw material.  The “reader” as some still might like to call them, is the only person responsible for a finished product.  It is therefore not a case of “involving the readers in what we do” – it works the other way round. The Guardian needs to create the permission to be involved in what the readers do.

Rusbridger goes on to assert that Guardian Extra will be at the vanguard of creating a bunch of readers who won’t accept journalism being shoved at them.  The thing is, it is not journalism that has been shoved at them, it is journalists and the attendant institutional structure of a newspaper (or other institutionalised forms of one-to-many mass media).  People are already working out how to “do” journalism in a way that doesn’t involve said institutions, their journalists or their content.  That’s the issue.

The only future for the Guardian, or any newspaper, is to first of all develop a content model that is fully adapted to the distribution media of print.  I.e. content that works better in a printed and mass distribution form that it does in the digital space.  The majority of the content newspapers currently produce won’t fit against this model (unfortunately).  In parallel to this, they will need to develop a digital (social media) model which sees journalism as a process, content as a raw material, and is designed to facilitate what it is people want news and/or journalism to achieve.  However this approach is a million miles away from where most editors’ or proprietors’ heads are at.  In theory, creating a model that can work in the new world is not so hard.  However, in practice it involves abandoning everything a journalist or an editor understands and is probably, culturally, too great a shift for most journalists to make – even the bright and digitally enabled ones at the Guardian.

Here

This suggestion is misplaced – and highlights how activism in the social media age has changed.  The people taking that action were undoubtedly a small group of activists.  However, the campaign was successful because the activists had the broad, albeit largely unexpressed, consent of the majority of consumers.

The views of the average KitKat consumer could probably be expressed thus:

Do you like the fact that your KitKat contains palm oil that comes from a company that is illegally clearing forests to create environmentally unsustainable palm oil plantations?

Not particularly.

Would you go on a March to protest about this?

No – I have a life.

Would you stop buying KitKats now that you know this?

Err – probably not.

But would you rather Nestle switched to a supplier that uses palm oil produced in a more ethical and sustainable way?

Absolutely.

Now in the past, this broadscale, but very lukewarm, response would have been functionally useless.  There was no way to capture the energy generated by a very small change in temperature across a very large number of people – you needed quite a large number of people to get very energetic to force companies to shift.  This is no longer the case – the will of the passive majority can be imposed through the actions of an active minority.

Now it is a huge mistake to jump to the conclusion that this means that social media has handed increased power to the activists or extremists.  It hasn’t.   These activists have to secure the passive consent of the majority, probably a very large proportion of this majority, if their actions are to be successful.  They have to mobilise more people than in a traditional campaign – but they only have to mobilise them a tiny little bit.

The fact of the Nestle case is that the vast majority of KitKat consumers would rather that KitKats were made using sustainably sourced ingredients.  None of them were actually very concerned about this – they didn’t have to be.  Their will could prevail with them barely having to lift a finger, let alone raise a placard.

The solution the Tories have gone for is to keep their content hub fixed – but change all the old content outposts (sort-of).  Thus www.number10.gov.uk remains the digital hub for the government, but the identities of the Twitter, Flickr and YouTube outposts have been changed – from having a DowningStreet identity to Number10Gov identity.  The content in the old accounts will be retained ‘for the archive’ and those signed-up will be moved across – but effectively the content thread has been broken.

Quite a neat solution – but was it really necessary?  Relevance in social media is not about places (i.e. where the content comes from) but about spaces (what the content is and where it goes).   After all, David Cameron is still going to live in No. 10, he is not going to put the old cabinet room table on eBay and get a new one from Ikea, (unless the IMF say so).   So why change Twitter, YouTube and Flickr?  These were the content outposts of the office of Prime Minister.  Also – what happens when we get a new government?  Will they feel they come up with yet another identity – and how many permutations of Gov, Number10 and DowningStreet are there available?

1. They have exchanged principles for power.  This is never a good thing – even if you assert that you will use your power in pursuit of  your principles – because this is a race you will never win (as New Labour demonstrated).
2. They have surrendered the territory.  Lib Dems cannot now exert authority over the ‘progressive centre left’ of British politics.  This territory is now available exclusively to Labour (if they get their act together).  Remember, this is where most of the votes were actually cast in last week’s election
3. They won’t get the political reform they need to break the two party system.  The Labour party can now provide what has been missing from politics for a long time:  an effective opposition and therefore real choice to voters.  This will significantly lessen the appetite for electoral reform making it unlikely that the Lib Dems will win a referendum on this issue, if and when the Tories give it to them.

Thus when the wheels drop of the coalition – inevitable  given that this is an alliance driven only by circumstance and short-term expediency – the Lib Dems will have sold their soul, have no place left to go (both in a political and geographical sense) and won’t have got the one thing they really want.  They have shot themselves in the foot, the heart and the head – and very few people recover from that.

All the Labour party has to do is avoid electing themselves an arrogant, smug bully as a leader (I don’t even have to mention the name).

And one other prediction.  Nick Clegg will stay on the Tory bandwagon, even after the wheels have dropped-off the coalition.  And before that happens, many Lib Dem MPs will defect to Labour (provided they don’t elect …).  The first defection will mark the beginning of the end of the coalition.

Lets see if this is how the story pans out.