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.

1. We are still waiting for the change we voted for in 1997.
2. People want a change of direction much more than they want a change of Government.
3. The change people want isn’t a political one in the sense of left or right, Labour versus Conservative – although the individual parties are trying to dramatise it as such.
4. What people want is for Government to re-discover the art of governing – rather than simply contracting-out its responsibility to manage the essential pieces of social and economic infrastructure that hold a nation together.
5. The problem isn’t that we are burdened by the State, it is that the State isn’t doing its job properly.  Society isn’t broken, Government is.
6. Competition, enterprise and markets create winners and losers.  This is fine when it is Sainsbury versus Tesco – but we don’t want an education or healthcare system of winners and losers.
7. Forcing a market system into an area where a market does not naturally exist (like the public provision of healthcare or education) creates bureaucracy and in-efficiencies as we generate the artificial beans for newly appointed bean-counters to count, rank and organise into league tables (like we see in the National Health Service and in schools).
8. Running a successful private school  is not the same as running a successful public education system.  The ability to do one does not translate into an ability to do the other.  Private companies can, and should, focus on running individual institutions where there is a genuine market for them.  Government needs to focus on managing the system.

Unfortunately no major party seems to have bought into this story – but I have a suspicion that the majority of voters – of all political persuasions – are waiting for someone to tell this story.  And that’s the problem – especially for the Conservative party – and it is the reason why the Conservatives are not way-ahead in the polls.

I’m voting Green Party!

I have advised many organisations on how to make the transition to operating in the social media space.  Without exception, there are three challenges that present themselves when doing this.

Challenge number one – People

In social media, the answer almost always is a person, never a piece of technology.  You need people to monitor social media, to participate in conversations, to nurture networks and communities.  Buying an editing suite won’t edit you a video unless it has a trained operator, but it surprising how many organisations are buying black box monitoring products or out-of-the-box social network platforms and somehow expecting that to be “the answer”.

Marketing departments are going to become conversation departments.    They can only sustain that conversation via real people – either by gathering  these people in one place, outsourcing elements to agencies or outsourcing the conversation to the business as a whole via encouraging employees to use social media tools as part of their day-to-day work.

Challenge number two – Content

Content is now a volume game.  Generic, one to many mass message doesn’t work, people expect the information that an organisation produces to be far more specific and relevant.  As a result, it is not about creating a shop window, with a few fixed, expensive displays (ads, brochures, campaigns) but about creating a warehouse with the shelves stacked with the digital and highly mobile answers to any conceivable question a customer may have.  The organisation that understands this better than any is Demand Media, which has cracked the business model for content provision and in the process showed us the future of content.  Demand Media pumps out about 4,000 videos per day – i.e. the equivalent in about one month that the entire global advertising industry puts out in one  year.

This high volume, low cost, editorial approach to content is what organisations need to get their heads around and it is no good trying to get an ad agency or conventional production facility to help.  Their business models are just not configured around this requirement.

Challenge number three – Stories

When distributing information was expensive messages has to be short.  In fact, the whole art of marketing was about reductive communication – boiling down a lot of information into a single 30 second generic statement, a single image, or a short piece of text.  The bedrock of this process was the brand proposition.  However, social media is not constrained by the expense of distribution – distribution is free.  We can use what we used to think of a mass broadcast channels, for things as frivolous as individual conversations.  Brand propositions don’t get you very far in a conversation, instead what you need is a story.  Encoding a message in a story is a tried-and-tested way of securing distribution through conversational channels,  something religions worked out a long time ago before Gutenberg came along and created a print and publication culture.

The basis for marketing therefore has to be a story and the ability to tell stories and have storytellers within an organisation will become critically important.  It is also necessary to have a credible story in the first place – something many organisations will struggle with (but that is another story).

Hopefully it is now apparent where journalists come in.  Their skills are far better adapted to helping companies meet these new challenges than the skills of the traditional agency creative.  Journalists don’t necessarily have the strategic skills to advise organisations on what they need to do – but there is also going to be a surplus of strategists (planners) falling out of traditional agencies as this business collapses.  Seizing this opportunity does require that a journalist give up on the practice and institutions of journalism, (in the same way that a planner will have to surrender an attachment to the creation of the one-to-many mass message) but the practice of journalism is becoming a collective and collaborative process and moving away from said institutions in any case.

If I had the money and inclination, I would set up (or invest in) a company offering a social content production and storytelling resource to organisations.  Of course, there is an industry sector – customer publishing – that says it already does this.  The trouble is that this is a sector  shaped by and welded to particular means of information distribution – mostly print with a bit of electronic and digital on the side.  It cannot shake itself loose of this heritage and business model and therefore looks set to go the way of the traditional media and advertising agencies.

If you were not at my session in Paris, the presentation won’t necessarily make a huge amount of sense because it is a presentation designed to illustrate a talk, rather than be viewed.

Speaking recently to the National  Press Club at the George Washington University he asserted that people will pay for content when they “have nowhere else to go” i.e. when everyone else is also charging for content.   However, this is never going to happen: not because other content providers won’t collude with Murdoch and also erect paywalls around their content, but because people already have somewhere else to go and this place is not a newspaper or other form of institutionalised news provider.  This is why newspapers are dying, not because newspapers’ content is available free in the digital space.   The institution of a newspaper is being replaced by the process of information sharing using the tools of social media.

The people who have nowhere else to go are newspaper proprietors – not consumers.