Here is a blast from the past (Sept 2006) about the future. I came across it again because I was searching for something I knew I had written once about the future of advertising / creative agencies. It has always been in my mind to update this article, but having read it I think most of the predictions it makes are still current and so – since I haven’t got around to finishing my post on the connected crowd – I have decided to punt this around again.
@obionyeaso recently sent me this DM on twitter:
Hi Richard.I wonder if you can point me to a more detailed A-B-C introduction to understanding ‘process ‘and ‘space’.
Not the sort of thing you can answer in a tweet – so rather than email a response I have decided to share this in a post. Continue reading
I have just been to the Social Media Club / Gov2Gov event hosted by the Canadian High Commission
Its purpose was “to bring together leaders from the Canadian High Commission in London, UK Central Government, the Greater London Authority (GLA) and the United States Department of State with Social Media leaders to discuss the changing nature of civic engagement and the relationships between citizens and their government.”
I took three things from it.
First, it was a very geeky event, which in some ways was a shame. Continue reading
Wired has just published an excellent article on the battle between Facebook and Google. It covers the key issues concisely and is well worth a read.
However, I think both companies (and possibly Wired) are wrong to think that this is a battle for future of the internet. Instead it is a battle for today’s internet. In my view neither Google nor Facebook will win the battle for the future of the internet because both are fighting in the wrong space. Both organisations are basing their strategies on the assumption that the future lies in an ad-driven, data capture, real estate model of the internet – and this is a 1.0, traditional institutionalised communications model.
Advertising is a creation of the world of traditional institutionalised information. No one is suggesting that advertising is still not incredibly important – but it is a pot that is shrinking as distribution-based communication itself shrinks. And while some of it is moving on-line, the on-line opportunity is never going to be as big as the current total pot and ultimately will disappear altogether.
Here’s why. Continue reading
Telling people that social media is about spaces rather than places draws a blank look from 90 per cent of people. I have therefore been searching for the good old analogy that helps people understand this concept. This search has also been prompted by a current project where a client “wants to be on Twitter” but wants to achieve this is a viral, one Tweet will make me famous, sort of a way and it is important to help them understand why this is unlikely to work.
The analogy I have come up with is that of trade show or exhibition. Suppose your business or organisation was to have a presence at the leading exhibition within your sector and you were presented with two choices as to what this presence would be. Continue reading
The elections in Iran have once again shown the power of social networks and Twitter in particular. We can say that Twitter is making history. The content on Twitter is changing the course of events. However, most of that history lives within tags, such as #iranelection, and these tags will die or be lost in a few weeks time as our ability to retain them and search for them slips beyond the reach of Twitter Search or other search engines. Twitter Search doesn’t give you access to a tag beyond two or three weeks. This is a serious problem.
The whole issue of the digital record is one that is becoming incredibly important for the future of social media – and an area that, in my opinion, isn’t receiving enough attention. If we can’t find a way to create and preserve a relevant digital record we will find ourselves destroying history as fast as we make it. This record has to work according to the controlling dynamics of social media – availability and accessibility.
It may well be that the individual tweets that collectively are making history in Iran at the moment will still live somewhere in the digital record – in a place. However, Twitter more so than any other social media tool is defined by space, not place. The power of Twitter in the Iran issue and all others of historical influence, lies in tags and the creation of tag spaces. These spaces live only in search or other forms of aggregation. Lose the ability to search for it and aggregate it – and essentially we lose the information.
In the old days of traditional information, one printed copy of a document or a newpaper article held within a secure archive was enough. There was a whole institutionalised system for ensuring that this information was held within the collective memory. Social media doesn’t work like that. It is defined by its ubiquity, by its ease of access, by its availability. Restrict any of these things and you kill it. Restriction of access has almost the same effect as actual removal or erradication of the information.
If ever there is one thing we should worry about – this is it. Forget social media doing away with cultural gatekeepers, the media and other institutionalised sources of trust and all the other arguments that have been raised against it. This issue losing or destroying history is what we should really be worried about.
Everything I bang on about concerning social media: the Gutenberg principle, the shift in trust from institutions to process, why its about spaces not places, why the new audience is neither an individual or a crowd but the connected crowd (post in draft) is fantastically illustrated in this talk by Clay Shirky. (Sorry – can’t get the video itself to embed)
It gives a perfect illutration of how the media world has changed and why social media is different. It is 17 minutes long and essential viewing for anyone with the slightest interest in This Social Media Thing.
The question it leaves hanging is “what do you do about it?” – although it does illustrate what I always present as the first part of the answer, namely to recognise that social media is fundamentally different and the approaches you used in the traditional media world will not work in the social media space.
I would than say what you do about it is focus on three things:
Content – make much more of it, make it much more niche and much more portable
Conversation – listen to it and then respond to it
Community – understand, support and possibly host the process of community building rather than try and build you own communities.
I have been spending time today working with an agency on a response to a social media monitoring brief. The view on how to approach this – coming from the agency and the client – has been based around identifying and monitoring places (blogs etc). I have found myself saying on a number of occasions that “social media monitoring is about understanding and monitoring the space more than the place”.
I think this is true for more than just monitoring Continue reading
There has recently been a bit of a flap going on within technology reporting circles between bloggers and reporters. At issue is the concern that blogs publish unfounded rumours, whereas newspapers publish only the truth (that old chestnut). At the centre of this curfluffle is this piece in the NY Times.
At heart it is a stupid debate that is founded in the inability (on probably both sides of the argument) to recognise that social media is fundamentally different from institutionalised media. As I have said before – truth within social media is founded in process. It is crystalised in the reception of information. Truth within institutionalised media is vested in the publication of information. Or as Clay Shirky has put it publish then filter versus filter then publish. Jeff Jarvis also hits on the same issue here – although he couches it as product versus process.
It is only when newspapers work out how their world has been changed by social media and what their role is within it, that this debate can become fruitful. Don’t expect that to happen anytime soon.
Something seems to have happened to Twitter Search in the last month that, to my mind, is incredibly important. However, I haven’t seen any attention given to it within the broader social media converstaion – especially from the likes of @SteveRubel – an avid Twitter watcher and advocate of social search. I know I have been tardy in keeping tabs on Twitter and my RSS feeds of late – but I can’t believe that I have missed this whole conversation. Perhaps I am going mad, but surely I am not the only one who has spotted / is concerned about this.
What is it? Continue reading