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
(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 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
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
Just because you can’t use your car to cross the ocean doesn’t mean that the sea isn’t a good transport medium. This isn’t a controversial statement. This is because we understand the difference between the sea and the land.
Why is it then that so many organisations (especially media organisations) fail to understand the difference, or even that there is a difference, between traditional (mass) media and social media?
Now if you want to cross the ocean, it pays to have a boat. There is no point simply trading in your salon car for a Toyota Hilux and driving that into the waves in the belief that you are going to get anywhere. Because whilst the Hilux has been shown to be as about as effective operating in the ocean as any wheeled vehicle can realistically expect to be, the limits of that effectiveness will only ever extend to about 10 feet from the shore and/or about 3 foot in depth.
Despite this every new dawn bring a fresh rash of corporate individuals leaping lemming-like into their corporate Hilux’s (and sometimes even salon cars) and roaring down the traditional media beach into the social media waves. It is a painful thing to watch.
And at the other end of the beach those same individuals are looking at the boats proffered to them and saying “where’s the wheels on that then mate, how do you expect the wife to take that to Tesco?” It is a painful thing to hear.
Social media is as different from traditional media as the ocean is to the land. Once you recognise that fact you can get about just fine. Fail to recognise that fact and you will find yourself in a spot of difficulty. That’s my thought for Friday.
If you ever want an example of how to “do” monitoring and customer service in the post-Gutenberg world take note of what I have just experienced. I was sat at my desk working on a ppt presentation (on storytelling as it happens) when a little twhirl window popped and I saw that Richard Dennison was asking for some help on monitoring stakeholders. I replied that I used a lot of services and then ran them through aiderss (PostRank) as a filter.
End of story you might have thought, just a fragment of mini-conversation, the likes of which happen millions of times every day within social media channels. But then I noticed an email from aiderss saying that they were now following me on twitter, and then a twitter reply to me thanking me for my recommendation. I looked at their twitter feed and saw that they had also sent a tweet to Richard D with a bit more information on what aiderss does.
Now that is impressive. But the thing is, it is not difficult to do. aiderss just had someone sitting on a twitter search of their name. Every business should do it – because while previously I thought aiderss was a useful tool (rational support) I know like them as an organisation (emotional engagement) and have taken the trouble to publicise my endorsement of them.
They will probably pick up on this bog post as well. Lets see if they do and add a comment.
… but haven’t got round to yet, include:
A new mass extinction – why the forces inherent in social media probably mean a dramatic brand cull over the next 10 to 15 years.
Social media pay-day – how the real pay-back from social media is achieved when you can push-out much of your brand development and promotion to the connected community of your customers and consumers.
Why the connected crowd is the new audience – we used to have individuals and crowds. Now we have a hybrid that is mass but can only be engaged with through individual interactions. Understanding its dynamics is the key to success in the future
Why stories are the core of any successful social media strategy – conversation is what it is all about and you can’t have a conversation off a proposition. Only stores drive conversations.
Watch this space!
Forget space time – TagSpace is the new dimension. Here’s why.
Every organisation wants to use social media to create and own a community these days. Its easy to see why – owning a community is a natural extension of the old approach to communication, based around owning and controlling the channel.
The problem is that the future doesn’t lie in channel, Continue reading