Tagged: Richard Stacy

Using analogies to explain social media. Its a bit like…

Trying to explain social media to businesses can sometimes feel a bit like Thomas Eddison trying to explain the lightbulb at a convention of oil-lamp manufacturers.

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.  Continue reading →

Thinking l’unthinkable

About a year ago Clay Shirky wrote a brilliant article called Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable, which is probably the best analysis I have read of the problems facing newspapers.  (This is something I have also written about in terms of the separation of journalists from journalism and the need to understand newspapers as a form of distribution rather than a form of content).

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.

Content is now a raw material, not a finished product (not even a special Guardian Extra product)

The Guardian has made an entry into the paid-for content space.  Called Extra it is, as the name suggested, the on-line Guardian with a little bit extra, for which you will be expected to part with £25 annually.  It is interesting and innovative, as one might expect from the Guardian – but it won’t work as a model for how what we currently call a newspaper (even an on-line, multimedia newspaper) can operate in the social media world.

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. Continue reading →

The power of passive consent – the real lessons from the Nestle KitKat, palm oil and Greenpeace saga

Here is a good summary of the recent spat between Nestle and Greenpeace over palm oil.  However, the lesson is not really that Nestle reacted clumsily to the initial salvo from Greenpeace and thus had to back-track and cave-in to their demands: the real lesson is touched on at the end of the article where it is suggested that companies can now be bullied by tiny groups of activists who don’t represent the majority of consumers.

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.

How much social media should a new broom sweep away?

Having a new UK government has presented some challenges for No. 10 from a social media perspective.  Principally, how to maintain the continuity that is attached to the office of Prime Minister, but sweep away as much of the old content as possible.

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?

Why the Liberal Democrat story is over

The Liberal Democrats have just written themselves out of the story of British politics.  Here is why.

  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.

The change that isn’t happening

Here are some thoughts on the UK election.  I know it is not really about social media, but it is about the The Story of British politics, as I see it anyway.

  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!

Journalists: the big winners from the social media revolution

The assertion that journalists have a bright future might seem rather strange  given the somewhat disparaging things I have tended to say in this blog about the institutions and processes of journalism (many of which are contained in the posts here).  However, if we separate out the skills of a journalist, from the institutions of journalism we can see that those who are able to make this separation are presented with many opportunities.  Here’s why. Continue reading →

Rupert Murdoch: “nowhere else to go”

Rupert Murdoch’s last great battle, getting people to pay for on-line content, has been much discussed.  The general view is that he will not win.  As I have previously said, the issue is not that people won’t pay for content, it is that they won’t pay for distribution, when distribution is free.  Here is some more evidence that he is heading for a fall.

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.

Books, iPads and chickens

@obionyeaso recently asked me for a view on this by David Gelles and Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson in the FT – essentially will the iPad / Kindle shatter the book publishing business in the way the iPod and iTunes shattered the music business.

My short answer would be no – it won’t.  The short reason for this is that the form of content that is a book is very well adapted to the form of distribution that is printed and bound bits of paper.  This is unlike news, which is not necessarily well adapted to the form of distribution that is newspaper, or the music track which we have discovered is very poorly adapted to the form of distribution that is an album or CD.  At the same time a book is an important cultural feature in the way that a CD, album or even a newspaper is not. Continue reading →