Google have just come out with a a New Shiny Tool – and I haven’t got time to really analyse it at the moment. Does it take us a step closer to my “Mythical One Place” – i.e. a tool that recognises that a social media citizen needs to do three things – produce stuff, consume stuff and share stuff – across multiple places and platforms but all from one place? Not sure – in the interim check out the ever reliable Mashable for an assessment.
This is something I’ve not done before – posting a comment. But hey, it took a while to write and the social media revolution is all about the separation of information from a dedicated means of distribution, so that’s alright then.
The comment was on a post by Dan Gillmor, which was really just a link to Alan Rusbridger’s recent speech about the future of journalism. I think my comment makes sense without first reading the speech – but I recommend you do read it. It is very good, albeit a speech that doesn’t really nail the answer – probably because the answer involves arriving at the conclusion that journalists have little role in the future of journalism.
Here is my comment. Continue reading
Yesterday was Apple iPad day – and what a let down it was. After all the hype it turned out to be just a big iTouch.
What Apple (usually) does really well is take something that already exist and make it sexy and so much easier to use. It turned MP3 players into iPods. It turned phones / PDAs into iPhones. So there was me waiting for it to turn the laptop / netbook into … what? Continue reading
The business of marketing as we know it is a creature of the ice age. It has evolved to adapt to set of very limiting conditions in the way that a woolly mammoth evolved to adapt to, what we now see as, the very limiting conditions of cold temparatures. Until recently, we haven’t been able to see what marketing’s limiting conditions have been in the same way that woolly mammoth’s didn’t think it was especially cold.
However, we can now see that marketing’s limiting condition has been the high cost of distributing information. This has meant that the evolutionary path of marketing has been about efficiency of message – packing the greatest amount of information into the smallest space in order to make the most of the precious resource which is the ability to harness an expensive distribution channel. Continue reading
2009 was a unique year in the fledgling history of social media, in that it was a year that contained no new “Big Thing”. The year obviously belonged to Twitter, but Twitter itself really broke into the mainstream at the end of 2008. There were a number of things launched that received a lot of attention amongst the digerati which may very well go on to become “Big Things” – Google Wave for example – but nothing that created the sort of mainstream attention that Facebook, or Twitter, or even Second Life did when they first broke. Continue reading
A parting post for 2009.
I was recently sent this by Influencer50, an organisation in the business of influencer marketing. It makes some interesting points about failures in on-line influencer measurement and the many organisations claiming to have offerings in this area. However, this report itself fails because it falls into the same trap as many of those approaches it is also criticising – namely the belief that influence is all about “screening out the noise” and finding the “needles in the haystack”.
That was the way influence was organised. What the social media revolution is doing is shifting influence away from institutions and individuals even, into the processes of connection that are generated within a crowd of individuals. Far from being screened out, the noise is what we should be looking at because it is where influence is moving towards. Expertise will no longer remain the preserve of experts – as James Surowieki has shown in his book “The Wisdom of the Crowds” (a book that is not explicitly about social media, but is essential reading if you want to understand social media).
Bad news for Influencer50, obviously, because its business is set-up around identifying a small number of influential individuals and connecting with them off-line. It’s why, in a recent blog post, one of the report’s authors states that, “Frankly, I think there’s a lot of tosh and assertion on the importance of social media in influence”. A sutiable epitaph for this organisation’s tombstone I feel, for this is not an organisation that will be around in five or 10 years time. Of course, social media doesn’t excert influence when you have determined in advance the rules through which influence must be excerted (i.e. through individuals and institutions). But when you realise that the rules of influence are changing, and when you look at influence as a process not a person, and when you realise that this is being driven by the social media revolution – then the picture starts to look very different.
So an exhortation for 2010 – embrace the noise, celebrate the “Pointlesss Babble”, revel in the “endless narcisism of the blogosphere”. It’s where the future is.
One of the staples of the ‘social media conversation’ is the social-media-consultant-as-snake-oil-salesman thing. (See this most recent offering from Business Week) A meme, in fact, is what I think it could be called. This often goes hand-in-hand with the whole social-media-show-us-your-metrics-or-go-away meme. The confluence of these two memes is the conclusion that unless a social media consultant can point to campaigns they have done and show you his or her metrics – they must be snake oil salesmen. And, by extension, all the social media car crashes out there (Toyota Matrix, Motrin Mums to name the two cited in the Business Week article) are therefore the fault of social media consultants.
Fair enough, there are a lot of people out there spouting nonsense at the moment, but is it really social media consultants who are to blame? Are social media consultants “leading clients astray” as the Business Week article suggests? I think not. Lets see whose fingerprints are actually all over most social media failures. Continue reading
In the old world content had to live within a particular means of distribution – a newspaper, a book, a website. In effect, content had to find its proper place. Short form written news information could only really live within a newspaper. Stories tended to gravitate towards books. Video could only live on the television.
When we talked about content we therefore talked about newspapers, books, the TV etc. We made the assumption that each type of media (means of distribution) was a type of content because what it was and how it was published, were locked together.
This assumption breaks down when you look at social media – especially Twitter. Continue reading
One of the mantras of social media is the need to listen. Listen to your customers, consumers, to conversations, etc. etc. etc. However, I am now starting to see organisations caught in a listening trap. These organisations have, sensibly enough, been monitoring social media for some time and have now reached the point where they are asking “where next with our monitoring?” They are looking to get ever more precise measures, crunch ever greater amounts of data, analyse the influence of the sources they identify in greater depth, develop better quantitative analysis. To them this seems both possible and necessary because the social media space is vast and growing, with so much data within it, so many opportunities for number crunching.
However, there is a problem. This is a road with no ending. Continue reading
Here is a news release from Prospect magazine
PROSPECT PRESS RELEASE: NEW TELEPHONE-USERS POLL
Often seen as little more than a harmless waste of time, the much-hyped Telphone is increasingly being used as a tool by liberal and left-wing political campaigners. Telephone users are among the most liberal groups in Britain, a new national poll of 2000+ people by Prospect magazine and pollsters YouGov reveals.
The poll tested Britain’s 5.5m Telephone users and compared them to the rest of the country — revealing that British Telephoners actually have a strongly liberal and civil libertarian bias. This is in contrast to the popular view that David Cameron’s Conservatives and their pamphleting supporters are the most adept online force in politics.
The poll shows that while 57 per cent of Britons think greater police powers to tackle terrorism are more important than protecting civil liberties, less than half of Telephone users agree. Fifty-six per cent of the public agree that “the greatest victims of discrimination in Britain these days are often ordinary white men,” compared to only 45 per cent of Telephone users.
Etc Etc…
OK – you may have spotted this is not quite the release Prospect issued. It was, of course, about Twitter. And it was recycled by The Guardian and others.
The point is – when are clunky old journos going to realise:
Twitter is not a web site.
Twitter is not a form of media.
Twitter is not a form of content.
Twitter is just an infrastructure – like the Telephone. The demographics of its initial adoption carry zero significance – in the same way as the fact that early adopting of the ‘phone took place within a limited segment of the population bore no significance to the role of the Telephone once it became established in every household and on every desk.
When the Telephone first came along people made the same mistake Prospect is now making. Everyone, including the ‘phone companies, assumed its was a form of content. Phone companies even tried to determine what type of content was appropriate. Funnily enough, they actively discouraged people using it for conversation.
Lets learn a little bit from history.