Tagged: social media

Diaspora – keep an eye on this

Diaspora is an alternative to Facebook.  One might say how on earth could anyone challenge Facebook, especially with a service that basically does the same thing, but just does it a little differently?  Well, what Diaspora does is give a much greater focus to what a social network is all about – i.e. connection with small groups of people that you probably already have a relationship ‘in the real world’.  Consequently it also makes privacy and ownership of information a much bigger deal (the Achilles heel of Facebook).

Diaspora was launched in September and it may not get off the runway, but it is gathering interest right now – so worth tracking, because Facebook is vulnerable.

Facebook will eventually fall over because Continue reading →

When social media becomes the metric

There is, of course, a huge debate about metrics, measurement and ROI in social media.  This tends to be framed in terms of   “if I do some social media, what am I going to get out of it and how will I measure that”.  Last week I came across an a new take on the whole metrics issue – not measuring the impact of social media activity, but seeing social media activity itself as a metric. Continue reading →

Wikileaks: a sign of the mess to come

The recent Wikileaks / US cables saga, and the previous Iraq leaks saga, illustrate very neatly the problems ahead as we struggle to come to terms with the social media revolution.  We are in a place where the world is changing, but we have yet to develop the rules and processes we need to adapt to this new world.

This new world is the world of greater transparency, where almost everything must be considered to exist in the public domain. Like it or not, this world is not going to go away; it follows inevitably from the fact that information cannot now be locked up and contained within institutionalised channels.  The ability to publish information is now, as Clay Shirky says, “global, social, ubiquitous and cheap”. Continue reading →

Stories and storytelling – its the future of marketing

Here is a good post from Antony Mayfield with some examples of the use of new technologies to tell stories.  As I have written about (at some length) before, storytelling and what I call narrative marketing is becoming incredibly important because social media is conversational and stories drive conversations, whereas propositions drive ads (or other forms of restrictive one-to-many mass messages).

The quick story on stories is this.  Continue reading →

Paper.li – content as raw material

Here is an interesting thingy brought to my attention courtesy of Neville Hobson.  Not sure whether it will take off, but I will give  go just to try it out.  Essentially it creates a piece of content (that it will call, in perhaps an unconciously retro way, my Daily Newspaper) out of my Twitter connections.

This is one more example of the fact that content can no longer be considered a finished product, only ever a raw material.  It only becomes a finished product in the hands of its’  consumer, and even then that content can be spun back out into the social maelstrom.   In effect, content is created via acts of interogation or connection rather than publication.   This is the Big Thing that newspapers (and other traditional content publishers) can’t get their heads around, as I have logged previously.

It also is another example (along with a Twitter tag) of McLuhan’s lightbulb – a medium that has no content of its own, but creates a social effect through the space it brings into being.

It’s nice to be appreciated

A couple of weeks ago I did a workshop for my fellow members of the EACA School faculty, since blogged about by the much esteemed Steve Henry (the 2nd H in HHCL – which will mean something for anyone who knows anything about the UK advertising industry) in Brand Republic. Steve gives a very succinct (and flattering) summary but what is also interesting are the comments.

The workshop was great fun – especially the opportunity to be present at the moment when a group of people who have a huge amount of experience invested in what I call Gutenberg media suddenly ‘get it’ in terms of understanding that social media is not about Facebook, blogs and Twitter.  And also when they start to realise how their expertise can be re-purposed to work in the new space.

There are a lot of Cs in social media

What is it with social media and Cs.  Conversation, Collaboration, Community, Content, Context, Collective, Connection, Cooperation, Crowd-sourced.   Also Consultant – lots of them.  The prevailing climate (Climate) of opinion however seems to suggest that there should only ever be four Cs in social media (see this article by Michael Brenner and the links within it).

I, however, always prefer the number three.  Two is never enough and four is always too much.  So I say there are three Cs in social media and this is how I arrive at this conclusion.

There are actually four spaces in social media (broken the rule already):

  1. the space where people are agreeing with you
  2. the space where people are disagreeing with you
  3. the space where people are asking the question to which you are the answer
  4. the space where people are prepared to help you do it (better)

The way you Do social media is to first of all identify these four spaces.  You then have to address them.

Spaces 1 and 2 you address through participation in Conversation.

Space 3 you address by producing Content (the role of content in social media being almost exclusively about answering specific questions, remembering, as I am always fond of saying, that an ad is an answer to a question that no-one ever asked)

Space 4 you address through the creation of a Community where you can get these people together.

That’s it.  There is no-more to social media than these four spaces and these three Cs.

Actually, that is not quite true.  You need a Story.  A story allows you work out what you need to say, in your conversations, in your content and in your community.  Four spaces, three Cs and a story.  I can almost feel a movie coming on.

A farewell to Ning

In a few hours time I will be bidding farewell to my Ning networks.  I will also stop advocating Ning as something people should look at in order to start building their own networks and communities.

This is because Ning is no longer free  and thus no longer an experimental  tool people can use to explore the potential for digital community formation.  This is happening right at the time when bespoke community formation is about to take off (in my opinion).

No  doubt Ning is doing this because some accountant has looked at the books with an eye to a future sale and predicted that the busiess will be more valuable with a dramatically smaller user base paying up to $500 for the service.  My instinct is that this is shortsighted.  The commercial dynamics of social media tend to favour models based on high volume and low price (often no cost to user, but with revenue from advertising or additional services or upgrades).   Not having a free entry level service if you still wish to attract a large user base is a problem.  I suspect it means that Ning is abandoning the mass and simply tring to squeeze a bit a revenue out of the base they have attracted.

This is a mistake.  In the future people  (i.e. the mass)  will form communities in order to manage their relationships with institutions rather than gather together in communities created for them by institutions.  Anyone who facilitates this process stands a chance of success.  Ning, unfortunately, is siding with the institutions and there are many better institutional products already out there.  It is probably making the classic mistake of being neither one thing nor the other and misunderstanding a gap between markets as a gap in the market.  However, accountants rarely understand markets and people – only numbers.

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.