Tagged: social media

Its not about citizens becoming journalists – but journalists becoming citizens

Today The Times launched its new online edition, which it will effectively be closing again late June when it starts to ask people to pay for it.  Times editor, James Harding, was interviewed this morning on the Today programme desperately trying to justify how initiatives such as this represented the salvation of journalism and reporting.

Laying aside the nature of the journalism and reporting that such an initiative is expected to preserve and also the arrogance in many of the assertions that Harding made that essentially implied that news just can’t happen unless some bloke with a notebook is there to ‘make sense of it’, there is a huge flaw in the thinking that upon which the whole paid-for content approach is based.  This flaw is the unquestioned assumption that journalism and journalist are one and the same.  Or to put it another way, the only way that journalism can be achieved is through the institutional structures of one-to-many mass media. Continue reading →

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?

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 →

My presentation at in-cosmetics Paris

For those at my presentation yesterday, who wanted a copy of the presentation, I have put it on Slideshare.  Or you can see it embeded below.

If you were not at my session in Paris, the presentation won’t necessarily make a huge amount of sense because it is a presentation designed to illustrate a talk, rather than be viewed.

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.

A lesson in PR and social media from Ben Goldacre (a journalist)

I have not shown a tendency to be charitable to journalists in many of my previous posts – because so few really understand what is going on with social media.  But here is an exception, from the blog of Ben Goldacre of The Guardian, reflecting on how social media changes PR.  It is spot on.

With the internet, page space is infinite, and people will post any old nonsense on the grounds that it might be interesting to someone somewhere (and I’m very glad of it). There are bloggers, of course, who will get inexplicably fascinated by a single issue, and follow-up every development, no matter how obscure. But there are also random passers-by, who might use Google to double check your utterances on Twitter, in 10 seconds, while they wait for the kettle to boil, just out of interest. Then they might post the results, with a single keystroke, on Twitter, in a blog comment, just because it adds a little to the story, and someone else might find that, and build on it, and so on. I’m rambling, but I do think it’s interesting how the web makes the environment very different for everyone in PR who hopes that vagueness and disinterest will smooth over their rougher edges.

The power of nonsense (or as I prefer to call it, information of very niche interest).  Trust that is grounded in process  – not institutionalised assertions.  The ability to publish no longer a scarce resource – and therefore liberated from the grip of institutionalised control.  It is all in that quote, even if Goldacre himself may not quite realise it.

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 →

A new Bright Shiny Google Tool

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.