Tagged: social media

Alan Rusbridger, Dan Gillmor, the future of journalism and the Great Schism between the Ism and the Ist

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 →

What’s the connection between social media and woolly mammoths?

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 →

2010 – the year of building

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 →

Social media failures – are consultants to blame?

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 →

Should you proofread a blog?

I have just had the following comment posted by Jim on my ‘biography‘ entry on this blog.

Please proofread your website.

It doesn’t detract from what you’re saying, but I did find the spelling errors and grammatical mistakes a little annoying.

How to respond?  Obviously, I first checked the comment for typos – no such luck.  Should I delete it?  It is, after all, the only comment on this ‘not-particularly-for commenting-on-page”.  Well that wouldn’t really be in the spirit of social media. Continue reading →

Einstein’s Twitter stream: quality content or pointless babble?

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 →

Social media – when the listening has to stop

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 →

Shock new Telephone users poll from Prospect magazine

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.

Beware the web1.5 beast

There is a dangerous beast preying on unsuspecting organisations who want to get into social media.  This beast is the web1.5 agency or campaign.  This is a campaign that purports to be a social media campaign, because it uses the tools of social media, but in reality is an old-fashioned, conventional one-to-many mass message approach.

How do you spot these beasts?

First – if it comes from a traditional ad agency, it will almost certainly be a 1.5 approach.  Continue reading →

How to make your crisis plan ‘social media compliant’

Enough of the theory (for the time being).  There is a very practical impact of social media that affects every organisation right now.  This is the fact that every crisis management plan and process is now out of date – unless it has been made ‘social media compliant’.

If you now have a crisis, you have no time or space within which to hide.  You are essentially in the business of performing ‘live’ within a rolling 24/7 press conference.  This requires different skills and preparation – just as doing live TV is different from making a documentary.

However, this is not all bad news.  Social media allows you to communicate directly with the people you need to influence, without having to rely on the filter of the media.  This can make it easier to get information out much quicker, to dampen concerns and emotions and to limit the extent to which a crisis can develop or spread.

There are five things an organisation needs to do to make their crisis preparation social media compliant.

  1. Monitor social media in real-time
  2. Establish a management process that delivers a response that is quicker and more specific to the needs of social media, rather than adapted only to the needs of traditional media
  3. Create an information publication platform that is optimised to spread information effectively through social networks
  4. Re-purpose your existing information so that it can spread easily through social networks
  5. Incorporate social media into your crisis training.

Looking at these points in more detail. Continue reading →