Tagged: social media

Time for the BBC to get its act together

Here is a transcript from the Guardian of the interview last night on the BBC’s Newsnight programme with Evan Williams – founder of Twitter.  What it reveals is a curious paradox.  One the one hand, the BBC is probably the world’s most progressive media organisation in terms of understanding social media, yet one the other the editorial approach in its traditional programmes and from its traditional journalists appears to display total ignorance and denial of what is happening.   Continue reading →

Is much of social media monitoring snake oil – or have I missed something?

Picture2I have recently had reason to focus on the area of monitoring of social media which has involved looking once more at the whole range of black box monitoring solutions that are out there.  This has caused me deep feelings of confusion and uncertainty.

The reason is this: when I do monitoring for a client, or advise a client on how to do monitoring, this is what I do.  Continue reading →

Blast from the past about the future

Here is a blast from the past (Sept 2006) about the future.  I came across it again because I was searching for something I knew I had written once about the future of advertising / creative agencies.  It has always been in my mind to update this article, but having read it I think most of the predictions it makes are still current and so – since I haven’t got around to finishing my post on the connected crowd – I have decided to punt this around again.

The future is not what it used to be.

A request for Obi Onyeaso

@obionyeaso recently sent me this DM on twitter:

Hi Richard.I wonder if you can point me to a more detailed A-B-C introduction to understanding ‘process ‘and ‘space’.

Not the sort of thing you can answer in a tweet – so rather than email a response I have decided to share this in a post. Continue reading →

Google v Facebook is a battle for today’s internet, not the internet of the future

Wired has just published an excellent article on the battle between Facebook and Google.  It covers the key issues concisely and is well worth a read.

However, I think both companies (and possibly Wired) are wrong to think that this is a battle for future of the internet.  Instead it is a battle for today’s internet.  In my view neither Google nor Facebook will win the battle for the future of the internet because both are fighting in the wrong space.  Both organisations are basing their strategies on the assumption that the future lies in an ad-driven, data capture, real estate model of the internet – and this is a 1.0, traditional institutionalised communications model.

Advertising is a creation of the world of traditional institutionalised information.  No one is suggesting that advertising is still not incredibly important – but it is a pot that is shrinking as distribution-based communication itself shrinks.  And while some of it is moving on-line, the on-line opportunity is never going to be as big as the current total pot and ultimately will disappear altogether.

Here’s why.  Continue reading →

Social media – its like a trade show

Telling people that social media is about spaces rather than places draws a blank look from 90 per cent of people.  I have therefore been searching for the good old analogy that helps people understand this concept.  This search has also been prompted by a current project where a client “wants to be on Twitter” but wants to achieve this is a viral, one Tweet will make me famous, sort of a way and it is important to help them understand why this is unlikely to work.

The analogy I have come up with is that of trade show or exhibition.  Suppose your business or organisation was to have a presence at the leading exhibition within your sector and you were presented with two choices as to what this presence would be.  Continue reading →

NY Times versus TechCrunch – a silly argument

There has recently been a bit of a flap going on within technology reporting circles between bloggers and reporters.  At issue is the concern that blogs publish unfounded rumours, whereas newspapers publish only the truth (that old chestnut).  At the centre of this curfluffle is this piece in the NY Times.

At heart it is a stupid debate that is founded in the inability (on probably both sides of the argument) to recognise that social media is fundamentally different from institutionalised media.  As I have said before –  truth within social media is founded in process.  It is crystalised in the reception of information.  Truth within institutionalised media is vested in the publication of information.  Or as Clay Shirky has put it publish then filter versus filter then publish.  Jeff Jarvis also hits on the same issue here – although he couches it as product versus process.

It is only when newspapers work out how their world has been changed by social media and what their role is within it, that this debate can become fruitful.  Don’t expect that to happen anytime soon.

Something rotten in the state of Twitter Search?

Something seems to have happened to Twitter Search in the last month that, to my mind, is incredibly important.  However, I haven’t seen any attention given to it within the broader social media converstaion – especially from the likes of @SteveRubel – an avid Twitter watcher and advocate of social search.  I know I have been tardy in keeping tabs on Twitter and my RSS feeds of late – but I can’t believe that I have missed this whole conversation.  Perhaps I am going mad, but surely I am not the only one who has spotted / is concerned about this.

What is it?  Continue reading →

Andrew Keen’s head – and the shift from institutions to processes

A recent blog post by Andrew Keen has finally prompted me to write a post dedicated to the idea that Big Thing in social media is the shift from institutions to processes as a source of trusted information.  I have referred to this many times in previous posts, but when I get to say “as I have said many times before” I realise I haven’t actually got one place purely dedicated to the saying of it.  Well no more.

Also, the fact that Andrew Keen, of all people, has identified what he calls the emergence of a new inchoate discource and is writing a post about media streams and agreeing with the likes of Clay Shirky about the essential ‘differentness’ of what may replace traditional media has also shown it is time to pull my finger out on this one. Continue reading →

Nik Gowing on crises and social media

Here is some worthwhile weekend reading.  It is a report by the broadcast journalist, Nik Gowing, published this week by Oxford University’s Reuter’s Institute for the Study of Journalism.

Entitled “Skyful of Lies and Black Swans” it looks at how technological changes and the emergence of what he calls ‘information doers’ (essentially social media) is changing the balance of power between institutions and individuals, with this shift being most evident at moments of crisis.

The paper tends to focus on government and politics in terms of the examples it highlights, rather than corporations and boardrooms.  It is also more on the observational and assertive side of things and rather light on analysis, in terms of really exposing the key new dynamics of the social media space.  However, this is to be expected given that Gowing is a journalist, not an analyst or academic.

I also sense that Gowing himself has not fully grasped the implications of the social media revolution, seeing it as simply an evolution of technology rather than recognising the fundamental breakdown in the relationship between content and distribution that social media represents.  He identifies the effects, but not yet fully appreciates the cause.  He recognises instances of institutional impotence, but not the fundamental shift from institutions to processes inherent in social media.

It is also a shame that the report itself is not more social media optimised – Gowing doesn’t appear to be available to discuss this on twitter, or have a blog for example and there are no links embedded in the pdf.  The opportunity to use this to create a conversation has clearly not been identified! (Update: he is on twitter @NikGowing but not exactly active)

However, minor gripes aside, the real value in this paper is the force with which it makes the point about the level of institutional denial (in governments and boardrooms) about what is happening, together with an identification of the fact that vastly increased speed of response is what crisis management is now all about.  Gowing calls this the Tyranny of the Time Line.

Read it and think about your own crisis management preparation and/or level of institutional denial.