Tagged: social media

The sanctity of publication

Thanks to Antony Mayfield (@amayfield) for drawing my attention to a couple of recent  articles.  It has prompted me to finally post on something that has been lurking  in the back of my mind for a year or more – this thing I call the sanctity of publication.

Both articles – one a piece in the Daily Mail and the other a opinion piece by Seth Finkelstein in the Guardian – come from very different people and places but both are essentially the same: cries of indignation from people and/or institutions who see their position as ‘sanctified’ oracles being undermined by the great unwashed. Continue reading →

The Filter of Stupidity

Successful communication is … the clarification of complexity via the application of the filter of stupidity.

(generated whilst thinking about the success of the Sun and Daily Mail).

The Filter of Stupidity is a bit like The Wisdom of the Crowds – and its why the power of social media lies in its messiness and apparent stupidity – as per twitterings of a wit / witterings of a twit post

Social media measurement – think carrots

carrot(Note 19/10/09 – this post is getting a lot of hits at the moment, but I don’t know why.  Its not generating any comments and its ceratainly not my best post – visitors please feel to leave a calling card in the comments and let me know why you are here).

This post is a follow-on to my previous post about stones and erosion.  It is more practical, fortunately you might say, but still relies on analogy, if not stories.  I like analogy.

So here is the analogy.  We know that a diet high in fruit and vegetables is healthy.  We now why it is healthy and we know roughly how much consumption of fruit and veg = healthy (five portions per day).  However – you cannot take a single carrot and measure how much it adds to our healthiness.  Consumption of one carrot cannot be correlated to an additional x milliseconds of life for example and any attempts to do so would be a classic example of misuse of statistical evidence.  Likewise, we know that physical fitness correlates to health but we can’t measure the impact of one session at the gym. Continue reading →

Social media measurement – are we staring at the stones?

Social media measurement and ROI is a hot subject.  It was one of the issues debated recently at Social Media Influence 09 and listening to that debate and some of the frustrations and difficulties that people were expressing got me thinking.  I developed the suspicion that we might be going about this the wrong way.  Perhaps our approach to measuring social media is conditioned by the approaches and tools we used in the highly measurable web1.0 environment.  Perhaps we are falling for the classic mistake, which is the failure to recognise the fundamental difference between the landscape of social media and the previous on-line, digital or traditional media environment.  Perhaps we are trying to micro measure processes rather than understand the system as a whole. Continue reading →

SMI09 – productive confusion

Yesterday I went to the Social Media Influence 09 conference (#SMI09) – a very good event.

Looking back – my impression of the day was productive confusion.

For example, YouTube seemed confused as to what they are.  Benjamin Faes, their MD for EMEA could only describe YouTube as either a website or TV channel.  Admittedly they have to do that to chase advertising revenue but there was no evidence in their forward planning that they really understand their role as a platform.  They are focusing on better quality video, community (within YouTube) and rights management – i.e. the watcher / owner experience rather than the total user or contributor experience. Continue reading →

Posts I want to write…

… but haven’t got round to yet, include:

A new mass extinction – why the forces inherent in social media probably mean a dramatic brand cull over the next 10 to 15 years.

Social media pay-day – how the real pay-back from social media is achieved when you can push-out much of your brand development and promotion to the connected community of your customers and consumers.

Why the connected crowd is the new audience – we used to have individuals and crowds. Now we have a hybrid that is mass but can only be engaged with through individual interactions. Understanding its dynamics is the key to success in the future

Why stories are the core of any successful social media strategy – conversation is what it is all about and you can’t have a conversation off a proposition. Only stores drive conversations.

Watch this space!

TagSpace – the new dimension in social media

Forget space time – TagSpace is the new dimension.  Here’s why.

Every organisation wants to use social media to create and own a community these days.  Its easy to see why – owning a community is a natural extension of the old approach to communication, based around owning and controlling the channel.

The problem is that the future doesn’t lie in channel, Continue reading →

The advertising industry – delusional in the face of adversity

The IPA and the Future Foundation has just released a report of the future of advertising in the light of the growth of social media.  The summary is worth a read not so much for what it says, but the way it reveals the essentially delusional assumption that there is even a remote possibility  that the advertising industry could ever get to grips with social media.  An assumption presumably endorsed by the IPA and shared by the industry as a whole. Continue reading →

Who says the web is wild?

I recently received an invite to this event organised by the Westminster eForum – a group within the UK House of Parliament.  It describes its agenda thus:

This seminar will offer a platform for debate on how best to approach internet regulation.

Earlier this year the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, Rt Hon Andy Burnham MP described the internet as ‘lawless’.

The internet is often over shadowed by its ‘darker side’. The ability of users to post content online has led to some of the most innovative and popular services such as Facebook, eBay and YouTube but also to inappropriate images, internet scams and illegal file-sharing. How can the UK protect internet users without stifling their creativity?

I want to challenge the fundamental assumption that lies behind this (and that frequently goes unchallenged) – that the internet is wild and lawless.  Continue reading →

The twitterings of a wit or the witterings of a twit – its all social media to me

I think it is time to celebrate the nonsense in social media.

Just recently there have been a few posts flying around where people have been moaning about mess and noise and pointless twittering. See this rather curmudgeonly rant from Jerry Bowles and this from OmMalik and this from Steve Hodson.

I think they are missing the point. Continue reading →