ASH-10

Some of the common problems I get from clients and the like:

• We’re not really having a conversation online with people.
• We post stuff on our blog / Twitter / Facebook page but it just seems to go into the ether.
• We ask questions of our audience but no-one answers.
• etc.

It’s a tricky one. I think I might have found an answer. Bear with me as I spend a few hundred words getting to the point as usual.

Image source

A few months ago I came across a group blog called Clusterflock and it quickly became one of those blogs I keep around in case I run out of things to read or when insomnia strikes. But there was something different about Clusterflock compared to the other rivers-of-stuff blogs I keep around the place. The Daily What is a great digest of Internet culture but it feels like a magazine or television channel. Here’s a bunch of things we’ve prepared for you to consume. Clusterflock, on the other hand, is like finding yourself sitting at a table with a bunch of people who are telling stories and sharing stuff. Strangers are welcome but you get the feeling they’ve known each other for a while. There’s in-jokes and things you think might be in-jokes but you can’t be sure and other potentially alienating phenomena that usually gets groups labeled as cliques, and yet I found myself drawn to it.

I’ve been wondering for a while what it is about this blog that I like. Sure, the stuff that’s posted crosses over with my interests and aesthetics – these seem, on the surface, to be my kinds of people, but there was something else. And then it struck me.

They’re not addressing an audience. They’re addressing the group. It’s not a broadcast model. It’s a group discussion that happens to be public.

It’s surprising how linear people’s attitude to online activity has become. Maybe it’s because the great “crowdsourcing” experiments didn’t really pan out but stuff seems to be very being publisher – audience driven right now. There are authors and there are commenters and there’s not much else going on. There’s nothing wrong with this per-se (my blogging is very soapbox-oriented, as you might have noticed) but it’s very one way.

What’s intriguing about Clusterflock is the contributors are talking to each other. The people in the comments are frequently other contributors and if they’re not they can use the the Christopher Walken account to post.

Everyone is an equal at the table, if they want to be. You know what this reminds me of? Metafilter, the granddaddy of community blogs. Or, if you prefer, a forum.

No-one recommends a forum these days. The memories of empty phpBB boards with two welcome posts and no activity whatsoever are too raw. But the forum model is still an interesting one even if the tools can be a little all or nothing. It’s a level playing field with a low barrier to entry where the the community is in charge.

So, how can you use this newfound knowledge to solve your social media woes? How do you build a community that shares amongst itself and welcomes newcomers? My answer would be you don’t build a community. You take the community you already have – yourselves.

I’m going to do something I don’t normally do and pick on a real world example. We Are Eastside is a campaign to unify and promote various arts and culture businesses that reside in the Eastside/Digbeth area of Birmingham. I’ve worked with a fair number of the organisations involved and care what happens culturally in that area. I think the We Are Eastside notion is a good one. Most of these people and organisations are friendly with each other and working towards similar goals. It makes sense to create some sort of loose collective and punch their collective weight. The We Are Eastside booklet was a lovely thing giving a great snapshot of activity in the city most would be unaware of. The blog, however, has been a bit of letdown.

The diagnosis from this blog doctor is clear. The contributors, if they post at all, merely post press releases or duplicate their own blogs. The former, frankly, is a crime while the latter begs the question, what is this blog for? Is it just an aggregator? A Google News for Eastside? There’s nothing wrong with that of course and it might be neat to see a cleverly aggregated snapshot of the news from that district. But it’s not very interesting.

Howabout this. The blog is where the participating organisations share things with each other. In public. And have a conversation about them. In public. No press releases, no commissioned pieces, no duplicating blog content, just things of mutual interest.

Obviously this easier said than done. People who’ve spent years seeing media as a one-way tool to can be uncomfortable having conversations about their businesses in public and some of the organisations (naming no names) might not be fit for such as challenge. Above all, there has to be need for this. It needs to solve a problem even if that problem is something as simple as “we don’t chat as much as we should”. Often it’s the simple things that create the bonds of community after all.

So let’s say there’s a need for a site where the various cultural and creative companies of Eastside can post anything they think is of interest to the others. And let’s say it’s a success. What benefit does it have to the bottom line? (I’m assuming that We Are Eastside got City Council support to increase the economic development of the area.)

Firstly there’s the obvious advantage of having businesses in the same sector connecting with each other, sharing resources and discussing them. This raises the intellectual capital and promotes collaboration and so on.

Secondly it demonstrates activity. People often say that walking around the Custard Factory complex you have no idea what’s happening in those offices and converted warehouses. This is a way of lifting the veil to all manner of people. Businesses looking to move to the area, customers looking for new suppliers, suppliers looking for new customers, people wondering what’s going on in the city.

Thirdly it’s a way of engaging with the audience on a level playing field. Remember Clusterflock’s Christopher Walken account which anyone in the world can use? Have a similar function where people who aren’t established on the scene can get involved. Sure, put in place moderation as required but set the tone yourselves first. Demonstrate what this space is for by using it in that way. Lead by example.

It’s never easy to throw a new form of communication onto an existing network, especially one as complex as a group of companies who happen to share a business classification and geographic location. The reason I picked We Are Eastside was because it’s a challenge and I’m not sure getting that bunch to run a group blog on top of everything else they’re doing is a reasonable request.

But it could also apply to a smaller group. Let’s say you’ve got 5 or 6 people in the office, a couple more on the road and a handful of freelancers. Would something like Clusterflock work for you?

I sublet a desk from Substrakt and have been keeping an eye on their company blog. As I understand it all of the team have to write for it as part of their job and what they write tends to be of a high quality. I can see why this post is a good thing – it shows them to be experts in their field and contributes to the developer community. Should this post become a valuable resource it will bring much Google traffic. But it’s very one way. It’d be interesting to read it as a discussion between Lee and Mark with space for others to get involved. Whether that would be as effective in promoting the company as the articles is debatable, mind you, but if you’re not in the position to produce a blog of the caliber of Substrakt then it’s something to consider.

“It’s all about the conversation” we say. And yet we build online platforms that look like this:

Source

forgetting the conversations tend to look more like this:

Photo credit

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If Ping, Apple’s new music social network, is a raging success then I’ll eat my hat. It might survive as a niche for those who live all their lives within the Apple ecosystem but I seriously doubt it’ll be adopted by a significant number of the 160 million iTunes users cited by Steve Jobs.

This isn’t because it’s a bad thing. It looks like a decent mix of Last.FM and Facebook neatly integrated into people’s music listening systems. The problem I’m seeing is that’s about it. It’s a functional thing that doesn’t appear to do much else.

Now, I’m aware that I’m judging this after playing with it for 30 seconds and that it took about 6 months for me to figure out what Twitter was for. But I now know what Twitter is for – it’s not for anything. Same with Facebook – ostensibly it’s to “connect and share with the people in your life” which is as vague as vague can be.

When a platform is for nothing in particular then it’s for everything you can think of. It seems to me that either your good at a niche activity or you’re good at integrating an abundance of niche activities. You can’t be both.

But all that aside this was the blast from the past that showed me Ping wasn’t there.

There are many ways this could work. At it’s most basic an integration into the OSX address book would be handy but that’s just a shortcut. More useful would be some kind of integration into Twitter or Facebook accounts, not to post annoying “@peteashton has just listened to Lady Gaga!” messages but to find out what my actual social network is listening to. These are the people I’ve built a relationship with and whose music tastes I don’t have access to. Smurshing these two datasets together would be awesome.

But no, Apple isn’t going to do that anytime soon. They need to own it all.

The approach to Ping is similar to Apple’s approach to Adobe Flash. They don’t like it because they don’t control it. Here’s Steve Jobs (quoted by John Gruber) from his notorious “Thoughts on Flash.”

We know from painful experience that letting a third party layer of software come between the platform and the developer ultimately results in sub-standard apps and hinders the enhancement and progress of the platform. If developers grow dependent on third party development libraries and tools, they can only take advantage of platform enhancements if and when the third party chooses to adopt the new features. We cannot be at the mercy of a third party deciding if and when they will make our enhancements available to our developers.

Let’s say Ping is integrated into Twitter and Facebook and some other social networks in a useful and interesting way. And then let’s say Twitter goes bankrupt or Facebook radically changes how it works without any warning. Ping is suddenly missing some seriously important vital organs and there’s nothing Apple can do about it. Twitter and Facebook don’t care what happens to Ping – only Apple does.

This might be a silly approach to building a social app in this era of interoperability but it fits with Apple’s culture. Either they can control it or they don’t want anything to do with it because if it breaks they’ll get the blame. (You can see this happen when Twitter flakes out and people blame Tweetdeck or some other 3rd party client for being rubbish instead of the source.)

I can sympathise with Apple’s position here. Latching on to Facebook or Twitter’s infrastructure is a risky proposition because they are closed platforms out of your control. If social networks were run on open standards then I’m sure Apple would be right in there just as they are with HTML5 over Flash. Their mantra is either we control it or no-one controls it and it’s a healthy attitude. Unfortunately the social Internet hasn’t matured to that state yet.

Back when I was reviewing and distributing zines and other self published paper objects I had a saying. Never think you have a handle on what’s going on or a sense of the scale of the “scene”. There’ll be huge seams of activity going on under your radar, in networks just a few degrees away from yours. The only reason you think you know it all is because you’ve stopped looking.

Stopping looking isn’t a crime. If you’re trying to actually do something drawing a line in your explorations is a good way to start. But if you’re in the business of media in the current era when anyone can create a media platform in seconds you should always be aware of your limitations.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot over the last year. When Twitter first broke out in the UK I could have confidently told you how it was being used because I was part of the relatively small community that was using it. As Twitter adoption grew my knowledge changed. I could no longer tell you how people were using it because the number of uses were becoming huge. All I could do was help you understand the nature of the Twitter model.

It’s probably best to think of engagement through Twitter in terms of slices. I give Twitter some variables (these are the people I want to follow / this is the search query I have) and, after adding some more variables (these are the people who have mentioned you) it returns a slice of Twitter based on who’s posted recently. This slice is pretty much unique to me. The connection is has with other people’s slices is merely how much it overlaps (mutual followers, etc) and these connections will shift and change over time.

Watching people I feel I know well use Twitter can be fascinating. Because their slice is different their whole perception of Twitter is different to mine, sometimes subtly, sometimes drastically. I don’t want to play down the importance of the overlaps – they are the glue thats makes Twitter work – but I think the differences are often under-appreciated by those who celebrate the power Twitter has to bring people together. It’s these these effectively infinite differences between the slices that enable messages, ideas and links to thinks to spread across the network so quickly and effectively.

The other great thing about the Twitter model is it’s a good way of understanding how the Internet works. One of the great early works about the Internet was David Weinberger‘s book Small Pieces Loosely Joined. It’s a very seductive phrase and one that I’ve returned to again and again over the last decade as it seems to be the fundamental difference between old media and new. But it also seems to me to be an accurate reflection on how society works.

In other words, what we’re seeing as a digital phenomena is more like the normal way of things. When Weinberger says in his introduction:

Then we go on the Web, and the pieces are so loosely joined that frequently the links don’t work. [...] But, that’s ok because the Web gets its value not from the smoothness of its overall operation but from its abundance of small nuggets that point to more small nuggets. And, most important, the Web is binding not just pages but us human beings in new ways. We are the true “small pieces” of the Web, and we are loosely joining ourselves in ways that we’re still inventing.

I’d say yes, that’s true, but what’s also happening is we’re rediscovering the power of that loose joining that our great-grandparents knew well.

Maybe.

I don’t know. I wasn’t there. But it makes sense to me. Big media is only 3 or 4 generations old and something must have held society together before then.

My motivation for writing this post came from a couple of posts. The first by hyperlocal guru Will Perrin about the Shott review of economics of Local Television where he argues “For me the overarching question is why do local video programming on TV rather than the internet? The internet does almost everything that small audience local TV can do but far cheaper and more flexibly.”

The second is a followup from social media for social good hero Nick Booth where he asks his network What would you show from Birmingham to demonstrate how the web can do local better than local tv? Now, I think I know what Nick’s trying to do here but I think he’s falling into the trap that appears whenever this sort of thing is discussed. It is very hard, if not impossible, to do x=y comparisons between big media models and the way the social internet operates.

He asks “if he were to come to Birmingham who could [Secretary of State] Jeremy Hunt meet and what locally grown bottom up Big Society media goodness could we show him to help demonstrate an alternative beyond Local TV?”

The implication being that what we have in Birmingham is a viable alternative in scope and reach to that put out by a local television station. And, as Dave Harte points out in the comments, it doesn’t quite measure up.

Overall, I can’t help feeling that even with all the sites mentioned there isn’t really much here that yet adds up to a viable local media scene.

No, it doesn’t. And that’s not to detract from any of the efforts out there because, with some exceptions, I don’t think they’re trying to be part of a vibrant local media scene. Either their not capable or they’re not interested or they have another agenda for doing what they do.

But there’s a more fundamental point. These sites Nick rolls out are, I think, aberrations. While they might be distinct from big media models they still share more with them than we might like to admit. If we’re talking about a media landscape it’s a bit like Houston (where my Dad used to live and which I’ve visited a few times).

This is Downtown Houston.

It’s about a mile across and contains lots of big tall buildings. It’s the skyline that Houston is known by.

pic by telwink

But Houston as a whole doesn’t look like that. I picked Houston because when I visited it I was struck be how spread out everything is. Land is relatively cheap in Houston and the motor car rules so the city sprawls in a way that boggles the mind of this walk-everywhere Brit. Here’s Houston as a whole with the Downtown bit marked in red.

And from the side:

pic by Jason McELweenie

This idea of a effectively infinite space housing a sprawl of relatively small buildings is what I perceive Birmingham’s local online media scene to be like. Sure, there are some striking things in the middle there which many people will point to as a shortcut, and yes they are impressive and important, but they do not and cannot and should not represent the whole.

The problem for the policy makers is they’re thinking in terms of things they can get their heads around, things that fit into the old models of doing things. There’s this attitude that because a model worked well in the past it’ll work well in the future and so we see bizarre projects like this Local TV thing (something which I’ve only ever seen supported by grey haired people who used to work in local TV back when it was a commercially viable model).

And so the danger for those who are trying to talk to policy makers is falling into the trap of comparing the old and the new within the framework of the old, to give the impression that these new things can fill the gap perceived to be left by the withering old things.

As Jon Bounds said last Spring after talking to a reporter about the decline of local newspapers:

He wanted to talk about whether blogging would “fill the gap” that a demise of local papers would create and kept trying to get us to say that we were waiting and wanting to do it commercially. We’re not. We said so a number of times. In my opinion it would be stupid, we’re already filling gaps and have been for years — the hole that “papers” currently fill isn’t a shape that blogging can be forced into (and papers themselves don’t fill the hole anyway).

There’s a tendency to see the shifts in the media landscape as a fragmentation of what was dominant into lots of smaller pieces. While I like the “smaller pieces” bit I do think the term “fragmentation” is a little misleading. It’s not that services provided by larger media outfits have been devolved – it’s more that the needs that those services were developed to fulfill are being serviced by something else entirely.

And, I would argue, that something will not be easy to identify as an entity. It’s a toolset, sure, and literacy in frictionless sharing environments like Twitter and Facebook are important, but it’s also an attitude, an understanding that this isn’t about using media in a broadcast way. It’s about using media without realising you’re using media.

I’ve been thinking for a while now that people like me make for the worst examples of social media usage. The early adopters and power users are too self-aware, too knowing in what they do online. Dubber calls Twitter “performance conversation” and I’ve been told off for playing games with my followers by posting provocative stuff for kicks. We’re the sort of people who are supposed to be pushing and tickling this stuff to see how it works. Everyone else is just using it, and that makes them a lot more interesting.

I think the examples Nick and his commenters gave are good and important things that are doing important work. I would not want to take anything away from what they’ve achieved. But I do not think presenting stuff like Created in Birmingham and The Stirrer as replicating the services of monolithic media outlets is doing anyone any favours because it’s too easy to say they’re not without addressing the real phenomena. That these online things are the anomalies in a rich tapestry of stuff, most of which which is too small or to temporary to get a handle on.

No-one should try and predict the future but in order to better define the present I’ll have a go. I think things online are going to get more atomised. We’re going to see smaller pieces reaching smaller audiences over smaller periods of time. I think concepts like hyperlocal will be seen as transitional stages between the big and the small where the small is effectively the personal. And I think we’ll see the importance of identity diminish as reputation is spread across networks and becomes a more fluid thing.

(As an aside I think Tumblr is a fascinating example of this and something I want to study in more depth)

In short I think the future of online media looks a lot like soup. There will be carrots and they will be important but on the whole it’ll be a murky and opaque and very hard to perceive as anything other than a whole.

And I think this will be a good thing.

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A couple of recent examples of large institutions letting their PR mask slip.

Paperchase

Nancy Smallwood complains about sexist promotional material in the shop window and is replied to by the Marketing Director of the company, Robert Warden, in a manner which Nancy describes as “patronizing, rude [and] unprofessional”.

Without getting into the debate itself (which, as Nancy says in an update to her post, isn’t what she’s really upset about), or taking sides on who’s right or wrong here I must say I found the exchange quite refreshing.

We’re used to corporations either hiding behind faux-apologetic customer-is-always-right lies or heavy handed legal speak so to have someone high up in the company stand up and say “I have sufficient faith in what my team is doing that I will shout you down” comes as a bit of a shock.

Yes, his manner is obnoxious and no, I wouldn’t advise anyone to address their customers like this but I think we should be celebrating that this discussion is happening in an unmediated, human-voiced way.

National Theatre

The other day some Evening Standard hack quoted Steve Norris saying nasty things about the National Theatre. “I think the National Theatre should have a Compulsory Demolition Order!” he japed. In response to which whoever was controlling their Twitter account posted:

The subsequent panic is nicely documented by Megan Vaughan but in short they deleted the tweet (logical) and claimed they’d been hacked (laughably absurd).

Was the tweet malicious? Was it a private message accidentally broadcast? We’ll never know. But what we do know is that people who work at the National Theatre feel passionately about their building and the work that goes on inside it. Unfortunately the institution cannot publicly defend itself against attacks from those who might control its funding. Slips like this give us a peek behind the curtain.

Conclusion

Every so often I come across the question of how large companies and institutions can use the social internet. The answer usually boils down to the nature of that organisation. How do they communicate internally and with their customers? Is that communication controlled by the PR department or are people free to speak their minds?

Being one of those annoying free spirits who can say what he wants online I tend towards the opinion that companies should let their people speak their minds (within reason, obviously). If you have enough faith in your offer or product and have employed staff who give a damn and are empowered to make adult decisions then what have you got to loose?

But I also accept that this utopian ideal doesn’t play in the world of corporate PR, which is why I don’t tend to work in that area. (If you need advice in that department my better half runs the blogs for Grant Thornton.)

It’s an interesting phenomena though. As people at the higher levels of companies get more comfortable with communicating through social channels we can expect more unmediated utterances, and as bloops on Twitter become mundane and outrage passe we can expect to see the leash loosened on those corporate tweeters and Facebookers. I’m looking forward to it.

Hey, it’s one of those posts where Pete starts of wanting to make a quick point, gets bogged down in the details and then struggles to come to a snappy conclusion! Enjoy!

Okay, here’s the tweet I was expecting to see.

Not picking on Digital Maverick as I’m sure the sentiment is being echoed all over. Here’s another which echoes the disquiet people in the West Mids have felt having seen it emerge from our patch.

If you’ve somehow missed it, or are reading this in the future when it’s all been forgotten, a lady threw a cat in a bin, was caught on CCTV which was put online and is currently under police protection as the world goes mad. It’s a nice little perfect media storm as on the one hand it’s really quite odd and on the other it’s really not very odd at all. You can be outraged while also understanding how to be outraged.

(BBC News | Boing Boing)

What I don’t want to do is address the rights and wrongs on throwing cats into bins or posting cctv video online or any of that. What I do want to address is the unease people are rightly feeling at the role social networks and online environments have played in the identification and hounding of this woman.

As with all things to do with The Internet it’s more complicated than you’d like to think, although the world is more complicated than most people would like to think which explains the Daily Mail, but I digress. There’s a reason people like me show pictures like this when we’re talking about the social internet.

It’s to drive home the point that when everyone is potentially connected to everyone else things get very complex indeed. So whenever you think of some simple explanation for why something happened because of the Internet picture that image in you head.

The same applies when someone tells you they can guarantee amazing results using “the power of social media” or some rubbish. They can’t. All they can do is amplify what’s already there by applying tools and strategies in intelligent ways. How successful these are depends on the people in the network and people, if you hadn’t figured it out yet, are complicated and weird.

So you’ve got a complex system connecting complex individuals in a complex world. But there’s more.

One thing we know the social Internet does well is help to amplify human activity. If you’re part of a matured network, whatever platforms it exists on (Twitter and Facebook are just dominant aspects of social activity), information will spread across it much faster than it would have 10 years ago. And since the networks are predominantly bonded through conversation a byproduct of this information is action which in turn is accelerated.

For those who’ve been working with this stuff for a year or more this isn’t news. But the way it’s been communicated has been generally positive. Social Media will help bond communities, boost news dissemination and generally make the world a better place. And, despite my tendency towards misanthropic pessimism I would agree that online social tools can make the world better. People tend to do good things. This is how we’ve developed this thing called society.

But, of course, people also do bad things. And, because good and bad are subject to interpretation and such, people who do bad things often think they’re doing good things. And, of course, some people are just dumb. This also explains the Daily Mail and countless other things that big media exploit and serve, but again I digress.

I’m rambling. In case you’ve forgotten what we’re talking about, here’s a picture.

So, my point. Let’s break it down.

People are complex creatures who work together to achieve mutual goals.

The Internet is a complex system which amplifies human communication and activity.

While the medium does affect and inform the content of the message and the manner in which it is processed (cf anonymity on 4chan) the starting point or source is people. The online/offline difference in environment is analogous to the difference between meeting in a lunchtime cafe or a Friday night bar.

In short, then, social media doesn’t hunt down and demonise people but when people hunt down and demonise people using social media it’s a lot quicker and louder.

The good thing is this sort of phenomena doesn’t happen that often, or at least no on this sort of scale. This was a perfect storm that hit all the right buttons. I mean, the message was communicated via the template of a funny cat video and everyone knows what to do with a funny cat video.

But if you’re of the opinion that “social media” is exclusively a tool for positive, constructive action then you’re going to be horribly, brutally disappointed because we’re talking about people.