Monthly Archives: December 2008

Old Media: Rumors of My Demise Have Been Greatly Exaggerated

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I pay far more attention to traditional media than I ever have. I went to the movies twice over the holidays, and watched a bunch more at home. I thought by now I’d be writing blog posts about the demise of print, but I read more books last year than I did in the 5 years preceding it. And, speaking of books, am I not supposed to have a Kindle by now? (I don’t).

It really crystallized for me the other day when, in a casual conversation with a coworker, I realized I discover an inordinate amount of new music in TV shows, commercials and movies. Six Feet Under may not have put Coldplay on the map (though they did play it relentlessly during its spectacular run), but it put Sia squarely on mine with her epic song “Breathe Me” in the series finale. I spent the entire month of June listening to nothing but Feist after Apple featured the hopelessly irresistible “1 2 3 4” in an iPod commercial. A Toyota commercial literally stopped me in my popcorn-fetching tracks with Pete Droge’s “Going Whichever Way the Wind Blows.” Cadillac introduced me to Black Iris Music, a band that creates music specifically for television commercials. This certainly isn’t your father’s Oldsmobile Cadillac.

After the conversation I checked out my iTunes playlists. Pete Droge? Check. Feist? Duh! Sia? Give me all of it. Even Black Iris Music is in there. Then I took a look at my desk and the area surrounding it. I found an iPhone, an iMac, and a Starbucks mug. I drive a Volkswagen, but have a Prius brochure on my coffee table. Death of old media, pffft.

New rules about old media:

1. Old media is a great way to infuse content into new media;
2. Old school marketers aren’t nearly as dumb as everyone in new media makes them out to be

I spent some time thinking about how it got to be this way, and usage patterns around new and old media. I realized that I control pretty much everything that happens to me. So do you. Whether you laud it a seminal moment in perpetual innovation or curse it the scourge of our cold, isolated modern culture, technology has made it possible for individuals to almost completely direct how they interact with the world. Tivo, various RSS readers, TweetBeep, Digg, Google Alerts – those are my tools. In fact, I filter almost every morsel of media I ingest.

Interest-specific communities and popular social media destinations ensure I select not only the toys I want to play with, but the sandboxes where I play with them. My iPhone lets me play what I want, where I want, whenever I want – fast. This partly explains why I literally did not know anyone, as in NOT ONE SINGLE PERSON (outside of my immediate family), that was not voting for Obama last Fall; technology has allowed me to find people who are a lot like me, and ignore the ones who aren’t (I’m an avid defriender).

It is sobering to think the technologies that were supposed to bring us all together actually further silo people, winnowing diverse physical communities into homogenous digital marketing selects. I suppose it shouldn’t be as jarring to me as it is – people still choose their friends based on commonalities in the real world, but it doesn’t feel right. It’s not that I don’t like my ivory tower, it’s just that it’s drafty.

How much do you charge?

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Mafia crime family structure tree
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I’ve been knocking around Social Media Mafia for just over a year – from the third media camp at Bucks New University.  Since then I have attended the fourth camp, also at BNU, and the fifth and sixth, now called MediaCampLondon, which were held at SAE’s premises in London.

As a work psychologist, I am a bit of an oddball amongst geeks and marketers.  I come from a world of large corporations where we need systems to coordinate with each other.  Imagine, for example, a large organization without a pay system.  I would compare my pay with you and 10 000 others, as you would, and as they would, making 10000 x 9999 x 9998 . . . . etc., etc. comparisons.  We need streamlined systems just to reduce the clutter of organizational life.

In small firms, like a psychology consultanncy, or a social media consultancy, we use similar systems for speed and agility.  It matters whether we can answer fluently and concisely when a client asks us a question.  It matters whether I understand what you do, and don’t do, and whether I can form a team with you quickly, overnight literally.   It matters that I have streamlined my office to offer some services and not others. If I am trying to do jobs with a 24 hour turn around and a year turnaround at the same time, the rhythms will clash and nominal profits will evaporate in confusion.

There has been some chatter on Twitter about templates for writing out marketing proposals.  Just before Christmas, Chris Heuer announced Adhocnium, a social media agency which describes typical assignments that are commissioned by clients.  He has even added typical prices.

My offer to you

Here’s my offer to you.  I’ve spent years writing out work processes, job descriptions, role specifications, pay levels and so on, for large corporates.  It is not particularly complicated for me.

  • If you want to develop a list of assignments that you’v done, like the list on Adhocnium, and you want a sounding board to help you do it, I am happy to work with you over Skype.  Just drop me a DM on Twitter @jobucks.
  • If you have gone past this stage already and you are trying to structure the roles for various team members for these assignments, or just get the roles into words, I am happy to help in the same way.
  • And finally, if you are verbalizing your special niche in the social media space, again, I am happy to be a sounding board.

In return, you can pay forward with whatever is your expertise to someone else in SMM.

My dream is that by the end of 2009, more social media consultants are able to articulate publically

  • What they do for clients
  • What a typical assignment looks like
  • What clients should look out for when they buy
  • Who else is selling and whom your clients should consider
  • How much a typical assigment costs and what determines the range of a price.

Here’s to a forward-looking and increasing prosperous 2009!

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Liberation technology?

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E-learning specialist, Donald Taylor today expressed his doubt that 2.0 contributes anything different, better, or durable.

Often my comments on other people’s blogs are better than my original posts.  Such is testimony to the value of the two-way web.  Here’s my attempt to explain what social media offers.

“The best way to think about 2.0 is like the telephone – our lives are extended into a virtual world.  We have bigger lives that also become easier and faster.

And the opposite applies too.  The virtual world extends back into what is called inelegantly, the meatspace world, and changes it.

So just as the telephone allows a relatively poor person to summon an ambulance as easily as a rich person, easier access to connections changes the structure of a community.”

I think that pretty much covers it?

Now we need to add some examples that show the social change that is happening.

Communities: Opiate for the Masses?

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If you haven’t monitored the controversy surrounding Motrin’s recent web advertisement, which may, or may not be the handiwork of bored creatives at J&J, you may want to take a look here.

Transcript:

Wearing your baby seems to be in fashion. I mean, in theory it’s a great idea. There’s the front baby carrier, sling, schwing, wrap, pouch. And who knows what else they’ve come up with. Wear your baby on your side, your front, go hands free. Supposedly, it’s a real bonding experience. They say that babies carried close to the body tend to cry less than others. But what about me? Do moms that wear their babies cry more than those who don’t. I sure do! These things put a ton of strain on your back, your neck, your shoulders. Did I mention your back? I mean, I’ll put up with the pain because it’s a good kind of pain; it’s for my kid. Plus, it totally makes me look like an official mom. And so if I look tired and crazy, people will understand why.

The commercial was launched in conjunction with International Babywearing Week. Immediately, it received substantial backlash. Hours after launch, there were hundreds of tweets complaining about it. Mommy bloggers were so enraged they formed a Facebook group calling for a Motrin boycott. J&J, no stranger to monitoring social media for brand commentary, responded quickly. The commercial was pulled, and J&J VP Kathy Widmer, (who is a mother of three) issued apologies to several bloggers and twitter users:

“I am the Vice President of Marketing for McNeil Consumer Healthcare. I have responsibility for the Motrin Brand, and am responding to concerns about recent advertising on our website. I am, myself, a mom of 3 daughters.

We certainly did not mean to offend moms through our advertising. Instead, we had intended to demonstrate genuine sympathy and appreciation for all that parents do for their babies. We believe deeply that moms know best and we sincerely apologize for disappointing you. Please know that we take your feedback seriously and will take swift action with regard to this ad. We are in process of removing it from our website. It will take longer, unfortunately, for it to be removed from magazine print as it is currently on newstands and in distribution.”

Obviously, the case study is an exceptional example of the power social media has to amplify the voices of the collected few to affect the behavior of a multinational corporation. Looking a little deeper, however, and some other interesting nuggets reveal themselves: a few women whose outrage runs probably a bit too deep, a few men who appear to be using the issue as an excuse to wax poetic about the ills of political correctness or show some overt sexism. In the middle, however, is an encouraging majority – people who think an otherwise savvy marketing group at Motrin (the name J&J has been pretty much synonymous with moms and babies for decades) went a bit too far and that everyone who is unduly outraged should probably lighten up a little bit.

It seems like the early days of the Internet were dominated by extremists. New media is leveling the playing field, weighting voices and empowering the reasonable majority. And (hopefully) turning down the volume on the crazies. While the extremists on either side will never be pacified (not to mention silent), the groundswell of activity in the middle seems to be assuaging people on the fringe, making me wonder, can social media tools be used to help people pacify one another? If so, what is the brand’s role in tinkering with those tools to bring people together – not just to buy goods and services, but to actually help people get along better in the face of controversy?

Thoughts?

MediaCampLondon 2: MCL2 Open and Educative

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Open and educative events make me happy in a warm inside fluffy kind of way, I like little better than seeing and hearing people are learning, it’s always been that way, I observe, I monitor and cherish seeing pennies drop.

I’ve been wrapped in an academic cloth for literally years and years and I often wonder where it came from, perhaps watching and listening to mum play piano in Sunday school, or witnessing Dad captaining the rugby team and barking instructions on a Saturday afternoon to a gang of marauders in order to achieve a desired outcome (win), makes little difference where the root of the edu tree stems from it’s planted it’s there.

For me education is a way of life, both personally and professionaly, and I feel strongly about anything which prevents that taking place what ever the platform. Maybe this is one of the reasons I am passionate about our MediaCamps, our strong brand of edu related events where in most cases people gain significant value from. What amazes me about these events more than anything else is the wide-ranging diversity of people that descend to these occasions, there always seems to be an abundance of people who really do have a thirst to learn.

I also actively encourage new migrations, boundaries to be broken, niches to be to burnt, moulds to be morphed, essentially through disparity we all gain in viewing an additional frame of reference. I am committed 100% to keeping that openness and clan melt-down in place. Some of you might know one of my greatest fears is that of Ideological Amplification, but well, I’ve never been a football supporter so, fandom and nerdy evangelising is not ever going to sit well with me. No, what turns me on is people breaking their shackles and learning to walk alone, learning to learn, and more importantly, being able to critically anaylise, critique, and dig into the nuts and bolts of the important aspects of whatever is up for discussion.

The heart of the Roman Empire was The Forum, and yet here we are again in danger of forgetting about whose shoulders we stand on, just about every form of communication that takes place using the Internet can be explained with an academic paper already written and slotted into an ology or ism, so I urge you to continue to think wide and hard, and jump off the “pop bus” now and then and take a look around.

The most recent event (MediaCampLondon number 2 or MCL2) was a shining example of this methodology and I would like to extend my gratitude to SAE Institute London, for sponsoring the event and I also wish to thank everyone that helped on the day, and you know who you are and what you did, I won’t gush here as that’s just too So.Me. but do leave a trace in the comments below so people know who you are eh?

This is the Social Media Mafia, but don’t let the title fool you into thinking we are tribal of nature and singularly self-promotional, we are more like a social virus permeating a place near you soon with tentacles reaching into places that might surprise you.

Might you come along to another event if you can, or run one yourself? – do leave your digital footprint.

Connect-ing social networks to the rest of web: Who owns those data?

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As the web grows exponentially in scale and complexity, an issue that becomes increasingly pressing is data ownership. There has been a lot of noise lately about how Facebook Connect, Google Friend Connect, and even MySpace’s Data Availability.

Each does essentially the same thing: allow a flow of data between those social networks and external sites. This accomplishes three major things:

  • it allows you to login to external sites with your existing I.D
  • your third-party activities can be relayed back to the network (think FB news feed)
  • it gives those external sites a more social, web 2.0-y aspect (buying something? what do your friends think? your neighbors?)

While I think each of these are good ideas, I think that the first two already exist, but have been largely ignored by the masses. The third is totally brilliant and game-changing and I can’t wait to see it fully implemented. More on that later.

OpenID has been, well, open for a while now: open to any developer who wants to add the feature, thus opening those sites up to anyone who has an OpenID. Google has already been providing OpenID support via Blogger for some time. Facebook has also tackled the activity stream problem. Twice, actually. Once, with Beacon, the invasive little advertising ploy which got nothing but bad press. And now, more succesfully, with the ability to import certain feeds (delicious, pandora, flickr, pure rss, etc.) into your news feed. Neither has done particularly well.

These previous attempts I think make obvious that these “connect” campaigns represent two things: firstly, Google’s and Facebook’s desires to rule the world (JK, well, maybe) and, secondly, a centralization and simplification of the issue of online identity.

The issue, however, goes far deeper than letting your friends know just how many hours you spent fooling around on ICHC. The real issue is: who owns that data. Is it you, the creator? The external site, the service provider? The social network, the facilitator? Or, does it fall between the gaps and is just open to the network and whatever Estonion crackers happen to be drifting by?

The significance of this came to my mind when Robert Scoble scraped his social graph off of Facebook to add to another site and had his account disabled for violating the Terms Of Use.

Excuse me? A site which allows me to import my email contact last and establish my network and communicate freely with those people doesn’t allow me to take those connections with me? It seems completely unreasonable but, has become the legal standard practice for the social network industry. Now, Facebook eventually let Scoble back on and networks like Plaxo now specialize in such import/export features, but the flaw has hardly been resolved.

The Data Portability Project is trying very, very hard to solve these serious issues. They’re seeking to unite the socio-rhetorico-legal precedent with the growing list of open technologies and specifications (OpenID, OAuth, RSS, OPML, MicroFormats, Creative Commons, to name a few) and make sure that these proprietary bits, bytes, friends, enemies, birthdays, activies, pictures, videos, lifestyles, etc. are made open to the content creators (read: YOU, not Mark Zuckerberg).

They’ve got a lot of information on their site, links out to their open, interoperable technology homies, and ways for users, developers, and entrepreneurs to get involved. Please do!

I’m also a big fan of The Social Web TV, a weekly-esque vodcast featuring John McCrea and Joseph Smarr from Plaxo, David Recordon from SixApart, Chris Messina aka Factory Joe, as well as new panelists almost every episode. They’re really dorky, sweet guys, with a real passion for the cause. Their most recent episode, comparing Facebook Connect with OpenID, touches on a lot of these issues.

If you hadn’t noticed, this is a cause quite close to my heart. Anything you can do to help, either by implementing these open technologies on your own site, showing this post some linklove, or even just adding the DPP to your Facebook Causes: it will all be appreciated.

This post is entirely speculative. I’m very excited about these new connections (McCrea thinks this is the “birth of the social web”) but am also worried that the desire for growth and monetization will cloud developers’ minds from what ought to be obvious facts about the nature of the ‘net. Social networking only works because it is empowering; no one would tweet or poke or post if it made them feel as though they were dispossessed.

So, social networks, here is a message: run your ads, reach 6 billion eyeballs, do what you need to do. But your work, your content, ends there. The rest of it belongs to us, the users, the creators.

As always, digg this up, check out my website, follow me on twitter, leave comments below, and fight on.

Social Media and Politics, and the New Coalition in Canada

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Here are the slides from a talk I gave on Dec. 1 at the Schulich School of Business in a session held for practicing marketers.

What I found most interesting from the discussion that ensued afterward was the suggestion that vote monitoring tactics observed during the U.S. Presidential election could be duplicated here, specifically for the proposed vote-swap.

The concept behind it was that all of the other parties would work together to ensure they all got as many seats as possible.  Ridings where the race was close were identified, and participants were matched with a person in a different riding where a vote for the other party was needed.

The success of this strategy was limited because participants were often skeptical that their counterpart from a different party would actually follow through.  Providing proof via cell phone photo might get us past that hurdle.

Although a new election has been averted for now, we might have an opportunity to see this in action sooner rather than later.

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Social Media strategist, New Media Publisher and Web Provocateur

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Expathos

G’day readers of Social Media Mafia.

I look forward to sharing some new tales and old with you on my experiences as a web guy from this side of the pond – on the continent – as well as reading about yours.

I am a Canadian expatriate based in Groningen in the northern Netherlands where I ‘work’ – mainly remotely – with a number of startups and clients globally, utilizing social media and community to add Web 2.0 to their projects and businesses.

My background is in the print media and I have worked in far flung locales from the Arctic to the Caribbean as a reporter, editor and publisher of ‘old school’ paper products before making the jump to digital in 1997, when I formed my first community online in the Dutch West Indies.

Though I have worn a few different hats in my days…

I now operate a very small company and consultancy here in Holland with my wife and we do quite a few different things, many pro bono and personal and others for pay.

PRO BONO – We are active politically as progressives – and like to think we are part of facilitating change and disseminating new ideas with a group of sites at the Free Press Group – which has over 300 progressive and like-minded writers from around the world (20% hold PhD’s) who contribute in an Open Source Journalism format. We swap coverage on Google News (we are three of 4000 official Google News sources in English) for copy. They get fresh eyeballs and we get material – it’s a great barter. And I get the chance to write myself as well as create political Photoshops for the sites. We also host several of them at www.safehost.nl.

And despite losing money (hosting bills etc.) over the years, the connections I have made with many brilliant writers has brought an immense amount of satisfaction personally – as well as added professionally to my personal brand – at Linkedin for instance – where I have had several writers offer their recommendation.

More recently, I have been involved in a couple of web campaigns that rocked the boat for two corporate entities… Continue reading →

Liferay Social Office – Using Open Source Enterprise Collaboration Software in Business

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We are about to test Liferay Social Office interally here at Moho in Groningen.

Link here – http://ww.liferay.com/web/guest/products/social_office/features

This Open Source software almost meets all the parameters I was looking for and I am sure will streamline internal tasking, collaboration and build more ‘teamness’ at the company.

But the biggest hurdle in implementing new software such as this is convincing people to use it. Some basic training is required to make people comfortable using it, and if people don’t feel comfortable with the software, they simply won’t use it. Employees should be given incentives to contribute and the rewards could be either financial or psychological.

Shifting a corporate culture from being competitive to being cooperative is no small undertaking but the staff is young here and more easily adaptable than Gen X’ers like me – and if the software used (built internally or from and outside vendor) has well-built, intuitive and intelligent architecture, the learning curve should not be that steep.

My original synopsis on needs:

The new collaborative work/communication/tasking product(s) should allow management (and staff in certain cases) to:

1. …assign track-able tasks to individual and/or groups of staff and define what is urgent. Include management and staff alerts by email and Gizmo (see #3). The idea is for management to better plan their tasks and duties, that of staff, as well as projects and, most importantly, track the progress. Management needs to see what the team is doing and what they need to do, discuss stuff that they are working on and generally have a firm grip on what is going on and what needs to go on. In my opinion, the current system of email alone is not a very good tool to manage projects and tasks in the company. Especially with current projected and anticipated growth. Continue reading →