Social tools help improve business communications, increase collaboration and nurture innovation, but what do you do if people won't use them? And how do you grow from a pilot to company-wide use?
The Email Problem and How To Solve It
3 Sept 08
Email is becoming a problem, with people sending and receiving hundreds each day. 'No Email Days' don't help, nor do inbox size limits. So just how do you reduce email and improve people's relationship with their inbox?
Suw Charman-Anderson is a social software consultant and writer who specialises in the use of blogs and wikis behind the firewall. With a background in journalism, publishing and web design, Suw is now one of the UK's best known bloggers, frequently speaking at conferences and seminars.
She recently launched Kits and Mortar, a blog about planning a green, cat-friendly self-built home. Her personal blog is Chocolate and Vodka, and yes, she's married to Kevin.
Kevin Anderson has been an online journalist since 1996, designing, editing and writing websites for both broadcast and print media. In 1998, he joined the BBC and became their first online journalist based outside of the UK, covering the US for its award winning news website. After coming to the UK in 2005, he developed a blogging strategy for BBC news, helped launch a programme on the BBC's 5Live covering weblogs and podcasts and was on the team that launched the interactive radio programme World Have Your Say on the BBC World Service.
Kevin is now the Blogs Editor for The Guardian, where he is responsible for management, strategy and 'leading by doing' for Guardian Unlimited blogs.
Andy Dickinson has posted this thought-provoking illustration on his blog. To sum up the illustration: The community feels used. The audience feels ignored, but the journalist? "I got what I needed." Andy promises more thoughts soon, but the post alone is a great beginning for a conversation.
Maybe the problem isn't about creating citizen journalists but re-awakening the citizen in journalists? Steve Yelvington has often mused that possibly one the unintended consequences of the professionalisation of journalism is that we've become isolated from the communities that we serve. Put succinctly, he said:
Arrogance is the cancer of professional journalism, and we need to stop it.
A few years ago, colleagues asked me why bloggers responded to my interview requests when they had trouble getting a response. The problem was, they were often sending out form e-mail interview requests and treating bloggers, usually ordinary people, as if they were members of government or industry spokespeople. I usually started my search for a blogger through a blog search engine like Technorati. When I found a relevant post, I would quote the post and ask them if they wanted to join a discussion about the topic they had blogged about.
I also use Creative Commons licenced pictures in Guardian blog posts (Attribution licence that allows for commercial use). Unless, I'm really pressed for time, I send the Flickr user a short note and a link. They always thank me for being a good member of the community, and the sometimes even blog about the post. I've acted in good faith, and they have reciprocated by flagging up their photo on a Guardian post. We can be good members of both virtual and real world communities, and I think it's one of the things that can rebuild journalists' relationship with the people formerly known as the audience. Becoming better citizen journalists might just save professional journalism.
As I’ve mentioned before, National Public Radio’s (US) On the Media is part of my weekly podcast diet. It was an interesting look at three different views on internet comments on articles and radio programmes. Host Bob Garfield interviewed This American Life's Ira Glass, 'professional writer and critic' Lee Siegel and Roanoke Times editor Carole Tarrant. It spawned a round of very interesting blog posts and comments - Comments on comments on comments, as Jeff Jarvis put it. It soon spilled out onto Twitter from with an interesting discussion between Jay Rosen and Kevin Marks.
But I’ve argued that we’re looking at commenting the wrong way. We spend so much of our time playing wack-a-mole with the dirty little creatures who dig up the garden that we miss the fruits and flowers. It is far more productive to curate the good people and good comments — whether they occur under an article or, better yet, via links — than it is to obsessively try to clean up life, which can’t help but be messy.
The tsk-tskers treat the web as if it is a media property and they judge it by its worst: Look what that nasty web is doing to our civilization! But, of course, that’s as silly as judging publishing by the worst of what is published.
And I have to agree with Jeff that it’s a bit rich for Gawker to be arguing against comments on newspaper sites. On the Media linked to the post, and Gawker sounds like many in the newspaper industry who pine for a simpler time when newspapers enjoyed a near monopoly when it came to people’s time and attention. Channeling their inner newspaper nostalgist, Gawker says:
Newspapers have more important things to do than worry about comments—like, say, report the stories that blogs so desperately need in their 24-7 quest for content! After all, blogs are often not equipped to regularly break the news, and we need content to chew on.
Of course, comments are OK on Gawker because they're a blog, they argue. Might the mighty Gawker be a suffering a crisis in ComScore with all the competition?
Of the three points of view, I almost said Amen out loud as I travelled on the Tube when Roanoke Times editor Carole Tarrant said, that she was surprised that newspaper are still having this conversation.
It's not the Wild West. I don't believe in putting comments on every story. ... I thought we had this (conversation) in 2002, and papers are getting in this conversation and acting surprised that there is this ugliness out there.
She then goes on and lays out a considered approach to comments and communities online. After the Virginia Tech shooting, they originally put up their standard message board. They took it down when it devolved into a loud discussion about gun rights and replaced it with a tribute site from Legacy.com (in the interest of disclosure, a good friend of mine works for Legacy), a site that powers the obituaries of several newspaper sites. The message boards are moderated by Legacy.com, and she said that the tribute site is still active.
Derek Powazek also wrote an excellent post criticising the On the Media segment. The main problem he saw with the piece was that Bob Garfield "lumps all commenters, and commenting systems, together. On the web, not all comments are created equal". He says:
Yes, if you open your site to comments from people who do not have to register or create an account, you’ll get a lot of unfiltered craziness. That’s because you’re not doing your job as a host. Imagine a newspaper of infinite pages with no editors where anyone with a keyboard could contribute. Sounds fun to me, but not a recipe for consistent thoughtfulness. ...
The story completely missed moderation queues, reputation management systems, or any of the hundreds of comment systems built over the last decade to address this very problem.
I'm with Derek. The media never focus on positive communities online, but it's not just the media's coverage of online communities that needs to improve. Most online communities hosted by media companies could use some improvement, but as Derek points out, there are tools and a lot of experience out there. Unfortunately, most of it is either outside of media organisations or was lost when digital departments at news organisations were gutted after the dot.com crash.
Some of the solution to improving online communities and conversations on websites is using the best technology, but there are also content and culture issues to be aware of. Kevin Marks shares wisdom and lessons learned about online spaces. For people who are part of internet culture, some of this is well known, but it's not common knowledge in media companies. (I'm fortunate to work with one of the best in the business, Meg Pickard, our head of communities at the Guardian.) Kevin highlights some great work done in terms of online communities and some common traits of those communities that don't work:
The communities that fail, whether dying out from apathy or being overwhelmed by noise, are the ones that don't have someone there cherishing the conversation, setting the tone, creating a space to speak, and rapidly segregating those intent on damage.
News websites were never a 'build it and they will come' proposition, especially in today's distributed world, and in the rush to build communities so that they will come, news oganisations are building the spaces but sometimes not preparing for when people come. Get enough people together online or offline, and not all of the experience will be positive or pleasant. The response shouldn't be to shut down the community and bar the door.
News organisations need to look outside of their immediate area of experience and find communities that have worked and learn from them. This isn't an area of blue-sky experimentation. There is a lot of experience and expertise out there. With a lot of this, news orgs will just have to look beyond other news orgs. There's a big world out there on the internet, but it's not always scary.
UPDATE: As Jay Rosen says via Twiter: "Jeff Jarvis tells Bob Garfield to join the conversation, and points out how many people online did the homework he didn't." Jeff highlights not only posts but excellent contributions from Doc Searls and Tish Grier in his comments. There is a lot of history to be learned from, and news organisations don't need to re-invent the wheel or feel that they are starting from scratch.
In defence of news orgs, I not only believe but have said publicly, that when the media adds community features, they need to be ready to manage that community from day one because they already are dealing with large amounts of traffic. They often run into teething problems that most communities don't reach until much later.
In the recent round of virtual mud-slinging in the 'curmudgeons' versus digital journalists, one of the arguments by way of assertion is that hyper-local doesn't work. It is, of course, a reductionist argument, lumping together a wide range of strategies. A lot of the assertions are short on facts, but Vickey Williams at the Readership Institute highlights two dailies that are succeeding in creating local community. From the Bakersfield Californian:
My thought is that it's because this paper lives up to its role as an essential connector and network builder. Some stats from Molen this week: 1,192 individual Bakersfield.com blogs launched since the newspaper's site began hosting weblogs two years ago this month; 314 updated within the last three months. Add in the newspaper company's nine other sites (including MasBakersfield, NorthwestVoice, NewToBakersfield; and their newest, RaisingBakersfield.com) and the number goes to 2,780 blogs launched, of which 655 have been updated in the last three months.
That community content represents about 18 percent of Bakersfield.com's traffic and 25 percent of total traffic throughout the local network of sites, Molen said. "It is easily the fastest growing source of traffic for us."
Another interesting metric is the number of people who have created public profiles in the company's online social network, and in doing so, essentially endorse its brands. For Bakersfield.com, the number is 16,792; across all 10, it's 31,868.
I would be curious to see their frequency numbers. What is the average frequency of their visitors? Is it better than the average visit of two pageviews per visitor per month?
Bill Densmore of the Media Giraffe Project dropped me a note about this.
What motivates people to launch a local online news community -- a "placeblog" and what are their challenges, their successes, the opportunities, vision and passion which accompany this work?
If you're a freelance, or are thinking of starting out on your own, then Going Solo will be invaluable - it has a great atmosphere and some stonking speakers! So go straight to registration, do not pass go, and pick up an early bird ticket whilst they are still around.
Friday was a brilliant day - as one of Steph's advisors, I've seen just how much hard work she put into organising Going Solo, and I have to say that it was all well worth it! I had a fun day, met some really cool and interesting people and, even though I've been a freelance for ten years, I still learnt a lot of useful stuff. I think Martin Roell was a highlight for me, and I very much enjoyed the panel I moderated on how to set rates and negotiate with clients - always a tricky subject.
The presentations up on Daily Motion, photos up on Flickr, plus notes by Urs and Jaap. And if you like the look of all that, and are feeling a bit disappointed that you didn't make it to Lausanne, then you'll be happy to hear that Going Solo is going on tour! The next Going Solo is going to be in Leeds, early in September this year - the exact date and venue are yet to be announced so subscribe to the Going Solo News mailing list and you'll be the first to know.
I already added the post Real People Don't Have Time for Social Media on ReadWriteWeb to del.icio.us because it talks about participation inequalities and relative time spent by people on various social media sites and services. The post has kicked off an interesting discussion in the comments as well as at the office. But as a journalist, one thing caught my eye. Sarah Perez 'interviewed' people on Twitter about how they spend their time using social media. Now, obviously, this isn't a broader sample of people who simply don't participate, but it does give a snapshot of social media usage and a range of participation.
I've used it personally if I have a tech question I'm stymied by or want to get a range of views on a movie or a restaurant. Suw jokingly refers to it as a query for the 'lazyweb'.
However, there is definitely something useful here journalistically. Sarah's use of Twitter also shows how using the service not only as a way to promote your content but also to create community could be used to add to your journalism. No, it's not a random sample. But since when are 'man on the street' interviews?
The important part of the job isn’t speaking to the first 20 people on the conference call for an hour, it’s maintaining contact with the one person on the call who has the potential to Get It: Moving from the Paper business to the News business isn’t as simple as picking up a different skillset; it’s about changing the mindset of journalists.
It reminded me of a question I'm often asked about cultural change: How do you turn journalists into bloggers? The simple answer is that I don't. I find journalists who happen to be bloggers or who show an interest in blogging, give them all the technical and editorial support that I can, and then I try to share that knowledge and success around the organisation.
How do I spot a good blogger? I ask whether the journalist is already aware of other bloggers writing in their beat. I try to determine whether they are willing to engage with other bloggers and people who comment on their posts. In short, are they ready to join the conversation?
Sharing the success stories helps spread the culture. As David Anderson of Fairfax Digital in Australia told me recently, you need success stories to tell your managers, and I would say that you also need success stories to win over journalists, who are professional sceptics. You have to spread culture up and down the organisation.
I've been fortunate. At the BBC, I had support at all levels for digital experimentation and, when I came to London, it was great to see evangelism from people like Richard Sambrook, the head of the Global News Division. At the Guardian, we've got digital evangelists all the way up to The Editor's office. However, both the BBC and the Guardian still grapple with cultural change. And I couldn't agree with Ryan more when he says you can't mandate change from the top down.
Anyone who has worked with me will attest that sometimes I get frustrated at the pace of change in the industry. I really thought digital journalism would be further along by now than we are. The dot.com crash wiped out a lot of talent in the industry and set us back years. And I've crossed swords with a fair number of nay sayers. I'm not sure there is much we can do for the close-minded, and the need for change is urgent enough that arguing with the Andrew Keens in the industry just isn't worth your or my time.
Industry scale change will only come with time. The industry is struggling because the depth of digital culture is still too thin and still so new. Don't sweat that. Don't even try changing your organisation wholesale. We might have the experience, but as Steve Yelvington says, we still don't have the political capital. Many of you will run into middle management who 'own' the bureaucracy and have an investment in the status quo. They've spent several years supporting the Andrew Keens because it protected their position and power. Now, they have a new strategy: They are fighting over who owns change rather than focusing on actually creating change. While they're fighting, us digital journalists need to get on with it:
Start small with an event or story-based project.
Bring the cost of the project down as close to zero as possible from a technical standpoint. Use open-source or free net-based services.
Try one new multimedia story-telling feature or engagement feature with each project.
Debrief. Learn. Repeat.
This is based in part on my interpretation of the Newspaper Next project. As Steve Yelvington says:
We need to think of making things that are good enough and not overshooting. We're taking too long to create 'perfect ' systems that don't meet needs. We over-invest, over-plan and then we stick with the bad business plan until it all collapses. Come up with a good idea and field test. Fail forward and fail cheaply. Failure is not a bad thing if we learn from our mistakes and correct. Be patient to scale. Impatient for profits.
This is real-time innovation. Try journalistic projects with existing tools and learn journalistically and technically from that. That takes zero development and relatively little time. It's about editorial creativity, not about development cycles or budgets. If you find something that works, then you know where to focus product development. What can you do with Twitter, blogging software, YouTube, Seesmic or FriendFeed to create a journalistic project and help build your audience?
In January's Fast Company was an article by Clive Thompson, Is The Tipping Point Toast? I read it with interest and made a mental note to at least add it to our Del.icio.us feed. But over the last two months it has just been gnawing away at the back of my head and I find myself compelled to think about it in a bit more detail.
In the article, Clive discusses the work of Yahoo!'s principal research scientist, Duncan Watts, who is challenging the idea that a small number of highly influential people are the ones who start new trends. The concept is central to books such as Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point, and is repeated over and over again in all sorts of contexts. In fact, it is so embedded in the way that we view how ideas are transferred and propagated between people that it feels almost like heresy to question it.
But Duncan Watts has questioned it, and his research seems to show that new trends can start anywhere, and that not only do you not have to be influential to start a trend, being influential doesn't guarantee that you are also a trendsetter.
In the past few years, Watts--a network-theory scientist who recently took a sabbatical from Columbia University and is now working for Yahoo --has performed a series of controversial, barn-burning experiments challenging the whole Influentials thesis. He has analyzed email patterns and found that highly connected people are not, in fact, crucial social hubs. He has written computer models of rumor spreading and found that your average slob is just as likely as a well-connected person to start a huge new trend. And last year, Watts demonstrated that even the breakout success of a hot new pop band might be nearly random. Any attempt to engineer success through Influentials, he argues, is almost certainly doomed to failure.
"It just doesn't work," Watts says, when I meet him at his gray cubicle at Yahoo Research in midtown Manhattan, which is unadorned except for a whiteboard crammed with equations. "A rare bunch of cool people just don't have that power. And when you test the way marketers say the world works, it falls apart. There's no there there."
This is a conclusion that's going to get up the nose of many a marketeer, but how does it affect social media consultants?
My work is focused mainly on how to persuade people in business to change their behaviour: how to replace bad working habits with good ones, and how to change unhealthy business cultures into positive, constructive ones. How do I help people wean themselves off their dependence on email, and learn how to collaborate and communicate in healthier, more effective ways?
The opportunities that social tools present to business are frequently missed because no one thought hard enough about how to introduce them to people. Most businesses fail to to understand why these tools are useful and why the old tools are so seductive. My job is to counter that, and is much more about psychology than technology (although the tech clearly does play a part).
Piloting social tools in business is relatively easy. You're working with a small group who have probably been picked because someone within that group is already enthusiastic. I can sit down and work face-to-face with these people, finding out how they work and then explaining how the new tools will help them. We can figure out specific tasks to shift onto the new tools, I can advise on how that shift should happen and I can support them through the change.
But rolling social media out to the rest of a large company takes a different way of working. I can probably work directly with tens, or maybe even over a hundred people - if the project has the time and budget - but no one person can sit down with thousands or tens of thousands of people in one company to make sure that they understand how the new tools could improve their working life. It would be a Sisyphean task.
Instead, we have to treat tool adoption as a meme, and rely on people propagating it through the company, person to person. In this sense, we are doing what marketeers are doing: Trying to create a self-sustaining trend. We want the social tool to go viral.
As anyone with real world experience of viral marketing will tell you, that's far easier said than done. The concept of an influential elite, a minority who have the majority of the power to influence, is a deeply attractive prospect. If it were true, it would mean that I could sit down with the 50 most influential people in any one company and bring them up to speed, and they would go on to do my work for me. I could change the culture of a business from closed to open, from distrustful to trusting, from competitive to collaborative, in merely a few weeks.
That is a seductive idea. And I must confess to you all now, I have been seduced by it. I have talked with clients about the concept of networks and nodes and bridges, and I have propagated the tipping point meme. I've never read Gladwell's book. I haven't had to - I've absorbed the concepts over time without really questioning them, without examining them in the cold light of day.
But deep down, I never really believed the idea of an elite group of influencers, and that disbelief has grown over the last couple of years as I've had more and more hands-on experience in business, introducing new tools to a suspicious workforce. I have asked businesses if they know who their influencers are, and they all claimed that they did, but I didn't really see any evidence either that I was actually talking to influencers, or that the people they thought were influencers made any real difference to the widespread adoption of a tool.
That is my dirty little secret. I propagated a meme that I hadn't critically examined and didn't believe in. For that, I apologise.
Yet, for me at least, the idea that 'influencers' aren't as influential as we've been lead to believe is good news. And for my clients too. I've always been worried that trying to tap into a network of influential staff was a pointless waste of time, because it's very hard to know who actually has influence and who's just got a big mouth. Identifying the influencers is a task inextricably bound up in status and position in the org chart, yet these three things do not correlate simply. A bad manager who's high up in the food chain may believe himself to have status, but is actually widely ignored by his subordinates because they can recognise a bad manager when they see one.
If you've read my social software adoption strategy, you'll see there's nothing in it about 'reaching the influencers'. I'm way too pragmatic, and the problem of influencer identification has always put me off recommending it as a tactic. Instead, I focus on how you identify 'low hanging fruit' - people who are already chomping at the bit to work differently, or people who are doing tasks that are just perfect for a transition onto a social platform. Those are doable tasks. They don't require any special magic, they just require the ability to ask the right questions and listen to the answers.
I also talk about converting users into trainers by giving them the materials and confidence to introduce their own colleagues to new tools. Centralised training can only fail when you're trying to introduce optional software to a huge workforce. The only way to reach large numbers of people is for a ripple effect to take over: users become trainers and train their colleagues who become users and then trainers who spread the virus throughout the company.
This doesn't require influence, it requires utility. If the tool is useful, it can succeed, given the right support. It's not, "Oh, look at this! It's so cool!"; it's, "Oh, look at this! It's going to make my life so much easier!"
I'm far happier with the idea that anyone can start a trend, and that the concept of influencers is at least less important than previously stated, or possibly even a complete red herring. It leaves the door open for much more sensible, reliable and workable strategies. Admittedly, they may take more time and effort, but at least the outcome will be more predictable. Focusing on what people need, instead of their status, can only be a good thing.
I recorded this video for a project that the Guardian is doing with Current TV. I recorded it after reading a post by a friend and one of my heroes , Steve Yelvington, in the wake of the recent conflagration over Barack Obama and his former pastor Jeremiah Wright. Steve asked whether we were listening. We could be interpreted as journalists, politicians, pundits as well as the public.
Today I see journalism falling into two traps. One is the passive abandonment of responsibility that sometimes comes along with the "objective" mode, and the other is the crass exploitation of divisive opportunities that you see from infotainers like Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and Lou Dobbs.
And that brings us back to my point. Is anyone listening? And is the press helping us all listen? Are we working to further understanding?
Or are journalists just parroting words and perpetuating the racial divide that has scarred this country throughout its history?
It's one of the things that many journalists don't do enough of when they blog: Listen. That's one of the important skills for a blogging journalist. Blogging is not just publishing my thoughts. I can do that in any old media. Blogging is about the conversation.
Why I've chosen to do the kind of journalism I do is that I see great potential in being able to foster civic discussion and participation using the internet. It hearkens to the ideals of journalism that I learned as a j-school student. I really don't understand why more journalists don't see it.
As I said in the video and the discussion that followed on Current, I want to find ways to expand who is taking part in these discussions and actually explore important issues. As a journalist, I can add some reporting to provide a for some of the issues, which isn't to say that the participants can't add their own reporting. There is such scope to explore the issues of the day and be in a constant, rolling, evolving conversation. It's exciting territory to explore.
But too often, either through neglect or active provocation, the media are turning these online spaces into brawls. It's not surprising. It mirrors talk radio, cable news shouting matches and some bizarre version of Jerry Springer for intellectuals. The media is just turning the internet into what it knows. Bring on the noise.
But isn't good journalism supposed to amplify the signal, find it in the noise? Aren't journalists supposed to help find the important data points, turning points to help people and themselves make sense of the world? It's an abdication of our professional responsibility if we stop trying to find the signal and become the noise.
That's not going to save our profession. It's not going to help use cut through the clutter in this very busy media landscape. But it's easier to try to shout above the crowd than to find the wisdom in it. It's easier to be provocative than to be thought provoking. I don't have much time for it, and increasingly, neither do our former audiences.
Susan Crawford: I have an image of a ticking clock because all good talks have a sense of urgency. And life is short, so we should tackle big questions today.
What makes a life significant?
- and inner ideal, intellectual, conscious, novel
- joined with active will
These ideals have to be joined to will and action.
Back to the ticking clock. My father's life is drawing to a close, not this month, but soon. So the ideal for him is to listen to music, as he is a composer. For him, the ideal is pure human expression in music. It's the most powerful thing to him - as his mind gives up and his body decays, the music stays.
Going to tie together music as an ideal, the great subjects of this conference. I do believe in an open internet and want to make this talk as human as possible.
We will spend a lot of time talking about network operators, because in the US these companies suffer inadequate competition for high-speed access. We're paying a lot for low speeds, but they are not monopolies. This is an oligopoly, with a few sellers providing for the industry. They act for the industry as a whole, so there will never be ruinous competition, but prices will never serve the users, it's not a competition model, it's something in between.
There is incomplete substitutability, as products offered aren't the same. These differences amplified by huge amounts of ads. Market power different only in degree from a monopolist, but similar in kind.
Can't go to antitrust, as their actions will always adhere to the letter of the law, and it would undermine the economy, and litigation would be ruinous.
What's the model? Stuck on the idea of competition, the idea that enough actors competing will give just he right results. Does restraint come from other companies? Doesn't seem so.
In an oligopolistic world, the restraint comes from retailers or consumers/users of the good, and that countervailing power is what answers the power of the oligopoly.
But the users aren't there. we need to find a way to organise the users in a way that would make restrains real. Doesn't have to be present in regulation, doesn't have to be law, if there were adequate countervailing power from users.
We can be as smart as we want to be, but without votes, without the ability to affect how a congressman feels about an issue, we're nowhere. The problem with net neutrality is that it's not actively connected to people who vote. Source of the countervailing power has to be user stories, human communication, made possible through the internet, that makes those lives more significant. The stories that give your life purpose need to be told.
I'm not the one to tell them, the way to do this is to simply the message, make it as simple as possible, as musical as possible, so that is' about the openness of the internet. Each one of them has these ideals that can be empowered, and we have to tell that story that aggregates the response to oligopoly.
Galbraith who thought about countervailing power used to go singing on NYE, and used to lead Auld Lang Syne, and need to do more of that. If I die tomorrow, I want to have talked to you about the effort to bring those stories forward via One Web Day. Out of character for me.
Purpose is to globalise a constituency of the internet. Whatever local issue are, to focus on those, could be connectivity, censorship, etc. 22 Sept. Third one this year. Opportunity to tell stories and teach about how it makes our lives better. Offline and online events. Lots of blog posts, twitters, videos. To make visible the constituency that will provide the countervailing force to the oligopoly.
But the leader isn't me, it has to be you. Be a part of the celebration this year.
Each talk can have only one message. Mine is that whatever you do, do something to bring people together. Our work and our lives are so closely intertwined, and there's a great source of countervailing power in all internet users that hasn't been called on to tell its stories, and I'm here to ask you to do that.
This is a paraphrase of Clay's talk at the Royal Society of Arts.
Clay Shirky, here comes everybody: the power of organising without organisations.
It was chaired by Nico Macdonald, a principal of Spy.
You can find a biography of Clay a shirky.com and wikipedia, Clay interjects. "Wikipedia has done a better job," he said.
We have reached an age when this stuff is technologically boring enough to be socially interesting.
It's not about gee-whiz adoption that we can do x. The book in one bullet point:
Group action just got a lot easier.
HSBC last year decided a great way to recruit new students is with interest-free overdrafts. Accountants called them back said it wasn't such a good idea. HSBC counted on switching is hard, and however mad the individuals are, there will not be any kind of serious response.
They hadn't counted on Facebook. To HSBC's horror, thousands of people joined. Out of no financial information, the students began sharing information. They wrote up incredibly detailed instructions. If you want to switch to Barclay, here is how to do it.
This got the attention of the newspapers. The organisaitonal advantage that HSBC had is now ended. The students co-ordinated a real world protest.
HSBC: We didn't know you would be upset. Obvioiusly, we're a customer service agency.
This didn't happen because the customers were upset. This happened that customers were upset and they were co-ordinated. They could talk to each other. They recruited the students when they were at school and changed the terms in July when they are dispersed. They knew exactly what they were doing. This would have worked in 2005.
Increasingly, publishing is for acting. Once you put people in touch with each other, you create social value on top of that media value. Now customers have ability to leverage high organisation.
Everyone remembers flashmobs. It was the pole sitting of 2003. Toronto pillow fight. New York, go to Central Park, and join together and all make pigeon noises. Bill, the creator of flashmobs, was making a critique of hipster culture.
In 2006, a developer created a page on Live Journal in Belarus. Let's all go to central square and eat ice cream. But black clad security appeared and grabbed them. It was illegal to carry out group action in October Square. They hit on flash mob as way to co-ordinate despite the govenment-stated goal of preventing this from happening. This is media leading to collective action. They didn't just bring ice cream. They also brought their cameras. They documented.
Nothing says dictatorship like arresting people for eating ice cream
In high-freedom environments, these things are deployed for frivollous reasons. Time-wasting. Twitter, this is mainly banal. Egyptian activisits experimented with Twitter to pass along information on who was in custody. Tools, (such as) flash-mobs as a hipster thing have a very differet flavour in Belarus.
One of most frustrating things about publishing, you deliver manuscript and it takes the company six months to hit print. There are s many stories he wanted to include. His last example was such a story. In Palermo in 2004, stuck up stickers that said (rough paraphrase) 'an entire people who pay money to the mafia (pizzo) is a people without dignity'. People say what else can we do. The problem here isn't just the mafia is pulling money out of the Palermo economy. Everyone knew that. The problem was the difficulty and danger in opposing the mafia.
They allowed business to stand up together. If you were a single business people standing up, it would be dangerous. When entire group stands up, then harder to target. Much better chance to stand up if they do it as a group. The people are really suffered. If you only want to patronise businesses, customers can anonymously check on businesses not doing business with mafia via a website. They took businesses and average people leverage against the mafia.
Small well organised core versus a large dispered population. The batttle before this has been very unequal. We're at the beginning of experimenting with the imbalance of power. The ability to share with others is remaking the world. We know this. Collective action where the fate of the group affects the individuals as a whole.
This effort forms the experimental wing of political philosophy.
Is large action best taken on by the state? Communism is the extreme answer to that question. Is it best taken by individual action? Libertarianism is the extreme answer to that question. What is the best instituion? The answer is not instituion but platform. If people can co-ordinate themselves, then people can organise themselves.
Media is moving from a source of information to a site of action. In US Constitution, freedom of speech and freedom of gathering are separate freedoms.
All of these developments are not entirely good. This is not a revolution that will lead us entirely well off.
I used to be a cyber-utopian. I remember the moment I stopped thinking about that. A student of his came and talked to me. She was the community manger of YM, and she was managing the online bulletin boards. Shut down health and beauty boards. We couldn't get pro-anorexic girls to shut up. If you find yourself feeling hungry, clean up. They shut down their boards, and the girls moved elsewhere.
This isn't a side effect. This is the internet. This is a case where it's not an improvement to society, it's also a challenge. We will have new negatives as well as new positives. The internet lowers the cost of failure. We can fail more and learn more. How can we pull out the good stuff and learn to react to the bad stuff?
Nico: What are the historical parallels?
Clay: All of these examples, it is being used by people who want to stop happening as opposed to people who want new things to happen. The places where real social scale things happening are often short-term, ad hoc and single issue. Anyone who has been in a consumer society can feel this anger bubbling up when we're given a chance to respond. This is a light-weight structure for people to decide that they want to be identified as a group.
Creative Commons dismantle the goals of copyright by using the tools of copyright. We need to do this with respect to corporations. If we allow people to come together in socially more stable ways that don't require institutional models, then we'll see longer term social engagement. We can get past the protest phase.
Nico: Are we trying to re-define political problems in terms of this social and IT tools?
Clay: I do agree with premise. When you find anything that works well, you want to apply it to everything. That is what our way of trying out things.
Sourceforge. 75% of these projects are failures. Zero downloads. Success for most of the rest modest. Then far end, millions of downloads. This is the open source model.
You sprinkle failure on everything and see what works.
Wikitorial and LATimes. Editorial product of individual voice. You need to make sure that failure is public. Open source is very easy to see what doesn't work. The paper doesn't cover failure well.
Failure can be a benefit as long as we can all learn from them.
Anytime you lower the cost of doing something, you lower the cost of trying something and lowers the cost of the number of meetings you need to have. In a world where you don't have to get permission of anyone to try new stuff.
Nico: Campaign is now Zucker-mail where in my day stood on a corner with CND badge and argued with people.
Question from audience: Facebook and HSBC, there are a lot of different tools. What are the next big tools?
Clay: Email. Boring-est answer. The thing to bet on. It's not a revolution not when behaviour adopts new tools but new behaviors. It's not about novelty but ubiquity. If you are looking for social scale change, it's adoption.
What is going on in Flickr is crazy because now your mom is using it.
Dan McQuillan : Wael Abbas shut down account. Commercial inerest of current platforms. (Notes from me: The human rights activism community responded to this quite strongly, and YouTube restored his account. But he had to re-upload the videos.)
Clay: Certainly, worst collision, Yahoo betraying Chinese dissidents. French sued for selling Nazi memorabilia. Yahoo said it was a US company, but when Chinese gov't came, they said we're a Chinese company.
Berkman (Center for Internet and Society at Harvard) has done work on how to go to non-commercial platforms.
Roland from NESTA: Is pain in change and opportunity greatest in public or private space?
Clay: That's such an interesting quesiton. You can see advantages of each. Public is already operating on subsidy model. Gov'ts and NGOs have historically defended themselves from public and constituents.
One of advantages of customer. Inaction. If stop going to store, the store cares. But if you stop voting, then the state doesn't mind so much.
Native advantage is how public sector has taken to defend itself from the public.
Pat Kane: How is different from socialist philosophy? Leisure time facilitate this??
Clay: It's about Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Lots of these things are at the top of Maslow's hierarchy of needs. The social goal is to increase the amount of time people have to give over to things they care about.
Digital divide has focused on wires. But biggest part of digital divide is permission for participation. Give people a sense of permission to participate (actually a reason to participate).
Another question from a person atRSA: As users become more sophisticated, what does it take for critical mass on virtual platform?
Clay: Back when I was a cyber-utopian and thought we'd all be float-y video heads in a video world in the 1990s, all friends were virtual friends because there were so few people on internet. Now, I realise the big reward of online relationships is real world meet ups.
Travel and communication are complements. If you want to support a virtual institution, have a real world meetup. IT guys asked what social tools they could deploy to get people talking: Plane tickets and beer. Start by catalysing groups. It will fertilise virtual collaboration.
Another question from a guy working on reputation mgmt system (Clay says growth industry). He set up a blog to complain about his botched kitchen install and got thousands of pounds in a refund, he says to the cheers in the audience. Are we in a world where everyone is single issue driven?
Clay: Single issue leverage. People are fantastically good at committing identity to groups. At high school, it became a group when you gave a name. It's like with a girlfriend when you talk about relationship as if third person. Some structural need to support that kind of density and social leverage. Don't think get out of special interest an single-issue motivation. Bring as many groups into conversation as possible and you will see larger and longer lived groups. interesting to see if see consumer group rising out of the HSBC student Facebook group.
Some of this is time and new institutional frameworks that reward long-term commitment.
Question from audience: Social exclusion. To the few much has been given. (Basically, it was a question on whether and how these tools can be used to counter social exclusion.)
JP who works for BT and writes the blog Confused of Calcutta : I was thinking about a mash up between what you are saying and what Kevin Kelly said in his answer to the Edge question: What have you changed your mind about? If you kept cost of repair as low as cost of dev then you avoid tragedy of commons. Wikipedia. Cost of repair to damage low. Before cost to repair high, Cost to damage low.
Clay: Tragedy of commons, sheep on commons. Everyone motivated to feed their sheep as much grass as possible and it destroyed the commons.
Openness creates value. Value creates incentive. Incentive has nothing to do with value. That encourages spammers.
Social software is the stuff that get spammed.
Bottom up is never enough in the long haul. Eventually, you run into the governance problem. You immediately run into the problem, who gets to guard the guardians. The tools are good enough that we're not running into problems of technology but age old problems. Such as: Who guards the guardians?
You have to deal with constitutional crises. Almost no one is good at designing for groups.
Social exclusion question. That is the most depressing thread of social research. Duncan Watts and Robert Putnam are finding that social density gives access to social capital. It has so much to do with like-to-like cluster. Only a handful of individuals who bridge those gaps. If I address social exclusion, I wouldn't address the bulk of groups. I would find people who are bridging. I would find people who know people who ive in council housing but also know someone who lives in Belgravia.
Every social system has imbalance in use of tools. Find natural bridges and strengthen them rather than building new bridges.
Mohamed Nanabhay, head of new media Al Jazeera Network. I missed the first part of Mohamed's presentation because I was doing an interview. I came in as he was talking Al Jazeera's focus on newsgathering. He said that while CNN showed the missiles taking off, Al Jazeera showed where the missiles landed.
It's not about mobile TV. It's about shift in media.
The ability for anyone to create and share media. This is a cultural shift. People try to ignore, and we're still trying to figure out how to deal with this shift. Public and private lives blurred Incredible choice. Shift in trust.
We have a shift in how we deal with technology and media consumption. He tells his 4-year-old daughter to ask Uncle Google if he doesn't know. What they of TV and media has shifted. We consume media totally different.
How do we deal with new engaged audience? We used to talk about coffee shop culture. Kids are now sitting forward.
Industry issues
TV and newspaper are losing audience to new platforms
Content is going online whether we like it or not
internal resistance to change
undefined business models
Al Jazeera's response
Don't fret over new platforms. Engage people wherever they are.
Content is going online. Al Jazeera is making our content online while everyone is taking it down.
Intternal resistance. Evangelise, experiment and empower. Win over people, and they will evangelise for you.
Undefined business models. Quick, low cost, experimental projects and see what works.
He talked about a distributed distributed model. It doesn't mean that TV is broken or throw out your TV.
They added an Al Jazeera English channel. 1.6 million people were introduced to Aljazeera English. People have put up 4700 videos online, and there have been 20 million views of those video.
They put up five of their most popular programmes. They are full 40 minute episodes. They allow people to embed the videos on their sites and blogs.
We have been talking about empowering people in Gaza to do video. People took out their phones into Gaza to provide video. People took the initiative.
Benefits of these models. People are discovering their content. They compliment the programming with new voices and new context. We create a sense of community around our content and are trying to be a part of the conversation.
He told the tragic story of an Al Jazeera correspondent being killed, but it was great to hear him talk about the channel's commitment to journalism even under difficult situations.
As Ammar, in the comments below, and Mohamed, on his blog, point out, his presentation has been posted at Slideshare.
As I blogged about before I caught the flight to Sydney, I'm at Media08 in Sydney. I'll be blogging about some of the sessions. I probably will backfill some of these posts because I'm juggling a lot today.
Jack Matthews, CEO of Fairfax Digital, kicked off the day of presentations. He said, that Fairfax did not the luxury of multimillion R&D departments. We need to be lean to innovate. And originally, we thought about doing this. We thought it was going to be an internal staff as part of our professional development plans to bring together this elite team of 'thought leaders.
This is the conference equivalent of speed dating. RSVP, their dating site, set Guiness Book of World Records for largest speed dating event.
David Kirk, (former captain of the All Blacks and) CEO of Fairfax Media. The issues you will discuss are on my mind everyday. How we rise to the challenges of today and manage them. They are difference between achievement and growth and mediocrity and decline.
Innovation is often thought of as the new new. It is not often that innovation is thought of in the context of the old: Publishing, automotive and mining (for instance). The Sydney Moring Herald reaches more people than ever. Moving from print publisher to multimedia company. They are focusing on integration and collaboration.
Three cornerstones of our strategy:
Defend and grow our newspapers. Involves innovation and change. Key to culture. Have to hang on to core of our values and history.
"Our newspapers have to be connected to our audience and our readers. It remains the core of our success." In US, see only decline. But the market is not the same here.
We need aggressive growth online. Three years ago, less than 2% of revenues. It will grow to 20% in a couple of years. It is the high growth part of our business.
We need to be a leading digital media company for media markets of 21st Century. The strategy has to be robust. Consumer behaviour is changing rapidly.
Discussing this to our staff has been the most difficult thing for me as a CEO. Rapid changes make it difficult to communicate a sense of certainty. We learn along the way to describe what we talk about.
Focus on transition from publisher to leading multimedia company. We have to the best at originating content. It is our fundamental history and heritage. I often say digital content, but everything that we do is digital these days. No one has the people on the ground in communities as Fairfax.
Building ability to deliver audio and video content. A year ago 800,000 downloads a month, now 4 million a month.
To be successful, we have to own and leverage cross media brands to drive extension of audience reach.
He then talked about building multimedia brands. As a social media guy, I talk about building connections not brands. Certainly now those connections are part off that brand. I am wary of the obsession around brand. The menu is not the meal, and sometimes abstract discussions of brand misplaces a focus.
I agree with him a lot more when he is talking about multi-platform.
Where the audience goes, we have to go. The only way to aggregate audiences is to chase them.
New media is littered with companies without business models. You need proven revenue models. The revenue models turn audience and brand participation into money. We are focused on classified and display ads and transaction market. We have stuck to our subscription model. WSJ and FT see as sensible way to go.
I don't necessarily agree 100% with him. Comparing a general media company to the FT and WSJ misses a point. We used to joke that the only content you can sell online is sport, business and porn. General content is commodity.
We have to build innovation into the DNA of the company.
We believe that we can hold our own. We still need to focus on the basics of good business everyday whatever the medium.
Fundamental drivers:
compelling content, every minute, every hour, every day
innovative, creative advertising and content sales
reader, viewer, listener community - audience -connection and management
production and distribution excellence
every day need to be managing, developing and training people.
Suw and I just got back from our honeymoon on Sunday, and I'm at the airport again. I'm heading to Sydney to speak at Media08.
I'm going to be speaking about making the transition from mass media to social media. Trends in audience fragmentation continue, and mass media are increasingly challenged to deliver the size of audiences they once did, which threatens their underlying business model of mass audiences delivered to advertisers. Journalists have been particularly poor in adapting to these changes as the positive sense of public service that many journalists have has soured into a false sense of entitlement. Yes, journalism is important to the functioning of a democracy, but just because we believe what we do is important, doesn't mean that people must pay attention to us. We're competing for people's valuable disposable time and income against not only other news outlets but also against other forms of information and entertainment. We're competing against not only CNN, the Telegraph, the Washington Post and the Economist but also against iPods, YouTube, Digg, the Wii, Facebook, real books, instant messaging, text messaging and MySpace messaging. Time and attention is the scarce resource that we're fighting for, and as I've said before, most journalists really don't grok this.
As journalists, we should focus on quality content, but our audiences have moved on, too often quite literally. They expect not only quality content but real, social interaction around that content. Wrap your content in a community. In 2008, that can still be a unique selling point. But this isn't rocket science, and while journalists have been fighting over fundamentalist definitions of what is and isn't journalism, innovators not beholden to dogmatic definitions of journalism have been creating social experiences around media. See Newsvine, which iterated and innovated enough to get the attention of a small company up the road in Seattle (well MSNBC - part owned by NBC and Microsoft) who came knocking with a cheque. But the time to gain the first adopter edge is coming to a close. By the end of 2008, savvy media and technology companies will have already moved and social media won't be such a differentiating competitive advantage.
I'll blog more about this over the next few days as well as blogging about conference itself.
After having the opportunity to speak about blogging and the US elections at the Oxford Internet Institute last Monday, the conversation is continuing. I apologise for not responding sooner, but I do have the small matter of getting married at the end of this week.
After my talk, I posted some links to links studies that I mentioned during the talk as well as well as added to some arguments that I made. One of the questions that was raised during my talk was whether the mainstream media should blog. Tobias Escher, a DPhil student and research assistant at Oxford, followed up his questions with a post. He says:
Journalists and their employers do already have a voice in the public sphere, they do not need yet another channel to get their take on issues across.
Most of these corporate blogs just don’t work. They are not written in the spirit of blogging, they are not looking for a real dialog (something they share with blogs of politicians) and aim only to co-opt bloggers into giving the media company some form of credibility.
The money spent on developing these platforms should rather be invested into the core business of news providers, e.g. in foreign correspondents and investigative stories (ie. the things that are most difficult for citizen journalists).
I agree with Tobias on point one, and I have often said publicly that to justify the effort of blogging, financially and editorially, that news organisations must do more than simply chop up content that they already produce and put it in blog format. (A friend of mine calls this approach ‘news sushi’.) I often play a Daily Show video in which Jon Stewart jokes that MSM blogs ‘give a voice to the already voiced’.
What is the strategic reason for news and media organisations to blog? What are news organisations trying to achieve? It can’t be simply to publish more content. Does the addition of comments below articles offer any strategic advantage that outweighs the potential liability both in terms of possible brand damage and moderation costs?
Adding comments to the bottom of stories or columns is a step, but it’s missing the point. It’s treating blogging strictly as a publishing tool, not as part of a broader community strategy. …
I’m not saying that it’s a mistake to allow comments on the bottom of articles or columns. But that doesn’t change the fact that simply allowing comments on static content isn’t taking full advantage of blogging. It’s is treating blogging as a content-management system that allows comments. If that’s your goal, just adapt your content-management system to accept comments.
And if that is your organisation’s goal, then I would argue that the risks do not outweigh the costs because the competitive advantages decrease while the cost remains constant. Comments alone are no longer a differentiating factor in today’s media market. They have become in many ways, a lowest common denominator in terms of participation.
I think Tobias is also right that most corporate and MSM blogs lack credibility. For one, they lack authenticity. They often have no voice, no humanity. In the US, journalists are hampered by believing that strict objectivity requires them to adopt not only a neutral tone but actually a boring, emotionless tone. Readers don’t believe us because they don’t believe we as journalists are actually objective. Also, why would anyone engage with the disembodied voice of objectivity?
In the UK market, blogging suffers from a belief that blogging is simply columns with comments. But the professional columnist still can lack authenticity and sees no need for engagement. As Dan Gillmor said, “We like readers plural, but we’re scared by readers singular.” Scared, and from a column delivered from a position of being above the conversation, professional columnists are often dismissive of the opinions delivered from beneath them.
I’m fascinated by the points of view that readers raise that I hadn’t considered, perspectives they bring that I don’t have. If I engage in the conversation as an equal, I often find that I don’t suffer the harsh blow back that some columnists complain about from readers.
Too many media blogs simply use the technology to give the appearance of interactivity with the addition of comments. But there is no conversation. There is a monologue from the media, and the conversation exists only amongst ‘them’, the commenters who come to discuss the article. Any sense of community remains completely external to the news organisations as long as journalists remain uninvolved in the discussion.
The bottom line is that if you are implicitly asking readers to interact by creating a space with comments, designed for conversation, that you have to be ready to be part of the conversation. Journalists who blog need to have some sense of responsibility for the conversations they start on their blogs, whether that be in the tone they set or their level of commitment to the conversation. Being a blogger is like being the host of a salon or a discussion group. A blogging journalist should bring original reporting from unique sources to the conversation, but they also should foster the discussion, highlighting interesting contributions from commenters, linking off to other interesting blog posts as part of the wider conversation and generally being congenial hosts. Why isn’t directly facilitating lively, intelligent, informed debate and discussion a journalistic function?
To respond to Tobias’ third point, which was to say that community isn’t the core function of a news organisation and not worthy of investment over news gathering functions, I cede that this is a valid and common question. I know that what I’m calling for is going to take time, effort and money. Most news organisaitons aren’t expanding, they are cutting back faster than the Detroit auto-makers.
To answer some of the cost concerns, I’d simply say:
The real cost is not in the development of a new platforms but in staff costs, whether that is hiring new staff or diverting existing staff or staff time to blog or support community projects.
As I wrote about recently, the development costs can be dramatically lowered by the use of open-source software. The New York Times uses WordPress. Morris Digital uses the open-source CMS Drupal, and there are several other open-source CMS and community software options.
It is much less costly to add a new blog than it is to launch a new print product or section. These blogs can be focused on niche coverage that is interesting to readers and to advertisers and helps grow the business and support quality journalism.
As I said at Oxford, most news and media organisations believe that quality and brand recognition will help them cut through the increasingly cluttered media landscape. At the risk of repetition, quality does not guarantee success in today’s media market. I believe that news organisations need to reconnect with their audiences. It’s my belief that the news organisation with the strongest relationship with their audiences will succeed.
This doesn’t mean I believe that journalists should pander to readers, but I believe that social media gives journalists the opportunity to develop a direct relationship with ‘the people formerly known as the audience’. The tools make it easy for journalists to carry on a conversation with readers, involve them in reporting and build a loyal community. To me, it is a competitive advantage. It is one of the competitive advantages of a networked journalist. I draw on the wisdom in the crowds to enhance my journalism as well as feed Guardian journalism back into those crowds.
Over the last few months I've working hard on the Creative Business in the Digital Era research project (hence my quietude here), which is examining the way in which businesses are using open intellectual property (IP) as a central pillar of their business model.
The project culminates in three free seminars in central London during March - a full day on 17th March, and two evening seminars on 18th/19th (with roughly the same content in each) - during which we'll talk about what we've discovered about open IP businesses, and talk to people who are actually giving stuff away whilst also making money from it. We've managed to recruit three fabulous guest speakers:
The seminar is aimed at people within the creative industry - e.g. music, publishing, film, TV, radio, visual arts, photography - and from any size of company, whether they are freelances or a C-level exec. The course materials are all being prepped out in the open, under CC licence.
As mentioned, the seminar is free to attend - if you are interested, all you need to do is to fill in our application form.
If you're interested yourself, please do apply! If you have a blog, podcast or Twitter account and would like to mention our seminar, please do. And if you know of anyone who might be interested in coming, feel free to tell them about it.
Our deadline for applications is 15th February, so apply now!
It was truly a great honour to speak on Monday at the Oxford Internet Institute about Blogging and the US Elections.
It was also slightly humbling to remember the differences between journalism and academic study. Journalists are trend spotters. We paint broad brush trends we see often with a mix of anecdotes and some statistics. We aren't necessarily held to the same level of proof as peer-reviewed research (although some might argue that bloggers are a form of peer-review).
I think it's easy to forget about the limits of what we know considering the time constraints journalists work under. We do need to remember that correlation is not causality. I think that journalists should be more honest and open about the limits of what we know instead of trying to be oracular, as Jonathan Zittrain put it. Jonathan is a friend of ours and also the brilliant Professor of Internet Governance and Regulation at the Institute.
I now have a small sense of what it must be like during the oral defence of one's dissertation. Several questions interrogated various statements I made and asked me to support them with statistics not just anecdotes.
Having said that, I did do my homework. Honest. Here are some links.
1) I said that blogs have increased participation in US politics, and I mean not simply in voting but also participation in the process. I quoted a 2006 Edelman poll that said in summary:
A new survey of consumers released today in the European Parliament, revealed that nearly a quarter of the population in the U.S., UK, and France, read blogs at least once a week and of that group nearly one-third are moved to undertake some type of political action.
One of the roundtable participants asked me to clarify whether there was simply a correlation between blogging and political action, whether bloggers were more likely to be politically active or whether blogging encouraged them to become politically active.
To be honest, reading the press release, it's unclear if the blog readers were moved to political action by blogging or simply took political action and also were blog readers. I remember the full poll being a little clearer, but I could only find the press release online. I couldn't find the full results of the poll.
Anecdotally, I would say that tools help activists connect and therefore, previously isolated political communities were able to join together virtually and be encouraged to take real-world political action. But that still doesn't answer the question: Correlation or causality? One student was studying political activist communities. They all seemed to use online organising tools. Did the activists use the tools or did they become activists through empowerment by the tools?
However, in preparing for the talk, I found several academic studies that indicated that blogging did indeed encourage political participation. I referred to them in my talk, but here are some other links. I found the summary of a study: “Online and Offline Activism: Communication Mediation and Political Messaging Among Blog Readers,” Homero Gil de Zuniga, Emily Vraga, Aaron Veenstra, Ming Wang, Cathy DeShano, and Dhavan Shah (first author from University of Texas-Austin; all others from University of Wisconsin-Madison). From the summary (Word document, study 3, with a PowerPoint presentation as well of this and other studies):
Political bloggers are viewed by many as lone voices, socially disconnected and working apart from the traditional mechanisms of participation. Critics assert that their audiences exist in an echo chamber, repeatedly exposed to uncritical reports that polarize but do not mobilize. This research challenges that view by examining the ways in which the members of blog audiences engage in the political process.
I also have a pre-release copy of David Perlmutter's Blogwars. I've only read about a third of it. And he makes reference to other studies showing that links between blogging and increased political awareness and participation. I'd suggest taking a look at his blog for more information. He is involved in some of the research in the previous links.
2) I also talked about the YouTube effects in my talk. I wrote a post last week referring to how YouTube was becoming another political channel, allowing Barack Obama's speeches to reach an audience that wouldn't have been possible with traditional 24-hour-cable channels. As of writing this, his speech at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, which Martin Luther King once was pastor, had been viewed 600,000 times. In the week since it was posted, his South Carolina victory speech has also been viewed 600,000 times. As I wrote, Obama's video would have been clipped by the 24-hour cable news channels. But the speech in its entirety would have been an ephemeral event forgotten in the attention-deficit news cycle. Will these videos bring new supporters to Obama? I just don't know. I only raise the issue as a new phenomenon, and unfortunately, we probably won't know the impact until after we have a nominee.
A student asked me if we knew anything about who had seen these videos. Were they from the US? Could they vote? I admitted that I didn't know. Web metrics are a black art, and I don't have access to the traffic information from YouTube.
I don't know what impact these speeches uploaded to YouTube will have. I don't know whether they are influencing new supporters or simply being passed around by those who already support Barack Obama. I think the impact of the viral videos like 'Obama Girl' (viewed 5.7m times) or the 'Yes we can' mashup (viewed 1.5m times in three days) is even more unpredictable. I am sure that we'll see some fascinating research come out of this new trend after the dust settles.
In this regard, substantial numbers of young people say they have gotten information on the campaign or the candidates from social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook. Overall, more than a quarter of those younger than age 30 (27%) – including 37% of those ages 18-24 – have gotten campaign information from social networking sites. This practice is almost exclusively limited to young people; just 4% of Americans in their 30s, and 1% of those ages 40 and older, have gotten news about the campaign in this way.
A student also said that young voters are unreliable voters. They express a lot of enthusiasm, but often don't show up when it counts at the ballot box. This has historically been true. In 2004, Howard Dean was seen as yet another example of a candidate who courted the youth vote, only to have young voters stay home.
Turnout among the youngest slice of the electorate more than doubled from 2004, when Howard Dean's intense campaign on college campuses produced far more modest results. This was part of an overall surge in Democratic participation — but while overall Democratic turnout jumped 90%, the number of young Democrats participating soared 135%.
It's hard to say whether this is a trend or an anomaly. Only time will tell.
(I also mentioned another Pew study of bloggers during the talk. That's here.)
4) Another student asked: Why should the media organisations like the Guardian or BBC blog?
This was a question that I get often from a number of audiences for different reasons. Journalists don't see blogging as journalism. Some bloggers don't see think journalists should blog because they see blogging as something that exits as a counter to the mainstream media so they see media organisations' blogging as an attempt to co-opt grassroots media.
I started by giving him examples of how blogging had added to the journalism I do, and I've blogged about that before. The student didn't feel as if this was a reason for why the media should blog.
I gave him a couple of examples of how having a standing as a blogger and with bloggers were important in the newsgathering that I do. As I mentioned, bloggers have Googled me to find out who I am before talking to me, before agreeing to an interview. And as Matt at Blackfive did, they post their responses to my questions to give their readers a chance to see whether the journalist spun the story.
He still didn't seem satisfied with the response. In the end, I see social media, such as blogs, as one way that journalists can reconnect with their audiences. I think that's important for journalists because too many journalists are isolated from their audiences. They are writing for other journalists and their sources, not the audience.
I also said that it's important because journalists still believe that quality information is enough in this world of information overload. They are still operating on assumptions based on a world of information scarcity, when they had the power of gatekeepers. They controlled what information got into the scarce pages and on scarce airtime. Now, people have so many choices for information and entertainment. The scarce resource isn't information but time and attention. News organisations aren't simply battling the old competition - the other newspaper, the TV station, cable news - but also new competitors, YouTube, the XBox, MySpace, Craigslist, etc. Social media allows journalists and journalism organisations to connect directly with their audiences and build a relationship with them, a mutually beneficial one.
Robert Patterson has a great description of how this works with US National Public Radio's new morning programme, the Bryant Park Project and their use blogs and Twitter. For him, it's like a virtual diner in the morning where there is a warm welcome, a cup of coffee and a conversation. As he says:
Wrap the content in a community.
That's the 'Jesus wept' summary of social media.
Many news and media organisations see the meteoric growth of YouTube, MySpace and Facebook, and still stuck in the mass media mindset, they want some of those eyeballs for their advertisers. They focus on the strength of their brands and the quality of their content and ignore the quality of the connection and interaction with their audiences. They also get distracted by the technology they don't have. Why not pose a different question. If you want to want to 'wrap the content in a community', what editorial steps can you take to build a relationship with your audience and build a community?
Hopefully, that answers a few of the questions with some supporting information and links.
Jonathan did ask whether a journalist had been caught out saying one thing in his or her reporting and then something less balanced, less objective in a blog. I didn't know of any instance of this happening. Do you?
Thanks again to the Oxford Internet Institute for the honour and opportunity of speaking there.
UPDATE: A student also asked me about projects trying to garner international opinion about the US elections, seeing as the elections have such an impact around the world. I mentioned a project by Global Voices and Reuters to look at what bloggers around the world are saying about the US elections. The project launched on Tuesday, Voices without Votes.
Actually, I think that wedding planning is killing my blogging, but for the last couple of weeks, vlogging has also cut into my spare blogging time both at home and at the day job. The Guardian has just started a vlogging project with Current TV. It’s been fun, if not a little challenging.
I sit in front of a webcam at work, or sometimes at home, and talk about something for a minute. It’s harder than you think. The first thing is to fight off the feeling that you’re making a complete tit of yourself talking at your computer, especially in an open plan office. Also, no matter how silly and excitable I think I sound, actually, I’m finding my delivery a little flat. It’s a fine balance between being conversational, which I want, and sounding too much like a broadcaster, which I don’t want. I guess I’ll become more comfortable over time.
We’ve just started, and I’m hoping that it generates some conversation. I really want this to be something engaging, rather than just video for the sake of video. I did and still do TV, but I want this to be something more like Seesmic, a video conversation. I’d definitely appreciate ideas from vloggers on how to make this a conversation like blogging rather than broadcasting at people over the internet.
TechPresident and The Nation in the US highlight an interesting trend in the presidential elections this year, and that is that YouTube is providing a venue for candidates' speeches that might otherwise get lost in the mainstream media agenda of the day. They point out that Barack Obama's speech is the fourth most watched video on YouTube, trailing a couple of Britney Spears, a perennial click champion. On Sunday, his South Carolina victory speech was the fifth most watched video on YouTube.
Ari Melber writing for The Nation says, "Barack Obama delivered a riveting speech about America's moral crisis this weekend, calling for a united movement to overcome the nation's moral deficit and mounting economic inequality." But, he adds:
Great speeches don't matter if no one hears them.
Kevin Drum at Washington Monthly says that most voters don't get to see these speeches, apart from a few sound bits clipped up on cable television, which he reads as a disadvantage for Obama. At the moment, the main themes in the coverage of Democratic race is the bare-fisted brawl between Obama and the Clintons, or Billary as Frank Rich called the power-couple. But YouTube is allowing more voters to hear the candidates' messages instead of following the 'horse race' or the story line out of the d
