Social Media - Servant of Chaos

eCitizen Kane – The Digital Citizens Forum

For me, one of the most interesting aspects of social media – or the emergence of the “social web” is the challenge that it presents to our sense of self – our identities as individuals, professionals, bloggers and amateur photographers. It provides opportunities for us to broadcast (podcasting), create movies (youtube) and publish (blogs/self published books) and so on. The power to create, distribute, filter and contextualise information has never before been in the hands of so many – this is what I call simple social media – though it is anything BUT simple in its execution.

It is the fragmenting or multiplying of identity that was explored this time last week at the inaugural Digital Citizens forum here in Sydney. Those who attended were treated to a truly open conversation, artfully curated by Bronwen Clune and panelled by visiting US lawyer Adrian Dayton (Social Media for Lawyers), Sam North (Ogilvy PR), Damian Damjanovski (BMF), and Renai LeMay (Delimiter).

The conversation jumped from panellist to panellist and out into the audience in a lively debate covering questions of law, ethics, identity, trust and copyright/intellectual property. There was some nice give and take, with some members of the audience taking the travelling microphone and debating points, raising questions and challenging not just the panel but the whole room. It was a lively topic and an appreciative crowd.

At times I expected a Citizen Kane style response, “You don’t realise you are speaking to two people” – with panellists contradicting themselves and audience members clearly enjoying the sense of theatre and opportunity for debate.

It is always difficult to know what to expect with any event like this – but there is no doubt that smaller, more intimate events like these are challenging the larger scale event/conferences. After all, at a certain point, we all have a desire to move beyond the hyperbole of the keynote and the blinding flash of never ending metrics. Social media is, after all, social. That means it will be inexact, moody and potentially mocking. These features are why many businesses find social media challenging – but in an event format – it makes social media compelling.

If you have a client who you want to “get” social media, the Digital Citizens events may well be the best introduction you could offer. It’s the cocktail party normally reserved for Twitter – just with people in the flesh. Mr Thatcher may never understand – but it’s a different world now. It’s the world of eCitizen Kane.

Chatroulette – It Isn’t What You Think

FutureVisions, Innovation, Social Media, Strategy

When Malcolm Gladwell wrote Blink, it changed the way that we think. It made us realise that first impressions really do count – and in fact, we only have the blink of an eye before our conditioning, our prejudices and our expectations kick in.

So it is hardly surprising then that a site like Chatroulette is generating a lot of buzz and, in the process, generating as much fear as excitement. It is a site that works on the level of the blink – randomly selecting two participants and allowing them to share their webcams. If you see something that you don’t wish to, you can click the Next button and skip to another, anonymous webcam.

When I first heard about it, there were various reports of voyeurism, exhibitionism and so on. It sounded like the early days of the internet – but with video. However, just weeks later, there is a certain level of “gaming” starting to take place – with participants seeking to surprise, confuse and even challenge others.

Take a look at this video. Think about the experience of the participants. What are they expecting? What are they hoping for? Is there a power relationship at play? What are the participants exchanging?

What we are seeing, already, is a maturing not necessarily of the TECHNOLOGY but of the PARTICIPANTS. Our capacity to work with and then transform the relationship we have with technology is accelerating (at least in pockets) – and those who are socially savvy on the web are engaging and challenging other participants. This is a trend that is not likely to end anytime soon.

The important thing to think about is not what the technology is doing, but which behaviours are these technologies enabling? Then you need to think about your business and whether there is a connection with your brands, opportunities for your products/marketing or a thin slice of innovation that you can apply to the way you do business. Platforms like Chatroulette may not not appear to have much value at first glance, but then neither did email 20 years ago. The challenge for us all is to find the value that lies underneath. It’s there. You just need to look below the surface.

Make Your Content CLEAN

Social Media, Storytelling

We have conditioned ourselves to a certain style of thinking and a certain style of communication. We have overpopulated our collateral with jargon, strangled it with acronyms and leeched any remaining meaning from its thinning blood. Is there any wonder that we now struggle to deal with the immediacy and impact of social media?

Communications in the social world are a different beast entirely. Your blog posts, your tweets, your messages have to be full-blooded. There must be a pulse in the language and a beat to the message. This is storytelling of a new order or magnitude.

You have to think outside the content square. It means thinking and acting CLEAN:

Clever – Play to your audience’s intelligence. Don’t dumb it down. Amp it up. Create content that flatter’s your audience’s knowledge and understanding.

Layer – The advertising adage – tell them, tell them and tell them again – just doesn’t work. You need to layer meaning. Invite your audiences in. Wink at them slyly. Nod to their expertise. Appreciate their engagement. Remember they’re not here for you – you’re here for them.

Engage – Engage your audience as if you are entertaining them. Even the driest content can be compelling if you inject personality and passion into its creation.

Active – It sounds basic, but provide some form of activation. Can your blog post be easily shared? Is there a video that can be embedded? What about a book that can be downloaded and passed on?

Nervous – Does your content make you nervous? Do you get a small thrill when you write it? Do you worry that people will respond in a way that is unpredictable? If so, you may be on the right path. To produce content that is remarkable – you need to invest something in it. You need to have an opinion. The best content makes you a little nervous as you release it to the public.

Here is a great example from Marcus Brown. What’s he doing? Is he keeping it CLEAN? You be the judge.

Official Tweet Mime 2. Robert Scoble from Marcus Brown on Vimeo.

Stop and Think

Branding, Innovation, Science, Social Media

You know what it is like. There are thousands of messages seeking your ever diminishing attention – email, twitter, advertising, friends, family, phone calls – you name it, it wants you. And the demands seem to mount ever higher.

Think about technology and social media. Think about the way the next new thing arrives and sweeps us along. Do you jump early? Do you sign up for the beta program so that you can brag to your friends on Facebook? Or do you wait … see what the early adopters say and determine where to spend your precious attention?

What’s your personal strategy?

To many people, the pursuit of the latest, shiny thing seems ludicrous. You can almost hear them thinking “don’t change what isn’t broke”. But it appears there is more than ego and self interest at play in our ongoing obsession with the new, new thing.

For those who are new to social media (or technology or even any other field of endeavour), coping with the constant change and innovation can be overwhelming. It presents as “noise” rather than signal”. But recent research in the field of cognitive fluency suggests that the very act of submitting ourselves to the unfamiliar has the effect of making the unfamiliar, familiar. Cognitive fluency is a measure of how easy it is for us to think about something. Where there is a “blockage” in our processing, we experience this as a “sense” of disfluency – we have to allocate our scarce cognitive resources to analyse and process the information. It triggers a sensory alarm which urges us to trust less.

The interesting aspect here is that cognitive fluency manifests largely as what we would call “gut instinct”. This means that almost any stimulus, from the shape of a face to the typography of a sign can cause us to intuitively TRUST or DISTRUST what we see/hear/feel.

The impact of truly understanding cognitive fluency (and its opposite) for marketers is profound. If we transfer a sense of “difficulty” to do with wording, typeface, design etc to a product, then this will impact our sense of the brand and its role (or potential) in our lives. Some DISFLUENCY may even be useful for some products or services where you really want people to think through and consider what’s on offer.

The interesting thing is that we can modify and work with cognitive fluency. We can employ marketing and communications techniques to transform the way that people “understand” our products ands services. We can work to change not just behaviour but also response and engagement.

All we need to do is stop and think.