Blogger Spectrum

We had an interesting social media discussion on Plurk today (now known as a Plurkshop) that raised a lot of questions. There were many participants in the quickly shifting conversation, including Amber Naslund, Connie Reece, Tim Jackson, Beth Harte and Mack Collier. The conversation started by talking about managing conversations across different platforms (Amber has a great wrap-up here), but along the way, the conversation shifted and changed. One of the questions that was raised concerns the objectives of social media — how do you use/activate social media and why. The answer depends on where in the media spectrum that you sit.

At the far end of the blogging spectrum, there is the lone blogger who is writing for their own enjoyment — the diarist. Then comes the activist or even passionate brand evangelist. In the centre is the Careerist — the blogger who writes as a demonstration of their skills and expertise. Next comes the “expert” blogger who writes about their area of knowledge. Then there is the corporate blogger which is written from a business perspective. Professional  bloggers can roam across any or all of these categories (and I am sure there are many others). But each of these bloggers will have their own objectives ranging from the personal to the professional — but there is something that they have in common — a desire to create a community.

BloggerSpectrum

Even the most strident blogger will gain some kind of pleasure from having their material read. They will love a comment here or there. They will thrill to a rise in subscriptions. Why? It is about community. In many ways, we build our world around opposing forces — our friends and our enemies. We can have a community that encompasses both.

So, is building a small community, or readership worth it? Clearly it is. Those blogs with a handful of readers/commenters will only continue as long as there is some form of value exchanged. But even the most personal of blogs may, at some point, become a money making venture. Take for example, the story of Lucas Cruikshank who has built a formidable YouTube subscriber base. At first instance, you can wonder what can drive a 14 year old to write, produce, star in, and distribute a series about a six year old — but clearly, in doing so, Lucas has opened opportunities for himself and his family (while at the same time building his own skills and experience).

You may not start with the aim of turning your social media/content into a business, but once a community forms and achieves a critical mass, opportunities will be pulled into your gravitational field. This is, perhaps, the great leveller of social media — the traditional barriers to entry in media are related to reach and production cost. Both are dramatically lowered thanks to social media.

After all, with social media, it is not where you start that is important. It is the journey, and the story that you tell (or allow to be told) along the path.

Pubcamp Sydney Voxpop

Craig Wilson and Gordon Whitehead from Sticky Advertising took some time out at Pubcamp Sydney to probe some members of the audience on the future of media in 2008. Here is the first set of responses … featuring (in order of appearance Gavin Heaton, Sean Carmody and Markus Hafner).

I am currently writing up a review of the Sydney event, but in the meantime, take a look at Matt Moore’s summary or view the twitter stream for yourself. Don’t forget, Pubcamp Melbourne next week.


PubCamp – The Web 2.0 Media Day from Sticky Advertising on Vimeo.

Who Really Gets Social Media?

PlurkChat Sometimes you just have to ask a question and see where it takes you. Twitter started off with the same premise. What are you doing? Eliciting a variety of responses and prompting a banal moment-by-moment commentary before the community kicked-in and reshaped Twitter’s reason for being.

But while I have a great affinity with Twitter, it is feeling more and more like a broadcast medium every day. Sure there are some small-scale discussions occurring but they are hardly conversational. Plurk, on the other hand, have placed conversation right at the heart of their design.

This post is continued over at MarketingProfs Daily Fix. Hope you enjoy!

The Evanescence of Social Media

In marketing/advertising we talk about changing behaviour. We speak of trends, present analysis and peer into the near horizon of our own timelines. We blog about the changing of consumer experience, discuss demographics, strategies and new ways of measuring reach, frequency and engagement. And in amongst all this conversation we are building our own edifice to social media — shouting, talking and building, word by word, our own empire. But I wonder, is this all sounding so hollow?

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats’ feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar
— TS Eliot, The Hollow Men

If we take a look at the shapes of these stimulus, if we examine the state of BEING rather than the active state of PERFORMING (in our roles of employer, employee, creator, listener, receiver, etc), then we may wonder at the particular historical moment in which we have found ourselves. The popularity and rise associated with "reality TV" shows such as Big Brother and even Eurovision only hold sway momentarily, never to be repeated in the future — for the interactivity, voting and audience involvement is as transient as the beep notification of an SMS alert.

And while our cultural artefacts are being produced at ever greater rates, the co-creation and location of their meaning appears to be increasingly bound up in the evanescent energy of this "interactivity". David Cushman, for example, cites a press release claiming that:

More video material has been uploaded to YouTube in the past six months than has ever been aired on all major networks combined, according to cultural anthropologist Michael Wesch. About 88 percent is new and original content, most of which has been created by people formerly known as “the audience".

However, as Alan Kirby points out in this article on Postmodernism (via Amanda Chappel):

A culture based on these things can have no memory – certainly not the burdensome sense of a preceding cultural inheritance which informed modernism and postmodernism. Non-reproducible and evanescent, pseudo-modernism is thus also amnesiac: these are cultural actions in the present moment with no sense of either past or future.

In the place of Postmodernism, Kirby argues for a new defining cultural moment — pseudo modernism. Identifying 1980 as the turning point, the pseudo modernists can also be seen as those generations succeeding Generation X — so called Generation Y or Millennials, though like anything, is more likely to relate to a mode of being than to an age/demographic group. Kirby’s pseudo modernists are spookily devoid of agency, caught in the neverland between the capacity to effect change and the overwhelming minutiae digital interactions:

You click, you punch the keys, you are ‘involved’, engulfed, deciding. You are the text, there is no-one else, no ‘author’; there is nowhere else, no other time or place.

But if this is the case — if the central seeding authority of the pseudo modernist is "cluelessness" — a contrasting capacity to see and act on a big picture but an inability to act as an individual (or in community), then the antidote may well lie in the social media interactions that are their cause. For while "engagement" may well mean contributing to a social action in a far off country (perhaps distributing our own agency into the network of strong and weak ties), the proliferation of "real world" meetups and the intensity around them may provide some small cause for optimism in the bleak sea of pseudo modernist reality. This desire to capture and contain the fleeting ephemera of social interaction has driven the popularity of "live blogging", the collating and curation of "favourites" via del.icio.us and other bookmarking sites and the use and sharing of photographs, videos and so on. And while the production fails (and always will) in its effort to capture the live moment, we can be in danger of focusing too much on product over process — emphasising the cultural or social aspect of end result over being in the moment.

However, I have a feeling that the artefacts of this new reality are yet to be realised for their value. For while it is easy to discount the quality, merit or even longevity of much that passes for cultural production in the current era, perhaps it is time to re-evaluate what can and should be considered important.

The disbelief in grand narratives that Lyotard identified with the postmodernists is a handy tool when it comes to thinking through our current consumer/cultural moment. And I have a feeling that Generation Y will prove to be more culturally heretical than they might at first appear. After all, the Internet with its hypertext and self-spurning evolution could well be considered the defining achievement of the postmodern generation. But the WAY in which future generations use, activate and build upon the Internet, its applications and social, technological and intellectual networks will have far reaching effects for our cultures and for us as individuals. This generation who have been "always connected" are bound to rethink society in fundamental ways.

This has certainly got ME thinking!

Why Social Networking is Imperative for Business and Brands

In the wake of the Enterprise 2.0 summit in Boston this week, I have been taking a peek at the blog coverage and thinking through the opportunities and challenges facing organisations struggling to find their way. (BTW, Stephen Collins has a couple of great posts here, which I am sure he will drill down into on his return.)

A clear intersection for me is the collision between the demands/desires of knowledge workers and the expectations of the business/management. The same is true for branding. We are effectively seeing the 20th Century modes of business (command and control) being subverted by the activities of individuals. The strict hierarchies and mechanisms of control are being called into question by active (consumer) participants and employee evangelists determined to achieve outcomes (often in spite of the barriers placed in their way). As Stephen Collins says:

… there is an active and engaged community out there who want to do this stuff in their organisations or are keen to be a part of organisations that do.

And while many businesses/brands react by blocking or disabling access to social networks, the fact remains — the PRACTICE of business (just like the PRACTICE of marketing/advertising) is changing in ways that have never before been imagined. These EMERGENT practices require new skills and flexible thinking … and they may not yet, deliver the value you want. But they will (even the CIA agrees). We (and I do mean “we”) just need to create the connections between the practices, our business strategies and our bottom lines — this is the hard, behind the scenes activities that also need to happen (who said Web 2.0 is all fun and games).

In the meantime, if you are like me, and was unable to attend in person, get your fill of Enterprise 2.0 thinking at the Conference Community site, and start saving for 2009. And before you go, take two minutes to listen to Karen Appleton, VP of Business Development of Box, the file storage utility, talking about the importance of social networks to your business (via Enterprise 2.0 blog).

Calling All Marketers — Inspiraton, Anyone?

InspirationAnyone Following up from the Microsoft teaser, the full-length video is now available.

With the first instalment in this series entitled The Breakup, the intention was to raise debate. Microsoft boldly tackled the issue around the shifting nature of the consumer-advertiser relationship, and invited marketers into the conversation. It certainly was not the type of communication or advertising I expected from Microsoft — and it did capture a lot of attention at the time of launch.

But with this sequel there is a wholly different challenge. Geert Desager and Kris Hoet are clearly taking another step — to facilitate the establishment of a marketing community (moving from conversation to action?). In the process, they are taking a sweep at brands, agencies and all the folks who inhabit them. There are some great lines, including “I tried to look up that Web 2.0 thing you told be about, I just couldn’t find the exact URL”. Let’s face it both agencies and marketers are easy targets (and we provide so much fodder) … so you are bound to raise a chuckle or two.

However, if you do want to move beyond the banter, the site Get Inspired Here is the place you can go. Over the coming weeks (and in the wake of Cannes), there is bound to be plenty of discussion, taunting and maybe even a little creativity. Get your full feed here. Hopefully there are more surprises in store!

Attention Deficit / Outcome Surfeit

With so much to read, so many meetings, connections, emails and so on, it is a wonder today’s knowledge workers are able to live productive work lives. There are incursions from our private and digitally-social lives that add to the noise while also offering promise — tools like Twitter, Plurk, Facebook and even YouTube threaten to both liberate our thinking from the structures of the enterprise and sink our productivity.

As Marci Alboher says:

Distracted? And how. Beeped and pinged, interrupted and inundated, overloaded and hurried – that’s how we live today. We prize knowledge work — work that relies on our intellectual abilities — and yet increasingly feel that we have no time to think. For all our connectivity, we often catch little more than snippets and glimpses of one another.

With the average knowledge worker switching tasks every three minutes, returning to the original task half an hour later, it is clear that we are facing an attention deficit.

However, this does not necessarily take into account the leaps in productivity offered by this new mode of working. Anne Zelenka talks about the clash of working cultures and expectations brought on by the Web 2.0 world, characterising this change as the difference between "bursty" and "busy":

The busyness economy works on face time, incremental improvement, strategic long-term planning, return on investment, and hierarchical control. The burst economy, enabled by the Web, works on innovation, flat knowledge networks, and discontinuous productivity.

Clearly businesses contain a variety of people. I most productively work in the bursty model, though I can also operate in the busy mode. My guess is that we need a mix of both. But rather than characterising "bursty" types as having low attention, my view is that it is not about attending to tasks, but achieving outcomes. Don’t look at the HOW of things, look at the RESULTS.

For a comical view on those suffering from Web 2.0 distractions, take a look at Twitterwhore.   

A Glimpse of the Future

A comment on my post about Twitter, Plurk and teens the other day really got me thinking. In the comment, Arthus Erea suggested that one of the driving factors for teens in their uptake of new technology is critical mass. Now, this is not surprising, but it is refreshing to hear it directly.

As Arthus says, community is king:

Community is the driving factor for my generation: we want to be where our friends are. That’s why *everyone* switches from MySpace to Facebook at roughly the same time (around 9th grade now). Sure, we knew Facebook was out there and was better than MySpace. But we don’t switch till there’s a critical mass (read: high school students) worthy of our attention.

So how does this play out? What is it that is going on in the lives of teens? What is this vision of community? What are they thinking and what does this hold for the futures of us all?

One of Arthus’ side projects (apart from school, blogging, photography, business and a plethora of other things) is Students 2.0. It is an inspiring insight into the thinking and passions of tomorrow’s business leaders:

For decades, students have been stuck in classrooms, behind desks, being told how and what to learn. For a time, when students were expected to become widgets for the vast machine of industry, this model of education was highly effective. However, we have now entered a new age: an age where thinking is more important than knowing, where thoughts out-do the facts. Borders are melting away; project teams collaborate across the globe and intelligence is being continually redefined. The world’s information is at our fingertips and anybody can publish their thoughts for virtually no cost.

Everywhere, we see changes: with how business operates, how people interact and how success is accomplished. There is unfortunately one place that remains unchanged, the place that could benefit most from the changes we see today… the classroom. The education system continues to “stay the course” upon a falling ship. Yet, the widgets within the machine are no longer content to grind away. Ideas are popping up everywhere, across the globe. Students are continually redefining their own lives and how they want to learn and interact

I will certainly be adding Students 2.0 to my reading list. Check it out, I am sure you will too.

What’s Next in Media

There is some great discussion going on around the nature, role and function of media. Neil Perkin has put together a great deck that digs into the impact of social media, while Craig Wilson looks at the potential of social media for local and regional brands. Interestingly, that is one of the comment threads suggested by Matt Hazel.

What do you think? What’s next? What’s missing? What is going to create the next, next thing?

The View from the Bottom

ML215056__DSC6005When I read online, I listen to the sound that the words make in my head. I try to detect the rhythms and energies of the writer as a way of gaining insight into their way of thinking. I look for freshness or a unique point of view. Even a turn of phrase can delight me. That is one of the great, and not so great aspects of microblogging — brevity can be a challenge for some but strangely liberating for others.

So as I have been digging around the various reactions to Plurk and Twitter, I was delighted to read this banner:

You could be getting your advertising commentary from a more experienced, higher-paid, and prettier ad exec. But the downbeat and bass line are in our hands– the adstar wannabes climbing the corporate ladder. As yet uncorrupted, somewhat uncouth, and utterly unrestrained, this is the view from the bottom, laid down by a first-year copywriter. Admit it. You’re jealous I just might be prettier. According to advertising tradition, that makes me a more viable source of information.

In the intensifying battle for our 140 character communications, the view from the bottom may be the clearest of all.