Media

I’ve been going through my posts from 2009 trying to identify the ones I think are the better ones. I suppose was making a kind of Top Ten list, despite my recurring griping about lists. It is not a “best of” list, however. It is a list of the ones I liked, though some may not have been all they could or should have been. It’s a favourites list, I suppose. It goes like this:

1. What Star Trek did to me
2. The class system is alive and well and now online
3. Readers have responsibilities too
4. I wonder what she’ll say today
5. Generations, transitions, moving pictures
6. Literacy is a prerequisite for independence
7. Monetizing meaning: what is content anyway?
8. Is usability kaput?
9. Who are we not hearing from?
10. The first draft is the outline

It has been an intriguing exercise. As I go through the posts I see the themes that have preoccupied me. I’ve been aware that there was some redundancy to my posts as I keep returning to certain subjects but I think this is likely true of anyone with a blog.

Here are some of the themes, observations and comments I see popping up over and over:

• What I perceive as a belief among many that social media, and the Internet generally, is ubiquitous and of a democratic nature and how that is a false belief.
• Sometimes the act of communication is more important than what is communicated.
• Social media is not tactile. We’re all in touch with each other online but we never touch each other – there is no physical contact to technological connections.

Those are the three big ones I keep seeing myself writing about. As far as the topic of writing went, my focus was a bit generic. I seemed to write more about that vague thing we call content – what is happening to traditional news, how blogs have evolved, managing social media content and so on. I was all over the map which is not unusual for me.

As an aside … I rarely make lists like the one above. I decided to do so this time as a first step in a process of going through all my posts, back to 2004, and identifying the better material. In my inept fashion, I’m trying to do a bit of online housekeeping.

Share:

Hide Sites

(This was originally posted October 23rd, 2005 on another one of my blogs, one that is on hiatus. I’ve edited slightly to make the terminology more current.)

I came across a post about blogging and social media and know exactly what it’s talking about when the blogger asks, “Why do some write about every, little, single, humdrum, minute aspect of the everyday?” It can be annoying and irksome at the best of times. I feel like she does. On the other hand, I do the very thing that bugs me.

It got me thinking about blogging again and, surprisingly, I came across a song by Emmylou Harris that I think of now as the social media song. It’s called Can You Hear Me Now?

And I’m reminded of two quotes. The first is Eduardo Galeano in his Book of Embraces. I’ve lost the exact wording, but it was along the lines of, “Everyone has a voice, something to say that needs to be heard by the others.” (I’ve pretty much butchered it, but that’s roughly what he said.)

The other quote is possibly from Martin Luther King, though I may be wrong. But it goes something like, “Violence is the speech of those who have no voice.”

And my point with both of these is the business of a voice. Technology aside, social media and most things on the Internet are about communication and communication is about people and voices and having someone on this silly rock just listen to you.

I send out my S.O.S.
A message in a bottle set out to sea
It just reads “Soul in distress”
And nobody ever got back to me

Can you hear me now?
Can you hear me now?

Not that everyone online is in distress. Most aren’t. But the point is people need to chatter and they need to feel someone, anyone, is listening to them chatter. I’ve always thought this was one of the biggest mistakes people make in relationships – not understanding that part of your job when you’re in one is to be a sounding board.

And sometimes not understanding that you really only need to appear to be listening because, often, when people sound off they don’t necessarily want a discussion. Shit builds up during the day and they need to let it go, like steam. Part of the art of listening is knowing when you’re supposed to listen and interact and when you’re really just supposed to sit there and nod.

I guess my point is that people need an outlet and this is one of the things social media provides – outlets. But people also need a sense that there is someone listening, even if what they are saying is nothing worth saying. The act of communication is often more important than the content of the communication. And this is why we see things online like – I changed my pants, I brushed my teeth, I petted the dog and so on.

Can you hear me now? Can you hear me now?

People are looking for an ear.

Not long ago, I came across one of the saddest blogs I’ve encountered. It was from a year or two ago, a woman in Toronto, and it was a blog with single post. Her husband of a certain number of years had been having an affair she had been unaware of. Now he had left saying he not only didn’t love her, he never had and now he had finally found someone he did love. She was blind-sided and alone and … well, you know the story.

One post. Who do you talk to when the house is empty, you’re alone and this is what you’re dealing with?

How did the load get to be so heavy?
I used to wear my trouble like a crown
A bad flood’s pounding on the levee
And I’m gonna need some help to hold my ground.

Anyway … blogs aren’t all sad – the exact opposite. I read a lot of blogs because they’re so damn funny.

But I think I mainly read them because I find people who feel about things the way I do – and sometimes very trivial things. But you get a sense that you’re not alone. You realize how freakin’ big the world is, how many people are out there, and that someone, somewhere is listening.

Can you hear me now? Can you hear me now?

Share:

Hide Sites

I’ve been meaning to do this for a while. So here goes:

1 - No one cares about your brand.

2 – Given number 1, you need to find something people do care about.

3 - No one cares about your company.

4 - Given number 3, you need to represent your company with a human face which means a style, an interest, a tone and hopefully a name – Bob, Mary, Fred, Susan – along with a last name and, somewhere, what their relationship to your company is (CEO, VP Marketing, janitor, whatever).

5 - Don’t post on Twitter, Facebook or your blog too frequently. And don’t post too infrequently. How do you tell? Have people in your company following you and get their opinions. Better yet, ask the people who are following your Twitter feed, Facebook feed, blog feed. People like being asked their opinion. It gives them a sense of involvement.

6 - It’s not only okay to discuss things in your feeds that are unrelated to your company, products and services, it’s probably a good idea. See numbers 1 and 3.

7 - If you are only posting you are wasting your time.

8 - Given number 7, get off your butt and start following and commenting and forwarding other feeds.

9 - Using social media is cheap only if you consider it in dollar terms.

10 - The cost of social media is time. See numbers 5, 6 and 8.

11 - Some social media campaigns have worked (I’ve heard) but these are usually clever, gimmicky campaigns.

12 - The problem with number 11 is that they wear thin fast and, without something substantive behind them, they die (as do you) on the vine.

13 - Do not trust anyone describing him or herself as a social media expert.

14 - There are no social media experts (see number 13). Everyone is making it up as they go along.

15 - Pontificating grandly is the favourite social media pastime. This post is a very good example.

And there they are. Feel free to add your own in the comments.

Share:

Hide Sites

I really am tired of the repetitive and now long-redundant either/or debate around traditional and social media. Apart from being well worn, it risks obfuscating other issues. A good example of what gets lost lies in the Michael Valpy essay, Is this the end of social cohesion? and David Eaves’ response, Dear Valpy: social media isn’t killing democracy, it’s making it stronger.

We can probably blame Mr. Valpy because he brings up the subject of newspapers and social media and certainly makes some valid points (such as quoting Carleton’s Christopher Waddell’s speculation about seeking out confirmation online rather than challenges).

The problem, however, is that if you accept the argument that newspapers provided some social cohesion and, through challenges and debate, unifying ideas (something Mr. Eaves flatly rejects), surely we can take it further. If we were all made to own and read and study Bibles, and all made to belong to and attend Christian churches and their services, regardless of whether we were Christian or not, surely we’d have the cultural coherence and common touchstones that they had in Elizabethan England. Now that was coherent and that was a world with things in common, including shared values.

The problem is that in a democratic society that can hardly be considered democratic.

We’re told, however, that social media is. It has the potential to save the day. But who exactly is social media democratic for? The homeless? Personally, I’m not aware of any homeless people online, but maybe my social circle is limited.

Canada’s aboriginal people, those living in far off, rural areas with no Internet access? Or the ones living in poverty – do they have access? Do they even have computers? (I recently approached Canada’s food banks with the idea of using social media as a way to facilitate what they did, to reach more potential donors and volunteers etc. They liked the idea but had some huge obstacles: their disparate nature and the fact that many food banks don’t have Internet access and/or don’t have computers. The real world gave me a wake up call.)

Yes, I’ve written about this before.

Here’s the thing about social media: you need a computer or some handheld device. And you need access. And even if you do have the wherewithal for those things, you need to know how to use them and have a facility for doing so. It may be hard to believe, but some people don’t. Just as some people couldn’t balance a bank account to save their lives and some people couldn’t sing on key no matter how many lessons they took.

Social media comes with predicates. It makes assumptions about who you are and what you have. You meet those, you get to use it. Otherwise, you’re outta luck pal.

So let’s be careful when we speak of the democratizing nature of social media.

Our beautiful mosaic

But getting back to Michael Valpy’s essay … Mr. Eaves says Mr. Valpy enters the conversation three years late and that is true if the conversation is this endless traditional/social media thing. But the science fiction author Samuel R. Delany was writing about this back in the 1970s and 80s. However, he wasn’t writing about social media because what is at the heart of Valpy’s essay is not tools but people and society and our ability to find and talk to each other. Social media is a tool and nothing more.

What Delany was writing about was social fragmentation and the “What if …?” that follows when you follow it through to its extremes. In one of his novels (Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand, I believe) the risk is cultural fugue, a kind of social catatonia. The economist Herbert Simon has said, “A wealth of information leads to a poverty of attention.” Delany’s novel seems to suggest, “A wealth of choice leads to an inability to choose.” Fugue.

To use a Canadian cliché, if we are a cultural mosaic what are we a mosaic of? Cultures or gated communities of the mind and spirit? Mr. Eaves doesn’t like the quote by Carleton’s Christopher Waddell about us seeking reinforcement rather than challenge online but I suspect Waddell is correct. But I think that is a human tendency the Internet facilitates rather than being a consequence of it being the Internet bogeyman. And it may be we tend to do this the more fragmented our world becomes.

Whatever the truth is, there is a problem and reducing it to a traditional versus social media argument misdirects attention. It misses the real world.

We think we know Canada and Canadians but what we know is the parameters of our own lives: friends, work, family. To everything else, we are tourists. The old saying, “Out of sight, out of mind,” applies. We don’t know the rest of the country, we don’t even know the rest of our own provinces. (How many people in Vancouver have ever been to, much less lived in, Fort St. John? How many of us have lived in Smiths Falls? How many in Toronto have lived in Elliot Lake? Who has been to and lived in Bathurst, New Brunswick?)

Social media can facilitate this but only if we are listening. Waddell’s question (“Do we?”) is one worth asking along with, “Who are we listening to?” Despite all the online voices, we have to constantly ask, “Who am I not hearing from?”

You can be sure someone’s voice isn’t there.

Share:

Hide Sites

I’ve been seeing all kinds of stories and posts and tweets and whatever about the alarming revelation that teens don’t use Twitter. (The link is arbitrary – there are loads of stories out there; it’s just one of many.)

The tone of many of these is that this is a bad thing and Twitter is in trouble and something really bad must be in the offing.

What if the reverse is true? What if one of the attractions of Twitter is that teens aren’t on it?

I hate sounding like some old grump doing the, “Kids these days …” routine because it doesn’t reflect how I think or feel. Quite the opposite. But let’s be realistic — much of what teens are interested in is only of interest to other teens, they often have a vocabulary all their own and, being the old grumps we are, it’s of no interest to us. It’s clutter. It’s noise.

Doesn’t that make something like Twitter more attractive if one of their aspects is the absence of this? For an older demographic, doesn’t it make it more useful?

And where did the implicit notion that the only demographic that spends money, the only one worth targeting for marketing purposes, was the teen set? An older demographic is likely to have more money to spend, and likely to spend on higher priced items (because they can). The only possible difference, and I’m not sure this is true, is that they may take more pursuading.

And where did this idea come from that in order to be successful you had to be the biggest, have the most users, reach the most people? Those might be nice things to have (if you know how to leverage such an audience – most don’t), but it’s more than possible to make a good buck being smaller or, put another way, big enough.

I’m not saying these things apply to Twitter. But they are worth taking into account. If Twitter doesn’t attract a teen audience, it’s not the end of the world. In some ways, it may be the best of all worlds.

Put another way, by putting the text of the image above the opposite way, “My kids don’t use Twitter. I shouldn’t have to explain this.”

(By the way … I loved that image. I thought it hilarious. It’s from the Seth Simmonds site.)

Share:

Hide Sites

For my headline to be complete it should read, “What you save in dollars you spend in time because, as you probably know, time is money.” In other words, saving dollars doesn’t always save dollars.

I’m thinking about businesses and web sites and social media. The other night I was at an event, talking to a number of people, many of them business people, and we talked a bit about business, marketing and the various tools available to leverage on the Internet.

I was talking to one guy, a small businessman, and said to him that what I usually tell businesses is that if they’re not sure what the tools are and how to use them, it’s best not to jump in. You should have a specific reason for using them and a good idea of how to go about using them so they’re effective. The biggest problem that I’ve seen is that the tools appear to have all kinds of potential – and they do have loads of potential – but what most people don’t see is the real cost, which is time.

Creating a web site and putting it in place, or getting accounts on social media tools like Facebook and Twitter, is relatively easy and there is an almost zero dollar investment – it seems. But maintaining these things is hard. And it involves time, which usually ends up as a cost.

Imagine business cards for example. You get one designed and spend a bit of time figuring out exactly what information you want on them and what message you want them to communicate. And you’ve hired a company to help you with the design, information, and message aspects, and to produce the cards. And they charge you something for all this and that is an expense.

Then you come across a tool that allows you to do all this yourself with almost no cost, and you do so, and you save a bunch of money and that looks good on the books. But …

The problem is, for the card to have value, for it to be effective, you have to rewrite it every week because now you’re on the Internet. And you can’t just rewrite it with anything. You have to think through what it says, each week, and in many cases, spend some time doing a bit of research to ensure what it says is accurate. And you have to present the information in a way that prompts people to read what the card says, not just toss it aside without a look.

In other words, every week (maybe more often, maybe less), you have to spend time on it in order for it to be effective and justify its existence and your effort. Nothing works online the same way it does in the tactile world. That’s why many ads fail online.

In my experience most businesses, especially small businesses, don’t have that time. Even if they do, they don’t have the writing expertise or the social conversation skills to do it well enough to make it work and become a valuable marketing tool.

What they end up with is some reduced marketing and other expenses and some crossed-fingers as they hope it works, which it seldom does without a specific focus on maintenance. People come once, might even like what they see, but without a reason for coming back you won’t see them again.

Maintenance is critical to making any of these things work and maintenance means time and that means money. If you do it yourself, it’s whatever your time is worth to you – how much an hour? It’s also what you don’t do – “If instead of doing this I was doing that, I’d generate …” If you spend an hour of your time and that hour is worth $50 and, while you do it you are not doing something that would pull in $75, you’re losing $25. And that’s a cost. Lost revenue. It might not show up on the books that way, but that’s what it is.

You could pay someone to do it for you – in many cases, the best option. But in trying to keep costs down you go with cheap, that may be what you get and end up being how you’re represented – meaning your brand feels the impact. Regardless of the cost, make sure whoever is doing the maintenance knows what they are doing and are very good at it.

Rumours to the contrary, the web is not a marvel where a storefront can be put in place without a thought and social media tools aren’t a magic pill to reach the world with the message about your product or service … and never give either, your site or your social tools, another thought. They have to be maintained, smartly. They require time and effort in order to work.

Sometimes the desperate need to reduce costs bamboozles us into believing in the pixie dust of the Internet. But the Internet, like life, keeps teaching the same lesson: ain’t nothing free, ain’t no easy routes to financial Valhalla, work and only work makes things work.

Share:

Hide Sites

Are you familiar with Mooer’s Law? It goes like this:

An information retrieval system will tend not to be used whenever it is more painful and troublesome for a customer to have information than for him not to have it.

Where an information retrieval system tends not to be used, a more capable information retrieval system may tend to be used even less.

It’s clunky way of saying it, but that’s Mooer’s Law (Calvin Mooer) and it’s not to be confused with Moore’s Law. This law, I think, is at the heart of all the problems media is having with the Internet and revenue. My interpretation of the law is this: Ease trumps authority every time. This is why it is so difficult to generate sustainable revenue for news content.

One approach to content has been the “walled garden” idea. This approach keeps content inaccessible until it has been paid for. A few years ago this was tried by many newspapers as they tried to make the transition to the online world. The problem was that, while they might have been a more authoritative source (a debated notion) they were difficult to access. “…Painful and troublesome …,” as Mooer’s Law puts it.

And it was so much easier to get it elsewhere. Where you got the information might have been of dubious authority but that was less important than how easy it was get. Similarly, why go to the library and get an authoritative text when it was so much easier to just Google it? When people speak of students using Wikipedia as a source for information for essays the reason students do is because it is easier. Faster. It’s not that they don’t care; it’s that they are behaving as most of us do.

Over at Technology Review, Jason Pontin has an interesting post titled How to Save Media. It’s worth reading because it is the best outline of a way for journalism to take on the current situation. It’s written with a pretty comprehensive understanding of the situation, the tools and the history. It’s the most realistic strategy outline that I’ve seen.

Having said that, I’m not sure it would work because of Mooer’s law. There is still a reliance on “paid for” content and while I am sure there would people willing to do so the problem is not so much in who pays for and receives that specialized content as it is in who does not. This may be conventional internet thinking on my part but when so much of the internet’s commercial aspect is dependent on numbers, can content that is not seen by most people justify itself economically? Isn’t some of a work’s value online its ability to reach many people? In other words, in relative terms, wouldn’t it be like creating content only to release it to a void where no one sees it?

My other concern with Pontin’s suggestion is complexity. Much of what he suggests I would like, especially the idea of print getting away from the daily delivery model into a model where a consumer chooses how often he or she receives it. But I’m always skeptical of something that adds a layer of complexity and this approach, much as I might like it, moves away from the simple “one size fits all” approach to the more complex “tailored for you.” And this at a time when print as a delivery mechanism is fading away.

But to return to Calvin Mooer … The internet allows us to do many things, one of which is observe human behavior. That’s what Mooer’s law is about: how we behave. Any approach to online content that makes it more difficult to access, versus similar content that is easy to get, will fail. In fact, even if similar content was not available, I think it would fail because it’s “troublesome.”

That’s Mooer’s Law.

Share:

Hide Sites

There’s a good answer on the question of Twitter, blogs etc. as news. From Susan Chira, foreign editor for the NY Times, answering reader questions March 30-April 3, 2009. Via @jayrosen_nyu (btw … the link at the end of this quote goes to the page it’s taken from but you need to scroll down to get to the questions. This answer is from the first question.)

So let’s take citizen journalists, bloggers, or even in some cases, Twitterers. I think for professional journalists the information they provide is great raw material. But before we can print it as fact, we usually have to sort through it and try to figure out how to verify it. Let’s just take a few of the very charged conflicts we cover: say, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict or the war between Russia and Georgia. How do we know someone sending us information over the transom is accurately reporting what he or she witnessed, or whether the information is being slanted or even fabricated to suit an ideological point of view? As reporters, we can weigh statements from witnesses we interview personally, and cross-check them with other sources. We are still learning how to do that in a warp-speed Web world. But it’s great to have the opportunity to figure out how to get more information, and the new tools to enable us to broaden and deepen our coverage using the resources of the public.

from: Talk to the Newsroom: Foreign Editor (NY Times)

Share:

Hide Sites

There is an apparent effect of media, particularly of social media, that results, I think, due to the sheer number of voices in the conversations and the speed at which they can communicate. For lack of a better word, I’ll call it the dichotomizing of issues. Or, maybe a more accessible term would be, “The Either/Or Syndrome.”

I notice it particularly in the discussions about social media and the current, related discussion about news. There seem to be just two views:

• We’re going to hell in a handcart because traditional journalism is dying and we’ve only the web (bloggers) to replace it and credibility is absent there, as well as resources etc.
• Traditional journalism is dead but doesn’t know it and therefore won’t give up the reins willingly to the new world so let’s just take ‘em and too bad for those guys.

That may not be the best description but at least it suggests what I’m getting at. And it’s not really my point.

My point is that we don’t take a more considered view, regardless of the side. I’m almost tempted to call it a more humanistic view but that sounds a bit more warm and cuddly than what I mean. We don’t appear to take human behavior into consideration.

If someone’s job is ending, if the career they’ve spent years developing, if the industry they’ve put money, time and sweat into is vanishing, it’s hardly surprising that they would not embrace the changing landscape willingly or that they would question what appears would replace them. I’m pretty sure I would respond that way. So it seems both callous and short-sighted to react to their reaction as we appear to, which often comes across as, “Well, f*** ‘em, then.”

At the same time, in the thrill of change we forget that change is just that: change. In itself, it has neither a positive or negative value. It’s not good or bad. It’s just change. For it to be good, the change needs some definition. If something is changing, what is it changing into? If we replace something, what do we replace it with? The assumption seems to be that it will be better than what was there before but, to quote Pete Townshend and The Who, “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.”

Change can be a blessing but it can also bite you in the butt. So it’s probably a good idea to get a sense for what that change will look like.

I think it’s pretty clear that change is happening. It’s also pretty clear that no one has any idea what it will look like. There are some vague scenarios tossed around but almost all of them hit the skids when it comes to, “But how does it make money? How does it function when everything it does has been commoditized down to ‘free?’”

So maybe it’s time for both sides to engage in a discussion about what this change can look like and figure out how to go about achieving it. My own feeling is, as things stand, the change that is happening will be a lose-lose event for all sides.

Share:

Hide Sites