Facebook heads south...

Little more than a year ago, I was being forced to operate two social networks, one for my friends, family and former colleagues outside Guatemala (Facebook), and one for all the Chapines (Hi5). Now the local migration to the more prim and proper pages of Mark Zuckerberg's platform is almost complete.

Following the link trail from friends to friends of friends, I recently found myself in the bizarre Facebook ghetto that is Yepocapa. I've never actually been up there, but the impression one gets from "The Face" is a community packed with vain, materialistic, cousin-shagging servidores de Cristo, who like to moped around the place in Oscar de la Renta sunglasses, not entirely unlike southern Italians. (Mondragone was particularly memorable as far as this peculiar raza of poseurs goes.)

Those not listing 'La Biblia' — or even particular psalms — under their Favourite Books [Bibliaphiles?], leave no doubt about their cultural aspirations with remarks such as "Yo no leo" or even "Déjenme pensar...no, ninguno."

Just how far south we've come from the virtual hang-out of the Harvard elite, becomes clear the moment one lets one's curiosity assume control of the mouse. One pre-teen friend of a family member lists as her only interest Money. Her brother meanwhile has but one activity: Xbox 360, while another mate of his keeps himself busy with McDonalds and nothing else. One girl in this neck of the virtual woods seems almost offended by the question of 'Interests', having typed in her answer as Yo no soy interesada!

It's not all grim reading for anyone who cares about the future of civilisation in this part of the world, however. One of V's nephews is a biochemist and his circle of university friends quaff from a quite enviable pool of shared cultural interests: "Learn to live...free thinking...Ernesto Sabato, Nietzsche, Rayuela, Roberto Bolaño, Milan Kundera etc etc."

For some reason the movie version of Perfume seems to have gained a lot of traction with the junior chattering classes here in Guatemala. Perhaps the book isn't so freely available in translation.

Social media phenomenon

"No me digas que no tienes que ir al baño, cuando te miro te la pasas facebookeando"

Yet another surprise hit in the Spanish-speaking world which owes its success almost entirely to promotion across multiple online platforms and word of mouth recommendation..and Esteman's exitazo is actually about the social media. His (Facebook?) friends provided the background dancing in this video that he financed himself, and which was viewed many more times in Spain that his native Colombia:

Twitter can be the game changer

Yesterday I experienced something of a lightbulb moment relating to the future role of Twitter in the production and consumption of media communications.

I love Twitter. I signed up early but it took a bit of peer pressure (thanks Frode) to turn me into the -114 follower twitterer I am today.

I've been immersed in the information revolution for as long as it has been possible for someone of my generation to be so — starting with a Computer Studies AO-level back in 1983 — but there's always been a fail-safe system of leery scepticism operating in parallel to any guileless, early-adopter enthusiasm: Is this technology truly indispensable? Does it complicate my life? What are the hidden costs? Is it for some people, not others?

I taught my 82-year-old father how to use email and he now uses it almost daily, revealing an ability to express himself with concise and witty prose messages that I'd been missing out on. But he doesn't really get blogging or microblogging, in the same way he doesn't really get modern advertising post-Ogilvy, with its emphasis on lifestyles over product benefits.

But yesterday it suddenly became clear to me how Twitter really does have the potential to change everything, at least for those of us that have grown up with the necessary information filtering skills (and inclinations).

My professional interests include the interpretation of the role of media in shaping the discourse of organisations, in particular through the identiification of patterns — or networks — of influence.

Up until now the starting point for the 'social' analysis of any piece of content would be a semantic one: algorithms made to carve up text into extractable entities such as the names of individuals — journalists, politicians, spokespeople — who could be assumed to participate within affective complexes of authority and influence.

These names and other keywords would then be fed through further software machines in order to identify and map out these associations and their amplification effects in meaningful ways.

Back in the day, the networks of influence were implicit, but essentially invisible until the majority of content assumed digital form, and even then further software number-crunching was required.

Then, when social networks appeared on the scene, some of the relationships started to become, in effect, hard coded, and so the would-be media analyst was about to get something at least for free.

Newspaper articles in online form have URLs which can now be shared via social media such as Facebook and Twitter (as opposed to the more private medium of email) and the open nature of the latter platform in particular means that it becomes comparatively straightforward to analyse / visualise the relationship between a particular piece of content and particular networks of 'friends'. Tweets thus appeared to be another important media phenomenon to be tracked, but as not all readers of content shared it with their 'friends', this was going to be another string to our bow rather than a whole new mode of combat.

Well, that's how it seemed to me until yesterday when I came across the New York Times's experimental Timespeople Twitter function. This is the game changer...

For if content itself becomes a node (or even a hub) within the social network, then all the relationships are finally joined up electronically. And in theory, any reader who has become a friend of the publisher will leave an electronic trace of the influence exerted by a particular article (plus a trail to their own social network) simply by reading it. No URL-sharing required.

Overgrazing of the blog commons

As my seven years of working within the UK PR industry draw to a close, I thought it might be appropriate to throw out a few observations on where my particular field appears to be heading. Here's the first of them.

The perhaps rather counter-intuitive notion that the blogosphere is a more finite PR resource than the traditional media doesn't seem to have achieved widespread enough currency to prevent the rather obvious consequences of 'overgrazing'.

For many years interactive expertise was seen as just the kind of higher-value service that would allow agency do-ers to position themselves more consistently as consultancy thinkers.

The rise of social media has upset this model somewhat, because suddenly digital stuff began to look much less esoteric and clever and rather more like what everyone else had been doing all along: media relations. In other words the kind of activity where social skills were deemed vastly more important than 'techie' ones, and agency-type services could earn a tidy premium without anyone having to do the intellectual gym-work needed to move up into the division where the likes of McKinsey ply their trade.

Except of course that building relationships with bloggers is not really agency grunt work at all and whereas PR professionals can usually recover from burning a relationship with a particular publication, the strong association between most blogs with a single individual mean that there's much more to building valuable relationships in the blogosphere than targeting 'lists' of topic commentators.

Potent combinations of everyone and someone

Very insightful new post on Technium by Kevin Kelly:

"Never before have we been able to make systems with as much "hive" in it as we have recently made with the web. Until this era, technology was primarily all control, all design. Now it can contain both design and no-design, or hive-ness.

In fact, this Web 2.0 business is chiefly the first step in exploring all the ways in which we can combine design and the hive in innumerable permutations. We are tweaking the dial in hundreds of combos:

1) dumb writers, smart filters, no editors
2) smart writers, dumb filters, no editors
3) smart editors, smart filters, no writers

...ad infinitum.

"The real art of business and organizations in the network economy will not be in harnessing the crowd of "everybody" (simple!) but in finding the appropriate hybrid mix of bottom and top for each niche, at the right time. The mix of control/no-control will shift as a system grows and matures."

Experiments in democracy

I was interested to learn the other day that Spain was officially classified as a member of the developing world up to 1964. (For rather obvious reasons Franco's regime missed out on the Marshall plan for Europe.)

Anyway, here in 2008 they have some general elections in the pipeline and RTVe has marked the occasion with a YouTube page (www.youtube.es/elecciones08) where each party has a video channel and ordinary citizens can upload their video interviews.

Last month the organisers of the World Economic Forum in Davos also decided to use YouTube to sound out public opinion and received 250 or so filmed answers to the question 'What is the one thing that could be done to make the world a better place?'

I was amused to hear Tony Curzon Price, Editor-in-Chief of Opendemocracy.org decribe this little experiment on the BBC's Digital Planet as "the most appalling piece of business populism". Going on to liken it to the Saudi monarch's "court of petitions" and a "dictatorship of business interests", he then decried this and other examples of the "translation of the metaphor of business into politics." and of the pretence of public consultation that is now very much in vogue. Real politics, he concluded, "is where the people involved in the process have some power."

Mark Adams, the Davos meeting's comms chief, was on hand to reaffirm that his was a "multi-stakeholder organisation". Perceptively, he suggested that Curzon Price's real problem was probably YouTube and not their use of it: "Maybe Tony doesn't think we should ask ordinary people their views..." (I don't think Tony did, as he later made a clear association between this kind of consultation and populism.)

Snooping?

Sociologists from UCLA are using Facebook to study the relationship-forming habits of a whole year at another university over on the east coast. The students don't know this is happening, but their university does...

Celebrate/Hate the new media douchebag

The Web without an advisor?

A week ago today the FT's Michael Skapinker was indulging in a few belly laughs at the expense of the PR industry, whose pretensions to expand their invisible handiwork into social media he claimed to find quite amusing.

I shared my response to the article with Michael and he kindly offered to pass it on to the editor for consideration for publication, but as I am yet to see my name in print, I'll reproduce it here:

Dear Michael,

You have some interesting insights there, but I feel there's still a good deal more thinking to be done between observation and opinion on this topic.

Back in the days when online chatter was going on in places like Usenet and Listserv groups, it was perhaps more understandable if companies elected to put their hands over their ears and make out that it wasn't happening. But the thing about blogs is that they are providing a more reliable conduit between spontaneous popular discussion and the commercial media, and it's this hybrid nature of the humble blog post that makes it so relevant to the communications professional.

Listserv users probably had no reasonable expectation that the companies whose goods and services they purchased would be using that particular channel to improve their overall consumption experience. Yet as you rightly observe, the internet is "teeming with people complaining about companies,"and much of this griping can probably be isolated to the frustration sensed by those who would rather these companies did not continue to pass up the opportunity to both listen and speak to them using newer channels that we are all increasingly native to.

You could in fact argue that campaign-style activities that treat blogs and social sites as nichier versions of traditional media should indeed be rare, because you wouldn't really expect them to be that effective anyway.

But the fact that spontaneous networks of conversation are emerging which are far more joined up with our increasingly fragmented mainstream media, should be inspiring emotions beyond fear and hope, and there is certainly room for the informed counselor here.

I would not expect that sending out messages with the hope that the network will do the rest of the work will be the primary activity of the PR profesional for much longer. There is a more nuanced role in the offing which, amongst other things, involves grasping (and fostering) the conditions which permit 'social' communications to occur online within the context of values shared by the brand owner.

Regards,

Guy

Look who's spamming me

I seem to have found my way onto some email list of cédula-carrying Chapines.

The big story this week in terms of my day job has been the ruthless retaliatory action taken by Chris Anderson against a few careless members of the PR profession.

It's hard to work out who is the shark and who is the cleaner fish in this tale of a symbiotic relationship gone bad.

Both parties depend quite squarely on other people's more productive labours.

It's a spat that has reminded me of Laurel and Hardy's slapstick comedy where neighbouring shopkeepers go to war.

However, a bloke called Dan appears to have extracted quite a lot of free business advice out of the comment trail.

The SKY interface

I haven't had much of a chance to play with SKY+ as our building hasn't been wired up for it and so I got myself an Archos instead as a way of making scheduled recordings.

So it is the original SKY box interface that I have to live with, and it continues to be a source of frustration. I was discussing with my cousin last night over dinner ways in which micro-content could be better aggregated and browsed and much of the same principles apply to the multiplicity of channels now available from SKY.

SKY does allow you to designate 'favourite' channels which can then be flicked through using the blue button. At first you were allowed only 15 but this number was doubled (?) a year or so ago.

It's still not the best way to navigate favoured areas of the content. One gripe and several suggestions follow:

• The absence of a BACK button that will return you to the time-location of the last menu you were on is a major annoyance
• You should be able to press one button during a programme that will set up an alert for that specific programme or series regardless of the particular channel or time
  
• You should be able to view a menu with just your favourite channels and be able to use that to browse through their programming over the next few days in the usual manner
• That same menu should enable you to view a series of alerts for the day. You would be able to select and click which of these you wanted to watch and, overlaps permitting, SKY could then transmit these to you as a continuous custom channel.
  

Obviously tagging would also add a great deal to the digital TV experience. What fun it would be to use tags to create your own news stream. I'm thinking too of how they might be usefully deployed to block certain types of trivial story or programme ("Britney", "McCann" etc.)

My cousin thinks there's definitely a niche for a new kind of blog content aggregator. It would learn from your reading habits ('More of this..' etc.) and could, I suggest, present content in more than one dimension. In other words similar articles might be presented as stacks rather than lists (as you currently see in live.com and its like) which could then be opened up if the reader wished to drill down in that dimension.

I reiterated my view that blog platforms need to wise up about printable layouts and give readers more scope for visualising lateral links, trackbacks and comments. It would also be useful to be able to quickly access a custom page showing all or some of the contributions by a given commenter, or indeed to see where else in the blogosphere certain bloggers have themselves contributed.

A notebook someone might read

Umberto Eco says he writes articles simply to get his thoughts in order; in effect, to work out what he actually thinks about a given topic.

Blogger Rohan Maitzen of Novel Readings also noted last week that the value of blogging for him was "sorting out my thoughts more carefully than I sometimes do in a notebook...because of the chance that someone else will read them."

Interestingly though, he goes on to question the value of the blogosphere as a medium for dialogue and exchange. I've always thought that it has been a bit oversold in this respect. Comments are very much a secondary element of the experience, especially for those that get their blog fix through RSS readers. (Strangely, some basic changes to the standard blog interface would I think improve our ability to browse and collate comments and of course print out those posts which do feature a long trail of reader addenda.)

Maitzen thinks that the tensions between specialist and generalist content within the same blog may work to reduce the volume of discussion there, and adds that where there is a level of chatter, it is often"dominated by a fairly small number of contributors, most of whom seem to know each other well and thus to be engaged in their own special game of point-counterpoint."

The new media beast and its long tail

The concept of The Long Tail entered our professional lingo when Wired editor Chris Anderson revealed in a 2004 article that Amazon.com makes more money selling the books you would have a hard time locating in any conventional high street bookstore. They still sell all the bestsellers of course, but freed from the physical limitations of shelf-space they have been able to tap into the market for more niche publications, and this has evolved into the more substantial part of their business.

The economics of the long tail are different when it comes to media. Here the bestsellers are still collectively more wealthy than all the little guys with their blogs and MySpace pages, but in terms of influence (on both propensity to purchase and on brand reputation) there has lately been a remarkable shift down the curve which has intersected with a longer-term transformation in the patterns of trust and authority in our society.

Look more closely at the micro-channels strung along the long tail of media and you can begin to see why their impact has run on ahead of the money. They are generally more connected and conversational than the established mainstream alternatives and as a result a number of important network effects come into play, which are particularly amenable to the transmission and amplification of information by word-of-mouth.

The barriers to entry for the creation of quite sophisticated content have also come down, which means that, as a group, they are just as likely to respond well to the communicators that facilitate their ability to create and control their own content, as they are to the those that continue to pump their messages down to them.

This situation presents two main problems for PR professionals. Firstly, the majority of us are still stuck in the bestseller mindset. "Who are the most influential bloggers in such and such sector?" is a question my colleagues throw at me quite regularly. Amidst all these insignificant navel-examiners, there surely must be a few stars, they surmise. Well yes there are, but the notion that a post written by a blogger with just one subscriber can still end up being extremely influential is apparently quite hard for many to grasp. (i.e. It doesn't really matter if you are Johnny One-Mate as long as that chum is separated from someone like Kevin Bacon by only a couple of degrees.)

Equally stuck in the old ways are the major search engines which use a ranking system for organising and displaying their results. Consequently, it remains comparatively difficult to track communications in the long tail of media, where hierarchy is less important than the dynamics of the network.

On a separate note, one of the reasons that I remain Facebook-sceptical is that it looks suspiciously like an attempt to surgically remove the tail from the rest of the new media beast...

Controlled Chaos

Gaylene remarked yesterday that you can always tell the difference between a journalist blogger and a "normal" blogger. And then Brendan left that comment on this post about "controlled chaos".

For me, the best bloggers − the ones that typify the medium and its unique form of exposition − are more than just 'air guitar journalists'. Two of my own literary heroes, Samuel Pepys (OP) and the more recently late Jean Baudrillard in their own ways both pointed towards to a new style of writing that consciously moves out towards the edge of discussion (or the long tail if you must) often adopting "controlled chaos" as the chosen idiom.

Pepys in particular was perhaps the first commentator in this language to so successfully run his opinions on matters of wider import through the prism of his own introspection. Baudrillard's America is a critique constructed from fragments of observation that could only have come from the pen of a man who regarded the delivery of opinion as a kind of performance art. In terms of both style and content, mainstream journalists and academics tend to be repelled by 'edgy' writing like this because they have been trained to move towards and assume control of the centre of the topic they are addressing.

Similarly, many people in the PR industry are perhaps more naturally inclined to the mass market side of communications rather than the long tail. They'd rather be a hub than a node, which is why as a group they tend to waste so much time on Facebook and why, in spite of an apparent knack for the construction of narratives, they have thus far met with mixed success in the new medium.

It's a highly competitive workplace and the bestseller mentality, wanting to be one, and to work with others in that same category, may be preventing PRs from fully grasping the transformations in their industry.

Shit happens: pooponaplane.com.

Our crisis comms expert Brendan is relating the sad tale of Continental Airlines Flight 1669Y, where a citizen journalist was on hand to file the story of "poop running down the aisles."

Most bad news gets onto social media sites now before the mainstream media get their act together, Brendan notes, and it will usually be updated far more regularly there too and of course, has the potential to remain available for viewing for a much longer period.

And yet it remains the case that "the reputation of the media is made during crises," so the way journalists interact with so-called gotcha stories emerging online is very relevant to us.

I was once a Continental Flight with a bust bog too. The steward eventually solved the problem by pouring about twenty coffee jugs-worth of water down the hole. Fortunately, no cerotes became mobile.

The day's programme is almost done and I have survived the challenge posed by that big tray of chocolate brownies. It's a real shame we missed the presentation from author David M. Scott during our airport excursion, but he has kindly given a copy of his book on The New Rules of PR to every delegate and Niall blogged about it on Collective Conversation.

Consumer Marketing meets Web 2-dotology

Right now I'm trying to eat a little plate of nachos without making high decibel munchy noises. Some of the tostadas are red! I've seen black corn, but red...

Gaylene and I had a dash to the aiport at lunchtime to report the loss of our passports to the United Express baggage handling office run by a pair of Mary-Sue types with low concentration levels, who might even have been endearing in a situation other than this. Gaylene's had been handed in; mine hadn't. There's probably some Chicano at Heathrow's Terminal 3 this evening: "Orale compadres! Me llamo Gooi Oward, dejenme entrar porfa!"

Deportation may be my best option for getting out of the US within a week now as the GB Consulate isn't answering its emergency line (even citizens reporting deaths need to leave voicemail and wait by their stiff). Just getting back to LA will present difficulties as I have no other government-issued ID with me.

Anyway, there are a lot more bullet points in this afternoon's presentations. I'm feeling a bit acribillado already. Right now a colleague from the LA office (also a history graduate/major) is talking about the attitudes and behaviours we all need to adopt in order to fully integrate digital communications into the offering. In a slide headed Web 2-dotology she recommends that, where relevant, we harness some of the structured understandings gathered by other disciplines such as sociology and pyschology.

Aha, another amusing video to watch. This one from Windward Reports:

Social Media 101

My colleague Niall has been live-blogging the conference all morning, but now it's his turn to stand up (along with James Gregson and Peter Imbres) and give us all an update on our collectively-agreed social media principles, which have now been approved without changes by our legal counsel. Thanks largely to his approach to this matter, H&K is recognised as a leader in the field.

The use of social media within the organisation remains a fundamentally political issue and it is my own view that any set of collective principles should, as far as possible, permit the basic polarities to survive, just as within our democracies we allow lefties and righties to sit in the same chamber, provided that they continue to pay heed to some fundamental code of conduct.

Niall went on to explain how we, as paid communications professionals, ought to approach perceived inaccuracies on Wikipedia. Rather than immediately proceeding to make edits ourselves, we should try instead to interact with the article-in-question's editors, pointing them to references which back up our complaint, and maybe also suggesting a time-frame for them to make changes to the article. After this we might feel we had permission to make the edits, but he added that one of the problems that we still face is that the guidelines on article mods published by Wikipedia are themselves subject to community-based editing.

Niall pinpointed the three most common, and invariably tricky, questions that our clients ask us about blogs:

• Should our CEO write one?
• Who are the most influential bloggers on topic X?
• One of these blogger people has said something negative about us; how should we respond?

Our own presentation tomorrow will return to the clearly recurring topic of why engaging with bloggers is fundamentally different to traditional media relations. Paul Gillin mentioned the less predictable motivations of bloggers this morning. Niall has just added that bloggers are far more likely than mainstream journalists to tell the world when you misjudge your pitch to them. The key learning here is that, on a campaign by campaign basis, communications professionals need to invest the time to establish whether a particular blogger is an appropriate subject for outreach.

Paul Taaffe

In the first afternoon session our global CEO challenged us to think about the ways that Digital communications could take our profession to entirely new places. One could think of the practice of public relations as broadly about managing the interface between the different publics within a society, yet even in some of the most developed nations it has often really involved little more than media relations, leaving the advertising industry to take the overall lead in terms of creative initiative and content generation. Digital, Taaffe argued, gives us a real opportunity to snatch this initiative back.

After all, where there is real communication - a relationship rather than a set of discreet transactions - our approach should be more effective in the long run. As David Muir told us this morning, a lot of the negativity online seems to stem from the fact that the trust-based conversations between consumers and the people that sell them stuff are not taking place to the extent that the technology would now appear to allow.

Over lunch Niall had also made the point that advertising has always been about buying into things, and that their approach to social media properties is little different. We on the other hand, really do have to change our ways.

Paul Gillin

Author of The New Influencers and a blogger since June '05.

Spoke about how social networks have harnessed the power of personal publishing, transforming me comms into us comms and how innovation in this sphere has been galvanised by cheaper open source software.

A few other factlets and interesting observations from his speech:

• 65% of Facebook users need a daily fix
• The average age of US network evening news viewers is now 60
• It is now cheaper to keep information than to delete it
• Influencers "dwell at all levels" as blog authority becomes more diffuse
  
• The economics of mainstream media is rooted in a dying form of scarcity: "the economic model of newspapers is unsustainable" (discuss..?)
• Negativity has the greatest impact when it amplifies a common problem
  
• Bloggers respond to different motivations and often actively seek out engagement
  
• Peer trust is now crucial, but some peers are more equal than others!
  

There are many different ways to measure the impact of social media on the market, he concluded, yet "what's the ROI?" isn't always the right first question to ask.

He finished up with a Kodak moment...



This was one of those internal productions that 'somehow got out'.

The new marketing environment

Our first keynote speaker is David Muir is CEO of The Channel, one of WPP's knowledge centres.

He made the telling point that customer rage online is more often than not driven by a sense that organisations simply aren't listening...when the technology for doing so is seemingly at its most prevalent ever.

Here are some great YouTube clips that he showed us in illustration of the permanent changes sweeping the comms industry:










See the selection of remixes for this last one!