Susan Elford and the gang at Canadian Public Relations Society (CPRS) Calgary asked me recently to present to the “Indy 500″, the independent practitioners’ sub-group of CPRS. The topic was “Social Media Strategy”. While I provided my usual overabundance of blah blah, attendees seemed pleased and asked for the slides to be posted. Here they are, plus a bonus video I couldn’t connect to in the room:

Video: Social Media Revolution

“Putting the Public Back in Public Relations: How Media is Reinventing the Aging Business of PR” was appropriately the fourth and final class reading. In many respects, Groundswell, Here Comes Everybody, and The Long Tail should be  prerequisite reading requirements for anyone who is about to read this book.

 Brian Solis and Deirdre Breckenridge have written a “how to manual” for today’s public relations practitioners. This book is a must read for public relations professionals that wish to survive in the Web 2.0 environment.  Solis and Breakenridge use their own experience in the PR industry coupled with their knowledge and understanding of the new age of communication to lay out their suggested framework and recipe for PR success in today’s digital market.

Groundswell set the stage regarding the current state of play, Here Comes Everybody explained the social and human behaviors in this new age of communication, and The Long Tail explored the emergence of niche consumption.  Putting the Public Back in Public Relations is a “nuts and bolts” user manual for PR 2.0 sucess.

 
The landscape has changed

 Part 1: The True Value of New PR

Along with identifying what is wrong with current PR practices, Solis and Breakenridge challenge the status quo and explain the difference between PR 2.0 and Public Relations.  They discuss the emergence of blogs and compare new journalism to traditional journalism.  Like Chris Anderson, they contend that bloggers are just one example of mass democratization and publication.  In the final chapter of this first section, they discuss the importance of personal relationships in PR.  This is important, because regardless of technological advances, personal relationships remain the most critical ingredient.

Part 2: Facilitating Conversations: New Tools and Techniques

Solis and Breakenridge introduce the reader to a myriad of new tools and techniques that exist in Web 2.0.  More importantly, they introduce innovative tactics to successful operations.  Some of these tactics include: blogger relationships, social media releases, video news releases, and corporate blogging.

Part 3: Participating in Social Media

Solis and Breakenridge explain that engagement with social media is essential, but will involve new and innovative approaches.  In other words, just because you’re using social media, doesn’t mean you can employ tired and outdated tactics.  These new tactics must not be confused with standard marketing and PR tactics of the past.  Solis and Breakenridge provide advice and examples of how to integrate a successful social media plan into any PR strategy.

Part 4: P.R. 2.0: A Promising Future

Here they explore community managers and customer service 2.0, socialization of communication, breaking news and metrics for PR 2.0.    Again, they discuss the new challenges with respect to new influences vs. traditional journalism.  Specifically, they explore how bloggers are involved with breaking news stories and the role of social media and the news process.

Part 5: Convergence

Finally, Solis and Breakenridge explain how the practices of PR 1.0 and PR 2.o can converge into today’s new environment and allow PR professional to succeed in this changed landscape.   As the other readings focused on Web 2.0 from a macro level, I found this reading to be a micro view for the individual PR practitioner.  This book relates to changes that each individual professional must proactively take to steer their respective company towards PR success.

The Coast Guard PR Professional

A rare benefit that the Coast Guard has related to PR is that generally public affairs officers complete graduate work in communication before they are assigned to executing any PR responsibilities.  As such, many of the officers stepping into PR roles are well-informed with respect to PR 2.0 through recent advanced education.  In fact, their overall inexperience doesn’t come with any of the PR 1.0 “baggage” and thus there really isn’t a status quo to change or overcome.  I believe the Coast Guard is well suited to succeed with PR 2.0.

The most valuable issue that I’ve learnt so far this semester is how social media is reshaping the way we communicate, and mainly how it shifts the power towards the people, resulting in a more democratic society.

In the Cluetrain Manifesto we’ve learnt a key lesson: markets are conversation. With the internet, the silence imposed by the mass production and mass marketing  advents, is coming to an end.

“On the Internet, markets are getting more connected and more powerfully vocal every day. (…) Connected, they reclaim their voice in the market, but this time with more reach and wider influence than ever.”(Chapter four) 

However, corporations are still dealing with the markets as something distance, as targets to be reached, and the internet is seen as just another channel to broadcast the message. They are afraid to join this conversation and lose control.

Nevertheless, we are entering a new era in which the one way communication model is becoming obsolete: the faith on advertising is declining; meanwhile the faith on individuals is increasing. According to Chris Anderson in “The Long tail”:

“we are leaving the information age and entering to the recommendation age.” (p.98)

Peer by peer review are getting and incredible importance. A study shows that 62 percent of consumers read consumer-written reviews online, and 82 percent of them said their purchasing decisions are influenced by customer reviews. 

This change reaches far beyond than just representing that we are now more empowered consumers. It indicates that we are more connected, and not only receiving, but also producing information. It ultimately represents a shift in the power, from big institutions to the people.  In “We the media” we’ve learnt more about how this power shift is impacting the media industry and the way we produce and consume information.

Clay Shirky, in “Here comes Everybody” goes further and tell us that:

“When we change the way we communicate, we change society” (p.17). 

Have a look on his thoughts on how collaboration technologies are changing the society, in this brilliant presentation.

The understanding of how this change in the media and technological landscapes has impacted the way people communicate and behave is crucial for communication professional. Whoever is trying to get a message out, can no longer work with the traditional media frameworks. Transparency and real two-way conversation are mandatory for those who want to survive this new world. Welcome!

I bought my copy of Chris Anderson’s, “The Long Tail” on Amazon.com. If you notice at the bottom of the page displaying Anderson’s book, “The Long Tail” you will also find recommendations for “Groundswell” and “Here Comes Everybody.”  Amazon.com has revolutionized the book industry and is a prime example of a long tail company.

Amazon is just one example of the long tail and their inventory goes far beyond the recommendations mentioned. In fact, Amazon’s inventory dwarfs that of any ordinary bricks and motor book store. According to Anderson’s theory, infinite shelf space is key in applying long tail principles to business.  This is just one example of the long tail in action and proof that Anderson is on to something with his notion that the traditional 80/20 power distribution law is a thing of the past. As Anderson puts it, our culture is a massive popularity contest and the world is built around blockbusters.  He explains that the blockbuster culture is starting to fade to a culture driven by smaller niches vice large-scale hits.

Online recommendations are changing the way people shop and without shelf space constraints, there are no limitations to what is available for consumption.  Amazon.com’s recommendations for books associated with “The Long Tail” were incredibly insightful as Li and Bernoff set the stage in “Groundswell,” laying out the foundation or basic enabler for Anderson’s theory. Likewise, Shirky explores the human element of the equation as he explains the new dynamics of group interaction and behavior in today’s world. Each book serves as a layer of knowledge that is necessary to truly understand how Web 2.0 is changing our culture and how the long tail works.

Anderson touches on some common themes from the two previous readings as he explains the three forces of the long tail: (1) democratize production, (2) democratize distribution, and (3) connect supply and demand. The very exercise of reading his book and writing this blog employed all three forces. Using my home desktop computer to blog, purchasing the book on eBay, and checking the subsequent recommendations, and eventually posting my blog entry are all examples of democratizing as Anderson explains.

Once you understand the long tail theory you quickly realize that long tail businesses are everywhere. Amazon, iTunes and Netflix are just a few examples that Anderson explains in detail. As he puts it, we live in a “seamless digital marketplace” where content can move from the very bottom of unviewed material to the top, with changes in public interest.  The legacy logistics of the bricks and mortar model don’t need to catch-up because the inventory already exists in a virtual endless fashion.

With all of these forces of democratization the keys to the market are in the hands of the consumer. This leads to an overwhelming amount of data on the Web. In Anderson’s words, “You Tube is full of crap!” One of my favorite case studies in the book explores some of this (data) crap in explaining how an online video loaded to You Tube was a catalyst to rejuvenating dwindling Saturday Night Live ratings.

Anderson explains how a December 2005 Lonely Island crew “white-boy” rap video spoofing on the Chronicles of Narnia become an online sensation and made the once popular show relevant again with a young generation of viewers.

This content managed to resonate with a new audience – a younger one that grew up online. Anderson contends that the days of everyone watching the same show and recounting the previous night’s episode over the water cooler are gone. The internet has democratized distribution and changed the architecture of participation putting the consumer in control.

Anderson does a remarkable job explaining his theory which makes this book an incredible read. To summarize at the risk of oversimplifying, Anderson drives home the point that niches add up. These narrowly targeted goods may seem like a relatively small portion of the market, but the sum can be significant, particularly on the scale of iTunes or Amazon sales.

For the Coast Guard the long tail may serve as a way to strengthen the workforce. With limited funds for requirement and a need to grow a diverse workforce with talented recruits, the long tail may serve as a way to reach niche markets. For example, the Coast Guard could target professional Hispanic engineers at a specific university through the use of social media. Recruiting commands could also use online videos to reach specific audiences. While, the organization must be careful so that their content is not viewed as spam, there remains an incredible opportunity to capitalize on this new distribution law to sell less of more.  The Coast Guard is small and in many ways offers niche services to our nation.  As such, the Coast Guard must be a long tail organization.

 Have spent the last couple of weeks reading “Here Comes Everybody” by Clay Shirky for class. The book focuses on the powerful “new way” of relating and communicating that has evolved with communication technology. Online communications tools are creating communities—and those communities are making things happen. The Internet has essentially introduced users to a new way of life that incorporates online relationships, and elevates those relationships in importance to equal that of the relationships and actions they might make in person—and often to a point with considerably more power and reach.

The book offers many examples of ordinary people making big things happen by using these tools to share ideas, and how online communication tools are empowering people of similar interests and efforts to grow their efforts exponentially.

These ideas are not new to much of the staff at the Virginia Department of Transportation—folks in both communications and executive roles are familiar with these tools. The ideas are, however, somewhat unfamiliar to the agency in that it has not yet begun to really explore the applicable communities that already exist, as well as those that could exist in the future, and how they could be reached and affected with a thoughtful communications strategy.

It’s certainly time for my client to understand the new roles of its active online followers. It is important to consider, also, how these concepts translate to a considerably sized government agency such as my client. The possibilities these new ways of interacting and communicating offer mean both increasing the agency’s opportunity as well as increase the negative voices and even the misinformation and rumors.

The idea of “publish, then filter” is also a concept that my client should contemplate. The culture of communications in a large agency often involves many levels of approvals. In the meantime, many communications may have entered the marketplace, from citizen journalists and local media alike, posting to blogs, tweeting, sending e-mail updates, etc. By the time a response has been formulated and passed through approval channels, it is often too late and may confirm a perception of bureaucracy and slow response.

On several levels, the agency has already seen this happen. Citizens behind particular causes create their own Web sites, Facebook pages, blog posts, e-mail distribution lists and e-mail addresses to reflect a particular project or cause of their interest. Some engineers and project managers have found great response from communications such as weekly e-mail newsletters, blog posts, e-mail updates, etc. The nature of how the agency communicates with the public is changing.

The idea of building community is extremely applicable to VDOT’s missions. Much of the experience the traveling public has the agency is on a grassroots level—whether it’s a safety service patrol officer helping to change a tire for a commuter stranded on the Beltway, or a crew cutting dangerous tree limbs over roadways after a storm or filling a pothole on a residential street. The public can really get to know crewmembers at local VDOT offices and the local representatives who respond to their requests and answer the real questions that affect their day-to-day lives. A major goal of a social media campaign for VDOT is to create these kind of connections through online communications as well.

The Internet revolutionized the way information passes from one person to another.  Clay Shirky’s book Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing with Organizations examines how the Internet has also revolutionized the way people connect to one another and form effective groups.  People no longer have to rely on a large central organizer to connect with like-minded people, nor do they have to the overcome barriers of institutional costs and location to achieve aggregate action.

The most compelling example of what Shirky is exploring, the power now in the hands of people connected through technology and social networking applications, came out of the Iranian protests earlier this year.  While the government cracked down on media outlets, ordinary citizens were able to use Twitter and Facebook to share their plight with the rest of the world.  The world was captivated by their messages, ones that would never have been seen or heard if not for individual communication options.  Throughout this book, Shirky uses easily relatable real world examples to demonstrate the various aspects of people organizing themselves through technology.

As with all technologies, society must take the positive effects of easier group formation with the negative.  One example described by Shirky is the hoarding of collective communities by walling off their access to other groups.  For instance, traditional organizations such as the Catholic Church or major political parties would clearly not be willing to extend the resources they have gathered to assist those seeking to speak and/or act against them. 

Another potential negative is the possibility that collective communities might end up reinforcing undesirable or destructive behavior.  The Internet and all of the various social systems used on it has allowed even comparatively small groups of concerned people to topple the resources hurdle by joining together to make their voices heard.  This can protect freedoms as discussed earlier, but also lead to group formation around socially undesired topics.  Shirky uses the example of young girls supporting each other in anorexic and bulimic behaviors to illustrate this point.

Another challenge that comes to mind is the crossroads between these new technologies and the limits of our society’s older more established customs and systems, notably with legal precedent.  Since the enhanced capability of collective communities is both new and easy to build, interesting legal questions might arise as the courts struggle to apply old precedents to novel situations, perhaps with unforeseen consequences.  One such example is the recent arrest of a protester at a G-20 summit who used Twitter to notify other protester of police whereabouts. 

On a positive note, the application of many of these advances holds great promise for an organization like the Junior League of Washington, which is uniquely set up to take advantage of the benefits of the technologies discussed in this book.  The JLW is fundamentally a large, diffuse, volunteer organization which continually works to coordinate the efforts of its members to serve and make a difference in the Washington, DC community.  Employing social media tools, such as Twitter, Facebook, and Wikis would allow members to communicate and share ideas more easily, and is ideal for organizing events at various off-site locations in the region given the hectic schedules of many JLW members. 

Beyond using these applications merely for internal communication purposes, the JLW could use them in spreading its messages of volunteerism and literacy to the larger metropolitan community as well.  Active members of the League have already proven themselves to be proactive in the fight against illiteracy in DC.  With user friendly websites, petitions, and involvement information, they could entice those around them who are less motivated to take action to take a stand against illiteracy.

This week I had the distinct honor to interview longtime investigative journalist Seymour Hersh. His office was a love story to journalism of days past. It was filled with piles of boxes, papers, files, notebooks, awards, and books written by him. He even had an old typewriter on top of a filing cabinet. He takes all his notes by hand and only types on the computer when the story is final. No database of contacts, just scribbles on the backs of yellow legal pads.

Newspapers are closing. Does this mean an end to quality information? Not if you believe Clay Shirky's "Here Comes Everybody"

Unsurprisingly, he had a very negative view on the future of the profession to which he has dedicated more than 30 years.

But I’m not so sure I agree with Hersh’s pessimism.

I truly value quality journalism (and in the interest of full disclosure, I am paid to say that). But I’m not so sure that professional journalists are the only ones that can give us quality news. And with dropping circulations, shuttered newspapers, and a widely-held business model going up in flames, we may all be stuck relying on online collaboration to do journalists’ dirty work of keeping politicians honest, businessmen ethical, and communities connected.

Clay Shirky spends 344 pages illustrating what will happen when the masses organize without formal corporations in Here Comes Everybody. Shirky points out that social media is based on very different principles than large organizations.

For one, in social media, collaboration is king.

The most successful social tools are the ones that started small and relied on a community. Through trial and error, and by incredible collaboration, they grew incrementally bigger. Take Linux, which now runs on some 40 percent of the world’s servers. The brainchild of Linus Torvalds, Linux began with an unassuming note on a discussion group. All along the way, Torvalds sought help from a community of developers and promised to implement the best ideas. This collaboration proved to be one of his keys to success.

Steven Colbert teases Craig Newmark for destroying the American newspaper then asks him how he comes up with the idea. Craig's answer is true to Shirky's definition of success for social organization: He put collaboration front and center.

Now, apply that to journalism.

Many analysts blame the rise of Craigslist.org with the decline of the newspaper industry. Craig Newmark started Craigslist with much of the same humble community awareness that went into Linux. He saw people using the Internet as a way to help eachother out, and decided to do the same. Newspapers missed the boat. They put brand and tradition ahead of the community’s needs, and as a result they missed an opportunity to provide a useful tool that could have, in turn, raised their popularity–and their profits.

New Ways to Produce the News

In the new era of social collaboration, Shirky says, quality content can be produced by hundreds of tiny contributions.

Take Wikipedia, a community-created and maintained encyclopedia. Since 2001, this collaborative Web site has been a growing source of information on every topic from asphalt to astrophysics.

And it has the news.

Minutes after the 2005 London bombings, there was a Wikipedia page with a few sentences of what had happened. In the first five hours of the page’s existence, Shirky says, more than a thousand edits were made. Members of the Wikipedia community linked to traditional news outlets, and to phone numbers for people trying to track down loved ones. The page that was never touched by a professional journalist was a hub for vital information. Oh: And it didn’t cost a penny to produce that information or share it with the public.

Powerful Forces

The forces of social media have proven to bring real results. In May of 1992, the Boston Globe published more than 50 cases detailing abusive behavior by Catholic priests, specifically Reverend James R. Porter, who was accused of sexually abusing children in three different Boston parishes. The stories produced outrage, and the church criticized the media coverage as unfair. Despite the scandal, no priests resigned and no legal action resulted.

This online community formed in response to newspaper articles regarding scandal in the Catholic church. Their organized outrage brought real results.

Compare that with a similar scandal in 2002.

Same city. Same newspaper. Same appalling behavior by religious leaders (this time it was Father John Geoghan, a Catholic priest who had abused children at parishes over a 35-year period). The difference? Technology enabled outraged readers to organize and demand action.

When the story broke in the Boston Globe, blogs, e-mail and discussion forums allowed readers to forward the information on to their own networks of friends, parents, and colleagues. An organization of concerned Catholics formed to demand change. And they brought results: about one year after the formation of the group, Cardinal Bernard F. Law, then archbishop of the Boston Diocese, resigned.

In ten years, the technology was developed for communities of like-minded individuals to unite forces. So instead of a newspaper article creating a wave that eventually died away, it created a tidal wave of action around the world. And it brought a powerful institution to its knees.

If online organizations can produce those kinds of results, I wonder:

Could it be that creative collaboration online could produce collective wisdom surpassing that of the professional news industry?

Time will tell.

We’ve already been fed up with “2.0″ (or even 3.0) hype, but this book explains quite logically not just what is changing but why and how, and puts it beyond the issue of new media and technology. This was more interesting and insightful to me than Groundswell: While both point out what matters is people rather than technology itself, Shirky’s book further explores what the consequences will be in a larger social context and highlights more profound change our society is facing now.

In short, Shirky argues that we are in a new social ecosystem where cost of forming and maintaining groups is so law, thanks to new technologies, that group activities previously unaffordable to organize are actually viable. In looking at how the change is taking place, he breaks group activities into three types: sharing, cooperation, collective action.

First, now that media for one-to-many communication (=broadcasting) and media for one-to-one personal communication are merging because of the Internet, not just mass media in a traditional sense but every single person can publish any information. In most cases, what people share with each other is not really “content” intended to be consumed by public audience, but unfiltered personal messages targeted to their friends and families. However, as the Internet also enables many-to-many communication, personal interaction within a small group can be extended to a larger community, especially when it assumes the potential to serve as what the author calls  “community of practice” where people ask “how did you do that?” and share information.

When this type of conversation goes on from “how did you do that?” to “look what I’ve done!” and further to “I can make it even better!,” it can lead to cooperation/collaborative production. What makes collaboration possible is not only tools like wiki but also motivation of the community members. Financial incentive is not always necessary here, because of the low cost of operation as well as low barriers to participate, and social motivation — willingness to contribute, desire for recognition and respect, etc. — is often enough to get things going, even in such a large project like Wikipedia.

Sharing and participating being this easy, it has become easier to coordinate collective action as well. Information and awareness of the need and possibility of a certain action can be readily shared through many-to-many communication tools, and thus with little or no advanced planning, a large number of people can spontaneously get together and take an action.

Power law distribution (Picture by Hay Kranen / PD)

When it cost to organize a group and the resources were scarce, people who shared latent desire to get together for something of negative or trivial value could not gain enough social support to make it happen. Now, with much less cost for forming a group, they no longer need social approval to realize their desire. Also, making a failure is too costly for traditional corporations, whereas open collaboration can tolerate many failures by allowing the participants to test their ideas and filter them by themselves. People and ideas at the lower end of the power law distribution (small in number, less in frequency/amount of contribution) can make themselves visible and meaningful. All of these eventually leads to more people forming more groups for more objectives. And as Shirky repeatedly emphasizes, more is different, not in quantity but in quality.

So, what does this all mean to my client? Lower cost of mobilizing people, along with “love” as a practical incentive, is a good news especially for nonprofit organizations like TFT. Even for a very small organization, there should be a group of people out there who are potentially interested in the cause it advocates, but are below “the Coasean ceiling,” in Shirky’s words, without enough resources to get activated, or too small and isolated due to the lack of “connectors.” It is highly feasible now for such an organization to gain support from them by having them to form, participate in, and expand a community. Since TFT asks people for contribution in a more participatory way than simply making donation —buying and eating a healthy meal —, there is a strong potential to involve them in sharing (e.g. conversation on what they eat, how to eat healthy, etc), collaborative production (e.g. proposing healthy recipe ideas), and collaborative action (e.g. petition requesting fast food restaurants to carry healthy menus). Also, as eating is such a basic human activity and relevant to anyone, possibility of growing from dense, small groups to a loose but larger network is promising.

This video and Q&A summarize his argument very well, with some updates.

Great lecture on social networking/media – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A_0FgRKsqqU very impressive intellectual presentation by Clay Shirky.

Some great quotes:
 - ’it seems to me that life has gotten to the point where the effects of the internet are now becoming broadly social enough that there is a general awareness that the internet isn’t a decoration on contemporary society it’s a challenge to it’
 - ‘the group gets better together’
 - ’sharing plus conversation leaves this residue of instruction’
 - ‘they changed the world to make it more like they wanted it and once it changed they could stop doing it’
 - ’sharing, conversation & collaboration are things that require in order more synchronisation of the individual with the group’ … ‘the fourth fund in the ladder’ …  ’collective action is a pattern we’re going to see a lot more of in the future’
 - ‘William James the American philosopher once said “thinking is for doing”‘ … ‘we … have brains because we’re deciding between or preparing for courses of action’ … ‘publishing is for acting’
 - ‘Nothing says dicatorship like arresting people for eating icecream’
 - ‘Ridiculously easy group-forming improves: Sharing, Conversation, Collaboration, Collective Action’

By Clay Shirky.

Clay Shirky changes the way you view the world in his book, “Here Comes Everybody.”  Recently there has been a crime spree in my suburban neighborhood.  Over the past few weeks my neighbors have had their cars broken into, personal property stolen and even cars and houses vandalized.  The people responsible for these actionsare yet to be caught, but that may not be the case for long.  Something interesting has started to take place.  My neighbors, frustrated with lack of law enforcement action, are organizing on Facebook and email.  There haven’t been any flyers distributed or any formal meetings – simple online discussion.  This type of group behavior is becoming commonplace around the world and changing the way we interact. 

             While “Groundswell” was eye-opening and set the foundation for what is changing, “Here Comes Everybody” explores why and how things are changing.  One of the most significant changes in recent years is that technology has allowed for creators to publish before filtering.  For example, mass media used to be controlled by organizations that had the talent, knowledge and technology to produce and release a product.  Today, anyone can create online content and publish it without any filtering or editing.  This is just the beginning of mass amaturization of media.  Virtually anyone can publish anything, anytime – this is revolutionary.

            Shirky challenges why companies exist anymore given the increasing ability for people to organize on their own.  He uses Wikipedia as an example of successful user generated content.  Conventional wisdom would suggest that an unmanaged online encyclopedia that is made-up of user generated content would fail.  This is completely wrong.  Today Wikipedia is larger than Encyclopedia Britannica and contains similarly trustworthy information.  Wikipedia is working without organization because of spontaneous division of labor.  Users add content and edit existing content.  While mistakes may exist, they are generally corrected faster than new material is added, making the site remarkably accurate and dependable. 

          Today we share information differently.  When I was growing-up my father owned a restaurant in New York State.  He would post newspaper articles of interest with magnets on a large stainless steel refrigerator.   The restaurant staff of 20 -30 people would look at them and sometimes even post comments.  This practice is completely unheard of today.  If my dad were still running that restaurant, he would certainly send those articles via email to a “bang-list” of employees.  Those employees wouldn’t be limited to commenting with sticky notes on the fridge.  They could forward those articles to as many people as they wish and the same of the recipients.  This has increased readership of any given article astronomically.  Shirky points out the case of a 1990’s Catholic Church sex scandal that went relatively undetected.  When the Boston Globe covered another similar case in 2002, the information spread much quicker and broader, and the Catholic Church could no longer ignore the issue.

            The internet allows people to connect with anyone at anytime.  Shirky points out that while traditional civic group participation is decreasing, people are congregating online.  Interestingly, the traditional groups that come to mind are not necessarily a fair representation of those online.  For example, witches, vampires and pagans are at the top of list for online organizations.  He points out that this is likely the case because these groups lack formal organizations as they are outside of social norms and acceptability.  Shirky also points out that while there are plenty of benefits from these technological advances that enhance society, there are equally counterproductive applications in the form of organized crime and terrorism.

            Thousands of people around the world assisting in finding a stolen cell phone, a user generated encyclopedia, masses of people pressuring the Catholic Church to act, and groups of people that rest outside of social norms congregating online are all examples of how technology is changing the world.  Clay Shirky’s views and theories are fascinating.  Group action is certainly changing and will have a profound impact on the future.

En el libro ‘Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations’ Clay Shirky realiza una crítica-visión de la sociedad en la que proliferan las herramientas de conocimiento, pero no tanto la voluntad de nutrirlas de contenido 

25/09/2009 ENTRINNOVA – El autor de la obra ‘Here Comes Everybody: T he Power of Org anizing Without Organizations’ lanza una pregunta a la sociedad: ¿Qué pasaría si utilizáramos parte del tiempo de ocio improductivo a participar en obras colaborativas?

Este es el desafío y el objeto de estudio de Clay Shirky, quien ha analizado las aplicaciones web de libre desarrollo y la predisposición de la gente a colaborar en ellas.

Para explicar estos conceptos, Shirky teoriza sobre la existencia del superávit cognitivo: este término expresa el tiempo cerebral, la motivación, la capacidad de acción vacante que están generando numerosas aplicaciones hoy disponibles en la red. Un buen ejemplo sería la Wikipedia: según las estimaciones del autor, el grueso de la enciclopedia web de creación libre se generó gracias a la actividad de unas 100.000 horas ofrecidas voluntariamente por unas cien millones de personas.

Como contrapunto a este dato, Shirky señala que sólo la población norteamericana consume más de 200 millones de horas al año viendo pasivamente la televisión y sin involucrarse en ninguna actividad cultural, familiar o productiva en algún sentido.

Shirky propone una pequeña revolución personal sobre los tiempos de ocio improductivos que alcanzaría dimensiones universales: “Un pequeño cambio puede tener profundas ramificaciones”, señala el autor.

Fuentes:

• http://www.shirky.com/herecomeseverybody/
• http://www.shirky.com/

Change was the buzz word of the Obama campaign. We all want some sort of change, but I’m still trying to figure out how to do it…

I think the four keys are 1) information gathering, 2) ideating, 3) acting, all connected by 4) communicating and it’s a process.

The Birth of Change Process

I was reading Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations by Clay Shirky. The book discusses the change that the Internet, specifically social media, has brought on the evolution of society. It got me thinking about why we say the change of society is accelerating.

Of course, the first real question is if the world really is changing faster.

The answer is here:

Now, watching the video we might agree that the world just keeps getting faster, but have you asked what makes society change faster? The following chart I think helps explain why.

Birth Of Change Process

Let’s unpack the Birth of Change Process chart starting from Information and move around the chart clockwise.

1. Information – knowledge communicated or received concerning a particular fact or circumstance; knowledge gained through study, communication, research, instruction [1]

Information is everywhere and unlimited. This is evidenced by the continuous research that is conducted at universities as well as in the private sector. The issue is not that the information does not exist, but we cannot understand all we need to know. Example:

What are the markings on the top row? I assume they say “stop” in Cree. Information exists, but it cannot always be understood. This is actually is a problem of communication.

2. Communication – something imparted, interchanged, or transmitted [2]

Here is a simple model:

I would like to expand the concept of communication in order to explain the Birth of Change Process. Everything is always trying to tell us what it is; the challenge is in our ability to decode. For example DNA always existed, but our ability to know it was there and then decode it is relatively new.

Here in lies the problem: insufficent communication inhibits the idea process.

3. Ideation – the process of forming ideas (any conception existing in the mind as a result of mental understanding, awareness, or activity [3]) or images [4]

In order to form an idea a person must have understanding or awareness of relevant material. It is at this point where either ideas create new questions or actions. If new questions arise then communication of the need for more information takes place. More information is collected and then communicated back so ideation can continue.

If an idea calls for action then the necessary steps to execute the idea must be communicated, which also includes the process of information collecting, communication and ideating.

An idea must be broken down into actionable steps or the idea will never manifest.

4. Action – an act that one consciously wills and that may be characterized by physical or mental activity [5]

Here I would also like to adjust the definition. The problem here with mental activity is that change takes place, but only in the isolation of the mind. It will not effect change in the world unless physical actions are taken.

Actions will always create change. Additionally, because change may have occurred before, while, or after implementing an idea, new information is discovered from which to draw from for ideating.

5. Change - a transformation or modification; alteration; a variation or deviation; the substitution of one thing for another [6]

When change takes place three things can happen. Change can make the situation better, worse, or maintain. Making things better or worse is immediately obvious, but maintenance is not. This is seen in sports. One year a team wins a championship, and they return most of the athletes the following year. The initial thought is that they can just do the same thing they did before and win another championship. Usually, they don’t. Another example is Roger Federer, who couldn’t keep his game at the same level and expect to beat Rafael Nadal.

The world is always changing. If this is what initiates us to change then we will always be a slave to the world. It will drag us along. We will continually be reacting to everything around us. Movers and shakers of the world don’t react, they initiate change.

We must understand why the world changes and why it changes faster.

Why the world changes and why it’s changing faster

1. Base rate change – People are always communicating. The very fact that we are created to communicate means that information will be passed along, ideas will be formed, actions will be taken and change will occur.

2. Change accelerating – The base rate has been upped over many years. We have had written works by scribes, the printing press, telegraph, telephone, radio, television, pagers, cell phones, fax machine, email, IM, SMS, and then there is Google Wave. As new communication media becomes ubiquitous, society’s expectation for base rate of communication increases and thus change increases. The unintended effect of increasing communication means that more information will be communicated, which will inevitably cause a change in our media of communication which will increase the rate of communication. You see the pattern. The more we communicate the more we change.

How to maximize change

1. Communicate more – After explaining why change is accelerating this point is self-apparent. Unfortunately I hadn’t seen it. My problem is I love to ideate. But now, I’m tired of just thinking, I want to see change. My first step is to make sure I up my communication. This is like placing more cars on the road.

2. Communicate faster – This is driving the cars faster. Looking at the chart shows that if communication moves faster, everything moves faster.

3. Communicate flexibly – This is like having more roads to get to the same destination. Everyone comes with a set of understanding that colors how they interpret communication. The more ways we can encode the message, the better chance others have at decoding the message, creating a more accurate transportation of information and ideas.

4. Communicate diversely – This is having different vehicles. I would also call this utilizing your team. It is related to #3. You probably noticed that some people just get you better than other people. You also have probably found it interesting that someone in a meeting can communicate your point to someone else better than you can even though you were all there together.

5. Applying 1-4 to actionable steps – This is critical. If actionable steps are not being communicated and actions are not being executed no change will take place. May I suggest Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done.

While I described the communication more as sending information, they also apply to receiving.

Now, this sounds great, but how should we factor in the changing world?

What to do about the changing world

Peter Drucker said, ”The best way to predict the future is to create it.”

The only thing constant is change, but the rate of change is not constant. It is generally accepted that the world is changing faster, and this post has helped to explain why the world is changing faster. We intuitively understand that we can control the rate of change because we see that it happen at different rates. When you change faster everything else changes slower relative to what you are doing, therefore Peter Drucker is right. We have a better chance at successful changes because our execution will more closely match the world we have accounted for.

Change doesn’t happen outside of one’s control, we can accelerate it by working the Birth of Change Process faster.

The four keys

1. Information – gather seeds of information in order to birth the next step

2. Ideation – transform the information into possible ideas

3. Action – ideas must be acted on or no change will take place

4. Communication – the glue and the accelerator. Communication plants the seed of information to birth an idea. Ideas communicated must establish actionable steps. The success and failures of action steps must be communicated to the pool of ideas to run the cycle again and improve the result.

I know there are other details that need to be unpacked, but I think this is a good starting point. Let me know what you think. Let’s help each other be better at creating positive change in this world.

Until a few days ago, I was the blogger in the family.  On my wife’s suggestion early this year, I launched this site to track the layoffs that were then a daily nightmare in newsrooms from coast to coast.  More recently, my focus has been on what happens next, and how all of us can stay relevant–and working.

When I walked away from my reporting job at WPLG in Miami at the height of the job-shedding, my blog got a sudden flood of attention, being picked up and linked by many of the major trade publications and websites.  It happened again when I wrote about NBC’s purchase of local domain names from coast to coast.

The other day my wife showed me what real web traffic looks like.  You see, she’s now the blogger in the family.

I could wail and moan about the injustice of it all–I write about journalism, for God’s sake, and the fate of a Nation and all that.  I write about jobs, and history and technology and blah blah blah.

My wife?  You may know her blog by now.  It’s certainly been in the papers and all over TV and the web:  she writes My Husband is Annoying, a site devoted to my quirks and eccentricities, like having a favorite green sweater (okay, sure, it does show up a lot in our vacation photos) and sometimes finding it difficult to get out of bed in the morning (it’s not just me, right?)

Well, as a joke, she posted a few less-than-flattering photos of yours truly, and described what it’s like to live with me.  And we figured, hey, our friends will get a kick out of this. Post it to Facebook and get some LOLs.

A few Facebook comments and Tweets later, and the wife’s blog was mentioned by a hyperlocal website here in Brooklyn, the Brooklyn Heights Blog, which got things rolling with the pithy and classic headline, “Area Man is Annoying Husband.”

As Clay Shirky, author of Here Comes Everybody could have told me, things were about to get weird, and fast.  First came the commenters.  A few LOLs, but a few “you sucks” also, and some strange, very personal comments on the nature of our marriage and my wife’s motive in creating the blog.  It was a blunt reminder that the media has shifted forever to an everybody-can-speak-without-your-permission dynamic, and the Old Media gatekeepers have no gates anymore.

As is happening in digital newsrooms around the world, editors post news stories online, reporters and anchors blog about their lives and hobbies–and then here comes everybody; some loving it, others eviscerating it.  How are stations, websites and papers handling comments?  My wife and I debated it in capital-J fashion:  give everyone their say no matter how offensive?  Keep the blog light and fun, as it was intended?  Or only weed out the truly sickening and borderline threatening?  Where’s the line?

My wife, a strong and amazing woman, posted every insulting comment–and the LOLs and You Go Girls–save one, which was truly unfit to print.

Then came the second wave:  the media.  Snarky New York blog Gothamist wrote up the site, as did a Dutch blog that translated My Husband is Annoying (we think) as “Mijn Man is Vervelend.” The pageviews began to skyrocket.  My LocalNewser record high fell quickly and it wasn’t even close.

Then the New York Daily News came calling, putting my wife and I across an entire page of the paper, and posting a video interview on the front page of the DN’s website.  I found odd satisfaction and pride in the News proclaiming me “New York’s most annoying husband.”

That article landed on BuzzFeed, and you could literally watch my wife’s pageviews jump by the hundreds every time you hit “refresh.”  It was astonishing.

Before we were out of bed the morning the News hit the streets, bookers from network morning shows and syndicated daytime shows were calling, along with radio stations from Florida to California.

I was recognized while shooting a story for WPIX at the New York Transit Museum by someone (I thought they were going to say “aren’t you the guy from TV?”) who said, “you’re the husband.  From the paper.  The annoying husband.”

This truly is a demonstration of the speed we’re working at these days.  Bret Favre signs with the Vikings and the reporter with the scoop goes to Twitter, not TV.  Why?  Have to. Can’t afford to wait.  It’s a new world.  If you can remember three-quarter decks?  Well, you’ve got to re-wire your brain and adjust to the new speed.

It’s fast.  And we, as journalists, don’t really have any access to the brakes anymore.  We can’t slow something down when it’s moving too fast.  If we do, all that will happen is we stop moving forward and other journos–or just the masses–will tell the story on their own.

Here comes everybody.

Seguimos con la serie de artículos publicados por Alan Wolk(2) con el título “Your brand is not your friend”, iniciados, en el post anterior, con El entorno de los medios sociales según Alan Wolk.

Teatro,  TV, DVR, YouTube, virales

En la segunda y tercera partes de su serie, Wolk habla de la Web 2.0 y dispara sin preámbulos una frase que creo fundamental: “Aún si la Web 2.0 tiene un valor limitado, la gente de marketing que la ignore lo hará bajo su propio riesgo. Porque realmente lo único fundamental es que deben ser conscientes de sus limitaciones” Y sigue: “En primer lugar, no va a reemplazar a la televisión por la misma razón que el teatro ha sobrevivido miles de años” y usa una expresión de John Gardner en su libro “On becoming a novelist” para explicar la maravillosa sensación que se recibe con “el sueño vívido y continuo” que cada cultura sobre la tierra ha creado, de sentarse a dejar que alguien le cuente a uno una historia, agregando que la televisión es la última encarnación del teatro: solo que permite ver un espectáculo sin moverse de casa. De la misma manera que la videograbadora y otros aparatos permiten, además, verlo cuando se quiere y no a una hora determinada. Asegura que la televisión seguirá transformándose como lo ha ido haciendo desde el televisor en blanco y negro, antena de conejo y botón selector de canales que eran, probablemente, solo dos o tres. Pero seguirá siendo televisión aunque se vea por Internet en el propio computador. O se reciba por algún sistema universal “a pedido”. Y será pasiva más que interactiva, porque la mayor parte de la gente no quiere comprarse el reloj que usa el héroe que está en pantalla o chatear online con los otros 20 millones de personas que están viendo el programa, entre otras cosas, porque la gente suele ver la televisión acompañada.

Por otro lado YouTube tampoco reemplaza a la televisión: es algo que la gente ve además de la televisión. Y no hay tantas cosas que ver en YouTube, que valgan la pena.

Interesante: prácticamente todo esto, escrito hace dos años, lo ha confirmado Nielsen hace pocas semanas y lo he consignado en Los jóvenes, la televisión e internet: una sorpresa.

Alan Wolk cree que hay una tremenda falta de calidad en la Web 2.0, en comparación con los medios tradicionales (de los que se nutren la mayor parte de los que hacen un blog — los bloggers—, por cierto) y que hay poca gente que quiera crear contenidos, sea esto en respuesta o reacción a algo que leyeron o a un video divertido en YouTube. Es más, incluso dentro de esa ya raleada categoría de “creadores de contenidos” hay muy pocos que realmente puedan crear contenidos convincentes y persuasivos, es decir cosas que la gente quiera ver o leer. Por ejemplo, un blog corporativo escrito con mediocridad es incluso peor que no tener uno. Y a menos que la empresa se pueda pagar un redactor con talento, las probabilidades de que sirva para algo, juegan en contra.

La falta de calidad es también el gran problema de la baja circulación de lo que se pretende que sea marketing viral, según Wolk, porque por falta de ella, la gente no circula los videos destinados a ser virales (y solo circular los hace virales) si no son ingeniosos, divertidos o relevantes como para que merezca la pena pasárselo a otras personas. Llamarlo viral no lo convierte en viral, es viral cuando la gente lo decide así.

Periodismo, información en la blogosfera

El siguiente tema que toca Wolk, es el de la popularidad de la “blogosfera”. La razón, dice, responde a la autenticidad de los autores que, por definición, escriben para sí mismos, o bien dan su propia versión de los hechos, frente a la manipulación de los medios de comunicación masivos, por todo el mundo. Desde sus dueños hasta sus equipos de RR PP (sin dejar de lado a los partidos políticos o a las propias organizaciones terroristas. Frente a noticias manipuladas, sometidas a los parámetros muchas veces rigurosos de las direcciones, hay una enorme legión de periodistas aficionados que con una laptop y una cámara digital cubren muchísimos eventos a una velocidad muy superior a la del periodismo profesional. Probablemente las noticias que mas repercusión han tenido en las semanas pasadas son las que tienen que ver con las elecciones en Iran y las protestas del pueblo en las calles. Su presencia en Twitter #iranelection, mezcla de periodismo y de flashmobs de los que hablé cuando el blog no existía aún y un correo llevaba noticias y comentarios a mis amigos, alumnos y clientes, comentando el libro de Clay Shirky “Here Comes Everybody“. De él y de su autor, encontrarán muchísima información en la red y en la página que Shirky creó cuando lo lanzó. Pongo al pie(3) un extracto del mail, en lo relacionado con ejemplos de flashmobs, sobre todo políticos.

La importancia de Twitter en este caso fue capital: el 13 de Junio cuando el gobierno iraní suprimió la escalada de protestas tanto en las calles como online, Twitter literalmente estalló en twits o mensajes de hasta 140 palabras, denunciando los hechos tanto en inglés como en farsi. El movimiento lo recogieron muchos medios (ver, por ejemplo, un artículo de Time), y el propio gobierno norteamericano le puso de manifiesto a los directivos de Twitter, que esa red social era una importante forma de comunicación en Iran, sugiriéndoles no hacer la actualización del sistema en la madrugada del martes 16 de junio como estaba programado, porque cortaría el servicio en horas de la mañana a los iraníes. La actualización se hizo, finalmente, el miércoles a las 17 horas EDT; es decir las 2100 GMt: o sea a la una de la mañana hora de Irán.)

Pero no sobredimensionemos la envergadura del evento. Aunque Twitter pueda ser estupendo para traer noticias que algún gobierno haya censurado —y además a mucha velocidad— la noticia completa, con varias fuentes y comentarios bien organizados, aún, se ve mejor en la televisión. Quizás solo sean hábitos pero subsisten hasta en los adolescentes (ver Los jóvenes, la televisión e internet: una sorpresa.)

Publicidad en blogs

Wolk toca entonces el tema de la industria de la publicidad y sus blogs y dice que el sector está lleno de comunicados de prensa regurgitados y de ejecutivos asustados echándose flores mutuamente y alabando sus trabajos. Cita a Stuart Elliott, columnista de publicidad del New York Times —y dice que trata de cubrir “las tendencias mas grandes” para “el público en general”— con George Parker, un inglés retirado y malhablado que fue redactor en varias agencias y dice las cosas sin pelos en la lengua en su blog Adscam (lo leo diariamente y rara vez me impresiona no solamente por su ordinariez y chabacanería, sino por su obsesión para hablar mal, y de forma soez, de ciertos personajes de la profesión y de ciertas agencias. También leo todas las semanas a Elliot y no concuerdo con Wolk: simplemente hace otro tipo de periodismo. No es incisivo ni va a la médula: presenta novedades y comenta la actualidad con un estilo muy “gran periódico”, muy tradicional. Y eso no es necesariamente malo. Es,  simplemente otro tipo de periodismo y cada uno debe tener su espacio).

Habla Wolk de los intentos de los anunciantes de hacer publicidad en ciertos blogs de opinión y cuenta entonces la historia de Joseph Jaffe y su JaffeJuice que con un grupo de otros bloggers (algunos de los cuales jamás habían mostrado interés en la fotografía) recibieron en calidad de préstamo, cámaras Nikkon gratis a cambio de tomar fotos con ellas y publicarlas en su blog haciendo mención de la marca y modelo. Por el equivalente a $700, que es el valor de la cámara, destruyeron, dice Wolk, buena parte de la credibilidad que tenían. Wolk incluso le echa en cara a Jaffe haber publicado con celeridad, una foto de su bebé recién nacido “tomada con su Nikon D80”, haciendo de un acto puro, un vulgar acto comercial. (Desde entonces Jaffe ha entrado en muchos otros auspicios y defiende con frecuencia su posición. Le ha buscado incluso un nombre “blogger/influencer outreach” (algo así como “extensión del blogger/influyente”) frente a “sponsored conversation” o “conversación auspiciada” que es como le puso Forrester Research al clasificar la actividad).

Un caso parecido es el de Microsoft que le pagó a una serie de dueños de blogs por usar ciertas palabras o expresiones supuestamente propias, en algún sitio de Microsoft y asociar en él las palabras o la expresión, a sus nombres. Levantó mucha polvareda: The Buzz Machine un blog importante en el mundo de la tecnología de punta, dijo que a los involucrados “les habían comprado la voz”  y Adrants, un blog de noticias y chismes, registró que la blogosfera estaba en armas contra Microsoft.

En una posición principista —y en mi opinión extremadamente escrupulosa— Wolk llama a las marcas “intrusos” que vienen a interrumpir una conversación entre amigos “y cuando estoy hablando con mis amigos no quiero hablarle a su marca. Quizás quiera hablar de su marca pero no con ella porque su marca, no es mi amiga”. Suscribe y lo declara así, la posición de su amiga Christina Kerley que en su blog C K afirma que aunque entiende que la publicidad sea válida en los blogs, ella no la aceptará jamás, y, enlazando el post de The Buzz Machine, declara que en la blogosfera, es imprescindible actuar con independencia, objetividad, y confiabilidad (es decir, inspirarla) y a eso lo llama C K sencillamente autenticidad. Wolk, a su vez, llama terreno resbaladizo a cualquier alternativa de auspicio a través de un blog, porque una vez tomado ese camino, así sea una sola vez, el beneficio de la duda quedará permanentemente en el aire para los lectores. (En mi opinión, quizás repetir los estribillos del cliente sin ningún tipo de valor agregado personal, por dinero, haga perder la autenticidad, sin remisión, a un autor. Pero probar un equipo o un software y dar una opinión imparcial no es distinto de lo que hace, por ejemplo, David Pogue en el New York Times o Walt Mossberg y Katherine Boehret en el Wall Street Journal. Y reciben una remuneración por hacerlo y seguramente que ningún fabricante le pide que devuelva el equipo o el software que le dio a probar. Claro que en el caso de los periodistas profesionales, el fabricante no paga directamente sus servicios y en el de los bloggers, si. En cualquier caso, el blog perderá audiencia o no la perderá si su autor toma auspicios. Y si la pierde “en el pecado le irá la penitencia” puesto que al reducir su audiencia decrecerá el interés de sus auspiciadores. Sobre este tema estoy más cerca de la posición de Josh Bernoff de Forrester Research, que de la de Wolk ).

El blog de un CEO: el de Tony Hsieh de Zappos

El Blog del CEO

Termina Alan Wolk hablando de los CEO y de sus blogs. Tener un blog es algo que está de moda en las altas esferas empresariales y es deseado, seguramente por vanidad, por los dirigentes de primer nivel, que encontrarán la forma de dejarle caer la noticia a sus amigos “¿Sabes que tengo un blog?” pero, según Wolk, “el blog del presidente”, no tiene futuro porque lo normal es que, con opiniones nunca comprometedoras además de totalmente neutras, el blog termine siendo una versión en capítulos del Reporte Anual de la empresa (a diferencia de casos excepcionales como el de Tony Hsieh de Zappos, que además de un blog que comparte con el  COO y CFO de la empresa, Alfred Lin usa Twitter con asiduidad como parte de la política de transparencia de la empresa). Recomienda a cambio del Blog, un documento de FAQ (Frequent Asked Questions) o Preguntas Más Frecuentes. Nada sexy y de perfil bajo pero siempre desde el punto de vista del cliente, con respuestas colocadas de manera que tengan sentido para el cliente, no para la empresa. Son las preguntas las que definen el documento y no las respuestas: silenciosamente y contestando lo que el cliente quiere oír y no lo que la empresa quiere decir. Y eso, de hecho, amigos míos, es una conversación, dice Wolk. Frase de cierre estupenda que le quita toda la confusión a un concepto que es simple pero que con frecuencia se enreda, solo para hacerlo parecer mas sofisticado y complejo. Y seguramente para poder cobrar la asesoría necesaria para desenredarlo y aplicarlo.

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(1)Geek (del inglés geek, pronunciado “guik” IPA /gik/) es un término que se utiliza para referirse a la persona fascinada por la tecnología y la informática. Se trata de un estilo de vida y una forma de ser. Aunque no suelen denominarse hackers o gurús, son en forma y fondo similares, con una afición concreta por algo poco habitual, hace referencia a llamar peyorativamente a lo extraño.

El término «geek» en español está relacionado sólo con la tecnología, a diferencia del uso del término geek en inglés, que tiene un significado más amplio y equivalente al término español friki. (Fuente Wikipedia)

(2)Hablamos de Alan Wolk, su blog The Toad Stool y de su frase famosa “Your brand is not my friend”, en Twitter como medio publicitario: una encuesta reveladora y una propuesta.

Alan Wolk se define a sí mismo como una de las nuevas voces del lado creativo del negocio publicitario que ha establecido un espacio distinto para su consultoría por su sentido común frente a la estrategia que combina con la práctica directa en funciones de director creativo.

Es un importante especialista en todo el entorno online, frecuentemente citado, y su blog enlazado, ha sido seleccionado por el exclusivo sitio de Guy Kawasaki en torno a blogs excepcionales, Alltop, aparece en el número 15 de la los “42 blogs” del Top Rank Marketing Blog y además publica artículos con frecuencia en Marketing Profs (mas conocida como MPDailyFix) un blog enfocado en los consultores de marketing y en el consorcio norteamericano de publicaciones Newstex.

Su serie de artículos mas renombrada (que es justamente la que vamos a tratar en dos o tres posts), escrita en el 2007, ha sido publicada, por ejemplo, en Adweek y su editor, Brian Morrissey ha calificado a su blog, The Toad Stool, “como uno de los más leídos de la industria”. La serie “Your brand is not my friend” tiene que ver con las falsas presunciones, suposiciones o conjeturas que expresan, a veces con no poco desparpajo, soberbia y ligereza, algunos especialistas en marketing sea del lado del cliente o del lado de las agencias, en torno a la explotación comercial de  la Web 2.0. La escribió en el 2007 pero no solamente no ha perdido vigencia sino que ha cobrado realismo porque varias de las cosas que el autor anticipó que sucederían … han sucedido.

Cientos de personas acudieron por ímpetu a un flashmob en la estación de la calle Liverpool de Londres y cantaron Bad como tributo al rey del Pop Michael Jackson.Lo mismo sucedió en Paris, Estocolmo, Montreal, Seatle, Tokyo, Hong Kong…

(3) Extracto del mail mencionado, a modo de ilustración de lo que es un flashmob:

Flashmob, traducido literalmente de inglés como “multitud instantánea” (flash -destello, ráfaga, mob – multitud) una acción organizada en la que un gran grupo de personas se reúne de repente en un lugar público, realiza algo inusual y luego se dispersa rápidamente. Suelen convocarse a través de los medios telemáticos (móviles e Internet) y en la mayor parte de los casos, no tienen ningún fin más que el entretenimiento, pero pueden convocarse también con fines políticos.

En Bielorrusia están prohibidas las reuniones de un cierto número de personas, un grupo de jóvenes se puso de acuerdo por Internet y usando sus teléfonos celulares, para ir a la plaza principal simplemente comiendo helados. Cuando empezaron a ser arrestados “por comer helados”, como una forma de protestar que se ha denominado flashmobs (1) sacaron cámaras fotográficas y registraron y subieron a la red la incongruente actitud de las fuerzas policiales con gente que lo único que hacía era “comer helados”. En el siguiente flashmob lo que hicieron fue sonreír sin parar mientras caminaban por la plaza.

El fenómeno de los flashmobs comenzó con la publicación en octubre de 2002 del libro del sociólogo Howard Rheingold, “Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution“. En este libro el autor predecía que la gente usará las nuevas tecnologías de comunicación (Internet, teléfonos móviles) para autoorganización. En junio de 2003 Rob Zazueta de San Francisco, después de haber leído las obras de Rheingold, creó la página web http://flocksmart.com/ en la que por primera vez los mobbers empezaron a planear sus reuniones

La serie de televisión Jericho se canceló al terminar el capítulo 22 de la primera temporada. En vez de enviar mails a la CBS (ya se sabe que la lluvia de mails es poco útil tanto en las productoras de televisión como en los estamentos políticos)  los fans de la misma decidieron enviar maní (peanuts en inglés) ya que al final de ese último capítulo uno de los personajes pronuncia  la expresión “Nuts” (“Nueces”, traducido en el doblaje al español como “¡Y un huevo!”) en respuesta a la sugerencia de rendición hecha por el alcalde de la ciudad donde se lleva a cabo la serie. (Hace, por cierto referencia a la respuesta del general americano de la Segunda Guerra Mundial Anthony McAuliffe cuando fue invitado a rendirse en la Batalla de Bastogne).

Con más de veinte toneladas de maní en sus almacenes CBS dio respuesta a los fans asegurando que grabaría siete capítulos más y volverían a analizar si el rating aconsejaba seguir con más temporadas de la serie.

El libro de Clay Shirky: Here Comes Everybody

Finalmente está la historia de un grupo que empezó a poner stickers protestando por la preeminencia de la Mafia en Palermo, Italia y después han abierto una página web en la que los negocios pueden declararse de acuerdo con no pagar “protección” a la Mafia. si esto se hubiese hecho de manera individual la Mafia hubiese respondido.

Un caso que no contempla Shirky es el de la primera elección de José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero en España

La noche del 13 de marzo de 2004 víspera de las elecciones presidenciales en España ha sido bautizada como “la noche de los mensajes cortos”. Cientos de personas, sin un mismo convocante que las uniera, coincidieron protestando frente a la sede del Partido Popular.

Detrás de estos acontecimientos no hubo ningún partido o plataforma política, no hubo ningún sindicato; ni siquiera algún periodista de los medios de la oposición -como sugirió un periódico- sino un ciudadano que convocó a un pequeño grupo de amigos allí y se encontró con 4.000 personas exigiendo la verdad a sus gobernantes sobre el atentado de los trenes en la estación de Atocha.

El mensaje, que desencadenó la concentración, se expandió primero por teléfono celular y finalmente invadió los foros de internet: “¿Aznar de rositas? ¿Lo llaman jornada de reflexión y Urdaci trabajando? Hoy 13M, a las 18h. Sede PP, C/ Génova 13. Sin partidos. Silencio por la verdad. ¡Pásalo!”.

La casualidad quiso que esa noche frente a la sede del PP, preparadas para informar de la jornada electoral -que tendría lugar 24 horas más tarde- se encontraran diversas emisoras de televisión del mundo que tenían las antenas parabólicas desplegadas… sólo tuvieron que conectar en directo.

Muchos piensan que allí se jugó el resultado final de la elección que dio por ganador al PSOE y presidente del gobierno español a su candidato José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero

Alan Wolk’s Websites:

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• Upcoming Speaking Engagements

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Canadian Flag: We stand on guard for thee.

Maybe I’m naive but I had this crazy idea that the CRTC existed to serve Canada not Bell Canada.

Yet the CRTC is allowing Bell Canada to charge third-party ISP customers “Usage Based Billing”.  This will essentially double my costs as a moderate internet user. But it will be worse for heavy users.

Because these usage charges aren’t just for downloads,

they will be applied both ways.

Don’t they know that this is a recession? The timing for this is almost as sensitive as firing people at Christmas. Apparently the fact that an increasing share of business and employment opportunities are only available online hasn’t make any difference to these decision makers.

Quite frankly I am not looking forward to paying for the privilege of receiving spam, or paying for the privilege of having web advertising inflicted on me, or paying for the privilege of downloading automatic Windows updates (which you can no longer even choose to decline if you have Vista).   Ironically Canadians will no longer be able to download free software like Open Office or Ubuntu for free.  We’ll be paying Bell Canada for it.

I’ve just begun reading the Clay Shirky book “Here Comes Everybody” and this certainly sounds a lot like his examples of the old guard attempting to suppress the use of the internet.

"Here Comes Everybody" by Clay Shirky

It would seem that if Bell Canada is allowed to do this, they may kill off the independent Canadian ISPs.

Not, I might add, in the classic free market way by providing better service for a better price, but rather in that time honored feudal way of using the forces of the government to eliminate the competition.

Bell Canada may in fact end up restoring their monopoly since no small company will ever have any hope of competing with them on the unfair playing field provided by the CRTC.

So this move may in fact seem to be good for Bell.  But it certainly is not good for Canada.

A few years ago Canada was at the leading edge of internet affordability. This is why so many Canadians are not only online but comfortable online. We could afford to be.

However over the last few years we’ve been sliding more and more quickly toward the bottom of the list– due in no small part to the actions of players like Bell Canada.

It wasn’t so very long ago that the Canadian Government forced Bell Canada to share the infrastructure with other service providers. Since the Bell Canada infrastructure (read: phone lines) had actually been paid for out of tax dollars when Bell Canada was a government monopoly, once the monopoly was broken it was only fair to share the infrastructure with independent companies for the benefit of Canadians.

Which is why services like Teksavvy can exist. That’s the ISP I use. Teksavvy gets to keep something in the neighborhood of $5.00 out of what I pay per month, while Bell Canada gets more than $20.00– strictly for the use of the phone lines. Yet Teksavvy handily provides good service for less than Bell Canada does.

So you would think that Bell Canada would match the deals being offered by their competitors.
On the contrary, Bell Canada hasn’t even tried. Instead of playing fair they want to kill off the competition and turn back the clock so they can be the only game in town again.

Drastically increasing the cost of internet usage– for no reason except increased profit for Bell Canada and without providing anything in return– could seriously damage Canadian internet access.

The real price we’ll pay is the curbing of Canadian internet use.

Not only will the cost of using the internet increase, it will affect how Canadians use the internet.
We will be much more careful about what we go online to do.

• We might decide not to make a blog because it will be too expensive.
• We might cut our kids off Facebook because it will be too expensive.
• We might decide not to add to wikipedia because it will be too expensive.
• We might decide against posting our photos on Flickr,
• but if we do, grandma might not download photos of the grandkids because it will be too expensive.

Maybe you don’t use one of the independent ISPs.  Maybe you’re using Sympatico right now.  Surprise, surprise, Bell Canada is doing the same thing to their own customers too. Are you using a cable ISP? I suspect it won’t do you any good, if the cable ISPs complain to the CRTC about not being able to gouge customers as well as Bell Canada the CRTC will give them what they want.

Even worse are the “Chilling Effects” – who’s going to develop new cool Web 2.0 applications if they’re constantly watching the meter to ensure they don’t exceed the 60 GiByte cap? Who’s going to sign up for online video services if the movies exceed the cap?

–This Blog Is Not For Reading

Ultimately, with caution being forced upon us,  Canadians will have a much harder time trying to compete in a global economy.

What Can We Do?

Help protest this, submit a complaint to the CRTC
For the type of application select Tariff, and as a subject, use File Number # 8740-B2-200904989 – Bell Canada – TN 7181.
(Instructions courtesy of Antonio Cangiano)

And as always, you can call or write your federal MP to let them know what you think about this.  I’d love to hear anyone else’s suggestion or ideas.

You can read the Telecom Order CRTC 2009-484

This is really dangerous.

It will not hurt the internet.
It will just compromise Canadian internet access by artificially inflating the transaction costs.
Which will hurt Canadian Citizens and Business alike.
Talk about acting contrary to the public good.

I’ve started a blog specifically for this issue:  Stop Usage Based Billing
I am compiling links to all the other internet sites dealing with the topic in the sidebar there.
My personal favorite would be http://dissolvethecrtc.ca

after my umpteenth confrontation with a clueless baby-boomer talking smack about the emerging new world i’ve decided to write a brief guide to living in the information age.  this is directed at everybody who is complaining about “those darn kids” and the death of print media, the people who are working in major arts institutions (especially theaters) and say things like, “I don’t understand. we’ve got a facebook page, we’ve got a twitter, we’ve tried everything and we just can’t get new audiences!”  The key is first part of the sentence – YOU DON’ T UNDERSTAND. It is not about the toys and gizmos and all that. It is about your attitude.

I’m going to start with something that will sound kind of new age-y but I hold to be true. In the ever-unfolding and mutating present the key is to embrace change, accept chaos and open yourself to endless possibility. Really. Just let go. Let go of everything you know. Let go of privacy, let go of power, let go of your ego and your need for control and embrace malleability. Dare to care. Dare to disclose. Dare to share. Reality is kind of like a powerful hallucinogen – if you fight it you’re going to have a bad trip. If you just let go and ride it, everything will be just fine and you might just learn something. Be open to learning things from whoever brings knowledge – and it can come from anyone, anywhere, anytime. Read Clay Shirky. He wrote a whole book about it.

Secondly, you have to actually mean what you say. The new internet age is very sensitive to bullshit and very positive about sincerity. That doesn’t mean be overly earnest, it means try not being completely full of shit. Young people respond to authenticity. If you are losing audience maybe you should try not to suck. Don’t put up crappy shows. Do something passionate and engaged that you care about – something you would do if you weren’t worried about money. Pretend like money is not an issue, let go and do what you really care about. Do a show that is meaningful to you and share why it is meaningful. Don’t try and trick people with a line of hooey. We see through you. Don’t tell us what to think, don’t try and second-guess. Just do what  you do with honesty and intention and share the process. If you care, we’ll care.

Here’s the deal. The gizmos are always going to change faster than you can adopt them. Twitter is pretty much over. I mean, its here, but its over as far as novelty goes. Remember, also, that Twitter was created by accident, to solve a specific problem. It was an aftereffect, not an intention. That’s kind of how things go these days. Soon Google WAVE is going to come out and change everything. Google OS, running on netbooks, is going to come out and change things. And who knows what else is going to come out and change everything? You just have to constantly be ready to adapt.

Living in the information age means starting every brainstorm session with, “Wouldn’t it be cool if….”
Living in the information age means no hierarchy
Living in the information age means starting from YES
Living in the information age means letting go of your old battles because they just don’t mean the same things anymore
Living in the information means nobody cares how hard you had to fight to get where you are
Living in the information age means being open and inviting people in
Living in the information age means sharing

We are living in the single best time to be alive ever. The information age doesn’t care about the sixties, or about how things used to be, it doesn’t care about all those old oppositional models that propagate conflict. The Information Age cares about the future, about making the world better, about boldly facing what is to be and working to shape it into something better, constantly improving, constantly evolving, constantly working towards a state of optimal good-ness.

So to all of you people who don’t get it. Quit worrying. Just go with it. And don’t worry too much. But if you get left behind, it’ll be your own fault. This isn’t like “Don’t trust anyone over thirty” – it is not oppositional. Being “on the bus” is not a generational thing, its an attitude thing, its a choice. And the choice is yours. We’d love to have you. Or we can just wait for nature to take its course.

In a wonderful TED Talk recorded last month, Clay Shirky details why the arrival of social media on a massive scale is a true communications revolution. His talk is prescient at a time when Twitter has been seen to be the most immediate way of delivering news from the front line of the Iran election protests.

Much of what he says derives from his fine book ‘Here Comes Everybody‘ that I blogged earlier this year during my sabbatical. If you don’t have time to read the book, watch this video, which is only seventeen minutes long. It introduces you to some of his key thinking, and it is highly relevant. Here are a couple of salient points he makes in this talk.

It isn’t when tools are shiny and new that they are revolutionary; it is when they are familiar and boring – because then they are widely distributed and used.

Furthermore, the contemporary communications revolution works on a number of fronts. First of all, we are no longer passive consumers. We do not simply receive what the professionals and the powerful broadcast to us. The same tools that make us consumers also make us producers: computers are not just for looking at websites and receiving messages, we can send messages and create our own websites and blogs. Mobile phones are not only for telephone conversations, we can send SMS and MMS messages.

And not only can we reply to the powerful and the professionals, we can then network among ourselves. We are way beyond ‘one to one’ and ‘one to many’ conversations; we now have ‘many to many’ conversations, and their significance grows exponentially with each new participant.

When the last Chinese earthquake happened, Twitter was the first service to break the news, because eyewitness accounts could be uploaded immediately. The BBC learned of the quake from Twitter. The so-called ‘Great Firewall of China‘ which existed to censor unsuitable material from the rest of the world was facing the wrong way. It was a long time before the Chinese authorities reverted to their normal clampdown methods.

Ultimately, though, the nature of the new social tools is such that there is no point discussing whether we like them or not, professionalism versus citizen journalism and all that. The horse has bolted, and this is the new world. Not to operate in it is like refusing to have a printing press, a camera, a telephone, a radio and a television.

The Barack Obama presidential campaign understood the new world well when they set up the My Barack Obama site for supporters. When Obama announced his support for something unpopular, they formed a forum on the site to oppose him and lobby him. Obama had to reply, explaining he had considered the issue and come to a conclusion they did not like, and that he would take the hits for that. What the campaign never did was censor the supporters. It realised that in the new world they could only convene them, and that was their task on the website.

Where does this leave Christians? Firstly, ignoring the new world is not an option. Communications (in all directions) are key to our faith. While we shall want to beware any values that might be inimical to our core beliefs (for example, the ‘instant’ or ‘real time’ nature of this stuff cuts both ways, between news spreading fast – good – and stunted reflection – bad), we cannot opt out. Churches that just want to set up static websites and think they are hip are behind the times. Blogs, Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, Flickr (I simply name the ones where I happen to have a presence) are now critical. We need to be active there. They are about more than the popular stereotype of Facebook and Twitter updates of saying what we had for breakfast. It is heartening in my own denomination to see that this year for the first time the Methodist Conference (which happens in a couple of weeks’ time) will have a Twitter feed. It’s already up and running. It will be the primary way in which I stay up to date with debates and decisions. Why wait two weeks for a Methodist Recorder report? Our weekly newspaper has instantly been rendered even more moribund than it already was.

By virtue of where I am publishing this article, I am probably to a considerable extent typing to the converted. But the argument needs to be carried elsewhere. I am not suggesting that every ninety-year-old in our churches buys a laptop and sings up with Twitter (although plenty with lively minds certainly could). However, it is as essential for the church to embrace the life in this new world as it was for the Jewish exiles to embrace life in Babylon. Not everyone will like it, but it is where we are right now, and we need to be involved.

Secondly, we must recognise that these different forms of communication will affect our worldview. Rex Miller argued as much, if not more, in his book ‘The Millennium Matrix‘. He said that Marshall McLuhan’s famous dictum that the medium is the message wasn’t radical enough: the medium is the worldview, Miller claimed. Social media moves us from one-way proclamation of the type I engage in when I preach on a Sunday to an interactive and conversational approach. This must affect how we do church and especially how we do mission.

Thirdly, while some will be bewildered and confused by the new world, I think it gives us cause for hope. If others can get their message out so quickly and broadly, then we can too. And we should be at the forefront of the revolution, not merely copying a new trend but innovating. We are the children of the Creator God. The Church’s history of arts patronage is something we could recover here, in that we could be leaders, not simply followers in the social media world. Why not?

Anyway, I said this was a conversation, and I’ve rattled on for a thousand words now. Over to you. What do you think?

Hanba is new to blogging. Actually, hanba has only recently really discovered the internet. It all happened as a reaction to my morning newspaper. One morning, reading a 13-page special about a particular celebrity engagement, I had had it. Why do I pay for this garbage? The papers feed us a narrow world view defined by the corporate interests, targeted towards the “baby-boomer generation” (=people born in the 1940’s) and propaganda. This the papers do, even though they could be discussing every possible view and perspective in the world, with only the sky as a limit.

Reading things on the net is difficult, as you have to wade through an infinite volume of material. Some of which is good, most of which is not. Finding your links and networks, however, is a dynamic, interesting and social process. There is so much creativity and talent out there! Talent not bound by agency policies, or the views of the advertisers. Articles not written by people sitting on a certain position in a publishing company; a position that allows them to write whatever the “cat dragged in” and have it be considered good journalism. (I am sure this exists on the net too, but I believe the net readers are quicker to change from a source to another, should the creativity fail. ) The only regret I have with terminating my newspaper subscription is that I did not do it sooner. I am enjoying following this shift from newspapers to the net media.

There’s a book lying around in our apartment; Here Comes Everybody by Clay Shirky. It will be the next book I’ll read. The book describes the collective media and how its role will be increasingly important in the future. The old word of mouth, or “the jungle drum” is back, only in a more global sense.

Shirky calls each individual blogger a media outlet. Hear that, I can be a media outlet! I am allowed to say things about architecture and literature, which are fields I have a passion for, but no formal education in. In the old world, my articles would never have been published in the newspapers, since I am not “an authority within the field”. While having a PhD may mean a person has knowledge and understanding about a subject, it does not mean that university studies is the only way to end up with interesting things to say. More importantly, wanting to communicate with people about books and buildings does not mean I desire to be an “authority within a field”, I just like to jot down thoughts and enjoy a nice chat with a stranger. It’s more relaxed this way.

I never liked Andy Warhol or his populistic, kitschy posters and ketchup boxes. I never got the fuss around his “fifteen minutes of fame”. If this is it, however, I may have begun to soften up for him.

'His Holiness' Would Make an Epic Twitter Handle

As reported in various news channels before the recent Holiday weekend, the Vatican launched www.pope2you.net last Thursday to celebrate World Communications Day, or Inter Mirifica: an outcome of the Second Vatican Council.  This year, the Pope’s message directly addresses ‘the digital generation’ through a website, e-mail outreach, and yes, a Facebook app.  No, you won’t be able to poke the pontiff or learn what his Smurf name might be, but this action represents a conscious, if occasionally unwieldy, move by this ancient organization into social media. 

The Pope’s message invites young people to become instruments for peace and promote a culture of respect built on ‘great synergies of friendship.’  Beyond the dismaying fact that the Pope himself resorted to saying ‘synergies,’ this move by the Pontifical Council for Social Communications drills home just how quickly our media environment has evolved over the past five years.  Obviously, technology has changed, but that’s not nearly as remarkable as how human behavior has changed.  The Vatican’s decision to turn to the internet as a means of spreading church gospel shows a practical awareness of where their congregation lives, plays and exchanges ideas.  With this new site, Catholics can now interact in this rich dialogue environment with a limitless supply of e-cards and banners from the Pope.  They can also follow and forward news and updates on YouTube or through a new iPhone app.  

What marketers refer to as viral messaging is merely a 21st century update of missionary work: a central organization creates a strong message, then sends out true believers with an imprimatur to take that message and spread it to people in far off lands.  The big difference is that today, you can do that simply by pressing ’send.’ 

As Clay Shirky explains in his engaging, imminently readable book “Here Comes Everybody” (You still haven’t read it?  C’mon…), we live in a time where communications technology makes it incredibly easy to organize without organizations.  Because of this, organizations need to think beyond their own walls and self interests to consider outside communities that might share their thinking, values or interests.  These communities are not officially sanctioned extensions of the organization, because they exist solely on the strength of their members’ passion; call them ‘intramural organizations.’

Every large organization with a message to market must become aware of their own ‘intramural organizations’ and find ways to foster and encourage them.  When done deftly, large organizations can extend their marketing almost exponentially because these intramural groups excel at driving recommendation and word of mouth. 

The best way to spread any message—religious or secular—is to define your brand’s mission, and spread that.  The Pope’s doing it, why aren’t you?

By Dennis Ryan, CCO, Element 79