Archive for October, 2007

by Angie Macdonald

Last week I attended a two-day Social Media Masterclass given by two renowned gurus in the field: Shel Holtz and Neville Hobson and organised by Ragan Communications and Simply Communicate.

There was a lot to take in, but a few points struck me as being vital to the future progress and understanding of using social media or web 2.0 in the work place.

The Power has Shifted
What web 2.0 technology has enabled is a shift of power from large corporations and governments to individuals and communities online. It is so much easier now to reach people online to join your protest group, or to sign a e-petition at the 10 Downing Street site. And because millions of people around the globe have easy access to these things, the voice of the individual has grown in strength and really can matter and make a difference.

Web 2.0 is a Constantly Evolving Toolkit
Different events or messages call for different tools. It is up to you to choose the tools that suit the task or the message, whether it be a wiki, a blog or a podcast. The thing to do is to try them out and see which ones you like and which ones best fit what you are trying to communicate. For that is what they are essentially: communication tools.

Choose the Most Effective Method to Communicate your Message
Web 2.0 doesn’t mean that the old tried and tested methods of communicating are over. Brochure websites, print media and press releases still have their place. The point is to choose those methods and tools which will best serve your message. Each time you communicate, it may be in a slightly different way, but you now have the option to choose from a wide variety of methods to appeal to as many different audiences as possible. Combine traditional methods with the appropriate social media tools for the most effective results.

Ignore Bloggers at your Peril
Many so-called “A-list bloggers” have millions of readers all around the world and their words carry a lot of clout. They have the ability to influence people because they are seen as gurus or experts. There have been several occasions where companies have been brought to their knees by bloggers.

Monitor what Bloggers are Saying about You
That way you can engage from the very beginning and manage the crisis before it gets out of control.

Don’t Try and Pull the Wool over Bloggers’ Eyes
If there’s one thing bloggers hate it’s being smoozed by companies in the hope that the blogger will recommend their product. If you want them to do that, be upfront and disclose your intentions from the start.

It’s all about Trust
In this day and age, when consumers don’t trust company-speak, and trust governments even less, building trust is a difficult process. Don’t do anything to break that trust once it is established. When it comes to trust, we tend to trust people like ourselves.

You can’t Control it
So you might as well join in and enjoy it. If you join in the conversation about your company you have a chance to influence the way the conversation flows. Staying out of it could be dangerous.

By the end of the second day, the message was loud and clear - ignore social media at your peril! Love it or loathe it, you can’t afford to ignore it. Social media is here to stay.

Photo: Thanks to eshm on Flickr

I’ve been invited to speak on Saturday at the Social Media and Photography one-day conference at the London College of Communication (LCC), part of the University of Arts, London. My brief is to give an overview of social media for the students at LCC while other speakers will be looking more specifically at photography within social media, such as Flickr and Photosynth.

Here’s the summary:

“Forms of social media, in which the user is also the author, are transforming the role of photography in contemporary culture. On sites such as YouTube, Flickr, Picasa, Facebook, MySpace and Second World users generate and share content, eemingly side-stepping the influence of corporations, governments and editors&;though new forms of censorship are on the rise. What attitudes and assumptions are built into the structures of existing forms of social media? What can we learn about ourselves, our moment in history, and about photography (and video) from looking at social media more carefully?

Speakers will include Roger Hargreaves, Yang-May Ooi, Alan Sekers, Craig Smith, Lucy Soutter and Paul Tebbs.”

The conference is organised by my friend Lucy Soutter, an art photographer and a lecturer in photography at LCC, and the other speakers are her professor colleagues. I’m looking forward to hearing what they are going to talk about as it will be a great opportunity to learn from some academic experts.

In my session, I’m going to focus on what social media means for creative artists and those working in the creative industries, especially where a lot of content on the web is created for free and distributed for free.

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For those attending the conference, you can download the slides from my presentation Social Media: Free for All? - the password will be available at the conference.

lccsm

This is a cross-post from my arts and writing blog, Fusion View

Following from my post on SlushPileReader.com, where readers can vote for unpublished manuscripts to get a publishing contract, Amazon.com and Borders are also getting in on the act with their own versions of the democratic publishing ideal.

See the January magazine article Looking for a New Publishing Paradigm

These business models all rely on one of the characteristics of social media - user-participation. On the bookmarking site, Digg.com, you can bookmark on online article that you like and it will appear in a public page on Digg. Other readers who then follow the link to read the article you bookmarked can then vote for that item - the more votes it has, the higher the ranking on the Digg page and more readers will see it. Wikipedia is dependent on users making and editing entries.

In general, experts take the view that only 10% of visitors on a site participate in any active way eg leaving comments or other action that contributes to the site or enterprise offered by the site. Digg is very technology and sports biased. I expect that the people who populate Wikipedia are serious fans of whatever topic they are writing about and enjoy the kudos of being an expert. Many other user-generated site I’ve come across has a strong bias towards the interests of young guys with a tecchy, gadget-, sports-, or auto-focused interest. While there are many book lovers who are young guys, I have a sense that the majority are women who love books, the physical things, and may not have such a passion for reading their novels online - and have less of a fervour about being an expert. I would be very interested to watch how these publishing business models pan out and whether there’s going to be a bias towards sci-fi, fantasy and male-readership genres.

I also note that these ventures are all US based. America is notoriously self-focused when it comes to book publishing and it is hugely difficult to get your book published if you’re not American - even if, as a non-native, you write about a US setting with American characters, it’s very difficult to get it past the US literary sniffer dogs. I wonder if these ventures will let in more non-American manuscripts or if we will still find only US books getting through. (I don’t know if there’s a condition of entry that rules out non-US manuscripts - does anyone know?)

Am I portraying gender stereotypes here? What do you think? Please add a comment.

Pic: thanks to archangeli on flickr.com

Following on from my post about the founding father of the web, Tim Berners-Lee, who created HTML and the follow up, giving a bite-sized explanation of Web 2.0, here is an excellent video that animates the whole story from the humble beginnings of HTML code to the dynamic interactive arena that is Web 2.0 - and how Web 2.0 and social media is now making us re-think copyright, authorship, rhetoric and just about everything else.

Thanks to Lucy Soutter for sending me this video.

I received an email in my Inbox a moment ago from the Online Journalism Review reporting that a German website is calling on the world to declare today, 04 Oct, “Free Burma Day”. The article explains:

“The state-controlled media in Myanmar has been tight-lipped, to say the least. Communication with international news organizations has been spotty, and soldiers continue to turn reporters away at the borders. The message has been clear: “Nothing to see here.”

But armed with cell phones, cameras and laptops, common citizens and protesters stepped in to expose the conflict in real time. Some ran blogs of their own. Many dispatched pictures and videos of police violence to off-shore bloggers and news sites. Either way, they loosened the government’s chokehold on communication.

Now, with the ebb and flow of information from within at a standstill, the offshore sites are left to sustain awareness. A brand-new site out of Germany, Free-Burma.org, calls on bloggers around the world to post a “Free Burma” awareness graphic on any posts today, Oct. 4. Organizer Philipp Hausser talked to us about “International Bloggers’ Day For Burma” and the impact of Myanmar’s citizen-journalist phenomenon.”

You can read the full article Bloggers organize international day of support for Burmese freedom

I’ve been watching the escalation of the tension in Burma through the blogs and online news. Here are some links:

Burma Digest - disturbing photos, videos and reports from right there in the demonstrations.

YouTube channel of niknayman - including footage of a dead monk floating in a river

The Democratic Voice of Burma

The Times article on bloggers who risked all

Del.icio.us tags for “Burma” - these show items bookmarked by web users around the world who have found articles and videos on Burma and tagged them in their bookmarking account at del.icio.us. (There’ll be those related to non-political events as well)

To find out how you can take action, spread the word, do your bit, go to the Free Burma website.

You may have received two email updates today - my apologies. Since I switched over to the new delivery system, there’s a short snagging period while I iron out the glitches. Thanks for your patience!

I wrote about The World’s First Website a couple of weeks ago to share some of the research I’ve been doing on the history of the web for the book I am co-authoring, New Trends in International Public Relations.

My next batch of research takes me forward from 1991 when Tim Berners-Lee created the first website to 2004 and Tim O’Reilly, CEO of O’Reilly Media, a leading computer book publisher, and internet thought-leader. O’Reilly coined the term “Web 2.0″ for the first Web 2.0 Conference.

The website for that milestone conference states “The Web 2.0 Conference is of, for and about the leading figures and companies driving innovation in the Internet economy. The conference will debut with the theme of “The Web as Platform,” exploring how the Web has developed into a robust platform for innovation across many media and devices - from mobile to television, telephone to search.”

O’Reilly’s article “What is Web 2.0?” offers a detailed analysis of the design concepts, technological infrastructure and online user-behaviour that make up Web 2.0. You can also read the original press coverage and presentation files from 2004 for an in-depth course on all the issues - see the Additional Resources section below.

For present purposes of this bite-sized history lesson - the phrase Web 2.0 is generally accepted to refer to online media and platforms that have the following characteristics:

• Content is user-generated - think of YouTube which provides the platform for you and me and the rest of the world to upload our own videos.

• Collaboration - users work together to produce the information on a site. The most famous is probably Wikipedia, the online encyclopaedia that anyone can write for or edit. There are also other sites such as Hotspotr, where anyone can upload information about cafes and other public places with WiFi access.

• Conversational - people can engage and discuss whatever issues take their fancy, from politics to gadgets to knitting. Think of blogs, forums, message boards, chat rooms

• Immediate - the applications are easy to use, easy to publish, easy to receive information from and also instantaneous, thanks to the RSS feed.

• Searchable - beyond Google and search-engine search, tagging allows users to assign keyword tags to content or data that they publish to make it more searchable and sortable. As more users use more common keyword tags, the database of knowledge grows even more - so to some extent, tagging also falls within “collaboration”

• Community - forums and blogs as well as social networks like Facebook bring people together online

• Open source - platforms like Facebook open up to developers so that a multitude of applications can be built around the core platform, faster and with more ingenuity than one central initiator might manage.

I’m sure you can think of other characteristics - please do add a comment or email me your examples!

So Web 2.0 is not really a new “version” of the web - there wasn’t a point where someone created a whole new software version of what’s online (like Microsoft issuing Windows Vista to replace XP). It’s more a state of mind or state of online interaction - and the phrase “Web 2.0″ is a useful short-hand to refer to the evolving way that the internet and online applications are being designed and used. You might just as easily refer to the “social media web” as social media tools - ie interactive online tools like blogging, podcasting, tagging, widgets etc - make up a large part of what is called Web 2.0.

Do you agree? Disagree? Let me know by adding a comment or sending me an email via the Contact link.

Additional Resources:

What I find interesting about articles and resources about the web or social media from a few years ago is that they take you back to the first time that concepts that we now take for granted hit the mainstream and it’s fascinating to see the commentators of that time analysing the impact that such technology would have and making predictions for the future. They say that a week is a long time in politics - on the internet, 3 years is like several hundred years: reading articles about social media from just a few years ago can be almost like reading the reports of people who were seeing the steam engine for the first time….

Web 2.0 Conference (2004) coverage - including articles on RSS, search, a look back Yahoo!’s first decade and the evolution of the web into interactive networks.

Web 2.0 Conference (2004) presentation files - including those from Technorati’s David Sifry on the State of the Blogosphere, Mary Meeker on the Internet in China and the founder and CEO of Craigs List.

While the majority of businesses and the mainstream are still wondering about dipping their toes into the Web 2.0 waters, the innovators and thought leaders will be looking beyond Web 2.0 when they gather for the 2007 Web 2.0 Conference on October 17-19 this year in San Francisco. The theme for this year is Discovering the Web’s Edge: “Surprising as it may seem, the Web has not infiltrated every industry–yet. So this year, we’ll delve into nascent innovation and attempt to parse the only-just-beginning-to-be-discovered territory at the edges of the Web. In 2007, we’ll slip past the mainstream and follow instead the road less traveled, the path taken by visionaries and those inspired by forces other than the tried and true. Who are the major players willing to take on new challenges, and the Davids that hold the promise of becoming Goliaths? What Web shortcomings still need to be overcome if we are to truly take the plunge into the next generation–and convince the next generation that we are listening? How can we respond positively to the cultural sea change the Web poses rather than being engulfed by it?”

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This post is part of my research project for the book New Trends in International Public Relations that I am co-authoring with business communications expert, Silvia Cambie. I am focusing on the social media aspects while she is working on the wider public relations issues.

You can find all my posts relating to this book project by clicking on the link in the sidebar New Trends in International PR under ZenGuide Projects.

If you have any comments or thoughts on any of the issues I’ve discussed in my posts, please do add a comment or email me. In particular, if you have any additional information or expertise that could add to the book, I would love to hear from you. Also, if you think that there are errors or inaccuracies in what I’ve said, I’d like to learn from you. I’ll credit you, of course, if your contribution is used directly in the book - you can check out my ongoing list of acknowledgements online. Please note that all contributions in respect of the book are subject to the terms set out in contributors release notice.

Photo: thanks to Mr Noded from flickr.com (CCL)

by Angie Macdonald

My friend Andrea * asked my advice recently. She is in the process of setting up a new business offering personal development workshops and wanted my input on her website design. As she explained her vision for the business and showed me the mock-ups of the website, I could see some common pitfalls that would detract from her great business idea, if left untreated.

Focus on one idea
The first problem was that Andrea was trying to do too much. She had so many ideas for the new business, including selling beauty products and a range of organic health drinks, but they didn’t all fit with the main purpose of the business, i.e. the workshops. She needed to focus. If those other business ideas were going to be developed further they needed their own websites, separate from that of the core business.

Think in the box
People find it very difficult to deal with more than one idea at a time. Think about Hollywood actor Ethan Hawke and musician Nick Cave who have both published critically acclaimed novels. Do you ever see them referred to as writers? No, because we already know them as an actor and a musician and their secondary careers confuse us. As humans we like to categorise things, put people into boxes, and this is what people are going to be doing when they visit your business website. Don’t confuse your visitors by offering too many different things.

Don’t litter
Secondly, Andrea had too many navigation buttons littering her home page. Some of these could be reduced and others deleted. For example instead of having a separate navigation button for the history of the business and another for the staff photos and biographies, a single About Us button could link to both. A perfect example of this is the Innocent Drinks site, one of my favourite business websites.

Keep things on a need to know basis
In her enthusiasm to put as much information as possible about the new business online, Andrea had blurred the boundary between information that is important to a website visitor and the internal information for her team working in the business. Think carefully before you include things like your Mission Statement or your company’s goals. Your business website should always be focused on your target audience and their needs.

Mind your language
And finally, the most crucial piece of advice I gave Andrea was to watch her language. People come to a website because they are looking for information. And they find that information by READING!

Keep the language simple and user-friendly. Put the thesaurus aside and leave out the jargon. Language like that is distancing and can be annoying. Speak directly to your visitors and view your site through their eyes. That means plain English, a friendly conversational tone and a chance to engage with your potential clients or customers.

What visitors read on your site is the most important part of the whole experience. If the words on the site draw them in, speak to them, and help them find what they’re looking for easily, then they’re going to reward you by coming back for more.

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*Name and details changed for privacy

Photo: Thanks to Mash Down Babylon from Flickr.com