Unwitting participation - is that social? 11/03/2009
 Is Amazon's collaborative filtering social? Is democracy social? Is the BBC iPlayer a piece of social media? We recently had an interesting debate at one of our BBC training sessions about whether what Amazon does with its website could really be considered "social media". We certainly define it thus, but one of our session attendees asked whether its maths-driven recommendations could be considered this way. Isn't it just good sales analysis (albeit on steroids)? Is it "social" to use the combined knowledge of the activity of all one's customers to make better recommendations for each customer in particular? Our debate hinged on whether a customer or user needed to be conscious of their involvement, or active in their participation to make something "social". In many ways this could be thought of as really just a semantic debate, a quarrel about the term social, but it did get me thinking about what it means to know something about large numbers of people. Marketing people obsess about this kind of knowledge, hoping it will strengthen the effectiveness of their message. But marketing rarely feels social. National scale democracy polls as many as possible to form a picture of opinions across society, but to me often doesn't feel particularly social. Oddly, it often feels utterly disconnected from the place I live, the people I know and the things I think about. We were asked whether we thought the BBC's iPlayer was a piece of social media. Our off the cuff answer was that it isn't, primarily because it makes no attempt to learn from its users. So maybe being social is about intent: that knowledge about the group which benefits members of the group can be a social good. That learning about users and trying to improve a service with that knowledge is as social as having comments on page or shared interest forums. To be frank, we haven't come to any hard and fast answers on this one; maybe there aren't any. But thoughts on the matter are welcome... Justin and Simon Yes, we said this at the head of the previous post, but in case you’re coming in afresh… We’ve just finished a series of three social media training or awareness-raising sessions for the good people at BBC Scotland, in the wonderful studios on Pacific Quay. These sessions were to some extent a remix of the sessions we did in London during the winter and spring earlier this year (which we blogged) but of course, times move on so there a whole load of new stuff in there too. So we’re going to our notes and resources up here both as follow up to the attendees and as – just possibly – a useful bit of “stuff” for the casual reader (with the obvious caveat that this is NOT an essay, but the basis of presentations punctuated with some great Q&A interventions from some brilliant guests)… Tracking the conversations The first thing to do if you want to start talking… is to start listening. That’s all very well, but how can you pick out apposite, useful conversation amongst the chattering Babel that is the web? Well let’s have a look at some specific tools. Capture Google Alerts Google Blog Search Twoogle Technorati Blogpulse Icerocket Twitter specific stuff Twitter Search Twitterfall Trendistic Feed Readers You really only need one of these – and Google is great, but in case you don’t want to put all your eggs in the Mountain View basket, we’ll include a couple of others: Google Reader Bloglines The cryptically-named Feedreader Another approach: Handy homepage aggregators Netvibes Page flakes iGoogle OK… that’s a lot of stuff… NOBODY uses all of ‘em (with the exception of social media consultants who HAVE TO!)… You do need to play with them and create your own “ecosystem”… Breakout – the art of listening We then asked the attendees to break into 3-5 groups. Each group was given a different news story from that day (or previous couple) and asked to use one or two (at most) of the tools listed above in order to find posts/threads/conversations related to the story. These questions might be useful to you when looking for conversations “out there”: •What new aspects of the story emerged – if any? •Did you manage to find interesting voices? •How did the tools compare to each other? •How easy were stories to find? •How did the tools compare to standard new gathering sources – the wires, cuts etc? Best practice in action 1 John Connell then gave a presentation and answered questions from us and the audience. John is a former teacher and head teacher and an educationalist who works full time for Cisco. Somehow he also finds time to maintain not one but two blogs and has – with the aid of the fabulous Tweetdeck – properly mastered the art of Twitter. John Connell: The Blog John Connell's Travel Blog Best practice in action 2: Bringing the Conversation Back into the Broadcast Ros Atkins is the main presenter of World Have Your Say, our favourite show on the radio, a 5-day-a-week, hour-long show which involves callers from around the world debating a hot topic. However, to call WHYS a call-in show would be to grievously underestimate it. Rather, it’s a forum in which participants talk to each other, with Ros (or one of his colleagues) “simply” wrangling the conversation. This wrangling, of course, is all in the preparation and the preparation is all about the adroit use of social media. Simon We’ve just finished a series of three social media training or awareness-raising sessions for the good people at BBC Scotland, in the wonderful studios on Pacific Quay. These sessions were to some extent a remix of the sessions we did in London during the winter and spring earlier this year (which we blogged) but of course, times move on so there a whole load of new stuff in there too. So we’re going to put our notes and resources up here both as follow up to the attendees and as – just possibly – a useful bit of “stuff” for the casual reader (with the obvious caveat that this is NOT an essay, but the basis of presentations punctuated with some great Q&A interventions from some brilliant guests, about who more later)… First up then: Social Media for broadcasters: an introduction So what is Social Media? Well, let’s kick off with our old favourite, Mitchell & Webb’s “Reckon” sketch: Sound familiar?! Actually, here’s how Wikipedia defines it: “Social media are media designed to be disseminated through social interaction, created using highly accessible and scalable publishing techniques. Social media supports the human need for social interaction, using Internet- and web-based technologies to transform broadcast media monologues (one to many) into social media dialogues (many to many). It supports the democratization of knowledge and information, transforming people from content consumers into content producers. Businesses also refer to social media as user-generated content (UGC) or consumer-generated media (CGM).” Mmm… ok… So what's that mean, and what sort of impact is it having in the UK? Let’s looks at some stats, which are never that easy to come by; we’re grateful to socialmediastatistics for these Facebook stats alone: “8.4 million UK users of which…
Double Shot’s Principles of Social media 1. Building Trust & enhanced reputation or Reliable voices Amazon’s featured user reviews are more "trusted" than "official" reviews; look at this review of shredders and note the review of the reviews: “50 of 50 people found the following review helpful: 5.0 out of 5 stars Good quality shredder for a good price!, 11 Jan 2008 By Mrs. J. E. Parkinson (UK) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME) It's not often I find the time to reveiw a product and I have certainly bought a lot from Amazon and am always impressed by their service. After having several of the everyday cross cut shredders which are too small and unbelievably cumbersome and messy to empty, this one is a dream come true! I work from home so I have a lot to shred! This one has a drawer, with a little window to view how full it's getting, so you only need to pull it out and empty. Very little mess involved and a much larger capacity than the everyday ones you can buy everywhere. Takes up to 10 sheets of 80 gsm paper and even has a credit card slot! I paid £66.93, which included postage, from an Amazon Market Trader called 'The Warehouse.Com. I ordered it Sunday evening and it arrived Tuesday morning! Unbelievable service!” Or look at Twitter’s announcement of change of terms from only last week: "Hi, We'd like to let you know about our new Terms of Service. As Twitter has evolved, we've gained a better understanding of how folks use the service. As a result, we've updated the Terms and we're notifying account holders. We've posted a brief overview on our company blog and you can read the Terms of Service online. If you haven't been by in a while, we invite you to visit Twitter to see what else is new. Overview: http://blog.twitter.com Terms: http://www.twitter.com/tos Twitter: http://www.twitter.com These updates complement the spirit of Twitter. If the nature of our service changes, we'll revisit the Terms as necessary. Comments are welcome, please find the "feedback" link on the Terms of Service page. Thanks, Biz Stone, Co-founder, Twitter Inc” Or take a look at their blog: Now compare that with, say, your bank’s small print changes…. 2. Empowerment A great recent one. John Mackey, founder of Whole Foods, wrote an op-ed piece in the WSJ attacking Obama’s healthcare reforms. The blogosphere blew up in response, and a Facebook campaign was under way swiftly. All sorts of claims then started to surface about WF: Then there’s the classic: the HSBC/Facebook/student loan story: It’s global, too; we’ve been thinking about this a lot in the context of our work with Save the Children. Here’s the highly successful AVAAZ campaigning site. Anyway, this leads us on to the next of our prinicples or themes: 3. People making the news Perhaps the moment when Twitter started to make its way into the mainstream consciousness: the Mumbai terror attacks. Here’s Forbes on the story. London’s 7th July attack three years previously saw arguably the first real embracing of user-generated content (UGC) by the media, with the BBC in particular using the public’s photos. Just don’t think about this as a new kind of journalism, though, as this excellent World Service piece makes clear. 4. Discovery vs Advertising or Your data matter or unintentional crowdsourcing… Here’s Simon’s user page on the music recommendations service Last.fm: Last is important here because it makes recommendations based on the actual listening habits of its 30 million+ users; it tracks these through its “Audioscrobbler” plug-in. This can even be triggered via other players/apps, even competitors, for instance Spotify. Why is this important? Because Last can make uncanny recommendations … all based on the unwitting actions of the rest of the “crowd”. It’s really the same principle as with Amazon (yes, them again): We’re no longer in the realm of “top down” marketing, rather in a world of more and more powerful maths and stats! The algorithm is the new marketer! (More on this in our session on marketing… ) 5. There’s no hiding or You can run but you can’t hide So, we’ve talked about Twitter and Facebook, and we take it for granted that people are more and more keen to live their life in public… but not always. Here’s that Japanese finance minister drunk at a press conference: And that Sarah Palin prank call: The point here is that in the past, one would most likely have got way with it… the prank call would have disappeared into the aether, the press conference would have been forgotten. Not any more! The web sticks! Even for journalists: Journalisted tracks what journalists have been writing about and it can be very revealing… This is important when thinking about our next point… 6. Authenticity Here’s the Walmarting Across America story. Remember, the lesson here isn’t that if you’re going to embark on a ruse you have to be careful – it’s that you shouldn’t “go there” in the first place. There are too many people out there: someone is going to rumble you! If you’re not authentic with this stuff, it can go horribly wrong. The Guardian have recently written about the phenomenon of "Glove puppets and Astro Turfing". Uh oh, it’s back to John Mackey of Whole Foods. 7. Connectedness Well, yes, of course this is about connectedness, really by definition. But we must stress how social media isn’t simply about a culture of narcissism - “me-casting”, if you will – it’s about real communities of interest. Mumsnet is a great example of this: Or look at this 7/7 bombings community on the photo-sharing site flickr. It’s somehow extraordinarily moving; it would take a considerable degree of cynicism to see this as simply narcissism at work. 8. Losing Control This point has huge implications for an organisation that associates quality with control, like the BBC. But it’s an essential characteristic of social media, that the very moment you put something out in the world anything can happen. Of course this is also what is so good and powerful about this new kind of engagement. It allows others to naturally work with you, sometimes for you… and allows what you do to become part of someone else’s conversation. It is, in fact, the letting go that drives the famous viral effect. Take a look at this (not untypical) thread on the BBC radio 3 message board. What’s interesting is that although the thread starts off with a damning line about the station, other listeners quickly jump in to the fray to take issue with the criticism. So while you can’t control the conversation, you should have faith in your audience/users/customers. We then had a two-way conversation and audience Q&A with: Mark Pendleton, whose Radio Lingua language learning service makes heavy and brilliant use of social media. And Graham Gillies, the Interactive Producer at BBC Scotland responsible for BBC One’s Cycling the Americas website, featuring about as much Web 2 and social media action as any BBC website ever! And then… The problematic Twitter default or Choosing the right tools for the job … in which SH/JS look at some useful groups of tools: Community tools Right, we don’t think you need to know about: mySpace But one thing to note about them… Facebook succeeded because it was much more usable. But… MySpace is possibly making a resurgence because it’s found a USP: music. Off the shelf web build Weebly Square Space Blogging Typepad Research and listening Twitterfall Google reader Twoogle Video and audio YouTube Vimeo Soundcloud Outbound aggregators Tweetdeck We finished up by asking the attendees to come up with a social media proposition based on a fictional/notional BBC show or brand. These are some of the questions we asked them to consider, which you my find useful: • Which specific products - tools, applications and services - will you need to make this project work? • Do you need a 3rd party tool or is there a BBC one that will do the job? • Can you find existing instances on the web of these tools at work, delivering outcomes comparable to your own? • What do you need to do to set these tools up, make them work and maintain them? • What type of community hosting will the idea need? And how much effort will it need? • Have you got a contingency "scaling up" plan for if your project really takes off? • Do you have a community "exit strategy" for the end of the project? Simon More mucking about with data 09/14/2009
Justin's going to love this: a data visualisation of the phrase "goodmorning" being tweeted around the world over a 24 hour period. It might not be quite as revealing nor indeed as useful as anything coming out of the Gapminder camp but it's pretty lovely for all that. Props to the tech-geist hoovers at Gizmodo for pointing it out. GoodMorning! Full Render #2 from blprnt on Vimeo. Simon We announced a while back that we were pleased to be working with BBC Training & Development on delivering a series of workshops about social media and its relevance to BBC production staff. So... yesterday we kicked the series off with a little 3 hour session entitled "Right Tools for the Right Job".     Ouch... The Reg on Gladwell 12/01/2008
The Register's Andrew Orlowski takes an especially sarky, scabrous look at Malcolm Gladwell's work this morning, using it as a platform to take a pop at the whole Web 2.0 & marketing consultancy world. Mumbai tragedy and Web 2.0 11/27/2008
This brief but extraordinary post on Wired's blog this morning looks at the social media activity around yesterday's horrific attacks in Mumbai, which include this mind-bendingly up-to-date Wikipedia entry. Web 2.0 Gaming 11/04/2008
It seems like Web 2.0 console gaming is now fully upon us. Recently we have seen Blast Works 'Build, Fuse and Destroy' for the Wii, a shoot'em up which asked its users to build and share their own levels. | ArchivesFebruary 2010 Blogs we learn from CategoriesAll |
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