We've said it here before: it's incredibly tough to keep on top of all the new online music services out there. And that's us. We're paid to do this; we can only imagine what it's like for, well, people with lives...

So here's MOG. Looks to us a little more like Last than Spotify, in that it's all about sharing playlists, but that said, the excellent music 'n' tech blog Hypebot suggest Spotify's delayed US launch might help MOG out. 

Anyway, we haven't had chance to play with it yet. We'll endeavour to soon, but until then, here's a little promo/demo film showing how to build and share a playlist  using the service. Certainly looks elegantly simple...

Look at that. Pretty nasty, isn't it? I have to tell you, I don't need that kind of thing in my inbox first thing in the morning. But this little email from Spotify did assault my senses yesterday morning. It prompted a couple of thoughts...

Firstly, I became a premium subscriber to Spotify precisely to avoid being advertised to/at. Yes, I know, it's specifically to avoid audio ads in their streaming service, but still, doesn't that entitle me not to be spammed?

And secondly, in the age of highly-targeted advertising just how dumb is this? I mean, just what in my entire history of digital music consumption would lead anyone to try to flog me this piece of excrescence? We hear a lot about Ek and crew's business genius; it's surely not on display here.

Let me be really clear: this really p***es me off. Properly. Much more of this and I'll have my tenner a month back, thank you very much. There are other ways to get hold of music, I gather.

(As an aside, I mentioned this to J last night and he pointed out that when he hires a movie on demand from Virgin Media, it comes with ads! Yes, he's paying for the Virgin subscription, he's renting the film - and still being advertised to. It's truly not good enough... )
Simon

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

This book is fabulous. Firstly, it's fabulous because it lays bare some of the ways in which we all learn, the ways we use different personal identities to connect to different learning environments. And it's about the very specific role language plays in each learning domain.

Secondly, it's about video games, an area I freely admit I'm still fascinated by.

James Paul Gee writes as an academic, but also a person in love with the experience that games offer. Consequently each chapter, which focuses on a different game type and specific example of the genre, is highly inspiring. I had that wonderful feeling when reading it of having things articulated aloud that I had previously only half buried instinctive notions.

Anyway I recommend it, as I am sure you can tell.

Justin

The first one is slightly too loud, has a fatboy slim soundtrack you'll want to turn off, but has some amazing statistics in it. It reminded us that it really is the social impact of technology that excites us.

This next film has been through many versions, this one is the 2007  official update to the original "Shift Happens" video from Karl Fisch and Scott McLeod - it is now called "Did you Know?". It is much gentler affair and is much more focused on how technology is changing the role and function of education around the world, something we are truly obsessed about.

This is the very latest version of the video, remixed and added to by Karl Fisch in partnership with XPLANE and The Economist, just in the last month. This one is loaded with new stuff and has quite a lot more detail crammed in to it. It really is amazing to see these videos change and get better over time - in many ways their form is their message

Very nice little slide-based round-up here of key trends in music-based games from Stuart Dredge of music think-tank and consultancy Musically. Nothing to add really, except to say we're intrigued by the implications here for music teaching, as ever... Anyway, it's pretty comprehensive so enjoy:

Once again, 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 a presentation and workshop.

The Boss, NIN and a new relationship with your consumers

We kicked off by discussing the different strategies employed in the business of conversing with their audience taken by two very different rock musicians, Bruce Springsteen and Nine Inch nails’ Trent Reznor. You certainly can't rely on the old ways of doing things, that's for sure. Having already run foul of the blogosphere by releasing his new album Working on a Dream as a Walmart exclusive, it seems that in the week after playing the Superbowl, watched on TV by 90 million Americans, Bruce Springsteen managed to flog just 100,000 units of the album. (And it’s not just poor old Bruce. Remember, U2 opened up the Grammys with their new single Get on Yer Boots without managing to get it into the top 100 songs on the iTMS. And all this against a background of 2008's most talked about about album - G'n'R's 17-year-hiatus-ending Chinese Democracy charting only at No 3 on its US release.)

As for Reznor, well, this presentation at the MidemNet conference earlier this year by business associate Michael Masnick tells the story better than we can.

The really essential thing here, though, is the different tone and approach used by each of these rock musicians when talking to the public - their fans. This brief slide show walks through some of the points made above but crucially ends with an email newsletter to his fans from Reznor and an "open letter" to the New York Times, apparently from Springsteen, addressing his Walmart error.

Justin then talked everyone through two sets of slides:

Losing Control illustrates the development of conversational approaches by broadcasters, from one to many, through one to many with a small back channel, through the viral approach and ending with the uncontrollable and difficult to scale up conversational approach.

Who are you and what are you selling? illustrates Double Shot’s views of different “families” of brands. We stress that these are our observations; there's no science in this and some of our attendees disagreed with some of our conclusions, not least about the brand structure of the Beeb.

We then briefly looked at how the advent of digital communications technology had seriously confused this already confusing relationship between customers/audience and brands, looking at some specific examples of BBC brands in new relationships to the audience.

Specifically, we asked about the ways in which multi-platform, on demand, and "additional" or user-generated content had changed this relationship.

The examples we used included...

The Wire. Yes, "those in the know" know it as an HBO show... but what about an audience who knows it only through the BBC's broadcasting of it? What about the people who write letters to the BBC to complain about it, or to praise it?

Mock the Week. Do you know what BBC channel it's on? Out attendees, between them, watch it on the iPlayer, on Virgin or Sky+, on Dave, over Torrents (naming no names). Some people even watched, well, on BBC2. You get the picture. (And if you need to "the picture" out - just look at that website; who's behind that?!)

Or here's 1Double Shot favourite, Radio 1 DJ Mary Anne Hobbs, who, earlier this year,  did a special for her Radio 1 show about the emerging electronic music scene in Los Angeles and San Francisco: West Coast Rocks.

Here's the tracklisting on the Radio 1 site.

Here's a video she made while there, now on the BBC's Introducing site.

But where's the show, dammit? Well of course it's not there - thanks to the 7-day only window catch up. This is what we call the Seashell: when the evidence of a broadcast outlives the show itself.

Of course, it's even more fiendishly complex than that, because you but know where to look, you can download the show, from such sites as Core News - which you have to know, was just one among many.

And what about Stephen Fry's famous twitter feed?

Let alone mash-ups like this University Challenge-meets-South Parl pro-Cannabis video:

Or even straightforward user-uploaded BBC material like this classic Youg Ones University Challenge sketch:

Unpick this lot then. What is the BBC brand? Channel? Talent? Strand? Show? Genre? The BBC itself?

We have no definitive answers here; we're just convinced that it's immeasurably more complex than many are prepared to admit... and only going to get more so.

Enjoy!
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…

• 3 million men
  
• 3.5 million women (the rest are unspecified)
  
• 1 million 13 - 18
  
• 3.8 million 18 – 24
  
• 2.8 million 24- 30
  
• 2.2 million 30 – 50
  
• 0.3 million 50 – 65”

OK, that’s a pretty straight definition and some stats. To give you a bit more to chew on, and with great fanfare, here are:

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:
Facebook
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

As mentioned in our news, we're delighted to announce that our old friend Matthew Shorter will be joining us as our fourth director from the beginning of 2010.

Matthew is currently the Interactive Editor, Music for the BBC's Audio & Music department, where he is putting into place a series of ground-breaking data-driven music information and discovery services as well as overseeing websites for events such as Glastonbury and The Electric Proms and various other BBC music strands like Introducing and Later.

Justin and I both worked with Matthew while at the BBC, and always knew he was someone we'd love to have on the DS team. He's smart, erudite and incisive and a fine pianist and composer to boot. He's also been a fine manager over the years and we're sure he'll be sorely missed.

For a bit more sense of the man, you might care to read this recent interview with Matthew in the The Guardian or, more properly revealing, his Last.fm profile.
Simon