#BeMyGuest

Social media is often praised for opening people’s boundaries and introducing them to ideas and content that they might previously missed. In reality, we tend to use social media to build a series of finely layered filters to ensure that we only see the information we’re interested in. From RSS, which allows you to ignore all the content on a website you don’t think you fancy. all the way through to Twitter which enables  you to follow just the people you find interesting and ignore the rest. It’s similar in the blogging world, it’s easy to get into a blog reading rut, and not to seek out anything new and exciting once in a while.  Which is why Adam Vincenzini and Emily Cagle’s idea for a mutual blogging month in March is such a stormer.

The idea is simple(s).

It’s pretty simple. During March 2010, anyone taking part will aim to:
1. Write at least one post for someone else’s blog, and
2. Feature at least one guest post on their own blog.

The launch of #BeMyGuest in March. the Comms Corner

Anyone interested in taking part just needs to tweet their intentions using the #bemyguest tag or using the tag to search Twitter for people to swap with . You can also keep up with who is swapping with who at the #BeMyGuest Posterous blog.

I’m quite excited as I’ll be swapping with one of the BeMyGuest originators, Adam Vincenzini at The Comms Corner and also Paul Sutton over at Tribal Boogie. They in turn will be posting here, which is nice, obviously. I reckon I can handle one or two more guest spots so if you fancy strutting your stuff on Niff, Naff then leave a comment, drop me a line or catch me on twitter, not forgetting to use the #BeMyGuest tag.

Clifford Stoll, Newsweek 1995, Why the Internet will Fail

Except he didn’t actually say that.

Predicting stuff is hard, and human nature means that we love it when predications go drastically wrong. Think how many times Bill Gates has been reminded that he once said ‘640k ought to be enough for anyone’ or the alleged quote by an IBM employee way that there is a ‘world market for maybe five computers’. What’s missing from these is context,  which is something that Twitter is also great at stripping away from the information that is passed round.

Today I’ve seen a fair few tweets linking to an 1995 Newsweek article by Clifford Stoll. Actually more accurately, most of the tweets say ‘Why the internet will fail’ by Clifford Stoll. The headline  comes from the blog, Three Chant, which picked up an article from Newsweek in 1995 by Clifford Stoll, called ‘The Internet? Bah!’, sub title -  Hype alert: Why cyberspace isn’t and never will be Nirvana. In which he was arguing against

Visionaries [that] see a future of telecommuting workers, interactive libraries and multimedia classrooms. They speak of electronic town meetings and virtual communities. Commerce and business will shift from offices and malls to networks and modems. And the freedom of digital networks will make government more democratic.

The Internet: Bah. Clifford Stoll, NewsWeek

Not exactly damning the future of the interwebz, if not an overly positive viewpoint. Admittedly he was wrong on some points, such as:

The truth in no online database will replace your daily newspaper,

However, on others he was spot on,

no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher

The main thrust of his argument was that even back in 1995:

Every voice can be heard cheaply and instantly. The result? Every voice is heard. The cacophany more closely resembles citizens band radio, complete with handles, harrasment, and anonymous threats. When most everyone shouts, few listen.(…)the Internet is one big ocean of unedited data, without any pretense of completeness. Lacking editors, reviewers or critics, the Internet has become a wasteland of unfiltered data. You don’t know what to ignore and what’s worth reading.

The online landscape was very different back in 1995,  there were only 16 million online, access was far far slower, and more expensive and places to communicate were limited but yet it still seems familiar. Today there are over 1.6 billion people with internet access. We have countless more ways of expressing our opinions online, but we have got better at curating  the content that we, and others, produce. We’ve also got better at filtering out the noise and identifying the people we want to listen to, which is not necessarily a good thing.

Stoll covers other topics with varying accuracy but his final point;

What’s missing from this electronic wonderland? Human contact. Discount the fawning techno-burble about virtual communities. Computers and networks isolate us from one another. A network chat line is a limp substitute for meeting friends over coffee. No interactive multimedia display comes close to the excitement of a live concert. And who’d prefer cybersex to the real thing? While the Internet beckons brightly, seductively flashing an icon of knowledge-as-power, this nonplace lures us to surrender our time on earth. A poor substitute it is, this virtual reality where frustration is legion and where–in the holy names of Education and Progress–important aspects of human interactions are relentlessly devalued.

Still rings true, if it didn’t then there’d be no such thing as Twestival, CozyTweet Up, Tuttle or any of the other hundreds of organised or casual offline meet-ups that happen every day. Obviously the internet hasn’t failed, even the Stoll didn’t argue that it would, however neither it is any form of nirvana. It does have a dark underbelly,  characterised by sites like 4Chan and GenMay and even in the carebear areas like Twitter. Perhaps the one thing that Stoll should’ve forseen was that the vast increase in noise would lead us to be less questioning and to accept the news that slips through our carefully crafted online filters.

Pro-active media consumption

A couple of experiments which look at the future of the media have worked their way through my own personal news filtration system, one looks at how journalists source news and the other is an individual PR chap who is avoiding newspapers. Both are interesting and flawed in their own ways.

For five days, five journalists from five different countries will be holed up in a French farmhouse and will only be able to access Twitter and FaceBook to source news. Although if there is a link to another site linked in a tweet or on FaceBook they will be able to access it. Personally I think that all this will do is mean that they will use almost the same sources that they do now but it will take them one extra click to get to it. Admittedly it is possible that as they are forced not to use their usual sources that they will discover stuff that perhaps they wouldn’t have usually but I guess we have to wait and see.

What would strengthen this is if each of the five participating journalists had a counterpart that shared a similar brief but could access any source they wished, a control group if you will. It would provide an excellent comparison in terms of content and quality, actually it could provide a very telling comparison.

The second experiment is one London PR chap’s attempt to not buy any print media for an entire year. A self-confessed lover of print, Adam Vincenzini, will be satisfying all his news and media related needs with purely digital formats. I feel the flaw with this particular experiment is that only the format is being switched. We know that almost every knowledge requirement can be sated by a digital perspective and yet newspapers do continue have large, if falling, readerships. In the write-up of his first week, Vincenzini states:

I’ll start with the most surprising (and shocking) thing I noticed: I miss print ads. Seriously.

I didn’t realise until this week how much / how important print advertising is in delivering valuable information.

Movie release dates, flight deals, new product launches…I wasn’t ‘forced’ to consume these messages so I didn’t…and as a result, I didn’t obtain them from anywhere else.

Which I think may be the second flaw, it can be too easy to restrict what you read when you limit yourself to online. Through Twitter and FaceBook we select the people we’d like to receive information from. RSS feeds do the same.

It’s going to be interesting to see the results from both of these approaches but I think all that will be proved in the end is that Tthe social graph is not just a network system, it’s a filtration system too.

Social Media Prediction for 2010

Since my last post assessing how my hopes for social media in 2009 panned out in which I promised a second post on my wishes for this year I’ve been procrastinating like a good ‘un. This is mainly because I thought I’d actually do predictions instead but there have been so many other excellent posts from wiser heads than mine on what 2010 will hold and predictions are tricksie, too exact and they are unlikely to come to pass, too vague and well, there’s not much point. Then I thought I’d do an uber-round up of everyone else’s predictions to see if there was a trend but I’m working to a time constraint, though the initial research indicates increases in more mobile web users,  an imminent app war, yet more blog storms but this time in relation to the FTC guidelines or political candidates So I’ve decided to stick with the wishes, which are three fold for this year.

1) The media stops  regarding Twitter as being newsworthy in its own right. We can’t deny that 2009 was the year of the microblogging platform and while many people still disparage its worth, others can’t live with out it. I wouldn’t quite put myself in the latter category but I do find it damned useful. However the BBC covering @stevenfry’s decision to leave Twitter seems a tad OTT. It would also be nice to see an end to stories that would not get coverage apart from the fact that it happened on Twitter, or that

2) That social media is a necessity. Most of the hype around social media has thankfully died down, we’re starting to work out what it can and can’t do but it still seems that a lot of companies think that they have to do it, and not just do it, but do the really tricky bit of generating content and building a community. I think every company will benefit from listening to what’s being said online, though some need to understand that they are not being talked about, but I’m yet to be convinced that every brand will benefit from online engagement.

3) That we really work out ROI for both social media and PR. Yes, it’s a repeat from last year’s wish list but who doesn’t want to be able to prove what they are doing is actually making some kind of difference? And while being able to throw some numbers around, like we’ve got you 45,000 twitter followers or 50 billion facebook fans, it would be even nicer if we could know what it actually meant in terms of the client/campaign objective.

2009 Resolutions Revisited

So about this time last year I created a list of five social media wishes for Social Media over the coming 12 months, as the year now draws to a close I thought I should review them and make some new ones.

The 2009 ones were mainly:

1) That I never have to sit through a presentation on digital that uses Kryptonite, Dell Hell or Wal-Mart as a proof point on how iccky the web can be, surely we dig up examples that are slightly newer?*

2) That I never have to see a blog post entitled PR/Blogging/Advertising is dead again meme. Really ppl find something better to link bait with in ‘09.

3) To see some case studies with actual ROI attached to them. Thus far I think I’ve seen two – Dell claiming a $1 million in sales via Twitter and HP’s month of the Dragon blogger outreach.  I know that digital engagement is more valuable than attributing figures to it might suggest but as the credit crunches, clients are increasingly to demand that we show them the money

4) That we stop over hyping what social media actually is, as John Jantsch says “Social media is a tool, not a religion‘

5) To see digital become an integrated part of what a PR person does, not an activity that is punted out to a separate silo of experts. Making everyone tick off the list of 51 things every PR person should know would be a bloody good start.

I did fairly well on number one, but then again I didn’t attend that many presentations but I know people that did and despaired that the same old clichés were still being trotted out. I even create an eponymous law about it.

The meme involved in two moved on, people stopped declaring things dead and instead started fighting about which discipline should own social media, there was a nice debate held by NMK in April about online versus traditional PR which came out of a twitter discussion, Drew has a very nice summary of it over here.

On to three, there is a still a lack of hard numbers attached to social media case studies. I know it’s a hangover from PR being difficult to measure but we really do need to address this if social media is ever to gain credibility. Personally I’ve been pushing this slide deck to everyone who mentions ROI as I think it’s a damn good starting point.

I do think that we have stopped over hyping what social media can achieve, and we’re also coming to a realisation about just how incredibly useful it can in certain situations, the recent Eurostar snafu being a good example of what a can be achieved on the fly. How much improved the outcome might have been if there was already decent monitoring and a response policy in place can only be guessed at.

Finally, integration of digital into the remit of the normal PR person’s bag of tricks. From a personal perspective it’s happening at PN Towers but this year has seen other agencies spin out dedicated digital shops so perhaps there is still some way to go on this front.

As for my Social Media wishes for 2010, that will be another post in the next couple of weeks.

If any one is interested in my  personal resolutions they mainly involve this , more of this and this , hopefully doing this in the summer and this  in the autumn, and the odd bit of this on grass as well as on sand. Oh and blogging more, mebbe. And world domination.Natch.

Have a happy Christmas people!

Zen Spam

I officially give up pretending to both  you and me that I’m going to stop posting the more interesting spam I get. I’ll stop when it does, till then skip the posts with ‘Spam’ in the title.

Full disclosure over and so on to this week’s comment.

The utter mental mind f’ck that this comment gives me is almost as bad as the time when a Bostonian cab driver interrogated, a very jetlagged, me about the efficacy of the EU and whether if it had existed pre-WWII, would WW II actually happened. Ever had a moment when you thought that your brain was literally dribbling out of your ears? That was me just over a week ago, after a very intense three day visit to Boston. I was barely capable of thought let alone historical European political discourse.

Surely, if we inhabit the body, then we are also in possession of it? Which means that we do possess the wisdom that we apparently lack, or is the physical body an independent entity with which we’ll never truly be a part of, as we lack its inherent wisdom?

Answers on a postcard.

And the winner is…

…not me.

But I did come third, out of 12, from an inital long list of 100, which is fanfuckingtasticly amazingly wonderful, if you’ll pardon my tmesisic anglo saxon. There are many reasons why this is so, so I shall list them in easy to digest bullet points.*

• I’ve only been blogging since August 2008, a mere 15 months
• I don’t actually write that much
• When I do write, it’s normally about the spam comments I receive
• Or a rant on something bollocky in the social media sphere
• I think this ws the only short-listed blog that has a b(l)og standard wordpress theme
• Definitely the only one that features a picture of Bagpuss in the header.
• Most of the shortlist were company related
• I have an embarrasingly small readership**

You get the drift.

The most amazing thing is that the award brought together a couple of disparate factors in my life. Like, I suspect, many of you, most of my family and friends don’t quite understand what I do. I think to them having a blogger aroundthe place is like having a train spotter as a mate. You think it’s a bit weird and can’t see the attraction yourself, but it makes them happy so you don’t take the mick (too much), you occasionaly try to make small talk about it but quickly lose the will to live once they start talking and contemplate murder when they start drawing diagrams.

However the blog nomination proved that some people within the digital world like what I do and that my colleagues, family and friends, care enough for me to vote on something that makes no or little sense to them. Better still, they cared enough to pester their friends to vote for me too. How blessed am I?

So a huge thanks to all that voted and a massive thank you to the person who nominated me in the first place.

*also easy to write, for I has a few cobwebs this morning on which I am blame Chris Kempt’s hearing defect which translates, ‘No thanks, I’m fine.’ into, ‘a large rum and coke you say? Why, that would be spiffing!’

**not the size matters, t’is quality not quantity though it would be nice if one of you buggers left a comment every now and then to let know you’re still awake

Accurate spam?

For some reason the above comment reminds me a quote from the excellent Tim Minchin, in which he suggests that his last words will be, ‘but who will the world revolve around now?’

Policing the Interwebz

As we have oft banged on about mentioned occasionally, one of the joys of social media is that it let’s you hear what’s actually being said, and as we warn clients, what is being said is not always good. This is because our actions and interactions on the interwebz tends to accurately reflect real life, and unfortunately real life is not the place of pink fluffy warmth and kindness that we like to pretend it is. On a personal level, one of the other joys of social media is that it allows us to create rather effective filters so that we can easily avoid the iccky stuff that might put us off our cornflakes. Of course, when this self-created cocoon does occasionally get burst it enhances the shock value.

It’s not surprising that social media darling, Twitter, has a dark underbelly. We know about the spammers, who hasn’t been followed by a gaggle of horny Brittany’s at some point, but they are easy to block and ignore, making sure our filters stay intact. But it seems that Mike Butcher, over at TechCrunch UK has discovered an even seedier side, when he was tipped off about a user called Dinner_Guest, who appears to be blogging about the kidnap and subsequent killing of someone. Mike suggests that it could be a stunt, but also says:

Now, clearly this could all be part of some sick fantasy. The trouble is, should we take that chance, or do the Police in Brighton need to know that they have a potential serial killer on their hands who has taken to Twittering his killing spree?

It’s clearly not possible to know either way, until real-world events start to match up with Dinner Guest’s Tweets.

I hope that Mike did actually call the cops before posting, even though I do believe that it is a stunt. The account is only eight days old but has a professional background and its very second tweet was from Twitterlator. Most unusual behaviour for a n00b, unless of course this is not their first account, though why would they then ask how to follow people later on, unless of course they are pretending to be a n00b?Plus, what kind of serial killer realises that no matter who says it that 80 followers does not a viral make. In short, the whole thing smells worse than my rugby captains lucky socks by season end and I have a sneaky suspicion that all will be revealed by Saturday.

Stunt or not, it does raise questions about how we should react to incidents like this, and how we should then deal with the perpetrator if it does turn out to be a stunt. Mike raises a good point about how once the mainstream media finds out about this there will no doubts be calls for Twitter to be policed, which to me is equally as unpalatable as some of the stuff that appears online. It would also be practically impossible plus, if there is a serial killer operating in Brighton, wouldn’t it be handy if he kept tweeting about it so that he could be tracked down via his email and IP address? Must be far more effective than tracing anonymous notes and phone calls.

Also posted on Clicking & Screaming

Spam?

Ok, I admit it I have seem to have a spam issue. Not in that I get lots of spam, only about 3,465 comments in the past year or so, but in that I’m fascinated in the evolving fashions of spam. When I first started off it tended to be long lists of keywords around pr0n and medicine, most recently we’ve had the crap joke spam.

Today, I have confusing spam and I’m not actually sure if it is spam or not. The comment does reflect the post rather well, and if it weren’t for the email address I would no doubt approve it straight off and there is no linkage in the comment which makes me think it’s not spam. Perhaps it is a spammer who is actually commenting of their own free will, kinda like having a peek at your own Facebook page in between playing around with your ad settings for a campaign.