I have been engaged on a quest to distill, as concisely as possible, what ‘This Social Media Thing’ is all about and why it is important.  This is my latest offering - three reasons why it is important and four things you should do about it.  Presented as a ‘one-off blog’ and also available as a pdf so it can travel on the email train.

I was recently looking for information on the decline of newspapers in the US when a Google search turned up a piece by Russell Baker from the 16 August 2007 edition of the New York Review of Books.

A quick scan revealed that it didn’t contain the information I was looking for but a comment caught my eye. The author made the following assertion. “How the internet might replace the newspaper as a source of information is never explained by those who assure you it will”. The author then went on to say that “the internet is basically an electronic version of the ten year old boy on a bicycle who used to toss the newspaper at the front porch: an ingenious circulation device”. He then went on to raise the oft-used (especially by journalists) response to blogging that’s its only value might lie in the fact that there are so many bloggers that inevitably a few “may eventually produce something original, arresting and refreshing” - an equivalent of the probability based scenario of the infinite number of monkeys producing the works of Shakespeare.

Russell it seemed to me, was falling for one of the classic mistakes that many, especially journalists, make when looking at social media - taking the rules that apply to traditional media and seeking to apply or impose them on social media without recognising that social media is fundamentally different in the way it works. This difference is that traditional media is about institutions and social media is about process. Russell can be forgiven for making this mistake because traditional media has been institutionalised ever since it came into being 500 years ago and, as a journalist, he has a vested interest in clinging onto this form.

His mistake produced a flawed assumption, which was implicit in both his question about what will replace newspapers as well as his inability to see where the answer lay and his dismissal of the internet and blogging. This assumption was that he was expecting one form of institutionalised access to information (i.e. a newspaper) to be replaced by another institutionalised form of access to information. His desire to see the answer to his question also framed within the terms of this assumption made him blind to a broader understanding of what will actually replace a newspaper (or to be more precise, what current functions of a newspaper will be replaced, and by what).

He had also fallen into one of the other common traps of assuming that information and its means of distribution are one and the same thing - not recognising that there are two components to a newspaper, its content, but also the basic mechanics of how that content is represented and distributed, being in this instance the form of widely available daily printed sheets of paper and that this distribution component also fundamentally affects the nature of much of the content that is in it.

When you look at his question with an understanding of social media and the shift from institutionalised to process based ways of accessing information the answer becomes easier to define. It is that actually newspapers won’t be replaced, they will simply loose a significant (distribution dependant) component of the content they currently carry and instead will refocus their content on that which is more exclusively adapted to the form in which newspapers are distributed. The content component they will loose will be replaced by a process of individualised news gathering and assessment and while this may be facilitated by institutionalised forms we are not going to have individual sources promoting themselves as being the one-and-only place for news, in the way that newspapers currently do. People will not rely on single sources, they will form their own opinion about the world based on ease of access to a wide range of information sources, combined with tools and processes that will help then determine the accuracy and provenance of the information they consume.

Gastronomy comes in as a good analogy to explain this. Suppose we had a way of obtaining nourishment without actually eating, would we still actually bother to eat? The answer is that yes we would, because eating has more to it than the simple gaining of nourishment - although much of the roots of the social and sensual pleasures we derive from eating lie in its role as a provider of nourishment. However, we almost certainly would not eat three times a day - eating would become a treat activity. Something we would plan, look forward to, spend a lot more money on, ritualise and revere even. We would all become gastronomes.

The relevance of this as an analogy is that the ability to obtain information without newspapers is the same as receiving nourishment without eating. It is possible for this to happen without spelling the end of newspapers (or eating). Viewed in this way, his question becomes something like, “In a world where I don’t need to eat, what will replace my spoon?” Clearly such a question has limited practical relevance, although it does start to stray into the realms of the philosophical.

It is also a useful analogy because it helps understand that the future of newspapers lies in understanding newspapers as a form of distribution, not a form of content, and therefore (hopefully) a re-discovery the almost sensual pleasures of newsprint in terms of its form and the occasions relevant to its ‘consumption’. These are things that the digitally based forms of social media will struggle to capture and thus replace. Thus, to return to the analogy, newspapers are going to be things we get perhaps once a week, maybe once a month. They will probably be far more visually rich than they currently are and the ‘consumption occasions’ they will seek to exploit or re-inforce will be the leisurely weekend breakfast or the armchair after Sunday lunch. They will also be far more expensive because they will not be able to use the function of daily news dissemination to subsidise the costs of the expensive distribution technology any more.

But perhaps the real value of the gastronomy analogy is that it helps people understand two critical things: first, we are entering a new media world with different systems and rules (i.e. a world where we don’t need to eat) and second, we need to separate content based functions from distribution based functions and recognise that traditional media is essentially a distribution dependant feature, not a content dependant feature as many would like to think that it is (i.e. the recognition that eating actually has two functions - nourishment and pleasure).

Here is a fascinating video that demonstrates the two big problems with social media - time and complexity. Loic is demonstrating what it takes to be a social media citizen - and if being a social media citizen means being Loic - we can forget engagement with social media ever being a mass activity. This is because being Loic requires a lot of time and a lot of geekiness - and there is no way we can expect Average Citizen to do the things Loic does in the way he currently does them. Take a look.

This video and the post that sparked it has driven a lot of chatter over the last few weeks about decentralised and fragmented conversation. People like Loic have been saying “I want it back on my blog”. Others, like Stowe Boyd have been saying “too late - its gone”. Others, perhaps more relevantly, have been talking about methods of giving visibility to conversation and comment threads.

However, for me, all these perspectives miss the main point largely because they represent the needs of social media geeks, rather than the potential needs of true social media citizens. Loic is primarily a publisher - he makes lots of interesting stuff which creates a lot of attention, and he therefore wants a pretty frame he can put round all of this. He talks about simplicity and one place to go to - but it is largely one place you can go to see the digital Loic, rather than a place he can use to Be the digital Loic. Likewise, many of the other new tools (such as Friend Feed) are all about aggregating content - essentially about creating display spaces where prolific producers can show-off their output.

A social media citizen won’t primarily need or want a display space. They won’t need to have one place where their del.icio.us links can be viewed alongside their flickr photostream and their Tweets etc etc. However, what they will need is management place where they can do four things:

• publish stuff (be it an email, a blog post a tweet or whatever other channel or platform emerges)
• receive all content that is addressed to them (from wherever it comes)
• follow content that interests them
• manage their portfolio of social networks.

Maybe I just don’t know enough about what is going on, but It doesn’t seem to me that we are getting anywhere close to making one of these things - perhaps because the market is being geek driven at the moment - and these people like working it all out for themselves (or showing-off all their stuff). Insofar as there is innovation, it is happening in only one segment, rather than addressing the whole spectrum of the activities of a social media citizen.

Here is the screen shot of the thing I (as a non-geek wannabe social media citizen) want.

OK - it looks like netvibes - but it does far more than netvibes does. OK - it may look simple but it would be very difficult to make (compatibility, data portability issues etc etc). I know - but until we have something with this simplicity we are not going to get everyone into the game. And, of course - it will have to work from a mobile platform as well as a desktop.

There is, of course, a chicken and egg thing going on here. You need to be quite deep with social media before you want one of these things. A tool such as this is therefore unlikely to create the demand required to bring it into existance and create the forced or otherwise collaboration and integration that would allow it to succeed. Social media geeks, who represent the current market, won’t really get that turned on by it because it will make things too easy and boring. Each new bright shiny thing would simply get eaten by it. They would just become commodities, add-on bits of functionality, and there wouldn’t really be those glorious first few weeks of play. Also it won’t really help them create their show-off spaces.

So where will the demand come from? Probably its going to come out of the workplace - in the same way that familiarisation with previous techy stuff such as email started off in the workplace. The big thing that is taking-off now is the construction of bespoke social networks within organisations - as this recent Forrester report shows. These are both enterprise wide, and grassroots / project or workgroup driven. As people become familiar driving these sort of networks, they will start to build them into their personal and leisure activities. And then, when they find they are members of several of them, they will want to have one place where they can coordinate all their activity from - and also roll-up existing functions such as email and subscription.

Who knows how and when this thing will emerge. But until it does - social media is never going to become truly absorbed into the fabric of life and stop being social media (in a silo or series of silos) and simply become media, or whatever it will be appropriate to call it.

Here is something else I have written that is relevant to this - in terms of charting the future digital landscape.

Number One: Facebook is not a social network - it is a facilitator of social networking, an important distinction.

Number Two: To understand Facebook best - and therefore how to use it - think about where it came from and what it was designed to do, its optimum state. It grew out of a single university campus and was designed to link together relatively small groups of people all of whom had something very specific in common and who probably actually knew and met with each other in the real world. All this other stuff - Robert Scoble and many others of the digiratti with their thousands of friends, the pages, the applications, the commercial involvement - is largely pulling it away from its optimum state and creating tensions that will probably become critical in the near future - unless it does some fundamental re-structuring, along the lines below.

Number Three: If Facebook wishes to remain successful it needs to build from its optimum state - and focus on helping people find and connect with others around areas of shared interest, forming small genuine social networks hosted within the Facebook infrastructure. Note, Facebook Groups is a long way short of this - but may indicate the direction to head. Lessons here can be learnt from Ning and also from My Space - given that much of the success of My Space came from the ability to create networks around music and bands.

Number Four: Facebook’s greatest contribution to the history of social media will probably lie in the fact that it brought the mainstream into the game. It will have given a large number of people experience in creating and managing a digital identity, uploading content and interacting with other people on-line.

Conclusion - because Facebook isn’t showing any signs of focusing in the direction outlined in thought number three - I would give it 18 more months as the king of the hill, 18 months after that as still in the game and then it will be sold-off as a membership list (for considerably less than its current valuation) to someone with better ideas.

Responding to the whole social media thing is not easy. On the one hand, it can seem can seem big and intimidating, demanding a whole re-think of the way an organisation communicates. Yet on the other, some of the easier or more accessible things that could be done, such as starting to put information on YouTube, creating a Facebook page or a blog just don’t seem to generate the interest or numbers that are going to shift the needle or start to compare with the effectiveness and reach of your current marketing and communications.

Both positions hold true. We are witnessing a truly revolutionary shift in the nature of media that will ultimately have profound implications. However, we are only at the start of this revolution and one of the defining characteristics of most revolutions is that people over-estimate their importance in the short-term but under-estimate their impact in the long-term. Therefore the best way to respond to the social media revolution is to not rush into the latest thing - but to recognise that it is still important to start the journey. Be the tortoise rather than the hare, but none-the-less be in the race rather than on the sidelines.

The best way of doing this is to address four areas.

1. Uncovering your digital identity

Corporate communications agencies make the valid point that you cannot choose whether or not to have a corporate identity - you can only choose how to manage and control it. The same could be said of a digital identity. Every organisation (and individual) already has one of these. It may not yet be important or substantial - but in five years time it will be. Understanding your digital identity is therefore critical and this involves knowing what information about you is “out there”, who is picking it up, what people are saying about you, and what groups or networks are relevant to you.

There are many ways to do this. The most expensive is to hire the services of a digital monitoring agency, of which there are now many. The cheapest is to make someone in your organisation your in-house analyst - showing them how to use the free monitoring and search tools available and giving them the brief to keep their ear to the ground. Somewhere between the two is to hire an agency or individual who is already familiar with the on-line environment and task them with doing an initial analysis  to prepare the ground for setting up your own monitoring thereafter.

One thing to bear in mind is that the extent to which you use an outside organisation or function to keep you in touch with “the conversation” is a measure of the extent to which you are not actually involved in “the conversation”. Thus while it is quite acceptable to use external monitoring to get you going, it is the equivalent of water wings - something that ultimately you should be looking to reduce your reliance on.

2. Creating a credible story

Having a story is not something specific to social media. The concept of defining and describing your organisation as a story and using this as the basis for communication is becoming increasingly popular as brands and businesses recognise that getting consumers or customer to buy-into the story is the key to getting them to buy the product. A story is a far more useful and flexible tool to plan communications than a proposition - because stories are broad and engaging and you can have a conversation from them, whereas propositions are narrow and focused and only help you shape focused mass communication (advertising).

However, having a credible story is especially important in order to start shaping your digital identity. The social media environment is a bit like a club with a defined dress and entry code. If you try to get in wearing your old marketing clothes - based on hype, promotional-speak and hard sell - you either won’t be let in or will rapidly thrown-out or isolated. The clothes and behaviours you need to adopt have to be rooted in realism, credibility, transparency and proven values, opinions and facts. Who and what lies behind a product or service are as important as what the product or service is or delivers.

Sitting down and enshrining this in a story - probably expressed on one page - is an incredibly important exercise and one where you may want to commission some help - either from your existing agencies or other external consultants. It is often difficult to have the necessary degree of realism if you try and do this entirely yourself - especially since an effective story may not have the same level of superficial attraction that previous propositions or statements of visions and values might have had.

3. Start creating “off-site” digital content

In the old days (i.e. six years ago) if you wanted to guarantee that you could reach large numbers of people, you had to spend your way to them , buying media or spending on other forms of distribution - direct mail, printed material etc. One of the big changes of social media / web 2.0 is that distribution, for many forms of content, has now become free.

This presents the opportunity, and also the need, to spend more money making media and less money buying media. It also provides the freedom to produce content that is much more niche and editorial in nature and also cheaper. Ultimately this is going to move to a point where organisations and brands become their own content channels or hubs - run in a similar way to newsrooms.

For most organisations this is still some way off and it is not yet time to  ditch the traditional advertising, direct mail, PR and sales promotion mix of communications. However, it is important to recognise the value in starting to become familiar in producing content that works in the social media space. There is probably a lot of existing information you have which could be re-purposed and placed into the new digital channels  helping to build your digital footprint but also acting as digital bait, helping people discover your organisation or brand. Likewise, there are probably some relatively low budget steps you could take to develop content specifically for digital placement. Every organisation should have a YouTube channel - even if the only video you have on it is a shot of your office, factory, shop or showroom with a graphic overlaid which describes your business. It will cost zero to do this - except about an hour of time - but with suitable tags applied it is effective digital bait that is out there helping people discover your organisation.

The most important thing to understand about this is that your website is no longer “where it is at” when it comes to digital content. A video that lives in YouTube is for more discoverable than a video that is locked into your website. Websites are much more about launching information into the social media space and, once out there, the individual bits of digital content can go to work finding an audience - especially if supported by some basic techniques to aid in their discovery by the audiences and networks you wish to target. (Creating digital discovery is essentially the new PR). For every bit of information that you think is potentially relevant to your stakeholders your motto should be “get it a link (i.e. a URL), get it tagged, get it up there and get it working for you”.

(Check this out from Electrolux - a simple blog format with links to latest news and YouTube and Flickr content)

4. Create a space to enagage with your stakeholders

Ultimately, the biggest change brought about by social media is going to lie in the area of relationships. It is easy to underestimate the extent to which the relationships between individuals and institutions have been based around a very restricted number of highly controlled mass channels. Trust has been generated largely on the basis of institutions constructing a reputation, based on statements of values, methods of operation and claims of efficacy. The increasing ability of individuals to use social media to interrogate and expose every aspect of institutional activity means that any gap between the stated “institutional” basis for trust and the reality can be exposed and become highly visible and damaging. Social media is far more about channels people will use to reach you, rather than channels you can use to target them.

Anyone with a Skype account can digitally capture any telephone conversation. This can then be released into cyber-space attracting its own audience and potentially creating havoc, if its interest is sufficient. Many organisations, most famously AOL, have discovered how damaging this can be.

This is but one example of how every citizen or consumer can assume the power of an investigative journalist and how every single touchpoint between an individual and an institution has the potential to become a consumer generated ad. (See this for a fantastic example of a consumer mashing together a real customer service call into a video and spoof website about Cingular and his exploding speakers). An organisation will not be able to see itself as having a wall around it, with defined and controlled windows through which it can communicate. Rather it will have to operate as though it has a porous membrane around it.

Learning how to deal with this is a challenge, to put it mildly. We are not yet at the point where the walls have come down, but they are starting to get pretty leaky. The only way to deal with this is not to try and attempt to manage all the leaks, but to work out how to have a much more receptive relationship with your stakeholders. One of the best examples of an organisation doing this is Dell. Having experienced the fire of being digitally outed, via the blogger Jeff Jarvis and his “Dell Hell” experiences, Dell took on board all the valid issues his experience raised and then went on to find ways of engaging their customers, actively seeking their input via the creation of IdeaStorm which allows people to suggest and then rate and comment on improvements to Dell’s business. (Here are Jarvis’s original Dell Hell posts - and here is a good summary of the whole story, including Dell’s turn-around).

Ultimately, the most important thing to remember about this whole transparency issue is that trust is shifting from institutions to visible processes.  And if your reputation is constructed around creating “institutionalised trust” you are highly vulnerable.  Simply put, people will no longer take or trust what you say about yourself (your institutional claims to trust) at face value (even if it it true) - they will need to be able to understand the processes that guarantee this. The best way to do this is to create the opportunity for them to become part of this process. It is worth remembering that your harshest critic and most loyal customer or supporter are often the same person - provide them a channel for this energy and it is far more likely to be directed in a mutually positive direction. And a good way to do this - as Dell has discovered - is to create social media channels or spaces that facilitate this.

Make a start on these areas now - and you will have ticked the social media box for the time being. You will be in the race, but most importantly, you will have established a process of learning and gaining experience that will help you manage whatever the future may bring.

I came across this article by Michael Skapinker on FT.com the other day. I had actually heard about it on the day of its publication, but it had come up in a discussion at the London Social Media Club about relationships between PR and bloggers and it didn’t really register. However, as is the way in highly networked social media, it came back to me in a slightly different guise via Constantin Basturea’s useful del.icio.us PR Digest as a post from Melvin Yuan. I must confess Melvin’s post rather lost my interest - but I did follow the link to Michael’s article. When I read it I was struck, not so much by the argument of the article itself, but by the fact that it seemed to be a classic example of a very good “old media” journalist in a very good “old media” publication (albeit on online variant of such) nonetheless failing to really appreciate the difference between the mass media that we have come to know over the last 400 years and this new social media thing - and falling into the classic trap of analysing the new by the standards of the old.

I was therefore motivated to post a comment responding as such - not really expecting a reply - but one came, very promptly, which impressed me, although I am not sure whether he accepted my points or not. He was probably just being polite. Below is both my comment, his response and my follow-up.

Dear Michael,

I am a bit late to this - and I am sure you have already received many many comments. However, I wanted to add to the pile, not least because, as in the manner of a letter to The Times I may well then use the fact of my commenting as a reason to promote my response wider.

You are absolutely right and your article makes perfect sense - provided you hold to two assumptions. First, that this thing you call the internet is a variant of the mass media and can be judged as such in terms of assessment of its impact and the nature of its content. The second, which partially follows from the first, is that you therefore judge the internet as though it were an institution.

In my view, neither of these assumptions hold true.

When I come across people who use the “the vast majority of stuff on the internet is inconsequential rubbish” argument, I say “its not necessarily rubbish, its just of very niche interest”. This usually gets a laugh as indeed is partly my intention. However, in five years time this won’t be a joke, it will be an accepted and unremarkable truth. Quite possibly within the handful of sites that you regard as those useful to run your life will be stuff that almost everyone else will regard as inconsequential rubbish. Indeed, I would suggest that if you don’t have such sites (stuff) you are not spending your considerable time on the internet productively. I will refrain from commenting on the fact that you assess the internet in terms of sites, but my points in the paragraph below may start to give some clue as to why this is an increasingly redundant way of looking at the internet. I would also refer you to the current work of Tim Berners Lee in this respect. This thing called social media (of which blogs are but one small aspect) is shifting the nature of the media from mass appeal to individual relevance as it is also separating content from distribution or structure. This is a difficult thing to get one’s head around because the nature of media defined by individual relevance and not rooted in any particular place is something not seen before - a Black Swan I believe such things are called. Nonetheless, it is an important thing for people in the media to get their heads around it if they still wish to be in what might be called the media in five years time.

To the second assumption. The internet is not an institution. It is not like some vast on-line repository of bits of information, a huge on-line newspaper if you like, which can therefore be judged according to to the way you would judge a newspaper or institution - by its lowest common denominator, its weakest piece of content. The internet is now essentially a process. The best way to understand the difference is to use the example of Michael Skapinker’s brain. If I were to assess Michael Skapinker’s brain as an institution, i.e. simply by looking at the assembled bits of information that sit on its mental shelves, it would not look very pretty. It would, in fact have the appearance of a mess of inconsequential rubbish. Fortunately this would be a foolish way to assess Michael Skapinker’s brain. Instead, the best way to assess it would be to establish its intellect. Intellect is a process, it is what is brought to bear on information to establish meaning. Viewed in this respect, judged by the quality of its process (not its content) Michael Skapinker’s brain becomes altogether more interesting and powerful thing. The switch from institution to process will become one of the defining shifts generated by the rise of social media.

I would therefore ask you to abandon, or at least suspend, your mass and institutional assumptions (one might say prejudices). The internet is a process defined by individual relevance. Use this as your starting point and you will begin to understand why, amongst hopefully many other things, consumers will start to have huge power to influence the behaviour of companies, but not through the mechanism of what you call “internet-backed consumer campaigns”.

Regards,

Richard Stacy

His reply:

Dear Richard,

Many thanks for your very interesting email. I generally agree with your points. The question will be the extent to which this individualised medium will be susceptible to mass action.

Regards,
Michael

My response:

Michael,

Thanks for the reply.

If my experience in this area is anything to go by, the best way to work out how mass action will operate with or through this medium is to look at the way it used to work and then assume that the opposite will apply. Mass action will therefore probably be far less organised, but more organic and its pressure won’t necessarily be generated by focused mass activities but more through collective momentum and mandates. In the future I think that all organisations / institutions will have to operate under a form of mass mandate. Quite how this will actually look or come about is anyone’s guess. I can see how it will operate when it comes to some consumer goods - where I think whole categories will come to operate under a form of mass consumer franchise - but as for other more complex areas and institutions, the future is harder to envisage.

Regards,

Richard

Technorati Tags: michael+skapinker, financial+times, FT, richard+stacy, social+media

A while ago I was asked to write a thoughtpiece to go on the website of a new consulting company, atz communications, on what social media is and why it is important. The piece had to be limited to 450 words. Trying to condense such a big subject into 450 words was a refreshing challenge (here is the piece). However, over time, I have distilled it even further. I think it serves as a useful reminder of the underlying dynamics that make social media so revolutionary - even if, and when, we all grow tired of Facebook.

So here it is - in 161 words - The Three Horsemen of Social Media (or why social media is a big and important thing which you ignore at your peril)

• Reinvention - the economics behind the organisation of the traditional media are being turned upside down. Traditional media is going to have to re-invent itself for a world in which it has a much more restricted role and has to compete with a media space managed and mediated by individuals. Many media organisations will not survive this transition. Organisations will have to work out how to operate in this social media space if they are to maintain the reach and effectiveness of their communication.
• Transparency - it will become increasingly difficult to hide information. Transparency will become the ruling dynamic and this will change the whole terms of engagement between individuals and institutions. Trust will be vested in visible process not institutions.
• Niche - niche players will find it increasingly easy to challenge dominant market players - not by trying to replace them, but by peeling-off small segments of their customer or consumer base. Big players will face death by a thousand niches.

Technorati Tags: Social+media, richard+stacy

Here are the links to some of my stuff posted or published previously

• The future isn’t what it used to be - a (rather lengthy) piece I have written that is an attempt to focus on the bigger picture of the world of social media. It does this by making ten semi-serious predictions of what the marketing and communications world could look like in five to ten years time.
• A brand manager’s social media manifesto - something I submitted to Hugh Macleod’s Gaping Void blog as part of his campaign to collect manifestos. He posted it!
• The future of advertising - a prediction that the agency world will break apart and re-form around specialists and aggregators
• PR is dead - a build on the post about advertising - essentially a piece on the future of PR, but with a more controversial title
• The Curve of Common Sense - some thoughts about mediation in social media
• Clusters, worms and Facebook - a look at the future of social networks and content