Simonsays

Blogs: that was then, this is now

Happy New Year one and all. As we enter 2008 I thought I’d flag a great post from Richard Bailey reflecting on blogs as mature communications tools and their place in the online mediasphere.

Richard considers how blogs were viewed when they first hit the mainstream somewhere around 2003:

“Compared to newspaper or magazine journalism, blogs seemed ill-considered, ill-informed and unaccountable.”

But that was then and this now. The growth of social networks has become exponential and Richard suggests if we compare blogs to social networks it’s fair to say “blogs seem considered, valuable and highly literate. The froth has gone, but there's something substantial left.”

I agree and this situation has been hinted at last year with analysis of Dave Sifry’s State of the Live Web report which showed a distinct slow down in blog growth leading some to speculate that blog networks were consolidating with the strong ones surviving and becoming even more important as online influencers.

Even more interestingly, Richard plots a chart of the publishing ecosystem ranked according to speed, reflectiveness, interactivity and immedicacy. As publishing tools blogs sit firmly between traditional media and newer tools such as Twitter, Jaiku, Facebook etc.

According to these criteria, Richard suggests blogs now occupy a relatively important lace in the media/publishing ecosystem. A position whereby they offer the PR professional a tool with “speed [and] a high degree of reflection.”

Put like that it seems pretty clear that the dust has settled around blogs and we can see where the strengths/weaknesses of social media tools lie. In turn this can give us a steer as to which ones are right for different PR programes or campaigns.

I don’t know where Richard got his charts from, but I think it’d be a good idea to continually revise them as new products/tools evolve so that we can build a kind of Gartner Hype Cycle for the online publishing/media tools. If anything it’ll help guide PR practitioners towards the right tool for their campaigns and communication/marketing programmes.

Technorati tags: Richard Bailey, blogs, publishing, media, communications

European 16-24 year-olds spend more time online than watching TV, and other useful stats

Two stories in today's Guardian make for an interesting juxtaposition and indicate that employers of the future have a rude awakening.

First up, a report by the paper shows employers are cracking down on the amount of time staff use the internet and in particular, social networks. A deeper read reveals that the investigation has only covered the public sector but still shows 1,700 staff have been diosciplined or sacked in the past three years for mis-use of the internet or email. Trade Unions also calims they are dealing with an increase in the number of disputes involving social networks.

Contrast this with the story a bit further on about young people aged 16-24 are spending longer than ever before on the internet and the number of people using social networks has doubled from 23% last year to 42%.

So as employers crack down on people connecting and socialising online, today's young people (and tomorrow's workers) are spending even more and more of their lives on the interent. Hopefully when they come to the world of work employers will have realised just how integral (not to mention useful) the internet and social web can be.

The report (produced by the European Interactive Advertising Association) also found:

• an increase in instant messaging and the message functions of social networks use which has led to a decrease in email (see also, Robin Goad's recent post)
  
• 81% of surfers say they have sent an email at least once a month over the past year, down from 85% in 2006
• internet users across Europe (7,000 specially selected people across 10 European countries) are spending an average of nearly 12 hours a week on the internet
• Italians are the heaviest users (13.6 hours per week), followed by the Swedes (13 hours) and the French (12.7 hours). The British - in seventh place - spend 12 hours a week, up from 11.3 hours in 2006. The Dutch are last on 9.8 hours
• Almost a third of European web users have watched a TV, film or video clip, compared with 12% last year.
• The EIAA study shows the effect on TV viewing, especially among the youth audience which is using the internet more often than TV for the first time. The survey shows that 82% of 16- to 24-year-olds use the web between five and seven days a week while only 77% watch TV as regularly - a drop of 5% from last year

Technorati tags: European Internet Useage Statistics, Guardian, social networks, employment

Sermo: the revenue model for Facebook?

Interesting point made on email today through Edelman's Me2 Revolution list.

Steve Rubel (for it was he) drew our attention to the US social network for health professionals, Sermo, which has just signed a deal with the pharmaceutical firm Pfizer.

In case you weren't aware(!), Sermo is "the largest U.S. networking site for doctors. It launched in September 2006, counts 30,000 physicians as members, and is adding 2,000 a week."

Although it's not clear exactly what Pfizer's involvement with the network will be it's possible that the drug company will be able to tap into and benefit from the novel income stream that Sermo already offers. According to Daily Brief:

"Instead of selling ads, Sermo makes its money by letting service companies, financial services firms, and the government become flies on the wall of the biggest physicians' roundtable out there. It packages and sells the data it holds on the medical community, allowing those parties to get insight into how to better serve them, and to anticipate what's on the horizon."

Now it's highly possible that someone has already written about the parallels between Sermo's revenue model and the potential for Facebook to go the same way - but I haven't read it yet.

Packaging and flogging user data aside, what's stopping Facebook from selling focus-group sessions with its member-base to corporates? Isn't it only one, logical step away from the daily poll you get in the side-bar.

It's also an interesting model. No-one wants advertising anymore (and you can block it anyway) and those sponsored links in the news feed are laughable. If it came down to unannounced listening or unobtrusive focus group invitations, I think that might not be a too unpleasent way for Facebook to make some cash and stay useful.

Technorati tags: Sermo, Pfizer, Facebook, revenue

Want to build your own social network?

Personally I’m not a techy type or web developer - I'm fascinated by what technology is doing to society and vice versa. As Richard Bailey pointed out recently: technology determinism is wrong’.

However, I also like to think I can spot a very useful list when I see one. As such it’s definitely worth posting a link to Jeremiah Owyang’s extremely comprehensive list of ‘white label’ social networks software. If you want a full customisable social network with your company’s brand on it there must be a network here for you.

Technorati tags: white label software, social networks, Jeremiah Owyang

*UPDATED* Twitter is about people, not technology... how many times?

*UPDATED*Further to my previous thoughts on online identity, Doc SearlsDave Winer has a nifty little post about how we engage with social networks (including Twitter) differently.

"When people get together to discuss Twitter, and perhaps other social networks (and Twitter is that, a bare-bones social network), they often discuss as if there were a common user experience, but this is a misperception, there are many different experiences ...

On Twitter I try to keep a ten percent ratio of people I follow over people who follow me. For other people, maybe most, the ratio is 1-to-1, they follow approximately the same number of people as follow them. Scoble follows thousands of people. For him Twitter is like a very fast chatroom. For me it's like weblogs.com on a busy day in 2002. I've seen people who follow 0 people, for them Twitter is a publishing environment. Very different experiences. To each of them Twitter is a different product."

Very astute point (obviously)... and something PR and marketing people should take into account when thinking about measurement.

We are dealing with social tools being put to social uses. It's not simply a case of measuring Twitter as Twitter. It's about measuring Twitter as totally diverse group of Twitterers each using the tool for different purposes

That's the difficulty (impossiblility?). And the usual metrics suspects probably aren't the right people to be doing the measuring.

Technorati tags: social networks, Twitter, Dave Winer, measurement, metrics

What if you can't measure it OR manage it?

I've written a couple of posts recently about ways to measure  social or participatory media online and concluded that we can't measure it. Or more specifically, we can't measure it unless we change the way we do business/communicate with the public. (although David Phillips believes we can't measure it at all - see his comment in my first post)

So it was nice to see Neville Hobson blogging about measurement guru, Katie Paine's views in the latest edition of the IABC's magazine, Communication World.

Katie writes:

"The standard maxim in the communication world is: “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.” The problem is not so much how to measure blogs, but rather that “managing” them is impossible: You simply can’t manage what 10 million independent-minded, opinionated people are saying."

Which is pretty much what I've been saying.

My concern is that all attempts to find ways of measuring social tools are being developed using existing measurement techniques and ideas which simply won't cut it in a bottom-up socially active world.

What we need are new ways of approaching measurement which involve setting measurement parameters after carrying out communications/community activity, or perhaps as Katie suggests in her CW article:

"Forget reach and frequency. Success in today’s marketplace is measured not by how broad your reach is but how deep your network is."

The only problem is... there is a whole industry built around traditional ways of measuring media and it's likely the less enlightened firms may resist attempts to go down that route.

As I wrote on EIS's Interactive blog in July:

"the current obsession with media measurement is very much driven by companies deeply in-depted - both financially and ideologically - to traditional business models."

As usual, getting past financial barriers may kick-start people into changing the way they think - and ultimately - behave towards measuring social activities online.

Technorati Tags: social media measurement, measurement, Katie Paine

Woah! There's social... and then *social*

I've just read about an astounding Facebook app that probably takes 'sociality' to a new, possibly unwelcome level.

The One Minute Friend app works thus:

"you add this application to your Facebook account, give it your phone number (just US and Canada for now), provide some selection criteria, and wait for your phone to ring. You’ll be connected, for free, to another person on Facebook who made matching selections. You talk for a minute and it disconnects. You see their first name and their photo, but no other information, such as your phone number or profile, is revealed. At the end of the call, if both of you so agree, the application will re-connect you for a more extended conversation. Otherwise you can move on to the next person"

I'm not sure I like the sound of that personally. Never does David Weinberger it seems, who admits "I haven't tried it. I'm not that social."

[Via  David Weinberger]

Technorati tags: Facebook apps; One Minute Friend

Why politicians still don't get the real power of social networks

Did anyone read yesterday's article in the London edition of the Financial Times about the use of social networks in the US presidential election?

I only ask because I did, and found it to be pretty un-insightful. OK, if I want up-to-the-minute commentary on social networking and politics I might turn to David Weinberger rather than the newspaper, but from the lumpen headline: "Battle for blogosphere ballot box heats up" to the closing para, little light was shed on what US candidates were actually doing with social networks.

First up the piece told us how many Facebook and MySpace friends the top Democrat and Republican candidates have. Then we got this insight from strategist, Thomas Gensemer, managing director of Blue State Digital:

"You can be putting a message out there in far more powerful ways than just e-mailing or on your own website ... Instead of pressing 'send' to half a million people today, it's activating a message that will be active for days thereafter"

Hmm. Enlightening.

Maybe Peter Daou, head of Hilary Clinton's online campaign team can offer us a better explanation:

"More and more the internet is becoming essential to the political process"

Maybe not.

The most interesting questions are raised by the article's critical voice of reason, Colin Nagy, director of Source Communications.

His argument is that:

"Collecting friends is superficial and doesn't require any real effort on behalf of the friend ...Would you rather have 20,000 friends who do nothing, donate nothing, or 10 friends who are active, crazy fundraisers?"

And he has hit the nail on the head. The real question is how do you get your 20,000 friends to become "active, crazy, fundraisers".

The answer is: you change the way you do politics. I've said time and again that simply pushing out the same, tired, two-faced political crap that most 12 year-olds can see through but doing so via exciting new tools like social networks won't work.

What politicians and their campaign teams need to grasp is the change in power dynamics within social networks. It's a flat structure rather than a top down or even slightly hierarchical network. Rather than the network being there for them, they are there for the network.

People, like Colin Nagy don't get it. He expects his 20,000 friends to do something for him or his candidate, when in reality they want him to do something for them. And isn't that what politics is all about?

XP: edemocracy Update

Technorati tags: US Presidential elections, social networking, Financial Times, Hilary Clinton, Peter Daou, Colin Nagy, Thomas Gensemer

Oxford Internet Institute publishes UK state of the nation report

Most people know the US-based Pew Internet and American Life project but how many UK bloggers know about the UK's Oxford Internet Institute?

The OII has today published it's annual state of the nation report, The Internet in Britain: 2007, which looks specifically at internet uses and trends in the UK.

I've posted some key findings below, but a full copy of the report can be downloaded here [pdf].

 

• Two thirds of Britons use the Internet and access it at home in 2007.
• The great majority of those with home access use a broadband connection.
• Internet users believe that individuals should play a role in regulating the Internet. Non-users see a greater role for government.
• Internet users in 2007 undertake more information, creative and social activities than they did in 2005. The only area in which use seems to have stabilised is in entertainment-related activities.
• Downloading music and videos and playing games are the most popular online entertainment activities of the Internet. According to a quarter of Internet users, the time they spend watching TV is reduced due to their use of the Internet.
• Users have changed their information search patterns. In 2007, almost two thirds of users depended primarily on search engines to find information: up from one fifth in 2005.
  
  
Technorati Tags: Oxford Internet Institute, The Internet in Britain Today 2007

What's revolutionary, disruptive, synergistic and viral?

The answer may not be what you think it is...

According to the quite amusing blog, Uncov, the answer is either social networking or gonorrhea.

I quote:

"Like Web 2.0, you can get the clap for free, and some providers ask you to pay for the premium service. Penicillin will cure you of one, but the other is degenerative."

Be warned, there's cuss words there.

Technorati Tags: social+networking, gonorrhea, Uncov, web+2.0