Being Buff: Marketing the social economy

I participated in my first live podcast yesterday on BlogTalkRadio and now I get it. What do I get? Well let me give some background first.

I’ve been listening to the great communications podcast, For Immediate Release (FIR), on my iPod (and now iPhone) for a couple of years now. About a year ago (please correct me on the timing if I’m wrong), hosts Shel Holtz and Neville Hobson starting doing live FIR episodes on BlogTalk Radio. I’ve never listened to a live episode - when it was actually live. I just download them after. This is because a key reason I listen to podcasts is I can listen when I want instead of having to listen when the show is aired.

However, yesterday’s experience changed my view and that’s because I participated – and I didn’t just listen. I asked questions in the online chat room that the host almost immediately asked the guest speaker. Considering the quest speaker was internationally recognized social media guy, Geoff Livingston, that was pretty cool -  and very empowering. There are few other forums in which I would have direct access to someone like Geoff.

I think the real power for organisations though is thinking about adding a real-time, live experience to your marketing/communications mix (if it fits with your strategy/objectives). Try a webinar, or a live podcast on BlogTalkRadio and experiment with the power of letting people give you instant feedback. It really made me feel my input was immediately valued and provided the show hosts with immediate, relevant content. Sure, there are risks with doing things live but that’s what social media is about: taking risks with giving up control.

Posted in Live events, Podcast | No Comments »

I’m in the middle of listening (time shifted on my iPhone) to part 1 of Ira Basen’s great CBC radio documentary News 2.0: The Future of News in an Age of Social Media.  It’s a great piece of work partly because of all the great interviews Basen scored. This post focuses on his interview with citizen journalism critic Andrew Keen, author of The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet is Killing our Culture.

What I love about Keen is that he’s a smart, dissenting voice in my lefty neck of the woods - and those always get me thinking. No difference here.

Basen’s entire interview with Keen is posted on the CBC Web site. In it, Keen alternates between far too broad generalisations and some really great points.

First the generalisations.

“The truth about these so called amateurs is [that they're] made up of wealthy technologists who have made a fortune sitting around… in California.. blogging because they’re the only ones who can really afford to invest significant time in working for free – and the other group of people are kids who again have nothing better to do in college or in high school - real…citizens are too busy with their jobs and careers and their families to invest too much time in expressing themselves for nothing.”

Keen misses a key point raised by someone else Basen interviewed: Clay Shirky, author of Here Comes Everybody. Shirky argues that the economy has changed so that money is no longer the primary motivator for people to produce things. They do it for recognition, challenge and passion. Keen dismisses the millions of people blogging because they’re passionate about their topic - and they enjoy it - people like me.

“The rebellion against mainstream media is part of a broader, social rebellion against authority and it can be seen most clearly in a generational revolt. You’ll find that most people over 30, 35 or 40 are somewhat sympathetic to mainstream media. The vast majority of people under 30 are deeply hostile to mainstream media…”

Blaming it all on age is way too simple.  (I don’t have studies to back this up. If  Keen does he doesn’t say so in the interview) From what I see, people haven’t abandoned mainstream news at all. They’re just getting some, or much, of what they used to consume from other sources. People still read their paper in the morning or watch TV news and then check their Twitter streams on the bus.

“…many of the kids who are involved in the web 2.0 movement are from broken families.”

This just seems completely unsupportable. What is his evidence for this?

“…the value of a professional journalist is to provide the citizen with…information, to understand the world, to vote, to determine the qualities of ones own government and ones own role in the world…..I don’t have a problem with democratizing the media, provided that there are editors and competent people involved in the process.”

This paragraph lays Keen’s simplistic beliefs bare: “real” journalists and editors are objective and competent, “citizen” journalists are bias and incompetent.  He ignores that fact that mainstream editors choose what to cover and how to cover it based on the values of the news outlet for which they work and, for private media, whether it will affect the organization’s power to make money.  The problem is that many people share his belief in the benevolent objectivity of mainstream media. Citizen journalism doesn’t pretend to be all objective or even all good - and that’s its power. Because much of it is so bad I assume people look at it more critically. (I “assume” because I admit I haven’t found studies to back this up yet.)

Also, a key part of the power of citizen journalism is the absence of editors - especially in places where journalists can’t go. No editors chose what reports people sent via Twitter about the violence during the recent Iranian election or what pictures people sent from Gaza during the recent Israeli occupation.  Journalists were restricted or banned from getting most of these stories but we got them thanks to citizen journalists.

“The other problem, and this is my fundamental critique of the web 2.0 idealogs is the vast majority of new voices on the internet are not earning an income, which means they can only do it part time, which means that the quality of their work, whatever their talent is going to be inferior to the person who is employed full time.”

Again, the issue is that often the “part-timers” are the first ones - or the only ones - on the scene capturing raw, unfiltered data. That being said, the full-timers have the luxury of providing more context making the two roles complementary.

So much for his generalisations. As for the good points I want to mention one in particular:

“Google, which on the one hand, idealizes the free market, is extremely hostile to the State.  They believe that the market resolves everything, that the activities of the crowd result in a kind of justice…”

Keen’s point highlights two key things here for me. The first is that “media” include things like Google and Wikipedia, for example. The second is that these also have biases of which most people aren’t aware and should be critical.  There is nothing objective about Google and search engine optimization (SEO) companies making millions from people paying to get their results to the top of Google’s rearch results. Yet many people think Google results are unfiltered (for more on this see Jay Moonah’s e-book Trusting Google and Yahoo: Search Engines & Information Literacy).

And Wikipedia, that supporters promote as completely objective, also has its biases. Firstly, fewer than two percent of Wikipedia users ever contribute (Clay Shirky, Here Come Everybody, pg. 125) so that’s the first bias. Then, to get an article to in Wikipedia about a person, that won’t be deleted, you have to show how that person was or is “significant”. Significant to whom? Making that call involves bias. Who are the main Wikipedia editors? Do we know? Are they a diverse group or all the same?

The main point is it’s crucial to be critical of all media we consume and I encourage all the lousy citizen journalists to keep it up because it makes that easier to remember.

Tags: citizenjournalism, mainstreammedia
Posted in Citizen journalism, Mainstream media | No Comments »

One of the gems I picked up at last weekend’s Podcasters Across Borders conference came from the CBC’s Tod Maffin. Tod did a presentation called Twenty Minutes of Epic Awesomeness (or “These are a Few of My Favourite Things” on the downloadable PDF program). In it, he shared twenty of his personal productivity and/or creativity tips – and this from a guy who scores high in both areas. Tod speaks internationally on technology and society and if you’ve ever seen him in action you get why he’s so in demand.

One tool he mentioned, the audio editing software Adobe Soundbooth CS4, solves a problem that’s existed since people started recording interviews: transcribing your tape. Yes, there is finally a program that will transcribe your tape for you! And it does it in all the cool, useful ways you want.

You can select a section of your audio, just like you do when you want to edit it, and have Soundbooth transcribe just that part. Or, after you have transcribed a section, you can highlight some text and Soundbooth will jump to that part of the audio file so you can edit it.

How much would you think editing software that smart would cost? $600? $700 $1000?…

Nope. All that and more for a little over 200 bucks.

I don’t think I’ve every heard so many people say, “I am so getting that.” as during Tod’s presentation.

Tags: Adobe, audio, editing, Tools, transcribing
Posted in Audio editing, Conferences, Tools | No Comments »

Tonight I listened to Jowi Taylor’s keynote speech to the 2009 Podcasters Across Borders conference in Kingston. As a result, this episode is about passion and inspiration. It’s about one man’s belief in a project, the Six String Nation Guitar, his unwavering pursuit to complete it - and how it inspired unity in a divided nation.

The story is amazing on many levels that you will hear when you listen to it. The one thing I wanted to highlight was how the project, building a guitar made from pieces of Canadian heritage and culture from across Canada, was a unifying force. From a piece of a tree sacred to the Haida Nation in Britich Columbia to a piece of the house of Canada’s first black cowboy (that almost none of us knew about), the guitar is made of pieces of things from some of Canada’s greatest stories. Some of the stories are well known, most aren’t. Each comes from one of Canada’s diverse peoples and together make an instrument that members of each group have used to play their unique stories. Many contributed to making it. Many have touched and played it. Everyone owns it.

Enjoy, and share, the conversation.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (50.8MB)

Tags: pab09
Posted in Inspiration, Podcast | 2 Comments »

I’ve never done this before but I just had to highlight one of the blog’s on my blogroll: Beth Kanter’s. Beth is a full-time social media consultant based in the US. When I started my blog and I asked myself the question: how can I add value beyond what Beth is doing? My answer was to focus on Canada which I try to do but often I find myself trying to find Canadian angles on Beth’s ideas. So, I thought it was important just to remind folks who may not have subscribed to Beth’s blog yet to check it out.

Her latest post is about her experience flying Virgin America where she consistently meets people working in social media. Perhaps one of reasons is, as Beth points out. Virgin has wi-fi. Wi-fi on planes? I’d heard it was possible - but learned it existed through Beth.

Beth, since I suspect you’re listening: thanks.

Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

I’m checking out a video demo of Google Wave, Google’s  new collaborative tool coming out later this year. It lets you use one browser tool do many of things that you now do using different tools – email, instant messaging, photo sharing, among others. I’ve only  watched the the first ten minutes and I’m already blown away. In classic Google fashion they’ve turned on whole concept of traditional one-to-one conversation even more on its head than they first did with Gmail. Waves are hosted conversations where people come and contribute to the evolving whole instead of sending pieces to different people like with email.

This is yet another game changer from Google. Very cool.  But don’t take my word for it. Check out the demo.

ps. It’s about an hour and a half.

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

I caught another great presentation today by Mike Kujawski of the Centre for Excellence in Public Sector Marketing. The topic was using social media for internal communications in the Canadian federal government and the format was, as usual, great, funny, image-based slides backed up with great spoken content and interesting, informative videos.

I was particularly impressed with the videos Mike used to explain social media tools like wikis and social networks.  They are simple, clear and funny and refreshingly low-tech. They’re made by CommonCraft “a small company owned by Lee and Sachi LeFever in Seattle, Washington”. Lee narrates the video in an upbeat, funny style. The videos aren’t free but at $20 bucks they’re well worth it if you’re trying to persuade management to give social media.

Here’s a link to the video Wikis in Plain English that Mike played.

Enjoy.

Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments »

When most people think of social media strategies they think of doing things online when what they should be thinking about first, always, is people meeting face-to-face. People think about doings things online because they’re not actually thinking about social media “strategy” they’re thinking about social media tactics and that gets them thinking about Twitter and Facebook. What they should be doing is thinking about their objectives and building a strategy around them. Doing that, these days more than ever, reveals that one of the main objectives is - or should be - helping build community by joining, and adding value to, existing ones. The best way to do this is for people to meet face-to-face.

Now before you say, “yeah, but we can’t meet all our customers or target audience face-to-face” let me tell you about a face-to-face meeting I attended this week.

I joined about 10 others at a friend’s house for a simple meal and discussion of the ideas in the book Transforming Power by Judy Rebick. The book looks at  various movements around the world where people are organizing informally to take back power in their own lives – including the power to elect presidents such as in Latin American and the US.

Rebick was at the meeting and gave a short summary of the book to launch discussion. The discussion was wide ranging but one thing that was mentioned frequently was the success of Obama’s social media campaign. One key reason for its success, however, was framed fundamentally differently from how most mainstream media reported it. The discussion at the meeting made it clear that the success started on the ground in face-to-face meetings in people’s houses and community centres across the country. The job of the super sophisticated online strategy was to help make these meetings happen and then magnify their effect a million times online. They key is that, without the face-to-face meetings, that sophisticated online strategy would have failed.

Obama campaigners didn’t meet all their potential voters face-to-face however: they gave people tools to organize their own meetings – and then got out of the way and let those meetings happen. They let go.

For most organizations letting go, online or off, means transforming the way they do things; transforming culture; transforming systems – transforming power.

Rebick highlights one of the most powerful recent examples of the power of face-to-face communication in her book: the 2007 United States Social Forum.

It was modeled on the World Social Forums that started in Porto Alegre Brazil and have been bringing together thousands of activists annually since 2002. It was organized by, and prominently featured, people of color and was the most diverse social forum ever according to Rebick and others who attended.  It attracted 12,000 people – face-to-face on a big scale. Obama was elected the next year using a campaign built on many of the same values as the social forum: inclusion, decentralization and local empowerment.  Exactly what part the US Social Forum played in electing Obama would be an interesting study…

So the message is simple and clear: get out there, talk to people, help them talk to other people - and get out of their way.

Tags: Face-to-face
Posted in Face-to-face | No Comments »

As I mentioned in an April post about the rabble.ca Activist Toolkit I signed up to beta test rabble.ca’s latest experiment.

As a reminder, rabble says the Toolkit is “a collaborative online resource that rabble.ca members can create, use and modify. It has been envisioned as an ever expanding repository of guides, articles, images, media and vocabularies — much like a wiki. You may think of it as a landing page for online resources, or perhaps a social-justice themed encyclopedia.”

Well, I just spent some time checking it out and here are my thoughts so far. And, just to say, I hesitated a moment before blogging about this wondering whether I shouldn’t because it’s beta and I should just leave my comments on the beta tester forum instead. But that was only for a moment. I then remembered this is a social media beta we’re talking about and the whole idea is to throw it out there for as much comment as possible. So I decided I would blog my comments and post them in the beta tester forum.

The Toolkit includes the following sections (with the descriptions rabble uses for each section):

Articles - definitions or descriptions of concepts written from a progressive standpoint, as well as individuals or social justice organizations of note.

Guides - A compilation of How-To Guides. This section aims to make specialized knowledge accessible to individuals across grassroots movements, by facilitating skill sharing.

Media - Media include any audio, video, image or PDF that appears on a page in another category (e.g. an inline
image in an article) that link to this category. This media may also be organized into galleries for those who
want to browse them directly. [They just need to clarify this because I don’t get it.]

On This Day - Details a past event with particular importance to the history of the social justice movement. 

Tool Sites - A review of a particularly valuable online tool, including a link to the site and a description of the sponsoring organization (if any).

First off, as usual, I applaud rabble for continuing to experiment. There is a great need for places for Canadian progressives to share online and having a place to share articles, how-to guides and useful online tools is a great start. Secondly, using the wiki format empowers users by letting them create and edit content.

Each page has a Share link to make it easy for people to share content on a wide variety of social networks.

My suggestions so far for improvement are:

1) add a section on best/practices case studies on how progressive organizations are using social media tools. This could be linked to the Tools section so the description of each tool followed by a list of organizations actually using it.

2) add a way of organizing info by topic and making it searchable to make things easier to find.

3) add links to great content on existing social networks. For example, links to great photo albums on Flickr or Facebook groups that might be of interest to the progressive community.

4) add a section on hot topics on social networks, i.e.  this week’s top trending progressive Twitter topics as chosen by users.

5) say who wrote and edited the content like on Wikipedia. Right now there is no indication of who created what.

6) stop using the “online encyclopedia” metaphor. Encyclopedia has a strong old school, Web 1.0 connotation. The Toolkit is the opposite of this.

7) This is a subtle one but change the message you get when you click the “Write to Editor” button at the top of articles from, “You can send Editor a message using the contact form below.” to, “You can send the Editor a message using the contact form below.” This small change makes it sound like it’s coming from a human not a computer.

My other problem is I don’t have an Edit button at the top of the Toolkit pages so I can’t add or edit anything but this is just a beta bug.

That’s it for now. Keep innovating rabbleites!

Tags: Toolkit
Posted in Tools | No Comments »

While listening to the recent Wash Your Produce episode of the Marketing Over Coffee podcast , super smart co-host Christopher S. Penn got to talking about Google local search. This is Google’s service that lets businesses enter profiles that appear when someone searches for their product or service locally or in a specific place. For example, when I search for pizza in the city where I am by entering “pizza Ottawa”, I get a listing of Ottawa pizza places. And if I’m heading to, say, Boston and really want to try some pizza down there. I enter “pizza Boston” and get a listing of local, Boston pizza places.

Simple but very powerful.

Search – the power of massive numbers of people typing what they’re looking for into Google and other search engines – is what makes Google millions. Combine this with two huge converging web trends - personalization and localization using GPS – and the power of local search begins to emerge. People love to search and they want things customized for them. Local search takes a step in that direction by customizing search results based on where people are or where they’re going. GPS adds to that by allowing search to not only give you results in the same city as you, but results in the same neighborhood.

To be found, businesses need online profiles. So, if your business has a local component, make sure you set up a Google Local profile and register with popular local search engines available in your area. Oh, and be sure to add a “Local Search Engine” answer to any “How did you find us?” survey you do.

Tags: search localsearch
Posted in Search engines | No Comments »