Social Media is for Conversation and Consumption

I've just added an 'AddThis' bookmarking button to the bottom of my blog posts and I'm keen to test it - only first I need something to bookmark.  Looking back through my previous blog posts however I can't say I feel proud enough about any one of them to want to draw new attention to it.

So let me quickly sketch out a new idea:

Looking back at old posts reminds me that I have previously fancied myself as some sort of amateur journalist.  Indeed that which I've written about the relationship between blogging and journalism has been founded partly on some notion of equality between journalists and bloggers.

The truth of the relationship I think actually is that all journalists can blog, but that not all bloggers can be journalists.  After all anyone can blog - that's a fundamental idea behind blogging - but we know very well that not everyone has the talent for worthwhile journalism.

If one examines blogging in its lowest common form one will find something merely social and nothing more; certainly nothing truly literary.

And so we mere bloggers should have no pretensions.  We should stick to what we are: members merely of society.  And here we arrive at what blogging is really suited to:  conversation and consumption, and perhaps best:  conversation about consumption.

By way of emphasising my point, I'd like to add that I really don't think the proprietors of British Subway franchises really understand the foot-long Italian BMT quite like those of the North American ones.

Nevermind the spellcheck

Last week I heard a live satellite report given to BBC Radio 4's PM programme. I was struck my a mistake that the reporter made - it was just a simple slip - he said one thing when he must have meant to say another.

I've written in my last couple of posts about some of the issues surrounding the development of new media; I'm going to play on this theme once again this time around.

It's all very well that consumers should be looking forward to stepping up in the new media world to the status of content creator, but I wonder now if traditional broadcasters and publishers (henceforth, broadcasters) can really be looking forward to the relative step down that this represents for them. I'm not suggesting that traditional broadcasters are going to lose their status as professional organisations overnight as a result of so many oiks being capable of writing a blog; but if traditional broadcasters are going to keep up with the developments of new media, in pace, breadth, and flexibility, then they're going to have to prepare themselves for the consequences of a degree of redundancy at some level in the traditional editorial process.

The work of the consumer-turned-creator is in most cases going to be rough around the edges, and I'm not suggesting either that major broadcasters are going to want to emulate this style in order to 'fit in' to new media; even in those instances when broadcasters would want to fake not being edited, I don't think they're going to have a problem doing it. The real problem though is this: the limits of the traditional editorial process are not easily resolved with the limitlessness of new media broadcasting. When a major event happens, for example, I could comment on it in my blog, with words, pictures and sound, within a day of hearing about it on the news. While maintaining its editorial integrity, I imagine it would take the BBC current affairs television programme Panorama at least a week to compile and produce their special on the same event. Even Newsnight doesn't match the pace of the internet in its latest form ('web 2.0', the 'blogosphere'). Without making a new offering in doing so, it would be impossible for the BBC to issue considered comment on the same level as my blog.

The corollary is that it's impossible for my blog to issue considered comment on the same level as the BBC; though given the number of smart people in the world who don't work in tradtional broadcasting, but who are capable of blogging, and given the ongoing development of new media as mentioned above, I know which body of creators is soon likely to be driving the other. The answer probably would be for traditional broadcasters, as they invest in new media, to get as many of these smart people on board as possible. I'm under the impression that Guardian Unlimited is a leader in this field: they've got loads of bloggers writing for them.

Perhaps I've identified a strength of traditional broadcasters in a new media environment: they are the bastions of the old media model, editorial integrity and more. The demand for reliable information is only going to increase with the growing popularity of new media. What's more, editorial integrity aside, the fact is that not everyone wants 'new' media all the time; in fact very few people do. I was conducting some research the other day, looking at online men's magazine Monkey. The magazine has a graphical interface that mimics the paper magazine reading experience - you can drag the pages by the corner across the screen to turn them - but I found that this detail of the interface seemed only to emphasise the fact that this wasn't a real magazine. It's a problem because a paper magazine to relax with is probably what a substantial proportion of the men's mag audience wants; computers are for working on.

This example is only a technological limitation, but you get my point: there will always be a market for traditional media. I think traditional broadcasting mammoths should still be worried though if the way I'm describing their offering is beginning to sound niche rather than mainstream; it's my belief that increasingly that's what traditional media is set to become: niche.

But that means that new media, and its editorial process, is increasingly going to have to develop beyond its current niche status. I hope we'll see a honing of what are effectively instinctive production and editorial techniques. More than that, redunancies on one level in editing and production in new media will necessarily be compensated for by an expansion in the same on a higher level, in terms of what is produced, who produces it, when it is produced, and in what context (Joe Marchese described on Tuesday some of the new processes involved in managing new media). I guess maybe what I'm describing is an expansion of PR function in place of redundancies in editing, as if in new media editing is PR... but then isn't that kind of what it is already? (See my entry 'Our Innocence Lost' on artifice and engineering in new media.)

... but with great power comes great responsibility

It was reported last month that five families at a court in Los Angeles jointly filed a negligence and fraud suit against Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation. The company owns the social networking site MySpace, which enabled paedophiles to groom and sexually assault the children of those families.

I first read about this case shortly after writing my last blog entry, and I think it provokes a discussion that follows from it: about the responsibility that new media providers must be willing to accept if they are to protect the health of new media. Empowering media consumers as broadcasters is a dangerous business. By encouraging us all to become personal broadcasters, new media providers are giving each of us the ability to devastate our own privacy in an instant. It's not just Google or News Corporation that we share our information with, so that they can show us adverts; imagine the consequences of accidentally sharing a personal document with the whole internet, instead of a small group of friends. And it's not just issues of privacy that accompany broadcasting. Media providers are also empowering individuals to commit libel and infringe ownership rights.

One immediate response to these concerns would be to say that it's down to individuals and the government to be responsible for these issues of identity and interaction; and it's true, we do have personal responsibility, and of course the government does too. But I think that responsibility for these concerns should lie most of all with media providers, because assuming this responsibility is in their own best interests. Let me explain why:

As I mentioned at the end of my last entry, moral integrity and trustworthiness are likely to become increasingly valuable as a consequence of changes in the branding environment. This somewhat superficial reason isn't the only one though for why media providers will need to be moral, trustworthy, and responsible: they will need to be these things in order for new media, for consumer content creation to work at all.

As they collect and help us to share more information, media providers are demanding more trust of consumers than has ever been asked of them before. In addtion to the information that we actively upload, media providers are in a position to collect information relating to every single discrete action we take in using the internet. When a transfer of information occurs, it's already being recorded:

• where geographically in the world the consumer is; and more specifically, what internet service provider he or she is using. This is to become increasingly important when, as with Virgin's new 'quadruple-play' TV, landline, mobile phone, and internet offering, the channels of our media consumption ('old' and new) begin to merge.
• When exactly the information transfer was made;
• exactly what information was transferred;
• and how, i.e. with exactly what media device the transfer was made.

That last category of recorded information is very sweet icing on the cake for the media industry. By using 'cookies', the data gathered about each of our information transfers is made uniquely identifiable, and so can be made continuous with the data on all our other internet activity.

We're looking in new media at the ready availability of a massive amount of information on consumption; and this information is without the bounds we've seen traditionally in media research methodologies, like those of sample size, human error, research budget, as well as others. Where online media consumption can be linked to purchase - and that's where consumption itself is not already purchase - there's a veritable cornicopia of data relating the media we consume, to how we spend our money.

My point here though is mainly to encourage trust, and to urge media providers to warrant it, rather than to warn consumers against it. There's incredible potential for insight in all this information, and I'm sure that that can be for the good of everyone involved; but, and here's the very significant rub: media providers must be responsible for and have the trust of consumers if they want us to invest our information.

Thinking now for a moment of the work I did at the marketing research agency Millward Brown, I'm not sure what all this new-found power in new media is going to mean for the study of consumer attitudes. In a world where on-demand, interactive new media is the only media, it might not be necessary for us to bother trying to research consumer attitudes at all, when we would have a near-perfect picture of what media people are exposed to over time, and the effects of that exposure on media consumption and purchase. In such a world, in the terms of consumer insight, attitudes become consumption itself.

I would probably guess also that advertising pretesting, as we know it - out of 'field' - will become a redundant practice. What would the point be of having a separate out-of-field process for pretesting a piece of advertising, when it's actual performance in field, amongst a perfectly controlled audience, can be monitored, perfectly?

However I can see it being useful to be able to apply to our ongoing study of how consumption is impacted upon in new media, that which we understand already about how in traditional media attitudes can be changed. And I don't mean to suggest either that the quantitative analysis of consumption data is ever going to replace the creative, brain-storming processes of qualitative research, or anticipating patterns in consumer behaviour before they form.

And once again, as with the future of the advertising industry, we run into a brick wall when it comes to the number of people actually 'on' the internet. All the traditional ways of examining consumer attitudes remain of paramount importance in the undeveloped world. Whatever man-power that might be freed up by efficiencies and redundancies in the new media world would probably be wisely invested in developing digital media on the ground, in the places where it hardly yet exists.

Our Innocence Lost

You may have seen an article in Tuesday's Evening Standard about the rise to fame of Mia Rose, whose homemade music videos have made her the most-viewed person on the video-sharing web site YouTube.

It got me thinking about the effects of increasing interactivity in our media environment. We can't ignore the fact that interactive modes of media are becoming increasingly popular, so it seems worth wondering what the effects of that interactivity are on the way media works.

We can be sure that interactive media engages consumers more actively than traditional modes of media: a consumer reading and posting a comment on a blog site will certainly be engaging with the blog more actively than if he were being presented with the same information in a television programme. This leads consequently to the potential for interactive media to be comparatively much more communicative to its audience than traditional media. Interactive media is also guaranteed to be more relevant to its audience, as consumers only interact with media that's relevant to them. Interactive media then, is more engaging, communicative, and relevant, which must make it more effective.

The reasons for this additional effectiveness of the media make it a good thing in itself for consumers, but increased effectiveness is also a good thing for advertisers. Media is, of course, the vehicle for advertising; more-effective media means more-effective advertising.

Through effectiveness though is not the only way that both consumers and advertisers benefit from interactivity. Interactive channels provide consumers with the ability to create their own content. Interactivity then probably also makes media on average cheaper, both to consume and to advertise in. Now that those we have traditionally thought of as media consumers are generating content themselves - for free, at home or wherever they are - there's a lot more of it available.

The rise of interactive modes of media - and I'm thinking mainly on the internet - has made it free and easy for anyone to communicate to a global audience. This is likely to make it more important for authors to be able to identify themselves effectively (when they want to); which is the same as it becoming more important for branding to be employed effectively. Branding is going to become more significant than it already is - if that's possible.

The article about Mia Rose in the Evening Standard actually focused on accusations that Mia's YouTube campaign has been conducted secretly by a PR team. (See my last post, 'Big Bully', for more on artifice and engineering in the media industry). You might have been forgiven for imagining that an increase in the significance of consumer-created content would cause the nature of interactive media in aggregate to tend further towards being 'honest' compared to traditional media: after all, the traditional consumer loves and demands honesty, and has no hidden agenda. The accusations levelled at Mia Rose however suggest that this is not the case.

The truth is that whoever creates its content, a degree of what we might describe as deception is inherent in all media, whatever its mode, and that in fact, there is even more opportunity in free and easy, interactive, consumer-created media for this deception. The Mia Rose case illustrates the effect that the removal of the line between consumer and content creator can cause: the creator can easily pose as a humble consumer - that's the corollary to the fact that the interactive media consumer can easily also be a content creator. It's central too to the nature of most interactive media that a single person can have an infinite number of different digital identities (real or otherwise). No truth in consumer-created content is necessarily the whole truth, if even the truth at all. Every single media consumer now has the potential to be multiple content creators, and to be on a level with all other content creators. With that potential have come the agenda that are universal to all content creators: not just the desire for audience, but also that which often drives it: the desire for advertising revenue. Services such as Google's AdSense for publishers have made it very easy for any creator of online content to generate advertising revenue from it. For the interactive media consumer, innocence is a fond memory; the interactive media consumer has come of age.

And there's certainly no going back; this is not a passing fad. There is nothing like the economics of an advertising industry in which the number of advertisers potentially matches the number of consumers to sustain the rate of growth of content production. This growth will in turn sustain the advertising industry. So long as the necessary infrastructure - like online storage space and interactive media services - remains in place, the only limit here that I can think of is the number of people in the world with access to the internet.

An interesting side-effect of this evolution in the media I think will be an increase in the importance of the function of branding to lend credibility to a content creator; while at the same time, branding's capacity for this function will deteriorate, as branding becomes cheaper and easier. Those brand values - i.e. brand image attributes - that are associated with moral integrity, trustworthiness or (somewhat paradoxically) innocence will become even more valuable than at present. Once again, Google, who continue to do a lot to drive the evolution of media, springs to mind, with their slogan: 'Don't be evil'.

Mia Rose on YouTube
Blogger
MySpace
Google AdSense for publishers