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New Media
Whatever "new media" is at the time, this is where I cover it.
Monday, November 05, 2007
Even snackers eat full meals
Kevin Dugan tagged me on the MediaSnackers meme, a concept I’ve been digesting (pun fully intended) before juping into well-covered territory. The question: How do you respect MediaSnackers?
By way of background, Jeremiah Owyang started the meme on October 24 by presenting the video from the MediaSnackers site and offering a terse definition:
What’s a mediasnacker? Folks who consume small bits of information, data or entertainment when, where, and how they want.
I’ve now read at least 15 posts contributing to the meme, subscribed to the MediaSnackers feed, watched several related videos...basically, I’ve gorged on snacks. Here are some observations that don’t duplicate too much what’s already been said.
What are MediaSnackers snacking on?
There seems to be a growing body of evidence to suggest that consumer-generated content (CGM)—particularly video—doesn’t have all that much reach. Sure, there are some CGM videos that attracted tens and hundreds of thousands—even millions—of views. These tend to be things like laughing babies, otters holding hands, and thelike. But by and large, the typical YouTube video has gets just a few views, mainly from friends, family, and people searching for videos on just that topic. What typically gets the most views? Professionally produced and, often, copyrighted material.
There is, therefore, plenty of room for organizations wanting to reach snackers to create snack-size content.
I don’t mean to suggest that there’s no value in the videos that get 400 views—if the right 400 people are viewing them. My choice of the number “400” is not arbitrary. It’s based on Shel Israel’s assertion that…
...the Internet is being structured around small circles of friends, usually containing no more than 400 people. There are millions of these global neighbourhoods. In the not too distant future, there will be 10s of millions of them and they, by definition, will be self-governed. They will have a great deal of influence iover what people buy, watch, listen to and read. They will influence where we travel, how we get there and where we stay. They will determine, in some cases, who will get elected.
Shel’s dead on with this. Most of the videos I watch these days are the ones my Facebook friends are posting; I see them when I do my twice-daily scroll through the my Facebook feed. As a result, I see mostly videos that my friends are recommending and sharing, as well as some they are producing. There’s a real challenge ahead for organizations to figure out how to reach these micro-communities with content they’ll want to share without disrespecting and alienating them. (I do expect a sizable part of the marketing and PR profession do do one hell of a job disrespecting and alienating them.)
One final point that a couple people have made but deserves repeating: How well are snackers digesting what they consume? That is, will a call to action be effective in snack-sized content? What is message retention like? I don’t have answers to these questions, but it sounds like a nifty bit of research for SNCR to consider.
Does anyone snack full time?
No. Even people who would classify themselves as Media Snackers have full meals, and probably do so more than they’d care to admit. Given media snacks are, by definition, small, a full meal would be traditional content.
I have two kids—26 and 18—and they both fit the definition of snackers. My son leaves various videos that he wants me to watch open on websites on my computer. My daughter samples music from a variety of sites. Yet both of them go to the movies. Both of them watch full-length TV shows—and if it’s an episode they’ve been waiting for (like the final installment of the three-part South Park “Imaginationland” arc for my son or the finale of “America’s Next Top Model” for my daughter), they’ll even watch it in real time, commercials and all. My daughter will instantly grab the latest Chuck Palahniuk book as soon as it comes out. They go to the movies. They read print magazines (but not the newspaper...except for the comics).
You can probably continue to reach snackers through full-meal media.
Is every snack a snack?
My wife often orders two appetizers to serve as her main course, and she’s hardly the only person to do this. The question, then, is when does a snack cease to be a snack?
If I watch a two-minute video the link to which somebody has emailed me, it’s a snack. If it leads me to find related videos, videos by the same producer, websites that address the issues raised in the video and otherwise consume related content resulting from focused research, then I’m no longer snacking. I’ve assembled a meal from smaller portions.
It is probably worth somebody’s effort to figure out how to identify common memes and engage through the meme rather than (or in addition to) the individual bite-sized nugget of content.
Are young people the only media snackers?
Of course not. I’ve always gotten a kick out of the “Ask a Ninja” special delivery episode titled, “What is Podcasting?” The Ninja says, “People under the age of 12 have asked the Ninja, ‘What is podcasting?’” Cute, but wrong, since Arbitron research suggests that most podcast listeners are somewhere in their late 30s or early 40s. Why? Because the producers of most podcasts are generating content that is of most interest to that group.
Media snacks didn’t generally exist before the whole Web 2.0 thing kicked into gear, so us older folks didn’t have snacks to consume. But it’s a mistake to assume that only the IM generation (born after 1980) are embracing this kind of content. Now that it’s available, everyone is taking advantage of it. If the younger generation has an edge, it’s figuring out how to consume snacks when they’re not tethered to a computer.
How do I respect media snackers?
Like everyone else who has answered this question, I respect media snackers in a number of ways—none of which were concentrated, focused attempts to appeal to snackers. It has all just been adoption of the media that work best to do what I want to do. These include…
- Embracing Twitter and Jaiku.
- Tapping into services like Jott and Utterz that make it easy to produce quick, snack-sized morsels.
- Blogging. Sure, some of my posts are long, but none are as long as your average Atlantic Monthly feature.
- Photo sharing with Flickr
- Contributing at least a little to the video world on YouTube
- I’ve created a widget for my blog and have several widgets on my blog, making it easy for visitors to consume content other than mine in small portions
There are probably other things I do that accommodate snackers, who do deserve attention. On the other hand, as Kevin Dugan points out, Neville and I produce a podcast that runs an hour twice each week, which has a healthy community of listeners and participants. It’s a mistake to assume someone is exclusively a snacker.
It’s probably past time for tagging anyone else on this meme—I’m not even sure I know anybody who hasn’t already been tagged. But comments, as always, are welcome. (Comments are, after all, snack-sized bits of content!)
Marketing • Media • New Media • Social Media • Video • (1) Comments • (0) Trackbacks • Permalink
Sunday, July 29, 2007
Facebook: The newest site for companies to block
Neville Hobson writes that more than two-thirds of UK companies are blocking employee access to Facebook and similar sites based on the fear that employees will waste time rather than get their work done. (This according to according to a study reported in the Daily Telegraph.
I wish I could say I was surprised by this, but I was expecting it. The report does, however, afford me the opportunity to list the problems I have with blocking employee access to anything on the web, an exercise I haven’t undertaken here in some time. Here goes:
- The productivity myth—Are employees really wasting time? Has anybody in the organization actually measured? Or is work getting done, is it getting done on time, and is it quality work? Most employees will not risk their jobs to screw around online. If they spend an hour online for non-work-related purposes, they’ll put in an extra hour to get the job done. That hour may be spent doing work at home, but on the other hand, employees are routinely expected to take work home with them. That’s the nature of work-life integration: If you expect me to do work at home, then I expect the employer to tolerate me engaging in non-work activities at work. The measure of productivity is the amount of output created.
- The statistics prove it’s a productivity issue—Statistics from companies that sell blocking software is suspect, and that’s a charitable characterization. The number of hours an average employee spends surfing (based on more questionable research) is multiplied by the number of employees, and the result is multiplied by an average hourly pay rate to come up with a terrifying “lost productivity” figure. You have to wonder how all that lost productivity can be reconciled against Bureau of Labor Statistics analysis showing producitivity continues to grow. These “studies” don’t account for the extra time an employee puts in to compensate for the time spent online, or the regular workload he takes home with him. They’re just designed to frighten executives into buying their products.
- There is no business value in Facebook or similar social networks—That’s what they said about the web. Remember when nobody could have web access without special dispensation from a member of the executive team, in writing? Then it was message boards. Then instant messaging. It took me less than 30 seconds to find Facebook groups on accounting, engineering, human resources and geology (I once worked for an oil company where good geologists were in high demand).
- We have to—it’s a legal issue—Company lawyers objected to email when it was new, fearing that email made it too easy to inadvertently (or intentionally) leak proprietary information. Imagine work without email today. There is a tendency among lawyers to fear new technologies. They had the same worries about fax machines, photocopiers, and even the telephone. Instant Messaging raised legal concerns, but today more than half of U.S. workers use IM for work-related purposes.
- Blocking access is the way to deal with abuse—Companies seeking to build an engaged workforce turn around an send a message to all employees that says, “We don’t trust any of you as far as we can throw you.” Since engagement requires trust, this is an engagement-killing move. It also can affect business. At one company, instant messaging was shut down when federal requirements for IM record-keeping went into effect; the move was made with no research to determine how important IM had become to the conduct of day-to-day business in this company. At some companies (IBM and Raytheon come to mind), switching off IM would cripple the business. At another company, implementing web filtering software suddenly denied access to websites that hundreds of employees used to do their work. Sites needed to obtain data could not be made available for weeks, due to a convuluted IT process, even though employees needed them immediately. At one healthcare company, all blogs are blocked based on the belief that blogs contain no valuable content, despite the presence of thousands of healthcare-related blogs, including influential ones like Eye on FDA, for example, that could provide a lot of employees with valuable intelligence.
The solution is simple: Establish and communicate policies governing what employees can and cannot do online. The policies should recognize that business value can accrue from these activities and that some personal activities are acceptable, assuming it’s not interfering with the ability to get work done. Supervisors should be trained to identify abuse so that policies are enforced by exception.
A CEO once proudly told me he had invested half a million dollars in hardware and software to block employees from visiting pornographic websites. When I wondered if that money might have better been invested in customer service, he bristled: “It is inappropriate for employees to view pornography in the workplace.”
“Of course it’s not,” I said. “So you have people stationed at every company entrance checking purses and briefcases for printed porn?”
“Don’t be stupid,” he told me. “That’s a supervisor’s job.”
I have never been able to understand why that changes when the delivery channel happens to be technology-based. It’s simple: Supervisor detects declining performance in an employee on her staff. She sees he’s spending a lot of time behind closed doors. She asks IT to check his logs and finds he’s spending six hours a day on social networks (or porn sites or gambling sites or shopping sites or whatever). She disciplines the employee. Word spreads that an employee was discliplined (or even fired) for violating the policy, an important reinforcement since culture is driven by reward and recognition.
As for Facebook and other social networks, I have no doubt that 12-24 months from now, companies will have figured out how these resources apply to business, the restrictions will have been lifted, and policies enacted. At the same time, new restrictions will be introduced to block whatever comes next.
Business • Internal • New Media • Social Media • Technology • (13) Comments • (2) Trackbacks • Permalink
Saturday, April 14, 2007
MSM live blogging via Twitter
I’ve seen some live blogging via Twitter, folks at conferences commenting on what the speakers are saying. But plans by the executive producer of a new Fox TV series to Twitter updates during the premier of ”Drive” may be the first such use of the channel by a mainstream media outlet. Greg Yaitanes, who also directed the first episode of the action-adventure series, says in a tweet, “Gonna be twittering for the east coast from fox lot and then over to Nathan’s house for a premiere party/live twitter commentary - tune in!” (Nathan is Nathan Fillion, star of the series as well as the lead in the late, great “Firefly.")
Fox’s website even has a page dedicated to the planned live blogging, er, Twittering, umm, tweeting…
I was alerted to Yaitanes’ plans by Denise, host of the Home Spa Goddess blog and podcast, who is a listener to For Immediate Release. We’ll play her audio comment on Monday’s show, but since “Drive” debuts on Sunday, it’s worth posting the informationn now.
A few people have blogged this, but not too many, suggesting the word hasn’t really spread much. Chris Thilk (a listener to FIR) notes on his Movie Marketing Madness blog:
Twitter is a great potential tool to use if you don’t want to create an all-out, RSS-enabled corporate site/blog. Imagine if Warner Bros., to pick a studio at random, setup its own Twitter feed it could use to send out updates to its fans on new posters, website updates, acquisition news and just about anything else. It could just include a short tweet with a link back to the studio’s site.
Thilk’s ideas open up a whole range of Twitter uses for non-entertainment properties, too. It could even be used for regular updates during an organizational crisis. I expect Twitter will ultimately move well beyond the fairly lame application of “What are you doing right now?”
If you’re interested in following Yaitanes’ tweets during the premiere, the account is at www.twitter.com/foxdrive.
New Media • Social Media • Social Networking • Twitter • (3) Comments • Permalink
Tuesday, April 10, 2007
Coordinates of a genocide
A lot of people have been putting in a lot of time over the last few years trying to raise awareness about the genoice occuring in Darfur. They have been greeted with mostly apathy. Now, Google has perhaps found a way to heighten that awareness and drive home the horror of what’s been taking place in this remote part of the world (remote, that is, from an American perspective).
Google Earth now features red flame icons over Darfur, and mousing over each one produces information about the death and destruction that has been the daily portion for people who live there. Zoom in and the flames spread out, showing even more destruction, and satellite images give you a close-up bird’s-eye view of the devastation.
Produced in cooperation with the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, the project is an eye-opening look at how something as simple as a map can become a powerful communication tool in the interactive, online world.
More here.
Wednesday, March 07, 2007
At the New Communications Forum
I’m in Las Vegas, but what happens here definitely won’t stay here. I’ll blog pretty regularly from the New Communications Forum, which begins this morning with pre-conference sessions, two in the morning and two (including the one I’m conducting on podcasting) in the afternoon. The conference proper gets underway tomorrow with a keynote by David Weinberbger. Among the sessions I’m anxious to attend:
- Jeffrey Treem, from Edelman‘s Change and Employee Engagement Group, on how top companies are using social media to engage employees
- John Cass and Zane Safrit on the role an organization’s culture plays on the adoption of social media for internal communications
- Katie Payne on measuring social media’s impact
- A panel discussion on the social meia press release moderated by Chris Heuer and featuring Todd Defren, Brian Solis, Tom Foremski, and Laura Sturaitis.
- David Parmet moderating a panel on managing crisis communications in the blogosphere
- Jeff DeCagna on applying Web 2.0 capabilities as a foundation for innovation
- Linda Zimmer, author of the “Businss Communicators of Second Life,” on (what else?) Second Life.
- JD Lasica on citizen-generated video
- Jen McClure, executive director of the Society for New Communication Research, moderating Steve Crescenzo (he who cannot be moderated) and Jeremy Wright for the presentation of “Winners and Sinners.” This one should be a hoot.
There are other great sessions and speakers, but with multiple tracks, you just can’t get to them all. But since my wrap-up keynote is supposed to provide an overview of the conference, I need to do my best to get to as many as possible, which should result in a flurry of posts on what I’ve heard here.
Attendance is well over 350, and things kick off in 45 minutes. Stand by…
Monday, February 19, 2007
Dell channels Digg to enter the world of co-creation
I have to confess that I’ve had my doubts about Digg. I love the idea of people voting on the most interesting and important stories to determine their rank, but just, who are these one-percenters who submit items and ten-percenters who vote on them? And who reads Digg at all? Certainly it’s a tiny minority of the online population, not like the readership of Wikipedia voting on the most interesting encyclopedia entries. And there has been enough chatter about people being paid to submit articles to throw Digg’s value further into doubt.
But the idea rocks, and now Dell Computers has done something with it that makes sense. Lionel Menchaca, Dell’s digital media manager, gave me early notice on Friday that Dell’s IdeaStorm was set to launch, but I was just too flat-out busy to blog it. It has since gone live and several blogs have covered it, but I still want to weigh in with a few thoughts. (Lionel blogged the launch on Direct2Dell, by the way.)
The idea behind IdeaStorm is a sort of mashup between Digg and a message board. Anyone (including employees) can submit ideas to share with Dell, from product and feature requests to changes in policies. People who visit the site then vote on the ideas, creating a ranking of the most popular ideas. visitors can also comment on each idea. This represents a masterful way to extend a conversation with your publics—at least, it’ll be masterful if we see Dell adopt some of the most popular ideas.
Over on his blog, Jeremiah Owyang suggests IdeaStorm “nods to Johnathan Schwartz’s mantra that ‘intranets are anachronisms.’ The site, Jeremiah contends, puts the company and its customers in a real-time feedback loop that should speed product development. That’s true, but I don’t think it spells the end for intranets. I still don’t see how I could use it to enroll in my benefits, conduct a performance evaluation, check the cafeteria menu, find the contact information of an employee in Bangkok or check the company’s maternity leave policy. But it certainly could represent a new communication paradigm for company/customer relations (and I don’t employ the overused word paradigm lightly).
The utility of something like IdeaStorm has applications in just about every industry and business. Consider these off-the-top-of-my-head ideas, for example:
- General Motors’ Fastlane blog is, according to Vice Chairman and principal blogger Bob Lutz, a means of obtaining unfiltered feedback from the most passionate of auto enthusiasts. Lutz says the intelligence gained from the blog is informing product decisions. Imagine the kind of product feedback Lutz could get from something like IdeaStorm.
- Among other uses, a company like Baskin Robbins or Ben & Jerry’s could collaborate with customers to identify new ice cream flavors.
- Airlines could let passengers contribute posts about the most important attributes of service while flying, helping companies like United decide that maybe, just maybe, a snack is important enough to be a deciding factor in which airline to fly.
- Employees (using an intranet) could submit and vote on the most important elements of a benefits package, helping the company tailor a package that meets employee needs, attracts new employees, but also holds the line on benefits costs.
The reason the IdeaStorm concept is so potent is because the audience it attracts—unlike Digg—could represent a significant portion (maybe even a majority) of a company’s customers or other constituency. By way of example, the top post at IdeaStorm right now, which suggests free installation of the top three Linux versions on all Dell PCs, has received 15,603 votes. In the meantime, the story with the most votes on Digg’s home page, about the announced merger of XM and Sirius Radio, has garnered 772 votes.
If you had the opportunity to tell a company that matters to you what it should be doing better—and then see how other customers feel about your idea—wouldn’t you? And wouldn’t you vote on an idea you loved if it meant better products or service from a company you rely on?
Much of the blogosphere is focusing on the notion IdeaStorm represents simple copy-catting, but, like Jeremiah, I think they’re missing the point. From where I sit, Dell is adapting, not copying, an idea to business that could alter both customer perceptions of the organizaton and the way it designs and develops products. While overtly recognizing Digg for the inspiration, Dell is also entering into co-creation in its purest form.
Incidentally, oncurrent with the launch of IdeaStorm, Dell opened StudioDell, which in addition to offering Dell-produced videos allows customers to upload their video testimonials. You can also download and share videos from the site. It’s a kind of Dell-specific YouTube.
Update: Constantin Basturea points out that Dell’s IdeaStorm uses CrispyNews as its back-end. Says Constantin, “The URL (which redirects to dellideastorm.com) is dell.crispynews.com." That’s the same service that Constanin uses for the PR ranking service you can see by clicking “Add to New PR” above each of this blog’s entries.
New Media • Participatory communication • (2) Comments • Permalink
Tuesday, February 13, 2007
SNCR needs your help
People who read this blog by and large care about social media. More to the point, they care about how effectively organizations use social media, how well they integrate it into their strategies, how well they understand its wholesale differences from tradtitional, managed, controlled messages. In order to enter the social media space with candor and authenticity, as a partner in the conversation, organizations need research, case studies, solid numbers. Armed with this kind of evidence and data, it becomes easier to make the case to senior leaders who have not engaged in the social media space and who, frankly, are confounded and frightened by it.
The Society for New Communication Research was formed based on the absence of such research. The leading communication associations (and I’m a dedicated, long-time member of one of them) have research arms that haven’t, for whatever reason, seen fit to tackle substantive research focusing on social media. Out of frustration and based on our enlightened self-interest, a number of us came together to create SNCR to provide the profession with the research needed to accelerate business’ intelligent and appropriate entree into the blogosphere, the podosphere, social networks, and other dimensions of social media.
Conducting this research isn’t free. It isn’t even cheap. SNCR has a few activities that raise money, but the New Communications Forum is the annual event—at this point—on which SNCR most relies. In order to raise the NewComm Forum’s profile, SNCR partnered with Lawrence Ragan Communications, a partnership I completely encouraged and completely endorse. Ragan has a reputation in corporate communication circles. They also have a monster marketing capability. The partnership is already paying off with registrations far ahead of where they were at the same time last year.
But the arrangement pays SNCR only for registrations that come through the SNCR site at http://www.newcommforum.com.
I definitely have divided loyalties. I have worked closely with Ragan for many years, and will continue to do so. The Ragan team is terrific. I want Ragan to succeed, to make piles of money they can invest in more professional development for the communications profession. And I have no doubt Ragan will do extremely well on the NewComm Forum.
I am more concerned about SNCR. Through Ragan’s marketing efforts, the company is bound to meet and even exceed its goals. That does not have to happen at SNCR’s expense. Those of you who are not on Ragan’s mailing list but who support SNCR’s goals—who stand to benefit from the research SNCR will conduct—should register thorugh the SNCR site and boost the society’s share of regisrations. And if you’ haven’t considered attending the Forum, reconsider. Take a look at the speaker lineup and the topics. Consider the people you will meet, the connections you’ll make.
So, at the risk of pissing off my very good friends at Ragan, I’m imploring you to attend the Forum and register through http://www.newcommforum.com. You’ll get more out of the Forum than you believe is possible (I know, I’ve been to the first two), and you’ll support efforts that will pay you back in multiples.
Pitch over.