Learn the ropes from Iain Dale, who’s re-writing the broadcaster’s rule-book

We talk to Iain Dale and ask him - is 18 Doughty Street the biggest online-only TV channel in the world?

A-list bloggers reading this story might imagine that Microsoft’s Channel9 with millions of visitors a month watching enormous amounts of video is easily the biggest exclusively-Internet TV station (that is, of course, if you are prepared to call Channel9 a TV station, or if you don’t call it a videoblog or a vlog instead).

Want to know more?

Check out the BBC News website coverage of Dale's new venture

Oh, and you'd better be quick, because according to Dale, the EU is already threatening to shut his channel (and any others like it) down!

Here's our Podcast of the interview with Iain Dale:

Download iain_dale_podcast1.mp3

But what if we told you that there’s an online-only station with far more video production resources, far more content and far more political power and potential audience size, and that it isn’t even based in the US?

Here are some basic facts about a new web TV powerhouse:

• 18 Doughty Street is an online political TV channel in the UK
• It’s fronted by Iain Dale, the most popular political blogger in the UK
• It’s got more resources behind it than any other Internet-only TV channel
• It has four hours of programming four times a week on weekday nights
• It’s a mixture of live conversation and pre-recorded programmes

Here are just some of the highlights of our conversation with Ian Dale (listen to the podcast to hear all the gory details):

What is 18 Doughty Street? An Internet phenomenon or a TV Channel?

When Dale talks about 18 Doughty Street and where it’s heading, his reference points aren’t Scoble and Channel9 but traditional broadcasting networks like the BBC, ITV and Sky-TV (for those in the US, read NBC, ABC, CBS, Fox and CNN, who all fit Dale’s model equally well).

In fact when we asked him about Channel 9, he’d never even heard of it – (we were so shocked to learn this that we forgot to ask him about RocketBoom, which is even more popular).

Because we were ‘thinking Internet’ and Dale was ‘thinking TV’ this conversation was a mutual discovery process - Dale was surprised by how surprised we were by the scale of his operation.

This is because he compares his own ‘resources to programming content creation ratio’ to that of the BBC, which might call upon the services of hundreds of people to produce just one single hour of programming (although some ‘ultra low budget’ BBC political shows might ‘only’ require a mere 20 to 30 professionals to put them together).

So maybe that’s why Dale hasn’t realised that he's running what is currently the biggest online-only TV entity in the world – when he thinks about 18 Doughty street, as far as the blogosphere is concerned, he’s not comparing apples with apples (although, to give him his due, as you’ll hear in the podcast, he has no qualms about claiming to be running the biggest online political TV channel, and we’re certain he’s bound to know much more about political TV than we do).

How is it funded?

Tory entrepreneur Stephan Shakespeare, the  guy behind ‘YouGov’ put up a six figure sum (maybe seven figures in dollars, we didn’t ask) to get the channel up and running and to keep it there for the first year.

Alongside Dale and Shakespeare is Tim Montgomery, the man behind ‘Conservative home’.

What are they up to?

Instead of the classic tough ‘newsroom’ style of questioning, putting the interviewee on the spot and grilling them until they squirm, Dale opts for a much more relaxed, chat-show style.

The medium really is the message here because something new does seem to emerge in these more conversational encounters.

There’s a particularly revealing (one and a quarter hours long) chat with Shami Chakrabarti from human rights defenders Liberty who, as Dale points out, usually only gets 2 or 3 minutes to present her case – and an even more surprising response from the decidedly Conservative audience who emailed the program afterwards to say how refreshing they found the program. (Here's a direct link to the interview on 18 Doughty Street's Vox politics show).

The guests get room to breathe and it doesn’t, despite the ‘Daytime TV’ format – dumb things down.

Quite the opposite in fact – the issues tend to get the time they deserve and the guests aren’t as defensive and tend to come across as real people rather than ciphers for an ideological position.

The business strategy – get ready for TV migration

The word from Dale himself was more business-focused – he was looking to get the channel up and running before UK telecoms giants BT and NTL start migrating Internet-only TV channels to 'set-top boxes' (can someone update us on any such plans or speculations?) so although 18 Doughty Street may not be resourced-up like Fox TV, these guys have their sights set on the set-top in the living room, not just the laptop in the study.

But before going mainstream, they are looking to corral ‘influentials’ as a core audience – this seems to be working because, he tells us, at the recent Tory party conference – despite comparatively small initial viewing figures, everyone he spoke to among this select but sizeable gathering of centre-right political power-brokers already knew about the channel and had already tuned in.

Future business models

With such a bespoke audience profile, 18 Doughty Street may have what he believes is an advertiser’s dream and he will be looking at a range of funding models from advertising to product placement and sponsorship.

So it’s a weird hybrid - how did he resource it?

He thought at the outset that they’d need to get traditional broadcast production staff on-board – seeing as he and his fellow founders had only ever had experience in front of the camera rather than behind it.

But they soon found that they were having problems getting these broadcasting professionals to ‘get with the program’ because these stick-in-the mud types didn’t like the fact that Dale and Co. were breaking so many broadcast TV ‘rules’.

But Dale and his team went ahead and broke the rules anyway

What you need, Dale now believes, is a ‘can-do’ attitude. No-one has done this ‘online political TV thing’ before, so you don’t need to feel that you should be doing things the way that ‘The TV Professionals’ do it.

That goes for formats too

The shows have a 'daytime TV' look and feel which - as you might imagine - gives the initial impression that the whole thing might be somewhat superficial, but Dale’s lifelong immersion in the political news ferment ensures that discussions held in the quite cosy-looking living room setting actually probe deeply into the issues as the participants have the time to develop arguments and allow conversations to find their own way.

In fact, the whole thing started off with more structured programming but they soon found that people preferred the live (yes, that’s right, live, unlike Channel9 which is all recorded video) less structured conversational programming.

Although Dale doesn’t know Scoble, he’s undoubtedly speaking the same language, and for all we know, if they ever met, they would probably both find that they had a great deal to learn from one another.

Those are the broadcast issues – what about the website?

Dale is none too happy with the usability of the website – for one thing, he thinks not enough people are downloading shows after those shows have ‘gone out live’ because they can't work out how to find them on the website. 

How are they using interactivity?

Dale is currently using audience feedback to drive the programming schedule and though this is at an early stage, he’s aiming to put together an audience panel which will – one day soon, he hopes – choose the guests and also choose the programming content on the day that it goes out live.

This is pretty radical stuff: remember this is political TV, so ‘audience democracy’ in any new shape or form is undoubtedly going to attract attention from the 'old guard', although it remains to be seen as to whether it actually adds to the long term attractiveness or influence-impact of the site.   

What are the resources?

This is an operation on an altogether bigger scale than the ‘one geek, a bedroom and a camcorder’ model that characterises typical YouTube contributors and most of the Vlogosphere.

Dale has 12 dedicated staff and a six figure start-up budget working full time to produce four hours of live political programming four times a week.

In the podcast Dale also offers his views on:

• How broadcasters have dumbed down political programming
• How the 18DoughtyStreet audience (and his relationship with it) has developed since launch
• More about their experiments with programming formats
• What they’ve learned
• Where they’re headed next with their programming
• The team’s steep learning curve and the mindset you need to make this work
• Some audience statistics
• How they’ve used Youtube
• Their plans for the website and their current wishlist.

The blogosphere's startups mogul is under house arrest for blog crimes he says he didn't commit

A case of mistaken identity?

Who is really responsible for stopping Mike Arrington leaving his house (to go to parties and have conversations he can safely blog about)?

The facts:

• Arrington wants to be rich and famous (according to the Wall Street Journal )
• He writes (with his team, working at his stable of news websites, lead by TechCrunch ) about products and services which crop up in conversations he's having with Web 2.0 start-ups
• He believes that Web 2.0 represents a revolution in business and media
• He believes that blogs are a source of honest and accurate news
• He doesn't believe that mainstream media (MSM) are honest or accurate
• He believes that blogs and Web 2.0 is the future and that mainstream media is dead
• He invests (and helps other venture capitalists invest) in Web 2.0 start-ups

Interview: Bruce Irvine

Here is the Journal of Social Media's first Podcast

It's an extremely enlightenening (unless, unlike us, you already know everything there is to know about the inner workings of the 'mind of the blogosphere', assuming it has one) three way conversation between the journal's founders (Stephen Fitzpatrick and Peter Friedman) and Bruce Irvine of the Grubb Institute, where we roam into the stormy but mostly uncharted waters which lie somewhere between where 'conventional blogging' (whatever that is) ends and a strange new monster (which seems to be a poorly understood combination of blogging, journalism, business and Web 2.0) lurks.

It contains:

Something unintentional which can occasionally be heard in the background which sounds irritatingly like a frenetic squirrell

Peter Friedman sounding as if he is being extremely disrespectful towards Mike Arrington (when in fact, as he makes clear he is actually being sympathetic with Mike's predicament, which seems to have far more wide-ranging implications for the future of business and journalism than 'whether Mike will ever be able to go to a party again')

Download bruce_on_arrington3.mp3

The conflict

How do these convictions and behaviours produce conflict?

The MSM are responding to Arrington's attacks on them by scrutinising his blogging about start-ups in order to try to discover examples of any failure to disclose vested interests.

When he attends events and has conversations with prospective investments i.e., web 2.0 start-ups which he intends to write about, he is now finding that he is coming under attack for having failed to write about them.

The sheer volume of attention his success is generating is now threatening to undermine his natural support base amongst the Web 2.0 start-up, investment and blogging communities.

The issues

What happens when business and blogging get together and succeed in reaching a large audience?

This turns the blogger into an institution, with a new and critical set of social relationships between the bloggers, business, media, audiences and the conversations they are blogging about.

What does this mean for business bloggers?

If you become a really successful blogger, you're probably going to become a business.

At this point, you're also going to become a part of the MSM. 

So what really changes?

Crucially it's not just the blogger's relationship with the MSM that changes as things develop: as Arrington is discovering, there's also a crucial change in the blogger's relationship with the blogosphere itself.

Mike Arrington thinks it's the MSM who are persecuting him, but he may have more to fear from the blogosphere as he acquires more and more of the very characteristics that hitherto defined their 'enemy'.

What are the forces which seem to be driving the blogosphere, Mike Arrington and the MSM into a three-way head-on collision?

Wasn't business blogging supposed to lead to positive changes like transparency, engagement and a more democratic business and media environment?

Doesn't this whole thing look like yet another fundamentalist battle zone? 

The hidden issues

In search of some way of reconciling the warring factions (i.e., Arrington, his audience and his adversaries) we called on a leading psycho-social expert to offer his perspective.

Bruce Irvine, is a clinical psychologist specializing in organisational problems who also happens to be Director of the Grubb Institute of Human Behavior.

Bruce shares with us some thoughts about what can happen when competing social groups each claim to have a monopoly on virtue and truth.

He challenges our assumptions about so-called 'revolutionary movements' like the blogosphere.

He discusses how these kinds of high-profile dramatic conflicts have a powerful tendency to work against each party's aspirations and prevent social change from occurring.

Need to get a fix on where we're coming from?

Our aim is to address some of the really tough questions about 'social media' and stimulate conversations about them:

What kind of questions?

For instance:

• What the hell is social media, really?
• Has anything actually changed?
• Is there actually a difference between social media and any other kind of media?
• Is there such a thing as anti-social media?
• If something important is happening – what should we do about it?

THE CONVERSATION BOX

Where we practice what we preach

This page is a good example of a problem the Social Media Lab is really interested in tackling.

We’ve been wondering for a while if people (including us) have been getting online communications completely wrong.

Conversations not messages? Ha!

It is tempting to imagine that once printed material has made the journey from boring old pieces of paper or a word file to this fabulously sexy medium, it will suddenly become easier to read and easier to understand and that your corporate voice will magically become more credible, more accessible and more exciting.

We don't think these assumptions bear close scrutiny.

Usability is not enough

We know that we aren't the only sceptics because usability people have been banging on about these problems since before the web began.

But unlike usability experts, we don't think that 'getting the usability right' is good enough.

Why not?

The text on the left of this sidebar, for instance, has pretty good usability.

It's very structured, clear and 'skimmable' which makes it quite accessible.

It's also expressed in a corporate voice that is coherent, focussed, thematically consistent, question-based and problem-oriented, which makes it potentially useful, although it has an unforgivable lack of hyperlinks (our excuse is - we're still working on them).

So, what’s missing?

If we are concerned with the Social part of Social Media, can we still spot something lacking in material like this, no matter how 'fit for purpose' it might be (even once we've put in all the useful hyperlinks we can think of)?

We don't mean something that can be fixed by 'jazzing it up' - by, for example, interspersing or overlaying eye-popping graphics, or inserting witty but otherwise redundant aphorisms into the body copy.

The social is missing

That’s because we don't think that 'socialising' the corporate voice should require that we undermine the usability of printed content or impose unacceptable 'creativity overheads' on authors or publishers.

We think that the corporate voice, once it goes online, finds itself (and is found by many readers) in an uprecedentedly busy, unpredictable and dynamic (i.e social) environment.

Radical recontextualistion

The context that the visitor is coming from and the experience that the reader has had - immediately prior to arriving at this web page - is almost impossible to nail down.

If they have found a page from your website on Google, they may never have seen your home page or any other page on your site.

Everything you have done on the rest of your website to close down ambiguities and make that one page fit neatly into the context of who you are and what you do can no longer be relied upon to deliver your corporate voice and make the things you have to say mean what you meant them to say.

So, despite the fact that some of the things you have to say are 'just functional' and thus 'inevitably boring' - such as a page like this one that's a typical 'who we are and what we do' statement - it's important to see if there might possibly be a treatment (and we are convinced that there is one) which we can apply to that voice on any web page which will make it much less likely that the person finding that page on Google will regret wasting their time trying to work out why they should be reading it.

Wondering how to do it?

We think a ‘CONVERSATION BOX’ like this might be a step in the right direction.

Why do we think these questions are important?

Because, if the rules of the game have changed, and media is going to be participative, deliberative and social from now on, then this is going to affect:

• Our lives and our work
• Government and politics
• Business and media
• Management, marketing and communications

in ways that we currently don't understand.

So who are we talking to?

We're aiming to reach out to audiences that in the past haven't had much to do with each other.

But we think it's about time that they did and we're intending to make sure that they do.

Audience One – Communications professionals

In particular we're going to be engaging with social media evangelists and sceptics amongst:

• Bloggers
• Professional journalists
• Broadcasters
• Marketeers and PRs

Audience Two – Human behaviour specialists

And because media is now social, perhaps it's about time we tried to introduce real rigour and genuine insights into our conversations about the social - rather than just the media - dimension of social media.

So we're going to be engaging with professional analysts of social behaviour and social communication including:

• Anthropologists (social and cultural)
• Psychologists (social and organisational)
• Philosophers
• Sociologists

Audience Three – CEOs and other Senior Executives, CIOs and management gurus

And because every company will soon be operating in a social media environment - whether they like it or not - we're going to get:

• Leading business school thinkers
• C-level management in key industries knowledge-based, high-tech and media
• prime movers in NGO and campaigning organisations, the public sector and government

involved so that this conversation is more than a media scrum or academic seminar. 

Audience Four – The Investment community

Now we shouldn't have to give compelling reasons for why we'll be talking to these guys, not after October 9th, 2006

• Venture Capitalists
• Financial Analysts

Audience Five – Human Resources Professionals

The impact of social media upon human resourcing may only become clear if and when so-called 'bubble behaviours' go mainstream.

Now if that point arrives then very large numbers of people in communications and management may need to be either completely retrained or recruited from a near-to-non existent talent-pool.

That's why we will also be reaching out now to those people involved in:

• Recruitment
• Training
• Industrial Relations
• Health and Safety

Because we can't wait till if and then to talk about what we think the issues actually are.

So who's behind this?

The Journal of Social Media editors are Peter Friedman and Stephen Fitzpatrick (also prime movers behind the Social Media Lab)

Contributing editors include Chris Oliver, Ken Eisold, Jon Stokes, Bruce Irvine, Colin Quine, John Bazalgette, Reenee Singh, Jenny Harris, Alan Rowan.

Thom McIntosh who's responsibe for user-experience design and technical support is an associate of the Social Media Lab, the organisation sponsoring the Journal of Social Media.

So what's the Social Media Lab?

Well, the Social Media Lab itself is a research facility that provides research and development services to organisations seeking to formulate socially engaged communications responses.

There's a section of the site completely devoted to the Social Media Lab, its mission and its history as well as interviews with social media lab people, should you wish to learn more.

Repositioning a government department as a social media business. Stephen Fitzpatrick i/view part six.

Part six of the interview with Stephen Fitzpatrick

M: You've talked a lot about how things didn’t work out - are there any examples you can give where you've managed to get things done - recently?

SF: Well, we’ve actually spent the last six months planning and preparing for the launch of the SMJ and getting people on the network up to speed with how they can contribute.

We’ve also conducted a couple of draining research and development work with the SML.

And doing less interesting stuff to pay the bills.

M: So when was the last Social Media Lab project then?

The last client-funded social media lab project was with the Inward Investment Group.

M: Who are they – a city firm? financial services?

SF: No they’re part of the DTI. They’re are a government funded agency. Their job is to pitch the UK to businesses worldwide who want to establish a business foot print in Europe.

They have a very tough brief - a very sceptical audience of CEOs and corporate researchers that they’re pitching the UK to.

These guys – usually guys - have to get the choice of investment location right and they are very hard-nosed. 

And the UK is up against fierce competition from other European countries pitching themselves as the place to invest and grow a business into Europe

So they have a tough job. Research showed that these CEOs didn’t trust marketing at all. But they did read the news and they did want to talk to the people – the business consultants who might help them relocate.

M: what did you do for them?

SF: We advised them to draw directly upon the experience of their business consultants and get them to tell their own stories in their own voices because these were the people potential clients wanted to talk to.

There was a very forward looking CEO at IIG at that time and we convinced him that IIG needed to get involved more directly in the news process.

Now, we didn’t get to do everything we would have liked but of course that’s the real world.

But we did sell in some of the fundamentals ideas and by this time we had a much more structured and professional set of processes.

So we didn’t just say – just do it. We were able to convince them with all the detail from the social media lab research.

M: so what did you do?

Lots of things – Ben is still working there and our part in the project took over a year.

In conventional marketing and branding terms we repositioned the agency online to the world as a media company.

So the new web presence is a big shift from the old, anonymously gray, government department look and feel – it’s intended to look and feel like a hybrid management consultancy and news publisher (the actual model for the news side was the BBC!).

Ben Whittam Smith - a member of the old Tomorrow research group at Saatchi is in there setting up an internal news sourcing and sharing system that will eventually work it’s way through to the front end and link up with the work we did with the marketing and editorial teams.

So the branding had real muscle behind in terms of being able to provide a useful news service

We did a lot of work internally with the marketing teams, teaching them new skills – how to read the news, respond from their own point of view, frame their responses as stories.

We also put an editorial policy in place and taught them how to set about building a collaborative news network by sourcing stories from their own people.

We ran a live ‘news simulation’ and put an editorial board in place for six weeks to give them a sense of what it’s actually like to read the news and participate in producing news process from their own point-of-view: we looked at what they should be covering, how they should cover it, that sort of thing. This fed into an editorial policy at the end 

M: Did you talk to them about blogging?

SF: No – we didn’t do that explicitly. We did look at sourcing contributions from staff but not as blogging – contributions were fed into the news and commentations process in a much more structured way.

It was a bit of a surprise when the whole corporate blogging thing took off and everyone seemed to be obsessed with what they shouldn’t say.

We were looking at what they should say – it was what they asked us to do, and because what we were proposing was much more structured than just blogging, the issue didn’t arise.

The great thing was that it gave them some confidence that they could actually do this – we helped them to define who the contributors might be inside the organisation.

It was always a matter of finding those people who couldn’t stop talking about what they do – and getting them involved in the news generation process.

At the front end we had a team montoring the news, developing angles, matching this back to their marketing opbjectives and liaising with in-house experts.

We were there to help them with developing angles, keeping the corporate voice and track and ensuring generally that they ‘kept the faith’. 

M: When was this? Recently?

SF: Not all that recently. The project kicked off in the middle of 2004 and our involvement came to an end at the end of 2005 though we still keep in touch.

The great thing was that, right in the middle of the project Scoble hit the headlines with his Economist piece and so we no longer had to work so hard everyday to convince them that were crazy and that they had been even crazier for listening to us.

Donal McIntyre -the online environmental activist. Nearly. i/view with Stephen FItzpatrick part five.

Part five of the interview with Stephen Fitzpatrick

M: Did you have any success at all – pitching these ideas at Saatchi?

SF: Yes, we had some success pitching it to Sir Peter Blake and his Blakes’ Expeditions team (Sir Peter Blake was a round the world yachtsman and national hero in New Zealand)

Blake was horrified by what he'd seen happening to oceans and wildlife and was repositioning himself as a new Jacques Cousteau with an environmental campaigning mission. He’s got a high tech boat, a team and a bunch of corporate sponsors looking to put money into his new venture.

Nothing too grandiose - we told them we could help them them punch above their weight in communications terms, build a news service and run it off the boat, get live footage back of the expeditions, get it out into the mainstream, get people engaged and backing their environmental campaigning agenda.

We had some success primarily because he was a mate of the CEO (laughs).

I also persuaded Donal Macintyre to get involved to help give the thing some momentum.

M: How did you get Donal Macintyre involved?

SF: I asked him.

M: What was he going to do?

SF: Donal was going to join the ship and take a film-crew with him to make a BBC documentary about Blake - to showcase the investigative aspect of what Blake was up to and to help him build his profile in the UK and US, help raise sponsorship,  but things turned very nasty 

M: How so?

SF: Blake was murdered by pirates on an environmental exploration trip in South America. Donal took a crew with him to try and find out what happened – but it all came to nothing in the end. After Blake had gone the project lost its’ way.

Part six: Social media meets e-government

Repositioning a government department as a social media business

Saatchi’s ‘open door ideas policy’ kick-starts the social media lab. Stephen FItzpatrick conversation part four

Part four of the interview with Stephen Fitzpatrick

M: What were you supposed to be doing at Saatchi and Saatchi – was this weird stuff part of your job?

SF. My title was ‘group strategist’ in Saatchi Vision – the interactive division.

One of my jobs was to ‘sell in’ interactive media to the mainstream agency, so I was doing more conventional stuff as well.

M: Were they paying you to do all this?

SF: Well I had some luck there. There was a new CEO at Saatchi, a very dynamic Kiwi by the name of James Hall, who took a liking what I had to say as it dovetailed with some of his own interests.

He was worried that the agency didn’t have a handle on the new wave of internet phenomena like Slashdot, Amazon and Hotmail.

As far as he could see, they seemed to be conjuring brand equity out of a hat -  not spending much – if anything - on advertising.

He asked me if I’d like to look into what was happening and report back. I set up an informal research group – people I knew and was making contact with – and we would meet and talk and I would supply the booze.   

So that’s how I got backing to do the research – the project was called ‘tomorrow’. Quite appropriate really because it never came – not at Saatchi anyway.

M: So how did you meet Peter?

Well, Saatchi had a very progressive and unusual policy of giving an audience to anyone who phoned in with an idea that sounded interesting.

Some of them could be very bizarre but one day I got a call – “Can you meet this guy? We don’t understand what he’s talking about so we thought of you. Can you talk to him?”

It was Peter. He’d phoned in with a story about some research he’d conducted and an idea he called ‘Web PR’.

Anyway. Peter walked in through the door with a story.

It proved to be a long story.

Make that a verrry long story. (laughs)

The first meeting lasted four hours.

The second went on for nine hours and a hangover

M: Did anything concrete come from all this talking?

SF: Unfortunately what began to emerge from all the discussions we were having wouldn’t fit onto a powerpoint deck.

MC: Deck?

SF: Marketing jargon for powerpoint presentation

MC: Ok

So it soon became obvious that what we were looking at entailed a quite fundamental reappraisal of many of the principles upon which the agency was based and which were taken for granted.

As they were almost everywhere else at the time, it has to be said.

M: What about Cluetrain?

SF: I mean in the mainstream agencies – you would see Cluetrain on the reading lists and it would be referenced in presentations from agency planners but taking the ideas seriously, that didn’t happen. 

When I did try to talk about how some of the cluetrain principles might be implemented I was met with what seemed like deliberate brute miscomprehension

Either that or they told me I was mad. 

M: To your face?

SF: Not often. I would hear about it afterwards though (laughs).

You see, this was 2001 and the bubble had just burst so they all breathed a sigh of relief.

The internet was ‘just another channel’ again. It was business as usual.

M: Did you talk to their clients about what you were working on?

SF: Yes I did.

M: What did they say?

SF: Well, don’t forget that there was no blogosphere, no myspace, no youtube to point to then.

M: so how did they respond?

SF:  Marketing directors were usually very enthusiastic – about the principles.

But they couldn’t believe that it could work for them.

They had so little confidence – or experience – in speaking publicly in their own voices.

They would back off fast.

Part five: Virtual Donal McIntyre? Not quite.

How Donal McIntyre almost became an online environmental activist (courtesy of Saatchi and Saatchi)

Part six: Social media meets e-government

Repositioning a government department as a social media business

Someone disturbed enough to work for both, does his best to tell us. Part three of conversation with Stephen Fitzpatrick

Part three of the interview with Stephen Fitzpatrick

M: How did you make the transition from Greenpeace to Saatchi and Saatchi – it doesn’t make much sense to me  to see how anyone can go from an organisation like Greenpeace to a place like Saatchi and Saatchi?

Well. There was an intervening step – I raised venture capital and founded a web-design company – but we did retain Greenpeace as a client but I guess your question isn’t really about chronology – it’s about values so I’ll try to respond to that..

What motivated me to make the shift was actually simple curiosity.

After Greenpeace and charter 88 I had a pretty good idea of how campaigning organisations worked as media organisations but hadn’t a clue about how commercial organisations and their big-time agencies went about things.

Working in the not-for-profit sector, I always had a sense that we were winging it with any weapons we could lay our hands on but we didn’t have the resources commercial organisations had. I always had the sense they ‘knew’ and I didn’t so I set out to get in on the inside and find out.

M: How did you convince Saatchi and Saatchi to take you on, after Greenpeace?

SF: A very long interview procedure that lasted more or less a whole day, that’s how I got in.

I also told them I was going undercover. They laughed. Nervously, but they did laugh.

M: And did you get what you expected?

SF: Lets just put it this way - it killed any sense of inferiority that I had about how the ‘professionals’ did it (laughs).

I did learn how to survive in one of those ‘elite’ blue-chip organisations.

I also learned how chaotic they can be. So watch out!

I don’t mean to underplay that – the survival aspect. It’s an amazing thing to learn.

Actually, the similarities were more striking than the differences.

One of the really striking things I learned was that, whether it was Greenpeace or Saatchi and Saatchi or LloydsTSB or Visa -  any organisations I encountered, no matter how they differed in terms of their aims, objectives, their values and cultures… there was a deep level at which they were all the same…

M: what was it?

There would always come a point when the client would realize that what we were proposing meant change – real change.

At this point, when it really came to the crunchpoint where they had to let go of the old way of doing things -  at that point there would be a loss of nerve – you could feel them tightening up and then they would begin to pull back…

I realised then that this wasn't just a marketing and communications issue – it was a strategic management issue and unless we could find a way to keep the conversation – keep the emotional bandwidth of the conversation open - during these really difficult moments, then things would never really change.

M: what were they afraid of?

SF: Losing control. Things getting out of hand. Being blamed for having initiated a process that would lead them into uncharted waters.

M: what happened when thye got scared?

SF; well, we would lose control of the situation….actually control’s not quite the right word. More that - suddenly, we found it impossible to talk to them in the way we had before and we also found it impossible to talk about the fact that we couldn’t talk about that – the really important issues had been buried and the fact that they had been buried had been buried too.

M: So what did you do?

Well, I realised that without knowing how to keep these difficult conversations with clients going – during the moments when they needed to implement a social media strategy, then social media – although we didn’t call it that then - would either be dumped, used as just another channel become anti-social very quickly.

It was worse than that actually – because even if they went ahead I realized that, unless they found a way to keep the emotional bandwidth open – when things got difficult say, when customers, the general public began to ask difficult questions or the organization had difficult or embarrassing news to break – then at that point, they would freeze and go back to playing it safe.

M: What do you do now then?

SF: well, to tell you the truth – I think they were right. If we couldn’t keep difficult conversation going with them, to get the damn stuff implemented, then how could we expect them to trust us that they would be able to keep them going with their customers when things got tough.

That’s when I started to look outside marketing and communications at other disciplines such as organizational and social psychology for insights into how to manage difficult conversations so that a) we could get the clients to take on board what we had to say and b) to build these insights into the model itself so that we could say more than ‘just do it’ – so we could teach them how to manage difficult conversations online.

All this stuff eventually fed into the Social Media Lab project and it’s what one of the themes we’re going to be pursuing with Journal of Social Media. 

Part four: “I’ve just had a very interesting meeting”

How Saatchi’s ‘open door ideas policy’ kick-starts the social media lab by introducing Peter to Steve

Part five: Virtual Donal McIntyre? Not quite.

How Donal McIntyre almost became an online environmental activist (courtesy of Saatchi and Saatchi)

Part six: Social media meets e-government

Repositioning a government department as a social media business

Blazing a trail as an online Greenpeace campaigner: part two of a conversation with JSM editor Stephen Fitzpatrick

Part two of the interview with Stephen Fitzpatrick

M: But why wait till now to start this? Everyone is talking about this kind of thing now aren’t they? Why did you wait till social media was fashionable?

SF. Well, we didn’t. I’ve been at this a long time – it just wasn’t called social media back then

M: Back when?

SF: Back to 95 actually….with Greenpeace.

M: I didn’t know that you worked with Greenpeace – I thought it was all business stuff.

SF: Actually, that’s not quite right. I began working with Greenpeace back in 96 but it was off the back of another proto-social media project with another campaigning group – an organisation called Charter 88.

M: Charter 88 - who are they?

SF: They’re a pressure group -  they campaign for ‘constitutional reform’.

Back in 95 they were planning a big public consultation exercise – asking people how they felt about a freedom of information act, a bill or rights, reform of the house of lords and a bunch of other reforms.

I got involved to help them use the net to reach people they ordinarily wouldn’t –

M: How many people responded?

SF: Over 34,000

M: That’s a lot – how many of them came through the net?

SF:  About 5% - which isn’t bad if you think about how few people were actually on line in ‘95.

It’s still is the biggest public democracy consultation exercise that’s been done – as far as I’m aware.

M: and Greenpeace?

SF:  Greenpeace were based just round the corner. I met up with the Greenpeace team over a cappucino in Clerkenwell and got talking.

The Charter 88 project was winding down so I crossed the road to Greenpeace,  who were a very different organisation to Charter 88. Greenpeace are much more maverick -  not quite so interested in public consultation!

When I got there they had been tooling up activists in the field with video cams, linking them via a communications satellite so they could get footage directly from an action onto the network in London – a completely digital operation. Very fast and responsive.

M: What kind of thing were Greenpeace doing with the Internet then?

SF: You can still find some of this on the net. I think Greenpeace archived a lot of the early net activist stuff. You can see it for yourself if you are interested.

There’s video footage of the time when French commandos took out the Rainbow Warior over Nuclear Testing in Mururoa.

You can see them throwing smoke grenades through the windows of the ship.

The crew was tooled up with camcorders and a video compressor so that the footage on the website within hours.

Demand was so massive that footage had to be shipped out to Reuters because the servers couldn’t cope.

The web operation was very advanced – nothing quite like it then and I don’t see much else that comes close even today.

When I got there it was run mainly by volunteers but there was a big audience and a lot of high profile actions had already made the news

M: Did you get ordinary people involved in what you were doing?

SF: A mixture - we were trying all kinds of stuff to see what would work.

At one point we had an activist crawling around the Larsen-b Ice shelf in the Antarctic with a video cam and some chat-software attached to his headgear beaming back footage of the cracks in the ice shelf.

He was looking down into a huge crack in the ice-shelf, beaming video back to London and answering questions from people around the world via the chat software.

It was the first time anyone had seen footage like that.

M: Did you ever go out on these actions then?

SF: No. I was always safe and sound, back in an office in London. But it was still exciting. Especially when there was a big action going on

M: Like?

SF. Onetime Greenpeace were running a campaign to raise awareness about plans by the government to open up new wilderness areas of the Atlantic to oil exploration.

So Greenpeace decided to occupy Rockall, a tiny island in the North Altlantic – I mean tiny, about 80 feet by 50 and in very rough seas.

Greenpeace flew out what looked like a Contac-400 pill with a bunch of activist inside.

They narrowly avoiding a head on collision with the Royal Navy out on night manouevres.

It was all very secret until the morning everyone opened the newspapers and there was a picture of pod there, bolted to the rock with a tiny crew of activitist inside.

We teamed up with the Knowledge Media Lab at the Open University so we could do a live interview with the activist inside the Pod.

I persuaded Johnny Walker the DJ to come into the office for the afternoon and do a ‘desertified island discs’ style programme via a sat link to the people on rock.

I got his number through a record shop in Crouch End – I can’t remember how I got in contact with them - gave him a call and suddenly, there’s an archetypal radio voice at the other end of the phone.

He says, “I’ll do it for a crate of Bud and 20 Marlboro lights!” He was very familiar with actions at sea from his old Radio Caroline days.

He turned up in cowboy boots and a Motorhead T-shirt with his hair streaming out behind him and did a show for us, interviewed the guys inside the pod about how things were going out there – this was a very precarious situation the rock being about 50 feet by 80 in very rough sea with this tiny pod bolted to it  – chatted with them, played requests (Simon and Garfunkel’s ‘I am a rock’, that sort of thing) and fielded question from people tuning in over the net.

M: Were you doing that sort of thing every day? It sound like a nice job to have

SF: Well, by ’98 we were running a more-or-less full time internet-based news service out of the london which linked to activists and campaign teams all over the world.

We were using text, audio and video, even back then and we were bypassing traditional news organisations and switching on a lot of people. The site was very popular.

Although it sound like fun it had a serious side.

We proved that it was possible to do serious stuff and entertain as well as inform and get people engaged and involved.

We weaved the news process into the campaigns and actions and got the stuff out there.

Greenpeace at that time has still got to be the best model for how a campaigning organization can become a media organization and create a news service can break and make the news.

M: Did you try your hand at community–based stuff, like myspace?

SF: Not exactly myspace but we did set up a community site called Waveland as part of the Atlantic frontier campaign. There’s a piece on it on Wikipedia – look under micro-nations.

I think it was the closest to what you’d call a community-based system, until later when I did something similar with the National Theatre.

Users could sign the constitution and get a Waveland passport, email address, chat that kind of thing.

M: Is it still going?

SF: No….it closed down a couple of years later. For a while it was pretty wild. People wrote manifestos and planned actions, even threatened to take Waveland away from Greenpeace and make it a republic, but it fizzled out after a while

M: Why didn’t Greenpeace keep it going?

SF: At that time we just didn’t have the micro-management techniques to keep an audience engaged and stimulated over time. No-one really knew what it was for – there were some woolly ideas about loyalty but they were never thought through with any rigour.

We were simply moving too fast, trying all kinds of things and didn't have time to evaluate what we were doing so we didn’t really know what was working and what wasn't

That's why, when Peter turned up at Saatchi with a whole battery of detailed analytics, I was ready.

We had done a lot of the things that he was talking about but we didn't know how to redeploy them in a structured and sustained way which would guarantee results.

Part three: What do Greenpeace and Saatchi and Saatchi have in common?

Someone disturbed enough to work for both, does his best to tell us

Part four: “I’ve just had a very interesting meeting”

How Saatchi’s ‘open door ideas policy’ kick-starts the social media lab by introducing Peter to Steve

Part five: Virtual Donal McIntyre? Not quite

How Donal McIntyre almost became an online environmental activist (courtesy of Saatchi and Saatchi)

Part six: Social media meets e-government

Repositioning a government department as a social media business

How to put the sociology into social media: a conversation with Stephen Fitzpatrick, JSM editor.

This is part one of an interview that proved to be quite long as it ranged all over the place to cover the problems of pitching social media, the academic study of conversations and ‘conversational psychology', Internet campaigning with Greenpeace, Steve’s time at Saatchi and Saatchi where, by chance he bumped into Peter and started the Social Media Lab, as well as putting some of the theory into practice with a government agency by the name of the Inward Investment Group (part of the DTI).

I’ve broken the interview up into six thematised parts so that it’s (hopefully) not too onerous a task to read and digest.

Preamble

I thought about how I might set up this idea of an 'interview with myself' in order to make it less boring.

In a moment of divine inspiration I decided to ask my partner’s 15 year old, who has ambitions to go to business school after university and I thought, maybe this could be my big chance to help save him from being embraced by the 'top four' agencies and disappearing into the jargon-o-sphere of management and communications consulting.

He was aware that I 'worked with The Internet’ but not much else, as an occasion hadn’t arisen before which called for me to be ‘talking shop’ with him, so this proved to be a voyage of discovery for both of us.

So what you’re about to read is the transcript of an interview with me, conducted by a precocious 15 year old named of Miheer who was given a very perfunctory masterclass in marketing jargon by Peter (plus twenty quid for good measure) before being instructed to give no quarter and pull no punches. 

Post-preamble

By Miheer

Steve asked me if he would interview him. I knew beforehand that he worked with the internet and businesses but not much else. Before the interview I had an hour with Peter who gave me some advice about how to do interview questions.

He told me to imagine I was Jeremy Paxman and that I should give Steve no quarter.

We had to stop quite a few times during the course of the interview while Steve explained some of the vocab but it’s been edited out, mostly because it made the interview too long and was a bit boring. 

M: So why a social media ‘journal’….is this some kind of pseudo-academic exercise?

SF: I hope not. The reason we are calling this a journal is as follows.

When we (that is Myself, Peter and Thom) go into organisations as consultants (as Social Media Lab) we would always get this….slightly disconcerting response from clients – “When you talk, you’re so…..conceptual” (that was when they were being kind) and they would look worried, as if we might have crashed out of some new age west-coast business school.

So we thought – conceptual? business school? If we are going to publish, then why not a journal? 

We thought that maybe it would make our job easier, to 'publish', to show that what we were telling them wasn’t crazy, so that we’d have to justify less, explain less. We could just point them at the site.

I guess we hope it will help to validate the research and development work and make things a bit easier.

It’s different now that there is a term –social media - to describe what’s happening out there and that there are bloggers now, but for a long time the response was, “Great story, guys – but, well, whew - not here, not now. Please. not now, not us….(laughs)

M: So who else is involved, besides you and Peter and Thom

SF: Well, over the past five years or so we’ve built up quite a network of contacts who work with us on consultancy projects and also collaborate and consult with social media lab research. These contacts will also be acting as stringers for the journal?

M: Stringers?

SF: Commentators and contributors – giving us their perspective on our stories about media and organisations..

So, we’ve got a very diverse group of people we can now call on to contribute and comment.

There are people from marketing and communication, journalists and PRs as well as people you wouldn’t usually associate with media or business  -  organisational psychologists, cyberneticians and systems theorists, group analysts, philosophers of language.

M: I think I can see why you’ve got the communications people in there - but what about that other lot – what have they got to do with social media?

SF: It seemed to me that the problems that these people – the psychologists and philosophers - were addressing in their own fields (the study of live real time communication in families, organisations, communities) were very similar to the communications problems that we were looking as companies struggle to come to terms with how to communicate in realtime with their customers and, beyond them, the general public 

I was looking for models, rules, precedents that might help with the consultancy model we (the social media lab) were developing.

We were looking for insights into how to create a structured and sustainable way of embedding conversational communications processes in an organisation, rather than just throwing caution to wind and flying by the seat of our pants.

I already knew how to do that.

A lot of these people were in working in academia or research institutions and were analysing how conversations between real people actually worked in realtime.

They were working out the rules or grammar of live conversations in different contexts and spelling out how these rules could be learned by professionals working in these contexts.

Some fascinating stuff about what happens when conversations go wrong, why they go wrong and how you could put them right.

They were talking about how to manage difficult conversations, how to open up the emotional bandwidth of these conversations safely.

There was a huge body of work and it seemed that a lot of it was transferable, with modifications to the online environment.

M: Did these people understand why you were interested in talking to them?

SF: More often than not – no. But they were intrigued that someone from the universe next door had come knocking.

M: Do you think ordinary people will understand what they’re talking about? 

SF. That’s a part of what the whole social media lab and social media journal project is about – to liberate the knowledge that’s is locked up in these disciplines that media people don’t usually come into contact with – and it’s very often expressed in an arcane language which is designed to preach to the converted, to to other specialists – and get it out there, into the public domain.

Anything that’s new and different will be a challenge to communicate more widely – it will be hard to explain and difficult to reduce to soundbites and messages.

So we thought – lets prove we can do this – make the links between these worlds, get the insights out there and hot-house a deeper level of conversation about social media.

The world needs desperately needs disruptive ideas right now – don’t you think – new social movements, products and services that can make a positive difference, make the world a better place?

I think social media could be one of these

M: Peter seems very interested in the media and technology. You seem to be more interested in the social side of social media than the media side? 

SF: I’m interested in what has to happen inside organisation so that they can embrace social media and use it to really communicate with people as well as how social media changes the way they communicate with their customers and the general public.

In fact I don’t see a difference – one reflects the other. That’s where this specialist knowledge that we’re talking about comes in – it can be used to help make for better communications inside organisations so that they can rise to the challenge of changing the way that they communicate outside too.

There’s a lot of fear around about – organisations aren’t using to talking directly to customers- they are right to be a little bit frightened because this is a big change.

If they can do this then there’s a chance they can take advantage of working with the grain of the medium otherwise it’s going to be a case of new media, old mindset

In other words they’ll turn social media into anti-social media. More mistrust, more alienation, more scepticism

Part two: Social media activism: the Greenpeace experience

Blazing a trail as an online Greenpeace campaigner 

Part three: What do Greenpeace and Saatchi and Saatchi have in common?

Someone disturbed enough to work for both, does his best to tell us
Part four: “I’ve just had a very interesting meeting”
How Saatchi’s ‘open door ideas policy’ kick-starts the social media lab by introducing Peter to Steve
Part five: Virtual Donal McIntyre? Not quite.

How Donal McIntyre almost became an online environmental activist (courtesy of Saatchi and Saatchi)

Part six: Social media meets e-government

Repositioning a government department as a social media business

The concluding part of my conversation with Peter Friedman about social media and his fears about what happens after what happens next.

SF: So we can see what you took from Kyte and put into SupportInsight but what have you taken from SupportInsight? How much of it is in Hercomeseveryone?

PF: Well, with the advent of the blogosphere and RSS people have now finally begun to recognise the value (that the Kyte experience taught me in 2000 and that I implemented in SupportInsight) of the  news and community process, so at least this is one thing we no longer have to convince people is worthwhile.

SF: So now that this idea has become accepted is there anything new that you can bring to the party these days? Isn’t it all a done deal?

PF: Even those who are pushing the social media envelope don’t know what they’re getting right and what they’re getting wrong, what they should retain from the traditional way of doing things and how they should recombine components from the old way in new ways.

The critics of social media in its current form are right.

In most cases, instead of fulfilling the utopian dreams of its earliest proponents (such as the Cluetrainers) it is turning into a monster.

By treating the new channels as yet another opportunity to exploit people’s supposed gullibility, Social Media is becoming yet another way of undermining trust.

My original discoveries about using the news/community and inter site relationship model for generating attention were coupled with a recognition that, if this model was used indiscriminately it would become just another source of resistance, just a ratcheting up of the noise level.

That is exactly what’s happening right now.

SF: So are you saying, if you anticipated this, that you had any ideas about how to stop this whole social media thing from eating itself?

Yes, there was no way I was interested in making my worst nightmares come true, so I spent most of the time I dedicated to research into the potential for social media into building the next generation model.

This was aimed at preventing this much more intensive communication process from becoming unbearable, simply because I was convinced it would be discovered and be exploited mercilessly without any consideration of the inevitable backlash.

SF: So what is this ‘next generation model?’

PF: It’s HereComesEveryone! We thought the best way to explain it was to do it – we didn’t want to wait another couple of years till people hit the backlash and started to ask – what next? We thought – lets do it now, see if we can help to prevent it?

SF: What is it then?

PF: The bottom line is – it’s not all about attention – that’s just the beginning. There’s also a trust algorithm.

SF: That sounds like a contradiction in terms

PF: Maybe this is a good place to stop?

SF: No, you’ll need to unpack that

PF: Watch this space.

Peter Friedman tells me how he persuaded a training services company to embrace the blogosphere, before it existed! Shurely shome mishtake?

SF: Can we talk a little bit about Support Insight? I mean that’s where you personally got to put the model into practise wasn’t it? It was Support Insight that helped you develop the ideas further – I guess Support Insight was the forerunner of HereComesEveryone wasn’t it?

PF: Yes, I think it would be fair to say that. It was with Support Insight that we developed a lot of the media planning tools we now use and we also discovered that the old thinking – I mean that silo thinking – in terms of media such as TV, Radio, Print or in terms of professions and disciplines PR, Marketing., Journalism and so on – were no longer useful or relevant.

We recombined elements from all of them and we were able to punch massively above our weight in communications terms.

This was the prospect that we presented to the client that got them excited.

We convinced them that they needed to become a media company first and then capitalise on the attention.

SF: Who was the client?

PF: The client was a training firm with a reputation for handling highly skill-intensive IT  projects.

They wanted to a marketing campaign to reach out to new clients but wanted to do something with a big impact.

They wanted more bang for their buck as marketing campaigns in this sector are traditionally very narrowly focused.

They also wanted to reach out to people they didn’t usually reach.

We convinced them that we could do this for them, without spending a fortune on advertising.

I’d just come out of the Kyte experience and so was armed with all the research I’d conducted for Kyte.

I persuaded the client that this was the way forward - there was no competition at the time, you see.

There were no bloggers in their market and no social network sites, no myspace either.

This was long before RSS and blogging wasn’t really on anyone’s radar.

Blogging and RSS were around but they were still thought of as a nerdy kind of thing and had made absolutely no impact whatsoever on the news-o-sphere.

This was great for us but the downside was that there was no Typepad or Moveable type at that time so a lot of our upfront development costs went into developing and setting up a CMS

These days of course this would have gone straight into developing the editorial resource so today you can hit the ground running from day one, but we couldn’t you see.

Of course there was another drawback back then – there wasn’t the rest of the blogosphere to link to so we had to concentrate a lot of our energy on linking out to the mainstream media.

But in a way this was a good thing.

We had to work a lot harder.

We worked out a low cost, non-linear way of doing media planning that would allow us to bounce stories out of the box marked internet and up into the mainstream media.

When we actually proved that this was possible – they were ecstatic!

What we were setting out to do was to make the client the focus of industry attention in the training and support industries, but indirectly, by creating a news-driven conversation about the things that actually mattered to people in the industry, rather than bragging or boasting about their products and services.

SF: What were you actually doing – I mean editorially?

PF: Today you would have called what we were doing link-blogging. Essentially I’d say the site was a link-blog but a long time before people like Jason Calacanis (Engadget) and Nick Denton (Gizmodo) made this the centre-piece of their publishing empires.

We had two staff link blogging anything up to 10 stories a day and I played the role of executive editor and acted as an outrider looking out for scoops

The stories we were running came from giving a meta-point-of-view on what was happening as well as taking news feeds from PR wire.

Of course once the site began to draw down its’ own audience we were also in direct contact with a lot of PR agencies
 
We were also seeking and getting audience feedback on the ZD Net/CNET model via forums and pump-priming the forums on the basis of the model developed at Kyte

We weren’t just feeding stories into the forums – our equivalent of today’s comments system - we were repurposing some of the content from the forums back onto the main site as well as getting the community directly involved in the news creation process

In order to help build the client’s credibility in the area we were also seeking out industry experts and inviting them to come onto the site and perform the role of guest blogger – avant la lettre of course.

SF: Like who?

PF: Well, one of them was Michael Woznicki who we found on Amazon. He was Amazon’s No 1 training certification book-reviewer.
His appearance on the site generated literally thousands of posts.

SF: When was this?

PF: 2001/2002 - before the blogosphere really took off – I know that people today, even Scoble – date the beginning of the biggest expansion of the blogosphere from 9/11 but I don’t think that’s quite right.

It was certainly the beginning of the rise to dominance of the online news-o-sphere but I’d date the big bang for the blogosphere to the day when the Tsunami hit.

Part four: Social media and its discontents:

A conversation with Peter Friedman about his fears about what happens after what happens next.

Putting theory into practise and working with internet legend
Alpesh Patel. part two of conversation with JSM editor, Peter Friedman.

Part two of an interview with Peter Friedman

SF: So when did you get the chance to actually apply what you learned from analysing what CNET and ZD were up to?

PF After PI, I got a call from Pantelis Kokkalis, who invited me to conduct a research project for a company he was working with - called Kyte Securities.

Kyte was a Futures and Options trading company and the directors could see what was happening with online trading (by now the Web 1.0 bubble was billowing) and were considering spinning off their stockbroking operation into a separate online venture.

They were very interested in getting into online trading – remember this was during the bubble and that online trading was one of the top three bubble phenomema.

My mission was to investigate the state of the online broking industry to determine how Kyte might make the move to becoming an online broker too.

So I was essentially conducting a best practice analysis – problem was that when I did the research I couldn’t find any best practice – everything that was really radical and new and driving enormous amounts of online traffic was happening outside of brokers’ sites.

This was of course part of the problem – nobody really knew what a broking website was supposed to do.

Kyte’s brief to me was ‘how do we attract attention to our online presence?”

What I discovered was that all of the broking activities which all of the online brokers were engaging in had absolutely nothing to do with what was driving activity on their sites.

The real stuff was all taking place beyond the frame of their corporate websites.

The critical factor to driving traffic  to the brokers' sites was the online news and community process (because of the news-intensive nature of financial analysis) and so what I had to tell Kyte took them by surprise.

I said that what they needed to do was to harness the news process to drive interest in what they were doing.

In other words, they shouldn’t just be 'indirectly affected' by the news process (as the other online brokers of the time were).

I told them that they should 'become an integral part of the news process'.

My findings showed that, in order to take advantage of the traffic generation opportunities open to them competitors, they should become a media company first and an online brokerage second.

Although this would have struck many as being extremely perverse advice – I was advising against spending lots of money on advertising – you can imagine that they were also very turned on by this.

This news-driven approach was totally against the prevailing marketing trend, you see, which was (even in online marketing, in fact especially in pre-bubble online marketing) to throw huge amounts of money at advertising.

SF: And it’s now very 'a la mode' to say that 'everyone is now a media company so don’t waste money on advertising' - get involved with the news process instead.

PF: Yeah, though people obviously don’t know what they mean when they say that – I mean what type of media company? As for the media companies – now that every business is supposedly a media company, what are the traditional media businesses going to do? Melt down? Try and hide? I don’t see media companies making the kind of lateral moves that will be required of them.

Anyway, I digress, this is what I advised Kyte to do – to become what we would now describe as an online media company.

This was back in 2000 and here I drew upon the research I’d undertaken in my spare time while I was working at PI.

SF: So what happened? What did they actually do about it?

PF: They started the Eden group and they brought in the legendary Alpesh Patel (author of the bestselling Net Trading) to make the whole news driven approach really happen.

Part Three: Link-blogging before the blogosphere?:

Peter Friedman tells me how he persuaded a training services company to embrace the blogosphere, before it existed! Shurely shome mishtake?

Part four: Social media and its discontents:

A conversation with Peter Friedman about his fears about what happens after what happens next.

The first part of a four-part conversation with JSM editor Peter Friedman about the secret history of Social Media.

By Stephen Fitzpatrick

Preamble

Interviewing Peter about his past work is always a mixture of pain and pleasure.

On the one hand it is a nightmare, because the sheer quantity of material he comes out with leaves me with a massive transcription job (and also a horrendous editing job, because his timeline is ridiculously convoluted: he is always working on more than one thing at a time) on the other hand it is great because so many new ideas emerge but which then need serious unpacking and structuring.

This is Part One of an interview that proved to be quite long so I’ve unpacked it into four coherent parts so that you, dear reader, don’t have to go through what I went through.

Part one covers the early research which fed into the Social Media Lab and the Journal of Social Media.

Part two covers the bubble-years and some interesting observations on stockbroking and social media from that feverish period

In part three Peter talks about a very early link-blogging and community project and part four covers is more speculative – a discussion about some of Peter’s fears about how social media could take a wrong turn and create an anti-social media backlash.

SF: How far back do we have to go?

PF: The ideas which went into HereComesEveryone’s project first came into existence when I was working as IT Director for a company in the city by the name of Perfect Information (PI).

This was the time when what we now call the tech bubble was in the middle of its explosive growth period and the tech-stock meltdown was a long way into the future.

PI was in the financial information services business, so it was hardly surprising that the PI office was buzzing with interest in the stock market and a great deal of that interest was focussed upon news about new technology companies.

The technology news publications, like Wired, Fast Company and Red Herring suddenly became an indispensable source of news about new potential investment opportunities (although rarely any warnings of potential perils, mainly because, at the time it seemed to many as if there was no such thing as anything but a sure-fire winner).

However, unlike my senior PI colleagues, I had come from the personal computing side of IT (rather than the stock market world which they inhabited) and so the publications that I gravitated towards for news about technology came from the leading PC IT publisher, Ziff Davis.

Ziff Davis seemed to have a massive head-start on the other players, because, as an organisation, they seemed to be taking the insights that they were gaining from their own technology well-informed news journalists (such as the now-vanished one-man proto-blogosphere Jesse Berst) about the future of technology and implementing it in their own publishing infrastructure.

PF. What’s the link between Journal of Social Media and this historical stuff about ZD?

PF: Well, looking back from where we are today you can see that what they – CNET and ZDNET - had was Web 2.0 before even Web 1.0 had really taken off!

These CMSs were immensely responsive and sophisticated and placed huge amounts of power in the hand of the editors of the CMS.

They could be configured to facilitate all kinds of participative functions that could be used to help integrate marketing, publishing and selling and I could see that what they had was critical – that they could have ‘taken over’ then if they’d been of a mind.

It seemed pretty obvious to me then that if you were serious about web-marketing then linking together the publishing process with news and community and integrating this into your business processes was the way to go – it wasn’t an advertising model – it meant becoming a media company yourself and of course that meant rethinking and retooling the business; at the time this seemed a crazy thing to suggest to anyone so I kept quiet about it..

I didn’t get a chance to put this model into operation until later……

Part two: The social media side of stockbroking?

Peter Friedman on putting theory into practise and working with internet legend
Alpesh Patel

Part three: Link-blogging before the blogosphere?:

Peter Friedman tells me how he persuaded a training services company to embrace the blogosphere, before it existed! Shurely shome mishtake?

Part four: Social media and its discontents:

A conversation with Peter Friedman about his fears about what happens after what happens next.

Here's more than you need to know about who to talk to.

Do you have an editorial enquiry?

Something you’d like us to write about?
Got an article that you’d like us to publish?

Want to know our press release policy?

If you wish to provide us with a press release so that we can cover events, activities and announcements we will first need to discuss the issues they raise before agreeing to publish.

Need to contact editorial?

then email either:

Stephen Fitzpatrick (Editor) at stephenf@ herecomeseveryone.com

or

Peter Friedman (Editor) at peterf@ herecomeseyone.com

Need to talk to someone personally?

then call us on:

Tel: 01582 696911
Fax: 01582 696913

Need to discuss a design and usability issue?

then email Thom McIntosh (User Experience designer and technical support) at thomm@ herecomeseyone.com

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then email Karen Appleby (Administration manager) at karena@ herecomeseyone.com

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then address your mail to the herecomeseveryone office at:

Herecomeseveryone: the Journal of Social Media, the Hustings, 37 Evelyn road, Dunstable, Beds, LU5 4NG

Journal of Social Media: Printed Edition

The journal of social media will be a printed publication. It will include all the content of the website as well as additional material exclusively for paying subscribers.

Could you use our help?

The Lab's services are focused upon these domains:

• Commissioned research
• Communication audits
• Strategy formation
• Design specification for social media environments
• Training
• Public and private seminars
• Organisational workshops and simulations

1. Experience Mining

Experience mining services offer a structured approach for discovering concealed communications capital inside organisational and business processes.

Once accessed and realised, this concealed communications capital can be utilised to ‘fuel’ structured and sustainable conversational marketing and communications programmes.

CONVERSATION BOX

"Yes, you're right, this page is seriously in need of hyperlinks to other pages which go into detail about the services.

And yes, it would be nice to have a glossary to explain all the new terms.

And how useful it would be to have a primer on how this all works.

But when you've got to choose between either getting a journal out there in order to bring people in who are currently conspicuous by their absense from the Social Media debate right now, or instead holding back in order to get more stuff onto the site at launch date..."

Peter Friedman, Editor, The Journal of Social Media

2. Corporate Voice Coaching

Corporate voice coaching services are designed to enable your organisation to make the transition from:

the current ‘broadcast’ style corporate voice:

• message based
• experience poor
• monolithic

to a ‘conversational’ corporate voice which is:

• realtime
• experience rich
• multi-dimensional.

3. Experience Sharing

Experience sharing services build upon the platform developed in Experience Mining and Corporate Voice Coaching to offer a safe and sustainable pathway to the world beyond the boundary of your organisation:

• Integrating conversational style communications with existing business and communications strategy
• Integrating conversational style communications into the production and management of day-to-day communications with online and offline audiences and customers

A more detailed description of these services follows:

1. EXPERIENCE MINING SERVICES

Experience mining is a structured approach for discovering a new kind of business and communications resource:

Concealed Communications Capital

Experience mining aims at accessing the concealed communications capital locked up inside your people and their social networks. This concealed communications capital consists of experience rich:

Organisational stories

about your products, your services, your people and the 'hidden life' of your organisation as well as

Communications champions

the networks of people who are enthusiastic and passionate about what they do, the experts, gurus and 'talkers' with social networks which regard them as informed conversational drivers

Organisational meta-narratives

which are the dominant topics, themes and conversational competencies

Once accessed and realised, this concealed communications capital can be utilised to ‘fuel’ structured and sustainable conversational marketing and communications programmes such as:

• blogs
• communities
• internet-based niche news services

In addition to providing the ‘communications capital’ to fuel conversational communications, experience mining may also yield stories which can be redeployed to:

• validate or qualify an existing business or marketing strategy
• fuel communications collateral developed for conventional channels
• provide the raw material for the creation of a completely new strategy , grounded in an organisation’s core conversational competencies and dominant stories

What do we audit?

Experience mining is an interview-based approach to auditing business processes for concealed communications capital.

Where are we looking?

• Business processes
• Work Experiences
• Product and service discovery processes
• Social networks
• Meetings and encounters
• Employee biographies
• Information networks
• Support networks
• Feedback channels

Experience mining outputs:

• Experience audit report
• Opportunity analysis
• Risk analysis
• Strategic recommendations

2.  CORPORATE VOICE COACHING

Corporate Voice Coaching comprises a structured series of seminars, workshops, organisational simulations and training modules.

CVC has been designed to enable your communications professionals make a safe and manageable transition from their current ‘broadcast’, message based, experience poor, monolithic corporate voice to one which is experience rich, multi-dimensional, and conversational.

Corporate Voice seminars

Presentations showing how the voice of traditional communications produces marketing backlashes, sales resistance and diminishing attention

Presentations demonstrating how social media professionals experiential communications’ offers opportunities to develop a more natural corporate voice.

Corporate Voice workshops

Interactive, intensive, multi-session experiences which introduce those involved in key communications roles to the principles and practices of transforming offline and online content from its current ‘broadcast’, message based, experience impoverished, monolithic style, into a form which is experience rich, multi-dimensional, and conversational.

Corporate Voice organizational simulations

Organisational simulations are customized which build upon the Experience Mining outputs to bring to life the risks and opportunities entailed by the transition to the era of social media and conversational communications.

Organisational simulations are ‘what-if’ scenarios realised as 'live' realtime events with actors and media simulations, ‘offstage’ organizational psychologists and key representatives from your organisation 

Corporate Voice simulations offer the opportunity for key management and staff to experience the reality of:

• Operating in a realtime conversational communications environment
• Gaining an appreciation of individual and group dynamics at realtime
• Using the conventional corporate voice in response to a range of ‘live’ scenarios
• Using the conversational voice in response to a range of ‘live scenarios’

Participants will have the opportunity to:

• ‘Stop’ and ‘replay’ the action
• Receive expert behavioural analysis
• Practise alternative ways of responding to stimuli under expert guidance

Learning opportunities

Corporate Voice simulations offer participants the opportunity to:

• Co-create the scenarios which will be enacted in the simulation
• Discover how conventional communications strategies and voice can backfire when deployed in a realtime social media environment
• Experience how different stakeholders respond to changes in corporate voice style
• Experience the different staff and management dynamics for which different voices create
• Experience PR and media dynamics set in train by a range of corporate voice techniques

Simulation Format

Corporate Voice simulations can be configured in diverse formats:

• Before a live audience of customers, staff or selected attendees
• Before a panel of experts, management, media 

Corporate voice simulations are conducted in partnership with the National Theatre and the Management School at the Institute of Family Therapy.

3. EXPERIENCE SHARING

Now that you have a new corporate voice to engage your customers and audiences in addition to a strucutred and sustainable program for communicating organisational experience in a way that integrates with your business and communications strategy, its time to enable frontline communications staff to develop their knowledge and skills to:

• Outreach to consumers, other stakeholders groups and the media
• Integrate conversational techniques with existing communications strategy and channels
• Build your own social media environments
• Handle crisis communications with confidence

Modules include:

Experience sharing with media and journalists

• Building inter-site relationships
• Selling in stories
• Journalist targeting
• Handling scoops and leaks

Experience sharing, niche news-casting and the art of story-creation

• Teaser design
• Story structure
• Story layout
• Prominence management

Experience sharing and crisis communications

• Building a conversational disclosure and ‘editorial’ policy
• Conversational rebuttal
• Conversational techniques for damage limitation
• Dealing with conversational critics and cynics

Experience sharing in many-to-many community environments

• Building a conversational community
• Building Inter community relationships
• Participating in other people’s communities

Experience sharing and the ‘new PR’

• Conversationalising your in-house PR
• Conversationalilsing the press-release
• Integrating your conversations with your PR agency
• Holding conversationalised events
• Conversationalising other people’s events
• Integrating offline events with the online world

Experience sharing and the blogosphere

• Integrating blogs with your online presence
• Corporate blogging policy formation: prescription not proscription
• Editorial process management
• Interacting with bloggers
• Joining the Metablogosphere
• Building conversational traffic

Experience sharing and online amplifiers

• Using Google News as a traffic and PR amplifier
• Using memetrackers

Experience sharing in a rich-media environment

• Creating a conversational radio station using Podcasting
• Creating a conversational TV station

Experience sharing and the conversationalised interface

• Conversational page-design
• Prominence management
• WAC
• 'Helpfulness’ permeation
• Commentation
• Knowledge Base design – building the ‘back end'

Experience sharing, sales and ROI

• Integrating selling with your conversations: “trust firewalls” and “safe juxtaposition”
• Online value building
• Conversational metrics

Experience sharing and the new business model

• Developing a conversational online/offline publication model
• The conversational subscription model

Why these? Social or anti-social media/technologists? You decide.

Not just the usual social media suspects. Plus the reasons why!

Q: What makes these sites exemplarary social media phenomena as far as we're concerned?

A: Each one preaches, supports or exemplifies our ur-social media model: news, community, inter-site relationships.

But,there are some surprises in here. If you're expecting a roll-call of the usual suspects;blogs and flickrs, digs, reddits and blowhos, then you'll be disappointed.
Isn't it too early to be getting anal about exclusive taxonomies for social media?

Shouldn't we be painstakingly empirical instead and try to figure out exactly what works what doesn’t work and save the big generalisations till we're clearer about what's really happenning?

All the following sites are important, special and web friendly things, but in each case there's something different and singular going on.

What does this mean?

Well, many of the sites listed here certainly wouldn’t consider themselves blogs.

So, what makes a non-blog a social media phenomenon?

Lets take Digital Photography Review as an example.
Unlike a blog, it's not a diary and it's not presented as the work of an individual, nor is it brnaded in any way as a personal phenomena. Also, unlike a blog, it has full length product reviews.

However, just like a blog, the content appears in chronological order, in a single column.
Much of it is 'linkbloggy' and is drawn from sources driven by press releases and its own community.

On the other hand, church of the customer, which is a blog, treat rest of blogosphere as it's community, whereas youtube is so closely connected to myspace, that to separate the two is to misunderstand what's going on there.

Q. So what makes these sites exemplarary social media phenomena as far as we're concerned?

A: Each one preaches, supports or exemplifies our ur-social media model: news, community, inter-site relationships.

More than that, one cannot say - the time for theory is not yet come.

Digital Photography Review
Probably the best example of a specialist news driven community site in the whole consumer electronics marketplace, in this case, the 'news' is an 'in-house reviews and commented press releases' model, but am I dreaming, or is this seemingly random 'differentiation of approach' yet another example of the proof that neither these guys, nor Engadget, nor Gizmodo, really know how what they are doing actually works?

Drudgereport
Billions of visits, exremely bloggy, and supposedly outside the blogosphere?

TechMeme
Who needs to bother with newsreaders if you have an aggregator as good as this?

(it's so addictive that it has radically changed Scoble's blog reading model) But does it let you miss the small stuff?

RobotWisdom
Jorn Barger, the father of linkblogging, a genius, invents his own abbreviated language, still makes other linkbloggers look like they are trying too hard, but is this a blog?

Technorati
Ok, it isn't a blog, but is the home of blog search, if only they or someone else could make the whole thing feel less like wading through a quagmire.

Church of the customer
Go here to worship word of mouth marketing; we do.

Beet TV
One day everyone will have one of these.

YouTube
So much promise, such a mess, the sheer volume of incoming material makes you imagine that quanity would make up for poor sub-editorial management, but instead it makes it worse, yet another demonstration of a poor balance of human and algorithmic structure.

Motley fool
These people discovered many key features of the 'news and community integration model' but didn't take it to the next level.

TurnHere
Channel9 for places other than Microsoft.

Clearstation
One upon a time, the future was buried inside this site: it's still in there, but it's still buried.

Clickz
Why is the site which teaches you how to not be a best kept secret, still a best kept secret?

Flickr
What will this morph into as server bandwidth becomes cheap enough for people not to need to use it to save money?

Digg
Supposedly all about tagging, but really, from everyone but the taggers point of view, is it really something else altogether?

Popurls
Why bother to go to any other linkblogging/newsfilter site?

MySpace
Turning usability on its head?

No, it's just exploiting tendencies that were there all the time, tendencies which were outside the 'convenience' paradigm which blinkers today's primitive notions of usability.

SecondLife
The introductory process is so poorly structured that only a determined effort, geeky stoicism, or assistance from another user can overcome the inhibitions it produces. The fact that despite this there is already a high sign up rate is proof of the vast potential of this kind of environment, if anyone finds a way to make the thing more newbie-friendly.

The Register
These people take the tabloid headline-writer's craft seriously and apply it to technology news. They are the very epitome of "British" writing: sceptical, ironic, self-deprecating, a powerful contrast to the typically positive, breezy, literal style of most of the US technology press. They are openly dismissive of 'blogosphere' phenomena like Web 2.0, despite being a good example of how online news can punch above its weight.

News.bbc.co.uk
This site can still teach just about every other news site (in fact just about every site) a thing or two about how to lay out content, even a decade after they moved into the lead (they got Jakob Nielsen in to help them set it up). But their prominence management still has a "matrix fetish" which is as obsolete now as it was then (although the blogosphere has taken most of their competiton a few steps backward).

The Guardian (UK newspaper)
This competes with the New York Times as the most 'switched on' newspaper, they love blogs, but have no idea how to makef their content any more web friendly than anyone else (cryptic hint (1): you need to do a certain something that you do in the printed version that don't you do in the online version, even more cryptic hint (2): vice versa).

http://slashdot.org/
This is 'the swarm', the hive mind. Is Myspace the hive mindless?

If you want to see an issue have the most chance of getting a good 'ventilation' amongst a dedicated bunch of online arguers, this is the place to go. Their prominence management has a great mix of people and algorithms defining the priority but a default 'algorithmic' message board layout, which means that although they punch above their weight, they punch far below their potential.

Tailrank
Techmeme-alike augmented with search capabilities but suffering from more rudimentary prominence management.

http://www.metafilter.com/
A linkblogging community that pre-dates the 'tagging linkblogs' like Digg.

Wikipedia
Yes, they have news, community and a superb UGC knowledge acquisition process. No, they know nothing about how to integrate them.

Arts and letters Daily
An archetypal link blog that doesn't look or feel like a link-blog. They have had (for many years) something to teach us about the whole online commentation process.

Science Daily
An unbeatable free resource for science stories.

New Scientist
As the most switched on publication outside the IT press, they seem just as confused about the strategic relationship between the printed mag and the online offering as anyone else in the same business.

E-politix
A pioneer in providing a 'bloggy' news resource for politicians, why does this thing seem to exist in a world of its own?

Huffington Post
A blog?

An online newspaper?

Why did this happen after Salon made it so clear that online newspapers were not a home run?

Salon
A notorious example of perils of attempting to monetise online news after the first online advertising bubble burst. There is a relationship between print media, online news, subscriptions and advertising that seems to eludes these guys as much as it does almost everyone else (see the Huffington Post for comparison).

Amazon made customer reviews integral to what they do. Shame they gave up there.

Amazon = no-clue pain

Despite having unfeasibly large amounts of coverage in Google (only recently surpassed by Wikipedia) and despite enormous quantities of ‘online service functionality’ and a ‘commitment to innovation’ they really are about as clueless about how to conversationalise what they are doing as they were on the day when they sold their very first book.

Algorithmic fetishists

Their tools, their infrastructure, the richness of the range of resources, seem to betray the same  ‘algorithmic fetish’ as Google.

Up the Amazon without a paddle?

Have you noticed that Google, in the Wikipedia era, doesn't seem to favour Amazon as much as they used to in the early days?

Wikipedia feels like it answers the searchers' question, where Amazon feels like it is just selling stuff.

So you can see why Google might want to give Wikipedia better positioning.

But Google does everything by algorithm.

So what is it about Amazon's pages that informs Google's algorithms that Amazon is 'less deserving of page rank' than it was?

Is it structure or content?

And how does this affect the rest of us in Social Media Land?

Humans and the voice of experience please

They could get away with a far smaller investment in technology if they used the tools that they have already developed as a means of introducing their own human experiences into the visitor and purchaser interaction process (their review process feels cold and detached).

Soul, POV and integration deficit

They need real prominence management, they need news and community integration, they need an editorial soul.

Shurely shome mishtake??

How can the thing which occupies the largest proportion of Google results-list real-estate be under performing?

A thought experiment

Imagine what a warm, friendly Amazon would be like.

But what is it now?

An appalling, if promising mess.

Amazon - what kind of media company are you?

Once upon a time news.bbc.co.uk was the world's leading news site...that is - until Google news came out!

News.bbc.co.uk still has the only really web-friendly story page layout (‘boxes within stories’ and ‘clustered related links’).

Why are newspapers still lagging behind?

Why the online versions of famour newspapers haven't caught up with them is still a mystery - they are still pasting in the newspaper print copy for each story, which, of course, has no embedded hyperlinks, because you can’t print a hyperlink on paper (yet).

The blogosphere finally arrives in force at the BBC?

It took Google's purchase of YouTube to do it

Blogosphere probes 'GooTube' deal

Yes, it's a proper 'What the Bloggers say" article, and it's all A list bloggers.

Woders will never cease.

Theyll be mentioning TechMeme next.

But news.bbc.co.uk fails to capitalise on its edge

The BBC site then proceeds to rigorously eschew embedded hyperlinks in its stories.

Now, although this minimises clutter and maximises readability above and beyond competing news sites (by putting the links into boxes, see above) why not do both?

What would this look like?

A bloggier beeb

Surely of all possible worlds would be to combine the BBC’s ‘boxed links’ with the ‘bloggy’ embedded links approach. "But...", you can see this objection coming a mile off, "wouldn't this undermine the BBC's uniquely high readability?".

BBC losing its' edge?

A real BBC weakness in the ‘post-Google News era’ is that the ‘number of stories covered’ in the BBC news site business and technology sections has become woefully inadequate.

Proof - I just can't be bothered any more....

I have stopped worrying about whether or not I have recently checked out these BBC news site sections, because the BBC news page tends to either lag behind coverage found elsewhere by Google News, or, when the BBC are covering the story, Google News will find the BBC story page and send me there anyway.

What about BBC's video output?

As for BBC news video, there's no need to go into full sentences on this one. Lets just say that it's:

• Too little
• Too short
• Poor picture quality
• Lagging behind the rest
• Punches way below its weight

Isn't it time the BBC took the challenge of Google and the blogosphere more seriously?

It used to be sooo good.

shame...

Passion, quirkiness, focus. The 'Jeremy Clarkson model' delivers a blogbuster

So what are the components of the classic 'Jeremy Clarkson' model ?

The 'Clarkson 5'

• It's a link blog
• It's the new model of the ‘monetizable online publication’
• It's the ‘what I found today on the web’ model
• It's the leading blog in the stable run by Nick Denton
• It's right up in the top tier of Technorati

Plus the Denton 12

The proprietor, Nick Denton, says he needs his linkbloggers to do 12 postings a day

What could beat this?

• Somebody doing the same thing but better?
• Somebody able to monetize it better?
• Someone doing it with lower costs?
• Bigger articles with more depth per article?
• More than 12 postigs a day?
• Even better writing?

Will the market grow?

Is there room in this world for more than two Engadgets?

Equals = still Hungary?

He claims he doesn’t make much money from his blogging empire which is why (so he tells us) that he needs to reduce his costs by running this site from Hungary

Engadget in the rear-view mirror

Gizmodo's main rival is Engadget, another link blog at the top of Technorati, running out of a stable of similar linkblogs

Want to know how to do next generation corporate videos?

This site has hundreds of them.

They actually do integration!

The video publishing process here is tightly integrated (well, as tightly integrated as anyone has gone so far, but it goes without saying that we would go much further) with a ‘message board’ (excuse me, er, no, I think I mean blog comments: Channel9 is a blog, isn’t it? right? discuss!).

And it shows!

The stats on the site are extremely impressive, with their seminal 'Nine guys’ video having been watched over half a million times.

How does this compare with ScobleShow?

ScobleShow, Scoble's new 'video blog' (when will we stop giving things these stupid anti-descriptive generic names? It's an online TV channel, get over it!) that he's doing over at his new employer PodTech Is as full of heaven and hell as you'd expect.

It's videos are in a current (i.e., iTunes-compatible only) version of Quicktime.

If, like most, you aren't using a Mac, you may have one hell of a problem playing them.

People have complained.

Scoble has apologised.

There's the hell.

The heaven?

Excellent interview with Jonathan Schwartz, CEO of Sun, the guy who many suspected had got Scoble fired by Microsoft for interviewing him ('twas a lie', Scoble tells us, Microsoft didn't mind at all, Scoble left of his own accord)

And 'Photowalking with Thomas Hawk' (Thomas Hawk is the blogosphere's top photo-blogger, and in the video he takes Scoble and us on a fascinating 'photographer's eye view' tour of San Francisco) is a series (and a mostly-new format idea) worthy of the BBC (shaky-cam notwithstanding).

Comparisons with Channel9?

This is a really tough question.

With all due respect to Charles Torre who has carried on with Channel9 over at Microsoft (and he has done some good stuff) we are talking Scoble here, and we are talking 'Scoble with a need to innovate even more than when he was at Microsoft'.

I expect him to leave Channel9 as an antique, a historic curiosity.

ScobleShow is in a mess right now, but don't bet on it staying that way.

And he's still doing good stuff and new kinds of stuff even though he hasn't really got his act together.

ScobleShow already gets as much of my attention as Channel9 used to.

Learn fast!

I learn new things about how to do this stuff (and just as often, and even more importantly, how not to do this stuff) every time I visit.

I still believe this is one of the most important sites on the web.

You can also learn (from the content of the videos) about a lot more than how to make corporate videos.

Learn what?

You can learn about transparency, change resistance, collaboration challenges, software management nightmares, PR dilemmas (and occasionally, about Microsoft, and software developemt).

Social media Management masterclass (SmMm)!

And yet the site - and everyone else in the world - is still deluded about it being Microsoft-centric.

Go here, take a look and see for yourself....

Is it possible that aiming for perfect usability is misconceived?

"Don Norman, Jakob Nielsen’s business partner, has written a book which tells us that the best ‘user interfaces’ are ones that you don’t even know are there.

If ‘trying to get something done’ becomes effortless, because the thing you are using to get things done ‘just makes it happen’, then the thing you are using to get things done is exhibiting ‘perfect usability’, and the interface (between you and the thing you are trying to do) is, as far as you are concerned, invisible.

Ok, so give me an example of an 'invisible interface'

The interface between mind and body is completely invisible to us for most of the time.

If I need to smile, talk or walk, I don't ask myself how I am going to do these things, I just do them.

Unless I am ill, tired, or in a very emotional or confused state, these things are effortless, at least mentally.

Touch-typing is an example of a 'human/machine interface' which allows an interaction where the proficient user is barely, if at all conscious of the fine details of the interaction at any one moment - it is almost as if the fast touch typist 'just thinks the words' and they miraculously appear on the screen.

Another example of an interface offering 'effortless control' is a 'Jeeves-like butler' who, by dilligent learning of our behavioural tics and tendencies, can decipher and anticipate our needs long before we become aware of them ourselves, allowing the butler to plan such things as culinary delights for us that they know we are not yet in the mood for, but confident (through interpretation of such things as body language in the context of our behavioural history) that we soon will be.

This 'butler-quality-interface' is unquestionably a holy grail of usability.

But as PG Woodhouse, the creator of the Jeeves character knew all too well, even the perfect servant has their limitations.

As far as we are concerned, service that is 'so good that it doesn't require you to describe your requirements' (because they have been deduced from your online or offline behaviour) has important yet underrated and unexplored social implications.

If you want to go to the people who are better at understanding how to design online interfaces that are ‘less obtrusive’ than anyone else’s, then The Nielsen Norman Group is the place to go.

If you want to find out about the latest goings-on in the world of online usability, then Jakob Nielsen’s useit.com website is one of the first places to check out."

Usability and the 'shadow' of convenience

Is it possible that when we have finally dispensed completely with the very last 'inconveniently visible interface', when we have achieved Don Norman’s usability nirvana, there is something precious that we might have somehow managed to unintentionally consign to oblivion?

If you can do everything important that you want to do without even noticing that you’re doing it, is this really heaven?

The end of inconvenience?

Maybe it seems far too early to be worrying about ‘the end of inconvenience’ in a world as full of usability nightmares as we have today, but maybe we shouldn’t wait until our lives are deprived, in a world of ever-more prevalent faceless online consumerism, of reasons to ever actually talk to another human being when we want to buy something or get something done.

As online activity pervades more and more of our daily existence, usability (the science of convenience?) threatens to become the sworn enemy of human experience.

Why?

Convenience = anti-social media

Because things that have the ‘convenient’ virtues of requiring less effort, taking less time and needing less knowledge, skill, or involvement, also have the vices of leaving us all with less and less to do and fewer interactions with people when we do it.

The next big challenge will become the very opposite of that addressed by the usability gods: how to reintroduce the very things that those ‘usability virtues’ are intended to eliminate (like having things to talk about and people to talk to when we do them) and to do so in such a way as to still satisfy our insatiable appetite for convenience.

What happens when usability and convenience hijack the social agenda?

Car insurance companies are currently conducting extremely large scale experiments where drivers can save up to 80% on their insurance premiums by simply putting a GPS tracker in their car which informs the insurer as to whether the driver has been driving in low risk conditions.

The interface for the driver is effortless, the usability is superb, the benefits are proving attractive, the government is interested in adopting the scheme for road pricing, potentially using environmental benefits as the pretext.

Why stop at tracking cars?

Health insurance costs (both public and private) are soaring and unhealthy lifestyle is often blamed.

Why not install RFID tags on everyone to see how often they exercise, whether they smoke, how much they drink and their calorific intake, using these criteria as a fairer way of charging for health services?

The technology to track all these things currently has (you may be disappointed to learn) rotten usability.

But once good usability has become possible (and you would probably need to employ the Nielsen Norman Group to accelerate such a development) would the fact that 'personal tracking' had become 'convenient' (and cheap) be a sufficient and necessary justification for implementing it?

Would we need to pay closer attention to the 'entertainment' values that these 'convenience benefits' would be playing a part in eliminating?

The future of the tracking system (both in-car and on-body) and its usability, looks to us to be a major Social Media issue, because once we have solved the usability/convenience problem for 'health and risk', we may find that we have rendered our own freedom and entertainment 'inconvenient'.

The 'media' part of this issue may not seem to be immediately apparent, but you can be sure that 'user participation' and 'web 2.0 technologies' will appear in just about every personal tracking technology propsal.

I'm beginning to regret that I ever dismissed self expression as a mandatory component of the blog-age phenomena, not because I was necessarily wrong to dismiss self expression as being the defining feature, but because the very technology which delivers 'Social Media' has the potential to do so much harm to our freedom for self-expression.

Nonetheless, being an optimist, I expect a combination of subversive human ingenuity, fallible technology and mischief inspired by boredom to allow self expression to survive even the most insidiously convenient mind-forged manacles that we can devise.

Usability people, when confronted with the undesirable consequences of ‘eliminating perceptible experiences from the usage process’ (which is what ‘invisible interfaces’ are all about) inevitably say something like this:

Reintroducing inconvencience - the entertainment requirement

‘Well, we’ve solved your usability requirement, we’ve eliminated your convenience problem, we’ve freed-up your time.

Sure, this has left you with less to do, but now you’re just complaining about something we technically call ‘boredom’; you need ‘entertainment’ to fix that problem.

We're sorry, but that’s just not our kind of problem, that’s not a usability requirement, it’s a content requirement, we don’t do content, content is subjective, it’s not objectively measurable, we're scientists and engineers, we’re not in the entertainment business, we can't help you with that'.

Social media is inconvenient media?

Shouldn’t Social Media, whatever we might mean by that term, treat this time-honoured ‘answer’ as a call to arms?

Somewhere in this yawning chasm between on the one hand the ‘zero perceptible time, zero perceptible experience’ aims of convenience and on the other hand the experience-intensive phenomenon ruled by 'the more time, human involvement and perceptibility the merrier' mandate of entertainment, it looks as if there is a whole raft of strange, new, and extremely valuable interfaces waiting to be discovered.

And the user interface people are telling us that this is ‘none of their goddamn business’!

Beyond the usability principle - the social media interface

So maybe the Social Media agenda has to answer questions like:

• What does a user experience look like if it gives the user the choice between convenience and entertainment?

• What kind of 'entertainment' could you possibly offer as an alternative to convenience?

• How can that choice be given without unnecessarily compromising usability, safety, liability or trust?

• How would offering such a choice affect the value proposition to the customer?

• Which products and services lend themselves to offering such choices?

• How does the delivery of such options affect the business model?

Too abstract? Here’s a social media thought experiment

What if a product is available in either a free or chargeable form and the difference is determined by whether the product delivers entertainment or convenience?

If you don’t pay for a product but you are delighted to find that it performs perfectly usefully when you start using it, but after a while it starts to behave strangely, maybe in a way which is frustrating, embarrassing, or just makes you laugh, or which makes you have to do things in a particularly inconvenient and perverse way that other people think is silly (which you excuse by proclaiming that you didn't have to pay for it) what is really going on here?

Has the product suddenly become a piece of social media, the content of conversations?

Can anyone work out how you could possibly capitalise on this metamorphosis?

The Gillmor gang, Steve’s ‘Radio show’ (er, podcast) was THE media to tune to.

It was a regular gathering of A-listers discussing the latest developments in the blogosphere.It was also often the most riveting thing you could listen to if you really wanted to hear what the 'metablogosphere' sounded like.

What do you mean 'was'?

Yep, there still does seem to be a new edition of the Gillmor Gang now and again.

Oh, and Steve Gillmor is getting to be infamous for declaring things to be DEAD that nobody knew had been killed yet.

Office is dead, TV is dead. Geddit?

And then 'social media' became fashionable

Suddenly Steve G became a ‘player’ in the blogosphere and the Gillmor Gang morphed into an altogether more fractious creature as egos jostled; and yet...even at its most acrimonious, it still exhibited moments where it fulfilled its original function -  to let us hear those ‘at the coal face’  discussing stuff that was changing the future of the online world, and maybe business itself, and maybe even life itself, and maybe....

Anti-social media, anyone?

And besides, hearing these people attack each other ‘over the air’ occasionally adds a much needed dose of realism: there is a lot at stake here, especially for anybody in the eye of the storm, which is where these people live, so it would be suspicious if this was just a love-in .

Core Gillmor concept one: Attention!

Steve Gillmor started to proclaim ‘links are dead’ to the outrage of just about everyone.

There’s a sense in which he’s right, but you’d be hard put to work out what he’s on about because this man is the William Faulkner of the bloggosphere.

But, isn't all this talk of attention and gestures really just a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing? We don't think so. Give it a ‘close reading’ and seek the meaning beneath the gleaming words.We guarantee his writing will repay the gift of your attention.

Core Gillmor concept one: Gestures!

After getting attention for the idea of “attention” Gillmor went to an even more mysterious ‘meta-level’ and got so fired up about it he left his job at ZD.

And finally, here's the man himself in a wonderfully revealing interview

Scoble/Gillmor

Watch this brilliant video, pre-dating YouTube and teaching everyone how to do a ScobleShow.

If anyone could be credited with kickstarting the blogosphere, it’s this man.

The prime mover

Just about any claim concerning who started anything in this field will start a bitter argument, but if Winer’s name doesn’t come up, you know that there’s something vital missing from the debate.

Watch him, listen to him?

Here is a video of Dave Winer being interviewed by 'Robert X Cringely' (the legendary pseudonymous satyrical columnist from InfoWorld) which is video number 6 on a page (the site is called Nerd TV) of other really interesting video interviews with other leading tech figures

Want to save time and get a combined 'first contact' with blogosphere phenomena including Dave Winer, The Gillmor Gang, Gnomedex and the history of RSS and Podcasting, all in one go?  Listen to this.

A chorus of disapproval

Every time he comes up with something new (which he does regularly) it is almost inevitably greeted by a chorus of dismissal, usually based upon the personal disaffection of his detractors, who are legion.

Yet every time, at least some aspects of his latest ideas end up becoming universally adopted as best practice.

No punches pulled

He never pulls any punches, so one often finds his blog looking like a battlefield strewn with bleeding-edge ideas, often hotly contested, which makes it a compelling place to check out.

Look here first

If you want to know what’s going to happen next in blogging technology, David Winer's site, Scripting News is one of the first places to look

Scoble isn’t dead! He's in Videography Valhalla

When Robert Scoble left Microsoft, most of his detractors thought he would disappear, evaporate, involute, go somewhere the sun don't shine etc. etc. especially when he announced he was going to join a tiny, relatively unknown startup.

Yet after he left Microsoft, his ‘Technorati top 100 blogs’ ranking soared.

There are plenty of respected people who think Scoble is a complete idiot - but we don't

He calls himself a "Geek Blogger" but lots of 'real' geeks refuse to recognise his qualifications as a geek, because as far as they are concerned, he has no technical knowledge that anyone but a non-geek would respect

He talks up Web 2.0 incessantly, which is enough to get the die-hard 'realists' among the technology community to throw chairs

He wrote a book which seems to offer blogging as a panacea, something which many (especially blogging-sceptics in the journalistic and IT management fraternities) find ludicrously naive

Despite his apparent naivety, he is pretty smart, in a kind of intuitive, rather than intellectual way, he thinks of himself as an ordinary guy, but there is nothing ordinary in the effect he has on people, there's more to his charm than just charm

Why? Here's 9 reasons why:

• NOT because he wrote a book on business blogging: other bestselling blogging book authors aren’t up there.
• NOT because he created Microsoft’s Channel9, the pioneer in corporate video blogging: many other leading video bloggers are still nowhere to be found in the A-list (yet).
• NOT because of who he used to be: ‘The man most likely to get fired for blogging against his employer’ or ‘The man most likely to leak Microsoft secrets’ (he is writing less and less about Microsoft these days)
• BUT BECAUSE the blogosphere seems to run like blood in his veins: he ‘emotes blogospherically’
• BUT BECAUSE he has a good ‘nose’ for a blogosphere-provoking headline (he is an arch link-baiter)
• BUT BECAUSE he intuitively knows how to grab the interest of the a-list
• BUT BECAUSE he has personally met most of the a-listers face to face many times (offline conversations are the fuel for online conversations, because they ‘secure your commentosphere’)
• BUT BECAUSE he knows (intuitively) how to balance the relevance-requirements of his content (biographical, occupational and institutional) to maximise trust
• BUT BECAUSE, unless you find everything to do with metablogging to be of little interest, Scoble is rarely if ever boring (in fact, if the subject is obscure, or if he says something predictable, his commenters inevitably liven things up by tormenting him mercilessly!)

There's 55 million blogs out there, so why pick these?

So what on earth does a Social Media Lab look like?

The social media lab is a communications and media research facility. We have an exclusive focus upon social media and organisational development

THE CONVERSATION BOX

Whose voice is this?

Now isn’t the voice on the left a great example of that corporate voice that you’re all too familiar with?

You know, the one that mesmerizes you, the one that whispers ‘this is the voice of God and you will believe’.

Trouble is, that trance isn’t so easily induced these days. People have learned to resist its seductive rhetoric.

These days everyone is suspicious of that God-like tone.

But old habits die hard.

How did that voice compel our attention and our assent for so long?

What are the strategies of the God-like tone?

Can we name them so that we can put them to one side and move on, learn a new voice that’s, well, a bit more human, a bit more like the voice that you and I use when we’re actually talking?

Tricks of the trade

It preaches and instructs, telling you how things really are, what’s gone wrong and how to put it right.

Its tone is quite deliberately abstract, cold and impersonal and it makes all kind of unsubstantiated claims (where are the examples for instance?)

How could you resist that paternal voice? Where else can you hear the ghost of the Victorian father speaking like that – in a voice that knows how things really are – in hese uncertain post-modern times?

Solutions-based language

It’s so seductive, the ‘solutions-based’ language that it deploys to elide the struggle and conflict and pain that is inevitably a part of working with others to solve really challenging problems.

Where's all the human drama in this grandiose talk about changing one ‘voice’ for another, as if the forms of corporate life that these ways of talking and acting are embedded in could be magically spirited away with the waving of a wand?

We are talking about a massive breakdown of legitimacy and authority here, aren’t we?

Who can really claim how to put this right, to say what 'this' is or even that in which 'rightness' might consist?

All the real problems – what and where are they? – are taking place 'offstage'.

Therein lies the tragic dimension of this dying god; in his unvocalised externalities.

Second nature

But this voice is second nature to anyone currently at work in the corporate 'communications' industry.

It’s so close.

It’s so easy.

Can we distance ourselves enough to find another way?

What are we afraid of?

Our research and development is focused in three areas:

Experience mining

Experience mining research and development is centred upon the creation of a structured approach for discovering concealed communications capital inside organisational and business processes.

Once accessed and realised, this concealed communications capital can be utilised to ‘fuel’ structured and sustainable conversational marketing and communications programmes

Experience mining services

Corporate voice

Corporate voice research and development work is concerned with enabling an organisation to make the transition from:

the current ‘broadcast’ style corporate voice which is:

• message based
• experience poor
• monolithic

to a ‘conversational’ corporate voice which is:

• realtime
• experience rich
• multi-dimensional

Corporate Voice services

Experience sharing

Experience sharing research explores sustainable ways of deploying conversational communications:

Current lines of research include:

• How to embed experience rich communications into day-to-day business processes.
• How to integrate conversational style communications into communications strategy
• How roles, responsibilities and skill-sets change in a conversationally enabled organisation

Experience sharing services

History

The Social Media Lab was originally a corporately funded research project which turned into a rolling 6 year investigation into emerging social behaviours on the internet.

This research project led to a number of development projects which tested and further refined the research findings

The most recent project was conducted on behalf of the Inward Investment Group (IIG) at the Department of Trade and Industry. 

We feel that this is the right time to put the project onto a formal footing and to engage in a public conversation about our work with the social media community via the Journal of Social Media.

People

Peter Friedman

Peter Friedman is Director of Research at the Social Media Lab

Stephen Fitzpatrick

Stephen Fitzpatrick is Director of Strategy at the Social Media Lab

Thom McIntosh

Thom McIntosh is an associate of the Social Media Lab specialising in user-experience design

Karen Appleby

Karen Appleby is Adminisration Manager

I Just don't get it

"The voice you're using in the "Conversation Box" above seems to be just as impersonal and preachy as the stuff on the left.

I't's just as much of an example of the godlike tone you're telling us is no good (at least you're saying one thing I agree with).

So if even you can't stop using this godlike tone, why on earth should we trust you to help us try and sound more like human beings than gods?"

Partners and network

The Social Media Lab draws upon the resources of a number of institutions including:

The Management School at the Institute of Family Therapy
The Grubb Institute of Human Science and Behaviour
National Theatre’s Theatreworks Management Development Department

as well as an diverse interdisciplinary network which comprises:

• communications professionals

and academics, theorists and practitioners from a diverse range of disciplines:

• psychology
• anthropology
• philosophy
• sociology