I have recently had reason to focus on the area of monitoring of social media which has involved looking once more at the whole range of black box monitoring solutions that are out there.  This has caused me deep feelings of confusion and uncertainty.

The reason is this: when I do monitoring for a client, or advise a client on how to do monitoring, this is what I do.  I work out what issues the client needs to track.  I devise from this relevant search queries.  I punch these queries into a range of search tools, since no one tool covers all the bases.  I have a quick look at the results and tweak the search queries if necessary and also have a quick look at the general shape of the conversation (i.e. any especially relevant blogs, the balance of conversation between twitter, blogs, social networks etc.)  I then pull the feeds from these searches into an aggregator (Netvibes seems to be the best for this) and segment things by creating relevant tabs.  I then start to watch what is going on and chase down the threads that seem to be interesting.  Over time I add to and tweak the model as I start to get a better feel for where the conversation is happening.

With such a tool I seem to have everything I need to stay tuned in to the conversation.  I can write a report or analysis of this for a client (or the client can access the information by tapping into the tool direct) as well as having all the information the client needs  to actually “do” social media – i.e. respond to the conversation, create relevant content, engage with relevant communities.

However, out there is a huge industry selling incredibly impressive black boxes that reel of reams of charts and data and figures and tracking, with sentiment analysis and conversation mining (conversation mining?) and all sorts of other wizardry.  This is very intimidating – surely my little homespun costs virtually nothing solution that relies primarily on the intelligence and analysis of a real person cannot be anywhere near as impressive as these mighty emperors with all their fancy clothes?

But the problem is – when I look at all these impressive reports I can’t work out how they help me design and run a social media strategy.  They could help me craft a one-to-many message (but that’s called advertising not social media) and the sentiment / volume metrics might help in measurement – we did x and the volume / sentiment needle moved x per cent in this direction.  But that’s about it.  And in any case all of this intelligence I would be getting through using my homemade tool anyway – albeit the intelligence would be in my head, not in a chart.

The analogy that springs to mind is this.  Suppose there was a large room and inside it were all the key stakeholders of your organisation.  Let’s say these people were at a drinks reception that you had organised – gathered around in groups chatting about you, subjects relevant to what you/ they do or maybe just about sport and the weather.   As hosts of this party what do you do?  The logical thing would be to go into the room circulate around the groups, listen to what people are saying, have a chat, tell people what you were doing.  What you wouldn’t do is send someone else in to listen-in on the conversations or set up a form of remote surveillance and then sit in another room and wait for someone to prepare a presentation and report back.  It may well be that this report is very detailed and gives you more information than you could obtain just by circulating round the room.  It would tell you exactly what topics were being discussed, what volume and sentiment of conversation was attached to each, who was speaking the most, correlate the people with the most to say with the colour of their shoes, determine that those with black socks are marginally more positive about you than those with brown socks – or any other way you would want to “mine the conversation”.  But exactly how useful would this information be?  If all you were going to do was to walk into the room, stand on a platform and deliver a speech, this type of stuff might help.  You could, for example drop in a subtle reference to the fashion credentials of black footwear.  But that’s advertising.  That’s good old-fashioned one-to many communication.  Its not social media.

But there again – it appears to be big business.  People are buying these remote sensing and analysis products.  Is it just snake oil and are the purveyors of such trading (albeit unwittingly) on ignorance? Or have a missed something?

Here is a blast from the past (Sept 2006) about the future.  I came across it again because I was searching for something I knew I had written once about the future of advertising / creative agencies.  It has always been in my mind to update this article, but having read it I think most of the predictions it makes are still current and so – since I haven’t got around to finishing my post on the connected crowd – I have decided to punt this around again.

The future is not what it used to be.

@obionyeaso recently sent me this DM on twitter:

Hi Richard.I wonder if you can point me to a more detailed A-B-C introduction to understanding ‘process ‘and ’space’.

Not the sort of thing you can answer in a tweet – so rather than email a response I have decided to share this in a post.

There is not a existing body of work I can point you to about either of these two concepts.  Unfortunately, much of the discourse within the social media space is around an assessment of the latest ‘bright shiny things’.  However, there are still people, such as Clay Shirky and Antony Mayfield, who are focussed on the bigger picture shifts and social impacts.  But, I am not aware of anyone else who has chosen to frame these shifts through the lens of institutions to processes and places to spaces.

Thus what I am saying about space and process is not new in the sense of uncovering new intelligence – it is just a way of looking at what is already out there.

Having got those caveats out of the way – lets get back to Obi’s question.

Process. The best way to understand this is to look at Wikipedia.  Wikipedia is a process.  Each entry is a never ending journey rather than a destination.  This is in contrast to the Encyclopedia Britanica which is an institution, a destination, a place.  The essence of process within social media is that the total is greater than the sum of its parts.  It is about bringing together fragments, which of themselves and in isolation, may not be especially significant but collectively do achieve significance.  As a rule, the more people who participate in a process, the better the outcome.  It is a concept that baffles many, especially those in the traditional media.  Not surprisingly, the idea that an expert, trained, journalist can none-the-less be bettered by a random group of non-experts, is provoking.   The issue of course is that none of those random individuals, in isolation, can produce anything as good as an individual journalist – but their output is not seen in isolation, it is judged as a collective or collaborative output.  As a process.

The label citizen journalist is what traditional journalists have created to try and describe this – but this only further demonstrates and perpetuates the bafflement.  Citizen journalists don’t actually exist (as I have described previously) but attaching the label journalist to people who for one reason or another become involved in the business of disseminating information that comes to be seen as newsworthy, provides a framework that has the comfort of familiarity and allows journalists to then assess the individual citizens as institutions, while ignoring their role within a process.

The processes of social media have much in common with probability theory.  They need a critical mass in terms of numbers in order to produce reliable outcomes and they are not about defining black and white outcomes.  The normal distribution curve, which sits at the heart of probability theory, also has relevance to the processes of social media.   The normal distribution curve is a way of taking any outcome and working out where it sits in relation to other outcomes.  It doesn’t say that any particular outcome is right – rather it gives an indication of how confident you can be in the rightness of the outcome.  Likewise, the processes of social media allow us to access the broad collective view.  It generates, if you like, a form social algorithm which allows us to see how information, or even opinion, is positioned in space – in much the same way as Google has built a mathematical algorithm to rank web sites.

Unfortunately, because for 600 years we have lived in a world where truth is seen to reside in institutions and places, we have been slow to understand the process-based nature of social media and devise tools which support this.  This will change.  It is why people still see the internet as chaotic or lawless.  This is because they are judging it by its extremes, in the way you would judge an institution.  They are not seeing its ability to aggregate around a median point and recognise that this median point is very ordered and structured.  Nor are they seeing that, unlike with institutionalised media or communication, it is not possible to take an extreme position and maintain that this is the view of the majority.  The process of interrogation by the crowd will ensure that any extreme position is quickly identified as such.

The beauty of the process based nature of social media is that it allows any contribution, not matter how small, irrelevant or foolish, to find its niche.  It is this micro-nonsense, so frequently derided, that gives it its strength.  It draws its strength in an opposite way to traditional media – which is a reductive process, designed to take a lot of information and pare this down to a single truth.  Social media is an expansive process.  The more contributions its gathers, the better its ability attach a rank, rating or position, to information.

Twitter is a classic example of social media as a process.  The vast majority of individual tweets are, as Twitters critics correctly say, nonsense (or as I prefer to say, of extremely niche interest).  However, Twitter has worked out a way (process) to aggregate these bits of nonsense and start to give them sense –the usage of #tags being the most significant of these.  Twitter required a certain critical mass of users to become useful.  Initially it recruited these from the geek community and for the first couple of years of its life remained a very niche space.  However, as it started to move beyond the geek community, its influence grew and continues to grow with every additional user and every tweet.  Originally people couldn’t see the difference between Twitter (or a tweet) and a Facebook update.  The content (and even the original purpose) of both was exactly the same.  However, the difference wasn’t in content, it lay in the fact that Twitter was able to turn itself into a process whereas Facebook status updates just sat in a single solitary place and haven’t got a way to connect themselves to other bits of information.

Twitter very neatly brings us to the concept of space (rather than place).  As we have seen, Twitter draws its strength from its ability to pull bits of information together.  It doesn’t do this by pulling information together in a particular place, rather it facilitates the creation of spaces to bring together relevant tweets.  It does this through processes of search and tagging.  A tag – especially a twitter tag – is the purest example of a media space that we have.  A tag doesn’t live anywhere.  It has no place and is created simply by the act of looking for it.

A space is a bit like a spotlight shining on a dark stage.  The circle of light this creates when or if we decide to switch it on, will illuminate anything that passes into it but everything else will remain in darkness and essentially invisible.  Critically, this spotlight isn’t mandated  to follow a particular actor around the stage.  The people controlling the spotlight are in control.  Iif, as an actor, you want visibility you have to step into the space, rather than expect the light to follow you around no matter where you are.

Up until recently it hasn’t been the spotlight which is in control – only the actors.  This is because the ‘rule’ of the Gutenberg world was that information was only available in places – books, newspapers, websites.  We therefore became accustomed to the idea that following or subscribing to these places and then filtering out the information that was not relevant was the way we had to do things.  The idea that it was possible to only receive information that was relevant and set criteria that screened out irrelevancy was, and still is, new.

As with processes we haven’t yet got to grips with the idea that intangible things like conversations or subjects are more important in defining relevance or influence than individual places or people.  This is despite the fact that, intuitively, we always start our search for information based around a specific subject or question.  However, this intuitive process has been disrupted by the fact that, in the Gutenberg world, we then had no alternative but to find a place which generically and on average was likely to provide the sort of information we want, along with probably a lot of surplus information.  Consequently we still attach more relevance to where something comes from rather than what it is.  This is because the world of mass communication is not set up to be able to work at the level of micro-relevance.  Our principal search engine, Google, is still a place based search tool.  However, tools that help us identify spaces are emerging.  These tools are based on allowing us to define the spaces we want to look at and detect (and connect to) all the relevant particles of information that sit in, or pass through, this space.  A good example is whostalkin.com.  This still monitors places, but it manages a much greater range of places including the places where micro-content (such as tweets) circulates.  It therefore is a much more effective space monitoring tool because it can pick-up everything that is going on seen through the lens of a specific search criteria – search criteria being the standard way of setting the boundaries of a digital space.

Obi – I hope this helps answer your question.  At one level this stuff is all a bit theoretical and incomplete.  However – if you get a grasp of it, it helps you understand what works and what won’t work in social media.  Most of the failures are occurring because people are still thinking institutions instead of processes or places instead of spaces.  My advice is to look at space and process as a form of acid test.  If something doesn’t have an inclusive process at its heart – it probably won’t work.  Likewise, if it seems to be adapted to work only within a particular place, rather than a space, it may be a ‘Gutenberg thing’ trying to survive in the post-Gutenberg world.

I have just been to the Social Media Club / Gov2Gov event hosted by the Canadian High Commission

Its purpose was “to bring together leaders from the Canadian High Commission in London, UK Central Government, the Greater London Authority (GLA) and the United States Department of State with Social Media leaders to discuss the changing nature of civic engagement and the relationships between citizens and their government.”

I took three things from it.

First, it was a very geeky event, which in some ways was a shame.  Not because there is anything wrong with geeks, but the fact that it is still only geeks talking about this thing is slightly disappointing.  As Clay Shirky has said – it is only when things becoming technically boring that they become socially interesting.  Hence the discussion was perhaps a little too focused on detail and practice with not enough attention (for my liking) on the bigger picture stuff.

Second, and perhaps linked to the above, all of the conversation seemed to be based on a single, and in my view, misplaced assumption.  This assumption was that the relevance of social media to government lies in the ways it could help government reach out and engage with The People, or allow The People to engage with government.  Admirable stuff, but the idea was not really entertained that ultimately the effect of social media is that people will stop engaging with government, because they have worked out better ways to do amongst themselves what government used to do for them.

Social media is a de-institutionalising and disintermediating force.  It gets rid of institutionalised functions.  This is the lesson from every sector it has touched.  In music it has got rid of the music business (and the creation and sharing of music has flourished).  In news it is getting rid of the news business (and the creation and sharing of information is flourishing).  In government, logically therefore, it will get rid of the government business.

Now, clearly some elements of centralised, institutionalised government will always be necessary.  Therefore, should not the debate at these events focus on what that bits these should be and how to organise an orderly transference of power (and possibly maintenance of stewardship) in those areas where people can do it better for themselves?

The idea that bits of government could become irrelevant is clearly an idea too challenging for those in government and a concept too social for most geeks to see as interesting.

Third – and perhaps more interesting for the future #g2g process – the most stimulating part of the evening for me was the conversations I had after the formal session once the ‘grandstanding’ inherent in these events – especially the ‘grandstanding on steriods’ facilitated by a twitter wall of Twitterfall – is put to one side.  This hints at the importance of creating a defined digital space to continue this debate rather than just off(ish)-line places for discussion.

Wired has just published an excellent article on the battle between Facebook and Google.  It covers the key issues concisely and is well worth a read.

However, I think both companies (and possibly Wired) are wrong to think that this is a battle for future of the internet.  Instead it is a battle for today’s internet.  In my view neither Google nor Facebook will win the battle for the future of the internet because both are fighting in the wrong space.  Both organisations are basing their strategies on the assumption that the future lies in an ad-driven, data capture, real estate model of the internet – and this is a 1.0, traditional institutionalised communications model.

Advertising is a creation of the world of traditional institutionalised information.  No one is suggesting that advertising is still not incredibly important – but it is a pot that is shrinking as distribution-based communication itself shrinks.  And while some of it is moving on-line, the on-line opportunity is never going to be as big as the current total pot and ultimately will disappear altogether.

Here’s why.  The world of traditional media (including traditional 1.0 digital media) was one where information was chained to, and shaped by, its means of distribution.  It lived in places (newspapers, books, websites) and you could rent space in these places to distribute messages.  This was also the world of Google, which was designed to trawl these places to  discover information.  Its why Google was very good at discovery of information, but not (relatively speaking) very good at rating or valuing information.

The first wave of social media (web2.0) emerged because  distribution suddenly became cheap and available to all.  This started to break the dominance that distribution had over content.  Information could start to move about and exist in a number of different places – for example a single blog post could be found in the blog, but also an RSS reader, become an update in Facebook and LinkedIn or any place that allowed an RSS feed.  The information was not shaped by a specific place or means of distribution in the same way as in the past.  It was much more portable and spreadable.  This has meant that processes of information sharing and connectivity have become more important.  These processes are more influential in defining the trust placed in a piece of information that simply the place (institution) where that piece of information originates.  As I have written previously, trust is shifting from institutions to processes.

This is the world of Facebook, a world where information discovery may not be easy as Google but the rating of information is better because of the process of filtering and sharing through a network.

As companies come to terms with the first wave of social media they will realise that they need to switch their investment from buying media (distribution) to making content and managing conversations in order to establish trust and influence.  They will start to realise that the key to influence in the social media lies in the influence of space not place.  This is what will cause the first absolute shrinkage in the amount of advertising revenue available, rather than simply a shift from off- to on-line.

The second, and termina,l shrinkage of the advertising pot that both Google and Facebook still covet, will occur once the next wave of the social media revolution kicks in.  This is when the separation of information from a means of distribution becomes complete, or rather “free” information becomes dominant over captured, institutionalised, information.  There will then be very few places left to sponsor or rent – no-where for an advertising dollar to live.

This third wave is not yet upon us, but it is not far away.  Twitter is starting to give us clues as to its existance and dynamics.  A Twitter tag is the first example of a space, a property, a thing that exists almost totally independently of a means or place of distribution.  It lives only through processes of search – no-where else.   This is the reason why Twitter is finding it so hard to monetize – it hasn’t got a piece of lawn that it can allow advertisers to camp-out on.

The economic model for this third wave will be totally different from that which exists now, and which is forming the basis for both the Facebook and Google strategy.  It won’t be ad based.  It will be much closer to an infrastructure, utility or service model.  Facebook may think that its advantage lies in social search based on the fact that people will trust a network of friends more than they trust an institution – and Facebook owns firendship.   Now while this is true, it is worth remebering that until now, when it comes to trust, people have had only two alternatives – trust an institution or trust a friend.  This choice is a product of the Gutenberg world.  There is now a new source of trust which is neither as close as a friend or as remote as an institution.  This source is the Connected Crowd – the vast, powerful and ever shifting network of connectivity that is swirling through time and space (rather than being captured in place).

The elements in this network will never be friends in a Facebook sense.  But, crucially, the processes of connectivity will mean that the trust you can extract from this will be as good, if not better, than that available from individuals you know and trust.  This is because it will combine the penetration and scale of a Google with the trust of a Facebook network.

The players, services, things that will control the world where information is separated from distribution are not yet in existance.  The only thing we know for sure is that power is shifting away from institutions to individuals.  This suggests that the commercial opportunity does not lie in challenging this shift, but in facilitating it.  It may be in providing the tools, services and infrastructure that helps individuals use this power, rather than denying their right to hold it in the first place.  It is certainly not going to be a Google or a Facebook as they are currently constructed.

It is worth remebering that telephone companies first tried to promote their service by influencing what people should say in a phone call.  In fact, astonishingly enough as it now seems, they tried to drive usage away from social chit-chat to serious business usage.  Very soon they realised that the commercial opportunity lay in  facilitating the process of connection (an infrastructure and service model), not controlling the content.

Telling people that social media is about spaces rather than places draws a blank look from 90 per cent of people.  I have therefore been searching for the good old analogy that helps people understand this concept.  This search has also been prompted by a current project where a client “wants to be on Twitter” but wants to achieve this is a viral, one Tweet will make me famous, sort of a way and it is important to help them understand why this is unlikely to work.

The analogy I have come up with is that of trade show or exhibition.  Suppose your business or organisation was to have a presence at the leading exhibition within your sector and you were presented with two choices as to what this presence would be.  Choice one is to have a physical space where you could create your stand, display what you do,  talk to people and develop sales leads which you could follow-up aftwerwards.  Choice two is to have an announcement about your company read-out over the PA twice a day.

Assume that the price for each option is roughly the same – what would you choose?    You would choose the physical space every time.

Why?  If I was trying to sell you the announcement alternative, I could mount a pursuasive argument.  I could say that here is a way of reaching all the people interested in your secor all at once.  One simple, powerfull message reaches all of them.  How more cost effective could you get?  To which the response would be – people haven’t come here to listen to ads.  They are here to talk, to find out detailed information, see the products and meet the people behind them.  I.e. exactly the same requirements of people in the social media space.

Clearly – it would be much simpler to broadcast a message at all these people – because creating your space involves some time and effort.  You have to create specific material, you have to think about how you host visitors.  Crucially you need representatives on your stand the whole time who are sufficiently qualified to talk about your organisation.  But you know that not to do this would be to waste the opportunity.

This is exactly the same with social media.  The difference is that in social media, the shows don’t last for a few days, they never end.  And also – the space costs you nothing.  The only investment required is in creating and managing your presence – and clearly, keeping this real-time, active and refreshed will yield results, rather than building a stand, sticking some brochures on a table (or posting some tweets / building a micro-site / creating a banner ad) and walking away.

The elections in Iran have once again shown the power of social networks and Twitter in particular.  We can say that Twitter is making history.  The content on Twitter is changing the course of events.  However, most of that history lives within tags, such as #iranelection, and these tags will die or be lost in a few weeks time as our ability to retain them and search for them slips beyond the reach of Twitter Search or other search engines.  Twitter Search doesn’t give you access to a tag beyond two or three weeks.  This is a serious problem.

The whole issue of the digital record is one that is becoming incredibly important for the future of social media – and an area that, in my opinion, isn’t receiving enough attention.  If we can’t find a way to create and preserve a relevant digital record we will find ourselves destroying history as fast as we make it.  This record has to work according to the controlling dynamics of social media – availability and accessibility.

It may well be that the individual tweets that collectively are making history in Iran at the moment will still live somewhere in the digital record – in a place.  However, Twitter more so than any other social media tool is defined by space, not place.  The power of Twitter in the Iran issue and all others of historical influence, lies in tags and the creation of tag spaces.  These spaces live only in search or other forms of aggregation.  Lose the ability to search for it and aggregate it – and essentially we lose the information.

In the old days of traditional information, one printed copy of a document or a newpaper article held within a secure archive was enough.  There was a whole institutionalised system for ensuring that this information was held within the collective memory.  Social media doesn’t work like that.  It is defined by its ubiquity, by its ease of access, by its availability.  Restrict any of these things and you kill it.  Restriction of access has almost the same effect as actual removal or erradication of the information.

If ever there is one thing we should worry about – this is it.  Forget social media doing away with cultural gatekeepers, the media and other institutionalised sources of trust and all the other arguments that have been raised against it.  This issue losing or destroying history is what we should really be worried about.

Everything I bang on about concerning social media: the Gutenberg principle, the shift in trust from institutions to process, why its about spaces not places, why the new audience is neither an individual or a crowd but the connected crowd (post in draft) is fantastically illustrated in this talk by Clay Shirky.  (Sorry – can’t get the video itself to embed)

It gives a perfect illutration of how the media world has changed and why social media is different.  It is 17 minutes long and essential viewing for anyone with the slightest interest in This Social Media Thing.

The question it leaves hanging is “what do you do about it?” – although it does illustrate what I always present as the first part of the answer, namely to  recognise that social media is fundamentally different and the approaches you used in the traditional media world will not work in the social media space.

I would than say what you do about it is focus on three things:

Content – make much more of it, make it much more niche and much more portable

Conversation – listen to it and then respond to it

Community – understand, support and possibly host the process of community building rather than try and build you own communities.

I have been spending time today working with an agency on a response to a social media monitoring brief.  The view on how to approach this – coming from the agency and the client – has been based around identifying and monitoring places (blogs etc).  I have found myself saying on a number of occasions that “social media monitoring is about understanding and monitoring the space more than the place”.

I think this is true for more than just monitoring - it is a basic principal that defines success in social media.  However, it is quite a difficult concept to really embrace, largely because our approach to communication and influence has always been based on place.  It is one other aspect of the shift from institution (place) to process which is at the heart of the change that social media is bringing.

There is an industry out there that is succesfully making money selling organisations place-based monitoring tools such as black boxes that purport to measure and chart influence.  This is because it is reassuring, from a clients perspective, to think that all they need to uncover are the key places to monitor and then “influence” – much like you monitor and influence traditional media.  Essentially this is just a step on from conventional media planning – but it only works if the assumption is that having identified the place you can then ride on the coat tails of its influence.  This assumption held true with conventional institutionalised media sources – which you could buy through advertising or co-opt through PR.  However, this assumption doesn’t hold true in social media.

Sure – it is useful to know which are the influential blogs in any given sector.  But this knowledge only becomes useful if you then use these blogs as sources of information rather than sources of distribution – as guide to understanding the space and the conversation.  We are starting to realise that ‘blogger outreach’ has a limited utility in most instances.  This is not surprising – blogger outreached emerged as one of the very early social media techniques, before we had started to really understand how social media worked.  It is a very institutionalised approach – and it did have some effect, especially when there were not many blogs and blogs were basically ‘it’ as far as social media was concerned – pre Twitter, Ning, Facebook etc.  Even if you get an ‘influential blogger’ to write a positive post or give you a link – all you are getting is a flash in the pan.  Here today gone tomorrow.  What it doesn’t give you is an enduring and discoverable presence in the space.  Here today and gone tomorrow worked fine with traditional media when your flash in the pan was put in front of hundreds of thousands or millions of people.  That is never going to happen with a single source (or place) in social media.

One of the things I always tell organisations embarking on a social media strategy is to understand their relevant digital space and then start to work out how to colonise it and populate it with content and then conversation.  I never advise trying to identify and influence places – because it just doesn’t get them anywhere in the long term.

This is especially true of monitoring.  It is a bit like astronomy in that the key to success is looking at the right parts of the sky.  For much of the time, there may be nothing happening in that space – but this in itself is important information.  And when information does enter it – it can come from anywhere – an ‘influential blog’ or a random tweet.  Both may be equally important.  Places only become relevant when they enter your spaces – which is why the space is the place, as it were.  Might we even say “space is the new place”?

There has recently been a bit of a flap going on within technology reporting circles between bloggers and reporters.  At issue is the concern that blogs publish unfounded rumours, whereas newspapers publish only the truth (that old chestnut).  At the centre of this curfluffle is this piece in the NY Times.

At heart it is a stupid debate that is founded in the inability (on probably both sides of the argument) to recognise that social media is fundamentally different from institutionalised media.  As I have said before -  truth within social media is founded in process.  It is crystalised in the reception of information.  Truth within institutionalised media is vested in the publication of information.  Or as Clay Shirky has put it publish then filter versus filter then publish.  Jeff Jarvis also hits on the same issue here – although he couches it as product versus process.

It is only when newspapers work out how their world has been changed by social media and what their role is within it, that this debate can become fruitful.  Don’t expect that to happen anytime soon.