Social Networking :: Robin Good's Latest News

Top Internet Marketing Trends For 2011: The Best Strategies To Follow

Robin Good — Thu, 03 Mar 2011 06:25:00 PST

What are the key emerging internet marketing trends? Which are the new marketing factors to take into greater consideration in the near future?

Photo credit: Absolut Vision, mashed-up by Robin Good

In this realm, some of the most frequently asked questions I receive in my inbox include:

"Hey Robin, should I invest extra energies on Facebook and Twitter?

What's the future of link building strategies?

Who do I go to for SEO work?

And when it comes to communication formats, styles and approaches, what are the solutions that will work next?"

Based on what I see, read, and believe, I have put together a simple outline of what I think are the key, most relevant and emerging internet marketing trends that I would advise any of my customers to seriously pay attention to.

Here they are:

From screaming to helping

From targeting to intercepting

SEO becoming an internal asset

Free is the red carpet

Employing direct trustworthy communication

Leveraging influencers and brand ambassadors

Moving from campaign to continuum - X-events

Nurturing strong and niche communities of interest

Mastering email and video marketing

Deploying one-to-one marketing solutions and personalization

If you want to understand in greater detail what these emerging trends entail for you and your company, please read on:

Internet Marketing: Future Trends and Emerging Trends

by Robin Good

1) From Screaming to Helping

One of the major shifts happening to the universe of marketing and advertising is the one represented by a deep and profound move from noise-making and attention-gathering approach typical of classical advertising and of the early, primitive use of many new media formats (from blogs to videos, Facebook and Twitter), to one of help and instantaneous utility provision. The shift is from distracting, interrupting, and light-info-gossiping into providing high-value editorial and service propositions taking many different formats and styles.

In simpler words: advertising moves from making noise to becoming as useful and helpful as it can.

Blogs move from bursting out posts and posts over a hundred different topics to produce higher quality content in much more specific directions.

Social networks specialize around specific interests and topics offering greater value and usefulness than the generic and open approach of Facebook like platforms.

This also means that marketing budgets will increasingly go to value-generating campaigns, tools and services rather than to banner and display ads campaigns. While these latter ones are unlikely to disappear in the near term, they are very likely to lose value, impact, and in the end ROI.

"Advertisers will need to not only get creative, but also ensure that campaigns and social objects are engaging, actionable, shareable, and valuable."

Brian Solis
http://www.briansolis.com/2010/07/the-hybrid-theory-manifesto-the-future-of-marketing-advertising-and-communications-part-two/

2) From Targeting to Intercepting

The truth is that statistics never tell a full story, but, depending in which way you look at them, only a version of it.

Target demographics force you to impose pre-established assumptions and prejudices on who should be your ideal potential customer, based on statistical data. While this approach may work great for large organizations and mass products, when you look at smaller markets and niches, you realize immediately that there may be lots of people outside your demographically "significant" groups that may have a high interest for your product or services. This is why, it is much more cost- and resource-effective to try to intercept such existing demand of true potential customers via search engines and social media, rather than to shoot a campaign over a generic statistically-generated target audience.

Therefore, while the traditional approach is one of going out after analytically identified demographics groups which should, represent your ideal potential customers, the new one involves the concept of "intercepting" a set of very specific needs, problems and interests, and then to identify which specific "tribe" having those interests, you are most compatible to communicate and market to. A much more fine-tuned and subtle strategy.

Online search engines and social media are the instruments that allow the monitoring, analysis and the direct interception of such specialty, niche needs.

3) SEO Needs to Become an Internal Asset

SEO expertise and competence will become an internal asset as it cannot be effectively outsourced without either limiting its potential best use or taking inevitable large penalization and reputation risks.

Companies and professionals that publish online will need to come to grips with the idea that understanding "how the system works" and how it can be "helped" do what is supposed to do, is only an additional high-value ammunition in the new media literacy skillset.

In other words: everyone who wants to be effective online needs to understand SEO, ranking factors, penalizations, The Google Guidelines and related matters or they will risk wasting their time and potential to blogs and sites that provide little or no value but have learned how to effectively use SEO for their own purposes.

Stubbornly insisting in being purists, classical publishers, or idealistic scholars which expect Google and other search engines to do their duty, helps no-one, as the Internet and search engines work on a set of rules and algorithms, which if not understood properly, can only become a dangerous hindrance over the long run.

4) Free Is the Red Carpet

Free offerings establish themselves as the most popular and effective way to introduce new products, services and value to new potential readers, users and customers online.

More and more products and services offer a free version or a complementary free product to lower barriers of adoption and try-out by new users.

Free is the red carpet to offer initial, immediate value, to build relationships and to start a conversation.

Free is the natural, frictionless strategy to facilitate the initial meeting, to allow potential fans to try out your product, to appreciate your talent, and once motivated, to ask for more at a price.

5) Employing Direct Trustworthy Communication

Communication style keeps moving to a direct, informal, personal style utilizing the "I" and "you" format.

Online people want to have a direct relationship with people with a name and a face, not with company logos and brands which hide themselves behind anonymous and generic email and signatures.

People have lost trust in brands because by talking to each other online they have finally realized that most mass-market brands are only after their money. This is why people are looking for influential individuals online that they like, trust and who are not operating on the premise of making money out of them.

For these reasons, those who are able to move out from the formal and indirect ways of communication utilized traditionally by mainstream media, will find immediate acceptance and interest from online users who crave transparency, credibility and authority from trusted individuals.

6) Leveraging Influencers and Brand Ambassadors

If the individual is supreme and it is the one that can be eventually trusted, respected and followed, then companies need to pay deep attention to those individuals who gained high reputation, visibility and trust for themselves in specific areas of interest, as these individuals can be, if properly supported, the best marketing agents one could ever find.

A delicate balance must be stricken between established brands and such influencers or brand ambassadors, in a way that allows the latter ones to be supported in creating high-value content and services (possibly with tools, finances and instruments provided by the sponsoring brand) and not by directly promoting the sponsoring brand product line.

Example:

"Consumers are constantly scouring the social web to decide where to eat, shop and stay; so it comes as no surprise that brands are desperately analyzing Twitter, blog posts and reviews to understand not only who has the largest audience, but how much influence individuals have.
YouTube’s Partner Program is being joined by new services such as Klout to create an official layer of social credibility.

Klout scores are being used by The Palms Hotel in Vegas to gauge discounts for hotel guests, including through the "Klout Klub," which "will allow high-ranking influencers to experience Palms’ impressive set of amenities in hopes that these influencers will want to communicate their positive experience to their followers."

Creating thoughtful ways to leverage your influencers is the thing to focus on.

People have always said it’s cheaper to keep and please the customers you have, than acquire new ones."

Jesse Thomas
http://mashable.com/2010/12/21/advertising-industry/

7) Moving from Campaign to Continuum - X-Events

Advertising and marketing campaigns employ a lot of resources to bring attention to a specific product or service during a limited amount of time.

The new marketing approach invests in building relationships to nurture over time and employs a continuum of live and virtual events to create a sustained level interest and engagement around itself.

The objective is one of building loyal communities of interest that become growing self-sustainable social ecosystems.

This is at its core the concept of X-Events.

"In new media, advertising and creative businesses are criticized for approaching social through the constructs of campaigns. While they spark increased brand awareness, activity, engagement, campaigns inherently place constraints on community and relationship development – unless designed otherwise. They start, incite activity, stop, and then disappear only to re-emerge as a completely different production when time, budgets, and events align.
Indeed campaigns are catalysts for conversation and action. However, in social, creative campaigns must now introduce continuous sequences where adjacent objectives, messages, and storylines are reinforced through ongoing participation.

Essentially, campaigns must be strung together through brand-driven conversations and connections."

Brian Solis
http://www.briansolis.com/2010/07/the-hybrid-theory-manifesto-the-future-of-marketing-advertising-and-communications-part-two/

8) Nurturing Niche Communities of Interest

Social networking is now mainstream with millions of people connecting to each other over Facebook, LinkedIn and others.

The emerging trend is one of topic and interest-specific social networks and of dedicated platforms to allow anyone to do so.

People do not just want to have a place like Facebook where they can find all of their contacts, they actually prefer having different networks to belong to, just like it happens in real-life. This gives way to the emergence of topic-specific social networks and communities of interests.

Extended events and communities of interest are tightly interwoven, as the planning and organization of any event provides many opportunities to create engagement, exchange, collaboration and networking inspired by a common specific-topic or interest.

9) Mastering Email and Video Marketing

Email and video are the two most effective communication media when it comes to marketing. They are the most intimate, direct and the ones that people enjoy the most reading / watching.

If there is ONE are where to invest to improve one's own most immediate communication skills, it should be in one of these two areas.

10) Deploying One-to-One Marketing and Personalization

What I have been reading over 10 years ago in books is finally becoming a reality, providing the opportunity to serve, cut and slice content, services and products in many formats and different recipes for different tribes and fans groups.

Diversification is the name of the game in an an era of rapid change and the ability to provide services in a very personalized, custom way is going to be valued more than the actual product / service itself.

Specialty niches will gain further value as brands, large and small, will start to learn how to build engaged communities of fans around them.

Niches provide the highest return on investment for marketers who vie for highly targeted and ready-to-buy potential customers.

What Others Say: Key Internet Marketing Trends

To provide a more comprehensive and objective view on where emerging internet marketing trends will be taking you, I have also put together my personal selection of the best articles published by other authors and magazines on key emerging internet marketing trends.

1) Digital Marketing Trends and Anticipations for 2011

What should marketers expect to see for 2011? Let’s look at some of the macro trends in online marketing and how they will impact advertisers. Specifically: CPC rise, mobile marketing, social search and remarking.

URL: http://searchengineland.com/digital-marketing-trends-predictions-for-2011-58729

2) 2011 Online Marketing Predictions for the Business Ecosystem

What’s on the horizon specifically for B2B marketers next year? Paul Dunay from Social Media Today shares 11 concrete ways in which the environment B2B marketers operate will evolve in 2011. A hint: Facebook will play even a massive role than today.

URL: http://socialmediatoday.com/pauldunay/250079/11-b2b-marketing-predictions-2011

3) Top Marketing and Social Media Trends to Watch Next Year

2011 it's going to be a busy and competitive year, and in looking back at 2010 there were plenty of big developments that point to a 2011 year filled with innovation, new business models, possibilities for new technologies like mobile and tablets and continued growth and attention on social media. Here 15 key trends marketers should look forward to next year.

URL: http://www.rohitbhargava.com/2011/01/the-top-15-marketing-social-media-trends-to-watch-in-2011.html

4) Online Marketing Predictions for 2011: A Comprehenisve List

In this article you will find 79 predictions - touching on everything from SEO developments to government regulation - for the next twelve months in the online arena. Here is what lies ahead for digital marketing and marketers in 2011.

URL: http://www.how-do.co.uk/north-west-media-news/north-west-digital-media/79-online-marketing-predictions-for-2011-201101069929/

Originally prepared by Robin Good, Daniele Bazzano and Elia Lombardi for MasterNewMedia, and first published on March 3rd, 2011 as "Top Internet Marketing Trends For 2011: The Best Strategies To Follow".

Photo credits:
From Screaming to Helping - Sandor Kacso
From Targeting to Intercepting - Argus
SEO Needs to Become an Internal Asset - Stephen Coburn
Free Is the Red Carpet - Mipan
Direct Trustworthy Communication - Iurii Davydov
From Campaign to Continuum - X-Events - Yuri Arcurs
Communities of Interest - Thomas Troy
Email and Video - Andres Rodriguez
One to One Marketing and Personalization - Elena Volegzhanina

Digital Media Trends: The Future Guide To The Best Predictions For 2011

Robin Good — Thu, 03 Feb 2011 09:30:00 PST

What are the key new media, communication and social technology trends that are going to affect you the most during 2011?

Photo credit: Ruben Sarkisyan

In the coming weeks, me and the MasterNewMedia editorial team, will devote a large amount of resources and time to identify, collect, and organize the most interesting, relevant and insightful media and technology predictions for 2011, in a series of future guides dedicated each one to a specific topic.

In this first Future Guide to the Best Predictions for 2011, I have personally spent some time to pick what I have found to be some of the most interesting "general" digital media predictions made. These include the thoughts, ideas and vision of people like John Battelle and Richard McManus as well as the ones of a few other prestigious editors from Mashable, Techcrunch and eMarketer.

If you are looking to see beyond the surface and the obvious and get a glimpse of which are the key changes that are already under way and which will make a difference in 2011, expect this guide to provide you with some good foundations.

Digital Media Trends: The Future Guide to The Best Predictions for 2011

1) Techradar: New Technologies

What will be the new technologies that will shape 2011? Is 3D eally going to be massive this year? Will cloud-based applications become mainstream (think of Google OS)? Are we going to see more and more iPad rivals boosting the tablet market? Gary Marshall of TechRadar.com gaze and reports from his crystal ball.

by Gary Marshall - December 13th, 2010

2) Techcrunch: Key Technologies

Techcrunch co-editor Erik Schonfeld shares a sneak peek of the future trends which will shape the Internet in 2011: social media, mobile apps, touch computing, geolocalization, cloud computing will keep propelling the technology world forward by becoming more and more part of our everyday lives.

by Erick Schonfeld - January 2nd, 2011

3) eMarketer: Digital Media Trends

Duration: 59' 16'' - Click the image to open the video recording of the webinar in a separate window

A recording of the comprehensive eMarketer webinar hosted by top analysts Noah Elkin, Debra Aho Williamson and David Hellerman on the future 2011 trends for social media marketing, online advertising, privacy and mobile commerce.

by Daniel Caridi - December 17th, 2010

4) John Battelle: Search, Media and Technology

Federated Media John Battelle has published his predictions on the online landscape where he spans from "Voice will become a critical interface for computing" to "The tablet market will have a year of incoherence". If you want to see what one of the most respected voices in the tech world sees in the future of the Internet, you might want to check out this article.

by John Battelle - January 3rd 2011

5) Richard MacManus: Web Development

Richard MacManus of ReadWriteWeb shares his own 2011 predictions for the tech world. For what he sees the Internet will be no longer restricted to your computer or mobile, by becoming more and more integrated in tablets, cars, eBook readers, TV sets, thanks also to "new" HTML5 technologies.

by Richard MacManus - December 27th, 2010

6) Mashable: Online Data

On 2010 there has been greater and greater focus on data, especially regarding social media and marketing. So what is at the horizon in 2011? Josh Jones-Dilworth foresees a new breed of professionals, services and start-ups that will jump on the online data bandwagon to help you and me to sort, organize and make sense of the information we share on the internet.

by Josh Jones-Dilworth - December 20th, 2010

7) ReadWriteWeb: Cloud Computing

Cloud computing blogger Chirag Mehta and analyst R "Ray" Wang share a list (Part 1 - Part 2) of their cloud computing predictions for 2011. The pair sees public cloud adoption stalling temporarily, the spread of the app store model in the enterprise, the convergence of Development-as-a-Service and Platform-as-a-Service and an overall simplification of the technology landscape as some of the most important trends in cloud computing in 2011.

by Klint Finley - December 27th, 2010

8) Mashable: Small Businesses

A general overview of small business trends by Mashable editor Erica Swallow. What is waiting for entrepreneurs around the corner next year? Erica foresees small businesses will strive to get a solid online presence, jump on the social shopping bandwagon, engage in mobile marketing, leverage social media more than ever and start utilizing cloud computing solutions.

by Erica Swallow - December 21st, 2010

9) Mashable: Startups - Entrepreneurship

In this article you will find an exploration of five startup markets that will grow in significance in 2011. Some of these specialized categories are ripe for disruption and innovation, while others have already produced early leaders that will be difficult to best. Regardless, the startups iterating in these newly invented product categories will capture our imagination in the year ahead and transform the way we use technology in our daily lives.

by Jennifer Van Grove - December 31st, 2010

Originally prepared by Robin Good, Daniele Bazzano and Elia Lombardi for MasterNewMedia, and first published on February 3rd, 2011 as "Digital Media Trends: The Future Guide To The Best Predictions For 2011".

Photo credits:
Techradar: New Technologies - alastor
Techcrunch: Key Technologies - Ndul
eMarketer: Digital Media Trends - eMarketer
John Battelle: Search, Media and Technology - Business Insider
Richard MacManus: Web Development - ReadWriteWeb
Mashable: Online Data - Hypermania
ReadWriteWeb: Cloud Computing - PC World Vietnam
Mashable: Small Businesses - Baby
Mashable: Startups - Entrepreneurship - Bruce Shippee

Peer-To-Peer And Open Systems: The Best 2010 Articles And Reports From MasterNewMedia

Robin Good — Thu, 27 Jan 2011 06:48:00 PST

Is the age of openness and peer-to-peer collaboration really coming? How does a system work when it is based on cooperation and collaborative approaches rather than on competition and predatory practices?

Photo credit: Ints Vikmanis

What are P2P and open infrastructures? Can open knowledge and peer production subvert the economic system of physical production? How do open business models compare with the traditional economic system based on intellectual property and copyright?

As you can learn inside this special digest dedicated to P2P and open infrastructures, what we are seeing today is the emergence of a growing number of companies that make use of the "Commons", and then who sell the extra value they have created or added to the Commons, back into the marketplace. Open source software is such an example.

Such new business model approach does not work by leveraging the same elements of our present work system such as job employment, wages and copyright. Instead, the new economy of the Commons grounds itself on three brand new components:

Distributed communities of passionate individuals working together spontaneously on

collaborative platform and Internet technologies and by

the foundations, for-benefit institutions that make their know-how available for free.

In this MasterNewMedia digest, you will find the best selection of articles and interviews on the world of peer-to-peer, and on the future of open systems and infrastructures. Specifically:

Peer-to-peer politics and the future

From open business models to an economy of the commons

P2P and open infrastructures: the society of openness comes of age

P2P and the social cloud - the emergence of peer economic systems

The alternative P2P wireless internet network: the Netsukuku idea

If you are looking to understand what peer-to-peer, open infrastructures and open economic systems look like, strive for and entail, you have landed on the right page.

Openness and Peer-To-Peer: The Best 2010 Articles and Reports from MasterNewMedia

Peer-To-Peer Politics and Its Vision For The Future - a Video Interview With Michel Bauwens

If you want to understand what peer-to-peer politics are all about, and why a peer-to-peer political system could be a good candidate to potentially replace our present political and economic system in the future, this in-depth video interview I have shot with Michel Bauwens, gives you immediate insight into why the present global system of neoliberal capitalism is close to collapsing and why a P2P-based society may be an attractive alternative socio-economic model to consider for the future.

by Robin Good - August 3rd, 2010

From Open Business Models To an Economy of The Commons

What does it take for open business models to become an economy of the Commons? What are the pros and cons of a system based on peer production? How do open business models compare with the traditional economic system based on intellectual property and copyright? I have recently shot a small number of very interesting videos with Michel Bauwens, to ask Michel to share his vision of such economic system. .

by Robin Good - August 19th, 2010

P2P and Open Infrastructures: The Society of Openness Comes of Age

What are P2P and open infrastructures? Can open knowledge and peer production subvert the economic system of physical production? Is there a chance for the "society of openness" to ever come of age? Robin Good interviewed on video the P2P Foundation evangelist and founder Michel Bauwens to find out.

by Robin Good - October 26th, 2010

P2P and The Social Cloud - The Emergence of Peer Economic Systems - Part 1

Rafael Pezzi introduces in this two-part white paper a new concept for designing social networking services, not provided by centralized servers, but by nodes of the network forming a cloud of computers owned by individuals who are all joining the network. Just like in cloud computing, where computer services are provided by an interconnected network of servers, the Social Cloud concept envisions services provided and maintained by a human-powered social network.

by Rafael Pezzi - November 26th, 2009

P2P and The Social Cloud - The Emergence of Peer Economic Systems - Part 2

While in Part 1 of Rafael Pezzi's white paper you can find a rationale, introduction and explanation of the reasons that would make a cloud-based peer-to-peer network infrastructure desirable for humanity as a whole, here in Part 2 Pezzi looks specifically at the implementation of such a social cloud peer-to-peer network and at the required infrastructure to make this vision come true: hardware, kernel, plugins, content and synchronization.

by Rafael Pezzi - December 2nd, 2009

The Alternative P2P Wireless Internet Network: The Netsukuku Idea

Would it be possible, using P2P and wireless technologies, to gain independence from internet providers and make free and open net connectivity a reality? Andrea Lo Pumo, a young Italian mathematician has developed Netsukuku, a vision for an alternative wireless network that may represent a disruptive change for the Internet as we know it.

by Sepp Hasslberger - April 23rd, 2010

Originally prepared by Robin Good, Daniele Bazzano and Elia Lombardi for MasterNewMedia, and first published on January 27th, 2010 as "Peer-To-Peer And Open Systems: The Best 2010 Articles And Reports From MasterNewMedia".

Photo credits:
Peer-To-Peer Politics And Its Vision For The Future - A Video Interview With Michel Bauwens - Robin Good
From Open Business Models To An Economy Of The Commons - GPRC, remixed by Robin Good
P2P And Open Infrastructures: The Society Of Openness Comes Of Age - itestro
The Alternative P2P Wireless Internet Network: The Netsukuku Idea - Clipart
P2P And The Social Cloud - The Emergence Of Peer Economic Systems - Part 1 and 2 - Dzmitry Stankevich

Online Learning, Teaching And Education: The Best 2010 Articles And Reports From MasterNewMedia

Robin Good — Tue, 25 Jan 2011 07:23:00 PST

The large adoption of communication and collaboration technologies, alongside the intelligent use and adoption of these tools by a new emergent class of educators, have opened up new horizons for the world of education and learning, by empowering students to be again explorers and active collaborative seekers of their know-how, and by extending the teacher role into one of a guide, coach and supporter rather than the one of the ultimate holder of truth.

Photo credit: Victor Habbick

This is why, in our view, the future of education is all about studying, understanding and embracing these new trends while opening up to the new realities of work and entrepreneurship that are emerging inside and around it.

For a growing number of people, learning has in fact already become a lifelong opportunity to master new skills and capabilities, to continuously upgrade one's own expertise and now, a new direction in which to design and develop high-value business services.

In this MasterNewMedia guide on online learning, teaching and education, you will find the top five interesting essays and articles (according to popularity) that we have published here, in the last 12 months. Specifically:

How to publish an online course as a book

How to approach learning without falling into the certification-loop

How to learn teamwork, critical thinking and communication skills

How to prepare yourself for digital citizenship: new media literacies

How blogs and wikis are changing the academic publishing process

If you are eager to understand some of the key trends and changes happening in the world of education, and how the goals, expectations and approaches to learning are transforming themselves, you may well find some interesting materials into this curated digest.

Online Learning, Teaching and Education: The Best 2010 Articles and Reports From MasterNewMedia

Self Publishing Your Online Course As A Book: A Complete Guide

Self-publishing your online course as a book may be a great way to distribute a valuable piece of content you have to a broader audience. But as you might imagine, writing, printing, publishing and distributing your online course as a book involves a lot of steps and decisions to make. To help you out, Heather Hedden has written a great guide to take you through all the steps you need to turn your online course into a successful published book.

by Heather Hedden - May 19th, 2010

Learning Without Schools: Four Points To Free Yourself From The Educational Get-Certified Mantra

Excerpted from my guest night at Teemu Arina's Dicole OZ in Helsinski, here are some of my strong, uncensored thoughts about school and academic education in general. In this four-point recipe I state what I think are the some of the key new attitudes we need to consider taking if we want to truly help some of your younger generations move to a higher level of intellectual and pragmatical acumen, beyond the one that most get from our present academic system.

by Robin Good - March 18th, 2010

Project-Based Learning: How Students Learn Teamwork, Critical Thinking And Communication Skills

In project-based learning students are given the opportunity to go through an educational approach which allows them to transcend the limiting nature of the one-to-one teacher-student relationships in favor of mastering how to collaborate and arrive at results efficiently while working with others. In this fascinating report, Bob Pearlman illustrates effectively the key traits and characteristics that make project-based learning so different from any traditional school learning curriculum.

by Bob Pearlman - April 7th, 2010

New Media Literacies Skills For The 21st Century Digital Citizen

Focused attention, participation, collaboration and critical consumption (which includes "crap detection") are the core 21st century new media literacy skills needed to become a fully enabled and active citizen of this ongoing digital communication revolution. Here is Howard Rheingold in a live video take recently recorded by JD Lasica, illustrating why 21st century new media literacies are so important for us and what are the critical skills you need to master to become a fully literate 21st century citizen.

by JD Lasica - Jan 22nd, 2010

Online Collaborative Writing: How Blogs And Wikis Are Changing The Academic Publishing Process

Is online collaborative writing the recipe to change the academic publishing process? Are blogs and wikis going to subvert the way academics publish and distribute their work?
In this fascinating article, Janelle Ward tries to make greater sense of the strengths and weaknesses of the current academic publishing model while suggesting a new approach to academic publishing that leverages the power of the web.

by Janelle Ward - January 29th, 2010

Originally prepared by Robin Good, Daniele Bazzano and Elia Lombardi for MasterNewMedia, and first published on January 25th, 2011 as "Online Learning, Teaching And Education: The Best 2010 Articles And Reports From MasterNewMedia".

Photo credits:
Self Publishing Your Online Course As A Book: A Complete Guide - Clipart
Learning Without Schools: Four Points To Free Yourself From The Educational Get-Certified Mantra - Clipart
Project-Based Learning: How Students Learn Teamwork, Critical Thinking And Communication Skills - Robin Good
New Media Literacies Skills For The 21st Century Digital Citizen - JD Lasica
Online Collaborative Writing: How Blogs And Wikis Are Changing The Academic Publishing Process - Tecnologia Pyme

Online Marketing: The Best 2010 Articles And Reports From MasterNewMedia

Robin Good — Thu, 06 Jan 2011 10:46:00 PST

For most of the people, online marketing is a risky business. A field packed with well-dressed unscrupulous people, who use all kinds of dirty tricks to carve money out of unaware visitors who land on their website pages. But this is just one kind of online marketing.

Photo credit: Ndul

Professional online marketing is the science of communicating effectively with your readers and potential customers. Well-done online marketing involves an accurate selection of all the market niches available and an ongoing true conversation where you offer all the best bits of content, tools and resources that you have without first asking for something in return.

This MasterNewMedia guide to the best 2010 articles and reports on online marketing, is meant to be a toolbox of useful resources and recommendations to promote and sell your products on the Internet in the right way, by leveraging a true relationship with your audience and by offering tangible value. Specifically, this guide covers:

How to market and sell your products on the Internet Robin Good

Key principles and strategies to promote your products using viral marketing techniques

How to leverage online forums to promote yourself and your products

The ethical strategies to market your products on the web explained by European entrepreneur Andrea Vascellari.

The best tools an services to create a store where you can sell your products online on a budget.

Here all the details:

Online Marketing: The Best 2010 Articles and Reports From MasterNewMedia

Becoming A Brand: The Experience Of Robin Good

How do you build a personal brand around yourself? Can you really create a business online simply by sharing your knowledge online? Robin Good shares his own strategy to market yourself online by sharing his own personal experience.

by Robin Good - February 26th, 2010

What Is Viral Marketing: Key Principles and Strategies

What is viral marketing? What are the characteristics of an effective viral marketing campaign? What does it take to produce content that flies on the wings of spontaneous word-of-mouth promotion? In this guide on viral marketing you can learn and understand the basic principles, foundations and strategies at the heart of effective online viral marketing.

by Robin Good, Daniele Bazzano and Elia Lombardi - July 13th, 2010

Viral Marketing: How To Trasform Content Into A Meme That Spreads Like A Virus Online

In this highly comprehensive and in-depth guide, MIT Professor Henry Jenkins and his team illustrate in simple terms how and what makes something "viral" as well as explain the dynamics that govern the social redistribution of your content across the web.

by Henry Jenkins, Xiaochang Li, Ana Domb Krauskopf with Joshua Green - February 19th, 2010

Forum Marketing Strategy: How To Promote Your Site Through Online Forums

As online forums are an online destination used to meet, share ideas and ask questions to people who have a shared interests, their very nature provides for access to communities of people interested in something very specific and they are one of the best marketing vehicles you might leverage to promote your own products.

by PostRelease - March 24th, 2010

Online Personal Marketing Strategy: A Video Interview With Andrea Vascellari

in this five-minute video clip Andrea Vascellari, a young European entrepreneur, gives you his best advice on how to create an online presence of value, and on how to build the basic foundations for a successful web business.

Link: http://www.masternewmedia.org/online-personal-marketing-strategy-a-video-interview-with-andrea-vascellari/#ixzz1AG61RU5S

by Robin Good - May 5th, 2010

How To Create An Online Store In Minutes And Start Selling Your Products On The Internet

If you want to start selling a physical or digital product on the Internet, there are now a growing number of online services that make it very easy for you to create an online store in minutes. You, set the price, and these services take care of all the transaction and payment matters. In this guide, you will find the very best web services out there to build, create or set-up your own online store in the easiest and most economical way possible.

by Robin Good and Daniele Bazzano - August 9th, 2010

Originally prepared by Robin Good, Daniele Bazzano and Elia Lombardi for MasterNewMedia, and first published on January 6th, 2011 as "Online Marketing: The Best 2010 Articles And Reports From MasterNewMedia".

Photo credits:
Becoming A Brand: The Experience Of Robin Good - Robin Good
What Is Viral Marketing: Key Principles and Strategies - Delion and Alberto Perez Veiga, mashed up by Robin Good
Viral Marketing: How To Trasform Content Into A Meme That Spreads Like A Virus Online - Kheng Ho Toh
Forum Marketing Strategy: How To Promote Your Site Through Online Forums - Lev Dolgachov
Online Personal Marketing Strategy: A Video Interview With Andrea Vascellari - Robin Good
How To Create An Online Store In Minutes And Start Selling Your Products On The Internet - pavlen

Social Media: The Best 2010 Articles And Reports From MasterNewMedia

Robin Good — Tue, 04 Jan 2011 05:08:00 PST

Social media is gradually changing the paradigm of how people market, promote and care about their customers and potential clients. But what is the correct strategy, tools and approach to achieve those goals?

Photo credit: Kirsty Pargeter e Creative Nerds

Most social media users, both individuals and companies, just open social media accounts without a clear strategy on how to actually achieve any of those goals in a pragmatic and systematic way. Most, don't even realize that the essence of an effective social media strategy is providing real value to people before even considering to ask something in return.

This curated guide of the best 2010 social media reports and articles from MasterNewMedia, helps you make sense of HOW to utilize social media while creating value, helping others out and building a following of passionate fans. Specifically, in this guide you will find:

How social media is transforming television into a new, more entertaining medium.

The best Ning alternatives to build your own community platform.

The importance of customer service in social media marketing

Best examples and strategies to create a Facebook fan page.

Social media marketing strategy tips from Ravit Lichtenberg, CEO of Ustrategy.com

Reports on the use and adoption of social media technologies inside the educational landscape and among top US business companies.

Here all the details:

Social Media: The Best 2010 Articles and Reports From MasterNewMedia

Social Media Meets Online Television: Social TV Brings Television 2.0 To Your TV Set

Social television is an emerging new media term used to refer to a new form of television technology that supports and integrates social interaction, recommendations, ratings, reviews and interactive participation among viewers via text chat, audio or even video-conferencing.

by Richard G. Kastelein - January 27th, 2010

Ning Alternatives: Guide To The Best Social Networking Platforms And Online Group Services

Last year Ning, one of the most popular social networking platforms on the web, phased out its free service. In this guide you will find a comprehensive mindmap, two comparative tables, and a set of mini-reviews that will help you evaluate the best Ning alternative for your needs.

by Robin Good and Daniele Bazzano - May 3rd, 2010

Customer Service Is The New Social Media Marketing King

If you want to understand what exactly needs to be done to make your custom service efforts turn your clients into raving fans and supporters, The Customer Service Manifesto will help you identify the critical points to move from being a seller of services and products into a trusted partner and advisor for a growing group of happy customers.

by Joseph Jaffe - April 15th, 2010

How To Create A Facebook Fan Page: Guide To The Best Strategies And Examples

In this guide you will find a passionately curated selection of the best online reports and articles explaining which are the best strategies to create a Facebook Fan Page, along with a uniquely hand-picked selection of valuable examples to get you inspired.

by Robin Good, Daniele Bazzano and Elia Lombardi - July 19th, 2010

Social Media Strategy: A Video Interview With Ravit Lichtenberg - Part 1

"Social media is a strategy, not a tactic". You cannot just jump on the social media bandwagon opening accounts here and there, without having a clear objective to reach and a specific path to follow. This is what Ravit Lichtenberg, founder and chief social media strategist of Ustrategy, recommends to her customers and readers

by Robin Good - July 2nd, 2010

Social Media Strategy: A Video Interview With Ravit Lichtenberg - Part 2

If you are still struggling to realize the value of social media for your business, this video interview with Ravit Lichtenberg will help you understand which are the practical steps that any small or medium-sized company must take to develop a social media strategy that really works.

by Robin Good - July 10th, 2010

Using Social Media: Colleges And Universities Vs. Businesses

Colleges and universities in North America continue to increase their adoption and large scale use of social media technologies, outpacing both Fortune and Inc 500 on the blogging front. Besides using these to augment and extend their overall communication, learning and student support services, educational institutions have found a key use of social media inside their marketing and student recruiting strategies.

by Nora Ganim Barnes and Eric Mattson - July 8th, 2010

Social Media Research: Blogs And Twitter Use Trends Inside US Corporations

What emerges from this in-depth research is the steady adoption of blogs and the explosive growth of Twitter among Fortune 500 companies, which emphasizes the increasing importance of social media inside the business world.

by Nora Ganim Barnes and Eric Mattson - March 12th, 2010

Social Media Research And Trends: Do Top Brands Adopt And Use Social Media Tools?

From the data presented in this report, it appears that top US corporations look at the adoption of social media technologies as a mean to improve their communications approach, to build internal knowledge, to improve marketing and sales as well as to guarantee long term sustainability and growth.

by Nora Ganim Barnes and Eric Mattson - January 13th, 2010

Social Media Research: Blogging, Twitter And Facebook Use Trends Inside US Corporations - 2010 Update

Given that Fortune 500 companies stand as an established model for business success, it is indeed strategically critical for you to examine all the data shared in this report to extract solid insights that may help you develop an effective social media strategy.

by Nora Ganim Barnes and Eric Mattson - December 10th, 2010

Originally prepared by Robin Good, Daniele Bazzano and Elia Lombardi for MasterNewMedia, and first published on January 4th, 2011 as "Social Media: The Best 2010 Articles And Reports From MasterNewMedia".

Photo credits:
Social Media Meets Online Television: Social TV Brings Television 2.0 To Your TV Set - Michele Piacquadio
Ning Alternatives: Guide To The Best Social Networking Platforms And Online Group Services - Shutterstock
Customer Service Is The New Social Media Marketing King - Clipart
How To Create a Facebook Fan Page: Guide To The Best Strategies and Examples - Marc Dietrich
Social Media Strategy: A Video Interview With Ravit Lichtenberg - Part 1 and 2 - Robin Good
Using Social Media: Colleges And Universities Vs. Businesses - Clipart
Social Media Research: Blogs And Twitter Use Trends Inside US Corporations - Kheng Ho Toh and Dmitriy Shironosov
Social Media Research And Trends: Do Top Brands Adopt And Use Social Media Tools? - Kheng Guan Toh
Social Media Research: Blogging, Twitter And Facebook Use Trends Inside US Corporations - 2010 Update - Kheng Ho Toh and Dmitriy Shironosov

Social Media Research: Blogging, Twitter And Facebook Use Trends Inside US Corporations - 2010 Update

Nora Ganim Barnes and Eric Mattson — Fri, 10 Dec 2010 07:45:00 PST

Are top US corporations embracing social media technologies? The new research study on 2010 Fortune 500 companies and their use of blogs, Twitter and Facebook seems to positively confirm this trend.

Photo credit: Kheng Ho Toh and Dmitriy Shironosov

Each year Fortune Magazine compiles a list of the largest US corporations, which are named the Fortune 500 given their size and wealth. Due to the hugely influential role that these companies play inside the corporate world, their use of social media technologies does provide valuable insights of emergent trends to monitor.

For this specific reason, every year Nora Ganim Barnes and Eric Mattson take Fortune 500 companies as a testing ground to analyze social media corporate use trends.

The new 2010 study revisits the 2009 study while also expanding its research focus by looking at the Fortune 500 companies use trends of Facebook.

These are the reported highlights:

116 (23%) of the primary US corporations listed on the 2010 Fortune 500 have a public-facing corporate blog updated in the past 12 months.

In 2010, only 32% of top US companies relies on the adoption of blogging to establish a conversation with customers. In 2009 it was the 39%.

298 (60%) of the new Fortune 500 companies have regularly-updated corporate Twitter accounts. This number is up dramatically from 35% last year.

280 (56%) of the 2010 Fortune 500 companies have now a solid presence on Facebook.

The Fortune 500 companies which regularly use social media technologies belong to a wide spectrum of industries.

Given that Fortune 500 companies stand as an established model for business success, it is indeed strategically critical for you to examine all the data shared in this report to extract solid insights that may help you develop an effective social media strategy.

The Fortune 500 and Social Media: A Longitudinal Study of Blogging, Twitter and Facebook Usage by America’s Largest Companies

by Nora Ganim Barnes and Eric Mattson

Fortune 500 Companies With Public Facing Corporate Blogs

One hundred and sixteen (23%) of the primary corporations listed on the 2010 F500 have a public-facing corporate blog with a post in the past 12 months. These include four of the top five corporations (Wal-Mart, Exxon, Chevron and General Electric).

The only company in the top five in 2010 without a public facing blog is Bank of America. They do have a URL for a blog that is described as a "blog beta" called Future Banking, but no active blog could be located at this time.

Included in those companies adding blogs in 2010 is Exxon. The company launched a blog in June of this year, shortly after the BP oil spill in the Gulf region of the US.

Conoco Philips, now ranked 6th in the F500, does not have a blog at this time.

In our 2008 study of F500 blogs, 81 companies (16%) had blogs that met the criteria for this study.

In 2009, 108 F500 companies (22%) had blogs.

In both years, three of the top five ranked companies had blogs. Exxon and Conoco Philips were the exceptions.

In 2010, 116 companies (23%) have blogs meeting our criteria for an increase of just 1% from 2009.

Fortune 500 Companies With Corporate Blogs by Industry

The 116 companies with blogs come from a cross section of industries.

A partial list is presented below showing those industries with the greatest presence in the blogosphere.

Blogging varied by industry type.

As might be expected, companies in the industry of computer software, peripherals and office equipment have had the most blogs in all three years of our study (eight, 11, and 11). Companies in this category include Hewlett-Packard, Dell, Microsoft, Apple, Oracle and Xerox.

The specialty retail industry saw an increase in the number of companies blogging (such as Home Depot, Best Buy, Toys "R" Us and BJ's Wholesale) from four companies on the 2008 list to seven from the 2009 list and eight in 2010.

The telecommunications industry represented by companies like AT&T, Verizon, Sprint and Comcast had seven of the blogs studied this year. Last year's list had six.

Food-related companies like Safeway, McDonald's, Tyson, General Mills, Whole Foods Market and Hershey had nine blogs, up from six in 2009 and 5 in 2008.

Three industries had five blogs in 2009 and 4 in 2008. These, with some company examples, include: Commercial banks (JP Morgan Chase), insurance (Progressive, NY Life), and semiconductors (Intel, Texas Instruments).

Commercial Banks and Semiconductors each have 6 blogs in 2010, while the insurance industry has dropped to three blogs in 2010. The information technology industry (IBM, SAIC, Computer Sciences etc.) and motor vehicle industries (Ford, GM, Goodyear Tire and Rubber etc.) both had 4 blogs in 2009.

Information technology blogs have decreased to three, while motor vehicle blogs have increased to six.

Fortune 500 Companies With Corporate Blogs by Rank

In 2008, 38% of the total number of blogs came from the top 100 followed by 39% of the blogs in the 2009 F500.

Rank continues to influence the adoption of blogging by the F500 but in 2010 that number drops to 32%.

Almost one third of the F500 blogs can be located among the top 100 ranked companies, making rank a factor in use of this particular tool.

In 2010 the top 200 companies account for 53% of corporate blogs and the bottom 200 ranked companies (those listed 301-500) make up 29% of the total number of blogs.

The top 200 companies in 2009 accounted for 58% of the F500 blogs, while the bottom 200 accounted for 29% of the 2009 F500 blogs.

The findings were consistent using the 2008 list with the top 200 having 63% of the F500's blogs while the bottom 200 had 26%.

It is interesting to note that adoption remains lower in the bottom 200 for the third year in a row with no real change since last year (29%).

Level of Interaction On The Fortune 500 Corporate Blogs

All 116 blogs were examined to determine the level of interactivity the blog allowed. This was done by looking at the blog to see if comments were accepted, if RSS feeds or email subscriptions were available and checking the date of the last post to determine how current it was.

Consistent with the findings in the past two years, 90% of the F500 blogs take comments, have RSS feeds and take subscriptions.

These blogs are kept current with frequent posts on a range of topics. It appears that those companies that have made the decision to "blog" have utilized the tool well.

There is frequent posting, on-going discussion and the ability to follow the conversation easily through RSS or email subscriptions.

Fortune 500 Companies Vs. The Inc. 500

The F500 companies are blogging at a lower rate than other business groups, specifically the Inc. 500.

The Inc. 500 list is composed of the fastest-growing, private companies in the US, while the F500 is based on total revenue (not growth) and may include public and private companies. That list is published in a special issue of Inc. Magazine published in September of each year.

While data is not yet available on blogging for the 2010 Inc. 500, in 2009 that group had 45% of the companies on the list hosting corporate blogs.

With 23% of the F500 companies hosting corporate blogs in 2010, that gap is likely to continue.

It is possible that the difference is related to size of the company, internal structure or corporate philosophy regarding open communication with its stakeholders.

Regardless of the motivation, the F500 companies have been less likely to adopt social media tools than their smaller, fast-growing counterparts.

Fortune 500 Companies Corporate Twitter Accounts

For purposes of this research, the following definition was used to locate 2010 F500 companies with Twitter accounts.

A company was considered a user of Twitter if they had an official corporate account with posts (a.k.a. a "tweet") made within the past thirty days.

Two hundred ninety-eight (60%) of the new F500 have corporate Twitter accounts with a tweet in the past thirty days. This number is up dramatically from 35% last year.

Of these companies, nine of the top 10 corporations (Wal-Mart, Exxon, Chevron, General Electric, Bank of America, ConocoPhillips, AT&T, Ford and HP) consistently post on their Twitter accounts.

No Twitter account could be located for the number nine ranked company, JP Morgan Chase.

Four companies in the medical or healthcare industries had Twitter accounts with no activity on them (Humana Health Care, Boston Scientific, United Health Care and Cardinal Health Care). This was also true for the food chain Winn Dixie, and the diversified financial service Freddie Mac. These companies were not included in our final tally.

Fortune 500 Companies Corporate Twitter Accounts by Industry

The 298 companies with Twitter accounts come from a cross section of industries. A partial list is presented below showing those industries with the greatest presence on Twitter.

Tweeting differed by industry type with Specialty Retail (Home Depot, Lowe's) having the most Twitter accounts (23), taking first place from the Insurance Category.

The food-related industry represented by companies like Kroger, Walgreen and McDonald's had 22 of the Twitter accounts studied, double the number in that group last year.

Insurance companies also increased their use of this tool dramatically moving from 13 corporate Twitter accounts to 20.

Many industries had 10 companies with a Twitter account in 2009. These, with some company examples, include: computer software, peripherals and office equipment (Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft), telecommunications (AT&T, Verizon Communications) and utilities (Dominion Resources, Duke Energy).

One year later we see those industries move to 14, 12 and 16 Twitter accounts respectively.

Fortune 500 Companies Corporate Twitter Accounts by Rank

Two hundred and ninety-eight (60%) of the 2010 F500 companies now have corporate Twitter accounts meeting the criteria of this study.

Rank appears to influence the use of Twitter by the F500.

Nine of the top 10 companies have corporate Twitter accounts.

A Twitter account could not be located for J.P. Morgan Chase, the 9th ranked company.

Half of the Twitter accounts belong to the companies in the top 200 on the list, while 33% come from those ranked in the bottom 200.

Similar to the adoption of blogs, those ranked higher in the 2010 F500 are more likely to adopt Twitter than their counterparts ranked lower.

Fortune 500 Companies Level of Interaction On Twitter

All 298 companies with Twitter accounts were examined to determine the level of interactivity with readers by examining @replies or "retweets" and by checking the date of the last post to determine how current it was.

One hundred and three companies (35%) consistently responded with @replies or retweets within 72 hours, many more often.These Twitter accounts are kept up-to-date with current news and information.

There is consistent interaction with other users and on-going discussions that are easy to follow.

Fortune 500 Companies Corporate Facebook Profiles

Two hundred and eighty (56%) of the 2010 F500 are now on Facebook.

This is the first year Facebook was included in this study, and the first time any systematic review of the entire Fortune 500 has been conducted on this issue.

One hundred and forty-seven companies (29%) have neither a Twitter account nor a Facebook presence.

Insurance companies are most likely to be on Facebook, followed by Specialty Retail, and Food, Drug and Consumer Products.

Methodology

For purposes of this research, the following definition was used to locate 2010 F500 companies with blogs: A company was counted as having a blog if they had a publicfacing corporate blog from the primary corporation with posts in the past 12 months.

This is the same definition used in the 2008 and 2009 studies.

Due to the complexity of corporate legal structures in this group and no clear methodology on how subsidiaries have been located or analyzed by others, the research presented here continues to focus on the primary / listed corporation.

While we acknowledge that mergers and acquisitions along with expansions have resulted in segments or subsidiaries with blogs, our focus has consistently been at the corporate level.

In addition, it is worth noting that there is evidence of usage of social media such as blogs inside of large companies like the F500.

This research did not look at that subject but instead focused on public-facing corporate blogs as a barometer of social media usage to engage the public.

All companies were analyzed using multiple steps.

First, working from the published 2010 F500 list, all corporate home pages were examined for links to, or mention of, corporate blogs. If none were found, a search on the company's site was conducted using the key word "blog".

Any links resulting from that search were followed and evaluated using the established criteria.

If no blogs were located on the home page or through a site search, other search engines were used.

Both Google and Technorati (a leading blog-focused search engine) were employed to check for corporate blogs using key words that included the primary / listed company name and the word "blog". This proved to be an effective method since additional blogs were located.

A search of other sites gathering information on the F500 was also reviewed for any mention of blogs in that group.

Similarly, all companies were analyzed through multiple steps to locate corporate Twitter accounts.

First, working from the 2010 F500 list, all corporate home pages were examined for links to, or mention of, a corporate Twitter account. If none were found, a search on the company's website was conducted using the keyword "Twitter."

Any links resulting from that search were followed and evaluated using the established criteria.

If no Twitter accounts were located on the home page or through a site search, Google was used to search for Twitter accounts using keywords that included the primary / listed company name and the word "Twitter." If no Twitter accounts were found this way, a search on the Twitter website was conducted using the primary/listed company name. These additional approaches proved to be effective as some Twitter accounts were located using this method.

The same methodology was used to locate Facebook profiles for each company in the 2010 F500 using multiple searches on multiple platforms.

All 500 companies on the list were researched using this process. This is the only known attempt to examine the entire F500 list for use of the microblogging tool, Twitter and the popular social networking platform Facebook.

The data was collected in August/ September 2010 at the University of MA Dartmouth Center for Marketing Research and the results follow.

Conclusion

The adoption of blogs in the 2010 F500 appears to be leveling off with only a 1% increase in the past year.

Twenty-three percent (116) of the 2010 F500 have corporate public facing blogs.

During the same time, there has been explosive growth in the use of Twitter (60% have corporate Twitter accounts) along with significant use of Facebook (56% with corporate profiles) among the 2010 F500 companies.

This clearly demonstrates the growing importance of social media in the business world.

These large and leading companies drive the American economy and to a large extent the world economy. Their willingness to interact more transparently via these new technologies with their stakeholders is a clear.

It will be interesting to watch as they expand their adoption of social media tools and connect with their constituents in dramatically new ways.

Originally written by Nora Ganim Barnes and Eric Mattson for the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, and first published on November 1st, 2010 as The Fortune 500 and Social Media: A Longitudinal Study of Blogging, Twitter and Facebook Usage by America’s Largest Companies

About Nora Ganim Barnes

Nora Ganim Barnes earned a Ph.D. in Consumer Behavior from the University of Connecticut and is a Chancellor Professor of Marketing and Director of the Center for Marketing Research at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. Nora has worked as a consultant for many national and international firms including the National Pharmaceutical Council, the National Court Reporters Association, and the Board of Inquiry of the British Parliament, Scotts Lawn Care Co, Distilled Spirits Council of the US and others. She has been named a Senior Research Fellow and Research Chair by the Society for New Communications Research.

About Eric Mattson

Eric Mattison is the CEO of Financial Insite Inc., an independent social media scholar whose research has appeared in BusinessWeek, Inc. Magazine and a number of other publications. Prior to his current endeavors, Eric ran direct marketing, market research and marketing analytics for SanMar. Eric is a graduate of the University of Washington where he earned dual degrees in business administration and mathematics as a Washington Scholar.

Photo credits:
Graphs - Elia Lombardi
Level of Interaction on the Fortune 500 Corporate Blogs - Xiao Fang Hu
Fortune 500 Companies Vs. the Inc. 500 - Aleksandr Ugorenkov
Fortune 500 Companies Corporate Twitter Accounts - Jay Simmons
Fortune 500 Companies Level of Interaction on Twitter - Mikhail Mishchenko
Methodology - Andrey Burmakin

Journalist Guide To Crowdsourced Data Collection With Amazon Mechanical Turk

Srinivas Rao and Amanda Michel — Tue, 02 Nov 2010 06:00:00 PDT

If you are looking for a cost-effective solution to offload any amount of tedious, time-consuming tasks to a qualified, on-demand human workforce, Amazon Mechanical Turk, or one of its new international competitors, may be your best choice. These services not only help you match your task to an always-on distributed workforce, but they also save you tons of money, costing a fraction of what a professional editor or data input person would normally cost in Europe or the US.

Photo credit: Xiao Fang Hu

This new breed of online services, which leverage qualified free-lance workers in fast-developing countries, can indeed provide great time- and cost-savings to many web publishers needing to sift, verify, collect, input or validate large sets of data.

The key idea behind these crowdsourced human workforce services is the one of flexibly providing qualified workers to execute tasks that a human being can do much more effectively than a computer. Such as identifying objects in a photo or video, filling-in a spreadsheet document, writing short technical reviews, transcribing video clips or verifying specific bits of information online.

While traditionally, tasks like these have been carried out by hiring a temporary workforce (which is time consuming, expensive and difficult to scale), these “marketplaces of human intelligence" have been designed to create much larger polls of workers that can be hired on-demand and just-in-time.

The most popular of these services is Amazon Mechanical Turk, which is in existance since 2005.

Amazon created the service having in mind those people who did not move forward with certain projects because the cost to establish a skilled individual outweighed the value of completing that particular project. By creating a marketplace where business owners could scale their costs to match precisely their needs, Mechanical Turk has proved to be an effective project which has survived until now.

In this guide from ProPublica, republished here with full permission from the authors, you will find a step-by-step journalist guide on how to use Mechanical Turk at its fullest.

While the guide is specifically written with the Amazon service in mind, you can certainly transfer the insights and “best practices” hereby given to other situations and also to some of the new and emerging competing services. The key limitation in fact for Mechanical Turk, is that the Amazon service is available only in the US.

If you live outside of the US, you may want to browse through this small map in which I have started collecting online service alternatives to Mechanical Turk, which can be used by any individual or company outside of the US.

Here the Journalist Guide to crowdsourced data collection with Mechanical Turk:

ProPublica’s Guide to Mechanical Turk

by Srinivas Rao and Amanda Michel

Amazon Mechanical Turk - or mTurk - is an online marketplace, set up by the online shopping site Amazon, where anyone can hire workers to complete short, simple tasks over the Internet.

Amazon originally developed it as an in-house tool, and commercialized it in 2005.

The mTurk workforce now numbers more than 100,000 workers in 200 countries, according to Amazon. At ProPublica, we use it for tasks like collecting, reformatting, and de-duplicating data.

This is a guide to journalists looking to use Mechanical Turk in their data projects. It's meant for users who are already familiar with mTurk and are looking for ways to improve their results.

Readers who are new to Mechanical Turk should start with Amazon mTurk Resource Center.

Much of this document is based on the research and advice of Panos Ipeirotis, a computer scientist at NYU's Stern School of Business, who maintains a blog of his research into Mechanical Turk.

1) The Basics

Before you start putting projects up, there are some fundamentals to get right.

a) Get the Lingo Down
Mechanical Turk is great for delegating lots of simple, well-defined requests, which Amazon refers to as "Human Intelligence Tasks," or "HITs."

People who complete tasks are called "workers" and those who post them are "requesters."

In this guide, the word "project" refers to a batch of similar tasks. "Spammers" are workers who try to make money without actually doing the work by answering with random data.

b) Make Sure Your Project is Suitable for mTurk

Can you easily deconstruct your project into tasks that can be completed independently? Use mTurk.

Do these tasks require specialized knowledge? Don't use mTurk.

Are the tasks simple and quick to finish? Use mTurk.

Are there multiple correct answers for each task? Don't use mTurk.

For example, ProPublica uses mTurk to help figure out which companies are getting stimulus money for our Recovery Tracker.

We get the data from the government, but in at least 400 cases last quarter, the data identified some companies only by their DUNS number instead of the company name. And because the online DUNS database uses a CAPTCHA to prevent scraping, we used mTurk workers to find company names by their DUNS numbers.

Each task is simple; a worker plugs a DUNS number into a field on the DUNS website and then copies and pastes relevant company information into fields in mTurk.

c) Be Careful! Mechanical Turk Is a Public Site

Amazon doesn't allow search engines to index its content, nor does it maintain a public archive of tasks or projects.

However, third party programs can still collect information about the projects you're running, and workers are under no obligation to keep their work secret.

To date, we've run all of our projects under the ProPublica name because it makes our work more interesting for potential workers.

If you're uncomfortable with someone accessing your work, and if your ethics rules are OK with it, you can run sensitive work under an assumed name.

Or, you can follow our lead and make it hard for anyone to scrape your work by allowing only approved workers to see your HITs (just use Amazon built-in qualification tests to screen workers based on accuracy rate, location and experience).

2) Ready, Set, Turk

mTurk is a big marketplace, and you'll attract workers' attention by:

Project type,

work quantity,

pay, and

your organization's reputation.

Here are some tips for when you're ready to assign mTurk workers to a project:

a) Design Your HITs so They're Hits
Think through the best approach to designing your projects and describing your tasks.

Do you have one batch of tasks or are there several to be done in sequence?

What information do you need to provide so people can complete a task?

We've found it's best to keep tasks as simple as possible.

You'll want to experiment at breaking down projects into different kinds of tasks to see which ones work best for you.

b) Write Crystal-Clear and Detailed Instructions

Workers won't be able to ask you questions as they complete your tasks, so you need to make sure your instructions are well-written and precise.

Any ambiguity will increase your error rate.

It will also frustrate workers because they'll make unnecessary mistakes.

We recommend giving workers as much information about projects as possible, including how you'll review their work.

Newsrooms and nonprofits should underscore their mission, as many workers respond favorably to mission-driven work.

Always clue workers into your project's goals so they're better positioned to troubleshoot any problems.

Don't be the judge of your own instructions: Ask someone who knows little about your subject to complete a task before you launch your project. Amanda's favorite test subject is her sister, who has no problem voicing complaints.

c) Error-Proof Your Project Beforehand

Here are a few best practices to minimize the chances that your projects will yield useless results:

I) Use Redundancy

You should never trust the response of a single worker. Instead, delegate each task to at least two but sometimes as many as five workers.

The number of workers you should use depends on the task's difficulty.

At ProPublica we often delegate each task to four workers and trust responses when three or more of the workers agree.

Our use of several workers for each task is based on Professor Ipeirotis' research on the subject.

II) Troubleshoot Any Complications

...a worker may face and adjust accordingly.

For instance, for our DUNS project, we originally forgot to plan for situations in which the DUNS number could not be found in the database. This led to workers entering responses like "error" and "no zip code listed" into the "company name" field. The next time we ran this task, we gave workers the option to note that a DUNS number returned an error.

III) Price Your HITs Appropriately

Pricing on mTurk is more art than science, unfortunately.

Pay too little, and workers won't complete your tasks.

Pay too much and you'll attract more spammers.

At ProPublica, we pay between 1 and 10 cents per task.

Professor Ipeirotis recently surveyed tasks on mTurk and found that 90 percent of them were priced within this range.

Requesters can also reward workers with bonuses after the project has been completed. But don't expect the promise of a bonus to work in your favor.

Workers rarely trust new requesters who guarantee bonuses for good work.

IV) Use "Code Words"

...to ward off spammers.

Spammers love multiple choice questions because they can complete tasks quickly by clicking randomly. Avoid this problem by asking workers to obtain an arbitrary piece of data on the Internet, even if you won't use it. You can use this data to verify that workers actually completed the task and didn't simply provide answers at random.

V) Spot-Check Results

Before we launch a project on mTurk, we try to complete 50 or so tasks on our own, and then compare the results to mTurk's.

The first time we ran a project on mTurk, we ran an old data set we'd completed ourselves and then compared the results.

The good news: In 524 cases, data from mTurk matched our own results - and mTurk actually caught 10 errors we made in-house.

VI) Be Good to Workers

Workers like requesters who treat them with respect.

Develop a reputation for prompt payment, clear instructions and fair judgment, and you will attract high-quality workers who will do quick and accurate work.

VII) Get to Know Your Workers

...and give them a heads-up when you post to MT.

mTurk assigns every worker a persistent ID, but doesn't show you their name or provide contact information. We've worked around this by adding a text field to our HITs that reads,

"If you would be interested in receiving email updates about upcoming HITs from ProPublica, enter your email address here. Don't worry, we will only send you messages related to Amazon Mechanical Turk."

Our plan is to send our best workers an e-mail alert before uploading a new project.

VIII) Test Massive Projects

Before posting a massive project, post a batch of 100-200 HITs as a test. Testing has helped us catch possible complications and errors. A $3 test can save you from running $100 of flawed results. You can see some of these tips in practice in our DUNS project.

In the HIT template, we showed workers a DUNS Number, and asked them to retrieve the corresponding company's name and ZIP code.

We assigned each task to four workers to ensure accuracy.

Since the tasks involved copying text, an arbitrary code word was not necessary.

We also asked workers to note when a DUNS number was not listed in the database, or if a company did not have a U.S. ZIP code.

We told workers that we would reject their work only if there was evidence of cheating, and we gave them an opportunity to sign up for ProPublica's mTurk team.

We paid workers one cent per task. This is on the low side of our pay range, as we underestimated the time it takes to run DUNS numbers through the database.

We'll pay three cents next time.

Uploading Your Project To mTurk

When you're actually filling in the details of your HITs, there are some good tips to keep in mind: Don't worry too much about your task's expiration date or the "time allotment per HIT."

Workers can't search for HITs based on either of these factors, so they don't generally have an effect on the speed or accuracy of your project.

Our recommendation: Just keep the default values.

Always use your company name as a keyword. Add a few more that describe your work. We use "data," "fast," and "easy" a lot.

Professor Ipeirotis has assembled a list of the top keywords.

We recommend you allow only workers with a 95 percent accuracy rate or higher to view your HITs.

If your tasks require knowledge of American culture or slang, limit your project to American workers.

Believe it or not, the bigger your job, the faster it will complete.

If your project includes more than 200 HITs and is simple, we've found that it will almost always finish within 12 hours.

Smaller projects take longer - in one case, a job with 18 HITs took four days to complete and a similar job with 155 HITs finished in less than an hour.

Run your project over a weekend or at night.

We've found that projects run over the weekend finish faster (very few HITs are loaded up on the weekend).

If you want to run your projects during the week, launch them in the evening, U.S. Eastern Time, when American workers are getting home from their day jobs, and the Indian workday is just beginning.

We published our DUNS project on a Friday afternoon at 5:30 p.m., and all 401 tasks were completed within six hours.

Higher-paying work doesn't get prioritized.

People favor simple tasks and large projects. One-cent jobs often complete faster than two- or three-cent jobs. That doesn't mean that under-priced HITs attract quality workers; workers tend to search for easy tasks to complete, and lower-priced tasks tend to be easier.

Project Completed, Now The Review Begins

Unless you ran your project over the weekend, don't let more than a day pass before you review the results. Make sure you examine the data closely.

If there are a lot of HITs in which workers disagreed about the correct answer, you should check if one worker was responsible for all the errors.

You can also check for spammers by calculating whether one worker completed tasks much faster than others.

You can see how we analyzed the results to our DUNS project.

Pay workers promptly.

mTurk workers are paid only once you've approved their work.

You should pay workers within one business day of posting your project.

If there is no evidence of spam, payment should happen immediately.

While Mechanical Turk gives you the ability to reject submissions and refuse payment to workers, we highly recommend against doing so unless there is clear evidence that workers are providing spam responses.

Many projects won't accept workers who have had less than 95 percent of their work accepted, so they are understandably protective of their accuracy rates.

Rejecting work that was completed with good intentions is not only unfair, it will also get your company a reputation for being inhospitable to workers.

Originally written by Srinivas Rao and Amanda Michel for ProPublica, and first published on October 15th, 2010 as ProPublica’s Guide to Mechanical Turk

About Srinivas Rao

Srinivas Rao is employed by ProPublica since March 2010. He graduated from George Washington University in 2008 in political communication.

About Amanda Michel

Amanda Michel is the director of distributed reporting at ProPublica. She recently directed HuffPost's OffTheBus, a citizen journalism site. She has also worked as an online organizer and strategist for political campaigns, including the Dean and Kerry Internet teams.

Photo credits:
Image of Amanda Michel - Lars Klove
Other Images - Jpsdk

P2P And Open Infrastructures: The Society Of Openness Comes Of Age

Robin Good — Tue, 26 Oct 2010 07:58:00 PDT

What are P2P and open infrastructures? Can open knowledge and peer production subvert the economic system of physical production? Is there a chance for the "society of openness" to ever come of age? Robin Good interviewed the P2P Foundation evangelist and founder Michel Bauwens to find out.

Photo credit: itestro

With the visual aid of a very in-depth mindmap entitled "Everything Open and Free", Michel thoroughly touches base on the eight core processes representing the cycle of reproduction and growth of openness inside societies:

1. Aspects of Openness: the demand for open access, spontaneous participation, transparency, full shareability and ‘changeability’ of the common material. All these represent new social expectations and are key ingredients of the Commons-based peer production.
2. Enablers of Openness: social charters that determine the boundary conditions of the open communities and which define the minimal conditions for openness to be recognized; open code, open licenses, and open standards; as well as the basic conditions which are open access and open data.

3. Infrastructures of Openness: infrastructures in which enablers of openness are embedded. Open platforms, both virtual and physical, to produce in a open way: open collaborative technical platforms, open places where to connect local production with global open design communities, open media and communication infrastructures, open and free software, knowledge and scientific data.

4. Open Practices: all the preceding enablers of openness foster the engagement in open practices, especially open design and open manufacturing, but also free currencies and new forms of sharing (ownership).

5. Open Domains of Practice: embedded in topical domains, such as education and science, where these practices are contextualized and made real to finally result in all kinds of Open Products.

6. Open Products: actual ’social artifacts’ like the Apache server, the Linux operating system, etc...

7. Open Movements: new social movements, dedicated to increasing ‘openness’, tackling the social awareness concerning this shift, strengthening and increasing the numbers of people who see this as a new mode of life and ethical ideal and as their default social practice.

8. Open Consciousness: all the efforts devoted to change subjectivities and how to relate to each other, reinforcing new iterations of the Open Cycle.

Here is the full video interview (with a full text transcription):

P2P and Open Infrastructures: The Rise of Open Society - Michel Bauwens

Duration: 11' 13''

Full English Text Transcription

Michel Bauwens: My name is Michel Bauwens. I am with the P2P Foundation.

We study:

Open and free participatory and commons oriented social practices,

peer production,

peer governance,

peer property.

I am doing this with Robin Good of MasterNewMedia, the aim is to explain open infrastructures.

Open everything: What does that mean?

What are we doing here on Earth that is changing the World as we know it and the way people relate to each other and create value together and make new types of businesses and all of that?

I made a mind map, which I called Everything Open and Free.

1. Aspects of Openness

The first thing I want to show is what I call aspects of openness.

Basically, the basis of everything is the change in value.

I am claiming that, because of these peer to peer networks that we are creating, people are more and more relating to each other horizontally and this creates a new value system.

What are these aspects of openness?

For example:

Transparency,

participation,

open access,

shareability,

the ability to fork.

All these are values that are related to openness.

Now, just a little background.

Why is this important? Because every big change in society has also been a big change in the value system.

When Rome changes from a kind of slave-based empire to the feudal system, under the domination of the Catholic Church and the feudal lords, this is a different value system.

For example, the Romans hated work - that was for the slaves, but the Christian monks worked. This was seen as a positive thing for them.

The new feudal society represented a new value system.

In order for this to be created, people also had to change into this new value system and wanted to behave and create value in this particular way.

I am arguing that this is occurring now.

I just want to give one example: The Trust Barometer from Edelman - it is a PR company. In 2003 they asked people: "Who do you trust?" and then again in 2007.

The amazing thing is that in 2003, people trusted institutions 60 to 70 percent. Only four years later, including in China, people said: "I trust people like myself."

This is kind of one of the signs that these value systems are changing.

2. Enablers of Openness

What do we do with these value systems?

We embed them in what I call "enablers of openness".

In other words, we make social charters. We make new social contracts.

Let's take again an historical example.

We have a crisis of the feudal system in the 16th century and serfs are fleeing the countryside. They arrive in the new cities.

In the new cities, they kind of mix with people who have capital to invest in these new workers and cities are created and strengthened.

What do they do? They ask for free city charters. They use their new influence to obtain a number of rights and freedoms that are encoded in social charters.

The Magna Charta, for example, is a charter that gives certain rights to people, but also the farmers, their commons is protected - it is a set of rights.

I am arguing this is what we are doing now.

The value systems are being encoded in, for example, open definitions.

Think about the General Public License, the license that governs free software. It is a set of five rules.

Basically, what you are saying is: "If you want to be part of our community, if you want to create value the way we do it, you have to abide by these five rules."

In summary, you can use everything that is in it, but every change and improvement also has to go back to the community.

That is a basic new value system and rule embedded, what I call "enablers of openness".

We have:

Access,

the new principles,

aspects of openness,

the value system, and then

the enablers of openness.

These are embedded in social charters.

Here I have a list:

Open definitions,

open code,

open access,

open licenses,

open standards,

open data,

open facilitation, and

open governance.

We arrive at the third step.

3. Infrastructures of Openness

We are going to embed those social charters in our infrastructures.

Commons-oriented peer production is basically a combination of an open community, using collaborative platforms and putting knowledge, code and software in a Commons.

The infrastructural element is very important. We need those collaborative platforms.

What I am saying here is that we are creating an infrastructure of cooperation, an infrastructure of openness, in all the different fields of social life.

Here is the list again:

Open collaboration spaces - think about The Hub, which is a place where global entrepreneurs can work together - this is an infrastructure that reflects different values.

Open meeting infrastructures - like BarCamps and Unconferences - these are ways of bringing people together to share knowledge and achieve some change, which has completely different rules from classic conference, where you have to listen to people speak.

Open funding infrastructures - where every individual has the freedom to collaborate in creating a fund, Crowd funding, social lending, etc.

This is the third step.

We had aspects of openness, new value systems, which were embedded in social charters.

Now we have achieved a third step.

We are creating new infrastructures of openness and collaboration, which are based on these new values, which have these these charters embedded in the way they are conceived.

This brings us to a fourth aspect.

4. Practices of Openness

I am just showing now examples of the open infrastructures.

What you see passing on the screen is, basically, the shift from open software to open hardware.

In other words, we have gone from open knowledge to open software and now we move to

Open designs,

shared designs,

manufacturing base of shared designs,

making things based on sharing the designs in an open way.

I showed Arduino, which is a circuit board project, an Italian project, with 13 companies making more than one million dollars and cooperating with this open community and sharing their innovations.

What I have on the screen now is called eCars. It is a Finnish project where they make designs for changing any car into a hybrid electric car. They started with the eCorolla.

This is just to show the shift of open infrastructures towards making things.

I have an extensive directory of open hardware, with as an example, open source projects in cars, open car projects.

These collaborative platforms are going to lead to new practices.

With a practice, I mean something which is not valid in one domain but over every domain.

For example, when I say open hardware, you need open hardware:

For science,

for education,

in manufacturing.

It is a practice that is across different domains.

What are these practices?

Open knowledge and science,

open and free software,

open designs,

open hardware,

open currencies,

open capital and ownership,

open funding practices.

I want to give you one example: Open currencies or open money.

The idea here is to conceive of money as something that is designed and the way it is designed has consequences.

For example, if we have an interest-based money system with compound interests, it needs infinite growth.

Infinite growth is not a good thing for our society today.

You can redesign the money in a different way and that would have a different logic.

Today people, for example, are making something called the Metacurrency Project, which is a project to create a TCP / IP like a standard for open moneymaking

Every community can eventually design its currency and see how this can be exchanged with another community.

These are open practices.

You need money for different things, not for one thing.

This is differentiated from the next section, which is domains of openness.

5. Domains of Openness

The new values that we have embedded in social charters, embedded in infrastructure of cooperation, and that we are practicing. With this we are going to change our own fields of practice.

If I am a scientist, I am going to use these practices to build open science.

If I am active in business, if I am an entrepreneur, I am going to change my practices into open business.

People are asking transparency and open politics.

If I want to have a spiritual life but I do not believe in a particular, let's say, hierarchically-organized religion, I can have an open spiritual practice.

I am going to change how I do spirituality.

All the domains of life are going to be changed in this way by achieving and adapting to these new demands of openness.

6. Products of Openness

Domains of openness leads to products of openness.

What we have here is concrete stuff, like: Wikipedia, open government data, or OpenCourseWare.

These are, within a field, something concrete that people can use.

Here we are in a very concrete life.

We have new products, new institutions, and this is changing the way society functions.

We are almost at the end, because the end is the following, which I call open movements.

7. Open Movements

I would just like to say a word about the P2P Foundation.

We are a global foundation for people collaborating around building knowledge around peer to peer. This means the open, free input.

You cannot work together if you do not have open and free input. This means participatory processes.

You are not going to contribute freely to a project where your work can be appropriated by somebody else and not shared and therefore we put it in a Commons.

This is our way of explaining the new reality and to contribute to the changing consciousness.

What you see on the slide are movements like:

Global Swadeshi,

Appropedia,

Open Internet Coalition,

The Pirate Parties,

OpenKollab,

OpenMaterials, and the

P2P Foundation.

If you like, we work on the consciousness that people have.

We take all these open platforms, open practices, open products and we create a platform where people can exchange these concrete experiences and learn from each other.

We arrive at the end of our circle, which is basically open consciousness.

8. Open Consciousness

We had the starting point which was the transvaluation, a new value system, which is an expression of a new form of consciousness.

We have arrived at this expression of open consciousness.

I want to use an analogy to explain why I took this approach.

Let's say we live in a feudal society.

In a feudal society, the lord gets the surplus from his farmers. He has, really, no interest in accumulating capital, but he spends it in a kind of competition with all the lords - but if you live in the city of Florence or Venice and you are a merchant, this does not really work.

At some point, a monk invents double bookkeeping, but once people start using double bookkeeping, they start thinking differently about value and managing value.

The fact that they use these tools, in turn, changes consciousness.

And a new society will basically be born because, in different fields, people are inventing new patterns.

These patterns kind of align to each other and, eventually, will create a new logic within society that emerges first, then might become as strong as the old system and eventually takes it over.

That is the story.

Conclusion

What I want to say is that we cannot change society merely by doing politics if we do not also have a proof that our alternatives work.

It is important to combine constructive and inter-networked construction of open infrastructures. This is how we change our concrete lives.

Even within the old system, we can change our lives.

Then we interconnect with each other and we create a baseline of change within society.

This, in itself, is not enough to change society, but it is a condition.

We combine that with social movements who have the power to change politics and to change the institutions in society.

Finally, we deal with policymaking and creating new institutions that will embed all of these changes.

I think open infrastructures are a very important step and it is very important to understand them.

The final point I want to make is: An enormous amount of people are doing this, but they may not know that other people are doing it, so they feel isolated and maybe they do not really believe in the change they want.

I think, by showing this map, we are showing that the open alternative, far from just being something totally marginal, has, already a substantial reality.

In the P2P Foundation.net wiki, we have 10,000 entries reflecting open patterns, open projects.

I invite you to check it out and to look at your own field of activity, whether it is spirituality or business or politics, and find out what other people are doing to change their lives, to create new social structures and to connect with them and to form a social movement that can change the world.

Thanks.

Video clips originally recorded by Robin Good for MasterNewMedia. First published on October 26th, 2010 as "P2P And Open Infrastructures: The Society Of Openness Comes Of Age".

About Michel Bauwens

Michel Bauwens (1958) is a Belgian integral philosopher and peer-to-peer theorist. He has worked as an internet consultant, information analyst for the United States Information Agency, information manager for British Petroleum (where he created one of the first virtual information centers), and is former editor-in-chief of the first European digital convergence magazine, the Dutch language Wave.

To know more about Michel Bauwens you can visit these sections of the P2P Foundation wiki:

Energy and Sustainability -http://p2pfoundation.net/Category:Ecology

Open Manufacturing - http://p2pfoundation.net/Category:Manufacturing

Open Money - http://p2pfoundation.net/Category:Money

Open Design - http://p2pfoundation.net/Category:Design

Open Design projects - http://p2pfoundation.net/Product_Hacking

Photo credits:
2. Enablers of Openness - Mipan
3. Infrastructures of Openness - Konstantinos Kokkinis
5. Domains of Openness - Chris Lamphear
8. Open Consciousness - Chris Harvey

Peer-To-Peer Politics And Its Vision For The Future - A Video Interview With Michel Bauwens

Robin Good — Tue, 03 Aug 2010 07:08:00 PDT

What has P2P to do with politics? Isn't peer-to-peer related to file sharing and pirated media? As a matter of fact, peer-to-peer is not just a popular set of tools and technologies to easily share and distribute digital content, but it is also a new fascinating study field that analyzes how we could approach our future by working and operating in a collaborative and sharing fashion rather than in a competitive and exploitative one.

Photo credit: Robin Good

This peer-to-peer vision is all centered around the cooperative creation of a truly sustainable future, not based on speculative and unregulated exploitation of natural resources, but on a social dynamic of voluntary spontaneous participation. The overarching goal is the creation of common goods, products and services for local, self-sustainable communities.

As such, the P2P political movement is shaped by open source, local self-reliance and a shared sense of the urgency of exploring and defining sustainable futures and it is made up of tens of thousands of independent, decentralized actors connected by expertise and skill affinity as well as by local projects and endeavours.

On the other hand, the current political economy is based on the fundamental misconception that natural resources are unlimited.

Not only. The same system is also responsible for creating artificial scarcity for potentially abundant cultural resources by leveraging copyright and similar laws to discourage re-use and replication of intellectual works.

This combination of pseudo-abundance and artificial scarcity does two things:

a) it destroys the biosphere and
b) it hampers the nourishing and growth of social innovation and of an open culture.

In a P2P-based society the situation is practically reversed: the limits of natural resources are recognized, and the focus is shifted to the potentially infinite abundance of immaterial resources as the core operating fulcrum.

The peer-to-peer political approach favors vocational work, co-operation and collaborative approaches where individuals operate together to create and distribute value to their peers.

According to Michel Bauwens, the peer-to-peer movement evangelist and publisher of the P2PFoundation web hub, we are approaching times in which our present working and economic paradigms may have to give in to completely new ways of organizing, producing wealth and of relating to each other on this planet.

If you want to understand what peer-to-peer politics are all about, and why a peer-to-peer political system could be a good candidate to potentially replace our present political and economic system in the future, this in-depth video interview I have recently shot with Michel Bauwens, gives you immediate insight into why the present global system of neoliberal capitalism is close to collapsing and why a P2P-based society may be an attractive alternative socio-economic model to consider for the future.

The Importance of a System Based on Creating Value

Duration: 2' 27''

Full English Text Transcription

Michel Bauwens: I wanted to discuss some of the political aspects of peer-to-peer and the Commons.

The first point I want to make is the following and it is a kind of meditation of how do societies change.

The classic left position was that the workers take power, then they change everything and create a new society - this is not exactly the approach of the P2P Foundation.

What I propose is based on the reading of history - which is basically the following:

When the system enters in a crisis, for example the end of the Roman empire, it:

cannot grow any longer,

cannot get slaves so easily and it

turns into some kind of a crisis.

Then the élite within a society will look for solutions and will try to find other ways to create and sustain value.

Within a slave-centered Roman economy, we have some slave owners that create serfs, which were called "coloni". They re-align themselves to to this new mode of creating value.

Of course, at the bottom you have also a change, because slaves become serfs. They can live on the land, have family, etc...

Societies only change when the old system breaks down and then the new system takes over. Of course that is a complicated historical process, but this is the kind of dynamic I want to explain.

Similarly, today you have:

A re-alignment of a section of the capital - which I call a netarctical capital, which enables and empowers social cooperation,

the people who work are becoming peer producers and participants in this new system.

This is the importance of people actually having a new system creating value, which out-cooperates and out-competes the classic model of IP proprietary capitalism. This is the seed of a new society, a new way of creating and distributing value.

I see a clear political link between the new way of creating value and the seed form for a new society.

This is one point.

The Grand Coalition of Commons

Duration: 3' 14"

Michel Bauwens: The second point is: How do you create a social movement around this change?

I use the concept of the "grand coalition of the Commons". It is based on my analysis of what is wrong with today’s society and basically is the following.

Our society is based on pseudo-abundance, false abundance, the think nature is infinite and we have a system which eats up the Earth's resources and the biosphere and basically it is endangering life on Earth.

We need an economic system which recognizes this natural scarcity, this limitation of the planet.

The other problem is what I call artificial scarcity or pseudo-scarcity.

The idea is that we have a system of intellectual property rights, copyright, patents, trademarks, different things which basically say: "You cannot copyright unless you pay us or you ask for permission."

Innovations are often:

Locked down,

privatized and

kept in check.

This is a real problem, especially in an era of climate change where we actually need very fast innovation.

You cannot mobilize open communities, open designs and open codes for your software if you do not have a form of sharing where people can say: "Yes, if I contribute, somebody else will not take it away and privatize it.".

If these analysis are correct, we have two forces that can already form part of what I call "the coalition of Commons":

One is all those forces on the planet which want to change the economy into a sustainable economy:
- Sustainability movements,
- environmental movements,
- green businesses, etc..

Then we have all the forces that want a free culture:
- Open science,
- open access publishing,
- free software movements and all of that.
We have a free culture movement and a sustainable economy movement.

Let’s imagine that we find a solution to this crisis of society, but that does not involve social justice. My idea is that that will not work, because then you have to manage social conflict and social tensions.

We need a solution that actually combines those three - it is like a tripod.

We also need social justice moments involved in this change.

What I call the grand coalition of Commons is the building of a new social movement that:

Is centered around the Commons and civil society,

develops Commons-oriented policy frameworks to protect the Earth, to free culture, to achieve social justice and a more fair distribution of the planet resources to humanity.

That was the second point.

How Is Political Struggle Related to Peer Production

Duration: 3' 25"

Michel Bauwens: The third point I want to make is the following: How is political struggle related to peer production, open infrastructures and the Commons?

I think the point is the following and again it is like a tripod.

The first thing is we need constructive social movements which build the alternative.
If you go in the streets, you disagree with what is happening and you do not have an alternative program, it is not going to work. You cannot just say no.

You need to build and prove that what you want is actually a viable method. This is why I am in favor of building open infrastructures in every area of social life. But this is a slow process and sometimes you do not have the time.

We will have take into account the current conjuncture, which is basically: There was a big financial meltdown, all the money went to the bailout of the banks and now there is no more money for welfare, pensions and education.

Let’s say the European welfare system is under sustained attack. Whether we want it or not, it is going to create social tension.

We are going to have movements on the right and on the left, radical movements are going to spring up and they are going to fight it out, eventually in the streets.

This is why you cannot ignore politics and social struggles, but what you have to find is a connection between:
- the constructive social movements who are building new things - let's say this is the slower road - and
- social movements, which can in a very short time sometimes become dominant.
  
  They can lose or they can win, but you can have massive mobilizations that can occur, especially in times of economic crisis like the one we are be going through in the next 8-15 years.
It is very important to find these connections.

The third connection is around policy making and the state.

I want to stress that is not just enough to build new things and it is not enough to have a social movement. You need to have policy. Why?

Let’s take the file sharing.

Young people want to share - this is a transgressive activity, a sub-cultural activity.

You just say: "No, I do not care about society, I want to do what I want to do." You get attacked.

The RIAA, MPAA - the Motion Picture Association of America and the Recording Industry Association of America - are going to enact loss and they are going to put you in jail. This creates the feeling around for a political reaction.

We see that from this transgressive social movement what you have is a Pirate Party and the Free Culture movement, which are protecting these new cultural rights.

You have a:
- Transgressive phase,
- constructive phase - Creative Commons,
- political phase.
Then you have to engage with the existing institutions of society, eventually create new institutions, but you have to engage with politics and policy making, in order to protect these new ways of creating value and these new ways of creating happiness in your life.

It is not going to happen just automatically, by just doing your things.

You have to take into account the whole totality of society and you have to be active in different fields.

This is the third point I wanted to make about peer-to-peer and politics.

Video clips originally recorded by Robin Good for MasterNewMedia. First published on August 3rd, 2010 as "Peer-To-Peer Politics And Its Vision For The Future - A Video Interview With Michel Bauwens".

About the author

To know more about Michel Bauwens you can visit these sections of the P2P Foundation wiki:

Energy and Sustainability -http://p2pfoundation.net/Category:Ecology

Open Manufacturing - http://p2pfoundation.net/Category:Manufacturing

Open Money - http://p2pfoundation.net/Category:Money

Open Design - http://p2pfoundation.net/Category:Design

Open Design projects - http://p2pfoundation.net/Product_Hacking