• We’re not really having a conversation online with people.
• We post stuff on our blog / Twitter / Facebook page but it just seems to go into the ether.
• We ask questions of our audience but no-one answers.
• etc.

It’s a tricky one. I think I might have found an answer. Bear with me as I spend a few hundred words getting to the point as usual.

Image source

A few months ago I came across a group blog called Clusterflock and it quickly became one of those blogs I keep around in case I run out of things to read or when insomnia strikes. But there was something different about Clusterflock compared to the other rivers-of-stuff blogs I keep around the place. The Daily What is a great digest of Internet culture but it feels like a magazine or television channel. Here’s a bunch of things we’ve prepared for you to consume. Clusterflock, on the other hand, is like finding yourself sitting at a table with a bunch of people who are telling stories and sharing stuff. Strangers are welcome but you get the feeling they’ve known each other for a while. There’s in-jokes and things you think might be in-jokes but you can’t be sure and other potentially alienating phenomena that usually gets groups labeled as cliques, and yet I found myself drawn to it.

I’ve been wondering for a while what it is about this blog that I like. Sure, the stuff that’s posted crosses over with my interests and aesthetics – these seem, on the surface, to be my kinds of people, but there was something else. And then it struck me.

They’re not addressing an audience. They’re addressing the group. It’s not a broadcast model. It’s a group discussion that happens to be public.

It’s surprising how linear people’s attitude to online activity has become. Maybe it’s because the great “crowdsourcing” experiments didn’t really pan out but stuff seems to be very being publisher – audience driven right now. There are authors and there are commenters and there’s not much else going on. There’s nothing wrong with this per-se (my blogging is very soapbox-oriented, as you might have noticed) but it’s very one way.

What’s intriguing about Clusterflock is the contributors are talking to each other. The people in the comments are frequently other contributors and if they’re not they can use the the Christopher Walken account to post.

Everyone is an equal at the table, if they want to be. You know what this reminds me of? Metafilter, the granddaddy of community blogs. Or, if you prefer, a forum.

No-one recommends a forum these days. The memories of empty phpBB boards with two welcome posts and no activity whatsoever are too raw. But the forum model is still an interesting one even if the tools can be a little all or nothing. It’s a level playing field with a low barrier to entry where the the community is in charge.

So, how can you use this newfound knowledge to solve your social media woes? How do you build a community that shares amongst itself and welcomes newcomers? My answer would be you don’t build a community. You take the community you already have – yourselves.

I’m going to do something I don’t normally do and pick on a real world example. We Are Eastside is a campaign to unify and promote various arts and culture businesses that reside in the Eastside/Digbeth area of Birmingham. I’ve worked with a fair number of the organisations involved and care what happens culturally in that area. I think the We Are Eastside notion is a good one. Most of these people and organisations are friendly with each other and working towards similar goals. It makes sense to create some sort of loose collective and punch their collective weight. The We Are Eastside booklet was a lovely thing giving a great snapshot of activity in the city most would be unaware of. The blog, however, has been a bit of letdown.

The diagnosis from this blog doctor is clear. The contributors, if they post at all, merely post press releases or duplicate their own blogs. The former, frankly, is a crime while the latter begs the question, what is this blog for? Is it just an aggregator? A Google News for Eastside? There’s nothing wrong with that of course and it might be neat to see a cleverly aggregated snapshot of the news from that district. But it’s not very interesting.

Howabout this. The blog is where the participating organisations share things with each other. In public. And have a conversation about them. In public. No press releases, no commissioned pieces, no duplicating blog content, just things of mutual interest.

Obviously this easier said than done. People who’ve spent years seeing media as a one-way tool to can be uncomfortable having conversations about their businesses in public and some of the organisations (naming no names) might not be fit for such as challenge. Above all, there has to be need for this. It needs to solve a problem even if that problem is something as simple as “we don’t chat as much as we should”. Often it’s the simple things that create the bonds of community after all.

So let’s say there’s a need for a site where the various cultural and creative companies of Eastside can post anything they think is of interest to the others. And let’s say it’s a success. What benefit does it have to the bottom line? (I’m assuming that We Are Eastside got City Council support to increase the economic development of the area.)

Firstly there’s the obvious advantage of having businesses in the same sector connecting with each other, sharing resources and discussing them. This raises the intellectual capital and promotes collaboration and so on.

Secondly it demonstrates activity. People often say that walking around the Custard Factory complex you have no idea what’s happening in those offices and converted warehouses. This is a way of lifting the veil to all manner of people. Businesses looking to move to the area, customers looking for new suppliers, suppliers looking for new customers, people wondering what’s going on in the city.

Thirdly it’s a way of engaging with the audience on a level playing field. Remember Clusterflock’s Christopher Walken account which anyone in the world can use? Have a similar function where people who aren’t established on the scene can get involved. Sure, put in place moderation as required but set the tone yourselves first. Demonstrate what this space is for by using it in that way. Lead by example.

It’s never easy to throw a new form of communication onto an existing network, especially one as complex as a group of companies who happen to share a business classification and geographic location. The reason I picked We Are Eastside was because it’s a challenge and I’m not sure getting that bunch to run a group blog on top of everything else they’re doing is a reasonable request.

But it could also apply to a smaller group. Let’s say you’ve got 5 or 6 people in the office, a couple more on the road and a handful of freelancers. Would something like Clusterflock work for you?

I sublet a desk from Substrakt and have been keeping an eye on their company blog. As I understand it all of the team have to write for it as part of their job and what they write tends to be of a high quality. I can see why this post is a good thing – it shows them to be experts in their field and contributes to the developer community. Should this post become a valuable resource it will bring much Google traffic. But it’s very one way. It’d be interesting to read it as a discussion between Lee and Mark with space for others to get involved. Whether that would be as effective in promoting the company as the articles is debatable, mind you, but if you’re not in the position to produce a blog of the caliber of Substrakt then it’s something to consider.

“It’s all about the conversation” we say. And yet we build online platforms that look like this:

Source

forgetting the conversations tend to look more like this:

Photo credit

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If Ping, Apple’s new music social network, is a raging success then I’ll eat my hat. It might survive as a niche for those who live all their lives within the Apple ecosystem but I seriously doubt it’ll be adopted by a significant number of the 160 million iTunes users cited by Steve Jobs.

This isn’t because it’s a bad thing. It looks like a decent mix of Last.FM and Facebook neatly integrated into people’s music listening systems. The problem I’m seeing is that’s about it. It’s a functional thing that doesn’t appear to do much else.

Now, I’m aware that I’m judging this after playing with it for 30 seconds and that it took about 6 months for me to figure out what Twitter was for. But I now know what Twitter is for – it’s not for anything. Same with Facebook – ostensibly it’s to “connect and share with the people in your life” which is as vague as vague can be.

When a platform is for nothing in particular then it’s for everything you can think of. It seems to me that either your good at a niche activity or you’re good at integrating an abundance of niche activities. You can’t be both.

But all that aside this was the blast from the past that showed me Ping wasn’t there.

There are many ways this could work. At it’s most basic an integration into the OSX address book would be handy but that’s just a shortcut. More useful would be some kind of integration into Twitter or Facebook accounts, not to post annoying “@peteashton has just listened to Lady Gaga!” messages but to find out what my actual social network is listening to. These are the people I’ve built a relationship with and whose music tastes I don’t have access to. Smurshing these two datasets together would be awesome.

But no, Apple isn’t going to do that anytime soon. They need to own it all.

The approach to Ping is similar to Apple’s approach to Adobe Flash. They don’t like it because they don’t control it. Here’s Steve Jobs (quoted by John Gruber) from his notorious “Thoughts on Flash.”

We know from painful experience that letting a third party layer of software come between the platform and the developer ultimately results in sub-standard apps and hinders the enhancement and progress of the platform. If developers grow dependent on third party development libraries and tools, they can only take advantage of platform enhancements if and when the third party chooses to adopt the new features. We cannot be at the mercy of a third party deciding if and when they will make our enhancements available to our developers.

Let’s say Ping is integrated into Twitter and Facebook and some other social networks in a useful and interesting way. And then let’s say Twitter goes bankrupt or Facebook radically changes how it works without any warning. Ping is suddenly missing some seriously important vital organs and there’s nothing Apple can do about it. Twitter and Facebook don’t care what happens to Ping – only Apple does.

This might be a silly approach to building a social app in this era of interoperability but it fits with Apple’s culture. Either they can control it or they don’t want anything to do with it because if it breaks they’ll get the blame. (You can see this happen when Twitter flakes out and people blame Tweetdeck or some other 3rd party client for being rubbish instead of the source.)

I can sympathise with Apple’s position here. Latching on to Facebook or Twitter’s infrastructure is a risky proposition because they are closed platforms out of your control. If social networks were run on open standards then I’m sure Apple would be right in there just as they are with HTML5 over Flash. Their mantra is either we control it or no-one controls it and it’s a healthy attitude. Unfortunately the social Internet hasn’t matured to that state yet.

Stopping looking isn’t a crime. If you’re trying to actually do something drawing a line in your explorations is a good way to start. But if you’re in the business of media in the current era when anyone can create a media platform in seconds you should always be aware of your limitations.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot over the last year. When Twitter first broke out in the UK I could have confidently told you how it was being used because I was part of the relatively small community that was using it. As Twitter adoption grew my knowledge changed. I could no longer tell you how people were using it because the number of uses were becoming huge. All I could do was help you understand the nature of the Twitter model.

It’s probably best to think of engagement through Twitter in terms of slices. I give Twitter some variables (these are the people I want to follow / this is the search query I have) and, after adding some more variables (these are the people who have mentioned you) it returns a slice of Twitter based on who’s posted recently. This slice is pretty much unique to me. The connection is has with other people’s slices is merely how much it overlaps (mutual followers, etc) and these connections will shift and change over time.

Watching people I feel I know well use Twitter can be fascinating. Because their slice is different their whole perception of Twitter is different to mine, sometimes subtly, sometimes drastically. I don’t want to play down the importance of the overlaps – they are the glue thats makes Twitter work – but I think the differences are often under-appreciated by those who celebrate the power Twitter has to bring people together. It’s these these effectively infinite differences between the slices that enable messages, ideas and links to thinks to spread across the network so quickly and effectively.

The other great thing about the Twitter model is it’s a good way of understanding how the Internet works. One of the great early works about the Internet was David Weinberger‘s book Small Pieces Loosely Joined. It’s a very seductive phrase and one that I’ve returned to again and again over the last decade as it seems to be the fundamental difference between old media and new. But it also seems to me to be an accurate reflection on how society works.

In other words, what we’re seeing as a digital phenomena is more like the normal way of things. When Weinberger says in his introduction:

Then we go on the Web, and the pieces are so loosely joined that frequently the links don’t work. [...] But, that’s ok because the Web gets its value not from the smoothness of its overall operation but from its abundance of small nuggets that point to more small nuggets. And, most important, the Web is binding not just pages but us human beings in new ways. We are the true “small pieces” of the Web, and we are loosely joining ourselves in ways that we’re still inventing.

I’d say yes, that’s true, but what’s also happening is we’re rediscovering the power of that loose joining that our great-grandparents knew well.

Maybe.

I don’t know. I wasn’t there. But it makes sense to me. Big media is only 3 or 4 generations old and something must have held society together before then.

My motivation for writing this post came from a couple of posts. The first by hyperlocal guru Will Perrin about the Shott review of economics of Local Television where he argues “For me the overarching question is why do local video programming on TV rather than the internet? The internet does almost everything that small audience local TV can do but far cheaper and more flexibly.”

The second is a followup from social media for social good hero Nick Booth where he asks his network What would you show from Birmingham to demonstrate how the web can do local better than local tv? Now, I think I know what Nick’s trying to do here but I think he’s falling into the trap that appears whenever this sort of thing is discussed. It is very hard, if not impossible, to do x=y comparisons between big media models and the way the social internet operates.

He asks “if he were to come to Birmingham who could [Secretary of State] Jeremy Hunt meet and what locally grown bottom up Big Society media goodness could we show him to help demonstrate an alternative beyond Local TV?”

The implication being that what we have in Birmingham is a viable alternative in scope and reach to that put out by a local television station. And, as Dave Harte points out in the comments, it doesn’t quite measure up.

Overall, I can’t help feeling that even with all the sites mentioned there isn’t really much here that yet adds up to a viable local media scene.

No, it doesn’t. And that’s not to detract from any of the efforts out there because, with some exceptions, I don’t think they’re trying to be part of a vibrant local media scene. Either their not capable or they’re not interested or they have another agenda for doing what they do.

But there’s a more fundamental point. These sites Nick rolls out are, I think, aberrations. While they might be distinct from big media models they still share more with them than we might like to admit. If we’re talking about a media landscape it’s a bit like Houston (where my Dad used to live and which I’ve visited a few times).

This is Downtown Houston.

It’s about a mile across and contains lots of big tall buildings. It’s the skyline that Houston is known by.

pic by telwink

But Houston as a whole doesn’t look like that. I picked Houston because when I visited it I was struck be how spread out everything is. Land is relatively cheap in Houston and the motor car rules so the city sprawls in a way that boggles the mind of this walk-everywhere Brit. Here’s Houston as a whole with the Downtown bit marked in red.

And from the side:

pic by Jason McELweenie

This idea of a effectively infinite space housing a sprawl of relatively small buildings is what I perceive Birmingham’s local online media scene to be like. Sure, there are some striking things in the middle there which many people will point to as a shortcut, and yes they are impressive and important, but they do not and cannot and should not represent the whole.

The problem for the policy makers is they’re thinking in terms of things they can get their heads around, things that fit into the old models of doing things. There’s this attitude that because a model worked well in the past it’ll work well in the future and so we see bizarre projects like this Local TV thing (something which I’ve only ever seen supported by grey haired people who used to work in local TV back when it was a commercially viable model).

And so the danger for those who are trying to talk to policy makers is falling into the trap of comparing the old and the new within the framework of the old, to give the impression that these new things can fill the gap perceived to be left by the withering old things.

As Jon Bounds said last Spring after talking to a reporter about the decline of local newspapers:

He wanted to talk about whether blogging would “fill the gap” that a demise of local papers would create and kept trying to get us to say that we were waiting and wanting to do it commercially. We’re not. We said so a number of times. In my opinion it would be stupid, we’re already filling gaps and have been for years — the hole that “papers” currently fill isn’t a shape that blogging can be forced into (and papers themselves don’t fill the hole anyway).

There’s a tendency to see the shifts in the media landscape as a fragmentation of what was dominant into lots of smaller pieces. While I like the “smaller pieces” bit I do think the term “fragmentation” is a little misleading. It’s not that services provided by larger media outfits have been devolved – it’s more that the needs that those services were developed to fulfill are being serviced by something else entirely.

And, I would argue, that something will not be easy to identify as an entity. It’s a toolset, sure, and literacy in frictionless sharing environments like Twitter and Facebook are important, but it’s also an attitude, an understanding that this isn’t about using media in a broadcast way. It’s about using media without realising you’re using media.

I’ve been thinking for a while now that people like me make for the worst examples of social media usage. The early adopters and power users are too self-aware, too knowing in what they do online. Dubber calls Twitter “performance conversation” and I’ve been told off for playing games with my followers by posting provocative stuff for kicks. We’re the sort of people who are supposed to be pushing and tickling this stuff to see how it works. Everyone else is just using it, and that makes them a lot more interesting.

I think the examples Nick and his commenters gave are good and important things that are doing important work. I would not want to take anything away from what they’ve achieved. But I do not think presenting stuff like Created in Birmingham and The Stirrer as replicating the services of monolithic media outlets is doing anyone any favours because it’s too easy to say they’re not without addressing the real phenomena. That these online things are the anomalies in a rich tapestry of stuff, most of which which is too small or to temporary to get a handle on.

No-one should try and predict the future but in order to better define the present I’ll have a go. I think things online are going to get more atomised. We’re going to see smaller pieces reaching smaller audiences over smaller periods of time. I think concepts like hyperlocal will be seen as transitional stages between the big and the small where the small is effectively the personal. And I think we’ll see the importance of identity diminish as reputation is spread across networks and becomes a more fluid thing.

(As an aside I think Tumblr is a fascinating example of this and something I want to study in more depth)

In short I think the future of online media looks a lot like soup. There will be carrots and they will be important but on the whole it’ll be a murky and opaque and very hard to perceive as anything other than a whole.

And I think this will be a good thing.

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Paperchase

Nancy Smallwood complains about sexist promotional material in the shop window and is replied to by the Marketing Director of the company, Robert Warden, in a manner which Nancy describes as “patronizing, rude [and] unprofessional”.

Without getting into the debate itself (which, as Nancy says in an update to her post, isn’t what she’s really upset about), or taking sides on who’s right or wrong here I must say I found the exchange quite refreshing.

We’re used to corporations either hiding behind faux-apologetic customer-is-always-right lies or heavy handed legal speak so to have someone high up in the company stand up and say “I have sufficient faith in what my team is doing that I will shout you down” comes as a bit of a shock.

Yes, his manner is obnoxious and no, I wouldn’t advise anyone to address their customers like this but I think we should be celebrating that this discussion is happening in an unmediated, human-voiced way.

National Theatre

The other day some Evening Standard hack quoted Steve Norris saying nasty things about the National Theatre. “I think the National Theatre should have a Compulsory Demolition Order!” he japed. In response to which whoever was controlling their Twitter account posted:

The subsequent panic is nicely documented by Megan Vaughan but in short they deleted the tweet (logical) and claimed they’d been hacked (laughably absurd).

Was the tweet malicious? Was it a private message accidentally broadcast? We’ll never know. But what we do know is that people who work at the National Theatre feel passionately about their building and the work that goes on inside it. Unfortunately the institution cannot publicly defend itself against attacks from those who might control its funding. Slips like this give us a peek behind the curtain.

Conclusion

Every so often I come across the question of how large companies and institutions can use the social internet. The answer usually boils down to the nature of that organisation. How do they communicate internally and with their customers? Is that communication controlled by the PR department or are people free to speak their minds?

Being one of those annoying free spirits who can say what he wants online I tend towards the opinion that companies should let their people speak their minds (within reason, obviously). If you have enough faith in your offer or product and have employed staff who give a damn and are empowered to make adult decisions then what have you got to loose?

But I also accept that this utopian ideal doesn’t play in the world of corporate PR, which is why I don’t tend to work in that area. (If you need advice in that department my better half runs the blogs for Grant Thornton.)

It’s an interesting phenomena though. As people at the higher levels of companies get more comfortable with communicating through social channels we can expect more unmediated utterances, and as bloops on Twitter become mundane and outrage passe we can expect to see the leash loosened on those corporate tweeters and Facebookers. I’m looking forward to it.

Okay, here’s the tweet I was expecting to see.

Not picking on Digital Maverick as I’m sure the sentiment is being echoed all over. Here’s another which echoes the disquiet people in the West Mids have felt having seen it emerge from our patch.

If you’ve somehow missed it, or are reading this in the future when it’s all been forgotten, a lady threw a cat in a bin, was caught on CCTV which was put online and is currently under police protection as the world goes mad. It’s a nice little perfect media storm as on the one hand it’s really quite odd and on the other it’s really not very odd at all. You can be outraged while also understanding how to be outraged.

(BBC News | Boing Boing)

What I don’t want to do is address the rights and wrongs on throwing cats into bins or posting cctv video online or any of that. What I do want to address is the unease people are rightly feeling at the role social networks and online environments have played in the identification and hounding of this woman.

As with all things to do with The Internet it’s more complicated than you’d like to think, although the world is more complicated than most people would like to think which explains the Daily Mail, but I digress. There’s a reason people like me show pictures like this when we’re talking about the social internet.

It’s to drive home the point that when everyone is potentially connected to everyone else things get very complex indeed. So whenever you think of some simple explanation for why something happened because of the Internet picture that image in you head.

The same applies when someone tells you they can guarantee amazing results using “the power of social media” or some rubbish. They can’t. All they can do is amplify what’s already there by applying tools and strategies in intelligent ways. How successful these are depends on the people in the network and people, if you hadn’t figured it out yet, are complicated and weird.

So you’ve got a complex system connecting complex individuals in a complex world. But there’s more.

One thing we know the social Internet does well is help to amplify human activity. If you’re part of a matured network, whatever platforms it exists on (Twitter and Facebook are just dominant aspects of social activity), information will spread across it much faster than it would have 10 years ago. And since the networks are predominantly bonded through conversation a byproduct of this information is action which in turn is accelerated.

For those who’ve been working with this stuff for a year or more this isn’t news. But the way it’s been communicated has been generally positive. Social Media will help bond communities, boost news dissemination and generally make the world a better place. And, despite my tendency towards misanthropic pessimism I would agree that online social tools can make the world better. People tend to do good things. This is how we’ve developed this thing called society.

But, of course, people also do bad things. And, because good and bad are subject to interpretation and such, people who do bad things often think they’re doing good things. And, of course, some people are just dumb. This also explains the Daily Mail and countless other things that big media exploit and serve, but again I digress.

I’m rambling. In case you’ve forgotten what we’re talking about, here’s a picture.

So, my point. Let’s break it down.

People are complex creatures who work together to achieve mutual goals.

The Internet is a complex system which amplifies human communication and activity.

While the medium does affect and inform the content of the message and the manner in which it is processed (cf anonymity on 4chan) the starting point or source is people. The online/offline difference in environment is analogous to the difference between meeting in a lunchtime cafe or a Friday night bar.

In short, then, social media doesn’t hunt down and demonise people but when people hunt down and demonise people using social media it’s a lot quicker and louder.

The good thing is this sort of phenomena doesn’t happen that often, or at least no on this sort of scale. This was a perfect storm that hit all the right buttons. I mean, the message was communicated via the template of a funny cat video and everyone knows what to do with a funny cat video.

But if you’re of the opinion that “social media” is exclusively a tool for positive, constructive action then you’re going to be horribly, brutally disappointed because we’re talking about people.

Consultancy – hire my expertise for a specific purpose.

Surgeries – moving away from the ad-hoc model to a full or half-day package.

Social Media Content Provision – liveblogging, in other words. I wish there were other words though. It’s a bit of a mouthful.

Public Speaking – because you know how much I love waving my arms around on stage.

See the Services page for finer details on these. I’ve also streamlined the rates page

Tomorrow, being Tuesday 3rd, I’ll be in the new Yumm cafe in the Custard Factory from 1pm to 5pm. I have a booking at 3pm but otherwise am free.

(By “free” I mean working on things that I can take time out from before you think I’m just browsing the web and playing games or something. I mean, please. I’m a professional here.)

The next surgery will be on Thursday 5th at the MAC from 1-7pm. No bookings yet as I’ve just decided on it.

Details about my surgeries can be found here and to book simply contact me through the usual channels. Sessions cost £20 for half an hour, though they usually go on a bit longer than that.

He’s talking about University websites but it applies to any communication venue where the sales and PR brain has taken over from the human brain.

There’s nothing wrong with sales or PR in their place. It’s just their place isn’t right at the front.

When I’m working with people I ask what they want to achieve from their online activity. The answer is usually “more sales” or “more visitors” or something like that. The problem is people don’t want to help you fullfil a sales objective. They want to solve whatever problem they have at that moment. Your job is to turn that into a sale.

I have a suspicion that in the pre-Internet era you could get away this with making people dig through the hype to get what they want but that doesn’t work anymore. They’ll just go elsewhere.

Put yourself in their shoes. If you wanted the thing you’re offering how would you like to be treated? Would you want a flashy website that shouts about how wonderful the provider of the thing is? Or would you just like to know about the thing?

Give people what they want in a manner that doesn’t annoy them. Simple, no?

So when Jan Bowman told me she’d had actual material benefits following on from our surgery last week I figured I’d better post about it.

Jan draws pictures like this:

She’s also got a fab book called This Is Birmingham out which did really well in the CiB Shop.

One of the many things I talked to Jan about was maintaining a relationship with her customers. We looked at various tools and methodologies to do this but the key thing was to think of them as more than just people who paid her for a drawing once.

Jan’s started playing with these ideas and has made two new commissions in the last week which she directly attributes to our session.

Which is nice.

If you’ve got a specific success story following on from a surgery you had with me do let me know and I’ll mention it on the blog.

Curiously it was a throwaway comment by Christian Payne reported by Rob Lindsay from BRB that caught my attention and got me on my high horse. [Update: In a typical Twitter-storm way I'm misatributed - Rob's asked me to clarify that it was his glib comment made during Christian's talk and wants to make that clear. Sorry Christian.]

I responded that this “reeks of early adopter self-importance” but that’s unfair as I’m sure it wasn’t the thrust of Christian’s presentation [Update: it wasn't!] and I’m certain I’ve used the line a few times. What worried me was that this kind of approach to Twitter and the like might be seen as a sensible and comprehensive strategy by someone new to the concept of marketing over social networks.

Part of my worry is that marketing in a conversation space is hard and no-one to my knowledge has really figured out how best to do it, so an idea that connects easily with traditional marketing techniques is going to resonate quite strongly. And yes, getting well connected people involved in your project so they amplify your message is a good thing to do. You should be doing this anyway be they Twitterers, bloggers, radio DJs, members of the parish council or politicians in high office. Even a monkey like me that shies away from anything with PR attached to it knows this is PR 101.

The problem I see is that influence online is quite different to influence offline. How it’s different is, of course, complicated but I’ve had a stab at it before – see last year’s Influence is weird and Towards a Theory of Yurtification.

So here’s the thing. I think you shouldn’t rely on the influential Twitter users in your sphere too much because the nature of Twitter means they’re influence isn’t that great really.

• Twitter makes it easy to connect with people. This is great but the importance of those connections is lessened. This is not an indictment on Twitter (I have good friends I only communicate with through Twitter and my connection with them is strong) but merely an observation that when something is easy that doesn’t automatically make it worth anything.
• It’s a two way street. I can ignore you as easily as I can listen to you, and when I listen to you my attention is variable on my terms. In other words the listener controls the influence. This is radically different to, say, the newspaper journalist who could dictate the reception of a message by putting it on the front page, or an advertising agency by buying all the billboards. (cf Tom Ewing’s What Happens When A Celebrity Links You On Twitter?)
• The number of followers someone has on Twitter has very little bearing on how they are perceived in someone’s stream. Their tweets are not bigger or flashier – they look just the same as your friend’s tweets. The difference is in the content and how it resonates with the reader.
• This brings in a law of diminishing returns. The more people you’re addressing the less personal you can be. My favourite illustration of this is the threat videos of gurgling babies with 10 views on YouTube pose to broadcast television networks. Given the choice between a glossy TV show with a famous cast and a badly shot 5 minute video of my newborn nephew I know which I’ll choose to watch over and over.

It’s not that you shouldn’t involve the well-networked seasoned communicators. Having someone like that on your team can help inspire others to get the message out and help you avoid some easy mistakes. Better to think of them as guides who can help you navigate the terrain than couriers who can deliver your message for you.

How you craft that message and how it travels through the network is another thing altogether.

Full details are on the Surgeries page but in essence, for £20 per half hour I will help you figure out what you’re doing on the Internet with an emphasis on social media and low-cost solutions.

These surgeries are ideal for sole traders and artists who need a functioning online presence but don’t know where to start. Rest assured I won’t pile you up with confusing options – I’ll help you sift through and find the right one for your situation whether it’s a blog, a Facebook page or a mailing list. And if you’ve already got a good presence I’ll give you tips and ideas to make it better.

To book a slot phone or email me.

This week I’m going to try something different. Rather than dictate where I’ll be on a particular day I’ll let you decide.

There are four options of places to hold the surgeries:

MAC Cafe (my personal preference)
Substrakt‘s office in Fazeley Studios (my second preference)
Urban Coffee Co (third place, just because it’s slightly out of my way)
Coffee Lounge (because it’s central)

All have free wifi and supplies of tea. If you’d prefer meeting somewhere else in town that has free wifi and tea I’ll seriously consider it.

I’m currently available every day except Tuesday afternoon. And I’d rather not meet before 11am (you want me awake, right?)

I’m also happy to meet in the early evening if I’m not already busy (and the venue is open). Currently all my evenings are free next week.

I know. It’s mildly tragic.

In summary then

• £20 per half hour (though it tends to be nearer 45 mins)
• Any time from 11am to 8pm (if I’m free)
• First person to book a slot determines the venue for that day.

Phone or email me to book a slot.

Update: Wednesday afternoon I’m in Fazeley Studios, Digbeth. 1pm slot has gone.

“I go to a lot of conferences on the subject of audience engagement in the digital age and how to address it, and I still hear people saying, ‘When it all settles down and we can see what has happened to the relationship between people, technology and culture, we’ll take sustained action.’ But it’s not going to settle down, at least not in our lifetimes. We are living through perpetual technological and cultural change: seismic shifts that challenge the way we make and distribute the performing arts.”

They’ll take place over three days in three different locations in Birmingham and cost £20 for half an hour. I’ve explained how these surgeries will work on the Surgeries page.

Where they’ll happen

Tuesday 13th sees me in the MAC cafe in Cannon Hill Park near Edgbaston Cricket Ground. Free wifi, plenty of parking and a nice creative atmosphere.

Wednesday 14th I’ll be in Digbeth at Fazeley Studios where I’m subletting a desk in Substrakt‘s lovely offices. A more professional atmosphere with other digital professionals around.

Thursday 15th has me in Urban Coffee Co on the edge of the Jewellery Quarter which is turning into the city centre’s de-facto co-working space. Free wifi, good quality beverages, comfy chairs.

How to book

Here’s a spreadsheet with the available slots.

If you’d like to book a slot contact me by email, phone or Twitter. I’ll then reserve you that slot.

Each slot is for 30 minutes of my time. You’re welcome to buy more time at £20 per half hour.

Pay by cash or cheque on the day, or bank transfer beforehand.

If you’d like a time before 1pm or after 6pm this might be possible.

Any questions?

Check the Surgeries page or get in touch.

I’ve finally put the audio online.

Download the mp3 (21 MB)
Download audio file (socmedglob_mac_peteashton.mp3)

Here are my notes if you want to sing along.

Please bear in mind I was utterly exhausted from running the Created in Birmingham shop so while I did manage to remain coherent and make my points I’m not at my most sparky!

LEGO’s Social Media Strategy – the way LEGO has used the Internet to engage with their customers in ways that were impossible before is a case study anyone who wants to learn how online social stuff is a game-changer. There’s more to it than this but this looks like a nice introductory video.

Cultivated Play: Farmville. Farmville is an interesting phenomena in that none of the big internet guru types seem to have anything to say about it other than bemusement yet it’s one of the biggest online games going. This article is fascinating, explaining that Farmville is not a fun game and the motivation for playing comes down to social pressure. “People are playing Farmville because people are playing Farmville.” You want dark side of social media? Here it is.

Two from my learned friend Mr Jon Bounds: Skip-Tech looks at QR codes and compares them to DVD recorders and other technology that the majority will skip over. Jon Bounds is not impressed by Nick Clegg’s Your Freedom is just that – his 2p on the Your Freedom site. “Crowdsourcing, like any form of community, isn’t just about setting up the space — it’s about thinking about how people interact, making sure that constructive behaviour prospers.”

Time Magazine’s Best Blogs of 2010 looks like an thoughtful snapshot that covers more bases than usual journalism-centric attempts.

Art and Digital Space: Fab Labs and Media Cities. No idea what this is about, where it came from or why I should read it but I’m reluctant to close it. Looks like it could be interesting.

Clay Shirky has a new book out. Mine’s on the Two Read pile but you can probably get most of what he’s talking about from the promotional talks he’s giving. This one is from the Watershed in Bristol. Of course people with vested interests are confused but that’s par for the course. He’s not saying TV=bad. He’s saying shifting from consumption as the dominant creative activity is having interesting results.

Everything you ever wanted to know about mobile, but were afraid to ask. This is very long. I’m not sure what I’m afraid to ask about mobile but I’m sure it’ll be worth a skim.

A history of media technology scares, from the printing press to Facebook. This is great stuff. “Socrates famously warned against writing because it would “create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories.” He also advised that children can’t distinguish fantasy from reality, so parents should only allow them to hear wholesome allegories and not “improper” tales, lest their development go astray. The Socratic warning has been repeated many times since: The older generation warns against a new technology and bemoans that society is abandoning the “wholesome” media it grew up with, seemingly unaware that this same technology was considered to be harmful when first introduced.”

Social Media Reversals in which Dubber tells people who want to use The Internet for selling their stuff to listen as much as talk. Which seems pretty obvious dull advice but occasionally it needs repeating.

Here’s Nick introducing the site and you can feel his pride and enthusiasm bursting from the screen and justifiably so.

Of course nothing comes from a bubble and, while I’ve only been on the periphery of the development of the surgery model, I planted one of the seeds when I sat in a cafe once a week giving free online help in 2008 and called it a “social media surgery”. Nick along with many others has taken it to new levels but I hope you’ll forgive me a soupçon of pride at seeing one of my silly ideas graduate like this.

I’ve been thinking of bringing back the original Pete Ashton Surgery model as a way of generating some income and it does seem to be the best way for me to work with people. More on that if and when it develops but if you’ve like half an hour of my time for a reasonable fee do get in touch.

Much buzz today about the government’s Your Freedom website which has been taken offline due to high demand. On the one hand it’s nice to see some web-based consultation happening. On the other hand how they’re doing it is a debacle of facepalm proportions, at least to those who’ve been thinking about this stuff for more than a few months.

Chris Applegate has a good teardown of why this is such a bad thing, drawing parallels with the BBC’s notorious Speak You’re Branes idiot magnet and making suggestions on how it could have been done intelligently. Which is the real tragedy of this site – it betrays a total ignorance of lessons that have already been learned over the last decade in online community management. Hell, we saw this when Obama’s change.gov site was hijacked by cannabis campaigners and that was frequently mentioned by Clay Shirky last year. It strongly implies the coalition is undoing all the tentative steps the last government made towards understanding how the Internet works as a social space.

Chris’ final paragraph says it the best.

As it stands, the site will end up as a total mess – in fact it’s well on the way there already. When it comes to closing the site down, I bet the politicians will take one look at all the “ban human rights act it give free school meals for wearing a burka” posts, shrug their shoulders and say that “the citizens have spoken, but it’s utter rubbish – they had their chance and they blew it”. No, the government who have blown it – they had their chance to make a valuable public resource, but we’ve instead got another poorly-designed, poorly-maintained failure.

Sigh.

So how could they have done it better? Well, I know we’re in an age of austerity and all but howabout hiring someone who knows what they’re doing? Unless of course this is just a harmless side project to keen Nick Clegg busy.

DiG came from a vague idea I had for a culture-biased blog about the area which I gave to Nicky Getgood who made it a thousand times less vague and drove it to national acclaim, not to mention a drastic career shift with Talk About Local.

More Canals I had nothing to do with directly but it’s blatantly inspired by Created in Birmingham, which was the whole point of CiB back in the day – to say to the arty types “stop relying on expensive centralised websites, go use free tools to do your own.” So to see Annabel successfully use the CiB model to carve out her own niche without futilely trying to cover everything is most gratifying.

I has a proud.