RESPECT OUR READERS 

By which he means that there are some absolute no-no’s Buzzfeed will not engage in:

We don’t publish slideshows. Instead we publish scrollable lists so readers don’t have to click a million times and can easily scroll through a post. The primary reason to publish slideshows, as far as I can tell, is to juice page views and banner ad impressions.  Slideshows are super annoying and lists are awesome so we do lists!

We don’t show crappy display ads; we make all our revenue from social advertising that users love and share.

We never launched one of those “frictionless sharing” apps on Facebook that automatically shares the stories you click because those apps are super annoying.

We don’t post deceptive, manipulative headlines that trick people into reading a story.

We don’t focus on SEO or gaming search engines or filling our pages with millions of keywords and tags that only a robot will read.

We avoid anything that is bad for our readers and can only be justified by short term business interests.

And the one thing you strive always to do:

We focus on publishing content our readers love so much they think it is worth sharing. It sounds simple but it’s hard to do and it is the metric that aligns our company with our readers. In the long term is good for readers and good for business.

Amen.

WINNERS TAKE ALL

The superrich have grabbed the bulk of the past three decades’ gains.

OUT OF BALANCE

A Harvard business prof and a behavioral economist recently asked more than 5,000 Americans how they thought wealth is distributed in the United States. Most thought that it’s more balanced than it actually is. Asked to choose their ideal distribution of wealth, 92% picked one that was even more equitable.

I like them because they lay out the whole story in a way that suits the attention spans of our age — they make the overall shape of a complicated story apprehendable in seconds, with much greater economy than words can usually manage. (One notable exception: title of Joe Stiglitz’s recent Vanity Fair piece, Of the 1%, by the 1%, for the 1%. Ain’t that a great turn of phrase?)

Point is, if you want your message amplified by crowds of people, if you want your content to go viral, you have to accept the following: You have less than 5 seconds to induce your users to stay and really read/watch what you have to say. Fail to make a strong enough impression, and they’re on to the next click.

Which is why, as advocacy groups close out the fiscal year and hash out next year’s budgets, any decisionmaker charged with persuading web audiences to get things done on the organization’s behalf ought to consider this proposition: If you don’t already have them, your next two critical hires should be Data Scientist and Data Visualization / Digital Illustration Ninja. Sometimes these skillsets can be found in a single person, but in my opinion this function is so critical to effective online storytelling for general audiences that I’d start with the assumption that you’ll be building a team, not just integrating one individual into your existing org chart.

Whether you’re, say, an advocacy organization or think tank or candidate for elective office, you’ve got to explain policy — a tall order, given the itchy trigger fingers of web users. You may already be generating reams of content explaining your programmatic work and policy recommendations. But if nobody’s reading it….

Imagine, now, what you could do communications-wise with a great data analyst/statistician/hacker and a storyteller of the Jonathan Harris or Chris Jordan variety. Whole different ballgame.

Update: One more example of visual presentation of meaningful number-crunching, from MoveOn (using data from ThinkProgress):

Malik is just back from Ecuador, where he spent four days in the company of the Achuar people, whose village life deep in the Amazon is much as it was “before contact.” He describes a sort of communal early morning ritual the Achuar practice every day:

We got up at 4 a.m. and slowly assembled in the communal longhouse. It was pitch black, with only the perpetual fire smouldering in the middle of the floor offering some light.  Sitting silently in a circle alongside the Achuar, we were soon offered bowls of wayusatea.  Drinking gradually, we individually trickled beyond the edge of the compound to make ourselves vomit.  Once reassembled, the most important part of the day could begin.

Ingesting the wayusa tea (made of a regular herbal extract) and the subsequent purging makes one enter a lucid, highly alert state of mind.  And as dawn starts to turn the sky to the east slightly gray, the Achuar relay their dreams from the previous night to each other.  On the basis of the interpretation of these dreams, they decide to go hunting or fishing that day, they glean what the weather has in store and receive all information necessary to give the day direction and content.  Dreams and their interpretations are an invaluable daily compass for the Achuar.

In fact, the whole early morning period is.  They use the clarity and calmness of the mind for the discussion of any contentious issue, and resolve  it by compromise.  In addition, any proposal to marry must be made during this period.  By the time it is light—around 6 a.m. —the day has content and no issue of importance has been left unresolved.

Strange?  Yes and no.  The highest entity in the Achuar world is Pachamama.  It represents all the beings and objects in the world and extends to all of the universe and all of time, past, present and future.  As such, it is the ultimate One.  Everyone and everything in Pachamama is interconnected.  And all actions, large and small, affect all of Pachamama.  Of course the complexity of such a web of relationships is literally infinite.  That’s why the Achuar believe in the role of the mysterious and resort to their dreams in order to determine the direction of their actions.  It is a humble and wise posture, one that considers people deeply integrated into the surrounding world and doesn’t put them above anyone or anything else.  It is the ultimate holistic view.

Wow. I was moved to leave the following comment:

What a treat to read this story.

In the western world, we typically give no time and energy at all to starting the day with a centering practice like you describe — the alarm rings, and we go from dreams to a full-tilt sprint of doing, doing, doing. Who has time to reflect, to reconnect with a sense of the whole of things, how we fit into it as individuals, the very real way in which we are interdependent with all else?

The problem with this way of living, in my experience, is that it makes each new day nothing more than a continuation of the past’s momentum. It forestalls the possibility of intentional change, which requires a surrender to … well, stopping, and listening, and looking deeply. And in the end, the daunting global problems we face today will overwhelm humanity if it is not up to the challenge of making intentional, rather than adaptive, change.

I have been so angry and frustrated of late with the American political landscape. But I wonder what would happen if I (and everyone concerned about climate change) were to live as the Achuar do and begin the day with contemplation. I’ve tried this but it hasn’t become true habit. I bet I’d do a better job living well and in a less resource-intense way. And maybe I (we) wouldn’t see those on the other side of the divide as the “other”; maybe, in affirming each day that we are all one, new possibilities might open for engaging those folks.

When people consider how humans might evolve from here, it’s usually increased intelligence we think of. But I suspect that if humans avoid going the way of the dinosaurs, it will be because of increased spiritual capacity more than brain power.

I’ve actually been thinking about how spiritual practice might affect my work for years. I decided long ago that I really needed some sort of centering practice, for many reasons. But I’ve always struggled to make it stick, to establish it as daily practice. One reason is the the voice in my head that tells me things like, You can’t go to sleep … you need to finish that task! and You can’t get up at 6 for morning meditation — you’d be on 3 hours of sleep and useless at work! and even If you really gave yourself to this Buddhism business, you’d lose your edge — your competitiveness, fighting spirit, ability to work from urgency and anger and passionate resolve.

But then I look around, and the evidence suggests that maybe I’m somehow wrong about the value of that “edge,” at least as I’ve relied on it to this point. Maybe what’s more important is living from principles. If I put a spiritual practice centered on principles first and foremost, would I be a better communications pro? I think that kind of questions is worth consideration — for all of us.

Thursday, in an email back-and-forth with a friend, I wrote:

The density and specificity of the data trail we all produce in an increasingly wired, ubicomp world is a nearly constant back-burner preoccupation for me — I’m both massively creeped out by what capital and power most certainly wants to do with it and intensely interested in what us peasants might do with it if we learn to claim for ourselves and leverage the data we produce. 

Activists have encouraged people to “vote with their wallets” for years; why couldn’t this be extended to include who knows how many varieties of the data we are now producing? Google, Facebook et al are raking in billions on top of our clicks, our “time on page,” the precise circumstances of our decision to “bounce” from a website we’ve lost interest in. That of course is just a tiny piece of what can be tracked/measured in exact detail — they’ve got our “social graph,” our locations, what/when/where/how often we buy things, blah blah. The upside — the potential for growth — in all sorts of business models lies in collecting the data we produce and locating opportunities within it. 

Well, that’s my fucking data. My online identity, growing ever richer and more nuanced and three-dimensional. I’m not getting rich off it. Which is fine with me, as long as it’s clear that I own it and am free to choose who gets to use it, to what end, and for how long. I’ll trade the dollar value of that data for other kinds of value — environmental concessions, social justice, quality of life, etc.; I’ll trade for a degree of control (asserted through collective action) over the world I live in. But I’m not inclined to give it away for baubles or whiskey or smallpox-infested blankets. 

I don’t know if human beings really have the capacity to demand control over their data streams and manage them in a way that reflects their values and priorities. But it’s one of those possibilities that I hang on to, out of need of hope that we’re not, as a species, just accelerating toward the buffalo jump.

And then the very next evening I find — via none other than Tim O’Reilly — a blog post by a writer / web thinker named Venessa Miemis, who’s clearly shared some of my preoccupations: Why the Online Identity and Data Ownership Debate Matters. Excerpt: 

We have multiple accounts and multiple levels of relationships within and across those social networks. When we click around on sites we are leaving a trail of ‘digital exhaust’, defining our habits, preferences, curiosities, and explorations. We don’t have control/access/ownership of this data, but 3rd parties do. Each of these pieces, and all the contextual information around it, is INCREDIBLY VALUABLE, but currently fragmented, fractured, and scattered. Shouldn’t we have access to it ALL, so we can connect the dots and make effecitve and meaningful choices?

Why can’t I just export my data, activity, and relationships from each service, and be in control of who gets to see it, which parts they get to access, and how they use it once I give them permission?

Why isn’t there an easy way for me to have an overview of everything about me, and be able to selectively share information about myself, my interests, my capacities, my needs, or my resources?

Go read it — great links, great discussion in comments, even a perfectly on-point video embed from The Onion. 

Its moments such as this that keep feeding my hope that the Internet can and will eventually make the world a better place. Only connect!

The whole “social media” or web2.0 scene is blood-boiling to me because instead of creating open spaces (or a web), we’re locking ourselves and our data down into proprietary walled gardens that are much more interested in making money by observing our behaviors to maximize “relevant” advertising than creating sustainable platforms for human development. So, I killed my Facebook, Google and Twitter accounts last night. Don’t get me wrong… I don’t blame them. Twitter, Facebook, Google, Apple etc are corporations. Corporations are inherently out for themselves and their stock holders. I blame myself for falling into the trap of shiny and nifty free/freemium services in exchange for my data and my online identity. I want my children and students to grow up in an era that includes an open web that isn’t based on advertising or 3rd party cookie data mining. [emphasis mine] I’m doing what I can to make that happen.

Hits home, hard. Five years ago I was burning with excitement over the the social web’s immense promise for humanity, but pretty much from the get-go I saw a potential deal-killer inherent in the privatized environment in which it was being built: there would be a quid pro quo, and it wasn’t clear yet whether we end users were going to get a fair deal. Yes, the new web2.0 services were giving us incredibly powerful tools to extend our identities, connect with others, and get things done together. And on the cheap — often free. But what would these services take in return?

For Google, Facebook, Twitter, the answer has always been this: a slice of the value of our self-expression, online. There is immense and variegated value in our data. Wired, our every gesture can be is recorded — what we like and don’t like; how we make decisions about what to purchase or give attention to; who our friends are; our physical location; every last detail of what we actually do when using a connected device — and there’s huge value in that. And of course there’s value in any content we produce within these services as well.

I’ve always said it’s fine with me if others get rich from my online self-expression — as long as they recognize that they are using my data, and maintain an open, respectful, upfront, and fair dialog with me about how they plan to use my data. I hoped that the conventions of how institutions — corporations, governments, nonprofit organizations, etc. — related to their customers and constituents would move toward something like Doc Searls’ VRM model:

VRM stands for Vendor Relationship Management. VRM tools provide customers with both independence from vendors and better ways of engaging with vendors. The same tools can also support individuals’ relations with schools, churches, government entities and other kinds of organizations.

In a narrow sense, VRM is the reciprocal — the customer side — of CRM (or Customer Relationship Management). VRM tools provide customers with the means to bear their side of the relationship burden. They relieve CRM of the perceived need to “capture,” “acquire,” “lock in,” “manage,” and otherwise employ the language and thinking of slave-owners when dealing with customers. With VRM operating on the customer’s side, CRM systems will no longer be alone in trying to improve the ways companies relate to customers. Customers will be also be involved, as fully empowered participants, rather than as captive followers.

These days I’m not feeling like we’re moving in the right direction. Facebook constantly pushes the envelope of what, by fiat, it is doing with our data. Today, a couple of tinkerers discovered that Apple never bothered to let customers know that iPhones are collecting time-stamped location data.

I’m not quite ready to throw in the towel on participating in the current social-web landscape, but I think I understand why Sam bailed and I’m certainly feeling less blazingly sunny about the web proving to be a positive, democratizing force for humanity, at least in the short term. Clouds on the horizon. Sam says he’s still working for an open web — me too, and I’ll try to follow on this post with some looks at what’s happening out there to see that an open web is built and protected as a public commons.

My father, in forwarding me an article about how we expect too much from technology, had this to say: “Technology which is not fundamentally created and implemented to advance individual and collective well-being will be destructive of life generally. Technology created within the present world system will be on balance a negative force for life on earth.” I don’t necessarily want to believe that — changing the “present world system” is rather a tall order. But I worry that he may be right.

p.s. — the Wendell Berry poem Sam quotes in his post about nuking his Goog/FB/twitter accounts is a miracle, says more than I could ever manage about where all this touches the core. Read it.

Not real attractive or compelling, and — especially with regards to links shared to your site — you want your stuff to look good as it streams down the newsfeed. What to do?

Well, an NRDC blogger ran into this problem this morning, NRDC Internet Director Will Tam solved it lickety-split, and I feel compelled to share his very useful tip:

There is a tool that clears out these bad preview info. The trouble is that Facebook heavily caches things. If you try to share a post and the post isn’t published yet, or if the server is being slow to respond, or Facebook is having their own issues, you’ll run into this.

Here’s how you fix it when you do run into it — BOOKMARK THIS LINK:

http://developers.facebook.com/tools/lint/

You visit that link, paste in the URL of the post you want to share, and hit submit. It will/should return the info you want, and clear out Facebook’s cache. Then, when you go back to ‘share’ the page via Facebook, it should be all better.

Danke schoen, Will.

(update: Did you know Facebook Share’s link-description field is editable? On mouseover of the description, click and you get a nice AJAX editable text field. Not sure how long this has been implemented but I noticed in the last month or two and have been finding it useful — text the Share tool pulls in automagically can be too long, or the lede may be buried, etc. It’s nice to be able to manually pull in a key quote.)

I take John Lennon for granted; always have. The Beatles songs and his solo records have always just sort of been there, omnipresent. More often than not, my back-to-the-land era parents had Apple Records–labeled vinyl spinning on the record changer in my childhood home. The White Album and Sgt Pepper and Revolver, Let It Be and Abbey Road and Imagine — they were the ambient soundtrack. And even at 10, 11 years old I was riveted by many Lennon songs; loved McCartney’s “Blackbird,” Harrison’s “Taxman,” and many others where Lennon wasn’t the dominant presence (either in the writing or the performing), but I’d get this instant live-wire connection to John’s songs. Couldn’t have explained it to anyone; didn’t have the vocabulary and concepts at that age, hadn’t yet an inkling of how as I got older I’d build identity out of musical affinities, Nick Hornby/High Fidelity–style, how — in the way guys do — I’d more or less navigate my own interiority by laying hands on cultural artifacts (songs, books, movies, TV shows, etc) and size others up by the way they did the same. (Okay, yes, there are major drawbacks to relying on this sort of thing for bearings and connection, as opposed to learning to directly experience what’s going on within and without. But that’s another story.)

Now, at 44, I can look back and recognize that live-wire thing as spiritual energy. As I write this I can see, grounded in specific memories, how certain Lennon songs reached territories within that I’d had no idea were there. I remember, yes I do:

I was a little boy in a flimsy lifeboat, afloat in a great ocean of unknowably large rages and fears, lonelinesses and yearnings for connection … and then I’d hear “Revolution 1″ and know (not with words, not fully consciously, usually not in any way that could be captured and made use of) that I’d always been angry, no, spittle-spraying fucking enraged — there was so much change-the-world bullshit around me that I had no say-so over and the perpetrators of this bullshit were deaf/blind to the consequences of said bullshit.

I’d hear “Dear Prudence” and know my own despair, or at least fleetingly experience it, heartsickness would ripple through, an ephemeral wave — no one was going to sing me out of the place I was in….

I’d hear “Imagine” and perceive, somehow, that there was love and connection big enough to transcend the twisted brambles of the life I knew, it was nearer to hand than I ever imagined and I had within me a great welling hunger for it.

These songs and others took me to these places within, made it a little bit okay that they were in there. My soul wasn’t some Area 51. I wasn’t, after all, the only one burdened with facets of interiority that felt just unspeakable; this Lennon guy knew about this stuff — he’d been there himself.

Rolling these memories around in a way I don’t think I’ve ever done, I feel certain these preteen trips I took with Lennon weren’t just to “emotions” I otherwise wouldn’t have accessed; they were to awarenesses, truths — intellect and powers of observation were sharply engaged, even if I didn’t have words. Seeing that, I feel like I’m reclaiming something of my pre-teen self I hadn’t expected to find. Like I knew the score, in a way, when I was that young — didn’t have the tools to own that awareness or put it to any practical use, but I knew when the world I’d come into wasn’t adding up. I feel proud of that kid; he was nobody’s fool.

I was 14 years old when Lennon was killed. I think I spent at least a couple of days more or less barricaded my room, glued to the little table radio I’d take under the covers with me for Sox games and music. I remember bawling — which by that age never happened, as I was well into a glaciated emotional state I’d remain in for a couple decades. (Always had plenty of grief, anger, sadness etc refracting around inside, but any direct contact with difficult feelings would simply trigger automatic shutdown.) I remember being really disturbed, freaked out. Bewildered as to why anyone would shoot you. Imagined myself going to New York to find this Chapman asshole and beat the living shit out of him. Afflicted with a sense of loss and grief that seemed scary-big and out of proportion, even to my teenaged self. Now I look back and see myself — this unhappy, lost kid who trusted almost no one and constantly felt overmatched, without adequate maps and tools — suddenly bereft of a source of precious gravity. Yeah. No wonder that I was upset.

Anyway, thank you, John Lennon. Through some alchemy of temperament (courage, desperate need for connection, generosity of spirit) and talent in your medium, you were able to broadcast the unsayable that’s inside. Turbulence, mess, ferocity, piercing insight, stubborn hope, bitterness, joy, fearlessness (and fearfulness), all this and much more sprawls across your music. And so you helped me along the long road I’ve walked toward accepting and embracing that I’m not alone in the howling void.

Cobbled together a YouTube playlist — 20 of my favorite John Lennon songs. (The video player here in this post won’t play ‘em all — it skips over several — but you’ll be able to see them all if you go to YouTube proper.)

Dan elaborates, in a way I like and that serves as jumping-off point:

“Ultimately, my job is to design structures. These are structures that establish navigation pathways, search frameworks, and business rules for governing how to display information. In order to design those things, I need insight into what you want the content to be, how you want it to behave, and what structures will let the content thrive.”

Yes, exactly — but I would restate like so:

“… In order to design those things, I need insight into the people you expect will be drawn to you — why you? How are you the Answer to their Question, the Solution to their Problem? how, step-by-step, do you figure the value transaction with this person/these people will actually unfold?

Every web publisher — from blogger/microblogger to small business looking for new leads to giant media company — has various motivations for putting information out there. But these motivations matter only insofar as it’s possible to credibly describe why and under what circumstances someone would want that information. If you can’t describe a credible transaction wherein what you, the publisher, have is the solution to what a realistic user persona needs, putting what you have on the web should be a non-starter.

This is only a basic top-level observation; mr. Brown’s excellent post has a lot more on the nuts and bolts of doing content strategy and is well worth a read.

Any problems I’ve had in teleworking — as both manager and manage-ee — have boiled down to process/systems failure, in establishing expectations, measuring performance, and inadequate communication. (Gee, that sounds pretty much like a list of what can go wrong in an onsite team….) Kyra puts great emphasis on how important it is to be deliberate about establishing clear protocol in all these areas:

• create a team operating agreement (I like the idea of borrowing some tricks from scrum and scrum-ban project-management frameworks, from the agile development world. scrum guidelines) and review/revise regularly;
• commit to setting goals and tracking performance (daily progress check-ins are, in my experience, often really helpful);
• adopt communications routines that establish a new sense of place — a “team culture,” shared online, so that all team members, whether on-site or off-, feel truly connected. Also, routines that will uncover and address frustrations — she includes a quote I love, “Don’t spend more than 30 seconds being angry without telling someone.”
• pick a handful of web-based tools — project management, bugtracker, conferencing, whiteboard, “watercooler” (she mentions CampFire; I like Yammer a lot); wiki (for KM/documentation of process), etc. — and get the entirety of the team’s workflow onto these systems, without fail.

Lots more good stuff in her presentation. And what comes across is something I can only underscore (in heavy Sharpie, about three times): the only real difference between a smooth-running, kick-ass virtual team and a smooth-running, kick-ass on-site team is that, with the former, setting up and adhering to such principles and protocols has extra urgency. Whatever energy it takes to get the team off to a good start, get buy-in from every team member, and arrive at a point where you’ve got a close-knit group of people that trust one another and bear each other up, it’s worth it — because without that bond among the team, things can go south really fast and can be harder to fix than when team members are literally face-to-face with each other every day.

At the peak of his basketball stardom at Princeton, Bill Bradley was asked how he did the things he did — the eyes-in-the-back-of-his-head passes to teammates, the miracle shots — and he answered “You develop a sense of where you are.” You want each member of a virtual team to feel this way, too — set the bar there and do what you can to get there fast if you want a happy, engaged, productive virtual team.

Their algorithm turns out to be far better at predicting how far a link will travel than counting followers, and is even better than the PageRank algorithm that powers the search results delivered by Google.

It’s called IP-Influence, and its predictive power reveals two facts important to anyone who wants to spread their message on Twitter:

1. The overwhelming majority of people on Twitter are passive – that is, they rarely if ever retweet anything.

2. The best predictor of how far a tweet or link will travel on Twitter is how much power its originator has to motivate the most passive of his or her followers to retweet it.

Confirms what’s always seemed like common sense to me, re social web ties. And very important for your networked nonprofit: this is why cultivating social media adoption and use by as large a percentage of staff as possible is critical not only to building influence — e.g. earning the actual *attention* of followers — but also to building a *sustainable* organizational presence on the social web, regardless of how the tech winds blow, which platforms rise and fall, etc. A small comm/marketing team doing all the work can’t possibly build and maintain quality relationships as followers scale, and won’t create ties to people that are strong enough to migrate to offline activity or to whatever the next dominant platform turns out to be.

[Side note: being extremely good at building online ties with others can certainly results in gobs of followers — 351K twitter pals now, Beth? Holy smokes! :)]