on crowdsourcing.

I've been hearing lately that crowdsourcing is a bad word.

I think the core issue is simpler. If you are asking others to do your work for you, and considering that the magic of collaboration, you are missing the point. A contest that asks the public to create your ads isn't inherently about the audience. It's gluing a high-school essay contest to the emergence of democratized production. This isn't inherently impressive. It's a contest, and this is an old idea.

Gluing it to a multi-million dollar SuperBowl media buy only makes it a worse idea.

If you ask people to work together to create something of value to not only themselves, but to a wider community, the crowd is creating real value. If you want to attach your brand to this, without corrupting it, expect a positive reaction.

Crowdsourcing based entirely on creating value for yourself, your brand, or your client, isn't crowdsourcing. It will either die due to lack of interest, or run entirely on incentive via cash. Paying directly for attention and interaction can be done better and smarter than this.

If you want to get a crowd of people working together on something, it needs to be about that crowd of people. Frankly, everything you do should be about that crowd of people - they decide what your brand means, and exactly how much it's worth.

the age of accountability.

Many moons ago, I wrote a post about something I called the Paparazzi Panopticon. I'm fairly sure I forgot to attribute the original idea to Bentham, focusing entirely on Foucault, but the core idea, a democratized version of the all-seeing eye, has never stopped being interesting to me.

I've been having several conversations in this vein lately, focused on accountability. People are accountable for each word of every email they send, anything they post online, comments and images published through social media sites, anything that happens on video, audio, or print. And nothing ever goes away, because we aren't dealing with one outlet that can be 'reasoned with' or 'bullied', we're dealing with reality.

The reality is, the internet has made us all accountable for anything we do, either as a means of recording our actions, or as a means of publishing them.

And this is a Very. Good. Thing.

If the method of surveillance is in the hands of the government, I'd be terrified, and suggest that you adopt a similar course of action. This is because I rarely feel as though the government has similar values to mine. And improper action only gains awareness online when it becomes a cause pushed by a passionate community. Short version: in our democratized panopticon, cops shooting a restrained youth will be made public. My use of orphan works to illuminate a point in a presentation? If no one is impacted negatively, there isn't an uprising.

Accountability isn't a bad thing. Ideally, it just means that we all do as few things we aren't proud of as possible. The counter argument is that people will be punished for anything they do that doesn't toe a company or government line.

My counter argument for that? It won't be too long before companies and governments demanding total control and limitation of employee's private expression becomes the latest infraction to spark a collaborative response. The internet made Tropicana change its logo in a few weeks. I think we can get people to care about corporate attacks of the freedom of expression that private citizens have.

Will people get fired for telling off clients, even indirectly, over social media? Yes. And they should. Because the most important lesson yet to be learned by most of us is that THIS IS REAL LIFE TOO. It's not a hiding place where you can act in ways that would shame you in real life. It's not a playground anymore, not entirely. It's another facet of real life. The separation many of us hide behind is flimsy at best.

This is real life. Real life means accountability, which means better actions, and better people. We just can't let ourselves get caught in the trap of spending out time policing the minor issues, rather than uniting to deal with the major ones.

pr as arg.

To me, the future of PR is in the mass narrative.  Not the official company line, or in the image generated by a specific piece of coverage, but in the collage created by every mention a company gets, whether from the New York Times or a rarely read WordPress blog. 

To work with this future, a company needs to do whatever it can to use it’s stance as a source of information and the authority on itself, to influence the attitudes and associations that the community attaches to the brand itself.

I’ve asserted before that I don’t consider myself someone who works in a media role, I consider myself someone who works with narratives.  This isn’t to say I craft narratives like an author, my function is more of a curator – I take facts, elements of a story, and make them available, either publicly or to specific interested parties in the media.  Through this, I exercise a small amount of influence (but not control) over the public perception of a brand.

I don’t write words on a page.  I encourage the development narratives across society, traditionally through media outlets.  (Or at least, I do when things work well.)

My vision for the future of PR is communication strategy modeled after an Alternate Reality Game.

I’ve spoken about ARG’s before, as a method of advertising and building engagement with a brand or product.  However, I think the same concepts can be shifted slightly, and put to use to engage the public, and share information with them, in a way that is mutually beneficial to community and brand.

I’ll add to this in the future, but here are some starting concepts:

Information Seeding:  Giving information to engaged parties instead of just widely read media outlets.  I wouldn’t suggest massive exclusives, but any company that would share information about upcoming offerings through a forum they did not own, and for no reason other than knowing the community there would care, stands a decent chance of building loyalty and interest in the products / services they offer.

Cumulative Narrative:  The whole story comes from learning about the individual elements, rather than an official line published somewhere, that omits defining information.  If people want to learn about what you do, they should be able to look at any element of your business and understand the core values that drive the overall brand.  Be defined by every part of your reality, not just the parts you think of as ‘media friendly’.  (This also suggests that you should have a reality you are comfortable with from every angle, not just the ones you consider ‘media facing’).  More importantly, people who care SHARE information.  The main thing that PR can learn from ARG’s is that a community that informs itself is more efficient, and generates more engagement, than official sources alone can.

Discrete Sub-Narratives:  Create more points of entry, and explore the stories within each story.  There’s no reason to share any information that would damage your business, but why shouldn’t every key feature of what you offer have it’s own point of contact for interested parties?  Off the top of my head, a ‘production blog’ for each key team building part of an interesting whole allows a community a better chance to find something that interests them, and a greater understanding of why they should care.  As mentioned before, each of these elements builds into a greater whole, which, if necessary, can be summarized (think social media optimized press releases).

‘Playing Fair’:  This is more related to any mystery story, but it’s a key point.  Narratives that play fair offer enough information that readers can come to reasonable conclusions.  A narrative that doesn’t play fair comes to a conclusion that no amount of rational speculation would have come to.  Playing fair encourages speculation.  While companies like Apple can generate speculation through secrecy, leaks drive the interest of the crowd.  If you control the flow of your own information, you can create a connection with the community.  And they can make themselves a part of your narrative.

Players Direct the Game:  The best narratives build and change with the ideas the crowd generates.  I’m not suggesting changing your brand at the whim of the crowd, but if people are interested in a specific element of what you do, release more information about it.  If there is a large concentration of interest in a specific geographical area, arrange a small event and spread information around discreetly.

The core concept of all this is to learn from the best example we currently have of telling a directed narrative through (and not TO) a large number of interested parties.  I’m going to try to go deeper into this, and expand on each element I mentioned (as well as a few others) in the coming weeks.

the potential for social media in canadian democracy.

A recent conversation with my father let me know that until recently, and MP from my area considered listening to Talk Radio call-in shows a good way of monitoring what issues were important to his constituents.  Not only does this only represent a small segment of our population, but letters likely represent an even smaller one.  Conversations with our elected officials should not be intermittent, or one directional.

I'm still wrestling with how best to create a watchable discussion, based on riding, and divided by issues, that could assist with measuring public interest and ideals for Canadian MPs.  My first instinct is to sort out which tools would best fit the idea, and therein lies the problem: I both want something that is easy to use and doesn't require a large time commitment, and I would prefer an engaged group that hashes out ideas in depth.  Not easy to figure out which service would best fit.

I don't particularly think Facebook fits, although everyone is already on it.  Facebook isn't, in my experience, good for focus or commitment.  People will join a group, or make a comment, and then forget about it while maintaining an affiliation.  Being part of a group on Facebook doesn't mean the group becomes part of your Facebook experience.

I'm considering Ning, mostly because creating a riding specific micro-network with sub-groups and discussion boards relating to key issues / legislation appeals to me.  But I'd love feedback on the service.

If there is a simple, free way to create dialogue (on a by riding basis), and then provide MPs with regular digests (created by wiki?) on what constituents find important, and what they want raised as an issue in the house, I think that would help Canadian politics, or at the very least help Canadians consider their own role in politics. 

I'm willing to try if you are.

this is a placeholder.

I'm still figuring out the details, but a conversation with my father (in which I told him this would be impossible) has inspired me to think about how to build a better feedback loop for Canada's parliamentary democracy, using free web based tools.

I'm interested enough at the moment that I might spend a long, long time figuring this out.  And then, shock of shocks, I might actually do something with it.

i don't do press, i do narratives.

I've loved narrative for as long as I can remember.  I used to drive my mother crazy because I would read rather than do anything else.  Until I was 22 or so, my only career aspiration was novelist.

Narratives are the most important thing in getting attention, interest, audiences and markets.

I was never the kind of writer who planned everything out.  I developed my characters, a situation, some undefined ideas, and went to it.  Writing was a process of discovery.  I can't do that anymore.

PR isn't just about arranging press coverage.  It's about developing a narrative, and exploring and expanding it through the media.  This is a hell of a lot more complicated, because you need to plan around the unexpected actions of others, the trends that dominate the marketplace, upcoming changes in those trends, the personalities of your stakeholders, the tangents that drive away from the actual narrative, and, of course, the truth (which is essential, immutable and unavoidable).

I'm spending a lot of time crafting, developing, and planning the narratives I manage and create now.  It's very rewarding, in a very similar way to how writing fiction was.  If anything, it feels like a particularly complex version of the same, but rooted in truth and the real world.

Because your brand, your narrative, is no longer up to you in the post-internet world.  All you can do is create the set of concepts, framing, ideas and narrative that best defines your product and goals, while planning around the nearly limitless number of things the newly infinite citizen media can do with it.

It would be terrifying if it wasn't so much fun.

fatal flaw of tagging.

Tagging seems like a great idea - allowing individuals to create an adaptable sorting system for their information.  The main problem, and the thing that totally destroys the usability, is the existence of synonyms.

If every tagging system came with a number of pre-set tags, and then allowed the addition of tags that didn't fit into that system, there would be less of the 'tag-spread' that makes tagging useless.  Blogger has a version of this with their 'labels', a little 'show all' button that I use religiously.

I suppose I could go back through all 200 odd posts I've made here and fix the tagging, but going backwards seems against the logic of blogs.  This is a good, personalized system that would work a lot better with a bit of the limitation that the free software world is very often against.  I love crowdsourcing, but people need a path to show them where to go sometimes.

adding a social media layer.

I've had a very social media themed day.  I'm not going to go into the details, but I'm solidly in the headspace, so I'm going to talk about something cool I saw on PSFK recently - the addition of a social media layer, melded with competition, on top of vapid reality TV.  

I don't particularly like the Hills, but I'd be very happy to see this added to streaming TV online on a wider scale.  Lately I've taken to sitting in front of the TV with my iPhone, twittering, tumbling and IMing my way through whatever I happen to watch (normally about one show a week, considering bittorrent is my favourite station).  If I'm watching most things on my laptop screen, I'd like that comment layer.  More useful would be the ability to tie it into the social media services I already use - TV show based chats with my Facebook, MSN, Twitter, etc contacts would be interesting and beneficial.

The scoring part is something I find less useful.  I know many people are excited by the idea of getting voted up or down in a Digg comment thread, but I'd prefer to actually have a conversation.

That said, I'd love watching a deep-tagged episode of the Hills with the highest voted commentary popping up at the times it was made by each individual viewer.  Crowdsourced criticism is easy to see entertainment in.

crowdsourcing as cubism: crowdfire.

I watch BoingBoingTV, usually on the subway as I head to work.  It's eclectic, and, frankly, has gotten a lot more watchable since they stopped with the 'German-French-Whatever Aspiring Action Hero' series, which was neither funny nor interesting.

The one I watched this morning was an in-depth look at CrowdFire, something the extended boingboing crew seems to have been involved in with backing from Windows, operating at the Outlands Festival.  CrowdFire, in short, is absurdly cool.

The quote from John Battelle was 'the idea is to give the crowd the tools to create the crowd's experience.'  In practice, this means giving the crowd a repository of crowd-sourced images, sound and video from the festival, to be remixed, re-edited, and broadcast during and after the festival itself.  To a creative commons geek like myself, this is already cool enough to warrant a blog post.  But it got me thinking about the project as a normalization, and communalization, of mediated experience.

CrowdFire is, in a way, about second memory as a communal action.  Photographs and video recordings are about sharing and preserving memories better than human equipment can do without assistance.  This is capturing something different though - the increase in scale makes it a recollection on a swarm scale - 60,000 snippets of a thing, as experienced by 60,000 people.  Opening this up not only to tagging, but to remixing and broadcast, makes me think of cubism.  Crowdsourcing something on this scale isn't a matter of photo realism, but experiential realism.  Looking at a compendium like this is seeing every facet, every angle at once.

And I can't help but wonder if this is the future of memory.

nike+ human race.

Nike’s Human Race is probably the best promotion I’ve heard of this year.  This is fairly unsurprising, considering it’s directly tied to Nike+, a joint product of Nike and Apple, the two greatest media machines in the corporate world.

The premise is dead simple.  You’ve got an army of people, running all over the world, using the Nike+ product to track their progress, training against themselves day after day.  You use the product, and the behaviour they’ve integrated into their daily lives, and you make it a marathon, run individually, tracked over the software.  A global event that has no costs tied directly to the physical event.  Just aggregating the data that’s already being tracked and stored, creating a central side for participants to visit, and donating some of the massive advertising budget to publicize the event.

I personally have only heard about it through local radio, but I don’t see why it would need to be a huge media blitz, considering the only participants are those who already use the Nike+ system, and are therefore accessible through that channel.

This is what the internet is for: taking people from different areas, with different experiences, and reminding them that they are indeed connected.  Attaching that feeling of connectedness with your product, which the consumer has already connected to a physical pursuit, and achievements related to that pursuit, furthers the long, impressive history of Nike crafting itself as something people want to be associated with for competitive, social, and quality reasons.

That, and really, a global crowd-sourced marathon called the Human Race is more or less guaranteed to get my attention.

on brand tags.

Noah Brier has put together one of those things that reminds you what the internet is good for.  Brand Tags is simple and functional - it tells you what people think of when they see logos.  It's interesting to read, but more importantly, oddly pleasurable to use.  Checking it out pretty much guarantees you'll spend a few minutes typing out what Hienz, for example, brings to mind.

It's an interesting tool, but it drives home the difference between my approach and most other people's.  My immediate question is what common ground connects brands - what brands have the most tags in common, which brands in different markets share similar mindspace.

Knowing what comes to mind when people look at your brand is useful, and it's intriguing for me to see the connections people make (guess how often adidas is connected to song lyrics?) I feel like my personal interests are more geared to crossreferencillia.  Anyways, Brand Tags.  Check it out before it gets ruined by people trying to be disruptive or witty.  

if people care, they matter. treat them that way.

My instinct is that this is a generational thing, but I rarely think of phones when I think of outreach, interaction, etc. Phones, to me, inherently mean sloppy, delayed, and often impersonal, when used in connection with products, services or brands. However, I just read something on Seth Godin's Blog that got me thinking:

Shouldn't every single inbound call be answered in one ring? Shouldn't there be as much spent on self-service customer support as is spent on the design of the selling part of your website? Shouldn't you be tracking in the finest detail what people have to say when they call in? Shouldn't you be rewarding call center operators by how long they keep people on the phone, not how many calls they can handle a minute? Shouldn't there be an easy, fast and happy way for an operator to instantly upgrade a call to management (not a supervisor, I hate supervisors) who can actually learn something from the caller, not just make them go away?

This more or less dovetails a lot of what I was saying when I wrote about social media relations. A phone is a tool like anything else, but my own little fishbowl skews towards the digital, I often forget that this is a simple thing that can be done better. I feel like the entire industry does, too.

One of my core tenets is that information is precious, and it should be held on to for the good of everyone, on either side of the transaction. If you leave it on the table, whether through less-than-stellar CSR service on the phone, or by ignoring online communities, I immediately wonder how seriously you take your customers.

People who care enough to pick up the phone are the same as people who care enough to contribute to an online community. They keep the lights on at your company, because people who care are people who pay. Keeping them happy isn't always cheap, but it is almost always worth it. Learning from them is priceless.

Why do we assume that interacting with the people who care is something that belongs at the bottom of the ladder, when interacting directly with corporate clients, and keeping them happy would never be outsourced, or left to the inexperienced.?

social media relations (practice)

Social Media Relations is, first and foremost, not about you, or your brand, or what you have decided is cool, or what you offer. It’s about learning from, and fostering relationships with, communities that already have an interest in your product. It’s about connecting with communities that already have an interest in what you do, and using that interest to build a kind of partnership.

SMR reps in online communities would exist as a resource. They would offer ‘insider’ information to the interested, clear up misconceptions, and generally only speak when spoken to. They offer support when acceptable, but do not attempt to take control.

Most important, they observe, learn, and explain. Observe how each community works. Learn what they think. Explain to brands and corporations what the people they should be focusing on think, want, and how they interact with the product in question. This is mutually beneficial, and gives a utility to a role that would otherwise be too easily subverted into an attempt at control.

This isn’t about sponsorship. It’s an idea based around the idea that adding value to a community is worth more than owning the community. It’s about allowing the people who are most engaged, who matter most, to interact with an offshoot of a brand they care for. This means providing information, and content, that they can interact with and remix. I’m not talking about crowd sourcing – this isn’t an attempt to farm out content creation to generate authenticity. The only benefit that the brand should want out of this is a happy, engaged community, and the opportunity to understand the core consumer base.

Not owning or sponsoring these communities is key, because the second money enters the equation, brands start to silence criticism and dissent. That only has two outcomes; either the community is destroyed, or the brand throws away opportunities to learn and innovate. Dealing positively with criticism is proof that you ACTUALLY value your consumers, instead of just valuing the free PR, and the brand evangelism. It’s essential that it isn’t your garden, or the temptation to wall it off will be overwhelming.

Bounce ideas of your community. Run concept sketches by them. Don’t give them decision-making power (that feels, and is, gimmicky), but use the resource they provide to make better decisions yourself. Link them from the official site, but only if they want that.

This isn’t about preaching to the converted. It’s about welcoming them into the fold without trying to change them. It’s about elevating the status of the converted in terms of the brand / consumer relationship.

And it should be happening on every platform that has an engaged community that cares about what you offer. Because you shouldn’t care about anything more than understanding who you are dealing with, and who you are creating for.

This post is a continuation of Social Media Relations (Rationale)

social media relations (rationale)

I’ve mentioned recently that public relations is an industry in flux. PR is in large part based on the dominance of the current media paradigm, and the core strategies are nearly completely top-down in focus. We (the royal we) don’t have a standard for approaching social media, and online communities. It shows.

While systems like the Facebook beacon are interesting, they are also inherently invasive, and create notable discomfort within a community. This is because, at core, we don’t have a model for participation in these communities. Instead, we have systems for exploitation, and colonization.

The average participant in an online community, whether it be a message board, virtual world, chat room or social network, is able to spot the difference between a participant and an interloper. The problem is, media still have it in their head that influence is created by brute force. This is one of the first mistakes I discussed on this blog – signal as noise – the way everyone with a message thinks getting louder is the key to being heard.

Social media is built on participation by equals, and the promise of meritocracy. The standard plan thus far has been to use real-world money and influence to buy a position that a user would have to earn, or could not attain, in a virtual world. Our problem is that we either take too much of a role in these communities, and attempt to shape them, or take too little of a role, for fear of causing a revolt. There has to be a middle ground, building on the tradition of information facilitation, and building relationships.

I’ve described public relations as getting someone you trust to tell you something we’d like you to hear. This is traditionally done by building media interest, and piggybacking on that inherent trust – a newspaper has built in credibility, and built in trust – to ensure that the information you receive has been vetted by professionals. The issue is that people are increasingly aware that professionals are not all that difficult to influence.

The difference between what I see, and what I’m suggesting is the separation between colonization and diplomacy. Take second life for an example – IBM, American Apparel, etc. talked to Linden, built custom store fronts that offered little to no utility, and basically received the online version of anti-gentrification response. This was inarguably an invasion – regardless of brand messages or reputation, this was the real world saying ‘You’ve created a new market, we don’t understand it, but we want it.’

The opposite approach, in my mind, is the Second Life Sketches that Warren Ellis writes for Reuters. This was something that isn’t about Ellis, or Reuters. It was about SL, and examining what made it special, and what made it worthwhile. It creates, I’d argue, a positive relationship between SL and Reuters. It’s not a one sided attempt to capitalize on what people do in world, everyone benefits.

Diplomacy is about envoys, understanding, and (despite modern real world happenings) shouldn’t involve strong-arming anyone. Brand or Personality envoys should be clearly identified, at be at a level that doesn’t give them special benefit over regular participants in an online community. This is the one thing Facebook has done beautifully with Fan Pages – an opt in system that offers brands a place to connect that is separate, and less full featured, than a personal profile. Brands are not part of the Community. The Community is paramount.

If brands want inroads into a community, I’d suggest they approach from this angle. Have people tasked to work in online communities, clearly labeled as representatives of the brand, and clearly identified as real people. No special treatment, no arguing, no misinformation. Just offer facts, links to useful information, and when suitable, special offers, benefits, etc.

Sponsorship is all well and good, and creates positive associations. But I’d imagine better ones come together when influencers are left to their own devices, and representatives come in when they can offer something useful. (Swag, information, access to that which is normally not available)

The most important advice I can offer is that, in an online community, it’s never about the brands involved, never about the sponsor, never about the platform. It’s about the community. If you can’t provide value to that community, you are an interloper. Your actions will be deemed disruptive, and the community will associate that action with the people and things you represent.

This post is continued in Social Media Relations (Practice)

public relations and the future.

A month and a half ago, someone asked me what I do on this website. I gave him an answer that was accurate, but felt insufficient. Something to the tune of 'I blog about media and strategy, focusing on the stuff that interests me - trends, change, etc', but less articulate.

At this point in my life, PR is what I do. I love parts of it - the writing, discovering a good angle, building relationships and creating strategy. There are parts of it I don't love - the reputation the industry has in some circles, and the grind aspect to some of it. But the only thing that worries me about Public Relations is that it doesn't seem to have much of a plan for the future, and I don't want to end up in another music industry.

PR is heavily reliant on old media. TV, Newspapers, Magazines, Radio. Each and every one of these is in the midst of some kind of decline, weather in earnings, in relevance, or in audience. And most of them have less than no plan for what comes next. TV is still scrambling to understand that it doesn't matter how or where people watch you shows, just that they get watched (advertising strategy should be shaped by viewing patterns, not the other way around). Newspapers are ignoring the one advantage they have (respect for their status) and are hacking away at journalists and fact checkers, and trying to emulate blogging in an attempt to stay relevant. Magazines still have validity, but haven't really defined a new space for themselves - they've just avoided the need to panic quite as totally thus far. Radio is more important as a means of connecting an iPod to a car stereo than it is as a medium. Internet radio is well on it's way to being killed, and that's coming from someone who's hopeful.

All of this means, more or less, that PR needs a redefined role. It isn't just about industry attention or media coverage, but those have been the major doorways to public attention and ubiquity for a long time.

The short version of my point? Most PR firms don't have a solid strategy for social media. This isn't shocking, it's been shown time and again that most advertising firms, and most marketing firms don't either. The difference is, PR is ABOUT social media, in a very inherent way. An advertiser wants you to see things, and develop an interest in them. PR wants your friend to want you to care about the thing they care about at the moment. It's different routes to the same place - PR has the benefit of trust (whether warranted or not) in media outlets.

Old media outlets are losing ground to individuals and new media very quickly.

The core of what I do on brokengent is look at this approaching problem, although I definitely didn't think of it that way when I started. I had no aspirations of being in PR at the time, but I happily stumbled into it. If PR has a future, it's in learning how to deal with social media, as a facilitator, but not as an irritant.

Bloggers hate PR intrusion, usually. I can see why, as much as I dislike the fact. Part of it comes to the same reason people hate Marketers and Ad People. Sometimes we have to represent something that isn't (at least on the surface) what people want. It's easy to generate interest and buzz for something that is desired. At those points, PR is one of the best businesses in the world, because all you do is explain, discuss, and nurture. If someone cares, you give them more information to care about, more context. I love this, PR as a form of cultural curation. It only works with trust.

It's more complicated than I'm making it seem. Sometimes the wrong person is spoken to about the wrong product, and efforts come across as selfish and lazy. Sometimes efforts are selfish and lazy, based more on a desire to get to as many as fast as possible, rather than helping to build relationships. But personal experience tells me that individuals, especially online, don't really trust the PR person, for any longer than it takes to get the new toy or experience before the regular public.

The problem comes when the pressure from up top, as found in old media orgs, no longer keeps an uneasy truce between both sides. The problem is that not being trusted as a starting point is instant fail in social media in online communities.

I recently updated my little 'about' blurb with the following: 'everyone has a voice, so you need strategy that can anticipate any number of contradictory stakeholders, while maintaining a consistent message and meaning across media.'

PR, as an industry, needs to learn how to be a valuable member in online communities, consistently. We need to serve both clients, and the population. We need to do it in a way consistent with the meaning and values of each community. Anyone who can't or won't do both is going to have a hard time in the coming years, and this applies to Advertising and Marketing as well. PR, more than related industries, is reliant on the current media iteration. And we need to start planning for when it shifts.

So, this is what we do here. Hope that clears things up.

redefining a personal experience (OYP)

I've been spending a lot of my spare time considering how to update a conference that has meant a lot to me over the years, basically an attempt to make politics, and faith (specifically Christian faith) more relevant to 14-21 year olds in Ontario. As a raging atheist, the Christian part is a hard sell for me, excepting the core values (golden rule, etc) that I think most people can agree are good ideas, at least when removed from the confines of a faith system. So I've been focusing on how to make politics interesting enough for youth to want to join a model parliament with religious components.

We have a socially aware and active youth base, but they aren't interested in politics in isolation. The point that keeps popping up in my head is that youth care about issues - you can see them proving it in Nathan Phillips Square every couple of months - and a political outreach program for youth, even a model one, has to be issue based to tap into that. The current model we use is based on getting cabinet ministers to write legislation on various issues they care about, debate it, amend it, and surround that time with structured social activities, fundraising, and spiritual reflection. (note: I think this is great, and that is backed up with me spending 9 years involved in an organisation partially based on a religious tradition I actually have disdain for).

I think the solution is to take the entire experience issue based. If the core issue for a session is, say, Darfur, as an example, then have everything focus on that. Draft legislation relating to banning trade with nations who condone genocide, or reinforcing Canada's lagging UN Peacekeeping commitment. Have the charity (we usually have one local, and one international) be directly related. Have workshops that educate kids on the issues before debating legislation. Screen a documentary or two. Make the religious component, bible verse, etc, complement the theme, and deal with the core moral violations that make it something that needs to be challenged. Create a framework for people to get involved when they get home. Make that issue live beyond the weekend - go as far as to organise meetups, a letter writing campaign, anything to create actual results from the effort.

The problem isn't that kids don't care about politics, it's that they've gotten used to actually doing things, rather than talking about them.

This is likely going to be one in a series, as I figure this out. I realise it's not overly accessible, but I hope it will become clearer as I come closer to a final product.

advertising vs. data collection in monetizing social networks.

I promised to follow up on this post around two weeks ago, but I think I can be excused due to the holiday madness that filled that time period.

In the previous post, my general complaint was that the amount of initiative necessary to elevate advertising in social networks from an annoyance to a service is negligible in comparison to the potential returns, both directly and in terms of reputation. The example at hand was Facebook, and the mediocre targeting that let me know a band I like was touring in my country, but didn't bother to take it a step further and actually point me to venues near me, and a place to purchase tickets.

The problem goes deeper than that, and it's pretty simple to explain. Facebook, like most social networks, has made the assumption that having a business model based on advertising revenue means you are a company that works in advertising. Looking into Facebook's brand promotion 'Fans' pages, etc, there is a lot of useful space in which to inject a brand identity. They've also made a point to keep the structure fairly rigid, which I respect - this feature was, at first, the major differentiator from MySpace. I'm not trying to question the advertiser focused initiatives that Facebook has created. I'm just wondering why they were necessary at all.

Facebook is not an advertising company. Facebook, like all social networks, is more accurately a clearing house of user data. Facebook has a lovely, massive community of people, many of whom are highly engaged with the 'social utility'. Most of whom have made vast amounts of personal information available. This is what Facebook is selling, first and foremost - the ability to identify a useful target market for ads, services, etc.

So why are they taking it further than that? You want fan pages for Brands, sure. This makes perfect sense to me. But beyond that? What you have to offer is a community, and your collected information about them. Leave the rest to people why can actually make creative, targeted advertising work. Don't further the spread of the pseudo banner ad by putting them into the News Feed.

Offer the information. Leave strategy to the same guys who handle the creative in other, slightly less closed systems, all the time.

When reading about advertising and the future, the word that is thrown around a lot is authenticity, because us youth of today have finely tuned bullshit detectors, etc etc. My stance is that it's often quality that's more important - you can't make something an ad, and hide that you are trying to sell me something by coating it in a fine layer of authenticity. But you can make me care, and sit through the ad, because the content is good, relevant to me, and entertaining.

Facebook has the information to be astounding at determining the relevance of a product or service to it's users. But honestly, trusting either quality of content, or entertainment value to a company who openly and proudly has been built on unpaid, personal contributions by users seems more than slightly odd.

Hopefully it's clear that Facebook is interchangeable for any other social network or social utility here. The issue is that if the only thing you are actually bringing to the table is information, why are you trying to sell a full service, rather than just taking money for the information at substantially less overhead?

democratic panopticon

[This is a work in progress, and it will be either heavily edited (when I am less sleepy), or re-written and re-posted (possibly with better defined arguments). Let's just consider this one workshopping online.]

This post is heavily thematically linked with a previous one, titled Paparazzi Panopticism.

Thing one: Warren Ellis' Crooked Little Vein includes a character who discusses the idea of cellular phones with cameras as a weapon. Any they are, because it allows anyone to create content, news content, information content, disruptive content. If you want the speech, buy the book. Seriously. It's brilliant.

Thing two: My father, who has, over the years, gone from the kind of guy who buys a 286 and convinces his wife that it's good for the kids (which it shockingly was), to the kind of guy who dislikes that blogging gives anyone a platform to say anything, made a compelling comment over dinner. That a world where people have cell phone cameras is a world where corruption is harder to get away with.

These things got me thinking. The effect of everyone being about to record anything isn't the us vs them issue that so many people think it is. The Panoptic reality this creates isn't binary, there is a more complex dynamic than authority vs people. What we're left with instead is a democratised panopticon, where interpretation and evidence can come from all sides, and from all agendas.

The intriguing part of this, for me, is the subversion of the original theory. Panoptic realities are about people policing themselves in fear of an authority who may or may not be watching at any given time. But the current situation isn't just about authority. Now there is reasonable need to fear that any action that would offend a reasonably sized community will be shown, and you will be penalized socially for it, by that group, and groups affiliated.

To put it simply, this isn't just about being caught standing against the whims of authority, now. It's about the possibility of being caught, at any time, for any act deemed against society, or even peace in society. This is more involved than fighting authority, for one simple reason - a democratised panopticon is inescapable.

In terms of fighting authority, it's marvelous that someone can't be tasered needlessly without it being caught on film. Authorities should be held responsible for their actions, because they have power. The same can be said for celebrities, which justifies, to an extent, the concept of the paparazzi panopticon. But a democratic panopticon seems to bring with it a need to better define the limitations of acceptable behaviour, of what acts, statements or opinions are anti-social in a strong enough sense to require response.

Or will the standard reply be something to the tune of 'live like no one's watching'?

yeah, the respected ones never lie.

I'm not going to read Keen's Cult of the Amateur. There are a lot of potential excuses I could use here, but the pertinent ones are that a) the basic premise is so wrong I can rarely make it through skimming an article covering the book, and b) I'm to busy to waste that time.

This comes up because two rather new pairs of jeans have been stained. not just like, regular use dirt stained, but (through different circumstances) the kind of stains that require effort. After struggling to get grease out (and potentially trashing the pants), I googled it. The experience was worth noting, because my normal pattern for searching for how-to's relates mostly to techy stuff. The most recent example of this was the attempt to get non-DRM ringtones to play on my Nokia 6300; it didn't go well.

Searching for stain removal tips was painless. I typed in grease stain, and clicked on the least spammy looking result. Quick, painless. The interface of the page was hideous, it wasn't supremely functional, but I got the advice I wanted. all sounds good to me.

I thought later, in the shower, how one of Keen's points (as far as I understand) is that the internet and it's ability to give equal access and weight to amateurs will result in a technocracy, where only the internet savvy will be able to find access to the good content. Well, looking for technology related stuff, people who are somewhere in-between in terms of tech savvy (I'm theory, not practice), need to parse dialogue they may not natively understand, and usually accept the need to dig through a lot of 'I know guy, MSFT suxx0rs' when trying to find drivers for an old scanner.

The internet is filled with information put forth by amateurs, and, unshockingly, the most accessible information in terms of content is usually the most accessible information in terms of accessibility.

The assumption that one needs to be tech savvy to get useful content via an internet connection has to come from someone who is either somewhat uncomfortable with the idea of the internet (such as my mother) or someone who forgets that anything needs a skill set to use it -- reading everything in the NYT as though it was gospel is just as stupid as reading everything online without suspicion -- and the assumption that less modern media are somehow easier to use forgets that the technology in play was not always invisible.

The cult of the amateur is another little thing in this society; at time we refer to it as democracy. Everyone gets an opinion, everyone has a RIGHT to that opinion, and each individual needs to decide for themselves. We go with the will of the crowd from time to time. What's enshrining old media as the high point in cultural representation is the exact thing that's presenting the internet as a better way.

If you're afraid that too many individual voices will drown out the 'respectable' ones, than the question is more about the power and validity of that assumed credible source, rather than an invading, more popular option.

linkblogging like i just don't care.

This is amazing, and so, so correct.

Spare Cycles as the power behind web2.0, and possibly our least considered natural resource.