don’t fall in love with the technology in your hand
February 4th, 2010 • posts i've written
On Monday I attended a Social Media Week panel entitled Networked News Gatherers: Defining the Social Media Editor Role, moderated by Melissa Parrish, the director of community strategy for Lifestyle Digital, Time Inc., with panelists Jen Preston, social media editor for the New York Times; Rachel Sklar, editor at large at Mediaite.com and former media editor at the Huffington Post; and Cyndi Stivers, managing editor for EW.com.
I walked away from the panel quite disappointed.
What seemed like an opportunity for forward-thinking discussions at the intersection of journalism and social platforms quickly turned into a love-fest for Twitter. Everyone had a very rosy anecdote of how they got tweeting and what an addiction it had become.
Twitter, twitter, twitter. Rachel is herself, warts and all, on Twitter, Jen once accidentally sent a public tweet instead of a DM, and Cyndi stalks people on Twitter but doesn’t tweet. And by the way, the New York Times doesn’t recognize the word ‘tweet,’ they enforce “an update was posted to Twitter” instead. And that was the biggest ah-ha moment of the entire panel. And I’m not the only one to think so.
When, finally, the question of what comes next, or what do you hope comes next, was asked to the panelists, the answer was “The most fun is scanning the horizon to see what’s next,” said Stivers “You just keep scampering along with it and who knows what’s going to develop next?” (quote from HuffPo)
Bah.
Wait and see?
So very disappointing…
Don’t fall in love with the technology in your hand because you’ll never dream up the technology you’ll use tomorrow. And if you don’t dream it, you can’t build it.
Rachel Sklar, whom I’ve been an avid reader of for some time now, tossed in the usual suspect for technological innovation, “some kid in his basement is building the next thing.”
I’m seriously concerned that if basements suddenly became outmoded we’d have no technological advances after that.
Who said that it had to be the kid in the basement? Where is that written?
The bell tolls for thee, dude.
Hello giant corporation with funds, connections, and talent – get your ass to work before you get your ass extinct.
Help people connect and share. That’s the secret of web 2.0 through web whatever-point-oh for media companies. Help people connect and share.
</rant>
I had some questions for the panel that were unanswered, so I’ll post them here in the very unlikely case they’re listening.
- How is your social team budgeted inside the organization? Do you have your own budgets or do you draw from PR, media relations, or the journalism pool?
- How does the organization feel about the platform, e.g. Twitter, owning the content you create?
- Take a guess at the breakdown of listening vs talking for your organization. 10/90?
- Is the role of your organization solely one of a filter for social media breaking news?
- Is social media merely a distribution platform for the panelists? Or does it ever lead editorial decision making?
- What has been the impact, traffic wise, of Twitter, Facebook (connect, if you got it), and other such platforms?
- How do you feel about conversation being splintered on your site and off (in social places) – what do you get, in your point of view, out of it happening elsewhere?
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6 Responses (add your comment)
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Tom, I love the phrase “living social.” If it’s your coinage, amazing.
(Sorry, Bud: I have nothing to add in response to your actual post!)
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Thanks for coming to the panel and for posting your thoughts about it. I’ve certainly read similar opinions from others, including Amanda Rykoff who you link to in your post, and I have to say that I think posts like these are important as they encourage larger media companies to continue thinking about social media as rigorously as possible.
I can’t speak for the panelists of course, and I’m not a journalist, but I can try to answer a couple of your questions from the community point of view within the Lifestyle Division at Time Inc.
I don’t think it would be appropriate to discuss budget issues, but I can tell you that my role sits outside of any of the departments you mention. I’m pretty much a department of one, with very close working relationships with audience development, PR, editorial, etc.
The listening vs. talking ratio is probably around 40/60 for the division as a whole, though it’s likely closer to 50/50 for some of our titles. As a dedicated community person, I try to ensure that our titles are listening and responding to our community as much as they can. I imagine it might not be possible to keep an eye on that ratio in organizations that don’t have a central resource to focus some time on it.
Breaking news is not the top priority for the titles I work with, but that’s likely not a big surprise since i’m not within the news division. We do post links to our content, but we don’t see social media primarily as a distribution platform– and it does lead some editorial decision-making. For example, if you take a look at Coastal Living’s Twitter stream you’ll see that the editors recently held a poll asking the community to help them pick a cover, and they often take submissions for column ideas. Real Simple uses its FB page to collect readers’ thoughts and quotes about articles they’re working on. All of the lifestyle titles have created web editorial based on feedback and ideas from their distributed communities– and This Old House actually does an entire reader-generated print issue.
As far as the conversations taking place off of our own sites and social presences, my own opinion is that conversation between readers/users wherever it exists is always valuable. I think it’s particularly valuable because where our audience chooses to engage can give us insight into what they’re looking for from us beyond what we can learn from just looking at the content of those conversations.
I agree with you that waiting for the genius kid in the basement to come up with something awesome isn’t the best way to advance technology. But I also know that big companies of all kinds have to find a balance between focusing on their core mission versus projects that support that mission but maybe aren’t the main thrust of it. I’m sure there are companies that will be able to put their funds, connections and talent against developing the next great social technology, even while they continue to devote resources to their core competencies. Whenever it happens, I really look forward to seeing the results.
Thanks again for coming to the event. I’ll alert the panelists to your post too– maybe they’ll have a chance to answer some of your questions here.
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As a former print editor who went digital, then social, I can tell you that there isn’t a lot of this thinking happening between the walls of big publishers, even ones with websites.
There’s a lot of lateral thinking in the way of “here’s something someone else made, and a lot of other people use. We better figure out something to do with it.”
And that makes me really sad.
However, magazines and newspapers came up with the very first UGC (remember letters to the editor?) and someday, hopefully soon, they’ll figure it out again.
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I’m really glad that the panel sparked this kind of discussion and I’m very happy to be a part of it.
I use a variety of tools for listening and responding to conversations. One thing that’s really important given the way our division is structured is that the tools I use will work for stakeholders from other departments too, so I use different tools for different titles. They run the gamut from Google Alerts for a quick overview of new conversations, to SocialMention and Trackur for quantified views of discussions in many different kinds of social spaces, to Tweetdeck for titles that need workflow structure to handle conversations on the most popular services, and then Radian6 for the super-toolset we’re about to begin using for some of our largest brands.
I absolutely agree with you that, “The platform or medium should be driven by the behaviors of people, not the investments made in the past.” And innovation is definitely key for all these companies. But I wonder how many steps removed from the content itself they’re able to go. I want to be totally clear and honest that I don’t have any insider information about the thinking going on around technological innovation at my company or in publishing in general. That said, I think a lot of content-provider brainpower is going towards developing new ways to deliver content to consumers where they want to consume it, rather than to developing the “where” itself. I’m thinking of ventures like the digital storefront partnership that hopes to work with existing hardware and software companies to bring innovative digital versions of long-established media brands to whatever the hardware turns out to be. They seem to be working towards an intermediary “where”– the place where users will go to purchase the new content. But they’re not trying to develop the ultimate “where”, as in the hardware itself. Is that maybe the difference between developing the next Twitter and developing the next great Twitter app?
And Anna, thank you for pointing out that letters to the editor were the media’s way of incorporating UGC long before anyone was thinking about the interwebs. It’s different in many ways of course, but it points to the fact that readers’ opinions have always mattered.
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Great post. I suspect you won’t be hearing much from those guys becase in order to get a response they’d need to be living social enough to even realize you wrote about them.
Maybe I’m wrong.
Actually, what if I’m wrong? What if we are all wrong and these organizations actually start putting rigor, sticktoitiveness and – dare – I – say – it REAL money into it? What then?
2+ years down the road when FEDEX has 25 agents constantly asking you how your experience was and GM follows you and comments / retaliates just because you bitched about how much you hate your Chevy that day just doesn’t seem like a funplace to live.
I like what we are advising people to do NOW but when everyone wakes up and starts doing it, the Internet doesn’t look like a great place to be.
On the one hand we want these businesses to dive in and grow, but on the other, their obsessive and gluttonous practices of the past make things look grim.