how to protest in the age of twitter

10 Jun, 2010 • posts i've written • 6 comments

It is officially Day 52 since the BP oil spill began in the gulf of Mexico.

Somewhere between 12,000 to 25,000 barrels of oil have been escaping into the ocean per day.

That’s 600,000 to 1.3 Million barrels of oil released total. So far.

Look at the cup sitting on your desk (or imagine one being there). Fill that cup 874 million times.

I don’t question that BP is attempting to solve the problem.

And I offer my sincere condolences to the families of the workers lost in the original accident.

I grew up playing in the waters of the Gulf.

I spend most of my days now, playing on the internet.

And because of that, I believe that BP should be solely focused on minimizing the already assured catastrophe – stopping the oil first and foremost – and not buying Adwords or worrying about Twitter.

In my opinion, BP should dispatch their PR & legal departments, donned in polyvinyl dungarees, to clean up the shoreline or preserve wildlife instead of conduct business as usual – spinning facts and covering their backsides.

You’re free to disagree. These are my opinions.

I asked myself, what do you do in the age of Twitter to protest … or give tangible voice to your beliefs?

I think @BPGlobalPR is one way. A brilliant way, actually. And Twitter deserves credit for not giving into the demands of a multi-national corporation, with legions of lawyers, and for not shutting down the account.

And I think there’s another way to protest directly to BP. And I’ve started it – but I need your help.

I’ve created a single Twitter account that, every hour on the hour, sends an @ reply to @bp_america – BP’s official Twitter account.

An example tweet the account sends – STOP THE OIL STOP THE SPIN @BP_America

Creating the account, powering it, and scheduling it was all pretty easy – and I’m going to show you how to do it yourself.

To me, this is the equivalent of holding a sign outside of their offices. And if there are enough of us, it will make using Twitter very difficult for the brand – their @replies will fill up with our message – assuming enough people join me or use my method and do something even more interesting with it.

How to set up your own protest account in 5 steps:

1. Create a new Twitter account at Twitter.com
2. Download the PHP file I’ve uploaded here
3. Edit the file (in a text editor) to input the name of your account and the password to the account (that’s all you have to change)
4. Upload the file to your webserver (make sure to give it full read/execute permissions – 755)
5. Here’s the complicated bit – create a cron job that runs the file every hour on the hour (a cron job is simply a way to tell your webserver to run a file periodically without you having to do it yourself). You should be able to find how to do this for your hosting service in their help files or in your control panel.

If you have any questions, drop them in the comments and I’ll do my best to be responsive (but readers, do feel free to help each other of course).

It will take a handful of us doing this together to have an impact – so please, if you agree, help out and get an account running.

responding to the social media bubble

24 Mar, 2010 • posts i've written • 19 comments

Yesterday, Umair Haque posted The Social Media Bubble over at The Harvard Business Review blog and it’s created quite a stir.

All in all, Umair’s post is a fairly damning treatise on the state of the social web. And though I’ve always valued Umair’s opinion, in this case I do take issue with many of his arguments.

Before my response to Umair’s post, I’ve transposed his central points for quick reading (edited and condensed):

… the Internet isn’t connecting us as much as we think it is. It’s largely home to weak, artificial connections, what I call thin relationships … Thin relationships are the illusion of real relationships. … At most, they’re marked by a tiny chunk of information or attention here or there. …

If we take social media at face value, the number of friends in the world has gone up a hundredfold. But have we seen an accompanying rise in trust? I’d argue no.

… If social tools were creating real economic gains, we’d expect to see a substitution effect. They’d replace — disintermediate — yesterday’s gatekeepers. Yet, increasingly, they are empowering gatekeepers. Your favorite social networks aren’t disintermediating PR agencies, recruiters, and other kinds of brokers. They’re creating legions of new ones.

… There’s this old trope: the Internet runs on love. Equally, though, it’s full of hate: irrational lashing-out at the nearest person, place, or thing that’s just a little bit different. … Far from fueling meaningful conversation, today’s “social” web is a world full of the linguistic equivalent of drive-by shootings.

… To be “friends” with 1000 people who are also obsessed with vintage 1960s glasses isn’t friendship — it’s just a single, solitary shared interest.

… I can swap bits with pseudo-strangers at any number of sites. “Friends” like that are a commodity — not a valuable, unique good.

… Farmville ain’t exactly Casablanca. Third, and most damaging, is the ongoing weakening of the Internet as a force for good. Not only is Farmville not Casablanca, it’s not Kiva either. One of the seminal examples of the promise of social media, Kiva allocates micro-credit more meaningfully. By contrast, Farmville is largely socially useless.

On to my response …

Relationships

Umair is clearly attacking a very specific type of behavior (the Pokemon-esque, friend them all philosophy) that I believe he is wrongly ascribing to a majority of people. I tend to find that people that include social media among the venn diagram of their job exhibit this behavior, but those outside of our sphere hardly ever reproduce this type of social activity. For most people, social networking sites are used predominantly to groom and support existing relationships, not to generate new relationships. Citing danah boyd on the topic, in her work on friendship, social networking sites, and teens, she concludes:

While social media have the potential to radically alter friendship-making processes, most teens use these tools to maintain preexisting connections, turn acquaintances into friendships, and develop connections through people they already know. Social media offer a platform for teens to take friendships to a new level. Those teens who seek new friends through networked media are a minority, often because developing online connections is stigmatized and set against a backdrop of adult fears of stranger danger and mainstream youth norms that center on school-centered sociability.

In contrast to Umair’s criticism, I do believe that most people are using social networking sites to strengthen existing relationships and not to generate thin relationships. In fact, the average active Twitter user has only 126 followers and the average Facebook user has 150-200 friends.

But while we’re on the topic, social technology often does one thing well – extract value from thin relationships. But let’s be clear, there isn’t much gold in those hills to begin with, they are indeed thin relationships, but the internet is an excellent extruder of say, the gold dust, that does exist. Google is a clear example of this: they were able to harness the value of thin relationships to improve search. And Amazon crunches thin relationships to offer better product recommendations. But both examples are applications of technology (algorithms, databases, etc) and not applications of a single person’s attention to extract value from thin relationships – which is what I think many of us are trying to reproduce with our behaviors, and we’re failing.

We, as in those of us with one foot or another in social media, can’t escape the inevitability of Dunbar’s number – after we pass around 150 relationships we need things like databases and algorithms to extract value from our social graph, and it won’t be the same kind of value we had before. And both Facebook and Twitter do an extremely poor job on their own of extracting value from thin relationships. In fact, things we typically call social networks are the worst at extracting value from thin relationships so far. We should fix that or fix our behaviors.

Substitution

Here, Umair’s argument seems to be that if the social web was actually empowering individuals, then brokers of all kinds (middle-men, intermediates) would be losing power of their own. Umair is arguing that the system should be tit for tat and that power is ultimately a fixed resource that can be exchanged between people or groups of people. Of course, this isn’t how a complex adaptive system works at all – and that’s exactly what the social web is.

Briefly, a complex adaptive system can be identified by the following attributes: 1) a multi-level system of agents constantly acting and interacting, 2) highly dispersed control, behavior is dictated by the cooperation and competition between agents, 3) an ability to adapt as experience is gained, 4) an anticipation of the future derived by agents predicting potential outcomes, and 5) many many niches that ultimately spawn further niches.

If that doesn’t sound exactly like the social web, I for sure can’t do any better. And it’s that last attribute, the many niches, that conflicts most with Umair’s argument. In his book, Complexity, Mitchell Waldrop describes best what I believe Umair is upset over:

… complex adaptive systems have many niches, each one of which can exploited by an agent adapted to fill that niche. Thus, the economic world has a place for computer programmers, plumbers, steel mills, and pet stores, just as the rain forest has a place for tree sloths and butterflies. Moreover, the very act of filling one niche opens up more niches – for new parasites, for new predators and prey, for new symbiotic partners. So new opportunities are always being created by the system. It is always unfolding, always in transition. In fact, if the system ever does reach equilibrium, it isn’t just stable. It’s dead.

The social web, as a complex adaptive system, will create new opportunities for niches and new opportunities for power struggles. But in contrast to Umair’s thesis, it will not actively destroy old opportunities in order to equalize power. The creation of a new niche can easily make the role of a broker, someone who can navigate a more complex landscape, even more valuable.

hate

The internet doesn’t run on love or hate – it runs on performance. Perhaps more than anything, the social web has generated new methods for identity construction and we’re actively performing in order to construct our identity among our peers. Certainly, anonymity online has contributed to people expressing distaste more freely, but I do believe that far before the internet was invented the world was already full of hateful speech. With that said, why is it that we expect the social web to purely be a place of love and good when inhabit a world and create a culture that is far from that utopian dream? I’m with Umair on this one, let’s make the internet a better place, but we may have to start by addressing reality.

farmville

As Henry Jenkins has said, “Humans do not engage in activities that are meaningless. If you think you see people doing things you find meaningless, look again and try to understand what the activities mean for them.” I find Umair’s dismissal of Farmville to sound more ignorant than I’m sure Umair, himself, actually is. And as Jane McGonigal cited in her recent TED talk, there is immense social and personal value found in gaming, enough so to easily justify why gamers would spend so much of their time inside gameplay. Farmville is so much more than Casablanca to so many more people – Casablanca has 23k fans on Facebook while Farmville has 82 million monthly users on Facebook (and ‘Not Playing Farmville’ has over 2 million fans).

but social media is a bubble

Of course social media is a bubble. But it’s the industry, not the technology, that’s the bubble. Those in the industry that are sick of social media are probably sick of their own reflection; we have to stop talking about social media as a thing wholly its own and instead talk of it as a reality of modern personal and professional life.

At this year’s SXSW, everyone seemed to be bored by most of the panels (and most were about social media) – because social media is boring. But that’s important, because now we can stop lecturing about social media and start innovating on social technologies and their applications.

google buzz kill

18 Feb, 2010 • posts i've written • 5 comments

Google’s Testing and Launch Procedure for Buzz

Usually I’m a Google fanboy. I live inside of my Reader, store most everything in Docs, broadcast my location with Latitude, hardly touch those other search engines (or whatever silly name they’re calling themselves today), and I’ve been a Gmail user since 2006. If Google builds it, I try it.

But Buzz is threatening my fandom… because Buzz is ruining my experience in the other products – specifically, Gmail and Google Reader.

First off, my inbox is a terrible place for Buzz. I like to get shit done in there, not casually browse the pithy complaints and LOLcat attached musings of my friends from Twitter. I’ve already got an app for that, it’s called TweetDeck. My Gmail behavior is akin to a seabird plummeting from the sky to the ocean’s surface and firing away with a satiated gullet. Gmail is not a particularly suitable environment for social domesticity.

Let’s ignore for a moment that when I activated Buzz I was following dozens of people I didn’t want to follow and had many accounts already churning out content for which I’d rather not connect to my overall profile. Last night, wanting to dig around my sent mail items looking for a specific communiqué (one that I didn’t remember enough salient details to go immediately to search), I realized that my sent mail box is now full of my Buzz items – everything that’s been automatically piped through to my account. This made my hunt much more difficult and annoying. The best name for this type of emotional response is technoyed.

Then I went to my Reader for a momentary fix of interesting and was alerted that now all of my Buzz followers were followers inside of Reader – and wouldn’t I like to follow them all back in the Reader environment?

No. I would not.

My relationship to members of my social graph is predicated on context. That context, in our digital world, is often based around technological platforms as well as degrees of familiarity. And that context is not meaningless or devoid of function.

I have profiles across the web not solely because I have to, but because that varied context provides value for me (the context in which you get to know me on LinkedIn is different from that of Tumblr, and that difference is meaningful). Moreover, when a user does the work needed to find me across the web, that says something about their interest; that work is meaningful to me. And if I accept that connection, especially on multiple platforms, it says something about my relationship to that person.

As danah boyd put it,

Social technologies that make things more efficient reduce the cost of action. Yet, that cost is often an important signal. We want communication to cost something because that cost signals that we value the other person, that we value them enough to spare our time and attention.

Or, in sandwich science terms, just because I love peanut butter and jelly does not mean I’d like you to invent a combination paste product of the two, which I’ll dub nut jelly.

The portal wars have now become the social wars – but services built to funnel our robust social graphs must learn how to preserve the heterogeneous qualities, not remove them.

What makes my relationship with you special might be platform specific, and that special quality should be preserved. The few people I share content with inside Google Reader are precious and I have no interest in diluting their awesomeness with, for that context, strangers.

I’m not quite ready to hit the eject button for Buzz, but if you are, here’s how.

don’t fall in love with the technology in your hand

04 Feb, 2010 • posts i've written • 6 comments

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?

behold the plateau of social media

22 Dec, 2009 • posts i've written • 4 comments

After playing with Google Insights for Search,

Are we seeing a permanent stagnation for social media? What comes next? And how soon?

hopes and fears

26 Oct, 2009 • posts i've written • No comments

image credit

Had a phone interview today with a gent named David Parsons about the future of the whole social media thing. David is getting his Masters in Interactive Media and also happens to be one of our Fiesta agents.

David asked an interesting question, so I thought I’d pose it to you, dear reader…

What’s your greatest hope and your greatest fear for the next five years when it comes to the intersection of business and digital technologies?

To be fair, I’ll start us off with my answers to David… (before you rip me to shreds, I had all of ten seconds to make these up, you give it a shot!)

Greatest hope: consumers truly control production. Digital technologies allow consumers to cooperate together and communicate their needs to corporations which (using superior production technologies) can service smaller and smaller consumer segments. Aaron also pointed out that wouldn’t it be nice if companies got better at serving those needs of ours we don’t clearly recognize or ask for.

Greatest fear: companies just get really good at faking it. Astro-turfing, town-halling, fabricating consumer opinion and using it to bullshit a demand (we want our guns to be extra shoot-ie)

final week for social media survey responses

24 Aug, 2009 • posts i've written • No comments

Hey there.

How ya’ doing?

Just wanted to let you know that we’re coming down the homestretch for responses to the social media practitioner survey.

The survey will close at midnight September 1st.

I need your help to spread the survey. So far we’ve collected about 250 completed responses (which is awesome, but you and I both know that we can do better than that).

But Bud, how can I help?

So glad you asked. Have you blogged about it yet? Have you tweeted it? Have you emailed other people in your company about it? Have you sent it to your clients?

The person that does all of the above is a hero in my book; and I’m strongly considering wearing a t-shirt with your face on it.

But on the serious side, the objective of the survey is to provide a little insight into a growing yet still nascent field.

We hope to answer larger questions like:
Who’s doing the actual work?
What are brands using social media for?
How are these activities being measured?

And more personal questions for practitioners such as:
Am I being paid fairly?
How senior am I compared to others doing the same kind of work?
Where can I find more information about the kind of work I’m doing?

I’m asking for your help, but this time (just this once), it’s not entirely about me. We plan on releasing our full findings along with the data as a free report.

I really do need your help here.

Thank you.

The Social Media Practitioner Survey

social media practitioner survey

12 Aug, 2009 • posts i've written • 3 comments

We at Undercurrent have put together a survey for social media practitioners I’d like to share. (and hope you’ll share, too)

http://bit.ly/socialmediasurvey
* please use the bit.ly link when sharing
** and how about the hashtag #smsurvey when tweeting

The objective of this survey is to gain a greater understanding of how social media is put in practice by agencies and clients, including: how objectives are defined, how results are measured, who is doing the work, the level of compensation, and what resources are most popular among practitioners.

Who should take the survey? Anyone that handles social media strategy, manages a social media team (internal or external), or conducts social media outreach on behalf of or within a brand.

It’s important to get a wide variety of data, so please share and spread this survey. We’ll keep the survey open during the month of August.

The survey should only take about 10 minutes of your time.

What are we doing with this data? We plan on releasing a free report (probably slideshare) on our findings, along with a free download of the full dataset. We’re hoping that what we collect will be beneficial for the entire industry. When you’re done with the survey, you’ll see a link to follow to request the report and dataset.

You may remember an earlier post of mine where I solicited feedback for the survey. Thanks to everyone for chiming in. Also a big thanks to Heather LeFevre, author of the Planner Survey, of which I drew great inspiration.

I can’t stress enough how much I need your help in spreading the survey to social media groups you may be a member of, to your industry friends, to your clients (this could lead to some very compelling insights), and to your co-workers.

If you have any issues at all with the survey, I’m your man, so please leave a comment below.

Also, after taking the survey, I invite you to leave a comment back here to let me know any data in particular you’re interested in seeing charted. (like average salary, or seniority)

eyes on your neighbor’s work

11 Jun, 2009 • posts i've written • 8 comments

I’ve been jotting notes in the margins of late on the subject of this whole social media phenom and its actual use among brands and agencies.

Like the planner survey, I’m putting together a medium sized survey to pass around the web to take the pulse of the what, why, where, and what the hell for social media (specifically the being social part) and its uses. I plan on wrapping up a concise report to share along with the full data set.

But I need YOUR help.

I need people to care about taking and spreading the survey.

Which means people need to be invested in learning what the survey could possibly answer.

Which means I need to know what YOU care about learning.

Here are topics I’m already considering:

- Who’s doing the actual social outreach: the brands, the agencies, the PR firms, the interns?
- What are the resources being allocated by brands: size of their own teams, budgets, and more?
- What are the typical job titles and salaries for the people doing the work?
- What are the most used mechanisms for social outreach: email, phone, twitter, facebook pages… ?
- What are the business objectives, and how is social media being measured and reported?
- How are learnings from interaction with your customers affecting the actual production of your products?
- I’m interested in success stories beyond the usual suspects

And I’d like to segment this data by industry, company type (brand, agency, PR firm, etc), size, country/region…

In the comment box below, please help answer: what am I missing, what specifically should I be asking, has another survey already accomplished this, do you give a shit?

put your work where your mouth is

18 May, 2009 • posts i've written • 2 comments

We’re in the business of sparking conversations.

But lately, we’re all participating in far too many petty conversations between each other.

Talking the ‘social media’ talk has gotten far too easy for this industry. The same trite catch phrases are passed back and forth while one person tries to assert their cerebral superiority over someone else.

My question is, what have you done?

Conversations should lead to actions, so where’s the amazing work? Where’s the amazing work between any of us?

Having a point of view is mandatory, but expressing that point of view through taking action is necessary too, otherwise you’re just more noise among the industry din.