Isabel Walcott Draves

Reminder: Social Media is for People

I lately suffered a cruel reminder that social media is meant for people, not bots.  If you live under a rock and don't know what a bot is, it's a program that automatically does something online, like post to someone's Facebook wall.

Spam is always spam, and never welcome.  But there's something worse than just plain spam. If you are going to automatically post ads on someone's wall, say because they "liked" your company page, there are times that it's really not appropriate to do so.  For example, if someone just announced that their mother died, their wall is inundated with sympathy posts, and your bot posts an ad for your funeral parlor, legal services, party rentals, or consignment shop.  This looks grossly like ambulance-chasing, profiting off of someone's death, and taking uncouth advantage of the fact that their wall is receiving a high number of visits right then.  Spamming someone's wall with your ad at this time in their life could end up doing way more damage to your company's reputation than at another time, when it would just be a mere annoyance (or perhaps the person would be glad to get 15% off).  Highly unwise tactic, from a social media strategy point of view (and a common sense point of view).

And that's what I saw the other day.  Someone's bot posted an inappropriate ad at an inappropriate time.  Stupidly, I opened up my big mouth and told the spammer off, because I was outraged at this classless, hurtful behavior that I felt was an insult to my friend.  And here's where it gets weird.

The spammer contacted me with his own outraged excuse.  His story?  "I had nothing to do with that post... I have no control over those posts...My company software sends the ads out when it sends them out, it's out of my control".

Really?  You set some bot in motion and say whatever it does is "not your fault", and your excuse is, you "can't control it"?  Why are you even posting ads to people's walls with your bot in the first place?  Who told you this was a good idea?  Are you actually paying them?

The problem with robots is just that.  They're robots.  They're not people, and they can't tell when it's a really, really bad idea to do their little robot thing.  Which is why you should never use them to make posts for you in social media.  Social is called social for a reason.  It's for people.  The more people assign posting tasks to bots and then say their interaction with their facebook friends is "out of their control", the more social media will be ruined for everyone for ever.

If you want to tell people about what you've got going on at your business, post to your own wall, not theirs.  If you're posting to their wall, look around you first.  The atmosphere there determines the nature of your comment.  You yell across the ballfield; you whisper in the library.  For all you beginner social media marketers out there - it's a conversation you're joining.  Act like a human.

 

Isabel's Theory for Social Network Value

A long time ago (sometime in 2006 to be exact), I got frustrated that investors and bigco's were applying Metcalfe's Law to social networks (value increases exponentially with addition of nodes).  Exclusivity is important to relationships and social networks are made of people.  So I wrote a brief paper arguing why valuing social networks more highly the bigger they are is incorrect.

I never bothered to speak to anyone to try to publish it or to even take it beyond a first draft.  Because I couldn't figure out a way to create an algorithm or a law, just show a bell curve-like picture indicating that when stuff gets too popular it starts to lose cache, I worried that it wasn't "scientific" enough (I'm no scientist).

But I was reminded of my work on this idea the other night at an Eyebeam benefit when talking with Clay Shirky, a great mind and presenter about Internet trends and author of Here Comes Everybody, about his next topic for study.  I wanted it to be this exclusivity idea.  Because, let's face it, that hip downtown club that the models and rock stars used to go to?  Here Comes Everybody, and those hipsters are GONE faster than you can sneeze at the dust they leave behind.

Let's take a quick example.  Facebook has been getting dumped on by the Internet's coolest hipsters for awhile now.  A quick Google search for "why facebook sucks" brings up over 24 million results.  As one of the top ones from MidwestSportsFans.com (chosen at random) says:

"At one time it was a nice, organized, relatively private and controlled way to keep in touch with friends and family, share photos and events, and – in a much less garish way than MySpace – create your own little personal shrine to yourself on the web. (Narcissism rules!)  It is not that anymore."

In fact, this concept is such a truism that I think the only people who don't see that social networks top out at a certain point when the crowd becomes too huge, are the people who are trying to make money off those networks.  They are always the last to "get it".  I'm not saying they don't make money.  But is MySpace worth what it was a few years ago?  Uh-uh.  Tools like Twitter are good - Clay pointed this out in our conversation - because they don't let people spam or pester you asking to be friends.

My paper (warning - Unedited since 1996 and just my first draft!) is here: Isabel's Theory for Social Network Value.  Please contact me if you'd like me to keynote your next event.

A Simple Definition for "Social Media"

I'm whipping up a little presentation to help me lead a discussion on Social Media for Business at Podcamp this weekend.  In doing so, I discovered that there is no solid definition for Social Media on the web.  I've seen confusion around this term at live events as well.  What is Social Media?

Let me clear it up once and for all. 

Social Media: Any communications format where the users publish the content.

Is that clear enough?  Yes, it can be multimedia - music, pictures, video as well as text.  Yes, it can be a blog or a social network like Facebook.  Open Source is social media, although they would hate to be associated with a term that traditional marketers are trying to hijack.  Social media can even be offline - like New Moon Magazine for girls, the citizens' band in radio, even the op-ed page of the New York Times (although arguably so because pretty tightly controlled).

Social media is media by society - as opposed to the top-down publishing model where one person (company, really) with a controlling editorial voice is in charge of the voice of the publication or the channel.

The entire web is social media - webpage after webpage, published by whoever wants to buy a domain name.  The only thing that can break it: destroying net neutrality and allowing carriers to prioritize their own content by providing better bandwidth for it, making content they don't favor slow as molasses for the end user.  Let's not even go there.

Hope that clears it up!

Who is more powerful?

I just accidentally clicked on the wrong tab:  this instead of this
Since I just discovered the Compare People app on facebook: Who is more powerful, Facebook or Forbes?  In February 06 Forbes.com claimed an audience of close to 15.3 million (MediaMetrix), which plummetted to 7.3 million in July of last year (ComScore).  Meanwhile, Facebook in July of last year was already ahead of Forbes with 14.3, and had 26.6 million users in May of this year (ComScore).  Facebook practically doubled in growth since last year and looks to quadruple in size within the year.  In the latest traffic results released by ComScore for July 2007, Facebook is #17.

Today, Alexa gives Forbes.com a traffic rank of 479 and shows that the percentage of the web audience it captures is trending steadily down from around .2% last July to around .15% this summer.  Meanwhile, Facebook traffic crossed Forbes' in Jan. 06 and has started the hockey stick  growth, passing 3% daily reach in early August of this year.

If you're a "serious business" in the habit of publishing or broadcasting, it's time for you to start exploring the power of social media.  My partners and I can help you, so please don't hesitate to contact us - isabel at isabelhilborn.com is a good place to start.

Google: Alert?

I decided today to have a peek into my spam folder in gmail, to see if I could find a password reminder gone awry.  In amongst the cheap software deals and the medicine cabinet of must-have pharmaceuticals, I found... my Google Alerts!  I'd forgotten all about them.

That's right, Google is spam filtering its own alerts.

More Supernova Threads

I posted a couple more session notes and commentary on the Supernova conversation hub:  One from the panelists discussing the Social Web and my strong feelings on the David Weinberger/Andrew Keen "debate" which I thought was one of the most interesting sessions.  I actually think Keen is a sharp, fun writer and I can see how he would be "concerned" about the decline of culture and civilization.  But it was so clear to me that there was something fundamental that he just doesn't get about what is happening with art and culture online. 

Yes, there's a ton of worthless crap being published now.  And yes, it's tough to sift through it all.  But now, Andrew, Mozart's sister has a forum for her genius.  And the garage mechanic who loves to draw, the airline attendant who loves to write, the teenage girl who wants to act, and the PR expert who moonlights as a photographer all have an audience.  This means that great diamonds have a better chance to shine now, and that the little diamonds all of us occasionally come up with have a better chance of being worth something even though we don't dedicate our lives to following them up.  There's more genius exposed now, not less.

Speaking of that PR expert, Renee Blodgett came up with some nice portraits of some of the more entrepreneurial Supernova attendees.

Notes from Open Video - Intelligent Television Conference

Karen Colbron, WGBH

Karen talked about their Open Vault project.

It’s an archive of free viewable videos they’ve produced for PBS, such as President Carter on Salt II Treaties and Afghanistan. (1300 videos in total, if I heard her correctly). They have strong social media features such as "people who liked this also liked – euro-strategic missiles" and "Top Picks". They have a keyword search – data is also shown alphabetically by person, and by series. Longer-format interviews are available for purchase.

Jane Johnson – Library of Congress

Jane told us about the LOC's media search tool, mic.llc.com mic.loc.gov(pronounced "Mike"). It’s apparently new at the LOC to be able to limit your search to pull up only moving images. They have an archive directory, advanced search. It’s an outcropping of film, television and video preservation acts taken by congress in the 90’s. They will tell you what videos are available, but from what I could see, you can’t view the videos. I asked a question about this later and, yes, they are not a repository, but in some cases there is a link to view the video.

I did a basic keyword search and saw lots of metadata, such as copyright holder and carrier type, along with this message: "Audio and moving image materials in the collections of the Library of Congress can be reproduced only when all rights and restrictions have been cleared and written authorizations have been obtained. While M/B/RS Reference staff can usually be of some assistance in determining what permissions are required, the onus is on the researcher to obtain them."

They also have an "archive search" that tells you the other archives that hold movies – I got three results using the keyword "New York": The Municipal Archives of the city of New York, the New American Cinema Group, and the Fales Library and special collections.

They can draw on records with certain metadata schemas and export them with different metadata schemas. They have a mapping wizard allowing you to match your "title" with their "title" and then you can import their data. [This feature seems useful for some new kind of mashup, to me. Maybe pull some of this data into Dabble?] The purpose is to incorporate all metadata needed for using the media. It supports non-textual indexing such as facial recognition.

Andrea Kales, The British Film Institute

BFI's got a bunch of stuff going on: Sight and Sound magazine, an archive that they argue is the largest in the world, the London Film Festival, the Gay and Lesbian Film Feestival which started early in the mid-eighties. ScreenOnline.org.uk, for people looking for information about British film and television. They have a new project, funded by the UK’s higher education funding body. The theme of the project is to have a curatorial perspective on moving images, and bring them online to juxtapose them.

They’ve done some co-production with the BBC. Jane showed incredible film footage from what’s got to be 100 years ago. The footage was almost lost. It was a novelty for people to go see at carnivals, made by two men who filmed people with signs saying "come and see yourself later at the carnival." The local films were the most popular thing at the carnival. It’s from a collaboration called "The Mitchell and Kenyon Program" which got 8M viewers - a lot in the UK. The films are beautifully restored and, I’d say, well worth buying.

During the Q&A session after this group, Frank Moretti, host of the conference, brought up a point that got him on the receiving end of a lot of active audience protest and agitation.  He asked, "What about this video is interactive? How do you learn from it?"  Now, I may be paraphrasing him dead wrong, because I'm not sure I understood his question.  So I invite him to comment on this blog with his point in his own words. 

All I can say is to report that the rest of the audience was taken aback - those who spoke up seem to view video as a natural educational material, when taught properly - which means, when teaching the student how to view and interpret the media.  It seemed to some that Dr. Moretti was questioning this point of view, in particular that he was making the point that students are evaluated on their ability to read, write and do math, therefore most of the video we've discussed here is perhaps not relevant to their education.

Of course he's correct that video is inherently one-way media, and video that's not "teaching to the test" won't be that valuable to the test. But once you start tinkering with the video, and teaching about the video, this changes.  You could make the same point about books - "how can people learn from them? They're not interactive!" It would be interesting to continue this discussion on this blog.

After the coffee break, we were treated to a quick demo of dotSub.  The website hosts videos along with their translation, apparently created via a wiki-like process where users can translate from one language to another and others can benefit.  Looks like a really cool tool.

More Open Video Notes: Production Best Practices

I’m impressed by how well-connected Peter is; the quality of the speakers, the packed room and the lovely catering presentation (low-budget while coming across as expensive) attest to great conference planning. The audience started out a little dead, but by the afternoon there were not only lively Q&As with the speakers, but also active discussions among audience members.

Continuing on with a few notes - and please, errors are mine:

We heard from Margaret Drain from WGBH, which produces much of the PBS content. They designed "we shall remain" project to engage young native Americans. " The citizen storyteller." Give them new cell phones that you can record and edit on.

Name of the project comes from this touching quote, which practically brought tears to my eyes: "The Master of Life has appointed this place for us to light our fires, and here we shall remain" – Tecumseh.

We saw an attractive presentation, reviewing efforts on sharing climate and astronomy data online and making it interactive, showing simulations, etc. This was given by Thomas Lucas, an independent producer working with the NCSA.

Curtis Wong from Microsoft Research "Next Media" spoke next – runs a small group developing services 4-6 years down the line; in his spare time he does educational technology work. 20 years ago he worked at Voyager. Standard DVD stuff. Then Corbis. He shows a trail of his work at these places over time.

What is he working on now at Microsoft? Using the "world wide telescope", hopefully to be released sometime this fall, Curtis showed us how you can browse satellite pictures of the sky much the same way you would zoom in to satellite pictures of your neighborhood on Google Earth.  The data comes from the Sloane Digital Sky Survey and the Hubble Telescope. Very cool.

More Intelligent Television conference notes

The sessions before lunch at Peter Kaufman’s CCNMTL conference, given by folks from different universities, are pretty interesting. For Columbia’s portion, CCNMTL got all the footage from CNN to create a Vaclav Havel website when he came to Columbia. Diana Kleiner discussed some of the issues Yale needed to address as they put video online.

Scott Shunk from the Visualizing Cultures class at MIT spoke eloquently. The course is not only a class, and part of MIT’s open courseware, but also a platform for media and content that examines history through the images that were created at the time. I find it really cool stuff, where you take text and pictures and line it up in a manga-style way, like a graphic novel, or really, in the case of the Japanese art, a scroll. Read, in this case, from left to right.

Mike Cubit spoke from MediaVision, the video conferencing facility at Case Western Reserve – They have produced 250 projects in the past year. Encode 100 hrs of video per week with 13 full-time staff, 4 people dedicated to video production. They’ve made a content management system to do it automatically. Delivered 250,000 streams to campus community since July of 06. 450 MBpS connectivity.

93% of students at Case Western use laptops, 96% brought their cell phones, and they have high expectations regarding technology services.

They’ve produced telesurgery with 2 cameras and a laparoscope, to show the donors how the surgeon was performing the operation, and it was very effective. They webcast a premier into Second Life with 1500 avatars attending virtually.

They’re offering the content to alumni, they’re incorporating automated uploads for a live 24/7 webcase channel, and are doing a number of other interesting projects.  75% of students say they watch the videos to help clarify course concepts.  The athletes who are traveling for their sports appreciate not having to go to class.  95% of students surveyed have watched a lecture online.  79% said they felt they did better in class because the lectures were available for review.  And 98% of them would recommend MultiVision as a tool to other students.

Rick Prelinger, Prelinger Archives

More notes from Kaufman's conference at Columbia: Keynote speaker Rick Prelinger.

"Openness is not binary and content isn't simply open or closed. It's a broad spectrum.  Not the just the image of the book page, but the text too, being able to manipulate it.  The ascii text, that you can take, mashup, quote, paste into your own document.  Not just watching a movie - being able to make your own cut. ..

"The BBC creative archive has been the focus of so many people's hopes.  It's raised expectations tremendously.  I hope we can support him.  ...

"Not just the music but the midi - not just the freedome to consume, but the freedom to remix.  In the digital world this means you really have to get your hands on the object itself.  Freedom to annotate. Freedom to share the network experience with others. And interoperability.  Think of quilting.  It's an early form of sampling. ...

"We need to default to openness.  Let's declare a period of letting some different ecologies flourish in educational video.  Some of us will be about billable events.  That can happen later after we've figured this out.  Archives will be in trouble if people look at them as a place that blocks access.

"The UK lives under a rights regime that many Americans would consider Draconian.  They are doing so much more than we are to mobilize archives and make them available, as long as you work in the education field."