In the classic
marsvenus 'argument' the
topic according to venus is not the point, but something else which mars has been
chipping away at that leads to an #fom08 outburst.
That is followed by make-up, or if it happens enough times, breakup. So there's still no post-coital cigarettes happening between the mars
nvenus of the Aussie blogosphere, but 2use a venus
ism the fact that there is a heated discussion goin on at all shows the
parties do care to start with. but do they care enough and r we arguing about the right things ?
I don't think, being a 9c degree Monday morning,
I'm going to do a journalistic recap of hesaid-shesaid Australia's own Sarah Lacy moment, nor will i wax poetic on the death of newspapers (
i guess rupe paid billions for wallstreetjournal because?) or the hitwise research @mspecht tweetrd that
aussies visit social networks more than newspaper/media sites (and that the relative category shares overseas is even more pronounced)
what i will recount is my
last 3.5 years of pounding the social media beat as a service provider to media companies, while also indexing 150K blogs via gnoos, and cracking out the odd 1000+ posts.
blah. ill keep the list to some basic bulletpoints so i dont spend more than a coffee break on this when i should be working on said client projects or my own game breakers.
1. the biggest thing (well justification) stopping media companies adopting user generated content is legal; firstly
interpretation of defamation policy, followed by
copyright. if a newspaper provides blogging, social networking to their
"citizens" and provide them with their own blog and subdomain and they then say kevin rudd is a scientologist etc, then their legal department says this may expose them to defamation exposure, as if one of their journalists wrote the piece.
the consequence is to not offer blogs, heavily moderate blog comments, and wait for someone else to own the online community space and then buy them. (interesting to note they have not had to do this as all the major marketshare of users social media time has been on overseas domains ie facebook, blogspot, wp etc)
2. the second legal area to slow down media companies use of social media is copyright - ah, youtube/viacom/judges providing user ips of all videos watched ring a bell ? closer to home -
afl suing foxsports/news i think for linking to afl youtube clips it was as telstra had online rights ? anyway, with video + copyright risks, if a 100 year old newspaper is to setup an online community where users upload video they dont have the right to, that is not preferred accg to the legal depts of media companies. operationally too, no1 wants a fulltime editor(s) assigned to moderate user generated content, esp as the cost/benefit analysis is highly negative as the
sales people cant monetise social networking, y'know ?2b. there are then smaller less obvious areas of copyright risk such as images, like when my flickr account was deleted because i had celebrity images in it. (while i can reblog images on tumblr, but the attribution is slightly different) anyway think smaller -
what about a users avatar ? or an image they upload in every post ? suddenly
u need filtering tools to ensure avatars are not breaking copyright. not joking. this stuff has absorbed my last 3.5 years, and these are the areas that need to be solved for media companies to take the lead.
3. with australia's oligopoly structure and cross media rules, no one wants to be first in user generated content. not surprisingly these copyright and defamation views are shared by the corporate departments and appropriately briefed collins street lawyers of most media groups. while there are ways to mitigate and manage this, easier to wait for someone else to trailblaze, then buy them as mentioned.
except u cant buy facebook, twitter, blogspot, wordpress. or u could try and license them as news did by investing in netus who funded allure who licensed defamer/gizmodo. but this is just using pro contract journos blogging from home, combined with
rerouting dentons australia traffic and syndicated content to allure.
4. most blogs arent media anyway : 80-90% plus are personal with a very low readership (under 20) comprised of family, close friends, and the author pressing refresh:) most ppl dont aim to establish an ad funded editorial based business.
what is interesting tho at the intersection, is the term "news" - i'm deep in speccing one of these hybrid 2.5 properties for a traditional media business,
and the term "news" came up. facebook's zuckerberg took alot of heat as he seems to, when he launched
Facebook's Mini-News Feed (new version pic from jake jarvis below)-
for the latest updates and actions by your FBfriends. He argued that was news. Not the politics/entertainment/business/sports type of news. But the latest member activity type of news.
And even when it comes to news' news : we are finding it from friendfeed + twitter links, even if i end up on theage.com.au, news.com.au, or alleyinsider.com. So what is mainstream and what is social media is a continuum aiight.
5. There is no doubt major media are going to need to be able to meld to these new definitions of news and make decisions about which part of the value chain it wishes to participate in;
-
Does it want to reinforce it's in the authoritative, best researched, written by the most qualified expert space ? (like weekend afr which i luv, or the $100m
portfolio.com experiment, or rupes plans to broaden wsj and take it cross platform, global)
-
And/or is it about being a infrastructure that is the first to break news ? Faster than other media incl blogs. In a
TMZ.com for all news model. (when u see the 24/7 newsroom of guardian, fairfax, news etc i dont think this ethos is at all unachievable when compared to a spare bedroom in atherton) For example, name an equivalent of tmz or perezhilton in australia for entertainment blogs by either bloggers or msm. There isnt its quite sad. The closest is prob
defamer.com.au - which while well written hasnt connected to the audience, as evidenced by the low level of (local) blog comments.
- Can it accurately aggregate and display the current conversations that are occuring locally ? Including the linkage, themes and rships running thru MSM pieces and blogs. Techmeme has shown the benefit in tech/2.0 space in algorithmic clustering, and this is why AOL bought sphere.com. Newspapers need to decide if they are going to bring in valuable 3rd party blog sources if they are reporting on the same story.
- How far into the quality video game are newspapers going to go ? You look at how fast the qik.coms and ustream.coms of this world are moving. Groups like fairfax have adopted video well for properties like drive to show video of cars they are reviewing. But this could go further. A flip camera for every reporter and a denton like revenue share based on traffic and adsales ? (btw the
How low can u go? debate re
Linkbaiting traffic vs publishing quality pieces :
There are real tradeoffs here :)
- Aggregating and enabling Micro-blogging, referral of micro-news between readers ala the friendfeed, twitter model.. Will newspapers aggregate conversations around what is happening ala
darkknight reviews, where people are eating locally that are happening on twitter, and the links they are sharing of youtube videos, delicious tags on friendfeed. Will they whitelabel identica or like news did for the recent pope tour setup a
popedownunder twitter account and run a very strange set of tweets following the pope and his red loafers around.
- Attention vs Creation : Facebook's definition of news has an inherent understanding that
news as well as being personal, can be about non content creating events - Those that became friends. Movies that were watched. Pictures that were commented on.
What media groups will need to decide past the basics of the "Build it and they will come" of offering blogging/online community is how much mining of attention gestures they want to do; How many people favourited a story. What restaurant is being highly reviewed in a particular area.
Who do the readers think will win the AFL B+F vs what journos/umps think. And I wont even get into the back end folkonomy tools and indexing and filtering algorithms needed for this :)
- Personalisation vs Serendipity : Should newspapers be going for one size fits all, or one size fits me, or practically what is the ratio between the two, and what controls are provided for the user to decide.
When does personalisation play a part and how does it crossover into crowd sourced serendipity? I'm spending more and more time on this - and frankly there was more personalisation in IE4 when i worked at ninemsn in the mid90's than there is now on Australia's newspaper sites and portals.
And its not like igoogle has done much better, altho it doesnt surprise me the next igoogle version is going to be alot better, and continue to cut share from au media groups with outdated feature sets. It's a pity the conferences downunder arent spending more time on this in the way
defrag and other leading US conferences around Web 3.0 and the implicit web are...
OK I better stop there with my farely unstructured post. Alot of us on the nonconference front line doin it every day, meeting after meeting, milestone after milestone,
equate this period to 1997-8 when online advertising was a tiny sub 1 percentage of total ad spend. Now its probably 7% on its way to 10% which would put it at an equivalent share of people's media consumption.
It's not a fait accompli that major media can just integrate social into its brands and operations, and in each case there needs to be an evangelist and a decision maker who can get things started :
The continuing share that google is taking of ad dollars and facebook/myspace of users, means its increasingly affecting user topline and revenue bottom line. So the business case for social media approval in media orgs is getting order of magnitude better than when i started this slog a few years ago.
Just like most startups will die from having a bloated or niche offer that doesnt solve a real problem, so will major media's social media initiatives fall into known traps; Either build it and they will come assumptions that content will just be created, which it wont. Or over moderation and suffocation of community due to legal worries.
Me-tooism will also likely topple a few wanting to be the facebook of travel/realestate/music/politics. But failure is better than not starting. As a percentage, the exception will succeed.
So I've ended up a waysaway from the
what is the difference between a journo and blogger. And frankly I'm not really sure or care. The best bloggers are likely ex-journos, or if they've succeeded (ala an arrington) its not coz they weren't journos. Lots of good journos were lawyers like Mike was too. And ironically, the real issues needing addressing downunder firstly -
so we can stop this being an overriding excuse to not do online community are legal : Copyright and Defamation. More understanding of social media research would be useful to be able to communicate the opportunities too (blogs + social networks are bigger than media) Then there are big product fit issues about which part of the UGC value chain should newspapers participate in. I guess I better put in my recommendations (remember im going to sell my products here, as this is my day job, not a 2 day conference respite:);
1. Clustering of the Conversations happening around the stories being published by a newspaper online. So readers can consume related blog content to a feature. Newspapers would get more traffic and become a more authoritative source on stories. Fact is there are more bloggers blogging on a story than a paper can afford journos. Combining the two equals three rather than being stuck with one.
2. Creating vertical social networks around mastheads, categories and stories; So consumers can be involved past a moderated blog comment. Dont make it a social network about nothing, the focus is people participating in the stories, topics and individuals covered by the companies properties.
3. Microblogging aggregation + Autotweetable content - As above cluster microblogging conversations in the mix, esp at a hyperlocal level and when specific linkage to a story.
More so, turn stories into 140 character autotweetable micrchunx with one click. Take the work out of it for the consumer-creator. Being able to clip, widgetise, reblog stories, pictures and links is key. And drives more traffic, google juice etc. It keeps the story going.
4. Personalise me already. I dont care about rugby. I like Porsches. I work in technology, web. I have 1800 google reader feeds I can provide to you in opml. Here are my 3000 delicious items. You have alot of content, give me the subset that is interesting to me. I'll click on what I like and dont like, and over time your system will have a pretty good idea of what I like.
5. Show me what other like people, friends are doing. Ala Facebook mini-news feed. I'm always interested in the stories that people i like are sharing. Dont let friendfeed have all the fun. Their members are so mountainview focused anyway....
OK thats my feedback from the social media frontline... it would be good if we could get rid of these institutional stereotypes that ppl r using, and instead use more real life case studies. The battle is hardfought, and moves slowly inch by inch! As The Joker says somewhat prophetically “
what doesn’t kill u makes u stranger.” RIP.
15 hours later and I'm home from a day on the road, altho unfortunately not in the classic monaro which this retro graphic at our really starting to settle in now Port Melbourne office' local cafe. I subscribe to so many feeds (close to 2k) that many of the blogs that come up in greader I have no memory adding them or who the author is. But a good headline, an interesting pic and some grabbing first para copy, and I'm quickly adding share on google reader, a further subset I'll tag in delicious and fwd to suitable associates/clients, and a smaller amount again, will end up as fodder'ere.
