Author Archive
I Went to SXSW and All I Got Was…
SXSWi 2009-Sketchnotes-Final Badge by Mike Rohde
This year was my first trip to the SXSW Interactive Festival, and I’m finally getting a chance to cull my impressions and thoughts about everything I experienced.
Event:
- It’s all about the people. Yes, I saw some inspiring and informative sessions, but I also came away having met a lot of amazing people, some for the first time and some who I’ve known or worked with but never met in person. The sheer quality of most everyone I met was pretty incredible. I was a bit nervous attending by myself, but I quickly learned that you’re only alone if you want to be at SXSW.
- It’s ok to check out. Wonderful people aside, I reached a point around the 4th day where I kind of maxed out – on lack of sleep, on energy of making new introductions, on mental capacity to focus on one more session. So, I unplugged. I rented a bike, and spent a couple of hours outside in the sunshine. Biked the path around the river, ate Tex-Mex at Chuy’s & blackberry ice cream at Amy’s, perused the rows of boots at Allen’s Boots. It was probably the single best decision I made the entire time I was there, and gave me the energy to finish out strong. (I also had to learn at SXSW that it’s ok to walk out of a session if it’s not doing it for you. I got stuck in one that I really should have left, and didn’t make that mistake again.)
- You can’t be everywhere. I had to come to terms with not being able to attend everything I had hoped to. (There were a couple days in particular where a number of really strong sessions overlapped.) I’m sure I missed some great things, but know I will be able to catch most everything online. (Some videos are already up on YouTube, podcasts on SXSW and more video promised to come.)
- Preparing is good. I spent some time before leaving for SXSW planning out a schedule (with built-in overlaps) using both the my.SXSW site and the SCHED*SXSW site. (The SCHED site ended up being the better performing of the two and included more unofficial events.) I imported both to iCal and my iPhone, and it made decisions and getting around much easier (especially if I was ditching one session and heading to another).
Themes:
From the various keynotes, presentations and panels I attended, seven themes emerged for me. (I tried to sample across a range of corporate, non-profit and education sessions – areas where I’m involved professionally – and also a few purely inspirational sessions that weren’t necessarily business-related.) (more…)
Facebook vs. Control: Smackdown of the Week
smackdown stage by linxbas
There’s a big brouhaha going on about Facebook’s new(ish) Terms of Service, updated earlier this month but called into the spotlight this past weekend on Consumerist and a number of other sites, including the MSM.
The biggest part of the debate hinges on who controls a user’s content, and what happens to that content even when users have removed themselves from the site.
Protest groups have formed on Facebook. Bloggers like Perez Hilton are calling for a boycott. People are deleting their accounts (but, with about 175 million members, I wonder if that has even a symbolic effect?).
The outcry prompted a response from response from Mark Zuckerburg on the Facebook blog yesterday, and says, among other things: (more…)
My Year in Review Comes Down to One
Into the fog by raindog
This time of year is ripe for reflection about the year past and prognostication about the year to come. Best-of lists, predictions for the new year, goals – many good & inspiring thoughts and ideas, but they’re so numerous it can become hard to digest even one more.
But I hope you will take just a little time to digest this one.
As I thought about the year past, all of the power of social media came down to one thing.
It wasn’t new in 2008, but it was new to me.
The most truly powerful communication and social media tool I used last year was CaringBridge. It’s a free, non-profit service for individuals or families during times of illness or treatment. It allows you to create a personalized website (either public or private) with a journal/blog-like feature, a section for photographs, a welcome or background page, and a guestbook for people to sign and leave messages.
It’s a service I hope most of you will never need, but it’s important, and it’s important to know it exists should you, or anyone you know, find yourself in need.
I was referred to this service during a time of intense family crisis last spring. During family crises, just like business crises, it can become difficult and burdensome to communicate. Have we communicated with everyone we need to? Have we forgotten anyone? Does everyone have the same information or the information they need? These questions are pretty universal, during any crisis. But all the updates, all the repetition – it can be crushing during a personal crisis.
CaringBridge was a lifeline for my family. The founder of CaringBridge describes it as a kind of “compassion technology,” combining “the human elements of care and concern with the Internet’s ability to connect people.” The private site we created gave us one central place to keep far-flung family and friends informed, and we drew strength from the messages of support from around the world.
Often with social media, we focus on what the tool or service is, versus what it does.
This is a powerful example of the doing. And something I will try to take with me into the new year.
When a Tweet From Mumbai Reaches Around the World
Mumbai by karmadude, under a Creative Commons license
Like many people in the U.S., I was out of town for Thanksgiving when I heard about the Mumbai attacks last week. After a Wednesday afternoon spent grocery shopping in Denver, CO, my family and I returned to my relatives’ house, turned on the news, and saw our first reports about the horrific attacks on CNN. Trying to learn more, I pulled up Twitter on a laptop, and searched for reports about what was happening. A flood of information started coming in.
Apparently, I wasn’t alone in using Twitter to follow the crisis. Twitter is a social networking tool that allows users (“Twitterers”) to post 140-character updates (or “tweets”) to their followers (or the public – over 80% of the 6 million users have public pages), either online, via text message or through other tools. This New York Times article notes that, “At the peak of the violence, more than one message per second with the word ‘Mumbai’ in it was being posted to Twitter.” Approximately 80 tweets were sent via SMS (text message) every five seconds (CNN).
(more…)
A Sea Change in Political Communication
David Katz via Obama for America
It’s been a little over a week since the 2008 election came to a dramatic close with Barack Obama as our new President-elect. There’s been a lot of discussion and agreement about how the Obama campaign was significantly better at harnessing the power of social media to drive support, action, donations, votes, and eventually victory, remapping the way a campaign communicates with supporters along the way.
The Internet has certainly been used in previous political campaigns (notably Howard Dean’s). But the tools, the candidates, and the rate at which constituents consume various social media channels have evolved tremendously since 2004
The younger generation voted heavily for Obama (the NYTimes notes that “more 18-29-year-olds went to the polls this year than in any election since 1972,” with 66% voting for Obama). As noted on another blog, “this group is likely to engage in two-way conversation with staff, volunteers, and clients, rather than one-way broadcasts, the style of communication most often used by organizations now.”
A Firm of Foodies
It can be hard to describe what characterizes the personality of a firm, what with different personalities, areas of expertise and converging (and sometimes diverging) passions. But here at Logos, one thing that brings us all together is FOOD.
Yes, food. All of us came to Logos with an interest in food, but we really discovered our mutual obsession in Japan. I was working for a client of Logos at the time, and Anthony, Fred and Barbara were all in Kyoto as part of the team. Over our long, sleep-deprived days (and during our few and fleeting moments of down-time), we talked food. And of course, being in Japan, we talked Iron Chef.
When Rumors Have Legs
It was like a bad game of telephone. An old Chicago Tribune article about United Airlines filing for bankruptcy protection in 2002 either did or didn’t reappear on the Web site of the South Florida Sun-Sentinel newspaper last weekend. United says it did, the Sun-Sentinel says it was an old archived story that was mistakenly picked up by Google as a new story after it appeared in its “Popular Stories” section. (Read Google News’ explanation here.) A research firm, Income Securities Advisors, found the story when it did a search on bankruptcies. The research firm then posted it on Bloomberg News, thinking it was breaking news.
Innocent mistake? Well, instead of mishearing the details of the weekend from a friend of a friend of a friend (and no one being the worse for wear), the airline suffered a nearly 75% loss of the value of its stocks in less than an hour before trading was halted on Nasdaq. The stock ended up mostly rebounding by the end of the day – once United corrected the reports and trading resumed – but still closed at a loss.
Everyone is now pointing fingers, and the SEC has begun an “informal investigation” into the matter. (more…)
When Blogs and Journalism Collide
The New York Times reported yesterday that a blogger, editor and writer, Joshua Micah Marshall from the Talking Points Memo, has been named the recipient of the 2007 George Polk Award for Legal Reporting. The award honors his reporting of the firings of eight United States attorneys, and, according to the announcement, his “tenancious investigative reporting sparked interest by the traditional news media and led to the resignation of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.” Quoted in the article, Marshal says, “I think of us as journalists; the medium we work in is blogging.”
The NYTimes article illustrates a few key trends:
- Further democratization of news. This is the “first Internet-only news operation to receive the Polk.” With today’s online media, journalism is further democratized, and people are reading, listening, sharing and following the news, no matter where it’s originating.
- No barriers. Internet-only news sites have the relative freedom of time and space to write continuing stories that build as the research and investigation builds, not just stories that start and end in one edition.
- We’re all in this together. This type of reporting combines three elements, pulling them together into one big picture: original reporting, reports from other news sites, and reports from readers. More on this in a minute.
- Influence goes both ways. And finally, blogs and online-only news sites are increasingly influencing the reporting of mainstream media publications. (See Brodeur’s survey summary from January 2008 on the influence of blogs on journalists.)
More on point 3: this style of journalism has been dubbed “link journalism” by blogger Scott Karp of the Publishing 2.0 blog, defined as “linking to other reporting on the web to enhance, complement, source, or add more context to a journalist’s original reporting.”
Karp’s discussion stems from the NYTimes ethics article on John McCain last week. JigSaw (via Jeff Jarvis at BuzzMachine) highlights how this kind of journalism makes reporting better, even for mainstream publications (and maybe especially when they get things wrong). In the context of a discussion that focused more on the reports and tips from readers aspect, Jarvis had previously described something like this as “networked journalism.”
This idea of networked journalism or link journalism goes beyond the “citizen journalist” phrase used to describe early bloggers, an idea that still puts the burden of production on a single individual or small group of individuals. Now, the new in news is as likely to come from the audience/readers of those blogs as from the bloggers themselves.
Photo credit: network by dsevilla
Something in the Media Air
There have been a number of developments in the media sphere this past week, some more high profile than others. What the following three do have in common is that mainstream media and social media are converging in ever increasing ways.
1. Yahoo! is feeling no love for Microsoft’s unsolicited takeover bid, and Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. stepped forward to see if they could become the white knight to save Yahoo! In addition to the usual sources, I’ve been following the coverage over at All Things Digital. I particularly like the running coverage of the internal communications surrounding the deal, which is always a precarious balance during times like this. (And also illustrates that “internal communications” is increasingly an oxymoron.)
As a side note, I’m including this item for the week even though there’s been some debate whether Yahoo! is a media company, or something else. But that’s another discussion for another day…
2. For several years, we’ve heard that anyone and everyone can be a journalist. Now, we’re hearing that from journalists, which is a game-changing proposition. CNN launched a new, all user-generated news site called iReport.com this week. While CNN had been using user-generated submissions for a while (also under the iReport name), they only use items on CNN that have been selected and verified by an editor. The new site is all user-generated, all the time (with some minimal oversight for inappropriate content):
“Welcome to a brand new beta site for uncensored, user-powered news. CNN built the tools, you take it from there. All the stories here are user-generated and instant: CNN does not vet or verify their authenticity or accuracy before they post. The ones with the “On CNN” stamp have been vetted and used in CNN news coverage.”
As reported on Mediaweek.com, there are two competing angles to this development. On the one hand, using the CNN brand with unfiltered news risks damaging the credibility of the parent brand, which is “The Most Trusted Name in News,” (at least according to their tag line). On the other hand, as Jim Walton, president of CNN Worldwide, says in the article, “It starts with the audience…. Audiences are more and more comfortable participating in news. It’s a natural extension for us.” The question to be seen is if the balance between credibility and creativity will be possible.
Missing the Bullseye
Target Corp. recently got into hot water over their response to a blogger, and the response at the center of the conversation/controversy is instructive in what companies should not do when responding to the blogosphere. The story is also a recent example (among many) of how mainstream media and social media have converged. The story started on the Shaping Youth blog, whose writer wrote to the company about concerns over this Target ad. The blogger contacted Target, and got this response:
“Thank you for contacting Target; unfortunately we are unable to respond to your inquiry because Target does not participate with non-traditional media outlets. This practice is in place to allow us to focus on publications that reach our core guest.
Once again thank you for your interest, and have a nice day.”
It’s no surprise that the company’s response – and the story – gained legs and started making its way around the blogosphere, and finally made the leap to mainstream media yesterday on the New York Times.
Side note: I’ve found it interesting that when I’ve talked about this story with different people, most poeple’s reaction is surprise – because it feels so uncharacteristic and out of brand character to them.