Social Skillz

In browsing presentations on slideshare.com for presentations relevant to my work, I came across this hilarious global warming presentation. I don’t think the author — a global warming skeptic — intended it to be hilarious, but I have to take it that way for my own mental well-being. (Also, the fact that there’s no narration included leaves some of his bullet points up to your imagination to translate; good times.)

From this, we have learned both that there is a dearth of good presentations about global warming available on slideshare.com (maybe I should do something about this? Do people really go here browsing through random presentations?) and have gained insight into how the other side makes their argument (a one-degree global temperature rise? You won’t even notice it!).

Recently finished Putting the Public Back in Public Relations by Brian Solis and Deirdre Breakenridge. I had high hopes for this book based on the previous readings for my class, but man, this book was a stinker.

Setting (not lightly) aside mortal flaws of editing, this book was clearly written for a less web-savvy and probably older audience, for men and women already ensconced in a PR career. But this doesn’t excuse the fact that, despite having been published just this year, the text already seems stale, failing to reflect an accurate picture of the rapidly changing web. “Myspace is one of the most popular and successful social networks online,” the authors tell us, “but Facebook is quickly becoming a dominant force in its own right.” O RLY?

Read the rest of this entry »

Though my main post on Putting the Public Back in Public Relations focuses on the authors’ lack of anything new to offer on the subject of social media, I would be failing in my duty as an English major if I failed to point out that their publication is rife with style and grammar problems.

<diatribe>

The writing is circular enough to make you nauseous, wandering erratically from listening strategies to generic communications philosophy to warnings that employers might look at your personal Facebook account (how novel!), then meandering back to listening strategies before too many pages have gone by.

The chapter divisions are utterly worthless, perhaps devised by an overmatched editor straining to impose order on pure chaos. I convinced myself initially that I was overreacting, that the dry subject matter had driven this former copyeditor to nitpicking. That was right before the authors used the term “soup de jour” [sic]. (There are other, equally egregious misspellings.) My high school English teachers were right! If you don’t care enough about your own work to proofread it, why should anyone else care about it at all?

Later, where the word “asshole” is censored out of a quoted blog post, I threw the book across the room.

It also doesn’t help that “thought leaders” like Robert Scoble are depicted as fussy narcissists, declaring that they will renounce email and only read messages posted to their wall on Facebook, living as they must for the moment they (and everyone else, no doubt) hear the message notification tone from their cellphone while shopping in a crowded Babies ‘R’ Us store. “I am already starting to be trained like a Pavlovian dog,” writes Scoble. This is the behavior we want to encourage?

Solis and Breakenridge quote Louis Gray (is it telling that all their best points involve them quoting someone else?), calling social media experts “the new webmasters.” As long as we don’t have to be PR professionals, because those people are crazy.

</diatribe>

“We are entering the world of abundance,” writes Chris Anderson, author of The Long Tail: Why The Future of Business is Selling Less of More. It’s like the third act of any great drama: The tyrannous villains (Hollywood blockbusters, brick-and-mortar stores) will get their comeuppance, and our hero (the common man) gets his reward in the form of democratized production and distribution and, as a result, increased choice and satisfaction. Actually, it’s kind of like communist propaganda.

But there’s a catch. Without 74% of viewers tuning into I Love Lucy anymore, the closest thing we have to a unifying cultural experience these days is shopping at Wal-Mart. (Shudder.)

Read the rest of this entry »

In many ways, Here Comes Everybody by Clay Shirky feels like the screenplay for a movie based on Groundswell. (Hey, they’re already making a movie based on Facebook.) Which is to say that Shirky’s strength is found in his narrative examples of social media at work–easily the most memorable parts of the text.

The opening chapter is largely the story of Evan Guttman’s quest to retrieve a lost/stolen smartphone using social tools. We also learn about a group of Catholics using these tools to protest sex abuse scandals, about the origins of Linux in a discussion group in 1991, and about the backlash of Digg users over perceived censorship. Angry passengers demand satisfaction after being stuck on a grounded Northwest Airlines flight. Egyptian prodemocracy bloggers twitter up a flashmob.  Throughout the book, Shirky chronicles many, many instances in which institutions are subverted, overcome, or won over by social media users. This is”the power of group action, given the right tools,” Shirky tells us. Where Groundswell uses research as evidence, Everybody uses anecdotes to make its points.

In contrast to Groundswell, Shirky chooses not to judge whether these changes are good or bad (for me, for you, or for your business), focusing instead on their ramifications. “These changes are profound because they are amplifying or extending our essential social skills, and our characteristic social failings as well,” he writes. “We are living in the middle of the largest increase in expressive capability in the history of the human race.” But the tools themselves are only part of the equation. In order to be effective, tools must be combined, according to the author, with a “plausible promise,” as well as a bargain with the user. By looking at these three components of any group using social tools, we can understand the reasons for their success, or their failure.

Of course, the book would be a pretty big downer if most of the stories ended in failure. Instead, Shirky provides provocative insights into why they succeed: Open source projects “get failure for free”–Linux has no employees, only contributors. Meetup succeeds not inspite of failed groups, but because of them. Bloggers aren’t ruled by a 24-hour news cycle. Flickr escapes prohibitive costs by eschewing management. Wikipedia doesn’t have to be efficient, only effective. Each example is an elegant illustration of the “jujitsu” discussed in Groundswell.

The book does bog down a bit when Shirky delves into the history of hierarchical management structures in more detail than is warranted. However, this does introduce one of the book’s more fascinating concepts, that of the Coasean floor. Activities that are valuable to someone, but too expensive to be taken on by an institution due to transaction costs, are said to be “lying under a Coasean floor.” However, with advent of social media, tasks as complex yet seemingly trivial as assembling photographers to cover a local parade and publishing their work can now be accomplished by large, loosely organized groups operating under the Cosean floor, “do[ing] big things for love.” This complements my suggestion in my Groundswell post that social media is, essentially, the new grassroots. Shirky agrees, noting that even if the participants of a group all live in the same town, it’s likely easier for them to organize online than in person.As a side note, I was intrigued by an early reference to class and race in the book, which are topics that we haven’t dealt with much in class yet. Also, in the Epilogue Shirky discusses how the availability of these tools is expanding worldwide, but suggests it may be as long as a decade until “most of the world” has access. The role of race and class (and gender!) in social networks is one I’m eager to learn more about. Just scratching the surface, for example: on at least one social network, men don’t write black women back. If this also applies to, say, Twitter, then as that service goes global in the next ten years, will these trends (or are they prejudices?) become a bigger problem? Or will they just become fodder for the next decade’s version of He’s Just Not That Into You?

From a recent episode of The Simpsons. I have to say, the first 5-10 minutes of this episode made me forget how bad the show has gotten in recent seasons. Unfortunately the show is 22 minutes long.

Above is a 3-minute “video” I made for the class using Animoto. I’m really pleased with the final product, although Animoto has its flaws — you can’t save a work in progress, and you’re limited to ~50 characters per text slide. Still, for $3, you can produce something like what you see above, which ain’t bad!

Hello everyone! I’ve recorded a podcast discussing the new documentary The National Parks: America’s Best Idea and a campaign the Sierra Club is running alongside the program this week.

And here’s where you can view the series online (through October 9, 2009).

In reading chapter two of Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody for class, the text was practically crying out for an illustration of the concepts discussed using internet memes as an example.

Chapter two, “Sharing Anchors Community,” focuses heavily on an analysis of traditional management structures (as described by Ronald Coase in the 1937 paper, “The Nature of the Firm”), and how the transaction costs inherent in such structures are eliminated by social media.

Shirky cites as an example the vast photo pools on Flickr dedicated to Coney Island’s annual Mermaid Parade, and how collecting photos of the event was “too unimportant to be worth any institutional effort.”

In contrast, consider lolcats. If photos of an event attended by hundreds of people annually are worth no effort, what value must we assign to ridiculous photos of domestic cats? Yet today, doubtless more people know what a lolcat is than have ever heard of the Coney Island Mermaid Parade (lolcat repository icanhascheezburger.com receives as many as 1.5 million hits per day).

Lolcats, along well as other internet memes (fails, YTMNDs, etc.) are not just “under a Cosean floor,” they’re buried, beneath the house, rising like the undead occupants of desecrated graves to exact a terrible, hilarious, revenge of procrastination on millions.

Which leads me to this question: Is the elimination of those transaction costs a good thing? Maybe having a value threshold was a good thing, ensuring that only those ideas with some merit would ever be acted on by groups of people. With those barriers gone, will we now be subjected to the raw, unfiltered collective consciousness of the masses, wretched and fascinating as it is? In comic books, no one actually likes being telepathic, and this is exactly why.

Oh, and in case you thought this was going to be over soon? Americans are now spending 17 percent of their time online on social networking sites, an increase of over 300 percent from the previous year.

Mashable’s talking about an August ‘09 survey showing that 84 percent of social media campaigns aren’t measuring return on investment, and 40 percent said “they didn’t even know whether they could track ROI from their social tools.” Further evidence that many communications professionals are ignoring the advice of Groundswell and launching social media programs without a clearly defined goal. (Well, I guess it’s possible some of these companies had a goal, but decided not to measure their success?)

So does this mean that there’s a poor ROI on measuring ROI? That the generalized benefits of an uncoordinated social media presence are good enough for most? Or maybe the 16 percent that are measuring are at the front of the class?