I wonder whether, social media is a term invented by advertisers who are trying to get close to the networked society? People are not a media, people are people, and they form connections, groups, associations and communities. At the absolute level some think that is a nation state, though I suggest there is level higher than that and that is humanity. Something I know is very close to David’s heart and MO.

DC writes

Today I can finally announce I’ve embarked on a new journey – as Managing Director and co-founder of a new business: 90:10. It’s a journey that emphasises a meme close observers will have seen emerging in my work for quite some time (it’s described in my Communities of Purpose paper written in March 08). That is, that in order to truly benefit from the power of the network we must think less about media (social or otherwise) and more about how and why people organise to get things done. 90:10 takes that to its logical business-oriented change-empowering conclusion. 90:10 is aimed at enabling efficiency, innovation and transformation through social technologies.

‘A business that operates without a comment box, operates broken’.

Is David’s shorthand of how all businesses and organisations must function and operate in the networked society.

So, if you need some real goodness in your company why not give the 90:10 a call – besides they are lovely people.

From Interruption to Engagement – the journey to truly engaging in the networked world from Alan Moore on Vimeo.

For over 150 years our economies, culture and society have been shaped by astraight-line logic producing considerable economic success. However, in the dawn of the Networked-Society, a straight-line logic of getting stuff done becomes a barrier to progress. Why? Because, the change wrought by the
networked society is structural ­ challenging how markets and organisations have co-evolved over the last 150 years.

This creates a dilemma. And the dilemma is this ­ How can firms and the people that work in those firms, develop coherent marketing strategies/products and services that are premised upon No-Straight-Line principles ­ when they have been versed only in Straight-Line thinking ­ at
least for the over 35¹s ­ from birth? So if the 20th Century was about straight line thinking around commerce, media and communications, the 21st Century will be about a no straight line approach defined as Engagement.

And to bring some sharper focus to what we do here is a film made by the Dutch Think Tank Freedom Lab that explores the central themes of my current research.

The basic outline is this… “I needs we, to truly be I,” wrote Carl Jung, and that is why we as a species are on a quest to rediscover our role in society. Humanity, deconstructed, over the last 150 years, to the point of deconstruction is now deploying communication technologies to regain its true identity. The rise of the networked society is no accident, and a new philosophy is needed to help us with our quest. The core areas are these:

1. System breakdown: We are witness to a structural and transformational change in society.

2. The wholesale pursuit of material wealth has in fact come at a terrible cost for society

3. Threat: the current unsustainability of humanity

4. The true nature of humans and the technology of man: their intimate relationship

5. Liberation Day: We need to examine the various solutions and tools that can enable us to thrive and survive, to take back that which makes us whole as people, individually and collectively.

6. Simplexity: The digital and highly networked world seems to have created a more complex way of living. We need to learn to deal with this complexity, by understanding how it works.

7. Deschoolling: Our imperative is to de-school ourselves in a philosophy that has driven us into a cultural, ideological and economic cul-de-sac.

8. New Philosophy: We need a new language to help us understand the deep context of the change we are in

9. The no straight line universe: We need to explore its shape we need to feel it; physically, intellectually, and emotionally

Nearly two-thirds — 63 percent — of Americans surveyed by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press believe that news stories are often inaccurate. That’s a flip from when Pew first asked that question in 1985, when 34 percent of respondents believed stories were frequently inaccurate.

Pew also found that 74 percent of respondents believe stories tend to favor one side of an issue over another, up from 66 percent two years ago.

The findings indicate U.S. newspapers and broadcasters could be alienating the audiences they are struggling to keep as they try to survive financial turmoil. Pew Research’s questionnaire didn’t attempt to gauge how shrinking newspapers and other cutbacks at news organizations are affecting people’s perceptions, though the reductions probably haven’t helped, said Michael Dimock, an associate director for the center.

I thought this was also interesting though hardly surprising,

Yet those who go online for national and international news also give the press relatively low ratings. Notably, 80% of the online news audience says that news stories are often inaccurate, which is only slightly less than the percentage of Fox News viewers (86%) and greater than the proportions of other news audiences expressing this view. In addition, 39% of those who say their main source of news is the internet say news organizations are declining in influence; that compares with roughly a third of Fox News and CNN viewers and smaller proportions of those who rely on network news and newspapers.

However,

Though the public is increasingly critical of news media organizations, most people think it would be an important loss if major news sources shut down.

More than eight-in-ten Americans (82%) say that if all local television news programs went off the air – and shut down their web sites– it would be an important loss.

I wonder how we feel about that issue in the UK? We wring our hands about giving up local democracy, as local newspapers shut down (replaced by local council broadsheets), we deny the freedom of the press – an attitude that has prevailed in northern Europe since the dawn of representative democracy. Yet at the same time media owners have struggled to readjust to market conditions. Yet how free is the media? And how representative is it of important news and information? In 2006 I posted this,

Over a ten-month period, the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) documented television newsrooms’ use of 36 video news releases (VNRs)—a small sample of the thousands produced each year. CMD identified 77 television stations, from those in the largest to the smallest markets, that aired these VNRs or related satellite media tours (SMTs) in 98 separate instances, without disclosure to viewers. Collectively, these 77 stations reach more than half of the U.S. population.

The VNRs and SMTs whose broadcast CMD documented were produced by three broadcast PR firms for 49 different clients, including General Motors, Intel, Pfizer and Capital One. In each case, these 77 television stations actively disguised the sponsored content to make it appear to be their own reporting. In almost all cases, stations failed to balance the clients’ messages with independently-gathered footage or basic journalistic research. More than one-third of the time, stations aired the pre-packaged VNR in its entirety.

Although the number of media formats and outlets has exploded in recent years, television remains the dominant news source in the United States. More than three-quarters of U.S. adults rely on local TV news, and more than 70 percent turn to network TV or cable news on a daily or near-daily basis, according to a January 2006 Harris Poll. The quality and integrity of television reporting thus significantly impacts the public’s ability to evaluate everything from consumer products to medical services to government policies.

To reach this audience—and to add a veneer of credibility to clients’ messages—the public relations industry uses video news releases (VNRs). VNRs are pre-packaged “news” segments and additional footage created by broadcast PR firms, or by publicists within corporations or government agencies. VNRs are designed to be seamlessly integrated into newscasts, and are freely provided to TV stations. Although the accompanying information sent to TV stations identifies the clients behind the VNRs, nothing in the material for broadcast does. Without strong disclosure requirements and the attention and action of TV station personnel, viewers cannot know when the news segment they’re watching was bought and paid for by the very subjects of that “report.”

Further

1). VNRs are aired in TV markets of all sizes

2). TV stations don’t disclose VNRs to viewers

3). TV stations disguise VNRs as their own reporting

4). TV stations don’t supplement VNR footage or verify VNR claims

5). The vast majority of VNRs are produced for corporate clients

6). Satellite media tours may accompany VNRs

So where does that leave us? I am not so sure

SB: Right now there seems to be a lot of confusion between social media and the definition of community. The idea of community is right now as fairly elusive one and is being bandied about like it’s some sacrosanct term. Community built around consumption is, for me fairly transitory. It reminds of an unruly mob during the time of the Paris Commune. We’re  not going to get a whole lot of sense out of this right now.

Then there’s these dire warnings coming from people like Forrester, that brands will be excluded from consumer choice because somehow they are now being defined by communities and no longer by the brand owners themselves. I think this is both disingenuous and untrue. Forcing brands out of their hands via social media created communities is only part of the story. While even as early as 2005 Tomi Ahonen and Alan Moore warned marketers, in their prescient work ‘Communities Dominate Brands‘, that if they didn’t cut loose the shackles of the traditional advertising agency and TV network model they would lose their brands. I’m seeing many of the same warnings again this year, particularly in the wake of the great financial crisis. But what real, if any, changes have we seen to this paradigm? No brands have fallen by the wayside because they didn’t have a social media strategy or because they continued advertising in traditional media.

JB: Brands may not fall by the wayside as such, but brands will become stronger because of their consumer engagement strategies. For example, the well known Dell Hell scenario certainly impacted on that organisation negatively, but by engaging with the community they came back stronger and more relevant to their client base. If they hadn’t done that who knows where that organisation would have been.

Some brands come to social media like Dell in a ‘reactive’ fashion knowing they now need to engage with consumers due to a negative event/issue. Other brands initiate the online engagement strategy ‘proactively’, understanding it will add value to their knowledge base, understanding the client better, product development and customer service.

SB: Ahonen and Moore predicted the consumer and their connected communities, would select the products and brands that are engaged in the most relevant dialogue with them. Somehow this would become the centre of a new modern and sustainable marketing model. While I think there are some massive shifts occurring,  I don’t think we’re quite there yet with this because I’m not sure anyone understands these kinds of ROIs yet.

Metrics, metrics, metrics. I can’t count so I am unable to help, but the fact is one can see where commerce is to be made, if one digs around a bit. And the big question is what is advertising and marketing in the 21st Century? When we live in a search economy, a participatory culture, where 25% of al media is made by us and there are 3.5 billion mobile phones of the planet. Networked economics?

Some called Tomi and I polemicists – I like to think we highlighted something critically important for brands, business and organisations. Remember our subtitle was, “business and marketing challenges for the 21st Century”. This went way beyond in my view the social media paradigm that so many are so now engaged in.

The highest and best form of efficiency is the spontaneous cooperation of free people.

That’s us then!! Reboot Britain shouts from the rooftops – let me paraphrase – We must become the change we want to be.

An extraordinary one-day event which will take a totally different look at the challenges we face as a country and the new possibilities that – uniquely – this generation has to overcome them.

We face an unprecedented set of challenges: a decimated economy, ever increasing demands on our public services and trust in our political system at an all time low.

But instead of more pessimism, how can we begin to punch through the gloom and take advantage of the radically networked digital world we now live in to help revive our economy, rebuild our democratic structures and improve public services?

I am included in an impressive speakers lineup [list below]

Martha Lane-Fox | entrepreneur and campaigner | twitter

Gillian Tett | Assistant Editor, FT

Howard Rheingold | Technology guru | twitter

Sir Michael Bichard | Director, Institute of Government

Jon Gisby | New Media Director, Channel 4

Craig Newmark | Customer service rep and founder, craigslist | twitter

Alan Moore | Media and Communications | twitter

Paul Miller | CEO, School of Everything | twitter

Lee Bryant | Director, Headshift | twitter

Andy Hobsbawm | Co-founder, Green Thing & Agency.com[block]25[/block]

Daniel Heaf | Digital commissioner, 4iP | twitter

Included in this very innovative and interactive event are possibilities for you to engage with these far ranging topics

Demos who present their Progressive Conservatism thinking which will look at the major challenges we face for public services,

Reboot SICamp and PICamp [health and politics]

WeBank Given the failure of traditional banks and financial instruments, are peer-to-peer platforms the answer or just a fleeting phenomenon?

Jeff Saperstein presents ‘Busting Open Silos,’ his view on how our organisations need to restructure in order to adapt and grow

For the People, By the People Two sessions from UK Online exploring what users of public services actually say.

Innovation Live wants you! Join the collective mindpool at Reboot Britain for a live brainstorming  session to develop practical solutions out of the content of the day.

Social by Social will challenge you on how to make social technologies work for local neighbourhoods

Learning Without Frontiers slate a number of sessions, from how technology is changing cognitive development, to redesigning our schools for the new age.

In the project I am currently developing [No Straight Lines] I write,

As I continued to research the evolution of the media and the commercial communication environment. I had a dawning realisation that what I was witnessing was something deeper, more profound, more epochal, more revolutionary.

It is in fact a communications revolution. And once you have stormed the Bastille you don’t go back to your day job, just ask anyone; Robspierre, Lenin, Che, take your pick. Why was this happening? What were the deep social undercurrents driving this revolution that is as big, if not bigger, than Gutenberg inventing moveable type?

And as Jamais Cascio explained to me; technology can be wielded as a powerful agent of social and political change, as it is indeed  being wielded today with great force and ferocity. We seem to have arrived at a crossroads, faultlines run through every aspect of our society – this makes me fearful  that few truly understand the underlying reasons of what  is happening now, nor the implications of what happens next.

So I want you, Reboot Britain wants you [sign up here] – we need each other, as Jung wrote

“I”
needs “We” to truly be
“I”

The Guardian’s Open Platform project has caused a bit of a stir, at a time when mass media of all kinds is struggling to work out business models that have a better fit with the networked world.

The clever bit about the Guardian’s plan is that they don’t pretend they have the answers – they are sharing what they have with the rest of the world in the hope that a bit of global crowd-sourcing will evolve a sustainable solution.

At least that’s my take. But let Dr Chris Thorpe tell you more.

I myself have a real interest in the future of newsbrands, Good journalism is not only supported by advertising, Currency of information, the future of newspapers. And here for those wanting a deeper dive.

Stan Schroeder, writes

In short, Guardian will let anyone use their content on their site or web service. How do they plan on making money then? Well, this bit from their announcement might give you a clue:

“The Guardian is positioning its Open Platform as a commercial venture, requiring partners to carry its advertising as part of its terms and conditions.”

Therefore, instead of trying to charge you for content that can easily be duplicated ad infinitum, Guardian will let anyone duplicate and use their content and then slap ads on top of everything. Launch partners include The Cass Sculpture Foundation, which is using Open Platform to add Guardian articles about British artists to its site, as well as Stamen and OpenStreetMap, which developed a service that makes use of users geotagging Guardian articles, positioning articles, images and videos on a map.

Will it work? It’s too early to tell, but it definitely beats going out of business, and Guardian is showing some guts by embracing new business models instead of clinging on to old, defunct ones.

It definitely beats going out of business, precisely. Unfortunately for many newsbrands they have not experimented nor explored to the extent nor the degree that they should have done. I remember meeting the CEO of the Johnston Press and imploring him that, JP needed to do 2 things…

1). Think hard about how to create more value for its readers and to invest in that

2). Think harder about how in achieving [1] they delivered greater value for their advertisers

This had to be done as a web/mobile – ergo ‘digital’ strategy. Unfortunately, this did not happen. And the net result is the parlous state of JP today. And frankly I think there is no going back. Which is in fact tragic, because it has significant ramifications for peoples livelihoods.

Steven Moss’s subtitle to his extensive piece in Friday’s Guardian was

Across the country, local newspapers are being cut to the bone or closed down. Is regional journalism doomed? And if it is, what does that mean for local democracy?

He asks this question because

It’s a terrible cliche, but local and regional papers are caught in a perfect storm (national titles are having a hard time, too, but that’s for another day). The local readership is ageing; high streets are losing their shops; the three key regional advertising markets – property, cars and jobs – have dropped dramatically. The Newspaper Society, which represents the local press, estimates the year-on-year ad slump at between 10% and 20%, but in those three key sectors all the big groups put the fall at more like 40%, with the bubble-deflating south-east the worst affected. Sixty-plus papers, mostly “frees”, have already been closed – the Long Eaton Advertiser is unusual in being a paid-for casualty; 1,000 or so UK journalists have lost their jobs.

There is something deeply disturbing about the decline of newspapers, especially local ones.

My visit to Bath is instructive. Metro (another DMGT title) – free, generic, rootless and thus emblematic of our deracinated age – is in a dumpbin by the lift in the Chronicle’s offices; an unusual example of inviting an accomplice to your murder into your house. The centre of Bath itself is devoid of newsagents; they have been squeezed out by food shops and a Sainsbury’s. “That hasn’t helped us,” says Holliday. “The newsagents have been very loyal in the past, but they’re struggling.” The signage on a former newsagent, called The Editor, in Westgate Street still gleams, but it is – for one week only – a charity shop raising money for guide dogs.

Will our high-streets become centres for charity shops and supermarkets? And if so what is left? But also look at what news has become, and its value to us – free. Metro and free sheets like it – represent the age of cut and paste journalism or churnalism, and so it becomes litter on trains, and tubes, and buses. Nick Davies in Flat earth news writes

These are corporations that think greatly about commerce and casually about journalism. This is the heart of modern journalism, the rapid repackaging of largely unchecked second-hand material, much of it designed to service the political or commercial interests of those that provide it.

So what is there to learn about the Guardian’s initiatives? That one must focus on the core product – good journalism, writing, and work very hard at exploring what news and reporting looks like in the 21st Century and how one creates greater value for advertisers as a consequence. Trust is also of paramount importance.

I have one last thought and it is this – the furniture of advertising is different in the networked society, and in the search economy – we have to change the currency of advertisng – from display, to something that is more like a service, that enables people. That is more relevant, more contextual, more life- enabling. That is where the money is.

And I picked up the FT this morning to find an editorial about the incident too. The FT also points to the fact that Daschle had unpaid taxes and that was the cause of the problem.

However, Rosen and Greenwald point to the fact that what makes this a bigger story is indeed the fact that Daschle had been peddling his contacts and influence to organisations and companies, in exchange for large amounts of cash, to enable them to get through Congress legislation that would directly benefit them, which not necessarily be in the public good. This in their view is the bigger story, but because the practice is institutionalised within Washington, it is not regarded as ‘the story’.

Funny that, and of course we had the whole ‘cash for questions’ issue in the UK, and then recently four Lords again using their influence, so it is claimed, to change legislation to the benefit of companies in exchange for large amounts of cash.

Again, we see symptoms of perhaps a bigger malaise… which is in fact not being reported on in the mainstream media.

In Audience Atomization Overcome Rosen writes

In the age of mass media, the press was able to define the sphere of legitimate debate with relative ease because the people on the receiving end were atomized  connected “up” to Big Media but not across to each other. And now that authority is eroding.

This ability to connect, to go round, over, under and through what were for years barriers to information are the means by which we challenge the authority of mainstream media.

In a long conversation with a friend of mine yesterday, we talked about trust. In a networked society, the ability to reach out and search for information in a  non-linear fashion destroys the information fuedalism we have lived in for so long. As modern day serfs to the feudal lords of mass media, and mass consumption, we have discovered our sense of civic pride, because we can once again re-engage with the world in a way that creates meaning for us.

This is a problem for mainstream media, because that is not part of their DNA. The problem then is that trust erodes and over time that equates to the erosion of revenues. The big media boys then do the obvious, they cut staff, they slash budgets – just look at the Johnston Press in the UK. And as they begin to bleed cash on a quarterly basis, they continue to do more of the same.

Not realising that they are approaching this in the wrong way. And how could they? How could they be able to look upon the world with fresh eyes?

In the meantime, individuals when connected, reconnected, superconnected, begin to see that re-engaging in the public sphere might be a good thing and so the reinvent the world a new. Citizen journalism being but one aspect of that. So we see the rise of Pro-publica, Globalpost and the Huffingtonpost, as just 3 examples

My view is that, as a consequence of this shift in authority, companies have to ask themselves about the role of their organisation in public life. How do they do good? How do they bring perceived value? And how on earth do they build trust?

Writes the Sunday Herald

And of course the banking collapse and its knock-on effect are well documented as stalling the economy, and advertising the bedrock of Newspaper revenues get hammered.

CEO Tim Bowdler commented that the extent of the fall in share price was “disappointing” but “if you look at our peer group it is not dissimilar”.

But I argue it still did not have to be that way.

I agree with the statement that there was a lack of an effective digital strategy, because there was a complete lack of knowledge and comprehension of the economics of living in a pull economy, defined by search, proximity, relevance, contextualisation, metadata, pointing, linking, trust and recommendation. what type of advertsing inventory comes out of that?

The search economy is defined bu the quality of information. The Johnston press misunderstood, community and what life is local really meant in the super-connected age. They sold digital inventory as one sell dead-wood inventory. Leaving them over exposed when times got tough.

Its not that journalism, news and newspapers are redundant in this time of epochal change, but the people that run them are. Because they have failed to truly experiement, they have failed to ask themselves what is advertising in the 21st Century?

If the mobile and the Internet were conceived, designed and constructed as bi-directional communication platforms, why are we in broadcast mode? How do we we use these low cost tools and capabilities to drive our business? Its the same for the music industry – rather than asking why 57 million people where file sharing – they focused on shutting the thing down. why are we using the furniture of advertising that was essentially created 500 years ago in a bi-directional, networked society and economy. C’mon do you think Gutenberg would still be slaving over a wooden printing press and hand stitching bibles. No he’d be blogging, and vlogging, and moblogging.

But Pandora was out of the box – the little minx, she wielded the stick of creative destruction with great aplomb.

Back to Tim Bowdler, though to be fair the board of JP must take full responsibility, he said – “if you look at our peer group it is not dissimilar”.

and that’s right because they all think in the same way. They could have experimented, brought in new metrics, road-tested stuff in the real world – limited exposure, but with great learning. Quick rapid iterations.

Sticking in a chair at a Journo school aint gonna quite crack it in my humble view.

The historic drop resulted from a worsening economy that sharply exacerbated long-term challenges already confronting the newspaper industry, and it affected all kinds of newspaper ads. National ad sales fell 18.4%, classifieds sank 30.9%, and the biggest category, retail, slid 11.7%. Newspapers’ online ad sales, where everyone is hoping some part of the future business model resides, accelerated their decline with a 3% drop. Online ad sales slipped 2.4% in the second quarter.

Reports Adage – Read more on Newspaper and economics

I predict we will see newspapers fail, the economic downturn is the final scene in this play. However, what newspapers have not done, nor most media, is to understand that in a networked society, the currency of advertising has to evolve, that offers more perceived value to both its recipients and its creators. An information ecology and economy judges information on its contextual relevancy, its timeliness and its ability to enable decisions and transactions to be made. Unfortunately, few have been able to grasp this completely and be able to deliver the type of value that signals the potential of survival as the gales of creative destruction whirl around us. The Link Economy is different to the Controlled Content Economy. We need a new logic and common sense and only then can we comprehend this miscellaneous world.

In the networked world, the only thing worse than being sampled is not being sampled.

said Siva Vaidhyanathan.

Which brings us nicely to the story of Robert, Flickr and a Paul Smith sweatshirt costing $235.

Robs design compared with the $235 Paul Smith design

The story goes like this – Rob goes to NY, meets some mates they take him to a Paul Smith shop he buys a sweatshirt as the design looks uncannily like his own design. He takes a pic with his iPhone, gets a bit bugged as how alike his design is to the Paul Smith one, and then discovers it is a direct copy of a part of his design.

Later that evening, Lance, Tara and I went out to dinner at Cookshop. I wore the new Paul Smith shirt. How could I not! At one point during the meal, I went to the mens room. As I stood at the sink, I looked up at the mirror and saw my collaboration with Paul Smith. I couldn’t stop laughing.

In the spirit of full disclosure, I must admit I am not completely innocent in all this. The birds I used in my coding study were culled from other people’s Flickr photos. I didn’t ask permission. I searched Flickr for images of flocking birds and traced a total of seven small silhouettes which I used in the original flocking study. However, I did not then go on to print my versions on clothing and sell them for hundreds of dollars each.

So what now? I have no idea. I am not angry. I am not feeling vindictive. I am flattered and amused. This isn’t like that Urban Outfitters/Johnny Cupcakes incident. I don’t actually feel wronged. I do feel that some designer for the Paul Smith brand committed an embarrassing act of laziness. This should not be excused and I imagine they will be dealt with accordingly. I don’t get a ton of blog traffic but I would be surprised if this didn’t eventually get back to the Paul Smith organization. And Mr. Smith, if you are reading this, Lance and I have always wanted to spend a week in London.

In the networked world, the only thing worse than being sampled is not being sampled.