Will the ABC be all spikes and no hub, or will virtual hubs rule?

Last month I blogged about innovation in media, including the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s (ABC) move to develop widgets for users to aggregate ABC content on their social network sites. As I’ve said before, this is a smart move by the ABC. In taking this initiative, the ABC appears to have recognised the reality that social networks are the new hub for news and entertainment.

So it is interesting to contrast this strategy with the ABC’s primary vision to become Australia’s “virtual town square” – a hub for user-generated content. In May 2009, Mark Scott, Managing Director of the ABC, described the virtual town square as “a place where Australians can come to speak and be heard, to listen and learn from one another”. By November 2009, planning had advanced to the point where the ABC is to employ digital media trainers around the country to teach Australians how to upload their own content to the ABC’s website.

What strikes me about the virtual town square idea is that conceptually it is not  a new. Local radio chat shows are a long-standing example of user-generated content in media. The town square idea also rests on media institutions continuing to provide the hub or the space for people to use.  I just wonder how congruent the strategy is with social media has it continues to grow in importance in the everyday lives of Australians.

For when it comes to creating and uploading content, people are already doing this for themselves. The emerging social media hub is a personalised place, one that is open to friends, family, coworkers and other associates in the work place and in the community. The social media hub has user-generated photos and videos, status updates and wall posts for expressing views about whatever is of interest.  It’s a place to join groups of interest and for political activism. It’s a place where users aggregate  news feeds, music and videos from third parties, updates from their other social media sites, and feeds from people they connect with. It’s a place that links data from all over the web. In Australia, that could well mean some content from the ABC. It may well mean that data is collated and shared within user-created and run virtual communities. Users doing it for themselves.

Where might social network site aggregation and sharing go? Steve Rubel has suggested that user preferences for personalised social network sites may mean that the next great media company will not have a website, they will be “all spokes and no hub”. I’d say that is a good call.  With the widget initiative, the ABC is positioning to play in the user-defined media hub space. The corporation is doing that as well as playing host to virtual town squares on its own website. It will be interesting to see how these two plays pan out over the next couple of years.

Social self-regulation

There have been some interesting issues around social media/social network self-regulation over the last few days. 

In the UK right now there is pressure on Twitter to lift their self-regulatory performance. As far as I can see, Twitter gets rid of users that post harmful or illegal content. Maybe not as fast as they could though.

I think it was Facebook (FB) that recently got rid of some 5,000 sex offenders from their site.

However, in an interesting twist, FB has gone social in developing a new set of self-regulatory controls. FB has proposed a set of principles and rights & responsibilities on their site and invited users to comment on them. I’ve copied the draft Rights and Responsibilities statement on safety to illustrate what is being proposed. There is clearly a significant burden of responsibility proposed on users.

3. Safety

We do our best to keep Facebook safe, but we cannot guarantee it. We need your help in order to do that, which includes the following commitments:

3.1 You will not send or otherwise post unauthorized commercial communications to users (such as spam).
3.2 You will not collect users’ information, or otherwise access Facebook, using automated means (such as harvesting bots, robots, spiders, or scrapers) without our permission.
3.3 You will not upload viruses or other malicious code.
3.4 You will not solicit login information or access an account belonging to someone else.
3.5 You will not bully, intimidate, or harass any user.
3.6 You will not post content that is hateful, threatening, pornographic, or that contains nudity or graphic or gratuitous violence.
3.7 You will not promote alcohol-related or other mature content without appropriate age-based restrictions.
3.8 You will not use Facebook to do anything unlawful, misleading, malicious, or discriminatory.
3.9 You will not facilitate or encourage any violations of this Statement.

The question is, will self-regulation be effective? Where should the onus lie – on the service provider or the user: social self-regulation?

Networked citizens: second post

Continuing my review of Networked Citizens (NC) by Peter Bradwell and Richard Reeves.

Social actors becoming defined by their networks

One of the most interesting things about the evolving use of social networking sites is that people are recognising that the relevancy and value of relationships to them are far more important than adding more and more connections. I’m finding the same thing too – I have culled some of people I follow on Twitter. Indeed, taking care about your online relationships is likely to become more important over time as networking influences your identity and your reputation. This recent posting by Chris Brogan goes into some useful strategies to make more of your social networks online.

One of the observations in NC is that our online presence is defined as much by others as ourselves. I think that is true. Content posted by my online friends or connections on Facebook, FriendFeed or Twine is by any measure an indicator of my online presence – in terms of the people that I connect with and the interests we may share – as well as the content that I’m directly responsible for. Anyone looking at my social networking will make judgements about me based not only on who I connect to but what content the connection produces as well.

So the social actor could be expected to be defined in part by their online networks. Understanding social action requires less of an emphasis on the individual (and individualism) and more of an emphasis on networks. As the authors of NC say “the role of networked capital is increasing, and the influence of personal reputation, history and network presence will be vital”.

Blurring boundaries between work and social interaction

NC found that organisations are aware of the way that employees experience the freedoms of network working.  Employee social networks are becoming “…bound up with the success of their careers, present and future, inside organisations and outside” (page 41).  In other words, people are linking with peers over social networks to share knowledge, contribute to group discussion, distribute their work and comment on others, publicise their credentials and gain new forms of visibility and reputation.

Actually, according to the Digital Youth Project research findings, youth in the United States are often more motivated to learn from their peers than from adults. They like the freedom and autonomy to explore in social networking online, which stands in contrast to rigidities of classroom learning that is set by predefined goals. I would say these ways of learning and inter-working with peers online are starting to operate within the work place too. The implications for organisations are significant: it’s a case of not what the organisation can to to improve organisational learning, it’s more a case of what social networks can do for the organisation.

NC found that organisations that develop their own social networking platforms have had variable success with their implementation and impact. Inhouse networks “…provide too formal a script for people’s interactions, writing out the connections between internal and external networking, between work and social life” (page 44). In other words, those organisations simply do not get it. Those organisations have not figured out that they can no longer be in control of work-related networking that utilises employee social networks online. NC found that the most innovative responses by organisations to social networking online is to go with the grain of networks. That is very useful advice indeed.

However, it is not just a case of going with the flow in terms of networking platforms, the nature of the relationship between employee and employer must also adapt to embrace social interaction online. It’s about embracing peer-relationships and peer production. Organisations need to look beyond financial remuneration to connect with employees and their peers. Organisations need to work with the freedoms that come from self-directed exploration and self-expression within peer-to-peer relationships. Or, as Charlene Li might say, it’s about having conversations with employees, not issuing commands that come out of centralised management processes.

Social capital

Another important distinction to make between traditional networking within and between organisations, and social networking online, is that there is no ownership online, either in terms of the employer or individual. Sure, an individual increases their social capital value from networking online, but they do not own the data or the connections contributed by others. Questions about who owns your data are raging right now, and I’m not going to get into that right now. Suffice to say that, just as organisations must free-up some control over their relationships with employees, organisations cannot claim an intellectual property right on the value arising from the blurred social/work networks.

Web science rules!

On flicking through the October 2008 edition of the Scientific American (SciAm) today  – the print version – I came across an article on IT: Web Science Emerges by Nigel Shadbolt and Tim Berners-Lee (p 60). Web science was launched as a formal discipline in November 2006. The SciAm article describes some of the emergent properties, including social networking, that are “transforming society”.

This posting draws out some of the thinking in the SciAm article and my thoughts on social networking in terms of the ability of people to participate online, the connections between networked people and the consequences for the firm. I’ll also outline some of my views on the importance of philosophy, sociology and psychology relative to economics in understanding the emergent properties of the Web.

Web science looks very interesting – it draws on mathematics, physics, computer science, psychology, ecology. sociology, law, political science, economics and more. Wow – as broad and deep as scientific and intellectual endeavor used to be in the 19th century – at at least as I understand it to have been – prior to the fragmentation and specialisation that occurred in the 20th century. I think that’s great. Some disciplines, and in my view particularly economics, have dominated thinking commercially and politically for too long. Economics is too narrow to be capable of understanding the complex emotional, social and biological factors influencing the decisions that people (either individually or in groups) are likely to take.

To illustrate the weakness of economics I will quote a couple of passages from the SciAm article: “networks thrive only in the light of the actions, strategies and perceptions of the individuals embedded in them….we need to know why people who contribute content [to the Web] link it to other material. Social drivers – goals, desires, interests and attitudes – are fundamental aspects of how links are made. Understanding the Web requires insights from sociology and psychology every bit as much as mathematics and computer science” (p 62). I would have added economics to that last bit.

Now classical economics assumes behaviour can be predicted by assuming what a rational, self-maximising person would do (in theory). The emerging disciplines of behavioural economics, cognitive economics and neuroeconomics provide sufficient tacit acknowledgement that classical economics is seriously flawed, i.e economics on its own just does not cut it anymore. That is nowhere more the case than with respect to the Web.

A broader, deeper understanding that is more inclusive of other disciplines – such as the emergent Web science – holds more promise than economics. And I haven’t even mentioned the global economic meltdown!
As Clay Shirky has observed, the imbalance of power between institutions and distributed groups is being adjusted through online social networking. Social networking has the potential to profoundly change the way that many people work and how business is done. It’s about being organised without organisations. I suspect that means the theory of the firm – which came out of classical economics as far as I understand – will need fundamental reconsideration. The issue is, has that job gone beyond what economics is capable of? Web science may hold out much more promise in getting to grips with the fundamental changes to society flowing from the Web, including new business models.

Social networking in 2030… or 2015?

I seem to be spending more time finding information about past events or reading publications that are two or more years old. One example is learning what the World Economic Forum’s Young Global Leaders had to say about the future of social networking by 2030. Here are three of their expectations:

• Networks that reach accross sectors, value-chains and national borders will be standard by 2030
• Markedly different company structures and forms of cooperation are likely
• About one-third of people in work will spend more than 10 hours per week online.

I wonder what the participants would say now? I’d bet they would bring forward their expectations a few years. Here in Australia some are saying that we are poised now for a period of accelerated development in social networking in the corporate sector. I’d agree with that. Whatever else that has contributed to the rapid rise in social networking over the last two years, the need to create value in the present economic environment is going to be another driver in the use of social networking. In the Foreword to Networked Citizens, Robert Ainger said that the value of networking in an economic downturn could “mean the difference between a business collapsing or capitalising”. I do so agree with that – there is a lot of doom and gloom about and not enough attention on opportunities. Leveraging social networking is an opportunity.

Institutional failure has taken a well deserved hiding recently. The widespread reduction in trust of financial institutions has been a value-destructive force of huge proportions. But then declining respect for institutions in the public and private sectors has been evident for some time now.

Now here is the twist. Trust has been a driver in the rise of social networking. In thinking about the work, people are increasingly reliant on their social network for ideas, to solve problems and to seek career opportunities. Social networkers look to each other to play games and to socialise or find out what hot (eating out, entertainment, the latest gadgets or where to go on vacation and so on). There is a lot of trust building up through online activities.

When an organisation hires a social networker, they actually take on more than an employee. I would be surprised if who a person networks with is not already integral to some employment decisions. Social networks of consumers are factors in a firms value-chain. Social networks are channels in the democratic process.

So trust in social networks is of considerable and growing social and economic importance. But how durable is that trust. Institutions and individuals have substantive legal and commercial frameworks in place to support their rights and obligations. What of social networks…particularly distributed social networks? Now that, I feel is a Big Issue…or soon will be.

Value Chain 2.0

I’ve just read Value Chain 2.0 by Xavier Comtesse and Jeffrey Huang 0f ThinkStudio. The authors hypothesis was that when consumers shift from being passive to active, they become integral parts of the value creation process – Value 2.0. I agree.

This analysis contributes to the expanding literature on the economic and social consequences arising from the Participative Web. My last two postings (in reference to changes in the work place and social capital value accruing from social networking) are also subsets of the Participative Web.

Participation is reshaping the media too – instead of passively sitting back to take whatever broadcasters and publishers distribute, consumers are now producers and distributors – prosumers as they say.

Instead of passively taking in media accounts of political developments, citizens are now journalists and they communicate directly online with senior politicians. So it goes on.

The authors of Value Chain 2.0 observed that a company’s support environment (especially Internet-based industries):

• does not belong to the company itself anymore, but to the “whole ecosystem in which the company is immersed” (page 5). Being an ecosystem, there are multiple stakeholders
• the internal processes of a company must connect with the non-linear, complex and networked realities of the participative economy
• the value chain 2.0 is only valid for companies that have opened up their value chains to integrate their customers.

The authors refer to the ‘infrastructures’ of a company connecting directly with the infrastructures of the other stakeholders. On the face of it, that sounds reasonable but I am left scratching my head some what. There is an assumed complementary relationship between value chain 1.0 and 2.0. But it seems to me that dynamic is really the tricky bit. How much would value chain 1.0 change in the course of connecting with value chain 2.0? Will a new and as yet unknown value chain emerge? Possibly.

Frustration Media

I’ve been an avid reader of newspapers since I was a kid…that’s a long time now. I’ve got to say that print media is losing out to social media in terms of my attention now.

Sure, I’m finding that blogging, commenting on other blogs, subscribing to news feeds and participating in microblogging and social networking is seductive. It’s interactive. It’s social. It’s creative. The knowledge networks that I can tap into seem limitless at times.

In comparison, I’ve got to the point now that I get frustrated when reading a print article that either gets things wrong or presents a view that I want to challenge…there and then… but of course, I’m not able to.  

On Monday, 29 September there was a critque by Matthew Mclean in The Age on social media. Just the print version. The article was on page 11, somewhat ironically headed the ‘Comment & Debate’ section. 

The article starts with “In the near future the worlds of Facebook and MySpace will suddently implode”. Why? McClean states that “Trying to entwine personality, and perhaps even one’s self-esteem , to something that does not actually exist [it's a virtual world] is a depressing and dangerous thing to do”. Mclean refers to unspecified ‘cyber-space’ critics claiming social network users are “subsuming their own reality as a consequence [of spending time in a virtual world]“. 

Mclean goes on to site some ’status updates’ of his former Facebook friends as evidence of “…a lack of orginality and serious contemplation”. One example used was ‘(Name) is full after a fairly nice tuna sandwich’. So what?

Everyone is entitled to their opinion. Fair enough. But McClean’s article takes just one element of the Facebook experience and condems the future of social networking. That is not balanced journalism. There was no reference to other elements such as news feeds, group action (that can be social, professional, educational or political) knowledge sharing or co-creation. At a basic social level, people like being able to make connections with others. Social networking provides many opportunities for connecting with others.

According to comScore, Facebook is now the most popular social network globally. But the storey is not all about Facebook or MySpace. The data also showed that social networking activity is popular globally, attracting 580 million visitors (an increase of 25% from the year before) out of a total internet audience of 860 million in June 2008. 

Social networking has come a long way (in terms of use) very quickly. Much of it is still experimental, and still at the early stages of development. According to a survey by Synovate, some people do seem to be losing interest in social networking. Apparently, 58% of the people surveyed did not know what social networking is. These are indicators of a nascent service – Facebook only went public about two years ago.

Here is what Steve Garton, global head of media research for Synovate, had to say about users having a balanced on- and offline existence. “Most people online, regardless of culture, have a very strong appreciation of being in the real world. Their attitudes and behaviour show us that the virtual world of social networking can complement relationships, but not replace them.  There is no substitute for real life, real friends and real relationships”.  That is a far cry from users subsuming their own reality. What’s more, forty percent of survey participants agreed that online communication can be just as meaningful as face-to-face communication.

So McClean’s perspective does have some validity, but no blance. To cast down social networking on such slim evidence and virtually no analysis – under a page header of comment and debate – and with no opportunity to interact, just leaves me feeling very cool about the experience and cool toward print media. 

That kind of experience is happening to me quite often with print media. So I’ve labelled it ‘Frustration Media’. No wonder it’ s in decline.

New influencers, new digital divides and Facebook

I’ve posted before about the emergence of social media as a new form of influence. Social media includes blogging, social network sites, wikis, web forums etc – anything that’s interactive and online. A few recent developments reinforce this trend and is indicative of new forms of digital divide.

Technorati has been tracking the state of the blogosphere since 2004.

By July 2005 there were 14.2 million blogs globally with 80,000 new blogs per day. By April 2007 there were 70 million blogs. By August 2008 there were 133 million blogs with 120,000 new ones launched each day. The number of blogs almost doubled between April 2007 and August 2008.

In May 2008 eMarkerter reported there were 94 million blog readers in the US in 2007 (about 50% of internet users). In August 2008 ComScore put the figure a little lower at 77.7 million or about 41%.

In Australia, the only figures I have available are those produced by Nielsen which indicated that 48% of internet users (7.1m) had read a blog and 16% (2.36m) had created one (source . I do not have other sources to check on the reasonableness of these figures – that is the only data I have. But the data in terms of blog readership by internet users are consistent with US data.

The figures do not take account of newer forms of blogging such as Twitter, FriendFeed (microblogging) and video blogging.

Is blogging mainstream?
Technorati claims that blogging is now mainstream. That seems to be so in the case of US newspaper industry – 95% of the top 100 US newspapers have reporter blogs.

ReadWriteWeb (RWW) concluded that reading blogs is becoming mainstream, but not writing them. The demographics are interesting (and may shatter a few myths) – 74% of US bloggers are college grads; 51% reported a household income >$75,000 US.

But here is an interesting point – only 1.5 million blogs around the world are updated as often as once a week. That indicates to me that blog readership is in the direction of a small number of bloggers (relative to total number of bloggers). I may be wrong and it would not be the first time. But it’s consistent with my research on social media participation – as little as 1% account for 90% of the activity. If my hunch stacks up, those 1.5 million bloggers are influential – the new influencers. Of course some of them are from mainstream media, but from my experience a good many of them are not.

It takes effort and skill to regularly update a good blog. Social networking and microblogging are less demanding in terms of written literacy skills. It’s easy to update your message status on Facebook or MySpace, upload a photo or whatever. I would say that regularly updating an influential blog will never be mainstream.

RWW say that blogging “may become centralized, professionalized and increasingly scarce”. Maybe, but the number bloggers continues to grow rapidly, even during a time when social networking sites and microblogging took off. So we shall see. Blogging, no matter how often they are updated, continues to grow significantly. In any case, the top bloggers have become influential in my view. I may be bias though – I spend more time reading blogs each day than reading newspapers.

btw, Facebook released stats on its growth by country in the first half of 2008. Australian Facebook user growth for 2008 (to 29 July) was 43% to a total of 3.4 million users or 18% of the population on Facebook alone). Outside of the US, Australia is the 4th highest in terms of user numbers after the UK, Canada and Turkey.

Digital divides
About one half of internet users read blogs, one half do not. Add that to the number of Australians that  use the internet largely for emailing and banking etc (not user content), it adds up to a lot of people not engaging in social media. My take on this is that internet use is segmenting – there are ‘digital divides’ within those classed more generically as internet users. Analysis of internet use segmentation is likely be of interest to policy makers, businesses, educators, health service providers and other service providers – just as much as who has an internet connection and who does not.

Social media has created a new layer of influencers

Brian Solis, principal of a PR and new media agency in the Silicon Valley, coined the title of this posting in his blog on June 11, 2007: The Social Media Manifesto – integrating Social Media into Marketing Communications. I’ve only just come across it. Slug. I’m glad I did though.

Social media goes beyond the role that people have played traditionally in disseminating information, it’s much more than that. The dynamic behind the new layer of influencers is the Social Web: enabling people to create and share news and information with others through decentralised networks. The Web is a 21st century social meeting place. Like any other meeting place over the eons, people socialise, discuss politics, conduct business all in the one place.

The impact on mainstream media is significant. Mass media scale advantages do not apply to social media. Broadcaster and publisher audiences and readers now have alternatives, and they are producers as well as consumers. There are many participants…millions of people…but as Clay Shirky has observed, a few are far more active than most. It’s a pattern that Clay states is general to social media. Just a few people can be very influential.

There are ways to identify who the main influencers are. One approach is that adopted by The Advertising Age in publishing a list of the top Media and Marketing blogs in the world. Laurel Papworth identified the most ‘influential’ Australian media and marketing bloggers out of the Australian entrants on world list. Just how influential these bloggers are is unclear…but it does provide evidence of social media influence.

Brian Solis’s message to PR & marketing professionals was that “…focusing on important markets and influencers will have a far greater impact than trying to reach the masses with any one message or tool”.

Back in 2006 The Future Exploration Network(FEN) described a symbiosis taking place between social media and mainstream media (eg. TV stars setting up profiles on social networking sites). Solis’s message and the FEN media symbiosis are just two indicators of the growing nexus between social and commercial elements of the Social Web.

Solis pointed out that understanding social media is more about sociology and less about technology. Perhaps another way to describe this is to take a socio-technical perspective. This is an important issue – it means that anticipating the future of communications and media is more about understanding social developments and less about technology.

Social media is being employed by corporates. Mashable has identified 35 examples of corporate social media in action. To paraphrase Brian Solis, understanding the nexus between social media and commerce is more about socio-economics and less about economics.

What all this means is the need to go deeper into the social and cultural transformation taking place.

Over the last couple of months I have become aware of many researchers and consultants blogging, presenting and twittering on the subject of social media and social networking. There are social media start-ups in Australia, such as Norg Media - people powered news. Read about the first robot with living brain tissue. 3eep is a social networking come social media enterprise for sporting enthusiasts.

Earlier this month Brian Solis and Jesse Thomas created The Conversation Prism graphic that charts online conversations between people that populate communities as well as networks that connect the Social Web.

The graphic is an excellent visual representation of rapidly evolving and pervasive extent of the Social Web.

The 20th century is known for massive advances in technology. It is not surprising that so much attention has been paid to technology trends in keeping pace with media developments. At this point in the 21st century however, social developments rate as being of more significance as drivers of change.

ITV joins Bebo’s ‘open media’ platform and possible implications for telecommunications

Yesterday Bebo announced that ITV is to join the ‘open media’ platform “giving free and open access to premium TV content to Bebo’s community of 40 million users worldwide”.  ITV will have a ‘member profile’ on Bebo that will host multiple channels, each promoting individual programs.  Bebo users could then choose to become ‘fans’ of programs and be notified when new content is uploaded to the ITV profile.

Users will be able to integrate video content into their own profiles. Interactivity elements include teaser clips, interviews, blogs, forums, galleries, a wall for users to post comments.

Imagine the possibilities:

• highly popular individual users (those with many ‘fans’) developing their own channels based on open media content?
• viral distribution/marketing?

Media companies can use their own video players which can carry their own advertising. Bebo gets to facilitate value-added experiences to their customers, increasing the likelihood of network extension and member-retention.

Somewhat ironically, I was reading about this idea in a Telco 2.0 posting this morning that questioned the sustainability of telcos morphing into media companies. In fact, Telco 2.0 stated that “Someone who isn’t a telco will have a smash-hit way of blending video, interactivity and social networking”. Rather than become a media business, Telco 2.0 say that the role of the telco is to become a logistics solution provider.

Key trends

For me, the Bebo/ITV announcement is another indicator of the symbiosis between traditional media and social media; it marks another important milestone in the migration from closed to open content distribution, and the use of social networks as a hub for entertainment and connectivity.