Social Media’s Longterm Viability

Francis Bacon, “I heart social media.”

Jeremiah had a post which made me think. In it he reports the inevitable progression of a new media, though in an accelerated age, it’s come a lot quicker than novels or the theatre. I’m talking about “The Death of X,” of course. Give X the value of “social media.”

In the post, Jeremiah says, “I promise you, Senior Management at many Fortune 1000 companies still lack awareness, strong belief in Social Media or resources a large percent of budget.”

That got me to thinking about the longterm viability of social media. The field is full of Belief, as you’ve probably noticed. And some belief (see what I did with that capitalization? I know, clever-writing), is necessary. If you’re not attracted to the possibilities, why sacrifice your time to it?

Well, as to whether social media has a longterm future, I am on the fence. I know from experience, as well as personal inclination, that a conversation is more powerful than a lecture or a stint of monastic rustication for most things. Sir Francis Bacon spoke to this point in his excellent essay, “Of Friendship.”

His wits and understanding do clarify and break up in the communicating and discoursing with another; he tosseth his thoughts more easily; he marshalleth them more orderly; he seeth how they look whan they are turned into words; finally, he waxeth wiser than himself; and that more by an hour’s discourse than by a day’s meditation.

(Anyone, by the way, who doesn’t understand how the full scope of human literature through history is valuable to us in the present day is just not paying attention. Bacon, writing in the early 17th century, has presented us with a series of thoughts that have a direct bearing on our discussion of communications, technology and business in the early 21st. G-d I’m glad I got an English degree.)

So, the things which social media offer – conversational discourse, insight into readers, feeds, ability to customize, ease of use – these things have clear benefits, not just to the individual but to businesses and other organizations. They are also, I think, in harmony with who we are as a species. (Throughout history people have chosen more efficiency over less and interaction over solitude.)

But the question is, will social media remain a separate discipline, so to speak, or will it be absorbed into the greater body of communications tools, much in the same way that Imagism was absorbed into the greater body of European poetry. I think it will be absorbed. Already elements like feeds are starting to be found on everything from the online iteration of newspapers to search engine results. But I think Jeremy’s right. I think there’s a long way to go before we need to worry about that. I also think we should not presume. Because these technologies are proliferating with such speed, we are in the process not just of deciding what to use, but what to reject. And it’s really hard to say, before we have a large group of experimenters, what’s going to be sustained and what will be rejected.

social_media, media, communications, bacon, friendship

The Knowledge-is-Power Fiction

Within many companies there is a core belief – core because it is a cherished belief of the people who make up the companies – that “knowledge is power.” In an era in which the public’s relationship to data, information and knowledge has changed so pronouncedly, this attitude is proving to be a liability. This liability amplifies a company’s inability to successfully reach and retain customers.

Here are what I have observed to be the primary fictions regarding information.

• All data is controllable
• All data should be controlled
• Customers can and should be controlled
• The organization, not the customer, should be in control
• The worst possible scenario is the most likely
• The only attitude of an organization to its data is to secure it

These ideas are suspect for a variety of reasons, including the following.

• All data, with very few exceptions (such as some economic data) is already available to the public; between the Web, blogs, forums, YouTube, etc. everything is already accessible
• Social software is demonstrably more effective and infinitely cheaper than broadcast marketing
• Efforts to control data send a series of messages to customers that they have already rejected:

They should remain passive and ingest what data you choose to give them
They should continue to cooperate in a “knowledge economy” characterized by artificial scarcity
They should accept that you know what’s best for them
They should be grateful to you should you choose to share any of the data

As a company, or any other organization with customers, your only real choice is whether or not to influence the use of data by entering into a conversation with your customers. Choosing to remain outside of a conversation that has already begun does not make the conversation go away.

There is, in addition to inertia, an additional reason why this attitude predominates as it does. To throw down the gauntlet and “take a stand” against sharing information due to “security issues” creates the appearance of prudence and concern and is therefore politically beneficial in the short run to anyone who advocates it.

socialsoftware, customer, conversation

A Writing Life

When I started my career as a journalist I did so as the co-founder/editor/features editor/managing editor (depending on the issue and the circumstance) of Emergency Horse, a monthly tabloid-style magazine in Oregon. I started from day one with an approach to the kind of articles it would contain and how the publication would be structured. A story had to have facts, analysis and personality. It had to physically take the reader into the real world of the topic. If you wrote a profile on the film-maker Robert Rodriguez, I had better be able to picture him. If you wrote an article on the Pine Ridge mission, I better be able to smell the smoke from woodstoves in winter. Additionally, the well as a whole had to also have three things, three different elements: local, national and international, after my belief, which I retain to this day, that those are the interlocking levels that every person lives on.

This experience led to a gig as a writer for The Rocket, a Seattle music magazine with a lot of local star-power, that later gained a national reputation for breaking grunge to the world media. For The Rocket I wrote portraits of Northwest bands, locating them in a cultural milieu and in musical history, as well as reviews of bands from every pop style. The portrait allowed me both the structure of form, and the freedom, indeed the duty, to develop a personal writing voice. When Grant Alden, the editor of the magazine, took a job at the national music magazine Huh, I began to write for him there, doing larger-scale features on pop culture topics like amateur wrestling, robot wars and the relationship between rock music and violence.

At the same time I began writing business for Oregon Business and economics and culture stories for Oregon Quarterly. I was able to explore the union of economics and statistics with culture and real, lived life. When I wrote my first large-scale article on the politics and economics of the Confederate Tribes of the Warm Springs Reservation I discovered something that until that time was largely theoretical to me: The economics and politics of an area, the decisions made and actions taken in these areas by politicians, business people and others, have a pronounced, vital and tangible effect on the citizens of the area, whether that’s a reservation, a county or a city. It seems like common sense but it hit me with the force of a revelation.

In an era of celebrity fetishism, and of increasing belief in historical mechanism, this realization had the effect of re-humanizing both my job and me as an individual. As journalists and publishers, there are elements of literature and elements of entertainment to what we do, but there is also the important but workaday task of clearly communicating information and providing rational analysis to people who need it. Whether it’s a piece on beaches, Judaism, police abuse or the Hawai’ian independence movement, writing is where news meets life. It is news with a doorway.

Since that time I have written on international trade, business, entertainment, pop culture, the outdoors, development, politics and travel. I have written and reported for Newsweek magazine, the Reuters agency, the San Francisco Chronicle, the San Francisco Bay Guardian, the ten papers of the Examiner-Independent Newspaper Group, the New Times chain, Salon, the Seattle Times, NPR affiliate KLCC and others.

As far as my interests go, I remember reading about the composer John Cage coming out of a performance one evening. A journalist was outside and asked him, as he left the hall, “Did you enjoy the performance, Mr. Cage?” Cage responded, “I enjoy everything!” That’s my motto. I have found a story in everything I looked at. I have found something interesting in everything for the simple reason that every story consists of a person acting in a place for a reason. I’m interested in people, actions, places and motivations, which is probably why I am a writer and editor.

That established, it would be disingenuous to maintain I enjoy everything equally. I have found particular personal and artistic rewards in writing about minority-majority cultural relations, the economics of culture, the outdoors, land-use conflicts, music, the theatre, travel and discoveries in the humanities (archaeology, history and so on). In these areas specially, I have found that I either possessed enough of a charge to light up my own feelings about it or that the topics themselves allow the human drama to act itself out. I would enjoy writing more about theatre and doing more explicitly activity-oriented outdoors stories, where I unite land-use/economics writing with participational activities.

My work as a journalist, eventually led to communications work in the corporate world. When I first started, I had little interest in business. I always thought of business as a realm of money without the distraction of anything interesting. My experience at Ask Jeeves (now Ask.com), as its ninth full-time employee, changed that forever. I discovered how rewarding it could be to exercise a direct, tangible influence on a growing company.

Since Jeeves, I found myself implementing projects, developing and supervising teams and building content departments for a large independent video game developer and publisher, PBwiki, the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Ask.com, Trumba, iKarma, Sproutit, Entopia, Autoweb, eLance and others. I have enjoyed both the strategic communications elements of the job, such as assessing communication needs, drafting written strategy strategy documents and helping excavate messaging, as well as the organizational elements, like assembling personnel, setting dates and work budgets and liaising with senior management.

My relationship with social media is, of course, a direct result of the foregoing activities as a journalist and corporate communications professional. On the one hand, those experiences gave me the encouragement and challenges that deepened my love of writing and on the other hand, it introduced obstacles that blogging and related activities gave me a way around. I started my blog Morpheme Tales in November of 2004. I am the founder and director of the non-profit The Committee to Protect Bloggers and the project director of Spirit of America’s Anonymous Blogging Campaign. I co-founded the blogging-for-others project, Blogswana, and developed the Zimbabwean democracy blog, Enough is Enough.

My activities in the CPB led to my developing skills in a previously undeveloped area of communications, public relations. I have been interviewed, sourced, quoted and invited to write on blogging, employment and human rights issues by the Los Angeles Times, Christian Science Monitor, Village Voice, National Post, PRI’s The World, BBC News Online, BBC Radio 5, Oakland Tribune, Newsday, Philadelphia Inquirer, Sacromento Bee, National Law Review, American Bar Association Journal, Overseas Press Club of America, Wall Street Journal, Foreign Policy, CNET, Smart Money, Columbia Journalism Review and others.

I’ve purposefully chosen not to restrict this outline to my work as a professional communicator. I will mention, briefly, however, that my writing life started in childhood, as far as you can get from any kind of “professional world.” I wrote stories about spaceships and used writing to puzzle out my thoughts about a complicated world, to make it less chaotic and painful. As the English poet John Donne said, “Grief brought to numbers cannot be so fierce, / For he tames it, that fetters it in verse.”

Shy of passing away, I’ll never put down the pen. (Yes, pen. The right technology for the right job.) My professional life may end some day. My writing life will not.

journalism, journalist, reporter, editor, freelancer, correspondent, marcom, communications, employment, writing, poetry

Papa Didn’t Take No Mess

James Brown
1922-2006

James_Brown, funk

Curt Hopkins

LeWeb3, TechCrunch & Vecosys: What’s All This Brouhaha About Flapping Loaves?

LeWeb3

I normally don’t get caught up in the food fights of the Web 2.0-Social Media-Web-based Application-Web 3.0 variety. For one thing, I live in Ashland, Oregon. For another, I know virtually no one in this group. For a third thing, I have sex. However, I think in this case I am uniquely qualified to step in and separate the wheat from the chaff.

With the application of Journalism™ and the vapor-clearing power of Folderism, my patented spiritual-philosophy system, I believe I can set out the events and their implications succinctly.

In early December, SixApart, the blog software and hosting company, sponsored a convention called LeWeb3 (“The TED of the 9th arrondissement” ™) in Paris. Loic Le Meur, blogger and SixApart VP for European operations, changed the program of the convention without prior warning. Instead of James Wong showing off his Pet Shop Boys tattoo and Seth Godin acting out the “One Romantic Evening” episode of Me and the Chimp with a sock puppet and a block of wood, Le Meur instead offered dais-space to Adolph Hitler, Benito Mussolini and Pol Pot who had sex with a roast beef in a kiddie pool while vlogcasting.

Needless to say, people were furious. Some because of the apparent snubbing of Vidkun Quisling and Shoko Asahara, others because they wanted to become millionaires. Among the latter was the estranged son of British pastie-cart mogul Simon Schama, Sam Sethi, co-editor of TechCrunch UK. This publication was a franchise of the better known, richer and more powerful American version, TechCrunch.

Sam posted a commentary on the LeWeb3 “debacle” on TechCrunchUK, entitled, “The Turner Diaries.” In the post, Sethi wrote, “Loic Le Meur is stinky because he is French and he eats frogs and he is a frog.” Le Meur responded with a comment on the post in which he calls Sethi, “English.”

Michael Arrington, America’s reigning king of chimp porn and publisher of TechCrunch, sent Sethi a digital photograph of a crap in a shoebox and said, “This is your mom!” Sethi responded by wifi-ing a wiki to an RSS feed. Or something. I don’t know. Anyway, then he stole a million dollars from Arrington and was a millionaire. Then, he made another post on TechCrunch UK in which he published the Skype addresses of Le Meur’s seven favorite Polish mistresses. Then Arrington fired him and Arrington and Le Meur hugged and cried.

I trust that through the use of Folderism and the application of Journalism ™, I have made an emotionally-charged and confusing situation a great deal more interesting.

leweb3, techcrunch, loiclemeur, samsethi

Curt Hopkins

Social Media Marketing for the Neophyte

I recently developed a plan for the introduction of social media into a large arts organization. The goal was to radically remake the organization’s relationship to its customers, a relationship which was showing significant signs of strain.

This was an organization that had a decades-long history of active discouragement by its leaders of listening to customers. It was a very large organization. It had a culture of fear, was very hierarchical, discouraged innovation and had gotten away with a monopoly for a long time. But in the last several years, it had seen its market share degrade substantially and at the same time age. It knew it needed to embrace a new conversational strategy, but, in the end, was unwilling to make the internal changes necessary to make that shift.

The opportunity was huge for this organization, so their surrender to short-term comfort was a real blow to me. But the intense thinking I was forced to put into this worst-case scenario was valuable. As a result, I have come up with The Plan.

Because each company or organization’s needs, history and culture are unique, it would never serve as a practical guide. But it might have some value as a point of departure and in that spirit I offer it. It was designed to both clear the ground and, at each stage, build upon the preceding one, training the users and the customers as it proceeded.

The Plan

• Announce that the conversation is on. Period. Hold hands, have meetings, encourage an internal conversation, but remember: This is “disruptive technology.” There will be no consensus. It will—until it is a proven success and, for some, even after that—be resented and resisted. Only a determined leader, one willing to employ the force of his or her moral and organizational authority, will be capable of seeing this change through the period of adjustment to fruition. Express, as your goal, the recognition of an already-occurring conversation with your audience. Articulate your respect for the intellect and spirit of a dedicated customer based. Remind your employees that to listen to their customers is not the same as to pander to them. But to refuse to listen to them is the same as dismissing them.
• Express your intent to destroy the hierarchical, authoritarian status quo in your customer relations, replacing it with a radical openness and absolute dedication to two-way conversation.
• Set up a phased rollout of conversational tools, building both skills and comfort as you go. (See the rollout below.)
• Be complete. Do not try to have your cake and eat it too by, for instance, unveiling a “blog” upon which no one can comment. Activate all elements of each tool you use.
• Monitor each tool you roll out. You may find your blog and forum are extremely popular but simply no one wants to listen to your podcast. You may find that your company’s blog attracts too much spam and needs a more restrictive commenting policy. Again, do not act as though you know what works for all parties prior to experimenting with them. Use a combination of your own guts, vision and intuition, the expressed preferences of your audience and hard usage data.
• Experiment promiscuously with all forms of conversational tools: blogging, podcasting, vlogcasting, forums, social networking, wikis and file-sharing.
• Extend that commitment into the physical environment of your company. People who use these tools do not think of the ‘real world’ vs. ‘cyberspace’ when they fire up their computers anymore than they think of the ‘real world’ vs. ‘telespace’ when they pick up the telephone. To wit: Give bloggers press access; sponsor meetups for blogging visitors; arrange group interviews for bloggers with your company’s professionals.
• Make it understood throughout the organization that everything, everywhere, with no exceptions, is open to being blogged about, podcasted and videoblogged within the organization and generally observed, commented upon, praised or criticized by anyone and everyone within and without the organization.
• Secure the necessary personnel to implement these initiatives. Make certain their positions report to someone capable of authoratative decision-making, someone outside any of the groups in the company that have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo.

The Rollout

1. Internal wiki
2. Internal blog
3. External blog
4. Podcast
5. Video podcast
6. MySpace page
7. Facebook or other social networking service for employees and customers
8. Second Life presence
9. You Tube postings
10. Forums or public wiki
11. Yahoo or Google group
12. Mobcasting and other coordinated events

social_media, marketing, customer

That One European Web Conference

If you have a sense of humor and follow the vagaries of the social media world, check out the post on my personal blog entitled, “LeWeb3, TechCrunch & Vecosys: What’s All This Brouhaha About Flapping Loaves?” As I said elsewhere, any group of people deeply into their thing can get pretty dramatic about stuff that, to others, is bafflingly unimportant. Best to have a sense of humor about it…

leweb3, techcrunch, loiclemeur, samsethi

The Dialogic Imagination

I find systems of thought (ideologies, philosophies) to be more intellectual exercise than trustworthy tool for understanding the world. Like a t-square, a system can be moved around a page to make interesting or comic patterns but they’re about as useful at getting at the meaning of life (and the “texts” that inform it) as “The Bible Code.”

The use of systems to understand communications issues I find entirely too precious. And how these manufactured constructions could possibly help anyone speak to a customer is utterly beyond me. Although, to be fair (and to paraphrase this generation’s “Battleship Potemkin”), “Curt Hopkins is not a thinker. Curt Hopkins is a writer!” I prefer the organic patterns than develop out of direct contact with our most common material of meaning, words. The absolutes of this world remain, but do not retain permanent form. The only way to apprehend the truth, great or small, of a situation is to move intellectually in the moment, something that is impossible to do when hobbled by a system. Writing is the discipline that allows me to pursue, and occasionally find, the truth.

Still, given all the intellection that communications and social media have been subject to, it surprises me that no one in this discussion has made mention of Mikhail Bakhtin. (To my knowledge, anyway. Someone please correct me if I’m wrong.) Bakhtin, a 20th century Russian literary theorist, introduced me to the notion of textual conversation long before blogs arrived on the scene. In his book, “The Dialogic Imagination,” Bahktin outlines the development of “heteroglossia,” or multivocal discourse, and “dialogism” in literature.

My favorite essay in the book is “Epic and Novel.” Bahktin’s basic argument is this: In the epic, and in much of poetry, meaning is unidirectional. It comes from, and speaks in, one voice. Meaning is a “substance” that travels from a permanent source and fills up words like water filling up a pitcher.

But with the advent of the novel, or the proto-novel, this structure changed. Now, we have a mixing of voices and a change of direction. Meaning is produced by the interchange between voices. Sources multiply. And the apprehension of meaning becomes dynamic. A novel may have the voices of the poor and the rich, of various working lives, jargon, situation-specific speech. In my reading, it is not a change from absolute to relative meaning. It is a recognition that, again, the surface of the truth changes, its external clothing is in constant movement. Truth is found in the interstices of the multiple voices. To my mind, this is much more of a spiritual exercise than the booming voice and the arrow.

The novel, in other words, is the recognition that the text is a conversation and the truth of a situation is to be found as much in the silences as in the words themselves. The truth resides in the dynamic shapes between speakers.

I do not believe that Bahktin developed a “system” and I believe even less in the superimposition of this non-existent system over modern communications and media. I do believe, however, that the ideas are interesting and, to my knowledge unrecognized, elements of our ongoing conversation.

communications, social_media, Bahktin, literary_theory, systems

Latest Publication: Jacksonville Essay in Medford Mail Tribune

My latest publication came out Sunday in the Medford Mail Tribune. It was an essay on the changes I’d seen in the town my mother grew up in, Jacksonville, Oregon. It was published in an occasional 2A column called, Southern Oregon Journal, which doesn’t get posted online apparently. The reaction to it was very positive, which was rather gratifying.

Memories of a Jacksonville gone by

My strongest memory of Jacksonville was seeing my Uncle Arch in his volunteer fire department uniform, jacket discarded, hat on backward, dancing with a hippy chick in a tube top to a band on the back of a flatbed playing “House of the Rising Sun” during Pioneer Days.

The Jacksonville of my youth was impossibly charming, featuring characters with names like “Red” and “Oakie.” To be young and on the loose in the summertime in Jacksonville was like being free to wander around Heaven, despite the fact our father was in Vietnam. In the years since, the town has changed a great deal, some for the better and some for the worst. The same could probably be said of me.

“You know, when we moved here,” said Aunt Darsy, talking about when my family came to Jacksonville in the Fifties, “this was where they sent the poor people, the welfare cases.” It was cheap and run-down, she said. It was out of the way and the houses were those awful old things, more than a few over a hundred years old. Who’d want them?

When I was growing up the most famous resident of Jacksonville, and no doubt among the richest, was professional bowler Marshall Holman. My brother Kevin, a lane rat to this day, was in awe. Now the town is full of refugees from Hollywood and corporate America. Bruce Campbell, famous for his roles in the Evil Dead series and the Hercules and Xena TV shows, has started a Jacksonville-based film production company.

When people move into a town that has its own distinctive identity, the new residents tend to fall into two camps. The first are those who value the place and what it provides so much that they exert an extra effort to give back to it. Then there are those who, having turned their own communities into combination amusement park-garbage dumps, move in and start the process again.

I would never have imagined when I was a youngster that I would actually do Christmas shopping on California Street. But I did. At one store, a personable purveyor of kitchen implements took time and joy in demonstrating a raft of doohickeys to the few of us who had wandered in. At a nearby café I stood in line for coffee and the new owner, not even making eye contact, waved a future former customer away from the bar to make room for others. Tourists visit Jacksonville in the summer. Then, it’s all about how well you serve the town. And dismissing them without even making eye contact may not work as well in Jacksonville as it did in Santa Clara.

Just the other day, my wife and I went to Jville to have breakfast at the Mustard Seed, a little erstwhile greasy spoon across from the museum that my grandparents used to own when it was called the Polar Bar. We were joined by a group of men in Jacksonville Fire Department outfits. Not volunteers. Professionals. When did this happen? I asked. The chief said only a year and a half ago. It was a “split department,” with a volunteer crew that helped out when necessary. I was a bit proud I have to say. Jacksonville deserved a real fire department, staffed by dedicated professionals. But none of them had heard of Uncle Arch. And none were likely to have one too many, throw off their jacket, turn their hat backward and dance with a hippy chick in a tube top to a band playing “House of the Rising Sun” from the back of a flat bed truck.

Jacksonville, freelance, essay

Two New Collective Blogs on Iran

Two new collective blogs have recently been started. The first, Sounds Iranian, was created by Farid Pouya to facilitate academic discussion on that country.

The second, The Persian Impediment, was started by Cyrus Pers under the auspices of Article 19, is devoted to bloggers and free speech in Iran.

Both are worth subscribing to if you have any interest in the country, the region or the issue of free speech.

Iran, freespeech, humanrights, threatened_bloggers, Article_19, Webgardian

Curt Hopkins