Senator Michael Bennet: Proof the Best Response on Any Channel is the Authentic One
Posted: September 15, 2010 Filed under: Department of Digital Leave a comment »Talked about this earlier today, and quite gracious for TechPresident’s tracking of it. To recap: two girls recorded a YouTube video as a mini-tutorial for using some of the tools of SLDN that help people tell their representatives to repeal Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.
Then it got passed around a bunch of places (including here).
Then the Senator responded, naturally, on his YouTube channel.
Kudos, Senator Michael Bennet for taking the time to do this. And for supporting the repeal (<—-closest thing to politics you’re getting out of me).
Peer-to-Peer & Top-to-Bottom: Activism in a Digital Communication Era
Posted: September 15, 2010 Filed under: Department of Digital 1 Comment »With the catalyst of a book review that I need to tackle, I’ve been looking slightly more comprehensively at the role digital can play in the activist set. The necessary disclosure is of course that this book was compliments of the publisher, but I promise to make this less fawning and critical and more of a conversation starter.
First, a quick segue, TechPresident wonderfully shared a perfect example surrounding an online advocacy campaign to repeal Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. The cost and ease of starting a movement has gotten significantly easier, and between the video and the story (that appears to be related to SLDN.org), you can see why:
Judging from the tape, Lauren and Ellie are two college students in Colorado who, through a combination of the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network website, Google, and giggling, organize a dorm campaign to convince Colorado’s Democratic Senator Michael Bennet to back a repeal of the military’s Don’t Ask Don’t Tell policy, in what seems to be real-life mini-case study of how online-offline organizing plays out.
Why does this matter? Well, not only does lower barrier to entry help make everyone a member of the media, it also makes it possible for more people to get involved in trying to influence the public by way of that. The definition that’s losing old is that of formal “organizations,” because connection of similar interest is really all you need. [Feel free to insert my favorite allusion to the Long Tail about how the tiny corners of the end of the Internet still have room for two people with similar interests to connect at the same cost/investment as those general feelings].
We are well passed the age where (most) people need to be convinced to be online if they want to be heard. It’s almost at the point that it’s a wasted effort to not be found on the Internet. How do you get to the next step, though? You realize you want to be there, but have minimal engagement experience. If that’s where you are in an organization’s being, then Tom Head’s It’s Your World, So Change It will provide the first blueprint to getting the wheels going.
Like anything in print (and in paperback), the landscape changes quickly. If you’re actively reading daily for the next big thing and how to leverage it for your ongoing program, Head’s book may be a little behind you. For a pretty good 101, though, Head’s checklist covers the parts of online ethics, fundraising and building the presence that will certainly be helpful.
As a shaky cam and search engine tutorial can tell you, complicated isn’t always the most important thing to getting noticed online. You have to start somewhere.
Quote of the Day: The Hamster Wheel
Posted: September 14, 2010 Filed under: journalism Leave a comment »The Hamster Wheel is volume without thought. It is news panic, a lack of discipline, an inability to say no. It is copy produced to meet arbitrary productivity metrics.
~Dean Starkman, Columbia Journalism Review
via Romanesko
The Benefits of Peer Pressure in Social Networks
Posted: September 14, 2010 Filed under: Department of Digital 2 Comments »Originally posted at Edelman Digital
The collection of people who we follow, friend and like on social networks is likely an interesting cross-section between personalities, professional contacts and friends. Depending on the networks, of course, there may even be more personal ties (say, like on Facebook), and each different channel works a little differently.
One lesson that has come out recently is that the personal ties on some of these networks can also work as a little bit of a peer pressure to those who chose to air their vices publicly as a way to use the power of the hive as motivation.
As you think about programs with a public health tinge, or even ways to help reach a personal goal, think about these five ways social networks and peer pressure have helped people improve their own lifestyles.
The Twitter Diet
Late in August, New York Times media reporter Brian Stelter shared the results of his personal diet test. His goal, starting last March, was to shed 25 pounds in the 25 weeks leading up to his 25th birthday. He wasn’t going to use a professional diet or weight management program, instead, he decided to lean on Twitter. As he recounted in his column last month, the network was more than “diet and tell,” and his followers really did become a support group that forced him to keep honest. The result speaks for itself: Stelter got rid of 75 pounds by the time his birthday came around last week.
Qwitter
Just like with losing weight, others have relied on social stigma to help them quit smoking cigarettes. While one example wasfeatured in TechCrunch last month, this capability of the Twitter network has actually been tapped well before then. A neat case study in the public health engagement space involves a group called TobaccoFreeFlorida. The organization launched Qwitter in 2008 as a way to use Twitter help count – and kick – the habit.
Handling Chronic Conditions
Earlier this summer, we documented a great event from Digital Capital Week on the impact digital communication can have on public health. During the event, Susannah Fox brought up lots of interesting data points. While we do spend a lot of time trying to quantify the number of people with chronic conditions who are online, we may be overlooking the fact that once they get connected, they get incredibly engaged with others as a network of support. Within that network, the relationships become tight enough that influence is a real possibility.
Watering Your Plants
Maybe the only reason you remember to water your plants every morning is the fear that a neighbor may disapprove of dead shrubbery on your porch. What if that neighbor was actually the public Facebook or Twitter universe, and your plant didn’t just show signs of thirst, but actively told everyone you knew? Last year, researchers from NYU found a way to hook up a plant to automate its state of care, and one of the creators shared a story of how her Tweeting plant (followed by more than 3,200 people) can cause her guilt since so many know how well she’s taking care of it.
Is the Influence Real?
A feature in Monday’s LA Times took a look at some of the more academic literature associated with this phenomenon of online social desirability. The author documents a few of the older studies that often look at just one demographic or condition, thus are not completely conclusively. However, compare that with a study at MIT released earlier this month: the power of social network influence has less to do with size and more to do with the cluster of connections, i.e., reinforcement from people you know, offline or on, often leads to the result of personal health change. The moral of the story may be best summed up by a quote from Thomas Valente in the LAT piece: “You can’t divorce the content of the program from the people delivering it. The message is really the messenger.”
Reports of the Death of RSS Readers May Be Greatly Exaggerated
Posted: September 13, 2010 Filed under: Department of Digital | Tags: RSS Readers 2 Comments »The era of RSS readers is apparently behind us. If you read the numerous reports about the decision by Ask.com to shut off access to Bloglines, not only are we giving a funeral for a service that had been one of the most popular when purchased by the site in 2005 for $10m, but really for RSS Readers in general. The story spilled into PaidContent over the weekend, and this is pretty accurate sum of the conversation:
Hitwise, for instance, tells us that visits to Google Reader are down 27 percent year-over-year, while visits to Bloglines are down 71 percent year-over-year. comScore (NSDQ: SCOR) figures show that traffic to Bloglines has largely stagnated:
Likely to blame is that people are increasingly turning to services like Facebook and Twitter to manage what they read instead instead of RSS readers. As Hitwise’s Heather Hopkins wrote last February, Facebook accounted for about 3.52 percent of all visits to news and media sites. Google Reader’s (shrinking) total back then stood at 0.01 percent.
There are two baseline assumptions driving this geeky trend piece. One, it’s that RSS readers were used by the widespread audience in the first place. Even two years ago, as Steve Rubel noted, Forrester surveyed RSS adoption at 11 percent and potentially peaking. I’m sure there’s probably some more recent data, but I think it isn’t likely that it grew exceptionally in the last few years. Heavy RSS usage has really only been in a small sect of people who consume and produce a lot of content. Thanks to the trend tracking within my own Reader account, this is what I would lose if RSS readers didn’t exist:
The difference between RSS and Twitter isn’t just that headlines tell just a small part of the story (which is assumption number two), but it really has more to do with permanence. I used to categorize Twitter like a whiteboard: if you miss something, it gets erased, and if it’s important enough, it’ll stay around long enough until it gets noticed. An RSS reader works more like a lobster trap. It catches lots of things, and when it has something of value in it, aren’t you glad you checked it?
I don’t follow many blogs on Twitter directly. One, I know that the big tech ones are increasingly likely to be retweeted anyway, so I’ll see them regardless. Second, I have a big group of people I follow, and I don’t have the time to stalk the stream during the day to see anything of value that may come through. I rely on direct recommendations and my reader to make sure I do catch the things of value, which don’t get wiped away with time until I press that “Mark All Read” button. Twitter doesn’t replace that part of the RSS reader service at that point.
The adoption of RSS readers has likely come and gone, the “era” is over. But nobody ever used it to be a trend setter, either. As long as there are feeds, there will always be something there to catch them.
Facebook in the Workplace Gets Dilbert Treatment
Posted: September 13, 2010 Filed under: Department of Digital Leave a comment »
Cracked’s Tribute To Communications Majors
Posted: September 9, 2010 Filed under: journalism Leave a comment »As a former Communications major, I have to say, I’m in no way offended because everything here is accurate. From Cracked’s 6 Best College Majors (For Filling You With Regret):
Communications
Why You Chose It
Look, you get it. No college career is going to spit you out onto the fast track to being a millionaire. Majoring in Communications allows you to achieve the same degree as all your friends while doing, like, half the work.
Why You’ll Regret It
Contrary to popular belief, there’s one really difficult aspect of being a Communications major: Convincing everyone you’re not functionally retarded after they find out you’re a Communications major.
There isn’t a more eye-rolling, smirk-inducing major than Communications. And hey, maybe those Communications professors really are good at, uh, communicating because the only people who don’t seem to know that they’ve selected a joke major are the Communications majors themselves. I’ve met some very earnest ones, who speak emphatically about how their school has “the best Communications program in the country.” It’s sort of adorable. Like a kindergartner who doesn’t realize all their classmate’s finger paintings got first prize at the art show too.
Online Media’s Number Problem
Posted: September 8, 2010 Filed under: Department of Digital, mass media Leave a comment »
Last night, the Awl passed around the internal memo from Nick Denton announcing that Gawker Media’s sites (Gawker, Deadspin, Kotaku, the obvious Fleshbot, etc.) had officially passed all but one newspaper in terms of eyeballs to its content. Being bigger than just about everyone online except for the New York Times and the Huffington Post is absolutely nothing to sneeze at, and you have give Denton credit for everything he’s done in the growth of one gossip/media/culture blog into a network of news sites. As Denton wrote in his announcement:
The network as a whole drew 17.8m domestic visitors for the month. Let’s put that in context. How do we stack up, against the established names in online news. Last time we measured ourselves against the traditional newspapers’ online operations, we were fourth. But we’ve overtaken both the Washington Post and USA Today, according to Comscore. And, in this category, we’re behind only the New York Times.
Denton’s measurement is perceived to be the most important online, and for the sales side of media, impressions and the base number of people who view the content are crucial. It determines reach in absolute terms (as opposed to the imbalance inherent in the page-view measurement), and represents audience size. By this, Denton is right, he ultimately has a bigger visitor number to his network’s different sites. You have to imagine that a site or network’s visitors broadly depict the right volume of eyeballs and not just clicks, and according to Nick’s numbers, they are doing better than really just about everyone.
Well, kind of, and Lucas Graves explained at CJR the overarching number problem:
By comparison, computer networks are a paradise of audience surveillance. Why expect media outlets, agencies, and advertisers to abide by the gospel of one ratings firm, to only talk about one number, with so much lovely data pouring in from so many sources? “People use whatever numbers look good that month. It gives publishers some flexibility,” says Kate Downey, director of “audience analytics” at The Wall Street Journal, which subscribes to Nielsen, comScore, Omniture, and HitWise. “I think if everybody had the same numbers, we would hate that even more.”
What, you thought I was going to make the “Gawker’s network counts people twice because it splits the audiences across verticals and interest can overlap between, say, low-brow sports and high-brow adult content” argument? That’d be easy.
I can give you a decent guess at the number of people who come through my site, but even at the low volume I get (trust me, I’m a farm system blogger), the two tracking tools I use differ anywhere between three and five percent. Scale that to a real-sized media organization or blog, and the error of margin is getting grand. The moral of the story is that bloggers and media will always use the number that helps them the most, makes the best point. That’s right, this is the “Lies, Damn Lies and Statistics” argument.
Let’s take a lap over to another of my favorite examples in terms of fuzzy math: Mashable. At #3 on the Technorati Top 100 (and the irony of citing statistics is ripe here), it obviously has significant amounts of incoming links to accompany the other components that Technorati takes into its algorithm for comparison. They’re doing well, no denying, and the success comes from prolific content that is broad to the social media sect.
Alright, now the fun. If you ever get bored when looking at measurements, my favorite comparison are the number of tweets a certain Mashable article gets in relation to both the number of clicks and number of comments. There is some sort of social desirability in the vacuum of online media that pushes Pete Cashmore’s face out there through the retweet button as humanly often as possible, yet for the often 4-digit times these stories are tweeted…you’d have to expect greater discussions or clicks than a handful of comments. Thanks to BackTweets (h/t @AppleGirl), here’s some data for a recent Mashable piece (that, yes, I happened to be quoted in, so call it a diva moment if you will):
There are more tweets than clicks, and minimal comments across all these networks. But I know that if I’m Mashable, I’m talking about the Twitter reach, and that big impressions number that Backtype offers. Who cares that the conversation doesn’t really get going? You have something to say the audience was massive, and someone will absolutely be impressed.
Online Media’s Number Problem? It’s convenient. Whether you’re Nick Denton, Mashable, a part time blogger or the New York Times, the number you want is out there, and as long as volume means something to advertisers, that’s where it will be. This isn’t about editorial reach, it’s about eyeballs for sales. And there’s nothing wrong with trying to make money as an online media entity – but the challenge of determining who’s first will only get harder.
(CC) Photo via Flickr user Rogiro
Quote: WaPo Ombud Weighs in On Mike Wise Suspension
Posted: September 7, 2010 Filed under: journalism | Tags: Mike Wise Leave a comment »But at its core, what Wise did isn’t about social media. It’s about fabrication, which is indefensible, even if done in jest. Our business is truth. A journalist’s falsehood on Twitter is the same as a falsehood in the paper.
~Andrew Alexander, Washington Post Ombudsman, on why a suspension was warranted in the Mike Wise/Fake Tweeting saga from last week.
Quote of the Weekend: A Season Begins
Posted: September 4, 2010 Filed under: motivation Leave a comment »
“In the depth of winter I finally learned there was in me an eternal September. This definite, very real September I’m writing in, however, is the only place and time I want or need. Football season is over; football season has begun. The rest is life, and it can and will wait until February.”
(Editor’s note: Taking a break for the weekend to go enjoy my favorite thing in the world: college football. Back to regularly scheduled programming on Tuesday)
