Social Media Is Organic…
Launching a blog is like growing tomatoes. At the earliest stage it’s anyones guess as to what might grow. And, even if you get a plant out of the ground there is no guarantee it will bear fruit…
Hugh gets at this when speaking to our Digital Nomads blog. We’ve got it off the ground and we’re watching it grow. Conversations are blossoming. Hopefully it will bear fruit in terms of ideas and information that benefit digital nomads. But who knows. He says it well:
The blog is still in its early days. I can see it still struggling, like all new blogs do, to “find its voice” [Hey, if a blog can find its voice in under twelve months, I consider that good going]. Of course, it’s going to have the same problem that ALL corporate blogs do i.e the problem of balancing BOTH the needs of the perennially kvetchy, perennially skeptical, perennially dissatisfied blog-reading public, and the commercial interests of the company. Harder than it looks. The fact that they are giving it a go AT ALL I find encouraging.
And herein lays the rub for so many of us in the communications profession. For the decades we have been doing what we do we’ve been trained, brainwashed and beaten into delivering perfection. Perfect press releases. Perfect press conferences. Perfect press clippings.
Suddenly we’re confronted by a medium that is inherently imperfect. We don’t control the conversation. Topics come and go. You allow others to publish where once you built walls. And, to work, we need to work quick which means publishing, warts and all… And that is what makes it exciting…
I’ve been part of the creation of more blogs than I care to remember. Some worked. Some didn’t. The main learning along the way is that success correlates closely with the willingness of the communicators to take risk and embrace the spirit of the medium. And that means letting go.
Loving Wikipaterns – Are you a Gnome or a Leech?
Patterns as a lens through which to look at your Wiki and its users is a very cool idea.
Over the years I’ve consulted to all shapes and kinds of organizations on social media – on ethe of the things that participating forces is the need for organizations to actually learn how to have a conversation. Within this notion is the need to understand the role you might be playing at any given point – and the role others are playing. This is where the “patterns” come in – things like:
- People Pattern | Leech: A leech takes content out of the wiki and sends it to people another
way, usually by email. This reduces peoples’ inclination to visit it,
and potentially creates confusion because information is coming from
multiple sources. - Adoption Pattern | Magnet: The magnet pattern involves having some content exclusively on the wiki to draw users to it.
Think about using Patterns to educate and manage your next Wiki or blog project – it will definitely help drive its success. Thanks to Mike for the pointer…
US Bloggers Set for Journalistic Shield
A US bill that would shield journalists, including bloggers, from revealing their sources has cleared the House Judiciary Committee, an important stage in becoming law. There is already legislation in the UK which protects journalists and bloggers.
The US Free Flow of Information Act protects journalistic sources generally, but does include several exceptions regarding terrorism, national security, imminent death and trade secret leaks.
How The New Opinion Leaders Drive Buzz On The Web…
Another interesting piece, this time on how opinion leaders drive buzz…
Bloggers, discussion-board denizens, and social networkers are courted by marketers, who believe they build buzz that can make or break new products and Web sites. But there’s growing controversy surrounding such efforts, and debate over just how much sway these opinion leaders really have…
… The notion that a small subset of individuals has disproportionate influence was formulated more than 50 years ago by academics Paul Lazarsfeld and Elihu Katz in their book Personal Influence: The Part Played by People in the Flow of Mass Communications. But it was Malcolm Gladwell’s 2002 best-selling The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make A Big Difference that popularized the notion. Gladwell divided people into connectors, people who bring other people together; mavens, who get a kick out of passing along knowledge to others; and salesmen, who like to persuade others of the validity of an idea or product. When taken altogether, Gladwell argued, these archetypes create “epidemics” that spread like viruses throughout the population, triggering massive trends that couldn’t be achieve by traditional top-down imposition of messages on the general public. The Influentials, by Jon Berry and Ed Keller, published a year after The Tipping Point, comes to many of the same conclusions.
It’s critical to understand, however, that all these proponents of opinion leaders as drivers of social and commercial trends aren’t talking about media stars or personalities, but about otherwise seemingly ordinary members of a community who, through accumulation of knowledge or number of connections with others, act as catalysts for change.
Blog Censorship…
The Blog censorship raises its ugly head not once but twice today.
First, from GMSV, the US military is clamping down on bloggers requiring that superiors approve of Blog posts. There are a large portion of US employers that require this if the blog is on company time and about company matters. This clearly doesn’t work for the Military who have a far broader reach.
“This is the final nail in the coffin for combat blogging. No more military bloggers writing about their experiences in the combat zone. This is the best PR the military has — its most honest voice out of the war zone. And it’s being silenced.” — Retired paratrooper Matthew Burden, editor of The Blog of War anthology, on a new Army directive requiring soldiers to submit the contents of blog posts, message board comments and e-mail to their superior officer for a security review.
I read a few of these blogs and have been surprised that they have been able to post so freely. But then, isn’t free speech one of the things we are fighting for?
Second, Digg removes posts with code in order to avoid legal action – and then says they’ll stop doing that and bear the consequences. Some call this move to keep the site up an act of commercial imperative over community responsibility. I call it commonsense expediency. The notion that bloggers can post whatever they like, anytime they like, is nonsense.
In a post, founder Kevin Rose published the key himself and said: “We’ve always given site moderation (digging/burying) power to the community. Occasionally we step in to remove stories that violate our terms of use (eg. linking to pornography, illegal downloads, racial hate sites, etc.). So today was a difficult day for us. We had to decide whether to remove stories containing a single code based on a cease and desist declaration. We had to make a call, and in our desire to avoid a scenario where Digg would be interrupted or shut down, we decided to comply and remove the stories with the code. But now, after seeing hundreds of stories and reading thousands of comments, you’ve made it clear. You’d rather see Digg go down fighting than bow down to a bigger company. We hear you, and effective immediately we won’t delete stories or comments containing the code and will deal with whatever the consequences might be. If we lose, then what the hell, at least we died trying.”
