technology in translation™

why social media marketing matters

One of the best things about the evolving web is that you can create good content, put it online and then re-use it on multiple sites.  And you can find other people's content on blogs and media services like YouTube and Flickr and share it on your site.  Slide Share is a place to discover good business information, and it's a particularly rich source for social media thinking.

Marta Kagan has put together a great presentation about what social media is and why you need to make it part of your marketing strategy - whether you're a small business, large corporation, activist group, non-profit or sole practitioner.  She pulls together useful marketing statistics with social media basics. 

What The F**K is Social Media?

view presentation (tags: socialmediamarketing marketing web2.0 socialmedia)

stage craft, alchemy and the attention economy

I ran a breakout session at the Theater Communications Group Conference on Saturday, with SITI Company's Brad Carlin, about social media and the network we're developing: SITI Extended Ensemble (SEE).  The notes and slides are in my previous post.

The discussion, which included people who are running and working at small, large and mid-sized non-profit theatre organizations throughout the U.S., raised questions about the nature of live and virtual experience, media literacy and multi-generational participation.

We didn't have enough time for everyone to participate, so I'm hoping we can continue the conversation through comments on this post.  I'm going use this as an opportunity to put up an extended post which is a draft of an essay I'm writing, and welcome discussion that informs its development.

Because my background is in theatre, I'm mindful of the storytelling, facilitation and audience engagement skills theatre professionals can bring to social media practice.  I've been attempting to seed an awareness of the confluence of theatre and social media through conversations with theatre colleagues.  The best theatre work contextualizes ideas, humanizes political issues, stimulates imagination and creates intimate public space where people can share an experience.

The skill set required to develop these events and engage audiences has enormous potential to improve the quality of online content and interaction and to fuel a participation loop that, in an ideal community, moves from face-to-face to online conversation and back again, creating broader, richer experiences.

The challenge, of course, is how to get people's attention - whether they're inclined to choose online participation over attending events, or the other way around.  Consciously or not, the attention economy is at the center of the daily work of theater producers and practitioners, from both artistic and management perspectives, as they program seasons, rehearse and market productions and raise the funds to make it happen.

Michael Goldhaber: ...the real new economy revolves around seeking, paying and sometimes receiving what is truly scarce now — the attention of other people. Money, corporations and material goods are all quite secondary.

John Hagel: Attention economics will reshape business economics.  It is not just a question of re-thinking marketing, but re-conceiving business.  Yet, with a few notable exceptions, we are only at the very early stages of mapping out what attention economics means, much less what its implications are for business.

I am reminded of Seth Goldstein's piece on Media Futures: Alchemy, Brecht 2.0, which looks to theatre directors Bertolt Brecht and Jerzy Grotowski to contextualize what's happening in social media:

social media: online and in person (notes from the tcg workshop)

Here are the notes from the presentation I did with Brad Carlin, of SITI Company, at the TCG conference on Saturday.

In addition to posting my presentation slides here, I've set up tcg_workshop_links tag on my del.icio.us account with relevant links.

You read the notes that accompany the slides by reading the extended post, or download them by clicking here.

 

social media ground rules

Catching up on my social media reading, I ran across Dion Hinchliffe's post, Social Media Goes Mainstream.  While I don't think it's mainstream yet (soon though!),  Hinchliffe proposes five ground rules that flesh out the "what" of social media and are essential to facilitating conversation and community engagement.   

Defining Social Media: Some Ground Rules

1. Communication in the form of conversation, not monologue.  This implies that social media must facilitate two-way discussion, discourse, and debate with little or no moderation or censorship.  In other words, the increasingly ubiquitous comments section of your local blog or media sharing site is NOT optional and must be open to everyone.


2. Participants in social media are people, not organizations.  Third-person voice is discouraged and the source of ideas and participation is clearly identified and associated with the individuals that contributed them.  Anonymity is also discouraged but permissible in some very limited situations.


3. Honesty and transparency are core values.  Spin and attempting to control, manipulate, or even spam the conversation are thoroughly discouraged.  Social media is an often painfully candid forum and traditional organizations -- which aren't part of the conversation other than through their people -- will often have a hard time adjusting to this.


4. It's all about pull, not push.  Like John Hagel and John Seely Brown observed in the McKinsey Quarterly a year ago or so, push-based systems, of which one-way marketing and advertising and command-and-control management are typical examples are nowhere near as efficient as pull systems.  Pull systems let people bring to them the content and relationships that they want, instead of having it forced upon them by an external entity.  Far from being a management theory, much of what we see in Web 2.0 shows the power of pull-based systems with extremely large audiences.  As you shape a social media community, understanding how to make embrace pull instead of push is one of the core techniques.  In social media, people are in control of their conversations, not the pushers.


5. Distribution instead of centralization.  One often overlooked aspect of social media is the fact that the interlocutors are so many and varied.  Gone are the biases that inevitably creep into information when only a few organizations control the creation and distribution of information.  Social media is highly distributed and made up of tens of millions of voices making it far more textured, rich, and heterogeneous than old media could ever be (or want to be).  Encouraging conversations on the vast edges of our networks, rather than in the middle, is what this point is all about.

The full article is well worth reading on Hinchcliffe's Web 2.0 Blog.

social media: concepts & contexts for activists

I spent Saturday at the Detention Watch Network conference, where I was on a panel about social media with Mallika Dutt of Breakthrough, moderated by Doua Thor of Southeast Asia Action Center.

You can download the presentation slides as a pdf which includes my notes and some of the web sites we discussed.  I've compiled a list of examples and resources on the social bookmarking site del.icio.us - using the tag detentionwatchtech.

Reflecting on our conversation, I return to questions about content and the personality of the organization, rather than looking at the social technologies as a panacea.  Don't jump on the trend wagon until your goals are clear.  It's likely that starting a blog, joining social networks or sharing videos can support your advocacy and education work, and you can implement them in small steps.  But they could also draw resources from effective ways of engaging your constituents off line - so take the time to consider this.  Before you change or add new communications tools, use the planning process as an opportunity to evaluate the effectiveness of your current and past work.

In addition to thinking about social media in terms of advocacy and publicity, consider how it can enable more efficient information sharing and collaboration within the Detention Watch Network.  And how it might be used to develop a living repository of and for the collective wisdom of the field or a particular organization.

Get young people involved.  Working with new technologies is a great opportunity for shared learning.  Organizations and activists can learn from students for whom social media is second nature.  And students can learn about activist processes, history and media literacy from people who've been working in the human rights field for many years.

Finally, if you have specific needs that can't be met with existing tools, there are many people developing new tools and mash-ups, working with an open source ethic, who might be interested in customizing something to solve a particular problem - which could then be made available to other organizations.

a definition of social media

Social media describes a new set of internet tools that enable shared community experiences, both online and in person.

A community, in this context, is a group of people with common interests who connect with one another to learn, play, work, organize and socialize.  Communities can be large or small, local or global.  They can be public or restricted to members.

Social media allows people with basic computer skills to tell their stories using publishing tools such as blogs, video logs, photo sharing, podcasting (audio stories broadcast from the web or downloaded to a computer) and wikis (collaboratively edited web pages).  They can also help us filter and organize the overwhelming amount of information on the web.

Social media tools make it easier to create and distribute content and discuss the things we care about.

Some better-known social media examples are Wikipedia, MySpace, YouTube (I've embedded YouTube videos in blog posts), and Flickr (where the photos on the blockwork web site come from). Other communities develop for support (Cancer Survivors Network), networking (LinkedIn) or political action (John Edwards).

There are also social bookmarking sites – such as del.icio.us – which is where the words below come from.  These are tags (key words) that categorize my bookmarks, which I’m able to share with you below. They are, in a sense, the story of my web wanderings.

net neutrality explained

In December, Congress killed legislation that would have jeopardized free and open access to information on the internet.   "Network Neutrality has been part of the Internet since its inception, ensuring that the service providers who control the “pipes” don’t interfere with content based on its ownership or source."  AT&T also accepted the FCC's net neutrality conditions attached to its recent merger with Bell South.  These are significant victories for all of us who benefit from an open internet - but they're no reason for complacency.  Introduced in January, the bi-partisan Internet Freedom Preservation Act would lend permanence to these protections and minimize future reactive activist campaigns.  Save the Internet is a good resource for updates.

For a great explanation of network neutrality and what's at stake, take 10 minutes to check out Four Eyed Monster's video, which includes a brief history of mass media, from the printing press to the internet. 

press releases for social media

Mark Nowlan writes about creating a new kind of press release in this article at Entrepreneur.com.  He explores the potential and future use of social media tools while reminding us that effective marketing is ultimately about content.  In other words, engage your audience - journalists, online communities, potential customers and partners - by telling a good story.

Article excerpt:
The format of the new social media news release steps well away from the traditional, text-focused news release. It’s designed so that anyone accessing it--whether a journalist, a potential customer or a curious onlooker--can quickly find and interact with its content......The future will see continued use of Web 2.0 tools and, over time, will cause the release format to evolve. The best PR tactic for you is to be aware of what’s available and not be too cautious to try different techniques and formats.

The key--and this remains the most important factor in getting visibility for your news--is the quality of the content in your release, regardless of the format. Writing a strong release with newsworthy information should always be foremost in your mind. Finding the best format for your content should follow.