Posts Tagged ‘media’

  • The Renaissance Is On Its Way: Thoughts on Social and Agile Ideas

    There’s some sort of renaissance bubbling. I’m sure of it. More and more people are coming out and speaking about this malaise that is afflicting the media/advertising/marketing/digital/interactive industry, so I thought I’d add my two-pennies worth. I mean any and all of the above-mentioned industries, and to simplify matters I’m going to henceforth refer to them as the communications industry, a broad umbrella term. OK, so many more people in the communications industry than before are voicing their honest thoughts about the state of the industry. Ben Malbon, Mark Earls, Gareth Kay, Robin Grant to start with. In the last couple of weeks that is. 

    I wrote about this in an article for Connect! (which you should buy, sorry to be pimping it but it’s for a good cause – proceeds go to Susan G. Komen for the Cure): if you can’t help people build their social capital in some form, then your business model is flawed. Gareth referred to a similar concept when he said ideas are divided into social and anti-social ideas. Social capital is an idea that dates back to the 1960’s, when Robert Putnam first mentioned it in his book Bowling Alone. The book, which spoke about the trend of Americans interacting less and less with their immediate community and how that would have ramifications for American society as a whole, started a revolution to revitalise the country. We are at a similar crossroads now. There is plenty of work still being produced, but the communications industry is feeling the change in the direction of the breeze because some ideas are not necessarily social even if they are good, and so are slowly being rejected in favour of those that are, by the people that they are directed at. They’re not just ‘users’ and ‘consumers’, it’s you and me we’re talking about. Us. ‘Consumers’ are not a race from Planet Xenon. 

    Digital/interactive is rising up in the overall scheme of things because it is easier, all said and done, to use them to create social ideas. TV will never die, but as a chunk of the pie it is shrinking in size, whereas the interactive medium is growing. And that is simply a reflection of the social reality – families don’t cluster around TVs to watch programmes the way they used to before. The individual members of most families probably spend more time online – that’s why Facebook and Twitter continue to grow, the latter at 1382% in the year from February 2008-2009, while Facebook has more people in the 35-54 age group joining (that demographic grew at 276.4% in the last 6 months) than ever before. 

    If you read Howard Gossage’s 1960 document about billboards (still relevant!), he says that billboards are an intrusion into our private lives because you cannot get rid of them, if for example, you happen to be driving along a highway. Whereas in the case of a magazine, TV or radio, you can close the magazine, or turn the TV or radio off. 

    One-way modes of communication are OK if you simply want to tell a quick story or relay a message. 30 or 60-second stories are the kinds that brands are most used to. But that was in the old days – the Mad Men days. Today, the ideas that last are the ones where people have a stake in them. Even TV shows have online versions so that fans can interact and comment. In fact, hardcore fans wind up creating their own sites focussing on a show, as with We Are Sterling Cooper. It’s simply in keeping with the natural progression of society’s and technology’s characteristics. If you don’t give people the mechanism they’re looking for, they will create it on their own sooner rather than later. People are now spoken to, not just at. And ideas have a better chance of succeeding if they mould themselves to the needs of the people that use them – if they are social and agile. Tim did a great job of explaining the ‘how’ of those kinds of ideas, the kind of ideas we try to come up with at Made By Many, here. 

    Agile ideas that promote social capital in some way, and I’m going to go out on a limb and say that a social idea is automatically useful – those are the kinds of strategies we all need to be thinking about. Period.

    4 Comments

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    Anjali Ramachandran By Anjali Ramachandran

    15th April 09

    4 comments

     Made by Many

  • Mumbai: flash mob or social media in action?

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    When news of the ‘terrorist outrage’ broke yesterday evening several people mailed and messaged me with links to the coverage on Twitter. I was awestruck by the live feeds provided at #Mumbai and others (such as Twitter Grid). Having looked around elsewhere, my initial reaction was that the main old-school news agencies like Reuters, CNN and the BBC just weren’t providing the coverage, in contrast to the truly MASSIVE volume of tweeting going on. But as the evening continued my feelings changed about this, and I started to see and ugly side to Twitter, far from being a crowd-sourced version of the news it was actually an incoherent, rumour-fueled mob operating in a mad echo chamber of tweets, re-tweets and re-re-tweets. During the hour or so I followed on Twitter there were wildly differing estimates of the numbers killed and injured – ranging up to 1,000.

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    The facts are still unknown, but it was clear that ‘citizen media’ filled the vacuum provided by official news agencies (here again, there were rumours doing the rounds that because of Thanksgiving, most of the official media had gone on holiday – leaving caretaker managers in place. It was suggested at one stage that CNN was being run by the IT team…). So much noise. So little signal. Even if the truest signal was actually coming through Twitter it was so drowned in rumour, personal utterance, revenge and irrelvance as to be incomprehensible. In the flattened world of the Social Web there is clearly no filter on decency or taste. That made tweets like these possible:

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    One of the most unpleasant things to witness was the general ‘whoop whoop’ the more self-regarding voices of the social mediasphere were giving themselves. For some, it seemed like the social media coverage of the event became the story. The real event for quite a number of people last night was: Twitter 1, CNN 0 – which is utterly sad. Old media became the enemies for many, not the terrorists.

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    If traditional media agencies behaved like this (openly) they’d find themselves in trouble – but no-one regulates the mob and it answers to no-one.

    Then this morning I see the word go round that the terrorists themselves might be using Twitter to find out what the security forces were up to. A hush went round:

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    Which, once again, brought out the worst in many:

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    There were no doubt many well-meaning people Twittering. Some on the ground were no doubt using the service to share their personal horror and to connect with the outside world must have been a comfort. But very few were on the ground. Most participants were far away. There needs to be some way of working out who in a situation like this has more authority than someone else. Of course, simply being there isn’t necessarily an indication of authority, but it does provide some context. I’d be interested to know if Twitter helped anyone last night to get hold of the right blood.

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    Many were simply expressing their horror – that’s fine. But do we want this to be ‘mixed up’ with news. Is it helpful or sensible to mash news up with personal reflections? How do we know what’s true any more when everyone’s voice has the same weight?

    Last night scared me. We’re like kids playing with things that we still don’t understand. A human tragedy became “something to follow”.

    I did find some interesting links were being posted – to journalist Vinu’s photostream, and I thought that NowPublic provided sensible, coherent coverage from a crowd-sourced base. Mainstream media appears to be using the social stuff to create its own coverage – CNN gave Twitter credit last night, and The NYTimes are actively asking for contributions.

    The most touching eyewitness account I found came from a blog called ‘A Night Out In Mumbai’, and tells the story of frightened people helping each other in an hour of need. Definitely worth a read – although be careful as it contains more than 140 characters.

    20 Comments

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    Tim Malbon By Tim Malbon

    27th November 08

    20 comments

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