Until a very few years ago the professional news media: owners, editors, and journalists had a huge power to limit the information that was available to the ordinary person. If any step in the chain didn't consider a piece of information was "fit to print" the ordinary person never got to hear about it. More subtly the professional news media had the ability to slant the news according to their prejudices (as we all do) but unlike today the other slant often didn't get a chance to get out.
In the 1940s and to an extent the 1950s Britain (in reality England) had the largest empire the world had ever seen and considered the world to be their oyster. The ordinary Briton was regaled by tales of the colonised people, admittedly not a very nice picture of them, but a picture none-the less.
We left Britain in 1959 when I was under 2. In the mid 1970s my father took me & my younger brother back to Britain to meet the relatives and see the home land. He was socked by how insular the British press and local TV news had become. In retrospect, the loss of empire and the adjustments to being a part of Europe had simply changed the views the news media chose to present. For the locals this had been a gradual change, for Dad Britain was frozen in his mind at 1959 and it was a sudden wrench to bring his world view forward 25 years in a couple of weeks.
New Zealand media have always been focused on the world. We know we're a small and relatively unimportant part of the world and so our press has always covered events in England, USA, Western Europe and Australia very well. In recent years it has expanded its coverage of Asia and Africa.
The United States is an interesting case. Despite being the strongest nation on Earth militarily and first or second economically, they have retained an incredibly insular media, and most people in the United States are woefully ignorant of the world outside their country; and what they do know is horrifically slanted by the views constantly trumpeted by their news media. Americans are no more stupid than any other nation, and if given better and more honest coverage of the world would be much better able to use their democracy to make far better choices. The keeping of them in ignorance by big media is almost a crime.
Also in today's world I can choose where I take my news from. 25 years ago I had a choice of 2 newspapers; today I can read the on-line version of any newspaper on earth. If I want an English daily I can read it, if I want a US paper I can read it, I can read the Chinese government news ... typically I don't but I have that freedom. I can choose the slant I want.
Things are changing though, and what is changing it is that big media is losing control. In 1975 it was incredibly expensive to have a voice. Today a home PC and Internet connection and anyone can. I'm currently "following" an obscure Icelandic politician on twitter and commenting on world events. Sure, there are a huge number of differences between me and a professional journalist, but I have the freedom to make my voice heard and an increasing number of independent voices are out there being read. So where is the journalist today? At least in theory I'm free to be as slanted as I like while journalists are supposed to give "unbiased reporting" ... the reality is both the journalist and myself can only report what our internal filters let us see ... I think I'm fairly open about my biases and I would like to see big media and professional journalists come out about their biases and prejudices, so when we read their words we have the ability to know where they are coming from.
I'm picking that the future of the professional journalist is going to be interesting. The independent commentators and amateur reporters in places like Wikinews are going to be increasingly pressuring them and they are going to adapt to survive. I can see a few futures that don't really work out. I'm sure that the professional journalist will survive, but I don't have a good handle on what that survival will mean ... it could be raw news feed with an ability to get to the right place at the right time ... it could be the ability to conduct interesting penetrating interviews with the key people ... it could be a slanted journalism that would make today's US media look unbiased ... it may well be something else.
Whatever professional journalists become, they won't have the ability to filter information in the way that their predecessors in the 1970s and earlier enjoyed.
[The title of this blog entry is a quote from Michael Flanders, who in turn was quoting Cicero.]
Showing posts with label Twitter. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Twitter. Show all posts
Thursday, February 3, 2011
Tuesday, April 13, 2010
Social networking marketing
There's currently a discussion on social networking going on on the Auckland Linux User's group mailing list.
One of the posters pointed out that he can write emails to whoever he chooses without having his conversation censored or being data-mined.
Of course you can do this, you can also create a website to broadcast your views to the world such as this blog, but getting an audience is difficult. Before you can email someone you need to know their email address and have some way of knowing that they will want to hear from you. When you create a blog it is always hit-or-miss that people will ever read your words.
To me the real strength of social networking is that it is an updated (more controlled) descendant of what Usenet was beforw it was spammed to death. There you had a large number of small communities of interest that were each composed of people who were all drawn together by a shared desire to discuss a single subject. People who were interested in a dozen subjects joined 12 groups. Usenet was different in that the available topics were coordinated by the server managers, but this coordination was mainly to ensure that there was sufficient interest to merit distributing them while social networking allows people to dynamically generate their own communities of interest.
Social networking covers a range of different techniques, but ultimately it is all about introductions. Referrals from person to person as in Linkedin or of ideas by rebroadcasting interesting posts as happens in Google Reader and Twitter create some quite interesting interpersonal dynamics for the distribution of information. People I know almost nothing about in any meaningful sense point out interesting pieces of information, and by implication point out the sources (direct or intermediate) of that information. Sometimes I not only read the information someone pointed at but also add the author to my personal list of people worth hearing from(1).
As social networking appears more trustworthy than random surfing (I'm not sure why, but it feels so), marketers desperately want to access this network of trust to promote their products. Small time operators are attempting to flood the channels in the same way that they destroyed usenet and freely published email addresses, but so far the organic nature of these networks where people follow based on recommendation, seem to reduce their effectiveness. Look for the spammers to try harder and harder(2) and try to deply technology to break through the protections. Ultimately deflecting the spammers is the shared responsibility of the users and social networking system owners and it requires a lot of vigilance by the providers of the social networking sites. If they are under capitalised so they can't afford to monitor their systems or simply choose to adopt a laissez faire approach to marketing on their servers I feel they will ultimately gain a reputation for spam-hell and lose out to those who do have the resources and the will to maintain their systems.
There are people who do manage to market effectively on social networking sites, and they aren't doing it by flooding our inboxes with constant repetition of low quality deals. They do it by offering helpful tips in their chosen field and if they do any actual selling it is infrequent and low key. They are smart enough to realise that their best move is to make themselves authorities in their chosen fieldsand gain a large number of followers so people approach them when they need something in their area. Of course having a large number of followers means that a lot of people actually read their occasional marketing messages.
It will be interesting to see if the small-time marketers can learn some discipline and the big companies can learn to speak to people not at them and engage an audience. History suggests neither group will.
Notes:
1) It can even work for self published sites - I follow Bruce Schneier's blog which largely consists of pointers to security articles he found interesting, he's one of the world's top security experts so his choices are good ones, but Schneier's blog doesn't scale in the same way that social networks do.
2) Even when a marketer has something useful to say, such as product support or genuine product news, they seem to lack control and discipline and end up driving watchers away by the sheer volume of posts they produce
One of the posters pointed out that he can write emails to whoever he chooses without having his conversation censored or being data-mined.
Of course you can do this, you can also create a website to broadcast your views to the world such as this blog, but getting an audience is difficult. Before you can email someone you need to know their email address and have some way of knowing that they will want to hear from you. When you create a blog it is always hit-or-miss that people will ever read your words.
To me the real strength of social networking is that it is an updated (more controlled) descendant of what Usenet was beforw it was spammed to death. There you had a large number of small communities of interest that were each composed of people who were all drawn together by a shared desire to discuss a single subject. People who were interested in a dozen subjects joined 12 groups. Usenet was different in that the available topics were coordinated by the server managers, but this coordination was mainly to ensure that there was sufficient interest to merit distributing them while social networking allows people to dynamically generate their own communities of interest.
Social networking covers a range of different techniques, but ultimately it is all about introductions. Referrals from person to person as in Linkedin or of ideas by rebroadcasting interesting posts as happens in Google Reader and Twitter create some quite interesting interpersonal dynamics for the distribution of information. People I know almost nothing about in any meaningful sense point out interesting pieces of information, and by implication point out the sources (direct or intermediate) of that information. Sometimes I not only read the information someone pointed at but also add the author to my personal list of people worth hearing from(1).
As social networking appears more trustworthy than random surfing (I'm not sure why, but it feels so), marketers desperately want to access this network of trust to promote their products. Small time operators are attempting to flood the channels in the same way that they destroyed usenet and freely published email addresses, but so far the organic nature of these networks where people follow based on recommendation, seem to reduce their effectiveness. Look for the spammers to try harder and harder(2) and try to deply technology to break through the protections. Ultimately deflecting the spammers is the shared responsibility of the users and social networking system owners and it requires a lot of vigilance by the providers of the social networking sites. If they are under capitalised so they can't afford to monitor their systems or simply choose to adopt a laissez faire approach to marketing on their servers I feel they will ultimately gain a reputation for spam-hell and lose out to those who do have the resources and the will to maintain their systems.
There are people who do manage to market effectively on social networking sites, and they aren't doing it by flooding our inboxes with constant repetition of low quality deals. They do it by offering helpful tips in their chosen field and if they do any actual selling it is infrequent and low key. They are smart enough to realise that their best move is to make themselves authorities in their chosen fieldsand gain a large number of followers so people approach them when they need something in their area. Of course having a large number of followers means that a lot of people actually read their occasional marketing messages.
It will be interesting to see if the small-time marketers can learn some discipline and the big companies can learn to speak to people not at them and engage an audience. History suggests neither group will.
Notes:
1) It can even work for self published sites - I follow Bruce Schneier's blog which largely consists of pointers to security articles he found interesting, he's one of the world's top security experts so his choices are good ones, but Schneier's blog doesn't scale in the same way that social networks do.
2) Even when a marketer has something useful to say, such as product support or genuine product news, they seem to lack control and discipline and end up driving watchers away by the sheer volume of posts they produce
Saturday, March 13, 2010
Twitter and Fake Followers
Over at BuzzUsers.com's Google Buzz list there's a discussion on what the rules for Buzz should be. One of the parts of the discussion is control of spam and this morning it was focusing on the number of followers one person can have. The following is an expansion of my thoughts published in that discussion.
"If people want to follow 2,000 people, let them. Their buzz will be crazy, but that's their choice. " @Maneeza Iqbal
In the twitter world at least, these "Spam followers" really annoy me. You get a mail saying xyz is now following me, check them out and they are "following" some huge number of people and their tweets are both trying to sell something and completely unrelated to my interests. it's pretty clear that people who "follow" 1000+ people aren't following them in any meaningful sense. It's obvious that they are just using bots to auto follow people they have no interest in to receive the "xyz is now following you" alerts delivered to try and con people into following them back or at bare minimum to see their spammy ads.
On the other hand I can't see any merit in limiting the number of followers you have, as Twitter apparently does. If you provide interesting content it's likely that your number of followers will increase over time, and if people choose to share what you say, you'll start acquiring a "public" following from people you know nothing about, in effect a social media version of the organic links that led to the creation of the original Google Pagerank algorithm. I wonder how many people choose to follow Dilbert, xkcd, Bruce Schneier, Matt Cutts etc? I doubt that these people had to use unethical methods to acquire and retain their followers, and I doubt that they have even the vaguest idea who their individual followers are, but as long as they keep providing content that is relevant to their public they will retain their followers.
Surely this is what "Social media" is supposed to be about, individuals deciding who they follow, who's comments they wish to read and even who's re-packaging of available information they wish to receive.
"If people want to follow 2,000 people, let them. Their buzz will be crazy, but that's their choice. " @Maneeza Iqbal
In the twitter world at least, these "Spam followers" really annoy me. You get a mail saying xyz is now following me, check them out and they are "following" some huge number of people and their tweets are both trying to sell something and completely unrelated to my interests. it's pretty clear that people who "follow" 1000+ people aren't following them in any meaningful sense. It's obvious that they are just using bots to auto follow people they have no interest in to receive the "xyz is now following you" alerts delivered to try and con people into following them back or at bare minimum to see their spammy ads.
On the other hand I can't see any merit in limiting the number of followers you have, as Twitter apparently does. If you provide interesting content it's likely that your number of followers will increase over time, and if people choose to share what you say, you'll start acquiring a "public" following from people you know nothing about, in effect a social media version of the organic links that led to the creation of the original Google Pagerank algorithm. I wonder how many people choose to follow Dilbert, xkcd, Bruce Schneier, Matt Cutts etc? I doubt that these people had to use unethical methods to acquire and retain their followers, and I doubt that they have even the vaguest idea who their individual followers are, but as long as they keep providing content that is relevant to their public they will retain their followers.
Surely this is what "Social media" is supposed to be about, individuals deciding who they follow, who's comments they wish to read and even who's re-packaging of available information they wish to receive.
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