Over the River

So a colleague sent me this article from Computerworld last night - finally, I have a label!  I am part of the Virtual Generation - and I am with pride.  Here’s how Gartner describes GenV in the article:

Generation Virtual, or V, is made up of people from multiple age groups who make social connections online — through virtual worlds, in video games, as bloggers, in social networks or through posting and reading user-generated content at e-commerce sites such as Amazon.com, said Adam Sarner, senior analyst at Gartner.

Forget Generations X and Y: Here comes Generation V

I spend WAY more time active and interacting in virtual communities and relationships that I do the physical world (OK, so that might be an exaggeration - but I do a lot online). And I do these things through a number of persona that have developed for different purposes.

So here’s my life as a 41 year old member of GenV:

I have three blogs that I update regularly - two of them every day.  Only this one is by me the person.  The others are written as persona - and one of those was a splinter from the first . . .

There is an online relationship with a fan of one of my blogs.  I’m very open about this.  My wife knows, friends know, she knows I’m married - we all know the terms and it’s all good.  Our relationship is built around collaborating on what is frankly pretty much pure filth smut.  The stories are a lot of fun and have resulted in a very popular blog (and no, I am not telling anyone where to find it).

I have three Facebook profile that I am on every day.  One is me, the other two and tied to my other blogs and have distinct friends.

I can’t even guess how many email accounts I have but there are four that I use on a daily basis.

Flickr is my friend and though I’ve slowed down recently (I need to revise my photographic workflow) I visit the site every day.

Twitter - and the network of friends and contacts there - has become a big part of my day.

(There’s more but I need to get moving - I have to bring my daughter to Spanish soon.)

When I read or hear people criticizing virtual contacts, communities, connections, relationships, etc. I always think that they’re the ones missing out.  Online communities and just as rich - if not richer - that their real world analogs.  They are populated by a far more diverse range of people and interests than you come across in the real world.  There’s only one GPC wandering around in physical space but there are several versions and variations of me active online.  And truly, I think that is a good thing.

Technorati Tags: Generation V, Computerworld, GenV, persona, person, identity, blogs, Twitter, Facebook, email, communities, Flickr, relationships

Blogged with Flock

I spent the last week on vacation with my family. For the past four years we’ve gone to a camp up in New Hampshire. For most of the summer it’s a YMCA camp for kids; but at the end of August it’s open for families. The accommodations are rustic (no electricity, running water, glass, locks, etc.) but it’s right on Lake Winnipesaukee. Many of the families there have been coming for years and it’s a really relaxing break.

One thing that I notices this year was that LOTS of people wanted to talk about social media. They may not have called it that, but over several dinners, around campfires, sitting in cabins the topic of blogs or Flickr or podcasts kept coming up. I assume that everyone is as into/excited about this stuff as me but I usually have to remind myself that I work in PR and that social media is something that not everyone is paying attention to. This past week made me realize that maybe more people are.

It was great to see the interest and excitement (if not a good understanding) of this in such an unlikely setting.

vacation, social media, blogging

Citizen journalism is a great idea; and hats off to NowPublic for being recognized for their efforts in this area:

NowPublic announced Monday that the fast-growing citizen journalism website has scored 10.6 million dollars (US) in financing to fuel its drive to become the world’s largest news agency.

The Vancouver-based start-up says it is growing at a rate of 35 percent monthly and has nearly 120,000 contributing “reporters” in more than 140 countries.

In part of a trend referred to as “citizen journalism,” NowPublic lets anyone with digital cameras or a camera-enable mobile telephones upload images or news snippets for dissemination via the Internet.

Citizen journalism website gets multi-million-dollar boost

But a quick check for stories on the site exposed the problem with “Crowd Powered Media” - a lot of it really sucks. I decided to check my local news on the site. It correctly determined that I was in Natick and served up what meager content it had - photos from the 2006 Boston Marathon. Not exactly the kind of current information I was looking for.

Further down the page there were sections for Massachusetts and US News. One of the stories, “The Couple Founds Out That Freedom Of Speech Was History,” caught my eye due to it’s strange headline. I clicked through to the original story and was confronted with some of the most perplexing prose imaginable. Here’s just a taste:

Do you know why the communist regime and the many dictatorship regimes had got their ways? Do you know why the peoples that still live in such a regime are suffering? These evil regimes had got their ways because they depended on the ignorances of the peoples, and the more peoples that were less educated the better for them to carry out their suppressive plans.

Huh? I don’t know - perhaps English is the writer’s second language. From his profile I was not able to learn much. I did see that he recommends that kids get their parents’ permission before reading the site. An excellent recommendation.

I read a number of stories in different categories and found that most of them were pretty bad. I’m all for user generated content and citizen journalism; but those things can’t simply become synonyms for shitty writing. Based on what I saw on NowPublic, that’s a real risk. To make matters worse, Time Magazine has named the site one of the 50 Best Web Sites of 2007.

Social media and user generated content are still nascent and need to prove their merits to a largely skeptical society. Producing sub-sub-sub-par content, while perhaps satisfying for its creators, may well alienate the people this new media is intended to serve.

Technorati Tags: NowPublic, Citizen Journalism, Crowd Powered Media, News, Social Media, Journalism

Last week I was on a panel for the Social Media Club here in Boston on making the business case for social media. Mine was an easy role - I just had to go out there and talk about all of the wonderful ways and reasons people have for saying NO! Pat Fennessey of Cymfony did a way better job of it than I did with a list that really rang true.

As the conversation went on, I pointed out that the investment in most social media programs is so small that we should think of ROI as ROi. I mean if it costs essentially NOTHING to create a blog or to post a video ANY result is upside. Look at Blendtec. They spent $50 to create the “Will it Blend” program. In its first five days, that $50 investment led to SIX MILLION visits to the company’s Web site. (That works out to approximately 0.000008 cents per vistior - a pretty good return if you ask me.)

We all understand that the reason social media works is because it is easy, effective, accessible and affordable. Businesses and the many naysayers out there need to recognize this as well. When the “I” is small the “R” can be as well.

Technorati Tags: Socia Media, ROI, SMCBoston

I’m having a hectic, harried but good time this week. Much of it is simply the natural ebb and flow of work but there are a couple of things happening that I’m looking forward to.

Tomorrow night I’m going to speaking on a panel for the Cambridge Chamber of Commerce on Web Marketing and Social Media for Small Businesses. That’s going to be with Scott Smigler of Exclusive Concepts and Matt Malloy of ZipCar. It’s happening at 5:30 at 38 Cameron Ave in Cambridge.

The next night I’m going to be on a Social Media Club panel on Making the Business Case for Social Media. That’s going to be with Aaron Strout of Shared Insights, Katie Payne of KDPayne and Partners and Andrew Bernstein of TNS Media Intelligence/Cymfony. It’s happening at 6:00 at the Watertown Public Library.

Perhaps you will be able to be there . . .

Technorati Tags: Cambridge Chamber of Commerce, Scott Smigler, Exclusive Concepts, Matt Malloy, ZipCar, Aaron Strout, Shared Insights, Katie Payne, KDPayner and Partners, Andrew Bernstein, TNS Media Intelligence, Cymfony, Social Media Club, social media

Today’s Boston Globe ran a front page story on a blogging doctor unmasked during a malpractice trial. It appears that the doctor in question - Robert P. Lindeman - had been writing a running commentary under an assumed name of a case very much like his own. Once the plaintiff’s lawyer determined that Lindeman was Flea (the name he used for his blog), the case was quickly settled.

In his blog, Flea had ridiculed the plaintiff’s case and the plaintiff’s lawyer. He had revealed the defense strategy. He had accused members of the jury of dozing.

Blogger unmasked, court case upended - The Boston Globe

I’ve written before that social media and transparency don’t translate to stupid or sloppy and this case demonstrates what can happen when they do. There is a time and a place for everything and when you are being sued for your part in the death of a child (as was Lindeman) it is not the time to pen a humorous and irreverent blog on the situation . . .

Technorati Tags: Robert P. Lindeman, Flea, Boston Globe, blogging, malpractice, hubris

Thanks to people’s understanding here at work, I will continue to be able to use my personal system at the office. It’s a big deal for me because I have things set up the way I like them, have all of the applications I need, as well as the content.

When word came down that my system was machina-non-grata earlier today I did try doing everything from my office PC and I can sum up the experience in one word: stinky. Sure it worked, but it involved moving files from one system to the other, dealing with kludgey interface issues, etc.

I really appreciate that I have the freedom and flexibility to work in ways that work best for me and need to make sure that I’m not overstepping any boundaries or otherwise misbehaving . . . Reasonable enough.

Technorati Tags: GregPC, two computers, work, home, personal, professional

Today an email was sent out from our IT group saying that any personal computers logged in through the company network need to be removed “ASAP.” I pretty much the only person logging in with a personal computer so I guess that means me. . .

Back in March I wrote about my reasoning for using two computers at work and I think the reasoning still stands up. I don’t think it is reasonable for me to necessarily do my blogging, Flickr, Second Life, etc. from my work computer. While some of those things are work-related, they are also personal and portable.

I wonder if this prohibition applies to any outside system? Does this mean that clients, vendors and partners are prohibited from accessing the Internet through our network? Should I assume that the inverse is also true - not work computers accessing the Internet through non-work networks?

This is troubling and disappointing news . . .

Technorati Tags: work computers personal professional bummer

For some reason, for a long time, I kept my various social media channels separate. I used Flickr for photos but didn’t really check out the blogs of people I know through Flickr. I read plenty of blogs but don’t check to see if the bloggers are also on Flickr or del.icio.us, etc. I’m trying to get better about this and here’s why.

On Saturday night (or Sunday morning) I was on Flickr and came across DoddieboBottie’s photos. I really really liked them and decided that the thing to do would be to write a post about them on my other blog. So I did. And the next morning I had an email from Dottie saying she’d read the post and thanking me.

Last night I saw that Alice Robison, one of the panelists on the fourth plenary session at MiT5 had posted something in response to my summary of the event. She had links to Flickr and del.icio.us and I went off to check them out.

For most people, this probably isn’t a big deal; but for me, for whatever reason, I’d been doing siloed social media and now I’ve decided to stop.

Technorati Tags: social media, silos, Flickr, del.icio.us, DoddieboBottie, Dottie Guy, Alice Robison, cha-cha-cha-change

A few weeks ago I wrote about some people’s wrong-headed desire to drag users back to specific Web sites rather than freeing content to live where people are already spending their time. I understand that given the way people are measured and evaluated the current approach may make sense - but it won’t forever.

I was talking to a woman the other day about this - she’s smart and well versed in the ideas of social media - and her take was that people are used to going to places to get the things they need or want. If you want food, you go to the market; if need shoes, you go to a shoe store, etc. (Of course for most things you can also just find them online, but even then, you tend to end up at a site that sells certain kinds of things.) Technology has made it possible though for the things we want to be available where we are.

You see it a lot with music - if you’re using Pandora or Peel you can click right to iTunes or Amazon to make a purchase. Google has made a science out of presenting people with what they might want wherever they go; and there are certainly plenty of services that allow people to create customer start pages, feeds or portals. The idea of providing content - even it through a user-defined space - still, in some ways, speaks to control. “If you want this, ask for it” “Here is the set of things we think you ought to have,” etc. But that’s not the same as creating content and releasing into the wild to see where it takes root and who gravitates to it.

This is what millions of people are doing every day with services like YouTube and Flickr. Sure, the content starts off on a given site, but people can take it from there and use it where they will. And even on the sites themselves, you can see what people are attracted to and respond to. It’s not perfect, but it allows content to be free and its use be flexible. (This raises issues of rights and ownership which approaches like Creative Commons seek to address.)

In any case, the bottom line is that information and content ought to be viewed independently of the entity that creates it. This doesn’t mean you take no credit or abrogate responsibility for things, only that it be allowed to leave the nest. It all gets down to content, control and choice around consumption.

Very few people agree with me on this. Even people who like and get social media see the value in content residing at some fixed address. Of course you need that, even if only as a staging area; but we need to move away from the fixed address concept as much as we can. It’s the next step in social media and one that we need to be thinking about and preparing to take.

The flipside of this coin is that the freedom to create and consume content will be co-opted. While PR people that get social media seem to be in the minority, there are an increasing number who seem to be thinking about it as a shiny new (and exploitable) channel for reaching their audiences.

Despite some stellar screw-ups, it seems that there are people who look at these cases and say to themselves, “I see what they did wrong,” instead of “how can I do that right?” The channels that are available through social media can’t become tools for manipulation. When found out (and it will be found out) it only gives everyone involved a black eye. So naked manipulation is out.

What about influence - manipulations cute cousin? I suppose it’s a step in the right direction; but it’s still built on the foundation of “us” and “them.” What prompted this whole digressive post was a post by Melvin Yuan a few weeks ago where he wrote about Ogilvy PR and the idea of 360 Degree Digital Influence. At the time, in a comment on his blog, I wondered if influence was too much of a one-way concept to describe how we ought to be communicating.

What I am more comfortable with is the idea that we (and by extension our clients) advocate for ideas and issues through transparent engagement with the community; that we share ideas (and content supporting them) in an unfettered way to see where they come to rest; that we bring ideas to communities that we believe will benefit from the information and that in all cases we openly support these ideas using the tools at hand.

Social media has lots of cool bells and whistles, that for sure. But we can’t get so caught up in the cool tools that we ignore the fact that these tools can represent an opportunity to communicate in new and more open ways. And we can’t support, condone or reward attempts to misuse this technology to create a false sense community, conversation or engagement.

Technorati Tags: social media, public relations, PR, communication, manipulation, influence, content, information