Over the River

When I talk with people, clients, companies, organizations, etc. I’m amazed by how much content - often awesome content - is just sitting around unused. Old brand materials (ads, packaging, signage), physical artifacts (products, packaging, prototypes) and information (historical data, b-roll, photographs) that could be doing a world of good in the light of day are simply being ignored.

It’s time for there to be a good old fashion content harvest. Look around at some of the great content you or your client or your company has on hand and imagine what could be done with it to make it accessible, engaging and exciting to people.

Have examples of every model widget your company has ever produced? Photograph them - show the evolution of the design - and post the photos onto Flickr. Have footage of every CEO speaking at a company event for the past 40 years? Cut it up, mash it up and use it to tell the story of change over that period. Tag it, post it, get it out there. This isn’t hard stuff - it just isn’t always obvious.

“But how will this approach support the current story or key messages?” you might be tempted to ask (although I hope you aren’t). Well, sometimes we get so fixated on telling the immediate story that we forget there are millions of forgotten or untold stories that will spark conversations and build excitement around individuals, brands and companies.

Come on, this stuff isn’t getting any fresher . . .

Technorati Tags: content, brands, marketing, communication

Brokaw started his comments with some self-deprecating humor and jibes at Harvard (where he was accepted but not given financial aid).

MIT, he said, is at the intersection of information technology, the personal computer and the Internet. While he doesn’t understand the inner workings of technology, he does recognize that the introduction of technology will fundamentally change the world. In fact, he sees this as the most transformative era of technology that he can imagine.

He likens this transformation to a second big bang; with all of us looking and trying to determine which of the new planets will support life, watching planets merge (or attempt to merge) and grow to play a larger-and-larger role in our digital life.

One of the things that is striking about the advances in technology, he said, is that it isn’t happening in the darkened cloisters of nerdish wonks. The advances are being driven out in the open by all kinds of people. The power of the transformation available through technology is limited only by our imaginations. As technology makes our planet smaller, it also makes the possibilities larger.

But, he went on to say that life can’t be a virtual experience. What happens, he asked, if we have capacity without compassion; or if speed outstrips reason. It will do little good, he continued, if we wire the world but short-circuit our souls. A bit overwrought perhaps but I got his point.

Brokaw went to to talk about the people whom he’s met who were the most interesting and he ran through a litany of the saints of power and influence. The most memorable people though, he said, were ones whose names he never know (he could have asked them or something – just sayin’): civil rights workers in the 60s, American doctors in Somalia, Chinese students in Tiananmen Square, NY firefighters after 9/11. What made these people memorable was that they were willing to put their lives at risk to make the world a better place for everyone; and, he said – perhaps again with more drama than was needed – technology was providing new tools for these people.

He went through examples of how technology is making a difference and cited Rwanda and Pakistan. He suggested that the tools being used need to always have a human face to help “lower the temperature of fundamentalist rage.” I think I got where we was going with this but not 100 percent. People of goodwill from around the world have been putting themselves at risk to help others for a very long time – often with nothing but a human face to present to the world.

If anything it seems that technology can – while making the process of providing support more efficient and effective – throw up barriers between people that even technology with a human face might now be able to surmount. His point was a good one though as he described the possibility of connecting technology with commitment to help define this generations contribution to the world.

He went on to describe the horrors witnessed during the 20th century and pointed out that we are now living on an even smaller planet where the limits of power have become increasingly apparent. He ticked off a list of the problems we’re facing today – the growing gap between the haves and the have nots, global warming, etc. - and suggested that while we had the technology to deal with these issues (which is questionable) we needed to find the will; and the attention span.

This led to his addressing concerns around the Internet. He feels that we need to think about the source and the integrity of what appears on the small screen (as, frankly we do with information from any source) and his message to the audience was to beware of the unidentified matter that comes from the edges of the blogosphere. Of course this assumes that the blogosphere – like the universe – has edges, which isn’t necessarily the case.

He expressed concern that there are “small media meteorites” that may be the product of imagination, error or malevolence bombarding us every day. And while how we receive information is changing the requirement that information be gathered and distributed by trained professionals remains. I suppose as someone who has spent his life in the traditional media this point of view is understandable; but clearly the rise of citizen journalism is in response (at least in part) to the frustration people feel with the main stream media.

Brokaw likes the democratic nature of the Internet for sharing ideas and opinions, for sharing information and connecting with others and for hearing voices that one might not otherwise hear. The access to information is powerful. He pointed out, however, that the possibilities for distortion, fraud and anarchy are there and that we need to recognize our moral, and intellectual commitment to leave the planet better than we found it by putting our boots on the ground while using technology as an extension of our hearts as well as our minds.

The whole of his comments lasted only 20 minutes or so (about the time I spent waiting in line to get in) and they were generally innocuous. There was nothing unexpected or profound in them (perhaps others would disagree) and they left me with the impression of an honorable man’s attempt to offer his perspective on a rapidly changing world.

Technorati Tags: Tom Brokaw, MIT, technology, media

When I heard there’d soon be free WiFi on the Worchester line (which is the one I take every day) I couldn’t stop grinning. I considered it to be a potentially life-altering development. A week later and a few opportunities to try it out here’s what I think.

First of all, it is totally nice to be able to get online on the train. I know lots of people already do with WiMax and Mobile Broadband but for the rest of us it’s nice to have an opportunity. It does seem like the program - especially in the early days - is a little confused. I have seen a number of on-train networks: DemoProject, Junctionbox and Commuter Rail Connect.

DemoProject - which gave me a nice strong signal on Friday morning wouldn’t actually allow me to connect with anything. Junctionbox that afternoon gave me a connection and a strong signal but was incredibly slow. CRC is the official network and this morning brought me to the T’s terms and conditions page.

Right now the connection is technically limited to one car. I’ve looked for the network in cars not marked with the on board broadband sticker and haven’t had any luck. I’ll bet if you were in the very next car you could get on no trouble.

I get on in Natick and the signal has been strong all the way into the city. The speed isn’t terrific - 400k down and 200k up but it’s better than nothing. I haven’t seen anyone else using the connection on any of the trains I’ve been on and I wonder how slow it will be if there are 30 or 40 people sharing the bandwidth. It won’t be pretty.

I’ve been using it for pretty light online activity - posting to this blog, IM, twitter, etc. While it might not be the fastest connection you’re going to find it’s free, fast(ish) and sure makes the commute a little more pleasant. Hats off the the MBTA for taking this first step.

At last week’s MITX event I badgered the panel about the possibility to payment for content creators on social sites. I was told the question was “naive” and heard from a commenter that there was no way this would happen in for foreseeable future. To his credit, that person did mention that YouTube was doing something like this but he wondered is anything had actually been paid.

Imagine my relief this morning when I saw this article on the BBC.com. Apparently I’m not as naive as some believe and the foreseeable future as arrived!

YouTube users in the UK will be given the chance to make money from the videos they post on the site.

The project is already up and running in the US and is now being extended to other countries, starting in the UK.

In the US some contributors are already earning thousands of dollars each month from their films, according to the video-sharing site.

The amount that is earned will depend on the number and popularity of the videos, it said.

Will this eventually extend beyond YouTube and become standard industry wide? Why not?

Over the past couple of days I’ve been talking with people at the Society for New Communications Research and the Social Media Club here in Boston about the intersection of communication and culture. I support the idea of looking at the stuff of life as legitimate channels for communication - but this has to be done with an extremely high level of sensitivity - especially when the content is commercial.

This past week the Campaign For A Commercial-Free Childhood sent out an email exposing an exploitation of a cultural communication channel by McDonald’s. The program was built around commercial messages being included on report card envelopes of kids in kindergarten through fifth grade in Seminole County, Florida. It offered free Happy Meals to kids that did well in Academics, Citizenship or Attendance.

Here’s the piece that went out:

Some complained that the promotion forced them to be the bad guys if they said “no” to the free Happy Meal; that kids might feel that they were entitled to a reward for their accomplishments; that it was simply inappropriate for commercial characters and messages to be included via this channel.

This isn’t the first time - and nor is McDonald’s the first company - to do this type of “sponsorship;” and some might argue that if communities don’t want this type of thing they should find alternative ways to fund local schools. The fact is though that even with full funding - if someone offers a school system with cash few are going to say “no.”

So using the idea of cultural communications, how might McDonald’s accomplished its marketing goal without raising the hackles of parents and advocacy groups?

First, they could have taken their commercial message off of the envelope all together - but still have paid the school for the mailing. Since this was a local program, they could have promoted their sponsorships in-store and perhaps generated positive word-of-mouth.

Second, they could have included parents in conversation. This was one of the things they were criticized for - and rightly so - they were marketing directly to kids and setting up potential conflict between kids and parents. Again, a program that was aimed at parents in the stores, letting them know that McDonald’s would let them - the parents - bring their kids into a store for a free Happy Meal would have make the reward the parents could bestow if they say fit. This would have made mom and dad - as well as McDonald’s into the hero.

Third, they could have made the program broader and more interesting. For example, rather then just giving kids a free meal for a report card, why not create a redeemable currency that kids could collect and save for meals or merchandise online? This would be something that would include the parents and the kids - and, for those that opted to participate - create and even stronger tie between the customers and the brand.

Instead, McDonald’s took the easiest path and is getting hammered (coverage has appeared in the New York Times, the AP and in local papers in Orlando). Cultural communications can work; it just has to be handled with more intelligence and sensitivity than was demonstrated in this case.

What do you think? Would you feel comfortable with a program like this in your community?

Technorati Tags: McDonald’s, education, marketing, cultural communications, report cards, Campaign For A Commercial-Free Childhood

Earlier this month I attended the MIT Communications Forum on Collective Intelligence. Here is a summary of the event.

Karim Lakhani, Harvard Business School
Alex “Sandy” Pentland, MIT Media Lab
Thomas Malone, MIT Center for Collective Intelligence

David Thorburn introduced the evenings panel and explained that the idea of collective intelligence has been a topic that the Forum has covered in the past, mentioning Howard Rheingold’s session on Smart Mobs in 2002 as an example. He also pointed out that it has been an ongoing preoccupation for people in technology for a long time.

One of the missions of the Forum, he explained, is to speak to a literate citizenry – and he asked the speakers to speak in a common, literate language. With that he opened the Forum by asking Thomas Malone to provide a definition and overview of collective intelligence.

Malone started by saying the the Forum was an example of collective intelligence, in that it seeks to take advantage of the intelligence of the audience. Collective intelligence happens through conversations among a literate citizenry.

He defined collective intelligence as groups of individuals, doing things collectively that seem intelligent. By that definition, it’s clear that collective intelligence has been around for a very long time – families, armies, countries – have all provided examples throughout history. He pointed out that all of these groups (and others) have also exhibit collective stupidity. Recognizing the differences between collective intelligence and collective stupidity is important.

In the past few years, he went on, there have been some interesting examples of collective intelligence: Google – not jut the technology or the company; but also the system – the creation of Web pages, the linking of pages and the technology that harvests all of this information. It’s an amazing example because it combines people and computers in a way that never existed before.

Wikipedia is also an excellent example. Again, it’s not just the technology. What’s really amazing is the organizational design that has arisen around Wikipedia. There, the community – which is virtually entirely voluntary - has invented an organizational design that allows thousands of people from all over the world to create an intellectual product with out centralized control.

He thinks these are just the beginning of whole new classes of intelligent entities that we will see over the coming decades. In order to take full advantage of them, we will need to understand their possibilities at a much deeper level. The goal of this understanding is to connect people and computers so they can act more intelligently than any people, machines or groups ever have before.

Consider the research status of collective intelligence as compared with artificial intelligence. In AI, the goal is to create machines that are more intelligent that humans; and much work has been done on this topic so the core questions of AI are well understood. Too little time has been spent on developing the same understanding for collective intelligence and we need to figure out how to take advantage of both people and machines.

Sandy Pentland spoke next and described his general thoughts on collective intelligence. The reason people come together into groups, he explained, is to be more intelligent. There are also problems that arise when groups collect – conflict, group think, etc.; and the larger the organization, the bigger these problems become. In some ways, collective intelligence can be seen as the attempt to simply break even and avoid collective idiocy.

This break even can be achieved by developing more sensible organizations – not ad hoc but based on data, science and modeling. In modern organizations, there is a great deal of organizational data that can be analyzed – emails, memos, etc. But the most important communication happens face-to-face. This communication is the delicate, content-full discussions that really matter. Until recently though, this was unmanageable and unstorable. Most of it was invisible and couldn’t be organized and managed. Now, Pentland explained, we are able to measure face-to-face communication in real time.

Pentland and his team are tracking face-to-face interaction with a name badge the keeps track of whom the wearer is talking to and when – but not the content on the conversations. It creates a recording of what happens when people see and are animated by each other.

He went onto describe research conducted at a German bank looking at the dynamics of communications. It analyzed communications patters – both over email and face-to-face. The resulting maps were very different, and, for the first time, provided a means to view how information flows within an organization.

Pentland emphasized that neither alone was key; but that the combination of the two helped provide and understanding of the most effective modes of communication. This work has allowed an analysis of what is happening, who is over worked, the quality of group interaction, etc. It permits the identification of potential problems and provides the ability to make suggestions for improved communication and information flow.

It can, of course, also seem more than a little Big Brother; but Pentland sees a value in creating personal information tools – based on electronic communication tracking, proximity badges, etc. - that lead to more awareness and alert people to issues of group think or polarization. His hope is that with this information people will be better able to manage themselves and achieve better results for themselves and their organizations.

He also mentioned other work that could lead to more formal collective intelligence applications. These included market-based models for predicting future events and systems for identifying and addressing the problems of gossip and rumor – which can be identified by paying attention to communication patterns.

Thorburn was interested in how rumor or gossip could be identified without access to the content of the communication. Pentland explained that you do need to have some baseline understanding in order to identify patterns of communication with patterns of decision making. With this though, he said, you can see who is reacting to the same memes versus those you are thinking independently.

Malone liked Pentland’s research to Von Leeuwenhoek and the microscope: what the microscope allowed was the observation of things that have always existed but in detail never before possible. Pentland is creating an organizational microscope for observing existing communication behavior in ways not possible in the past.

Lakhani spoke next and described how he came to be involved with collective intelligence – which he described as being quite by accident. He’d been working with a client, trying to sell them some software. They wouldn’t buy because they claimed to have created a similar system themselves. Given the complexity of the problems they were trying to address, Lakhani couldn’t accept this explanation; but when he spent time looking at what they’d done, he saw they were years ahead of others. How had they done this? By tapping into the Open Source community.

While at MIT he saw examples of this again and again as people were using communities to solve tough computing challenges. How, he wondered, is it that this distributed organizational model can work better than large, centralized systems? He came to recognize that there was something real and different about the Open Source approach – despite the general skepticism of the time. These projects typically entailed lots of work – so what motivated people to get involved in what is essentially unpaid work?

Lakhani found that Open Source is a prototypical example of collective intelligence and there there is a heterogeneity in motivation. Some people simply believe in the model and so want to support it. Others are pragmatists who are trying to solve a specific problem they are facing. The fact of the matters is that the community doesn’t care about motivation as long as the work gets done.

For this to happen, communities need to have a participation infrastructure that will attract people. There also needs to be an understanding of the ownership of the intellectual property. For Open Source projects this has been solved but, he wondered, will it become an issue for collective intelligence efforts? Governance also needs to be considered. Wikipedia offers an example of a functional flat structure, but within each article there are battles to reach compromise and build consensus.

For Lakhani, the Open Source community provides an inspiration; but he sees other examples. Innocentive, for instance, takes scientific problems beyond the bounds of an organization to tap into the collective intelligence. Often, people are able to provide solutions that are outside of their domain. One of the hopes of collective intelligence is that it is able to aggregate the pockets of “sticky” intelligence that exist around the world.

Another example he provided was Threadless, a t-shirt design company. Its designs are user submitted and user judged. User demand for specific shirts is also tracked to determine how many of each design is actually produced. This model – though small and specialized – shows how the way an organization can be redefined and how much work can be done by the community.

Thorburn asked the panel to provide additional examples of collective intelligence at work, and to discuss its limitations.

Malone described the idea of collective prediction and predictive markets mentioned by Pentland. The idea is to broaden this and to predict more types on information. This will require an infrastructure that includes the participation of computational agents. In many cases, these types of software agents can do a better job of predicting things that humans with the result being faster, smoother markets. People will continue to play an important role to step in if the agents are making bad predictions.

In terms of measuring collective intelligence, Malone pointed out that we’ve been measuring human intelligence for more than a century and as a result have a precise definition of intelligence. According to the psychometric definition, how well does at one intellectual task is a good predictor of how well one will do on other types of tasks; and there are all sorts of statistically significant relationships and correlations.

The question is, can the same thing be true for groups of humans or humans and computers? Will a group that does well on some tasks do well on others? While it is currently unclear if this is true, there is a project underway to find the answer. Malone is especially interested in what causes difference in intelligence between groups and to find ways to improve the collective intelligence capabilities of groups in general.

Thorburn raised the issue of collective intelligence as a surveillance tool and asked Pentland for his thoughts, as well as about the limitations of collective intelligence.

Regarding privacy, Pentland pointed out that like it or not, we are constantly being monitored or monitoring ourselves (he pointed to cell phones as one means of this happening). The real question is determining the balance between privacy and advantage: how much information do we need to give up for what level of benefit.

His vision is the creation of feedback tools able to provide valuable insight for individuals. In terms of limits, there certainly are some; but we need to work to detect our errors and improve the way we think in groups.

Malone pointed out that behind Thorburns questions was a widespread misnotion – wisdom of crowds – that crowds are intelligent and can by their nature can solve problems. He explained that collective intelligence isn’t magic; sometimes it works and sometimes it does not. It’s also very complicated and whether it is successful or not depends on what one is trying to achieve. His goal is to put it on a firm scientific foundation so we can better judge when and how collective intelligence will work well. For this to happen, we need to know which people and computers to connect and how to connect them effectively.

Lakhani said that collective intelligence is not a universal solutions. He has worked on decision markets in the past and the data showed that the system can work. One of the biggest issue is that managers don’t want to use predictive markets or collective intelligence because they can be contradictory to the role of the manager. This is often an organizational rather than a technical limit and at this point there are no course on community management so there are few mechanisms for doing this yet.

He also pointed to legal and technical issues as potential limitations. From a legal perspective, our views on intellectual property are a major question mark. How will profits be shared the profits from that which is created by the community? And on technology, not everything can be modularized and distributed. It works well in software, but how would it work in something like drug discovery?

With these comments in mind, Thorburn asked if the best we can hope for from collective intelligence was selling more t-shirts and wondered if there were any applications that weren’t based on profit and loss.

Malone pointed to Wikipedia is an example. Another, he suggested, is the use of collective intelligence to monitor and deal with climate change. He mentioned a project using technology to allow people to propose and analyze plans for addressing climate change. It will probably focus on government policy and give people the ability to access, view and analyze massive computer climate simulations. Collective decision making around climate data - by allowing people to consider and vote the policies that make the most sense. Finally, he discussed using technology for improved argumentation by providing structure around discussion through a series of positions and structured arguments so debates can become become less chaotic.

Lakhani mentioned Open Congress as a means to enable citizens to observe what the legislature is doing. He also discussed the rise of creative commons and peoples willingness to allow their content to be remixed to create new content.

Pentland suggested collective intelligence as a tool for detecting depressions by analyzing patterns of interaction. He again mentioned the benefit of collective intelligence as a reflective aid. In the larger arena, he said that collective intelligence could be used to detect societal discord and mentioned patterns of cell phone usage in the UK and the correlation of that data with social integration. He concluded by describing the Legatum Center for Development and Entrepreneurship, which is bringing together change agents from around the world to consider problems and bring solutions back to their communities.

———

Overall, it was a strong and interesting Forum that raised some pretty interesting points. One of the things I found most interesting was how much the patterns and context of communication among a group could say about the group’s effectiveness. That, coupled with the difference in patterns of electronic and interpersonal communication, made me question my own communication patterns. I use the phone very infrequently now - most of my communication is either over email or Facebook, twitter, etc.

The analysis that was described didn’t appear to take these channels into account - but were focused more on email, telephone and interpersonal. How different would the patterns be if these were taken into account?

Technorati Tags: MIT, Communication Forum, Collective Intelligence, Karim R. Lakhani, Thomas W. Malone, Sandy Pentland

A couple of weeks ago I attended the kick off for the Fall program of the MIT Communications Forum. The evening’s focus was on the new Center for the Future of Civic Media (C4FCM) and exploring what Civic Media was all about. I’ve prepared a summary of the event for the Comm Forum Web site but thought I’d share a little bit here as well.

The format for the evening was a panel discussion. It featured Henry Jenkins of the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program, Chris Csikszentmihalyi of the MIT Media Lab, Beth Noveck of New York Law School and Ethan Zuckerman of the Berkman Center and Global Voices.

What struck me most during the course of the discussion was the idea that the media has failed to provide a means for people to be engaged with their communities. Part of this had to do with the technologies people use to consume media - which were described as being designed for the individual at the expense of the community. Civic media itself, of course, is itself built on technology.

According to Jenkins, Civic Media is any use of any medium (by which he means a communications technology and the protocols that govern its use) that fosters any civic engagement. So while communication technology has been part of the problem in the past, it is seen as part of the solution for the future. How can this work? The main issue is that the individual nature of much technology has fostered the rise of media (and to an extent a democracy) that is built around talk rather than action. Civic media - it’s hoped - will create a media based around action by providing people not only with information but with the tools to put information to work. Building on the democracy theme, Jenkins said that democracy needs to be more than a special event that takes place once a year. It needs to become an everyday challenge and activity; and everyone needs to be asking what are the technologies that will help create this sense of engagement.

When it comes to the issue of technology, Csikszentmihalyi pointed out that everything has winners and losers - as well as unanticipated uses. He thought it was unfortunate that so few technologies support the idea of civic engagement but went a step further, suggesting that specific types of engagement need to be supported and encouraged. His view was that civic media needs to be about gaming the system to create better civic spaces. Again, the idea that democracy isn’t being supported by the current media came through loud and clear.

Noveck was probably the most outspoken of the panelists on the failure of the media in fostering public conversation. According to her, the deliberative role of the media - and of democracy itself - has failed and she suggested that the time might be right to reinvent our conception of the media. She pointed out that civic engagement and conversation don’t necessarily translate into participation or a change in power structures. There were a few reasons for this. First, community-level engagement doesn’t scale and second because the issues we face often require more knowledge and information than people have. Providing tools to access and share information with larger and larger communities (whether actual communities or imagined ones) is the key to Noveck. She described the end-game as recasting our conceptualization of the First Amendment to be not simply about talking about talk but also talking about action.

Zuckerman provided some great examples of civic media in action around the world. Cases where communities were forced to create their own news because the traditional media was controlled by the government. So not only were these people creating content and conversation and action - they were also building the communication channels around their actions to bring attention that hadn’t been there in the past. He also described the “action, not words” aspect of civic media by describing a situation where crowds rallied via SMS and Twitter were able to block the progress of local police and secure the release of an arrested man. What he described was neither talk for the sake of talk or action for the sake of action but the practical blending of ideas and engagement to shift the balance of power and effect change.

At the end of the day, that was really what everyone was talking about - how do we make technology more than a tool for individual entertainment and content consumption and more into a tool to connect people and ideas in ways that will benefit their communities. Considering this issue - and developing the ideas and tools to make it happen - is the goal of the Center. It’s very cool and I am looking forward to getting involved.

Technorati Tags: MIT, MIT Communication Forum, MIT Center for the Future of Civic Media, C4FCM, Civic Media, MIT Media Lab, Berkman Center, Henry Jenkins, Chris Csikszentmihalyi, Beth Noveck, Ethan Zuckerman

I’m working on a paper for the Society for New Communications Research on “New Media, New Influencers and Implications for Public Relations Professionals” to be presented at the Society for New Communications Research Symposium here in Boston in December. I’d appreciate it if people would be willing to complete (and share) a survey on the topic.

There are actually two surveys - one aimed at communication professionals and another for general consumers.

In addition, we’re looking to include case studies on how companies are adopting and applying new media/social media programs. Please let me know if you know of companies that might be interested. You can reach me at gpc AT pevco DOT net.

Technorati Tags: SNCR, social media, public relations, PR, communications, survey

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

I haven’t posted in here in a while because I’ve been busy working on some really interesting projects. The main one has been to use social media to build grassroots awareness for the National September 11 Memorial & Museum. There hasn’t been anything super flashy (not yet at least) but just open, direct engagement with established communities - Flickr, Facebook, MySpace, etc. The response has been great - after less than a week we have one of the largest September 11 groups on Flickr.

One of the things that has been especially interesting to me as I’ve worked on this is the difference in thinking needed for social media vs traditional media. In social media we’re always talking about conversation and engagement. We let ideas out into communities and allow them to develop and expand as they will. So far on this project that’s worked well.

There’s one community that we want to be involved with that is more controlled and is looking for more detailed information before becoming engaged. Someone mentioned that we’d have to provide the content for the site. What we need to provide isn’t the content. What we need to provide is the information to get the conversation started and then let the conversation itself become the content. This can be a hard shift in thinking.

Technorati Tags: social media, public relations, content vs conversation