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

I wasn’t familiar with these guys until the wrote asking to use some of my photos for their guides. I’ve been seeing a number of new travel companies recently and like some of the approaches people are taking. I’m a big fan of Untravel, not so much of Urban Interactive and way of Schmap (OK, so the fact that they use my photos for free helps . . .).

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?

For most of our history, creative content has moved freely - if slowly - through culture. Before the printing press, stories were passed through oral tradition of through hand written reproduction. Both of these models allowed room for change and adaptation. Once he technology of printing and publishing arrived, written content was increasingly locked, owned and protected.

The same has been true for musical content - especially in the folk tradition. Music passed from player to listener. People would learn and swap songs, change the lyrics, reuse the tune and create together. Obviously someone somewhere had written the song and the music and often it was available in sheet form for others to play. The understanding and assumption was that people would play and perform the music.

Once sound recording came onto the scene, that seems to have changed. No more sharing songs with friends. No more repurposing tunes or lyrics. Thanks to recording audio content became something that could be locked, owned, protected and commoditized. Are we better off?

There’s a relationship between the level of skill/technology needed to produce content and the lengths people are willing to take to prevent its reproduction. I mean if I relate a story I’ve read in a book no one raises an eyebrow. If I were to tell a story - or even read from a book - in front of a group, no one cracks down.

If I were to play a piece of produced content in front of that same group - whether it was sound or images - what then? Would that be OK?

One think that’s interesting to consider is that a company like Sony used to actively encourage people to reproduce copyrighted produced content. How many tape decks and blank cassettes have they sold over the past 40 years? Why was it OK to tape but now not OK to rip? And Sony’s taken the extra step to suggest that copying music you OWN for your own use may be criminal.

The barriers to producing and sharing content are down. We’re back in the content world that we have existed in for hundreds of thousands of years. Technology took the freedom to create and recreate and share away as the ability to produce and protect content became prevalent.

We’re kind of back to where we started but we need to be responsible. Wholesale copyright infringement isn’t OK but a more liberal understanding of fair use needs to be developed to allow for the resumption of non-homoginized cultural development.

Check out Tom Pettitt’s paper on the Gutenberg Parenthesis for more coherent thoughts on this whole issue.

What do you think?

I’ve been so busy with my other blogs lately that I haven’t been writing here as much as I ought to - now that the 2008 events are underway I expect that to change.

I went out last night to MITX. The panel was moderated by Larry Weber and featured Tom Arrix of Facebook, Pauline Ores of IBM, Juan Santos or StudioCom, Suzanne Skop of MySpace and Jeff Taylor of Eons. The event drew a good crowd, probably 250 people. It was less the hip social media scene people and more folks that I think were looking for ways to understand what’s happening. (I will say that most of the people in the room raised their hands when asked if they were using Facebook or Myspace.)

In terms of content, I didn’t come away with anything especially new or revealing. It was what has become a fairly familiar conversation - the way people want to receive content is changing so the way marketers communicate with them needs to change as well. Yep, got it.

What made this panel perhaps more interesting was the quality of the panelists - or at least of the companies for whom they worked. This gave me an opportunity to raise an issue that’s been bothering me lately. Let me explain the issue and then get into the panel’s response.

I’m reading, “The Ball is Round - A Global History of Soccer.” It’s a pretty good book and has been a good introduction to the game. One of the things that surprised me is that in the early days, “amateurism” was the spirit of the day. What this meant was that players weren’t paid. So the club owners would invest in building stadiums (often just a few wood stands or even raised earth mounds for spectators) and charge a gate. At the time though, the players saw NONE of the money and that, of course, suited the owners just fine.

Fast forward a hundred or so odd years and replace stadiums with social networking sites, replace the fans with visitors and the players with content creators (who might also be visitors). There’s typically no admission fee but there’s a ton of money flowing into the pockets of the companies that build and maintain the sites. The value of these sites is the content and interaction provided by the members. But the people creating the value are seeing NONE of the revenue.

It seems like a pretty exploitative model to me and one - over time - that’s bound to change in time as people recognize that this is the same old economic model that unions were created to deal with wrapped in newer and friendlier fabric. So I can pay Linden Labs for the privilege of creating value for Linden Labs . . . hmmmm. What’s wrong with this picture?

So I asked the panel what they though. Whether they’re respective companies would ever think of a model that recognized and compensated people for the value they bring to the community. Guess what? The short answer is no. I was told that this was a naïve question, that people are already rewarded with intangible things like recognition and kudos.

Those early soccer players were also rewarded by the cheers of the fans but sooner or later they recognized that cheers don’t buy a whole hell of a lot.

One of the big ideas of this whole social media thing is the democratization of content creation and distribution and that’s awesome. But the result can’t be a concentration of money and control in the hands of the few built on the work of the many. That just isn’t going to be sustainable forever.

Is it time to form a content creators union? Is it time to organize the unrecognized social media workforce? Is it at least time to take a step back and ask these kinds of questions?
Let me know what you think.

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

Earlier today I had the opportunity to attend the “Game Changers” session at MIT’s Emerging Technology Conference

The panelists were Kevin Rose from Digg, Tariq Krim from Netvibes and Garret Campbell from Stumble Upon. Jason Pontin, the editor in chief for MIT’s Technology Review was the moderator.

Pontin presented the panelists as founders of some of today’s most exciting Web startups and said that they would unveil what’s next for their companies and reveal the impact it could have other companies. I’m not sure if that exactly happened over the course of the discussion. Pontin started the session by polling the audience about their media consumption habits using the nTag badges we all had. The polling process was a little clunky but the bottom line was that the audience had pretty mainstream habits – relying primarily on traditional media.

His first question to the panel was what what game each company was changing.

Campbell described Stumble Upon as a Web discovery service that allows users to rate sites and content and then provides suggestions on additional based on the likes and interests of with similar profiles. The site currently has about 3.5 million users. Krim described Netvibes as a personalized aggregation service that allowed people to put everything they care about onto a single page. He described it as widgetized content. Rose explained that digg started as a social news web site allowing people to share found news and content with the masses and rate the news to move it up or down the site.

None what they said was especially enlightening but it was good to hear each of them describe their businesses themselves.

Pontin’s next question was on how media consumption habits had changed.

Campbell said that the biggest difference was that the media was now a two-way street with users able to and increasingly expecting to be able to rate and respond to stories. According to Rose, it took a while for people to grasp the concept of digg. He’d been using del.icio.us and Slashdot and saw digg as an experiment to see what would happen if you gave complete editorial control to the community. Krim was overwhelmed by the volume of information he had to deal with and sees all of us facing “attention competition.” The task of managing our attention is one of the biggest changes in how we deal with the media.

I thought all three panelists made some pretty cool points – especially the idea that we can use technology to better manage or relationship with content and the media. As a digg user, I think it’s pretty safe to say the the experiment worked.

The next thing Pontin asked about was the role of trust for each of sites.

On digg, according to Rose, trust is everything. He tried to equate more diggs with more interest and therefor more trust. That seemed like a bit of a stretch – popularity doesn’t necessarily mean accurate content. He did say that the source of the content didn’t really matter that much since it was up to the community to filter the content. Because Rose understands that the front page stories aren’t of interest to everyone, digg also provides additional filtering tools – by topic, friends, etc. In the future digg will be providing a suggestion service which offers stories based on what has been dug by a user in the past.

Kevin Rose

Not surprisingly, both Campbell and Krim also thought trust was important. Campell said that they think it’s important; but that it’s also important to find and connect like-minded people so they can create create clusters of similar people and allow people to get and share info. Over time, he expects Stumbledupon to become more social. Krim made the point that people are providing more and more personal information on social sites and how these various services use this information is critical.

None of the panelists really addressed the issue of trust very well but all of them were happy to talk about it. The issue at hand was, I think, the degree to which the content on these sites could be trusted rather than the trust relationship between members or between members and the sites.

Pontin’s next question had to do with how content sources – like the Tech – would be compensated. Who’s going to pay for content creation? None of the panelists seemed to get the question and each of them instead chose to talk about the business model for their sites.

Campbell said that advertising has been effective; but that paid content or membership sections were also viable models. Rose pointed out that “content is king” and that he’s seen several part-time bloggers that have been able to do it full time because their content attracts enough readers. He also pointed out the New York Times has taken down their paid wall because they are making enough from advertising to open up the site. Krim acknowledged that this is an issue, but he took the conversation in a different direction by suggesting that the advertising market needs to keep pace with audience interest.

Garrett Campbell

His point was a perfect segue to Pontin’s next question, which was whether the panelists thought advertising would change.

Campbell thought that it would because it would be important (and beneficial) to understand which advertising matters to whom. He also thought that giving users the ability to rate ads so they could be better targeted made sense as well. Rose sees a blurring between advertising and other content. On digg people often share ads that they find funny or interesting. He also pointed to the example of a kitchen remodeling company that posted what were essentially advertising messages into a blog post that was popular on digg. Krin said that it was important for social media to have social advertising and that advertising needs to provide a real service to the user, not just information.

Pontin also wanted to know how important other media types – in particular video – factor into the three sites. This seemed like kind of a simplistic question since all three of the sites already provide some degree of access to other media.

Campbell thought that media diversification was important and that after text they offered photographs and that video was on the horizon. Music was another that he sees in the future. Overall, he sees a shift in the amount of time people spend with different media types and he wants to make sure they are able to provide what’s of interest to Stumbledupon users. Krim said that in the beginning, people were using NetVibes for RSS aggregation but that now people are adding all sorts of content types. He sees content as the key to user attention and engagement. According to Rose, digg’s value comes wherever there is too much content for people to sift through. Today the site is primarily text, video and podcast but there will be other media types in the future.

Next Pontin asked about Twitter , Pownce and microblogging in general. He asked for a show of hands and it turns out that very few people in the audience were Twitter users.

Given the fact that Rose started Pownce, he started the discussion. He started using Twitter himself back in March at SXSW and though it was really useful for connecting and keeping track of people at the event. He said that Pownce serves a different function. It’s a way to share media files within a community. If Twitter is all about the mobile experience, Pownce is about being at the computer sharing content with friends.

Tariq Krim

Krim thought said that you need to understand tools in the context of the community. He Twitters because he travels and has ended up with lots of people following him. He told a story of visting the Apple store and Twittering about the iPhone. He was called by two reporter right away who wanted to interview him about the phone. In his opinion, these are tools that the wireless carriers should have provided. all of this is about community and the carriers ought to have used it. Campbell added that microblogging is cool because it combines information and expression.

Pontin’s last question to the panel was what they thought of as Facebook as a challenger to each of their companies.

Rose said he met with Mark Zuckerberg before Facebook launched the application project, who said he wanted to become the social network and to work with companies like the ones on stage to create applications for the network. At this point though, he thought that many of the apps were kind silly, pirate vs. ninja kind of stuff. He thought that this reflected the way people used Facebook – more for social connections rather than for information. Krim saw the value of Facebook in the fact that it has made it possible for more to get involved. He raised the issue of privacy and worried that there was a risk in the monitization of context – particularly as it relates to private information.

All in all, it was a pretty good discussion and all three of the panelists shared some interesting points.

Technorati Tags: digg, emtech, garret campbell, jason pontin, kevin rose, mit, netvibes, stumble upon, tariq krim

Aside from having to run to San Francisco for a quick meeting (no really, I like day trips to California) this is shaping up to be a great week. Why? Because Thursday night is just chuck full of good events.

I’ll be starting my evening at the kick off for the MIT Communication Forum Fall series. The Comparative Media Studies program and the Media Lab have come together to create the new MIT Center for Future Civic Media and Thursday night’s forum will ask the question. “What is Civic Media.” It’s going to be happening from 5:00 to 7:00 in the Bartos Theater at 20 Ames Street. I’m excited to see these two groups put their heads together around technology, emerging media forms and civic engagement.

The panel will feature:

Chris Csikszentmihalyi is Muriel R. Cooper Career Development Professor of Media Arts and Sciences at the MIT Media Lab.

Henry Jenkinsis co-director of Comparative Media Studies and the Peter de Florez Professor of Humanities at MIT.

Beth Noveck is professor of law at New York Law School where she directs the Institute for Information Law & Policy.

Ethan Zuckerman is a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, Harvard Law School, and co-founder of Global Voices.

It should be terrific and will serve as a great beginning to what promises to be a solid series of events.

Later that same night - and not far down the road - will be the first Social Media Club meeting of the Fall. Business Wire is sponsoring a panel on the social media lessons learned by corporate America. In my role as the programming director for the Club, I helped pull this panel together and am really excited by the topic and the speakers. The only thing that bums me out is that I am going to be late; but there isn’t much I can do about that.

Here’s the panel line up for this event:

Steve Restivo, Director of Corporate Affairs, Wal-Mart Northeast, will discuss how America’s biggest retailer has started to put social media to work and the lessons they have learned along the way.

Dan Lyons, Senior Editor, Forbes Magazine and the man behind Fake Steve Jobs, will discuss how the lines of mainstream media and the blogosphere have blurred and how this impacts communications professionals and corporate PR. Dan is also the author of the forthcoming book “Options: The Secret Life of Steve Jobs, a Parody.”

Josh Bernoff, Vice Principal & Principal Analyst, Forrester Research, will address how the adoption of social media is changing the world or corporate communication. Josh is also currently co-authoring (with Charlene Li, also of Forrester) “Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies.”

Monika Maeckle, Vice President, Southwest Region, Business Wire, will moderate. Monika has been deeply involved in the development of Business Wire’s EON suite of services, a web only social media platform. Maeckle is also the author of many of Business Wire’s SEO tip sheets and blog posts.

Things will be kicking off on Thursday, September 2 at 6:30 at the Newton Marriott so be sure to come on down. You can find more details – and a registration link – on the Social Media Clubwiki.

Both events are going to be good so try to make it to one or both if you can swing it.

Technorati Tags: MIT Communications Forum, MIT Media Lab, MIT Center for Future Civic Media, Comparative Media Studies, Chris Csikszentmihalyi, Henry Jenkins, Beth Noveck, Ethan Zuckerman, SMCBoston, Steve Restivo, Wal-Mart, Dan Lyons, Forbes, Fake Steve Jobs, Josh Bernoff, Forrester, Monika Maeckle, Business Wire, Events, Boston

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