How do we act on social networks? How should we act on social networks?

What is the best way to leverage the branding, marketing and communications possibilities provided by social networking tools?

Faris Yakob, Chief Technology Strategist, McCann-Erickson New York, has a surprisingly simple answer: Be Nice, Or Leave.

It’s a simple dictum, one that he takes from our social interactions in the “real” world and applies to our digital lives.

For example, it doesn’t take much social grace to understand you’re boorish if you perpetually interrupt conversations, shout others down, always talk about how great you are, or constantly fixate on just you and not on the community within which you exist and operate. Doing so is not the way to win friends and influence people despite how we see some brands and organizations acting online.

Through a number of examples, Faris discusses how the art of listening, communicating and most importantly, participating as an equal — albeit important — voice among many is a path towards increasing brand trust, transparency and influence.

The video above was filmed in Spring 2009. I think its insight will last much longer.

Mike Smith led us this week with an excellent account of his experience in grass roots organizing during the Obama presidential campaign. More importantly — and if we listened well — he discussed how we might learn lessons from the campaign for future political advocacy whether that advocacy revolves around an election or the promotion of specific issues.

One of the key takeaways is to embrace potential allies and enable them to pursue their own online messaging in support of the issue at hand. This necessitates a relinquishing of top down control, and relinquishing such control is something many struggle with throughout all industries be they corporations, advocacy organizations, political campaigns or community organizers.

At issue, of course, is the actual message. What is it? How is it said and how is it presented? This is a classic case of who controls the messenger. In the parlance of the day, are there mechanisms to prevent others from going rogue? Or is that just the cost of doing business in the digital age?

The answer is not simple and the conversation about the answer is quite long. If we cut to the short of it though the answer is yes, no matter the vertical we need to give up our attempts to control every aspect of a brand or message and instead realize that we are a participant in an ever evolving conversation about it.

That the digital medium no longer allows top down control is not a new idea. However, many still struggle in their interactions with others who are engaging a message, and reinterpreting that message for their particular audience.

Our success in doing so is partly based on our ability to relinquish control while simultaneously maintaining active engagement with the interpretation of our message and the endless reinterpretation — and indeed misinterpretation — that is bound to take place.

How to actually do so will be tackled elsewhere. Let us now acknowledge it though and flag for later debate.

After Mike’s presentation we workshopped and tried to create grassroots campaigns that could affect a global issue (in this case, the climate change in Copenhagen). As we came out of that workshop and listened to what individual groups proposed, an interesting mix of online advocacy and physical world gathering was suggested.

While the offline advocacy was concrete (eg, we will hold events across the country and this is who we’ll target), online strategies remained somewhat vague. With each group’s presentation, we heard something along the lines of, “We’ll pursue social media, we’ll have a Web site.”

A Web site is all well and good, but to what end? What is this “social media” site that everyone leans towards and believes they must have?

I mentioned that these hypothetical sites do not need to include much. Some media around the advocacy is important. Updates for targeted communities are also important. But in the role playing we pursued the general consensus was that traditional in-person events still trump virtual communications in our efforts to engage audience support.

So where does that leave an organization’s Web site and, by extension, Internet strategy?

In this case, with others. That is, to hand our message over to advocates in the blogosphere and let them run with it.

This requires a number of important qualities, namely authenticity and transparency so that Bloggers will believe enough in your story to run it, promote it, and engage with it as they engage their Web audiences.

Equally important, it requires that after demonstrating your authenticity you accept that your idea and mission is “out there” for interpretation, manipulation and sometimes, unfortunately, condemnation.

The idea here is that you’ve put your idea, mission, thought or brand into the public and you will receive both feedback and backlash. This is important. This is expected. This is what you must navigate to be successful. At least, this is what you need to navigate to succeed in the online space.

All of which is a very long way to get to the video that starts this post: CarrotMobs.

Each cluster working on our climate change exercise advocated in-person and event oriented action. I suggested Carrot Mob techniques and the video above gives a good sense of what those may be, and how they could be engaged.

The point is rather simple, and the Jujutsu (柔術) should be clear. Take your target’s greatest strength and turn it to your advantage.

I’m interested in hearing how you can advocate and get those you target to come on board with your message.

I’m doubly interested in whether you’re willing to pass your advocacy message along to the digital world, and then engage it as it transforms, or wanders off in directions you may not have planned for.

When we talk about Internet and mobile communications, we should always keep in mind that in many parts of the world these technologies just don’t compute.

Take, for example, the video above from Liberia’s capital Monrovia. Here, where per capita GDP is $215, newspapers are too expensive to buy and Internet access is something the majority only hear about.

How to share and spread information then? The Chalkboard Blog.

Each morning, Alfred Sirleaf combs through the day’s news and writes headlines and stories on a giant chalkboard. Then readers come to discuss, debate in this newly formed town square. Call it the world’s least likely, most popular blog.

What’s amazing though in this video is how Sirleaf discusses design and technology issues associated with the medium. It’s a conversation any news editor can appreciate.

A different video on this can be seen here.

pwned, v, to own, in the sense of defeat.

John Stewart calls out CNN for their journalistic mediocrity and gives us a lesson in journalism 101 while he’s at it.

The behavior’s not so much surprising as it’s disappointing. Companies that succeed within an economic framework want to maintain the structures — legal, cultural, physical and otherwise — that allowed for success in the first place.

Look no further than the record industry and its decade-long confusion over how to interact with, treat and sell to those of us who prefer mp3’s over CD’s (the physical), those of us who share and sample mp3’s before purchase (the legal) and those of us who think sharing and sampling is right and proper behavior (the cultural).

Instead of adapting and innovating to take advantage of these new-ish realities, the industry walks around with a big stick and sues the likes of Joel Tenenbaum and Jammie Thomas-Rasset. Tenenbaum downloaded 30 songs and was fined $675,000. He got off easy. Thomas-Rasset downloaded 24 songs and now owes $1.92 million.

One wonders about the viability of an industry that sues those that transgress the old order in order to scare others from entering the new. Perhaps it’s a delay tactic until they figure out how to operate in a new paradigm. Perhaps they simply don’t have answers.

Meanwhile, despite the industry’s handwringing over petty pirates and the culture that breads them, total music revenue has actually increased. Just not for the major labels.

A report from the UK tells us that while people buy less recorded music than before (thus less money in the labels’ coffers), they spend more on music as a whole (ie, on recorded music plus concerts plus swag, etc.). The net effect of all this file sharing appears to be increased consumer involvement, albeit involvement the record industry — to its litigious chagrin — no longer controls.

About a year ago I asked whether big companies can innovate. The question then, and now, is what companies do once they’ve cornered a market. Do they defend their turf at all costs, rhyme and reason be damned? Or do they continue to innovate, come up with new models, take risks and branch out into the perpetual unknown?

This is especially true as our technical landscape changes economic boundaries and workflows, and cultural practices accelerate those changes. It’s also true when it’s not just a company or companies that are disrupted but an entire industry instead.

Newspapers, unfortunately, are becoming increasingly adept at demonstrating to the rest of us what not to do. As that ship sinks one head scratching proposal after another bubbles to the surface.

Creating pay walls is a fabulous solution until we realize that walls box in just as much as they box out. People will just go elsewhere for the same ubiquitous information as publications get trapped in prisons of their own making and lose any link economy benefits.

The thought then is that partial pay walls might work in order to “protect” premium content.

The immediate question that arises: protect from what? The readers one thinks we’d actually like to attract?

Or, the fear in every Associated Press nightmare: bloggers and aggregators quoting content as they converse about and disseminate the news and issues of the day.

As News Futurist writes:

This is not to say some news providers couldn’t get away with charging online; but to do so they would have to have content so valuable and unique that they don’t face the competitive forces that pull prices down to the marginal cost of ~zero. And even if you find a specific niche and premium content you can charge for, you’re likely to face free competition once the word gets out.

The news industry struggles though, and as it looks for a way out its economic misery a non-exhaustive list of recent headscratchers includes:

• the European Court of Justice rules that reproducing 11 words from a news article can constitute copyright infringement.
• Not to be outdone, the Associated Press will sell you five words and even license content it didn’t produce.
• One newspaper sends another a a cease and desist notice for reporting… the news.
• At a Newspaper Association of America event, a publisher says pay walls are advantageous because they keep offline, print circulation up.

The point here is that as information industries struggle, they grasp at anything to protect their turf. What we see are more and more cases of mental squatting, a tactic I’ve described before as the deliberate attempt to expand one’s hold on content and ideas outwards into the public sphere through copyright, patents, and redefining what the boundaries of content are to begin with.

Amazon’s snafu with the Kindle edition of Nineteen Eighty-Four is an exceptional example. Forget legal posturing. The company reached out and deleted books people had purchased. These were “their” books on “their” Kindles. No matter. As we enter a permission culture, one were we ask for the privilege to read, listen to, build upon or otherwise consume content, even paying for it is not enough.

Slate’s Farhad Manjoo paints a dark picture on what’s at stake when a company’s empowered to reach out and delete content, writing that corporate and governmental censorship is literally a click of a button away.

There are some positives. First, some major media companies do get it. The New York Times’ top lawyer pushed back at the AP’s content grab, stating that he doesn’t believe aggregation is a copyright issue. Then, Chris Ahearn, President, Media at Thomson Reuters, basically told the AP to stop whining and evolve with the link economy. In a blog post, Ahearn wrote:

Blaming the new leaders or aggregators for disrupting the business of the old leaders, or saber-rattling and threatening to sue are not business strategies – they are personal therapy sessions. Go ask a music executive how well it works.

At the Harvard Business School, two economists, Felix Oberholzer-Gee and Koleman Strumpf, recently released a working paper on the societal benefits of less stringent copyright protections. Part of their findings (download) demonstrate that overall cultural productivity increases in countries and regions where piracy is greatest. Michael Geist provides an overview here, noting in particular that:

The paper takes on several longstanding myths about the economic effects of file sharing, noting that many downloaded songs do not represent a lost sale, some mashups may increase the market for the original work, and the entertainment industry can still steer consumer attention to particular artists (which results in more sales and downloads).

This shouldn’t surprise. The Dutch government recently released a similar report about the overall societal gains attributable to file sharing. Before that Canada released a study concluding that file sharing has a “a positive effect on music purchases among Canadian downloaders.”

Few companies within industries holding the short end of a rapidly evolving technology stick will survive and the convulsions from their demise will be felt through and through.

An AP has clout, power, and an army of lawyers it can and will employ to protect its inalienable turf. It’s already spent $55 million on what from the outside appears to be a bunky software to prevent people from “stealing” its content and in general has a confrontational stance about what others consider fair use.

How much it — along with others dependent on information control — will spend on litigation and attempts to expand copyright and limit fair use is anyone’s guess. But as the ship goes down, do not underestimate the desperation of the drowning. If we don’t look after and care for society’s interest, these organizations will make them their own.

This article originally appeared on ScribeMedia.org
]]> http://tubescodecontent.com/2009/09/16/copyright-and-mental-squatting-headaches-that-wont-go-away/feed/ 0 http://tubescodecontent.com/2009/09/16/11-things-we-all-should-do-too/ http://tubescodecontent.com/2009/09/16/11-things-we-all-should-do-too/#comments Wed, 16 Sep 2009 17:16:58 +0000 Michael Cervieri http://bmunch.tubescodecontent.com/?p=6 Dan Gillmor has a great piece on Mediactive, his new site dedicated to exploring how to democratize the media. Called, Eleven Things I’d do if I Ran a News Organization, he outlines how news organizations can embrace transparency, communication and interaction to improve their coverage and value to their readers/viewers.

Two personal favs:

• “Every print article would have an accompanying box called “Things We Don’t Know” — a list of questions our journalists couldn’t answer in their reporting.” He goes on to suggest that readers and viewers should be invited onto the news organization Web site to help fill in the blanks.
• “We would refuse to do stenography and call it journalism. If one faction or party to a dispute is lying, we would say so, with the accompanying evidence.” This one should be self-explanatory but in an age he said, she said journalism, a BS monitor would be a welcome change.

The entire post can be found here. And I think its value goes beyond “journalism” and includes best practices for any organization (read: NGO, non-profit, etc.) that aims to demonstrate and report what’s of interest to their communities.

Gillmor is the director of the Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship at Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication,

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