Hypothesis: the mainstream #media feeds social media. What do you think? [Infographic]

My supposition here is that in today’s information culture, the mainstream media (MSM) are still an important conduit for information. They take raw information and give it the context that years of newsgathering provides, and the clout of accuracy commiserate with the individual media org’s brand. Amateur media adds a layer of commentary, repackaging MSM’s contribution and feeding it out to the social streams, where it’s reblogged and shared.

Does this graphic work* for you? Am I missing anything? Let me know your thoughts on MSM’s place in the infosystem.

The dotted lines represent MSM making it straight to FB/Twitter, which I suspect doesn’t happen much on the reblogging platforms (Tumblr & Posterous) because it’s not beautiful/pithy (too much context).

* A funny comment on information quality—what MSM represents—is that Google will return this graphic to people without the context where I’m saying “this is a draft; what do you think?”, unavoidably making me contribute to the unverified information that characterizes an unmediated internet. Sorry about that. What am I going to do, stamp ‘draft’ across it?

Why the NSI logo never swears

Creative media attracts creative folks. Filmmakers use social media to fund, create, and promote their films. But what about the people who train filmmakers? I chat with the National Screen Institute‘s Liz Hover about how her organization is using social media to reach Canada’s film community.

Erica: How’s social media working for NSI? Where have you guys been engaging people, and what’s the response level? I think of Winnipeg as having a pretty engaged film community (filmmakers, film studies students, arts groups, etc).

Liz: Social media has opened up a lot of doors for the National Screen Institute.

The internet has let us connect with people in very remote regions. People we might never get to meet otherwise.

Yes, we have a pretty engaged film community in Winnipeg but we’re a national training school so our focus has to be country-wide.

Just to clarify for anyone reading this: I think ‘social media’ is a bit of a silly term. I think we’re really talking about ’online communication’ or, the internet. Anywhere that communication is happening between two people or more.

NSI has a set of online tools which we use to open up dialogue with students, potential students, grads and a wider, more global audience with an interest in film, TV and digital media. These tools include our website (built by your husband, Kevin, [Ed: from Tactica] in fact) that has a year-round online film festival, blogs, audio and video interviews, training info and more. Facebook Connect was built into the site a couple of years ago so folks can sign in and comment using their Facebook account.

We do use Twitter and Facebook a lot.

In the past year we’ve run Facebook clinics using our fan page. It’s basically a live Q&A session with a training program manager and potential applicants hosted on our fan page. This has been brilliant and totally interactive and we have plans to do more and expand on this idea.

Twitter tends to be less interactive for us. I find I’m using it to share info with our 2,500 followers. There is less conversation.

We also have a YouTube channel which, again, tends to be more about sharing than a two-way dialogue. We have around 100 videos – including Brian Linehan interviews which are super popular. We also post highlights from some of our training. We’re the tenth most subscribed Canadian non-profit. Sounds impressive but I don’t think there are that many Canadian non-profits on YouTube. But we’re doing well: our videos have had 135,000+ total views. We’re part of the YouTube Non Profit Program which gives us greater branding options on our channel.

Erica: Jeez, Liz, take a breath. So, where do you think you’re getting the best response?

Liz: In terms of the overall response level I think Facebook is working the best for us. This doesn’t really surprise me. We have the highest level of engagement there.

Also our website traffic has grown since Kevin redeveloped our website several years ago and a lot of that is down to Facebook referral traffic. Facebook is our number one referring site.

Facebook has worked in a couple of different ways: I happen to be friends with a lot of the same people who are fans of NSI so our level of interaction goes way beyond someone just fanning our page.

I’ve played around with lots of different niche networking sites too but there’s a tendency to try to be everywhere and that’s just not practical. I’ve kept our focus on the sites where we know most people will be rather than trying to spread NSI too thinly. If you Google it, you’ll probably find lists of sites I’ve signed up to and abandoned.

A lot of online communication is about experimentation. There isn’t one formula for everyone. Fortunately I’m fairly adventurous and happen to have a dog who is willing to be my guinea pig for most of my work before I put it to use at NSI. True story.

New, need I say “free”, Twitter bird illustration.

In light of my recent dissertation on Twitter’s damn bird, the last thing I ever want to see is another blue avian anything, but here you go. Available on Flickr with a Creative Commons license.

Not your cup of tea? How ’bout this older, but no less adorable, free Twitter bird? I’m full of ‘em!

Clicking ‘like’ is basically the same as picking and eating someone’s fleas.

Alrighty, here’s a drinking game: let’s try to map the major schools of Cultural Anthropology to social media. Every time we’re able to draw a plausible comparison, we do a shot of MGD and Jägermeister. Please note that I’ve been studying* this subject for 8 days now, and am 100% talking out of my derière.

Historical Particularism
Boas’ view that cultures can’t be compared, must be viewed as products of unique historical conditions, & culture traits understood as articulated to an integrated meaning system.
See: iPhone vs. Blackberry/Android/whatever isn’t an iPhone wars. No phone is intrinsically better than the others, except the iPhone.

Structural Functionalism
Emile Durkheim’s theory that people’s values and behaviours are determined by their role in society.
See: ass kissing on Twitter by those who fall on the wrong side of the followers-to-following ratio.
See: Twitter Charity auction for the honour of having a Kardashian retweet you.
See: the existence of Empire Avenue, the Whuffie Bank, and everywhere else you’re told you can trade on your “influence”.

Interpretive Anthropology
The idea that culture is a symbolic system, and people’s behaviour acts out those meanings, communicating them to each other.
See: The Facebook ‘like’ (content liking, not Page). A pictogram of a thumb, singled out for its connotations of approval, transmits social acceptance and stands in for phatic and grooming behaviours.

Ethnosemantics
The notion that language serves to classify experience into universal categories, denoting cultural meaning.
See: “retweet” (social acceptance), “fail whale” (a frustrating act of god), “pwnage” (loss of social status due to naivete or mental insufficiency)

Cultural Evolution
The classification of cultures on the basis of technologies, especially in regards to vital resource production.
See: 24 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute, 90 million tweets per day (srsly), and 30 billion pieces of content shared on Facebook monthly. Social media content is the new food.

Cultural Ecology
The theory that culture is an adaptation to the local environment.
See: half of Canadians prefer meeting online to meeting in the frigid outdoors.

Processual Approaches
The feeling that people manipulate the dictates of culture to achieve their own ends. Individual people have agency to change culture.
See: Mark Zuckerberg.

Marxism
The idea that culture is controlled by the people who have the means to produce wealth, and that they use this position to maintain their elite status.
See: Steve Jobs.

*Real Anthropologists: I apologize for mangling your discipline. If you note anywhere that I’ve grossly misunderstood the above theoretical frameworks, please educate me in the comments.

I’d feel really good about myself if you’d subscribe to my blog.

Oversocialized: My face hurts from smiling

The antisocial backlash is in full swing! Umair called it a bubble, Tamar said it was boring & trendy, and the gloves are coming off with the rise of patently unfriendly social networks for meanies. Society’s gettin’ sick and tired of being so darn social.

What’s with the rise of ‘bad’ social sites like Unvarnished and Failings?

There are two camps in the social media flea market, with crossover. There’s the shopkeepers—marketers, community managers, entrepreneurs, developers, media—and the customers, the non-industry people who interact on the framework so carefully crafted by the shopkeepers. The crossover is the fact that shopkeepers are also consumers.

From both camps I’ve been feeling pushback against relentless SEFTTI (“social every fu©king thing there is”; gracias Doc Searls). Shopkeepers are sick of enthusiastic gurus who soak up their hard-fought battle plans with no real commitment to grueling content strategies (to hear Tamar tell it). Customers hate when Facebook updates their interface. And everybody has to be extra nicey-nice.

There is no “dislike” button on Facebook

Why? Well, the participatory web has attached your face to your online presence. It’s a Twitter chestnut: ensure your bio really contains info about you and your avatar really represents you. You know, for humanization purposes. Add that to logging in with Facebook Connect to comment on someone’s blog, multiply by an obsession with personal branding, and you got yourselves a web where you’ve got to be on your best behaviour at all times.

Your mother-in-law is, in fact, watching. And just like IRL, she’s affected by how you act in front of the world.

So it’s no surprise there’s a new trend towards social networks that niche on being less than nice. Both Failings—where you invite “friends” to anonymously suggest areas in need of personal, um, improvement—and Unvarnished, a sort of LinkedIn for a$$hole$—seek a social counterculture where nice is not necessary.

We get sick of being too nice. It’s like work. It is work. Social networks, customer-side, were meant to be places to relax and let it all hang out. Then socializing morphed into networking.

One thing we’ve learned in the struggle to come to grips with online privacy is that your opinions, once professed, are forever. Google caching isn’t the worst of it, either—Twitter just “donated” our tweeting histories to the American Library of Congress, for pity’s sake. How’s that for archival? I’m so glad I always delete tweets I think are too mean!

About Face

Being yourself, the only person you can be in these days of increasing online personal responsibility, means always having to say you’re sorry. If you’re a shopkeeper, you probably also have the weight of a company, brand or a host of clients who, disclaimers aside, are indeed reflected on if you go mental on the web. It’s a bit of a burden, this perpetually archived “conversation”. God forbid you have a bad hair day.

Failings and Unvarnished represent an attempt to steer things towards the dirt that people actually enjoy dishing & consuming. Bring sexy back, if you will. There are evolutionary motivators for enjoying gossip, but a cursory explanation is that it’s just more freakin’ fun, more cathartic, more hair-down-letting than always being upbeat and awesome-sauce.

I’d never use these networks, because I’m kept in line by the nonsense drive to eradicate everything questionable about me from the internet forever. But I get what their existence means. People are fed up with toeing the line.

“Drive by Anonymity”

Not surprisingly, in order to function, the bad (re: truthful) social sites collect the dirt anonymously. The attacked is known, but not the attacker.

To help reviewers be honest and candid in their reviews, Unvarnished obscures the identity of review authors. This lets reviewers share their true, nuanced opinions without fear of repercussions.
—Unvarnished About Page

Hey, a return to the original anonymous Wild West flame wars of yore!

Jaron Lanier, a guy who thinks about the web the way God thinks about Creation, says in his humanist exhortation You Are Not A Gadget that anonymity breeds trollishness, potential “unforseen social patholog(ies)”, and that

to have a substantial exchange…you need to be fully present. That is why facing one’s accuser is a fundamental right of the accused.

What he’s saying is you being you is the best way for you to be.

SoMe is here to stay

I think it’s obvious social is gonna be baked into to the web’s crust going forward. People have had a taste of participation, and they liked being the centre of attention. Corporations have had to get transparent, brands have had to respect consumer’s intelligence. It’s the natural shift in the balance of power when attention becomes scarce, and people dig it.

Social isn’t going anywhere, but we still have to come to terms we can live with in the always-on, reputation-based future. We’ve got Kirk Cameron-level growing pains.

Maybe this is a GenX thing; I’ve heard it said that digital natives are quite comfortable always thinking of themselves as having an audience. Perhaps the niceness overload we grownups are experiencing will wash away when the cool waves of the next Pepsi Refresh splash over us, reinvigorating our love for this thing called social media.

Don’t pop the social media bubble!

Umair Haque recently advanced a hypothesis that social media is a bubble, and that when it bursts we will see that we were not brought meaningfully closer together by the growth of social communication.

I don’t want social media to be a bubble, because I like it.

First, let’s define a bubble. We mean an economics-style bubble, like the dot-com bubble or the housing bubble. In this sense, a bubble is “trade in high volumes at prices that are considerably at variance with intrinsic values”. So lots of new relationships that aren’t worth very much. I think Unmair was saying we’ve been placing undue value on the relationships generated by social media, both from a personal standpoint (these aren’t real friends) and a marketing standpoint (these aren’t very devoted ‘fans’).

Here are the reasons I feel the shiny, soapy dome of social media’s bubble should be left alone.

The flowering of human creativity

“Thin relationships” are not a new phenomena to society. If we rechristen these friends “acquaintances”, you might recognize them better. Aquaintances are certainly not without value.

Clay Shirky’s SXSW keynote touched on the evolutionary impetus to share and to cooperate, calling it “spiteful” not to pass on information when it’s very little effort for you to do so. This is the link economy in action.

It’s easy to share links to interesting content. It’s fun to add to the conversation by commenting on blogs and liking updates. It’s gratifying to contribute content to the collective by taking photos, writing essays (blog posts), illustrating, designing fonts and photoshop brushes, and shooting funny videos. It’s meaningful to lead culture and capture the zeitgeist by giving birth to memes, defining ideas, pushing for human thought development.

The more the merrier

Thin relationships, or “weak connections” make these upper-Maslow interactions possible. You don’t need a high level of investment in someone to trade ideas. Their input is valuable precisely because they come from a different perspective, and aren’t bound by politeness or concern for your ego. I’ve mentioned the findings that novel input from new friends sparks more innovative, creative solutions. The more the merrier.

Marketing soap

From a marketing standpoint, I hate to put the idea out there (there being Google search) that we’re overestimating the worth of social media and it’s practitioners. It could sour corporate decision makers who ponder how much to invest in newfangled media.

This isn’t about protecting our jobs, it’s about making them better. My firm belief is that all marketing, communication, PR, customer service and sales efforts (not to mention internal communications) can be enhanced and made more worthwhile and productive by conversing instead of broadcasting. I don’t think organizations have a choice, because public expectation of brands/services/orgs has changed.

This being a nascent revolution in the mainstream, still, I don’t want to throw the word b-word around. I want to work to show that teaming up with customers to get them what they want is going to succeed.

Let your people talk: a holistic approach to social media

In repsonse to Who should do your social media? my friend Liz Hover commented “I don’t think social media should be ‘assigned’ to a department. I think everyone in an organisation should be a part of social media”. Let’s address this idea as complimentary to establishing an official branded social media channel.

Do you know where advertising is ranked on the list of credibility these days? 17%. That means 83% of people think it’s a waste of time. Couple that with the fact that more information was created in 2009 than in the entire history of the world, and you’ve got a lot of people who don’t have time for your message, and wouldn’t believe it if they were forced to endure it.

Who do people listen to when it comes to a company’s product, service, or reputation?

• 64% take it on faith from “an expert”
• 41% would believe a conversation with an employee
• 44% would be convinced by a friend or peer

And where might people encounter a friend, who might happen to be an employee, who’s surely employed because of their expertise? Why, on a social network, during the almost 20% of time they spend online at all. Your brand voices are out there every day, interacting with existing and potential customers. Read the rest of this entry »