A café-shaped conversation

Photo credit: WhatCouldPossiblyGoWrong (CreativeCommons license)

A great conversation has been going on at my previous post, with participants including:

• A musician/entrepreneur who runs a hyperlocal social network in Fort Dodge, Iowa
• A mountaineer/futurist who speaks and consults globally on new media matters
• A newspaper editor in Waco, Texas
• The president and publisher of "the most widely-read magazine in America" (a 32-million circulation newspaper supplement), based in New York City
• The CEO of a Alabama newspaper holding company operating in 150 communities
• An arts reporter/blogger in East Bay, California
• A New York print evangelist/entrepreneur/educator
• A Rhode Island consultant specializing in brands, organizational communications and enterprise technology design
• Plus, yours truly, tucked away in snowy Vermont, and some of his fellow Nieman bloggers located at Harvard and Johns Hopkins

It was as if we all bumped into each other at a sidewalk café and started knocking around the problems of printed newspapers and journalism on the internet. It took a somewhat provocative post on my part to kick off the discussion, but then, that's what we do every day in newspaper editorials and in our letters columns to get some buzz going. We got past any animosity, pulled our tables and chairs closer together, and while in the end we "agreed to disagree," we ascended to some deep thinking about the nature of media and the utility of social networking to news enterprises. Given some of the players involved, it's even possible that some of the ideas thrown out could have some actual effects in the marketplace.

Only of few of us have ever previously met in person or by phone or email, but there were were, having what Chris Brogan, writing about social media, has called a café-shaped conversation...

Read the rest of this post at my blogging home base, the Nieman Journalism Lab.

Social networks: news organizations ignore them at their peril

PLEASE NOTE: My new blogging home is now at the Nieman Journalism Lab. I'll continue to update this site for the time being with the introductory portion of my posts, but to read the whole thing, you'll have to head over to the Nieman site!

On the heels of my post the other day on building social networks around news (in which I mentioned that more than 90 percent of newspapers still have no social networking in their business model) here’s some information from the Pew Internet and American Life Project that that makes it clear why, in largely ignoring social networking, the newspaper industry is missing the boat:

The share of adult internet users who have a profile on an online social network site has more than quadrupled in the past four years — from 8% in 2005 to 35% now, according to the Pew Internet & American Life Project’s December 2008 tracking survey.

By age group, the survey found that in 2008:

• 75% of online adults 18-24 have a profile on a social network site
• 57% of online adults 25-34 have a profile on a social network
• 30% of online adults 35-44 have one
• 19% of online 45 to 54 year olds have a profile
• 10% of online 55 to 64 year olds have a profile
• 7% of online adults 65 and older have a profile

View those levels in the context of the four-year quadrupling rate, it’s clear that in another few years, virtually everyone under 45, and perhaps a majority of those older, will be active on social networks. (It’s the newspaper readership curve, upside-down.) What will they be doing and looking for on these networks, besides banter with friends?

Well, add this forecast to Pew’s findings: “10 Ways Social Media Will Change in 2009″ at ReadWriteWeb, including...

Read the rest of this post at Nieman Journalism Lab.

Building networks around news

PLEASE NOTE: My new blogging home is now at the Nieman Journalism Lab. I'll continue to update this site for the time being with the introductory portion of my posts, but to read the whole thing, you'll have to head over to the Nieman site!

Even though the public’s engagement with social networks is growing strongly, news enterprises have been slow to wade into the social networking waters.

Publishers, and especially editors, still tend to see themselves as curators of content: selecting, generating, massaging and presenting material for the audience they perceive, but not really networking with that audience except in rudimentary ways like comment forums that are not enormously evolved from the old channel of writing a letter to the editor.

A Bivings Group report published in December, “The Use of the Internet by America’s Largest Newspapers” (which I’ve discussed previously) found that while the adoption of individual social media tools (social bookmarking, blogs, RSS, etc.) was pretty strong at the papers in 2008, only 10 percent, or 10 newspapers, had incorporated some form of social networking on their sites...

Read the rest of this post at the Nieman Journalism Lab.

Nuts and bolts: How newspapers can optimize use of social media

In my previous post (Tipping point: Online news overtakes print), I posed this question: How can newspapers raise the level of their online presence from being a simple, one-way content delivery medium, and have their sites become full-fledged "means of collaboration, creation and curation" (Jeff Jarvis's characterization of the internet)?

In other words, how can newspapers (after making sure they've built a truly online-first newsroom) leverage the social networking power of the internet? And why is that important?

Well, how are they doing, first of all? Last week I discussed the Bivings group report called "The Use of the Internet by America's Largest Newspapers." This graph summarizes what Bivings found about the use of social media by America's top 100 newspapers:


(Click graph for expanded view.)

Looks good, doesn't it? The trends are heading for 100 percent adoption of RSS, video, blogs, commenting and bookmarking. Terrific.

But the big problem, noted by Bivings themselves in their final conclusions, is that "the sites are being improved incrementally on the margins. Newspapers are focused on improving what they already have, when reinvention may be what is necessary in order for the industry to come out of the current crisis on the other side."

I agree. These various social media techniques are being applied experimentally and randomly. With a few possible exceptions, they are not applied as part of a unified concept that's clear to the site visitor. Installing a collection of social media tools on a site does not create a community. It does not leverage the power of a social network. It does not encourage or enable readers to "collaborate, create and curate." Some of the obvious ways newspapers could enables readers to do that, such as local news wikis, are non-existent. And tools like tags, RSS and bookmarking are not very useful in the absence of a community sharing content.

Why is it important for newspapers to get into social networking? Basically, because of Metcalfe's Law, which says that the value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of nodes, or users, on it. (See also.) A news site that just delivers news to readers, uni-directionally, is not a network. Once you do build a network with good interactivity, the amount of traffic on it grows exponentially, much faster than the number of users does. To readers, the value of this lies in the connections made, the content shared, the community created. To the owner of the network, in turn, it will leverage much greater revenue potential.

Newspapers have always had a social product—they rely on readers and retailers to participate and interact via press releases, letters, display and classified ads, pass-alongs of the physical paper, crosswords, generation of buzz and gossip, purchases made, you name it. This interactivity historically has made newspapers builders of actual communities (and a lot of fun to work for until not long ago)—but newspapers have been very slow, and well behind other industries, in building online communities through social networking, as distinct from simply employing various individual social media. This failure also threatens to leave newspapers truly left behind when the web progresses from to social-networking "Web 2.0" stage into the "Semantic Web" or "Web 3.0," which will add a further dimension of networks among facts, ideas and concepts.

So, what should a truly socially-networked news site look like? Let's look at a few sites to collect the ingredients:

Here's a New York Times movie review. On or via this single page, I can: (a) read the review, within which I can (b) follow a slew of hyperlinks to related other NYTimes.com pages. I can participate myself by (c) rating the movie, and (d) writing a review (or reading reviews by other readers). I can also (e) watch a clip, (f) find a full listing of credits, (g) find theatre and showtime listings, and in some cases (h) buy tickets via MovieTickets.com. So far, so good—lots of interactivity, including at least some with other readers.

Moreover, in a 5-month old Times project still in beta, I can register to become a "TimesPerson" on the "TimesPeople" social network, through which I can share and recommend Times content, RSS feeds and the like with "followers," and I can "follow" the recommendations of others. It sounds like a social network, but it's really just social bookmarking. Meanwhile, the Times has run a brief campaign on Facebook that has resulted in nearly 200,000 "fans" signing on to its Facebook presence—but on its Facebook page, the Times so far doesn't offer TimesPeople functionality, or much of anything else to draw its fans deeper into its content, or into a real network. All in all, despite the enormous depth and scope of its content, despite almost weekly announcements of site enhancements, the Times seems to be, in Bivings' words, timidly experimenting "incrementally on the edges," not jumping into the deep end of social networking, not fully embracing Web 2.0.

Another approach, in a much smaller market: the Cedar Rapids (Iowa) Gazette, which flew below Bivings' radar with print circulation of 61,000 weekdays, 75,000 Sundays (ABC audit), logging 3.48 million pageviews from about 132,000 unique visitors monthly (via Compete.com).

The Gazette has plenty of social media features, plus a semi-wiki in its Data Central section, interactive maps, and about three dozen staff blogs, on some of which you can follow the Gazette's evolving philosophy on web publishing and networking. One of those is the blog of CEO Chuck Peters: C3: Complete Community Connection, in which he publicly talks to his staff and the community about his vision for a community networked by the Gazette's news enterprises:

We have acknowledged that we need a new model, mindset, tasks and organization to move from the franchise megaphones of newspaper and television to an interconnected ecosystem of local information, available on all platforms, created “with and by” the communities we serve. We know that we have to separate content creation from product creation. We know that we need to develop a network of people creating blogs and wikis on key topics and communities. We know that we need to develop a common technical framework for that creation of content. Commercial content likewise must created in a more atomized and fluid way.

Entrepreneurial journalists will lead the way. Without them, we have nothing to offer. We need to create the systems to support them. In order to do so, we need to focus not only on the tasks at hand, but why we do them, in order to have the energy and patience to persevere through this great change.

Now, let's jump to Bakersfield, California, home of the independently-owned Bakersfield Californian, circulation 132,000 weekdays and 156,000 Sundays, and logging 2.05 million page views from 158,000 unique visitors monthly (Bakersfield.com only, via Compete.com.)

Note that relative to its print circulation level, the Californian lags the Cedar Rapids Gazette, perhaps an indication of the value of the Gazette's slicker, more up-to-date site design. Indeed,
Bakersfield.com won't win design prizes. But it has a real social network. Its members aren't "CalifornianPeople," they're just people.

Simply by registering on the Californian's site, here's what the paper's 20,000-odd actively registered "people" can do:

• Post a detailed profile with photos, interests, links, friend thumbnails, a guestbook, and their choice of various apps
  
• Start a blog—the site boasts an astounding 2,000 active bloggers
• Comment on stories and blogs
• Post reviews of restaurants
• Report by posting stories, listing events, posting photos and video.
  
• Participate in forums
• Share social milestones
  
• Find and connect with "friends", including via a cloud of interest tags
  
• Post comments on guestbooks of friends

Jeepers. Looks like a real social network. Not only that, but various components including blog updates, reader-submitted photos and videos, and reader reports are posted on the site's home page, while "today's paper" is an inside page. And check out the company's youth-oriented network site—it's called Bakotopia, which functions also as a classified platform to stave off Craigslist—and its suburban citizen-journalism platform called Northwest Voice. The company has nine sites in all. And it looks like it's "monetizing" nicely, with both local display and contextual advertising all over the place.* It's not even terribly new—most of this has been in place since 2006.

Wanna just duplicate what they're doing in Bakersfield? You can—they're offering the whole platform as "reskinnable and redeployable"at Bakomatic. So far as I can tell, though, only the Arizona Republic and the Idaho State Journal have done so.

As I said, what the Californian's doing is not pretty (which may be why their approach has not been influential), but it's real social networking. It's gutsy, and it's working. (Although it may be somewhat frozen in time. Oddly, for example, the Californian's presence on Facebook is minimal.)
But now imagine what would happen if the Times expanded TimesPeople into a real social network: register once and you can blog, comment, bookmark, connect, post reports, events, pictures and video, and all the rest. Imagine, further, if newspapers decided to abandon their walled-garden approaches, and started connecting their individual networks, allowing TimesPeople to befriend CalifornianPeople and WaPoPeople. And FacebookPeople. Imagine expanding this concept to include a rewards system for users based on Charlene Li's "personal CPM" concept. Imagine if newspapers did all this transparently, operating in a public fishbowl like Chuck Peters and his staff, letting the public talk back to them about what they like and don't like.

Unfortunately, there's not much momentum in this direction. And at most of the "other 1300" newspapers, with circulations under 95,000, not examined by Bivings, social networking is as distant as a manned Mars mission. I promised a few posts ago to explore that territory, but my initial forays have been discouraging. For example, I visited the site of the nearby (to me) Northampton, (Mass.) Gazette, which I've always regarded as a fine newspaper, only to discover that (a) to comment on a story, I need to register (fair enough, I thought), but, to register, I need to be a print subscriber. Not only that, some of the news content is totally off limits except to registered subscribers. Newsstand buyers and casual site visitors: chopped liver—you can't read the good stuff on the site, and you can't comment, except with a special online-only subscription. So, I was off to a discouraging start on that quest, but I'll keep looking.
____________
*It should be noted, however, that the Californian has not been immune to the recession, having announced 25 layoffs this month. There have been none at Cedar Rapids, as far as I can tell. The Times has made cuts in its newsroom and other departments.

How to monetize "air"

So, letting others dissect the Tribune bankruptcy (foreshadowed here last week), I've been thinking about how social networks will impact the online advertising business, particularly in connection with yesterday's discussion of the Information Valet Project.

A while ago, I had this to say about marketers transitioning in their pursuit from eyeballs to friends:

Publishing stuff online in order to generate "eyeballs" and then selling ads to folks interested in reaching those eyeballs is pretty much yesterday's model. (Actually, it's a previous-centuries model that may have lost its final bit of momentum on 9/11—an event "important enough to find" just about everyone long before showing up anywhere in print, and one that created new imperatives for people to reach out and connect with each other.) A community-centered news enterprise that exploits the power of social networking will tend to generate "friends" rather than "eyeballs," and friends—customers with loyalty—are what advertisers are looking for.

And, I quoted from a Wired piece by Chris Anderson about the economics of giving things away free (content, for example, because there is plenty of it) in order to make money:

There is, presumably, a limited supply of reputation and attention in the world at any point in time. These are the new scarcities—and the world of free exists mostly to acquire these valuable assets for the sake of a business model to be identified later.

Clearly, reputation and attention will follow friend relationships in social networks, and friends will have far more value than standard display advertising in print or online. To understand why, find 45 minutes to watch this video featuring Charlene Li speaking at Google about social media. (If Google want to hear what she's got to say, so do you.)

Li reminds us that while advertisers just throw stuff at us to see what will stick, friends have conversations. She cites plenty of examples, such as Oracle's homepage campaign "Oracle Listens," and Comcast's seeking out customers mentioning problems with them on Twitter, and stepping in by asking "What can we do for you?" She notes that the value of a friend gained by a business is huge, when you consider the cost of customer acquisition and retention, the lifetime revenue during the relationship, and the referral value of a loyal customer.

"Social networks will be like air," she says, and lists four components of such networks (with quotations from this blog post by Li):

• Universal identity — "First let’s get at the real problem—I want to be able to maintain and control my identity, and when needed, to make them connected between services. And I think that the way to do this is a federated approach..." This is a problem also being tackled by Information Valet and by Information Card. Li suggests that the universal keys can be e-mail addresses and mobile phone numbers.
• Open (and single) social graph — "In a world of a single social graph, social networks will have to compete on the basis of creating the best experience for its members—not because it controls a unique social graph."
• Portable applications that tap into the social graph—not just the relatively trivial recreational communication that dominates Facebook, but, for heaven's sake, shopping: "The biggest hole and opportunity, IMHO, is shopping. I research and buy things online every day, and with rare exception, these activities take place outside of Facebook. Facebook Beacon brings some of the information into News Feed, while a few shopping-oriented applications like StyleFeeder have potential. But by and large, social networks don’t figure into my shopping experiences. But it could, and in a very significant [way]."
• Personal CPM — the business model of the future for social networks, and potentially for news organizations that awaken their slumbering potential social networks. Demographics is how marketers have always targeted eyeballs. But in the future, remember, reputation and attention are scarce and have value, and those who have it will be able to monetize it. "Everyone is a marketer," Li says. "Today’s advertising models don’t work on social networking sites—that’s because simply targeting better on profile or social graph details is still the same old media model of CPM and CPC pricing. What’s missing is marketing value based on how valuable I am in the context of my influence."

To me, this line of thinking starts to fill a few of the gaps in the InfoValet model, especially (a) how users get rewarded for their participation in the system (I'm envisioning a kind of PageRank system that quantifies one's Personal CPM in a way that can't be gamed by blindly clicking on ads), and (b) how advertisers can benefit by more efficiently finding "friends" and having "conversations" rather than advertising the old-fashioned way.

A few more Li links:

• Corporate Rock Star blog post with a bit more about personal CPM and the death of demographics.
• Another slide show presentation by Li on social media.
• Li's book, Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies.
  

Now, if Li is talking to Google, what's Google doing in this space? Via a Jeff Jarvis post last week, here's a slideshow that could take another 45 minutes out of your life. (At least, that's how long I spent studying it.) It's a fascinating look at all the ways Google makes money, or plans to make money, but the operative part for this discussion is OpenSocial, on slide 11. OpenSocial is simply a way to build program applications that will work on multiple partnering social networks. Currently participating networks have about 700 million users, but don't include Facebook, which is going its own way for now. But, the camel's nose is in the tent—expect Google and Facebook to begin developing competing ways to match marketers with "friends."

All of this leads me to wonder whether InfoValet should be thought of as a social network. It certainly envisions solutions related to—and in fact aiming well beyond the limits of—each of Li's four social network attributes. It took 2 days for a bunch of brainiacs convened at Mizzou to come up with some unwieldy definitions of InfoValet. It would be a whole lot easier to be able to say, "InfoValet is a social network consisting of trusted connections between creators, consumers and marketers in a way that allows all of them to make a little money."

The CIA spies the future of journalism

Who would have thought that the Central Intelligence Agency has something to teach the news business?

A bit of serendipitous surfing landed me at Library Clips, the Australian knowledge-management blog of John Tropea, and in particular at his recent post "How do wikis and blogs fit together"—a topic which is not much different from the question of how wikis can be integrated into a news operation, a subject I've touched upon before, and which Matt Thompson is exploring at Mizzou.

John quotes a 2005 paper by D. Calvin Andrus of the CIA, "The Wiki and the Blog: Toward a Complex Adaptive Intelligence Community" (free downloadable PDF via link). The paper proposed replacing the agency's cumbersome, hierarchical, inflexible and ineffective processing of raw data into accepted conclusions of fact with a self-organizing "complex adaptive system" consisting of:

• A repository of raw data ("like unrefined ore") gathered from the agency's network of sources.
• Blogs in which individuals can express and share opinions within the agency (which would be a big "paradigm shift," according to Andrus.
• A wikipedia in which material archived in the repository and discussed and interpreted in the blogs is organized into an authoritative agency knowledge base of agreed-upon facts, tools, techniques and policies.
• Search tools: "Part of the agility required in today's high speed security environment is to be able to quickly find information."
• Feedback tools, with which agency users can discover quick answers to questions such as what parts of the wiki are changing rapidly (an indication of new information being developed), where there are knowledge gaps, what areas of the system are getting the most attention, and so on. "As important as information sharing is to the success of the solution, it is even more important to know who is sharing what information."

It turns out the agency took Andrus's advice and has implemented much of this system in the form of its Intellipedia. (See also the Wikipedia entry on this.)

Does this suggest a way for news enterprises to organize and publish their information? Indeed. Here's the model (assuming a local or regional news organization):

• A repository of raw data stored electronically—census data, election results, municipal reports, agendas, minutes, financial data, press releases, court records, real estate sales information, traffic studies, environmental impact statements, and data from reporters, stringers, and other contributors: notes, audio, video, stills. In other words, all the detritus that usually stagnates in, under and atop desks and file cabinets in newsrooms.
• "News" (the equivalent of the CIA's internal blogs): published "stories" as well as blog posts, columns, editorials, letters to the editor, reader comments, etc., which are generated based on information in the repository, or on stories and blog posts by others.
  
• A local wikipedia constantly being built and refined from the blog-equivalents, in which local issues as well as people-in-the-news, businesses, government entities, non-profits, geographic features, buildings, streets, etc. all have pages that are collectively built and curated using the knowledge gathered into the repository and refined in the blog-equivalents.
• Search: a self-explanatory feature facilitating access to all of this material
• Feedback tools: these will help editors and journalists see how material is accessed, shared and disseminated by its users.

But importantly, I would add one more key feature that's perhaps not as important in a closed system such as the CIA, but will be critical for news enterprises interested in garnering a loyal readership without gray hair:

• Social networking: As famously uttered by a college student in a focus group and repeated throughout the journalism blogosphere, "if the news is that important, it will find me." From the linked N. Y. Times story: "In the days after Mr. Obama’s speech on race last week, for example, links to the transcript and the video were the most popular items posted on Facebook. On The New York Times’s Web site, the transcript of the speech ranked consistently higher on the most e-mailed list than the articles written about the speech." As Steve Outing has suggested in a column worth a detailed read, this suggests not only that we must redefine the news organization and the news itself, but that news organizations must connect with readers and sources through networks like Facebook and Twitter, incorporating unaffiliated news feeds like Google News and Topix, pushing content out via Flickr, YouTube and Twitter, and facilitating user-generated news feeds that may incorporate everything from wire-service feeds to micro-personal news from the reader's social network connections.
  

Social networking also suggests avenues for those (like me) who are still interested in how all this gets paid for. Publishing stuff online in order to generate "eyeballs" and then selling ads to folks interested in reaching those eyeballs is pretty much yesterday's model. (Actually, it's a previous-centuries model that may have lost its final bit of momentum on 9/11—an event "important enough to find" just about everyone long before showing up anywhere in print, and one that created new imperatives for people to reach out and connect with each other.) A community-centered news enterprise that exploits the power of social networking will tend to generate "friends" rather than "eyeballs," and friends—customers with loyalty—are what advertisers are looking for.