The Case for Agile Journalism.

Journalism outsider is a lonely role.  It’s a little like being a Janitor, a hired hand who tackles the unsavory duties avoided by the more  fastidious and mainstream staff.  You can find them doing web updates, or mobile app development, or “dealing with all that social media stuff”, or maybe, in more forward-thinking organizations,  the R&D, but one thing they’ll rarely be found doing is much journalism.  News with a capitol ‘N’ promotes from within, and the number of its High Priests who started as anything other than a writer is still pretty low.

As a Journalism outsider myself (using the traditional definition, my bona fides extend to only two semesters as Comics Editor at the Johns Hopkins weekly back in ’99) it’s interesting to observe that writing is still sometimes considered the basic journalism accomplishment. It would be like declaring that the default unit of Marine Biology is ‘naming fish’.  I mean, it’s certainly a foundation skill for every marine biologist, and, depending on the job track, they might even end up doing some seriously classy fish naming, but it’s hardly the exhaustive definition of the career.

But as the search continues for a new skillset fit for a post-writing industry,  seriously, how tempting is it to say:  ‘But of course!  We need more of those janitorial skills we’ve overlooked for so long!’  It’s a great ‘gotcha’ solution, isn’t it?  Everyone loves to hear about a young savant coder who overcomes the cynical traditionalists and saves the day.  Teach the Journalist of tomorrow how to livestream and podcast!  There shalt be coding in 5 languages so they can make all kinds of news games and mobile aps and social media channels and data visualizations!  It’s as though sprinkling technology over the field like pixidust can make the underlying bulk fly.

Surely on the changing menu of journalism, arguing if steak should replace chicken seems rather pedantic, no?   We’re debating the merits of one limited skillset over another, an exercise which rather misses the point.  Why are we still deciding between chicken or steak?  Why are we arguing about the best dishes to put on the menu?  Wouldn’t it make a lot more sense to just  teach tomorrows journalist how to cook?

Myself I come down on the side of methodology. The world has plenty of delightful news writers trying to find their relevency, but it’s just as easy to imagine the world full of of delightful news technologists trying to find their relevency. What does the world have very few of?  Folks with the background training to orchestrate either group.

Skills are for interns. Everyone should know what the skills are and how they work, but if the Head of Digital is still spending his days thinking about HTML bugs then you’ve got a problem.   The power in any field lies in the planning, not the implementing.  It’s  in the ability to see the bigger picture and plot a course through it, and to relay that vision to those who were hired for their limited skillset (who, increasingly, aren’t employees at all but rather someone’s college  friend who’s between jobs, or  a dude bidding on projects from Poland.)

Yes, anyone arriving at a journalism school should be expected to know a basic level of  technology just as their counterparts of yesteryear were expected to know how to read.  Perhaps there could still be remedial tutorials for those getting up to speed. But for the core experience?  Perhaps it’s time to really take a page from software development.  Instead of co-opting its low level skills, co opt its high-level ones!  The Agile design cycle.   Iterative Project development.  Pitching.  Usability testing.  Gamification. Entrepreneurship.    You know, the tech skills that actually matter.

Otherwise we risk turning Journalism school into a certification degree like Nursing or Air Conditioning Repair – full of important protocol but with a focus on skillset, not strategy. Taking a step back and thinking a little bigger would go a long way to making sure that students don’t end up as outsiders in their own field. Journalists are too valuable to waste as highly-paid Janitors for hire.

Your Clients are Smarter Than You

Before client meetings, an early design guru of mine always insisted our team stand in the hallway and chant the phrase “All designers are arrogant bastards” until he felt we were in the proper frame of mind for the upcoming stand-off. From the vantage point of a decade I’d love to ask him about this little ritual; the project was a website redesign for the space industry, not the most cut-throat of opponents to begin with. There’s only so much satisfaction to be gained from dominating a bunch of kindly old astronomers. But for whatever reason, we never failed to ram our design suggestions through.

That website is still in use today, and it gives me the deepest pangs of shame to browse over its now-venerable pixels.  Not ’cause the design is so  ancient – for all I know its longevity could be a sign of really timeless thinking and not, as is more probable, budget cuts.  The shame comes from this:  My goodness were we a fantastic design team.  But what were we absolutely lousy at?  Astronomy.

It takes a lot of cash to hire a consultant who’s sure enough of herself to be a bully, and there’s a temptation to believe that throwing your weight around is part of the floor show.  This is the same line of thought that leads to rude service in a fancy restaurant: only a restaurant completely confident in its food could afford to be so disdainful of a customer. But does anyone actually enjoy eating at those restaurants?  No! Oh neophyte consultant, of course you know more than your client, but only, and this is important, only in one very small, specific area. What does your client know more about than you do?  Everything else.

A dude was recently ranting to me about a troublesome coding team.  The whole project idea, so terrible!  I’d offered them SO many better alternatives! And they wanted it in purple!  Agh!  Well dude of mine, let me take this opportunity to apologize for the angry lecture I gave you (not for the angry part, but I really shouldn’t have cursed so much.)

It can be tough to explain why it’s so important to never say no to a client.   I myself have asked prospective employees “So give me an example of how you handled a difficult client” and chortled at their tales of supremacy.  But why do we offer alternatives and trade offs, and when all else fails, beg and plead, but never ever ever ever outright say no?  It’s not, as the poor beleaguered dude guessed, that we need the money, although there are worse incentives for diplomacy.  It’s because more often than we’re comfortable admitting, the client is completely right.  After all, they do know a hell of a lot more than we do.

Imagine if any of the big innovators had let themselves be intimidated by their design team: Alright, let me get this straight – you want a big screen with extremely limited functionality, but you’re going to charge three times the amount of a fully functional computer. But having no content won’t matter because you expect thousands of programmers to teach themselves one of the more sophisticated coding languages  in order to create entirely new custom apps for it. And you’re going to make it white and rectangular, and name it the “ipad”, a combination sure to make schoolchildren everywhere snicker.  Mmmhmmm.

Well if that were you, wouldn’t you feel silly now (not to mention totally poor).  Every once in a while, the client isn’t being stupid or stubborn or disdainful or dense, they’re being gosh darn brilliant and you’d better listen up.  And the kicker is, you’ll never know which one it is until afterwords.

So, dude of mine, just for a moment,what about entertaining the possibility of a completely purple website?  Who knows what fantastic new ‘all-purple’ trend your clients may actually be onto?  Being an arrogant bastard is a great way to bulldoze over a couple of sweet old astronomers, but a really crappy way to build a website about astronomy.  It’s an awesome way to get things done your way, and a terrible way to innovate.  When it comes to assuming idiocy over invention, consider giving your client the benefit of the doubt. After all, they were smart enough to hire you, eh?

A Lady’s Guide to Lying

In the summer of 2004 I was poor. I was fresh back from playing the wandering European for a year and I was cashless, homeless, jobless, and had spent too long living on what I’m proud to call “Zoe’s stolen spaghetti stew” (secret ingredient: stealth).

The first temp company had no design jobs, but on the way out the receptionist asked me if I knew anyone who could use Visio. Why yes, I said, I’m a Visio expert, did I forget to put that on my resume? She called my interviewer back, who said  in that case the job started tomorrow.

I left the building, went the the nearby Barnes and Nobles and looked up what the hell this Visio thing was. Then I called the guy on whose whose couch I was crashing and had him pirate me a copy. I spent the night working through the help files, and started my new job designing userflows for SAP the next morning. It lead to what’s been a rather nifty career in interaction design.

I am proud to say I have never been hired for a job I didn’t have to lie to get. Not about my achievements, those are stupid to lie about and anyway they’re easy to check on. But when it comes to skills, to take a job you’re absolutely sure you can already do seems silly. Taking career risks is the only way to make sure of having one, and I’d sure as hell prefer to try and fail than demur until some imaginary time when I’m 100% sure I’ll be perfect.

This is the time of year when students start coming to me for career advice. The dudes in general either have something or don’t. But for some of the ladies its not so clean-cut. Yesterday, for the third time this year I heard a variation on this theme: girl has a job, usually an internship. Girl is offered a promotion to full time. Girl is nervous she’s not ready yet and decides to turn it down. Or this variation: girl is offered dream full-time job. Girl is also offered dream freelance job on the side. Girl decides to take full-time job, but turn down freelance one because she wants her performance in the full time job to be perfect. Neither of these scenarios have happy endings, at best her career stalls from lack of trying new things, and at worst at some point she’ll be replaced by someone with a bit more guts.

From where came this bizarre female aversion to self promotion? This insistence on perfection to the point where, like OCD, it handicaps the victim and ruins their  prospects? Why is taking a risk so impossible to contemplate for some otherwise brilliant ladies ?

Lets run through these scenarios again. Girl gets offered promotion. Girl takes promotion. Girl fails. The boss is disappointed. Or this one: girl takes both jobs. Girl does marginally less well at both. Girl will be forced to quit one of them. One of the bosses will be disappointed. Bottom line: disappointed bosses. Is that truly the worst possible thing that could happen? Without resorting to the highly improbable, the answer is yes, yes it really is. But hamstringing a career from  fear of letting down an authority figure is something even the most  desperate of daddy issues should balk at.

Well ladies, being successful takes guts, and having guts means taking the type of risks that sometimes result in looking stupid and disappointing people. That assurance, that strike of lightning that says “Why yes, I just realized I am the best possible person in the world for this particular job” may by long coming.  As Nietzche points out, “claiming to be good only because you have no claws” isn’t actually being good at all, and cowardice masquerading as politeness does no one any favors, least of all your boss.  Speaking as one now myself, I’d surely rather have my employees ambitious than submissive.  It makes them more fun to be around, for one.

So go after that job ladies, even though you don’t have a clue if you can handle it or not. Grit your teeth and tell that lie about your confidence that, for you all you know, might just be the truth. And maybe you’ll fail. Maybe you’ll be fired. Maybe you’ll have to cut back your hours. Maybe your boss will yell at you in front of everyone and they’ll all point and laugh while you cry. But maybe, just maybe, you will be amazing at it.

The Lazy Lady’s Backchannel

Today’s post is brought to you by the backchannel, that swirly, seething collection of tweets, FB posts, and I suppose technically Google+ comments that makes up the realtime reaction to any presentation. If used right it provide instant audience interaction, keep folks paying attention, and guards against awkward silences when the presenter asks “anyone have any questions?” If used wrong it’s great place to heckle.  It’s what you would be saying if you didn’t have to wait for the darn speaker to be done.

Generally, the line of thought is, the audience is gonna talk about you anyway so you can either force them to turn off their phones (which makes you look like a dick) or you can harness their sniping for the powers of good.  Usually this is accomplished by projecting the audience’s twitter feed or chatroom somewhere the presenter can see it.  More rarely it means building the feed directly into the presentation software.  Even more rarely it means hosting the chat yourself.  That’s the one I wanna talk about.

After all the backchannel excitement at SXSW I started getting curious about how they could be used in an academic setting.  One sign of a good class is when I see that the students have gone ahead and made their own group chat (using partyappchat, or some such) so they can talk during lectures.  Usually it’s to make fun of the professor, but sometimes it’s to share resources or ask advice.  The point is, they only bother in classes where there’s some level of engagement.

I tried experimenting with this a little during a class I was involved with last semester.  During the student’s final presentations I tried projecting the live twitter feedback on the wall near the speakers. Students sent a pre-list of all the quotes and links they wanted re-tweeted during thier presentation, and that, plus the reactions, made up the backchannel. With a couple of exceptions, this totally failed.  There was a lot of excitement and retweets, and a little joking in the feed, but not a whole lot of conversation.

I think the issue is that people might retweet interesting quotes, and people might heckle or offer encouragement, but no one is going to clutter up their feed with comments like “Could you repeat that?” or “What’s he talking about?” or “Actually, I think that’s wrong but I’m not totally sure, anyone?”  We’re all too worried about the persona we’ve created on our social networks to risk polluting it with anything resembling real conversation.

Here’s one possible solution, this Fall I’ve implemented a new experiment with the same class. During each four hour lecture every week, all students, and also the professors and visiting critiquers are logged onto HipChat.  If you haven’t used hipChat yet I must say this is a pretty great tool – complete archiving and searchability in a nice chat package.  What goes on there?  Whatever!  Reactions to the presentations, side conversations, reference material, and yeah, a little bit of snarking.  Why is this so great for us:

• Each presenter ends up with a complete transcript of reactions throughout their presentation.  When listening, especially to a lecture that’s a little long, it’s so easy to forget the more nuanced points of feedback in trade for the big ones.  And likewise, if there is good feedback there’s pressure to tune out the rest of a conversation in favor of remembering your comments.  Either way, better to just get it down on screen.
• As moderator it’s a whole lot easier to see who’s engaged and who isn’t, the commenting and the not. I await the day that this thing has some analytics built in so I can see participation a little more easily.  It’s great to no longer wonder if someone is taking notes or on Facebook.
• Questions get answered a whole lot faster, and without breaking up the presenter’s train of talk.  It’s so easy to derail a line of thought when a concept doesn’t make sense, and the jump to boredom after that is pretty fast.  This way confusion gets resolved immediately, and moreover without stopping the stream of the  lecture to do it.

Is it a panacea?  Not at all – there’s one glaring issue:  it’s hard to pay attention while typing.  This method almost requires small lapses in attention.  And second of all, it does require a healthy dose of control to keep things from devolving into ascii art.  If the presenter isn’t pretty darn dominant, this isn’t the tool for them.

Of course, that’s a bit of a gamble in any presentation, whether academic or otherwise, but I heartily suggest giving it a try either way.

Ignorance is Romantic

Not everyone is a computer person.  There’s nothing wrong with that – not everyone is literate, not everyone can walk, or do basic addition and subtraction. There’s certainly no shortage of groups that offer rehab, classes and therapy to help those who want to overcome these basic disabilities and access a better quality of life.

But what do you do about this person: “Haha, I guess I’m just not a computer person”.  Every time these words pass someone’s lips there’s a kindergarten teacher somewhere that cries. It’s the “haha” that does it.  Imagine the scene: the harried tech bending over the keyboard to fix a problem for the nth time, while the bemused end user insists they just don’t know what happened.  Asking for help if a wonderful, important thing, but asking for help without the intention of preventing the situation next time is a bizarrity in this age where we claim to count our seconds.

In no other sphere could this happen: You might be a great lawyer but if you can’t read then Davis Polk & Wardwell probably isn’t hiring you.   If “Haha, I can’t use basic tools” has somehow become an acceptable phrase in polite company, and not, say, a grave embarassment for which you should seek help immediately,  what’s the point of even living in a first world country?

I blame the history of nerdiness in the U.S. for this one: Up until the arrival of smartphones knowledge of technology was considered a little taboo.  It was fine for awkward boys with nothing better to do on a Saturday night, but heaven help you if it came up over a martinis (or worse, if you let it come up while under the influence of being  female!  Egads!).

Technical ignorance is ‘Proper’ with a capitol P – the dangerous kind of ‘Proper’ that applies to white weddings and burkas.   There’s a feeling that there’s something cute,  delightful even, about being helpless in the face of the most predominant appliance in the world besides the wheel.   While the arrival of the iphone has lifted some of the stigma, if you’re good-looking it’s still considered safest to ask someone else to  change the settings rather than attempt it yourself.

So beware the “Haha” -  it signifies a person proud of their hangup who isn’t planning to do anything about it any time soon. You know who I’m talking about.

Online Content Curation Three Ways, and Boobs.

If new media theory is so interesting, why are the articles about it so boring? Articles about its practitioners aren’t boring, they’re all like hey, guess which just made $50 million? Or, ooh, its a standoff between Gladwell and Shirky, or between Jarvis and everyone.

But when it comes to the the actual theory it’s suddenly time to break out the footnotes and google charts. These are topics that are new and, let’s face it, they make us a little uneasy. Talking about the effects is easy, but when it comes to technicalities it’s safer to cloth them in what sounds suspiciously like marketing speak rather than admit we’re kind of making our vocabulary up on the fly.

But no more! I am about to attempt to talk about a potentially boring piece of Media theory that I’m not totally concrete on. And it’s going to be interesting. Let’s give it a try!

We all know that the holy trinity that is online content curation: Crowd-sourcing, algorithmic curation, and human editing, have an uneasy truce. At each point of the triangle we have a good example of how a purist version can do wonders: Wikipedia, Google News, and Huffington Post respectively. And each has detractors who spend all day talking about how subscribing to the other two points on the triangle will bring about the end of civilization, the parade of “Editors are out of touch/Machines can’t really know what we want/Groups only care about sensationalism.” Also, boobs. See? You’re interested already.

As in all cases where there’s dogma involved, there’s a temptation to say that the best option is actually a compromise between the three. Of course, that makes no sense at all – no one would say that the best choice between green, purple, and orange would be a little of each, but that’s just what we’re implying here. Yes, plenty of services have BOOBS succeeded in combining two forms (See StumbleUpon or the ICanHaz empire), but the key is in the judicious choice of which two it should be LOTS OF BOOBS.

And even single-source success stories have worst case scenarios where perhaps they should have tried a little more mix n’ match – see Facebook’s auto-deletion of Chinese dissidents accounts because the used pseudonyms, or youTube’s removal of Egyptian protestors footage for being too graphic. Orange and green are great together if you’re aiming for a portrait of a brunette in a mud-bath, not so much for a blond in a snowstorm. Both of which incidentally would contain boobs.

Here is my grid for choosing citation methods, depending on what the needs of the system, and more importantly, the worst case scenario that they want to avoid.

I have a lot of	I have very little	Accuracy Needed?	I should curate using
Money	Time	Nope	Algorithmic – if you don’t care about accuracy and just want some sort of results, pouring the cash into software is probably the way to go
Money	Time or computing power	Yep	Editorial – if it has to be accurate, with unlimited funds you might as well just hire the graduating class of your local Liberal Arts school. Problem solved.
Computing Power and Time	Money	No	Crowd-sourcing – A free or cheap crowdsourcing system can go far as long as you have the tech power to wrestle it itno the submisison and scale it up.
Computing Power	Time	No	Algorithmic – A fast turnaround time rules out the crowdsourcing option unless you already have a pre-existing fanbase to launch it on. Boobs.
Time	-	Nope	Algorithmic or Crowdsourcing. If you don’t care about accuracy, pretty much anything you throw at it will be fine. So you might as well take the easy way out.
Time	Money	Yep	Editorial – With unlimited time, even if you’re only hiring a single person to curate they’ll get through it eventually
Time	Computing Power	Yep	Crowdsourcing with a bit of editorial on the side. See above, except you might wanna hire a couple more editors to make up for that Mac SE you’re running it off of.

Properly sourced content curation. Its sexy stuff.

Facebook is not an advertising platform

I recently took a stab at talking about how the power of online fandom – any fandom, not just the Facebook kind – can change the foundation of the customer/seller relationship to everyone’s advantage. But there’s one point that I think keeps getting ignored by industry, and also by Social Networking platforms themselves (who should know better!). Why oh why is Facebook still being spoken about as if it’s an advertising platform?

The other day I had a conversation with a very nice guy from a large social network who was was profiling the social network activities of one of my companies for a success stories report. He wanted to know how we decide to run a campeign, if we use an ad agency to coordinate it with our other properties, our objectives, targeting, and analytics, and what kind of custom quizzes, games, videos, and other bells and whistles we integrate to catch peoples attention.

The answer is that we don’t use any custom quizzes, games or ad agencies, and the only analytic I care about is the Engagement score. We have one custom page: a list of our products. To continue judging Social network success by these old-school marketing phrases is to throw away the number one advantage of a social space: Authenticity.

The secret to our success on this Social network is that we reply to every post. We answer every question. We ask our users what colors to use for our new design, and we go back to the drawing board if they don’t like it. We tell them what we had for lunch. We sympathise that they had a bad day. We wish them happy birthday, and we do it morning, noon, nights, and weekends because that’s when they’re on. And in return they give us something that’s so much more valuable than their wallets, they give us thier goodwill.

What it comes down to is this. If you treat Social Network users as customers, they’ll treat you like a corporation. Treat them as people and they’ll treat you like someone worth paying attention to. To narrow it down: Facebook is not just a bigger megaphone. Its sad to see so many companies turning thier pages in to themeparks when they should be turning them into summercamp. Come on people, try a little authenticity. It will go a long way towards not looking quite so desperate.

When Narraitive is a Euphemism

“Find the narrative in the numbers.” It’s this year’s mantra of data visualization, and some variation thereof is the watchword for all modern journalism: Find the story. Let the facts speak for themselves to tell what happened.

It’s a beguiling idea, the concept that a narration is hidden like a sculpture in every misshapen lump of data if only it could be liberated from the clay of unrelated information. And it’s true that in a world of infinite resources where every bit of existing data could be considered holistically, this would definitely be the case. After all, everything influences something. But perhaps it’s time to read a little closer into this much-abused buzzphrase: when we say “Find the narrative”, don’t we really mean, “Attribute some causality?”

Data vis is cool fun exciting stuff, and yes everyone and their aunt has a right, nay, a duty to give it a try. But in the last couple of months we’ve watched this well-meaning catchphrase morph from a description of data-cleaning processes to an injunction to project all kinds of causality on any given collection of numbers. Just three years shy of its 50th anniversary, the prime directive of  How to Lie with Statistics (“Don’t!”) is getting brushed aside in our excitement to plot the hell out of any data set we can get our hands on.

It’s a difficult thing to explain to a client: sometimes things just happen. An upward trend in sales numbers may not be related to advertising campaigns, and a downward trend may not be the fault of the economy.  This is basic basic stuff, people, and it’s just as true now that we can instantly make a groovy looking visualization in Fusion Charts as it was when we needed some graph paper and a sliderule. Being two steps removed from reality means that every visualization has an element of editorialization, but it doesn’t follow that we can suddenly make wild claims about the real-world events they very very abstractly represent.

How would we feel if we treated past representational art forms this way? We all know that the square-looking blob that is a Picasso nude says more about Picasso’s mental tools than what his model actually looked like. Certainly no company would decide to re-tailor their fall clothing line based on his “findings” about the female body. The graph is not the phenomenon.

But there’s something so finite about numbers that when faced with a visualization all of this logic suddenly goes out the window. Correlation is easy to show and impossible to prove. Truly impossible. Short of that infinite holistic data set I mentioned we’re going to have to accept that causality is networked: All a data set can show is is how a data set changed over time. Impart causality – I’m sorry, “narrative” – into it at your own peril.

The War is Over! Using fandom to overcome buyer-seller struggle

Here’s the text of a speech I gave at Miva Merchant’s “It’s a Social World” conference in San Diego this last week. I used the opportunity to try out some stuff I’d been musing on for a couple of months, that when it comes to retail the power of social media is not in its ability to increase reach, but in its ability to create depth of commitment from its users. Much thanks to Clay Shirky and Jay Rosen for the vocabulary for of a couple of these concepts

Welcome and good morning! The title of the next 45 minutes is “The War is Over – Fan Communities and the rise of buyer-seller collaboration”. Now, that’s a bit of a mouthful, so there is an alternate title I was considering: “Everything I ever wanted to know about marketing I learned from comic book geeks.” Today I want to take a step back and talk a little bit about what why we’re doing all this. What’s so great about a fanbase.

A while ago, a large company decided that it wanted to write a reference book. It was going to be really really big. They realized right off the bat that it was going to be way over their budget, even if they hired an entire new staff, the quality just wouldn’t be worth it. A solution was finally suggested: they would find fans who had shown an interest in similar books –intelligent people with a little spare time every day, and they would ask them to each help out, just a little bit. By the end of the project they had over 800 volunteers who produced what ended up being 12 books worth of information.

The Oxford English Dictionary took from the year 1860 to the year 1895, and it was a huge success. Now they didn’t have to do it this way. Their product was in high demand so no matter how crappy the quality, they knew people would buy it. And if people didn’t buy it, they knew they had some of the most powerful advertisers in the world working for them at the time. But Instead they used the wisdom of their potential buyers, and that’s probably why, instead of being a passing fad, we still use dictionaries today.

It was a brilliant concept. But it did take 35 years. Today this idea of working with your customers for a shared goal finally has the chance of taking place in a reasonable amount of time because the internet has changed the way we think about group dynamics. That’s just a fancy way of saying that we not only talk to each other differently, we think about each other differently too.

Ecommerce changed how sellers see themselves – it’s so much easier to make the leap to being a seller now – but it is also changing how sellers see their customers. It’s true that many of us still consider it the job of merchants to extract money from customers with pliers: push people hard enough in the direction of a product and a certain number of people will go for it.

The war is over! Maybe?

But I think it’s not overstating things by saying, a good two centuries later, we might be witnessing the end to the age-old adversarial relationship between customers and sellers. Why? Because there are a couple of seriously huge incentives for sellers to begin taking seriously the phrase they’ve been using ever since the advent of Facebook: fan communities. The idea of fans dates back hundreds of years, but the metaphor I’m going to use is comic books, of which I myself am a fan. If you buy a comic, you’re by default a fan. All you need in order to join this exclusive fan community is interest. Your badge of membership is the product you’ve purchased. When a new product comes out, it’s the fan community who discusses its merits, who makes suggestions for the next issue, and who spreads the word to other potential customers. And because it’s self-advertising, there are a lot of members. And oh are they motivated

With the rise of social media we are all of us potential fans. We’re looking at a possible future where all consumer groups are fan groups, and where buying a product is just a side product of that fan activities. Will this be better for business as a whole? Well, If nothing else it will be a lot more fun. I mean, given a choice between cajoling customers into purchases through high pressure sales tactics, and delighting them so much that they give you money for the sheer joy of being in your product’s presence, I know which one I’d pick. Remember, concentrating strictly on money instead of the buying experience is like praying to win the lottery but refusing to buy a ticket.

So, a fast review. What we know and love today as Social Software is made up of all kinds of services: Wikis, Realtime editors, social networking services, bookmarking tools, microblogging, forums, chat rooms, virtual worlds, MultiPalyer Online games, and technically Blogs, sometimes, and all of their purposes are to allow many-to-many interaction. So instead of a website talking to you, which is how we are used to dealing with the web, now, the website can talk to you, and you can talk back to it, and you can also talk to all the other fans who are reading it. Now, just to get some vocabulary out of the way, today I’ll be focusing on facebook, and I’m going to use that word “fans” a lot. To avoid confusion, I’m talking about fans as in football, not fans as in facebook. Their Fan tool was aptly named, but a little confusing in a talk like this.

So, Social Networking is powerful in terms of connectivity and reach 1) because it’s a good way to quickly contextualize and build stories around people and things , for example, a few moments on someone’s facebook page and you probably know if you want to get to know them better or not. And 2) because it deeply reduces transaction costs for meeting new people and ideas. That means the amount of energy it takes to try something new. Whereas once meeting required going to parties and joining activity groups, now you might just have to scroll down through a list. But very quickly, smart people realized that where you have large groups of people money also follows. It’s a fact of technology that systems created to help people share cute kitty pictures can suddenly be reused for completely different purposes, like overthrowing governments. This is the fact on which what facebook has made their billions.

We are all fans

As you’ve been hearing these last two days, social tools are not a panacea – it’s not like you can just sprinkle some social on something and voila, here is profit. The reason is because causality is networked. There’s a buzzword, it means that many different things influence a final outcome. Very few us ask, would I buy something from me? Would I be influenced by my posts? Would I comment on this entry? Would I ever be a fan of my page (fan in the facebook sense)? At best, people answer “Well, I wouldn’t, but fans are different.”

The fans are you. We are all fans. The line between sellers and buyers doesn’t exist anymore except in your bank account. If you wouldn’t participate in your own social community, no one else will either. While it IS possible to reach unlimited people with our new tools, unlimited reach isn’t good enough because we ourselves aren’t unlimited. Our budgets aren’t unlimited, our resources are not unlimited.

So, social tools with infinite reach are only free if our time is worthless. That means we need to focus on the real-world triggers that can cause the type of behaviors we want to encourage. As retailers, what do we want? We want influence, control, buzz, we want as much reach as we can get for the least effort.

But, what does a potential fan community want? Note, that’s a very different thing from asking what your customers want. Your customers probably want discounts and free shipping. The good news is, your fan community wants things besides product. What they want is stuff that you can give them, and more importantly, stuff that they can give each other. Why is this so cool? Sooner or later we run out of our capacity to want more stuff. Whereas your potential fans want things that, as humans, we will never run out of a capacity to want.
The basic pluses to social media membership are those of any group:

• Comradeship. Perhaps they’re feeling lonely
• Access to techniques (things passed on as knowledge rather than officially documented)
• Collaboration. They want to have a voice in something bigger than themselves
• Approval. They’re looking for someone else to tell them how great they are

All of these boil down to two major categories: Recognition, and belonging

Each transaction you make with a fan has an unspoken question: this transaction is free, so what is the social coinage I expect to be paid in. Is it a feeling of belonging? Or is it feeling of achievement? Do I expect “thanks” or do I expect “attention”. Now, the best fan interactions address both motivations at once – they allow a feeling of both “I did it” and “we did it”. Wikipedia is a great example of this. Editors get the thanks by having their name listed, but they get the satisfaction of watching their entry become more and more accurate.

When creating an active, involved fan community, the first question to ask is, what are my potential fans like? What are they after? Who’s your imagined user, and what do they get out of this tool? At Squshable ours are motivated by a little of each category. They like being part of a community: They want to talk about how to wash our products and swap stories about how they got theirs, and they want to tell us which designs they want next and what colors to make them in, and they bring in their friends so we all as a group can reach certain quotas and feel good that we reached them together. But, they’re also looking for recognition. They create videos. They write stories and want feedback on it. They post pictures of themselves and want to be told how cute they are, and that’s all completely valid too.

Your Facebook Page is Not an Advertisement

The best thing you can do to in order to encourage your fans in fanlike activities, hopefully one of which will eventually be a purchase, is to give them a venue to discuss their opinions. And I do mean a venue to discuss. Your facebook page is not an advertisement. I’ll say it again because that’s so important. You can’t hold a discussion in an advertisement because everyone knows that the communication is only really going one way.

This is one of the reasons why many companies have latent pages: they may or may not have a relatively large number of fans but they’re not engaged. So when you are evaluating why a fan community isn’t working, you want to address these two major motivations: Perhaps people rarely comment, so there’s no motivation of community acceptance. Perhaps you rarely comment, or comment with the wrong replies, so there’s no motivation of approval.

Attracting fans is a topics being addressed by a couple different panels here, so for now the important thing to remember is this: becoming a fan with a lowercase f, a facebook fan, takes energy. It takes a leap of faith and trust – “yes, I hereby believe this person isn’t going to cause me annoyance.” It’s small transaction, but they add up fast. These people have done you a huuuge favor by visiting you fan page, so make it as easy for them as possible.What it comes down to is, never underestimate someone’s willingness to bail during the beginning of any complex interaction. Getting over that hump is the first issue.

Your second step is creating a safe place for potential fans to land. Once a user has taken the leap of faith required to take time out of their very important lives to check out your materials, what kind of environment have they arrive in? Is it active? Is it friendly? Does it give a feeling of community? To get a web sale you might need 30 seconds of attention. But social media requires a much longer term relationship.  Here are some items to check:

Are fans encouraged to share their tokens of membership, their tribal colors if you will, their signs that show “you don’t know me but I am embedded in your society”. If not, you should encourage users to submit them. What am I talking about? We receive roughly 30-40 pictures a week on our facebook page of people showing off with our product. They’re not showing off for us, they’re doing it for each other, to prove they belong. Even if you have only one or two images showing real live people, every bit helps, so, you want to support these displays of identity as much as you can.

Is it timely? Do fans see you responding to other fans within a couple of hours? Being timely is more important than being transparent or accurate because the recent activity area on the facebook page is there to create social pressure. All of these people are doing something. Why aren’t you?

Do they recognize that this is a communal space, and not just a commercial space? There’s an easy trick for this one – I call it the 40/40/20 rule. To keep your fan area social, and not just make it into advertising, 40% of your posts should be about You. You as a person. What you’re thinking and doing and what you’ll do later. Another 40% should be about topics of interest to your fans. Only 20% should ever be about you as a corporate entity. That’s your sales announcements, your product launches, the stuff that you want to slip in under the radar. If anyone has ever used the OKCupid dating website, they’re brilliant at this: they have an entire blog devoted to data of all things, and it keeps people coming back because it’s not really related to what they do, and thus nonthreatening. So basically, when users look at your page, you want something in the users brain to say, “hey, it really looks like those guys are having fun. I wish I was a part of it.”

Our last step to building this fan community is keeping those fans active. Remember, your facebook page is not an advertisement. It’s a social space that happens to be populated by people who like your product. So Socialize! People like to talk to real people. They like to talk to each other (that’s that community motivation we spoke about) and they like to talk to you (that’s the approval motivation we spoke abut.)

People are fans of you, your product, your store, your branding, your other fans. The one thing they are not a fan of your corporate entity. People can tell when you’re thinking of them as customers, not fans.

The key to staying in the right mindset is good old fashioned authenticity. It’s as simple as being careful to never use marketing speak. “On sale for a limited time only”. New and improved”. “Act now.” Come on guys. When small businesses try to take on the trappings of big corporations you often find it has the opposite results. Our biggest strength is that we are not Walmart, and people aren’t coming to us for a Walmart experience. Incidentally, part of authenticity is sometimes breaking the third wall – admitting you’re a retailer: a person, and not a corporation. Let them know you’re trying to make money, so you can fund your vacation to Bermuda. You like watching Dr Who re-urns. When works is done you’re going out for a beer.

Another key to authenticity is consistency in acknowledging the customers experience. They’ve gone through a lot of effort to post that picture, to let you know what they did and didn’t like about your store or hairstyle or whatever. The least you can do is validate it, approve of it, by replying.

Comments are not a way to keep score! We often think of them that way – look, I got fifty posts on my page, I must be hot stuff – but they aren’t. Each comment no matter what it says is a request for your attention

Using your Powers for Good

So, as any cult leader will tell you, controlling the actions of large groups of fanatical people is an exciting experience, not to mention rewarding financially. So our question becomes, how can we use this goodwill, and benefit from these motivated fans.

First off, obviously they can become your marketing force. Because of the way facebook is set up, every interaction they make with our fan page informs their friends of their preferences, and that social pressure is one of the most powerful motivators in existence. There are a couple ways to use that: You can use it for build-up to a big event, you can make private launches on products, you can give discounts or sales, or really, anything that will get people excited enough to weigh in.

But although it has its place, strict marketing still confuses fans with customers, when there are so many other ways to use this active, engaged community you have created:

Beta testing. Outside of advertising I can’t stress this enough as one as the most important services your fans can provide. Testing new site updates, testing design or product ideas

Usability testing services. That ‘s a biggy

You can also use them for user-contributed resources and services. These depend on the size of your company. A rabid enough fan community cares about you and cares about your store, and wants to help you succeed. When you’re small it can be invaluable to put a call out for peple to help with things you can’t do. For example, every once in a while we need some models. We know exactly where to go to get them.

Idea sourcing. This one is very cool – if you know exactly what your customers will buy, you suddenly know exactly what to supply. Ourselves we use a voting system to find out what types of new animals people would buy, and we make the top ones. It’s never failed us, except once. They wanted a zombie. That was just weird.

User-generated content. This is where the pictures, the videos, the reviews, etc. all comes in. Each one continues the cycle of interaction by rewarding the fan with recognition and encouraging group engagement in others. That makes up for the times when you yourself can’t be in on a conversation – if done well the conversation is still going on without you.

So when you’re trying to decide what to do with your newfound fans, the question you should ask yourself is: What do I want to accomplish, and what is the simplest thing that could possibly work. We’ve had situations where we scope out large complex rewards systems – fans get free merchandise if they complete a set of tasks, etc. In the end, simple is best. We are small businesses; let’s stick with what we know.

Keeping the Balance

I’d like to end on a downer. After all this cheer-leading it’s important to acknowledge once again that social media is no panacea, and more importantly, it’s no place for anyone who is insincere. It is possible to fake authenticity for a little while, but it sounds pretty exhausting to me.

One of the biggest challenges in transferring from customers to fans is you gotta start treating them with respect. They are your fellow travelers. And with the loss of control that comes with abandoning our strict authoritarian pigeonholing of roles comes some unhappiness too.

Social media survives on a very delicate balance of exerting just enough control to encourage behaviors you want, and at the same time suppressing those behaviors you don’t. I am not talking about trolling, or spam, or malicious hacking, all of those should be stomped on without mercy. But, say for example someone rants about the price of your shipping. And someone else points out that it’s because of the size of the box. And someone else makes fun of their spelling. And pretty soon you have a flame war going on.

There are a couple of things you can do:

First of all you can encourage that conflict! It’s important to recognize the extremely important role that conflict plays in keeping your fans involved. Having a civil debate sometimes means that people do beat each other up. There is very little as effective in keeping a fan involved in a scene and coming back to your page as a good fight. Why is this? The danger in fan groups is not that they blow up, but that they fade away. The danger is not from conflict but from disinterest. If people are fighting, it’s going to be okay because that means there is some long-term commitment.

And furthermore, Flame wars are a side effect of creating a great space where people feel comfortable expressing themselves. Metaphorically speaking, we want a space that people think is worth vandalizing. I remember one of our proudest moments, a while back we put up a vote on four new designs and then we noticed that someone had created a hack to stuff the ballot boxes for the design they wanted. That showed time and commitment: it meant we were doing something right.

Second off, you can accept the conflict you can’t change. The knee-jerk reaction is to immediately suppress what people are doing to your lovely page. However here’s a good rule: Don’t forbid what you can’t prevent. For our fans, feeling controlled is a demotivate, just like feeling ignored. Instead of just deleting comments you disagree with, try disarming them instead. When someone complains about shipping times, remind them that you don’t ship on weekends because the post office is closed, and anyway your wife wanted you to paint the kitchen. People respond well to fairness even if they disagree with you, especially if they view you as a person.

Suppression is a very distant third option. It’s true that groups where each person is completely free to do what they like…aren’t groups.

I’d like to leave you with this final thought: The strength of social media comes from it’s risk. People pay attention to it exactly because it cannot be completely controlled by one person. But that loss of control is a small price to pay for a self-sustaining, attentive, involved, enthusiastic, and most importantly, happy fan community.  Who might even buy something at some point.

Thanks everyone.

It’s never too early to backlash

The road to professional academic success often seems to be paved by wild refutations: pick a pet theory by another leading academic and disagree as loudly as you can. Maybe the concept is to to provoke a response which will drive traffic to your site. I’d feel bad for all of the recent flack Malcolm Gladwell is receiving for his well-researched and thoughtful New Yorker article from people who obviously did no more than skim it, except that Gladwell himself is occasionally guilty of this method. Another prime example, well, Evgeny Morozov love him though I do.

The lesson here: it’s never too early to backlash. Let’s call it the ‘Remora Effect with a twist’, although I’m sure there’s an official name for it (and someone who loudly disagrees with that name). Romoras  (AKA Suckerfish) are fish that hitch rides on a host to save themselves the effort of really thinking about a topic.  Alright, I added that last bit.

The concept does bring up an interesting question though, how much of news media released is original thought, that is to say primary source reporting and editorial, and how much of it is a rehashing of other sources. Jay Rosen points out the surprising amount of “reporting” is taken directly from press releases, and anyone following Japan on twitter the last two days sees that new developments come about once every six hours, not on the second by second basis that the firehose would have you believe.

To do this xkcd style, I’m guessing the graph of actual news before and after digital tools looks something like this: