One Man and His Blog: Media140 Archives

#media140 - Dataeconomy - New Opportunities, New Business Models

Andrew Lyons

The dataeconomy is about turning information into a usable asset - and an engaging experience. So, there's a reason to develop new business models. Lyons invested £100 in a quiz at the beginning (the money was the rewards) - he might get contacts, a drink, anything out of it at the end - but he's trying something new.

He's showing off his Twitterwall product, which draws out user icons, tweets and stats. Which came up with a 404. Oops. OK - working again. Lots of data sifting about the people who have tweeted with the #media140 hashtag - can this be used to identify the most influential people at the events? The product can build a relationship wheel to show you who is connected to whom amongst a Twitter community - and its being demonstrated with my relationships... *gulp*

They also work with publishers. They have archives - but now they need to think about how to wrap it up in new visual stimulus. They can create news walls for every sub-section of a publisher's website. They content's already there - they're just giving a new, enticing interface. Here's an example. You can search visually for things you're interested in. It's more of a discovery engine than a search one, perhaps - it's about finding things you don't know you might be interested in.

#media140 - Dataeconomy - Visualisation

David McCandless

David McCandless - Information is Beautiful

Oh, look. David McCandless. I'be blogged his talks once or twice recently. He's kicking off with his billion dollar-a-gram. He scraped all the data for it from journalism sites, but he did it manually. Did it via searches on billion dollar amounts on sites. Drew the proportional shapes in Adobe Illustrator. And then played Tetris with them until the fitted together.

He sketches ideas for his visualisations, trying to match the style of the graphic to the feel of the data being conveyed - triangles are more conspiratorial, for instance...

Spreadsheets underlie a lot of his work - word processors are linear, while spreadsheets are multi-directional - and you can bring in live elements. They're very tidy, and they can be the start of a great design. Visualisations go through many drafts, as he works on the details of layout with the person commissioning it. The designer on the time travel visualisation left after the 13th of 14th draft. McCandless then realised that time travel was a chaotic thing, and that a visualisation that embraced that would work - and allowed you to see crossover points between various time-travel movies... Sometimes the form of the visualisation only emerges during the work - you discover the important data as you go.

What doesn't work? Too much spaghetti - not shaping the data with a story - just creates a mess. Circular diagrams often make little sense. Cartograms (based on geography) are over-used and the information is difficult to get out.

McCandless's bif FAIL:

McCandless FAIL

Can you figure out why?

#media140 : Dataeconomy: Open Data

(Live-blogging - prone to error, omission and typos...)

Rufus Pollock from Open Knowledge Foundation

Wouldn't it be nice to know where our money goes when we pay taxes?

You need lots of stuff - government spending (local and regional), region codes, company data… Much of it locked up or in difficult formats like PDF…

We need raw data and we want it now…

Open = freedom to use, re-use, redistribute - but it must be non-personal. More and more businesses are being built on data (*cough* Reed Business Information *cough*) Data is non-rivalrous - if I give you a copy of my data, I haven't lost access to it (like my shoes or car). Information systems are the most complex systems we've ever built - and how do we deal with complexity? We break it down into bits. But if those bits are closed, it's very hard to put it all back together again.

Why open? Other people may come up with the best ideas of how to use the data - and we move towards a read-write society, where we no longer just passively consume information. Too much information is now locked up in closed systems like Google and Facebook? How do we change from that? How do we build an ecosystem around that outside these walled gardens?

Lots of back-end work needed…

Simon Rogers

Simon Rogers - The Guardian Datastore

Inspired by James Cameron - not the Avatar one - he was all about telling human stories and making things real, and Florence Nightingale, who made visualisations of troop casualties as well as nursing…

Guardian busy collecting and using data for journalism - why not share that? Lead to the setting up of the data blog. No longer journalists labouring in isolation, but others can pitch in and do things with the data.

Showing a bunch of examples - MPs Travel Expenses, the expenses crowd-sourcing - one person did 29k pages! Interest rapidly declined after first day. Sometimes too much data can swamp the story. Coins Data Explorer - built both for journalists and others to use.

Then he showed us an Excel spreadsheet of Afghanistan data, and showed how it could be used via a pivot table to feed a visualisation. It's probably quite straightforward, if you have the first clue about Excel, which I don't. :-)

Oh, and if you really want to get attention - do a Doctor Who visualisation…

The media140 Meetup and Social Media Evolution

And so to the first media140 meetup, over in the City. Unusually for this sort of event, I've only recognised two faces (oh, three) here so far.

It's a grand total of eight months since I went to my first media140 event, and the mood and feel has changed completely. There's been a progressive move from the social media enthusiasts and evangelists to those who are trying to figure out how to integrate it into their businesses - and that's great. That's social media growing up.

But I am feel rather that the questions and answers I'm hearing aren't really adding to my sum of knowledge. In fact, there are things being said that I'd say were objectively wrong. "homogonised output on Twitter"? Uh, no. Luckily some voices are being raised in protest. But this is social media as a tool applied to existing processes rather than as a thought process, as a means of conversation.

Charlie Osmond from Fresh Networks is being provocative by suggesting that the social media mantra of "go where the conversation is" is wrong. But his argument rather relies on the idea that the only conversation worth having is the marketing one. He gave the example of a vicar, who does his evangelism from the pulpit, but also goes to village fetes, etc. And that trying to evangelise at the fete would be a poor idea. And he's right in that. However, just trying evangelising from the pulpit if you haven't built a relationship with your parishioners by going and chatting at the fete...

He's a social media pragmatist rather than a social media purist, he suggests. I might ge tempted to insert the word "cynic" in place of "pragmatist". Certainly one could argue the methods he are advocating are cynical rather than genuine engagement... :-)

Ooh, best idea of his bit: the last thing you want to do when launching a community is just open the doors. If you just open the doors of a restaurant, and it's empty on a Friday night, you have a problem. And that's bang on. And that brings us back to the vicar at the fete, talking to folks so they will come back to his sermons.

And he's predicting a social media backlash. Which is pretty safe, as it's already started. :-) And, yes, I think he was being deliberately provocative up front, as he is talking what I would consider the talk, with sensible words about the fact it's going to take at least a year to build a community, and get genuine engagement.

And with that, I'm sneaking off home.

Nice cocktails from Ping Pong, though...

#media140 : Hemlock & AudioBoo

Hemlock is an open-source environment for building social applications, with a gaming focus. There's a showcase of uses on the site.

AudioBoo - a low coast, efficient way of generating audio reports. The platform collects pictures, geodata and so on at the time of recording, and pushes it into a social, connected, embeddable environment. Currently, it's on the iPhone, with Android and web versions coming soon. And they're adding an API which will allow others to build clients.

Podcasting was too complicated, suggests SEO MArk Rock. The idea of AudioBoo was to make audio publishing as easy as possible. In the short term, they'll monetise through pro services, from editing, to managing team contributions. 10 licences sold for the pro services - and it's not built yet!

#media140 : Information is Beautiful.

David McCandless (@mccandelish) has a book coming out. He didn't beat around the bush about that. He showed us the UK and US editions. But he's also interested in the growing visual literacy of the population through the growth of the web.

If you come into the social space trying to sell something "you're a bit of a dick, really". What you can do is bring a gift - interestingness. If you're interesting, you'll get followed and you'll get retweeted. And the most interesting gift is the revealing gift.

(This is a really hard session to liveblog, BTW. It's all about great, fascinating graphics.)

And I think what he's showing, and this should be of particular note to journalists, is how limited and uninspired our graphical representation of data is right now, and how illuminating it can be when done right. Asking the real-time web the right questions, and you can find some fascinating information - but give back. Give back into the social space what you create from that data.

Wonderful talk. Go read his blog.

#media140 : Show Me The Money - Bernard Desarnauts

Last keynote of the day: Bernard Desarnauts of Glam Media and Tinker.com talking (in theory) about where the money is.

Media is every-fragmenting. Blogs are growing as are social networks. Traffic is fragmenting around topics, and traditional sites are drawing a small and smaller amount of people's time. The traditional places where advertisers spent money are becoming less and less relevant.

So, the answer is distributed media - go where the audience is. And that's brought them 12m uniques worldwide - by focusing on mid to long tail.

Tinker - instead of following people, you follow topics. They use semantic analysis to find relevant content wherever it is. Beyond that, they create widgets that contain the conversation within them. You don't force people to come to Tinker - you can push the conversation out to where they are.

Has been used by many media brands. They use algorithmic and manual filtering to curate the flow of content. They have direct API access to the Twitter "firehose". Most customers only want the Twitter data.

[This feels a bit like a sales pitch rather than a case study]

#media140 : Who's your brand?

This panel looks interesting. The relationship between individual personality and brand is clearly an uncomfortable one for many people here, and exploring that looks worthwhile. In the driving seat: Gordon MacMillan, Social Media and International Editor of Haymarket.

Candace Kuss (@candancekuss) Hill & Knowlton: Personality is not the same as a character.

Drew Benvie (@drewb), 33 digital: Social media is full of fake and FAIL. The conversation about character and personality needs to happen. People need to learn to be personal about personality.

Will Mcinnes (@willmcinnes), NixonMcinnes: Does a brand have a personality? Once we get past the social media as the new new, we need to understand what the organisation's DNA is.

Ruth Mortimer (@marketingweeked), Marketing Week: Every brand already has a personality - it's about how you use it.

Richard Baker (@richard_baker), Virgin Trains: Not every customer care wether or not you have a personality. Some just want information. The skill is about tailoring response to the right customers.

Richard is making the point quite strongly that marketing can't own social media. It's cross-functional and just as important to, say customer service. Candace is backing him up, restating that the best thing people can do is listen - and spend a long time listening, and then they can keep it real because they've seen how to do it.

Continue reading #media140 : Who's your brand?.

#media140 : The Survivors' Club

I'm uncomfortable with some of this panel's message. There seems to be a distinct undertow of "how do we control the message through Twitter. The examples we're being given seem to be using Twitter as just another channel, maybe to give a veneer of engagement, without a reality to it.

ASOS seems to be the notable exception right now, but let's see how the panel develops.

Amelia Torode from VCCP suggests that it's about the right people doing the right things...

And this panel has almost been completely hijacked by the Twitterfeed... Running jokes about the guy from Innocent, Ted Hunt.

Some suggestion that Twitter is a passing fad, and it will be replaced by something else next year, but that feels like someone who isn't really engaged.

Look, the real lesson of this panel was that, if a panel is insufficiently interesting, using a Twitterwall will sabotage it. Fascinated people don't undermine sessions with jokey tweets, they tweet reaction to people's statements - or just tweet the statements. Despite the best efforts of chair Jess Greenwood of Contagious magazine, this is actually a classic counter to the sentiment that I saw emerging at the start of the panel - about controlling the message. With so many people able to publish now, you can't control the message - you can just join in.

#media140 : Learning To Listen

Former colleague Ciarán Norris is going to tell us how to listen.

Use your ears?

:)

First up: why should we listen on Twitter? Exponential growth in the last year, for one. We've had a growth of people at the creator end of the scale. First you had know HTML, then you had to have a blog, and now you just need Twitter, a mobile phone and maybe a cameras.

And because of that, Google is now your company front page, and other people's work maybe on the front page and more interesting than yours. Tools like ViralTracker allow them to follow how pieces of work spread across the web. Delicious is still a good way of seeing how people view your brand. Tweetdeck gives you the ability to understand and monitor Twitter across multiple accounts. Tweetfunnel allows multiple people to manage one account. Tweetmeme tracks how links are spread around Twitter. They're adding analytics (which I'm testing and it's cool). Twitterfall, great way to check what people are saying around a brand.

But: some perspective. 2% of Iranians have access to Twitter, so it's the "liberal intelligentsia talking to the liberal intelligentsia in the west".

Some good examples:

Glassesdirect
Dominos Pizza got more views for its response to a problem video than the original
Ryanair - and traffic went up!

#media140 : "Do"s and "Don't"s in Social Media

The idea of brands joining in on people's private conversations is just creepy, suggests Lloyd Davis (alloyddavis) of the Tuttle Club.

Be honest and transparent, don't lie or fake it.

Daren Forsyth (@darenBBC) points out that human is basically the default mode of Twitter. Think about how human and how subtle you can be.

And the converse? Habitat. Lots of debate as to wether the rules of social media are obvious, or need thinking about. If they're so obvious, why did Habitat get it so wrong. The answer offered is that it was "a kid", but that seems like a cop-out.

George Nimah (@iboy) is doing his best to kick the panel more into gear, but suggesting that a panel of advertising folks talking about evidence is up there with military intelligence as an oxymoron. We need more honesty, like being honest that Peperami was as much about saving money in a recession as about being creative. (Follow the money.)

Daljit Bhurji of Diffusion PR (@daljit_bhurji) suggests that it's as much about how you turn things around in a crisis. Dell has recovered brilliantly from Dell Hell, and even Habitat now has a good agency behind their Twitter stream. (An agency. Not people in the company. Doesn't sound good to me).

Lloyd raises the issue of celebs using their entourage to tweet for them - which does their image harm. George says it's about being clear. If you tweet under your name, make sure it's you. If you tweet under a brand name, be clear who it is that's tweeting on behalf of a brand.

I like Daren's suggestion that companies need to identify their conversationalists - and all have them already - and use them as their social media first line, as it were.

Two pieces of wisdom from Lloyd: We're all making this up as we go along, and don't use spam bots.

#media140 : Idea Bounty

Did you know that the 19th century Oxford English Dictionary was crowd-sourced? It's not a new concept, but technology brings new things to it, says Nic Ray, managing director of Quirk, particularly a wider reach.

The basic process is:

Company broadcasts problem
Crowd offers solution
Crowd vets solutions
Company rewards winning suggestions

And you can see it in use anywhere from Wikipedia to Threadless, to 99 Designs. And the benefits? Everything from tapping a wider range of talents, to actually building engagement with your brands.

And yes, this is a threat to the traditional agency model. Wider range of potential talent, and lower costs? That's attractive, and Ray seems to suggest that push-back from the traditional agency community is one of the bigger problems of the process.

You should also pick and choose where you use crowd-sourcing techniques. The more research that's needed, or more face to face interaction, then you want to go the traditional route.

Noam Buchalter then went on to explain why Peperami crowd-sourced ideas for future ads, as they felt the most recent peperami-charcetr-based ads weren't as strong as they could have been. The whole process seems to have been a mix of cost-saving and engagement, as well as a source of new ideas. The filming was doen in South Africa, for example, to save costs.

One questioner from the floor suggested that it was a missed opportunity, and that they could have gone for something genuinely "ground up", rather than a "top down" filtering process for the final results.

#media140 : Can you change a brand in 140 characters?

"Twitter is like word of mouth on crack," says Scott Seaborn, head of mobile tech at Ogilvy (@scottseaborn). "The paradigm shift is that the people now have the power. The best thing to do is acknowledge that and give them tools to have more power."

Gareth Jones, the editor of Revolution (@gj), means that they have moved from pushing their content out to having conversations with their readers, and making their brand more transparent.

For BA, social media humanises the brand. It puts a human face on something they normally think is out of their league.

"Isn't social media just PR?" asked Kieron Matthews of IAB (@IABUK)

"Is PR in the sense of ongoing discourse, but it's not PR in the modern sense of spamming journalists with press releases," said Robin Grant of We Are Social. (@robingrant)

And Gareth pointed out that Twitter allows him to engage directly with people without going through PRs.

Scott then characterised social media as just another channel, and there need to be PRs with a speciality in it. And then Kieron had a go at RSS. This conference is feeling far less what I'd call "socially media aware" then the journalism-based one earlier in the year.

And now - the ROI discussion is upon us with the inevitability of a WiFi FAIL at a tech conference...

Continue reading #media140 : Can you change a brand in 140 characters?.

Media140: Local Journalism

Joanna Geary: Twitter us another way of finding you local community online and interacting with them.

Christian Payne: Geri Jackson (sp?) - evicted from Zimbabwe, broadcast into the country. Blocked. Now texts into there. 400k texts a month. One third of population left, but leave a mobile there to communicate with family. How get free texts into Zimbabwe?

Paul Bradshaw: Distribution is now journalists' responsibility. Can you organize users to cover events?

Simon Grice: setting up a local news site. At a local level, people are interested in things that happen where they live. Unique opportunity for local news to harness this medium to serve audience.

Monetization:

PB: tools and services around news
SG: local ads
JG: no-one has the answer. We don't sell content, we sell audiences. Audiences follow you because you have something to say. We need to look again at what people want from us.
SG: We need to rethink what localization means, when you don't have a fixed distribution base.
PB: Need to create a newsroom without walls. Connected journalism.
JG: For traditional journalists, social media are a scary lot. Taking meetings face to face cements online relationships.
CP: I'm glad the advertising model is lying kicking and screaming in the gutter.
PB: Publishers not throwing enough money at innovation.
SG: Publishers not looking at the innovation in startups.

Media140: Success & Failures With Twitter Journalism

Panel chained by Laura Oliver of Journalism.co.uk

Suw Charman-Anderson is talking about Ada Lovelace day, an event to celebrate women in technology, and give women good technology role models. They had 1000 people sign up in the first day, and meme mainly spread through Twitter. The Facebook group was closed and inwards-looking and many people who joined the events page didn't sign up to the pledge. Twitter spread the idea widely through retweeting. Will be more Ada Lovelace events and another day next year.

Kevin Anderson is up next, talking about twittering and blogging his way across the US for the presidential election. Use Twitter to crowd-source question. Took him back to his early reporting days in Kansas. Blogging brought him back that sense of immediacy that he lost when he went to national press. "The worst thing is to be in the field and not to be able to file". The US trip was an experiment - came down to blog as the hub, with Facebook, Twitter and Flickr as the main tools. @s and DMs while he was moving - a 2 month conversation in the field with his audience. Met people and made contact (ie built community) as he went. Found it difficult to aggregate everything they did in one place on the site - hard to add the right context. And how do you aggregate the interaction?

Continue reading Media140: Success & Failures With Twitter Journalism.

Media140: How Will Twitter Change News Reporting?

First panel discussion - five white males, points out Bill Thompson.

Difference between PA and Twitter is between newspaper front page and an ocean, says Mike Butcher.

Jon Grimpton says that Sky use search terms during breaking news events. Generally, they're just monitoring Twitter. PA is just a potential source of stories - so is Twitter if you use the tools around it.

Bill Thompson: old school journalism should be allowed to continue so we can all experience its death throes. It's missing the point of Twitter. It's the Id unleashed. Like ESP with no filters.

Darren Waters: foolish of any news organisation to ignore the flow of information in Twitter. BBC has a user-generated content hub, who sources information from the audience.

Nick Halstead: Pairing of blogging and Twitter is giving a wide reach to the small blogger. (Content marketing, essentially). The future is all about sites that discover the trending stories.

Mike Butcher: 5 years ago we would have been having mediaTechnorati, but that's now something of an also-ran. I was late because I was breaking a story.

BT: Did you call them to ask if it was true?

Continue reading Media140: How Will Twitter Change News Reporting?.

Media140: Opening Sessions

Pat Kane is first up, showing us a picture of Dick Tracey with his wrist communication device - something for us all to aspire to, right?

Social Media lets you play at being a journalist - and play is an ambiguous term - are you a player or are you being trivial?

Journalism becomes quotidian in this environment - you can produce it on the same street corner you used to buy your newspaper.

Beat reporting (content search, geolocation)
Early warning of events/news
Real time content/reporting
Traceable sources for leads and interviewing
"can you help" - audience interaction
Promo tool (content marketing)
Expertise archive

Desk research becomes handheld device responsiveness as you react to the community's collaborative decision as to what is important.

Who verifies flows of information? All news is a narrative that is constructed by groups. Truth is balkanised - which is an interesting niche for existing brands. Can they be the people who frame the tumult?

Continue reading Media140: Opening Sessions.

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October 21, 2010