I have been watching the Old Spice phenomenon with interest and admiration so don’t get me wrong; it will set the bar for great, creative work in advertising but is it a high point for social media?  I don’t think so.

The campaign, with its barrage of rapid-response YouTube videos distributed through Twitter, is modern advertising done extremely well; it acknowledges (and capitalizes on the fact) that we live in a world suffused with social tools, but it isn’t exemplary of them or the fullest expression of their potential.   It is still essentially a high-polish, broadcast campaign (technically one might better call it “transmedia“).  In fact, I would contend that this is exactly why the campaign has been so successful in bridging the gap from its origins as a television commercial.  They maintained the formula of high production standards that marked the original.   They kept the responses exclusive, selectively engaging people that would keep them “on brand” while maintaining a steady stream of high-quality content.

At the end of the day, the breathless analysis of Old Spice as the zenith of social media leaves one to wonder what the commentariat think social media is, and whom it is actually for.

I once read that in the 1960’s comics and counterculture figures began using profanity in part because they felt that the use of such language precluded their message/movement from being co-opted.   They were, of course, temporarily right and permanently wrong.  It took a bit longer but nearly every song of that age has found its way into an advertisement.  Its slogans have been re-engineered to suit – and peace, harmony (“I’d like to give the world a Coke”) and even songs critiquing material pursuits (Janis Joplin for Mercedes-Benz ) have been stripped of their original intent and attached to one product or other.

So it goes with the social media land grab currently underway as every major corporation rushes to stake a claim on our attention and our loyalty.   They are co-opting a medium whose fundamental and radical proposition is a promotion of interpersonal connection, many-to-many communication, and the privilege of social norms over business norms.

Further, the discourse that informs the way we define social media in practice is being shaped by an army of consultants whose personal stake in this game is deeply tied to the clients that they serve.  More often these are big corporations.  Thus the analysis of BP all too often focused on how BP could help itself during the crisis rather than how society at large might better use these tools to come to grips with corporate malfeasance.   The conversations about Nestle’s “failure” focused on prescriptions that supported the consultant’s value proposition more than the real-world context that surrounded the Nestle incident.   On a much more benign level the analysis of Old Spice would lead you to believe that it is the pinnacle of social media– when in my opinion it rises just above a clever extension of a broadcast message.

The transformative nature of social media lies in the fact that it enables a more equitable distribution of power, ingenuity and creativity.    The sea change that comes from realizing this potential is not about technology or marketing.  It certainly (from my point of view) isn’t about how corporations can profit or dominate.  It is all about how a major shift in our own sense of identity (we are all now authors and authorities), social norms and a new mode of production might give us a better world.   It’s greatest exemplars then are drawn from the grass roots, the marginalized, the entrepreneurial, the unintended and even the seemingly trivial.

Yes, let’s celebrate some interesting corporate case studies.  But let’s keep our eyes on the bigger prize and promise of social media.  Doing so is part of making sure that promise is realized.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Old Spice and the Return of Ad-Power: Are “Transformats” the Future of Marketing? (designmind.frogdesign.com)
• Old Spice: The Archetype of a Successful Social Media Campaign (Mashable)

The title of this post is a quote from Kevin Kelly.  I was reminded of it when I read this brief entry in Boing Boing, titled, “Winds howl over the deserted moonscape behind Rupert Murdoch’s UK Newspaper Paywalls”

Newser’s Michael Wolff has a report from behind Rupert Murdoch’s notorious UK paywalls which went up this month around The Times and Sunday Time’s sites, which are apparently ghost-towns, unpeopled even by the print subscribers who get free access but can’t be arsed to log in (and never follow links to Times stories, since chances are anyone in a position to make such a link doesn’t have an account for the site).

Does the idea of charging for a perishable good (news) that exists in overwhelming abundance, can be copied and redistributed at zero cost and only has value for one-time use make sense to any economist on planet earth?

via Winds howl over the deserted moonscape behind Rupert Murdoch’s UK newspaper paywalls – Boing Boing.

I’ve come to the conclusion that meetings are good.   And we need more of them – not less.

Most executives have a knee-jerk reaction against meetings; they are a waste of time.   Employees couldn’t agree more; let us get work done.

And yet if you are a manager, a major portion of your job is dedicated to communication… your time is  spent either in meetings or preparing for meetings.   Most meetings are a mashed-up bag of confusion that leaves people with the mistaken impression that meetings are the problem.  They aren’t.  It is the way we have meetings that is a problem.  The failure of meetings is an indictment of process and leadership… not of the concept.

A well organized meeting  in which people are prepared, the process has structure and the desired outcomes are clear (we need to decide X) is second to none in terms of efficiency.   Our businesses are the sum product of decision-making; “this is our business”, “this is our customer”, “this is how we reach them”, “this is how we measure value creation” and so on.   These decisions are constantly being reassessed and are rarely made alone, they are made in meetings.

I cannot count the number of times in which I have realized after the fact (why do you think I am writing this today?) that a two-week back and forth over email could have been resolved in an hour during a structured meeting.  Just as often I am aware that (as a consultant) I have tried to go extremely light on the meetings due the fact that my client(s) hate meetings.

Finally, despite my full embrace of social technologies, we still do not have a surrogate for face to face contact.  It  contains a density of actionable information that can’t be rivaled.  In that regard the most successful technology yet developed for collaboration is the table and chair.

Flickr image: mnadi

“Video Killed the Radio Star” – The Buggles, Sept 7, 1979

The rise of MTV and the age of video heralded the end of the line for the ugly rock star.   Why?  Media places selection pressures upon the content that flows through them and a visual medium had no use for the likes of Foghat.

Media is Darwinian.  Which is to say the medium of communication inherently enables or inhibits certain traits.  Consider the rise of  literacy which promoted abstract thinking done in solitude versus orality, which favors skills of memorization and shared experience.

In similar fashion, Social media is  placing selection pressures on business (along with every aspect of society).   As more and more of our friends, customers and business colleagues begin participating on the web (as opposed to just reading on it)  it has become a fundamentally social medium; its operating principles now follow social norms more than they do traditional business norms.

What’s the difference?

Social contracts are founded upon trust, authenticity, reputation and reciprocity to name a substantive few.   While these traits have always governed our personal relationships, until the rise of social media most of business that was transacted was remarkably impersonal and asocial.

This leads to an obvious assertion that has huge implications:  Over time businesses that “get” social and adhere to a social contract will thrive – while those that do not, will wither.

In 2008 I delivered a keynote at a conference on law and journalism.  The mood among the journalists present was one of palpable contempt for blogging and “citizen journalism.”  You  would think we were witnessing the undermining of Western civilization at the hands of a rabble of pajama-wearing, due diligence-ignoring amateur (God forbid!) know-nothing ideologues.   During the post-talk Q&A  I felt compelled to tell the audience  that I was quite happy with my news choices and I sought online alternatives in large part because I had lost faith in traditional media’s role as the fourth estate.  This new study  from several Harvard students at the Kennedy School puts a fine point on that loss of faith.  You can read it here (pdf) but the  abstract is devastating:

“The current debate over waterboarding has spawned hundreds of newspaper articles in the last two years alone. However, waterboarding has been the subject of press attention for over a century. Examining the four newspapers with the highest daily circulation in the country, we found a significant and sudden shift in how newspapers characterized waterboarding. From the early 1930s until the modern story broke in 2004, the newspapers that covered waterboarding almost uniformly called the practice torture or implied it was torture: The New York Times characterized it thus in 81.5% (44 of 54) of articles on the subject and The Los Angeles Times did so in 96.3% of articles (26 of 27). By contrast, from 2002‐2008, the studied newspapers almost never referred to waterboarding as torture. The New York Times called waterboarding torture or implied it was torture in just 2 of 143 articles (1.4%). The Los Angeles Times did so in 4.8% of articles (3 of 63). The Wall Street Journal characterized the practice as torture in just 1 of 63 articles (1.6%). USA Today never called waterboarding torture or implied it was torture. In addition, the newspapers are much more likely to call waterboarding torture if a country other than the United States is the perpetrator. In The New York Times, 85.8% of articles (28 of 33) that dealt with a country other than the United States using waterboarding called it torture or implied it was torture while only 7.69% (16 of 208) did so when the United States was responsible. The Los Angeles Times characterized the practice as torture in 91.3% of articles (21 of 23) when another country was the violator, but in only 11.4% of articles (9 of 79) when the United States was the perpetrator.”

While there is plenty of need to discuss the business models under which proper journalism can thrive (that was the purpose of my keynote two years ago)  it would be good for those in the journalism business to be thinking about how to maintain public credibility by focusing on the purpose of journalism rather than just the business of it…

I received an email today letting me know that a friend had just passed away after complications arose during her surgery last week.   She was part of the community of friends Yvette and I have made after we bought our home in France and while we were not intimate; she was always someone I looked forward to seeing.   She will be greatly missed.

I was set on the path of buying that home in France after a business lunch about four years ago.  There was nothing remarkable or unusual about the lunch, the company or the circumstances – but after a conversation about travel, I realized in an instant that I no longer lived  life with spontaneity or adventure.   Rather, I lived a life of plans… long term plans stretching years into the future and centered on career, financial stability and one-week vacations.   These are all worthy things but they aren’t the only things worth consideration when living a life.

We get lost in our planning; thinking that we can control the future if we can just find the right method – be it the Atkins diet or Six Sigma.  Of course this is folly.  There are too many unknown unknowns that evade the best of plans.  In that battle for the future we often lose the present, timeless joys that are almost always near at hand – a well-cooked meal, conversation with friends, a quiet, lazy afternoon with a book.

We also labor hard without really knowing why.   Our work life increasingly consumes our attention and, like ants working on a project whose outer precincts we cannot conceive, we toil for some obscure institutional good that isn’t personally gratifying and that takes us away from the immediacy of life.

So with that jolt that only a death seems to initiate, I am recommitting to planning my life in months – not years; and to finding the good things near-at-hand.

BPGlobalPR, the fake Twitter account mocking BP has , at the time of this writing, over 150,000 followers.  It is dark humor – but it is humorous.

Many people have taken to social media to vent their frustration and anger over the oil spill.  There are myriad blog posts, great ongoing conversation at the OilDrum, and the Twitter hashtags (#oilspill and #oilpocalypse) are a steady stream of regular people discussing the disaster.

BP’s response?  Its war-room legions of crisis managers have bought keywords in order to direct search queries to its own story (“learn more about how BP is helping”), it has tried to shut down the fake Twitter account and it has produced pricey television ads (links to aforementioned are intentionally absent).  In both cases the predictable result has been more bad press and ill will.

I have seen many back channel emails. tweets and posts from the social media cognoscenti on the subject of how BP should be using social media.  In one sense the entire question seems misplaced – after all, who cares how BP uses social media during a crisis of biblical proportion?   Isn’t the more potent question how society can benefit from social media rather than the offending corporation?   The answer to why so much time is spent on what BP can do resides in no small part I believe to the fact that social media consultants earn their bread from corporations.  Fair enough.

But my original and still current opinion is that BP should be doing nothing with social media.   They should be doing nothing other than trying to fix their apocalyptic problem.    Any other actions appear to detract from the task at hand and BP has proven itself incapable of wielding social tools (more on that later).  Beyond my sage words of wisdom for BP, I have a bigger issue with the nature of the advice being given by my colleagues.

A few days ago one of leading proponents of social business, The Dachis Group, posted Would Being More Social Help BP? The article suggests many ways in which BP could utilize social technologies to address the oil spill – and implicitly (as the title suggests) improve their reputation.

In  the technical, jargon-heavy language that typifies the Dachis Group’s approach to social business the post states:

BP can leverage the power of social tools to help their current situation – but only if all current business processes are aligned and calibrated for social activation.

Huh?   The post puts forward a series of one-line ideas for BP – some ideas are as interesting as they are unlikely;  “an app to let people report affected areas and wildlife” for example seems a bit far-fetched when you consider that BP is actively trying to minimize assessments of damage  in order to maintain their prime directive, shareholder value (each barrel may cost BP up to  $40K).   Some ideas are slightly appalling, “a private market research community made up of carefully selected consumers to begin to test public messaging” — do we really need message testing on this one?

This leads me to the heart of my issue with this specific post – and by extension all posts of its ilk that speculate about what BP could do without trying to come to terms with who BP are as an institution.   BP is a profit-engine.  BP is not a social business.   And “helping BP”  has nothing to do with technology, tools, apps or “social calibration.”  Being social as a business is a way of treading lightly because you recognize your interconnection with the world around you.   BP is not structured to be social – it is structured to be profitable at all costs… and structure drives behavior.  The Gulf Coast is currently bearing the brunt of their corporate behavior.  What’s more, the moment to help itself has long passed…

To be clear, I believe that social technologies put selection pressures on businesses over the long run – and will make  it harder and harder for corporate profiteers to thrive.  This to me is the promise of social business — over time, businesses that abide by a social contract (respect, authenticity, reciprocity, earned trust etc.) will outperform those that abide by a strictly corporate (or legal) contract.

BP has consistently shown a tin ear to the outrage, hurt and devastation that they are causing.  That again emanates from a business culture – and no amount of technology will be a balm to that malady.

I understand that BP is a stand-in for “corporate crisis” and social media pundits (I am not exempt) are using it to speculate on just how they might utilize these tools in a crisis setting.  I am also not trying to single out this single post.  But for me it  is exemplary of how much and how often the social media conversation misses the entire point.   The post ends:

Of course, for these efforts to be successful, they would have to be planned, heavily moderated, highly coordinated, and integrated with current data and information systems – then communicated to consumers, franchise owners, the media, and government officials.  In other words, all social business systems would have needed to be in place before disaster struck.

Best of luck with that.  BP’s entire culture appears to have been one in denial about this being possible in the first place (for more on that see Cheney‘s energy task force statement on the riskless nature of deep water drilling)…

The nature of public outrage is not something that BP can (or should) try to game for their own benefit.   The more BP tries to enter a conversation, the more they will be torn apart.   Like the angry mobs that drove Emperor Justinian from the Hippodrome to barricade himself in his palace… this mob doesn’t want conversation… they want blood.

I don’t want BP to “join the conversation.”  I want them to  fix the problem.

I was struck by a posting in the New York Times on how the food industry is responding to calls to reduce the use of salt in processed food.  It seemed the industry’s response is mirror of how Facebook  has responded to privacy concerns.  From the article:

Now, the [food] industry is blaming consumers for resisting efforts to reduce salt in all foods, pointing to, as Kellogg put it in a letter to a federal nutrition advisory committee, “the virtually intractable nature of the appetite for salt”

The food industry’s argument is best summarized as follows,”People want salt – and we are just following the demand.”   Yet salt is a cheap ingredient that serves a multiplicity of purposes that redound to the industry’s benefit:

Beyond its own taste, salt also masks bitter flavors and counters a side effect of processed food production called “warmed-over flavor,” which, the scientists said, can make meat taste like “cardboard” or “damp dog hair.”

Salt also works in tandem with fat and sugar to achieve flavors that grip the consumer and do not let go — an allure the industry has recognized for decades. “Once a preference is acquired,” a top scientist at Frito-Lay wrote in a 1979 internal memorandum, “most people do not change it, but simply obey it.”

The issue here is that the food industry is (rather transparently) protecting their own self interest by claiming that rather than leading, they are simply following customer demand.  This total abdication of (1) reality and (2) responsibility is reprehensible when what lies on the other side of the equation is a human death toll.    As the article points out, “Government health experts estimate that deep cuts in salt consumption could save 150,000 lives a year.”

Now here comes the stretch…  What is the difference between the food industry’s stance on salt and Facebook’s stance on privacy?

Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg has stated,

People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people. That social norm is just something that has evolved over time. We view it as our role in the system to constantly be innovating and be updating what our system is to reflect what the current social norms are.

The consistent argument is that people have an “insatiable appetite” for sharing, that privacy is dead and that this is a positive social development.  This spin on privacy is also an abdication of reality and corporate responsibility.   Studies (and common sense) show that people ARE concerned with privacy (see the Pew Study below).  While it is true that people love to share – they are also concerned with their privacy.

Facebook’s value as a business is all about harvesting their user’s data for targeted advertising, sale to search engines, and intranetwork commerce (mainly in virtual goods etc).  The argument of trailing social norms is an argument of convenience and it is one we shouldn’t accept.

Links:

NY Times: Pushed to Lower Salt Use, Food Industry Pushes Back – NYTimes.com.

Facebook’s Zuckerberg says the Age of Privacy is Over

Reputation Management and Social Media (Pew Internet)

I had the privilege to present at Web 2.0 Expo this past week.  Here is the SlideShare presentation: Building a Social Business.    I tend to hew to Stowe Boyd’s definition of a Social Business,

A social business is an organization designed consciously around sociality and social tools, as a response to a changed world and the emergence of the social web, including social media, social networks, and a long list of other advances.

Ideally, a Social Business creates a human-scale organization – one with more points of contact with the outside world, one where information flows more freely in all directions, one that is responsive to community, one that inherently cares about those it engages in business with; one that deals honestly and constructively with the world around it because it is part of (and depends upon) the same social group.  A social business builds awesome products, designs awesome services because (1) it actively seeks to know and care about its customers and (2) it relies on customer communities to carry the flag as evangelists and advocates.

Buildingasocialbusiness

When I teamed up with Forbes to produce a series on etiquette in the age of social networks (Social Sense and Sensibility) it was driven by a simple idea: unique cultures and social norms develop around online communities.  You ignore them at your peril.

The story of the social web is a story about how people, when given the ability to freely communicate – do so in great numbers.  And when they do they abide by social rules (be yourself, listen, build relationships through give and take etc.).  Hence, Social Tools Follow Social Rules (the current tagline of this blog).  When people are allowed to exercise their innate drive to be social they expect the companies they interact with, and work for, to get social as well.  Thus social rules become the new rules of doing business.  This is the sea change and breakthrough insight (in my opinion of course) that explains much of the discomfort and missteps that corporations are making when entering the fray.  Behaving like a corporation (impersonal press releases, constant self-aggrandizing and selling in every communication etc.) in a social medium makes you look like a psychopath.

Online etiquette isn’t just for business – it applies to everyone.

Precisely because it is a social medium, online exchanges are full of the same issues that exist offline; rude behavior, bullying, slander and so on.  In fact, online communications often stimulate bad behavior since the online environment lacks physical cues and distances the speaker from the consequences of their speech.  Just take a look at YouTube comments and you get a sense of how a social environment, lacking any controls or community norms can quickly spiral out of control.

So it was that I came to watch my colleague, Bill Evans, speaking on CNBC about the recent Facebook suicide incident.  In short, a teenage girl committed suicide, apparently after being bullied… much of it via Facebook.   I am a bit discomforted by  two elements of the story.  First, that it is a story in the first place (more on that later).  Second, some of the implied responsibility on Facebook as a platform to monitor and control conversations that take place there.

Bill does a great job, especially in pointing out that responsibility for maintaining decorum needs to be distributed across every person with a stake in it; parents, teachers, friends and Facebook.  His counterpart, Joel Reidenberg, from the Center on Law & Information Policy at Fordham University, makes solid points as well – specifically pointing at simple feedback mechanisms that would allow users themselves to flag abuse (however since Facebook relies on you actively choosing who your friends are the notion of a “report abuse” button seems a bit odd).  But he does slip in one idea that, while it sounds great on T.V.  is, to me, hopelessly unrealistic.   Essentially Reidenberg seems to charge Facebook with responsibility to police etiquette of its users by monitoring the substance of their conversation.   Sounds great and he implies that we have the technology to do this.   Well, theoretically yes.  We can apply data analysis to unstructured text but it is a very imperfect art since language (especially among youth) is in constant flux.  Consider for instance that saying “your are sick” can often be a compliment.  But when you digest a few statistics about Facebook the practical implications get mind boggling:

• There are 400 million (and growing) people on Facebook.  Only 30% of them are within the U.S.
• More than 5 billion pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photo albums, etc.) are shared each week

• About 70% of Facebook users are outside the United States (mostly using non English languages)
• There are more than 70 translations are available on the site

Facebook employees roughly 300 engineers.  That is a ratio of over 1 million users for every single engineer working at Facebook.  Obviously the first issue that gets raised is whether such monitoring and flagging is even a technically reasonable request.  Do you end that responsibility with U.S. citizens or is this a global effort?  The bigger issue gets to who is responsible for ensuring social etiquette online in the first place.

My answer is that ensuring etiquette never has been, nor ever will be the domain of automated surveillance, or platforms (online or off) that host literally billions of conversations.  Not because of the technical challenges but because of the nature of etiquette itself.  Etiquette is a social norm that is instilled through acculturation in your family, school, community and broader media diet.  You do not arrive at good etiquette through policy nor do you effectively enforce etiquette through surveillance and punishment. Policy and punishment are guardrails but it is community norms that constrain bad behavior.  Don’t take my word for it, let’s look to Confucius on this one: “If the people be led by laws, and uniformity sought to be given them by punishments, they will try to avoid the punishment, but have no sense of shame. If they be led by virtue, and uniformity sought to be given them by the rules of propriety, they will have the sense of the shame, and moreover will become good.”

Which brings me to my first point:  While the whole story seems newsworthy I feel uncomfortable with the framing. essentially  “Teen commits Suicide after Facebook Bullying”… how many suicides occur because of bullying each year?  How many can we trace to social networks?  Are social networks playing a unique and pivotal role in raising the level of suicides?  Not of these questions are raised but the frame itself seems to condemn the new technology…

Bad behavior is bad behavior whether it is committed via email, telephone, in person or social network.  Every time a new technology comes along we commit two cardinal sins:

• We attribute new cause to old problems… case in point, bullying has always taken place – now that it is taking place on Facebook we seem to think Facebook has played some unique role.  I disagree with this but I am totally open to being swayed by data.
• We expect some parental figure to govern behavior through surveillance or punishment.  Case in point –  let’s charge Facebook with ensuring that no one bullies on their platform.   To do this let’s monitor every conversation for possible bullying, inspect every escalated issue and then get in touch with the offenders and make them stop.   That is a lost cause and it put the burden on the wrong party.

Bad behavior is bad behavior whether it is committed via email, telephone, in person or social network.  Etiquette is a critical skill in the age of social networks but education and enforcement of such skills must be equally distributed among us all.