On his blog Marketing | Truth, Mark Olson has a very interesting post that includes opinion from some like-minded smart people discussing the notion of authenticity vs authority across the social web. I left a comment of my own over there but I felt my initial thoughts may be worth expanding upon here.

In the comment, I ask first “Is social media marketing now just a channel where marketers are missing out on the Social Web?” My argument being once someone opens a browser they are participating in the social web. Also, as heated discussions arise around the idea of real-time search and its value versus indexed search, where experiential awareness and reputation management become all important, where does authority and authenticity fall in user perception?

Seth Godin kicks things off and arguably takes the laurels with his short, incisive paragraph:

“If it’s a word game, then authority wins, because authority is about the perception of the consumer. If they believe you are an authority, you are. In the long run, of course, authenticity will trump it, because your authority fades without it. The converse is not true. And yes, it’s a word game.”

Brian Solis has his say too. Anyone who cares about the idea of web communications, PR 2.0 along with social media marketing and advertising must know Brian Solis.

At its heart my response was really just my thoughts based around their opinions. Here is my comment [slightly edited]:

“Seth Godin begins his smart, short answer with “If it’s a word game…” as if planting a stake in the ground. He knows it is a word game and he knows that we know it too. Brian Solis proposes a list of new definitions but the problem is that they are more words. He suggests switching out new definitions such as ‘believability’ for ‘transparency’ where transparency is already perfect; transparency says it all very clearly, whereas believability makes me think of the possibility of opaqueness.

This search for ‘authenticity or ‘authority’ is an extension of television in my mind – who would we trust to read us the news? In the past it was always well spoken, handsome, gravelly-voiced white men. It is no coincidence that we view the web through the same lens, a rectangular screen, but it’s worth remembering that technology simply shortens the distance between us. As Marshall McLuhan has written “any history of technology is filled with unexpected reversal of form resulting from new advances.” Now we have the social web.

Arguably what is being discussed here is how web users are searching for the authoritive newsman of yesteryear amid a sea of millions of “wanna be” bloggers and celebrities – and yet they are all looking in the mirror! Everyone is a celebrity these days so, as Seth rightly says “authority is about the perception of the consumer…” The TV newsreader had no more authority than the next newsreader, it was the viewers’ perception that gave them rank.

As a member of a famous UK post-punk band I started a music and mp3 blog three years ago, Pampelmoose, and watched it build in unique viewers over the years to its current 150k + a month. I never had to try. I apparently was perceived as authentic and therefore I was “given” authority by my readers and peers. And yet I am more interested in finding the people who don’t read my blog – I’d like to know if they don’t think I’m an ‘authority’ or perhaps it’s simply that they don’t care for what I write about – those are two distinctions worth mulling over.

I am Community Manager at Nemo where I spend a lot of time thinking about and researching the social web. I write posts and essays that are published on the Nemo blog and about one year ago wrote this one – ‘On Social Media, Blogs and Advertising’ in which I embrace nature over technology.

I align myself with John Gray’s position that we are all technological beings – as I wrote – “Most people that take a position on social networking and advertising come at it from a technological point of view, as in “technology has created the means for everyone to be connected and to stay in touch.” I disagree with that statement because it removes nature from the game. It is entirely natural for humans to want to interact as often as possible as we are all social animals. Cities are no more artificial (technological) than the hives of bees. Therefore the Internet is as natural as a spider’s web. People who believe that technology is driving our interactions are missing the point – we ourselves are technological devices, invented by ancient bacterial communities as a means of genetic survival”

In other words once we realize that technology merely shortens the distance between us, and while ’social networking’ online we are simply engaged in the same activity that we pursue offline, perception, then, ought to be almost identical – in conversation with an opinionated person in a bar for example, we can quickly do the gut check and decide if he or she is full of it or an actual authority on the subject.

Any normal person therefore ought to do the same thing when they come across a blog or someone’s Tweets, Facebook page et al – use the gut check or better still Google them or tweet search them.

And suddenly there’s a new tool in the crowded social web field – FaceBook vanity urls – now a person can own their own brand, albeit on Facebook…. Apparently Facebook has developed an Open Stream API that will allow a ‘friend’ to follow streams of interest or to comment on comments back in to the stream… we are all ‘celebrities’ now and authenticity and authority will be determined by our followers’ perception of our reputation management and experiential awareness. Marketers will now, more than ever, have to own the message or the message will own them.

Related Posts:

Brian Solis – A Soliloquy On The Universal Language of Social Media

SEO and SEM as You Know It Will Be Dead in 6 Months

Thoughts on the Social Web

Strategy For Authenticity

The pop star and the professor … Mike Skinner talks to John Gray. Photograph: Suki Dhanda

Mike Skinner and me have some things in common – we are both well-known musicians; me as bass player for Gang of Four and he performing under his moniker The Streets, although he is arguably more popular. That aside I now find that we are both ardent supporters of the work of the philosopher John Gray, especially his book ‘Straw Dogs: Thoughts On Humans and Other Animals‘.

In The Streets recent release ‘Everything Is Borrowed,’ Skinner reveals Gray’s influence in his lyrics while Gray’s influence on me comes through in my writings on the conceit of ’social media’, a term that I feel is empty and is peddled furiously only by those that would profit from harnessing social networks for the purpose of creating advertising revenue. Here we are then – two musicians, a philosopher, Charles Darwin and Facebook; such a wonderful mashup. Much food for thought. Here’s the interview:

Few records this year addressed themes such as human consciousness and evolution (as well as reflecting the linguist’s pleasure in a good piece of slang) as smartly as the Streets’ fourth album, Everything is Borrowed. OMM detected in it the influence of the work of the philosopher and occasional Observer contributor John Gray – and a quick call revealed that Mike Skinner is a huge fan of the Straw Dogs author. That bestseller, first published in 2003, argued that humans have still not come to terms with Darwin or accepted that they are like other animals – thereby knocking the humanists’ belief in progress.

It seemed a good idea to put the pop star and the professor together, and so they met for a wide-ranging conversation – covering the art of storytelling and the imminent collapse of Western capitalism – in a north London pub hours before Skinner’s performance at the BBC Electric Proms.

Mike Skinner: Reading Straw Dogs… I was aware of the idea that consciousness is an illusion, but it really made me think about a lot of things differently.

John Gray: The book is not intended to convert anyone to anything or to impose my world view. It’s intended to stir people’s thinking so that they see their lives in different ways. People have said to me – young people, old people, a couple who were trapped in a religious cult for 40 years – that they liked the book because it helped to weaken the story that they’ve woven of their lives, the story that was ruling them.

MS: What you seem to be saying is that it’s all an illusion, life goes on and shit just happens…

JG: Well, good things happen too.

MS” But what’s a good thing? It’s just something that we perceive to be good…

JG: I’m not saying we should rid ourselves of the need for stories, but when that need becomes tyrannical then we can give up too much of our freedom. One story of the past few years was that wealth was going to grow indefinitely – we were all going to get richer and the ups and downs of history weren’t going to apply to us. Well, stories are not true or false in the way that science is, but some are closer to human reality. And this Prozac-like story of the last 20 years – people believed it!

MS: The financial situation: the impression I have is that we’re not in as much trouble as we were in 1929.

JG: Not yet.

MS: OK… and the reason for that is memes – it’s the knowledge that if you don’t bail the banks out, we’re in really deep shit. So does that represent progress?

JG: It’s an interesting question. And I’m serious when I reply by saying the proof will be in the pudding. You can say we studied the 1930s and so we won’t commit the same mistakes. We’ll do what should have been done then and maybe it will work. But there is a different way of looking at it. Even if avoiding those mistakes now is the right thing to do, there will be different consequences which will get us into different types of trouble. Bailing out the banks might lead to the sort of stagflation we saw in the 1970s.

The point is: there’s an element of luck, and while I’m not a religious believer, if you want stories in your life, it might be better to follow religious stories rather than those you know to be shallow – like the story of unending growth.

MS: Your work can be very dark. But as a person you seem very amiable…

JG: Well, I’m not writing in order to provide consolation. One idea that’s really unpopular nowadays is that there are any aspects of a human being which are inherently bad. But one thing that’s distinctive in human beings – it might not be unique – is cruelty.

Now what should we do about cruelty? There’s a belief that if people have a proper education, if they live in a peaceful, safe society, there won’t be any evil. But is evil – for example, cruelty – normal or abnormal? I think it’s normal. It doesn’t mean you have to accept it.

MS: Isn’t it dangerous to say evil is natural?

JG: It’s the opposite. I’m a big fan of JG Ballard…

MS: I’m halfway through High-rise

JG: The very book I was going to mention! Ballard says that people from Catholic countries are less shocked by his books than people from Protestant countries, because they still believe in original sin – there are murderers and psychopaths inside us. It doesn’t mean you accept that state of affairs, it means you have rules and conventions which stand in the way. That’s what used to be called civilisation – though, of course, there’s nowhere that’s more than half-civilised. In general, I’m interested in looking at what’s happening now and trying to deal with it. For instance, climate change is not fully solvable…

MS: Because it’s natural or… because we’re fucked?

JG: [Laughs] Well, my best understanding is that the planet is not like a clock that we can wind back. Once the carbon is in the system, there are inexorable results. Also, there’s global dimming – the darkening of the skies by pollution, which also makes the world cooler than it would otherwise be. Getting rid of pollution too quickly could accelerate global warming.

Most greens are horrified by the thought that we can’t stop climate change, but that’s childish. Am I telling people to give up? No. In Holland, for instance, they’re giving back land to the sea and building more on stilts because they expect sea levels to rise… and I find that uplifting, even though it’s a very sober approach.

MS: Just to get a bit Dr Who, if we’ve also lost control of technology, could robots take over the world?

JG: There’s nothing inherently unique and inexplicable about humans, so we could create devices that could indeed become conscious. But if we create robots that are only conscious – that don’t have the 99 per cent of unconscious mental life that we have – could that hollow replica of how we imagine ourselves to be start painting in the same way as van Gogh?

Most creativity in the arts, and even in science, comes from levels of the mind that are not conscious. Conscious thought is a tiny, tiny part of the life of the mind. Have you heard of transhumanists? These are people who are interested in technologies that will allow them not to die – some of them end up having their brains frozen. They think they can remodel themselves. Now I’m not as unhappy as they are with the idea of human life…

MS: But you don’t want to die – you’re never going to want to die!

JG: Is that true? Do we really, really want to be different from all the human beings in the past and all the other animals?

MS: I think we all do. I think you do!

JG: If I could become the sort of creature that doesn’t need to die, I’d be different from the way I am. And I don’t want to become like a robot.

MS: I was famous, I guess, for a while, and one of the fascinating things about it for me – and one of the unnerving, scary things – was how my boundaries completely controlled me. I wasn’t as autonomous as I thought I was.

JG: The person you were before was a by-product of your limitations and circumstances.

MS: Exactly. Dying is a boundary. Everything we do is to try not to die, and once you don’t have that… I’m 30 soon and all I’ve got behind me are the years when I thought I was never going to die.

JG: If the boundaries that you associate with growing up are removed, you can live in a different way. The picture you have of yourself alters or dissolves. But if the wall of mortality disappeared… well, you can almost not imagine the change; I think it would turn us into something different.

MS: If we believe in Darwin we have to believe that every evolutionary stage brings an advantage.

JG: Darwin has been turned into a humanist icon. Darwin’s followers think they’ve renounced religion, but they cling to the idea that while other animals can’t control their destiny, humans can – a belief that comes from Christianity. Darwinism has actually been turned into another religion.

• ‘Everything is Borrowed’ (679) is out now; John Gray’s latest book is ‘Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia’ (Penguin)

Other than an elongated literary adventure through Cormac McCarthy’s ‘Border Trilogy,’ reading ‘All The Pretty Horses,’ ‘The Crossing’ and ‘Cities of the Plain’ in the summer of 2005, followed in 2006 by reading McCarthy’s masterpiece, the aweful ‘Blood Meridian‘ [and I use aweful by way of its true Middle English definition - "Filled with awe, especially: 1. Filled with or displaying great reverence.",] I’m not inclined to reading novels. McCarthy’s ‘The Road’ and ‘No Country For Old Men’ were both outstanding and Martin Amis turns out great work but I prefer non-fiction; currently I am buried in E.O.Wilson’s ‘Consilience’, re-reading Robert Wright’s ‘The Moral Animal’ and am halfway through John Gray’s ‘Al Qaeda And What It Means To Be Modern’ having finally finished his ‘Straw Dogs: Thoughts On Humans and Other Animals’ for the third time. This summer’s less than light reading list just grew by two – the Amazon package today contained John Gray’s ‘Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and The Death Of Utopia,’ and ‘Heresies: Against Progress And Other Illusions.’

Otherwise I’m keeping an eye on the Madonna – Guy Ritchie marital farce.

I love coincidence. Coincidence I mention because as I reach the end of John Gray’s book, Straw Dogs, for the third time in as many years, I read chapter 20, ‘The Soul In The Machine,’ an hour before leaving the cabin this weekend. On arriving home last night I caught up with Friday’s edition of the NYT and read a review of the new Pixar movie, Wall-E, by A.O. Scott. In the first paragraph of his review he tells us – “This is a world without people, you might say without animation, though it teems with evidence of past life.” He also mentions that in the first 40 minutes of the movie – “barely any dialogue is spoken.”

Another coincidence here is that it is as if the movie’s director, Andrew Stanton and his co-writer Jim Reardon, had also read the last few chapters of John Gray’s book. According to A.O. Scott the movie’s underlying theme is far from a happy one – “…… but ‘Wall-E’ surely breaks new ground. It gives us a G-rated, computer-generated cartoon vision of our own potential extinction. It’s not the only film lately to engage this somber theme. As the earth heats up, the vanishing of humanity has become something of a hot topic…”

The Earth devoid of humans, or at least where the remaining humans are reduced to living in cities “emulating the noble idleness of hunter-gatherers, their needs met by new technologies” as Gray writes, is an Earth left to conscious machines. The writers and director of Wall-E suggest that this has already occurred and conscious machines are all that remain on the planet. As he says – “Wall-E’s tender regard for the material artifacts of a lost civilization is understandable. After all, he too is a product of human ingenuity.”

“In his recent documentary Encounters at the End of the World the film director, Werner Herzog muses that “the human presence on this planet is not really sustainable,” a sentiment that is voiced, almost verbatim, in the second half of Wall-E.”

As Gray writes in his passage ‘The Soul of the Machine,’ – “Those who fear conscious machines do so because they think that consciousness is the most valuable feature of humans – and because they fear anything they cannot subject to their will. They fear the evolution of conscious machines for the same reason they seek to become masters of the Earth.”

Gray predicts – “As machines slip from human control they will do more than become conscious. They will become spiritual beings, whose inner life is no more limited by conscious thought than ours. Not only will they think and have emotions. They will develop the errors and illusions that go with self-awareness.”

That sounds like a movie called ‘Wall-E’ to me.

One other coincidence regarding the movie was that today I read a post by Seth Godin on his blog entitled “Bravery and Wall-E.” At first I thought from the title that by bravery he meant that we humans are brave to be advancing our technological know-how ever forward as we invent “living software” and biological chips, machines that Gray predicts will move us humans toward extinction. Unfortunately that wasn’t the case – Seth discussed the marketing [or lack of] and how the movie will make “plenty of money.”

The parable of ‘Wall-E’ transcends marketing and money.

The Tower of Babel

Cities live and breathe. As I wrote in a post last week on Social Media, cities are no more artificial [technological] than the hives of bees. As we go about our daily lives [mostly unconsciously,] we psycho-drift from block to block through neighborhoods that we know well, in amongst communities that have been drawn together by like-minded people. Think East Village in Manhattan, Venice Beach in Los Angeles, Camden Town in London, Pigalle in Paris – and here in Portland, the Pearl District.

Where we tend to live and work is often amongst communities of like-minded people, unless, as in the USA, one lives in a far-flung exurb and commutes for hours to work. Over centuries we have moved as a species from the rural countryside into large urban centres. As we have done so the ‘idea’ of the city sprang up. Throughout different periods in history, planners and architects have had differing ideas about how to cultivate urban living arrangements. There has been some success and much failure.

As James Kunstler writes in his book, The City in Mind, – “[the] nation’s massive suburban build-out was an orgy of misspent energy and material resources that squandered our national wealth and left us with an infrastructure of daily life that, left as is, has poor prospects in the new century.” Kunstler points out that as global warming, oil depletion and other epochal disorders are upon us, we must reconsider what is a ‘city.’

He argues that one of the chief side effects of the move to suburbanism is “the cultural destruction…especially the loss of knowledge, tradition, skill, custom and vernacular wisdom in the art of city-making that was thrown in the dumpster of history….”

A city is not just a series of streets and avenues with buildings on either side, a city is people, culture, society and the networks that form to bind those societies together into communities. The suburbs were literally a dream, an idea that General Motors had of a drive-in utopia in its plan for a World of Tomorrow. Kunstler goes on to point out the folly of the “Edge City,” a term coined by the writer Joel Garreau. Kunstler says “I essay to show how Atlanta took the urban model of car-crazy Los Angeles to its most ludicrous, and in my view, terminal stage. With Atlanta, you can forego agonizing over the future, because the present doesn’t even work there.” As he points out “our human ecologies – namely our towns and cities – remain devalued, depopulated and decivilized.”

In America we prefer landscape over urbanism. What then now as our dependence upon oil, refined as gasoline for cars that transport one person at a time from these suburbs to the cities, proves the folly of these far-flung suburbs? Will we see a move toward urban vitality? A migration back to the city?

Government spending at any level, state or local, does little to help. We need to “nurture the unplanned civic engagements that make mixed-use city life so appealing” – writes Douglas Rae, the Richard Ely Professor of Management and Professor of Political Science at Yale University, in his book, City; Urbanism and Its End. “Small scale retailing, neighborhood clubs, informal enforcement of sidewalk civility and new urbanist design may be the keys to the future.”

I agree with Rae on the idea of “nurturing unplanned civic engagements” as he puts it but that’s as far as I would go. The rest of his thought sounds like the issue of we humans being in control of our destinies again, trying to have the answer that is beyond nature, beyond what we actually do when we congregate in cities. Our desire for urban centres always seem to be about ‘order’ or ‘cleanliness’ and ‘organization.’ So on one hand we have the thinkers – the planners and the architects, and on the other – the citizens who actually inhabit the space that we call city. What we might call the ‘Few and the Many.’

Alongside a piece by the New York Times film critic, A.O.Scott, called Metropolis Now, where he writes about the idea of how yesterday’s film sets became today’s cities, there is a sidebar that takes some lines from Fritz Lang’s 1927 film “Metropolis” – “The minds that had conceived the Tower of Babel could not build it. So they hired hands for wages. But the hands that built the Tower of Babel knew nothing of the dream of the brain that had conceived it. One man’s hymns of praise became other men’s curses.” There’s that word again, dream.

We humans dream. We dream of controlling nature, we dream of saving the earth, we dream of organizing our cities. Those dreaming deny the fact that cities live and breathe. Not the concrete architecture, not the buildings – the people that inhabit them. When someone talks of Rome having a ’soul, a feeling’ they are misinterpreting the difference between the city and its cultural makeup; people can be said to have souls and feelings, we ‘know’ this – buildings don’t have soul and feelings.

As Fernando Pessoa writes – “Only if you don’t know what flowers, stones and rivers are can you talk about their feelings. To talk about the soul of flowers, stones and rivers, is to talk about yourself, about your delusions. Thank God stones are just stones, and rivers just rivers, and flowers just flowers.” We dream and we delude ourselves.

Richard Florida, author of The Rise of the Creative Class dreams of organizing urban centres [which he correctly identifies as 'place'] around the idea of a mythical “creative class” who are bound by the idea of the “three T’s,” Technology, Talent and Tolerance. This dream involves cities having a strong technology base, a “creative” class as he calls it, and a strong gay community. And of course the idea he spins is that to grow a city’s economic base it should invest in nurturing the “three T’s.” Once again – The Few and the Many. Planners and architects can no more decide what a city’s culture will be than we know that a stone has feeling.

The fabric of a city is its population. Like a bee hive [architecture] or an ant colony [social network], natural rules of engagement spring up through the daily interaction of those who inhabit a city. They commune. They gather in tribes in their ‘places.’ They share information, ideas, things they like. They become less ’selfish.’ They are city.

As John Gray writes in Straw Dogs – “Anyone who wants to escape human solipsism should not seek out empty places. Instead of fleeing to the desert, where they will be thrown back into their own thoughts, they will do better to seek the company of other animals. A zoo is a better window from which to look out of the human world than a monastery.”

Most large cities have a zoo.

Listen to and download Psycho Drift. Shriekback – Psycho Drift

For references –
References:

James Howard Kunstler – The City in Mind. Published 2001 by The Free Press.
Joel Garreau – Edge City
Douglas W. Rae – City; Urbanism and Its End. Published 2003 by Yale University Press.
Richard Florida – The Rise of the Creative Class. Published 2002 by Basic Books.
A.O.Scott – Metropolis Now. Published in the New York Times magazine June 6th 2008.
Fritz Lang – Metropolis
Enrique Peñalosa – Man With a Plan. Published in the New York Times magazine June 6th 2008.
Fernando Pessoa
John Gray – Straw Dogs. Published 2002 by Granta Books.
Solipsism
Shriekback – Sacred City [Compact Disc]. Released by World Domination Records 1992.
Barry Andrews – Lyrics to Psycho Drift.
Peter Carey – 30 Days in Sydney.

Roy Christopher has posted his annual Summer Reading List. Click on that link and all will be revealed. For those not inclined to click through here’s my contribution, followed below by Roy’s.

Dave Allen

I’ve traveled less this year than is normal for me. No Gang of Four activity anymore, so no more mind numbing journeys by train, plane, and automobile alleviated only by the power of a good book. If I was a humanist I could say that at least my carbon footprint is lower, but the Earth has plans for us, and we can’t do a damn thing about it.

That thought has always been at the forefront of my mind as I have tracked the environmental/green movements, and then followed the chattering classes’ attempts to reduce the United States’ energy dependence as they dropped into the arms of the more-than-willing Toyota Corp, helping to push sales of the Prius through more than one million.

More than one million new vehicles added to the world’s roads. Well done. A bicycle and public transport would have actually made a difference.

That brings me to the book that affirmed my thoughts on our epic — but inevitably useless — human battle to change the course of the Earth. John Gray’s Straw Dogs (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) published in 2002 is a book that I keep returning to. As the UK author, Will Self says, “Straw Dogs is that rarest of things, a contemporary work of philosophy devoid of jargon, wholly accessible, and profoundly relevant to the rapidly evolving world we live in.” Gray simply and concisely slices through the human conceit that we are radically different from other animals.

Otherwise I rediscovered Philip Roth especially his wonderfully depressing Exit Ghost (Houghton Mifflin). I also finally got around to reading Roth’s The Plot Against America (Vintage). Denis Johnson’s Tree of Smoke (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) was a great read on long trans-continental flights and Robert Hughes’ memoir Things I Don’t Know (Vintage) was a fascinating read from the man who brought me two favorites, Barcelona (Vintage) and Culture of Complaint (Grand Central Publishing).

————–

Roy Christopher

David Mitchell Cloud Atlas (Random House): This collection of nested-doll stories from 2004 is like exploring an abandoned building via descending staircase, stopping on each floor to read some left-behind letters, a travel journal, or a mystery novel. Like Mitchell’s previous novel, Ghostwritten (Vintage) [also recommended], each section of this one refers to the others. It’s like reading pieces of several quasi
-related books that somehow add up to an engaging whole. I snagged this at Powell’s during my last few days in Portland based on its cover alone.

Sherry Turkle Falling for Science: Objects in Mind (MIT Press): One of the largely unsung voices of the digital revolution, Sherry Turkle has been hard at work for over two decades trying to keep tabs on technology’s influence on our lives. Inspired in the early eighties by Seymour Papert’s essay on an interest in the inner-workings of gears and how it lead him to study math (included in this volume), Turkle has assigned her students at MIT to write a similar piece. Falling for Science collects fifty-one of these essays — by her students and colleagues over the past twenty-five years — explaining how certain physical objects influenced them to pursue a life of science. Legos, bicycles, erector sets, computers, and other usual suspects get their due, but so do shirts, walls, bubbles, and keys (among many other things, both exp
ected and surprising). It’s an interesting look at the subtleties of design, influences (often unintended), science, and inspiration.

Mary Roach Bonk (W. W. Norton): Mary Roach has a knack for finding intriguing book topics (and writing interesting books about them, of course). They’re all slightly askew, but one can easily see how anyone would be interested in them. In Stiff she followed the afterlives of cadavers, in Spook she followed the afterlife of afterlives (ghosts), and in Bonk she, ahem, gets science laid. It’s everything you always wanted to know about sex — if you’re a science geek.

Mikita Brottman The Solitary Vice: Against Reading (Counterpoint): If there were a Bibliophiles Anonymous, this would be its bible. Brottman isn’t actually averse to reading, quite the opposite, but in The Solitary Vice, she explores the reasons that attitudes toward reading have been so historically conflicted. Coincidentally, her book is a damn good read.

James D. Watson Avoid Boring People (Knopf): As marginally interested as I am in James Watson’s Nobel-winning scientific work, I’m finding his memoirs completely enthralling. Here’s one of the co-discoverers of the building blocks of life breaking down his academic career into first-person narratives and — true to its title — easily digestible lists of practical advice, unwritten protocols, and lessons learned. This book proves that Watson’s gift for scientific inquiry is well matched by his wily way with words.

I’m also currently reading and re-reading the following: Gilbert Ryle The Concept of Mind (University of Chicago Press), Jack O’Connell Word Made Flesh (Perennial) [Thanks, Ashley], Terry Eagleton The Gatekeeper (St. Martin’s), Christopher Vogler The Writer’s Journey (Michael Wiese Productions), Etienne Wenger Communities of
Practice (Cambridge University Press), Rebecca Solnit Wanderlust: A History of Walking (Penguin), and Andrew Ortony (editor) Metaphor and Thought (Cambridge University Press).

Obama’s viral timepiece.

These days the advertising and marketing world is all abuzz with phrases such as – Social Media, Social Advertising, Facebook Ads, Mass Media Networking Advertising…..etc, etc.. In the last two weeks I have been a panelist at the L I S A seminar in Portland and the Hawaii MusicTech Conference in Honolulu. L.I.S.A., which is an acronym for Lessons In Social Advertising, was aimed at marketers and advertisers who [for some reason] don’t understand social networks or haven’t yet worked out how to advertise effectively to them. It focused on topics such as ‘What is social advertising?’ and ‘How do you get young people to recommend your brand?’ The Hawaii MusicTech panel discussed how musicians could effectively use social networks such as Facebook and MySpace to reach an audience and communicate with them.

Two sides of the table as it were. One group wants to advertise, or push, their messages to a mass audience, while the other wants to create a network of like-minded people who hopefully will pull content such as free MP3s and then “evangelize” on behalf of the musicians by spreading messages by electronic word of mouth. With no hint of schizophrenia I happily migrate between both camps.

To understand and embrace social networking is to place the idea that says “technology makes this possible” to one side and embrace the idea of the basic human need to stay in touch with other like-minded people at all times. As Clay Shirky says “The desire to be part of a group that shares, cooperates, or acts in concert is a basic human instinct.” Think about rock concerts for a minute…..

Most people that take a position on social networking and advertising come at it from a technological point of view, as in “technology has created the means for everyone to be connected and to stay in touch.” I disagree with that statement because it removes nature from the game. It is entirely natural for humans to want to interact as often as possible as we are all social animals. Cities are no more artificial (technological) than the hives of bees. Therefore the Internet is as natural as a spider’s web. People who believe that technology is driving our interactions are missing the point – we ourselves are technological devices, invented by ancient bacterial communities as a means of genetic survival. Bottom line – social media is as natural as apple pie as we all want to be as connected as possible – we can’t help it. [A really good book from which I have borrowed some thoughts is 'Straw Dogs' by John Gray, professor of European thought at LSE, published in the UK by Granta.]

Online networks might be seen as antidotes to boredom at work, school or college. These new social networks do more than transmit information about their members, they change behaviour by propagating moods. These days we can all share “news” really fast, even about ourselves – for example, my Facebook or Twitter status might say “I’m heading to the beach in Waikiki…” and the mood that simple statement makes might become very contagious.

The Internet confirms what we have all known for a long time – the world is ruled by the power of suggestion but in the case of social networking it is “influencers” that lead the suggesting. Then suggestions might become “group think.” John Gray writes – “in evolutionary prehistory, consciousness emerged as a side effect of language. Today it is a by product of media.”

So, the question currently being asked by companies and advertisers is “how do we market and advertise to social networks?” Having to ask that question suggests the rocky ground that online advertisers are standing on. For instance, Jack Myers sees nothing but doom and gloom in online marketing: He says “Advertising is simply not a sufficient revenue model to sustain content companies into the long-term future.” And goes on -

“I have preached evangelically for nearly three decades about the bifurcation of the media and advertising marketplace into 1) a transactional commodity business model and 2) a relationship-based brand-focused premium marketplace. Most media companies and agencies are investing appropriately in the technology resources required for their transactional businesses. [But] Brand building, relationship-based business models and premium-priced enterprises require completely new and innovative models, and can take years before they generate returns that justify the investments. Industry realities place enormous pressure on executives to adhere to traditional business models, and companies that foster and advance innovation are often drained of resources before they can deliver the return-on-investment demanded by the stock market, equity rights holders and VC investors. Typically, implementation of new business models must be forcefully imposed by the CEO, need the blessing of investors, and they cannot be managed by executives trained exclusively in the ways of traditional media and advertising.”

Neil Perkin in a slideshow entitled ‘What’s Next in Media’ that can be found here says that today – Social Media is counter-intuitive to communications media. Here’s one of his slides that shows just how counter-intuitive things have become for marketing online:

Meanwhile, the old way of marketing is through push messaging and therein lies the mistake of many of today’s marketing managers. Take a look at this slide to see how things don’t stack up nicely into a marketing message or ‘drop’ that has been long planned waiting its turn on the calendar.

The Linear model above reminds me of traditional TV and Print advertising. Some people in advertising and marketing today still view the Internet as a “channel” rather like TV.

Let’s consider another buzz phrase – viral marketing online. The success of YouTube in extending an advertising campaigns length and reach is now common currency. We’ve all seen the videos, perhaps even this one – My girlfriend and the Wii Fit. 2.2 million views and going strong.

The viral aspect of YouTube pleases advertisers and marketers because they can take pride in the statistics – 2.2 million viewers, that’s great! Not so quick though. The wise online marketer knows that it’s not all about page impressions. Broad use of metrics is far more important – users, time-spent, interactions and pass-alongs. The Wii certainly got a lot of exposure in that video but how can the results be tracked? Where’s the ROI?

Those YouTube stats don’t show the whole picture. It is clear that the video is very popular and it fits the rules of users, time-spent, interactions and pass-alongs, but there is no clear ROI except in its “value.” By value I mean that the brand is being talked about, the brand via the video is being shared, people are “spending time” with the brand. The ROI though is difficult to judge. Even if Wii sales were to jump by 5% in one week can we really say it was due to this “viral” campaign. Probably not. The video’s value will continue throughout its lifetime on YouTube. Talk of value over ROI makes marketing managers queazy.

Viral campaigns are not just online. From Adrants: Jack Goldenberg tells the story of how he and Kevin Glennon turned a custom-made Obama for President watch into what could become a fairly sizable viral campaign for the candidate.

“Most people think of viral marketing as something they’ve seen on YouTube or a similar site. But in reality, a viral is any communication that causes one person to be so affected by “experiencing” the viral that they communicate it to another.” He also argues that “Happy Meal toys were an in-home reminder of the need to visit McDonald’s. Kids would see two or three of them on their desk in their room and say, “Mom, Dad, we HAVE to go back to McDonald’s. I need 3 more Star Treks Happy Meals to complete my collection…..the Happy Meal was viral – kid to parent-multiplied by the millions of kids who frequented McDonald’s.”

That’s an example of an early viral campaign. We can perceive its “value” but we can’t perceive its ROI. And that’s why Jack Myers, as I quoted above, says “(completely new, innovative models) can take years before they generate returns that justify the investments.” If as marketers we don’t understand social media and merely pay lip service to viral marketing then we are basically flying by the seat of our pants.

Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief of Wired Magazine and blogger at The Long Tail, has pitched in to the social media advertising conversation with a post entitled You may be on Facebook But the Money’s in the Long Tail. He also posits that “social networks should be a feature, not a destination.”

As Chris says, and I agree, “I’ve been thinking a lot about how to integrate social networking into websites better. Right now the world is focused on stand-alone social networking sites, especially Facebook and MySpace, and the fad of the moment is to take brands and services there, as companies build Facebook apps and MySpace pages in a bid to follow the audience wherever they happen to be. But at the same time there’s a growing sense that elements of social networking is something all good sites should have, not just dedicated social networks. And that suggests a very different strategy – social networking as a feature, not a destination.”

He has a proviso too – “social networking to me means the tracking of individual preferences and behavior and giving users the ability to draw upon implicit or explicit connections between them and other users to do something useful.” This brings me to Ning, a social network platform that both Chris and I like. As he says “Ning, suppresses its own brand for the sake of those of the microsites it hosts.” Go here to see how the hip hop/rap label, Rawkus, uses Ning as its entire web presence.

Chris goes on to say – “As I think about the current Facebook craze and the notion of it as an all-encompassing platform, sucking in functionality from other sites across the board, I find myself skeptical. With my Long Tail hat on, I think that one-size-fits-all will fail in social networking, just as it has everywhere else.”

Meanwhile MySpace admits that it is not making as much money through ads as it would like. See Selling Ads For MySpace is Hard Work. MySpace COO Peter Chernin said:

“We remain incredibly optimistic about social media. But there are specific challenges 1) Tons of inventory. Lack of scarcity creates a liquidity challenge. Working on bringing big brands aboard. 2) People who are visiting social networks are there for different reasons, different uses. Figuring out how to target. 3) What’s the value of a “friend”? Trying to figure out new metrics to communicate with marketers.”

Bottomline: It’s the wild, wild west out there.

Anderson points out that ad rates on MySpace go for an astonishingly low $0.13 cents per CPM (one thousand impressions.) So that’s $0.13 on a general-purpose social network like MySpace and on his Ning-hosted network DIYDrones he’s getting $7.00. Even with a more generous scenario–$0.50 on MySpace and $5.00 on a focused Ning site–the difference is still a factor of ten. He believes that as big networks like Facebook and MySpace struggle to target ads based on the faint signals of consumer behavior in a generic social network, the smart money is going to the niche sites, where laser-focused content and community makes targeting easy. I couldn’t agree more. Also see: Facebook Ads Don’t Rock an experiment by Bob Gilbreath, an advertising executive who ran an ad on Facebook. It’s a real eye-opener. And another – Ad CPMs Are Higher In The Tail. And of course companies are springing up that think they have the answer to your problems in dealing with big social networks. Here’s one.

What this all points to is that companies should be advertising directly to those niche groups and networks that include people who would like to hear from their brand. The brands need to wait until they are invited in. A mass, scatter-shot approach to the large social networks will only fail.

Companies also need to consider Radical Transparency. For those unaware of this concept there’s a great article here on Wired Magazine’s site. I also wrote about it myself when Wired’s web site crashed. The basis of this theory is that you open the company’s doors [only as much as you like] by creating communication between your company and its fans and detractors. It’s a big step and for some, especially executives, it will cause a great deal of unease.

Wal-Mart used this approach to great effect. Here’s the original story from the New York Times and here’s just one bloggers’ reaction. And here is the Wal-Mart blog.

As the NYT article says “Known for its strict, by-the-books culture — accepting a cup of coffee from a supplier can be a firing offense — Wal-Mart is now encouraging its merchants to speak frankly, even critically, about the products the chain carries. This unusual new Web site, which was quietly created during the holiday shopping season, has become a forum for unvarnished rants about gadgets, raves about new video games and advice on selecting environmentally sustainable food.

Corporate blogs are nothing new — General Motors, Dell and Boeing have them — but Wal-Mart’s site, called Check Out, turns the traditional model on its head. Instead of relying on polished high-level executives, it is written by little-known buyers, largely without editing.”

And the key point there is “without editing.” Once a company opens the doors it can not close them. If a company starts a blog [and it should] it can not moderate the comments. And the CEO and other executives should not be contributing to the blog if they do not have the right “authority” or “voice”. By that I mean authenticity. It’s an overused word at times but in the right context it is completely accurate. If a CEO were to jump on the blog to blow her own trumpet non-critically about a company’s service or product the readers would see through it immediately. Being authentic means the blog author is a “trusted source” and this trust can never be abused.

A blog is a micro social network. My blog garners around 100,000 unique visits a month and its adherents are seeking out what I have to say about music, technology and the web. I am well versed in those things. I have an opinion about them. I also provide free music downloads from artists that I have “filtered.” I only post music from artists that I like and I believe that my audience will like them too. In short I have become a trusted source [people like my opinions,] a filter [people share my musical tastes,] and I am an influencer [I push certain artists and online companies that I support,] as well as an authority [people believe that I know what I am talking about.] A company’s blogger or bloggers need to have all these bases covered if they are going to safely cover the company’s communications through the blog.

Meanwhile the executives have to sit back and allow the comments, both good and bad, begin to flow. They can never interfere if they want the blog to be taken seriously. They will feel insecure and perhaps a little nauseous but if they wait it out it will work fine. It works for Wal-Mart, the world’s biggest retailer.

A company with a good blog policy will be listening to its customers and then shaping its communications around that data. It will also create content that is both relevant and hopefully surprising. Influencers will pass along the good stuff creating the viral moment that marketers pray for. Then people in the outer circle of the influencers will also start to talk about the brand, and as they do the company has to make it very easy for its core fans to spread the word. Do not fear negativity, it is just more communication – let it roll. There should never be a barrier to communication or interactivity. Remember, it’s not about technology, it’s about people. Bloggers have to be about having an opinion and sharing it but never about reporting….it’s a two-way conversation.

Sometimes people look at it backwards. Points 1 and 2 in this slide are wrong. As I said at the beginning of this post, we are technological beings and we are naturally immersed in technology; it can’t be any other way. And you can’t enforce social cultures online as there is no central “being.” Facebook’s “soul” is merely the millions of disparate people who are members. When Facebook goes away, as it will, those millions will migrate to the next application that allows them to socialize freely and easily.

For marketers this is a huge dilemma. In social media we create a selfless or virtual “self” – for instance, in the Facebook friends network one might see a coherent global pattern but that pattern only emerges from the activity of all its members (friends). The group or network seems to be centrally located but in fact it is nowhere to be found. No one has the slightest idea what these people do or want; they actually don’t exist. The good news is that within each of any of these social network groups resides at least a couple of influencers; again, companies and brands must wait to be invited in. These are parties that can’t be crashed.

Dave Allen, Director, Insights & Digital Media, Nemo Design.

The following URLs link to people, companies, articles or stories that are referred to in this post:

Grammy’s Hawaii MusicTech Conference
LISA 08
Content Marketing = Brand New Marketing
What’s Next In Media
My Facebook profile
My Twitter
My music and technology blog, Pampelmoose
Clay Shirkey’s blog
Jack Myers’ Web Site
Neil Perkin’s Blog
Wii Fit YouTube video
Adrants Obama watch story
Obama watches web store
Wired Magazine
You may be on Facebook but the money’s in the Long Tail
Social networks should be a feature not a destination
Rawkus, a social network on Ning
Selling ads on MySpace is hard work
Bob Gilbreath’s Facebook ad experiment
Ad CPMs are higher in the tail
Lotame.com
Blog reaction to Wal-Mart blogs
NYT story on Wal-Mart blog
WalMart blog