The Bigger Tent

Wednesday, 9/24 in NYC, Social Media Club is going to welcome Dan Patterson, a blogger, podcaster, and professional journalist, and Ann Cooper, who teaches at Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism. Ann has worked as a reporter for newspapers, magazines, and National Public Radio, and was the executive director of the Committee to Protect Journalists.

Recently, Ann published this article at the Columbia Journalism Review:

CJR: The Bigger Tent

And so it went for a few years, bloggers versus journalists; a fight over much more than semantics, a fight to see whether the big tent of American journalism would become a bigger tent to accommodate the newcomers and their new ideas. Who belongs in that tent, and who gets to decide who’s in it? Put another way: Who is a journalist? It’s a tantalizing question, but it’s hardly worth asking anymore.

This is the subject of our meeting tomorrow night. There are journalistic acts happening everywhere online, by bloggers and journalists alike. How do we know the difference, when is the difference important, and who decides?

On a side note, I’ve been blogging for 10 years, but not until I got picked up by a mainstream business publication did I start getting offers of “press passes.” So it seems the lines are still pretty blurry.

UPDATE: More food for thought from Max Gladwell:BlogWorld 2008: The Line Between Blogging and Journalism 
This is an important question, and I hope you’ll attend if you’re in NYC, and support our chapter there.

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4 Missions, 4 Projects: Social Media Club Gets to Work

With the creation of the interim advisory board/group, it was my hope to gain some new momentum and secure a real commitment from industry leaders to collaborate for our collective benefit. From the coverage and feedback we received, it seems that we did that part well.

Now we need to turn that energy and attention into some collaborative action. So a few people in the interim advisory group have agreed to step up and help lead some initial projects. In looking at what is most important to us, it would seem most appropriate to focus our efforts on the four areas of our core mission:

1. Expand Media Literacy
2. Share Lessons Learned Among Practitioners
3. Encourage Adoption of Industry Standards
4. Promote Ethical Practices through Discussion and Actions

From here, it is important to note that anyone in the advisory group (and any member of the community) may propose projects for the club to support. Over the next few weeks we will need to formalize the governance on how we choose which projects get our formal support, but for now we are going to keep it simple and ask for your help in making these first 4 projects, that support our 4 missions a success. You can stay up to date on them here on the blog or over on the Social Media Club Special Projects page on the wiki.

Media Literacy

Michael Brito is leading an effort to find and organize all the best Introduction to Social Media presentations, classes, discussions, cartoons, videos, blog posts etc… There are a lot of ‘here is what you need to know about social media‘ lists out there as well - where are they, which ones are the best. If you have some materials to submit, or if you run across some good material, can you please join this project by submitting your introduction to Social Media materials on the Social Media Club wiki.

Sharing Lessons Learned

This one is a bit self serving as well, but important, and open. As part of The Social Media Playbook, we are building a section on Social Media Champions - the people inside of organizations who fought for engaging customers, employees and the broader market through Social Media. We are looking for champions to fill out an online interview form and will be publishing the findings on the Social Media Club blog and some of them in the book. In short, we want to discover how you overcame the objections of management, what worked for you and what didn’t. Or more simply, how did you go from weird outsider to welcomed champion? Go to the Champions project page on the wiki for more information.

Encourage Adoption of Industry Standards

John Gatrell is leading our efforts to leverage our collective expertise to further promote key industry standards such as Creative Commons, Open ID, Data Portability, the Open Web Foundation and others. He will be posting more on this project in the weeks ahead. In principle it would be great if we could do work along the lines of what Chris Messina et al did with Spread Firefox - find ways to expand awareness and explain these key standards to more everyday folks, business decision makers and others.

The first project will be in support of Creative Commons. We would like to propose a Creative Commons Awareness Day, where everyone participating writes a quick blog post about what CC means to them, how to explain it to others, what are some examples of things they have been able to do more easily because of having access to creative commons content and the challenges they have faced by people not honoring their requests for attribution etc… (there is some bad with the good, lets be honest). We have also put together a fundraising widget to help raise money for their efforts from Social Media Club Members - if you want to help us spread the campaign and start other efforts, please go to the wiki page for this project to stay up to date and contribute.

Promote Ethical Behaviour

This is tougher to get a project going in this area since it is more of a matter of discussion, but from that principle, comes the idea for our first project. We are starting a discussion about how membership in Social Media Club can serve as a ‘trusted mark’ for people to know that someone is ethical, understands social media and is committed to the advancement of the industry. There are more and more people claiming to be ’social media experts’ while more and more of us are shunning such titles, realizing we are merely practitioners who are learning more each day.

Everyone I know is concerned with what we do about the schemers and con-artists who are getting into social media with a ‘get rich quick’ mentality. How do we help people avoid those who are selling the snake oil and find those businesses, service providers and people who are really doing good work? Go to the Project Page on our Wiki and join the discussion. You should also check out this recent blog post by Kristie Wells aggregating some of the biggest ethical issues in Social Media today.

Other Projects

We are open to supporting other projects, collaborating with other groups and taking ideas for new projects related to our mission. If you are a member, we especially want to hear from you. What can we do to better serve your needs. But even if you are only an occasional reader of this blog, we want to hear from you too so we can address your needs and serve the community of social media professionals and enthusiasts.

Besides visiting the special projects pages on the wiki to get more involved, please help us get more people involved by sharing your perspective on these first projects on your own blog and helping get others involved. What it is, is up to us…

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What is the biggest ethical issue we face in Social Media today?

A great question that was brought up in the SMC Los Angeles gathering tonight. I can think of one or two issues at hand.

What issue is chomping at your bit?

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Social Media Club No Longer Welcomed at MyRagan

Since I have received a few emails from some members already, let me just say I am disappointed that Mark Ragan has decided to take this action.  I have setup Social Media Club groups on Facebook, LinkedIn, Ning and many other social networking sites, so that members who use those services can come together to further the goals of the club.  Mark invited me to create a group on his “myspace” clone a few weeks ago, and even invited me to promote our Workshop through it.

Since becoming the largest group on MyRagan, Mark has apparently changed his mind, because the group (and my profile) was represented by the Social Media Club logo.  His post to the group (which he deleted after my response to this message) read:

We are recreating the Social Media Club tomorrow and re-naming it to read simply: Social Media Tools and Strategies.

The current logo for the club is giving the impression that we are somehow selling this space to an advertiser.  We are not. These groups are designed as non-commercial places where free discussion can flow without fear of being pitched. 

Your moderator will be Ragan editor Bill Sweetland.

Because we are changing the name of the club, you will all have to join it again. But, as you know, this only takes a few seconds. Look forward to seeing you back here soon.

Mark Ragan
CEO
MyRagan.com

There is more to say about this of course, but for now, just wanted to let you know that if you want to talk more about this, please join the main Social Media Club mailing list or of course, comment here.  I wish I could still have the message I sent in reply to him, but since it was deleted before the conversation could even begin, it is lost. I am sure I was not overly polite in it, but I was definitely speaking to the truth of the situation.  This is apparently not a MySpace clone at all - it now just seems like a social network established for the purpose of selling Ragan rather than serving the interests of the community as he originally told me.
Truth is though, it is his site and his rules so he can do what he wants with it and there is nothing to do about it except leave.  We will simply take our conversation elsewhere and I will move on so we don’t waste anymore energy on such things…

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Social Media Now: Blogger Code of Conduct is DOA

There are few things worse than media self-examination. It’s freighted with the kind of navel-gazing self importance that turns off all but the most egotistic insiders.

The mishugas surrounding Tim O’Reilly’s attempt to get a bloggers to adopt a code of conduct (his is modeled on the guidelines adopted by the BlogHer group) smacks a little bit of this kind of self-involvement.

I get civility. I practice it. Always will. But the kind of code O’Reilly’s is proposing is the kind of feel-good measure that will have no effect on the “problem,” to the extent that there is a problem at all.

As Duncan Riley wrote on the 901am blog: 

….those who think that a blogging code of conduct is the antidote to death threats and misogyny have about as much hope of success as I’ve got of space walking on Jupiter next year….

Reaction among the digerati has largely been strongly negative. People seem to feel there’s a mob mentality developing. Michael Arrington writes: 

…whenever someone, no matter how much I respect them, tries to tell me what I can and cannot do by defining “civility” around their own ideals, I tense up. It feels like a big angry mob is arming itself to the teeth and looking for targets, and I need to choose whether I’m with them or against them.

…The code of conduct and the mass of bloggers lining up behind it scares me a lot more than the hate comments and death threats
I’ve received in the past.

Robert Scoble had a similar reaction:

I do find disquieting the social pressure to get on board with this program. Tim O’Reilly is a guy who really can affect one’s career online (and off, too). I do have to admit that I feel some pressure just to get on board here and that makes me feel very uneasy.

Well, with this much opposition it hardly seems like the villagers are at the door with torches and pitchforks. In fact, it looks to me that the code is dead on arrival.

O’Reilly’s code would require bloggers to police themselves and the conversations that take place on their blogs for threatening language, libelous language, copyright infringement, and violations of privacy. But, except for the last matter, bloggers are already under a legal obligation to do these things or face potential civil or even criminal action. Contrary to popular belief, blog publishing is subject to the same legal standards of print publishing. There’s really no need for an extra code on this score.

Interestingly the only measure in O’Reilly’s code that would likely have an effect on blog incivility is the one that has met with the most opposition from the uber bloggers–banning anonymous comments.

I despise anonymous comments. Too often they function as a shield for precisely the kind of vitriol that creates problems, driving the level of discourse down to something that resembles a graffiti chain on a junior high school bathroom stall. Furthermore if the ethos of the social Internet is centered on personal responsibility, then taking responsibility for what you post–either on a blog or in comments–requires an openly declared identity. As a journalist, I was trained by both educators and editors, to allow source anonymity judiciously. It is an essential tool for reporting policy from the inside, for example, but it functions poorly in sport reporting when anonymous locker room sources pile on a coach or manager. Arrington and Scoble both refuse to ban anonymous comments. Fine. And certainly O’Reilly’s requirement that bloggers confirm the e-mail addresses of people posting comments is impractical. But anyone who accepts anonymous comments should be conscious of the potential for abuse.

 

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Share your Corporate Blogging Policies

At the Social Media 2007 conference there was a discussion about sharing blogging policies. Someone at lunch has asked if Social Media Club had a repository for this. We do now: please share your blogging policies here by putting in a link or upload a file at our Wiki.

Thanks to Racquel Wright of Acuity Brands for this great suggestion.

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Cow Dung and Concentric Circle Theory

There are some good elements from Eric Rice’s article here about how comments and criticism change in tenor like the different wave sizes/wavelengths of the ripple of a stone thrown in a pond. (thanks to C.C. Chapman for the link to his article).

A few excerpts:

My previous post on income levels and the Long Tail had been brewing in my mind for a while, and finally found a place to jump out due to the latest observations about the comments on Amanda Congdon’s recent segment on ABCNews.com about cow dung as sustainable fuel….

He then talks about how the comments about the article can go from useful or relevant close to the context of where the story was reported, to less useful or more snarky/vicoious as you get farther away.

…

Metafilter and Valleywag are two examples of access-controlled content (need an invite), as opposed to the wide-open form of digg.com and tech news forum, Slashdot, considered by many to be much higher on the level of snark for snark’s sake.

It’s another simple example of content that starts from a different place, existing in a much wider space, getting criticized with a different intent. In fact, the commenter responsible for the comment above was the only one who commented on the actual topic of the video…

This piece is worth a read – it is tough to cut excerpts and still get the sense of it.

The comments make it even a better piece, as others have posted thoughts or disagreed.

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Social Media Club - London Meeting #2

Our good friends over at Fleishman Hillard have opened up their offices again and are hosting the second meeting in London. Come one, come all.

Suggestions have been to discuss the latest in tools, technologies and success stories. However, if there is something specific you would like to throw out onto the table, please place it in the comments below.

Our hope is for each local group to set goals, meet regularly and share opinions on the role of Social Media in the present and future of PR, marketing and journalism. Help us reach that goal in London.

Where: Fleishman Hillard London, 40 Long Acre, Covent Garden, London WC2E 9LG
When: November 15th, from 6pm to 8:30pm
Costs: FREE (we do need you to pre-register so we may prepare for your arrival)

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Talking About Disclosure: A Social Media Club Podcast

This is the audio from the Talking About Disclosure Round Table that we held at CNet’s Headquarters in San Francisco on Wednesday October 25, 2006. In attendance were about 19 leading thinkers on social media including Rafe Needleman, Mike Arrington, Tantek Celik, Martin Mckeay and Social Media Club’s SF Trio of Chris Heuer, Brian Sollis and Kristie Wells. Some excellent points were made and some good proposals for moving forward. Please tag everything related with ‘blogger+ethics’ and contribute to the Wiki at http://wiki.socialmediaclub.org/

You can subscribe to the podcast here or just download the 28MB audio file of the 1 hour and 49 minute conversation.

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Consequences for abusing the public trust?

For me the biggest challenge I see in our efforts for dealing with the ethics of disclosure coming out of our Social Media Club Round Table on Wednesday was the matter of consequences for those individuals and organizations who betray our trust so egregiously. Edelman and Wal-Mart both abused the public’s trust in the Web’s ability to be a source for honesty with the Walmarting Across America episode, and we all suffered as a result (we being Bloggers and producers of media - journalists and communications pros alike). I was speaking with Cathy Brooks last night at the VOX Launch Party about this, and she felt that there are indeed consequences in the system of law that governs us that may offer a recourse - but I truly dislike the litigation culture we live in and don’t see that as being the fair route. She had many other important things to say on this, and I for one, am sorry she was not able to make it to our discussion.

In the Edelman matter, we know that Edelman is a leader in the Word of Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA), and this episode was a clear violation of their own ethics, but Shel Holtz pointed out what does that really mean? In reviewing it closely after reading Shel’s and Stowe Boyd’s post on this WOMMA’s creation of the 20 Questions, I really like a lot of what they have to say on this subject. There are clearly some smart people there that get it. In doing the research, I think that WOMMA’s original Code of Ethics were pretty good to start, and the clarity that these questions bring takes them even further. But “marketer restrain thyself” needs to have consequences when the marketer breaks the rules. So given that that a member of WOMMA has failed to answer so many of those questions in the way we would hope, now what? I suppose it is not retroactive as a community standard though it should be, but seriously, what happens when people show questionable ethical judgment? What are the consequences for abusing the public trust? Obviously the reputation of the individual and the organization is tarnished and there is conceivably a real financial loss of some form, but what consequences are faced by those who break the rules?

I am not out for blood here, far from it, I am ready to move forward. Clearly Edelman has apologized and wants to make good to ensure it never happens again (as much if not more for their own interests of course), but what compensation is due the public? In looking at this the other night in our Round Table on disclosure, that is the point at which I think we are in real need of good solutions. We are trying to figure out the right course of action for Social Media Club members around such ethics violations, but we are not the Senate, so censure seems a bit odd as a consequence. I know from my friend Todd Tweedy’s experience that WOMMA does expel/suspend members for violations of its code of ethics - in that case the entire story was false and was the subject of a correction/retraction of the charge by the reporter. Todd adds an excellent perspective with his blog post today entitled Prediction: Edelman Will Make Us Stronger in Terms of Blogging and Corporate Ethics. It would seem that WOMMA’s course of action should be clear, but there are seemingly some gray areas we don’t know about but, deserve to know clearly.

Mike Arrington suggested the other night that we simply do not link to those who have a verified ethics violation. Indeed all of this attention on the issue is actually driving up the perceived popularity and awareness of those who made the mistake. There is a great discussion going on over on the WOMMA site about disclosure, and I am curiously watching for the outcome. In that one of the big issues coming out of our discussion was a need for a well educated public in regards to media literacy (that is one of the core elements of Social Media Club), perhaps they could fund some 3rd party programs to promote media literacy and use the Walmarting Across America case as an example of things that people should not do (after all, it was not the entire Edelman organization who did this, but rather some actual people inside the company). I am not to say that the company is not ultimately to blame, but seriously - it was some human beings bad judgment that is the point of fault.

Maybe even some public service work and some genuine apologies from the people who screwed this up. As Rafe Needleman said at the Round Table the other night, (paraphrasing) “if you have a car accident, most people are unable to apologize because of the fear of litigation that may result, but if more people did apologize and show remorse, there would be a lot less litigation around accidents.” Not surprisingly, I agree with Todd Defren and am reminded of the book “All I Really Need to Know, I Learned in Kindergarten“. Or the more advanced version that I believe is the core of The Four Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz which starts off with the most important principle of all:

“Be Impeccable with your Word: Speak with integrity. Say only what you mean. Avoid using the word to speak against yourself or to gossip about others. Use the power of your word in the direction of truth and love.”

Technorati Chairman Peter Hirshberg assured me that this was his philosophy on this matter last night and everyone else I spoke with seems to feel the same thing, so should be near universal consensus here, but what do we do when people aren’t impeccable with their word? What about those gray areas that we talked about the other night?

[The audio from the Round Table will be up shortly]

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NMRCast #9

Chris Heuer, Brian Solis and Shel Holtz* discuss Edelman’s woes and the notion of disclosure; they also catch up on the working group progress and chat a bit more about tags (can you ever get enough?).

Shel Holtz provides a list of links supporting this podcast on his website, For Immediate Release.

You can download the file here (MP3, 12.7MB), or sign up for the RSS feed to get it and future shows automatically. (For automatic synchronization with your iPod or other digital player, you’ll also need a podcatcher such as Juice, DopplerRadio, iTunes or Yahoo! Podcasts, or an RSS aggregator that supports podcasts such as FeedDemon). Also, the Apple iTunes subscription is now available here or by searching for NMRCast at the Apple iTunes store under “podcasts.” If you subscribe to the FIR “everything” feed, however, this podcast will not be included.

* Tom Foremski is currently in India and was not able to attend.

UPDATE: I had orignally titled this post ‘NMRCast #9: Disclose. Disclose. Disclose.’.  I realized this did not truly cover the content of this podcast, so I have changed the title to simply NMRCast #9.

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Talking About Disclosure Round Table Recap

Wow! What a great conversation tonight over at CNet’s Headquarters here in San Francisco - thanks again to Joel Sacks and Rafe Needleman for hosting us there. Unfortunately my M-Audio died again in a new and interesting way - thankfully Martin Mckeay had his trusty iRiver and we will be posting audio of the nearly two hour conversation soon. You can subscribe to the Social Media Club podcast via iTunes by searching for Social Media Club in their podcast directory.

As for the meat of the matter, it was quickly clear that the issue of disclosure is one that impacts everyone and everyone understands its importance in the broader context. When one person makes a bad decision, everyone is impacted so it is an issue that everyone wants to work on together. The mix of people was pretty good with 19 people showing up including Rafe Needleman, Mike Arrington, Tantek Celik, Joel Sacks, Greg Narain, Brian Solis, Sean Savage, Shannon Clark, Vic Podcaster, Sanford Barr, Jeremy, Daniel Riveong, Pete Kazanjy, Glenda Bautista, Matt Levine, James Yu with nearly everyone contributing some great points. (too many links to research and create this late tonight - my apologies everyone)
There were a few key points that emerged from my perspective:

• I started off the conversation talking about this era needing to embrace the 3 T’s (as opposed to the old focus on the 3 C’s) which are Transparency, Truth and Trust
• There are a lot of grey areas so absolute rules are hard to come by here, we should strive for greater understanding of best practices (which is the purpose of Social Media Club)
• Disclosure is somewhat situational in nature and will vary by geography and culture
• The biggest issue is seemingly one of media literacy amongst media consumers as much as it is an issue for those producing media
• Everyone is biased in some way, journalists are not immune as we are all human - bloggers need more appreciation of how they can be influenced
• We all get free drinks from time to time (including everyone who attended tonight) but that usually is not enough to be bought
• We need to find a great and easy to understand metaphor/story about what is ok and what is not ok
• We have more to figure out and map than one discussion could allow

Kristie Wells took some good notes of what people had to say which are available in a MindJet MindMap format as well as a PDF and also took some good photos. Personally, I am really looking forward to listening to the audio and dissecting some of the finer points of the discussion. Perhaps someone out there will take the MindMap and re-organize it according to topics rather than speakers and that will really move it forward. (you can download a free trial from MindJet or get their free MindMap viewer if you want to play with it - yes MindJet has sponsored our events in the past, but I bought the software before we had a relationship because I loved it so much)

At the end of the conversation, Mike Arrington made a proposal that:

We begin a dialogue and process that we all agree to adhere to the outcome of in regards to what is the proper, ethical way to handle disclosure - even if it is not the one I want, I will agree to abide by the group’s decision. We also need to have a meethod of resolution for challenges to ethics where the process can begin in private first so that people can not use such challenges to create controvery and generate increased page views and notoriety through baseless accusations. (paraphrased, not quoted)

So we have opened up the Social Media Club Wiki (password is ‘media’ without the quotes) to start working on a real Social Media Code of Ethics which will be adopted as the standard for the club and all members to endorse. Rafe Needleman suggested we keep our initial efforts focused, perhaps just on Technology Bloggers so we can avoid some of those muddier grey areas and I think he is probably right about that.

The entire effort is adopting the tag “blogger+ethics” (tip of the hat to Greg Narain on the added value the plus sign has here). We would like to start by tagging all relevant codes of ethics thusly and also all opinions on these matters to be collected in Blog posts tagged similarly to help us start focusing. Also, start making use of the Wiki to begin our work on this important effort.

There is a lot more to discuss here and we came up with some more interesting ideas for the Disclosr service that Social Media Club is beginning to develop. As I suspected in my post last night, this is only the beginning of a very important and high impact conversation.

Thanks to everyone for coming out. I am looking forward to continuing this conversation in DC next Monday and Boston next Thursday at the Round Tables we are holding there. I imagine it will be a part of the conversation in New York tonight as well.

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