Social Media Now: When Users Attack!

Digg-hating has become a favorite pastime of the digerati. The sport hasn’t reached the proportions of Microsoft-hating yet, but it’s getting there.

Yesterday’s flap began when Neil Patel at Pronet Advertising wrote a post claiming to prove that Digg editors or algorithms are intentionally burying certain stories posted to the service in a kind of double-secret censorship.

Several bloggers followed up with posts taking issue with Patel’s data–which came from Digg internal data posted through several Digg public applications. Other bloggers followed up supporting Patel with anecdotal “evidence” of stories being censored. Executives at Digg have yet to respond to the story. The latest to-do comes two weeks after the Digg user revolt over Digg’s removal of stories liking to code for cracking HD-DVDs.

I don’t know if it’s true that Digg is burying stories, though I’ve asked the company if it is, and if so what criteria are being used.

But I am fascinated by the anger and resentment that seems to be continuously bubbling up from the Digg user community. Why does Digg suffer the slings and arrows of user anger while other user-informed news sites, like Wikipeida, don’t? And what can companies do to avoid facing the kind of user revolt that Digg has faced this spring?

At the heart of the current brouhaha are questions–perhaps unfair ones–about Digg’s honesty. Just as the Sanjaya flack threatened to undermine the perceived credibility of American Idol, the Patel charge threatens Digg’s credibility–are the top stories really the stories users like the best, or are ulterior motives at work?

That question goes to the core of what Digg has promised users: “everything on Digg is submitted by our community,” the company claims, and “Digg is a digital media democracy.”  But Digg also retains rights to remove content for any reason at any time. It’s a reasonable policy given the potential for corporate liability, but it can leave the company in conflict with users–as in the case of the DVD code, the posting of which threatens Digg with legal liability.

MG Siegler–whose story was the buried one at the hear of Patel’s post–suggests that the solution is total transparency:

It is time for Digg Founder Kevin Rose to man-up once again. It is time to make Digg fully transparent. It is time to remove the barrier that hides the bury data from the users. Mr. Rose, tear down this wall.

Siegler is right, the greatest possible transparency is always the best policy for Internet businesses. But users don’t revolt at eBay because tools to track prices and volume of certain kinds of goods aren’t made freely available to sellers AND buyers. eBay users have a different expectation in part because they carry into their eBay experience certain preconceptions of a retail marketplace, but also because eBay doesn’t promise to be a digital democracy.

In some ways Digg’s troubles have resulted from the company being a bad parent–not providing users explicit, firm rules; and capriciously and mercurially changing the enforcement of whatever obscure rules exist (like pulling down the code cracking stories then putting them back up in response to a user tantrum).

But there’s a third reason for Digg’s recent problems, one that’s not often discussed among the cognoscenti–users don’t share Digg’s liability.  Would a user revolt over the DVD cracking code have snowballed if every Digg poster shared legal liability? Just as flame wars erupt more easily online than fights do offline because of the abstraction of cyberspace, social media users are more likely to engage in certain behavior online than off because they don’t face any consequences.

Of course, shared liability is a two way street–users also don’t share in the rewards of social media companies–not just ad revenue but also capital appreciation in community equity. But what if they did? A social media property in which not just revenue but also equity is shared with users would be a fascinating thing to watch develop. Would a community of users behave differently if users were equity-holders?
Link Love:

MTV Licenses Social Net Media Player; Offers Grant Money For Student Developed Programs
Meebo Launches Meebo Rooms (oh, and Meebo now has ads)

A Casualty Of War: MySpace

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Social Media Now: Corporations vs. Communities

Events conspired this week to throw into high relief the core question for those who would commercialize social media: can a balanced be reached between user control and corporate control or will commercial social media always exist on a cliff’s edge over which either party can push it at any time?

In the Digg/HD-DVD fiasco, it was users who pushed the corporation over the edge–forcing the company to ignore a legal takedown request in order to keep it’s community alive. As Fred Wilson wrote:

I’ve been around web communities since we invested in Geocities in 1996 and one thing I’ve learned is the community thinks they own the community. And if you are the one who actually owns it, you’d better act like the community owns it or you’ll lose it.…

Forget about what’s right and wrong in this case, the important point is Digg showed that they control the community and will police it.

That’s a big deal. They might get away with that on issues like hate, porn, terror, but not on hacking.

When you get in the way of geeks sharing hacks with each other in a geek community, you’ve done something big.
Meanwhile over at MySpace, it was presidential hopeful Barack Obama who was feeling the wrath of the crowd. The Obama campaign had jumped all over a MySpace page started way back in November 2004 when a paralegal named Joe Anthony became a fan of the then-newly elected senator.

Since Obama announced his presidential bid, his campaign had been working with Anthony and the profile had pulled 160,000 friends and garnered Obama a lot of press buzz. But, after an open dispute with Anthony over control of the site, the Obama camp this week had MySpace hand over the “BarackObama” name, refusing to compensate Anthony who reportedly offered to hand over control for a fee of $39,000, a number reflecting the 5 hours a day Anthony claims to have devoted to the site.

Today the “official” Barack Obama MySpace profile has 33,500 friends and the candidate has lost not only a high profile volunteer but also a voter. As Anthony himself explained to Micah Sifry in an open letter:

The campaign got involved in February and although at first it was very exciting, it quickly became clear that they just had no interest in me or my involvement. They only wanted to take control of the profile and get on with it. I bit the bullet for a while and kept working for the good of the campaign, but they quickly went from passive aggressive, to aggressive, and then eventually just rotten and dishonest.

For the past few weeks, the campaign decided it would be better if they just took control of the profile and we decided to try to come to some agreement. By this time, I didn’t have quite as much respect for the campaign guys, and frankly felt like I was just being used. They knew about this profile the entire time, and really just waited until it got enough media coverage and friends request so they could step in and bully me out of it….

This was not about money and I don’t believe that one person who has interacted with me via the Obama profile over the past couple of years would be able to say that my efforts were anything but sincere. This was about holding a campaign to their message, about acknowledging my work, and taking this community seriously.

Apparently the message here is, as an individual, if you have too big of an impact, you’re just a liability.

This is how Obama lost my vote, and one of his strongest supporters.

TechPresident has offered excellent extended coverage of the dispute, Anthony’s explanation, Obama’s response, and even an analysis of what Anthony’s profile might really have been worth (as much as $90K according to Sifray). Most interesting is the response from someone in the Dean campaign who had faced similar problems to the ones faced by Obama:

We called people like Joe Anthony “centers of gravity”– people who had built up their own Dean communities. We wanted centers of gravity as close to campaign as possible without imploding.

At first, new centers of gravity were exciting, but very perplexing, and our tiny team debated options. We quickly ran into an odd clarifier–the law. Because of legal concerns about campaign coordination, we were told early on by our lawyers that we had two choices: to have a manager/agent relationship with grassroots supporters, or to not direct grassroots supporters actions at all….

We simply couldn’t have a manager/agent relationship and still have all this flowering of intelligent political energy: we chose to be hands off, talking with people but not telling them what to do.

Finally today we have word that YouTube is finally going to begin to bring its user-creators into the corporate side flow by doing something Obama didn’t want to do for Anthony–offer money.

YouTube announced on it’s corporate blog that it was adding half a dozen or so high profile posters to its partnership program–the same program to which CBS, the NBA, and other big media producers belong.

YouTube didn’t announce specific criteria for choosing the initial members who got a bump in status other than to say that “they have built and sustained large, persistent audiences through the creation of engaging videos, their content has become attractive for advertisers….”

At NewTeeVee Om Malik had an interview with Jamie Byrne, vice president of marketing at YouTube in which Byrne 20 to 40 producers would be included in the initial roll out, with more potentially added in the future.
At Techcrunch Duncan Riley wonders what the revenue split is worth:

…the new Partners Program only goes as far as monetizing the actual YouTube page destination with Adsense units. Whilst not without merit, the new program is limited given the way YouTube content is consumed. The great strength of YouTube from its earliest days has been the use of embedded video on external sites: a large number, if not a majority of viewers will never see the advertising, viewing it only on blogs and forums which if they are running Google Adsense units, do so in a way that does not benefit the content creator.

But nearly everyone expects YouTube to begin inserting pre-roll video advertising at some point in the not to distant future. It will be interesting to watch what happens with the YouTube program–will it spark competition to be chosen for partnership? will it spark resentment that some but not all members are chosen to participate? will it generate enough money for chosen members to matter at all?

Link Love:

BlogCatalog Gets Socially Networked

NBA Taps Into Second Life
If Markets Are Conversations Then Twitter Is Money

 

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Social Media Now: UGC and its Discontents

 Live by the link, die by the link. Yesterday’s Digg user revolt was an object lesson in the power and peril of user generated media.

I won’t give a blow by blow recap of the events–Techmeme is already overburdened by links to recap stories. You can read a first hand account of how the snowball got rolling here; and Danny Sullivan has an excellent wrap up of events at Search Engine Land. What you need to know is that someone posted to Digg a link to the hexadecimal key to cracking HD-DVD’s DRM. Digg pulled the link down, together with several other stories, after receiving a takedown request. Digg users then began bombing Digg with the code in links and by early this morning Digg founder Kevin Rose had capitulated:

 

But now, after seeing hundreds of stories and reading thousands of comments, you’ve made it clear. You’d rather see Digg go down fighting than bow down to a bigger company. We hear you, and effective immediately we won’t delete stories or comments containing the code and will deal with whatever the consequences might be.

If we lose, then what the hell, at least we died trying.

 

Social media triumphalists and anti-encryption cyberlibertarians are crowing about a great victory. Duncan Riley’s response was typical:

 

Will the Digg Revolt of 2007 result in a renaissance in listening to users? maybe, and hopefully it will at Digg, but others should also take note: corporate arrogance towards the user base shouldn’t have a place in Web 2.0, and companies that continue to act in this old fashioned way can now look at a case study of what collectively users can say and do when you won’t listen to them.

 

Grant Robertson’s was the most ludicrously over the top, comparing the mass postings to Digg with the last great schism in Christianity!

Witness the modern equivalent of the 95 thesis’ Martin Luther nailed to the door of Wittenburg church. We, digital citizens –commonly referred to by the vulgar term of ‘consumers’ — have had enough of content lock-in. We’ve bought and re-bought entertainment media — repackaged and regurgitated digital vomitus — until we’re blue in the face. We’ve been told time and time again that DRM is for our own protection, and we’re finally and inconsolably fed up.

 

Others looked for nefarious, conspiratorial motives in Digg’s actions :

 

Episodes of the DiggNation video show were sponsored by the HD DVD Promotion Group. DiggNation is produced by Revision3, a company run by Digg founders, Jay Adelson and Kevin Rose. Rose is also a co-host of the DiggNation show.

 

Inside the fishbowl its easy to be seduced by the transformative power of collective intelligence, but history has taught us that the mob mentality can also produce the most dangerous and destructive behavior of which human beings are capable. We’re hardly talking about blood in the streets of Paris following the French Revolution here, but what happens to a social media company if its users get it wrong?

 

That’s the provocative question asked by Andrew Lih whose excellent blog item is the best I’ve read on the subject this morning:

 

This is quite unprecedented — you basically have a multi-million dollar enterprise intimidated by its mob community into taking a stance that is rather clearly against the law.

 

Andrew gives us the relevant text from the DCMA:

 

 

(2) No person shall manufacture, import, offer to the public, provide, or otherwise traffic in any technology, product, service, device, component, or part thereof, that—

(A) is primarily designed or produced for the purpose of circumventing a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title;

 

 

If the Digg situation results in legal action, Digg’s only defense will be to challenge the constitutionality of the DCMA provision, dicey proposition at best. And it will be interesting to see if all those armchair revolutionaries who posted links and comments will pony up money for Digg’s legal defense–Pete at Mashable proposes taking up a collection.

 

The industry fall out will also be interesting to watch. Will the Digg fiasco chill investment in user generated content? What about Wikipedia and other sites to which users posted the offending code? Those sites were able to remove the illegal material without being over run. What processes do they have in place that are lacking at Digg? And is there some difference between the communities of contributors at Digg and at Wikipedia that accounts for the fact that Wikipedia wasn’t surrounded by surfers with virtual torches and pitchforks?

 

Stay tuned.

 

 

 

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Social Media Now: MySpace to Offer Social News

The idea of MySpace launching a news aggregator is hardly surprising. After all MySpace parent Newscorp is not only one of the world’s largest newspaper and TV news companies but also one of the most creative. (FoxNews changed the tone of TV news forever. I’m certain Newscorp is more comfortable than most with blog-style news that mixes information, opinion and personality.)

Terry Heaton, who had the first post on MySpace News, says the service will gather stuff from websites, blogs, and members, combining Google News-style and Digg-style functionality. Om Malik offers the phrase social news.

The story comes a day after an enormous thread centering around a Doc Searls’ post recirculated all the old saws about traditional vs. citizen journalism–everyone’s a reporter, its the relationship that matters, etc.

Most of the conversation around the impact of Web 2.0 on news focuses on the newspaper’s role as producer of information and the impact of citizen journalism on professional journalism.

That impact is real and enormous and barely hinted at by the creeping blogification of newspapers (Chris Heuer wrote about USAToday’s makeover this week). Socially-enabling national newspapers has had an impact on the way newspaper people work. A friend at The Times said that there is competition in the newsroom to be at the top of the daily “most e-mailed” list. That competition is a kind of social feedback. So to are comments (but only when editors and reporters are involved in the conversation).

But social news does more than just undermine the news gathering primacy of traditional journalism. It also unwinds the aggregator function of newspapers.

Ten years ago technology gave people the power to be reporters of their own lives. Today technology enables community aggregation. That’s what Digg and Technorati and del.icio.us allow–something beyond the self-selected aggregation of RSS feeds. Tagging, ranking and sharing create public hierarchical lists of information. That’s what newspaper editors used to do. The Internet is an enormous, on-going Page One meeting.

Can any one aggregation service capture all that? We’ll find out. So far efforts to pull together that kind of grand unified shared aggregation haven’t lived up to the promise. Maybe MySpace News, which will have both the problems and benefits of serving a closed group of members, will show us how it can be done.  Will it be to all sources of information or just those with which it cuts deals? How will it exploit it’s members input? And most of all will newspapers feel the influence?

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Social Media Club Phoenix:Revolution in Marketing Mini-Conference

Damn, we did it again! Although about five people who had signed up called in sick, about fifty people who hadn’t registered in advance showed up, and we blew the doors off the room for the third month in a row. When I asked people to raise their hands and tell me if they were producers or consumers of social media (by which I meant “do you already participate, or are you hear to learn?”), the room was divided almost equally in half.

Because of the enormous amount of interest in social media, we are holding a mini-conference the morning of March 1 at Grand Canyon University in Phoenix. Chris Heuer will come down to give us some good definitions of social media, followed by three case studies of Arizona organizations who are heavily involved, and keynoted by the grand old man of the space,  Robert Scoble and his better half. You will be able to sign up next week, but in the mean time you can save a spot by emailing me at francine@stealthmode.com.

Because we were talking about the Social Media Press release tonight, we had many PR people in the room, and one former BusinessWire employee who defended the traditional wire service method of distribution. We also had a radio talk show host who said she had never received anything but the traditional press release, and she reminded us that the revolution may not have really begun. I think some of us needed to hear that.  We live in our own little word of podcasts and BlogHauses.
We talked a bit about the elements of the press release–which of them were new and which were just additive to traditional releases. It then became clear that while most PR practitioners now felt comfortable with links in a press release, most still weren’t familiar with services like Digg, Technorati, or Deli.cio.us (sic), nor would it occur to them to, say, embed a video in a press release. Moreover, many people felt uncomfortable with giving the media “too much” information, which could mean losing control of the corporate messages.
Unfortunately, I’m a horrible moderator because I like to hear myself talk and I lectured on far too long about why everyone needed to know about what’s “out there” in the social media space and how it could be used to communicate with more than just media — with customers, constituents, shareholders, etc. But finally I shut up and let everyone network, and when I left, the room was still full.

We are begging everyone from Phoenix to sign up in advance for Feb. 8. We may have to cut off reservations.

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