Using Social Media to track Hurricane Gustav

I love hearing interesting ways people are using Social Media, and the Ning site put up today to help report news on Hurricane Gustav is a brilliant use of the tools available. The site will aggregate content from a variety of sources, including; Flickr, Twitter, YouTube, Utterz, Technorati, etc.- all you have to do is tag the item gustav.

Kudos to Andy Carvin for starting it and for everyone participating/contributing to help educate folks in the affected areas as well as keeping us connected so we can mobilize when needed.

We are all praying Gustav dies before hitting land again, but if it should continue on - here’s hoping we are better prepared to take action and respond quickly.

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Is SxSW going to be the death of Twitter?

Just about 6 weeks ago, I wrote a post about Twitter being a great evolution of IM, moving to EM, which I called “everywhere messaging”. Well, in the weeks since, I have come to realize it is really about EP, “everywhere publishing” - but not just publishing in the broad sense, but rather, it is a functionally restricted form of micro-blogging. If you look at my Twitter feed, you will see that this is generally how I use it.

Unfortunately, it feels like Fonzi is getting his swim trunks on, and the sharks are looking ferocious. Why would I suggest that this great channel that I have been touting for the last few weeks is about to jump the shark? Because of the amount of focus on the use of Twitter as a communications channel down at SxSW (did I mention how bummed I am that I am not there?). BTW, I am seriously asking the question of whether SxSW will be the death of Twitter? The reason being that we must cross over and bump up against barriers in order for us to realize they exist in new realms - the amount of traffic coming through Twitterific is just overwhelming and causing it to lose its’ intimacy for me.

Tonight, I came back to the Social Media Clubhouse from dinner with Kristie and Tom Foremski to see that my last 20+ Twitters were a back and forth conversation between my friends Chris Pirillo and Robert Scoble about Twitter. In fact, Kristie, Tom and I were just having a conversation in the car no more then 60 minutes ago about the same problem. I already can’t keep track of the friends I really care about staying connected to with the increase in usage, and now I am feeling guilty every time someone adds me as a friend when I don’t add them in return. But I can’t add everyone - I just don’t have the extra attention to invest, and to Chris Pirillo’s point

what happens when you have 10,000 followers - and their responses get buried because you can’t reciprocate?

The thing is, the very nature of Twitter, which Kristie pointed out mirrors the addictive nature of Flickr, will lead to a natural increase in the frequency in usage, the scope of usage and the number of people using the service. In the last week, I have received at least 30 friend requests, and I am not really that well known or popular. Scoble is over 1,000 already and climbing fast. Pirillo is right, but he need not go out to 10,000 followers - Scoble is already having responses and more get buried - it has happened in his voicemail where he directs you to email, and even in email and other channels, he is always going to fight to keep up, despite all his very hard work and great intentions.
The thing about Twitter, Flickr and other similarly architected services is that we like staying in touch with the people we care about, the people we WANT to have connecttions with. Unfortunately, and as I have been saying a lot lately - Humans Don’t Scale. Dunbar was really right - I am pretty much putting the Dunbar number in the same category as Newton’s laws of gravity. It is important to note that I am not hoping for its demise - far from it. I am however wondering what can be done about those of us that care about such things in thinking about some sort of guideliness to prevent usage patterns from destroying the incredible value we find in staying connected to the people we care about most.

So what are the limits of Twitter, what are the best uses? Can we put this altogether in a wiki? Am I just crazy? Or is the usage of it morphing in ways that are really decreasing the value of the channel instead of increasing it? Is there any possibility to save Twitter from Twittering itself to death?

Mea Culpa: Occasionally, I do use the dreaded @ myfriend message myself. At this time, I want to apologize to everyone for this terrible, terrible assault on your attention. Direct messages should be sent directly - or if it was/is necessary to build upon a conversational thread, I should have made the slight additional effort to have blogged it myself on my full site. Perhaps Twitter could make a C messageID, or C myfriend feature to redirect some of this additional traffic. But honestly, I think the additional volume, the experimentation and the morphing of this great everywhere publishing must give us all pause, to rethink what works well and what doesn’t - to then start modeling the behaviour we hope to see from others…

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Social Media Now: Cisco’s Media Dreams

There’s an old saw in the technology business which says if you want to make money in a gold rush, sell tools to the miners.

Certainly that’s a formula which worked for Cisco during the Internet explosion of the 1990s, and it seems to be a policy the company plans to pursue with social media. This weekend  The New York Times reporting that Cisco will acquire Tribe.net. The deal is Cisco’s second social media acquisition in a month and suggests that the company plans to sell social networking as an enterprise technology.

The Cisco deals were completed by Dan Scheinman who runs Cisco’s Media Solutions Group. Scheinman told The New York Times that, as much as anything, Cisco’s plan is to “form a relationship with media companies and deliver technology services to them.” So it’s less about helping Toyota turn it’s intranet into a
social network, and more about helping Time Warner Cable offer blogging, video sharing, and the like to subscribers.

Om Malik  is typically skeptical (gosh, he’s more cynical than me!):

Social networks and Cisco pairing is as odd as the relationship between Angelina Jolie and Billy Bob Thornton, aka Fembot and the Freak. That didn’t work out, and neither will this.
…

What media companies does Cisco have a relationship with? Last I checked they sold equipment to large corporations, cable companies and phone companies? And those guys – they can’t even get people to use their email!

Joe Duck  agrees with Malik that Cisco’s moves are doomed, but believes the reason is that the success of social networks has little to do with the underlying technology

PlentyofFish.com, a hugely popular dating site, still uses a *single* server and very basic technology despite the fact that it competes with big players working on platforms that probably cost 100x that of PlentyofFish’s.

I think the future will be like the past - successful sites will cater to the needs of people and bend the technologies as needed.   Cisco, Ning, and other social networking technology platforms are great but they won’t define things.   People will do that.

But my guess is that Cisco’s social networking aspirations are doomed by their target audience–media companies.
Big media companies think they are ready to go social, but a comparison between Joost and YouTube is instructive.  Joost, the TV industry’s online video hub of choice, is merely a cable TV style video distributor. YouTube is a community hub with a set of tools allowing all three legs of social media (contribution, participation, meta information generation).  Big media simply is not really ready to embrace the stuff that makes social media so transformative.

When media becomes socially-enabled the source of media’s fundamental value shifts. The intellectual property itself is no longer the thing that drives value, instead, the ability of end users to do something with the intellectual property–tag it, share it, mash it up, comment on it–drives value. Contrary to the RIAA’s belief, a song that you can only listen to is considerably less valuable than one you can share, tag or remix.

Reading a book, watching a movie, listening to the radio, these are the leisure activities that make traditional media entertaining. But posting a video to YouTube, podcasting, or commenting on a blog are the leisure activities that make social media entertaining.

Selling the tools will do Cisco no good unless its clients are ready to use the tools the right way. And if its clients are media companies then Cisco will have to convince them to do what they do best–contribute IP to the community– while allowing the community to do what it will with the IP.

Related links

All Software Should Be Local
Wanted - The Sonos Social Net
Fred Wilson talks with Marc Canter about social software, muses about OpenID, and daydreams about connecting his Sonos system to a social network
Enterprise Infrastructure Industry can Up Business Offering
A look at social networking in the enterprise

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What is Social Media? No, really, WTF?

I have been thinking about this question for a couple of years and have a few thoughts around a coherent answer which I have talked about through this blog and through comments on other people’s blogs. I have talked about it in a beercast with Mike Hudack and I have talked the ears off of people like you who are passionate in your like and dislike of this language to describe what is happening. Of course, the whole thing has blown up a couple of times lately inside the mediasphere, with these posts from Jeremiah Owyang, Robert Scoble, Brian Solis, Doc Searls and many, many others. Today, I am beginning a new journey, to co-create with you, a very clear answer to this question, from which we may all benefit.

Rather than diving into the 3-4,000 word post I was trying to get posted today, let me get to the point and propose my initial draft of an answer to the question:

Social Media is redefining how we relate to each other as humans and how we as humans relate to the organizations that serve us. While it is commonly represented by blogs, podcasts, vlogs, wikis, user generated content and social networks, it is not about those specific things as much as it is about what happens around and because of those things. This includes most notably the ability and desire to easily share with each other, to build upon that which is shared and to discover people, places and things that are of interest to you, because the sharing of these things with these new tools, is making visible that which was previously unknown.

While the early days of the Internet talked about the Three C’s of Content, Commerce and Community, we have come to realize that this era of our evolutionary growth has it’s own Three C’s, which speaks more closely to the fundamental needs of society beyond the interest in the technology for its own sake. The “Greater Significance” of Social Media is a newfound understanding of the importance of Context, Communications and Collaboration. The context of what we are trying to accomplish and why we are passionate about it is the starting point for our conversations and the basis of everything else. Communications in its traditional and emerging forms, references how we come to understand and connect with each other. Collaboration is about how we work together for our common and individual interests within the various contexts in which we invest our attention.

While this definition is still a bit long and not fully refined, I think it does move us forward in the right direction. Ian Kennedy’s insight from the Stirr mixer last week was crucial in bringing me back to these important points, which I first made at a Net Tuesday event with Mena Trott what seems like a very long time ago. Also deserving a mention here is Giovanni Rodriguez who told me during our Social Media to Corporate Media workshop in October 2006 that he felt we should be talking about “socializing media” instead of Social Media. While our choice of language here is seemingly one of convenience for many, I feel it is indeed the most fitting and appropriate in light of the greater importance. As I have said elsewhere, in a few years, it will just be referenced as media and people will talk about the “early days of the Social Media era.”

The backbone of the New Media era (aka Web 1.0), while constrained by limited connectivity to the network, complicated software for tinkerers, expensive tools and simple Web pages, was conceptually centered around edge activities. Today, in the era of Social Media, the limitations on participation defined by those prior constraints are largely, but not completely, lifted, moving a greater number of those activities to the core of society. Because participation is more broadly available across society, it is the contexts in which we interact with others that is most crucial - within those contexts we communicate with each other and if through those communications, we reach agreement to trust one another, we can collaborate towards common goals. As I have stated many times, in the knowledge economy, the greatest barrier to value creation in the enterprise and between them, is the inability of smart people to get along with one another.

In September of 2006, I sought to answer the question “Why is Social Media important?” - it was a powerful question which is informative here in trying to answer the current question. In trying to define anything by what it is very specifically as some have tried to do, we restrict the possibilities for what else may be considered in that same light - in trying to define Social Media by what it is not as Robert Scoble did in comparing what is different today, we are being more expansive in allowing for new possibilities to emerge. In that this is an emergent term, I think it appropriate to more broadly define the term rather than trying to be restrictive, though many will disagree. In defining Social Media by what it is not, we make it easier for people to understand the concept by the comparison to other known things, but we also do not fully impress upon people the “greater significance” of why this is important. This is ok - really it is - for the 90% of society that may never fully participate in online communities or contribute to our greater social wisdom, they need not think of what they are doing in the same way we, the early adopters are - they only need gain the benefit and enjoyment from within their specific contextual frame of reference. Does grandma need to understand the broader impact of social media, or does she merely care about the fact that she can read about what is going on in your life and stay connected to her grandchildren?

As the Cluetrain Manifesto rightly pointed out, “Markets are Conversations”. Social Media and the tools we use to create, consume and connect with each other are making those markets, and those conversations, more visible, and as a result, laying bare in plain sight those people and organizations we can trust, and those we can not. It is why I still think David Brin’s Transparent Society is such an important read. It is why many of the ‘folks like me’ are so optimistic about the potential for Social Media to empower ideas like The Noble Pursuit and more broadly create economic opportunities while delivering on the original promise of information technology to provide true market efficiencies.

So let’s see how well we can communicate and collaborate here within this context - the definition above has been posted to the Social Media Club Wiki for you to edit and refine. Love it or hate it, I want to see how you can make it better. If we do well with it, I suggest we ask our friend Jimmy Wales to consider the resulting definition to replace the current entry in Wikipedia. If you want to propose your own separate definition, or write more about this separately of the wiki page, please use the tag whatissocialmedia so we can all follow along. Either way, as the very wise Howard Rheingold says, “What it is –> is up to you.”

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SMC is the Media Partner for the Social Software Summit

Chris and I are proud that Social Media Club is the “Knowledge Partner” or “Media Partner” (different brochures say different things) for Technology IQ/IQPC’s “Social Software Summit” April 30-May 2 in San Francisco.

We’re pleased to offer members of Social Media Club 20% off the price, by using code “IUS_15072” when you check out.

Here’s some of their copy about the event:

The World Wide Web + 1, Web 2.0, is now deeply rooted in the fabric of our online society.

Are people tagging your website all over the terrain of the web? Does your company have a blog… do your employees? Do you understand the power of wikis or of RSS feeds?

Now, more than ever, it is crucial that the leaders in social media, the purveyors of collaborative social software, and users of these technologies, are talking to each other. This new ecosystem of services has proved incredibly fruitful and lucrative for Fortune 500 companies across industries. Hear how you too can start reaping the benefits of this improved version of the World Wide Web.

More info at their site.

Chris and I will be doing a session on day 1 about:

The Communications Strategy for a Social Media World
• Discover why knowledge marketing is your not-so secret weapon in a
successful communications strategy
• Create genuine engagement that builds relationship capital and
brand value
• Learn why embracing a holistic communications strategy will improve
your products and your bottom line

AND

we’ll be doing a Pre-Conference session called “Mastering Social Media Concepts and Practices.”

We hope to see you there.

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