In 2009, Social Media Will Be So Over

Back in my callow youth, in 1996, I was reporting on an “online travel” technology conference for the Washington Post. It focused on the breathtaking development that the Internet would soon let people actually purchase airline tickets and hotel visits online, without a travel agent or even a phone call!

It was heady stuff during a period when Windows 95 was a bug-riddled juggernaut and connection speeds were measured in “baud.” Brains were abuzz.

But I vividly recall one of the panelists saying something like this:

No offense to the conference organizers, but in five years there will be no “online travel.” The Internet will be fully integrated into commercial transactions and the term “online travel business” won’t mean anything different from “travel business.”

I think of this often as it applies to social media. I think by the end of 2009 what we now call “social media” will start to become just “media.”

The capacity for people to interact and collaborate with each other online–using social networks, instant message platforms, content sharing sites, ratings and recommendations tools, self-publishing communities and so forth–is becoming so commonplace that the concept of “social media” as a distinct entity soon will have lost its meaning. It’ll just become part of what people mean when they say “media.”

We’re already getting close.

Just about every news site publishes blogs and allows reader comments. Surely the site visitors who use those features don’t think of themselves as using a special kind of media with its own name. Having a Facebook and/or LinkedIn page is simply what web users do. Checking out a ratings and recommendations site to pick a restaurant or hotel has lost any feeling of exotic play at the leading edge. Online dating is simply one ubiquitous method of looking for partners, not a dangerous foray into geekland.

Facebook claims 140 million active users, and adding over half a million per month. [Squishy numbers, but still.]

Twitter is now on TV, Facebook supports candidates, candidates have Twitter profiles and any cause or business that isn’t integrating some of this social media into their overall marketing/communications plans and internal processes is in danger of marginalization.

According to the authors of the seminal book Groundswell, in October 2008 only 25 percent of online users qualified as “inactives” [no engagement with social media] while the group considered “spectators” [who at least consume others' social media] was about 70 percent.

With the exception of Facebook, more complete and active engagement with the social media is still fairly low. But if the rate of adoption continues in 2009 as it did in 2008–especially if the government begins to carry out 2.0bama’s plans for digital civic participation–one year from today the use of these “social media” will be largely integrated into a majority of folks’ lives.

In which case we may find that–to bastardize media near-futurist Jay Rosen’s manifesto on “the people formerly known as The Audience“–we may begin to think about “the media formerly known as ’social’.”

My Wrongest Post of 2008: A Transparent Disaster

I take pride in not only admitting mistakes, but making them. In fact, I carry this old [paper!] news clipping in my wallet:

“If you’re not failing enough, you’re not trying hard enough,” said Richard Holden, product manager for Google’s Adwords service. . .”The stigma [for failure] is less [at Google] because we staff projects leanly and encourage them to just move, move, move. If it doesn’t work, move on.”

And so I’m here to call direct attention to my most dead-from-the-neck-up incorrect, thoroughly wrong-headed post of 2008: “Election08: A Transparent Disaster.”

In it I argued that, due to the proliferation of social media tools that allow people to create and publish videos, pictures and brief text reports of goings-on at the polls on election day, the election would collapse under the weight of all that citizen reportage. It would tie up results in some places for weeks, I argued.

I forecast this with the nuanced prose style I have been honing my entire life. Wrote I:

I predict a paralyzing info hell as a rickety, distributed, incoherent, often incompetent, long-invisible voting system is exposed to the harsh light of Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, FaceBook, iReports, youReports, themReports, cell photos, almost-real-time blog postings and whatever self-interested data-motes are broadcast by, um, legit journalists on the national networks on TV and online.

I predict legal intervention, litigation and a long postponement of official results.

As anyone who has not been sequestered in a warehouse full of Minnesota ballots for the past two months knows, none of the above came to pass. Not even close.

The two biggest efforts, in fact, suggest that the proliferation of those tools made the election more efficient, not less.

Problems were captured and reported on by CNN. But in many cases it appears the problems were reported in local election officials who actually may have responded to correct, control or at least explain the problems.

Ditto a big effort called Twitter Vote Report, an initiative sponsored by a bunch of large (though mostly progressive) organizations.

In no case could I find an example of the reports being used to dispute  results. I remain surprised. After so many reports of voter intimidation and official incompetence in 2000 in Florida, I couldn’t imagine how those alleged events would not have been captured in real time and the data used to litigate close elections.

Even the recount of the extremely close Senate election between comedians Norm Coleman and Al Franken has been handled with such admirable transparency that no question of election day mischief has come into play.

So: Mea culpa. Mea freakin’ culpa. I was wrong.

I would vouch that I’ll be careful not to repeat that kind of transparent blogging disaster in 2009. But that itself would be another blatant mistake.

After all, if I don’t fail enough, that would mean I’m not trying hard enough.

New Use for Twitter: End-of-Year Family Update Letters

I think I’ve blundered into a novel and possibly world-changing use for Twitter: 140-character versions of those Holiday Family Update letters/e-mails.

Like fruitcakes and 6 a.m. door-buster sales, the letters are a holiday tradition that persists despite wide public disapproval. Certainly the sender’s intentions are good. But I got one in the mail earlier today and found myself thinking geez, it’s long and dull but I guess I’ve got to read all three pages.

And as much as I love the family that sent it. . .I know this sounds really Grinchy, but. . .I really don’t care about most of that stuff.

And then I thought: Twitter!

Here’s my end-of-year family update:

craigstoltz Cal@UMd/Jordan17+gf!/PamBeautiful,BusyPsychPractice/ParrotKokoVocab50+words/MeBizGood,Twtr2much/Obama!TnkGod/08blessed,09??!?!/Luck&Love4All

Fact is, that’s pretty much my family’s year. The details are pretty boring, even to me.

A few minutes after I updated, my friend from the Health 2.0 world Alan Greene updated:

DrGreene GarrettCheekyMonkey+Rachel/Kev@Case+Lauren/SrClaireApps+Michael/AustinVoiceChanged/All4delight/amazingCheryl1stNatlTV/meWritingNewBook/Peace

So Kevin’s at Case Western Reserve University, Austin’s voice changed, Alan’s wife Cheryl has landed a national TV gig, and Alan’s writing a new book. Okay, I don’t quite follow some of the other stuff, but I know I’ll ask Alan about Garrett and CheekyMonkey next time I see him.

Of course, there are environmental benefits to year-end family Tweets, and cost savings from paper and stamps. Probably social benefits too, since you can reach more people than you might send the standard update to. And–who knows? Call me a dreamer–the ellipical nature of the message could actually trigger phone calls or real-live conversations around the holidays. Besides, if someone gets your update and doesn’t care, what harm is done?

Okay, I admit this doesn’t rise to Albert Schweitzer levels in the contribution-to-humanity category. But if even one person is spared reading one end-of-year family letter that embarrasses him on behalf of the sender, I’ll feel damn proud.

Anyway, I invite you all to go out and Tweet your year-end messages to your followers. Copy them below as comments if you like, so we can see how you do them. I’m sure there are syntax “best practices” we can share.

Oh, and we need a hashtag. Anybody?

Just the Facts: Washington Post, NY Times at the Tipping Point

To start the week, let’s look at a set of six facts from the top of the American journalism food chain that on the surface may seem merely ironic or even typical. But aggregated in the cerebral cortex and shaken lightly, they are enough to make even a veteran journalism industry critic take a knee:

1. Washington Post chairman Don Graham has joined the board of Facebook

2. The New York Times had to take a $250 million home equity loan on its new Manhattan HQ building to pay the light bill, putting back in circulation the unsettling speculation that Google could/should/might acquire the New York Times.

3. Today paidcontent.org features an interview with newly appointed New York Times GM Denise Warren in which she discusses, among other things, Times Extra, a feature that for the first time automatically integrates journalism from outside sources alongside Times articles.

4. The interview appears on washingtonpost.com, which has a content-sharing partnership with  paidcontent.org.

5. The New York Times on Saturday published a significant news story previewing a unpublished draft of 514-page government report presenting a harsh assessment of the failed rebuilding effort in Iraq. It’s the kind of journalism that only well-funded major news-gathering organizations can do, the sort of personnel- and money-intensive public interest work that makes mainstream journalism worth fighting for.

6. The Times article was supported by ProPublica, an independent, non-profit investigative reporting operation funded largely by a $10 million annual grant Sandler Foundation.

Government, the Public Interest and You.0

Today I was lucky enough to appear at a Washington forum on government, non-profits and social media.

The event was hosted by Clickability and Kick Apps, two companies that work mostly in the private sector but who, like so many in the tech world, are eyeing Washington as a center of social media innovation. [Or at least technology contracts.]

As one federal agency CIO said over lunch, “It’s Obama. Everybody knows he’s into this, and we’ve got to get up to speed.”

As usual, I learned more from listening to the others than the audience did by listening to me. Here are seven nuggets I picked up:

1. The government is innovating with social technologies more than I realized. I heard about internal knowledge sharing at the State Department, a CDC effort to collect on-the-ground intel from first responders and the DOD’s Pentagon Channel. And the EPA’s blogging program. Here’s a wiki that planks out what various federal agencies are up to with social media.

2. In prepping for the conference, I learned about The Twittering Diplomat. Colleen Graffy, Deputy Assistant Secretary for Public Diplomacy at U.S. State Department, is Tweeting away as she tours eastern Europe on a diplomatic mission. Yes, it opens Twitizens’ eyes to what a diplomat really does. What led her to do it? I have no clue. As I am writing this, she has Tweeted this:

flight departing for Armenia now–land 4:50AM

Of course, the Twitter profile could be a front, a persona created to head-fake the Iranians or something like that. I’d be delighted if this turned out to the first case of Twitter Espionage.

3. Michael Chin of Kick Apps, in his introduction, used a phrase I hadn’t heard on the 2.0 conference circuit: “multilogue”–as opposed to “monologue” or “dialogue.” I like that. I may steal it.

4. Fellow panelist and IBM marketing VP Sandy Carter described her company’s participation in an effort before the Beijing Olympics to get Chinese citizens to take cell phone images of broken stuff out on the street as a way to report problems to the government in time to spruce things up for the international media. She’s author of a new book titled The New Language of Marketing 2.0, full of case histories about this stuff.

5. Mario Armstrong, a digital guy who appears on his own web radio show Digital Spin Radio and occasionally on NPR as a technology expert, talked about a program he works on designed to get more U.S. students to graduate with engineering degrees. The program targets young kids.

Key insight: The adults designed a great-looking social media portal they thought was wonderful. The kids rejected it. Instead of retreating to the safety of a focus group, they just paid a bunch of the kids to plan the site. Armstrong showed a photo of the kids actually doing the card-sorting thing.

6. Alan Wolk, an advertising/PR strategist, talked about how the sort of persistent, minor contacts people have in social networks creates an effect like a “Seurat painting“–little points of color that, when taken together, suggest the full picture without providing every detail. I may steal that too.

7. The Voice of America, that hoary World-War-2-era government-funded broadcast service, launched a highly widgetized, user-generated-content-laden, make-a-profile-to-participate, join-our-discussion social network about the U.S. presidential election. They launched this in just two weeks.

Twittering diplomats. Two-week social media platform launches. Agency CIOs who know they have to get up to speed on social media. Head-spinning stuff.

Drinks were served afterward.

Who Would Subscribe to a Bankrupt Newspaper?

The automakers assert that bankruptcy isn’t an option for their companies, arguing that purchasing a car is different from buying, say, a ticket from a bankrupt airline. A car is a long-term investment of a lot of money, not a smaller one-time purchase you’ll use once in the near future. Car buyers need to know the makers and dealers will be around for service, recalls, annoying mailers inviting you to trade in prematurely during a Summer Tent Sale Blowout, etc.

Which brings me to the news that the Tribune Co., publisher of the Chicago Tribune, has may //edit 6:30 p.m.//declared bankruptcy. Curiously, it raises the same question: Would you subscribe to a bankrupt newspaper? I think not.

After all, subscribing to a newspaper is a long-term commitment too. Seven-day home delivery will set you back $156 per year. For that kind of dough I expect the company will still be around to deliver the goods.

I need to know that not only that the newspaper itself will arrive at the base of my juniper bush by 6 a.m. I expect the plastic wrapper bag, which I use every day to scoop my spaniel’s poop. I expect other subscriber services too: the annual calendar bundled with a solicitation for a holiday tip for the faceless delivery person, etc.

And don’t forget membership in Subscriber Advantage, a valuable rewards program available only to subscribers.

This program provides among many other features full access to 365 days of Tribune archives, exclusive invitations to VIP events, a monthly exclusive e-mail introducing me to a Tribune reporter, and all sorts of discounts. For example, Subscriber Advantage members get 20 percent off opening-night tickets to Chitty Chitty Bang Bang at the Chicago Theatre. If I subscribe, man, I expect the goods.

So no, I don’t think I’m going to subscribe to the Tribune. It’s just too big a long-term investment with too much uncertainty attached.

I could subscribe to the Chicago Sun-Times instead. While it’s a stabler business–which is to say it’s not been driven to the precipice of bankruptcy by a swaggering ignoramus who purchased the paper with debt I can’t believe anyone was stupid enough to give him. But then, no newspaper is really all that stable a business these days. A subscription is just too much of a commitment.

So I think I’ll just read the news on the Tribune’s website.

The content’s free, and I have a sense that it’s going to be around a lot longer than the printed newspaper.

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