UGC and The Law

Published by moderation company Tempero, this guide helps site owners get to grips with how their social media ventures might fall foul of the law and how to avoid that happening. Relying on former audience members to generate your site’s content for free sounds like a jolly good wheeze, but the consequences of using non-contracted employees as your writers might be a spell in the slammer if you aren’t careful. And it doesn’t matter how big you are or where your company’s headquarters are located, as Google discovered recently. The most common problem is copyright violation, of course, but defamation, discrimination, incitement to bad things, privacy violations, aiding and abetting and obscenity are all perfectly possible. Most of the time common sense should be a good guide: if it is illegal offline, then it’s illegal online too; if someone asks you to take something down and gives a good reason, then you should take action or seek advice; a site owner can not rely upon the defence of being a ‘mere conduit’. Nonetheless, pretty-much anyone will discover things here that will open their eyes and lead to a spot more caution.

At 48-pages, this is quite a comprehensive overview. However, like a lot of ‘free’ legal advice, the guide tells you just enough to persuade you that you probably need a lawyer. ;-)

The Definitive Guide to B2B Social Media

The second guide comes from US marketing firm Marketo and gives a good overview of how B2B companies can use social media. These media are still somewhat under-exploited in the B2B space with the likes of Twitter and Facebook often viewed as wholly consumer-facing vehicles. The guide has a workbook format with exercises to do and model examples to help show best practise. It encompasses quick guides to particular networks, but the main meat of the book is designing strategies to help guide what content to create, how to measure it and how one might justify the necessary investment. Also 48-pages long. (Hat-tip to my friends at Velocity for their design and sub-editing work).

Only poor MySpace has a greater proportion of slackers, while Facebook seems like a hive of communal activity in comparison, with a whopping half of the users there accounting for nearly all the time spent on the site. (sarcasm not intended, but may be enjoyed nonetheless).

[Nielsen invokes the ‘Pareto Principle’: the 80:20 ‘rule’ that’s so frequently mentioned nowadays. That 80% of the content/wealth/product/whatever is produced by 20% of the populace. Except, of course, it isn’t a rule. And if it was, it doesn't apply here. On Twitter, it would actually be a 79:7 rule, which is totally different. And Facebook would have similar figure, which it doesn’t. And there wouldn’t have been a theatre group called 7:84, since 7% of Scotland’s population own 84% of the wealth.

In actual fact, the scientific term for this distribution is a coincidence.]

Moving on, the Times Technology Blog reports today on some research published at the end of January by RJMetrics. Surveying 50,000 users, the report found that most members of Twitter simply do not tweet. Here, around 80% of users have published fewer than ten updates since opening their account.

The issue is not, as you might have imagined, abandoned older accounts, but rather new users who simply never get started. Over the last six months, the likelihood of a new member tweeting in their second month on the site has declined to just 17%. The next graph shows your likelihood of tweeting this month against the date that you joined:

The network – from some perspectives – is also becoming less social, according to this research: “the average Twitter user has 27 followers, down from 42 followers in August 2009”. The new users aren’t tweeting and aren’t connecting either (the two help to explain each other, of course). Around 80% of Twitter members have fewer than eleven followers, with the mega-stars inflating the average figure very considerably.

You might take this as a sign of Twitter’s figures being over-inflated, or of it being a fad of which people have already grown tired. The Times blog sees the figures as evidence that the site is vastly over-hyped and will soon disappear from the headlines, backing this up with its own ‘original’ reporting:

In an unscientific survey of my friends and business contacts here in San Francisco, the home of Twitter, I found that no one not using Twitter felt they were out of the loop. Only those who needed to get a message out there, usually for company reasons, were using it.

Even those in Tech PR are finding it nowhere near as useful as it once was. One told me: “We launched a social media platform for our client but after a few days, once the the spammers had cottoned on to us, it was pretty much a waste of time.”

I’d suggest that there are at least a couple of reasons why newer users aren’t following or tweeting as much as older users, and neither of them are that Twitter is a fad or a failure. First, if you join Twitter now, it’s all rather odd and intimidating. Every other user is seemingly more popular and interesting than you are. There are no instructions about what to do – why would anyone be interested in what I’m doing right now? Even I’m not interested in that. Then a bunch of marketing bots will start following you. The people you know who are already on Twitter are following too many people already and, as nice as you are, don’t want more on their list. 

Second, and more importantly, there’s more than one Twitter. Here are four:

• there’s the one where geeks swap links and chat;
• there’s the one where people make thinly veiled boasts about their professional success;
• there’s the one where marketers and publishers spurt content blips at people;
• there’s the one where you read celebrities’ micro-blogs.

And there’s plenty of other use cases as well, and many people will probably fall into more than one category. In each case, the criteria for the site delivering a useful experience to its members is slightly different. If I joined Twitter because I am a devoted fan of Lindsay Lohan, then it’s more than likely that I am following one person, am followed by nobody and am saying nothing. It’s quite possible that I don’t even open my own account, preferring to bookmark Linday’s page like my other websites. I’m not a bad user or behind the curve: I’m using the site my way to achieve my aims. Twitter is represented in the press as a celebrity micro-blog site. There is a book about it. No, wait, there’s two. If the site is represented as an online companion to Hello magazine and reality TV shows, it shouldn’t really surprise anyone that a lot of people join in order to consume celebrity lifestyle information.

I think that this is why the usage figures are so different for Twitter and Facebook. Facebook tells you what to do on the site and then gives you multiple ways to do it. Twitter is a blank canvas in comparison: the way you use can be totally different to the way everyone else uses it. To many people, that’s an invitation to their creativity or to their egos; to others it’s an invitation to spend their time on a more obviously useful site.

It also shows us how meaningless averages and per-user figures are in social media. It makes absolutely no sense whatsoever to lump the Lohan fan in with the geek early adopters. It is a different site with different purposes.

The smallest group of people using social networks is the 18-24 age group, which rather confounds the idea that these sites are for young people. Across the board, only 9% of 18-24 year-olds are social network users, according to the research. Even on bebo, the ‘youthiest’, of the networks in the group, the mean age is 28. On facebook, which was originally conceived for college students, the average age is 38.

I have to throw in three cautions here:

1. It’s not clear what counts as being a ‘user’ of a social network. Having an account? More than 5 hours a month? More than 10? If the answer is ‘having an account’, then the mean age will naturally slip to the right as people try things out and then abandon them. Parents might well be expected to create accounts to see what it’s all about or to spy on their children.
2. More than half of teenagers lie about their age online, according to this story [http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/teens-lying-about-age-looks-and-lifes-online/story-0-1225746449526] and some qualitative research by danah boyd.
3. The 18-24 age band is [d’uh] only 6 years, as opposed to at least 9 years for the other age groups in the study. So there are 33% fewer people in the band – of course they’re going to represent lower numbers on social networks.

Notwithstanding, I don’t think this is enough to explain away the figures. Let’s face it: most social networks are more popular with older people than the young.

More surprises about what young people do and don’t do comes via the Guardian this morning. The following graph shows the percentage of people who have paid, or are willing to pay, for media products, by age:

Across every media type, teenagers claim that they are more willing to pay or have paid than people in their forties.

If you combine the two pieces of research together, you discover that most social networks appeal to a demographic that is significantly less likely to pay for anything than teenagers. More headaches for Mr Zuckerberg.

Dramatic Hamster: 19mn views for the version that went viral; maybe 40mn from the spin-off versions. But why?

There are four parts to the solution (the one to the question about how things become viral and influence spreads; I have no idea about the hamster):

• the nature of the spreader or influencer(s);
• the nature of the audience;
• the nature of the network or media through which the information is moving;
• and the nature of the information/content itself.

So how do you get stuff spread on the Internet?

1) Through very influential people

Some people are more influential than others, it seems. If I tell you to buy a Blackberry rather than an iPhone, I’m not – on the face of things -  likely to achieve as much of a result as if Brian Lam (the editor of Gizmodo) said it. Why? Because he’s more of an influencer on this subject than I am. He has a rather larger audience. He runs a site that is acknowledged as an authority for this sort of information. And because he’s being reviewing mobiles and other gadgets for some time. If you were a marketer working for RIM, you’d probably be inclined to take Brian out for a nice lunch and send him some Blackberries.

You might call this the ‘old-fashioned’ model of PR and marketing. You want a story about your product/services/company in a big publication – so you take the editors out to lunch, give them access to information not available elsewhere, such as an interview with the CEO and send them free stuff.

This old model has been somewhat reinvigorated in recent years with the realisation that the most influential people might not be working for the FT or even Gizmodo, but might work for what seem smaller publications or websites that are read by or otherwise reach all the other editors. These ideas stem from those published by Katz and Lagerfeld in Personal Influence (1955). Malcolm Gladwell’s influential 2002 book The Tipping Point revived this, suggesting the existence of thought-leaders (Mavens and Salesmen in his parlance) who – if they recommended something – will lead to that item spreading like wildfire – the spread of hush-puppy shoes in 90’s New York is his most-cited example. It didn’t come from fashion columns or fashion magazines. It came, Gladwell says, from a small number of eminent dudes (to use the scientific term) sporting this footwear brand.

That’s when things get tricky. Finding these ‘quiet influencers’ is difficult since you (as a marketer) haven’t got access to other people’s reading lists. Where do the editors of the FT and Gizmodo go to for their information? Where do they find their stories, outside of their Inbox? Where do other people go for their footwear and mobile phone advice? On the Web, you might look at the blogrolls most people publish on their websites – if you find the people that lots of others read or cite, then they are most probably very influential, whatever their apparent profile or position. (Tim Hoang wrote some interesting stuff about this at the start of the year).

Even greater access comes through Twitter, where following/follower lists are visible to any user of the service. I went to a seminar last week about online influence where Andrew Walker from digital agency Thin Martian described some work they did around the UK release of the film Anvil last year. They wanted to find out who the most influential rock-music twitterers were. But rather than looking to the likes of Coldplay (2.5mn followers) or Lily Allen (2mn), they traced back from the people who talk and write about rock, publishing blogs and zines. It emerges that the most influential rock-twitterer is shock-jock Howard Stern, with a mere 67,000 followers. Why? Because the people who talk, write and otherwise publish about rock all follow him. (Mat Morrison has done some analysis of the UK social media twittersphere that you may find interesting).

2) By finding influence-able audiences

That last finding, about the extent of Howard Stern’s influence, despite relatively modest audience figures points towards the second part of the ‘finding influence’ equation – finding audiences that are willing to be influenced. Stern’s read by people who are looking for stuff about rock music to publish on their own sites and publications. They’ll be receptive to all sorts of tidbits that wouldn’t necessarily be seen as interesting by other audiences. Back to the Blackberry example, if gadget-review magazine Stuff (ABC circ. 95,000 pcm) publishes a 10/10 review of the latest model, then that could well be more influential than Lily Allen giving it the thumbs-up, despite 20-times the reach. Give people the recommendation in the context they want it and it will carry. Otherwise, it probably won’t.

Research into influence and virality suggest that finding these audiences is far more important when it comes to spreading information than the apparent influence quotient of the person passing it on. Yahoo chief researcher Duncan Watts has poured scorn on The Tipping Point’s idea of key influencers:

“It just doesn’t work,” Watts says, when I meet him at his gray cubicle at Yahoo Research in midtown Manhattan, which is unadorned except for a whiteboard crammed with equations. “A rare bunch of cool people just don’t have that power. And when you test the way marketers say the world works, it falls apart. There’s no there there.”

Academic research into modelling the spread of ideas through the simulation of epidemics has supported Watts’ beliefs. Instead, Watts’ approach is far more akin to traditional – albeit well-targeted – advertising. Get the thing out there to lots of people who may be receptive. Watts recreated the famous Milgram experiment (not the one about following orders, the one about six degrees) and found that, yes, anyone is separated from anyone else by six-degrees-of-separation or fewer (just three for the population of the US). But furthermore, there weren’t key links in the chain – the alleged especially-connected people or gatekeepers. Accidents and apparently unrelated environmental variables were just as important to the spread. See Watts’ 2007 paper Viral Marketing in the Real World for more on this. These ideas should give marketers heart, though: even if you can’t get the editor of the FT to look at your company/thing, getting a few bloggers on the case may well result in the same amount of real-world influence.

And that brings us on to the next part of the equation…

3) By using media and networks that spread quickly

This helps to explain the importance of websites like Twitter, YouTube and digg when it comes to spreading the news. People go there for distraction. These sites are all about finding cool, new stuff you can either re-publish or pass on. An article that reaches the front page of digg can expect to receive 100X its normal level of readership, not because it represents world-class journalism, nor because it comes from a terribly influential site, nor even because the person proposing it is especially influential (though there are cartels of diggers and influential diggers – something the site has fought to curtail since its establishment). Rather, because it caught people’s attention as something worth passing on – I’ll go into the reasons later.

Marketers certainly can and do attempt to get hold of some of this. Ask bloggers to write about your stuff. Make short-form videos instead of microsites. Write and give away handy guides and white papers. Submit your stuff to all the social bookmarking sites. Get people to join their Facebook groups.

This can work spectacularly well. But, as most agencies and clients have found to their cost, it’s rather hit and miss. Tens of thousands of videos, groups and bookmarks are created every day. People can only take notice of a limited amount of cool, new stuff each day. Your stuff is likely to be missed. This is particularly invidious when working under the constraints of a time-limited campaign or project – items on the web can and do accrete considerable value over months and years, but that’s not much use if you’re being judged on figures to be delivered in six weeks’ time.

One important lesson here. You can’t do any of this stuff in isolation. Making a great video is all very well, but you also need to give it velocity through straight PR and marketing; social media strategy and positioning.

It’s so annoying that most efforts fail that you might be sorely tempted to cheat – get your entire staff, your client’s staff, their friends and relations, plus a load of made-up accounts to vote for your stuff in the hope of it either (a) being noticed by a larger audience because of your apparent popularity or (b) that this pseudo-popularity is enough to assuage your client. There are downsides to this, though, because people will notice. Then you will look inept, your client’s brand will suffer and it’s bye-bye social media budget.

So, as well as all the above, you’ll want to make sure that your stuff is both good and spreadable.

4) Creating stuff that’s good and spreadable

The ‘spreadable’ part is the easiest to deal with and has already been mentioned above. Make sure that people can email it in some way. Attach social bookmarking links to your items. Put it into contexts, like YouTube and delicious that encourage sharing and spreading. Instead of regular press releases, use the SMNR model to make them blogger (and journalist) friendly. Make artefacts remixable to help generate spin-off variants.

That’s all quite common sense and mechanical. Good is where the difficult part lies.

There’s already plenty of advice on creating linkbait – make something that’s either useful, surprising or controversial. (‘Linkbait’ is web content that people are likely to link to, share or otherwise transmit elsewhere). Unfortunately, everyone on the Web has already read those articles and we’re swimming with ‘Top Ten Ways to/Resources for X’, ‘Why Y will be the Z Killer’, zippy flash games and mind-blowing visualisations. There’s an SEO arms race afoot and while there is a lot of success to be had with these formats, there are thousands of people going after the same top slots.

To be more positive. A recent academic paper – Social Transmission and Viral Culture by Jonah Berger and Katherine Milkman – analysed the virality of 7500 items from the New York Times, monitoring the most-emailed list from the site. They focused on the psychological characteristics of the items, rather than their actual content, which provides some useful prompts. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, awesome is good: “content’s ability to inspire awe is strongly associated with its virality”. But awesome doesn’t mean – here – some sort of Bill and Ted mind-blowing. In a more classical sense, it means something bigger and wider:

One emotion we focus on in particular is awe. Stimuli that open the mind to vast and often unconsidered possibilities can inspire awe, a unique human emotion that expands a reader’s frame of reference (Keltner and Haidt 2003). Awe is the emotion of self-transcendence, a feeling of admiration and elevation in the face of something greater than the self (Haidt 2006). It occurs when two conditions are met (Keltner and Haidt 2003). First, people experience something vast: either physically vast such as the grand canyon, conceptually vast such as a grand theory or finding, or socially vast such as fame or power. Second, the vast experience cannot be accommodated by existing mental structures. Intellectual epiphanies, natural wonders, and great works of art can all make people feel a sense of awe (Shiota, Keltner, and Mossman 2007). Similarly, news stories about a treatment that may cure AIDS or a hockey goalie who continues to play even with brain cancer may both inspire some level of awe.

The other values tested, all of which indicated likely virality, though to a lesser extent, were:

• practical usefulness (e.g. how to get a cheaper mortgage)
• surprisingness (e.g. dog drives owner to hospital)
• positive stories vs. negative stories (e.g. X is great vs. Y is terrible: positive stories get greater word-of-mouth, which you may find surprising)
• emotional content (e.g. anger against X; tragedy of Y)

Awe-inspiring ought to be the goal, then. Hmm you’re thinking that’s all very well. But my client makes sprockets for Acme. Where does that leave me? In all honesty, it probably means that you aren’t going to achieve virality for a story without considerable imagination. A great example would be liquidiser manufacturer Blendtec who converted drab kitchenware into a runaway viral success with its Will it Blend videocast. The Best Job in the World campaign by Nitro converted a run-of-the-mill ‘Come to Queensland’ message into an awe-inspiring adventure to attain an idyllic lifestyle. Diet Coke and Mentos turned two totally familiar supermarket staples into boy’s-own science fun combined with Bellagio spectacular. Yes, that sounds bloody hard to emulate, but that’s the nature of this territory. Sorry.

To sum up

Four ingredients to spreadiness. None of them are totally foolproof, but each reinforces all of the others, so it only makes sense to work on all four. In essence, it’s not very different to a traditional media plan.

• Involve influencers (if you still believe in that tack); but don’t mistake volume for influence.
• Work out where your audiences are (who and where are the people who want to talk about this stuff?) and go after them with the best & most sources you can reach.
• Do blogger outreach (but don’t be a dick); social media sites; making it spreadable; etc. Get broad exposure as well as targeted. It can produce the same results, if not better.
• Take a long time to think up the ideas. Be really imaginative and make it awesome.

picture credits: jiparis and wikipedia

As you will be equally unsurprised to learn, Facebook remains the front runner, with 206mn unique visitors in December – 67% of all social media users.

While the rate of growth is impressive, there’s another side to these figures which is rather less so. Five-and-a-half hours over a month? Pathetic! People in the US spend four hours a day watching television.

Of course the figures are slightly meaningless, except as a comparison to the same measure over the previous period. The figure of 5h30 is arrived at by dividing all the time spent online by the number of people using social sites during that time. In truth, there’s probably a very stark differentiation between people who spend hardly any time at all on social sites and those who are never off them.  Nonetheless, a bit of a reminder that social networks have quite some way to go before they rival more traditional media for consumption rates (although – interestingly – their reach is pretty similar).

Another interesting chart shows the differences in time spent across different countries. Australians appear to be the most socially active, with the Japanese bringing up the rear. Presumably interactions using mobile devices weren’t measured? We in the UK come third – another Bronze for the plucky Brits. I’d love to speculate further, but wouldn’t be able to resist national stereotypes.

picture credit: Avlxyz

There is a fever of anticipation over the imminent release of a tablet-style computer from Apple – let’s call it the iSlate [Thursday Update - actually, let's call it the iPad - I stand by everything else in the post, though].

Nobody outside the company knows very much about how it works or its specifications, but the consensus of opinion is that it’s basically a big iPhone. Let’s imagine that’s the case, and I’ll write an apology on Thursday if this turns out to be very wrong.

It’s not just Apple that thinks that 2010 will be the year when Tablets finally come of age. Models from HP and Nokia were just two of the slew unveiled at CES a couple of weeks ago.

Now, I know that Apple UX design expertise means that their device will be poles apart from the Tablet PCs launched by these competitors or Microsoft hardware partners in the noughties, but it won’t be entirely different. The latter part of that is interesting to me, because I spent quite a lot of time with those devices, reviewing them for trade and consumer press titles. What I discovered is that they’re good at some things and less so at others.

Good for:

• Reading things – but not very long things – they still had LCD screens, so still created eye fatigue. Fine for a magazine article or a blog post, though.
• Filling in forms – the devices proved popular with people like service engineers, medical doctors and financial services salespeople.
• Drawing things – it’s easier to draw freehand using something like a pen, rather than something like a mouse or a touchpad.

Not so good for:

• Typing more than a few words – some had convertible designs whereby you could unfold a keyboard, but that made them bulkier.
• Surviving in your bag – the screen needs covering so needs a sturdy secondary case, which means it takes longer to get out and at work than a conventional laptop.

In a story today that looks not totally dissimilar from industrial espionage, a research firm called Flurry has apparently tracked the application usage coming out of Apple’s headquarters to reveal some suggestions of the use cases the company is anticipating:

The mix of apps is made up mostly of media and entertainment titles, as opposed to productivity or entertainment programs — underscoring that the tablet is aimed at consumers. [my emphasis]

“In particular, there was a strong trend toward news, books and other kinds of daily media consumption, including streaming music and radio,” stated the report. Coupled with recent reports that Apple is in talks with book and newspaper publishers, the apps suggest the tablet will compete with Amazon’s Kindle e-reading device.

Across the “tablet” apps Flurry identified, it also found a strong emphasis on social networking, photo sharing and other types of social interaction.

I hope you can see where this is going: iSlate and social media in a world where all right-thinking people are toting an iSlate. Web 2.0 is all about people creating online content: wikipedia, blogs, flickr, twitter, whatever. Slate computing devices are good for consuming content – I think it’s safe to say that a modern slate will also do video quite well. And anything that’s similar to a big iPhone will have some sort of GPS capability and the capacity for Location Based Services (LBS). They’re good for creating certain kinds of content – especially pictures, but not really for creating text content. I can imagine that up-to-140-characters will be fine, but your hand will get tired after that point.

So – in a slate-enabled future of social media expect…

More: microblogging, drawings, tagging, one-click sharing, LBS, pro media by the microchunk (iNews).

Fewer: blogs, wikipedians, lengthy comments.

This is bad in some ways, of course. Social media is already criticised for its superficiality. I cannot imagine that being able to write less will improve this image problem. On the other hand, blogging and wikipeding are already far too onerous for most people, so you could say this was simply being responsive to what people mainly want to do. Perhaps more worrying is the idea that there will be less authorship in this world and more spreading and curating. Perhaps fancifully, I like to think that the ability for anyone to self-publish is an empowering thing. I wouldn’t like to think that my ability to do so would be impeded by my choice of computer hardware.

One things I will be very interested in is the camera capabilities of the device. I cannot, for the life of me, imagine people taking a photo using a tablet, no matter who designed it, but am prepared to be corrected.

Picture: iPed Multitouch Slate by Myiube

The diagram was changed to add in users of Twitter and other ‘status-update’ applications, most notably Facebook. Author Josh Bernoff notes that this group has a different demographic make-up to others:

Conversationalists intrigue me. They’re 56% female, more than any other group in the ladder. While they’re among the youngest of the groups, 70% are still 30 and up.

He also explains that people don’t just belong in one category. That’s why the percentages don’t add up to 100 – people take on a variety of roles at different times – the rungs are behaviours rather than groups. I’d argue that all of us are Spectators at least some of the time – people who continually contribute tend to be a bit annnoying, to say the least.

It’s clearly appropriate that Tweeters be included, and understandable that they weren’t perceived as a meaningful description two-and-a-half years ago when the chart was first published. But why are they placed higher than Joiners, Collectors and Critics? It surely doesn’t take any more commitment or engagement to publish an update than it does to join the site in the first place?

I guess the problem is that Twitterers are a broad church. Some people are using it as a microblog or lifestream; some use it to share or republish cool links; some just offer a daily ‘I’m doing this today’; some have conversations.

This was a problem with the ladder analogy in the first place: it’s a little too coarse. Owning a blog doesn’t necessarily mean you’re more ‘engaged’ or ‘participatory’ than someone who doesn’t.

picture credit: Anne Oedolfhirsch

My estwhile colleague, the excellent David Gauntlett, has posted a new video about the work towards his next book Making is Connecting:

The video argues that certain forms of digital/social media practise offer the hope of personal and communal redemption. When we publish stuff or make things online or get together with others in a common cause online to do practical things, then the value of that activity goes beyond the intrinsic value of whatever artefact is produced: we’re connecting with other people and increasing our social capital. We’re making ourselves happier as a consequence and establishing or reinforcing communities that might do social good. Becoming a member of wikipedia or getting together with others to do some guerilla gardening are new opportunities that help us get over the cultural, spiritual and social slump that constituted C20th mass media. That era is characterised as one of consumption rather than creation, the renewed promise of the C21st through the magic of digital.

I love all this and a big part of me would like to leave this post here. But then I’d have to rename this blog twopointhappyclappy. This is terribly unfair, I know, given that Gauntlett’s book is only half-finished. but meh.

My main issue is that I’m tempted to say ‘so what?’

So what if some people become more happy, productive, social as a consequence of this? That’s all lovely but there’s no challenge to power in any of this. There’s no real change to the world. The mandarins at Whitehall aren’t going to be shaking in their boots. I imagine the scene:

Bernard (rushes in breathless): Sir Humphrey!?

Sir Humphrey (for it is he): Yes, Bernard (arches a brow)

Bernard: It’s the internet people, sir. They’re making things!

Sir Hunphrey: What’s this? Barricades across the Mall? Million man marches into Parliament Square?

Bernard: No, sir. It’s something different.. It’s…

Sir Humphrey (exasperated): Spit it out, Bernard.

Bernard: They’re making community gardens on disused land and infographics about motorway jams.

Sir Humphrey (sighs): Oh, Bernard. Why on earth do you think we spent all that money on data.gov.uk?

Getting people involved in creative community and personal projects is clearly a good thing. I have no argument with that. I agree that this change will probably make things better. And happier. But I want more better. An intelligent networked commons has the opportunity to make government, parliament, business and international affairs work differently: to be more accountable, changeable and responsive; to empower people to do as much as they can, and find other people so they can do more; possibly wreak radical change to the whole system*. I feel a little short-changed by Gauntlett’s account, in short. I think our expectations can and ought to be higher.

picture credit: Kelly Sue

*(I remain vague on this – sorry)

The idea is that fans can collaborate with the band in their latest music video. You use your webcam to imitate a pose taken by a band member (e.g. arms out wide or sticking out your tongue). Then upload your snap to the site and it is then integrated – every hour, on the hour – into the video. It creates a phenomenal blurring effect as dozens of user photos follow every move of the band, in synchronisation.

More than 8500 people have already taken part. Not enormous numbers perhaps, by some people’s standards. But hey, it’s for a Dutch indie band I’ve never heard of.

To me, it illustrates a few great ideas about doing social media well:

• Don’t make your users do all the work. Send us your videos and we might turn it into an advert sounds so phony and exploitative nowadays.
• Reward your people instantly – or as close to that as you can.
• Make it something that makes your relationship closer. Something that’s really sharing, not paying lip service.
• Make it joyous if you possibly can. I don’t own a webcam, but I’m tempted to get one after seeing this!

photo credit: Michale

via Jez Kay

Late December and early January see the seasonal appearance of a popular type of blog post: ‘My Predictions for [Next Year]’. They’re a great stock-in-trade because you can say whatever you like and nobody can prove you wrong until the end of the following year, by which time everyone’s forgotten. I’ve written a couple in the past, but refrained this year, leaving the task to wiser heads than mine.

Heads such as those at analyst firm Gartner, which has just produced its own variation on the theme:  Key Predictions for IT Organizations and Users in 2010 and Beyond. Since they get paid thousands of pounds by businesses to be correct about the future, Gartner doesn’t offer many 12-month predictions, with several stretching to the six-year level – even high-paying subscribers won’t remember by 2015. ;-)

Anyway, the bold bits are from the press release. The regular text is my attempt at a quip or reaction.

By 2012, 20 percent of businesses will own no IT assets.

Quite a lot of businesses own very few IT assets right now. The phone is still the key communications tool for plenty of bricks-and-mortar firms. But what Gartner is talking about is the Cloud, of course, or – more prosaically – leasing arrangements. I’m not entirely sure I buy this. I can see that there will be fewer server rooms, more leasing and more thin devices, but no IT assets is quite a stretch. As I understand it, most leased IT at present is basically the big printers that have come to replace photocopiers, which were always leased anyway.

By 2012, Facebook will become the hub for social network integration and Web socialization.

A safer bet here, I think – with 350mn subscribers already, Facebook could already make this claim to some extent. But Gartner is bolder than this looks – it means all web socialisation. That other social networks and websites will have to offer Facebook integration to survive. This goes against the common wisdom that the incumbent dominant social network will eventually go the way of Friendster, Six Degrees and Friends Reunited as fresher networks attract the restless young.

Nonetheless, I’m relatively happy with the suggestion that Facebook will remain a dominant force. I see more and more websites with Facebook Connect installed. I even installed a module allowing users to log into this site to make comments using their Facebook account. Albeit an open-standards model that will work with other OpenID providers.

It will be interesting to see how this pans out internationally, though. While Facebook dominates in English-speaking countries, there’s considerably more flux and variety elsewhere. Maybe Gartner meant “in the US”, though the text doesn’t say that.

Internet marketing will be regulated by 2015, controlling more than $250 billion in Internet marketing spending worldwide.

Woah. That’s a big push – but remember they’ve got six years for it to happen or for us all to forget. There are a couple of problems with Internet marketing regulation: (1) it already is regulated. Companies have to operate to the same standards they do in offline dealings. (2) But it’s regulated by local laws.Suing a dodgy dealer in Timbuktu in a UK court is all very well, but you still won’t get that herbal vi-gr- you ordered. (3) Increasing local regulation tends to be unpopular because it puts local businesses at a disadvantage compared to those in Timbuktu.

By 2014, over 3 billion of the world’s adult population will be able to transact electronically via mobile or Internet technology.

I can buy this. If anything, I think it will happen quicker. There are already 4bn mobile phones in use. The next iPhone is tipped to incorporate near-field communications. People change their phones at least every 18 months – so now everyone’s got at least a cameraphone with bluetooth. Chip-readers should surely become standard within two generations.

By 2015, context will be as influential to mobile consumer services and relationships as search engines are to the Web.

Pretty vague, but context here means the use of location, time, the accelerometer, near-field communications etc. So if I am walking into Tesco at six-o’clock, the phone loads an appropriate shopping portal that I can wave at the things I want to buy and reminds me to get washing powder, that sort of thing. And why not? Tesco has already got this sort of thing for desktops and dedicated appliances. If my mobile is four-generations better, then I don’t see why I shouldn’t have it there.

By 2013, mobile phones will overtake PCs as the most common Web access device worldwide.

As I’ve mentioned above, there are already 4bn mobile phones in circulation, versus about 1.5bn PCs. If those phones are two generations better, then they can probably do an OK job of rendering the web, maybe through micro-projectors and gesture recognition.

I’ll finish, though, with this video of mobile guru Tomi Ahonen about the next 4bn mobile users. One key point he makes is that the next 4bn are probably in developing nations and that they’ll still be using SMS and WAP for some time to come (he’s not very sanguine about the mobile web, full stop) – thus the biggest revenue opportunities for businesses aren’t the mobile web at all, but in far more down-to-earth, but universally usable applications.

photo credit: Panoramas