The Coming Change in Social Media Business Applications

by Brian Solis

As a follow up to my post, “Extra Extra, Read All About It! Newspapers Respond to the Social Web,” new research emerges that documents the looming exit of print newspapers as a primary source of national and international news.

According to the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, a new survey indicates that 40% of respondents claim the Internet as their primary source for national and international news, versus 24% in 2007. In comparison, 35%, up 1% from 2007, rely on newspapers and 70% count on television as their main source for news, down from 74% in 2007.

Perhaps the harbinger of things to come is embodied in the response from Americans under 30. A staggering 59% indicated that they get most of their news from the Internet, up from 34% in 2007. In the group, television tied with the Internet at 59%, but for broadcast TV, it’s a steep decline from 68% in 2007. As Dan Farber of CNET points out, these figures add up to more 100 percent because people have the ability to offer multiple answers.

Clearly, printed newspapers as well as television are under tremendous pressure to reinvent themselves in the social economy. It’s not just about the socialized mechanisms and channels to source and broadcast news however, a successful metamorphosis requires the creation of an active and enlivened community supported by a profitable business model.

As I’ve stated previously, through social networks, blogs, and micro communities, consumers have access to information literally as it happens. Their peers become sources for news and information, reinforced by social frequency and reverberation. Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, and other networks ARE emerging as trusted and oft referenced newsfeeds. And, they’re fueled by immediacy, brevity, and connectedness.

You can download the study as a PDF here.

UPDATE: TechCrunch reports that content sites brace for 50% revenue loss

Traditional managers often lack the skills required to understand if an intranet is successful or not.

I was once talking to a manager about how the intranet could save staff time and make things easier, when he shook his head dismissively. “It’s not the job of management to make life easier for staff,” he told me. “And the only time I’m interested in is firing time. If you say you can save me one man year, I want to know which man I can fire. Otherwise, I’m not interested.”

Some time later, I was telling another manager that if we made a particular task easier we could save 5 minutes every time that task was completed, and that many thousands of staff members needed to complete that task every month. He shrugged. “5 minutes saved? They could be out smoking a cigarette.”

Indeed they could be. But it is management’s job to manage time effectively. Properly managed, those 5 minutes could help make another sale or help a customer solve a problem. But because of a poorly designed intranet this time was being lost every time a staff member needed to complete this task.

Organizations are simply not structured to allow for time management when that time runs across the organization. Managers manage within the framework of departments or units. They also tend to be obsessed with head count rather than efficiency.

Let’s say that Organization A has 30,000 employees. Let’s say each employee does a particular task on average 50 times a year. Let’s say it takes 10 minutes longer than it should because it’s badly managed. This is costing the organization 15 million minutes a year in lost productivity. That’s 250,000 hours. Or 33,333 days. Or 150 person years. It’s significant.

By improving this task you can save the entire organization 150 person years; but that doesn’t necessarily mean firing anybody. What it does mean is making the entire workforce more efficient, more productive.

Most managers will not be very impressed. They want to know which 150 people they can fire. Otherwise it’s not real savings, not real efficiency. But you can’t fire everybody. Surely it is still logical and practical to make sure that those employees who are still left with the organization can do their jobs more efficiently. Shouldn’t management also have a role there?

The origin of management, in the late Nineteenth Century, was about making the tasks factory workers carried out on a day-to-day basis more efficient. However, when management pioneer Frederick Taylor said that he could make the job of shovelling coal faster and easier, he was initially met with skepticism.

The intranet is the factory of the information worker. And it’s not in a very good state at the moment. No organization would allow its physical factories to be managed with the level of messiness, carelessness, confusion, waste content, and general untidiness that occurs daily on most intranets.

There is a much better way; focus on time and efficiency.

Gerry McGovern
mailto:gerry@gerrymcgovern.com

There is probably no worse strategy for an intranet or public website than content migration. It is doomed to failure from the very start.

Joe the manager picks up a jug. Inside that jug is milk that is curdled, sour and foul smelling. As Joe shakes the jug the solids and water separate and slosh about and the smell rises further, choking the air. Joe has a problem.

How is Joe going to solve this problem? Here is the traditional web management solution. Joe decides he needs a new jug. Joe gets a team together to decide what sort of jug is needed. They specify a really cool, all-dancing, all-singing, high-tech portal jug and they go out and spend a lot of money on it.

Then what happens? Another team is assembled to take the old jug and migrate its contents into the new portal jug. Once all the putrefied milk has been drained into the new portal jug there’s high-fives and lattes all-round. Job well done, Joe! Project complete.

If you’ve been involved in the Web for a while then the above story will be all-too-familiar to you. It is nothing less than shocking how little attention and genuine strategic focus most managers give to their websites. Even in 2008, I’m still coming across stone-age strategies that revolve around buying cool new technology.

From a management perspective, content has little or no value. It does not even deserve to be managed. Whether it is good or bad is irrelevant. Just shovel it onto the website. If it was written for print, so what? Just shovel it onto the website. The old website didn’t work? Buy new technology and hire a fancy graphics agency. The content? Just migrate/shovel it over from the old website.

You get the website you deserve. Quality content is at the heart of all great websites. This sounds like a self-evident, no-brainer statement. However, as we approach 2009, it still needs repeating.

Taking your old intranet content and migrating it into a new software system is doomed to failure. If your website isn’t working then ask this question: why isn’t the website working? Is it because of the technology? Is it because of the graphics and the layout? Or is it because of the content? Nine-times-out-of-ten it will be the content.

Content migration—and its first cousin, website “redesign”—are all about pouring sour old milk into new portal jugs. At some stage, we have to address the core web management challenges. Why do we have such bad content?
1. We allow the organization to publish puff, fluff and vanity, instead of focusing on the needs of our customers/staff.
2. We don’t hire web content professionals. Instead we find the most junior person in the department and give them the job of managing the website.
3. We don’t see the Web as a unique medium—we just take print content and print thinking and shovel it onto the Web.
4. We don’t review and quality control. We have practically no processes to take old content off our website.

by Bryan Murley, November 19, 2008

With the swift pace of change in the media landscape, it’s easy to overlook how far college news media has come in a short time. There has been some great innovation in college media, even as some lag behind.

I was prompted to reflect on this last month, after reading Going Digital, an Inside Higher Ed article by Brian Farkas, editor of the Vassar Miscellany News.

Farkas writes:

With our new Web site, http://miscellanynews.com/, we have now entered into the next generation of online journalism. And, for better or worse, we have become one of the few colleges in the country to do so. On our new site, reporters can contribute live blogs, attach videos and other multimedia to their articles, and display high-resolution photography in a way that our print publication never could. Best of all, The Miscellany’s site is flexible, no longer burdened with the stagnant design so common among news sites in the 1990s. We have become one of only a handful of college newspapers in the country, along with The Yale Daily News and The Swarthmore Phoenix, to adopt a Web 2.0 approach and craft our site using up-to-date CSS and XML standards.

Farkas’ description is overly pessimistic. Despite his negative outlook, college newspapers across the country are still moving forward with online content. Their innovations have been visible over the past few years — especially when you consider how difficult it is for them to change.

Resistance to Change

When I first began blogging about online college media three years ago, most websites were little more than shovelware, with print editors and some advisers reluctant to invest time and energy in developing a robust web presence.

Some of that resistance was based in tradition: It’s hard to steer a 100-year-old institution in a new direction. Production workflows had developed and been set like clockwork. Each new generation of editors and reporters walked in the footsteps of the previous generation, and learned their ways. The website was appended to the end of the workflow, after pages were sent to the press. Blowing up that workflow is not easy.

Still more resistance was cultural. Print journalists saw themselves as newspaper journalists first. The battles over whether blogging could be journalism were still being fought. Copy editor Greg Finley of the Orion at California State-Chico argued in 2006 that newspapers should keep their content offline, saying “No other medium can match newspapers’ depth.”

And another hurdle was technological: Inexpensive, easy-to-use tools for online storytelling were just coming into widespread use, and broadband Internet access was not nearly as widespread as it is today.

That resistance has faded over time, especially as the news industry has struggled to reinvent itself.

But that doesn’t mean it’s been easy. Even now, I find community college newspapers that still have no web presence. Bob Bergland, a professor at Missouri Western State University, found that 36% of a random sample of college newspapers had no web presence at all. (Bergland’s findings are not yet available online, but I’ll update this post as soon as they are available.)

Large daily university papers struggle to make money from their websites, and campus readership of the printed product remains high compared to industry standards, which leads to a conundrum: whether to devote resources to a website when the print product is still so popular.

And online efforts ebb and flow with staff changes as student journalists graduate and new ones take their place. One year, a paper hires a whiz-bang web designer who beefs up their online offerings. The next year, that designer is gone, and a less-savvy replacement can’t keep up the pace. One year’s multimedia journalist gives way to the next year’s more traditional print journalist.

Blazing New Trails

Despite all these obstacles, many college newspapers have moved forward with innovative online offerings. Here are a few examples of sites that have paved the way in blogging, video, audio slideshows, and other forms of interactivity:

Xpress Flash-based map of campus

San Francisco State University Xpress — Former SFSU journalism professor Andrew DeVigal, now multimedia editor for the New York Times, helped lead the Xpress staff in producing a multimedia-rich web site using Movable Type blogging software. Flash-based maps and audio slideshows (like this package that illustrates favorite student hangouts at SFSU) began on the Xpress site in 2006.

Vanderbilt University InsideVandy — Chris Carroll, Vanderbilt student media adviser and co-founder of the Center for Innovation in College Media, led InsideVandy student journalists in an effort to create a “mothership” approach to student media, akin to Steve Yelvington’s BlufftonToday in 2006. The idea was to bring all student media — TV, radio, newspaper, and magazines — into one online presence that would allow anyone in the community to contribute content.

Virginia Tech Collegiate Times — The Collegiate Times became an example of both breaking news and multimedia usage in the aftermath of the April 16, 2007, massacre on campus. Student journalists posted breaking news updates, a blog, audio slideshows and video (see the CT archives here). More than that, other school newspapers also used online media to report on the shootings, posting video reports from their campuses and posting blog updates from Virginia (see continuing ICM coverage here).

University of Washington Daily — Just days before the VT shootings, UW’s student journalists covered the death of a student on campus, using video and live updates to tell the story (archived story here). The Daily began shooting video news on campus in the 2006-07 school year.

Spartan Daily slideshow for a boxing story

San Jose State University Spartan Daily — With Ryan Sholin as web editor, the Spartan Daily plunged into multimedia early. See this example, a 2006 story about SJSU boxing club members traveling to Berkeley to compete in a regional boxing tournament. In addition to text, the article features video and audio slideshows. The paper has continued to push the envelope, in March 2008 experimenting with live streaming TV and live blogging.

Boise State University Arbiter — The Arbiter dove headfirst into web-first publishing when the Broncos went to the Fiesta Bowl in 2006. Since the Arbiter wasn’t publishing during the Christmas break, they made the most of their online presence. Staffers from the student newspaper published web-only content from Arizona, including podcasts, video and audio slideshows (see their coverage here). They have continued to produce podcasts and other multimedia coverage since then.

Eastern Illinois University Daily Eastern News — Long before I was hired at Eastern, the DEN was producing audio slideshows using Soundslides that rivaled the best in the business. Check out this audio slideshow from the 2006 Greek Week Tugs competition. They were also early to experiment with podcasts and, in 2006, revamped their sports coverage by introducing a widget that could automatically update football scores and schedule information for readers.

This is just a small sampling of the ways that students have taken advantage of online tools since late 2005. There are numerous other schools that have also moved into multimedia and online publishing with gusto, including the Daily Tar Heel at UNC-Chapel Hill, the Daily Collegian at Penn State, the Daily Pennsylvanian at Penn, the GW Hatchet at George Washington U., the Miami Hurricane, the Independent Florida Alligator at the University of Florida, the Corsair at Pensacola Junior College, the Gargoyle at Flagler College, the Daily Mississippian at Ole Miss, and numerous others. For more examples of student journalists’ multimedia, see this database.

Recently, we saw clear evidence of this movement into online journalism on Tuesday, Nov. 4, 2008, when student journalists across the country used tools like Mogulus, Twitter and CoverItLive to cover the historic election night. (For a sampling of coverage, see here).

To borrow a phrase, “You’ve come a long way, baby.”

Bryan Murley is assistant professor of new and emerging media at Eastern Illinois University, where he advises DENnews.com, the online site for the student newspaper. He is also the director for innovation at the Center for Innovation in College Media, where he leads the weblog Innovation in College Media. He is the college media correspondent for MediaShift.

By Jacqui Cheng | Published: November 17, 2008 – 11:53AM CT

No matter how into gadgets and hardware we are, we’re all forced to face a cold truth every once in a while: our PCs and gadgets sometimes break. What’s important, however, is how often it happens and how easy (or difficult, as the case may be) it is for us to remedy the problem. According to survey results from the Pew Internet & American Life Project, Americans tend to have the most frequent problems when it comes to their Internet connections, home PCs, and cell phones, and often find themselves confused about how to fix them.

According to Pew, almost half of adults said they needed someone to help them set up or learn how to use their gadgets. Once they finally get them going, however, things aren’t all smooth sailing—44 percent of adults with home Internet connections reported service failure sometime in the last 12 months. Similarly, 39 percent of those with home PCs or laptops, 29 percent of cell phone users, and 26 percent of those with BlackBerrys, Palm Pilots, or other PDAs said their devices stopped working sometime in the last year. Apparently, the most resilient gadget included in Pew’s survey was the iPod/MP3 player—only 15 percent of those surveyed reported problems over the last year.

Interestingly, age seemed to be a factor in at least one of these technological failures. Although almost all age groups experienced problems with their Internet connections (roughly) equally, younger people appeared to experience cell phone failure of some kind much more frequently than their senior counterparts. According to the numbers, 30 percent of 18 to 29 year-olds and 33 percent of 30 to 49 year-olds had cell phone issues, while only 18 percent of those 65 and older had problems. Pew doesn’t say why, but we’re going to take a guess and say that younger folk are more likely to play around with their cell phone configurations and ultimately run into issues than seniors, who are more likely to just use what they have and not mess around with it too much.

Unsurprisingly, people aren’t very thrilled when this happens either. 40 percent of those surveyed reported feeling confused by the information they got when trying to fix their tech woes, while 48 percent felt discouraged by the amount of effort needed to fix the problem. Even more—59 percent—were impatient about the problem because they needed to use it for important things. Still, despite all these negative emotions, almost three-quarters of the group said that they felt confident that they were on the right track to solving the problem with the help of tech support, friends or family, online support, or just their own know-how.

The category that got the highest number of tech support calls was failed Internet connections, bringing to light the importance of competent and friendly customer service. According to a report from CFI Group in September, however, customer service from cable companies tends to leave customers fuming and “highly vulnerable to new competition.” Looks like it’s time to step it up, lest these companies lose business to someone who can do a better job at keeping those 44 percent of users with Internet connection problems happy.

The more you delete, the more you simplify. The more you simplify, the more you increase the chances of your customers succeeding on your website.

I recently worked with an organization that had managed to delete a substantial quantity of content from its website. It was not an easy process. In fact, it took years of effort to build up an internal consensus that actually deleting content was a good idea.

“You can’t delete that,” people would say, “because you never know when someone might need it.” Even content that had become out-of-date and was now actually misleading was defended. “I don’t have time to review or delete,” was another excuse.

Working with another organization I found a page that was old and contained content that was now clearly wrong and misleading. “You can’t delete that,” the web manager said to me tersely.
“Why not?” I replied.
“It will hurt our search engine optimization.”

It will what? This web manager—to call him a manager, I know, is stretching the meaning of the word—had become a search engine optimization fanatic. (There are quite a few out there.)

Blindly, he believed that the more pages he had, and the more content he had on each of these pages, the more likely he was to get found in search engines. (As if getting found was the Holy Grail of web management.) Bringing customers to a page with wrong content is like bringing customers into a car salesroom to show them your cars that won’t start and have scratches all over the paintwork.

Back to the website that deleted lots of its content. It was hard going. It took leadership. Compromises had to be made. Some content was not deleted but was changed so that it would not be found when customers used the search engine.

The results were more dramatic than anyone could have imagined. Customer satisfaction with the website had remained stubbornly low for several years despite many other initiatives. Well, when they deleted the content, customer satisfaction shot up. Why?

Most customers come to your website to complete top tasks. The more irrelevant and out of date pages of content you have, the greater the chances they will arrive on these pages. There is simply nothing worse than presenting a customer with useless content. It infuriates them, wastes their time, and drives them away from your website like a plague.

Every time I hear the word “redesign” I shiver a little. The website has grown more and more useless because of badly managed and out-of-date content. Management should have mandated the boring, politically difficult and thankless work of regularly removing poor quality content.

Instead, many web managers—particularly the newly appointed ones—want to do a redesign. This is much more fun. It involves hiring latte-drinking, cool-haircut web designers, who will eulogize the brand and dress up the first couple of levels of the website in shiny new graphics.

But the rot of out-of-date, badly organized content remains. The organization feels good because it has ‘done something’. But what has it done? It has engaged in the classic, ever-popular pastime of putting lipstick on a pig.

Gerry McGovern
mailto:gerry@gerrymcgovern.com

Facebook’s ties to Microsoft go back to 2006 when they first signed an advertising deal. A year later they took a $240 million investment, and the advertising relationship was extended this year.

Those ties may explain why Facebook was willing to ignore its own privacy policy in March 2008 and give Microsoft access to Facebook user emails. Despite shutting down Plaxo and Google products that tried to access Facebook users over privacy concerns, they were ok with sending and displaying emails to Microsoft to let users invite Facebook friends to Windows Live Messenger.

Facebook’s privacy policy says “We do not provide contact information to third party marketers without your permission. We share your information with third parties only in limited circumstances where we believe such sharing is 1) reasonably necessary to offer the service, 2) legally required or, 3) permitted by you.”

But Microsoft’s Invite2Messenger appears to violate that policy. Messenger users are asked to log in to Facebook, and then the names and email addresses of all that user’s Facebook friends are then sent to Microsoft and displayed in clear text on a page they control (Facebook itself only shows friend’s emails as images to prevent scraping). You check off which friends you want to invite to use Messenger, and then Microsoft sends each of them an email to install the client and become friends with you. Screenshots of the process (with emails removed) are below.

When Microsoft announced Invite2Messenger they said that LinkedIn, Bebo, Hi5 and Tagged would participate, but none of those partners ever went live. Just Facebook. Another oddity – on a UK MSN site, Microsoft even noted that Robert Scoble was banned for doing exactly what Microsoft is now doing with Facebook’s apparent blessing.

As far as I can tell, Facebook has never allowed this with any other partner. And as I wrote above, they’ve shut down both Plaxo and Google for similar actions.

Why does Microsoft want these social connections imported into Messenger? Does it have anything to do with Microsoft’s surprise launch yesterday of the new Live.com social network, which pre-populates friends based on Messenger connections? From people we’ve talked to, the launch came as a complete surprise to everyone, including Facebook.

For months Microsoft has urged users to effectively import their Facebook social graph into Messenger, with Facebook’s consent, even though it appears to clearly violate the Facebook Privacy Policy. Then Microsoft launches a surprise social network based on Messenger contacts.

There’s a lot more to this story as well. Why did Facebook allow this in the first place (in other words, what did they get out of it)? We’ll update soon.

Peter Kim is a Senior Partner at Dachis Corporation.  He blogs about social computing and marketing at Being Peter Kim.

Over the past couple of months, I’ve been curating a list of social media marketing examples.  The list started with 100 examples (including 35+ from Mashable) and has since tripled in size with the participation of over a hundred contributors with examples from companies around the world.

We could probably come up with 3,000 examples instead of 300 – but the current set already gives us a pretty good sample to think about.  One takeaway: for now, those neurotic about missing “what’s next” can relax a bit.  Consumers still use a broader set of social tools than corporations, but new categories of tools aren’t emerging rapidly today, giving brands a chance to catch up.  It’s time to master the last big thing while you have a chance to catch a breath.

As corporate adoption emerges, there’s nothing wrong with learning lessons from others and making them your own.  Start by making sure you have all of your bases covered with the major tools.  In other words, copy and paste the items below, then fill in the blanks with your own company-driven effort.

Here’s a framework of 22 tools to consider with notable brand examples:

1. Blogs (Johnson & Johnson, Delta Air Lines)
2. Bookmarking/Tagging (Adobe, Kodak)
3. Brand monitoring (Dell, MINI)
4. Content aggregation (Alltop, EMC)
5. Crowdsourcing/Voting (Oracle, Starbucks)
6. Discussion boards and forums (IBM, Mountain Dew)
7. Events and meetups (Molson, Pampers)
8. Mashups (Fidelity Investments, Nike)
9. Microblogging (method, Whole Foods)
10. Online video (Eukanuba, Home Depot)
11. Organization and staffing (Ford, Pepsi)
12. Outreach programs (Nokia, Yum Brands)
13. Photosharing (Rubbermaid, UK Government)
14. Podcasting (Ericsson, McDonalds)
15. Presentation sharing (CapGemini, Daimler AG)
16. Public Relations – social media releases (Avon, Intel)
17. Ratings and reviews (Loblaws, TurboTax)
18. Social networks: applications, fan pages, groups, and personalities (British Airways, Saturn)
19. Sponsorships (Coca-Cola, Whirlpool)
20. Virtual worlds (National Geographic, Toyota)
21. Widgets (Southwest Airlines, Target)
22. Wikis (Second Life, T-Mobile Sidekick)

And use this username check tool to see if your brands/preferred handles are still available.

I haven’t found a single company doing all of these today. Forget divining a big, meaningful business objective before getting started – you’ll end up in analysis paralysis. Just make sure you’re making an existing business function better and get started.  Today.