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How does social media impact society as a whole? Far more than some of us may imagine. When everyone's a publisher with the ability to scale globally, the world changes. It challenges the very nature of many institutions. What happens when a tsunami takes more than 240,000 lives and the people of Content Nation equipped with today's social media publishing tools respond more effectively than governments? What happens when you can invite anyone from around the world to the scene at your local coffee shop or pub? What happens when markets really ARE global conversations on Facebook or Twitter that anyone in the world can join? What happens when the world collaborates to create knowledge? What happens when the audience at a concert asks for more content from a performer by lighting up their own publishing machines instead of matches or lighters?

It means that Content Nation has arrived. A world of global publishers is challenging how modern society sees itself and organizes itself. Their abilities and their creations will shake the very foundation of human society - and how we will survive and thrive as humans.

Chapter 7: The New Society - Content Nation Redefines How People Live Their Lives

As you can probably tell by my low profile I am deep into book -cranking mode, but to tide you over here's a tidbit on a recent new development in Chapter 7, which covers social media's impact on society:

The folks at Microsoft , having done some research on the impact of altruism on the marketing value of a company's brand, decided recently to do a nice thing: they decided that for a limited time they would donate to charity a portion of the ad revenue every time someone used their Windows Live Messenger instant messaging product or their Windows Live Hotmail webmail service The basic concept: the more messages you send, the more Microsoft would give to charities. Microsoft called this product promotion the I'm Talkathon, an effort that seemed to be hitting all of the right buttons. Microsoft was honest about what they were trying to accomplish ultimately (promote their products and services), all you really had to do was to register at the event Web site to have your messages count towards the charitable goal. So far, so good - people like to do the right thing, and a fund-raiser was a concept more likely to generate use of the products than any sort of small rebate or other direct financial incentive would provide.

And then came Parker.

Parker appeared as the author of a weblog associated with the I'm talkathon campaign, saying in a note on the home page of the weblog, "I’m just a guy with a computer and good intentions. A couple of months ago, I found out about the i’m Initiative...I hope you join me. Thanks for checking out the Talkathon!" Parker's blog entries had links to his pages on major social media outlets, the ability to post comments, embedded videos - all the things that one would expect from an enthusiast's weblog.

There was just one problem. Parker was fake, an actor hired to play the role of a blogger along with "friends" who would appear in videos. A disclaimer at the very bottom of the weblog notes: "If you’re reading this, your BS detector is chirping like a smoke detector with a dicey 9-volt. As you’ve probably guessed, this blog is fictional, but the causes, and the i’m Initiative most certainly are not. The purpose of this blog is to raise awareness of the i’m Initiative and the worthy causes it helps. If we rubbed you the wrong way in the process that wasn’t our intention, so “sorry, our bad.” The alternate was something called an 'e-mail blast.' But, believe us that’s not nearly as exciting as it sounds." Funny in its own way, perhaps, and probably acceptable to many people used to staged "reality" television shows - but words that came no doubt from McCann Worldgroup, an advertising agency hired to develop and to promote the fund-raiser. The weblog was received for what it was - a promotion that was entertaining, but not real - but the weblog received few comments and its YouTube videos were viewed by a small handful of people. The link to Facebook and to other social media Web sites connected to dummy accounts; no person, real or otherwise, was there to respond.

Promoting charities is a good idea for marketers, but if your aim is to position your company's brands in the marketplace as being more sincere and in touch with your customers, why would you use a pretend spokesperson instead of a real person? If altruism in social media is about allowing yourself to become vulnerable enough to offer something to a community who will give back to you social rewards, why would you be afraid to put someone out in front of the public as a spokesperson who was real? Why use a medium that's all about genuine conversations to promote a cause based on genuine conversations by using social media to provide fake conversations? And most importantly, why go out of your way to pretend to be linked in to other social media networks and then allow people to see that these were fake presences?

People accept that companies are trying to use social media for their own marketing and people accept that actors can be entertaining, even in social media outlets. But it's probably a mistake to try to create something that's supposed to be promoting altruism with an actor pretending to be a person doing something for purely altruistic reasons. It may be an indication of how much some companies struggle to engage a public that has grown cynical from mass marketing in general, but it's also an indication of how hard it is for some people to accept that altruism is truly about getting benefits back from society as a whole where and when society as a whole is able to give them.

Content Nation Social Rule #12: It's possible to mix your own commercial goals with social goals through social media, but pretending to be sincere about social goals is not a good way to go about it.

P.S. - Late-breaking edit - If you'd like to see a good way to do altrusitic marketing without a Fake Parker to spoil the party, check out the WikiAnswers Answerthon , coming up July 26th-27th.

Google's new Lively virtual reality platform is now available, a stab at helping Google to find a place in the expanding world of virtual worlds. In its just-up form it's not surprisingly a work in progress - Windows-only compatablity, a thin inventory of virtual looks and gear and apparent problems with memory management and networking - but there's enough to see that this is a different kind of play from other simming environments.

Like the popular IMVU service Lively is not an entire alternate world with limited real estate and the ability to travel from one "place" to another geographically. Instead, Lively is a series of rooms or scenes that can be selected from a menu or a search and can be embedded into any Web page with a snippet of HTML code. This makes sense given the embedding strategy that Google is using via its OpenSocial initiative, making it easier to insert a particular room into a particular Web page and making it inviting to people already in your real-world social network. The Second Life concept of defining "scarce" prime locations was appealing only to those used to trying to create artificial scarcity. It's a far better strategy to adapt virtual reality to the unlimited social real estate of the Web, where any context could be the right context for a social experience with people who offer more trusted relationships. The OpenSocial connection will probably put membership in Google's Gtalk messaging service in a different light also, encouraging people to bring their real-world networks into both text and virtual reality communications.

Google's blog mentions the ability to use objects defined in your Lively space on your desktop also, providing a bridge from the virtual into the more personal world, but also made it a point to integrate its own YouTube videos and Picasa photos into a member-defined room to enable people to share in something more than just the usual chat-room banter. The animated avatar figures can also take actions based on typical chat room symbology - [hug] sets someone putting their arms around you, for example - and there seems to be a fair amount of physical exploration embedded into the platform. Still, judging by many curt reactions from some of the early adopters it's not a platform that's going to win over serious gamers and VR zealots.

And that may be OK - if Google can find its own brand of enthusiasts that are interested in how virtual reality can enhance real-world relationships more effectively. Platforms like IMVU and the emerging Twinity platform are popular because they help people to escape into a more ideal world, one in which the real-world barriers of physique, culture, social status and, yes, age are not barriers to social acceptance in the eyes of people needing that kind of security. Lively is likely to be a virtual world in which people can adopt alternative personas if they want to but will be more likely to use a slightly idealized real-world persona to share with other people. That may not appeal heavily to people who need the security of other-worldly worlds to meet and greet other people, but it's probably more likely to appeal to the 80-plus percent of people who are used to being themselves most days. It's hard enough for me to keep up with the real world and my social media networks and I suspect that most adults feel the same.

Google needs some stronger social media mojo beyond its current initiatives and a bridge to a younger generation used to online gaming, so Lively may be an innovative step forward to put their current social media initiatives in a more valuable light. However, if Lively gets the "lame" label early on it may take a while to get that enthusiasm going. Once its capabilites show up in embedded content it's more likely to be an attractive alternative than just text messaging or - gasp! - emails. In the meantime I did find it interesting that one of the Lively rooms was for Digg fans. Fodder for the acquisition rumor mill, but in the meantime a good example of how more Google capabilities need to be in the middle of global conversations that create valuable context for content. I go by my real-world name in Lively, don't diss my gear too much, it's the best I could do on short notice.

How do you write a book chapter on social media in politics? Carefully. Chapter 6 of Content Nation was a lot of fun to write, but it took a lot of weighing of different examples from around the world to come up with stories that were both compelling and politically balanced. But somehow I think that I've managed to pull it off. I mention no one's political party directly (only one indirect reference to parties at all), I talk about terrorism without using the word "terrorism," I talk about political freedom without using the word "freedom" - it's a big world out there, and my hope is that this book can reach as many people as possible around the world and to get them thinking about the power of social media to transform their work, their lives and their future. I think that you'll enjoy my full draft of this chapter. Give it a whirl.

In the U.S. it is Independence Day, the day on which we celebrate the founding of our nation on July 4th, 1776. It is ultimately a day in which we celebrate social media, for the document that declared the birth of the United States of America was not signed on that day, as has been celebrated in folklore: it was the day on which its final wording was agreed to by the delegates assembled in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, at what is today called Independence Hall, and printed for distribution later on that day. So, in the most true sense, Independence Day is a celebration of the publishing of the Declaration of Independence. It is in the creation of those words in a form that could be shared with citizens that the nation was truly born. This is a nation born of content.

As global citizens of Content Nation let us celebrate the social media pioneers who dared to think great thoughts that have in many ways inspired today's freedom of expression through social media. Enjoy your day, wherever you may be.

The Wall Street Journal has coverage of a new report from Forrester Research which claims that most corporate blogs are a dull failure. Lacking imagination, timeliness and engagement, Forrester notes that there are very few new corproate blogs starting up compared to just a year ago and that 53 percent of marketers believe that blogs have a marginal impact at best on their strategies.

I would agree that most corporate blogs tend to flop with a resounding "thud" when executives responsible for them discover that - 'gads! - it's a lot of work to maintain one. Many CEOs, especially those of companies that have publicly issued stock, are so used to the corporate lawyers poring through every sentence that emanates from the company that they fail to develop a style that's engaging and worth reading. Blogs are for people who have something to say to an audience - they're not PR machines in the manner in which a typical marketer would like them to be. They are an opportunity to enable people who can articulate their own view of the world well to make that view a corporate asset that starts conversations.

One example in the WSJ article of Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz' blog is a great one. Jonathan (or the person writing his blog) knows how to chat up a topic, add nice illustrations that spice it up and still manages to get across a point with a clear voice that's relevant to his company and his audience. As far as the other example in the WSJ article, though, I have to scratch my head over why "Greg the Architect," a "blog" developed for TIBCO, a major technology company, is a conversation starter. As you can see above it's a catchy looking site, to be sure - for someone. Maybe gamers or someone else who doesn't have a clue as to what a conversation is might stumble into this cartoonish world and find something worth thinking about. But as a blog, it's...not. It's a slick piece of online communications that doesn't really communicate a personal point of view at all. Maybe it drives site metrics, but I doubt that it drives corprorate value. It's a conversation piece that will build an audience, but not a conversation.

I agree that there should be a fun aspect to corporate content that engages people on a regular basis as a point to take a breather as much as a point to get informed, but corporations shouldn't be afraid to develop a thought leadership role through blogging. When your CEO or evangelist or whomever your blogging point person may be walks into a room at a conference or at a sales call you want that person's point of view to be known, to be respected and to be eagerly awaited as a presence. If corporations are failing at having people like this blogging for them, then I'd suggest that they're failing to attract people with skills that can provide invaluable marketing assets. There are only so many people who can do this, though, so if you can't hire them as employees at least hire someone who can "ghost-blog" for you in a style that fits your lead person's personality.

In this metrics-obsessed world there's also a little too much emphasis on comments as a barometer of blogging success. While comments can be valuable, it's far more important that the phone rings and a person-to-person conversation begins as the result of a blog post. In the book Content Nation I give an example of a CEO whose blog resulted in a sales breakthrough with a key prospect - because her blog make a point in an honest and thoughtful way that her prospect finally "got" through a key blog post.

Corporate blogging takes time, it takes a strategy and it takes a commitment to a form of communications that is far more than PR. It also takes more than just a blog to make a blog successful - it takes a core group of people who are committed readers and a willingness to engage the markets in other social media venues as well. The power of social media is about empowering your clients to engage you in conversations through your own company's ability to demonstrate that it knows how to have a conversation. You don't need cartoons and other gimmickery to tell people that you're ready to talk. Just start talking sincerely, engagingly and consistently - and the rest will start to happen.

An announcement came from the U.S. Library of Congress trumpeting the recent launch by the U.S. Copyright Office of a new online new online registration system named electronic Copyright Office (eCO), which the Office plans to release through a portal on its Web site on July 1. For a reduced fee of $35 a person seeking the official registration of copyright for their publications can do so via an all-electronic form. For those still wanting to file via paper, instead of six paper forms one will be able to use an online form to print out a single form imprinted with a digital barcode that can be sent to the Copyright Office - and pay the traditional $45 paper filing fee. Good news for the publishers who file more than 550,000 registered copyright claims annually.

Um...did I hear this right?

In the face of millions of Americans producing pages of valuable content every day via social media, the U.S. government has decided to lower the costs for the small club of publishers who wish to have a registered copyright for their legal claims to content - with a system that cannot possibly enable any significant number of additional publishers to exercise that claim cost-effectively. Good for publishers, to be sure, and I don't mean to disparage the hard-working people at the USCO who do their best to serve an existing industry. But as I read the U.S. Constitution, that's not what copyright is really about. It says that amongst other things our Congress was established:

To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries

Note that the Constitution says nowhere that Congress was to promote the securing for limited times the right for publishers to reproduce the works of authors. Of course that is the net effect of our nation's copyright laws, but it is important to note that the Constitution makes no mention of any technology or methods used to secure the rights of an author or inventor. It says simply that they ought to be secured by Congress for a limited time.

Now the pat answer from a legal perspective is that any original work of authorship created in the nation is covered by U.S. copyright law, regardless of whether it is a registered work or not. But registered copyrights give publishers more access to due process in courts to enforce their legal rights, both in the U.S. and abroad. How, then, in this age of digital publishing via social media, does this dual system "secure" the rights of U.S. authors using social media? The Constitution does not seem to recognize which technology used by an author entitles them to such security. Unfortunately, by its methods and by its pricing structure the USCO recognizes only one technology used by one group of publishers as the true barometer of what is worth securing.

With so much intellectual property being generated by creative and inventive people each and every day that can be seen by the world via the Web it's no surprise that the USCO avoids putting a toe too deeply into the waters of social media intellectual property rights. Given the resources at their disposal there is no effective way for them to address copyright for the masses. Yet a significant and increasing share of our nation's output from authors and inventors - an important part of our gross domestic product - goes unprotected by the government. There are many things to be said for open source and Creative Commons licensing of content, but none of these approaches has so far provided a truly elegant route towards the securing the rights of everyday authors for their original works. Good systems, yes, but not ones which lead to economic security for authors in electronic media wishing to have secured rights to their original works generated via personal publishing.

The net effect of this is that the open source/open access/Creative Commons movement will continue to gain momentum, while the USCO will protect a dwindling portion of our nation's intellectual assets. This is not necessarily bad for pubishing in general - there are many ways in which authors can benefit from their electronic publishing, most of them having little or anything to do with absolute rights to their intellectual property - but it does put the issue back in Congress' lap squarely to consider how to protect not just well-established media companies but the true sources of the intellectual product of our country.

The framers of the Constitution were extremely foresightful to include wording that recognized the creative output of a nation as one of its most important assets. If a nation is unable or unwilling to protect such an asset effectively, then its ability to compete among nations may be in question. Some countries will address copyright for 21st century publishing effectively: hopefully with the legacy of our Constitution our country will be amongst them. But with its focus on decaying methods for securing the value of an author's rights in the marketplace of ideas it's likely that copyright as a concept will remain in jeopardy - not because of failed "digital rights management" software or failed legislation protecting large electronic publishers but because the everyday citizens who are the source of much of today's creativity in publishiing using social media tools were not protected adequately.

If you've never been to a Twebinar - and my guess is that until this afternoon probably most haven't - a Twebinar is in essence an online "Webinar" using a Web video conferencing system such as WebEx or Adobe Acrobat Connect - but using the Twitter messaging platform to enable people to carry on message-based conversations before, during and after the webinar. Chris Brogan, Vice President of Strategy & Technology at CrossTech Media, is a major promoter of Twitter and pressed the outer edges of the envelope with the platforms available with support and PR courtesy of David Alston , VP of marketing for Twebinar co-sponsors Radian6. (Full size screen grab of above here (381.7 KB) ).

It was one of those experiences where you felt lucky to be there at the birth of something really neat but also one where you hope that the next time around is a little more sussed out. Chris and his support team realized soon on that the 500+ people signed up for the event would soon overwhelm their WebEx webinar infrastructure so in a wise last-minute move they switched the outgoing portion of the program to Adobe Acrobat Connect. Even on my high-speed connection the video got a little hiccupish now and again, but overall the part that should have been sussed out went pretty well. The main program was a pre-recorded video that played on in the main video window while Chris Brogan appeared in a side-window to break up the segments a bit and to give a little live feedback now and again.

Twitter remained up and tweeting for most all of the session - yes, things are improving, we hope - and was used to direct twebinar-specific messages to a Twitter account set up specifically for this session . To view the stream of tweets we were directed to a query on Summize, a search engine that looks at all Twitter messages in real-time and allows you to filter them via a search query by a Twitter account name and/or keywords. As new tweets come up that meet the filter's requirements, a small message appears at the top of the query page telling you how many new ones come up. Pretty handy - definitely a tool that I will use moving forward. This allowed one to see a good chunk of comments and then refresh to see more. With five hundred people tweeting all at once it was really hard to keep up with this stream - balky technology led to too many "wha happen" messages - but there were a few good nuggets in there. Best of all, one can go back and re-query on this account and catch up with messages later on. This is something that's generally harder to do with webinar software - once the session is gone you can't go back and, most importantly, if you want to keep the conversation going you're off to some other venue.

This is an important point for webinar providers to think about - there's a natural tendency to try to use "walled garden" technologies to produce them, but it's probably at least as important at times to enable enthusiasm on more open channels like Twitter to get event mojo building beforehand which can shift over to the live event as easily as a conversation that starts on a sidewalk and continues all the way to your seats in a theatre. With this in mind, a "must" would seem to be to have a Twitter and/or Summize-like plug-in as part of a Web video conferencing package, so that you can have everything happening in one window but still be able to continue and retrieve the Twitter messages shared on other platforms. As it was, some quick jiggering of side-by-side browser windows was needed to keep the webinar, the Summize stream of messages and my live Twitterfox window working more or less in harmony.

As for the content - yes, there was some content - Chris had assembled a lot of good video footage of conversations over the past few months with people who have been working with social media in a business setting. These were all quite good comments individually and very well edited to provide a cohesive whole, but as a Webinar experience even factoring out the distractions of new technology I found it very hard to focus on the conversations and get much new out of them. One member (geechee_girl) twittered "game changing getting a little over used" in noting that a lot of the video segments seemed to have the same meme applied too often. I was glad to get that many views in a small period of time but it was impossible to live-blog, much less take notes, with so many switches between speakers. My suggestion to the Twebinar team, which seemed to be received well, was to have bio info and links to more info off of the Webcast window next time they try this.

Many of the case studies were fairly familiar examples of how social media is helping businesses to succeed, but I think that the thing that impressed me most is how much businesses have awoken to social media in just the past year or so. I think that what I am covering in the book is spot on in terms of the fundamental shifts in both marketing and in culture taking place. One speaker - sorry not to provide attribution, I did have a hard time taking notes - mentioned watching a waiter listening to a television in a restaurant and shouting back at the television as an analogy to how people are no longer taking it for granted that electronic media is something that one absorbs passively any more. The marketing methods of the past fifty years and more are coming tumbling down, not only because of new technologies enabling new channels of communications but because those technologies enable markets to have their own conversations that will lead to fundamentally different patterns of commerce. We are moving from an era of one-way mass marketing messages to an era of massive and niche marketing conversations that may or may not result in the kinds of mass-market products and services that have produced value in society for many years. But if you've been reading the book you know that story, don't-cha?

My thanks to Chris Brogan and everyone else involved in this exercise for having the guts to use social media technologies that are right on the bleeding edge of the latest capabilities to show people in the raw the enormous potential of what will be fully formed soon enough. It's worth thinking about how you can have your own conversations that move from one venue to another with the general ease that was demonstrated in today's Twebinar.

Brad Stone from the NY Times chatted today with Alan Levy, CEO, BlogTalkRadio about a new round of funding ($4.6M) and plans for the future.

The article was interesting because it speaks to how companies (e.g. Sun, Intel) can go beyond the CEO/Corporate blog and use more interactive social media platforms like BlogTalkRadio to build communities and strengthen their brands online among other social networking/communication benefits. 

You can read the interview in its entirety here:  

BlogTalkRadio Chats About New Funding, New Plans: http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/06/25/blogtalkradio-chats-about-new-funding-and-new-plans/http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/06/25/blogtalkradio-chats-about-new-funding-and-new-plans/

(NOTE: Twitt(url)y provided me with more information about their ranking algorithms, which I have provided in this updated version.)

The concept behind the new Twitt(url)y service is quite simple and surprisingly effective: aggregate messages on Twitter that point to common Web addresses and rank them according to how many "tweets" they have received. The look and feel of Twitt(url)y is similar in its overall presentation to the social bookmarking service Digg, with all Twitter messages counted and multiple factors applied to determine the trust, authority, relevance and freshness of the URL for a given link, with some additional filtering on the Twitter members themselves. That's probably fine for now, given that Twitter still has a relatively small community and it's not good form on the service to be spamming your friends with every single link that looks interesting (though some do). But as volume on Twitter grows it might be nice to include more sophisticated measurements of Twitter member influence in the algorithms that rank Twitter messages.

The bigger point with Twitt(url)y is that through aggregation of messages on Twitter it's possible to build a map as to what is moving people to communicate on the messaging service. In some ways the question may be asked why someone would not just forward their tweets to Digg or another major social bookmarking service - and that may be one nice additional thing to manage through other available services. But as Twitter is now so large a phenomenon that Amazon's Jeff Bezos is investing in it - an annoucement that (wait for it...) yet again sent Twitter into max-capacity mode - one can expect volume on Twitter to grow quickly on Amazon's robust hosting infrastructure and to make Twitter into an ever more powerful real-time information service.

In days of yore real-time messaging for communities was the province of high-end securities traders. Now everyone's preferred jam selections for breakfast toast and world-shaking headlines are bearing down on the world with highly influential intensity. No small wonder that the New York Stock Exchange announced a new real-time securities quote system for consumer Web markets today: we're in a world that gets and expects real-time information all the time. Twitt(url)y might be just a passing fad in terms of its capabilities but in general the importance of aggregating instant messaging networks like Twitter has only just begun. First the world learned how to write a news story on blogs: now they're learning how to break headlines. And this is only the beginning, Content Nation.

There's a great article in Read/Write Web summing up some of the realizations in Silicon Valley these days that much of what happens with social media is rather empty in terms of its ultimate impact on society. Like someone who just scarfed down a whole box of Oreos, there's a sense of both fullness and emptiness amongst many who have committed themselves so passionately to social media. More to the point, a lot of private equity is looking at the social media marketplace and realizing that there are not going to be huge returns on their investments based on coming up with just one more slightly more clever technology. All the basic pieces are there. The real question now is what do we do with them?

To some degree this is the self-indulgence of a small set of people in a very affluent part of the world recognizing that at the end of the day they have done little with all of their potential power and wealth. People in the streets of Myanmar equipped with little more than mobile phones and the willingness to question their authoritarian government did more in a few weeks to show the power of social media than months worth of "click here to save the world" pleas on Facebook. We have the ability to assemble mobs of people in public places on a moment's notice who do little more than giggle at the thought of it all. When do those people start doing real things? In fact many people are doing real things using social media. The way we do business is changing, the way be buy and sell things is changing, the way we choose our leaders is changing, the way that we think about the world is changing. Many of the changes are small and localized. But they are changes nevertheless. And they will grow. The best of what social media can do to help change the world has just barely begun.

In the Content Nation book I will be touching on these themes in a chapter on The New Society. To some degree I'll be touching upon them also in the chapter on The New Politics, but the real point of the book is to help people recognize that social media has the potential to ignite changes in human society on a scale unseen for thousands of years. You will be a part of that change. What role will you play in it?

Feel free to add your thoughts on the next steps in society for Content Nation here. I've also opened up a public forum topic if you want to provide videos and other examples of where social media can really change the world. It's not just about ads and exit plans, folks. It's about the future that our children and our children's children will live in. What are your thoughts?\

Read more in: Bored With Web 2.0? Demand Change - ReadWriteWeb
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/bored_with_web_20_demand_chang.php