with this, which arrived in my spam box today:

I wonder if it’s always true that a new area attracts charlatans? I suspect so. There have been plenty of medical charlatans in recent years. You look back at the history of science and there’s all sort of whackos.

In the case of social media, though, I think we’re all aware that there are an especially large number of hucksters out there. Why?

• It’s easily faked. Put some ‘read-write’, ‘paradigm change’ and ‘transparency’ into your presentation and everyone’s game.
• Multiple Personality Cash Order. Create a load of fake accounts and your client will be delighted that so many people are commenting on their blog post about goat collars, or something.
• Preying on the fearful. There’s still an idea, among some execs, that the web is very new and very scary. Show someone a negative review on a blog and they shit their pants.
• The basics are *so* easy. Whacking up a twi/fac/mysp/4sq/etc account is a piece of piss. So is blogging. I am living proof.
• People fall for these crappy formats = easy again: You wouldn’t stand for a ‘top five reasons why’ post in your favourite newspaper, so why are these silly lists continually at the top of social media tracking charts? I think it’s because we all want easy rather than hard, even though hard might be better for us.

Doing these things well is an entirely different matter, of course. Despite reading about social media and practising it in some ways every day for five years, and as a social web user for 20 years, I’m learning new things every day. And I’m still rubbish.

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 Predictive Web | Brian Solis
  Social Media becomes less about a move-and-react strategy and sets the stage for engendering meaningful interactions as well as building more tuned business infrastructures to support anticipated activity based on the intelligence and insight extracted from online behavior.
  (tags: predictions predictive intentions socialweb,)
• Why Twitter Will Endure — NYTimes.com
  Twitter is looking more and more like plumbing, and plumbing is eternal.
  (tags: twitter socialmedia communication technology media)
• A New School Teaches Students Through Videogames | Popular Science
  This could be the future of American education, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. The Quest to Learn school opened last September in Manhattan, welcoming the first class of sixth-graders who will learn almost entirely through videogame-inspired activities, an educational strategy geared to keep kids engaged and prepare them for high-tech careers.
  (tags: education games learning gaming videogames)
• Web 2 Icons
  (tags: icons, socialweb, socialnetworking)

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

Via Stuart Bruce, I found this funny clip in which social media marketing guru David Meerman Scott lambasts client-side marketing managers for continually asking about the ROI of social media projects.

His point is that marketers don’t know the ROI of traditional forms of advertising like billboards and 30-second TV slots, so why is it such a stumbling block when it comes to social? It’s nonsense, he says. Often, the objection is really that people don’t like doing new things.

Bruce rightly points out that social media people have been guilty of muddying the waters by equating ROI with an increase in page views, twitter followers and whatnot. While those things might be the objectives of a particular campaign, they’re not the same as return on investment. ROI is just about money:

In finance, rate of return (ROR), also known as return on investment (ROI), rate of profit or sometimes just return, is the ratio of money gained or lost (whether realized or unrealized) on an investment relative to the amount of money invested. The amount of money gained or lost may be referred to as interest, profit/loss, gain/loss, or net income/loss. The money invested may be referred to as the asset, capital, principal, or the cost basis of the investment. ROI is usually expressed as a percentage rather than a fraction. (wikipedia)

I’m sympathetic to these arguments. The objectives of social media campaigns can be as broad as increased awareness, employee retention, customer satisfaction and R&D. They are rarely just about flogging more stuff. It’s not like some coupon campaign where you can add up the number of coupons redeemed to see how much it was worth.

But there’s a problem. And that problem’s name is The Grumpy FD. Because he turns round and says:

Hang on, sunbeam. If you can’t calculate a monetary value for all these social shenanigans, then why am I going to sign-off your invoices? Furthermore, I note that you’re charging me £150 an hour. So you have already put a value on these activities, not to mention all the other costs you’re incurring in terms of my staff’s time. Where is my £300 an hour that I should get from employing you?

If you stick to your guns and insist that ‘it’s all about the love, man’, then the conversation could end quite briskly.

I’m not terribly experienced in these things, but there are certainly better solutions.

I think you need to unpick what you’re doing a little more carefully. Everything you’re doing has to result in increased profitability, otherwise the Grumpy FD isn’t going to pay your invoices. The difficulty is in obtaining the proof and putting a precise value on it.

Ultimately, a lot of the time, the information that you’d need to calculate the Rate of Return is too difficult to obtain — or won’t be available within a sensible time period. I think the main thing to do is to get the GFD to agree to some conservative estimates.

Let’s say you agree with a client to look into a new project. You’re planning to set up an online, but private, staff ideas forum, with the aims of improving the firm’s service offering. Something like Dell Ideastorm but internal (you can buy solutions off the shelf for this).

To work out how much that’s worth, you’re going to need to guesstimate some things:

• How much time people will spend on the forum and the value of that time.
• Likelihood of anyone having a good idea over an agreed period of time.
• Likelihood of that idea being workable.
• Value of that improvement to your service.
• How much you’re going to charge for implementation and training.
• Potential reduced R&D costs.

The added benefit of improved staff morale, recruitment and retention probably exists and has value, but I think it should be left out of your sums. It’s a gift, rather than the objective the GFD is paying for. Also, although the product ought to have lasting value, stick to an agreed time frame for measurement. A set period is part of the definition of what constitutes a project. If things get sticky, you might remind the GFD, however, that his ROI is going to recur long after you’ve disappeared on your micro-scooter.

My point is that every investment in anything is an educated guess. You don’t know whether the price of gold will boom or bust, but before you invest, you’re going to do some research and some sums and arrive at a probability of each of those two outcomes. If your chances look good, then, depending on your level of risk aversion, you’ll take a punt.

What people won’t do — least of all the GFD — is invest in ‘this thing’ you’ve just found on the Internet that may or may not be successful and you haven’t got any more information to inform a decision.

photo credit: Iscan

The FT reports that The Economist plans to make headroads into social networks:

The Economist newspaper plans to acquire 500,000 fans on Facebook and 750,000 followers on Twitter within six months, in another sign that traditional publishers are looking to social media as a substantial source of web traffic and new readers.

via FT.com / UK — Economist eyes social network cash boost.

It may come as a surprise to some that the magazine is interested in such things. In many respects, The Economist is the great hope for paid-for printed magazine media. The title sells more than 180,000 copies of the UK edition alone, according to the latest ABC report. I do not have advertising figures, but the interim annual report posts profits of slightly over £20mn for the first half of 2009, under the toughest advertising conditions for years.

The reasons for The Economist’s success where other news media have failed and flailed are fairly clear: its content cannot be obtained elsewhere online; consequently it’s of high value; plus its target demographic is one that doesn’t resent the need to pay a cover price. That’s a reaadership that, fortuitously, is also of great value to premium brand advertisers.

But no reason there to ignore the rich pickings potentially available online. Paid Content reported earlier this year:

Economist.com [viz. the online magazine] increased its advertising revenue by 29 percent year-on-year, while page views increased 53 percent.

For me, the interesting part of this story is the magazine’s acknowledgement of social networks as a key part of its marketing strategy, but not by just advertising on those sites — though I am sure that in the case of Facebook, ads will also form a part of the plan. The interesting bit is their embrace of the social aspects. To gain the figures that they aspire to, the site will need to offer more and more free content and market it cleverly. Gaining followers and fans depends upon making people willing to share your content. And for that to happen, it needs to be good.

A far cry from the paywall route currently touted by Rupert Murdoch and the Johnson Press chain of local papers in the UK. Or the free-for-all route followed by competitors for that matter — The Economist magazine’s print content will remain subscribers-only.

Perhaps if other media owners were more able to offer uniquely valuable content, rather than paying their reporters peanuts and reprinting press releases, they might be equally bullish about the opportunies offered by the likes of Facebook and Twitter.

picture credit: Edgar Zuniga Jr.

I’ve been having a go at the latest chic-geek blogging tool — posterous — recently, as you’ll be able to tell if you look at the posts I’ve made here over the last month or so. But, in the end, I’ve decided not to use it. Why? Read on.

Just to be clear, before I go on to my objections: it’s damned good. If you haven’t yet tried it yourself, the highlights, as I see it, are:

• You can post really easily using email (just email post@posterous.com right now, and it’ll start a new blog for you – the email address you send from is your log-in).
• No login; no set-up; no configuration. A monkey could do it.
• Free – always a consideration. And no apparent limits on anything.
• Great media handling out of the box – send photos, videos, mp3s and it will sort out a nifty player for you.
• Syndication – it’ll repost the content you send to photo/video/text sharing sites and twitter it as well.

See these posts by incumbent Edelman and iCrossing social media champions for a taste of the fervour that people are feeling.

That’s all dandy. It’s really dandy. If I had to set up a blog for someone, I’d send them straight to posterous.

So what’s this ‘past–posterous’ nonsense, you ask? Like most things, there’s a combination of reasons that add up to a discomfort about the whole thing.

(1) I can replicate almost all of those features in WordPress. Post via email; audio-player, all the rest. It’s not simple, but it isn’t that hard either.

(2) It may sound a bit sad, but I am concerned about ownership of my content. On my own (rented) server space, I have that (as long as I pay the rent). If I put my stuff on a third-party service, then I very-slightly lose ownership and control.

(3) I also wonder how search-engines will interpret this. The first posting of content is normally taken as canonical by Google (i.e the real, original source) and consequently appears highest in search results. Duplicated content is deprecated. This protects against content thieves in normal circumstances, but in this case, the canonical source would presumably be posterous.com, not your personal URL. Another reason to have one canonical source is to protect against black-hat SEO types posting the same content on multiple, inter-linked sites, much ermm… like a fully fledged posterous account might create. That’s a worry, too. I’d like my blog to be the canonical source and not marked as a content duplicator. I’ve had a quick look round the SEO blogs and don’t think anyone has an answer on that yet.

(4) Posterous will undoubtedly launch paid-for plans or advertising schemes to earn revenue. I don’t know what those are or whether they will be successful. I hope that they are. In the mean time, it’s a zero-revenue business. I don’t want to trust my content to that. And I don’t know yet what sacrifices I might have to make to keep a free service in the future. Adverts? Pop-Ups?

Beyond that, there’s another reason. One that twists my melon considerably.

Is there such a thing as too-easy?

For me, there is.

If creating a blog post is as easy as hitting a button and typing twenty words, then I’m opening a Pandora’s Box.

Because I could do that all day, every day. I just thought of a new blog post then – whoosh – there it is. I could be creating 12 blog posts while you’re in the bog. For many long-time blog owners it’s a blessed release. Coming up with new ideas and new posts is a pain. The hard part about blogging isn’t setting one up, as their proliferation shows. There are already at least 200mn blogs. The hard part is keeping with it. Journalistic writing is hard – if you’re doing it right. If you’re doing it right, then you’re thinking about the audience all the time and turning your words and how much or how little you give to make them happier.

One reason to keep with it (and I have several, just in case) is so that people will respect your blog as a quality source, in some respect. You’ve filtered and processed the information so they don’t have to. And hopefully presented it in an agreeable way. You are providing Signal not Noise.

There are some great posterous blogs and tumblr blogs, I’m sure. But they are different – not better or worse – from a really good blog. Some people probably have a twitter-stream that could be made into a book. Not me.