Your audience get smarter every year: you have to as well

At our New Year’s eve dinner, my wife’s cousin Izzy was taking photo after photo with her new camera. They were awful photos: she had no sense of composition, no consideration of the effects candlelight would have on her subjects, and no mastery of the camera settings that would help overcome them.

Izzy is 8 years old. By the time she’s 12, she’ll be an amateur photographer as talented as any but the very best in my parents’ generation. Here’s 20 seconds of Cory Doctorow to explain why.

Why does this new ability to learn and share affect us as copywriters and web editors?

When I wrote my first marketing copy in 2002, I was writing for an audience who had never written anything themselves – or at any rate never anything for public consumption. I had stats to tell me what was working; I had colleagues to point out how I could improve; I went on courses. I was a professional writer, my audience weren’t even amateurs.

In 2012, Facebook will gain its billionth user. A sixth of the population of the world will be writing stuff for people to consume. And because of that mechanism of Likes and Shares, people get feedback on what they’ve written: they will be learning, something that was previously reserved only for people who wrote for a public audience (copywriters, marketers, novelists, academics and a handful of others).

Of course, not everyone who writes on Facebook becomes a better writer, but a lot of people will:

While it is impossible to make a competent writer out of a bad writer, and while it is equally impossible to make a great writer out of a good one, it is possible, with lots of hard work, dedication, and timely help, to make a good writer out of a merely competent one.
Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

That hard work, dedication and timely help is now available to anyone who posts their thoughts on a blog or social network. As a result, the barrier between the professional copywriter and the gifted amateur has shrunk to almost nothing. And where once upon a time, gifted amateurs were rare, because they had to struggle to find time for their thankless hobby, today they are everywhere, blogging, tweeting, commenting and debating.

The power to self-publish is creating a generation of educated readers. And because they are the readers most likely to share your work, they are the audience you have to appeal to.

What’s the difference between content created for amateurs, and content created for experts? Compare and contrast this Dixons advertisement from the days when it ruled the high street:

With the modern, web-only version of the brand:

The first advert is all exclamations: ‘Amazing! Free! Deal of the Year!’ The second is entirely style: it’s designed to appeal to a reader who understands and appreciates good writing. A slogan like ‘The last place you want to go’ would have been anathema to mass-market copywriters not so many years ago: flashy, self-referential advertising that impresses people in the industry, but doesn’t sell anything. Now, however, we know that our readers will get the joke.

It’s a tough time to be a copywriter, but a really exciting one. We can no longer get away with lazily flashing a special offer at people. For our new, educated audience, we need to write real content with real flair.

The riots were caused by social media. And bicycles.

Newsreaders still feel it is worth a special and rather worrying mention if, for instance, a crime was planned by people over the Internet. They don’t bother to mention when criminals use the telephone or the M4, or discuss their dastardly plans ‘over a cup of tea,’ though each of these was new and controversial in their day.
Douglas Adams, 1999

There has been some very silly stuff written about the riots and social media written in the last few days (this article in the Telegraph perhaps takes the prize for being most cretinous). It is, however, absolutely certain that these riots could not have been organised without the ability of loose networks to communicate spontaneously.

Simply put, new technologies have taken power from traditional authorities and give it to ordinary people. And some of those people are not very nice.

After the arrival of police radios in the 1960s, the boys in blue had a huge advantage over any kind of mass uprising – they could communicate with each other, the people on the street could not. That changed with the mass uptake of mobile phones, and the coming of the mobile internet has given a further advantage to loose self-organising networks. Whether you’re toppling a regime in Egypt, organising a flashmob to prove how fun and quirky you are, or trying to gather enough people to rob a branch of Curry’s in broad daylight, the ability to instantly share information is essential. A lot of kids have discovered that they are now more mobile than the police, and are taking full advantage of that fact to burn down their own high streets.

All that said, however, I am getting slightly bored of Blackberry Messenger being treated on news outlets as if it was in some way morally reprehensible, to the extent that the head of Blackberry manufacturers Research In Motion has had to issue a kind of apology. Without their bicycles, the rioters wouldn’t be able to move around London and gather in numbers – when the police arrive with overwhelming force the youths scatter to wherever they’ve left their bikes, and whizz off into the night, only to reconvene somewhere else – but nobody is blaming Halfords.

Douglas Adams has written the perfect response to Brendan O’Neill’s cretinous Twitter article

Professional wind-up merchant Brendan O’Neill, of Spiked (something he describes as an ‘independent online phenomenon’, though everyone else would call it a ‘shit blog’) has written an attack on Twitter in the Daily Telegraph:

Twitterers’ supposed passion for freedom of speech quickly shrivels up and evaporates if anyone dares to say something that goes against liberal orthodoxies. That is because, for all the claims that Twitter is an un-policeable, almost anarchic space in which law fears to tread, in truth it has created its own hierarchy and its own forms of conformism… The general political outlook of influential Twitterers is summed up in the fact that 76.1% of tweets about the AV referendum were pro-AV (and only 23.9% were anti), compared with 67.9% of the electorate that firmly said no to AV.

The liberal consensus, and its corresponding intolerance of consensus-breakers, has been fairly successfully transported into Twitter, making this social networking site a surprisingly conformist and uncritical arena.

This is the kind of tedious linkbait that wouldn’t normally be worthy of response – except that he happened to write it on the 10th anniversary of of Douglas Adams’ death, and Adams’ 1999 essay How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Internet provides the perfect riposte. I’ve swapped the words ‘Internet’ and ‘web’ for ‘Twitter’, but everything else is Douglas Adams’ own:

Because Twitter is so new we still don’t really understand what it is. We mistake it for a type of publishing or broadcasting, because that’s what we’re used to. So people complain that there’s a lot of rubbish on Twitter, or that it’s dominated by Americans, or that you can’t necessarily trust what you read on Twitter. Imagine trying to apply any of those criticisms to what you hear on the telephone.

Of course you can’t ‘trust’ what people tell you on Twitter anymore than you can ‘trust’ what people tell you on megaphones, postcards or in restaurants. Working out the social politics of who you can trust and why is, quite literally, what a very large part of our brain has evolved to do. For some batty reason we turn off this natural scepticism when we see things in any medium which require a lot of work or resources to work in, or in which we can’t easily answer back – like newspapers, television or granite. Hence ‘carved in stone.’

What should concern us is not that we can’t take what we read on Twitter on trust – of course you can’t, it’s just people talking – but that we ever got into the dangerous habit of believing what we read in the newspapers or saw on the TV – a mistake that no one who has met an actual journalist would ever make. One of the most important things you learn from Twitter is that there is no ‘them’ out there. It’s just an awful lot of ‘us’.

Brendan O’Neill: a man so ignorant about the web that he can be torn apart by a someone who died in the days of dial-up.

Facebook’s dirty secret: your profile page

A couple of weeks ago, I was explaining Facebook to a non-user (they do still exist), and I did something I realised I haven’t done for over a year.

I looked at my own profile page.

It wasn’t a pretty sight. In fact, it made me look like a tedious, self-important, rambling fool.

Why is it that so many deeply private people, people like me, are happy to expose themselves on Facebook? And why is it that someone like me whose job involves a fair amount of work on social media for brands can let their personal page look so crappy?

Because part of the genius of Facebook is that you never have to see your own profile.

Social networks as social competitions

Facebook’s 2005-2008 incarnation, just like MySpace and Bebo, encouraged you to recruit new users by making profile pages a competition.  There was a competitive gaming element where you tried to outdo your acquaintances with exciting photographs, your taste in films and music and, above all, the number of friends you had. Your profile was your landing page and, since interactions took place either there or on friends’ profile pages, you were always aware of how you were doing.

Image courtesy of http://www.352media.com/blog/

It was a social network that appealed, as Twitter and Foursquare do now, to the socially competitive. Your profile page was where you kept the score: your photos, your wall, your details, your friends.

The 2008 rebuild changed that and opened Facebook up to a huge new user-base: the shy, the introverted, the ordinary people who didn’t want to shout about how great their lives were. Since 2008, interactions have taken place through the newsfeed, with the effect that you never have a reason to land on your own profile page, and see how other users might perceive you. The creation of the ‘Like’ button took that a step further, allowing users to edit details about personal tastes in music, movies and brands, without even realising that they were changing their profile pages.

That freed Facebook from a lot of social awkwardness. It ceased to be about building your personal profile – it became all about your friends and what they were up to right now. Some people still ‘play’ Facebook in the same competitive spirit: I have friends who get a buzz from ‘Likes’ and comments. But even those people are never really aware that anyone else is watching how they do.

Facebook’s hidden data capture

One hugely beneficial result for Facebook – whether by accident or design – is that you no longer even notice which personal details you’ve fed into the social network.

The Daily Mash’s take on the last Facebook privacy scandal was:

We Don’t Have Facebook Accounts, Say People Who Care About Privacy

Millions of users who are quite happy to write down everything about themselves and then show it to people complained that their privacy was being compromised.

It was funny, but a little unfair. Facebook does everything it can to avoid showing you what you personally have put in. Its unique selling point, strangely for a social network, is the very strong impression that you are invisible. That’s how Mark Zuckerburg has persuaded all those shy, reserved, normal people – people who hated MySpace and all the garish showing off it entailed – to put their lives on the internet.

Have a look at your profile page today. It may surprise you…

Follow a Twitter hashtag if you actually want to find out what happened at today’s ‘riot’

I’ve just had a very quick stroll along the ‘March for an alternative’ demonstration in London. It was a genial, meaningful and often rather beautiful event.

As usual, it’s going to be  in the news tomorrow as a terrifying riot. Does it matter that the media report only the extremes, given that those 300,000 marchers are sending 200 Tweets a minute showing the other side of things? I’m afraid it does. The people watching the news are not, mostly, following the marchers on Twitter, so they’ll never get that true picture unless they can actually be bothered to plough through thousands of messages from people they’ve never met.

Still, the existence of social media is making a small difference to the way the news is reported. For all the far left’s paranoia, there has never been a media agenda to present all protesters as thugs. It’s just that ‘Revolutionaries destroy Ritz… you’re going to be next’ will sell a lot more papers than ’300,000 nice people all agree with each other and go for a nice walk to show it.’

But the journalists are following these events on Twitter and Facebook – and that has two effects. Firstly it generates alternative good stories they might never have found before: that was how ‘kettling’ made the news. Secondly, broadsheet and TV journalists are reluctant to lie when they might get found out – however much a little lying might help the story along. The Twitter feed for #26march tells the full story of the day in a million mundane haikus and 100,000 grainy photos.

The truth is out there now. And while it’s too boring for most of us to trawl through, it does at least make it a little harder for journalists to present it without balance.

(All photos by @kerstint)

Cutting off the Internet: Mubarak’s big mistake

“At 22:34 GMT, Renesys observed the virtually simultaneous withdrawal of all routes to Egyptian networks in the Internet’s global routing table.”

Is this seriously a sensible way to stop a revolution? I’m sure Mr. Mubarak’s security forces know more about oppression than me, but it looks like a terrible mistake.

This is, in part, a revolution of demographics: half of Egypt’s population is under 25, and many of them are unemployed. Does Mr. Mubarak seriously think that cutting off unemployed young men from their supply of pornography is going to make them less angry?

“By God, I think the devil shits Dutchmen”: why @samuelpepys is the future of history writing

There’s nothing quite like opening Twitter to do a bit of boring marketing and finding something like this in your feed:

Samuel Pepys’ diary is amazing: salacious, intimate, packed with war and whoring, farts and fires, booze and bitchy gossip. And now it’s on Twitter. Possibly the best thing on Twitter. Possibly just the best thing. Ever.

The Dutch have burnt the British ships at Sheerness, the King’s mistress has threatened to dash her baby’s brains out in Parliament unless the King acknowledges he is the child’s father, and Samuel Pepys has lured a girl called Peg up to his room, but he can’t get it on with her because some other bloke is hanging about. It’s confessional blogging at its  finest, given glorious immediacy by being live on Twitter.

Really readable, entertaining diarists have historically been few and far between – James Boswell, Chips Channon and Alan Clark spring to mind, but not many more.  That’s going to change. The ability to record daily events in a manner that others find entertaining is no longer an unusual hobby, but an essential social skill. Around a quarter of the people in Britain keep some sort of online diary, whether it’s a blog, a Twitter feed, a Facebook account, or regular boring emails to a huge list of friends about how the family are and what they did on their holidays. We are a generation of diarists, and the digital natives who grew up with the social web write very, very good ones.

A single illuminating quotation is often the best tool a social historian has for bringing an era to life. Age of Austerity, David Kynaston’s brilliant depiction of post-war Britain, is structured around evocative moments from ordinary people’s diaries: “Oh for a little extra butter”, “Jolly good, as a whole”, Christ, it’s bleeding cold”.

The David Kynaston who looks back on our era won’t have to dig so deep. Future historians will portray life in the early 21st century not as 900 pages of elegant descriptive writing, and diligently researched quotes, but by building feeds of the finest, funniest and most typical of our contemporaries, and releasing them day by day.

@samuelpepys is the shape of things to come.