Those who experience the first onset of a new technology, whether it be alphabet or radio respond most emphatically… But the real revolution is in the later and prolonged phase of ‘adjustment’ of all personal and social life to the new model of perception set up by the new technology
Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy, 1962
We have our new technlogy: the “Publish”, “Like”, “Send”, “Share” and “Tweet” buttons are giving everyone in the world the power of mass communication, once reserved to governments, big business and the media. But we still haven’t absorbed the importance of this change into our way of thinking. 2011 was the year when we were shocked by the power of protest. In Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, London and Russia, public disorder went from non-existent to nationally important in the blink of an eye. Nobody had any idea riots and revolutions were coming: politicians, academics, journalists and even the protesters themselves found themselves baffled that instant, free one-to-many communication had transferred power from the centre to mass movements.
The ‘adjustment of all personal and social life’ to the internet has barely begun, but perhaps this will be the year when we stop thinking of digital communications as ‘new media’, and of ‘social’ as some faddish sub-genre, and realise that everything has changed.
Screengrab from PayPal's Facebook page - no matter how fast they took them down, people kept on putting them up
You can read the full story on Regretsy. As so often, it’s a social media storm whipped up because someone was rude to a customer on the phone.
Back in 1999, James Gleick described how the new software giants had innovated in transferring expense and inconvenience to their customers:
In the past, people made reservations by mail. Thousands of letters needed to be processed in a single week…
The telephone lottery shields institutions.It transfers the loss of time to their customers… Personal-computer companies have tightened the telephone chokepoint to an extreme that led customers to file a class action.
Social networks are reversing that trend. It takes less time to Tweet a brand than it does to find its phone number, let alone sit around on hold. Instead of filling in the (deliberately) overcomplicated contact forms a company offers, we can just fill in a single field on our own Twitter account and press send.
And above all, a Tweet is a flexing of muscle, a sign that you can and will take that complaint public. “Ignore me,” it says, “and I might just go viral.”
Your social media team are very, very good at dealing with this kind of complaint. But your call centre, or, worse, the agency you have hired to deal with your calls, are probably still trapped in the past, where their job was to minimise inconvenience and cost for their employers, rather than for the invisible, powerless customer.
You need to get someone who understands the power of social into that customer service team as fast as possible, or you could be the next victim of the Twitter mob.
‘the genius of Facebook is that you never have to see your own profile page’
Googledigook.com
Six months ago I suggested that part of the reason for Facebook’s broad appeal is that it emphasises friends’ updates instead of your own profile. It gives people who don’t want to show off on a social network a way to enjoy Facebook without worrying how they might appear to others.
Mark Zuckerburg, however, has had enough of these quiet lurkers:
(don’t watch the first 10 minutes of this unless you’re a fan of
excruciating corporate comedy)
The new Facebook timeline restores your profile to the centre of the social network. It’s a much more sophisticated page than MySpace, but it is a very MySpace experience, encouraging you to compete with your friends in curating the coolest profile possible.
Do you want to compete with this? (image from Mashable)
The benefits for Facebook are obvious: to make your timeline really exciting, you have to give more of your photos, videos, friendships and life events to Facebook, and that data is the source of Facebook’s income.
There are many attractions for the user as well. They are extraordinarily elegant pages, and many users will delight in curating them into something that is both beautiful and true – a personal biography that can represent your most attractive, sociable side to the world.
Some of the new lifestreaming options might seem a bit weird:
Do Facebook send some goons round to make sure this happens?
but they add yet more depths of self-expression.
The trouble comes for those who don’t want to express themselves through the medium of Facebook. The old Facebook was a friendly place for the shy and introverted, but this emphasis on profile and lifestreaming changes that. For a lot of the quieter people I know, I suspect this will be the beginning of the end of their love affair with Facebook.
Milgrim checked the branding at the bottom of the screen. “Yes,” he said.
“It is very nice.” Zero History, William Gibson
Coming soon to a novel near you
The above is a fairly typical exchange from the latest novel by William Gibson, the writer who invented cyberspace, and remains the best living chronicler of digitally connected modernity. And who has now produced the most blatant example of turning a novel over to product placement since Fay Weldon’s The Bulgari Connection. Apple products are shamelessly and continuously plugged throughout Zero History.
It’s 11 years since Bill Fitzhugh signed the first ever product placement deal for a novel but the idea is an exciting one for publishers, and it’s spreading fast, especially in thrillers and brand-obsessed teen fiction, as publishing searches for new sources of revenue.
The speed with which ebooks have grown in popularity surprised many in a publishing industry which set a lot of store by readers’ loyalty to a physical product. For the next couple of years, we can expect a boom in profits for publishers and writers alike, defended as they will be by the powerful Digital Rights Management of the Kindle. But history tells us that at some point, readers will find a way to get round the paywalls and share books without paying for the privilege.
For musicians, the digital revolution has been (relatively) easy: live performance replaces lost revenue from recordings. Cinema and television have plenty of fat they can afford to trim as their profits fall. But a novelist often needs two years of sitting on their own, thinking and writing, to produce a book. If readers share and distribute their work instantly and for free, writers will have no way to earn two years’ worth of income from it, and no way to pay the bills while they work on their next book. Unless they can find an alternative source of revenue.
If no better model than product placement can be found, we may find ourselves looking back on the last three centuries as a lost golden age of advertising-free fiction.
1) everything that’s already in the world when you’re born is just normal;
2) anything that gets invented between then and before you turn thirty is incredibly
exciting and creative and with any luck you can make a career out of it;
3) anything that gets invented after you’re thirty is against the natural order
of things and the beginning of the end of civilisation as we know it until it’s
been around for about ten years when it gradually turns out to be alright really.
Why? Because loads of people are going to get sacked this week.
The first time we realised the terrifying implications of the new admin system for Facebook fan pages was when ActionAid International ‘liked’ Mogwai and Black Rebel Motorcycle Club. Whereas it used to be impossible to post as your employer’s brand unless you were actually writing on the page itself, the new pages can be updated wherever you happen to be.
You can flip between accounts at the touch of a button, and there are almost no visual signals on Facebook to show that you’re logged in as your company rather than yourself.
In other words, last Friday night, lots of social media professionals ended the day by updating their company’s Facebook status to ‘Yay! Friday night! Time to get pissed!’ And this morning, lots of major international brands are going to be describing their hangover breakfasts.
Expect to see some fantastic fallout on Monday. A good moment to send out those speculative CVs.
Last night, as sinister Vice-President Omar Suleiman railed at the influence of foreign journalists, Twitter congratulated itself on a revolution well done. All over the world, left-wingers sent this smug Tweet to each other.
But this was a revolution that was categorically not born of the Internet – apart from anything else, the Internet was cut off for everyone in Egypt for the entire first week of protests.
This revolution was all about satelite TV.
In every small village and large town in Egypt, some enterprising cafe owner has installed a gigantic dish, so that they can show their patrons Turkish pop music, English football and American movies. And during times of political turmoil, they can tune into Al-Jazeera. And what that means, is that when Egypt TV is pretending that the revolution has petered out, everybody can tell they are lying. When reality and the words of your dictator diverge so extravagantly, he becomes ridiculous. And a dictator who becomes ridiculous is just a mad old man, temporarily occupying a gaudy palace.
Watch People Jump has been talking about the coming of cable, and how Wayne’s World changed youth television forever. Because MTV was a channel for us, because there were a proliferation of ideas, beyond the usual top-down controlled networks, the kids were finally taking over.
For all the backslapping at Facebook and Twitter, for all Google’s laughable publicity stunts (can you imagine how dull it would be to listen to Twitter), the kids have taken over because of satellite TV.
an early draft of our communications strategy, which said that by 2013 we should be prepared for mobile web
a survey which said that 60% of our users were already browsing the web on their mobiles
After years of gestation, mobile internet is here. So after some panicky research, I’ve identified some bits and bobs that us charity web editors can do right now do improve fundraising and campaigning on the mobile web.
1.Put phone numbers next to your donate buttons
Filling out your card details on a mobile phone is a huge nuisance – on some touchscreens it’s borderline impossible.
Calling someone, on the other hand, takes only one click. If you don’t put a phone number RIGHT NEXT TO your main call to action, you’re losing donations.
2. Keep your forms short
Marketing want to capture 18 different pieces of information about everybody who fills in a form, including the name of their dog, and what they feel is Stanley Kubrick’s most complete film*.
Give them an iPhone and tell them to try filling in their mammoth bloody form without using any foul language. Laugh at them for a while, and then quietly capture name, email address and nothing more.
*Barry Lyndon, in case you’re interested
3. Find out about your mobile users
Build a segment in your analytics that only includes people using mobile browsers. Look at what content they’re visiting.
Your website is being accessed in a different way and for different reasons on mobile. I’m finding a high proportion coming in from social networks to news and blog pages, or from emails to campaign landing pages – and proportionately fewer arriving from search or hittting the homepage.
Identify the pages people are browsing with their phones and then see what you can do to make them work..
4. The third column in your 3-column layout is now officially worthless.
Sorry. It just is. If you’ve been putting important content in there, nobody browsing on a mobile will see it, however much you make it pop.
Nobody with a phone is going to find anything that’s not slap bang in the middle of your central content.
5. Don’t get complacent just because you’re ahead of the game on txt
We know about txt. It’s a high-cost, high-return fundraising tool. It’s great for getting campaign actions out of people, too. It has nothing to do with the mobile internet.
Clay Shirky has called the Times Paywall a ‘Referendum on the future… the end of the beginning’ of the question of whether newspapers can be made to pay online. I think it’s something even more dramatic. The evidence is mounting that the paywall is not a final attempt to make online content profitable. It’s an admission that a newspaper can’t compete online at all, and might as well give up trying.
Consider the facts:
The Times has lost somewhere between 80% and 95% of its online audience. And everyone always knew it would.
The paywall launch was not so much botched, as completely half-hearted. No thrilling new content, a weird separation of The Times and the Sunday Times, awful emails, dismal design, endless technical hitches.
Rupert Murdoch is neither stupid, nor desperate.
So why has Rupert Murdoch done this? If he knows that online content stuck behind a paywall has no chance of competing with the free stuff, what does he think he’s doing?
Answer: he’s giving up.
As Shirky pointed out long ago, the idea that newspapers will inevitably find some way to turn a profit online is wishful thinking. And if this is the case, investing and competing in the online news market is a race to bankrupt yourself first.
Especially since the biggest competitor for the Times Online is not The Daily Telegraph Online or theguardian, but the printed version of The Times. Every time a regular reader checks out their favourite columnist on a free web page, instead of buying a copy of the paper, The Times loses readers. And even with the paywall up, a digital subscriber is worth less than a third of a print one. If a print reader moves online, Mr. Murdoch loses money.
The important part of the paywall isn’t the ‘pay’… it’s the ‘wall’.
But we all know the future of news is online, so how does he benefit from running a newspaper?
In the long run, all the newspapers are screwed. I know that, you know that, Rupert knows that. But they’ll be screwed a damn sight faster if they continue to bring the profitable parts of their business (the print version) into direct competition with the bit that loses money (the website).
There is no future, there is no grand plan, the paywall is an admission that the inevitable is coming, and News International would rather it came a little more slowly.
We have our new technlogy: the “Publish”, “Like”, “Send”, “Share” and “Tweet” buttons are giving everyone in the world the power of mass communication, once reserved to governments, big business and the media. But we still haven’t absorbed the importance of this change into our way of thinking. 2011 was the year when we were shocked by the power of protest. In Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, London and Russia, public disorder went from non-existent to nationally important in the blink of an eye. Nobody had any idea riots and revolutions were coming: politicians, academics, journalists and even the protesters themselves found themselves baffled that instant, free one-to-many communication had transferred power from the centre to mass movements.
