Lark Newcomm Final

The Participatory Communications Revolution a wander through the blogsphere and look at its implications for communicators.

Andrew Lark [email protected] andylark.blogs.com Jan 21 2005

fuckedcompany.com corpwatch.org internalmemos.com whistelblowers.com vault.com rottentomatoes.com

Sept 2002

Shanghai

The WebMink

The Roller

Jonathan “OK, I'm starting a blog. Why shouldn't an officer of a public company start a blog? Hey, life is short. At Text some point, take this how we're all going to be communicating anyways. Think about it.” Jonathan Schwartz, June 28, 2004

sun.com/news

2nd Attempt

Conversations Connections

Why Do I Blog?

New Connections Learn more - see new things Experiment & Ideate Like to write Great Archive...

Technology Changes Everything

LiveJournal - 5,861,527 (...2,528,043 active) 34m blogs worldwide (est.) 8m US bloggers 32m blog readers

The Sphere

5% Internet users using RSS 400,000 posts per day 16,000 posts per hour

= as many stories as AP sends out each day

70 new users signed up for NTT DoCoMo 400 new users came to the Internet

In The Last 2 Minutes

1,000 auctions closed on eBay 2,100 cellular phones were sold $30,000 was transacted at Amazon.com

What’s Your Ringtone?

$3.2 billion (up 40% over 2002) The Arc Group, WSJ, May 4, 2004

15 billion SMS Messages per month on GSM networks worldwide in 2004* Vodafone AirTouch processed 160 million text messages on its U.K. network in September. * The GSM Association

The Revolution Society

Ethics/Law

You!

Technology

Network Effects Copyright Lark Ventures

aka Linux This is a Grassroots Revolution

aka Chat aka Google aka Skype

Why are organizations, everywhere, whether political, commercial or social, increasingly unable to manage their affairs? Why are individuals, everywhere, increasingly in conflict with and alienated from the organizations of which they are part? Why are society and the biosphere increasingly in disarray? Dee Hoc!

"We are entering one era in which the technological infrastructure is creating a different context for how we tell our stories and how we communicate with each other. " Andrew Nachison, Director, Media Center

“Network Computing creates a global brain whose capacity to remember expands exponentially” Don Tapscott

Triangulating News

The Media Crisis (coming soon to analysts)

"The telegraph is ruining our business." James Rothschild

Confidence Down Trust Down Circ Down

Since 1997 the share of available viewers commanded by local early evening newscasts around the country has dropped 18% and later evening news has dropped by 16%. Ratings for the three nightly newscasts have dropped 34% in the last decade and 44% since 1980. Newspaper circulation has declined 11% since 1990 (about 1% a year). Pew Internet & American Life Project

“There has been a long drift away from mass media to more specialized media ... The bloggers are the latest manifestation — more messages to smaller numbers of people.”

Phil Meyer, University of North Carolina journalism professor. Author of The Vanishing Newspaper: Saving Journalism in the Information Age.

“That traditional media are shrinking down to a few dominant players... When old methods of communication mature, it's natural for them to merge. Diversity in media will win out, thanks to faster, cheaper and smaller computing power.”

Larry Downes, author, The Strategy Machine

Proprietary Media Space

Shared Media Space

Media As Business

Media As Community

Appointment Driven News Consumption

On Demand News Consumption (rss = Tivo for the Web)

Tom Curley, President & CEO, Associated Press

1.Open Source is as Applicable to Industry Analysis as it is to Software

Open Source Analysts

2.Great Ideas Come Can Come from Anyone 3.The Group Mind is Smarter than the Individual 4.An Idea's Power is Proportional to Its Audience 5.Proprietary Analysis is a Myth 6.Open Source is About More than Source Code Stephen O'Grady - the other half of Redmonk

This Changes Everything (You Are Naked!)

"If you are a flack or a PR person, your business is gone." Marc Canter

"Horseshit!" Andy Lark

? Why

Community Building & Advocacy Employee Communications Knowledge Management Measurement Monitoring Media Relations External Communications Marketing

Creating The Participatory Communications Network

Listen-Up! Authenticity Matters Love Your S Webs Communities Are Conversations 5. Publish Or Perish 6. Measure & Manage 1. 2. 3. 4.

1

Listen-Up!

Engage & Participate

vs.

Transmit

Advocate

vs.

Control

Bloggers (the new constituency)

Canaries in the Coalmine.

Blogger As Employee

Recommenders engadget

gizmodo

Blogger As Ex-Employee

Blogger As Pointer

Blogger As Evangelist

Blogger As Leader

Blogger As Marketer (& crazy evangelist)

2

Authenticity Matters

Schwartz & Scoble vs. GM vs. Boeing

Opacity vs.

Transparency

“Sunlight Is The Best Disinfectant” Louis Brandeis - U.S. Supreme Court Justice

“A Blog, you see, is a little First Amendment machine” Jay Rosen

“Well over 1000 (Sun employees) have been given space for blogging. There's no restraint on what they can blog about. We provide tools and expect them to use them responsibly. Restricting what you can write on a blog is the same as restricting what you can say in an email or a phone call. And if they

aren’t speaking as an employee, well, we live in a country that values free speech.” Jonathan Schwartz, coo and president, Sun Microsystems

“Sun is using blogs, open letters, Web sites, and customer testimonials as guerilla warfare, take-it-to-the-streets tools to force a much larger competitor to accede to its needs/demands. It's becoming totally embarrassing for IBM. It's hard to imagine how IBM can come up with any reasonable excuse that the IT community (customers) would accept and save face at this point. Given the public forum and the support Sun has built up among customers and other vendors for its request, IBM should just bite the bullet and port the apps.” Dan Farber, ZDNet

“Wherever there has been a gross injustice because of a broken system, the muttering "transparency" usually isn't far behind.  If we can go behind the scenes, we'll spot trouble before it happens, and the actors--knowing we're there--will all behave better.” David Berlind, ZDNet, Jan 18, 2005

(voice & authenticity)

Behavior

Authenticity Axis Opaque

Graveyard

Best-In-Class (Naked)

Aspiring

Transparency

Copyright Lark Ventures

“If you fudge or lie on a blog, you are biting the karmic weenie. The negative reaction will be so great that, whatever your intention was, it will be overwhelmed and crushed like a bug.” Steve Hayden, vice chairman, Ogilvy & Mather. Fortune, Jan 14, 2005.

3

Love Your S Webs

Option One:

Conventional PR (non participatory inflames the S Web)

Option Two:

Start a Conversation (participatory engages the S Web)

“We have no way of knowing if Sun has sold us out”

S Webs

• • • • • •

Employees Stakeholders “Developers” Educators Smart Mobs Recommenders

Email correspondence (grey lines) mapped to organizational hierarchy (black lines) How To Search a Social Network, Lada Adamic, Eytan Adar

Pattern Recognition

“Information flows freely from areas of high concentration to low, where it disseminates rapidly across space and time” Anthony Williams - Researcher

Audience

Community

4

Communities Are Conversations

Communities of Interest Communities of Business Communities of Geography Communities of Events Communities of Support (Channel 9) ....

Advocate

Role of The Communicator in the Blogsphere

Coach Writer/Poster Editor Traffic cop Policy maker (& breaker) Blog program Lead Blog tracker and conservationist

New spokespeople New rock-stars

Implications

New intermediaries New channels & outlets New conversations News at the speed of light

Incompleteness (a total rethink of outcomes)

“You can’t have a weblog if your style of writing is that you finish your pieces. Therefore, anybody who works in a profession which depends on completed documents– journalism, academia, law, engineers, medicine– it is impossible to develop community.” David Weinberger

Real Challenges First Amendment SOX Cost & Resourcing

Blog Success Factors

“Passion & Authority” Scoble

Clear sense of the outcome Be blogger friendly

Real people doing real stuff. Focus - pick a topic

Blog Success Factors

Link. Link. Link. Comments. Comments. Comments. Note questionable or biased sources Authenticity Voice Audience Clarity Thinking

Willingness to play (Cuban)

Make bias apparent Full disclosure Correct mistakes

Basic Rules

Don’t lie Attribute. Congratulate. Celebrate. Have fun!

5

Publish Or Perish

Bytes Are Cheaper Than Atoms!

“We are in the twilight of a society based on data. As information and intelligence become the domain of computers, society will place more value on the one human ability that cannot be automated: emotion. Imagination, myth, ritual - the language of emotion - will affect everything from our purchasing decisions to how we work with others.

Companies will thrive on the basis of their stories and myths. Companies will need to understand that their products are less important than their stories.” Rolf Jensen, Copenhagen Institute for Future Studies

What Does Your Computer Most Look Like?

6

Measure & Monitor

OTS Visits Pull thought Links & Trackbacks RSS Opt-ins Call’s to action

Sales!

Track The Ecosystem That’s The Measure Of Community Health! Who is Pointing? Who is Driving? Who is Linking? Who is Making?

Do you blog? Do you podcast/ webcast?

Your PN Competency?

Do you do search? What’s your Ring tone? Do SMS/Text? Do you have a game , a cartoon? Do you RSS?

Copyright Lark Ventures

Releases & Speeches posted with comments sections Start a news channel

Other Changes

Post interview notes and transcripts Blend your PR/AR/crisis and online practices Get the latest gadgets Understand search engine strategy - Recommend keyword buys & sponsorships Copyright Lark Ventures

You Must Be The Change You Wish To See In The World

Mahatma Gandhi

Thanks! please send me feedback, ideas, thoughts and corrections: [email protected] andylark.blogs.com 408.656.9446