Social networking

The great promise of the Internet is that it empowers the voices and knowledge of so many people, and smart entrepreneurs and others can harness that to do great things. Wikipedia is the classic example of the potential: An army of volunteers, not paid a cent, have created a living encyclopedia that has become an essential and highly trafficked resource.

I think that the news industry — probably mostly due to cultural reasons that limit innovation when it comes to tapping the resources of the human web (the “we’re the professionals, we know best” mentality) — has been largely blind to the opportunities that are present.

Now is a good time to take a look at what other industries are doing to tap the collective intelligence. A GREAT example is this video from Google of Luis Van Ahn giving a talk on this topic. The solution to finding an army of non-paid online users to catalog images on the web — so that doing an image search on Google by typing in words will bring back accurate results — is stunningly brilliant.

Watch this video and see if it doesn’t get you thinking in new ways.

No sooner had I finished off a draft of my January Editor & Publisher Online column (probably to be published next week) on how news organizations must learn to share their content any- and everywhere, than did news of ESPN’s WidgetCenter arrive on my radar screen. (I think it launched last month, but I must’ve missed it then. I’ve added it in to the column.) It nicely confirms the wisdom of my advice in the column.

Check this out. ESPN is now offering widgets that you can put on your blog, website, social network profile, or wherever. Here they are embedded in this blog item.

Don’t you get tired of big corporations that are just friggin’ clueless when it comes to the Internet and marketing? I’m going to pile on along with Matthew Ingram, who comments on a boneheaded move by Hasbro and Mattel to clamp down on the Scrabulous application for Facebook.

The story is that the toy companies want Scrabulous — which is one of the top 10 most popular external applications on Facebook and was created by independent developers — to be removed by Facebook. While the companies are within their rights to demand that, they are profoundly stupid if they follow up on this.

This is another in a long line of instances where a dinosaur-thinking corporation thinks it needs to clamp down because someone is damaging their trademark, when actually the Scrabulous application is helping them sell more Scrabble games!

Ingram has the best suggestion: If the toy companies (which share the rights to Scrabble) are concerned, they should buy Scrabulous from the developers and hire those guys to keep it running. Shutting it down would be a collosally bad move.

Perhaps Hasbro and Mattel will come to their senses. As it currently stands, they look like D,O,T,I,S,I. (That shouldn’t be too hard to unscramble.)

(One last thought: It’s possible, I suppose, that Hasbro and Mattel are more calculating that I’m giving them credit for. The publicity machine ramps up, then they “save the day” by purchasing Scrabulous rather than shutting it down. They look like good guys after all. .. I think that’s unlikely, though; in that scenario they still look clueless and nasty for the short term.)

There’s a great video about social marketing that’s begun making the rounds, by Don Crowther of StomperNet. It’s 50 minutes long, but I think it’s truly worth your time.

The topic is the transformation of Internet marketing. (To my news industry readers: Don’t ignore this; it applies to you, big time.) Crowther’s premise is that social media and social networks have given companies one of those rare openings to take advantage of in getting to the top of search engine rankings and driving tremendous online traffic. The window may only last a year or a year and a half, but for those willing to learn how to do social marketing — and do it properly — there’s a tremendous opportunity.

Crowther likens 2008 to what it was like in 1997, when if you knew what you were doing, it was relatively easy to get to the top spots of online visibility for whatever niche you were in.

I spent the last couple years working in social media with my start-up company, and when our initial strategy faltered, we transitioned to trying to utilize the platform we created for social media and social marketing purposes for media and brand companies. We didn’t succeed well at that, and my company died.

Perhaps my colleagues and I weren’t the most brilliant salespeople in the world, but that wasn’t the main problem. (I’ll ‘fess up to not being much of a salesperson, but that wasn’t the case with my colleagues.) What we ran into was resistance to the very notion of social networking and social media as being something companies wanted to explore. They wanted to wait and see before putting any effort or resources into social media or social marketing. (I’m generalizing, of course, but that was the response enough of the time to make me very frustrated by the resistance to what is an obvious sea change.)

I urge you to view the StomperNet video. If you don’t think it’s relevant to your media company, well, maybe you’re in the wrong business.

(Yeah, Crowther is trying to sell something: his company’s advisory services. But you can get a lot of great free information from this video and accompany free PDF report without paying him a dime. So I have no hesitation in recommending this.)

I’m definitely hooked on Facebook, and I think that when the company opened up to third-party applications, that was a brilliant move. But the applications thing does get to be annoying.

Today, a Facebook friend sent me some “Good Karma.” Hey, that’s nice. But, in order to “receive” it, I have to add the Good Karma application to my Facebook profile.

Since I already have 47 applications installed (though not all of them are visible on my Facebook profile), I declined my Good Karma. I’m definitely suffering from application overload, since new and cool ones keep coming out — and I keep trying them out. I periodically go through a winnowing process to keep my Facebook page at least someone under control.

Have we already reached a point where it’s nearly impossible for any application to succeed in capturing a large audience because there’s so much competition?

Over at STLToday.com, Kurt Greenbaum’s Twitter project is live: Today on Highway 40.

The idea is to use Twitter to document the driving and commuting experiences of people as a key arterial in St. Louis is closed for a long reconstruction period. Greenbaum, who is the St. Louis Post-Dispatch’s social media director, recruited 10 people (plus himself) to use Twitter to file short (140 characters) reports about what they encounter in the weeks before the shutdown and the week after. The road closes on January 2.

Here’s the list of traffic Twitter correspondents, who have begun their short reporting assignment. You can read their reports on a special STLToday page, or on Twitter itself.

This will be interesting to watch. But I’m also looking out for a good example of using Twitter for a big fast-breaking story. I’m not sure how this will work for a more drawn-out story that can be planned for. It’ll work fine, of course, but will the content be interesting enough to engage the audience? Let’s see!

Yet another Twitter+journalism item. … Slate political correspondent John Dickerson is reporting from Iowa this week, and he’s filing Twitter bursts as well as blog items — and his musings are going on a Google Maps mashup. Talk about your trendy reporter!

Here’s yet another Twitter+journalism idea, via PBS MediaShift: Twitter posses.

As J.D. Lasica explains, the concept is to have reporters begin using the immediacy and interactivity of Twitter: “A beat reporter could enlist a dozen or two dozen passionate, driven readers to serve as a kind of Twitter posse. Whenever she was about to tackle a big story or difficult interview, the reporter could begin a mobile dialogue with her posse members, who could pose questions, much like the ‘backchannel’ IRC feed at conferences such as AlwaysOn or Supernova.”

This is a faster version of “beat blogging,” the idea of journalists using social networking tools to assemble a group of experts in a topic to assist and advise them and improve the depth of their reporting.

I can’t help but love how journalists are embracing these new online tools as they appear. For lots of people, their first reaction to Twitter was, “That’s frivolous.” (I’ll admit it; I thought that initially, too.) But fairly quickly folks started thinking outside the box.

I’ve said here that I’m a (qualified) fan of the “social ads” concept that Facebook is implementing. But I’m only a fan as far as the concept goes; Facebook’s implementation still has major problems.

Example: In my Facebook News Feed this afternoon was this social ad, which appeared because someone on my friends list allowed it to be published:

Now that sucks. It’s a stupid way to advertise, because it gives the appearance that David Henderson is spamming my Facebook account with an ad from Blockbuster Video — which is not what he intended, I’m sure.

But if this was done right, it could be a great and cool form of advertising. If Dave had just rented the movie Rent — or had just rated it 4 stars on Blockbuster.com — then I’d be fine with receiving that information in my News Feed. If Dave was (because he agreed to) sending all his Facebook friends a $1 off coupon for Blockbuster, that would be fine. But the ad above is stupid and counterproductive on Blockbuster’s part.

The best way to handle this ad would be to 1) have the News Feed ad above be something like “David Henderson gave Rent 4 stars on Blockbuster.com” (relevant personal information about a Facebook friend’s activities, approved for publication by him in an opt-in manner), and 2) use the ad banner space in the left side of the Facebook News Feed page for a more conventional ad (like “One month free trial…”).

The social ad that showed up in my News Feed is dumb. If Facebook pumps that kind of crap onto user News Feed pages, the Beacon and Social Ad programs will fail.

Done right, they will represent a major positive innovation in online advertising.

The deal between MediaNews Corp. and Topix.net, where Topix will host the user comments for web articles on MediaNews’ newspaper websites, is stirring up debate in the blogosphere — especially between Howard Owens and Topix CEO Chris Tolles. (Journalism.co.uk report.)

Owens has gotten heated in his criticism of the deal. I understand where he’s coming from, but my own view isn’t quite as harsh.

First, I’ll point back to an article I wrote for the Poynter Institute several years ago: “The 11 Layers of Citizen Journalism.” In that, I outlined the various levels of user interaction that media sites can pick and choose from. User comments were at the absolute bottom of the list; it’s the very least that any website can do to let the audience into the game.

I would argue that while user comments are essential, they can take up substantial resources if you’ve got a lot of traffic and you’re monitoring them closely. So if you’re going to outsource anything on the “social” side of web publishing, user comments would be it.

BUT, working with an outside vendor, there must be good communication with the editorial staff. The vendor can alert the publisher to problems or user comments that require personal attention. And just because a news website is working with a vendor on user comments does not mean that editorial staff members are off the hook. The system should work to alert them to comments on their stories that require interaction with the audience.

I’ll go along with this idea only if the rest of the audience-interaction or social strategy of the news organization is taken seriously — the other things I talked about in that 11 Layers article (and more; that was written in 2005, and much has changed since then).

If any news companies are looking at the Topix offering and thinking, “Great. We can outsource our audience interaction and get back to the news business as usual,” well, that’s nuts. User comments are just one small element of interacting and engaging with your audience.