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Do social networks like Twitter belong in media?

July 13, 2009 By Dr. Pamela Rutledge Leave a Comment
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There’s an article on on ABS/CBN news site (Do social networks like Twitter belong in media?) discussing, among other things, the business models of social media, if it’s possible to monetize Twitter, and whether or not Murdoch will invest in Twitter after MySpace.  About 3/4 of the way down the article is a statement that shows me how hard it is for people to let loose of their current models of how the world works and why so many companies and people are having a hard time taking advantage of social networking technologies.  The author writes: “What is also unclear is whether social networks belong under the roof of Internet companies or traditional media.” Why is it that we insist on putting something firmly in an existing category?  Why must social networks be under one roof or the other?

Partly it’s because that’s how brains work.  We process new information by sticking it to something similar in our “brain bank” of stuff so we can decide what it is–or even remember it at all.  We do that with all kinds of things based on our experience.  Call it classification, call it stereotyping.  They are the same.  It is the process of trying to understand new information in the context of old information.  It isn’t a moral failure, it’s a biological constraint.  If we weren’t able to do that, we’d never make it out of the house in the morning for having to figure so much stuff out.  And we get really nervous if we can’t stick things somewhere, so we put new information, new experiences, and stuff we don’t understand firmly into the closest bucket.  And that’s the problem, because once in a bucket, it’s really hard to get it out.  And to make matters worse, this new bucket entry serves as a place to stick other stuff that kind of matches it, and they become equally as questionnably filed away.  When it comes to technology, this constrains us, not helps us.

Hello?  Did anybody watch the CNN coverage of Michael Jackson’s Memorial streaming across Facebook while people texted their experience in Twitters?  It’s time to wrench our old metaphors about media technologies out of the old media vs. new media model.  The boundaries are going away.  Making judgments based on out of date metaphors makes bad decisions.  It is true no matter what arena you’re operating in–business, socially, politically, interpersonally or scientifically.

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Social Media & Network Properties (In PowerPoint)

July 12, 2009 By Dr. Pamela Rutledge 3 Comments
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I will be teaching Social Media & Audience Profiling next week in the UCI Extension Business School. As part of the course materials, I made a PowerPoint presentation explaining some of the basics of network properties to provide some background. Call me crazy, but I think it helps to understand a little of the theory of how networks work if you’re going to make the most of social media. (They are posted on YouTube in three parts because Jing Pro has a 5 minute limit. I hear Camtasia for MacOS is in Beta!)

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The Native Tongue of Teens: Social Media

June 5, 2009 By Dr. Pamela Rutledge 1 Comment
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(This was posted June 5, 2009 on my blog “Positively Media” at PsychologyToday.com)

Ralph Waldo Emerson said:

“No man should travel until he has learned the language of the country he visits. Otherwise he voluntarily makes himself a great baby – so helpless and so ridiculous.”

Think of the tech-saavy younger generation as another country with a different language. Their lives are inseparable from technology and they are connected to each other and to information flows in ways many of us will never understand. We can learn to speak their language or we can look ridiculous and irrelevant.

No where is learning to speak the language of technology more important than when you’re trying to educate young people. At a time when one in five American students drops out of high school, we parents and educators need to work on our language skills. This is why I love to see educational institutions embrace media technologies. At Azusa Pacific University (APU), my friend David Peck is leading a team doing some really cool things to connect with this generation of digital natives by creating conversations in the language of the users. Sounds simple enough, but it is surprisingly rare.

APU is smartly and simply integrating game play and information delivery. Their website contains games starring Stickman Bob where you must protect the campus from comets and, although I am embarrassed to say that I destroyed the campus several times due to my lack of gaming skills, I now know what the Cougar Dome and Wilden Hall look like and I’ve never been to APU. After flattening the place, I also feel a little responsible for the protection of the campus. Pretty good emotional engagement for 15 minutes of play.

Games like Stickman Bob can also normalize experiences, such as the anxiety of the admissions and entry process, such as where you help Stickman Bob dodge crazed admissions counselors by leaping wildly and arming him with book bags. (I’m sorry to say that my Stickman Bob was resoundingly trampled.) This injection of humor allows APU to humanize their institution. They also invite engagement by letting you customize your own personal Stickman Bob avatar (in either gender) and keep track of your score. And they don’t stop there. You can “Join the Stickman Bob Facebook Group” or Twitter your opinions to @azusapacific. While marketers will be all excited about the website’s “stickiness” (ability to hold visitor’s attention), the real value comes in the brand perception of APU and in beginning to build a relationship with prospective students that will last long beyond graduation. These games are the equivalent of saying “Hey, we get you!” If it were my school, I’d put Stickman Bob on the home page.

As technologies emerge, the boundaries between platforms become more porous and things cross over. Think texting your Twitters and iPhoning your Facebook page. What many consider to be Internet applications are hitting the road. Mobile devices are an under-25 appendage and Blackberries and iPhones are no longer the tools of tech-dilettantes and Type A workaholics. In the summer of 2008, Hot Lava Software working with the Kauffman Foundation used the ubiquity of mobile devices to deliver Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics education as a ‘Sports Bytes’ contest to teens’ mobile phones with the hope of sparking their interest in the math and science at a time when many teens turn away. They asked questions like: Which ball has the slower speed when thrown: a softball or a baseball? Over 70,000 teens registered to play over the series of sporting events.

Teaching mobile game development is also emerging as a motivational tool to engage students, according to researchers like Kurkovsky, and can help students see the connections between Computer Science and real-world technology.

Where many educators demand the incapacitation of mobile devices during class, schools like APU have faculty that say “Turn on your cell phones. Text me with questions.” They are actively going mobile with access to school information like sports scores and calendars available to students via mobile devices with plans to integrate administrative chores. Compared to India, however, the US is a bit behind in adoption of mobile applications. New startups are doing everything from introducing mobile-based English language classes to companies like Find Guru who developing online classroom where you can get connected with teachers, assignments and texts. Love me, love my technology.

The brilliance of these projects, and the hopefully many like them, is that they aren’t using technology to replicate current educational experiences. They are using the technology to support ways of motivating and connecting with kids in the language they use every day. Not only will using technology help motivate and engage kids, it is also the only way to prepare them for problem-solving for jobs that haven’t been invented yet in a world full of technology.

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Kurkovsky, S. (2009). Engaging students through mobile game development. SIGCSE Bulletin, 41(1), 44-48.
Photos: APU Public Relations, iStockphoto.com

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Twitter and Goliath

April 14, 2009 By Dr. Pamela Rutledge 5 Comments
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This was posted April 13, 2009 on my blog “Positively Media” at Psychology Today.

First it was “Dell Hell” and now it is “#AmazonFail.” For all the debates over the purpose, point, and value of social media, it is events like these that illustrate how important they have become and how powerful they can be.

“Dell Hell” is one of the iconic stories in the history of social media sending an emphatic message that consumers have a new power. In June 2005, blogger Jeff Jarvis shared his less than satisfactory experience with Dell’s customer service on his blog “Buzz Machine” with the title “Dell Hell.” (This story is documented in a number of places, including the books Groundswell and Citizen Marketers, both quite interesting.)  The reach of Jarvis’ blog got his story out there, but the fact that his experience resonated with so many other Dell customers coupled with the system properties of the Internet sent the story viral, ending up not only all over the web but in the New York Times and Business Week. Dell had quite a wake-up call that resulted in substantial internal changes.2009-04-13-amazon-failwhale

To quote Yogi Berra, we’re having déjà vu all over again and Amazon gets to learn Dell’s lesson.

For those of you who haven’t been following the Amazon story, the company recently revised its ranking system. The system, like Google’s search algorithms, causes search results to be based not just on content match but also on popularity. An Amazon ranking is very important to authors because it allows their titles to appear on bestseller lists.

The furor began on Live Journal, when author Mark Probst noticed that the ranking had been removed from his young-adult novel with a gay character. As Probst remarked in his blog, he checked other gay titles and found that they too had been de-ranked. The story on his blog was picked up and reported on Twitter with the hashtag #amazon fail. (The hashtag is an identifier that tags Twitter posts to make them searchable.) Twitters and retweets (resending someone’s tweet) spread the information that Amazon had stripped the sales ranking from adult content (no pun intended). Although the de-ranking was intended to be targeted at all adult content, the result was the deletion of rankings from hundreds of gay and lesbian books while overlooking quite a bit of heterosexual lit-porn. The story and outrage reverberated through Twitter with #amazonfail quickly becoming the number one word on Twitter.

People began to collect lists of books of questionable content. Carolyn Kellogg on the The LA Times blog Jacket Copy reported that the sadistic murder story “American Psycho” remained ranked while the well-reviewed nonfiction work “Unfriendly Fire,” about the scoial costs of the current gay ban in the military, lost theirs. An online petition ensued.

New tools in the distribution arsenal since Dell’s misadventure, such as Google Bombs, were organized and deployed. Google bombs are a collective effort of people to link to specific words so that they disrupt the Google search and come up first. In this case the words are “Amazon Rank,” taking searchers to an explanation of Amazon’s transgression. The story of Amazon Rank reached epic proportions in little over a day.

Amazon reported that this was an unfortunate computer error. Many, but not all, are skeptical. At the least, this episode has raised issues about Amazon’s control and the transparency of the de-ranking process. Either way, social media has scored another victory for the little guy by proving that individuals have a voice and can make a difference.

The moral of the story is that the power has shifted from a one-to-many to many-to-many model, as Clay Shirky discusses in Here Comes Everybody. This means that not just as customers, but as citizens, we can and do get involved and make our voices heard in response to perceived abuses of power. The conversation can go global at any time and it just doesn’t matter anymore who starts it. Because of the way we, are tied together as nodes in a system, something as innocuous as a Tweet can trigger a cascade of information across the network. That one Twitterer now has the potential to create social change.

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Rebranding Nigeria in Global Brains

April 10, 2009 By Dr. Pamela Rutledge 5 Comments
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Nigeria has recently embarked on a rebranding effort to improve their image worldwide.  Global perceptions are important in attracting the kinds of things an emerging economy needs to improve the living standards and opportunities of its people: tourism, trade, foreign direct investment and foreign financial assistance, or even to meet the UN recommended Millennium Development goals. In the words of President Yar Adua, “we must readily put in place a positive perception of Nigeria.”   It has been interesting to watch the dialogue in the AllAfrica.com news.  In a recent article Nigeria: Re-Branding – Country May Be Worse If Credibility Gap is Created the National Institute of Marketing of Nigeria (NIMN) president Aimiuwu warned that things may get worse rather than better if Nigeria doesn’t do the rebranding effort right, noting that credibility is important, if “a product is not authentic and credible then our acceptability by other comity of nations will be difficult.” He also pointed out that corruption by Nigeria ‘s leaders presented a serious challenge in the selling of Nigeria as a brand.  Corruption is always a challenge to crediblity and transparency.

Whether it’s corruption, quality of workforce, infrastructure, tourist venues, or social stability and safety, credibility is key. Nigeria faces two big challenges: 1) brands are held in the brains of the tourists and investors, not the promoters, and 2) emerging social technologies have established new standards and expectations around the globe for authenticity and transparency.

Nigeria (and any nation) needs a new approach in the current environment. A new slogan, catchy song, and opulent video footage won’t do the trick in an age where regular people can talk to regular people without official intervention or institutional intermediaries. I know, easy for me to say, but Nigeria needs to identify the areas that are most detrimental to their goals and establish specific intervention strategies. The intervention strategies must address both the substance of the problem (i.e. improve something) and then the perception in the market. Holistic rebranding efforts sound fine, but the economic manifestation of positive perceptions often hinges on a short list of perceptions. No one can change everything, so it’s good to change the things that matter most.

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Photo source: http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2007/04/19/world/19nigeria-600.jpg

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/2658127.stm

http://marketplace.publicradio.org/display/web/2007/04/20/nigerias_election_may_move_a_continent/

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