What drives social media?

As one of only three people left in the online industry who doesn’t claim to be a social media guru, I thought I’d take a stab at making some incisive and sweeping generalisations on the topic off the top of my head.

When professional content-creators set up a publication they have a clear idea of who their target audience is and what they’re trying to achieve. Or at least they ought to. So what are the basic drivers behind the shed-load of social media content being generated all around us?

I reckon there are half a dozen different basic motivations.

1. Business Mode. Social media is increasingly a tool of business – and this mode is all about hustle: selling stuff or selling yourself. The latter sees individuals commenting on their industry to establish their credentials among peers.

2. Self-Promotion Mode. Some people on social networks seem most concerned about letting the world know how wunderbar they (or their family) are. Concentrating on their achievements and glossing over personal difficulties, frankly I tire of hearing about their latest holiday in the Seychelles and how Little Jimmy got a double-first from Oxford. Such vanity publishers are reticent about also letting their network know how Little Jimmy’s brother got suspended from school for attempting to set fire to his class-mate’s hair.

3. Dear Diary Mode. Arguably where blogging started out – with musings about life, the universe and everything. The impersonal nature of a computer keyboard allows some to let their emotions out in a way they would find difficult face-to-face with the very friends who might read their stuff online.

4. Functional Mode. My personal favourite. This is all about extending one’s ability to keep in touch with real-life networks. This could be anything from using Facebook to organise a get-together in the pub to giving selective updates about what’s happening to you. Such publishing shys away from overt self-publicity, marking significant events in the progress through life – holidays, jobs (lost and found), births/deaths, marriages…that kind of thing. Good and bad included. Some people get carried away though and seem to think it’s important the rest us know they’ve just had a haircut. A deluge of pointless information is not going to help the planet or deepen relationships.

5. Reviewer Mode. From slagging off tv programmes to politicians in live presidential debates to a hoover you bought that broke after a week, people are using social media to express their opinions and ‘to be heard’. With increasingly sophisiticated social media aggregation services such comment does count - in a way that similar banter in the pub with friends doesn’t travel beyond the next pint.

6. Citizen-reporter Mode. If you find yourself in the midst of a newsworthy event with a mobile phone, the urge may grab you to report on what’s happening and publish it to the outside world. The Arab Spring is an obvious case in point. It is difficult to imagine major breaking news events in future without this dimension of social media.

7. The God Knows Mode. I suspect a good many people are tweeting and updating Facebook pages because – well – everyone else seems to be doing it.

Naturally there is a good deal of crossover and people may operate in more than one mode at once. But maybe I've missed other motivations?

What's happened to BBC News?

This morning on the BBC News homepage at least three prominent stories are promoting BBC tv and radio programmes - here, here and here.

To my taste all interesting and worthy pieces, but it opens up a question about the nature of the BBC News brand. Increasingly it's being used to extend BBC output from airwaves onto the net.

Some would argue that this is harmless. It's not much different, after all, from the softer news focus of something like Breakfast on BBC One, which frequently puffs other BBC programming.

And yet there is something unsettling about the 'impartial' BBC News machine being used as a promotional tool for other parts of the Corporation. At a low levels this may be acceptable, but in recent months I've noticed more and more examples cropping up.

The solution, I would argue, is not to stop doing it - that would be a shameful waste - but rather to establish a 'Features' brand online distinct from BBC News. The new brand would signal to users that such features are not quite the same as a regular news.

Moreover, such a brand could provide useful focus internally. Currently there is lack of clarity concerning which BBC division is responsible for online content that isn't news/sport/weather. A BBC Features brand would help force BBC departments to present a unified, single, offering to users.

How Google+ can beat Facebook

For a while I’ve been thinking Facebook might just be a bubble close to bursting.

My opinion was not changed when a close friend informed me on a train ride yesterday that he recently deleted his account. It was privacy wot done it for him; caught out by the jumble of close friends, work colleagues and who-knows-who-else ending up on his Friends list.

I’ve tinkered around with Google+ and come up with a shopping list of things that would make this promising product something that can really take on the Facebook-Twitter duopoly.

Before I get on to this wish-list, though, it's worth mentioning some of the good stuff already in Google’s beta.

• It’s a clean design with a more grown-up feel: more a publishing platform for adults, less a kids’ game. And Facebook apps wind me up. I just don’t want to be Monster-Twiddle-Hugged by a vague acquaintance wanting to impose their poor taste in software on unsuspecting ‘friends’. Facebook apps are more likely annoying clutter than anything useful (Apple beware). I don’t want Facebook IM or email and all that other functionality cluttering up their interface. They may want to take over the world, but I just want to be left alone to do my thing, thank you very much.

• Circles. Facebook may have introduced ‘groups’ but the concept of divvying-up your contacts is core to Google Plus. I want control over the stuff I publish and decide exactly who gets to see what. Google is flexible in this respect, seamlessly moving from ‘open’ to ‘closed’ networks. Facebook much less so.

• I never liked the Facebook wall. Google Plus doesn’t have one. Yippie!

I could go on. Lots of nice integration - not least uploading photos directly from your phone - but let’s move on. What are the weaknesses: what needs improving, which features are missing?

• I found the ‘pictures’ side of things in need of better integration. Google pinged me between Google Plus, Picasa albums and ‘Google Pictures’, while giving me the option to use Picnik. A strangely schizophrenic user-experience all round. I’ve heard Picasa is to be rebranded Google Pictures, so fixing the issue may be in hand.

• Better integration with Google Contacts and Calendar. It strikes me the ‘groups’ I set up in contacts map more-or-less directly against my ‘circles’ in Google. Ideally, contacts and circles would sync, with profiles updating automatically. Will somebody please release me from the boring tyranny of updating telephone numbers and addresses.

• Facebook and Twitter newsfeed integration into the Google+ interface. I want a single newsfeed with everything on it. Freelance developers are having a stab with the G++ plugin and suchlike. This functionality needs to be integrated into the core product though.

• Ditto for my own posts/status updates. There needs to be really elegant integration with Twitter and Facebook so Google’s ‘share’ button seamlessly publishes to other platforms.

With all that, I would happily leave my Twitter and Facebook accounts semi-dormant. I would use Google + as my only day-to-day interface with stuff being sent to/from the other platforms from there.

Finally – and perhaps more important than any technical innovation – Google needs to stay on the right side of public opinion vis-a-vis privacy. This won’t guarantee them poll position on the social media grid, but one can be sure anyone falling foul of this is doomed to crash out of the race.

Insurance prangs

In recent years the borderline-criminal activities of the insurance industry has become a national scandal.

Where there should be sympathy for its exposure to fraudsters, there is only hatred from law-abiding citizenry, most of whom sooner or later get exposed to their schysterism.

One growth area has been the wholesale breach of personal privacy by the industry, which is little better than News of the World.

Get in a prang and your insurer sells your details to a gut-bucket lawyer who encourages you to claim further damages, all of which pushes up premiums for everyone. This activity should be banned without delay.

Another growth area is this business of paying for replacement cars while a pranged car gets fixed in the garage. This also caused insurance premiums to rocket, as stupidly expensive cars get hired out while repairs get argued over and eventually carried out.

I propose two things to help curb this unwanted nonsense.

Firstly, there should be the legal right to have insurance that waives the right to a hire car replacement in the event of an accident. In an industry-wide reciprocal arrangement, all such policies would be discounted to exclude costs associated with replacement cars.

Secondly, terms & conditions should be re-written for the remaining policies so that replacement cars would no longer be required to be ‘similar’ (ie: in the price bracket).

The new rule should only require a vehicle of ‘similar capacity’ (or size). The point here being that a £10,000 Fiat Punto actually has a bigger passenger capacity than a £100,000 two-seat sports car.

Given the bad things that happen in the world, having to forsake a luxury motor a few days for more modest wheels seems like a reasonable price to pay so that the rest of us can enjoy lower insurance premiums. I say ‘enjoy’ and ‘lower’ in the loosest sense of the words there, but you get my drift.

I haven’t run the figures to see how much this would save, but I can’t help feeling it would be worthwhile.

Murdoch’s downfall? The before and after effect

Facing MPs this week Rupert Murdoch cited the sale of government documents to the Daily Telegraph. He hinted there was something wrong with the methods used to break the scandal of MPs expenses. Putting aside ‘public interest’ justifying nefarious activities, there is another similarity with his situation that Murdoch didn’t mention.

It was over a period of months and years that MPs gradually stretched the limits for the kinds of things they could claim on expenses. Signing off a duck pond did not happen overnight. And so it is with phone hacking. Nobody would have signed off on Milly Dowler’s phone if it had been the first time a hack came to an editor asking for help getting into someone’s voicemail. It was a gradual slide.

For starters, journalists have been using dodgy means to gather info of one sort or another since the dawn of their profession. When electronic methods of doing this first appeared, it probably seemed no different particularly from buying someone a few pints and getting them to be unduly indiscreet. What nobody had anticipated at that outset was the scale of what would occur.

This is a function of the networked, Information Age we live in. Electronic intelligence-gathering, not long ago the preserve of MI6 and the CIA, is to use the jargon ‘scalable’. Where once it took a great deal of time to gather personal information about an individual together in one place, now it can be done in a few clicks. No more hours spent trawling dusty folders in the Land Registry or Passport Office.

So it started with the pleasingly simple – and apparently legal - ability to hear the voicemails of celebs. It ended with a newspaper giving the family of a murder victim straws to clutch.

It was a gradual, incremental slide. Those running corporations and governments need to be on the lookout. Like being unaware of the aging process when you live with someone, it’s only as you a see a picture of them 20 years ago that you suddenly recall how much younger they looked then. Generals fear ‘mission creep’. Incrementalism is all around us.

Problems occur when things cross the line unnoticed. The justification is the immediate precedent rather than a rounded view taken from a step back. It seems to be logical that you can do Y, because it’s not that different from X which has been done already. You need to be aware which end of the alphabet you’re at though.

Take American policy in the Vietnam war. This is another classic example of incrementalism that got out of hand. President Kennedy starts off with a few military advisors in the early Sixties. By the time of the Tet Offensive in 1968, the American public were surprised to hear of a US artillery officer saying without apparent irony: “we had to destroy the village in order to save it.”

This was one of the defining moments in the war. When the so-called logic of the generals was blown apart as being absurd. The US military view of the war had a strong internal logic, but the whole edifice become detached from the world around it. By 1968 it existed adjacent to, but quite separate from, reality.

The artillery officer jolted the American public into seeing the wider perspective. The Milly Dowler hack did the same for the British public, as did the duck pond for MPs expenses. Incrementalism is belatedly halted when an incident simply too bizarre to ignore occurs. And so the emperor stands naked for all to see.

The examples I’ve used here are just the first ones that came to my mind. If you can think of others, I’d love to hear from you

Goodbye to News of the World

In an attempt to take the heat out of the phone hacking scandal, News International today screwed the News of the Screws. A couple of their past front pages seem strangely poignant...