Blue Collar Rocket Science

Food or Cell Phone? Needs, Status, and Decisions for the Future

2009-10-18T00:15:08Z

Disagreements about applying resources to alleviating the suffering of poverty have deep roots. Two thousand years ago, in a oft-quoted passage from the Bible, Jesus told his disciples not to worry if they missed an opportunity to give money to the poor because “The poor you will always have with you,” and therefore there’s always another opportunity to give in the future. In the 18th century Adam Smith took a more proactive approach than Jesus, arguing that the best treatment for poverty was to increase the wealth of nations by allowing capitalists to increase their own wealth.

These two views continue to shape current conversation on the “bottom billion” of the planet’s population who are getting poorer or, at best, stagnating in poverty. Digital media devices have increasingly become available to populations that may be struggling with hunger, unsafe drinking water, civil war, or systemic corruption. In light of these basic challenges, the question of whether the global poor really need cell phones absolutely deserves to be asked.

When people ask this question, it’s a mirror image of the same question companies ask: What is the Return on Investment (ROI) of digital media?

As media professionals, we are accustomed to making the case that our specialty area can contribute to the profitability of our employers. We often just accept that the other end of the pipeline knows what it’s doing, and that digital media consumers can best judge that value they get from their cell phones and laptops. But there are two reasons why we can’t make that assumption when it comes to the emerging market of digital media users in the bottom billion countries.

The first is that when a bottom billion family directs scarce resources into a digital connection (almost invariably through a mobile phone), the short-term impacts are real. In his overview of the issue, Mobiles for Impoverishment?, Richard Heeks cites the finding by Hosea Mgopole, Hidaya Usanga, and Matti Tedre in Mobile Phones and Poverty Alleviation: A Survey Study in Rural Tanzania (.doc) that “48% of respondents reported that they sometimes substitute important needs (e.g. education, buying food, and clothes) for mobile phone ownership/usage.”

Mobile phone adoption is deeply tied to perceptions of status. In a wealthy country with an advanced banking system, we are accustomed to the idea of people borrowing against their own futures to obtain status symbols beyond their current means. But when the future borrowed against isn’t cash, but is food, clothing, or education, should we look at leveraged status climbing differently? This is the debate between Jesus and his disciples about the prioritization of resources to alleviate the effects of poverty, recast in a digital light.

The second reason we can’t make simple assumptions about the value of digital media adoption in poor communities is because, in Heeks’ words, “most research tells us that the poor are using mobiles for social more than business purposes.” The ROI of social communication has been notoriously difficult for businesses to quantify. When we talk about its use by the global poor, we turn the question on its head: We aren’t focused on the value of social media to companies, but instead on the value of social media to users. But we have the same lack of metrics to work with.

If businesses engage in social media on little more than faith, can we extend the same faith to poor social media users? It may be that, in the long run, the capital that the poor put into social media by shorting themselves on immediate needs will pay off in systemic improvements that lift their incomes. Perhaps social media’s value can’t be measured because it increases the wealth of the community as a finger on Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” theory of economic regulation.

As just one example of unexpected benefits from digital media, in a short piece for Wired magazine, Clive Thompson summarized a Stanford University study that claims digital media has ushered in an era of unprecedented literacy among college students. Perhaps the poor family that choose a cell phone over education is actually giving their children a better education than we suppose, as they master two-way literary conversation. And, as was pointed out in “The Bottom Billion” the establishment of a journalistic Fourth Estate is of immense value in improving the systemic conditions of poverty.

Using Jesus and Adam Smith as bookends on a discussion of the value of digital media to the poor might not be quite fair to either one, but there does seem to be a growing discussion happening somewhere between the two. In this new territory, digital media and microcredit start to blur, and social capital becomes as much a part of wealth creation as financial capital. The here-and-now problems shouldn’t be glossed over, but it can almost give one hope that perhaps the poor really won’t be with us always and there really is a middle way enabled by technology. Certainly, it will be interesting to watch how the poor use these new devices in the coming years.

Two for One: Could eCommerce Coops Help Developing Countries? What’s the Point of Computers in the Classroom Anyway?

2009-10-09T19:55:15Z

This is my Reflection Paper for week two of the Emerging Markets in Digital Media class.

Free PDF download: The Case of the Occasionally Cheap Computer: Low-cost Devices and Classrooms in the Developing World

In the first three chapters of “The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty Through Profits,” C. K. Prahalad proposes that the best path out of poverty in developing countries is the same path most of the developed world has taken: wealth creation through capital investment in supplying consumer goods. Prahalad recognizes flaws that have historically accompanied this route, such as wasteful use of resources, and even presents them as opportunities for progress that could pay off in developed economies as well. Primarily, however, the first part of the book is concerned with promoting the understanding that social, economic, and infrastructure conditions in the developing world mandate different business approaches from those that succeed in the developed world.

In their paper “The Case of the Occasionally Cheap Computer: Low-cost Devices and Classrooms in the Developing World,” an international team of researchers looks into computers in primary education in developing countries. They examine not only cost, but also form factors, technology, and social attitudes. In many respects, their conclusions mirror Prahalad’s point that solutions built for developed countries don’t necessarily meet the needs of developing ones.

Having read only part of Prahalad so far, I find myself fully in agreement with his belief in the capitalist structure as a creator of wealth, but wondering if he will explore forms of capitalism other than the multinational corporation (MNC) model he frequently references. If Prahalad taught at the University of Washington, instead of the University of Michigan, would his regional exposure to such long-lived cooperative businesses as REI, Group Health, and PEMCO influence his arguments? The regional coops that were formed during, and immediately after, the Great Depression were attempts to find a middle ground between socialist aims and capitalist efficiency, which clearly parallels the paths many developing countries seek today.

Prahalad demonstrates that there is a premium placed on sales to the poor. Someone who earns a little money every day, then spends that money on immediate needs, does not benefit from the bulk purchasing power that drives a company such as Costco, not to mention coops such as those I mentioned before. He argues that product producers should recognize this fact and introduce new form factors, such as the single use packet of shampoo, then shift their profit model to a low-margin, high-volume approach.

Once my mind turned from a horrifying image of India buried under used shampoo packets, I wondered why Prahalad is seemingly so quick to write off economies of scale in developing countries. Certainly the hand-to-mouth poor won’t be driving their Hummers to load up at Costco, but in a world connected by digital media, they might not need to. He cites how delivery drivers for Mexico’s Bimbo Bakery are entrusted with the keys to local stores and their cash boxes. What if that relationship extended to deliveries of essential goods at a price point set by group purchasing power?

A “basic needs” coop member in a developing country could place an online order for, say, a one-week package of shampoo, some underwear, and a washcloth. The package would be delivered to a corner grocery store, where the coop member is known by sight. This solves identification challenges, reduces delivery overhead, and encourages ancillary sales at the store, which is already being compensated for being a drop-off point. Perhaps a kiosk at the store accepts orders as well. The member may have purchased more than they can pay for at the time, but the difference is covered by the credit extended to the coop at rates lower than those available to individuals, and by not letting members place more than one credit order at a time, they are unable to get too far behind in payments.

While reading “The Case of the Occasionally Cheap Computer” I was nagged by a similarly fundamental question: What is the purpose of computer-aided primary education in developing countries? The researchers look at how well different use patterns impact learning new words on computers, but is that the best use of the technology?

To my mind, the most empowering use of computers in developing world classrooms might be to encourage a deeper understanding of them. In the developed world, this happened through school computer clubs, and the gradual dissemenation of computer knowledge through use as a work aid. But there’s an underlying tension at work there. A historic picture of Bill Gates and Paul Allen as teenagers using a Unix mainframe terminal at their school serves as an exhibit in the eventual rise of Windows to dominate Unix in market share. But with the spread of Unix’s open-source doppelganger, Linux, a picture taken today of two Indian teenagers using a Windows desktop could prove to be a key exhibit in the future dominance of Windows by a free GUI-based operating system, running on chips made by a company that hasn’t yet been thought of. The strategies pursued by hardware and software companies in developing countries seem geared towards making consumers, not competitors, which may impact their effectiveness.

A complicated web of knowledge transfer, intellectual property rights, and software business models entangles the uses of computers for education in the developing world. This particular study looks at important factors, but in the end it seems the decision on how children learn to use computers in developing countries may be shaped more by what individuals spend their money on than on grand educational visions.

How can Digital Media Help the Bottom Billion?

2009-10-02T19:00:10Z

The first weekly reflection paper for the class I’m taking this quarter in the Master of Communication in Digital Media program. The class is Emerging Markets in Digital Media, taught by Anita Verna Crofts, Director of Communication and Outreach for the Global Health Leadership Program.

In his book “The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries are Failing and What Can Be Done About It,” Paul Collier presents the arguments he and his students have developed from years of statistical research, but for the most part leaves out the statistics. This is a popular book, not a tome for wonks, and the way its theses come across to a non-expert reader simultaneously as both small revelations and simple common sense recalls Jared Diamond’s sweeping look at history, “Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies.” The difference is in scale and conclusion. Collier is looking at problems that have here-and-now effects not just on poor countries but all of us, and proposing solutions to them.

In Collier’s model, there are four “traps” that desperately impoverished countries fall into: conflict, natural resources, landlocked with bad neighbors, and bad governance in a small country. As a data-based pragmatist, he doesn’t offer single solutions to escaping these traps. For example, he recognizes that democracy can provide solutions to bad governance, pointing out that countries such as China can improve governance without democracy, and countries such as Nigeria can have democracies that produce poor governance.

I find the natural resource trap perhaps the most interesting, in particular the concept of “Dutch Disease.” In a country where exporting a single natural resource provides the bulk of GDP, other potential sources of export are made prohibitively expensive by an inflated currency value. He discusses how non-natural resource exports need not be physical but can also, as has been happening in India, be the knowledge and skills of an educated populace.

In the context of bad governance coupled with a single natural resource, Collier brings up a quantitative analysis of checks on political power, developed by unnamed “political scientists,” which consists of seventeen items. While the standard analysis weights each of these items equally, in Collier’s opinion the most important is the free press. He believes that with sufficient restraints on power, resource rich democracies can escape their governance traps and provide meaningful growth and improvement in standard of living.

From a digital media perspective, free press is an attractive starting point. Journalism and the media used to distribute it are so deeply intertwined as to have become nearly synonymous. The business models of large journalistic media companies in wealthy democracies may be collapsing due to the changed realities of digital media, but in countries where the free press hasn’t previously existed, the same factors would be a step forward, not a step back. One-to-many broadcast media that may be blocked, or which so often are the first things taken over in a coup, can be effectively replaced with many-to-one communications enabled through relatively low-cost cell phones and accompanying infrastructure. In an open communication marketplace, journalistic voices may arise and be difficult to silence.

In “resource trapped” countries, or landlocked countries where physical exportation is hampered by “bad neighbors,” the same cell networks could provide longer term solutions. At little cost, aid organizations based outside of target countries could establish online education programs that were freely available to all. Over the course of a few years, a better-educated generation of young people could emerge, ready not only to pursue new economic opportunities, but also equipped with critical reasoning skills allowing them to evaluate their countries’ political realities and find new models. And with digital networks, the transfer of funds or even the extension of credit, becomes available to anyone with a cell phone, adding velocity to stagnant economies. Ultimately, the two-way nature of digital communication could open up external markets for remote services offered by a trained populace.

By breaking with decades of received wisdom and doing statistical analysis on the patterns of failing countries Collier has identified that growth isn’t something greedy capitalist systems want, it’s a prerequisite to success in any economic system. Digital media has made information cheap and portable, and these two qualities make it possible to apply information-based solutions to seemingly intractable problems in the Bottom Billion countries.

CEOs and Tank Warfare

2009-08-18T22:41:39Z

In writing about the European front in World War II, it’s been argued that American troops were well-prepared for the realities of field warfare because they hadn’t been raised to be soldiers. By training, the GIs were farmers, mechanics, workers of all stripes. When a German tank broke, more often than not the crew abandoned it. When an American tank broke, the crew often figured out ways to get it running again using a boot lace and a tin can. The Germans waited for orders, the Americans improvised.

The Germans were excellent soldiers. The Americans were excellent doers.

In my experience, even the best-run companies I’ve worked for have had a built-in tendency to run like the German army. In fact, a lot of managers I know would define adherence to a hierarchy to be the very definition of “well-run.”

I disagree. In the media age, the weakest companies are those where management insists on being completely in charge. Or worse, where “rewarding individual initiative” is a mantra but is regularly undercut by actually rewarding the opposite.

CEO Ike

If you are a CEO, you may imagine yourself looking at a map of France, pushing little chess pieces closer and close to the Rhine river and think you are doing a great job. But what General Eisenhower knew was that it was the people represented by those chess pieces, those men in a tank with their boot laces and tin cans, that were actually getting the job done. All Ike did was point and say “go there.”

In the corporate world, I spent several years managing a team that had been waiting for orders, inside a department that had been waiting for orders. It seems that some years before I had been hired, senior management had become nervous about the people in their Internet operations department making decisions on their own, doing things, making money in ways that weren’t well-understood at the top levels of the company. That’s reasonable. It’s never good to have things happening in your company that you don’t really know about.

But what seems to have been the reaction to the situation was utterly incomprehensible to me. Instead of educating themselves about what this new Internet line of business was, Senior Management cracked down on it. They moved key components to other departments, they used layoffs to purge staff, and they buried profit from the Internet into a line item that merged it with other lines of business.

When I arrived, almost five years later, the site was paralyzed by inaction. The people who I expected to be leading were looking around for leaders, and finding none. Being who I am, took a different approach. I unlaced my boots and dug a couple of tin cans out of the garbage.

That was five years ago and I’ve been gone for more than a year. I hear, once again, that improvement at that company is just around the corner. I can only hope it is, because they’re just about to hit the ten year anniversary of when they cracked down on the Internet line of business and a much smaller competitor began eating away at their market share at an impressive clip.

Unfortunately, I have my doubts that anything is going to resolve soon. The problem isn’t unique to one company — it’s endemic to the business model that we instinctively embrace in America. Senior management naturally wants to give orders and have them followed.

But technology has decentralized power in ways that many senior managers don’t get. Many of us have worked under people who withheld information to maintain control. Without getting into the self-defeating aspects of that tactic, the sheer difficulty of hoarding information in the information age makes it a poor choice. Information is free, and freely available to your competitors as well. If they don’t do an end run around the info-hoarders, internal staff will. And if staff doesn’t do it, your own customers will.

At the job I’m recalling, management was aware on some level that their Internet operations was a broken tank. What they didn’t seem to understand was that their preceding actions had, in effect, been to issue the following order “Do not fix the tank. We will fix the tank.”

During the time I was there, lip service was given to rewarding staff who took initiative and fixed the tank. However, as anyone in a field related to marketing should know, there are explicit messages and there are implicit messages. And nothing sums up how management sends implicit messages better than this one slide from the Netflix Reference Guide on their “Freedom and Responsibility Culture”:

The real company values, as opposed to the nice-sounding values, are shown by who gets rewarded, promoted, or let go

Management that says it wants employee initiative, but only rewards employees who contributed to greater and greater levels of hierarchy is far too common. It is an untenable approach to a long-term culture of success, and the numbers will eventually catch up to companies with this fault as the competition moves both faster and smarter.

Senior Management and Washing Dishes

2009-08-18T22:38:06Z

Months ago, I proclaimed my next blog post would be on the Semantic Web. I started writing it, then things got a little hectic. It’s been a very busy and productive summer for me, with a lot of different strands coming together in interesting ways.

It’s made me thing that too often when thinking about all this media stuff that I do for a living, it becomes an abstraction. There are a lot of mental exercises one can do to figure out how to make a great user experience, or utilize social media to boost sales, or markup HTML to optimize semantic value. But on a base level, it’s not that different from any other job.

Back in college and right after, during the recession of the early 90’s, I used to pick up food service jobs. I’ve been a coffee barista, a pie slinger, and a prep cook. But more often than not, I was a dishwasher.

On Having Too Many Dirty Dishes

Dishwashing is the lowliest position in the kitchen, yet enlightened cooks understand that some nights it’s the most important. The pace of the dishwasher and the pace of the restaurant feed into each other. On slow nights, the dishwasher surfs on top of the orders, washing dinner plates or sauté pans as they fit into the dishwasher’s own rhythm. On busy nights, the dishwasher is controlled by the orders, and the orders are controlled by the efficiency of the dishwashing station. The machine is at maximum capacity, and so is the human.

This is when the bussers turn on the dishwasher. They go to get water glasses or silverware, only to find that there might be some clean, but they haven’t been stocked in the bus stations because the dishwasher has been too busy. The bussers, lowliest of the floor staff, complain about the dishwasher’s performance. They urge the floor manager to have it out with the kitchen manager. They watch the dishwasher disappear behind ever-taller piles of dishes and think how happy they are to be bussers, with their nice shirts and pressed pants.

In better-run restaurants, the line cooks, the highest status kitchen staff other than the kitchen manager, don’t yell at the dishwasher. I’ve even had it happen that the most junior line cook was sent to to help wash dishes. The line cooks knew the success of their night depended on the dishwasher’s success. A line cook at the dishwashing station only cleans what they need for their job, but when that means scrubbing gooey alfredo out of pans while the dishwasher loads glassware in a tray, that can get the kitchen back on pace, and everyone can work a little better.

Now, I’m not romanticizing dishwashing. It’s a dreadful job. I used to do it because it has a high turnover rate so I could always find an opening without having to look for more than a day, I could work evenings while going to school, I got free meals, and I learned more about cooking, which is my favorite hobby. But it was smelly, involved a lot of lifting, made my shoes rot, often ended with me alone mopping the floor at 2:00 AM, and didn’t pay well.

Who Will Scrub the Pots?

Far too often, I see senior managers who aren’t behaving like high status line cooks, helping out to ensure their own success. Instead, they’re acting like bussers. They want someone to fix the problem, but they won’t step in and get their hands dirty themselves.

Bussers want to look good. They face the public. They don’t want to set tables looking like they’ve just been in an overloaded dishwashing station. Helping themselves by helping the dishwasher is a major challenge to their self-image, and that self-image is what they think will move them to waiting, and maybe eventually into the big shoes of the floor manager.

Line cooks want to preserve the quality of the work. They know that ultimately, the fate of every restaurant rests on how well its kitchen performs. Many of them worked their way up from washing dishes, and they know how to do it. Helping themselves by helping the dishwasher is something they want to avoid, but if it needs to be done, they will do it.

Every restaurant needs both floor staff and kitchen staff. Think of them as “sales” and “production”

It would seem to follow that successful corporations would also need parallel hierarchies. But from the production side, it often looks like management only rewards the sales hierarchy. The company values are shown very clearly when someone is promoted, not for being a good dishwasher, but for making a PowerPoint presentation explaining “The Four Success Metrics for Measuring the Cleanliness of Dishes in an Enterprise.”

When these people tell the dishwasher that output needs to increase, instead of pitching in and helping, that’s when the status switch happens. A C-level manager standing in front of a department meeting and saying the wrong thing can become a complaining busser in the blink of an eye. I’ve watched it happen.

As a manager, I’ve tried to make sure everyone under me has what they need to work well. It’s a huge challenge though, and it can be hard to maintain. But when it comes down to it, I know my success depends on the success of those underneath me. And if I don’t know enough about how what they need to succeed that I could pitch in if necessary, then I make sure I get educated.

Maybe this isn’t the right approach for every person, or every business, but it works for me. It’s a startup mentality, but I’ve found it works equally well in non-startup businesses.

Search Engine Optimization: The Unauthorized Biography

2009-05-31T17:37:02Z

In case you’ve never heard of it, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the practice of trying to raise your site’s placement in Internet Search Engines. Everyone wants to be on the first page of Google results, and preferably in the first five listings on that page. The increase in traffic that comes from better search rankings can be enormous and lucrative.

I might be called an “SEO skeptic.” That’s not because I think SEO has no benefit — In fact I think understanding SEO is essential to managing a Web site well. So how can I be a skeptic?

I’m an SEO skeptic because too often SEO is treated as a specialized practice and I believe focusing on it in isolation can:

De-emphasize Web content as content created primarily for people, and
Over-emphasize a small subset of Best Practices for Web Development

Unfortunately, no matter how well-intentioned SEO specialists may be, their work can’t be performed in the absence of information architecture, standards-aware development, and user-centric content practices. While targeted SEO work might lead to short-term gain, it carries genuine risk of creating long-term problems. This is why I advocate treating SEO as a benefit of having a well-managed Web site rather than a type of work to be done for its own sake. Spending money on an SEO specialist should be the last thing you do after you make sure your Web team is adequately trained and that training is reflected in their performance.

Nearly all SEO benefits can be had as byproducts of trained workers doing long-term quality content and development, but SEO work done without also doing long-term quality content and development can actually harm the health of a Web site.

The Blue Collar Rocket Science Breakdown:

The best SEO results come from managing it as 95% skilled blue collar work, and 5% rocket science.

Quick Detour: SEO in The Semantic Web

While SEO as we know it today will be a consideration for years to come, the way the Web is understood by search engines will be changing as a new set of ideas and standards often collectively called “the Semantic Web” takes hold. Initially, semantic information will only impact what information is shown in search results, but there may come a time when “Semantic Web Optimization” is more important than SEO.

I will take a deeper look at the state of the Semantic Web in my next blog post.

SEO 101

There are a number of components to SEO. Here are summaries of the main ones:

Write your content so that a robot can easily extract keywords from the content.
Make your content something that is worth linking to from other sites, encourage people to link to it from other sites, and actively find legitimate ways to link to it from other sites.
Use HTML that has semantic meaning, instead of HTML that is only concerned with how things look.
Use URLs that reinforce the keywords in the content.

Number two is far and away the biggest one. If you get linking right, you’ll rise in the rankings. Get it wrong, say by spamming blog comments with links to your site, and you’ll sink like a stone. Don’t be greedy with your links and try to only have inbound traffic: The Web is an ecosystem. You link out, others link in, and Google notices.

SEO and Me: A Wary Relationship

In late 1998 I was working on Disney’s GO.com portal initiative. I once participated in a conversation with one of the search engineers who worked on the Infoseek search engine that was at the portal’s core. We were asking him to share tips to get GO.com pages higher than competitors’ pages but even though we all worked for Disney he was, rightfully, not enthusiastic about sullying the purity of the search. All he was willing to divulge was the things people did that hurt their rankings, which at that time mostly had to do with abuse of <meta> elements (or “metatags” in the imprecise terminology of most SEO conversations).

But some things seemed to be helping. Even in those days of HTML that followed no standard, the use of semantic heading elements appeared to have some weight. That was my first moment of starting to understand something very important:

HTML is a language for describing scientific research papers.

Tim Berners-Lee didn’t come up with HTML because it would solve the problem of how to sell shoes over the Internet. He came up with it because there was no common language for describing documents or referencing their sources. He was sick of needing a bunch of different programs for reading papers, and he was sick of trying to track down the sources for the papers. HTML provided a standard way to mark up papers, and HTTP provided a way to link them to each other.

The problem was that once it was released, HTML spun off into a wild, uncontrolled thing with no standard definition. Those of us who were making Web sites in the mid-90’s hacked it into a layout language, ignoring semantic meanings, and generally messing everything up.

In 1998 search engines hadn’t yet become as important to the Web as they are, so SEO wasn’t a primary concern. As a Producer I was focused on content creation and user experience. I came up with best practices like this:

Write your content so that a reader can easily extract keywords from the content.
Make your content something that is worth linking to from other sites, encourage people to link to it from other sites, and actively find legitimate ways to link to it from other sites.

Yep, those are the same first two items as in the SEO components list, except in number one I changed “a robot” to “a reader.” This highlights something that I think many people, including many SEO consultants and their clients, overlook:

In the current pre-Semantic state of the Web, Search engines are robots that try to experience the Web the way human beings experience the Web.

If people can glance at your content and quickly understand what it’s about, then robots will too. If people think sites linking to your site are good, then robots will too. If people think sites you link to are good, then robots will too. If people see you have a lot of links into and out of your site, they will see you as an active, valuable part of the Web, and robots will too.

If you focus on creating content that is just for robots, you may succeed in raising your rankings. But you might alienate your human readers.

That conversation with the Infoseek search engineer, as well as a few less-than-fantastic experiences with Content Management Systems got me interested in how data is structured. I went into XML, which primed me for learning XSLT a couple years later during a contract sojourn at Microsoft, which led to something of a sliding left turn into Web development. But long before that, something much more important happened, although I didn’t know it until years later…

In 1997, the HTML 4 spec was published. By moving formatting out of the markup and into the CSS language it provided a clear solution to the mess that had been made of the Web. It also made it much, much easier to build, update, redesign, and maintain sites. But until browsers caught up, in about 2001, most sites still had to do things the wrong way. But when the early adopters of clean HTML 4 began trouncing the competition in Google search results the SEO consulting industry really took off. What their clients perhaps didn’t understand was that SEO wasn’t the magic, standards-compliant HTML 4 was.

Fortunately for SEO consultants, but unfortunately for their clients, it’s possible to get pretty good rankings by hacking a few semantic elements into a site built with old-style HTML. So it was easy to make recommendations that would deliver desired results, but ignored the deeper underlying problems. This could, and often did, turn what might have been a single, unified, push to modernize Web sites into a multi-year agony of diminishing returns and frustration.

It was with the turn of the century that I started actually caring about how HTML was structured. But still I come at it from a background in managing content creation and user experience. I’d internalized that semantic HTML makes Web design, development, and maintenance much easier and cheaper. You don’t have to be a developer to appreciate that. So when I took on management of the HTML production at REI, I had one primary Best Practice that I drilled into my reports:

Use HTML that has semantic meaning, instead of HTML that is only concerned with how things look.

Where have I seen that before? Oh yeah, it’s the same, word-for-word, as point number three in my SEO components list. So that leaves us just number four from the SEO list:

Use URLs that reinforce the keywords in the content.

Really that’s actually a part of user experience that’s as old as the Internet’s Domain Name System itself. No one wants to make their users go to the Web site address 207.46.197.32 when they could go to Microsoft.com instead. Some User Experience people had been arguing addresses built out of query strings like http://rei.com/search?query=Tents&button.x=0&button.y=0 instead of http://rei.com/search/Tents were bad experiences to be avoided whenever possible, but they didn’t get far with the backend developers until SEO gained momentum. Of course, the reason this is important to SEO is if it’s bad for people, it’s bad for robots.

When Bad Things Happen to Good Web Sites

SEO is an easy sell to management because it can return significant gains rather quickly, assuming there are gains to be made. (Remember, there are only ten spots on the first page of Google results and your competition has an SEO consultant too. Maybe even the same one you have.) But if you have issues with SEO, it’s pretty much a given that they stem from deeper issues you need to address.

SEO by the Gallon

Last summer, a local site development company with a national base of clients was looking for a manager of their SEO team. I was just coming off my work at REI, where I had achieved major SEO improvements in as an integral part of managing the implementation of the site redesign. I figured I was plenty qualified for the posted position, so I applied.

I got as far as an interview with the person who would have been my Director. About an hour after the interview ended, the recruiter I’d been working with called me back. In a tone of voice that clearly indicated she felt I’d been wasting their time, she said the Director told her I wasn’t a real candidate because I was “a developer.”

The turning point in the interview had come when I told the manager that I’d looked at the HTML from a few sites that they managed and could see SEO improvements to be made. He didn’t want to hear that. He wanted a special SEO sauce that came in a jug and could be poured over a site without getting on anything inside it. Because I showed I think of SEO as part of a holistic approach to content and development, I had disqualified myself.

If I thought it was one director at one company that thought that way, I wouldn’t mention it. But it’s a misperception I’ve run into a number of times.

Audit Yourself

If you are tempted to seek SEO expert advice, first make sure that the fundamentals of your site are in the best possible shape that your available resources can make them:

Ask your Web Developers if their HTML will validate against the spec. If it won’t validate, there may be a perfectly good reason why it doesn’t, but if your developers can’t tell you the reason they may need some additional training.
View the site with CSS turned off (an easy way to do this is with the Web Developer Extension for Firefox.) Ideally, you will see nothing but text, images, and tables, all lined up neatly in a column. Again, if you see something else your Web Developers may be able to give you a perfectly good reason why, but if they can’t some additional training may be in order.
Review your content. Can you tell what a page is about at a glance? Does the title description in the frame of the browser describe the page? Do important keywords get used in multiple locations, without being so obtrusive as to interrupt the user experience? Do links to other pages or other use meaningful text, or do they say something generic like “read more…”? If you find problems and you’ve never had a dedicated Information Architect working on the site, you might need one now. IA’s provide the skeleton plans for sites that designers, content creators, and developers flesh out. It’s their job to think all this through before anything gets set in stone.
What about the URLs? Do you see the anything in there that describes what the page is about? If not, you may want to work with your server administrators to change that. But beware, just changing one URL for another could cause your search ranking to plummet. You need “301 Redirects” in place first. If your server adminstrators don’t know what that means, they need additional training.

Last Thoughts

Those are the thoughts of an SEO skeptic. It’s important to understand what SEO is and what it isn’t. One thing it is, is a zero sum game. At some point, you and all your competitors are going to have put as much energy into getting on that first page of Google as you can. Maybe you’re already there. Only ten links can do it, and there’s no guarantee that you are going to own any of them.

What is your strategy for succeeding without a focus on SEO? Is the rest of your site up to snuff? Is your Web team trained well enough to create competitive product? If you focus on that and let SEO happen, you’ll be spending your money wisely.

The Future of Social Networking Sites

2009-06-07T19:01:40Z

This is the final paper for the Master of Communication, Digital Media program’s “Evolution and Trends in Digital Media” class, taught with enthusiasm by Ken Rufo. The assignment was to project the future of a chosen medium two, five, and ten years into the future. By the time I was finished prognosticating social networking, I’d come to feel my projections were conservative and the pace of change will likely be more rapid. I now feel we may see my ten year projections coming to pass in little more than five years. By contrast, In 1999 when I was at Disney doing a streaming media competitive analysis and making projections on the rate of adoption of broadband I was too optimistic in my assessment by about 50%. Moral: It can be hard to get the future exactly right.

Brook Ellingwood
COM 546: Evolution and Trends in Digital Media
Instructor: Dr. Kenneth Rufo
May 08, 2006

Introduction
Social Networking and Social Network Sites
Social Networking is not Restricted to Social Network Sites
Social Networking as Human Extension
Financial Background of Dedicated Social Network Sites
Current Directions
Current Challenges
Predicting the Future in Three Easy Steps
The Next Two Years: The Venture Era Continues
Waypoint: Q2, 2011
Impact on Other Media
Third Party Interface and Platform Options
Point of Sale Meets Profiles
Two to Five Years: The Interchange Era
Waypoint: Q2, 2014
Impact on Other Media
“Open Profile” Servers
Mergers, Partnerships, and Smaller Players
Confusion in Retail and Content
Five to Ten Years: The Open Era
Waypoint: Q2, 2019
Impact on Other Media
Social Networking 1, Business Model 0
Conclusion
References

Introduction

Over the past several years, social networking has distinguished itself as a significant and growing Internet activity. Much as Web content did in the early days of mainstream Internet adoption, the increasing number of participants in Internet social networking activity has attracted the attention of venture capitalists, entrepreneurs, and forward-looking non-technology business people. The manifestation of this attention has been a number of popular social networking sites.

In this paper, I will make predictions for the future development of Internet social networking as a behavior and social network sites as a class of media technologies that underly this behavior. While the predictions by themselves may not a address monetization models, I hope to provide a framework within which monetization strategies can be defined. The way points on this future path will be set at two, five, and ten years from the time of writing.

Social Networking and Social Network Sites

To understand social network sites, we first need to understand social networking behavior. Social networking is behavior in which individuals define their connections to agents, allowing interaction with them. The term “agents” is borrowed from the Friend of a Friend (FOAF) vocabulary specification, which states it may encompass individuals, groups of individuals, software, or objects (Brickley & Miller, 2007).

Although outside the scope of this paper, I believe it can be demonstrated that social networking is an inevitable by-product of the interactions made possible by the nature of the Internet. As the network was developed and new protocols were introduced for the exchange of “official” information, they also facilitated “unofficial” uses, which amounted to social networking. Email and Usenet are early examples of protocols with narrowly defined uses, but which individuals used for social networking behavior.

Social network sites are a class of Internet media, which emerged from recognition of social networking behaviors. Social network sites are specifically designed to facilitate social networking, but are driven by competition to be protective of their data, which places strict limits on the true networking ability each allows. Profiles on MySpace, Facebook, and LinkedIn are not interchangeable, nor for the most part are they interoperable, or even show an awareness of each other. As a medium, social networking is currently kept from reaching its potential by the imperatives of economic competition.

Social Networking is not Restricted to Social Network Sites

Discussing social networking as it is today, is is nearly impossible to not focus heavily on the major social networking sites. But social networking is a behavior, not a technology. These sites seek to capitalize on what people were doing already, by making it easier and more powerful.

As mentioned previously, it is my belief that in the early days of the Internet social networking became an adjunct behavior to information exchange via pre-Web protocols. These protocols have analogues today.

Although often referred to as “micro-blogging,” Twitter’s exchange of information with groups or individuals actually bears a strong resemblance to historical usage of email, even to the common practice of choosing a client that suits user preferences. The obvious difference is the limitation on the length and format of the message and ability to preemptively filter by user, yet I believe this helps Twitter fill a function email used to before too many messages led to over-full inboxes.

Blogs can be shown to resemble newsgroups, especially moderated newsgroups. The gamers have taken social networking from text-based virtual universes to rich graphical ones such as World of Warcraft. And peer-to-peer networks provide seeds around which online communities of file-sharers form, in a way that even the lowly FTP and Gopher services once did.

Directed social networking has become a part of many sites that at first glance exist for other purposes, such as commerce or self-publishing. Amazon.com’s integration of social networking into its online retail experience via customer reviews set a standard for commerce sites to follow, while user activity on YouTube goes far beyond passively watching uploaded video and includes ratings, comments, subscriptions, and more.

What social network sites seek to do is monetize what had previously been an adjunct behavior. To apply McLuhan’s “global village” metaphor to the Internet, we can imagine a central plaza ringed by businesses. These businesses benefit from the fact that everyone gathers in the plaza, creating a beneficial economic climate. In this metaphor the pure social network sites are hanging around in the plaza talking with their old friends, meeting new friends, and not spending any money at the businesses around the plaza. Perhaps they are even driving potential customers away from the businesses. The answer to the question “can social network sites make money by hanging around in the plaza chatting?” will eventually determine the future of social networking itself.

Social Networking as Human Extension

25 years ago Marshall McLuhan defined media as “any extension of ourselves” (McLuhan, 1964). Internet social network sites clearly fit this definition while the way they have integrated into the everyday pattern of many peoples’ lives takes it to a level that technologic infrastructures simply could not support until very recently.

Where a strict McLuhanist view of social networks sites proves problematic however is in McLuhan’s lack of differentiation between behavior and the technology enabling the behavior. McLuhan’s implicit assumption would be that social networking behavior is supported by a social network infrastructure, as his theories were developed in a time when mass media were defined by a common specification, whether formal like television broadcast standards, or informal like the layout and content norms of newspapers.

It’s difficult to discuss the current state of Internet social networking as a singular medium, as if Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter were merely different television networks, each offering unique programs within an otherwise similar experience. In 1964 there was little to be done to enhance the experience of television. Buying an expensive television might marginally improve the picture quality, allow you to view a rare color broadcast, or perhaps change the channel without getting out of your chair, but the fundamental experience of watching television remained the same. The technology almost completely defined the behavior. It was certainly technically possible to experience television broadcasts through radio receivers, but for a normally-sighted person, this removed the defining characteristic of television as a medium and made the experience thoroughly unrewarding.

Instead of a single specification for broadcasting audio/visual signals, what social media networking sites share now is the foundational IP and HTTP protocols. These allow for considerably more flexibility of experience than specifications for earlier media allowed. The Internet Protocol (IP) provides for addressing and routing of information between physical machine locations (Internet Engineering Task Force, 1980), while the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) provides for structuring the information in a standardized format that can be interpreted by client software (Berners-Lee & Fischetti, 1999). Within the boundaries of HTTP, there is considerable flexibility in controlling the user experience with the client software.

While little is likely to change with the IP and HTTP protocols in the next 10 years, understanding that the Internet is a layer cake of standards resting on a platter of data exchange protocols is important. We may think first of Web browsers when we think of social networks, but they are by no means the only class of client that can interpret HTTP content sent via IP. Twitter owes some of its success to the ease of writing alternate clients for its Application Programming Interface (API), ranging from desktop computing software to installable interfaces for mobile phones. These clients attempt to improve or extend the Twitter experience in ways defined outside of Twitter’s own development process. More complex social networking experiences, such as Facebook, have yet to fully open their APIs. They have created alternate clients in-house although these clients tend to have limited functionality and platform support.

We are left then, holding a mixed bag of media, which share common underlying protocols but don’t offer the same sort of shared experience of technology that shaped McLuhan’s concept of media as both behavior and technology. The challenge of definition is further complicated in that the product contemporary social network sites pitch to users is not actually the network, but the user experience of the network.

Where television networks differentiated with content, social networks differentiate and compete by offering unique experiences, thereby creating alternative extensions of the user. The hoped-for monetization models of social networking sites place a high value on user data, which discourages sharing information broadly outside of the user experience. Although it is changing rapidly, until recently each site has been contained within a garden wall of authentication, over which only the smallest bits of information was allowed to pass.

Jockeying for users and attempts to define monetization strategies will drive changes in how social networking sites evolve. This competition may be direct, such as that between the social sites Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, and Friendster, or it may be tangential, such as it is between the social sites and the established social networking behavior on Amazon.com. It may only be implied, as in the open source Elgg platform and the proprietary services, but even this low grade competition affects decisions that shape how social networks as a class of media will develop.

While predicting what the outcome of this period may be is fairly straightforward, the act of researching it for this paper is not. The business news carries stories daily about Facebook and MySpace, which will be shown to be the two most significant drivers of social network usage at this time. Sources used in early drafts of the paper have been made obsolete by ongoing events. However, the broad outlines of prediction can be made with confidence, even if details change after the time of writing.

Financial Background of Dedicated Social Network Sites

In the United States, MySpace is the largest social dedicated network site, followed by Facebook. A number of other sites trail by a good distance.

Site	Unique U.S. Monthly Visitors (in millions)
MySpace	76
Facebook	55
Classmates	16.6
LinkedIn	6.3
Bebo	4.9
Ning	3.9
Friendster	1.7
Table 1: Unique Monthly U.S. Users of popular Social Network Sites as of 12/1/2008, Measured by Comscore (Arrington, 2009)

Facebook use in the US is growing, while MySpace use remains relatively flat.

Illustration 1: Comparison of growth rates for U.S. users of MySpace and Facebook, Measured by Comscore (Arrington, 2009)

Worldwide monthly user numbers for the top two social networking sites are staggering, with Facebook almost twice as large as MySpace.

Site	Unique Worldwide Monthly Visitors (in millions)
Facebook	222
MySpace	125
Table 2: Unique Monthly Worldwide Users of Social Network Sites as of 12/1/2008, Measured by Comscore (Arrington, 2009)

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg recently announced that Facebook’s total number of “active users” had reached 200 million (Zuckerberg, 2009). Only three months ago, when the number was 150 million, Zuckerberg observed that Facebook’s virtual population was larger than the real populations of all but seven countries (Zuckerberg, 2009). If Zuckerberg made his comparison now, only five countries would be larger (Central Intelligence Agency, 2009).

Illustration 2: Comparison of growth rates for worldwide users of MySpace and Facebook, Measured by Comscore (Arrington, 2009)

Since September, 2005, MySpace has been 100% owned by Intermix Media, Inc., which is owned by Fox Interactive Media, which is owned by News Corp. At that time, MySpace received $70 million in cash (News Corporation, 2008), on top of funding MySpace received prior to the purchase, including an earlier purchase of a 47% stake by Intermix. MySpace’s profitability is not separately reported, although press reports give a figure of $200 million revenue in 2008 (Laughlin, Cox & Segal, 2009).

By contrast, Facebook remains privately owned, and has gone through three rounds of funding totaling $40.7 million (Facebook). Recently, Facebook reportedly declined more investment money, apparently because Zuckerberg believed the valuation potential investors were using was too low and because the company has up to two years operating expenses in the bank. There is speculation Facebook may break even this year (Eldon, 2009).

Current Directions

The MySpace experience has long been defined by users sharing media content, and with the launch of MySpace Music, the company is looking to integrate sales of music downloads from Amazon.com, concert tickets, and other entertainment products into its user experience (Nakashima, 2009). At the same time, the site is facing a loss of revenue from an expiring advertising deal with Google that is unlikely to be renewed (Laughlin, et. al., 2009). Just a week before the time of this writing, co-founder and CEO Chris DeWolfe was forced out, while the other co-founder, Tom Anderson, has been removed from his existing role with no clear new role defined (Grover, 2009).

By contrast, Facebook has not looked to add revenue streams through partnerships. The company places a high premium on its relationship with its users, even to the extent that this year it has rolled back terms of service and interface changes in response to user complaints. At the current time, it has just completed allowing users to vote on the new terms of service (Harris, 2009). And, in a another indication of how fast the background information is changing, just a few hours before the time of this writing Facebook announce a new API, which will allow users’ activity streams to be reused by developers without requiring any user interaction with Facebook itself (Musil, 2009). Facebook’s newly announced API complies with the Activity Streams standard, based on the Internet Engineering Task Force’s (IETF) Atom feed standard (Cheng, 2009).

A suite of technologies referred to as “the Open Stack” is increasingly being adopted by community-focused sites. From the user perspective, the component of the stack that will be most apparent will be Open ID, which allows users a single set of credentials which may be used across multiple sites. Underlying that, an additional four standards for data discovery and exchange eases interoperability. MySpace supports the Open Stack for its MySpace Data Availability API (Hughes-Croucher, 2009). The established Windows Live ID, which provides a single sign-on service like OpenID’s, became an OpenID provider in late 2008, calling OpenID a “de facto” standard (Kincaid, 2008). Facebook’s position on OpenID is unclear, as it offers a competing service called “Facebook Connect” yet has joined the OpenID board (Ostrow, 2009).

Current Challenges

In a number of ways, the current era of social network sites greatly resembles the “dotcom” era of the 1990s. There has been considerable investment based on assumptions of future profitability, and the speculation is based on a belief that a single entity leveraged income from many small sources can prevail.

The depressed online market of 2001 and 2002 provided Google with an opportunity in the form of AdSense, or syndicated advertising targeted by page content, with profit shared between site owners and Google. Tim O’Reilly, when attempting to explain what his “Web 2.0″ coinage means, focused on Google AdSense as a way of leveraging the “long tail” of “small sites that make up the bulk of the web’s content” (O’Reilly, 2005).

This economy in which a dominant player partners with smaller players and creates a fertile business environment can also be seen in Amazon’s expansion into hosting small retail sites, even to the extent of stocking and shipping products for partners (Amazon.com). As in the 1990’s, the social network power players are fighting to be the last one standing.

What is not clear, however, is what the survivor will see when the dust of the battle clears. Is there another Google AdSense waiting over the horizon, ready to pull a new revenue model out of the smoldering embers of the old?

Predicting the Future in Three Easy Steps

Predicting the future of social networking with two, five, and 10 year way points gives us three periods in which different factors have the most impact on social networking sites. The three periods I have identified are as follows:

The Venture Era. Over the next two years, developments in social media will continue to be largely driven by active competition to define the space and maximize profits to investors.

The Interchange Era. As the competitive landscape becomes settled, partnerships will form, and social network sites will be entirely recast as social networking services.

The Open Era. Social networking will become indistinguishable from most other Internet behaviors. Will the social networking business model survive the asteroid strike?

The Next Two Years: The Venture Era Continues

Waypoint: Q2, 2011

Two years from today, in the second quarter of calendar 2011, the term “social networking site” will be increasing superseded by the concept of “social networking service,” as many active users of Facebook, Ning, LinkedIn, and many other current social networking sites will only visit them for purely administrative tasks. Although the experience of activity feeds will be exported to third party clients, easy aggregation of activity feeds from multiple services will intentionally be made difficult by competing services. Many social networking experiences will incorporate ecommerce in increasingly effective ways, and smaller ecommerce sites will experience declining visitations and sales. A high valuation placed on the limited number of retail placement deals in activity feeds will fuel an economic boom amongst third party experience providers. MySpace will only be a partial participant in the services-oriented ecosystem, and thus will see a continuing decrease in active users even as its revenue increases due to high placement fees paid by online retailers.

Impact on Other Media

Social network sites will continue to grow in usage across the world until the point of ubiquity in “connected” demographics.

Broadcast media which already has turned to social media to enhance user experience by offering bonus content online and facilitating custom social network sites, will use social networking to a greater and greater extent.

Newspapers, having failed to support legacy operations by attempting to monetize articles as blog postings, will increasingly add social networking experiences into their Web sites. They will resist open technologies, such as OpenID, which will hurt them as many customers will come to see managing multiple logins as a hurdle they choose not to leap.

Third Party Interface and Platform Options

By supporting the Activity Streams standard, Facebook has given an additional boost to the trend towards openness. Within the year, all major social networking sites will support open standards or begin what will eventually become fatal drops in active users. These technologies will begin a further break down of the “walled garden” effect of current social networking sites.

For the time users will have a choice of interface, instead of only using the one offered by the social networking site itself. Developers will provide a flood of options for experiencing social network activity on any imaginable platform. Over time, the best implementations will be attract large numbers of users. Conversely, some potential benefits to Facebook users in particular may be unfulfilled, as the company tries to avoid a repeat of the backlash to its Terms of Service update, which would have given the company more protection in issues arising from use of the API by third parties.

Existing aggregator sites like FriendFeed will continue to have a relatively small number of users compared to the dedicated social networking sites.

Point of Sale Meets Profiles

MySpace, driven by the pressure of being part of the News Corp. conglomerate, will focus more heavily and more obviously on mixing direct ecommerce into user activity streams and in the process become less of a social networking site in the perceptions of users. However, the direction they take will make it easier for other sites to implement more subtle ecommerce utility without disrupting the perceived authenticity of the social networking.

Two to Five Years: The Interchange Era

Waypoint: Q2, 2014

Five years from today, social networking will have become firmly embedded in most online activity, and will be moving from an adjunct role in broadcast and print media to a position in which it becomes a main driver of content. The “walled garden” experience that most users associate with social networking today will be giving way to mashups and custom user experiences. The face of online retail will be changing from a focus on standalone storefront sites to providing contextually appropriate feeds for mashups, and shopping cart and checkout activities will frequently happen without leaving the social media context and going to the retail Web site.

Impact on Other Media

An increasing number of broadcast programs will more closely resemble packaged summaries of the activity on targeted social networking sites, than they will traditional programs. Similarly, the surviving print newspapers will be publishing content that was created for, and in, a social networking context.

“Open Profile” Servers

As part of the increasing adopting of Semantic Web standards, some version of an Open Profile data format will be promoted by major players that aren’t strictly focused on social networking, such as Google and Amazon.com. Similar to OpenID, it will let anyone publish user profiles that can be consumed by all who follow the specification’s authentication protocols. With major player support, the social networking sites will be pressured to both consume and publish Open Profiles.

Mergers, Partnerships, and Smaller Players

As investors in smaller social networking sites see the profit made from commerce relationships by larger sites and third parties experience providers, the pressure to maximize tThe return on their investment will fuel a series of mergers. One plausible scenario would be for LinkedIn, currently a standalone site with a focus on business relationships, to merge its data with Facebook’s, and LinkedIn.com to continue its existence as a little more than a skin on a subset of Facebook data. Similar mergers would continue throughout 2011 and 2012, and will result in two or three meta social networking service providers.

Paradoxically, as the “old growth” sites go away, smaller services with less venture capital funding and deeper roots in niche online communities, such as open source development or gaming will begin filling the void. These sites will initially be aggregators, relying on tying together user information from multiple sources via the Open Stack and APIs, then augmenting it with custom features serving the site’s particular community interest. Soon, however, they will evolve in complexity and the roles will reverse: The niche community sites will increasingly feed activity data into meta social networking services rather than primarily consume it. Ning, which currently offers a robust community platform service for free, will remain independent, while providing users with API hooks into social networking services.

With Open Profiles, it will become much easier to create social network mashups. Activity and connection information can be combined with other data sources to make new user experiences. Aggragator sites like FriendFeed will expand their utility with new data sources. API combination kits, similar to today’s Google Pipes, but with a lower technical knowledge threshold will make it possible for power users to create their own mashups quickly and easily.

Confusion in Retail and Content

As social networking increasingly offers direct contextual access to ecommerce and entertainment or news content, retailers and content creators will find themselves reassessing the roles of their standalone sites. Many will choose to de-emphasize their sites, scaling back operations and moving content or transactions into contextual widgets on various social network clients. Others will move to adopt the open standards that have led to the spread of smaller social networking services, and become social networking services themselves. Still others, faced with the reality that maintaining dedicated media departments is outside their core competencies, will outsource: Many retail sites will move to Amazon.com storefronts, leveraging the existing work in social networking that has fueled Amazon’s success.

Five to Ten Years: The Open Era

Waypoint: Q2, 2019

Fulfilling the early social promise of the pre-Web internet protocols, most online activity again will be in a person-to-person context, in which person-to-machine activity such as content consumption and retail will be embedded rather than primary.

Impact on Other Media

The majority of broadcast and periodical print media will rely on social networking to drive content. It will be possible for groups of people to form and create television shows although none of them have any direct connections to the industry. Most regional newspapers will have ceased print operations altogether.

Social Networking 1, Business Model 0

The significant social networking sites of today will all have been acquired by players with a broader focus or will be operating at a reduced scale, providing services to partners in content or retail. With Open Profiles making social networking a ubiquitous context online, the only business value to social networking will be in combining it with other activities.

Conclusion

The direction of social networking is in many ways presaged by the history of the Internet, and the social interactions inherent in many pre-Web protocols. With the benefit of hindsight, it can be seen that introduction of the Web enabled a period in which many online interactions ceased to be in the person-to-person context. This first manifested itself in online published content, which took the form of machine-to-person in the same way that interactions through print are mediated by the agency of the printing press. Swiftly following content, online retail also established a machine-to-person model of interaction.

Almost as soon as these non-social modes of interaction were established, they began to evolve in a social direction. The typical content model developed towards blog posts with comments, while retailers soon added socially-driven features like profiles, comments, and wish lists.

With the launch of Friendster in 2003, the era of social networking for the sake of social networking began. While this period has driven significant technical innovation and demonstrated the enormous appetite for social networking, it has also highlighted challenges with the problem of monetizing social networking activity in a pure context, as well as the frustration of walled gardens of data that are kept from interoperability due to financial competion.

The purchase of MySpace by News Corp will be seen as the beginning of the integrated social network era, when social networking competencies will be brought in from the outside and used to provide a social text to previously non-social activities. At the same time pressure from companies that benefit from open information such as Google, as well as influential thinkers promoting open standards, has begun opening cracks in the walls of the social networking sites’ gardens.

As businesses in online and other media wrestle with how to maintain competition by putting their product in a social context, there will be more openness and exchange. This will undercut the business potential of pure social networking sites. Eventually, social networking will become simply the context within which virtually all online activity takes place.

Ten years from today, the wired demographic will be living in McLuhan’s “global village.” The next great step in the process will be the time when everyone on Earth joins that demographic.

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O’Reilly, T. (2005,September 30). What Is Web 2.0?. Retrieved May 5, 2009, from O’Reilly Web site: http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html

Ostrow, A. (2009, February 09). Facebook Joins OpenID Foundation; So What?. Retrieved May 5, 2009, from Mashable: The Social Media Guide Web site: http://mashable.com/2009/02/05/facebook-openid/

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Zuckerberg, M. (2009, January 7). A Great Start to 2009. Retrieved April 15, 2009, from Facebook Web site: http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=46881667130

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Précis: The Muse Learns to Write: Reflections on Orality and Literacy from Antiquity to the Present

2009-05-22T05:04:27Z

This is another short paper for the “Evolution and Trends in Digital Media” class. I chose this book because it came out during my undergraduate studies when I was first being exposed to the Orality and Literacy concepts that Walter J. Ong and others had developed. Havelock was recommended to me by the amazing Charlie Teske, but my studies were moving from media theory to media practice and I didn’t read him at the time. Even though “The Muse Learns to Write” didn’t quite fit the criteria for supplemental readings, Ken Rufo let me choose it because he had almost assigned it as a reading for the “Evolution” class. Anyone who really wants to understand what’s going on in media today has to go back to the emergence of literacy in Ancient Greece. Seriously. I wish more people in upper management over media properties would learn this stuff.

Overview

Eric A. Havelock’s final book synthesizes, revises, and summarizes theories he developed over his long career as a classical scholar. His concern is with the impact on Greek modes of thought by the transition from orality to literacy, and he acknowledges the work of others in this field, such as Walter J. Ong, while maintaining his own pioneering stature and likely influence on Harold Innis while lecturing at the University of Toronto and, therefore, also on Innis’ acolyte Marshall McLuhan.

Oral Writers, Written Speech

In his first chapter, Havelock asserts that the concept of “self,” or the “separation of the knower from the known” was made possible by growing literacy. This idea is central to his arguments about orality and literacy and will be explored further in the book.

Socrates’ voice is a paradoxical one in that he uses the oral tradition to argue for reforms only made conceivable by the changes in Greek thought brought on by literacy. Plato, only some 30 to 40 years younger than Socrates, both thinks and presents in the manner of the literate culture even as he writes allegories arguing that writing is detrimental to society. While no record of Socrates’ teachings exists from his own time, Havelock believes he used poetry, formerly a mnemonic device to aid information storage in an oral society, as a rhetorical device to more persuasively present his ideas. His disciples then, being of a new literate generation, then wrote them down. In Plato’s case, his writing was in prose, marking a break with the poetic oral tradition of previous Greek generations.

One additional idea from the first chapter that helps explain Havelock’s focus on the Greek transition to literacy is that of all the methods of writing emerging in various Near Eastern cultures, the Greek alphabet was uniquely capable of capturing, not just the content, but also the style of the oral tradition. In written form, the Homeric epics use lager vocabularies and express greater detail than the Sumerian transcription of The Epic of Gilgamesh or Hindu Vedic literature. Havelock suggests that the original source material for these oral works was all equally rich, but the atomic structure of the Greek alphabet allowed for better transcription than the other writing systems.

The concept of authorship as applied to the Homeric epics, as well as the even more shadowy bard Hesiod, raises further questions. Both the Iliad and the Odyssey contain passages in which the “author” who we know as Homer, invites “the Muse” to sing the poems. Central to the exploration of orality and literacy is the idea that the Muse was literally believed to be external to the presenter, who acted as a medium channeling the received oral tradition.

Modern Reflection of Ancient Change

Having laid the conceptual ground work for the book, Havelock turns the scholarly magnifying glass on himself. He makes no bones about his own centrality to the exploration of orality and literacy, placing his own 1963 book Preface to Plato alongside four other works published in that “watershed” year: Claude Lévi-Strauss’s La Pensée Sauvage, McLuhan’s The Gutenburg Galaxy, Ernst Mayr’s Animal Species and Evolution, and the article “The Consequences of Literacy” by Jack Goody and Ian Watt. In his opinion these diverse works all contributed in their own ways to a new understanding of how the medium of writing changes the thinking of societies in which writing becomes commonplace.

What was it that made 1963 a watershed moment in the exploration of media and thought? Early in the book Havelock describes his own traditional literary early-20th Century education in classical literature, then in a brief chapter entitled “Radio and the Rediscovery of Rhetoric” he remembers a time in 1939 when faculty and students at the University of Toronto trouped out into the street where a loudspeaker had been set up. There, they stood and listened to a live broadcast of a speech by Adolf Hitler in which he urged Canada to withdraw from World War II. Havelock recalls how he didn’t understand the literal meaning of the German words, but was transfixed by Hitler’s rhythms and expressiveness. Havelock cites also Franklin Roosevelt’s mastery of the radio medium as a part of the time he remembers.

Thus, it is a roughly forty year exposure to radio that Havelock credits with influencing thinkers in seemingly unrelated disciplines. Eventually their conclusions dovetailed into theories of orality and literacy that are credible today. He speculates that, even though they didn’t know each other, on that day in 1939 Marshall McLuhan may very well have been in the same Toronto crowd and had a similar experience.

Socrates and Plato were commenting on the impact of introducing written media to an oral culture, while Havelock, McLuhan, and others were commenting on the impact of re-introducing oral communication as a primary medium to a written culture. Unlike the events of some two-and-a-half millennia ago, however, the new media forms of the 20th Century served to augment the written culture rather than displace it.

Think Different

In exploring examples of cross-cultural collision Havelock anecdotally illustrates different modes of thinking between literary and oral cultures and traces how the growing study of spoken language in the mid-20th century eventually led to deeper study by Innis and McLuhan, among others, on the impact of media themselves. In the oral mind, the world is understood in terms of objects and actions. To a non-literate in one survey a hammer, a saw, an axe, and a log couldn’t be broken in to subcategories. Where a literate mind might separate the log into one group, and the tools into another, the subject saw them all as part of one group, connected by the similarity of use, namely to hit, saw, or chop wood. The literate idea expressed in the verb “to be” is missing in the non-literate mind. The tools can only do, they can’t be. Lacking the idea of being, the oral mind lacks the sense of self as the literate mind understands it.

The question of whether text can “speak” occupies a short chapter, which explores the paradoxes present in trying to experience a written medium as an oral medium. It concludes with a very short overview of Millman Parry’s experience recording the oral epics recited by non-literate Yugoslavian peasant bards, noting the irony in the title of The Center for the Study of Oral Literature at Harvard, where Parry’s recordings of Balkan songs are archived.

A Theoretical Tryptic

Havelock presents a General Theory of Primary Orality, predicated on the idea that no society can exist without methods of passing information to successive generations. Some information, such as architectural norms, may be deduced by looking at examples but in a non-literate society the only way to pass more abstract information is orally. To ensure effective memorization of this information, it is expressed in rythmic, repetitive patterns. Poetry, then, takes a place as the most important form of communication in oral cultures, while in literate cultures it is typically seen as a pastime.

Rather than a fictional personification of inspiration the Muse in Greek oral culture was the keeper of the culture itself. In his chapter on the Special Greek Theory of Primary Orality, Havelock presents five conditions of continuity of practice between orality and literacy, which only Ancient Greece can meet. Other societies in which there is a record of the transition meet some of the requirements, but Greece alone meets all five of them. In the emerging literate Greek culture, the standards and practices of Greek oral culture were slow to transition, with the result that some of the first literature composed for text still followed the conventions and practices of orality. Thus when we read Homer, Hesiod, Euripides, and other early Greek followers of the tradition of the Muse, we are experiencing oral thought in a literate medium.

Havelock points out that our literate minds find it easier to read later Greeks whose writing had become more influenced by literate thought. In the “oral literature” there are object and there are actions. He provides examples illustrating how the concept of self-reflection is not present in the orally-aligned works, although to make them comprehensible, even grammatical, modern translations rework the original to provide this thought framework. Not only does this limit topics to the concrete, but it alienates literate readers. We have become nearly unable to recognize descriptions of human behavior that don’t include self-reflection and conscious decision. By providing us a glimpse of pre-literate thinking, Ancient Greek literature allows us to understand that these ways of thinking about ourselves and the world are created by our shared experience of written media, and are not essential characteristics of human thought.

The Special Theory of Greek Literacy follows, presenting more consideration on the role of orality in shaping early literature. An example is found in Hesiod’s discourse on justice. In the oral mind, a discourse would require as its subject something that has behavior, like a person or an object. A concept like justice that only has existence can’t properly be described. So, he has taken a large leap towards literate thinking. But, bound by the rules of orality, he must build a discourse on a new topic by reference to mentions of justice that his audience will be familiar with, which are limited to the oral tradition. So, while literacy has allowed him to address a new topic, he lacks the means to be truly original and individualistic in his discourse. In fact, he can’t actually discuss the concept, but can only describe people or objects doing something. His discourse is metaphorical, not because it’s the best way to approach the topic, but because it’s the only way to approach the topic. He is trapped between tradition and emergence.

For the Muse to “learn to write” then, she will need to supplement the verb “to do” with the “to be.” And as she does, the language containing the culture moves from poetry to prose. Plato tries to use writing to preserve the thoughts of his teacher, Socrates, but because he has developed a literate mind and writes in prose rather than poetry, he frames his discourses as dialogs, reaching back to the pre-literate ideal that Socrates defended. But Havelock credits the Socratic vocabulary as the source of the concept of “self,” indicating that Socrates, or at least his students, had already moved their thinking towards the literate.

Finally, Havelock takes on the task of critiquing his own special theories, devoting the final chapter to putting “The Special Theories on Trial,” perhaps in a nod to Socrates’ own fate. Objections are touched on briefly but honestly. By acknowledging areas where he may have been tripped up by his own ingrained habits of thought, Eric A. Havelock nicely caps a lifetime of study.

Havelock, E. A. (1986). The Muse Learns to Write: Reflections on Orality and Literacy from Antiquity to the Present. New Haven: Yale University Press.

The Unrise of BeOS

2009-05-22T04:48:21Z

I wrote this paper as an assigned topic for Ken Rufo’s “Evolution and Trends in Digital Media” class for the Master of Communication, Digital Media program. I chose this one because I had purchased a PowerComputing Mac clone during the period when they shipped with BeOS as well as MacOS, and I had followed the long saga leading to the eventual purchase of NeXT by Apple with considerable interest. The paper could use another editorial pass, as my last edit for length introduced some choppiness, but I think it’s a good read and a story that you don’t have to be too much of a geek to find interesting.

“Hammerheads”

Computer Operating Systems provoke emotional reactions in people, and sometimes these reactions turn into heated disagreements. While I’ve never seen an OS argument come to blows, I have no doubt that it’s happened.

Since Operating Systems are just tools for accessing the instructions contained in computer hardware, this can seem irrational. It’s like getting emotional over the difference between a carpenter’s claw hammer and a metalworker’s ball peen hammer. They both are used for hitting things, but they hit things in different ways and are used for different jobs. I have no doubt that hammer arguments also have occurred, and come to very painful blows as well.

This passion makes some sense if we think of tools as media. If media are extensions of ourselves, then the Operating System interfaces and hammers we choose reflect how we present ourselves to the world. (McLuhan, 1964)

This idea is contained in the common expression “to a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” What differences are there in the way the world looks to users of Windows, Macintosh OS X, Ubuntu, or any other Operating System?

“Nemesis”

In 1991, the computer business landscape was in the midst of a shift.

In the 1970’s and early 1980’s saw the emergence of successful computer companies selling proprietary hardware, requiring Operating Systems written expressly for them. Significant players included Commodore, Tandy/Radio Shack, Atari, Texas Instruments, Apple, and NeXT Computer.

By 1991, Tandy/Radio Shack and Texas Instruments we no longer selling computers. Commodore and Atari were failing and Apple was headed for a stock price crash, and NeXT Computer was seen as innovative and influential, but not viable.

In contrast, Microsoft was enjoying a remarkable ascendence. By staying out of the hardware business, focusing instead on software, they had been perfectly positioned to benefit as the IBM PC design was copied by numerous companies. This meant their MS-DOS Operating System licensed by IBM would run these clone computers as well.

Among other competitive advantages, avoiding platform integration allowed Microsoft to benefit from price competition between hardware companies, without actually facing significant competition for its own products. Whether it emerged by design or by luck, this proved to be an enormously successful business model for dominating the business user market.

Then, as more people learned to use MS-DOS and early versions of Windows at work, they began buying home computers running these familiar Operating Systems at home as well.

“Health and Knowledge and Wealth and Power”

In 1991 two notable new Operating Systems began development.

The first Linux kernel ran on IBM PC clones. Unlike Windows (or UNIX) it was free and within a year would be distributed with an open-source license. The first public release of Linux was version “0.01″ denoting how incomplete it was after a few short months of part time development by Linus Torvalds in his spare time. (Hasan)

In contrast, BeOS was an Operating System intended to follow the tightly-coupled hardware/software model. Like Linux it was written from the ground up, but unlike Linux it was never released as a work in progress. The first release of BeOS would not occur until 1995, when it would prove to be stable, powerful, and very well-suited for the multimedia computer experience that has become common in the last few years.

Be Inc. founder Jean-Louis Gassée had overseen advanced product development and worldwide marketing at Apple. Previously, as the head of Macintosh development, Gassée had resisted the idea of licensing the Operating System to other hardware manufacturers, believing that hardware control was a key component of Apple’s strength. (Hormby, 2005)

Perhaps because of this belief, the first prototype BeBox running the BeOS used AT&T’s Hobbit chip, rather than the chips from Intel or Motorola used by other computer companies. (Lampert)

When AT&T stopped Hobbit production, Be Inc. needed a replacement platform immediately and found it in the PowerPC chips that Apple had jointly developed with IBM and Motorola to replace the 6800x processor in Macintoshes. Thus, when the first BeBox shipped in 1995, it was very similar to the hardware used in the first Macintosh PowerPC’s released the previous year. All told, around 2000 BeBoxes were sold.

“Everything That Rises Must Converge”

Back at Apple, the idea of increasing market share by licensing the MacOS was regaining traction. However, unlike Microsoft, which had a minimal interest in the hardware Windows ran on, Apple had until recently been the world’s single largest manufacturer of desktop computers. Not wanting to open their lucrative hardware line of business to the cutthroat competition that made IBM PC clone hardware so cheap, they chose a middle path and licensed their proprietary hardware designs and OS to other systems manufacturers.

Be Inc. knew that hardware was only part of Apple’s problem. The Macintosh Operating System, which had had new features haphazardly layered on top of it since its initial release in 1984, had become bloated, unstable, and a major point of user frustration.

A new MacOS project launched in 1989 had struggled from lack of management attention, until by 1994 the situation had become dire enough that it was seen as a crisis. Running MacOS on faster hardware wasn’t going to be enough to put the company back in serious competition.

The new OS project was relaunched and codenamed “Copland” after composer Aaron Copland. Every month, magazines such as Macworld and MacUser provided updates on Copland’s progress. It clearly wasn’t going well.

An initial developer release of Copland was sent to select partners in 1996, and proved to be so unstable as to be unusable. The project was cancelled, and in a surprising break with its history and corporate culture, Apple began looking to outside companies for ideas. (Linzmayer)

BeOS had everything the new MacOS needed to be a modern Operating System: protected memory, multithreading, multitasking, all the geeky details that a user experienced as speed and stability. Negotiations began with Apple to buy Be Inc. but failed, when Apple refused to pay the price Gassée was asking. (Linzmayer)

In December 1996 Apple bought Jobs’ NeXT instead, paying more than twice what Gassée had wanted. Work immediately began on turning the NeXTSTEP OS into what later became released as Macintosh OS X. (Linzmayer)

Looking to get BeOS into people’s hands, in 1997, Be Inc. licensed the BeOS to Macintosh clone maker PowerComputing. BeOS could be installed from a CD that shipped with the clone, allowing the computer to boot into either BeOS or MacOS at startup. User reaction was positive: BeOS was fast and stable, but more than that, the multimedia experience was clearly years ahead of any other OS most people had seen. (Smith, 2007) While the OS X interface owes much to NeXTSTEP, it’s possible to see some influence from BeOS in it as well.

In July 1997 Jobs became CEO of Apple, and, in what might have been a shot at Gassée, declared that the decision to license the MacOS had been made too late to repeat Microsoft’s success. Apple bought out PowerComputing’s license to make Mac clones, which also took the only platform running BeOS off the market.

Seven years after beginning development, and without having yet found a substantial market, Be Inc. ported BeOS to IBM PC clones while continuing support for the PowerPC platform. An embedded version was used in a few dedicated media production systems. Be Inc. sued Microsoft, alleging they had improperly interfered in negotiations with Hitachi to include BeOS with its computers, popular in Europe at the time. The case was settled out of court, years after Be Inc. had suspended operations. (Berniker, 2003)

A version on BeOS intended to run on Internet Appliances — essentially computers capable only of email and Web surfing — was released as BeIA, but the company was chasing a hardware model that would never arrive. In 2000, in an effort to increase interest, BeOS Personal Edition was given away as a download that could be launched from within Windows or Linux.

After 10 years, Be Inc. threw in the towel in 2001. The company was purchased by Palm, and BeOS technology was incorporated into Palm’s Cobalt OS. However, when no licensees adopted Cobalt, it was dropped in favor of Palm’s work on a new Linux-based OS. A few media appliances by companies such as Roland and Tascam still use modified versions of the BeOS or ZETA, an apparently unlicensed update of the original BeOS code.

“Fish Below the Ice”

While undoubtedly very talented, it appears that Gassée was slow to let go of the obsolete tightly-coupled hardware/software model and shaped Be Inc.’s first product offering in a way that made it out of sync with the market he was entering. It’s even conceivable that while at Apple his mindset may have prevented the company from decoupling its hardware and software, a decision that could have cost the company dearly.

In the context of the 80’s, Microsoft’s business model appears as a relatively open one, and that openness is what led to the company’s success. In the context of 1991, Linux came to be the very definition of openness, while BeOS opted for tight control. That control may have produced a great, fully-developed, Operating System while Linux was still a kernel in search of an interface, but over time, the openness of Linux has produced releases like Ubuntu, a free Operating System that comes close to challenging products from Windows and Apple for utility and ease of use.

But in the Internet age, it seems no computer code ever really dies. A group of BeOS fans has been working on “Haiku,” a project to recreate the underlying code, so as to allow the OS legally to be released under an Open Source license, allowing future community development.

While Jean-Louis Gassée might have been looking for BeOS to hit a critical mass of users and explode, the better atomic metaphor here may be that of the half-life. The number of people interested in maintaining an abandoned Operating System decreases fractionally over time. Because the process is one of division instead of subtraction, the number seemingly never quite reaches zero.

“Only Thing That Shines”

When users choose an Operating System, they are choosing a tool to extend themselves. But the OS isn’t just a medium, it’s a tool for making tools — a meta-medium, containing and shaping the experience of all the other media that pass through it. Apple’s marketing department understands this, and I sometimes hate them for it.

I am a cross-platform person, proficient on Mac and Windows, competent on Ubuntu, not unfamiliar with the *nix command line. When I bought a PowerComputing Mac clone dirt cheap after Apple cancelled their license, I even used BeOS to the extent that its lack of practical applications allowed. I can come up with a list of logical, rational reasons for using all these operating systems. Yet when given the option of picking one for general use, I guess the emotional appeal is that I just “think different.”

When users choose a Operating System with marginal software support and a tiny user base, like BeOS in its heyday, is it because they “think differenter”? When BeOS fans dedicate their time to keeping it alive years after it’s become abandonware, what compels them to do so? Is the experience that good, even all these years later when OS X and Windows have UI experiences that look and feel more like BeOS than they do MacOS 7.5 and Windows 95?

Perhaps BeOS might have succeeded if Be Inc. had transmitted this emotional appeal to more people, and all that held them back was the poor timing of their business model, or nefarious maneuvers by other companies. Perhaps not. It’s hard to call BeOS a failure though. They produced an experience that was ahead of its time, coupled to an outdated business model. And in the end, they made a difference.

References

In addition to the sources cited below, some information in this post reflect my own recollection and experiences.

Linzmayer, Owen W. Apple Confidential: The Day They Almost Decided To Put Windows NT On The Mac Instead Of OS X!. Retrieved January 11, 2009, from http://macspeedzone.com/archive/art/con/be.shtml

Berniker, Mark (2003 , September 08). “Microsoft Settles Anti-Trust Charges with Be”. Retrieved January 11, 2009, from http://www.internetnews.com/ent-news/print.php/3073811/

Hasan, Ragib History of Linux. Retrieved January 11, 2009, Web site: https://netfiles.uiuc.edu/rhasan/linux/

Hormby, Tom (2005, June 20). How Jean Louis Gassée Changed the Mac’s Direction. Retrieved January 11, 2009, from Tom Hormby’s Orchard Web site: http://lowendmac.com/orchard/05/jean-louis-gassee-apple.html

Lampert, Andrew Prototype Hobbit BeBox. Retrieved January 11, 2009, from The BeBox Zone Web site: http://www.bebox.nu/images.php?s=images/hobbit

McLuhan, Marshall (1964). Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man.

PalmSource Introduces Palm OS Cobalt, PalmSource press release (Feb 10, 2004). Retrieved January 11, 2009, from http://www.access-company.com/news/press/PalmSource/2004/021004_cobalt.html

Smith, Tony (2007, January 30). BeOS: the Mac OS X might-have-been. Retrieved January 11, 2009, from Register Hardware Web site: http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2007/01/30/forgotten_tech_beos/

CRED+STAMP: Proposal for a Persuasive Social Media Metric

2009-06-02T23:38:16Z

This is a paper I wrote in Fall Quarter 2009 for the Master of Communication, Digital Media program’s “Research and Methodology”core class. The assignment was to propose a research project, with the grade being given on the form and thoroughness of the proposal. The CRED+STAMP metric I propose is one way to approach the problem of measuring campaign effectiveness through social media. I think it has value and could be pursued. However, I offer it with the caveat that more effort went into the form of the paper than the substance.

Brook Ellingwood

COM 529: Research and Methodology in Digital Media
December 2, 2008
Instructor: Hanson Hosein

Abstract

A proposal for a project to develop a new metric for measuring the change of conversational topics in social media channels coinciding with advertising or marketing campaigns.

Project Summary

The CRED+STAMP project is an effort to apply techniques of data mining and textual meaning analysis to social media sources. It seeks to determine the value of conversations in the social media space to companies engaged in campaign-style marketing efforts. These campaigns may support commerce or other activities.

Inspiration for CRED+STAMP can be summarized by a quote, attributed to department store magnate John Wanamaker: “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half” (”John Wanamaker Quotes,” 2008). At the root of this complaint is the simple fact that human behavior can be directly observed, but human motivations must be inferred, even if they are self-reported via polling.

CRED+STAMP is thus a proposed metric to increase the amount and accuracy of inferred data available to marketers and advertisers. Each letter in the acronym is the first letter in a word used to discretely measure aspects of the social media sources being analyzed.

CRED, the X axis:

Commentary
Rumor
Expression
Distraction

STAMP, the Y axis:

Site
Topic
Account
Message
Phrase

The value of this information to marketers can be enormous, especially for those who are looking to ease acceptance of social media within organizations that have been resistant to it. In this paper, I will describe in some detail a proposed methodology for using text data mining to demonstrate measurable outcomes of using social media.

Project Details

Genesis

My proposal for a CRED+STAMP metric is heavily influenced by my professional experience, and bolstered by research showing that others have similar experiences. The “Social Media Resistance Survey” (Pereira, 2008) showed that 26% of respondents felt their organizations were resistant to new media and technologies because of an inability to demonstrate Return On Investment (ROI) and 31% due to the lack of ROI on applications.

At the 2007 Community 2.0 conference, I made a note when one main stage panelist suggested that asking for the Return on Investment of social media was the wrong question. Instead, he suggested, the right ROI for social media would be “Return on Information.” Similar ideas can be found in the blog posts of professionals working in social media:

…the consistent response I get is “Show me how to make money with it”. To this response I ask the following questions:

How much money do you make with email?

How much money do you make from your phone conversations?

How to you measure the ROI on marketing materials, sales brochures, attendance at industry events?

How much money do you make on a sales call?

How much money do you make from your web site?

The consistent response is similar to a deer staring into the headlights of an oncoming car. (Deragon, 2008)

The problem with trying to determine ROI for social media is you are trying to put numeric quantities around human interactions and conversations, which are not quantifiable. (Falls, 2008)

These comments anecdotally illustrate the statistic that 53% of those surveyed felt their organization lacked a basic understanding of new media and technologies (Periera, 2008).

CRED+STAMP is a proposal to create a metric that can provide some insight into the value of social media in measuring campaign effectiveness. If CRED+STAMP could be an effective tool to bypass resistance to new media and technologies based both on concerns about ROI and lack of understanding, then it could be very useful to those looking to persuade organizations to use social media.

Instead of looking at monetary return, CRED+STAMP looks at conversational return by asking the question: “What are people saying about us and our products?” Without the knowledge inferred from knowing what people are saying, campaign results are seen with Wanamaker’s blind spot blotting out the middle. They may or may not make money, but either way, understanding what motivates behavior remains unknown.

Goals

Having concluded that Return on Investment is not a fruitful goal, my initial goal for the CRED+STAMP proposal is to promote conversation about the feasibility of extracting meaning from conversations in social media space.

If it seems worthwhile, CRED+STAMP may be further developed as a methodology, and the technical issues involved in applying it to real-world data can be quantified.

Should study of CRED+STAMP methodology and supporting technology show feasibility, a further goal of developing a business model based on offering CRED+STAMP analysis as a service would be justified.

Historical Context

The emergence of user-generated content as a major element of Internet content has clouded analysis of content quality (Agichtein, Castillo, Donato, Gionis, & Mishne, 2008). While CRED+STAMP as currently conceived has no concept of “quality” it does share some of the same challenges Agichtein, et al. describe in programmatically determining the best content submitted to Yahoo! Answers:

The main challenge posed by content in social media sites is the fact that the distribution of quality has high variance: from very high-quality items to low-quality, sometimes abusive content. This makes the tasks of filtering and ranking in such systems more complex than in other domains. However, for information-retrieval tasks, social media systems present inherent advantages over traditional collections of documents: their rich structure offers more available data than in other domains. In addition to document content and link structure, social media exhibit a wide variety of user-to-document relation types, and user-to-user interactions. (Agichtein, et al., 2008)

Given the general economic nature of technological societies, I suppose some sort of promotion of goods and services has been present in electronic media almost from beginning. However, the current advertising age on the Internet can be said to have begun in 1994, with the first clickable banner ad, widely credited to TANGENT Design/Communication’s “Have You Clicked Here?” banner on Hotwired.com as part of ATT’s “You Will” campaign (Dabitch, 2004). From the start, a major selling point for clickable advertising was that it provided performance-based pricing plans.

Performance-based advertising is advertising, typically used in electronic media, for which the advertiser only pays when a measurable outcome is achieved. The primary models are “pay-per-view” in which the desired outcome is displaying the ad to a user, and “pay-per-click” in which the desired outcome is for the user to click the ad and be taken to the advertiser’s target site (”Performance-based advertising,” 2008).

Performance-based advertising has succeeded because the hypertext-based user interface of Web browsers provides convenient mechanisms for circumventing Wanamaker’s conundrum. Where the pricing of newspaper ads, for example, is based on newspaper circulation numbers, an advertiser has no guarantee that any given reader will even open the newspaper to the page on which the ad appears. By contrast, user interaction with ads served through the Web are much more traceable. It can be known if a page with an ad is viewed, and it can be known if a link in an ad is clicked.

“The benefits of online advertising become even greater If you have a performance-based component to it,” said Vivian Wu, a VP at TA Associates, a private equity firm. …[The] next generation of online advertisers is creating models that can provide more specific data points. “If you achieve interaction with your customers, you should be able to quantify that” with conversion rates and ROI measurability, Wu said. “But we’re still in the early stages of online advertising.”Brand marketers are still less comfortable than direct marketers with the concept of performance-based marketing, being more accustomed with the glossy ads and the banners. “They will eventually be more comfortable with the action-based and performance-based stuff,” Wu said. (O’Conner, 2005)

AdWords and AdSense, Google’s pay-per-click performance-based advertising services, have leveraged very simple quantification of behavior to a powerful revenue model. A user uses a term in a search, in an email, on a blog, or in some other context were Google AdWords is enabled. The use of the term triggers the serving of ads. The user clicks on one of the ads, and the advertiser then pays Google a negotiated price for the click. More sophisticated advertisers then have the ability to track that user’s behavior as they navigate the advertiser’s site, and can accurately determine that X number of clicks on a Google ad triggered by keyword Y will result in conversion metric Z.

Google AdWords extracts meaning on a a fairly primitive basis, by allowing advertisers to set values for keywords by bidding on them. This results in a 1:1 correspondence between keywords and message. At this moment, if I search on Google for “The North Face” an ad for REI.com is in the #1 spot, and an ad for Backcountry.com is in the #3 spot. However, if I search Google for “North Face” they switch positions, with Backcountry.com taking #1 and REI.com taking #3. This shows the relative value each company has placed on these terms with their keyword bids.

When other sites subscribe to Google’s AdSense revenue model, they embed the ability for Google to analyze the content on their site in this same simple fashion. If you have a blog with a Google AdSense feed and use the word ‘North Face’ in a post, the Google AdWords engine will go displaying the advertisement with the highest bid for that keyword match just as it did when displaying ads directly on Google search results.

But a key difference is that now the phrase has context, which it did not before. If I go to Google and search for the phrase “North Face rocks” none of the advertising I get with my results is for REI.com, Backcountry.com, or any of the other retailers on the less-specific search, except for The North Face itself, which one suspects did not bid on the term expecting many results. If I search for the opposite phrase “North Face sucks” I get no results at all. Apparently no one wants to associate their name with that negative search term.

But one of the links in the search leads to a thread entitled “The North Face..(sic) SUCKS” on a discussion forum (”The North Face.. SUCKS,” 2005). On that page Google is serving two ads for competitors of REI.com and Backcountry.com. These companies almost certainly did not bid on the phrase “The North Face Sucks,” but Google’s matching algorithms have not been designed to do a lot of contextual analysis, so the ads get served on this page whether the retailers would like it or not.

Even in the simplified context of a pure search query, this model absolutely cannot tell the advertiser is why the user used that term in the first place. What is the motivation? If you run a successful commerce Web site maybe 1% of the people who mention your best-selling product in an online context are interested in buying it, but what about the other 99%? Why are they talking about it? When they talk about it, do they also talk about you? When you run an advertising campaign featuring that product and sales go up, does the online conversation change in some way that corresponds to sales? What else are people who talk about the product talking about? Do the things people say online about your product contain clues to other keywords you should include in your performance-based advertising plan?

The outcome of performance-based advertising models is that marketers and advertisers were drawn to the emerging Internet market with the promise that they would be able to directly track ROI. However, there is no applicable model for measuring the ROI of a social media campaign, which makes social media less attractive as an marketing tool.

Even companies that don’t engage with social media directly — or engage, but not effectively — can learn from monitoring social media conversations and then apply those learnings to other business decisions.

Description, Part One: The Graph

CRED+STAMP proposes increasing the value and decreasing the cost of inferred knowledge about marketing and advertising by data mining conversations in social media settings. While the approach outlined in this paper can’t provide a measure of the ROI of social-media related expenses, it can provide companies the ability to measure the visibility of target messages within social media contexts, providing more data for accurately inference.

Illustration 1: White noise is all pitches at the same volume. In the jargon of audio engineering, “white noise” is the sound of all the audio frequencies humans can hear, playing at an equal volume. This term has been popularly appropriated to refer to ongoing chatter from which no sense is being extracted, which is an apt description for how many advertisers and marketers perceive the Internet at large.

As in audio, the chatter of white noise may be filtered by tonal ranges. An audio pitch may correspond to single note, while in CRED+STAMP analysis the four CRED tones correspond to one of four categories of conversation:

Commentary. Commentary is a statement of belief, opinion, or action characterized by the use of the first person pronoun and strong verbs: “I think…” “I know…” “I like…”
Rumor. Rumor is hearsay, or commentary that may be stated in the first person but is not backed up by first person credibility: “I heard…” “My friend said…” “REI is…”
Expression. Expression is creative speech, or speech that doesn’t fit patterns of commentary or rumor. It is the first of two categories by default, which exist to capture communication which may be about the topic of analysis but can’t be further classified.
Distraction. Distraction is the second category by default. This is any speech that doesn’t pertain to the topic of analysis in any way and therefore is not analyzed further.

Fine-tuning these definitions is a task best suited for someone with a background in linguistics, and would be an early step in any actual development of CRED+STAMP as a methodology.

In CRED+STAMP analysis, volume is an absolute number of CRED pitch determined by data mining discussion at five discrete levels:

Site. A site is a channel or domain. Examples might be Twitter.com, Facebook.com, or YouTube.com.
Topic. The term “topic” is borrowed from message boards, where a topic might be “Crosscountry Skiing” or “Mountain Biking.” In other contexts, topics may be defined according to the architecture of individual sites, according the needs of the particular CRED+STAMP analysis being performed: Twitter topics might be all tweets by the followers of a given account, or all tweets by the followers and second-generation followers of the account; Facebook topics might be the news feeds of all the friends of a given account; YouTube topics might be all the comments on all the videos returned by a site search for “snowboard.”
Message. A message is a single post by a single account.
Phrase. A phrase is an identifiable part of speech with a subject, a noun, and a predicate.

Illustration 2: CRED pitches graphed to show relative volumes at a single STAMP level. Account. An account corresponds to a user name. While it may be generally assumed that accounts exist in a 1:1 correspondence to individuals, it’s safer to think of them as representing a single “voice.” The voice may be that of a family that share the account, or it may be one persona used by an individual with multiple personae, such as a “switch Twitter,” who maintains one account for personal posts and another for professional posts.

Description, Part 2: The Baseline Analysis

CRED+STAMP analysis would be done on a per-campaign basis. First, the general terms of the topic to be analyzed would be identified.

Assume REI is to introduce a new three-season tent called the “Hart’s Pass” with an ad campaign, and wants to track the effectiveness of the campaign in reaching users of Twitter. A CRED+STAMP analyst might track the following words and phrases “Hart’s Pass,” “Harts Pass,” Heart’s Pass,” “Hearts Pass,” “three-season,” “three season,” “three-season tent,” “three season tent,” “tent,” “REI,” “REI.com,” etc.

A baseline analysis would establish how those terms were being used on Twitter in the month before the campaign launch, providing as much additional context to them as possible. All the posts made to Twitter during the baseline period would be loaded into the CRED+STAMP database via the Twitter public timeline API.

The first parsing of the data would be to flag posts as either containing the target phrases or not. Those that don’t contain the keyword are irrelevant, or Distraction, posts. Through text data mining, the non-Distraction posts are grouped into the Commentary, Rumor, and Expression buckets. As the processes for each bucket are the same, we’ll follow an example analysis through the Commentary bucket.

First we want to establish a number representing the Commentary rating for the Site — the CS number. Like all the discrete measurements in CRED+STAMP, this needs to be an open-ended number, providing an absolute value which can be meaningfully compared to the CS numbers for any other sites.

Without the input of a trained statistician, I am hesitant to suggest how this number might actually be calculated, but for the sake of illustration we can imagine it to be a something like

X+X∗((X/T)∗100)

where

X=Number of posts labeled as 'Commentary'

and

T=Total number of sample posts

This formula will be consistent for all CRED+STAMP number pairs and is essential to understanding how CRED+STAMP can be used for comparison against a baseline, or against a sample taken from any other site. Because the number is calculated from both the total and the percentage, it provides an absolute reference for comparison.

The messages that make up the CS group will be “spidered” and those that are part of a chain of replies will be grouped as Topics. Each standalone message will be a topic of one. Each topic gets a DT score, using the same formula used to calculate the CS score except now

X=Number of topics labeled as 'Commentary'

Now each post is grouped by posting Account and given an initial CA score where

X=Number of accounts labeled as 'Commentary'

Following that, each Message is given an initial TM score where

X=Number of messages labeled as 'Commentary'

Finally, each message is broken down into constituent Phrases, and given a CP score where

X=Number of phrases labelled as 'Commentary'

The process as described is then repeated for the remaining three tonal ranges, R, E, and D.

By this point, it’s clear that the analysis needs to account for the very likely possibility that whatever unit of amplitude is being measured (S, T, A, M, or P) may very well contain within it text that fits into multiple tonal ranges (C, R, E, or D). How best to handle this mathematically is best left to an expert in the field, but we can visualize the solution by picturing the X-axis of our graph curving around on the Z-axis so that the tonal ranges overlap.

Illustration 3: Overlapping CRED pitches roughly illustrate how at each STAMP level, quanta of data may contain more than one pitch. Description, Part 3: Setting Goals

With the baseline set, it becomes possible to set some goals. Lets look at setting goals for the target phrase “Hart’s Pass” in our hypothetical example.

As a place location well-known to campers and hikers in Washington State, we might find “Hart’s Pass” to be mentioned occasionally in our baseline sample, although a search during the drafting of this paper returned no results. (”No results for hart’s pass,” 2008) For the purposes of this campaign, all these references are Distractions. But looking at the context in which the phrase appears, we can see the difference between baseline use of the phrase and the way we want the campaign to influence the use of the phrase.

A Distraction use of the phrase as a place name might use it as the subject of verbs such as “to go” or “to visit”: “We went to Hart’s Pass…”, “My friend visited the Hart’s Pass fire lookout…” As each CRED+STAMP analysis is customized to a campaign, identifying these uses and feeding them back into the text data mining engine as Distraction examples can help in fine-tuning the algorithm.

For this campaign there are two sequential goals. The first is to introduce “buzz” around the use of the phrase “Hart’s Pass” in the context of a new tent, beginning two months before the tent is available for purchase. This means we are looking for increases in tonal range “R” for Rumor, reflecting contextual uses like “I saw an ad for the REI Hart’s Pass tent…” or “The Hart’s Pass looks interesting…”

The second goal is to monitor reaction to the product after it becomes available for sale. For this, we are looking for increases in tonal range “C” for Commentary, reflecting contextual uses like “I bought the Hart’s Pass…”, “I used the Hart’s Pass…”, “Looked at the Hart’s Pass in the store, but…”

This illustration of the use of the discrete CRED+STAMP numbers shows how some measure of campaign effectiveness can be gathered by monitoring and data mining social media sources. It is predicated on the assumption that having your brand or products talked about is a predictor of increased conversion. As with choosing the right keywords to purchase in Google’s pay-for-performance advertising programs, knowing how to stoke the conversation is up to the advertiser or marketer. All CRED+STAMP can do is focus the thinking around goals, and report back on how well they were achieved.

Project Plan

I’ve sought to envision a metric that would would have practical value, using a methodology of my own devising. Input from specialists in data mining and statistics, as well as users of analytics in business would be helpful in further determining its usefulness and shaping how it might be developed. This would be achieved by conducting interviews and sharing this proposal for comment. I envision that I could complete this phase alone.

Pending more input from specialists, the best approach to actual development of CRED+STAMP would be to pursue it as a cross-departmental academic project at The University of Washington. A provisional team plan of graduate students would be:

1 Project Manager
2 Computer Science majors
1 Linguistics Major
1 Statistics Major

Technical resource needs would be minimal, but would include access to a networked computer with significant amounts of memory and a good processing speed. It is possible that open source data mining solutions such as GATE (”GATE Home,” n.d.) or RapidMiner (”RapidMiner Community Edition,” n.d.) would provide acceptable starting points for the project, possibly influencing decisions about computing capacity and operating system.

Budget

The initial phase of further information gathering could be undertaken as independent study at no additional costs above those already incurred for academic enrollment.

The estimated budget for the development phase of the project is $2000 for computer hardware. Staffing will be student labor working for credit, and network connectivity will be provided by piggybacking on existing systems.

Personnel Qualifications

My interest and qualification in solving the problem of value metrics for social media is rooted in my 18 years of professional media experience. After receiving my BA from The Evergreen State College, with an emphasis in Media and Performance Communications, I moved to Seattle and worked in sound, film, and live theater. By 1993, I was working on interactive CD-ROM projects, active in the local online Bulletin Board Service (BBS) community, and beginning to explore the possibilities of hypertext just as the Internet entered the graphical era.

In 1996, I began working with Starwave Corp. At the time, CEO Mike Slade described his own experience with Starwave this way:

“When I joined Starwave, I viewed it as a software-company type of management challenge. As I’ve gotten educated, mostly by the people I’ve hired, I’ve realized that Starwave is really a next-generation media company.” (Malone, M. S., 1996)

As a Content Producer at Starwave, I was expected to use the company’s analytics tools to measure the performance of my work and guide my decision-making. Later, after Starwave was purchased by Disney and merged with Infoseek, one of the leading search engines of the day, I dove deeper into user search behavior and used it to inform content programming choices we made on Disney’s GO.com portal launch.

In 1999, having developed an interest in indexing, linking, and publishing information on the Web, I left Disney for a small startup in San Francisco called Invisible Worlds. One of the company founders was the editor of the specifications for POP and SMTP, the protocols that e-mail uses, and the focus was on data mining, and intelligent tagging with XML. Invisible Worlds didn’t succeed as a company, but it was an extremely educational experience on both the technical and business sides.

Following my return to Seattle in 2001, I worked variously as a freelancer and contractor, finally settling into a role as the Online Production Supervisor at REI, managing a team of up to six Technical Producers. There, I advocated for the creation of dedicated Information Architect roles, data-driven decision making, flexible publishing models, the adoption of social media as a natural channel for customer support, and reorganization to follow media staffing best practices. I even succeeded in getting some of it implemented.

In early 2008, in recognition of the nature that much of the work I had undertaken didn’t fit in my job description, my title was changed to Information Architecture Manager. After leading a very successful “frame-off” rebuilding and redesign of the REI Web site, I chose to leave the company in pursuit of other opportunities.

Currently, I am contracting at POP, an award-winning interactive agency, while I work towards my Master of Communication in Digital Media.

Bibliography 1: Sources Referenced in this Proposal

Agichtein, E., Castillo, C., Donato, D., Gionis, A., & Mishne, G., (2008, 2 11-12). Finding High-Quality Content in Social Media . Eugene Agichtein’s Publications, Retrieved November 17, 2008, from http://www.mathcs.emory.edu/~eugene/papers/wsdm2008quality.pdf

The quality of user-generated content varies drastically from excellent to abuse and spam. As the availability of such content increases, the task of identifying high-quality content in sites based on user contributions—social media sites—becomes increasingly important.

Dabitch, (2004, 10 27). Banner ads tenth birthday!. Retrieved November 30, 2008, from AdLand Web site: http://commercial-archive.com/node/114815

Deragon, Jay (2008, 10 30). Is Social Media ROI Important?. Retrieved November 28, 2008, from pitchengine Web site: http://mediapitch.ning.com/profiles/blogs/1625905:BlogPost:7636

Mr. Deragon has over 25 years experience in working as a strategic consultant for numerous industries such as wireless, entertainment, capital markets and technology.

Falls, J (2008, 10 28 ). What Is The ROI For Social Media?. Retrieved November 28, 2008, from Social Media Explorer Web site: http://www.socialmediaexplorer.com/2008/10/28/what-is-the-roi-for-social-media/

Jason Falls is the director of social media for Doe-Anderson, a brand-building agency in Louisville, Ky.

GATE Home. (n.d.) GATE Home. Retrieved November 28, 2008, from GATE, A General Architecture for Text Engineering Web site: http://gate.ac.uk/

The home page of the GATE open source text data mining application.

John Wanamaker Quotes. (2008, 10 1). John Wanamaker Quotes. Retrieved November 30, 2008, from ThinkExist.com Quotations Web site: http://thinkexist.com/quotes/john_wanamaker/2.html

A non-authoritative listing of quotations without attribution. At the time of retrieval, it listed two different versions of the Wanamaker quote in question, demonstrating its folkloric status.

No Results for Hart’s Pass. (2008, 11 28 ). No results for hart’s pass. Retrieved November 28, 2008, from twitter Web site: http://search.twitter.com/search?q=hart%27s+pass

A search for the phrase “hart’s pass” on twitter that returned no results.

O’Connor, C. (2005, September 19). Behind Search Engine Craze Lies Advertising. Investment Dealers’ Digest, 71(35), 7-8. Retrieved November 29, 2008, from Business Source Complete database.

A slightly-dated article on search engine advertising intended for a general business audience.

Pereira, F. (2008, May 24). Social media resistance survey - Preliminary report. Retrieved October 7, 2008, from http://www.communitelligence.com/blps/article.cfm?weblog=73&page=537

The Institute for Communication Technology Management’s Dr. Pereira conducted an original survey of business professionals about the resistance to social media at their companies. The findings were presented at the Executing Social Media conference in 2008. Although the powerpoint presentation available online provides little information on methodology, the data is thought-provoking.

Performance-based advertising. (2008, November 27). Performance-based advertising. Retrieved 03:15, November 28, 2008, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Performance-based_advertising&oldid=254498839

Wikipedia entry provides general background on the subject.

RapidMiner Community Edition.(n.d.). RapidMiner Community Edition. Retrieved November 30, 2008, from Rapid-I: Report the Future Web site: http://rapid-i.com/content/blogcategory/38/69/

Home page for the Rapid-I company’s open-source data mining application.

Malone, M. S. (1996, 10). Starwave Takes the Web … (Seriously) . Retrieved November 30, 2008, from Fast Company Web site: http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/05/starwave.html

A Fast Company cover story on Starwave Corp.

The North Face.. SUCKS. (2005, 3 28). The North Face.. SUCKS. Retrieved November 28, 2008, from IH8MUD.com Web site: http://forum.ih8mud.com/chit-chat-section/39601-north-face-sucks.html

Off-road enthusiasts openly express their opinions about camping gear on a forum.

Bibliography 2: Additional Source Material

Facebook for suits. (2008, September 27). Economist, Retrieved October 6, 2008, from Academic Search Complete database.

The Economist reports on LinkedIn and Xing, two social media networks geared towards professionals. It further touches on possibilities for Facebook or other networks to displace LinkedIn and Xing.

Global research from Trampoline Systems reveals 88 per cent of businesses ready to deploy enterprise social networking (2008, June 24). Retrieved October 6, 2008, from http://www.trampolinesystems.com/news/press+release/14

UK-based vendor of social computing software Trampoline Systems released the results of a survey of executives in the US and UK on their views regarding the internal use of social media software to impove communications.

Herzog, A. (2008, July 29). Wary, Risky Business Tackles Social Media. Retrieved October 5, 2008, from http://www.ariwriter.com/2008/07/wary-risky-business-tackles-social.html

A roundup of data from a number of studies and articles, which are promising paths for further research.

Jones, A. (2008). Studies Suggest That Enterprise Social Media Will Change the Face of Business. Retrieved October 7, 2008, from http://www.econtentmag.com/Articles/News/News-Feature/Studies-Suggest-That-Enterprise-Social-Media-Will–Change-the-Face-of-Business-50353.htm

A review of studies on social media adoption by Trampoline Systems, AIIM, and Forrester this overview provides useful information, plus new directions for research information.

Kho, N. D. (2008, April 4). B2B Gets Social Media. Retrieved October 5, 2008, from Communication & Mass Media Complete database.

Much discussion of social media focuses on business-to-consumer and internal uses. This article provides another perspective by surveying use of social media in business-to-business (B2B) interactions.

Livingston, G. (2007, October 8). Corporations Have Anti-Social Media Cultures. Retrieved October 7, 2008, from http://www.livingstonbuzz.com/2007/10/08/corporations-have-anti-social-cultures/

This post on Livingston’s blog makes a number of assertions about the reasons businesses may resist social media, many linked to other blogs. As part of a shared narrative amongst social media practitioners, including quantative data from some sources, his opinions reinforce and clarify issues.

Stoller, J. (2008, May). Online social networking arrives in the office. CMA Management, 82(3), 46-47. Retrieved October 6, 2008, from MasterFILE Premier database.

Attitudes towards privacy and legality of social media in business are briefly explored.

The Digital Millennials (2006). Retrieved October 7, 2008, from http://www.resource.com/thoughtleadership/gen_y.aspx (Please see following notation.)

The Digital Millennials: R U Ready? (2006). Retrieved October 7, 2008, from http://www.myspace.com/ruready4us

Kelly Mooney, President and Chief Experience Officer at Resource Interactive, compiled data from a number of sources to present a portrait for marketing professionals of the “Digital Millenial” generation, the leading edge of which is defined by those who graduated from high school in 2000. Mooney unveiled her findings as the opeining keynote at the National Retail Federation’s Shop.Org annual summit in 2006, where the audience largely consisted of members of the “Baby Boom” generation. Her slideshow from the presentation is hosted on a My Space page and additional content has been published on the Resource Interactive site.

Wang, L., Baker, J., Wagner, J., & Wakefield, K. (2007, July). Can a Retail Web Site Be Social?. Journal of Marketing, 71(3), 143-157. Retrieved October 6, 2008, from Communication & Mass Media Complete database.

Focusing on marketing retail customer interactions through social media, this article mixes both original research into user experience and summary data from other studies. The bibliography sources are worth further examination.

Blue Collar Rocket Science

Food or Cell Phone? Needs, Status, and Decisions for the Future

Two for One: Could eCommerce Coops Help Developing Countries? What’s the Point of Computers in the Classroom Anyway?

How can Digital Media Help the Bottom Billion?

CEOs and Tank Warfare

CEO Ike

Senior Management and Washing Dishes

On Having Too Many Dirty Dishes

Who Will Scrub the Pots?

Search Engine Optimization: The Unauthorized Biography

Quick Detour: SEO in The Semantic Web

SEO 101

SEO and Me: A Wary Relationship

When Bad Things Happen to Good Web Sites

SEO by the Gallon

Audit Yourself

Last Thoughts

The Future of Social Networking Sites

Table of Contents

Introduction

Social Networking and Social Network Sites

Social Networking is not Restricted to Social Network Sites

Social Networking as Human Extension

Financial Background of Dedicated Social Network Sites

Current Directions

Current Challenges

Predicting the Future in Three Easy Steps

The Next Two Years: The Venture Era Continues

Waypoint: Q2, 2011

Impact on Other Media

Third Party Interface and Platform Options

Point of Sale Meets Profiles

Two to Five Years: The Interchange Era

Waypoint: Q2, 2014

Impact on Other Media

“Open Profile” Servers

Mergers, Partnerships, and Smaller Players

Confusion in Retail and Content

Five to Ten Years: The Open Era

Waypoint: Q2, 2019

Impact on Other Media

Social Networking 1, Business Model 0

Conclusion

References

Précis: The Muse Learns to Write: Reflections on Orality and Literacy from Antiquity to the Present

Overview

Oral Writers, Written Speech

Modern Reflection of Ancient Change

Think Different

A Theoretical Tryptic

The Unrise of BeOS

“Hammerheads”

“Nemesis”

“Health and Knowledge and Wealth and Power”

“Everything That Rises Must Converge”

“Fish Below the Ice”

“Only Thing That Shines”

References

CRED+STAMP: Proposal for a Persuasive Social Media Metric

Abstract

Project Summary

Project Details

Genesis

Goals

Historical Context

Description, Part One: The Graph

Description, Part 2: The Baseline Analysis

Project Plan

Budget

Personnel Qualifications

Bibliography 1: Sources Referenced in this Proposal

Bibliography 2: Additional Source Material