Broadcasting Brain

In today’s post I’m going to play out a situation that happened almost 20 years ago and I’d like you to tell me if you think it was an early example of social media.

In 1988 and 1989, DC Comics (the publisher of popular comic books about Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, the Flash, the Teen Titans, Green Lantern, and many other characters) ran a multi-part story in their Batman comic book called A Death In The Family. This story occurred several years after the original Robin, Dick Grayson, had adopted a new superhero identity while a boy named Jason Todd took over the Robin identity. This story, a mystery in which Jason attempted to find his birth mother, featured a number of classic Batman characters, including his nemesis the Joker.

DC Comics did something quite extraordinary for the times with this story. DC Comics editorial was aware that a number of comic book readers did not like the Jason Todd character, so they decided to put some decision making power in the hands of the readers. The penultimate chapter of the story was left as a cliffhanger, where Jason was placed in a situation where he could die. DC then set up two phone numbers that fans could call: one to spare Jason’s life, a second to lead to the character’s death.

As the story goes, after the votes were tallied, a slim majority of callers voted to kill off Jason Todd.

Jason Todd was killed in the final issue of the Batman story.

This was a clear example of getting reader input and reacting to it. The technology wasn’t Web enabled or housed on the Internet, but it had some similar characteristics.

My question to you: was the use of these phone numbers to kill off a character an example of social media in action? I’d really like to know what YOU think, including your arguments FOR or AGAINST the idea.

If you're new here, welcome! Please consider subscribing to my RSS feed to stay up to date with my latest posts and articles. Thanks for visiting!

Sometimes we take all of this social media, Internet marketing, and self-promotion stuff too seriously. Many of us look for role models to help shape what we do and how we do it. There are times when we take it too far and slip into adoration and idol worship. Read the rest of this entry »

Sometimes a writer really nails something and nails it down perfectly.

If you’re interested in social media, I suggest that you check out Steven Hodson’s post where he compares social media to the ancient art of maintaining oral history.

It’s one of those points that just seems like it should be obvious, but it sometimes eludes our comprehension.

Well done Steven!

Growth of the entire social media market is every content creator’s best hope for success. That means that bloggers in general need to continue to provide content on an ever-widening and growing field of topics and interests.

At the same time, social media enthusiasts need to continue to promote social media to any or all who are interested in order to grow the overall social media market. We’ll all benefit if that happens. Otherwise, the blogosphere will be engaging in the fierce market share wars that highlight the life of commodity producers in mature markets. And it’s pretty darned hard to compete on price when something is free.

So how do we keep growing the thing, looking at blogs in particular?

Leading Question

ReadWriteWeb’s Josh Catone asked the following question: do regular people really read blogs?

The answer to Josh’s question would seem to be no, or at least not many people do. It’s worth noting that his main source of information was a Harris Poll asking US adults about political blogs, but, as Josh also points out, there doesn’t appear to be a lot of data from 2007 or 2008 about blog reading statistics.

Let’s not forget one thing, though: the poll was limited to politics and political blogs. If long term voter trends in North America are any indication, interest in voting is waning, which could likely reflect declining interest in politics or political discussions (not withstanding The Huffington Post’s success at the top of the Technorati index). On the other hand, my general feeling is that readership of tech blogs continues to increase over time, and there are some other hot blogging areas that growing (perhaps mommy bloggers, making money online (there will always be a market for this), and business blogs in general).

(The comments section from Josh’s post, full of interesting insights, also spawned a thread at LinkedIn on the topic of blog reading that’s worth checking out.)

How to grow the blogging audience

I believe that we can increase the number of potential readers by focusing on five different areas:

Education - many people have heard what a blog is, but might not be able to tell a static website from a blog. They need to understand things like:

• reverse-chronological sequence of publishing, which is the reverse of the structure of a lot of other documents
• tags/categories
• searching
• pages
• comments
• RSS and news aggregators

These things are second nature to the vast majority of the current blogging audience, but some people don’t get it yet. Maybe a lot of people don’t get it yet. Marketing Ninja also has a relevant anecdote showing a situation where people preferred static documents (e.g. Adobe .PDF files) over blog posts at a ratio of 8:1 or more. There must still be a significant population of people who don’t, won’t, or can’t read online, although I don’t have any statistics to back this up. Even in my own case, there are many times when I’ll print out a blog post in order to read it later.

This brings up another good point: trust and reliability. Many people will put more faith in a professional-looking document than an amateur-looking blog, even if the blog happens to have better content. Old programming dies hard, sometimes.

Promotion of all kinds - create demand: virtually everyone in the world needs a telephone or access to one in order to conduct their business. By contrast, virtually everyone in the civilized world wants an iPod or other portable media player, but few actually need the device. However, the precedent started with the Walkman and Discman players evolved with the introduction of the digital media formats (particularly .MP3 and .MP4 files), creating desire that was satisfied with a revolutionary product both in design and capabilities. The growing number of media files, both professional and amateur, helped create demand for a new portable media player.

Blogs are like the “player” and good content will create demand for the “player”. However, we need to keep emphasizing things like portals, indexes, and search engines. Alltop, as I’ve written before, can only help to promote the blogosphere and social media in general. [Here's a post that can help you take advantage of what Alltop offers]

Cross-promotion between bloggers, even those in the same niche, needs to continue to maximize eyeball exposure.

Value - put simply, bloggers need to provide content that other people would want to read or find useful. We don’t need spam, we don’t need a lot of echoes, we need new, fresh, and useful material. This material needs to appeal to beginners, intermediates, and experts.

Unfortunately, the blogosphere could also be called the spamosphere due to a lot of content which is designed as platforms for online advertising sales instead of valuable content. Give people material that they both want and need!

Diversity - related to value, we need to broaden the subject matter, or at least provide more valuable content across a wider range of topics. We may be digging deep into the fabled Long Tail into increasingly smaller and specialized niches, but we need more good (hopefully original) content suitable to an increasingly wider audience. Fortunately, ongoing innovation and new product launches offer a continual supply of blogging source material. We also need more material about everyday items that affect broad groups people, both within and outside the tech realms.

Opportunity - more high speed Internet and wireless access; cheaper hardware and software; ease of use. As Steven Hodson recently pointed out, what may be seen as inexpensive to some may be a prohibitive cost to others. There’s talk of $100 or $200 laptops for developing countries… maybe there’s a lot of opportunity for these in the Americas and Europe as well. In addition, inexpensive high speed Internet access is not ubiquitous, even within the Americas. My parents have only had access to medium speed Internet during the past two years and they live about 10 KM from my home. Mobile phone Web use is predicted to drive demand and may be a cheap alternative; however, this could remove any incentive to produce cheaper desktop PCs and laptop PCs.

The rising tide

The phrase “a rising tide that lifts all boats” was not coined by US President Bill Clinton, although he and his executive team made significant use of the phrase during his presidency. Here’s a definition from Wikipedia:

…is associated with the idea that improvements in the general economy will benefit all participants in that economy, and that economic policy, particularly government economic policy, should therefore focus on the general macroeconomic environment first and foremost.

Substitute the word “blogosphere” for “economy”, remove the references to government and policy, and the concept holds true for blogging. Broaden the potential blogging readership base and you help prevent commoditization. We can enlarge blog readership by following the five suggestions that I’ve presented.

Everyone can win.

It’s too cool!

Seriously, this Watchmen commercial contest, where you make a commercial, set in the Watchmen continuity, to be embedded in the upcoming Watchmen movie is too cool!

Social media might be seen as lightweight by some, but this… is just too cool!

A chance to win cash, other prizes, getting your commercial featured in the movie, maybe even getting a bit part in the film…

At what other time in history could you pull together a competition like this with these tools?

Lots of conversation going on this week about social media channels and purposes and what’s next.

Julian Baldwin has a great post summarizing and linking to the various conversation threads about the forms and future of social media.

For my part, the greatest value of social media, and its potential for the future, is how it makes distance and physical barriers irrelevant.

Social media is as close to telepathy as you can get without having an actual telepath. Social media allows a direct mind-to-mind (or minds) transfer of information while removing the obvious barrier of distance. It can also strip away class, politics, religion, and upbringing as potential stumbling blocks. Language is still tricky, but there are ways to compensate for that.

Distance, however, is the greatest hurdle that social media can jump. It’s practically free when compared to travel and telecommunications costs (although both have become less expensive over time) and it allows many possible means to communicate.

Alexander van Elsas described television as possibly the greatest social media channel due to the interaction it can stimulate, primarily through large events like sporting events, but also through other special event coverage. Although he’s quite right about the impact of television and it’s ability to generate common experiences that stimulate social interaction, the fact is that today television is a one-way medium. To my way of thinking, this separates it from the media that we currently consider to be social media, although TV broadcasts certainly do stimulate emotions and socialization.

Note: a number of people have suggested that social media is a misnomer because it doesn’t exclusively lead to socialization between parties. Maybe it’s better to call them interaction media, although I doubt anyone will wish to change at this point.

Still, television broadcasts do achieve something that social media also do: communication of ideas and emotions across long distances.

You just can’t interact with the creator while the television performance is happening.

Between Colin Walker, Louis Gray, and FriendFeed itself, I’ve discovered five other great bloggers that I should have mentioned a couple of weeks ago. Shame on me.

Here they are:

Robin Cannon - Fog of Eternity covers social media and tech with an emphasis on web design. Great observations on social media, bookmarking, and news. He’s got some very good thoughts on the fragmentation of conversation on the Web, as an example.

Hutch Carpenter - I don’t believe Hutch when he has a title like I’m Not Really a Geek because he’s got some great, sharp insights into social media and its associated challenges. One of his signal vs. noise posts was quoted in ReadWriteWeb, so you know he’s got a sharp mind and writing style.

Julian Baldwin - yet another insightful social media blogger, the author of Notes, Thoughts, Ideas and Responses is making his mark as well. His recent post on How Early Adopters Pull The Web is an outstanding look at the influence of technology early adopters.

Aurelis Maximus - I don’t know a whole lot about this blogger, but I was impressed by his navel gazing post which also talked about the value that the early adopter provides to the rest of the blogosphere.

Rob Diana - I’ve seen this Regular Geek around social media for a few months but I only recently tuned into his blog. He’s also getting some well deserved recognition for creating YackTrack, a new conversation tracking application.

Rock on, guys!

Sometimes everyone wants a piece of the social media champ.

That piece may be bragging rights or it may be a share of the spotlight.

How about learning from the pro? Or acknowledgment as a form of social proof?

Is this a bad thing?

One of the greatest opportunities of social media is to interact with people both similar and different than ourselves who we might never otherwise meet. Technology becomes a common glue and a blank slate where we can interact with virtually anyone, whether they are:

• junior to ourselves (but not inferior!)
• equivalent in skill and knowledge
• the type of expert or role model that we’d look up to.

This flattened playing field and the multiple access paths to attention share is an innovation that we sometimes don’t appreciate for what it is: the ability to punch above our weight. Read the rest of this entry »

This week I’ve been trying to do something different here at Broadcasting Brain – I’ve been focusing more on creating original content vs. joining the echo chamber. Or, to put it another way, I’ve been trying to create conversations instead of following them. It’s been interesting to compare the two weeks.

Last week was a lot of fun because I was feeding off some other conversations from guys like Alexander van Elsas and Colin Walker, among others.

This week, I’ve been trying to go my own way. Trying to start my own conversation threads. Trying to move away from the ongoing conversations and talk about what other people aren’t talking about. I think there’s been some good conversations here this week.

Which is better? I really don’t know. Some would say that it’s always better to blaze trails down different paths. However, I think I’ve really come to appreciate the value of echoing.

Echoing makes you feel less alone and more like you belong to something bigger. It makes you feel like you are a part of a larger conversation. It allows you to take a concept and make it more interesting. That’s one of the great things that’s been happening on FriendFeed – new and better conversations. Sharing. A sense of community, even.

If you’re lucky, you can start new conversations when you strike out on your own. Sometimes you won’t. It’s a lot like planting seeds. Some will grow, some won’t. Some will be dwarfs, some will become giants. You don’t always know.

I think you need to try both: to join in conversations and to start your own. Sometimes it’s hard to strike out in a different direction, but many people value new thoughts and new ideas.

It’s easy to echo other people or to climb on to the latest conversation train in social media. Some people think it’s the wrong thing to do. However, if you can add your own good ideas and make an honest attempt to analyze part of the conversation, then there’s nothing at all wrong with doing that.

We have to make our own choices about the conversations that we’ll start or join. However, either alternative is perfectly acceptable if your intent is good and if your contribution is thoughtful and heartfelt.

There is no right choice; any discussion choice can be the right one at any given time. Make the choice, commit to it, and make the best of it.

Nothing fancy here, just a simple list:

Andy Partridge (musician of the band XTC)

John Cusack (the brilliant cool actor guy)

Seth Godin (I’d pick his brain)

Al Gore (ditto)

David Suzuki (same)

Geoff Johns, Mark Waid, Grant Morrison (comic book writers, all)

George R. R. Martin (novelist - author of A Song of Ice and Fire series, among others)

Stephen King (novelist)

How about you?

EDIT:  May 30/08 - of course, it would be pretty cool to meet them in person, too!