eastwikkers

The Green Thing

Our former colleague Giovanni Rodriguez worries that “community” is under stress from commercial interests that would abuse the label. “A fair number of people in my world have wondered if marketers are using the word to whitewash their commercial interests.”

I say, take heart. Unlike fabricated labels such as “Web 2.0,” “community” is a real word with some clear definitions. Web 2.0 was coined to refer to a new generation of web-based services and tools, including social networking sites, wikis, and folksonomies, but was quickly adopted as a catch phrase referring to all sorts of things, including websites, businesses, business models, even completely unrelated technologies. And since few actually knew what it meant and investment dollars poured in, little could be done to stop the flood.

But “community” means something generally understood, and if folks start using it for something that isn’t in the spirit of a community, readers will more easily detect it. At the same time, it’s important not to force this broad term to mean only one type of online community. Perhaps we need to keep a modifier in front of it – something more specific and informative than “online” – so we preserve usefulness of the general term and encourage other types of communities, online and off.

Another word feeling the stress is “green.” Although we can all agree that one definition of “green” is “environmentally sound or beneficial,” agreeing on what is environmentally sound or beneficial is far more difficult—which means “green” can end up meaning just about anything.

We may well have reached a tipping point with support for environmental issues. Tim Dyson is hopeful. Hollywood has gone green. Evangelicals have gone green. And PRWeek is holding its first-ever green conference in San Francisco because “Corporations are going green like never before.” But that may also mean that many other companies will soon turn green with envy and start spending the green to convince everyone they too are going green. So while we may finally be planting the right garden, there will still likely be plenty of weeding to do.

Trust and Deception

In 2003, the prescient William Gibson published Pattern Recognition, a novel about a group obsessing over and trying to discover the source of some mysterious video clips trickling out onto the Internet. This year, the Lonely Girl video series appeared on YouTube, causing a similar frenzy and turning out to be the work of a screenwriter, filmmaker, and hired actress. We also had the fake Wal-Mart blog and the fake Beer Ape commercial.  And the Jason Fortuny and Craigslist episode – publishing the responses to a fake personals ad – raised further questions about credibility, deception, privacy and abuse on the net.

So how long before algorithm-controlled deceptions actually destroy a company or bring down a candidate – or get one elected? In a world where you can’t believe what you read or watch, how do we make informed decisions? 

Even in pre-Internet/pre-digital photo days, documents and photos could be faked, personal information could be stolen, and private letters could be photocopied and passed around to create a scandal. And a well-placed lie could always be spread to harm candidates and companies. We used to trust (not always with good reason) our local newspaper editors and favorite newscasters to sort out the truth, and brick-and-mortar stores that had longevity not to cheat us.

But today, the problem is on a much larger scale, much faster, and more complicated. So now we seek trusted sources on the net.  Many of us rely on the online versions of our trusted off-line resources for both news and shopping. But how do we develop trust in valuable online resources, from auction and travel sites to bloggers, that have no offline equivalents?

Does it depend on personal time spent and testing the waters? Does it come from the type of community formed? Word-of-mouth? How have you developed trust? We’re curious. Let us know.

Question? Yes, Ms. Pac-Man?

Red Herring, in a playful mood, apparently, notes that "First Sun asks the SEC if it can break news on blogs; now its executives are set to hold a press conference inside a video game."  The "video game" in question? None other than Second Life, the virtual world that all the kids are talking about. Eastwikker Mimi Harris recently attended the Second Life Community Convention in August (read her report here).

All kidding about “video games” aside, it will be interesting to see how Sun’s intention tomorrow to become “the first Fortune 500 company to hold a press conference in Second Life” plays out. Sun isn’t the only large company to embrace Second Life – Coke and Wells Fargo, among others, are expanding their presences in the virtual world.

Religion Meets MySpace – a Heavenly Match?

We’ve discussed how technology and citizen journalism have evolved during the past few years, and how blogs and wikis have offered real-time reports during emergencies to get the word out to an exponential number of readers (example: Hurricane Katrina). Now it appears the potential viral reach of Web 2.0 and new media technologies is being embraced by the church -- is this religion meets MySpace?

“Church Marketing Sucks” is a blog “to frustrate, educate and motivate the church to communicate, with uncompromising clarity, the truth of Jesus Christ.” A recent posting discusses how churches can use “MySpace and other social networking sites to connect with people, whether it's connecting your congregants or giving visitors a preview.” There’s also networking site MyChurch and biblical search tool eBible. “We’re really just starting to open up that Pandora’s box of the Bible and social networking,” says Mark Sears, chief executive of Godspeed Computing. For more, check out this Red Herring article.

On a similar note, I just read that the Catholic Archbishop of  Boston has started his own blog chronicling his travels “as part of an effort to reach out to modern-day Catholics.” For more, click here. Clearly, religion is putting new technology to work to accomplish something it’s been trying to do for years: recruit new members. This is also a recognition of sorts that social networking’s long reach and strong grasp cannot be ignored. The only question is: can the Web’s most tech savvy social networkers be reached? And what about older members of the church. Will they welcome technology as a way to recruit, communicate with members and converse about services, biblical passages, etc.?

Click Fraud and the Golden Age of PR

Check out Steve Rubel’s post on Click Fraud and the source article in BusinessWeek. According to the article, click fraud is “a dizzying collection of scams and deceptions that inflate advertising bills for thousands of companies of all sizes. The spreading scourge poses the single biggest threat to the Internet’s advertising gold mine and is the most nettlesome question facing Google and Yahoo, whose digital empires depend on all that gold.”

Says Rubel: “My take on all of this is that advertising is clearly at a major crossroads. The old model of throwing stuff up there and seeing what sticks is dying. Search engine marketing, while certainly effective, can have its challenges too and clearly can be gamed. Over time, people are going to say “enough.” They’re going to want companies to engage them in conversation before they are convinced they should buy. This is why I believe we’re about to enter the golden age of PR.”

Rubel is right. Unless Google, Yahoo, and others change their practices, the click advertising model is likely to collapse in upon itself. It’s not just about scammed advertisers abandoning the model. Search for an item, say ping pong tables, and you get more links to more tables from more sellers than you can possibly assimilate. It’s unpleasant and intimidating—unless you are already dealing with a select group of trusted retailers.

Which is why Rubel is right that relying purely on search engines will likely be replaced with something more conversational, which paves the way for trust. Still, the “golden age” of PR may be a bit further off than we hope. While many of the experiments in community—and Eastwick is involved in several—are extremely successful and point us in the right direction, companies need to be more tech savvy and invest more time and money to create a community. And while large retailers and tech companies will move more quickly to adopt new models and reap the benefits, new tools and partnerships will be needed to help smaller retailers and non-tech companies to participate.

 

Brave New CYWorld?

In the social networking realm, I’ve been reading a lot about Cyworld, the popular Korean Web site, and its launch here in the U.S. Click here for more.

The question many are asking: will MySpace users defect to Cyworld, a community that even has its own virtual economy with currency referred to as “acorns.” I read that something like 90 percent of South Koreans between 20 and 29 have pages on the network… but will the site “translate” into U.S. success?

It has been reported that 15,000 people have signed up already, making me wonder if users will have different “rooms”/”spaces”/pages at two or three of these different social networking sites, each with its own set of online friends. And with multiple sites/pages to manage and friends with whom to communicate (some MySpace users have hundreds of friends), will there even be time to interact in the offline world?

Telepathic PR?

From Business 2.0’s Chris Taylor in “Surfing the Web with nothing but brainwaves”: “Controlling devices with the mind is just the beginning. Next, Wolf believes, is what he calls “network-enabled telepathy” - instant thought transfer. In other words, your thoughts will flow from your brain over the network right into someone else’s brain. If you think instant messaging is addictive, just wait for instant thinking.”

Too far-out to take seriously? According to Taylor, the technical ability to do this is not all that far off. But at what point does a technology evolve from feasible to affordable, accessible, and widespread? Think virtual reality.

Still, it gives one pause. The potential good from such a technology is enormous, especially for the incapacitated. But in our world, how do you control messaging in brain-to-brain transfers? Does the endgame for online communities become a single identity? Does the disconnect between the "jacked-in" and the rest of us become a chasm across which it becomes increasingly difficult to communicate at all?

 

Second Life/New Market

Check out the cover story in the latest issue of Business Week -- about the new social media phenomenon known as Second Life (a project brought to you by the brainy folks at Linden Lab).   It's a virtual world supported by real commerce, and from where we sit, it also looks like a living laboratory for emergent behavior -- the way that people naturally organize themselves if you only let them do so.  That's a topic that will get an increasing amount of attention throughout the year, and Second Life will shine bright as one of the most interesting experiments.   And we're going to delve into that topic on Monday, in our wrap-up of "33 Wikis,"  our month-long look at best practices in wiki-based collaboration. 

Danah Boyd on the O'Reilly Factor

That's right.  And they are calling her a cultural anthropologist.   Danah is a well-known social media researcher and Ph.D. student in SIMS at U.C. Berkeley.   We recently pointed to a great paper she wrote on communities, which was the subject of the O'Reilly show.

Reminds us of the recent conversation on this blog about PR roles.   See role number #2.

Facebook for $2 Billion

Will they get that price?   Read about it on Silicon Beat.

BTW -- why not?  It's one of the biggest, most vibrant communities out there.   Bubble or not, someone is going to make money on this.

UPDATE:  Ok, Erick Schonfeld has a very good answer to the general question "why not":

At 7 million members, that values each college-loan-saddled college student who uses the Facebook at $285 million.  Excuse me?  Now, even accounting for future growth of 10X or even 100X members (forget for a second that there aren't that many college students in the country), and it's still hard to swallow.  I don't care if the Facebook is now the  seventh most heavily trafficked site on the Web.  By that calculation, MySpace on its own would be worth $10.7 billion, based on its estimated 37 million unique users.

Erick is not the only person who thinks the numbers are too high.   Search the blogs this morning and you will see some of the reaction.

"Bottelon" -- How Do you Say MySpace in Spanish?

If you are between the ages 14-18, and you live in Spain, chances are good that you believe your space should be a public space.   The latest round of "bottelons" -- outdoor drinking parties in Spanish cities -- took over public spaces in 20 Spanish cities on Friday, with "mixed" results, depending on your perspective.   In cities like Barcelona, things got really ugly as revellers and police skirmished on the streets; there were fires, looting, injuries, and arrests.  In Granada, where city officials chose not to oppose the get-togethers and went so far as to designate a public area, things were mellow. 

What strikes us most is how this national Spanish phenomenon appears to be driven by some of the same forces that are stoking online communities in the U.S. -- the wide adoption of online communication tools for self-organization (emails and chatrooms are helping people to organize these events), an element of competition (there was a contest regarding which city could hold the biggest botellon of all on Friday), and, yes, the in-your-face nature of this movement which has got to be leaving both Spanish parents and marketers in awe. 

What we are hearing in news reports is the dark side of ad hoc communities, which, as Forrester recently noted, are beginning to challenge institutional power everywhere. But the lesson in  Granada is that institutions do not have to oppose this power.  And there is nothing like institutional/parental consent to make a rebellious act seem uncool ("Hey kids -- anyone ready for some Sunny-D?)."   

America Offline -- The New Frontier for New Media?

Over the past year, I've attended many events and conferences, of all different types and sizes.  I can tell you -- about half of them were not worth the time, expense and effort, which as any veteran event-goer knows, is considerable.  But I just completed a few solid weeks of event-going, and it's clear to me that the smarter organizers are beginning to understand that the best way to make an event succeed is to carefully think through how well you are serving the individual, from a social perspective. 

As a partner to Socialtext on a number of "event wiki" projects (e.g., Web 2.0, and NewCommForum), we've observed how at least one part of the offline world is adopting rules and tools from the online world.  Just as blogging has personalized publishing, wikis and new organizational concepts like Open Space are personalizing the event experience.   And the effect is this:  events are getting better at the individual level, because they are becoming more personalized and participatory.

It's an interesting trend, and I'm betting we'll soon see this kind of thinking applied to more complex offline environments.  Last Fall, we talked about how the online world -- the greatest venue for social experiments today -- will influence the offline world (just as the New World exported its lessons learned from early experiments in democratic government).  Prediction:  in 2006-08, we'll see innovation in the realm of political organization.  See our earlier post on Mark Warner and Hillary Clinton.  We believe the Democrats will be forced to innovate first.

Smart Groups

The two hottest online communities got major ink in the past couple of days.  The New York Times profiled MySpace, a vibrant community for the 20-something set that recently surpassed Google in number of monthly hits (that's right -- they surpassed Google), while The San Jose Mercury News took a close look at thefacebook.com, the new rage on college campuses that already boasts several million members.   The common theme:  both sites have learned to serve well-defined communities with easy-to-use, easy-to-implement social tools.  And they have also learned how to replicate, or complement, ideal social rules that may or may not exist in the non-digital world.  As Merc authors Matt Marshall and Anna Tong observe, "Facebook has firmly rooted itself in the offline lives of its members." 

So what's next?  A vibrant online community for the senior set?  Don't rule it out:   it's the demographic that everyone is moving toward, and it is becoming more and more Web-savvy.