The "Avatar Age"

This Wednesday I'll be trying Second Life for the first time during the final session of class. While my professor and classmates will all be in on campus trying it out, I will be in Baltimore at a conference and so I'll be joining them "in world."

I can't say that I really know what to expect. I don't know where to place virtual worlds like Second Life within the broader Web 2.0 phenomenon. What really distinguishes a person's or a company's presence in Second Life from their presence in the blogosphere or on social networks? An avatar? I'm guessing it's much more than that and I hope to have a better sense of what it's all about after Wednesday's class.

Jackie has a post about how "in world" meetups differ from in person meetups but I guess I'm even more interested in how virtual worlds differ from other types of social networking platforms.

What can you do in Second Life that you can't do elsewhere on the web? I know you can buy things, talk to people, and even attend classes "in world." But you can do all that online with a variety of other tools as well. So other than the avatar, what is it that makes virtual worlds useful?

Anyway, I'm definitely still in the "I don't get it" phase with virtual worlds. But unlike Zaid, I won't knock it til I've tried it!

With 'experts' like this, who needs amateurs?

Andrew Keen is one of the better known pop-critics of Web 2.0 and he is worried that the internet is creating a culture that no longer values expertise.

Keen is completely dismissive of claims by so-called "digital utopians" who he believes see in Web 2.0 the fulfillment of their Marxist, libertarian, relativist, post-modern, or counter-enlightenment philosophies. (If web 2.0 could create agreement between all of those camps that in itself would be impressive.)

Says Keen:

These enabling technologies have simply reopened America’s old wounds about the role and meaning of intellectual authority, economic privilege, social class, cultural authority, and political power. The debate about the value of social media is really a conversation about the legitimacy of our free-market meritocracy.

and:

I believe in a meritocracy in which our individual worth is valued by our professional accomplishments.

But regardless of whether or not you agree with him about meritocracy, Keen's arguments are simply not convincing on his own terms. Even if you accept his preference for traditional expertise, his analysis of the web gets it wrong on both the theoretical and the practical level.

First, the theoretical:

I argue that Web 2.0’s gatekeeper-free media—without professional fact checkers, grammarians, and publishers—is by definition less accurate, reliable, and honest than professionally edited newspapers, encyclopedias, or books.

There are a couple of things worth noting about that statement. First, the claim that we now live in a gatekeeper-free media environment is controversial. Sure, everyone can publish their views, but not everyone's views are heard equally. Google is a new kind of gatekeeper, but Keen doesn't bother to consider what this means for his argument.

Second, I take issue with the claim that today's media environment should be viewed as, by definition, less accurate, reliable, and honest than our pre-2.0 media.

Personal blogs, Twitter, and Wikipedia exist in a media environment alongside traditional sources of "expert" information like The New York Times. Keen refers multiple times to Harvard professors whom he trusts more than anonymous teenagers. But the web has empowered the Harvard professor every bit as much as it has everyone else. (He admits as much towards the end of the article.)

The question, then, is whether an information environment containing both traditional experts and amateurs is intrinsically worse than an information environment that contains only the former.

I argue that it is not.

In practice, Keen is concerned that all the amateurism of web 2.0 is keeping us from finding quality expert content:

We really are all journalists and writers and filmmakers now—which means, in practice, that genuinely valuable journalism and writing get lost in all the self-authored junk on the internet.

But this statement isn't borne out by the literature on the structure and organization of the web. If anything, it's the self-authored "junk" that gets lost in the process of organizing content through search and through link patterns, which follow a winner-take-all power-law distribution. (Expert analysis on this topic here here and here.)

In fact, it's never been easier to find expert content. Universities are making their courses available for free online and professors from all over the world are blogging.

Thanks to the web, we are living in the age of Public Intellectual 2.0.

But Keen seems content to ignore the fact that amateur expression lives alongside of expert content, and that the web makes it easier, not harder, to find experts.

He'd prefer to exist in his own narrative in which he stands for the preservation of quality, culture, and intellectualism.

And that's fine. Thanks to Web 2.0 he can publish all he wants.

But given how easy it is to find more serious (and, yes, more expert) analysis of the way the web really works, I won't be adding Andrew Keen to my RSS reader any time soon.

Elite Social Networking

In the fall of 2006, during my senior year of college, I took a career class that aimed to help students recognize their interests and successfully navigate the job search process. During the course my teacher invited us to join a new, invite-only social networking site called Doostang.

At the time, the invite to Doostang seemed like a great opportunity. Time Magazine said it was "Facebook for the Morgan Stanley crowd." Though I had no interest in Morgan Stanley or the world of finance, the exclusivity of the site still somehow seemed to be a feature rather than a bug.

But the site proved difficult to use. Many of the job listings could not be accessed unless you had successfully brought in 10 new users to Doostang. This was only a couple of years ago, but most of the people I knew thought of social networking as a quick way to lose a job, not get one.

Unable to attract the requisite number of new users, I soon stopped signing into Doostang, and I had completely forgotten about it until the class reading on LinkedIn.

It appears that Doostang still exists, and perhaps it fills a niche. But I think I'd of been better served if my teacher had just sent me to LinkedIn and insisted I join.

Just say NO to social media

This article in BtoB, a marketing magazine, outlines a few situations in which companies should avoid using social media:

You're in a high-ticket business. If you can count your customers on your fingers and toes, and if those customers spend tens of millions of dollars with you each year, you're probably better off using the phone, the golf course and the dinner table to deliver your message. This also goes for financial services firms with wealthy customers who prefer to keep their activities—and that of their financial advisers— private.

You fight with your employees. I recently consulted for a client in the heavy equipment industry. More than 80% of its work force is unionized, and management-labor strife is a constant. This is not an environment for encouraging direct interactions between employees and customers. While opening up the lines of communication may work in industries with a motivated and highly technical work force, it's a potential disaster if employees use that channel to trash management.

Management skepticism. In a recent study of 50 early adopters of Web 2.0 technology, McKinsey & Co. concluded that the key characteristic of successful organizations was high-level support. Social media strategies demand transparency, and employees accustomed to years of careful message filtering are understandably suspicious of being asked to speak openly. If management doesn't encourage and reward participation, the initiative will fail.

Strategic vacuum. One of the most common mistakes marketers make is to launch a social media campaign without having any idea what they're trying to accomplish. Very often this approach is driven by fascination with a tool, but tools are no good unless you know what to do with them. If you don't have an objective, then you don't know what to measure, which means you have no way to determine success. Your social media project will be cut in the next round of belt-tightening. And an objective shouldn't be to launch a product or distribute a press release. If you do it right, conversations should continue for years.

Privacy and regulatory concerns. While a few health care companies have started blogs and social networks, most are proceeding with justifiable caution. If you're in an industry where people can go to jail for what they say in public, you should be careful. Much as I hate to say it, you should probably get the lawyers closely involved.

Items 1, 2, and 5 seem to me to be good reasons not to use social media. But items 3 and 4, Management Skepticism and Strategic Vacuums, are just reasons not to jump into social media right now. They're not necessarily proof that social media won't be valuable.

So convince management, come up with a coherent goals-oriented strategy, and get to it!

[Via ReadWriteWeb.]

Hey Google, get off my lawn!

There are plenty of reasons to worry about the hegemony of Google. This is not one of them:

Google presents a far greater threat to the livelihood of individuals and the future of commercial institutions important to the community. One case emerged last week when a letter from Billy Bragg, Robin Gibb and other songwriters was published in the Times explaining that Google was playing very rough with those who appeared on its subsidiary, YouTube. When the Performing Rights Society demanded more money for music videos streamed from the website, Google reacted by refusing to pay the requested 0.22p per play and took down the videos of the artists concerned.

Sigh.

According to the author, Google is "a parasite that creates nothing" and "has known nothing but success and does not understand the risks, skill and failure involved in the creation of original content."

We desperately need copyright reform that takes seriously the information ecosystem of the 21st century. That said, the creation of content has undergone a fundamental and structural change. And while violation of copyright must be taken seriously, it's also clear that industries with skin in the game are going to fight tooth and nail to avoid admitting that they simply don't create the value that they used to.

Sadly, with newspapers in decline, much of the media old guard seems sympathetic to just this sort of desperate clamoring.

[Via Kevin Drum]

Two Parodies of Twitter

One by CurrentTV



One by Slate

Buying Conversation

This post is a sponsored post on behalf of Kmart via Izea. The opinions are mine.

The text above stirred up a lot of controversy when it appeared before a post about Kmart by social media blogger Chris Brogan.

It's an example of "sponsored conversation," when a company pays a blogger to post about its products. To many, something about this seems wrong. But in March, Josh Bernoff, author of the best-selling social media book Groundswell and VP of Forrester Research, blogged in support of the idea, so long as it is done carefully. Writes Bernoff:

The challenge, of course, is can bloggers do this and retain any credibility?
We believe they can, if -- and only if -- they obey two rules.

1. They must disclose that they are being paid.
2. They must be able to write whatever they want, positive or negative.

Brogan also emphasizes disclosure in a lengthy post defending himself and his Kmart post.

Not everyone agrees. ReadWriteWeb responded with a post titled Forrester is Wrong About Paying Bloggers, arguing that:

Blogging is a beautiful thing. The prospect of this young media being overrun with "pay for play" pseudo-shilling is not an attractive one to us.

I, too, am greatly troubled by the thought of bloggers competing to write sponsored posts about products, because of the inevitable pressure they would face to write positive reviews in order to continue to receive sponsorship opportunities.

I also think that Bernoff and Forrester are right that the big question is whether or not a blogger can participate in sponsored conversations while maintaining authenticity. If it turns out that it's not really possible for a blogger to balance the two, then sponsored conversations won't make much sense for either bloggers or marketers.

But what if the practice persists? Should we accept it? Or should we frown upon it and remove sponsored bloggers from our daily reading?