JANUARY 6, 2009

Crowdsourcing has been widely accepted as a method of using the web to organize everyday people to help complete a large task, or to generate ideas and solutions to a problem. This has been effective in many ways; the iconic example is Wikipedia, which is now the most prominent educational reference site. Crowdsourcing has also been used to conduct research and development for Innocentive, and even to rally campaign supporters to call voters.

crowdSPRING is a site with a simple premise: anyone looking to have design work done for his or her business can post a creative project on the site and watch the submissions roll in. Once the posting expires, the person can then choose which design he or she likes best. Payment comes in the form of a lump sum that is specified at the beginning, winner takes all.  At first glance, it looks like a great opportunity for young designers or businesses that don’t have a lot of money to spare on design, but many designers have decried the site because the practice of “speculative work”, which asks designers to design for a client before actually signing a contract, arguably cheapens the deal in many ways.

The criticism is that designers are basically being asked to do most of their creative and intellectual work at the beginning with no guarantee of being paid, which results in lower quality work and no real client-contractor relationship. Andrew Hyde writes on his blog that this is a serious ethical problem and undermines the best practices of the industry.

Jeremiah Owyang responds to the criticism, pointing out that like it or not, crowdsourcing and spec work is here to stay. He suggests that sites like crowdSPRING actually serve the needs of the “long tail”, bringing together a community of amateur designers and freelancers who may not otherwise get these project opportunities as easily. Additionally, the site could foster dialogue and collaboration in the community, staying true to the spirit of social media.

While I’m sure this debate will rage on in the near future, I do agree with Owyang’s assessment that regardless of how the industry feels about crowdsourcing, it’s here to stay. This example from the design industry is particularly revealing because it shows that while we may have gotten used to social media concepts, they may not always fit seamlessly into existing practices in certain industries. Clearly, the objections voiced by Andrew Hyde show that there are professional ethics issues that have to be worked out before crowdsourcing design can be more readily accepted among designers. In the next few years, I expect to see a lot of these fascinating conflicts play out as online communities grow and try to find their place in the established business environment.

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DECEMBER 19, 2008

This week, Apple announced that 2009 would be the last year that it would participate in the annual MacWorld conference, and that Steve Jobs would not deliver the keynote address. While there has been much speculation as to the real reason Jobs won’t be on hand in January, the official word from Apple is that it has cheaper and easier ways to reach consumers than the annual trade show, such as its website and network of Apple stores.

Trade shows: another casualty of Web 2.0.  It makes sense - in this age of blogs, Twitter, video press releases, webchats, and online product reveals, what role do these annual gatherings play? There really isn’t a need for in-person announcements when bloggers spread the word widely and instantaneously armed only with a video clip. Questions can be answered online via webchats or in comments fields.

Traditionally, trade shows also provided opportunities for networking among industry colleagues. Facebook and LinkedIn are starting to fill this role - for free. These sites also let fans come together online to share thoughts and build affinity for their favorite products. And corporate blogs put faces on companies and provide opportunities for dialogue and interaction with consumers and industry followers.

So why bother attending these shows anymore? Especially in a tight economy, I wouldn’t be surprised to see attendance way down in 2009 at the big shows.  I am not alone either - The Pervasive Datacenter, Discrete Cosine and Mark Evans all had a similar reaction to Steve Jobs’ announcement.  In fact, I can’t seem to find anyone arguing in support of trade shows - even Convention Insider seems resigned to the fate of its livelihood.

What should trade show organizers do to transform their industry and survive Web 2.0?

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DECEMBER 16, 2008

I love books, but due to some work and general life craziness, I’ve been unable to read much for the past few weeks. Luckily, things have slowed down enough that I was able to finally sit down and finish a book I started a month or two ago - Claire Messud’s The Emperor’s Children, a novel about an aging liberal patriarch, a veteran of the culture wars of the 60s, and his relationship with the younger generation, comprised of his daughter, his nephew and his daughter’s two friends.

I’m ashamed to say I picked up the book because of its inclusion in several critics’ Best of 2006 awards. I don’t read a lot of fiction and not many of my friends do either, so when it comes to figuring out what I should read next, I generally have to rely on the Pulitzer committee or the New York Times’ Review of Books. I figured The Emperor’s Children was a safe purchase because of its critical acclaim.

Was I ever wrong. Undercurrents isn’t a book review site, but suffice it to say that the critics’ perception of this book didn’t match my own. I thought the dialogue was hackneyed and impossibly witty, that many of the central premises of the book were outlandish,  and the characters unbelievable. The constant refrain running through my head as I read was “People like this do not exist, and if they do, they do not deserve to have a book written about them.”

After finishing the book, I blamed my own upbringing for my lack of appreciation - I’m a hayseed from Richmond, Virginia and a current resident of staid and practical Washington, not the child of Manhattan literary eminences -  but upon reading reviews at Amazon and Metacritic, I quickly discovered that my opinion about The Emperor’s Children wasn’t unique. At Amazon, the most commonly-used tags for the book are “waste of time and money”, “avoid”, and “awful”, the most common rating for the book is one star, and the average rating is a mere two and a half. At Metacritic, the aggregate rating from professional critics is 85 (denoting “universal acclaim”) while the rating from readers is 69. Whichever way you slice it, reader reactions to this book were a far cry from those of elite reviewers of literature.

Reading these reviews, my insecurity over not “getting” The Emperor’s Children quickly melted into triumphalism - I was right, and the professionals were wrong. I mean, it’s not surprising the book was reviewed so well - it’s basically about the same New York literary-journalism class that reviewed the book, and paints it in a very appealing light. But it’s nice to know that that small clique isn’t capable of driving public opinion about books like they once did.

This particular book aside, it’s incredible how much power social media has had in debunking the ideas of “professionals”.  As print media continues to die, the blogosphere has eroded the opinion-setting power of all kinds of pundits, from art and literature critics in New York, to political talking heads in Washington - and one can only hope that the unwashed masses on the internet continue to prove that the emperor has no clothes.

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DECEMBER 11, 2008

Facebook Connect and Google Friend Connect were both recently opened up to the public, spurring some discussion about the future of net IDs and profile portability. At the heart of this discussion is the idea that people can use a single profile for different kinds of net activity. Facebook Connect will allow users to send news about their activity on other sites to their Facebook newsfeed. Google Friend Connect is a more open service that allows users to access their info and any networking site that uses Google’s OpenID. As social networking and online services have exploded in popularity in recent years, services that help organize the clutter have been in fairly high demand. The Connect services approach the organization challenge in a new way: they make profile information more mobile so that users can feel like they have personalized information on tap wherever they go online.

As Facebook continues to dominate the social network world, and with the latest announcement about Facebook Connect, it is interesting to consider how Facebook is expanding and what model of growth would work best for the community. In this TechCrunch interview, Mark Zuckerberg talks about the “ecosystem” of developers that has grown around the Facebook platform and how his company tries not to compete with developers in order to encourage good growth in the ecosystem. Since Connect will draw in more and more developers, Facebook’s situation is a great example of how, in the technology sector, companies are now focused on fostering a community of developers who actually create services and experiences for consumers.  This accelerates innovation because the community of developers creates a constant stream of products for the regular user community.

More than 40% of surveyed women in their 40’s participate in social networks, says a study by SheSpeaks. Other results from the survey show that over 70% of women with children ages 13 to 17 had reviewed products on social networks. Targeted social media advertising has had mixed results, and the debate on how to measure ROI in general for social media advertising still rages on. However, these poll results seem to reaffirm the value of marketing towards mothers with teenaged kids, a powerful consumer group.

During the Mumbai attacks, Twitter and Flickr bustled with activity as users posted firsthand accounts and images. Both services were very useful during times of crisis, as people use the sites to find breaking news and first-hand accounts. Flickr user Vinukumar Ranganathan posted over two hundred photos of the attacks as they were going on, drawing hundreds of thousands of views on his Flickr account. Citizen reporting has proven to be a very compelling source of information, especially at times when the world is thirsty for any small bit of information about a crisis.

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DECEMBER 5, 2008

I was a Facebook holdout.

Oh, I knew it was out there - after all, I work in social media. For the first few years, I wrote it off as a tool for students, another item I could add to the list of things that weren’t around when I was in college (cell phones, email, illegal file sharing, etc.).  Then, as colleagues started signing up, and companies started working it into their media strategies, I took a detached, academic interest in Facebook. But I didn’t actually sign up.

This all changed a few months ago. I started noticing that my contemporaries - not just younger friends - were on Facebook.  Finally, one of them sent me an invitation to join, and, justifying it by saying “I need to understand this for my clients”, I took the plunge.

Now, I think Facebook is the greatest time-suck since Tetris. Here’s why I like it:

• It helps me stay in touch with friends using minimal effort.
• Status updates - my favorite part of Facebook - give me little glimpses into my friends’ lives, the kind I never get now that we’re all spread across the country, busy with kids and work and schedules.
• Status updates also let me see a different side of clients and colleagues - people I don’t often interact with in a non-work context.
• People are funny and snarky on Facebook - my favorite type of humor.
• Birthday reminders - can’t beat that!
• I love finding the random connections between friends. The other day I typed “Jack” into the seach bar - was looking for a friend and forgot to type in his last name - and eight random Jack’s came up who share mutual friends with me. Trying to figure out how my former colleague from a law firm in San Francisco and a childhood camp friend might know the same person is kind of fun. (I’ve gotten a few emails from people of late asking me, “How do you know Trish? I went to high school with her?”).
• Cyberstalking. (You know what I’m talking about.)
• Funny pictures from the 80s that people upload and tag.
• Facebook detente - waiting to see whether “someone I may know” on Facebook will cave before I do and click on “Add Friend”.

From a professional perspective, Facebook is fascinating. Brian Solis calls Facebook ”a river of relevance that displays invaluable insight, giving you direct access into the most important conversations and activities taking place in and out of Facebook.” I agree - I’ve seen causes, products, TV shows, even presidential debates discussed on Facebook, and I can’t understate its value in providing genuine, often-real time public opinion.

I do have a quibble. On any given day, I need to respond to Facebook email, posts on my Wall, comments on my status, and possibly a Facebook IM.  Added to my work and personal email accounts, this is sometimes daunting.  Welcome to the Saturation Generation, where Inbox Zero is nothing more than the impossible dream.

I’m still holding out on Twitter, though.

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NOVEMBER 10, 2008

Starbucks Shared Planet is a new site aimed at promoting corporate responsibility and environmental stewardship. This is a great example of a company being directly inspired by consumers to be more transparent about its operations. Michelle Gass, the senior vice president of the company, even outlined specific goals the company hopes to achieve by 2015. By inviting customers to suggest ways for the company to become a better community leader, Starbucks is really investing in long-term relationships with them.

The presidential election this year was definitely a historic one in many ways, not the least of which was the use of social media to mobilize voters. Another example was PBS and YouTube’s collaboration on “video your vote”, a site for user-submitted videos documenting peoples’ experiences with voting. YouTube has been very active this year in collaborating with various companies to cover the election; it co-sponsored the first Democratic debate, formed an election center called YouChoose, and debuted many popular videos such as will.i.am’s “Yes We Can”. It’s no wonder than many people have dubbed this election the “YouTube Election”.

I’ve written about Barack Obama’s use of social media before. After the election, the Obama team set up a website at Change.gov to set the tone for the new administration. The website asks visitors to share their own experiences with the election, as well as their hopes for the future. Although the website does not have many social media components yet, it seems that some will be added in the future. Adam Ostrow from Mashable wrote an excellent post on the unprecedented potential of social media as a communication tool for the presidency; I particularly agree with his point that social media can encourage citizens to get more involved and informed about policy making.

Yammer is a new tool based on Twitter that won top prize at this year’s TechCrunch50, where 50 new tech start-ups were presented and officially launched before an audience of “influential VCs, corporations, fellow entrepreneurs and press.” Like Twitter, Yammer allows people post short “tweets” to share links and hold brief exchanges, but it focuses on internal corporate communications. Every company on the Yammer network is a closed group; you must have a work email at that company to be able to talk in the group. It seems like there’s a very real need for an enterprise version of Twitter, as Yammer adopters have noted its usefulness for enhancing office culture. Maybe we’ll even try it out at TMG!

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NOVEMBER 7, 2008

I am big fan of internet snooping. It never ceases to amaze me, what I can learn about people through a simple Google search. I’ve tracked down wayward college classmates for our alumni website. I once planned a reunion for a summer journalism program I attended in 1986 and tracked down, online, almost 75% of the people who attended.  And that was all before Facebook and LinkedIn, two sites that have made internet snooping even richer.  It’s no surprise that it has been over two years since Merriam-Webster added the verb “to google” to the dictionary. Googling has become a way of life.

This week I came across an interesting angle on the Google culture.  Buried underneath all of the election news was this article in The Washington Post (and printed in various other papers) about litigation consultants using the internet to get information about potential jurors. For example, a trial consultant working for a client involved in a patent case learned via a potential juror’s website that she “had spent a lifetime marketing exclusive sequined gowns for beauty contestants, only to have them copied without compensation.” Clearly, she was a good jury candidate for a client bringing a patent suit, given her sympathy for intellectual property holders alleging infringement.

According to the article:

Now, with a wealth of information online - newspaper letters to the editor, petition signatures, club memberships, campaign contributions - retrievable with a couple of keystrokes, Internet surfing can produce a detailed picture of how an individual votes, spends money and sounds off on controversial issues.

For some reason, this development doesn’t sit right with me. I don’t fault the lawyers for using these tools to learn all they can about jurors - I wouldn’t expect them to shy away from a free resource that offers significant insight into the minds of the individuals in whose hands their clients’ fate rests. But I can’t shake a nagging feeling that this is not what the jury system was supposed to be built on. Jurors are basically supposed to be anonymous and seemingly impartial, and the Google effect basically makes that impossible.  Lawyers can now practically custom design their ideal jurors, based not just on demographic data and courtroom demeanor, but also on the jurors’ own thoughts, history, and actions.

Just another byproduct of the Information Age? A troubling intrusion into personal privacy? Or a fundamental flaw in our judicial system?

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NOVEMBER 3, 2008

“…and I don’t know what to do, ‘Cause I’ll never be with you.” 

James Blunt obviously craves a meaningful life - and, like many others, he finds it through romance.  For the rest of us, all we really have to do is browse through the “Missed Connections” page on Craigslist.

Last week I read an article on CNN.com entitled “‘I saw you’ romance ads wildly popular.”  The author writes,

Craigslist, Kizmeet.com, ISawYou.com, SubwayCrush.com – these missed-opportunity matchmakers have become a staple of online modern love.  They’ve also become a way for some singles to fantasize about the people they’d like to meet and those they hope will want to meet them.

Mary Robertson, a documentary filmmaker in New York City, isn’t surprised by the appeal of the missed connection.  She’s been working on a film about the phenomenon for almost a year. “What inspires me about these ads is the density of the narrative,” Robertson says.  “The longing, the romance – all in this small space.  They’re like haikus.”

Blogger J. Stone at That’s So Fetch does not feel so inspired.  Stone writes,

Craigslist’s ‘missed connections’ gives soft-spoken people with a self-aware cowardice the chance to reconnect with a girl/guy they saw perusing the cereal aisle or the buxom blond who smiled back at them at the airport. . . . I would really like to know the average IQ of these people.  Instead of posting anonymously on the internet about some chick you missed out on, how about you work on your interpersonal skills?

One could certainly argue that the growing popularity of “missed connections” and “ambient awareness” is actually a reaction to social isolation – the modern American disconnectedness that Robert Putnam explored in his book Bowling Alone.

Indeed, have the internet and accompanying communications technologies actually made us feel lonelier than ever?  More socially inept than ever?  Are we purposely, purposefully - and, yes, perhaps cowardly - “missing the connection” in hopes of a fatalistic reunion on the internet?  Some believe fantasy love is better than real love, after all.

Ultimately, whether you admire or pity people who track down alleged “missed connections,” you have to admit that the appeal of missed-connection Web sites may indicate a shift in how people approach the search for love.

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OCTOBER 31, 2008

Besides the friends I’ve met at church, I can only think of a handful of people my age that regularly go to church.  This isn’t surprising: the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life recently found that 44% of Americans have left the religions of their childhoods.   The New York Times also reports that, “Among those born after 1984, about 33 percent attend church on a typical weekend” while 49% of Baby Boomers attend church regularly.  Churches are obviously having a tough time “[e]nticing young people to become regular members of a Christian congregation.”

So what are churches seeking younger members doing about it?  They are plugging into social media and other multi-media outlets to reach their flock.  In addition to having rock music instead of hymns and adding video clips to sermons, churches have begun joining Facebook, MySpace, and MyChurch.org among other sites.  Churches have begun blogging, texting pastors during services, podcasting, and set up message boards.

Most churches I know are all about growing community.  I think it’s interesting that now, community doesn’t have to stay local.  Some churches now show their sermons live online so you can check them out before ever darkening the doorway.  Out-of-towners and troops overseas can feel a part of the community while talking in a forum during service.

I can stay connected to my old church by watching clips posted to YouTube (yes, that’s my pastor and church staff doing the New Kids on the Block… I’d also recommend their Dirty Jobs clip!).  Churches have found a way for prospective members to preview what they can expect, figure out if it’s a community they want to be involved in, and decide if it’s worth their time to even show up.

In what ways has your place of worship updated its methods to keep up with the times and younger members?

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OCTOBER 30, 2008

Back in April, my colleague Mike wrote a post entitled “The Long Goodbye To Newsprint Begins” in which he detailed the final changeover from print to online format for Madison, Wisconsin’s The Capital Times:

The Capital Times may be among the first to step so emphatically into journalism’s future, but every entity of the Old Media – not just newspapers, but TV, magazines and even newsletters and academic journals – has had to face the fact that the digital age has transformed the rules of mass communications.

And while it’s true that every aspect of traditional media is facing a paradigm shift, it seems that print media is taking the worst beating, at least for the moment.

• Condé Nast, an international publisher with numerous publications (many of them household names like Wired, Vogue, Glamour and GQ) announced major cuts across the board, with each title having to reduce staff and budget costs by 5% over a matter of weeks.

• The Orange County Register is laying off 110 employees by the end of the week.

• The Los Angeles Times is cutting 75 newsroom jobs, which is about 10% of its staff.

• Gannett, the largest newspaper publisher in the U.S., is also cutting 10% of its community newspaper staff, on top of 1,000 jobs it let go in August. (Because of Gannett’s size, this will be a very substantial number of jobs.)

• And next year, the 100-year-old Christian Science Monitor will become the first nationally circulated newspaper to go to an online-only daily edition. (CSM will retain a weekly print edition.)

No doubt the economy plays a role here (particularly when the only printing press seeing an increase in demand seems to be the one at the Treasury Department) but it’s also indicative of the rapid convergence of social and traditional media. As we increasingly exchange information electronically, print newspapers - and to a lesser extent magazines and books - become a seeming anachronism. When content I can find in a print edtion of a newspaper is also available online, I will opt for the electronic version every time.

As exciting as the changes are in the way we consume and distribute information, the loss of jobs is unfortunate and has a tremendous impact on the people in the industry.  The question now is whether the decline of print media continues to accelerate, or holds firm. My guess is that 2009 will bring a number of similar announcements to the one made by the Christian Science Monitor.

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