Category Archives: Community

Crowdsourced campaigning

Posted on by
4

After seeing a tweet from @cslyons about the mydavidcameron.com website I had a look and decided to submit the picture above, a day later it was up on the site. Today, incredibly, it went up on the Mail’s website.

The Labour party have also now adopted the idea and posted an entry on their website, which they’ve used to highlight what they see as some of the misgivings of the Conservative campaign so far. This little idea is really having an impact!

With the simple instruction below and a good idea Clifford Singer, the man behind mydavidcameron.com, has effectively crowdsourced an audience of activists and provided a vehicle through which their voices can be heard and can gain national attention. What a great achievement!

This is the first election that can really harness the full power of social media to intimately involve us in the debate on our terms. With mydavidcameron.com Clifford has started something which may grow and develop over the coming months and result in more people taking an active shared interest in the current feelings about the different parties campaigns. Could that effect the result of the general election? Not on its own, but it can form a relevant part of the debate.

The reason people don’t vote in the numbers they used to is because they are disillusioned and disconnected with the electoral processes. If through activities like this the electorate can re-engage with it then this is an extremely good thing.

This is the first part of the user generated digital election of 2010. As Labour and the Conservatives trade blows over the coming moths it will be interesting to see who really ‘gets’ digital. If one of the parties can harness social media as Obama did to such great effect in the US presidential election last year it could get really interesting!

Loyalty Beyond Reason

Posted on by
Reply

heart-dpReading this presentation by Matt Kelly from Trinity Mirror given at the World Editors Forum I found some interesting arguments.

Certainly as people (hopefully) become less reliant on algorithmic search and more focused on recommendations from friends through social networks, or a new social search platform, brands having this sort of approach to an extent does make sense and cant be discarded out of hand.

We followed the brochure word for word, and we employed the same merry-go-round of SEO consultants to help us build sites that would ping to the top of search engines for a world hungry for our content.

If little things like character, brand…the ingrained values that made the print product a success, got in the way, well … the ends justified the means. Content wasn’t king. Traffic was. Whoever, from wherever, reading whatever. It didn’t matter as long as the audience grew.“

Crucially, traffic from search engines is ridiculously low for a newspaper website. Around 15 percent for MirrorFootball and less than 10 for 3am.
That means the vast majority of traffic has either come from bookmarks, or a referral from an informed source. We get a lot of traffic to both sites from social networks like Twitter and Facebook.”

In part it does sound like a sales pitch based on having an alternative product, going against the flow, ooooooh exciting, what rebels! However with an ambition to grow traffic I often fear it is easy to forget how important engagement is and the value content has to hold for the audience it purports to represent.

In my opinion the way in which commercial revenue is generated by ‘big media brands’ online will completely change in the coming years so we are more focused on delivering integrated engaging partnerships, which will not be measured by eyeballs but by how many people make a meaningful engagement. You cant really do that with a transient audience that are not dedicated lovers of a brand, I think this is what Trinity Mirror recognise, it isn’t just about being rebellious.

We can already see this with companies like videoegg getting more clients who want to base their ad spend not on how many browse past an advert or how many it is forced on, through preroll, but how many actually love the website they are on so much that they would willingly accept and advert from them because it may actually be on benefit to view it.

Of course this isn’t just a debate about SEO, and I certainly do not write this with the intension of starting a war against it! It is about the core proposition of content based sites and what they actually offer an audience that they cant get on a million other sites. It is about making deep emotional connections with our audience, loving them and in turn allowing them to love us so they have a “Loyalty Beyond Reason*”, which can be exploit ed to commercial gain.

*Lovemarks worth reading the book if you haven’t already.

Become Streetfighter: You’re In The Advert

Posted on by
2

streetfighterHow do you make an advert more intimate and memorable? Put the viewer in it! The new promotional site for Street Fighter IV becomestreetfighter.com does this brilliantly.

Become Street Fighter allows users to very easily include a picture of their own face on the character in the video. You can then embed the video that is created on a variety of different sites including Facebook and Myspace.

This is a brilliant example of how making commercial media an intimate experience for users and allowing viral distribution through social networks can have a positive impact on the way people form a relationship with a product or brand.

Creating a video like this takes no longer than 1 minute if you already have the pictures. No registration pages or forms to fill out, just upload your pics, get your video and that’s it.

The system is built using technology made by 15secondtv, which renders the face from an uploaded picture on to the video a user has selected to create the final video.

This is an overwhelmingly positive commercial experience, which is infinitely more memorable than a normal game trailer and should therefore have much more of an impact in driving sales of the game.

Disqus: Building Collective Comminities

Posted on by
10

disqus-drop-inThe web breaks down the barriers put up by location and time to allow discussion and debate anywhere at any time.

Disqus is an interesting system because it also removes the barriers put up by different websites and allows commenting on a central hub. It provides users with a very flexible platform on which they can follow multiple threads of discussion in the same place without having multiple sign ins on different sites.

Disqus makes it easier for people to comment and track their contributions on a single profile which they can display as a comment blog. After all, there is no difference between a great comment and a great published article.”

disqus.com

A shared space like this is great because it makes the process of engagement easier and facilitates debate though commenting, which adds value to the content being debated and to the comments themselves.

For larger brands who want debate to happen on their “digital property” thus generating registrations to their system from which they can collect data a system like this could be seen as disruptive, however if Disqus allows communication to happen more productively across different sites and are able to facilitate the sharing of user data then then content providers may find this sort of solution very attractive.

Below I have tried to represent this idea through the example of UK national newspaper websites. The Collective Community which is joined by a system like Disqus can push and pull users between different debates and points of view allowing users to move between different debates easily and interact with them using the same identity. The Separate Communities on the right are more isolated and contained. They don’t allow a freedom of expression amongst them without using different identities.

community-diagram

Traditional content publishers (which newspapers are) may find this a difficult concept to buy into initially. The system is not exclusive, so users could be actively recruited by another content provider, who might be a direct competitor. Users might then choose to spend more time with that other content provider if their experience of the content and debate are better than that which they had before.

Content providers such as newspapers and magazines have very competitive rivalries for sales in hard-copy that now spills over into the digital world in a battle for users, this influences the relationship these brands have with their readers. Whether or not a system like this would be used by a competitor should be put to one side and the user should always be considered first.

Content providers own the content being presented, when it then takes a life on of it’s own through the comments made on it that is not their property, it belongs collectively to those who have continued the conversation.

Content creators don’t own the conversation, users do.

Having a collective community which is able to move betwen different newspaper websites means those websites can concentrate on what they are traditionally good at. Not managing a community but producing interesting, exciting content that users will love.

Online Identity

Posted on by
4

identity-dropinOne of the things I learned about when first studying Communications as an A-Level student was that online platforms give people the opportunity to contact other users and view content anonymously.

Back then social networks didn’t exist as they do in their current form, where it is essential to display your true identity and communicate as yourself in order to engage and connect with other people you know.

The ability to communicate without people taking your physical demeanour and appearance into consideration is of great advantage to some people who might otherwise be treated differently because of their physical characteristics. However If people hide something though a false online identity and the communications they then make have a positive impact on the people they reach, the positive impact that could have had on the persons real identity is lost, which devalues the communication process.

If as an individual you were to come into a room and introduced yourself wearing a mask and with a false name people wouldn’t take you seriously, respect you or find you particularly easy to communicate with. Why is it any different online? If you put up a veil people cant see though it. The problem is you can’t see the mask if they are wearing one online, you can in the physical world.

I recently changed my profile picture on Twitter with the expressed intention of making that method of communication as human as possible so people can see who I am. At the time I said the following.

Changed my profile pic to an actual picture of me (before I had a little graphical avatar). Feels more direct when you see a picture of somebody’s face next to a message. 3:39 PM Jan 25th – dpwilliams

I think it makes a big difference if you can see the face of the person you are talking to, it makes it more intimate and personal, which increases the value of the message.

  • I adjusted my user facing profile to one which I think is more meaningful and that represents me physically.

I think that a dehumanised online identity will have a negative impact on the way in which people communicate with each other and the understanding people have of the communications being made.

Before concluding I should mention that I believe these things are a personal preference and it’s important people do have a choice about the way in which they represent themselves online and in the physical world.

Saying that, I think…

…we can do some simple things to make our identity as clear as possible.

Different networks and situations call for people to adopt different identities if they want to communicate in different ways or engage in different narrative threads. If you are for example representing a brand then it is appropriate to display an identifiable company logo. The comments being made are on behalf of that brand so this is an appropriate way to communicate and one that people will understand and be comfortable with.

As an individual if you are using a network which is a representation of yourself as a human then it is best to be seen as one and not as a character or logo. If possible you should show a picture of yourself clearly displaying who you are. Also where possible you should use your name so that the adjacent comment is received with a meaningful human association.

The more I think about identity the more complicated it becomes!

The issue isn’t just the identity you take on in different places but also the communication partners perception of identity and the perception you have of yourself. The perception others have of your identity is also it turn governed by their own perception of themselves.

Free thinker Gregory Lent, who I follow with great interest on Twitter, mentioned to me when Tweeting about online identity that “(it is an) interesting topic .. not sufficiently understood yet, sensationalized too”. He is completely right, this is such a complicated topic, which I am not at all qualified to analyse in enough detail to give the depth to this post that is necessary to truly understand the wider issue of human identity.

When I have time I’ll try and do some reading around this subject until then I leave you with an open mind.