The Measurement Standard: Blog Edition

The Not-So-New Social/Anti-Social Media

Jim Macnamara"s "Measuring Up"

 

 

Welcome to a new age where media are software and the audiences are the networks.

I don't know about you but, as fascinated as I am with media developments, I am fed up with hearing the term "new media." And I am not too enamored with "social media" either.

What's So New About New Media?

Why? First, because many of the media that we are talking about are increasingly not new. OK, so Web 2.0 has upped the ante with interactivity and participation, but newsgroup chat rooms celebrate their 30th anniversary next year, having been conceived by Duke University graduate students Tom Trucott and Jim Ellis in 1979. The term "Weblog" was created in 1997 and bloggers have been blogging for a decade. Google is into its second decade, celebrating its 10th anniversary as a company in 2008, while MySpace will celebrate its 10th anniversary next year. Even YouTube and FaceBook are three and four years old respectively and, with hundreds of millions of users between them, are hardly new.

Apart from being increasingly inaccurate, the term "new media" leads us to an inevitable terminology trap when the next wave of media developments arrive. Web 3.0 is already under construction and new hybrid forms of media are evolving – what Roger Fidler calls "mediamorphosis." Rather than a choice between "old" or "traditional" and "new" media, which suggests a simple two-horse race, we are living through a period of ongoing media and communications change.

What's So Social About Social Media?

"Social media" is also a problematic term. As much as social networking has wide interpretations and social network mapping is all the rage, "social media" suggests to most that these media are primarily used for chat and gossip, friendship, dating, etcetera. It is this confusion that is causing many businesses to ignore these media or underestimate them. In reality, so-called social networking utilities and social media are making and breaking brands and products every day, building and destroying political careers, and shaping corporate reputations. They are used for civic and political engagement, research, job searching, marketing, shopping, knowledge sharing, and a host of other purposes.

While the U.S. progresses through its primaries in preparation for the November 2008 Presidential election, Australian had a national election in late 2007 which was widely dubbed "the YouTube election," and resulted in a new government. The new Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, and his party were elected in a landmark campaign spearheaded by Kevin07, a Web-based strategy which extensively used MySpace, blogs, YouTube and other so-called social media. Even though many conservative politicians clung to traditional media advertising -- particularly those who lost the election -- Web 2.0 type media were used for political communication and civic engagement by a large number of both politicians and interest groups.

The U.S. Presidential race is also seeing Web 2.0 media used at an unprecedented level -- even more than in the 2004 election which was described as a critical turning point in media use for political electioneering. (See, for instance, this article, previously in The Measurement Standard.)The term "social media" fails to reflect the serious and substantial communication that is flowing through these channels.

To take the point further, a few hours of research will show that many of the so-called social media are also downright anti-social. Political spoofs and parodies that ridicule, mash-ups of children's nursery rhymes with lyrics replaced by obscenities, and various types of pornography, racism, and other abuses are features and challenges of the Internet and the new forms and genre of media that it facilitates.

What's In a Name?

So what do we call emerging media forms and genre? And is it important what we call them? I suggest it is because our way of describing things frames our understanding. Language limits or delimits the concepts we deal with. It seems clear that we need a review of terminology in relation to media as convergence escalates. In preparing a public lecture which I am due to deliver in June, I compiled a list of 32 different terms used for media today. Many of these are based on delivery systems that are increasingly redundant -- such as film, video tape, broadcast, and so on. Even traditional terms such as "newspapers," "press," "broadcast," "radio" and "television" no longer adequately describe our media, as newspapers are less and less provided on paper, radio programs are increasingly distributed as podcasts rather than broadcasts, and television content is being "transmitted" via the Internet and watched on computers and even hand phones. And "phones" are not phones any more.

The benefit of a review of terminology is that we would find we can dispense with more than half the terms in use and simplify discussion considerably. What does it matter that content is distributed on paper, plastic, magnetic tape or disk, celluloid, cable, broadcast waves, or in jello? Only two things seem to matter: content and users -- whether they are producers or consumers, or a combination of both, as reflected in the terms "prosumers" or "produsers."

This raises three points that I will throw out there for comment. The first observation is that media are becoming immaterial. By that I do not mean that media don't matter per se; I mean the materiality of media is becoming unimportant. With convergence, content pays no mind to the medium on which it is distributed -- nor do most users. In the digital art world, Lev Manovich talks about "post-media" referring to the same notion, so I am not alone in this thinking.

In the same way, hardware technology such as computers and telecommunications networks are disappearing and becoming invisible. The invisible computer was first forecast in 1998 by Donald Norman and research continues through the Disappearing Computer Initiative in the U.S. Similarly, cables and wires are disappearing as we move to wireless. And "logging on," which was an often troublesome ritual that regularly reminded us that we were entering a complex world of machines, is increasingly being replaced with "always on." But it is not only the increasing physical invisibility of hardware that is significant; what is most significant is the growing psychological invisibility of hardware. Today, what Marc Prensky calls "digital natives" and assimilated "digital immigrants" move seamlessly and effortlessly between sources of content without a moment's thought to the hardware infrastructure that delivers them.

Today media are software -- intellectual property in the form of both applications and content. And audiences are the network, actively connecting, linking, redirecting, forwarding, and injecting local comment and static into communications.

Welcome to a new age in which media are software and audiences are the networks.

Dr Jim Macnamara MA, PhD, FPRIA, FAMI, CPM, FAMEC became Professor of Public Communication at the University of Technology Sydney in late 2007. His 30-year career in journalism, public relations and media research culminated in the 2006 sale of CARMA Asia Pacific, which he founded, to Media Monitors. He worked as Group Research Director with Media Monitors - CARMA Asia Pacific following the sale and continues as a Consultant with the Group.

How Public Relations Measurement Can Win the War on Terror

It's not a new thing to talk about the war on terror as a war in the media for mindshare. But I've never seen it stated as explicitly as in the article "Marketing Osama" which appeared in a recent issue of The Week, and which was reprinted from a story by John Cook originally published in Radar. The point there is that Brand USA and Brand Osama are fighting it out in the media, and this marketing/PR battle is the important front in the war.

Public relations measurement evaluates exactly the sort of metrics that define the strategy that al Qaida has been using to enlarge its support: media impressions, media content, key messages, contributions and new members. Public relations should be not only measuring the war on terror, but, by virtue of tracking the most important metrics, should be defining the war on terror too. (See "Knowing the Enemy: Can social scientists redefine the "war on terror"?")

One of the more interesting aspects of the war on terror is that there is, (so far, that I know of) no way to know if we are winning or losing, or how we will ever know if we do win or lose. And that's where public relations measurement comes in: If we can use public relations metrics to define progress in the war, we can use them to define success and failure. Public relations measurement can win the war on terror by defining when the war will be over.

And here's how we do it: Let's say that al Qaida's media and marketing efforts now generate X impressions of their key messages each year, which in turn result in Y dollars of contributions and Z new members. We gather and track this data for the last ten or twenty years, and correlate it against terrorist activity of all sorts. (Yeah, it's a big job.) We then will understand what level of exposure to key messages (or Osama bin Laden videos) is required to generate what levels of recruits. Or to generate one new suicide bomber.

Then we define success in terms of the metrics. So, we could define "winning the war on terror" as when al-Qaida's impressions, contributions and recruits are dropping. And then we define victory as the point at which these metric fall low enough so that al Qaida can no longer function effectively. If Osama bin Laden doesn't get his message out, or if no one believes it enough to do anything, then we've won. --Bill Paarlberg

Paul Gillin's "The New Influencers" Gets Highest Recommendation

Your Measurement Reading List

Understand the Coming Change
The New Influencers by Paul Gillin

There have been countless books written about the blogosphere, ranging from the worthless to a handful that are truly useful. Paul Gillin's The New Influencers is at the far end of the scale: It is really great, exceptionally good. It has my highest recommendation. In the Must-Read-If-You-Want-to Survive-the-21st-Century trilogy, The Cluetrain Manifesto is the prequel, Naked Conversations comes in the middle, and now The New Influencers is the sequel.

As I say in my Paine of Measurement column for this issue, my standard answer to a wide variety of questions is "Ask your customers." When asked what someone should do about the blogosphere, I tell them: "Read Naked Conversations." And from now on, I'm adding, "Read The New Influencers."

Now, I have to say that author Paul Gillin is one of the people who have changed my life. Way back when, I was interviewing for the Director of Corporate Communications job at Lotus, and I was presented with a story that he'd just written that was critical of the company. The question was: "What would you do about this!" I think I said I'd take Paul to lunch and find out what was on his mind. It must have been the right answer because I got the job. And about a month later I really was having lunch with him, learning the ins and outs of the PC media world.

We've crossed paths numerous times in the intervening two decades and he's always been just a little ahead of the pack. And that's exactly where you need to be in this new, ever-evolving world where deadlines and gatekeepers are as useful as buggy whips and 8-track tapes. So go read this book.

What makes The New Influencers really great is not just the solid practical advice, but also how Paul approaches the fundamental dynamics of the new media world. He makes you understand the DNA of this new society and how it works, which is a much better place to start off from.

Too many people do not comprehend how fundamental the coming change is. If they read Gillin's book, then they will. -KDP

Can the Votes of a Panel Measure Trust, Reputation, and Other Tricky Things?

How do you measure trust? I just read about an innovative social media approach as applied to news media, (thanks to PR Watch.org). NewsTrust, now still in beta, is "...a social network model which uses the intellect of the masses to rate all manner of news content and news sources..." So, as I take it, news sources will be rated by many readers to result in an overall score that roughly translates to "trustworthiness."

And that brings up an interesting thought: If you can derive a useful measure of trustworthiness by having a bunch of people just vote on it, then why couldn't we measure all kinds of tricky things by having people vote on them? Could we compare the trustworthiness of companies or politicians just by combining ratings from enough people?

And if so, then why go to all the media analysis effort of compiling a Reputation Index for big companies when you could just get a bunch of people to rate the companies? Hey, maybe there's already a social media site called YourRep.com or something where everyone can rank companies to provide an overall reputation score.

I guess if we can use Wikipedia to provide accurate information on, say, Total Quality Management (which I happen to have looked up there just a little while ago, and I feel more or less confident that what I read was accurate), then perhaps we can use a similar consensus-of-many approach to defining (or at least getting a handle on) more nebulous concepts as well. --WTP

Newspapers Need News To Make Money: So That's Why They're Called Newspapers

We here at The Measurement Standard are always interested in news about the news media, and when that includes research and some ironic conclusions -- well, it hardly gets better than that. A new edition of This Is True arrived a couple days ago, featuring this gem:

DEPARTMENT OF THE OBVIOUS: A study by the University of Missouri-Columbia School of Journalism finds the reason newspapers are losing money is they've cut too much of their newsroom staff. "If you invest in the newsroom, do you make more money? The answer is yes," said Prof. Esther Thorson. "If you lower the amount of money spent in the newsroom, then pretty soon the news product becomes so bad that you begin to lose money." (Reuters) ...Unfortunately there are so few reporters left, no one was able to go more in depth on this story.

(Reprinted with permission from the weird news publication This is True with permission from the author. Copyright 2007 Randy Cassingham.)

You can read more about this research and Professor Thorson at this page on the Missouri School of Journalism site. And if you find yourself longing for more bizarre-but-true news of the ironically humorous variety, This Is True has got plenty of it, featuring author Randy Cassingham's pithy and opinionated commentary.