Blogging

Hugh Macleod is a well known cartoonist who has a blog by the name Gaping Void. Here is an excellent and thought-provoking post from last month:

Earlier today I told everybody on Twitter and Facebook, that I’m leaving Twitter and Facebook.

Why?

Because Facebook and Twitter are too easy. Keeping up a decent blog that people actually want to take the time to read, that’s much harder. And it’s the hard stuff that pays off in the end.

Besides, even if they’re very good at hiding the fact, over on Twitter and Facebook, it’s not your content, it’s their content.

The content on your blog, however, belongs to you, and you alone. People come to your online home, to hear what you have to say, not to hear what everybody else has to say. This sense of personal sovereignty is important.

And as I’ve said many times over the years, Web 2.0 IS ALL ABOUT personal sovereignty. About using media to do something meaningful, WITHOUT someone else giving you permission first, without having to rely on anyone else’s resources, authority and money. Self-sufficiency. Exactly. [...]

Read the rest of the post for more of Macleod’s reasoning. It’s interesting to read the various responses around the web to the post.

I admire Macleod’s idealism. In general I’m inclined to agree with his points about Twitter and Facebook. They are companies with their own objectives and although the services are free, we should think about if we should use them – and how. (Incidentally at the time of writing Macleod appears to be back on Twitter but let’s ignore that and focus on the advice.)

I wouldn’t recommend Macleod’s advice for everyone in every case but I would say that it is of particular relevance to artists and creative people who ‘create content’. As always it comes back to the nature of your set-up and what you want to achieve.

I’m working with National Rural Touring Forum at the moment. In their words they’re:

the organisation that represents a number of mainly rural touring schemes and rural arts development agencies across England and Wales. Our touring scheme members work with local communities to promote high quality arts events and experiences in local venues.

Just wanted to say a quick word about one aspect of my work which is the new NRTF blog at nrtf.wordpress.com.

Part of my brief was to help the organisation to help its members in the use of digital media when organising gigs and events in villages and rural communities.

While already equipped with a website I thought there was a need for somewhere where we could quickly post news, videos, images and notes from the conference. We also wanted to allow comments and sharing of the posts around the web.

We had to get it online quickly in time for the beginning of the conference. So this time I opted to use wordpress.com.

The blog could have been hosted and accessible from their main domain, in the background running WordPress code from wordpress.org. I am no stranger to installing WordPress code, running completely independently, with all the customisation and design flexibility that brings.

But rather than spend time discussing and planning that and going back and forth with visual design and other issues, I just set the blog up on wordpress.com and added some team members as users so they can post.

I think far too often people agonise over all kinds of comparatively small issues (branding, design tweaks, everything under one domain, what could be possible with the technology) at the expense of the THING which just has to be DONE and available.

In the long run we can still do many things.

Maybe we want to lose ‘wordpress’ from the address to have a more branded name – but make sure any inbound links don’t break. In that case we can use WordPress’ paid service to redirect a subdomain (such as blog.nrtf.org.uk, just an example) to the blog on Automattic’s company servers. Any visitor will not know any differently, other than the neat domain name.

Alternatively, if NRTF build a new website (hopefully using an open source system such as WordPress itself or maybe Drupal) they might decide to include a blog as a section. In that case we can export the content from the posts on the existing WordPress blog and import them on to the new website. Unlike many other web services, WordPress is very good at letting you export your data and move it elsewhere. (Dear web services: if you love someone, please set them free.) We could post one final entry on the existing blog with a link to the new home and a brief explanation.

Or we can just carry on with the blog as it is.

I’m happy that the NRTF team are up and running with a blog, which is probably the quickest way to publish long-form content on the web. They also have freedom, they are not locked into this system, which is important.

The annual gathering of NRTF is about to start in Caerleon, Newport. The hashtag is #ruraltouring. I’m doing three presentations and a social media surgery. So I’ll be pretty busy – but please make sure you say hi to me if you’re attending!

In The Telegraph today, Boris Johnson opines on the double-edged sword that is comments on blogs:

In the past few days there have been plenty of people wondering whether the blogosphere, with its seething irascibility, is actually coarsening political discourse. Could all this aggressive language actually encourage aggressive behaviour – or even violence? There are some people who wonder whether we need to tame the blogs, to sandpaper them, moderate them – perhaps even to censor them. And as soon as you put it like that you can see what twaddle it is. What we are seeing on our websites, for all its exuberant roughness, is a uniquely healthy and democratic process.

I’m inclined to agree with Boris, at least on this point.

But for the rest of us, in people’s minds blogs and blogging and discussion around them can tend to be dominated by newspapers. Therefore it would also be useful to remember the following points.

A blog is just a set of posts organised by time
On the web, blogs are all around. To assume every blog post is an opinion piece is wrong. To assume a blog is a diary is wrong too. Not all of what gets discussed on blogs is party political, nor is all of it political. I have no idea of Boris Johnson’s total experience of the web, but I can hazard a guess that he reads a lot of political opinion. For those of us working on digital media projects in industry, in the third sector, in arts and so forth, our experience of comments can be very different, particularly the kind of toxic comments you often find on newspapers. In other words, don’t let blogging experiences by the likes of The Telegraph guide your preconceptions of blogging or comments because this is a big world. You can use your blog to explore your service offerings, to discuss your professional interests, to post video from conferences, to invite comment on your organisation, to think out loud, to share notes and many other things. Hardly any of these things resemble the poisonous blogosphere so demonised – and beloved – by the press.

Your strategy and software are important
The example set by the newspaper industry is frequently poor and unreliable as a model for people in entirely different fields. For instance, the newspaper’s objective is often to maximum ad revenue and one way to do that is to find strategies to boost page view counts. This doesn’t necessarily align with the objective of sensible, polite discussion. I would argue it rarely does. Therefore the way the software is configured encourages this. In the case of The Telegraph, their nested comment threads allow people to go off on tangents, taking them off-topic. That’s possibly OK for page views and controversy (if you’re fine for every comment conversation to descend into “yo loser, we saved your ass in WW2″ that is). It is not fine if you want to be the owner of your blog and set the topics and tone. In practice we have found the linear column of comments to be much more conducive to on-topic conversation in many cases. The comments amplify, correct and improve the original post. The general point is that you should invest time in figuring out why your blog exists, why you’re allowing comments and how the software is going to guide your visitors and provide incentives for the right behaviour. Sometimes anonymity can be an advantage, often it isn’t. Often like and recommend buttons can incentivise cheap sloganeering, turning the comments into a game of abuse. At other times, you might want to try that.

The web as a conversation
“Conversation” is a popular metaphor for what happens online. But it applies beyond the confines of any particular blog. It might be worthwhile to consider having a blog for what you do, just as it might be worth opening up comments. But this isn’t the only place the conversation is happening. For example, this blog post is a kind of long-form response to Boris Johnson but it’s not taking place on The Telegraph website. Frequently people will be discussing your subject in their own spaces and own channels in their own formats and media. The move is not only from one-way to two-way communications, it’s towards multi-way. If what people are saying is important to you, then you might need to spend time monitoring it and responding accordingly.

In summary, Johnson is right to emphasise taking the positive with the negative. There is frequently a good argument for taking ownership of the good and bad. If someone wants to emphasise a negative, shouldn’t you be the first to offer them an opportunity to fix it? And be seen to do so?

Often I meet people who would like to shut down the negative comments by not allowing them in the first place. But the fact is, just because you don’t have discussion on your own site, doesn’t mean it isn’t taking place elsewhere on the web.

Many organisations are only just beginning to open up to published comments by third parties. Often people are tempted to offer an email address and receive comments privately, but that won’t win them any kudos for openness and engaging people in public. Such organisations might be advised to offer comments and start the learning process. It has the potential to change their work – for the better.

Recently I’ve noticed how organisations who are starting to use social media are radically underestimating the time investment that such work requires… and often adding this work onto the job description of people who are already pretty busy. This is a bit of a mistake – it’s important to work out exactly what is involved in generating and getting content out successfully into the web community and to your followers.

Talking recently to a photographer, I was struck by how he described his clients’ lack of understanding about what it took to properly publish his work online so that people saw it. Usually basing their own assumptions on their (limited) use of Facebook to share photos, they see it as an easy thing, which doesn’t require much time of special knowledge.

For a modern photographer, taking the photo is just the start of things… then comes processing of RAW files, then into Photoshop for some finishing touches to the post production process. Then resizing the image files and getting the colours right for print or web, depending on their use.

Over to Flickr, there’s uploading and creating (good) titles, descriptions, tags, geo-tags and other meta-data. Then there’s the option of doing a bit of research on Flickr to find appropriate groups to put the photos on. Then beyond Flickr, there are the other online places you might want to embed or publicise the content. Facebook, Twitter, client’s websites, niche networks etc.

Only then can he really consider his job ‘done’… and it takes at least as long as he used to spend in the dark room in the old days of film, when clients could appreciate that it took a good deal of time, art and experience to create a photographic object.

The same is true of text content (edits, re-edits, checking sources, writing for web and search, adding metadata, double checking, publishing,  pushing the content out to other networks etc). And the same with video – shooting, editing, captioning, converting into the right format, uploading (sometimes to multiple sites), embedding, publicising on other networks etc…

Often, a brand is also running a presence on Facebook – which needs its own attention, then there’s responding to incoming communications, monitoring online activity etc. All in all, it can be time consuming if you’re planning to attend to your online activity meaningfully.

So when we’re talking to companies who are looking at working seriously in the real time web environment, we’re pretty eager to hear how they plan to provide enough people time to resource it. Who will be doing the actual work, and how will it fit into their job? I do hear too many saying that they’ll just ‘add it onto’ someone’s existing role – and it’s a bit of a red flag.

The cost of online technology has come crashing down in recent years – but the requirement to provide some real human time paying attention to online activity has increased. Rather than just see this as an opportunity to save money from the technology budget, companies should be re-investing those savings in human time to pay for all the work that is actually involved in running a successful online presence.

It’s great the brands are now able to run their own online media presence, but it takes time and human effort – and that is what generates the value – people. So if your thinking of investing in this space, think in terms of time, rather than money.

We’ve been working with National Theatre Wales on their online community strategy. Earlier this year we unveiled a social site based on the Ning platform.

It’s similar to Facebook in some ways except that it allows a level of detailed conversation probably not possible before. We’ve had many people join and, importantly, participate on there – actors, writers, directors, technical people and of course audience (like me).

NTW wanted something which would complement and support their work and their ethos of boldness, openness and experimentation. National Theatre Wales are like the host of a party – on the site there’s a great deal of freedom in the topics you can discuss. Feel free to sign up and try it.

If you want to be precise about terminology you could say it’s both a “social network” site and a “social networking” site. It’s a subtle difference in wording but a big difference in practice. In other words, it not only supports existing connections between people (like Facebook friends) but encourages new connections to form between people who wouldn’t otherwise know each other. (If you’re interested in some background to this distinction, check out USA-based researcher danah boyd’s thoughts in this area. Not for everyone but you might like it.)

So it’s been fun to work on the site – with NTW and their visual branding partners Elfen – and now see people discussing things and blogging about theatre and related topics. And it’s genuinely exciting to think that people will meet “in real life” and work on new projects together as a result of this online community and the various groups it now holds.

Currently we’re gearing up to November’s announcements of next year’s theatre events. More news soon.

In the meantime, here’s a great example of a discussion which resulted from a blog post.

This blog post Why comments suck (and ideas on un-sucking them) has good advice among the hard talk. Sample:

One last thing: Stop making excuses. I know none of this is easy, but you really should have only one choice — either have comments and do them properly, or don’t offer comments at all. And if you’re offering them solely to increase page traffic to boost revenues, give up. Just quit. You’re hopeless.

It’s aimed at newspapers – who are still getting accustomed to the people formerly known as “the audience” – but you can apply it to any blog or community on the web.

We were invited to BBC Cymru Wales last Friday to present a “Learning Lunch” about Twitter. Above are the slides we used.

It was a new presentation for us, with Tom and I alternating places. I’m very happy with the way it turned out. We wanted to expand the imagination around Twitter to show different uses of it, away from celebrity stories like Stephen Fry and Oprah Winfrey which have been already well publicised.

We also wanted to use Twitter as an example of a social web platform modelling the emerging culture of sharing. We didn’t want this to be tech evangelism for Twitter, we talked about the limitations of Twitter and its pitfalls (particularly around compliance issues in organisations, especially media) as well as the potential benefits.

Afterwards, someone raised the point that we didn’t introduce Twitter in the context of blogging. I think that’s because blogging is well established. Blogging lives. And what’s more blogging is in rude health! It has just diversified into different forms. Blogging is part of our culture for many people, particularly the young who are familiar with blog-like features on social networking sites and don’t remember a time when the web never existed. Again, blogging has so many forms and uses. On an elementary level a blog is a “website organised by time” (who first said that?). As such a blog is very flexible – anything you want and not just an “online diary”. Likewise for Twitter – which can trace some of its conventions and features back to blogging.

Here are some handy links related to our presentation.

Newbie’s Guide To Twitter by Chris Brogan

The comments are worth a look too.
http://www.chrisbrogan.com/newbies-guide-to-twitter/

Twitter For Absolute Beginners

A list of mere guidelines.
http://honestlyreal.wordpress.com/2009/04/16/twitter-for-absolute-beginners/

Twitter essentials

Sign up for an account at Twitter’s website. The default web interface can be clumsy, so Twhirl and Tweetdeck are fairly good desktop client programs. Mobile clients are plentiful – do a search for your phone or look at the tweetstream to see what other people are using.
http://www.twitter.com
http://twhirl.org
http://www.tweetdeck.com

Twitpic

This is the dominant software client for posting photographs taken on your mobile phone – arguably the best but not the only one.
http://twitpic.com

URL shortening with bit.ly

The 140-character limit of Twitter has led to widespread adoption of URL shortening services. Our favourite is bit.ly because of the analytics data it gathers. In general, if you can measure something easily, then measure it. It might be useful later.
http://bit.ly

Joshua Schachter led a recent debate on the risks of trusting your URLs to a single point of failure. (In short, if the shortening service goes down, a large number of web links become inaccessible too.)
http://joshua.schachter.org/2009/04/on-url-shorteners.html

Twitter Search

It’s good for real time search. More difficult for finding older tweets (needle in a haystack problems).

http://search.twitter.com/advanced

Here’s an example of search feeds – if you’re interested in Caernarfon you can monitor mentions of the word (as well as the Welsh mutations). Twitter provides an RSS feed so you can avoid manually searching.
http://search.twitter.com/search?q=caernarfon+OR+gaernarfon+OR+nghaernarfon

Hashtags

The central hashtags site has different analytics to Twitter Search.

http://www.hashtags.org

Here are people using the hashtag #apprentice to talk about the TV programme The Apprentice (may have quietened by the time you read this). As far as we’re aware, this discussion and hashtag emerged without any official sanction from the programme itself.
http://www.hashtags.org/search?q=apprentice&page=1

Other tools for spotting/tracking emerging stories

There are stacks of applications that help you track events and news stories in real time. Here are just two. Twitscoop is a live display of words trending across Twitter as a whole, displayed as a live tag cloud. (This could be useful for generating “and finally” item ideas for news programmes, for example, as somebody pointed out afterwards.)
http://twitscoop.com

Monitter allows you to track search phrases, defaulting to the top three.
http://monitter.com

#uksnow

It seems like a distant memory now but when the snow hit the UK earlier this year, a hashtag convention emerged – #uksnow postcode mark-out-of-10 – e.g. for a slightly above average snowfall in the centre of Cardiff you could post “#uksnow CF11 6/10″. This hashtag convention spread. Noticing this, enterprising coder Ben Marsh wrote a small application to represent this data as a map. We mentioned this example because it was a fascinating use of the Twitter API which generated a new view on the UK snowfall when satellite images may have been difficult because of cloud cover. It demonstrates how rapidly these applications for mashing up data can be written (during a news event). Here’s the live map, looking green and mostly snow-free at the time of writing.

http://www.benmarsh.co.uk/snow/

and here’s a blog post from Ben Marsh with an early screen shot from 2nd February 2009.

http://www.benmarsh.co.uk/2009/02/02/snow-map-after-12-hours/

and links to media coverage of the software. Who in the UK can resist a bit of weather reporting?

http://www.benmarsh.co.uk/2009/02/02/uksnow-map-everywhere/

Why do people write these mash-ups? Well – for fun, curiosity, kudos and occasionally for financial gain.

Laconi.ca

Laconi.ca is an open source Twitter-like service (“roll your own Twitter”) for when the public Twitter may not be appropriate for your application. It can also be installed on a private company intranet.

http://laconi.ca

If you want to see it installed and in action, Identi.ca is the publicly hosted version.

http://identi.ca

Here’s another example of an installed and customised Laconi.ca which was made by tech journalist Leo Laporte.

http://army.twit.tv/

Matt Cutts of Google receives a lot of requests to remove pages from the search engine’s index. This is his standard response. In short, Google don’t remove pages from their index unless there are extremely good reasons.

What he didn’t mention this time (although he obviously does know it) is that it’s vital to maintain your own web presence to overcome any negative or defamatory treatment you might be getting online.

This means monitoring and responding to people’s grievances in a timely fashion on various networks and platforms. Twitter is just one (read the Motrin story from last year for just one example).

It also means having your own site or blog which you regularly update. There are many benefits to this – idea development, more “content” to pull people in, maybe a dash of promotion and a nice, recent “last posted” date to reassure new visitors you’re still on the case. Plus you will probably get a better search ranking from a frequently updated site.

But the benefits for reputation are what I’ll focus on here. With your own blog, you can respond instantly to any trend of opinion that might be emerging – highlighting the good stuff and rebutting the bad stuff.

It’s possible to nip something at an early stage and make your stance clear. Ideally each blog post would have its own permalink so people can use it to respond in turn and – if you deserve it – support you. Here’s the permalink to this post.

Depending on the situation you might need to take it on the chin and admit a mistake, the earlier the better. Most organisations can expect a sensitive and potentially reputation-damaging event at some point. You can’t “bury bad news” in this space, sorry!

Here’s this week’s good example – Spotify’s honest admission of a security breach. Spotify are a tech company and they seem to know about this stuff. But it’s just as applicable in other industries. And will become more so.

Building an online reputation is a slow process.

Having it destroyed is a much quicker process.

Make sure you’re prepared.

If you want another angle, I’m also reminded of a seminal blog post from Anil Dash of Six Apart – about privacy and identity control, an oldie but a goodie.

There’s lots of blog bustle about this Ryanair story. (In summary, a blogger wrote about a minor glitch he’d experienced in Ryanair’s online ticket booking system. Ryanair employees responded in his blog comments calling him an “idiot and a liar” and berating his choice of the WordPress blogging platform. Ryanair compound the fury by releasing an official statement saying “It is Ryanair policy not to waste time and energy in corresponding with idiot bloggers…”).

Customer service now happens on a stage… Customers are networked. I’ve visited these themes before, with Chrysler and Ford. Read the seminal and prophetic book Cluetrain Manifesto for more of this wonderful stuff.

But rather than take the bait, I think this is completely in keeping with Ryanair’s PR policy and possibly everything they’ve done before this point.

This may well fall into the so-bad-it’s-good category. Undoubtedly, it’s a cheap shot response – in keeping with the airline’s established reputation for cheapness.

(As a staunch advocate of WordPress, I’m sure they can only be kidding…)

After the blog post, Travolution covered this and later Guardian, Telegraph, The Times and other news outlets. What’s the value of all that exposure – in exchange for some blog comments and a quick statement?

While I’m on it, did you know Ryanair don’t hire outside agencies for their advertising?

The Times had a feature about Ryanair’s advertising in December 2004, containing this gem from Paul Fitzsimmons, their then head of communications:

“We have a Wal-Mart approach to business: stack ’em high and sell in bulk,” said Fitzsimmons. “We are driven by price and we don’t need a bunch of ponytails in some ad agency to tell us how to build our brand.”

Then later:

Fitzsimmons admits the Ryanair ads are designed to spark controversy on the basis that “any negative perception of an ad is a publicity opportunity”.

So why should their online PR be any different? Talk about an integrated communications policy! It’s risky, for sure. For fans of the Cluetrain Manifesto, it certainly corresponds to the “authentic human voice”. But I can imagine it backfiring if their amiable tomfoolery does not translate across countries. For instance, now that CNN have covered it, will USA and other international readers appreciate the jokes?

I subscribe to quite a lot of blogs.

But I don’t subscribe to many company blogs.

By “company blog” I mean a blog which is an adjunct to a company’s ordinary business. I just haven’t found many that are worth following. In order to get my attention, the blog needs a human voice and needs to tell me something useful, relevant or interesting.

Usually, companies either don’t do it or they do it wrongly. I know you want me to buy your goods and services. But to keep me coming back to your website you need to give me more than a pitch.

One exception to this is the blog of Carsonified, a software development company based in Bath, UK, who specialise in web-based applications and related conferences. Please bear with me, even if that’s not your area of interest.

To be sure, they have plenty of work to be getting on with besides writing blog posts. But something about the industry insights of co-founder Ryan Carson in particular has kept me coming back, plus his eagerness to blog honestly about their company activities.

Building and launching a successful web app is a fraught and turbulent business, which adds to the fascination for me. It reminds me of artist development in the music industry, especially music managers I’ve met – not least in the fact there is an abundance of people making a play and only a few who will win. Even by their own definitions of success.

As if to undermine part of what I’ve just said (!), Ryan Carson sometimes gets it wrong, as he admits in this new video, Blogging Tips for Downturn 2.0 (don’t let the title put you off).

After laying off three employees in December 2008, Carson (with their permission) decided to blog about it. That wasn’t the problem. Yes, layoffs are embarrassing but the news will travel anyway. So you may as well set the tone. And you’ll probably do the former employees a favour by highlighting their availability.

His mistake, in his view, was to combine the news with some advice about how to be a “good” employee. In effect, he combined two blog posts into one which gave out an impression that he was admonishing them, which wasn’t his intention. You can still read the original post about the redundancies.

Those who don’t blog may ask: was all this worth the effort for Carson? Well, I for one am reading his blog and checking out his products and have also mentioned the company to a few people as a result, including you now. So make up your own mind.