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.

(I don’t know how reliable the figures are.)

They’ve opted to release their new book The Art of Community, by Jono Bacon, in paper-based version, electronic book reader versions and a free PDF of the whole thing.

In the words of the author it’s intended to be a “solid guide to building, energizing and enabling pro-active, productive and enjoyable communities”, which is right up our street of course.

The contents are released under a Creative Commons licence (Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike in this case). It’ll be interesting to see how people adapt it and how that boosts attention for O’Reilly and the author.

(Thanks to @zambonini for the tip.)

Judging from his blog and the work he does, Kevin Marks is a guy who understands the web. He absolutely nails it with this blog post about the scammy connotations of viral. He suggests we retain the word “viral” but use it solely for “exploitatative applications that violate trust to reproduce against the interests of their hosts”. Love it. It’s worth reading in full, as well as this earlier post How not to be viral.

Marks’ emphasis here is on companies who create software, citing the photo sharing service Flickr as a good example of somewhere that supports “fruitful social interactions”.

Our emphasis is slightly different. In my experience the word “viral” is also used for funny videos and other online content that spreads rapidly.

For marketers discovering YouTube and other services, as methods for spreading a “brand message”, the word viral can be seductive because it implies a smaller investment of effort. (Let the viral do the work and go home early!) But of all the viral videos you can name, how many can you associate with a specific company or product? It makes a good straw poll for colleagues whenever they mention the dreaded word.

Viral videos often merely advertise themselves. That is, you remember the video but seldom remember the company. It comes back to another one of my bugbears, which is the over-emphasis on hit count or view count as metrics of success. We’ve never met a client whose sole aim was to notch up a million video views, it might help the ego but it just isn’t an objective in and of itself.

At Native, we recognise the value of good marketing – but what we do seldom intersects with interruption advertising or one-way broadcast videos and the like.

That’s because we hold that good marketing is far more than spreading a brand message. Good marketing is being aware of what people are saying about you, helping customers with problems, meeting them on their terms, making a quality product or service – and providing or supporting spaces where customers can talk to each other. These principles apply offline. Now online we have some great opportunities and tools to do these things in new ways.

Another benefit of online is allowing niche conversations about all the subjects that relate to you and your business. These take place in text, images, audio, graphic visualisations and yes, videos.

“Viral” annoys me because it’s too much of an abstraction of the real human beings you’re trying to deal with. These people become prospects, targets, vectors, hosts. This is actually how I feel I’m being categorised when I watch TV advertising now. It’s too general and it alienates me. Besides, people don’t really talk like that. The same goes for viral videos. Actually the videos that spread most effectively are the ones that have no product or company behind them, like the “free hugs” movement. People are not stupid, they’ll assess your motives and share the videos that smell genuine.

Incidentally, often the memorable and useful videos I find online are straight-to-camera, lo-fidelity, quick, unpolished recordings, not slick adverts. This is a guideline, not a rule, but if it’s a social media conversation people are coming to expect videos that are like blog posts, not brochures.

All this is about as far from a single-message viral video as you could hope to get.

The meaningful question is not about who has more fans, but about who can authentically and transparently – and usefully – interact with citizens to provide social and intellectual value and become the pulse of their conversations. Here are some questions I have for governments and agencies running Facebook fan pages: What are the names of the people running the pages? What are their titles? What city is their office in? Where do they blog? Which events are they attending this year? (Can I meet them there?) How are you going to get your fans engaged in your mission? How can I tell you my stories about military service, or foreign travel, or amateur astronomy? Would those stories be helpful to you? How are you using social media like Facebook to get citizens involved in their government?

Indeed, this is applicable to any social media activity. In order for your activity to work – for your community and for you – it’s impossible to automate it or just set something up and leaving it running in the background. The value is in the human interaction.

If you’re unsure of the term “web2.0″, I would say Cunliffe has used it here as a synonym for social media. The report was commissioned by the Welsh Language Board and should be of interest to anyone running websites, blogs or any kind of other web presence intended for Welsh users. It would also be of interest in any other country or situation where bilingualism is important.

I haven’t read it in full yet but if you know me you’ll be aware that this report lives at a crossroads where two of my main interests intersect! Just don’t hold me to any of the recommendations just yet.

We only get the glib soundbite from Cameron – crude language and all – and it adds nothing to the topic of discussion. So ironically, Cameron is guilty of being as trivial, whether by accident or by planning, as the Twitter users he presumes to criticise!

But there is a grain of truth in the point he was apparently trying to make. Yes, anyone using a communication medium – especially one so relatively new – should be aware of its limitations and be careful to avoid being misunderstood. But that’s self-evident isn’t it? That goes for blogs, television, the press, Facebook, YouTube and any of the other media “outlets” you might speak through. Radio too.

With Twitter and other social media platforms, politicians and the public sector can communicate directly with people, without the filtering or editing that takes place in traditional mainstream media. His language is unfortunate and misses the point. But I guess it’s good to hear Cameron speaking with passion and an authentic human voice. He could have posted it on Twitter.

Meanwhile Simon Dickson has some insights into Whitehall and a recent Twitter strategy document for civil servants:

Yes, Neil’s document is lengthy; and he admitted from the off that it would seem ‘a bit over the top’. But if exciting new tools like Twitter are to make it through the middle-management swamp of the Civil Service, they need to be wrapped in boring documentation like this. Whether or not it ever gets read, mandarins need to feel that your Twitter proposal has received the same proper consideration as the other (weightier?) items on their to-do list. ‘Dude! This is so cooool! We should so be doing this!’ will not get you very far.

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.

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/