Where the Fishermen Ain't -- Phil Gomes' Thoughts on PR, Social Media, and Blockchain Applications

How Emerging Social Networks are Applying Economic Models to Attention and Content

(A version of this piece appeared on LinkedIn.)

One of the trends that I have been following involves how emerging social network experiments are applying economic models to determine how to surface and present user-generated content.

Here the term "economic" is very different from merely "money changing hands for paid amplification." At its very bottom, economics is the science of the choices you make and how you manage scarcity. In this instance, the scarce goods are 1) meaningful participation in a social network and 2) attention. Today, I'll offer three such ideas. 

 

DATT

Standing for "Decentralize All The Things," this is a project from Ryan X. Charles, a former Reddit employee who was originally hired to figure out Reddit's cryptocurrency strategy. It turns out that Reddit didn't need a cryptocurrency strategy as much as it perhaps thought it did, so out went Charles and the DATT concept was born. 

It was particularly good timing that all of this happened amid widespread dissatisfaction with Reddit's posture toward transparency and censorship. Charles imagines DATT as fully peer-to-peer, such that it would be difficult to censor content if someone--even DATT's developers--wanted to do so. Most interestingly, instead of merely "upvoting" content that you like, you would have to put your money where your mouse-clicks are... with small micro-fractions of bitcoin. (Keep in mind that, as of this writing, one bitcoin is worth US$370 and the minimum transferable unit is a "satoshi" or US$0.00000370.)

Obviously, it's easy to simply upvote something and even inspire some sizable number of like-button-minded people to do the same. Far fewer would pay money--even a tiny amount--to join such a mini-crusade. This makes for a higher-quality experience for everyone, in much the same way that prediction markets tend to match and eventually outperform polling. 

DATT is presently at the proof-of-concept stage and Charles is "seeking to find a technical co-founder who understands blockchain and web technologies." 

TARINGA!

Based in Argentina, the 75-million-member Taringa! social network shares its ad revenue with its top content-creating members. Each participant in the Taringa! Creadores program receives a bitcoin wallet from Xapo, where the money is transferred and the creators can buy from bitcoin-accepting merchants, exchange it for traditional currency, or tip other users on the site. 

In the first six months of the invite-only program, the site distributed $76,000 worth of bitcoin, with one participant receiving $2,000. Not surprisingly, Taringa! Creadores has had a strong effect on the site's growth while, according to Taringa!, keeping the quality of the content high. 

MINDS

One would imagine that any social network endorsed by the hacktivist collective Anonymous would have to be open-source, encrypted end-to-end, and fully dedicated to privacy. Minds is one such network. 

But what really makes it interesting is its economic model. From the site: "You earn a digital currency of points for every vote, comment, upload and share which can be exchanged directly for views on your content. ... These points can either be exchanged with Minds or directly p2p with other users in exchange for shares." Of course, points can be purchased as well. 

So what does this all tell us? 

Much of what we find valuable on the web has been built on the backs of unpaid volunteers, such as Wikipedia editors or the moderators of your favorite subreddit. Others are willing, consciously or otherwise, to give away personal data in order to access a useful service like Facebook. The various species of a "third way" as described above show that it could be easy and mutually beneficial for Internet users to accept greater control over their digital lives and truly be economic partners in the platforms that their attention helps build. The frictionless nature of cryptocurrency payments makes this possible in ways that more intermediary-reliant methods simply cannot. 

Also, in addition to earning one's access to a social media site via quality participation, Internet users might be able to supplement this personal fund by doing almost nothing at all. Innovations like the 21 computer might mean that media consumers might mine small amounts of their own bitcoin just to help support their media consumption habits, again, in a frictionless manner. 

The mainstream media has certainly learned volumes from social media in terms of how people seek out and share information. This new class of social networks, if even modestly successful, could show them a thing or two about monetizing content as well. 

Photo Credit: PhotoSteve101

PR Must Embrace the Hacker Ethic

 At Edelman.Com, I have a post that speaks to my latest passion: bringing the hacker ethic into public relations. 

When it comes to the value of expertise versus authority, hacker ethics (as developed over time by students at MIT and Stanford several decades ago) double down on the former and strongly resist the latter. This code, in fact, posits several recommended behaviors that I believe are central to the evolution of public relations. For the sake of compression, here are three.

This is the latest in a series of posts related to my talk "Hacking Public Relations." In previous pieces, I've outlined the general concepts and talked a little about the importance of thoughtful disintermediation. 

 Image by William Grootonk.

Digital Rubbernecking and The New, New Pornography

One afternoon as an undergrad at Saint Mary’s College of California, I was racing to the campus radio station where I was running late for my afternoon air-shift. As I turned the corner, I overheard the wonderful Brother Ray Berta (RIP) regaling one student with his latest big idea at the intersection of mass media and culture. Brother Ray was not a quiet man (a distinct advantage for a speech professor, I imagine) and so I managed to hear some of his conversation even in my haste.

“You see, the old pornography is just so-so,” he said. “But, now, the new pornography is…”

Okay... It was an odd statement coming from a Christian Brother.

A couple of weeks later, I asked Brother Ray what he was talking about that afternoon. It turns out he was specifically referring to talk shows like Jerry Springer’s, Maury Povich’s, and others of that ilk. Such programs encouraged people to put on display some of the more unusual, shocking and often even depraved aspects of American life, usually set up for maximum dramatic effect. With such intimate, awkward and sometimes obscene ugliness willingly offered by the shows’ guests every day over broadcast networks, he argued, any content depicting naked people having sex probably wasn’t that big a deal anymore.

“The old pornography was about skin,” he said. “The new pornography is about souls.”

This was the early 1990s, when most of the campus’ Internet connectivity was served by a single ISDN line. (It stood for “Integrated Services Digital Network” or, during peak periods, “It Still Does Nothing.”) Unless ASCII art delivered at 4,800bps was a turn-on (or you were incredibly patient), you weren’t going to get a whole lot of the “old” but USENET certainly offered plenty of evidence of the “new” even then.

The Internet is presently abuzz with news of Internet-company PR director Justine Sacco—employed in the one occupation that ought to know better—who dropped an incredibly offensive tweet on all of us before heading out on a transcontinental flight to Africa. Last fall, given the recent news of a book deal, I found myself reviewing the now-famous case of Rebecca Martinson, sorority girl whose lengthy and foul admonition of her “sisters” went viral online (as did her also quite offensive Twitter posts, now deleted-yet-preserved).

Taken together, I can’t help but revisit Brother Ray’s thesis and wonder whether we’ve long ago entered the age of what he might have called The New, New Pornography.

The New, New Pornography is still about souls. It just comes at us at higher velocity from more directions (thanks to the social Web), and is frozen in a kind of digital amber (thanks to search). Further, we are simultaneously the “audience” and “bookers” of this show that is custom-fed into our browsers, based on our own interests, desires, and connections.

I’m certainly not a prude by any means. I found the FCC’s crusade against Janet Jackson’s bosom many times more offensive than the “wardrobe malfunction” itself, to say nothing of the cynical self-expansion of its mandate. (The expansion of the FCC’s mandate, that is, not the bosom’s.) In truth, the Internet is not the gleaming and relatively sanitized place that far too many marketers, communicators, and trade/business mags make it out to be. I wholeheartedly accept this as a fair trade for the nearly unfettered access to vast amounts of information, insight, and entertainment that I enjoy thanks to one of the most open communications platforms yet devised.

But, I’ll admit… There’s some meretricious entertainment value in watching the fallout from Sacco’s original tweet, taking in the vast amounts of righteous indignation, making fun of the really haphazard  “real-time marketing” attempts (and apologies for same), and waiting (just waiting) for the object of all of this fuss to land at her destination. Then there’s the Martinson case: the ranty email, the deleted tweets, the dramatic readings, and all of the attention they received (including a rather interesting job offer). All of this most certainly caught my attention and distracted me for a spell.

I imagine that we, dear reader, consume a lot of the same sources online and these stories crossed your field of vision multiple times too. In the context of the New, New Pornography (from skin to souls, delivered at high speed from multiple directions), it’s actually kind of tough to look down your nose at the skeezy dude that Google Street-level caught walking into the adult film store. You could, sure, but it’s kind of like the alcoholic telling the heroin addict that at least his vice enjoys a less-stigmatized status.

Face it… The new, new pornographer: It’s you. It’s us.

PR: We Have One Shot

Earlier this year, a professional organization included me on a bcc'ed cattle-call seeking volunteers to help deliver a long-form seminar on "culture-jacking" a la this year's Super Bowl and subsequent events. I responded that I tend to take a strategic and measured view of such things, so the organizers could absolutely rely on me to ensure that the session stayed meaningful and wouldn't turn into a rah-rah session.

I didn't get a response. With a pitch like that and given the frothy tenor that often surrounds that kind of thing, I didn't really expect to.

For the past several months, everyone has been running around trying to be the next illumination-challenged snack experience. Some will be good at it. Some will excel at it. Most efforts will sadly amount to tolerated digital vandalism, the result of "checkbox marketing." ("Yup! Our brand TwitPic'ed something during the Indy 500. Well, glad I got that out of the way. Gonna email my boss now.")

As I've often observed, there is no hand yet imagined that our industry will not overplay. I fear that this industry about to do it again with poor executions of "content marketing" and its hyperkinetic sibling "real-time marketing."

Let's put aside for a moment that the public relations industry, all things considered, should have been absolutely laser-focused on creating dynamite media assets ("content") and making them relevant in the moment ("real-time") all along.

Shame on us, really.

Unfortunately, in the online community context, "real-time marketing" is something that far too many confuse with "advertisements generated on-the-fly and transmitted via social media." This is more of a bug than a feature in online communities. Consider the following:

1. Every single dramatic advance in media-consumption technology has been about one thing: helping us to avoid marketing. VCR, Walkman, iPod, TiVo... You name it. People have demanded technologies that free them from getting explicitly sold to. This will not change.
2. At the most tactical, explain-it-to-your-mom level, public relations has been about managing your client's reputation and relationships, and (even more tactically) most often doing so by making that client relevant in those parts of the media that people want to consume. Advertising and advertising-like behaviors, in the strictest sense and over the long term, constitute a parasitic element in this media-consumption scenario. Advertising deployed in the service of PR will be preferable than the other way around, the latter of which is more or less the current practice.

In short, the PR industry has to demonstrate that it can make companies meaningful in online communities while not crapping up the entire Internet. If it doesn't, it will absolutely destroy companies' license to operate online.

In this environment, understanding the following is what will separate winners from losers:

Timely content that possesses objectively educational, journalistic, or entertainment qualities is the price of admission. Full-stop.

To say nothing of a company's owned and social media presences, this is especially important in a world where journalistic enterprises are exploring company partnerships, "native advertising," and plain ol' advertorial opportunities in order to help keep the lights on. (Again, advertising playing a supporting role to PR.) Even as much of a Hail-Mary revenue pass as this is, publishers must know that no amount of money from a company will be worth sacrificing long-term integrity of their media properties if the sponsored, PR-generated content stinks. Further, regulators are already assuming we're going to get this wrong without their help—another lost opportunity.

Your community matters. Your client/company matters. Be guided by them, not the trade press, awards, pundits, or your ego.

As I always tell young community managers, "Support your client, but stand for your community." I guarantee you that most efforts to embrace real-time marketing are going to naively treat communities as sad, wandering, empty vessels who anxiously await to be filled up with a company's brand message. This is incredibly wrong. I love guitar companies very nearly to the point of distraction but I guarantee you I will drop their access to my attention that quickly if my newsfeed is clotted up with any irrelevant crud from them. Unfortunately, it evidently doesn't take much to impress the trade and business press when it comes to this kind of thing, which helps skew incentives somewhat.

Get your hands really, really dirty.

Those funny little graphics many folks (often inaccurately, annoyingly) call "memes" started in places that most PR folks wouldn't want to be caught dead in, like 4chan. "Internet culture" becomes mainstream culture very quickly and you need to keep your ears to some very different—some might say even somewhat dangerous—rails. Don't be satisfied with merely staying ahead of your boss and mistaking that for being good at your job.

If you're thinking "it's-just-like-ads-only-faster," please find another career.

"Ads-only-faster" will only motivate someone to invent a TiVo-only-faster for the Internet. If PR inspires people to build something that does to PR what TiVo was supposed to do to television advertising, we'll know (perhaps too late) that we failed.

Our industry is in a rather precarious place at the moment—far more than any number of breathless pundits would care to admit. Let's not blow it.

Photo Credit: Happy Via

My Edelman.Com Article on Online Behavior Policies

I have a piece up on the day-job site entitled "The Big Thing Companies Get Wrong About Online Behavior Policies."

From the article:

Face it: The number of employees who wake up in the morning and say, “My company’s reputation is a chief decision variable for what I’m going to post online today” is very small. (If you are the type to visit this site regularly, you are probably a member of this tiny group. Congratulations.) This is something that no policy will change — and it takes vast amounts of arrogance to think it will.

The way mechanisms and institutions of control attempt to come to terms with online communities is a passion of mine.

My Comments on News of the NYPD's Social Media Policy

I have a post up at Edelman.Com about the news of the NYPD's social media policy.

From the piece, called "The Thin Blue (Digital) Line":

A balance must be achieved here. One could argue that we have a very strong incentive to know as much as we possibly can about those we pay to protect us. So, we should want members of law enforcement to be online as much as is practical, so long as it doesn’t interfere with their duties or compromise loved ones. A policy, if too-broadly drawn, may have a chilling effect at precisely the time when citizens desire more transparency from their government.

On Google Reader: No, My Inbound Twitter Feeds Are *Not* An RSS Substitute

In the wake of Google's shuttering of its beloved Reader service for RSS aggregation, I'm reading some posts rehashing the idea that simply following the right people or sources on Twitter is a better way to go. 

I disagree. 

Let's put aside the fact that we're not talking about a mutually exclusive choice and there's room for both in one's information-consumption workflow. I'm not saying that Twitter is useless as an information source or that a well-managed Tweetdeck won't provide great value. 

Many of the sources that I rely on to stay out front actually do not use Twitter. The reason why I'm at all successful in what I do is that I try to ignore the majority of the social media punditocracy as much as professional responsibility will allow. Nevertheless, I must follow that group in any case, owing to said responsibilities. So, in that small but important slice of my media diet, relying on Twitter as a replacement for RSS would lower the signal-to-noise ratio to unacceptable levels. It would mean, for example, that my ability to contextualize information would almost totally evaporate during SxSW.  

My point of view on many online-related matters tend to be unique and grounded in communications principles that many forget in the rush to be seen as "getting it". I'm told this is often why people seek my counsel. Using Twitter as an RSS replacement is more than just "media snacking"--it's an empty-calorie diet. 

Sure, I can instead opt to focus on the somewhat less-cacophanous Twitter streams of media outlets, reporters, and so on. Even then, though, that's noisy. Social media, at least for me, is not "just another channel"; it's a means by which I can pay less attention to figuring out what I need to pay attention to.

Granted, my needs are unusual. In my role, I am called upon to parachute into clients representing diverse industries: automotive, energy, technology, packaging, consumer goods, business services, and many others... on a light week. I don't need to know everything @nytimestech has to say, but if it matters enough to someone that they'll spend more than 140 characters on it, it is very likely to matter to me. 

So, I'm exploring alternatives, of course.

Curious that Orkut is stil ticking, especially given that its holdout markets in India and Brazil are moving away from it. Also, it's worth noting Google Reader's contribution to BuzzFeed's traffic relative to Google+. 

It will be interesting to see what services will capitalize on this, serving a relatively small but highly vocal group of power users. 

CREWE: Corporate Representatives for Ethical Wikipedia Engagement

For people who are serious about discussing the PR-and-Wikipedia-related matters covered in yesterday's posts, I've created a group on Facebook at the suggestion of John Cass. This was in the context of a discussion on Kevin Dugan's Facebook related to my original open letter. 

Owing to the name, I anticipate that the bulk of the members would be PR folks, but I strongly encourage people of all views to participate because, frankly, that's the only way we'll get closer to the goal.

And what is this goal? This will become clearer over time, but the core idea rests on four pillars:

1. Corporate communicators want to do the right thing.
2. Communicators engaged in ethical practice have a lot to contribute.
3. Current Wikipedia policy does not fully understand #1 and #2, owing to the activities of some bad actors and a general misunderstanding of public relations in general.
4. Accurate Wikipedia entries are in the public interest. 

The group is open. There's not much of a there there yet, but that's where you come in.

And, yes, I realize that there's some philosophy-shear in terms of using a proprietary resource to discuss matters related to an open-source one. This is trumped (if slightly) by the very "PR" consideration of going where most of the interested parties already are and integrating it into people's day-to-day online experience. 

Hoping people support this effort and take it up in the spirit it is intended. 

An Open Letter to Jimmy Wales and Wikipedia

Jimmy,

I’d like to take the opportunity to publicly address an important topic that is long overdue for discussion. I write this, not as a representative of my employer, but as a career communications professional focused on matters related to online communities.

Short version: A truly serious conversation needs to happen about how communications professionals and the Wikipedia community can/must work together. Since recent events have thrown this issue into sharp relief, I’d like us to have an open, constructive and fair discussion about the important issues where public relations and Wikipedia intersect.

As to the long version, consider:

• Wikipedia is on the first page of search results for nearly every company, brand, product, personality, captain-of-industry, etc. This shoulders Wikipedia with a great level of responsibility, whether asked for or otherwise.
• Many entries are derelict, even for important topics and well-known industry bellwethers. Financial data is often years old. Some companies are described as remaining in businesses long divested. A WikiProject for reviving abandoned articles, and a proposal for a similar effort, themselves both appear abandoned.
• You can imagine why a company might consider its entry to be a high priority (perhaps even to the point of distraction) and task its communications staff to "do something", especially if the entry is inaccurate.
• Entreaties on Talk pages—determined as the most appropriate place for a company representative to make his/her case—often go ignored for very long periods while inaccurate information persists. 
• The small concession to PR on the FAQ (that a company can "fix minor errors in spelling, grammar, usage, or fact", etc.) takes a lot for granted and helps neither a PR representative nor Wikipedia. For example, too often, a company representative will “go native” when it comes to separating matters of “fact” from matters upon which reasonable people might disagree. On the other hand, activists (hardly of a neutral point of view) appear to enjoy much more latitude. 

So, while I appreciate and support that Wikipedia must develop and enforce certain rules regarding neutrality and so on, the site is trying to have it both ways. In other words, it's clear that Wikipedia wants to be thought of as an accurate and available resource while 1) the volunteer maintenance of that resource—despite a strong level of dedication—is unable to keep up, and 2) the hands of ethical practitioners—those closest to data—are bound due to the activities of some bad actors.

This is a source of great tension between companies and Wikipedia and I’m not sure how the public is properly served by this state of affairs. Contrary to popular imagination, most corporate communications practitioners want to do the right thing. 

Some initial recommendations to help start discussion:

• When an entry is derelict (duration and definition TBD), a communications representative should be granted greater leeway in editing the entry. The entry can have a notification at the top indicating the derelict status, or even that a communications representative has had a hand in updating it. This will allow visitors to make their own judgments on how to evaluate the entry or even prioritize it in terms of how and when it gets evaluated and/or revised by a neutral party. The choice is between the certainty of an inaccurate entry or the possibility that the entry would not meet NPOV guidelines. Negative attention to bad behavior (or even to mediocre efforts) would mitigate the impact of the latter. 
• We could revive discussion about some guidance you gave in 2006, whereby a company could author a suggested entry, license it under the FDL, post it on its own site, and “notify Wikipedians who are totally independent.” This means less work for volunteers, since it’s almost always easier to react to something rather than write it from scratch. The best corporate communicators should be able to author something reasonably neutral, I'd imagine, with the Wikipedia community serving as an important check-and-balance. 

The next move is yours. I’d welcome further discussion on this topic, with the aim of fairly framing an open and constructive discussion about this matter. 

Thanks and regards,

/pmg

UPDATE 2012-01-04-1100 CT: In one of those "Great Minds Think Alike" type things, Stuart Bruce published his own thoughts about PR and Wikipedia, even referencing the same 2006 post from Jimmy Wales that I referenced above. He was inspired by MP Tom Watson's talk page on the topic. Clearly there's some pent-up discussion here and, I agree, that working with Wikipedia on improving the rules for corporate communications participation should be an international effort. 

UPDATE 2012-01-09-1300 CT: Mr. Wales responds. A lot to think about, so you'll see my reaction delivered in bits on this blog over the next few days. 

PRSA Central Ohio: My Post-speech Thoughts

I recently gave a speech to PRSA's Central Ohio chapter. The topic was how an organization can ease themselves into becoming a social business by looking at the communications tasks that it currently performs and evaluating how social technologies and philosophies can accelerate and improve those tasks in the service of a broad communications strategy.

They managed to capture my post-talk thoughts on the way out the door to the airport.