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 Lose Its Reliance on Hierarchy

A Truly Peer-to-Peer Online Environment Will Test How Good We Really Are At What We Do

(To catch up, check out my previous pieces “Blockchain, Inc.” and “The Future of Trust is Decentralization.”)

I have been in the public relations field for nearly two decades. In retrospect, I’ve noticed that the most notable milestones during that time have had less to do with the evolution of the trade but, rather, moments that mark its sclerotic resistance to same. Most often, the problem lies with our industry’s reluctance to let go of comfortable, familiar hierarchies.

What does this mean? Changes in how programs and platforms use the Internet mean that, sooner than we think, meaningful hierarchies that communications professionals can reliably appeal to will be rare. Companies whose success in communications and reputation management largely depends on mastering those hierarchies will find themselves somewhat adrift.

By way of example, here are some representative, on-the-ground, quasi-hypothetical stories that describe three mini-epochs in our trade during that time:

Late 1990s: Executive suite calls, freaking out about a story on the website for The Chicago Herald-Investigator-Review-Argus-Gazette. PR person contacts reporter. Mutual stubbornness escalates the issue to the associate editor who, in turn, brings the issue to a managing editor and editor-in-chief. Factual errors are corrected and (far less often) perceived undue weight or misunderstandings of context are addressed. Executive suite says something like, “Well, thank God! It least it wasn’t in the print edition!”

Early-to-Mid-2000s: Product manager calls, freaking out about commenters in a blog post on WayTooMuchTech.Com. The tone of some of the comments is abusive and even involve potential invasions of an employee’s privacy. Many of these are from known trolls. PR person talks to blogger who, understanding the impact of these trolls, bans them and hides their comments. It’s a good thing, too -- what if the blogger agreed with the trolls? How would you address it?

Late-2000s-to-Early-2010s: Chief-of-Staff calls, freaking out about the Wikipedia article about the company’s CEO. PR person (who keeps up with such things) encourages discussion with Wikipedia volunteers. Chief-of-Staff asks “Can’t you just call Jimmy Wales?” PR person says it doesn’t work that way since Wales, though a co-founder, does not wield that many more privileges on the system than the average user and, besides, concerns himself with many other things these days. “How about donating to the Wikimedia Foundation?” No. And, so, Talk-page discussions with Wikipedia volunteer editors and admins ensue. Article gets adjusted closer to neutral (if slightly, and with any luck) after some amount of debate, discussion, Kafka-esque rule-quoting, and strong suspicion of motive.

See what’s happening? At each step, the hierarchies that the company representative could appeal to in order to ensure representation of the company’s point of view have flattened. Every single time, the public relations industry has exhibited rather public and highly embarrassing teething issues.

This particular pendulum isn’t going to swing back. In fact, it has a lot further yet to go. Take a look at how engineer Paul Baran (1926 - 2011) described the progressive topography of networks:

 

As described in the three stories above, the evolutionary path that our industry has had trouble navigating is the seemingly simple one of moving from centralized to decentralized environments. Now, decentralized is flattening further to distributed, as we see with concepts like Bitcoin (for currency), OpenBazaar (commerce), Augur (prediction markets), Bitnation (DIY governance) and Ethereum (smart contracts and, perhaps at some point, a lot more).

Think this has nothing to do with public relations or media? The recent set of dustups at Reddit are instructive, particularly regarding the controversial dismissal of its popular communications director. This resulted in administrators and moderators shutting down entire sections of the site in protest.

As venture capitalist Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures said (emphasis mine):

We have also wondered what the first killer app of the blockchain is going to be. Is it going to be personal finance (bitcoin), is it going to be peer to peer connectivity (mesh networking), or is it going to be something else?

There’s a chance that the answer to the struggle that Reddit is going through will also answer this question. It may be that there is no viable middle ground between a centrally controlled media platform and an entirely decentralized media platform. You are either going to police the site or you are going to build something that cannot be policed even if you want to.

Is your organization prepared for such an environment? Is your team? Are your executives sufficiently briefed on the realities of a reputation environment where you probably can’t buy, sue, or “cute” your way to success?

As to what it may take to succeed as we move from decentralized to distributed influence environments, here are a few initial recommendations:

• You may need a really good programmer: Projects like OpenBazaar and Augur send the faint signal that we could be moving away from destinations and properties on the Internet as the first-order variable for digital PR. More fundamentally, communicators may have to understand the basics of distributed programs and protocols. It’s therefore not inconceivable that ensuring fair representation of your organization will have just as much to do with bringing on a skilled programmer as it does hiring a savvy media strategist.

• Uncertainty is a feature, not a bug: Skilled, experienced musicians, athletes, actors and other performers will tell you that they will always feel nervous just before going on stage. This means that they still care about their craft. You should feel the same, but use this anxiety as a source of inspiration rather than an excuse to stand still.

• Get your hands dirty: Since my early days in technology PR, it has always astounded me how many practitioners who reach a certain level of seniority start to believe that they are above understanding important details of the technology they promote. If you want to start seeing around corners, consider attending hacking meetups or participating in the sites that the world’s makers use. In my experience, it’s the rare one that will reject you for thinking that “garbage collection” is only the thing that happens on Tuesdays with the big truck. A sincere desire to understand a concept or movement, beyond the specific and immediate needs of a client or practice, is usually the price of admission.

• In the end, all you have is your ability to persuade: When you strip away the more blunt tools and worn concepts of our trade, you’re left with the core of what we are tasked to do--make a case and persuade an audience.

As you can tell from this essay and my previous writings, I am unapologetic in my enthusiasm for the emergence of truly distributed environments, and passionate about exploring what this means for public relations. In the next few years, we will know as a trade whether our industry’s talk and reassurances about its ability to innovate and adapt was a sincere call-to-action or just, well, spin.

(Banner image by Flickr user frankleleon, CC BY. Network topology picture via NetworkCultures.Org.)

R.I.P. Doug Engelbart

Was sad to hear that one of my heroes, Doug Engelbart, passed away yesterday. NYT's John Markoff and TIME's Harry McCracken have the best articles on his passing that I've read thus far. I'm still going through the rest.

For those who don't know, Doug is the father of modern concepts of human-computer interaction and collaboration. In 1968, he delivered what came to be known as The Mother of All Demos, wherein he ushered a world where humans not only interacted with computers in a practical way, but interacted with each other through computers. In the process, he showed hypertext, document/object linking, document collaboration and, yes, the mouse. He and his team received a standing ovation, which was highly unusual for conferences of that type. 

I was very fortunate to meet and talk with him several times during my five-year agency-side tenure with SRI International, where he undertook the work that would make him famous.

Most know him as "the inventor of the mouse"—a description that I thought he seemed to tolerate more than embrace. In his view, people were far too hung up on that little device. His real contribution, I think, was getting people to understand the potential for how an organization could do what it does better if supplied with connected computing power. He still felt that there was so much more work to be done.

The intro to his 1968 demo was prescient:

If in your office you as an intellectual worker were supplied with a computer display backed up by a computer that was alive for you all day and was instantly responsive to every action you have, how much value could you derive from that?

There are going to be a lot of articles about his considerable (and, he would argue with genuine modesty, unfinished) contributions to computing. Most of these articles, for better or worse, are going to be hung up on the mouse. Journalism is the art of compression and, well, "inventor of the mouse" works better in a headline than "father of most of the ideas that spawned the technogies that this journalist used to write/file this article and that you used to access it."

I won't be able to add much to such eulogies and obituaries. I can, however, relay a fun story.

The PR firm I worked for in 2001 was doing the publicity around SRI's 55th anniversary, which involved an event where the scientists set up a room full of technology demonstrations. These tabletop demos included robotics, artificial muscles, telecommunications advancements, and other cutting-edge innovations. During this event, one of my teammates was responsible for making sure that CNN got to interview SRI's CEO, captured great shots of the technologies, and so on.

At one point, the producer pointed to a white-haired man who was calmly moving from one demonstration to the next.

"Who's that?" he asked.

"Well," my colleague said. "That's Doug Engelbart. While he was at SRI, he invented the mouse and a whole host of other technologies."

"Oh, I've got to meet him."

And, so it went, my colleague approached Doug and explained that CNN wanted to get an interview with him about SRI's history, innovations, and so on. Doug graciously agreed. He gave great interviews anyway.

As CNN's tech crew wired him up for sound and the on-air talent was getting his notes ready, Doug turned to my colleague and calmly asked "What is this 'CNN?'"

For a PR person, explaining "CNN" is kind of like a lightbulb trying to explain "electricity." After a beat, my colleague said, "Well, Doug. It's a TV station on cable that runs news twenty-four hours a day."

Doug pondered this concept for a few long seconds.

"So, people really want that?"

It turned out he didn't watch much TV. Mostly PBS, so he told my colleague.

His brilliance aside, you could forgive the man for enjoying life in his head so much that a top cable news network, by then more than two decades old, might escape his notice. If you got to play around in a head like that, I imagine that a lot of things that you currently find absolutely critical would suddenly seem far less so.

He did everything anyone could to improve our world. I'm certain he's already hard at work improving the next.

Transparency and Humility, Defined

Dan Primack's must-read "Term Sheet" newsletter today pointed me to Bessemer Ventures' "Anti-Portfolio" page--a list of venture opportunities with spectacular exits that the firm, for whatever reason, decided to pass on. It's chock-full of names you know, going back decades.

Whatever the reason, we would like to honor these companies--our "anti-portfolio"--whose phenomenal success inspires us in our ongoing endeavors to build growing businesses. Or, to put it another way: if we had invested in any of these companies, we might not still be working.

Photo Credit: San Diego Air & Space Museum

Fred Wilson: "Nobody Is Crying For You When You Are Worth Billions"

Wisdom from Fred Wilson, who sees a fundamental communications disconnect in the current mania about promoting ionospheric startup valuations:

Here's my point. We, the tech/startup/VC world, are not doing ourselves any favors by bragging about the big valuations we are raising money at. We are in fact doing ourselves great harm. Because it makes us look like spoiled brats who are being fed with a silver spoon. Those inside these companies (Spotify, Airbnb, Square, Twitter, etc, etc) know that is not what is really going on. We know how hard it is to build something really new and different. It is a struggle and nothing comes easy. But it is important to realize how the broader world sees it. And they just see billions. And then you get the attacks that I mentioned above.

via www.avc.com

Articles that the Spectacularly Useless "X is Dead" Crowd Missed

Photo Credit: Guillermo Cárcamo

Because no one ever heightened their Google juice by talking about the death of the CD.

Worth reading:

• Sony shut down a CD manufacturing plant
• Techi wonders how physical media can still have a future
• Gizmodo IDs 12 technologies on the verge of extinction (and I take exception to the addition of the Kindle to that list)

 

RSS Is Dea....*yawn*

Flickr User:Matteo & Marianna

It's a shame that so many folks online still suffer from the childhood disease known as "X Is Dead" Syndrome. This time around, it was the recurring "RSS Is Dead" meme.

RSS creator Dave Winer didn't miss a chance to throw a tantrum, obviously. True to form, TechCrunch couldn't pass up participating in an ill-considered dustup either. After all, "RSS Is Dead" is comfortable territory for them. 

As I'm fond of saying, life for many folks in the Web 2.0 world is simply just the downtime between opportunities to hate on stuff.

Thankfully, cooler heads like Matthew Ingram exist: 

The fact that RSS may be fading in terms of mainstream user awareness is actually a good thing rather than a bad one. The sooner people can forget about it because it just works in the background, the better off we’ll all be — in the same way many of us have forgotten (if we ever knew) how the internal-combustion engine works, because we no longer have to pull over and fix them ourselves.

IMHO, Ingram demonstrates the proper understanding of this topic. As for me? I love my Google Reader and it's fair to say that it puts hours into my day. That said, RSS (or some other syndication technology) will attain its true power and value when more apps and online experiences are transparently syndication-aware.