I have been a part of ‘new media’ since it was barely even new back in 1994. In all that time I have only met a few Mainstream Media ‘oldtiimers’ who really understood the impact that the technology was having - more so lately of course, but I am still in awe at those who vehemently resist change. The good news is that many of those who get it have all been working for the BBC over the past year on a blueprint for their strategic vision called ‘Creative Future‘. I highly recommend that you follow that link and read it in its entirety, so I won’t be including much of it here except…

Some key points from BBC Director General Mark Thompson

“The second wave of digital will be far more disruptive than the first and the foundations of traditional media will be swept away, taking us beyond broadcasting.”

“We can deliver much more public value when we think across all platforms and consider how audiences can find our best content, content that’s more relevant, more useful and more valuable to them.”

According to a report from Mark Sweeney of Media Guardian, the BBC’s plan for going “Beyond Broadcast” calls for a “a three-pronged approach to refocus all future BBC digital output and services around three concepts - ’share’, ‘find’ and ‘play’.” It would seem that share is really at the heart of these efforts as they hope their audience will be using the BBC site for customizing their news experience, writing blogs and posting video content. “User generated content” has often been of late a key element of business models designed to keep costs of operation down, it is a pleasure to finally see someone use the concept in its proper context. Apparently, the BBC is taking the idea one step further, asking their audience to submit their redesigns for the BBC home page.

Ben McConnell over at the Church of the Customer Blog makes a great point, which is one of the reason this story interested me so much:

“The world is changing for advertisers who hope to insert themselves among the networked community masses, too. They must also cede traditional expectations of control not only to be heard by the community, but to be relevant.”

As I have been telling all my friends and associates for the last year, the key aspect of remaining relevant in the era of social media and user generated content - as a media company or as a brand - is to understand you can’t control what people do or say, but you can participate in the conversation. Or at least, you can participate as long as you are honest, helpful and authentic. So rather than thinking like someone who controls all aspects of the situation, think about media as being a facilitator instead of a dictator. What sort of conversations do you, as a human being, want to have with people you trust? with companies you trust? with companies you don’t trust?
It would seem this sort of understanding will go a long way towards ensuring your, and your client’s relevancy in the future - Beyond Blogging and Beyond Broadcast.

Categories: Conversation, New Media, User Generated Content
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I was in the middle of writing a blog post on Living with Uncertainty when I came across this poem from Tom Atlee called Let’s Nail It Down, Before It Gets Away!. This is the third time in as many days when the emotional learning brought on by a poem has been great and swift - when the creative use of words has helped me understand something more deeply. A timely reminder of the power inherent in true wisdom, spoken from the heart. The ability to help people understand expansive concepts in simple terms through the power of words is something that every human shares.

It is the power of conversation. It is at the heart of all media.

In every form I have examined, media is about some one, or some organization communicating with you - having a conversation, or at least wanting to have one. The Broadcast models is often referred to as one-to-many and is unidirectional. The Internet is about one-to-one conversations, which is bi-directional. Now social media has truly enhanced the Web with many to many conversations, held within some broader context, but always a personal conversation. Some examples to consider:

• Blogger
• Nightly News Anchor
• Rock Band
• Print Ad
• Television Commercial
• Play
• Movie
• Radio Talk Shows
• Poem
• Press Release

Are they not all examples of people holding conversations? While you may consider the Rock Band to be giving a performance (as do I), on the most fundamental level they are communicating with you, telling you a story - even the instrumentals do so. It is all about the connections between people, their ideas, their emotions and their actions - and how we communicate those via mediated conversations with one another.I am not quite sure where this is going yet, but I think it is a key insight that will be at the core of another big idea in the near future. I spoke a little more about the idea of media as conversations (ok, perhaps I rambled on about it) with Eddie Codel in this NetSquared Vlog entry. I had not yet worked out the idea of media as conversation fully, but the original question was how do you use Blogs for your non-profit community. My answer was simple, the blog is my site, it is my primary media, it is my way for communicating with everyone - it is where I have conversations with the people who care about what matters to us.

At the same time, it is just one of the many ways in which I have conversations with people and with groups of people.

The lesson though is that we should perhaps think about Media as we think about having a conversation with someone. That blogging is just a conversation between me and you. Perhaps you have something you want to say, so you can comment on this. Or perhaps you have something so important to share that you want to more closely associate it with your online identity, so you write about it on your blog and (hopefully) you link back to me. But the blog is adaptive - it is both a broadcast communication, from me to everyone out there who reads it and a potential one-to-one conversation. Most importantly, it is as easy to do as it is to type and click a button.

This is what makes blogging so powerful from my perspective, and why my answer about how we use blogs was so simple. Once you make the conceptual shift to this understanding and enter the flow with a genuine vooice, the world will change ‘write’ before your eyes.

Categories: Blogging, Conversation
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One of the greatest things about tags is how we can use them expressly for sharing information with others. When we add tags to our blog posts, or tag a given Web page within a social bookmarking service like Delicious, we are not only helping ourselves refind that information later, we are engaging in conversation with other people who have an interest in the same tags and topics. The community that forms around a tag for conversation can have an ongoing topical focus as with Web2.0 or it can be focused on an organization as with the non-profit I started called BrainJams or focused on a specific product like the iPod.

Tags are also very powerfully used for promoting an event and for starting conversations around the event. Promoting the event is done by tagging the blog posts and Web pages about an event so that people within the existing topical communities can be made aware of it. If they have an interest, they may also tag it, or they may Digg it or even better, they may blog about it and the word of mouth momentum begins organically. The best way to hold the conversation together around an event is by having a single tag that everyone uses when talking about the event, so communicating that tag to participants is a very important part of the event planning.

The tag we are using for this event is BeyondBlogging.

In addition to using the event tag to focus what people are saying about the event, it is most helpful to use the tag for identifying what event participants (aka attendees) wish to discuss at the event. So let’s try an experiment with each other. If you already have an account on Delicious, you are all set - if you don’t, would you please consider registering for one. After that, I recommend that you follow their instructions for adding the ‘post to Delicious’ buttons/links to your browser as they suggest. Once this is done, you are ready to roll and contribute to our conversation for Beyond Blogging 2006.

Next time you are reading something informative online that might be appropriate for us to discuss at the event, you can click the Post to Delicious button you just installed on your browser and add the tag BeyondBlogging (no spaces) and other tags you feel are appropriate. As you do so, everyone (such as myself and the panelists) who is following that tag will get to benefit from your efforts to filter the best content into our discussion. Together, we can build quite a library of resources for the Beyond Blogging 2006 discussion. We will also share a common understanding of the issues by having read the same Web pages, which can do wonders for advancing the discussion at the event.

As you can imagine, there are many ways tags can be used to foster collaboration and to promote ideas into a conversation, but there are also more direct and personal uses of tags. With Delicious for instance, you can actually tag a given page for an individual user. So if you are working with someone who has a Delicious account (like me) and you want to share something with them, you can tag it for:username and it will show up in a special ‘inbox’ where the person can view it. So if there is something you want to share with me to read or consider writing about, tag it for:chrisheuer and I will see it. This works extremely well for getting the attention of a specific person or perhaps for making sure that the people working on a project with you are all on the same page.

While there are many other uses for tags (such as TagSpaces like BeyondBlogging:Tags) and many other contexts in which event tags are important (such as within a photo sharing community like Flickr), I believe this post together with the Tag You’re It post from yesterday covers the basics. Tags are really the fundamental building blocks of social media, so I would really like to hear back from you on this topic. If you have any questions or want to clarify what I have written here, let’s start a conversation using the comments feature on this site. This conversation, and this event, will only be as useful to you as the amount of participation you put into it. This is your golden opportunity to prepare for the future of Communications today - don’t miss it!

One other note about Del.icio.us. You may be wondering what’s up with those dots? Quite simply, most of the good domain names are taken, so a couple of years ago, people started getting creative with their naming. Delicious saw an opportunity with the .us domain and the took it. Personally, I don’t bother with the dots in between when I reference the site since they were able to buy the delicious.com domain once they received venture funding. It had gotten so bad in the fall of 2005 that the dots in the name schema ‘jumped the shark’ and Supr.c.ilio.us launched as the Web 2.0 Snarks to spoof all of the Super Silly things that were going on. (I still can’t get to the site by just entering the name directly, and that is kind of the point)

Categories: Tags
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No, we are not going to be talking about one of my favorite childhood games, though I am sure I could relive quite a few good memories about “Freeze Tag” and countless other varieties. Tags are seemingly ‘it’ these days. For a while in late 2005, it seemed that every startup taking funding out here in Silicon Valley had something to do with tags, or at least there business plan said they did.

As we dive into the conversation for Beyond Blogging 2006, we thought it important to spend a few days making sure we are all on the same page in regards to some of the basic concepts we will be discussing and building upon. For me personally, tags are perhaps one of the most important aspects of this thing many call Web 2.0 and the most important facet of social media. So what are tags anyways and how do we make use of them?

Simply put, tags are very nearly identical to keywords or phrases, but they are used in a much more powerful way. OK, that is a good start, but from here it gets more complicated if you let it - so rather than getting too deep in the philosophical discussions or the vagaries of explaining their potential impact, lets focus on some practical applications of tags for communications professionals. In this regard, there are two important uses of tags, tagging of web pages within social bookmarking services like Delicious and tagging of blog posts by the blog author.

Social Bookmarking: Tags as a means of organizing and finding

You may notice that we include a link at the end of every post called “Add to Delicious”. For those of you unfamiliar, Delicious is a Web site where you can save Web pages for later retrieval. Rather than saving it to your browser on your hard drive, you save a link to the page on the network where you can access it later from anywhere in the world. Unlike your IE Favorites though, these links are generally saved ‘publicly’ for other’s to discover. Hence the ’social’ part of social bookmarking.

What makes Delicious (and many of the other services) wildly popular with so many people is its implementation of tagging. Rather than trying to save each item within a folder, people can ‘tag’ the page with relevant keywords and/or unique tags. For instance, if you wanted to save this blog post for later, you might want to add it to your Delicious account and tag it “BeyondBlogging“, “Beyond Blogging”, “Tags”, “Tagging” and perhaps “BeyondBlogging:tags“. This is a different way of organizing the Web pages you visit - rather than being a hierarchically based structure, it is an unstructured system which makes it more flexible and usable.

Tags plus public bookmarks that are shared gives us insight into the wisdom of crowds. So if for instance, we wanted to see what Web pages other people have tagged with “folksonomy“, or even “tags” we have a new way of discovering what other people are thinking and how they are classifying content.

Bottom line, if we want people who use these systems to discover interesting and relevant content, we should start by tagging it ourselves, as I have done with this article.

For those of you wishing to dig deeper into this subject, the April 2005 issue of D-Lib Magazine has a great overview of Social Bookmarking tools. A generally current list of the more known tools is available from Wikipedia.

Technorati Tags: Tags as a means of promotion, discovery and community

As with the example of social bookmarking, Technorati Tags are also about the idea of someone tagging a piece of content and someone else being able to more easily search for it. Unlike the social bookmarking use of tagging though, Technorati Tags are ways that Blog authors are able to add tags to their blog posts. In a sense this is how an author is able to let those people interested in a particular topic know that they have something to say about it.

Blog search engines like Technorati, IceRocket, and BlogDigger leverage the tags within the blog posts to enable people to find out what people have had to say about a given topic most recently. Services like PubSub enable you to subscribe to receive alerts when people write something new about a topic. Communications professionals need to use tags for the purpose of promoting a given piece of news to its intended audiences as well as for monitoring what is being said around a given topic of interest.

It is exactly those people who watch what is being said about a given topic of interest, via the tags for that topic, which forms a community. Another interesting way to think of tags is as the ‘glue’ that holds the conversation on a given topic together. The tag for “Web 2.0” for instance is almost always one of the hottest out there. There are numerous experts, analysts, students and lay people who care about what people have to say about Web 2.0, and the tag is an important element of what holds the community together.

For those of you wishing to dig deeper into Technorati Tags, the blog “A Consumning Experience” has a great introduction. The best way is to jump into Technorati’s Tags and see how people tag things for yourself.

So much more…

Tags are such an important part of the fabric that weaves the Web 2.0, I could not possibly do the subject justice in one post - especially in trying to keep this somewhat short. Beyond tags, there are tagclouds (aka Heat Maps) which let you see the most popular tags in a given cluster. And there really is so much more…

But rather than go too deep here, let’s check in with a few questions and see what is on your mind. What do you think of tags? What questions do you have? How might you use tags to your advantage professionally? What are some important issues that should be added to this primer?

[Disclaimer: Tagging is not something to be done lightly on behalf of a client, nor is it to be done excessively. This introduction to the topic gives you enough knowledge to be dangerous, so let’s take a breath and not be dangerous. Tags must be honest and accurate. In this case, less is truly more - using every word in the english language to reach a wider audience will not only be ineffective, it can be downright damaging to the interests of your clients. There is a great danger of ‘tagspam’ which has already become a bit of a menace, polluting the valuable tagstream with inappropriate material. If this trend continues, a truly valuable service will lose its value.]

Tech Tags: BeyondBlogging Tags Tagging BeyondBlogging:tags

Categories: Tags
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There is an old saying that goes, “Some days it is in the cards, and some days it isn’t”. My grandfather used to say that a lot about whether or not he would be able to golf when the summer rains came, but it just as well could refer to my relationship with Blogging. Rather than looking at blogging as ‘my job’ which I must do every day, I go with the flow and my blog posting frequency changes dramatically as a result.

Somedays I am so excited by an idea or news item that I must put other things on hold to blog about it. Sometimes, I end up writing posts just for me that never get published - many never even saved, just written. Other times, like the past couple of weeks, I am so deep in the activities of ‘work’, having conversations with people and simply being in the real world, I have no time for it. Even if it is important to share or perhaps just personally meaningful, it is nearly impossible for me to get a blog post published. I suspect a lot of people out there are like me in this regards - sometimes we are just too busy with life, work or whatever to find time to blog.

The key is that I don’t need to blog every day, or several times a day to make an impact, but it would certainly help in some regards. My goal is to merely communicate with people who care about the things I care about - to have my voice heard and be recognized for my ability to understand a particular topic. So I do it when I have time and do my best to share valuable insights, stories and experiences with you. Depending on your goals, or the goals of your organization though, the demands on your time could be vastly different. I know of at least 2 startup companies here in Silicon Valley who don’t plan to do any traditional PR activities. They expect their blog will be the company’s official voice to the public, to their customers and to the press at large. They blog when they have something to say, not everyday for the sake of blogging.

The month ahead is going to be an interesting shift for me as I move from the free flowing Blogger mentality of writing when I feel like it for the sole purpose of serving my own passions to blogging every day as part of my work life. Today marks the beginning of a new gig I am doing with my friends over at Fleishman Hillard. I have this incredible opportunity to lead an online conversation leading up to an event they are sponsoring with DC Communicator called Beyond Blogging 2006. The premise is very dear to my heart and is something I have been talking about for quite some time.

The truth is that Blogs are a free style, free ranging form of communications that have made it possible for people and organizations to more directly communicate with the world over the Internet. It does not require an army of ‘techies’ to publish, it does not require some special knowledge of some cryptic computer language and it does not require any real capital expenditures. A Blog can be started in under 5 minutes, it can be free or a few dollars per month, it can be private or public, it can be used as a simple outbound communications channel or it could be used as the foundation of a community. Blogs are just another tool in the communications arsenal, so I am glad we are not doing another conversation on Blogs - it is time to go way beyond the initial idea and look at the bigger picture of how all of this fits together and can be used properly by all communication professionals.

Too many people think that the ‘Blog’ is some mythical panacea for communications. Too many people don’t understand the idea of Blogging within the proper context of participating in the conversation. Too many people think that the Blog is just another fad. (even I have written about Blogging being a fad previously) Regardless of what we think of Blogging, it is here to stay - the power of the tools are growing tremendously along with the number of people who are using Blogs for personal and professional communications. So this event, and this Blog, represent a great opportunity to dive into the conversation with communications professionals who are on the front lines of the industry. Together we will explore the strategic and tactical aspects of Blogging in the context of the shifting media landscape, to collectively gain a better understanding of where it fits within the broader context of communications.

So your first assignment, if you choose to accept it, is to dust off your old copy of The Cluetrain Manifesto and celebrate the 7th anniversary of this landmark book with me. The majority of what we will be talking about over the next month leading up to the Beyond Blogging event on May 19th will likely be based within the key principle of Cluetrain thinking - “markets are conversations”. From my perspective, the job of communications professionals, marketing pros and even sales people is to engage people in conversations - this is perhaps what has been forgotten by a few and is what real people are craving - but that discussion can wait for another day.

Over the month ahead, join us in a discussion that will go beyond the ideas and the strategies and dive into the practical applications of how it all works together. We will start off by delving into some of the basic questions like “What are tags? and How do I use them?” As we get closer to the event, we will be hearing from the panelists more directly and moving the conversation into areas that are of interest to you. So let’s get this party started - post a comment and let us know what sort of things you want to discuss.

Categories: General, Blogging
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