Reflections on Birmingham Social Media Café from Jon Hickman on Vimeo.

An overview of BCC DIY, by Stef from Jon Hickman on Vimeo.

What we’re doing this week

Tomorrow we are sponsoring the Birmingham Social Media Café along with the MA Online Journalism class. The café describes itself as: “a place for people interested in social media to gather, get acquainted, chat, plot, scheme, and share.” This is a great opportunity for our students to start building a professional network here in Birmingham.

After that we are heading to the BCC DIY hack day (registration here). This event will give students an opportunity to get involved in a community project, continue their professional networking, and experience first hand some of the activism that Birmingham is becoming known for.

Students will meet in Baker Building Costa at 9:15am, we’re heading over to Perry Barr train station at 9:30am. If you;re late, just make your wy under your own steam. I suggest everyone who wants to come to Moseley afterward invests in a Daytripper ticket.

What happens then?

Classes start next week, and I’ll start stepping away from this blog a little. Our students will begin to take ownership of the blog, reporting on their findings. I’ll still be here, posting occasionally, but will mostly be blogging at Interactive Cultures. In addition to students, expect to hear more from my colleagues on the MA teaching team and updates on some of the research and knowledge transfer projects that are taking place at BCU.

We’ll also be out and about at various local events, for example we’re all attending Digital Districts on 14th October.

It’s been a great few months developing the course. We’ve generated a lot of interest since we started talking about it at WxWM. Thanks for your interest thus far. Stick with us, it’s just getting interesting.

The following email came in overnight from my local Freecycle moderator:

We Recycle with Freegle
=============================

Hi everyone

You’ll notice that our group has changed our name, and this also means that our address has changed too.

It’s now:

Web: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/BirminghamFreegle

Email: BirminghamFreegle@yahoogroups.com

What’s changed for you?
======================

Nothing much. The home page looks a bit different, and the email address is new (and you have seen it at the top of this page) but other than that – all the rules are the same, all your moderators are the same, and our group is still GRASS ROOTS and LOCAL.

We’re still dedicated to keeping things out of land fill, and the same moderation team are still here beavering away in the background helping to keep the group running smoothly.

The main reason for our move is simple. While Freecycle is a GREAT idea, all our UK groups were basically forced to work under a system devised in and for the United States. Leaders of Freecycle in the UK spent more than two years talking with the main Freecycle Network trying to get the freedom to run things in a way more suited to our own country and our own laws. Nothing changed.

In July four leading members of our National UK Freecycle team resigned. Moderators around the country then formed an Independent Association of Freecycle Moderators and again tried talks with The Freecycle Network. But again to no avail.

Since then an increasing number of Group Owners and Moderators have been SUMMARILY DISMISSED from Freecycle including the former UK Director of Freecycle UK.

So we have decided to go our own way.

It seems nothing has changed for me in the big scheme of things as a Freecycle Freegle user, but it hints at a problem of scale: sure Freecycle was great because it was a collective that self-organised over the web, but this affair suggests that flexibility is needed to sustain glocal organisations.

The other thing that I’ve been reflecting on is the name “Freegle”. It doesn’t work as a verb so I guess people who used the service for a while will continue to see they are “going to freecycle the sofa”. It also seems to privilege the act of receiving over the act of giving. Linked to “frugal”, with the added emphasis of “free” this sounds more like a site to grab the ultimate bargain, not a site aimed at reducing landfill. Without the allusion to “recycle” where’s the incentive for the donor in the new freegle future?

• Citizensheep » Manage your online reputation – How to respond to conversations online – from a third sector perspective
• Round up from Data, Mashups and APIs | Birmingham Social Media Cafe –
• FORA.tv – Scott Rosenberg: Say Everything: How Blogging Began – On the road promoting a book on the subject, some historical overview of blogging (via http://www.d-log.info/?p=9537)
• Master List (A Wiki of Social Media Monitoring Solutions) – A list of software used for reputation management activity ie monitoring the net for keywords and brand mentions (an then responding)
• Babble + Context = Conversation | I Hate Mornings – Of the many responses to reports that "40% of Twitter is inane babble", this was one of my favourites. And Ben's songs are worth listening to too.

I happened to take a look at her website today, and was a little surprised by what I found. It’s a slick looking site, but it seems to lack some understanding of the digital world which Lane Fox is selling to the public. I find this a little worrying. There are two issues which I’d like to pick up on: technical problems and voice.

Technical Difficulties

We need to be clear that digital inclusion doesn’t equal getting people blogging. However, I think we all understand that blogging is part of the digital inclusion agenda. Blogging might be the tool that makes the digitally excluded want to join in with digital technology. It’s also a key activity in terms of shaping debates around digital participation, and indeed in shaping any other debates we might wish active citizens to take part in. I’d expect Lane Fox to be blogging a lot, yet marthalanefox.com is something of a demi-blog. Is it a diary of Lane Fox’s public appearances, a news page, or a blog? It’s not clear.

The site employs blogging language such as “read entire blogpost”, but comments are not available which diminishes the blog post to the status of a press release. My key disappointment with the website is the lack of RSS. I’d like to keep track of the Champion for Digital Inclusion’s thoughts, but I’m not likely to remember to come back regularly hoping for more: an option to subscribe to the site would seem to me to be an obviously desirable feature for this website.

Who’s Speaking Please?

Actually there is a feed for marthalanefox.com, if you know where to look (http://www.marthalanefox.com/rss). This brings me on to the second difficulty I have with the Champion’s web presence: the feed suggests that she’s not writing the blog posts herself. The feed shows that Martha has a team – Theo Park and Tim Van Damme – that are speaking on her behalf, authoring, or at least uploading, the blog entries for her. Park is Lane Fox’s “Executive Assistant” while Van Damme appears to be her web designer.

The message? You too can be a champion of the digital world, all you need is the budget to buy a web designer’s time. And an executive assistant.

Of course we know this isn’t true. You could just swing by a social media surgery and get free advice from an expert, who will get you blogging on wordpress in half hour (with RSS and comments enabled). Feel free to pop in to the next one, Martha.

• An email that accused Starbucks of not supporting the War on Terror
• Talk of Red Bull containing a stimulant devised by the US army for soldiers in Vietnam
• News of fictional viruses affecting Nokia phones, etc.

There are many more examples we can find of erroneous information that spreads around the Internet. The journalist wanted to know how social media might be playing a part in spreading these rumours, and how companies should respond. The following is my response:

One of the most interesting ideas in this area is the employment of “conversation agencies” which aim to locate and respond to negative conversations on behalf of brands and corporations. I touched on these during my talk at Communicate’s Social Media in a Corporate Context conference. I’m sure the guys at We Are Social would be delighted to discuss the way in which they manage reputation for brands such as Skype (their blog has case studies written up already – http://wearesocial.net/).

Any organisation using a conversation agency or an in house team to monitor the Internet for conversations about their brands would be well advised to take a measured and planned approach. This should ensure that these are dealt with efficiently and proportionally. The US Air Force drew up a flow chart which they use when deciding how they respond to online discussions about their activities. This was picked up on by people such as Jeremiah Owyang and popularised. It has then been updated to make it useful for specific sectors, e.g. Michael Grimes of Citizensheep has adapted this to third sector organisations (available as a Creative Commons licensed download).

The phenomenon of urban myths related to brands is not new. Sharing of information about companies, true or false, through web pages and viral email distribution predates what we tend to think of as “social media” and, indeed, predates the Internet. When we think about the web, commentators often reflect that it has sped up the exchange of ideas by making communication more immediate and removing geographic boundaries. When we think about social media we see more opportunities for forwarding on messages and ideas, and more public fora for discussion of those ideas. If social media changes the way we think about brand rumours, it is that if these ideas are shared and debated in the open (e.g. on a blog) then the brands have a chance to answer back; they wouldn’t have had this opportunity when the ideas were shared over email or face to face.

At the Social Media in a Corporate Context conference I discussed the responsibility that corporates have when they join online conversations. Corporates must remember that the public have a right to discuss their experiences of a brand. Some of these conversations will not be comfortable reading for reputation managers. Social media communities function through trades in social capital; most corporate organisations understand the world through economic capital and do not want to invest time in building social capital. This then leads to them short cutting their way into the conversation through using their financial resources to buy into the conversation: economic capital (money) is exchanged for social capital (influence). It is likely that the fiscal reserves of a given brand exceed the social reserves of an individual, and therefore companies must behave responsibly to ensure they are not “buying the conversation”.

Sub-viral marketing appeared a little later. It’s the same general principle of viral marketing – a hook & a forwarding mechanism – but with a twist.

One of the staples of email forwarding culture (and now link sharing with friends through social media platforms) is the funny picture or video, and a key sub-genre is pop culture parody. Parody relies on brand owners to create messages, and for these to become part of the pop culture lexicon. The audience must understand the codes and conventions of a campaign to understand a parody of the same: the humour derives from subverting the original codes, denying us the expected outcome, or inverting the message.

Sub-viral campaigns shortcut this system: brands create fake pop-culture references to themselves, bypassing their consumers altogether. Ian Harris, writing in The Guardian in 2002, described sub-viral:

“Subviral marketing is a topsy-turvy trend that’s said to be being pioneered by brands including Budweiser, Ford, Levi’s and Mastercard. While traditional viral attachments feature short, slapstick video clips stamped with the brand’s logo and web address, subviral campaigns are carefully shot to seem like they were produced by an internet prankster.”

The sub-viral story seemed to disappear quite quickly, and I seldom hear people talk about them now. The sub-viral illusion relies on producer discretion: distancing one’s self from one’s “parodies”.  Given the possibilities for sharing funny video clips, photos and links through various social media channels, it would be difficult to believe that this sharp practice doesn’t continue in 2009.

The inherent post-modernism of sub-viral imagery and video is worthy of the attention of media scholars: is it possible that by short-cutting the cultural practices of parody, brand owners can win attention for the original, non parodic, work? Do we understand the sub-viral’s original in terms of the parody, and does it therefore earn more attention for a campaign than it might normally have won? Does the audience stop to decode the original only because the parody demands this of them?

A further issue of debate here regards the encroachment of corporates into a space which is traditionally the reserve of alternative (non corporate) voices. Does the extension of corporate influence into an area of ideological opposition weaken the hand of anti-corporate activists?

Angel service for Drug Addicts in South Africa from Podnosh on Vimeo.