If You’re Anonymous (For No Reason) I’m Assuming You’re a Coward

This: 

Blogging anonymously is like playing a video game in “God Mode.” It’s blogging without risk or consequences. Without accountability, the anonymous blogger can present whatever version of the truth he/she wishes without risk. I’m guessing that anonymity gives those people some level of comfort and safety to “speak their mind” that they wouldn’t feel otherwise. However, blogging isn’t only about being comfortable…it’s about being real and authentic.

I’ve been in more than one verbal jousting match over the years about whether online anonymity is valuable or not. Without fail I’ve come down on the side of saying that unless there’s a legitimate fear for your life have the courage to put your name on what you write or otherwise produce. I put no trust in something that’s written by someone hiding their name since it means I can’t suss out what their agenda, be it positive or negative, might be. 

I’m proud of the fact that, with one situational exception, I’ve put my real name on everything I’ve written since I started writing online upwards of eight years ago. The one exception to that rule was my time at MarketingVox, where author names weren’t published. If I had the capability, though, to republish that material under my name I’d gladly do so without a moment’s hesitation. 

If you feel otherwise I’m going to, as the title of this post states, assume you are coward with an agenda that you’d like to keep hidden. If you’re trying to expose some great injustice, file it with the right authorities or find someone who will tell your story. Hiding behind a pseudonym or going completely anonymous means you’re trying to avoid the consequences of your actions, in which case you need to question the actions you’re taking in the first place. 

Social Curation in the Newsroom

According to Dick Costello Twitter has social curation for journalists in mind: 

“We have known for a long time that when events happen in the real world, the shared experience is on Twitter and we want to create an ability to curate events,” he said.

One unresolved issue they are grappling with is whether an “algorithmically curated experience is a better experience than an editorially curated experience.”

“We haven’t decided internally the answer to that,” he said.

But one thing they know is when you filter a stream so that it only shows the most popular tweets, ”You lose the roar of the crowd.”

It’s unclear exactly what Costello is talking about. But what seems the most likely, to my mind at least, interpretation of his comments is that he wants to build a tool that would allow a journalist or editor to quickly surface and publish Twitter updates from anyone to some platform in a way so as to enhance the story being told. 

Two questions then emerge from the (potential) existence of such a tool: 

1) What journalistic measure does a Tweet need to clear in order to be included? This is something that will, of course, vary from one newsroom to the next but there will have to be someone who makes the gut decision that this Tweet meets the curation standards and that one does not. Even if some sort of algorithm were to be in place on Twitter’s side that could help there needs to be a human editor there making that call since, as we all know, algorithms aren’t perfect. 

2) How much editing out of the “roar of the crowd” is too much before you start to cut into bone, so to speak, and lose all the flavor? In other words, if a story is so interesting that so many people are talking about it, how much can you filter out that stream before you start to lose the very reason it’s interesting? 

There are plenty of other questions that would arise from such a tool being in place. But it’s important to note that even without it this kind of thing is being done in newsrooms around the country even as we speak as journalists and editors look for key conversation points that add depth, nuance and relatability to the stories they’re producing. 

It’s reasonable to assume that this isn’t something Twitter would be doing out of the kindness of its heart. Instead it would very likely be a paid tool that would have advertising – which the news organization itself may or may not benefit from – included in some manner. And it remains to be seen whether this would be a one-size-fits-all type of offering or something that a news org could have custom built. 

This is all, of course, speculation at this point. But the idea of making it easier for journalists to curate citizen Twitter updates is one that should be attractive to Twitter, which gets to increase its ties to the news organizations it has shown signs of loving so much, and the media, which gets to tap into the immediacy and personal nature of these Tweets and the depth and flavor they can add to a story, something that theoretically turns that news org into an increasingly popular destination for the reader. 

More News Consumed Via Social/Mobile

From a recent Pew study on media consumption: 

The study found 33 percent of those young adults got news from social networks the day before, while 34 percent watched TV news and just 13 percent read print or digital newspaper content. Overall, the study says, the major trends driving the growth and change of digital news are social media, as well as the rapid adoption of mobile Internet devices.

This study kind of adds credence to the launch of Quartz by The Atlantic Media Group. As John Roberts at GigaOm says: 

…the new publication is optimized for reading on mobile devices and aimed at the “global business leaders” who have become something of a white whale for media outlets looking for reliable revenue streams.

This is why it is and has been so important to news organizations to be innovating and meeting the audience where they are instead of where the publisher wants them to be. Otherwise they’re going to get disaggregated right out of business (too many have already fallen victim) to HuffPo, Flipboard and other sites or tools that are, for lack of a better phrase, getting all up in the new industry’s grill. 

Too Many Social Posts Turn Off Readers

If you’re posting too frequently to Facebook, Twitter or other social networks you may be turning off your fans and followers and turning away new ones according to a new study. 

The research, conducted by Lab42, found that newsfeed clutter was the top reason people on social network chose not to follow or otherwise align themselves with a brand profile. And too many updates was the top reason why those who had already chosen to follow a company profile unliked or otherwise cut the tether. 

As is almost universally the case with such studies the biggest reason for people to Like a brand is for promotions, discounts and free stuff. A good portion of respondents even said they had no intention of buying anything from that company, they just wanted a free item that was, in my experience, offered as an incentive for people to Like the brand in the first place. Such tactics are widespread as brands seek to bump up their numbers but, as this painfully shows, the actual value of these tactics is dubious at best. 

The key finding, the one that deals with frequency and its correlation to abandonment, reinforces the need for social publishing managers to regularly review the programs they’re running and take the temperature of the audience both through quantifiable metrics such as followers/Likes and engagement data as well as through qualifiable metrics like the sentiment of that engagement and the feedback being received. 

MySpace is Moving in the Wrong Direction

The other day in the wake of all the stories, introductory videos and conversations about the (8th?) relaunch of MySpace, this time with the backing of superstar Justin Timberlake I finally coalesced my thoughts on Twitter. 

I didn’t want to hate on it just for the sake of doing so or in some sort of attempt to seem too cool for old school or anything like that. The comment came from a legitimate concern that the kind of user MySpace seems to be targeting simply doesn’t exist anymore. 

Look at the results of a recent Pew study about behavior on social networks: 

Pew’s study showed a shift in the way people use social media. Posting original photos and videos online ranked slightly ahead of sharing content from other people, with 46 percent of respondents who said they had created content and 41 percent who said they had curated it.

There’s clearly a trend line that shows there’s more curation happening on social network, with production of original material declining as a result. But the new MySpace seems to be specifically built around the idea that people are producing tons of flashy videos and photos. So while a professionally produced music video may look super in that environment, someone’s photos from a frat party that’s been busted up by the cops will look just as trashy there as anywhere else. 

(Incidentally, I saw more than one person say something along the lines of “The new MySpace design makes Facebook look like MS-DOS,” an analogy that I’m not sure anyone either network is trying to attract would even recognize. People born the year Windows 95 came out started driving last year.)

More than that, though, I’m just not sure what the real incentive is for people to go over and join/rejoin MySpace. If you’re signing in with MySpace then you may be able to pull all your friends over there but what’s the point? Why not just stick with Facebook? If someone isn’t a rich media producer there’s little, if any, “there” there. 

Time, as always, will tell if I’m wrong. But my first impression is that MySpace is chasing an audience that increasingly doesn’t exist with no strong pull on people to change their existing behaviors. 

FeedBurner Lives On

There’s been a lot of speculation around the fate of FeedBurner lately after some updates about the service’s API were mis-construed (including by me) to apply to the future of the service as a whole. It’s not a shock to say that RSS has fallen out of favor as models shift to social network distribution and consumption so all the stars seemed to be aligning for FeedBurner to be phased out. Not helping the matter was Google’s silence on the speculation, something that thankfully ended today with this short note in a longer post:

AdSense for Feeds was designed to help publishers earn revenue from their content by placing ads on their RSS feeds. Starting October 2, we’ll begin to retire this feature—and on December 3 we’ll close it. Publishers can continue to use FeedBurner URLs powered by Google, so they won’t need to redirect subscribers to different URLs.

That’s incredibly good to see and calms a lot of fears.  

But someone asked in the wake of this news whether RSS was even relevant anymore and whether this was something we, as an industry that includes corporate publishing program support as a feature set, should continue to focus on? 

Let me put it this way: There are a lot of good reasons why support for RSS could be dropped as a publishing priority. It’s not user-friendly (outside of things like MyYahoo that hid the RSS experience even while including its functionality), the metrics have always been a little fuzzy and more. I get the desire to make this one less thing to worry about as the focus moves to distribution on social networks. 

But the best reason to continue to support RSS feeds and include them as key performance indicators – even if they need to be caveated to within an inch of their lives – is that just like someone who has opted to Like you on Facebook, RSS subscriber numbers represent individuals who have taken a positive action to stay up to date on whatever news it is you’re sharing. And even more importantly, those are folks who have said this is the best way for them to continue doing so since time-shifting those updates is more efficient for them than potentially losing important news in the stream. They *want* to see it. 

As I discussed previously, the problem with the metrics on many social networks is that while they’re very good at showing the potential reach of an update – represented by fan/follower counts – they’re sometimes very bad at showing how many people actually did see it. Facebook, interestingly enough, is better at this than Twitter since it shows engagement and reach on a post-by-post level, numbers that are incredibly important when measuring the success of a program. RSS too has the potential to show that sort of detail around how many people actually loaded the feed, how many clicked through and so on. 

It’s important to note, though, that RSS is natively a dumb technology. I don’t mean to say it’s stupid, but it’s simple. It shoves content out the door in a certain way and it’s largely up to the reader/catcher software to interpret it and display it accordingly. That’s where services like FeedBurner have been so useful since it took that dumb feed and gave some of that control – full/partial feeds, signature and so on – back to the publisher by acting as a pre-delivery interpreter. 

Yes, RSS is still important. Without it we lose a lot of the functionality that powers the web. It’s importance to one program or another will vary from one case to the next but it costs nothing to continue offering it as an option and maintains one of the core foundations of the social web, even as distribution and consumption models change. There may be a day where all this ceases to be so but we’re not there yet. Not even close. 

(Update since writing this: TechCrunch reads the same paragraph and concludes it’s part of the FeedBurner Death Watch. While I agree it’s disconcerting that more resources aren’t being put into maintenance I think this is an overly pessimistic reading of tea leaves.