Social Media - Trussssst in Meeeeeee... and other illusions

Attended my second Social Media Club in London (SMC London) meeting last night, got there (and home later) without incident despite the apparent total collapse of the London transport system in the Hurricane. Thanks to Fleischman Hillard for the effervescent hospitality and Lloyd Davis for being the facilitator.

The format this evening was a bit like a Bar Camp, after all giving a short intro then various people electing to host topics of interest, and groups formed around them. What was really interesting was at the end of a period of talking, we all got together again to discuss the big takeaways – that worked very well, we all got an insight into what else was going on.

The stream I attended was about the use of Social Media outside the better reported, English speaking blogiverse. This was sparked off by some of us wanting to learn more about the work of Global Voices who monitor and translate blogs from across the world into English. Some takeaways were:

- Blogging (and internet access in general) in the third world is often driven by who can access blogging media – and these are quite often the wealthier people interested in reinforcing the status quo in some countries, so getting the vox populi voice is quite hard
- Conversely, the vox populi in many developing areas are using mobile devices as their main way of communicating and accessing social networks (and many other) functions. What particularly caught my ear was that the Chinese are developing mobile devices with relevant functionality for these usage patterns, which are very different to the mobiles that OECD manufacturers build – and that the techniques and technologies developed in China and Africa are starting to spread to other areas – so watch out companies like Nokia, Motorola etc.
- Pictures and Videos are far more transferable across cultures, rather than text in languages that other people probably cannot understand. A picture speaks a thousand words - and in a thousand languages. Less clear on the transferability of sound, though I had a very interesting side conversation on how companies need to think about signature audio as well as picture and text cues - hence the title of this post alludes to Kaa's song in the Jungle Book....

Another stream was about something that is a big bugbear of mine – Trust and the gaming of social media system (see here for a post of mine on the issue). Fascinating takeaways here were the sophisticated “how to’s” for gaming the systems currently in operation. Here are five that apparently are increasingly commonly used today – how many are you aware of?

- MySpace - false profiles, tied in to false Flickr photos and YouTube videos, initially these were “user generated falseness” like LonelyGirl, but now often built by PR agencies for the purposes of co-ordinated advertising, pimping products or bands, or swaying opinions in niche areas (because many niches are small, a fairly small co-ordinated snow-job can be disproportionately influential)
- Digg – there is now a growth industry of Corporate Diggers, using it as a (fairly unsophisticated) board to pimp their paymasters’ products
- Facebook – similar plays to MySpace starting – find niches and bias them by weighting them with co-ordinated content, typically with the intention of pimping product and/or influencing opinions.
- Online “shock teams” – finding conversations and co-ordinating the responses as a corporate marketing tool.
- Online Video sites - undergoing the same evolution as Digg, where a small number of co-ordinated videos and voting can easily get huge numbers of people watching the (advertising / influencing / product demo / political sermon) clip being pimped.

(I’m not sure I got all the subtleties here – others feel free to comment / condemn / correct etc)

Quite scary stuff – it is clear that a growing amount of fairly antisocial activity is occurring in the major (still fairly naïvely structured) social media sites. I include email Groups as social media sites, they are just an older instance...and there will be others after blogging and RSS pass on.....

When the idea of ensuring trust came around, the view was that most Social Media networks were still lousy (compared to real life social nets) at allowing us to read the cues of other users to decide on how trustworthy they are, and how trustworthy their content is. Ways of doing this will be important in 2007 – both bottom up and top down – for Social Media sites to remain trusted.

Funnily enough, I don't yet see Trust Retention in the canon of things to do in Social Media Optimisation ("be real" is about as close as it gets), probably because the gaming of sites is fairly new.

I think Trust in Social Media is going to be a major issue in 2007, and I suspect a lot of these sites will reap some very unpleasant harvests when people start to realise what is going on. Trust, once lost, is very difficult to regain.

An aside - I came home to find a storm in one of my Yahoo Groups - Mobile Monday London - because it seems SpinVox's PR agency (Porter Novelli) had spammed the group with a product announcement, but the address had been spoofed to make it look like an ordinary Yahoo member (yes, one can find these things out.....for now anyway).

There was another stream loosely based on whether Social Media is global and scalable – can MySpace go global, or will it devolve into many niches, with a social net for every arena (Old Hands may recognise the evolution of individual email ListServers, into various Group system before all of them were hovered up pretty much by Yahoo Groups). Anyway, some takeaways:

- Niche Sites / Microcasting struggle to get advertising revenue, for example the blogs have low “authority”, so they will lose out in any funding battle. Seems to me a bit like magazines – niche publications are either subscription or published by enthusiasts, and advertising is “local”. Local will mean different things in global social media advertising niches I suspect
- There was an interesting observation on Content – the majority belief was that Content is still king, but “Content” increasingly means a lot of historical content as well as the “now” stuff that most mainstream media systems are built to deliver.

(There were some other points / subtle corollaries but my brain was full by now….)

The last discussion was on what we as members wanted from this club – re-reading what I have written above I realised this is what I want – good company, fascinating discussion, great insights - and cold beer

Postscript - Ian Delaney has blogged on stream I forgot, that of "attention lifecycles" - I captured some of it in my trust area above but go here for more good stuff.