Global Neighbourhoods

My 10 2008 Resolutions

I tweeted these already, but I thought those of you who follow me here might enjoy them.

1. Be more humble than anyone else. Be less competitive.
2. Blog more.  Consult less. Screw the mortgage.
3. Suffer fools. Usually you can learn something if you listen anyhow.
4. Know when it's my turn to shut up and listen.
5. Go to Tweet-enders to cure this $#@&*& addiction.
6. Do more video, lot's more.
7. Spend an entire week with family at Tahoe, connecting twice daily maximum.
 8. Remember departed friends & remember life is for a limited time only. Exercise. Smell roses Spoil grandkids.    
9. Let communities define themselves. That's where the crowd wisdom comes in.
10 Rejoice. For George Bush will leave office shortly after the next New Year.

Happy New Year to you all. May the new year bring you only things joyous and tax deductible. 
        
   
   

Loic LeMeur & US Communities in the 50s

[Loic LeMeur. This is what a Community leader looks like these days. Photo by Shel]

NOTE--This is the 4th in my series of undetermined length on virtual communities. I welcome you joining this discussion. Please use the tag "community conversations" so people can find it.

The 1950s in the US were really not good old days. But in a great many ways they were simpler. Most cities had one newspaper, two radio staions and three TV networks.  People had the same information, delivered from the same perspective and few of us would challenge it for another decade. The Interstate Highways system for the most part was unbuilt and there was no commercial jet service. People stayed home more.

Whether we liked them or not, most community members agreed on who the community leaders were. Doctors, the municpal judge, religious leaders, the head of the local Red Cross, and the High School Varsity coaches were among the most prominent. One tier down were lawyers, insurance agents and other professional service providers who would often--like doctors-visit people at home.

These same people were all prominent on the lists of local charitable boards. The best of them were trusted because they helped people with problems--health, legal, family protection, turning kids into athletic scholorship candidates. They were the community members most often quoted in the local media. If they had problems, emergency services got to their homes the most rapidly. If you a problem, chance were you could see them in their homes to discuss the matter privately.

They were also often elected to public office.  They lived in some of the nicest homes, drove the biggest and most expensive cars. Other community members followed them into the stores and restaurants they patronized. We wanted the same gardners and roof repair services that these community leaders wanted.

Times changed.  The butcher, the baker & candlestick maker gave way to the franchise, chain and big block. The malls replaced downtowns.  The lines that defined the communities of mid-20th century America blurred and eroded.

Flash forward to current times. Communities are now forming online.  None that most of us use are more than 10 years old, most of them less than five. They are still forming, but growing at great speed.

What is clear is that community leaders are being selected online today for the same reasons they evolved to the highest echelons of influence in the tangible communities of the 50s. The new community influencer is like the doctor or coach of yesterday. They give to their community that which is needed. They give  a great deal to their communities and the commnities revere them for that generosity.

We trust their judgement. If they like a new technology, we tend to follow and give a try.  If they say they had a great meal in a restaurant, we might give the place a try.  The same with places to travel, music or video. They give the most.  They bcome the most influental and perhaps the most powerful.

For the modern company, this is a painful flex point. This is not how brands extend themselves. You don't get eyeballs to stick on your stuff by being generous. You don't get to own customers by being generous to them. Mass marketing techniques simply don't work when your dealing with communities of a few hundred or a few dozen members.

But, if you give to this community that which is interesting or useful, then the community will revere you for it. They will tell others and send them your way.  Just look at what Loic LeMeur has done with Seesmic. Yes, he has had great traditional ress coverage and that may have helped him with investors. That's not how Seesmic has become the most frequent company named on 2008 hot lists.

It's because Loic has used Twitter almost exclusively to create passionate users as Kathy Sierra would have put it. Unlike others, trying to reach the same community, Loic uses it for all sorts of conversations that are not just shovelware for his company. It puts people on his side.

Loic has joined the tech portion of the Twitter community and he had become a community leader.  He has been generous and there is now an entire community wanting to give back to him.

Loic did not foist his brand  He contributed to a community that could help his brand and in so doing, the community supports his brand.

I submit there is a huge lesson to be learned there.

Australian Govt to Censor Internet

Duncan Riley at TechCrunch has a most disturbing report about the Australian government imposing censorship on Internet content.  This puts them in the same camp as China and it just doesn't seem like something your would expect from a country with a reputation for freedom and independence.

The incumbent Labor Party is doing it, of course for noble reasons: To protect children.  Governments always seem to have noble reasons for taking people's liberty away.

Lurkers? Nope. Just Neighbors

[NOTE--This is my third post in as many days on the topic of online communities.  There will be several more. I am growing concerned with the issues of how traditional marketers and brand managers are approaching social media. I think there is a huge opportunity for social media to become a new, more efficient marketplace, one, in which buyers and sellers can find each other without the noise and cost of outmoded traditional practices. I am hopeful that others will join this conversation. If you choose to do so, I am using the tag: 'community conversations' and I encourage you to do so. as well."]

Words are important to me. I try hard to choose mine wisely. When words are misused they can lead to misunderstandings. Lately, people who watch an online conversation but do not contribute to it have been labeled as "lurkers."

According to Dictionary.com, to "lurk is to lie or wait in concealment, as a person in ambush..." Definition 2 is to "go furtively; slink; steal." This is not what is going on and I think many of the people using this term do not realize the negative implications it connotes.

In my physical community, I have neighbors with whom I never speak. I don't see them at the restaurants I frequent. Never run accross them at my Starbuck's; don't see them at our summer block party. They don't stand at silly hours in a dog park, a pick up bag tied to the leash.

But still, they are neighbors. They are part of my community. Occasionally,  we see each other on the street and we smile slightly and nod--also slightly. A few years ago, when there was a controversial City Hall meeting I spoke out.  As is my style, I did it with passion. A few neighbors who had become active with me sat in the front of the room, they gave me looks of encouragement and applauded. They shared my passion.

The rest of the room was filled with other community members. I didn't recognize most of them. Didn't attach their homes to their faces.  Did not know how they voted. Yet, they were equal parts of my community.  They paid their taxes and voted. They would vote on the issue I was hollering about. They didn't get known as I did at that time. They didn't get interviewed in the local paper as I did, but they had the same say as me on the vote.

My side lost that vote, and I went back to being a quieter member of my physical community. Next year, there would be a different issue, bringing out passions in other people.  Perhaps one would go to the front of the room and speak and enjoy some fleeting community prominence.

Communities are filled with people who are mostly quiet most of the time.  That is their right.  They contribute to the community just by being there, just by baring witness and more important, when they wish, they can be counted and they can be heard. At some moment, they may feel the passion that brings them to speak, as EA Spouse did several years ago, or as the guy with the camera phone did when a hole appeared on his Alaska Airlines flight.

These people are not lurkers. They are just quiet members of particular communities.  They go along. They give us vociferous members audience. Sometimes, they use email or Twitter Direct to quietly share an opinion or two, often politely disagreeing, sometimes with a good deal of knowledge on the subject.

Then one day, something happens.  A subject matter where one of them has great passion or knowledge. He or she steps to the front of the room and they are heard.

These people are not lurkers. They are valuable members of the community. I value the ones who have made themselves known to me. I think of them as neighbors.

Street Gangs in the Community

There is a good deal of conversation going on regarding communities. Jeremiah Owyang is at the center of much of it, and as much as I admire him, I think he may be focusing on issues that are not at the core of the matter.

Along with Jeremiah, continuing probe, there seems to be an increasing influx of complex graphs and Corpspeak terms. That would indicate that--drawn by the fragrance of money--traditional marketers and branding pros are beginning to queue up at the wide open gates of online communities.

Instead of getting cranky about it, as Jeremiah sometimes accuses me, I am going to write a series of posts to explain my thoughts on communities and the dangers they face. I'm going to tag them all "community conversations" and I invite you to do the same if you choose to join the conversation.

This post will sound the most cynical. I see a great future for commercial efforts in online communities. But I see grave dangers that traditional brand managers and marketers will try to drag in the same crap that they have used with steadily diminished results elsewhere, tactics and perspectives that can muck things up as they are evolving in online communities.

It is a bit of an exaggeration to liken marters and brand managers to street gangs. The violence online is not so brutal. But there are simlarities, and the impact of marketers on virtual communities may be as damaging as a street gang can be to an urban neighborhood . Gangs stake out turf by tagging everything. They show colors as a form of brand extension. Both groups think in military terms. Both often behave viciously to competitors. Both often provide goods and services to members of the community that are detrimental to the common good of the community. Both deplete all sorts of community resources.

It is often futile for one person to try to go against the power, numbers, resources of brands or gangs. It takes a village to stave defeat a damaging incursion.

There is one significant difference between online and real world communities. It is easy for an online community to just up and leave. If unwanted elements muck up your online neighborhood, you and the people you encounter can just go somewhere else.

In my community, a good many of its members was enamored a few short months ago, with Facebook. When spammers, direct marketers and data mners began to invade, many of us left and now hang out on Twitter.  If something goes wrong on Twitter, we will migrate either to an existing site or some smart entrepreneur will build a new neighborhood hangout for us.

Sometimes a whole neighborhood just leaves because something better has come along. For example, Seesmic has become a pillar of my community, and many of us are spending much less time at YouTube.

This defense is important for branders and marketers to note.  For years, we could only use bathrooms and refrigerators to avoid TV ads. In online communities, if you intrude, manipulate, buy or pervade, we can just leave.

That's why I keep saying that the power has shifted from the organization to the community. That's why I keep saying the most generous community members are inevitable the most powerful. For branding and marketing efforts to succeed rather than corrode in a community, they are going to have to undergo a fundamental change in approach.

Charlie Griffin Video blogs at Age 100

Chip Griffin's grandfather turns 100 and shows he's still sharper than some people a fraction of his age. He talks about life and some damned Yankee named Lou Gehrig. He does it with wit and wisdom.

Charlie Griffin is the oldest person I know to use social media so far. It seems to me a special gift to his descendents who will be abe to watch him and smilke and learn for many generations to come.

FaceBook's 'Citizen-Generated Translations'

Yesterday, I posted about Luis Rull who has started a Spanish to English translation service for bloggers. As I have written, I consider language to remain among the stickiest barriers of all people being able to have conversations and it is a subject that interests me.

This morning KD Paine pointed me to this WebProNews post of how Facebook is enabling user-generated translation services. While WebProNews focuses on the fact that it is free to the provider, that is of no concern to me.  I find citizen-generated translation it a promising move. Luis may have competition on the Facebook front. There are already over 800 Spanish translations on some Facebook content. The issues immediately become objectivity and accuracy.

To do their jobs, translators need to be absolutely neutral on content. There job is simply to let people of varied tongues understand each other. When I spoke in Spain recently, I received a question in Spanish, that some may have considered controversial. My translator would simply not tell me what had been asked.

I am for most citizen-generated activities. I think glitches tend to work themselves out. Perhaps, Facebook's new citizen-generated translations can start working like Wikipedia, where one translation keeps getting edited and refined until most knowledgeable parties agree on the content.

What I like most, is the number of places where I see efforts being made to translate one language into another in social media so that more people can tlk to more people.

SAP Global Survey: Spain's Luis Rull

[Luis Rull @EBE07. Photo by Shel]

Luis Rull was a co-host of Evento Blog Espana [EBE07], in Seville, Spain,  where I spoke in November. I got the chance to hang out with him and Biz Stone. He seems to have grown up a child of the global Internet communications revolution with an abundance of stories to tell. What interested me for the SAP Global Survey is the Luis' soon-to-be implemented Spanish-to-English translation service for bloggers. Spain has an abundance of bloggers.  Very few post in English, although a good many of them read English language blogs. Like most people, Spanish bloggers are just more comfortable posting in their native language.  But they see the need to join a larger and more more global network.  That's where Luis' service will coe in, but I'll let him tell his story.

1. Tell me a bit about your background.

I was born in 1973 and raised in Seville. My father is a scientist whose research was about computer simulation of molecular dynamics. I played with mainframepunch cards and crayons   before I could ride a bike.

In 1982, My father's work took us to Copenhagen where I met people totally different from my family and friends. I played with kids from Argentina to Russia, and from all over the world, letting find new ways to have fun. We kids were fascinated by the strangeness each other's toys, especially the new electronic stuff that we shared with each other.

I went to college in Granada where I got my first PC. My dorm friends used it to write essays and do homework. There were no networks. We shared with floppy disks. Toward the end of my degree studies, Internet Cafés began came to Granada and used them to email my parents who were already using it at the University of Sevilla.

When I got a grant I got a graduate studies grant at Pablo de Olavide University, I was given free internet access and I became the unofficial IT guy for my research group and friends. I found myself very comfortable teaching others about computers.

In 2004, I read an article about US politics and the rise of blogs.  It motivated me to visit blogger.com at Google and start my first blog to keep my friends and family informed, but it also gave me a place, a notebook to write ideas as they came into my head, content that could not be published in any other place such as a scientific journal.

As I became more knowledgable about blogs and wikis, I kept helping others.  Eventually, I moved into the private sector as a consultant. A new world was beginning and I wanted to be in it. I joined some wonderful internet entrepreneurs from Valencia and we founded Blogestudio.com.

Mainly, I teach clients how to communicate through their blogs and how to discover, store and share information with colleagues and clients.  Now I am beginning my own company mecus.es with a great team in Seville, focused in Corporate Blogging and Knowledge Management, where I am developing a new service of translation for bloggers.

2. How did you come to co-produce EBE07? Why is it free to attend?

Some of Spain's blogging pioneers come from Seville. Two of them,  José Luis Antúnez and José Luis Perdomo called Benito Castro and asked us to do a kind of summit for bloggers and Evento Blog España was born.

In 2006, Seville's state government, Junta de Andalucía, and Microsoft agreed to be sponsors, with the understanding they would respect our freedom to invite whoever we wanted. Suddenly we had a free place to do it and money to pay the flights and hotels of international speakers. When other bloggers heard about it, the all expressed enthusiasm. Friends and enemies, colleagues and competitors all enthusiastically offered  support. We gathered a great group who knew each other online, but had never seen each other in person.

In our first year we invited Matt Mullenweg, and some of the most influential and interested people in some areas of blogging: Education, Politics, Technology, Ethics, Business, etc. We later discovered that the most interested conversations took place during the breaks and the beers & in tapas bars.

In 2007, the expectation was high and we grew from 200 attendants to 620. Our goal was to respect for the community. EBE 07 was organized for bloggers, and we tried treat them as queens and kings not as subjects. EBE07 was built on them, with low key sponsor presence, free admission and long breaks and social activities.

3. Let's talk about Spain in general. How any bloggers are there? What do they blog about? How many are in business v personal?

I cannot tell for sure, but the Spanish blogosphere is made up mainly of personal bloggers. The growth right now is incredibly fast. There are many more personal blogs than business or commercial blogs. The average audience per blogger is low but the long tail in Spain is really long. From MSN Spaces, to Bitacoras.com or LaCoctelera.com, small groups reign.

Business and professionals have just started to discover the value of blogs in the last three years. I believe that as they understand the profits of listening and gaining their own voice, they will all want to get into social media. There are a lot of resources to help them use the new tools. The number of talented Internet consultants is growing.

4. What other social media tools are popular in general and in business?

Places like meneame.net are very popular, but the management of recommended info thought blogs, twitter, google reader shared or del.icio.us are growing very fast, mainly because they are not very time consuming and are based on people you trust.

In business, the most important innovation is building relationships with people who share your  interest through blogs. News alerts and data mining techniques need a lot of improving, but my opinion is that the heterogeneity blogs are introducing to companies and people’s minds have a lot of potential. 

5. Is social media making its way into government, education and other large institutions? Why or why not?

I think it is only happening in a very small number of places. A few individual civil servant or teachers are using it, but only in a disorganized, decentralized way. The positive way of seeing it is that they are building their own way of using them. They are not following higher agendas or narrow paths. They are adapting social media to their needs, founding great things. My opinion on the lack of interest is that people on top do not want to lose the monopoly of knowledge and want to keep people isolated.

6. Most bloggers in Spain blog, of course, in Spanish. What are the pluses and minuses of that? Do many Spanish bloggers read blogs in other languages?

I cannot say numbers, but my opinion is that many influential bloggers get their influence by gathering information from blogs in English and writing about it on their blogs in Spanish. Many readers don’t have the time, interest or skill in English to get that information from those sources, and they trust these gatekeepers. The amount of information in English is huge and the additional effort only worthwhile for specific niches (For example: your hobby or you competitors)

On the other hand, most Spanish bloggers do it just to express themselves. They are not eager to reach large audiences, so they are not very interested in reaching English readers. But, the Spanish-speaking audience itself is huge because it includes Latin Americans. Internet is becoming more and more popular all over the world and our brothers from the other side of the ocean are no exception. The high quality of some blogs from Argentina, Chile or Mexico proves that.

7. I understand that you are planning to offer a translation service to bloggers. Why? What's the market opportunity?

The market opportunity is a two-way road. It’s obvious that English is the most common language in Europe. If you want to reach a large audience in Europe and USA, the easiest way is to write in English.  Spanish companies are getting more and more investment from abroad and start-ups are beginning to think in a broad way about their market. The world is flat.

Automatic translators do not work properly with dense and rich blogs, so there’s room for professional translators here. The biggest cost for a translator is to specialize in the vocabulary of an area, for example, software. With individual blogs, we can take that away, because the language, special words and expressions are similar every time.

Our products do not only include professional translations but also the adaptation of their blogging software to it. Taking care of SEO matters, ease for clients and freshness of content, we offer the translation of a post within 24 hours. The blogger only has to blog in his or her usual way. We adapt the templates and take care of the translated version. The clients get an identical blog, with the texts in Spanish, with no additional time invested. We only have done it so far  in WordPress, our favourite blog software, but we have researched others and would be able to do it as soon any client requests it.

8. Will it be just Spanish-toEnglish? Would you do English-to-Spanish?

We are also thinking about translation to Spanish. English, French and German are our first choices. We consider Spanish audience very attractive to some English-speaking bloggers all over the world. The consumption of social media in Spain is one of the fastest growing in Europe, and with the weight of Latin American audiences, our product is simply a good choice.

Translating into Spanish is also a good idea because Spanish tends to overrate foreign ideas and people, and that usually gives English bloggers a good first impression.

9. Let's talk longterm. What impact do you see over the next five years of social media on Spain? How about Spanish interaction with the EU and the US?

The shock in the last three years has been so hard that nobody can say for certain. Big media conglomerates had been trying so many defensive strategies that failed. Now, they all join almost any innovation offered to them. This is mainly because small media companies had been fast and imaginative and are succeeding in the growing market of digital audiences. You may see it in the number of newspapers that have easy access to social media tools such as del.icio.us, digg, technorati or meneame (a popular Spanish Digg-style site). You can even see in the content of some news in mainstream media: sometimes you see a TV newscaster saying something that appeared in a blog six days earlier.

It's obvious that the audio and video will have a great impact in blogging in 2008. The number of video blggers and podcasters are increasing in a rate higher than  100% per year. Self-producing audio-visual content is the big change in Spanish media.

The influence of US culture is huge in Spain. Although many Spanish companies are in joint ventures with EU companies, the audience is strongly demanding US content over EU content. With more translation from French, German and Italian we hope to change that.

About 52% of the Spanish population between ages 17 and 52 have Internet access and is growing very fast, according to trusted sources. They represent the more affluent and better education portions of our society.

Spanish people tend to be expressive and passionate about what they like. I see an explosion of quality content. Prepare yourself.

10. Additional comments?

Spain IT community is beginning to think about the world in a “flatter” way. Spanish Content generators will follow them

Redefining Communities in a slow news week.

[Doc Searls (l) with Cluetrain co-author David Weinberger. Photo by Shel]

Jeremiah complains this is a slow news week. Between the holidays. It seems to me that you have to be a worse workaholic than I am to lament a week that let's you look up and around a bit. Over on Twitter, he seems to be back in a debate that seems to come up whenever we people centered on social media have a slow news week.

What is a community? Who runs a community? Who cares?

The definition of community really hasn't been much changed since the Internet came in. Since the advent of social media, there are a lot more communities and a great many people belong to more communities than they used to.

But by defintion, they remain the same. Communities are bodies of people loosely joined together by a common interest.  Historically, that common interest could be geography, a profession, a religion, a political affiliation or even a hobby like stamp collecting.

The Internet has reduced the physical boundaries of community. You can now have a strong bind with community members you have never met. It is based on shared passion and interest. Communities are like living bodies, in that the health of the body is more important, in the long run, than the continiuation of any one component. If it's your body, you will want to have the wart of cander removed for your health.  If it is your physical neighborhood, you will want that burned-out, graffiti-tagged building taken down.

Yes, companies can build communities.  Governments can do it as well. The results are often bad. Ford Motors built company towns in the middle of the last century.  They owned everything, the streets, the homes, the schools, the churches, even the cars people could buy. Ford decided if you could stay or be evicted and in the end most people decided the company town was a bad place to live.

Some companies still want to build online communities, with walls and gates. They want to own the community residents, and like the Ford Factory towns, this is generally a bad thing. People need to own their own communities.  When they have bad leaders, or too much crime, or poor education, or poor enforcement bodies, they tend to find a way to leave and go elsewhere to enjoy greater freedom.

On Jeremiah's Twitter conversation, someone noted that Facebook's customers are not the millions of users, but the marketer who have come in, who will support FaceBook in its desire to have a decent return on investment. This may sound like an obvious truth.  Some people think users have been spoiled by free services and content and they just have to accept that it's no longer like that.

I disagree. When the community rules become unjust (my theme for today), community members will just up and leave. The will go somewhere else where they have greater freedom.  Facebook is just a piece of virtually geography, and people will have very little trouble moving to another location, where they can share passion and information with people who will join them there.

As Jeremiah well knows, the power of a community is ultimately in the hands of te community members. The real leaders of a community will only remain leaders if they remain generous to the community itself. This is a concept that is very difficult for marketers to grasp. They need to go study what Doc Searls has to say about an Intention Economy, then they need to figure out how to provide it.

If not, every time they show up in numbers, the members of a community will just leave.

It's funny. I feel like I've written all this before. But then again, it's a slow news week.

DRM Belongs to Sony

Warner has become the third of four music giants to equivocate on the despised DRM.
This is an interesting case of a music lobby getting a law passed by the US Congress that the citizens just would not obey. There's a metaphor in here somewhere about a tea party, but it hasn't come to me yet.

And Google wouldn't help me find the applicable quote I was searching for, not the author, who I'm guessing was Thms. Paine.It goes something like, "Whenever those laws become unjust it is the duty of each citizen to takes arms to overthrow..." [If you can source it, please send it. I'm curious].

DRM, is an unjust law, and no more need be said on that art of the issue.  But is the speed in which the record industry giants have equivocated to the wrath of their unruly customers. From beginning to end, DRM lasted less than five years, before, one at a time four of the five Gargantuan members f the record industry oligarchy decided to folded up their portion of the monopoly.

Now, Sony, a long-standing leader in keeping its stuff proprietary stands alone as an enforcer of DRM as all other members have now cut deals with either Apple or Amazon to unlock DRM. Will they continue to enforce it? If so, they will discover the world can live without the portion of music content they think they own.

I can just picture a Sony executive pacing in circles upon the executive carpet, crying, "My empire for a lawyer. My empire for an army of subpoena servers for all those peasants downloading my shit for free!"

They will equivocate as well.  They really have no other choice. And being last will not help them.

BTW, a nice sidebar will be to watch the new marketplace competition between Apple Computer and Amazon.  I think the result will be the eventual end to exclusive Internet distribution rights of music, but that will take a while.  Until then, I think the competition will benefit us users.

And we bloggers can score one for ourselves. So many of us voiced the anger, pointed out the injustice of the law. Score one for the unruly mob that Dan Lyons mocks so often.