Reinventing The Wheel

A lot of topics I write about as a freelancer concerns the banking industry. Recently I did a spate of articles on Social Banking, how banks are embracing social media to reinvent their business. And it’s not just social media websites but many of the Web 2.0 tools that banks are using to open up communication channels with customers.

One thing I’ve learned during this economic crisis is that American business has drifted away from creating innovative products people want to buy to creating ways to make more money for the company with less effort. In an article in Business Week a former Harvard Business school professor tackles the problems on Wall Street by having them redirect attention to serving the needs of the customer and instead of serving the needs of the shareholder. Trust is at an all time low for American businesses and the consumer has become empowered int he digital age. This makes for a dire situation for businesses who look to keep the status quo rather than go with the flow. In the article the Harvard Professor, Shoshana Zuboff, proposes that company managers unlearn what they learned in her classroom over the years and embrace the space where individuals actually live, what she calls the I-space.

It’s a good read and a wake-up call for the way we build and run businesses in America as we approach the second decade of the 21st Century. Click to read the article, “The Old Solutions Have Become the New Problems.”

Publishers: Don’t Punish the Readers

A long time ago even Pennysavers raked in the money just on classifieds alone. I should know, because I used to design ads (both display and classified) and manage the computer network for a Pennysaver. I didn’t typeset those little text ads. They were done by minimum wage making working mothers and elderly ladies. At first it was done on phototype machines but then we got smart and had them typeset on Macs. When we purchased those Macintoshes and some of those ladies in the classified section lost their jobs, boy was there a lot of screaming and yelling. This was back in the early 1990s, so in the entire history of the newspaper business, it really wasn’t that long ago. When we implemented a pagination system so that we didn’t need the paste-up artists anymore few years later, again people bitched and complained.

Back then Apple Macintosh networks were rather small affairs and in small shops the head Graphic Designer was most often also the Macintosh network administrator. Crazy, I know. If this was your lot in life at the time, then you must remember what it was like being caught between a rock and a hard place suggesting to your Art Director and Publisher and Editor the immense savings they would see from pagination and typesetting on the Macintosh. See you were essentially selling our your fellow artists because some of them were going to go extinct in the transition to all digital design and lose their jobs from this change. On the other hand, if you didn’t suggest these small investments in equipment and software to show a cost savings, someone else was going to come in the door very soon and do it. Then you lost your job (or risked demotion.)

When the cost savings was going toward the publisher, all was well and good in the industry. We happily traded human power for machine power in the production department because we could slash costs while still cornering the market on display ads, a market monopoly the print business had since Ben Franklin’s day.

Then one day a guy named Craig came along with his confounded list and ruined the party. We all know the story of how the newspaper business made a ghetto out of the web until they just couldn’t ignore it anymore. Call it blindness. Call it ignorance or arrogance. Call it what you will, but publishers let it all go by as they watched first Google, then eBay then Craigslist steal their revenue right out from under their noses when what they should have been doing was hiring these guys and buying them out for pennies on the dollar before they were billionaires. The web was just the ultimate printing press but no one (except young innovators who may or may not have been bought for a song back in the late 1990s) saw it for what it was.

Newspaper men will be newspaper men and now that the truth is staring them right in the face, what do they do? Go after the little guys once again. Just like when technology made it easier to beef up the bottom line by eliminating costly staff and their benefits packages publishers like Rupert Murdock think a paywall is the life preserver for their sinking industry.

“Google is ruining our business!” they cry, among other things.

What they don’t realize is that what traffic they are getting is because of the sites that scrape their stuff and provide backlinks. Or the search engines that crawl their news sites and provide an easy way to find news then go read it, even if it is one story at a time.

The rallying cry of the industry: Blame Google. But that’s the lazy way out. What they aren’t looking at are the advertisers. Google manages to monetize their product very nicely with ads sitting astride news results being only a small fraction of their income, according to an op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal by Google CEO Eric Schmidt.

Newspapers and magazine publishers rushed to get online put the cart before the horse, so to speak. At first it was a ghetto. Then it was the place to be. But what they didn’t do is think about a business model before throwing all their content up for the world to see for free.

I don’t have numbers to support this but I suspect that if you take out distribution and printing costs what’s left can be supported strictly by advertising in the news industry if you do it right. I think a website like newjerseynewsroom.com poses as a model. Ex Star-Ledger newspaper staffers started this news site. It seems to be going string but I can’t find any stories on its financial stability.

The New York Times or the Wall Street Journal with the sheer number of visitors they get and the long history of each of these publications can easily dictate to advertisers a fair price for all those readers. They are not eyeballs or clicks, they are exactly what they used to be: readers of papers of record.

By the number of times I see these news organizations’ stories cited by bloggers and on twitter I have to suspect that they also have just as high a brand loyalty and trust than they ever did when they were printed on paper only. Papers like that have to set the bar a little higher. They must charge what a reader in that paper seeing and ad is worth, just like they did when they were in print. No one in the world can compare one little blog banner or an ad network buy to a display ad on the New York Times website.

In another version of this blog post I wrote a couple of paragraphs about a central clearinghouse standard whereby all newspapers and magazine publishers can filter content to eReader devices to be distributed and charged a fair subscription rate. Alas real life beat me to the punch and I saw this story on Mashable about a Hulu type of website for magazines. I think it’s a step in the right direction. Of course it’s in the early stages and I know very little about it yet but it’s a start.

A Simple Idea Like Slicing Bread or Homogenizing Milk.

Before I was born, my grandfather used to own a grocery store. It’s clear that this man whom I admire and love as much as anyone in the world was never destined to become a captain of industry. One day many decades ago someone came into his store with a new product for him to sell to his customers. It was milk. Not just any old milk, but homogenized milk.

“In the old days,” grandpa would tell me. “You had to shake up your milk before you drank it because the cream would separate and rest on top.”

In my entire life, I have yet to see unhomogenized milk, but it’s not that hard to imagine. What did my grandfather do with this brilliant idea? Nothing. He kicked the guy out of the store. Just like he did to the guy selling him Sara Lee cakes (“I thought, who would buy a cake that you put in the freezer instead of a pantry shelf!”) He didn’t really take to change very well, my grandfather. It’s an admirable quality in a man to stick to your principles and it’s somewhat endearing to know he’s much the same man he is now in his 80s as he was when he came home from World War II.

The point of the story is that my grandfather can be as curmudgeonly as most people about shiny new technologies and that prevents us from seeing how a simple idea can be an innovation. When I told that story to my friend once he cried out that my grandfather probably would have kick the guy out of his store who first brought him sliced bread. I don’t doubt it.

Twitter is like homogenized milk or sliced bread.

Facebooks, MySpace, LinkedIn and a host of other application layer on more and more features but it’s Twitter’s idea, which is a refinement and hybridization of two another simple technologies—the blog and the SMS message—that all the others now seem to try to emulate. Think about it. Facebook allows you to connect with people, share photos, videos, music, links to web pages and information about yourself. Isn’t that basically what Twitter does, albeit in a striped down format? Instead of layering on the applications, Twitter is reliant on outside developers in the community to add the features needed like TwitPic and url shorteners all in a brief time frame of a couple of years and in the era of one of the worst financial crises since the Great Depression.

There are some who say this is a weakness. The decentralization of Twitter’s other services like TweetDeck make us reliant on a network of application, offered for free, that may be here today but gone tomorrow. I’d argue that if it’s a good enough idea there will be some other developer ready to step up and offer an alternative that’s just as good or even better. (Referring to 3rd party applications that run on top of Twitter.) A prime example are the many url shortening options out there from bit.ly to ow.ly to tinyurl.com.

In a similar way Facebook already is build upon a bunch of other unrelated but vital technologies to make it feasible. But it uses them in that “homogenized milk” sort of way. A prime example is digital imaging technology for the masses. Without the ability for almost everyone to take and upload images taken on their digital cameras a very big part of Facebook’s usefulness to many of its members goes away. It was only a few short years ago that a digital camera and a scanner were luxuries not staples in every home. Facebook took this and served it up for us in a way that’s 10x easier to distribute and share than other services. Tagging of photos added social networking gold to the process.

I’m actually not sure if MySpace had the ability to tag photos as an option previous to Facebook. I used MySpace briefly at first but quickly moved to Facebook. I do remember putting tags onto photos but I’m not sure if it did the personal network tagging in the same way as Facebook’s ubiquitous tagging system.

See it’s the simple ideas that are the best even if you wrap them in a ton of bells and whistles or as we like to call them in the tech community: features.

There is a happy end to this tale. My grandfather eventually left the grocery business and drove for a private airport taxi service for many years until he retired. But don’t even try to tell him the best way to get from the train station in Woodmere to JFK. It’s a losing battle no matter how you slice it. He’s the type of guy who’d be arguing with the GPS system. I can just imagine it now.

GPS system’s sweet female, slightly English voice: “Go three miles and make a left.”

My grandfather in old guy’s Jewish accent: “Ahhh, she doesn’t know what she’s talking about.”

Coloring Outside The Lines

Social Media consultants (including me) like to tell you all the rules that apply to using services like Twitter. But the fact is that without innovation from the grassroots users, many of the features that are standard on Twitter now would never have existed. Take RT (retweeting) for instance. This was a practice started by the users to re post another twitterer’s tweet that his followers found interesting. The user base was coloring a little outside of the lines and finding their own unique ways to use the service.

In this sense anyone putting restrictions on how Twitter should and should not be used is essentially limiting innovation on the service. I had a pretty public debate with both Dr. Mark Drapeau and Shel Israel about brands on Twitter. In fact, my first post on Mashable was in response to another post by Dr. Drapeau calling for a ban on twittering brands. Shel Israel seems to share Dr. Drapeau’s opinion and asked me to write my best argument for brands on Twitter which he graciously referenced in his book Twitterville. To distill the argument down to its basic form, according to Israel and Drapeau, Twitter should only be used for human to human communication and conversation.

They do not preclude companies from using Twitter in their marketing campaigns but they’d just rather that company be as transparent as possible and reveal exactly who is manning the Twitter account. Israel cites many different means to achieve this level of transparency, which you can read about in his excellent and well-researched book. I respect both Shel Israel’s and Dr. Mark Drapeau’s thoughts and opinions. I even suspect that in the end, they may be right about this and I might be wrong.

I don’t think that brand twittering is on par with an innovation like RT or @replies but my point is that when you listen to anyone with a set of rules about how to use social media, take it with a grain of salt. It’s coloring outside the lines a little that sometimes make the most interesting compositions.

Why Can’t We Teach Sociability?

By Lon S. Cohen

There is a great post on the Direct Marketing Observations blog that perfectly illustrates a problem in Social Media and companies. See the post here.

In a very easy to understand and striking way, it really does address the problem most people have with Social Media. You can learn the mechanics of the tools but putting them to use is a whole other ball game. Of course, the post probably hits on the failing of Social Media professionals more than the people who they work for. Shouldn’t we also teach people not only how to use Social Media but to USE Media Socially? Meaning, can’t we also teach people to be social? Follow up with them? Coach them? Isn’t that an untapped market in a way?

This incorporates some psychological and sociological professions. We Social Media professionals sit back and shake our heads because we seem to “get it” but we don’t understand why no one else does. I think it’s time we also offer to teach sociability to company managers so they can use Social Media and in turn encourage their employees to be social as well. I don’t mean we have to make every shrinking violet the life of the party but along with discussions about return on value and the next Twitter application, we should be teaching businesses how to be more social. I am sure that we can adapt plenty of other fields on study into this discussion to develop a set of accepted guidelines.

In Beth Harte’s post “19 Things Social Media Consultants or Agencies Can’t Teach You” on the MarketingProf’s Daily Fix blog she lists the things that companies will have to learn to do for themselves. Now it’s true that you can’t teach someone to “have a personality” or to “desire real relationships and conversations” as Beth says, we can point out to business managers that these things are important and that if they truly want to learn them, then there are steps to take to help. While you can’t teach personality, you can help them see the personality within their brand or to recognize that there may be a personality on staff who’d be great for representing a brand.

Some things on her list you can teach by example. For instance it’s easy to show someone that they should “want to implement internal systems to track all of your social activities.” You can inspire and then follow up on progress. There are ways to change behavior but only if you can see results. Putting Beth’s list in order you may be able to show someone why they’d want to “really care” and “commit to transparent communications” if they see that this will help them “get the benefits of being an ‘unmarketer” after they “embrace the value of having a measurable plan.”

According to Beth in a Tweet David Armano gave a good start to this conversation in his post, “Debunking Social Media Myths” on the Conversation Starter blog, which I highly suggest you take a look at.

Twitter? As If!

Sorry Twitter. Teens just aren’t that into you. And Facebook – you’re next.

I just read this article in the Financial Times about how Social Media sites are losing popularity with the young. I’m really not surprised.

I find it weird that anyone ever assumed that teenagers (sometimes called Millennials by marketers) used Twitter. I haven’t seen many teens at all ever on or talking about the service. Twitter is definitely for us old guys. It seems to have a magical appeal for the Gen X-ers (Possibly Gen Y too) and older. Definitely for geeks and for techies. As a matter of fact, my teen (I asked him) says he and his friends don’t use Facebook much at all either and rarely utilize Social Networks, except for MySpace perhaps.

Teens are more about texting, photo sharing (my son claims Photobucket is very popular with his peers) they use and IM (still). Again, except for MySpace, teens seem to want super-fast communication that is limited to access between their friends only (sometimes exclusive of other peers entirely – cliques) and not public (parents or others can’t just search out them and find them there.) MySpace was popular, I think, with teens because it didn’t catch on very much with older people like Facebook did. Also, MySpace was much more customizable than any other Social Newtorking website, which for teens was a bonus letting them express their individuality through colors, backgrounds and pictures but was more of a turn-off to anyone older, seeming a little schlocky.

Twitter is actually too much work for teens, believe it or not and Facebook is too open and static looking. It’s also too popular, especially now and their parents, family, etc. are always requesting to friend them there. I think teens keep Facebook profiles for the family interaction but it’s more of a big Gen X site (and Baby Boomers more and more too.)

Teens like their privacy and individuality at least as it pertains to their social group. They also want to have the perception at least thet they live in their own world. They make up fashions and styles, adopt musical tastes that never fail to offend their parents and speak in an ever more colorful series of slang language. (i.e. Valley Girl talk in the 1980s, Hippie slang from the 1960s or the Beat language of the 1950s?)

Don’t you remember when you were a teenager? Did you go in for anything that you even remotely thought your parents were involved in? Didn’t you actually go out of your way to reject things as passe as soon as the parents got hip to it? Did you want to fly under the radar? Twitter is too popular for them, believe it or not, as is Facebook. IM is quick, private and personal. It can be turned off and hidden from parent as can texting (for the most part).

So I am not surprised to learn that kids aren’t taking to social networks (at least the popular ones) in record numbers as they were before. If I were a youth marketer, I’d be concentrating on iPods, mobile phones, text and IM. That’s where you’ll find the kids – on ever smaller and smaller screens.

Mashable Pokes New York Times Social Media Editor

Since we’re on the subject of The New York Times, I thought I’d bring up a post on Mashable.com that put a particularly sharpened point on a thorn in the side of the New York Times’ new Social Media Editor, Jennifer Preston while at the same time throwing another spotlight on the debate about the importance of engagement when big businesses (especially august news organizations) embrace Social Media. The post pointed out that the Twitter account used by Preston had at the time lay dormant for a month, which in the online world is a virtual lifetime.

“Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m not some Twitter-Nazi who thinks that everyone should tweet at all, let alone on a daily basis,” wrote the post’s author, Stan Schroeder. “But Twitter has been at the very core of various social media-related movements and occurrences, and a social media editor for a large media publication, with over 9000 Twitter followers, is expected to actually use the social media tools at her disposal.”

Preston politely responded in the comments section of the post that she was thankful for the helpful advice and was using her Twitter account “to listen and to determine how I can best bring value to the conversation and how I can most effectively guide our journalists.” It was a polite response but smacked of the kind of corporate insincerity that doesn’t always fly in the casual world of Social Media.

It seems to me that a Social Media Editor should already have a keen understanding of the conversations and contributions being bandied about. She should also be tweeting organically and not only as the outline of her job description allows. I suspect that the New York Times has already been “listening” for a while now considering that they have had active Twitter accounts for more than a year. That’s long enough to know better. They must have some idea of what they wanted to accomplish before promoting Preston to Social Media Editor.

While Social Media isn’t as old as newspapers, it’s been around as a concept without a catchy title for longer than most people realize. BBS, IRC, AOL’s walled garden, chat rooms, forums and even the advent of email were all part of an evolution into what we label as Social Media today. It didn’t just spring into existence from the heads of Evan Williams or Mark Zuckerberg fully formed. Simply sitting back and listening at this point for a massive news organization that has investigative journalists at its disposal seems silly and redundant. Taking time to listen may be good advice for a small business or a bank with regulation concerns or even Domino’s Pizza but does the New York Times need to listen for a month while it’s Twitter account goes cold enough to warrant a Mashable.com opinion piece? I think not.

Luckily, it seems that so far the New York Times has avoided the kind of backlash CNN had to endure when young Iranian citizens first started to protest election results in that country and people rushed to the cable news channel only to find the coverage nonexistent. Because CNN infamously competed with Ashton Kutcher in a race to 1,000,000 followers, Twitter users might have assumed that the organization was tuned into the events unfolding as they were passed along through Social Media. They hadn’t been listening and the #cnnfail hastag rose to a top position in the trending topics on Twitter along with some actual reports coming from Iran tagged as #iranelection.

The ability to engaged in Social Media is limited only by the collective imagination of the users, whether you want to listen more than you contribute or create a hub for your own big media company to engage the masses. A weekly #hashtag driven chat—a user-created concept—hosted on Twitter might be a great place to start. A perfect example is #journchat which engages PR folks and journalists in conversation about issues that affect both. The chat often looks for guest hosts and a Social Media Editor can offer to moderate a session. It’s a good investment of a few hours of time for a news organization looking for feedback on how Social Media is being used to extend the conversation, how to use it to improve the background of sourcing and reporting stories and what may happen in the future. And that’s just one of many ways a Social Media Editor can engage a specialized and enthusiastic audience of thoughtful contributors (for free I might add) through Twitter in a fully formed conversation space.

Listening to the chatter in Social Media, while important, is only one small part of the equation. Listening and reacting, sharing, creating, commenting, engaging and contributing are aggregate parts to Social Media. Otherwise you’d have no need to post at all but simply conduct some Twitter searches, set up Google alerts or hire a company that tracks hits on Social Media sites and then listen away.

If you’re a Social Media Editor on Twitter you need to use it or the community will call you out on it. Preston did the right thing by responding directly and within the comments of the actual post. But her excuse that she was listening didn’t seem to satisfy enough to stem the debate. Sure, she has to assist and advise a huge staff, but with the number of resources I imagine are at her disposal there’s no excuse not to contribute original content and updates about the Social Media plans of the paper. Or better yet to come out guns blazing with original, innovative ideas, especially if you work for the paper of record in an industry that is losing ground quick to the web in general.

After all this time, if the paper’s big idea is to continue to “listen” and they don’t have enough staff in place to assist the Social Media Editor in her duties at a company whose mission it is to inform, educate and report to the public, then the problems go much deeper than just a few navel gazing Social Media strategists’ comments (myself included.) The problem is that main stream media still doesn’t get where the trend is heading and how to steward the way through.

Note: When I originally posted this I regretfully neglected to attribute the source of inspiration for this article, @Thandelike Our conversation on Twitter after the initial Mashable piece inspired me to write this article and without her prodding and help I’d never have done it. Originally, I wrote this with @Thandelike suggestions, to be a New York Times, Op Ed piece. I submitted it but they never printed it, hence it appears here on my blog. Of course, while @Thandelike suggested and encouraged me to write this piece, I take absolute full responsibility for the content. @Thandelike is Anastasia M. Ashman. She lives in Istanbul, Turkey, a city I visited and loved, which is how I connected to her. She is Co-creator of expatriate literature collection Tales from the Expat Harem, coproducer of Near East’s 1st Global Nomad Salon and a Berkeley expat. You can read her blog, “Furthering the Worldwide Cultural Conversation.”

TechCrunch On The New New York Times?

On TechCrunch, Mike Arrington wrote an interesting article where he postulates the possibility of a “New” New York Times. You can read the article here.

In summary he asks what if the top reporters of the New York Times walked out and started their own venture with less overhead. After you read the article and some of the interesting commentary come back here for my response.

I don’t usually agree with Michael Arrington but I think he’s on to something there about the “New” New York Times that might work. Best part, reporters are well paid.

But I think that there doesn’t have to be total Armageddon for this to happen. The real New York Times can do this too, except I think they have a bunch of refinanced mortgages on that beautiful building in midtown. I expect that for the near future there will be some more turbulence but the NYT has been on the right track for a little while in my opinion. It just needs more slicing and dicing.

I like the idea of getting rid of delivery and printing of the weekday editions of the paper as it might help segue in to a more digital hybrid. Besides I only really read the Sunday paper anyway and even that I read maybe a quarter to a third if I even have the time. The Sunday edition is more comfort than substance for me nowadays.

No one I know or ever heard of reads the New York Times for the coverage of school boards and the like. I think it’s the cache of New York and the quality journalism and writing that is the essence of the paper and that can be retained when they give up paper altogether.

And seriously, they can make up a little of the advertising online when the NYT paper edition goes away b/c the options are becoming more limited for advertisers and they have to eventually accept that people are reading online and they’ll have to pay a little more for those eyeballs. More creative technology and advertising will be developed out of necessity; it’s only a matter of time because when papers go away there will be no other options for advertisers.

The rest of the NYT I read exclusively online and usually through two channels: Twitter links and my email notifications of headline and breaking news from the paper.

The New York Times can come to this Arrington-type of conclusion if and only if and when and only when they give up some of the legacy of being the Grey Lady and plunge fully into digital adoption. They can retain the power and fame of the brand AND their best and brightest reporters as well as their up and coming writers.

I see a New York Times enterprise 2.0 endeavor exclusive to reporters, editors, staff and interns that replaces the big buildings, meeting rooms and water coolers. Expenses cut. Staff and reputation saved.

Paring Down

By Lon S. Cohen

I’m starting to pare down the number of things I’m involved in. What does this have to do with Social Media? Everything. Just take a look at any of the life stream or control panel type of Social Media applications like Ping.fm or Friendfeed that let you either repost from or post to all of your other social media websites. There’s a million of them. OK more like a hundred, but you get the point.

There’s so many websites to get involved in and they all look so colorful and fun one ends up opening an account on too many and feeling guilty about ignoring them. Have I twittered lately? Am I feeding the Friendfeed beast? Am I commenting back? Did I select a list of songs? Updated my Wish lists? Write a review on Yelp?

Add in my three personal blogs and one blog for work among all my other duties managing the communications at work and I’ve just got too many distractions. (That doesn’t include my freelance writing.) In this economy, you need to be focused and with all the free toys out there on the web, I know that I get distracted. In reality, I’m only using Facebook, Twitter and maybe Friedfeed on a daily basis. I also want to make sure that my work is not taking away from my social life (the IRL one, I mean) and most importantly my family – especially my children. I used to be addicted to the laptop almost 24/7 either chatting, updating, blogging, writing, pitching, managing, consulting, and who knows what else! I’ve given out free advice, written long responses to associates who seek my expertise and then turn them all into a new blog post. I needed to come back to earth.

So I’ve made a conscious effort to pare down my social media, blogging and everything else to what’s really important. I haven’t made an official list (yet) but I do know in the back of my mind what I need to divert my full attention to:

1) Family most importantly my kids.
2) My full time job, which includes all related SM activities.
3) Freelance work that actually pays me money.
4) Looking for more paying work, either full-time or freelance.
5) Freelance that pays me in other ways like exposure and social capital.
6) Social Media including my Twitter obsession.
7) Personal blogging when inspired and when it doesn’t interfere with the above.

I am not advocating giving up the digital life in any way. I am probably becoming better at my digital life by not spreading myself so thin. I’m focusing on one or two endeavors at a time and letting some others that I started—and that only kept up out of some weird guilt for thinking about abandoning—die on the vine, at least for now.

I’ve given up my long form novel that I was researching, my extraneous blogs, my long comments and threaded conversations and most of all my free work. The economy is really bad and it’s looking like it’s not getting better very quickly or any time soon. It’ll be a long slog and to better prepare for what’s ahead, I need a tighter focus.

In good times, I tend to stray with side projects and pursuing endeavors that may or may not lead to a dead end. That’s OK. And I’m not saying in tough economic times, experimentation and innovation should stop either. I’m saying if I’m experimenting, I’d better damn well have a good plan beforehand and I’d better make sure there’s at least a faint light at the end of the tunnel instead of groping around in darkness.

What do you think? Do you have a priority list or have you decided to pare down recently? If so let me know about it.

Twitter Becomes Mainstream – Bad For Geeks, Good For The World?

By Lon S. Cohen

Hillary Clinton said she didn’t know a “Twitter from a tweeter, but apparently, it is very important” when the State Department asked Twitter to postpone a planned maintenance outage so they could stay online throughout the Iranian protesters could continue to tweet out their ire and plight to the world. It occurred to me when I heard this that something amazing happened: Twitter jumped over the proverbial jumping of the shark.

When @AplusK went on @oprah to explain Twitter to her everyone in the United States (plus some people abroad I assume) with a living room, a television and a reason to be sitting home on a weekday (which is apparently a little over 9% of eligible U.S. workers as of May, 2009) went to their laptops and opened an account. Twitter had reached mainstream. Some claimed that this was the end of their beloved mini blogging service. Others said that the fun was just starting. Judging by the ever increasing population of accounts opened and then immediately abandoned or the most obvious trailing indicator, by the number of porn spammers signing up, it seemed that Twitter had indeed jumped the shark – or was close to becoming too mainstream for the digiterati. But Twitter seems to have a life of its own and for a service of such simplicity, it’s really quite complex. Despite headlines that read “Twitter Close To Completely Useless” claiming that the old 80/20 rule (in this case 90/10 but who’s counting?) was something brand new and made the service a passing fad (consider that the entire internet probably conforms to the 80/20 rule and we might as well toss the whole system into the trash heap) Twitter actually was becoming more useful, more important. At least that’s what the U.S. Government thinks along with hundreds of Iranian protesters and the people who are following them.

The mainstreaming of Twitter, bringing it into the public eye in such a faddish fashion actually empowered the people of Iran to use the service to communicate to the world. While foreign journalists were quarantined and forbidden by the Iranian government from reporting on the growing violence, digital cameras, smart phones and Twitterers were broadcasting the revolution in the streets, reporting for themselves on the goings on and essentially bringing a light onto this event that might have been successfully closed off by Mr. Ahmadinejad. If we didn’t have Twitter and it wasn’t so much in the public eye then we might never have heard from the people on the streets of Tehran that they were unsatisfied with the way their country’s elections turned out, or that a large, vocal group of young people were willing to risk life and limb to make their voices heard. Twitter was there for them when a totalitarian regime tried to silence their voices. A hashtag (#iranelection) to follow the events was quickly adopted and millions of people now use Twitter as a primary source of information of this phenomenon halfway across the world.

In Brian Stelter’s New York Times article “In Coverage of Iran, Amateurs Take the Lead” Christiane Amanpour, CNN’s chief international correspondent and a native of Iran said, “You can’t keep any of this news down anymore, and that’s a huge change from the past. The process of getting the word out is totally democratized.”

While we’re at it let’s hold a mirror up to this event. Over the weekend when the Iranian elections declared Ahmadinejad the winner, people took to the streets immediately. CNN hadn’t begun covering the news. On Twitter, people began complaining about it using the hashtag #cnnfail. This most definitely got the attention of the reporters, producers and executives at the station and they quickly worked to rectify the situation. But the fact that they were trumped in news coverage by Twitter or at least the rumblings of how big this event was going to be came directly from Iranians Twittering says something about the quantification atomization of news today.

Even more important was the fact that people on Twitter were using the platform to protest to CNN that their coverage of the Iran protests was insufficient. People outside of Iran used this democratic process to get action from a mainstream media station about the protesters inside Iran using that same democratic process to get their story heard. Both sides were clamoring to be connected. People quickly realized that indeed they were connected and while following the links, tweets and videos that were coming out of Iran to piece together the full story may have been taxing even on the most plugged in user, at least a direct connection existed and it bypassed the traditional thoroughfare.

According to Stetler’s story a CNN correspondent said that even though they couldn’t independently verify the stuff coming out of Iran, “we feel it’s important that people see this, see and hear what is coming into us.” CNN even took to showing YouTube videos of “of the aftermath of an apparent raid at Tehran University” according to the Stetler. He added that the visas of many foreign journalists expire this week. “As they depart the country,” he wrote, “amateur video is expected to take on even more importance.

Why CNN? The station that cut its teeth in Tiananmen Square and became noticed during their coverage of events leading up to and during the first Iraqi war has been extremely active on Twitter even going toe-to-toe in a race to 1,000,000 followers with none other than @AplusK himself, though all in the name of charity – Ashton Kutcher promised to donate mosquito nets to people who needed them if he won. Even when CNN found out that a user was tweeting out links to their web items under their brand name on Twitter they didn’t flinch. What they did was offer the guy a job! That’s the kind of behavior I’d expect of CNN. In a recent #journchat on Twitter I commented that, “CNN was upstart news channel that proved itself with first Iraq conflict in early ’90s. Is Twitter the SM version?”

Remember when CNN was an upstart station? When they weren’t just an alternative to Fox News and cable news meant 24-hour news cycle. Yes, you can argue that the over analysis of the OJ Simpson trial and the Clinton/Lewinsky affair were low points in cable news but there is surely a need and a desire on the part of the public for a media channel to provide a constant flow of information from around the world.

Cable news was at its best with big breaking news stories, keeping us on the edge of our seats, feeding us every little detail no matter how small, not because it was important to the overall picture but because that’s what we wanted. In the case of Iran’s protesters, it’s probably more of a case of what we needed. We don’t need to know what @AplusK or @oprah thinks every moment of every day, but we do need to know that there are hundreds of young Iranians protesting an election in their own country, especially when their government tries to shut them up.

This is how the world will get its news from now on. Not through big cable news stories feeding live streams of commentary from professional reporters but in drips and drabs and 140-character sets, cell phone pictures and videos. At least that’s how it will start. We will be informed of the next event just like we got the first pictures from an iPhone photo uploaded to Twitter when a US Air flight ditched into the Hudson or when terrorists attacked in Mumbai or when Iran tried to silence its populace.

In the meantime mainstream media has some work to do. They’ve probably already figured that they need to keep their antennas tuned to services like Twitter and if they haven’t then shame on them because Twitter has proved its usefulness for signaling a breaking news story many times over. But what they really have to do is figure out how they are going to parse that information, verify it and use it in a newscast. I suggested in the same #journchat news outlets need “a front line SM fact check/reporter? Checking on Twitter stream leads. That’d be a good job for a new journo!”

So while geeks are grumbling that their Twitter has lost its exclusivity and being soiled by the unwashed masses, I have to say that this has probably been the greatest thing to happen to the service since it started. It has made Twitter not just more interesting, it’s made Twitter imperative.