Ian On The Red Dot

I had dinner with a good friend and her husband last night. The husband is one intelligent dude and talking to him was a joy.

Anyway, I made a comment about disputes needlessly dragging on and commenting that I didn’t understand why people seemed so intent to pursuing their personal agendas when the payoff at the end was almost non-existent.

He shared this quote from Henry Kissinger with me:

University politics are vicious precisely because the stakes are so small.

Substitute ‘university’ with ’social media’.

The truth is, everyone has some sort of agenda even those who profess not to or those who keep insisting that others have, possibly a malicious, one.

The useful question is to ask what sort of agenda the individual has.

Usually, when we say someone has a personal agenda, we assume (possibly erroneously) the end result of that agenda is one or both of these two results:

1. Make sure I gain something at the expense of someone else.

2. Make sure I don’t lose anything which will eventually benefit someone else.

The reason why people don’t compromise and try to resolve an issue is because subconsciously they think, or maybe know, that if the matter is not resolved, eventually, they don’t really lose anything.

So they rather not lose out relatively or try to gain relatively because the possible absolute loss is nothing while the possible nothingness of the absolute gain doesn’t factor in - just win the other guy can already.

The total triviality of the issue removes any sense of urgency.

Which brings me to the final point.

The way we who are involved in social media handle the conflicts within social media betray how trivial social media is even in our own minds albeit it is arguably a subconscious inclination to treat social media as trivial within ourselves.

We can all profess to say social media is this or that, equivalent to the first or second coming of Christ, a panacea for all problems, but as long as we treat conflicts with triviality and not resolve them the way the big boys do, then social media is nothing.

Saying it does not make it.

thanks: brian

Apparently, there is a storm over at Digg regarding its top member. ReadWriteWeb has an excellent post covering the event. More importantly, the post brings up a lot of good points about the social media scene, its nature, the somewhat inevitability of the kind of people it will attract and the dynamics of community on a ostensibly democratic site.

A lot of the stuff said is what I have always felt about social media. I just didn’t say it as eloquently as Marshall Kirkpatrick over at ReadWriteWeb. I’m going to highlight some parts which I find useful and end with a comment at the end about what social media online reveals about democracy.

There are a number of criticisms that Digg users levy against Andrew Sorcini. The primary one, which Vogt’s cartoon remix refers to, is that MrBabyMan submits duplicate stories that other Diggers have submitted, knowing that his superior prowess will eliminate any chance that the original submission will hit the front page.

The next criticism is that MrBabyMan uses an unfairly large network of friends and spam-like “shouts” to garner favors and give his submissions an artificial momentum that they don’t warrant on merit alone.

The dominant one is this. Andrew Sorcini’s MrBabyMan persona is sitting at the top of a small network of loyal friends, made up of people like SEO marketers, PR agents turned would-be social media experts and other unsavory folk. That circle is further surrounded by an even larger network of millions of Digg users who try to have fun on the site but also wish they could find success there. Many of them no doubt with they too could find a way to make a living in the snake-oil filled circus that is “new media marketing,” as many of the top Digg users have done.

MrBabyMan says he has added friends to help promote stories because that’s how the rules work, if he didn’t need to do that he wouldn’t.

“All I ever wanted,” he said, “was just for the stories to live or die on their own merits. If everyone was on a level playing field I would love that - because I still have the skills to find the great stories…I’m not complaining about the algorithm, but I don’t want to be vilified for working within the parameters of it.“

While mid-tier Diggers are far more likely to be engaging in pure pay-for-play, other people at various points in the hierarchy are building careers as “new media experts.” The experience that lands them the consulting contracts they live on? A demonstrated history of success in promoting stories on sites like Digg.

but to claim that top Digg users invest as much time and energy into the site as they do entirely “for the love of it” and “to share good stories with people” - with no economic incentive, short or long term, is a cynical joke.

He’s human, too, so sometimes he fudges a little. “The only promotion I do,” he said, “is Digging the stories my friends submit and keeping the chain of Digging going. That’s the same thing everyone does and that’s the system Digg has set up.”

We like to think that democracy is a system where every individual’s vote counts. I believe it is. But it isn’t just a system where everyone who has an idea or plan or opinion just puts it out there for everyone else to hear and then hopes everyone supports and vote for it. There is work that needs to be done behind the scenes. Part of the work behind the scenes is to build up a network of friends who are more likely to support you because of the nature of an existing friendship. We can feel that it is unfair. We can feel that it goes against the essence of fairplay that a group can dictate proceedings. While some members of the group will have their own selfish nefarious agenda of personal aggrandizement, I believe such groups are necessary because it allows people to find support for their ideas, plans or opinions. Sometimes, these people have terrible ideas, plans, opinions and the sadly, they gain momentum in the wider community because of the work and support of the inner-circle/elite/core group of whatever you want to call it.

The thing now is not to criticize these groups of power-brokers within a community. The question is this - if you feel you have an idea, or plan, or opinion, or whatever worth advancing, do you have the skills to bring it to the rest of the people. A core skill in a democracy is the ability to network.

The only criticism that can possibly be levied against such systems is when the existing power structure prevents a new group with better ideas, plans, opinions from advancing their cause.

Is that the case in online social media sites?

Daryl from Unique-Frequency asks why social media in Singapore is blooming slowly but not blossoming rapidly.

Is it really struggling?

Let’s stop and ask ourselves what is social media? That phrase has a definition that is nebulous at best and schizophrenic at worst. But lets try to use the great Google to help us. Using define:social media, we get this:

Web content such as blogs and wikis, created by individuals or a collaboration of individuals.

Social media describes the online technologies and practices that people use to share opinions, insights, experiences, and perspectives with each other.

Hmmm…so blogs are just one of the tools and bloggers just a subset of the individuals involved in creating social media.

It would seem to me that the problem is not that social media is struggling. It is there. It is happening. The problem I feel is that we (people who live/breathe the media2.0/web2.0 space) think it is all just happening on blogs (Daryl also touched on this point). It isn’t. Have companies made an effort to reach out to Singaporeans commenting on forums beyond just sticking ads on it? Are there companies creating tools to make it easier for forum owners to monetize their traffic? From the conversations with my colleagues, most of them participate more actively in forums then social networking sites and blogs.

The thing is, I suspect Techmeme, Techcrunch, Mashable and all the other similar sites we (the media2.0/web2.0 groupies) check out have done us great harm in skewing our perspectives of the online world in the context of Singapore. We see cool stuff happening there and think it SHOULD happen here.

The thing is, what’s happening in the US, UK or whatever other markets is interesting and we definitely can learn from them. But we got to be sensitive to what’s happening here. We can try to get everyone to come to our new club to party. Or we can see where the people are going to have fun and go there and be part of the fun if not make the fun there better.

Daryl asks if the problem is our small population. He also asked if the convenience of meeting people we know and the ubiquity and ease of other channels of communications like SMS hurts social media’s growth.

No. Well, maybe it hurts it in the form of blogs and reviews on a website or whatever Web2.0ish thing we can think up based on current tools. But it shouldn’t.

Why?

Because basically what the above happening shows is that people want to share. They share differently - not through blogs, not even online. So, how can we capture this sharing that is happening? In a way, it is social media, just in a different form or rather a form that hasn’t been able to be wrapped and place online and made more accessible. Take SMS - it is just SILOED in our individual phones. How can we make it easier for people who want to share this information offline. How do we track these conversations offline. How do we use what we have learned from Web2.0 and the current crop of online tools to make these offline communications better and pull it online and connect it with online conversations.

I don’t think there is a problem with the same bloggers going for events although I would be worried if the numbers don’t grow though. The thing above social media is that we got to recognize that the same people who create content online are also those who are more likely to share an opinion with a friend in the offline world. So, if the individual is interested, you would want him or her at the event even if they had been to a competitors. Sure, maybe since readership online overlaps, the company might want exclusive online coverage for a certain segment but while online readership might overlap, offline it probably might not.

I think what’s actually happening is companies are struggling to engage with these content creators and consumers (and it is actually a big ‘if’ that they even want to). More importantly, the problem is that Media2.0/Web2.0 evangelists who are trying to carve a niche for themselves to increase their own professional value, career prospects and industry reputation are finding hard to sell their wares here or get others to drink their Kool-Aid.

There is a difference between the above and social media struggling.