It’s Internet Week in New York (#iwNY), which means everyone’s busy discussing web culture, media consumption and media creation. Here’s a 30 minute video of a discussion between the mircrocelebrity Julia Allison and champion of the overshare Jeff Jarvis that makes points I’m probably going to be brewing on for the next few weeks — if not more.
I remember the first time I ran for office. I was in junior high and I wanted to be vice president of the student council (Why vice and not outright president? Because while I will lead if I have to, I am a much happier right-hand woman to someone who shares my vision). That campaign highlighted the importance of being conservative with how often you ask people to support you.
THE BALLOON BOY INCIDENT
On October 15, 2009, news broke that six-year-old Falcon Heene had floated away in a balloon made by his father in Fort Collins, Colorado. The media and public were stirred into a panicked frenzy only to discover, when the balloon landed near Denver International Airport hours later, that there was no one aboard. A search for the body of the child found nothing. Heene was eventually reported to have been found hiding in a cardboard box over the garage of his family’s home. There is a criminal investigation of the Heenes underway and now many believe that the entire thing was staged to draw attention to the family’s aspirations for fame.
I don’t know what really happened in the Heene household, nor do I have any clever quips about what it all means about the state of modern society. What I do know is that the Heenes asked for our attention and support and broke our trust in them. We will never believe them again. It’s the 21st century boy who cried wolf.
THE EFFECTIVE CALL-TO-ACTION
In early January of 2009, David Armano asked the readers of his popular blog Logic+Emotion to help his family help a friend of theirs whose life had put her in a difficult position. He knew it’s not easy to ask people for donations and that that the crumbling economy made it less likely that people would contribute. His post was short and got right to the point:
I’ve been at this blog for nearly 3 years now and have never asked for something like this—I hope I’ve earned enough trust to be able to ask something back from you. Above is a picture of Daniela and her family. Brandon, age 6, Daniela, age 9 and little Evelyn age 4. Daniela is divorcing her spouse after years of abuse. In recent years her mortgage went unpaid and she’s lost her house.
As of this moment, Daniela’s family is staying at our house and we are trying to help her find a one bedroom apartment for her family to live in. With Evelyn, her youngest having Down’s Syndrome and Daniela herself being a Romanian immigrant with very little family support she literally has no one to turn to. Except us (all of us).
Daniela cleans houses when she can leave her family. I’m not even going to tell you what she gets paid—it’s obscene. Right now her options are pretty limited, aside from an apartment, there is only a group shelter. Not very pretty.
Here’s what we are asking. Right now, Belinda and I are opening our home, but it’s tight as we have no basement. We’ve committed to giving as much as we can spare, diverting funds from other places. I’m asking if you could think about doing the same. Or at the very least, helping get the word out about this. We are looking to raise 5k for Daniela and her family. Enough so that she doesn’t have to worry about a deposit or rent for a while.
I know this is the worst possible time to ask for anything…. I don’t have anything to offer back. Not an ego list or top donators directory. I can only hope that this thing we call “community” puts its money or heart where its mouth is. Please do whatever you can.
Respectfully, David and family
What happened? Donations poured in to a startling total of $16,880. David Griner summarized the forces that seemed to be at work in this unprecedented show of support. The first one is the most important, and the backbone of this post: rarity.
Armano has built himself a reputation as a brilliant commentator on business and the social web. His content is valuable to us–we tune in because we trust his judgment and insight. Secondly, he provides this information (quite often in beautifully minimalistic infographics) at no cost to us and gives us feedback on our own ideas, whether in his blog, comments section, Twitter, or Facebook. So when he asked his Twitter followers and readers to do something for him, we did it. At the time my now ex-husband was in a panic, we were liquidating all of our assets, and awaiting a financial Apocalypse that was hurtling toward us at light speed. I knew he’d have more than a word with me about throwing money at people I didn’t even know. But I didn’t hesitate.
And neither did 544 other people.
THE TRUST FUND
Every once in a while, we do need the support of our network. Maybe we need a ride to a conference in a nearby town. Maybe we’re launching a new product and we want to get buzz going. Maybe we want to see if anyone wants to buy a laptop bag we impulse bought that turned out to be too small or too big for our needs. It’s not as urgent, but the same rules apply–if your network feels your content has value, if they feel you have given them something, they’re going to do what they can to help.
My friend Damien Basile calls it The Trust Fund: “When you invest time and energy into someone you form a relationship. When this happens you create a ‘Trust Fund’ where both you and the other person either add or subtract trust from this mutual fund you have set up.” Asking for help requires trust. Do you have enough in your trust fund to make that request?
Not a single one of us is faultless, but how many of us know one person who just, oh, takes the cake Heene-style? How likely are you to stretch a helping hand the next time you see one of their tweets asking for support? Exactly.
VOTE FOR ME!
So there I was, standing in front of the school, about to give a speech about why they should vote for me. A closet introvert (surprised? Good, that means I’m doing something right), I didn’t want to address them myself, so I’d made a horse paperbag puppet. My promises were simple–we’d be able to order lunch from more franchises, I’d address the ridiculous little song we were made to sing at assembly about having a positive attitude with the principal, and so on. I’m convinced they voted for me because I was the girl who invited her whole class to her birthday parties and because I’d never asked for anything from anyone until that moment.
I won by a landslide.
So here is my point: before you consider what you’re asking, think about what you’re giving. Your space online is yours to do what you will, but be consistent in your offerings. People who read what you put out there come back time and time again because they know what they can expect from you. Yes, even if 50 percent of your tweets are conversation tidbits without much context. Be gentle in your metamorphosis–remember it’s not just you in that bus.
Engage. David Armano didn’t just put out content for three years before he asked us to help him out. He put out content and he interacted with his readers across multiple platforms. He, like most power-users of social media, know that the blog post or tweet is not a closing argument but a springboard for discussion. This is a big part of the Trust Fund. Your readers take you seriously–do you show them that you take their feed back seriously?
If you say you’re going to do something, follow through. I know this is hard, God knows I’ve dropped the ball with as much aplomb as I’ve followed through. Learn to avoid failing to follow through (or worse, having a nervous breakdown because you’re so much of everything to everyone that you’re nothing to yourself) by being selective in your commitments. Saying no is not rude, just be transparent about your limitations. And at the very least, be fast to notify people when things aren’t going to turn out as you’d promised. Time is scarce, but consideration doesn’t cost a whole lot. Take those two minutes, even if it means shooting a short text in the middle of a stressful call with a client.
EPILOGUE
Having said all this, thank you all for voting for me for the 140 Conference NOW Awards and Mashable Open Web Awards. Your submitting a vote says to me that you value my content and I am both humbled and honored by your gesture of appreciation. But you will not see me ask you to vote for me so lightly anymore.
One day, I may call upon you, my dear friends. And that day, without a doubt, you will know that what I’m asking means a lot to me. But just to make sure that you know, I promise to take the time to explain to you exactly why I need your support.
Now I ask all of you to think of your trust funds the next time you’re about to pelt your friends and readers with “vote for me” DMs. And if you absolutely must call upon me, avoid the form-letter feel of such a message and opt for e-mail. You don’t need a horse puppet and definitely not a UFO-shaped balloon, just a simple message that lets me know why this means so much.
New influencers like bloggers and web personalities are the new must-have for brands looking to strengthen their products in the marketplace. Word-of-mouth has come to the fore as one of the most successful ways to reach an audience, and companies are responding. This has led to the creation of a plugged-in, hyper-engaged breed of spokesperson who regularly plug products in multiple forms online media–blogs, videos, social networks, micro-blogs, etc. For their efforts, these spokespeople are compensated–economically, with products, or other opportunities.
This, perhaps, is the biggest difference between bloggers and journalists. A journalist cannot be rewarded in any way for his or her coverage, while many on the forefront of web 2.0 have worked to delineate best practices for web personalities who receive compensation (direct or indirect) for their product placement, these guidelines have not reached a consensus. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is moving to change this. Their new guidelines dictate that web personalities pitching these products are to be made liable if their claims or other content misrepresent the product or company they’re pitching.
Brian Solis, principal of FutureWorks, the award-winning PR and new media agency in Silicon Valley, wrote about the FTC’s vision for bloggers and web personalities at TechCrunch:
In a discussion with Mary Engle, the acting deputy director for the Bureau of Consumer Protection, she articulated to me, “It’s not about preventing citizen journalists from becoming citizen advertisers, that’s just not true. We’re acting to ensure that bloggers don’t create a bias in the consumer decision-making process. Consumers just need to know that what they’re reading is technically an advertisement.”
Whether the post is compensated with cash or with free product or rewards, the FTC views them equally. Engle observed, “The real test is whether or not the consumer’s impression or decision would change if they knew the post was sponsored.”
The FTC Guides advise that an advertisement employing a consumer endorsement on a central or key attribute of a product will be interpreted as representing that the endorser’s experience is representative of what consumers will generally achieve.
It’s about responsibility and credibility.
Solis believe that compensating bloggers and influencers directly or indirectly can’t but cloud their ability to be unbiased about the products they’re discussing, thereby risking their credibility and the trust of their audience.
I don’t necessarily agree. As I wrote in The Balance between Money and Credibility, I think it’s possible to endorse the brands that you believe in and maintain credibility and trust by being upfront and disclosing your relationships.
In that regard, Solis brings up important rebuttals:
If we examine Forrester’s case for sponsored conversations, we’re essentially fueling word of mouth by paying for social or topical authorities to share their views about our company or product brand in their domain. This is important. We’re talking about paying people to write about a company or product on their existing, personally-branded content platform associated with it’s already existing, captive audience. This theoretically sparks Webwide buzz that connects a brand to the community of would be customers who rely upon these personalities and voices in the both the blogosphere and statusphere to make informed decisions.
Seems simple enough, except two things are going to prevent this from effectively promoting the sponsoring brand over time — 1) disclosures read like warning signs; 2) Google is downgrading any blog or site that actively publishes paid content.
The matter of disclosures as warning signs is not unfounded. It is up to every blogger and influencer to word their disclosures so these are fair, but the association with a brand can serve to make them experts in terms of this brand’s products, which can be useful for consumers when seeking specific information. It is a blogger’s and influencer’s responsibility to be informed about the products they support. For a company, it is important to reach out to bloggers and influencers whose personal brands reflect the product they’re trying to place (and this ties in to an earlier post I wrote Pitching to Bloggers the Right Way.
Personally, I think the FTC guidelines will enable consumers to feel more secure about the reliability of the content they encounter and it will also help bloggers and influencers undertake paid conversations in a much more clear-cut manner that enables them to preserve their credibility and the trust that they have created with their respective audiences.
For those interested in the subject matter, Social Media Today will be hosting an Ethics of Blogging webinar on Thursday, September 24 at 10:00AM PT, which will discuss: transparency; web content as a marketing tool; online privacy; and compliance and legal obligations. For more information, visit their site.
My Twitter stream and inbox caught on fire this afternoon following a post by Dave McClure, a software developer and marketing nerd in Silicon Valley, regarding the importance of visual cues in calls to action (CTAs).
McClure, who begins the post with a disclaimer that he has no professional training in user interface (UI) design, but goes on to say he has 25 years of experience, illustrated his point about visual cues by employing the rear of a woman shown bent over. In his post, The Faces! The FACES! It’s ALL About the F**king FACES!, McClure writes:
If there’s one thing i’ve learned from all that geeking around, it’s that UI typically works best when it’s butt-simple. As a famous PayPal colleague of mine once stated succinctly: “Users are Stupid… give them something to click on.” Wise words. You’ll do well not to forget them, Young Jedi.
However it’s not always enough to simply give people underlined text links to click on… rather, it’s important to have strong associated visual cues that encourage users to take action. Sometimes that can be as simple as just creating a beveled, slightly rounded, 3D-looking button with a color offset and some text that identifies a Call-To-Action (CTA).
Many people have become trained thru years of working with operating systems to click on things that look like buttons. particularly BIG buttons. particularly BIG buttons with pictures or icons. they are almost irresistible. Go on. Click it! you know you want to!
But — and i do mean butt — even big buttons with big graphics aren’t always going to capture user attention. What has gradually happened over the past 10 years is that online consumer interfaces have started to zero in on basic human behaviors, recognition systems, and patterns. many of those offline interactions start with the simplest of human interactions — looking at someone’s face.
In fact, you could argue that much of the online experience these days is less about reading text, and a lot more about looking at faces, icons, and other visual representations of people.
The post makes good points, but the image employed, while it got him a lot of hits, took the attention away from the ideas McClure is trying to convey.
“I’m drawn to the button,” says Sean Percival, Director of Content at Tsavo Media. “I wouldn’t click it though–it looks too spammy to me. The colors and rounded edges are horrible–the pastel pink dates it extremely. It just doesn’t tell me enough about what I’m clicking.”
Visual cues are important. We click on hundreds of buttons on sites regularly, buttons that employ a single letter, or none at all. We know what symbol represents RSS, that Twitter is the blue t on the aqua background, that Facebook is the white f on the blue background–our minds have made those associations.
Just as they have made the association of scantily-clad human bodies with the likelihood of pop-ups, spam or porn.
McClure is making good points, but he’s undermining himself as an expert by presenting graphic elements that don’t resonate with the message–which is the importance of visual cues in UI design and the forward-looking applications embracing it.
I bring up the inconsistency with my good friend Atherton Bartelby, a graphic designer and associate at DMD Network, a firm specializing in integrated marketing.
“I think there’s a vast distinction between UI and this kind of shoddy attempt to get traffic,” he tells me. “This is not making a point with ‘design,’ this is visually pandering to the lowest common denominator of visitor that any site could possibly imagine. It’s offensive it was even brought into the context of design and UI! ‘Strong associated visual cues’ does not mean shoving an ass in someone’s face.”
Bartelby is not wrong to describe this as an attempt to get traffic. In the comments, a regular reader responds to an objector by saying: “This post is a very Dave tactic. Trying to shock to get attention for a (great) point he is making.”
We all want to be read–that’s how ideas spread–and an outrage gets views like nothing else. But how far can you go without destroying your credibility?
The internet was on fire on Sunday after Maureen Dowd, New York Times op-ed columnist, admitted she had plagiarized the work of Talking Points Memo blogger, Josh Marshall. The Huffington Post published an e-mail where Dowd admitted her error:
josh is right. I didn’t read his blog last week, and didn’t have any idea he had made that point until you informed me just now.
i was talking to a friend of mine Friday about what I was writing who suggested I make this point, expressing it in a cogent — and I assumed spontaneous — way and I wanted to weave the idea into my column. but, clearly, my friend must have read josh marshall without mentioning that to me.
we’re fixing it on the web, to give josh credit, and will include a note, as well as a formal correction tomorrow.
Unless this was an IM discussion, it’s questionable how the 43-word paragraph made it nearly verbatim into Dowd’s column, but enough crucifying of Maureen Dowd has occurred across the blogosphere, so I’m going to pass on that aspect of the discussion. What I see here is not just a case of plagiarism, but a perfectly illustrative situation of the general disrespect of mainstream media for the blogosphere.
Much has been said about the importance of mainstream media: they have the fact-checkers, resources, and the investigative teams and they are the only ones who can do the kind of unearthing that enables us to live as an informed society. Bloggers, on the other hand, are the exploiters, the ones who take the hard work of journalists everywhere and turn it into cheap (or, in most cases, free) photocopies. Shame on those bloggers, shame, shame, shame.
Except that’s not really the case. Increasingly, the exploitation is happening on the side of the mainstream media.
In February, a friend of mine, Brooks Bayne, wrote a blog post about the suspiciously massive increase in followers for select Twitter users. Evan Williams, CEO of Twitter left him a comment explaining it was a possible effect of the Suggested Users feature that Twitter had recently implemented.
A couple of days later, The LA Times’ Mark Milian picked up the story and featured William’s comment. While Milian’s piece links the original blog post, no credit is given to Bayne. Milian simply credits the comment as having appeared on “another blog post.”
I contacted Jay Rosen, professor of journalism at New York University and a champion of the blogosphere’s role in journalism, about the issue. He responded via e-mail, saying: “It happens all the time. It sucks.”
Rosen told me there was no standard for citing the information or ideas that journalists fid in blogs or new media.
“There should be,” he said.
He linked me to Can I Get A Link Please?, a site devoted to getting bloggers linked back by the mainstream publications that use their content, information, and ideas.
The blog lists a study by Brodeur released last year which reveals that over three quarters of the journalists surveyed use blogs to get story ideas, insight and angles. A piece at Taking The Blogosphere Seriously summarized the results as follows:
Nearly 70% of all reporters check a blog list on a regular basis. Over one in five (20.9%) reporters said they spend over an hour per day reading blogs. And a total of nearly three in five (57.1%) reporters said they read blogs at least two to three times a week… About half of reporters (47.5%) say they are “lurkers” – reading blogs but rarely commenting.
The majority of journalists thought blogs were having a significant impact on news reporting in all areas tested EXCEPT in the area of news quality. The biggest impact has been in speed and availability of news. Over half said that blogs were having a significant impact on the “tone” (61.8%) and “editorial direction” (51.1%) of news reporting.
Can I Get A Link Please? also features a clip from a panel at the Carnegie Counsel’s Ethics Studio featuring Rosen, in which he illustrates the importance of the link, not only in terms of attribution, but in terms of using the web as it was made to be used—to connect information.
The link—which is the idea that “you’re interested in this, but did you know about that?” Or “here is what I’m saying, but you should you see what they’re saying.” Or “you’re here but you know there is also this over there,”—is actually building out the potential of the web to link people, which is what Timothy Berners-Lee put into it in the first place. So when we link, we are expressing the ethic of the web, which is connecting people and knowledge.
… When we talk about this stereotypical conflict between the bloggers and the mainstream media—by the way, Michael, the only people who worry about whether bloggers are going to replace the news media are people who work in the news media. Nobody else talks about that.
But when we think about it, think about the news industry’s reaction to the rise of the web. When the major news sites built their first pages, which was about 1996, they decided to re-purpose their content from the print platform and put it it online, which certainly makes sense. You paid all the costs already for all the articles and features that you produced for The Washington Post newspaper, now you have this new way to distribute them, put them onoine, you get new audience, new readers… In re-purposing their content on the web, which is a rational thing, they made up some rules from themselves. One of the rules was: you don’t send people away from your domain. That is, you don’t link out from the Washington Post to the rest of the web. Because you’re the Washinton Post! You have everything… why would we send you anywhere else?
So when they decided to give birth to their first websites, their sites were actually anti-web because they didn’t understand the ethic of the link. And they didn’t accept the ethic of the link. And it’s taken them a long time to learn the ethic of the link because the Washington Post is willing to share their knowledge with you but the whole idea of connecting people to knowledge wherever it is, which is the ethic of the web, has taken them a while to understand. And so the bloggers were the people who came along and who developed the web first as a tool for informing people, because they didn’t have these rules. And they used it for what it was for.
As more publications, as more journalists get on the web with their own blogs, I hope that the practice of the link and proper attribution of bloggers improves dramatically. After all, it is an abrogation of a journalist’s responsibility to not do their due diligence in citing and crediting their sources appropriately, whether they deign take the blogosphere seriously or not.
In closing I offer another paragraph from Jay Rosen’s talk at the Carnegie Ethics Studio:
As a blogger what I try to do is do everything well, all the time and give you way more than you asked for every single time you come to my blog. More knowledge than you thought, more links than you bargained for, more nuance, more depth, more education than you imagined when you clicked that link.
Absolutely.
Of possible interest:
The Myth of the Parasitical Blogger at Salon.com by Glenn Greenwald echoes the sentiments I express in this piece, and notes a similar example of the mainstream media picking up story ideas from a blogger—in this case, his piece, which inspired an article in the Economist.
Maureen Dowd Gets a Pass, But in Journalism, Plagiarism Still Matters by BlogHer’s Kim Pearson offers the reaction to Dowd’s actions from the media as well as a list of past plagiarism scandals.
Id Maureen Dowd Guilty of Plagiarism? at TIME.com
Maureen Dowd Admits Inadvertently Lifting Line From TPM’s Josh Marshall at The Huffington Post
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