Social media–a fad or the biggest shift since the Industrial Revolution?
“It’s the economy, stupid.” — James Carville, 1992
“It’s a people-driven economy, stupid.” — Erik Qualman, 2009
Oh, and this video? I found it via @laura_no_esta.
The National Football League (NFL), which makes more than $4 billion in television revenues annually, is having trouble dealing with social media. Already having reined in its members with rules about how soon before and after a game they can use services like Twitter, MySpace and Facebook, the NFL has now instituted social media guidelines for its fans.
While fans are welcome to post messages about teams and players, they are not to update any kind of play-by-play accounts of games or post extensive footage taken at games.
The reason? According to a statement NFL spokesman Brian McCarthy made to Forbes, “the NFL sells exclusive rights to television networks and radio stations to broadcast the games and posting text or video recaps of each play could undermine the league and its broadcasting partners’ efforts to make money airing the games.”
What happens if you don’t follow the rules? The NFL will get in touch with you and tell you to pull the content. If a user refuses, the league will consider filing a lawsuit. Frightening, isn’t it? The problem is that the NFL doesn’t have property rights over fans’ tweets.
According to Wendy Seltzer, a fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, fans have the same right guaranteed by the First Amendment to publish accounts of football games, even in play-by-play form, that any news organization.
“Imagine a national or global brand monitoring intense volumes of conversations in real-time (at trending topic speed), which usually averages about 4,000 plus updates per hour,” says Brian Solis in a piece for Social Media Today. “Now picture the NFL attempting to identify offending parties within the noise and in turn, singling them out for official review and potential enforcement. The NFL would essentially need to implement a social media police force, which is impractical and expensive, or it would require the use of turks to perform this process on game days, but still face the burden of justifying action.”
In terms of preventing the spread of video footage, the NFL and its teams could put a clause on the back of game tickets specifying fans are prohibited from using recording equipment in stadiums. It goes without saying that enforcing the rules would be difficult and because the league doesn’t have property rights over the recorded footage, the task of proving that the presence of the footage in social networking sites reduced the value of their broadcasts falls entirely on them.
Licensing is a real issue that many sports organizations are going to have to face as social media becomes more prominent among fans. It’s going to require a careful balance of protecting leagues’ own broadcasting revenue and finding a way to encourage fans to participate in the experience.
This ban is not the way, but it’s something. And in this world, that’s how we learn best: by trial and error.
(And for those of you wondering if I would be this calm about this if the FIFA went draconian on social media, yes, I’m glad soccer moves too fast for me to say anything other than some variation of OMGOMGGOOOOOOL!)
Remember the days we used Twitter to answer the question “What are you doing?” I still do on occasion, but over time, Twitter has become much more than that. Now it’s a conversation, a sounding board, a think tank, and a place to broadcast my work.
There is no question that Twitter is a powerful tool. And as with most powerful tools, over time we have figured out what works and what doesn’t. Over at Social Media Today, Sherry Main has drafted a Twitter style-guide to summarize some key things we’ve discovered about using Twitter most effectively:
I have a few more to add to this, and it’s about conversation. Twitter is a conversation, yes. But that doesn’t mean it should be used regularly as an instant messaging platform. If you feel some conversations fit your brand and the general discussion is useful to your followers, they should be had publicly. But if the subject matter isn’t a topic you think will benefit your users, the best option is to take it to direct message.
Messages like “LOL!” and “that’s interesting,” definitely fit into that category.
MORE
10 Basic Rules Of Twitter (And How To Avoid Being A Twanker) by Rohit Bhargava
Social Media isn’t going away, either get on the bus, or get left behind by MackCollier
Four-Step Plan for Getting Started in Social Media by David B. Thomas
Photo by Bryan Veloso.
As e-mail started to become more popular in the early 00s, I began to use it when a far more intrusive phone call was not necessary. But e-mail and other forms of online communication have become integrated into life. Today, these are officially intrusive and merit the same amount of consideration that we give to phone calls: is this worth calling about? Is it relevant to the person I’m calling? Might the person I’m calling be busy? Might they find this offensive?
Now, I run on notifications because if I have no room in my inbox, I have even less in my brain. I need to be told to check my social network profiles or I will forget all about them. This works well for me as most social networks are rather limited in the range of notifications they send out.
Except Facebook, of course. Oh, the great universe of Facebook. So many things to do to your friends, colleagues and acquaintances and so little time. This is my list of the top seven notifications that give me nosebleeds:
As Facebook becomes more like Twitter, the role of lists in managing friends is becoming more and more important. A brief reminder of how we know each other helps me know where to place you. But the introduction is more than just a practical thing: would you show up at my house, ring my doorbell and just stand there?
I might be amused by such a request if it happens to stumble in while I am on vacation and my inbox is totally devoid of any other messages. This has never happened, of course, and probably never will. Sending an invite to someone you hardly know and asking them to take a quiz or fight with your zombie or join your mafia gang or whatever in the middle of what could be a busy day is not only not fun, it’s annoying.
Facebook is all about expressing ourselves and our beliefs—I have no problem with that. But invitations to join causes should be considered carefully. Simply, don’t send your atheist friend an invite to bring prayer back to schools or invite the one colleague wearing a fur coat on your friends list to join the fight against animal cruelty. If your beliefs are worth possibly offending someone over, you might need to reconsider whether you should remain Facebook friends.
It’s 6:26AM and a fight has broken out on your wall among two friends of yours who don’t know one another, in response to a status message you posted the previous night about how much you disagree with, say, something the Obama Administration has done. When you wake up, there are 25 notifications announcing this exchange alone, with each response getting less and less civil as the discussion progresses.
I consider my Facebook profile an extension of my home. I don’t take kindly to friends screaming obscenities at one another in my parlor, nor will I entertain this kind of behavior on my wall or any other space on my profile. If you can’t keep your head on straight while arguing a point, you’re not only embarrassing yourself and disrespecting my other friend, you’re also embarrassing and disrespecting me.
Even if I had a PJ at my disposal, which I currently don’t, sadly, not least of all because I live in a country with a collapsing economy, giving someone no time to schedule is causing them undue stress—especially if it’s an event they wish to attend. Invitations to any event that require travel should be sent at least six weeks in advance. I perceive the amount of advance notice you give me to be in direct correlation to your desire to see me at the event. The more time you give me, the better I can plan to attend. The less time you give me, the more I feel like an afterthought.
I’ve been tagged in a note! I go look at it and find… it has nothing to do with me at all. If it has an explanation, it goes something like this: “While cleaning my closet, I found this old story I wrote when I was still in college in the pocket of an old coat!” Seriously? Please get a Tumblr so I can ignore your failed attempts at literature along with all my other friends’.
A friend has written on my wall—for the tenth time today! Look, I love that we’re connected, too, but wall posts are for occasional greetings and comments, not a substitute for IM. There is a reason I am never logged in to Facebook chat: I don’t have time.
I think the sooner we realize that everything we do on social networks has the potential to intrude or otherwise inconvenience someone, we’ll be better equipped to develop meaningful, and long-lasting connections with others.
What are some of the things that bug you on Facebook?
Add one part MySpace and one part American Idol to a martini shaker over ice and give it a powerful shake. Serve in a martini glass and garnish with a million dollars and world peace. This wild cocktail is called WorldSings.
Essentially, WorldSings is a new social media network that gives musicians a free venue and connects music lovers to new sounds the world over. Unlike MySpace and Imeem, however, the community being built at WorldSings comes with a significant perk: the potential for musicians to win 1,000,0000 dollars in prizes.
The web has done a lot to pulverize the geographic barriers between us and WorldSings is a good example. Their annual contest for the World’s Best Song is open to anyone in the world with talent and a good enough internet connection to upload a video. Members of the site then get to vote over the course of the year on the artists that they like best.
Like most everything else today, it started with reality TV.
“We were watching Eurovision,” co-founder Dragana Ognenovska told me laughing over the phone when we spoke yesterday. “Do you know Eurovision? It’s like American Idol.”
The Eurovision Song Contest, which has been broadcast since 1956, is an annual music contest held among member countries of the European Broadcasting Union. The premise is simple: every country selects a singer and song to be performed and then other countries vote for the songs, eventually selecting the most popular.
“It’s actually one of the most watched non-sporting events in the world,” Ognenovska told me. She’s right. According to the Museum of Broadcast Communications, the show is viewed by 600 million people.
“Me and my brother, we thought, wow, why don’t we do something like this for the world?”
That was only a year ago. Today, WorldSings is a social network blossoming with talent and the rush that comes every time a user discovers a new band or artist.
Anyone can join the site for free and begin browsing bands by country, keywords or genre immediately.
“For bands, it’s great, you get to upload your music for free, and we don’t take the rights to the music,” Ognenovska said. “And you can expand your fan base—we give musicians the statistical information so you know where your votes are coming from. Let’s say you’re Canadian and Canadians don’t love your music, but Brazil may love what you’re doing. You don’t know exactly who voted for you, but you get the demographic information such as age and country.”
WorldSings offers report-like stats on fans so bands know who’s digging their stuff. But being able to check in on your fans’ details isn’t really new in the world of social media, where everyone slaps that kind of information right on their profiles.
“There’s a climax,” Ognenovska told me when I asked how WorldSings is different from sites like MySpace and Imeem. “There, you put your music up, people check it out, but you’re not looking forward to something, whereas here you’re looking forward to a contest that’s happening every year. You can win 500,000 dollars or 10,000 as a finalist, so you’re working toward something, you’re not just adding friends and putting events up so people go to your shows.”
Another difference is that unlike most other musical competitions, WorldSings’ World’s Best Song fosters individuality among participants.
“WorldSings is not like American Idol in that we’re here for the musicians,” Ognenovska told me. “We’re not looking for people that just sing well or not. American Idol is a great concept, but you have to have your own music, your own style, to be a musician. It’s really hard—you may sing like Mariah Carey, but can you do that for yourself and be someone totally different? We’re looking for the trade musicians that put in the hard work, for the musicians that go out, spend their money, write their own songs, play and put everything together.”
Even with the lure of such a hefty sum, time and again, Ognenovska impressed upon me that WorldSings seeks to be more than a contest.
“We’re really trying to make a home, too. A home for people,” she told me. “It’s more than a place where you go make money. We want to bring people from all over the world under one roof. Music is a universal language, and we want too bring everyone in through that to promote peace.”
Music as a trojan horse for peace? Their vision of involves working with charities around the world and donating a part of their profits to varying important global causes.
“We plan on giving part of our proceeds to charities,” Ognenovska said. “We’ll do little fund-raising events where all the money will go to charities—all over the world, not just the US, in every continent. We still don’t have a clear-cut plan about how it’s going to be done, though we are working with several ideas right now. Once we have it figured out, we’re going to put that information on the site.”
When I asked her whether her interest in music originates from personal aspiration as a musician, Ognenovska confessed she plays no instruments.
“But I love music and I’ve traveled around the world and listened to all kinds of music,” she said. “I always wanted to do something with music, but I’m not really talented when it comes to being a musician so I had to get in on the back end of it.”
WorldSings is a wonderfully ambitious way to go about it.
Of Possible Interest:
WorldSings Official Contest Rules
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