From Document to Application, My Social Bookmarking Experience

In the past few days, I was playing around with del.icio.us, a popular social bookmarking system. I would like to share some of my experiences and thoughts here.

Before having my del.icio.us account, I used bookmark quite often. It was a feature of my Internet Explorer called favorite. When I worked full time in advertising agency, I had the folders according to different client I served, which include the industry information or competitor PR/adverting news: Intel, GM, VW, Bank etc. Sometimes, I needed to backup them in a USB flash drive so I could take it with me. When I bought a new laptop, or changed the work place and computer, I could quickly install those folders and use them. It was really helpful and time saving, because it accumulated all my previous online searching history and kept them safe and well organized. This looks like I create for myself a drawer of personal documents so I can refer to them anytime in future.

However, using del.icio.us, the social bookmarking experience, changed my view of bookmark as documents. Now I think that it plays more powerful role in my information seeking, and functions like a dynamic, self-learning application rather than static document. It is an application, because I don’t need to backup it in my USB flash driver, it can be applied in any computer, in any system or search engine. All I have to do is log in to my account in del.icio.us on a computer with internet access. Second, tags make my internet experiences more social, and enable me to refer thousands of others’ experiences which make my information seeking task easier, more efficient and accurate. I really like using tags which provide a vast amount of user-generated annotations and reflect mine as well as other millions of users’ interests. The creating and sharing of these tags makes previously dead document (web address) in my favorite folder alive and growing. They become a social community including tags (the source indication), users, and information sources. Moreover, tags, as some sort of data, speak. They tell you the trends of the topics, the amount of users, and popularity.

How about other social media tools? Aren’t they shifting our life from the document era to the application age (traditional text webpage to imbedded social media features e.g., the video gadget at the right hand side of this blog)? From solitude to community (e.g., writing personal diary to reality life show on twitter and facebook)? From being influenced by media to exert influence through media (e.g., blogs, podcast make your idea public and powerful).

Drama, the Main Characteristics of Social Media

I found a quite interesting critique on social media on YouTube.

The social media reality show

According to the speaker, social media functions more like a reality show than a real communicating tool such as email, telephone etc. He stresses the dramatic feature of the posts on facebook by points out that it carries too much drama of people’s life or the presentation of their life.

Although I disagree with the speaker on the dichotomy of communication and entertainment (I believe that entertainment is one of the functions and manifestations of communication), I am in line with the him on that to seek/watch/comment on a drama is one main purpose of people who are using social media. And therefore, one of the important features of social media contents is dramatic.

Originally, drama is the specific mode of fiction performed in the theater. Some characteristics worth mentioning here: (1) performed by a few actors and watched by many times more audiences; (2) the situation or events acted out have dramatic progression, emotional impacts, strange or unusual features; (3) it is in essence entertaining for both actors and audiences. Social media shares many common grounds with drama.

First, Forrester’s North American Social Media Technographics Online Survey (as cited by Li & Bernoff, 2008) categorizes U.S. online adult population into six overlapping but featured groups: creators (i.e., people initiate online content), critics (i.e., people react to online content), collectors (e.g., people doing social bookmarking), joiners (e.g., blog followers, facebook joiners), spectators (i.e., people surfing online without react to the content), and inactives (i.e., nonparticipants). If we divided them more generally into actor and audiences, we can see that only 18% of them are actors (the percentage of creators) compare 72% audiences. What’s more, among nearly half of the population are spectators (48%)—the inactive audiences. The audiences predominate in the social media as well as in drama.

Second, the speaker gives an example of a tweet he chose randomly from his list: “it looks that I wet myself again, someday this house will be avoid a massive amount of dishes, I look forward to that day.” The speaker points out its dramatic element, “massive dirty dishes,” “getting wet through,” which are emotionally entertaining and dramatically unusual. We can imagine that the person post that tweet more for fun or joking rather than serious complaining, it is entertaining himself. Similarly, the speaker through reading the tweet is also entertained and even wants to know more.

A detail is quite interesting, as a “creator,” the speaker post his video on YouTube, and under the video, one of the comment from a “critics” writes “Looks like you need another frame for your second photo, there...” which has nothing to do with the speaker’s talking but joking about his photo frame on the background. Isn’t it another entertaining drama?

Symmetrical corporate-public relationship: use social media to invite public participating in nurturing a brand

Some argue that social media contents such as Blogs, user generated video, and podcasts are out of control, anything is possible online. “Unlike journalists, bloggers may sometimes mix fact and opinion, report rumors, and fail to disclose conflicts of interest. Few YouTube video uploaders check first with the subjects of their videos for permission and copyright violations are rife” (Li & Bernoff, 2008). These threaten the power of organizations and the brand. I think this perspective is based on an “asymmetrical model” of the relationship between the organization and the public. They treat organizational reputation, brand image and PR/Advertising message as something delivered to the public aimed at advancing the standing and the projects of the organization. In this case, any meanings, values, beliefs not “made by the organization” are out of control, potentially negative, unofficial etc.

However, given the current social media context, and the world trend of increasing interdependence among people, groups, organizations and countries, I believe that a “symmetrical model” of corporate-public relationship maintaining, brand developing and corporate image building are going to replace the asymmetrical one. A symmetrical model treats public as important as the organization—both sides are working together to achieving the mutual understanding and goals and sharing of common interest. From this perspective, public relations programs are those that try to make sure the targeted publics benefit as much as the programs’ sponsors or originators. Brand images and characters are created and agreed upon by both corporate and public which formulate a collaborative partnership. Therefore, social media becomes a strong tool of organizations to develop and promote themselves in public.

Instead of monitoring negative blogs, audios, and videos, the organizations can join those bloggers and uploaders to comment on their digital contents. The organization can also create their own social media sites. From here, social media gains transformation power to the faith of organizations—it helps the organization to communicate to the world, and, more importantly, it gets the feedback. Through this way, those blogs, audios and videos endow a lifeless brand or economic entity with vivid human characters—a soul. Moreover, other authors of blogs read and comment on organizations’ blogs. Both sides also cite each other, adding links to other blogs from their own posts. This interlinking creates relationships between the blogs and their authors and forms the blogosphere.

I would like to introduce my favorite case from Honda’s video sharing site,

which is embedded with many social media channels such as twitter, facebook, delicious, digg etc. For me it seems like a corporate video blogs, like Martin Lindstrom does on Advertising Age site. All the videos encourage commentary, and it is these commentaries that help Honda to develop itself.

I will look into more details about Honda’s site in future, but it is really worth watching it, and subscribing to it.

Reference:

Li, C., & Bernoff, J. (2008). Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies. Harvard Business School Press (ISBN: 978-1422125007)

Learning by Doing, Learning by Sharing

My first experience of blogging, which found an echo of my mind, is from the movie Julie and Julia.

Learning by Doing. In the story, Julie, turns to her 30s (me too), is at loose ends feeling nothing is sure (some sort unsure of my future facing the graduation in May) except when she is cooking: “you can come home and absolutely know that if you add egg yolks to chocolate and sugar and milk, it will get thick, it’s such a comfort.” (Also, what I am quite sure about is my interest in social media and advertising). In attempting to revitalize her marriage, restore her ambition, and save her soul, Julie decides to learn how to cook by cooking all 524 recipes in Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Volume I, in a period of 365 days (Learning by doing, that’s why I decided to learn social media by blogging. I also set a deadline, the period of the following 5 months before I go back to China).

Learning by Sharing. Another important purpose, and benefit, of Julie’s blogging is as she says: “people are reading it, I am sure.” Sharing gives Julie’s project the meaning and cures her uncertainty and frustration of the life. Sharing makes her feel that she is not alone, and such feeling motivates her during those low tide periods. Sharing brings readers’ ideas, critiques, supports, and advices. What's more important, sharing creates a forum for dialogues of those people sharing the common interests, characters, and beliefs. Instead of Julie’s strong proclamation: “I have thoughts, I can write a book,” I would argue that people have thoughts which inspire mine, and we together can make difference.

I think, these are the two major features of social media such as blogs. Doing means you really create the content by yourself, and you are the initiate author; sharing means you are never alone: you have readers out there and you are also the reader of their comments, and you, together with your readers, are creating something new.

In this blog: Social Media Ideas and Critiques, I will post my reflection of the readings and lectures in my social media and PR class base on my past work experiences and current social media cases. The topics may cover current popular events, advertising and PR campaigns, academic and professional research, communication theory, or the practices of public relations. It can be a brainstorming session for a non-profit organization PR program, a harsh critique of some misdeed using social media, a literature review and synthesis of relevant studies, and online print ad and TV commercial show. There will be two new postings each week with regular responses to the comments.

Julie ends her blogging project by saying that "back exactly where we started--just Eric and me, three cats and Buffy...sitting on a couch in the outer boroughs, eating, with Julia chortling alongside us...." I wish that in the end of mine, I can confidently say that “back exactly where I started—my computer, social media books and class notes…sitting in front of my desk, editing blogs, responding comments with some music from Niccolo Paganini, but with more friends known from the blogs, and full brilliant ideas can’t wait to be carried out, and excitement of bring my learning back to China, and more…”

Let's get started, Bon appétit!