2 Sep 2010

Supersize me - how much would it cost to upgrade all of your freemium services?

Freemium is a popular business model for web apps and online services. The idea is pretty simple (and a touch obvious): offer a great product that people want to use, and let them have it for free; charge a fee to the small proportion of the users who need it to do just a little more. A lot of web businesses are built on scale, and that makes freemium attractive. Imagine if Twitter or Facebook had charged to sign up when they were new start ups. Few people would have taken a punt on something as stupid sounding as Twitter (it did sound stupid, really it did, watch this if you don't believe me) and without  a user base, Twitter is nothing but a bit of software. Of course, Twitter is still free to use and isn't freemium at all but a lot of other web services and social media businesses need to build big user bases, and then persuade some of them to pay. Flickr is a great example of this: you can do a heck of a lot with a free Flickr account, and Flickr has lots of users as a result, some of whom pay twenty-five bucks per year to access premium features.

I'm actually a Flickr pro member, so every time you use Flickr for free say a little thanks to me for paying my dues and subsidising the storage of your holiday snaps. I don't hold any other premium accounts, but I do use a fair few freemium services. I'm not sure why, but I thought I'd add them all up. This proves nothing about anything, except for the fact that the amount I could spend without breaking a sweat is pretty big. I was especially surprised as I'm a fairly paired down and focussed user of things compared to many people I know (I don't sign up for everything that's passing my way).

Here's the break down:

Read the rest of this post »

27 Aug 2010

What's Next? #westwing Fan fiction on Twitter

A week or so ago I started following Josiah Bartlet on Twitter. Turned out he was already following me, as he likes to follow people who are tagging tweets #westwing. I don't get a lot of the references to contemporary American politics in his tweets, but there's the occasional reference to the show and a good attempt at some of the classical witticisms and bon mots of the "Former Fictional President, Nobel Prize Winner". 

But then I spotted something: Jed's talking to other West Wing characters, who in turn are having conversations with other characters. Josh & Donna (now Donna Moss-Lyman) are chatting about their kids and other domestic niceties, swapping baking tips with Leo's PA Margaret. CJ & Charlie are still engaged in an escalating battle of one-upmanship, which is currently focussed on their follower count. Meanwhile, Ron Butterfield, head of the POTUS security detail is obsessing about how to keep these Tweets secure (Ron's also a dab hand at hashtagging, probably those years of protocol).

Read the rest of this post »

27 Aug 2010

Do you strip or crunch? A lazy marketer's guide to social media campaigns

Imagine the following brief: 
Bourbon biscuits want to relaunch to attract new younger consumers; our demographic is dying out and young people are more into fudge brownies from Starbucks, we need to bring Bourbons into the 21st Century.
What's the betting that agencies will come back with the following campaign:

What we need to do is get young people talking about bourbons in social media, making them advocates for our brand. We can do this by creating a debate about bourbon biscuits. Everyone knows that there are two ways to eat a bourbon biscuit! You can strip off the top part of the sandwich, and then lick off the cream, leaving you with a gammy bit, or you can just crunch in! But which is best?

Our campaign plays on the two ways of eating bourbons and asks people to vote for their favourite on our Facebook page. They will talk about biscuits in the office and eat them. Nom. Chocolate win FTW! But it's not just young people! Old people use the Internet to is says in this graph [they'll have some powerpoint] and they can vote too plus tell their grandchildren about the first Bourbon they saw after the war. People can put photos on the wall of them having a bourbon with their Granny, and the best will win a prize

OK, I'm starting to get a bit silly, but the point is that "set up two opposing positions about our product to create conversations about our brand" is looking tired. Sorry, Polo, but there's a hole in your campaign.

Image, CC simonomis
26 Aug 2010

Chris is working for Facebook while he's asleep, try it now

Here's an interesting one for you. I got a message from Facebook today that said:

"Chris is chatting with Facebook friends using AIM, try it now"

Now I've mentioned that to Chris, and it's not something that he asked Facebook to send out for him; point of fact he doesn't use AIM for Facebook chat. So that's a bit weird then. It's also a bit clever of Facebook.


The more time I spend on Facebook, the better that is for Facebook - I might click on an advert or something, and clock up a few more pennies in their bank. I don't use chat at all, so that's a way they could get me to use the service more. If I were to use Chat, and use AIM to do it, I'm guessing that would be a way to hook messenger friends neatly into Facebook, connecting a few nodes of my social graph, shortening some things in Facebook's favour - they might get a few more members, some more page impressions, etc. 

Automatically sending out a message that links this activity to a Facebook friend provides some authenticity, and adds a certain cense of urgency and appropriateness to the task that Facebook want me to do - "Hey Chris is cool, right? He's doing this - we're not telling you to do it, Chris is!". That's a neat example of the way in which Facebook members are a form of labour, employed by the network, to help gain advantages for them. Chris is actually being used to generate capital for them. He gets a pay off - playing Farmville or whatever he does on there - but in doing so our connection can be exploited by Facebook.

The really clever thing is that they chose Chris as the front man for this. You see the strange thing is, Chris and I don't talk on Facebook. Could that be why he was used? Now I concur  that it may have been a random match, but think about it: I trust Chris enough to be friends with him on Facebook, but I don't talk to him much on Facebook, therefore, based purely on our Facebook activity, I'm unlikely to be able to validate that the message is genuine. That means that Chris is unlikely to know that his identity is being used within this exchange, and he'll sleep walk through the whole thing. That would sound pretty neat, particularly if you're a company that has a user base which is a bit twitchy about privacy right now.

But here's the problem. If Facebook's algorithms have matched Chris and me in the way outlined above then it's a gambit that shows a lack of regard for the other ways in which people connect. As far as Facebook is concerned, we're not very close, but in fact our connection is active in so many other fora e.g., Twitter, email, classes, tutorials. The world isn't polarised neatly, but I can see how when you're working in a corporate silo, or focussed purely on code and people, you might not be able to see that bigger picture.

As I say, it may have been a random pairing, but it's a useful thought experiment. If you've had any similar emails, do let me know in the comments.

Note - I did a quick check to see if it was a phishing email - all kosher
27 Jul 2010

Help Me Investigate: the social practices of investigative journalism

Last week I attended the 2010 conference of the International Association of Media & Communication Research where amongst other things I gave a paper, Help Me Investigate: the social practices of investigative journalism.

Taking all of your ideas and presenting them in less than 15 minutes is pretty hard going when you're used to having captive audiences in lecture rooms for up to an hour, so I was delighted that several people wanted to read the full paper and get some more detail from me. So here it is, my full paper.

Some folk I know will be a little put off by these 8,000+ words, so if you're not used to reading academic work, the best plan is to read the abstract, then the conclusion and then work your way through the detail. You can also catch a pithy version of one of the themes over at Interactive Cultures.  This is draft work at the moment. Following a pep talk from Paul Long (my BCU colleague - Reader in Cultural Studies at Birmingham School of Media) yesterday, I'll be honing this down for publication over the rest of the summer.

(download)

27 Jul 2010

Social capital: you're doing it wrong*

(img cc kelvin255)

*not really. I'm being provocative, but I do have some ideas about another way of using the concept when talking about the Internet.

I wrote a brief piece over at Interactive Cultures last week, which was a neat distillation of a lit review I've written about social capital and a key point from my paper, which I presented to IAMCR 2010. Here's the blog post and here's the inevitable Flickr photo of my IAMCR badge (I collect my name badges)

4 Jun 2010

Professional ethics and informal social media

Last year I spoke to a big room full of occupational therapists at their annual conference and I promised to do a follow up with a smaller group over at Therapy Learning. So today I took a day's annual leave from BCU, and went to Melton Mowbray (where the pies come from) to talk to a few occupational therapists and some physiotherapists about social media things.

The format of the day was for them to find out a bit about some tools they might like to use to help their professional practice. The most interesting stuff we did were chats about how thi sall fits into what they do. These are regulated professionals, so ethics is a big part of their job. While we were trying to unpick what a therapist should and shouldn't do in social media, we were looking at the activity of a few therapists who actively use social media in a professional context. What we discovered was that even when people have good intentions, they can slip. Here's an example tweet:

When hearing what I did for a living, my bank manager confessed to breaking down earlier this year. Reminded him he is one of 1 in 4...
That's over the line. Big time. In the flow of a conversation, and the heat of the moment, it may have seemed reasonable to the author. The bank manager isn't named at all, but really this isn't good enough. If you know the person, and who they bank with (maybe they've written you a cheque, or you all live in a small town with only one bank), you'd easily know who they're talking about. It's a breach of trust, and an ethical fail.

We tend to think about digital footprints as being all about us: don't put drunken photos on Facebook, don't give out your date of birth or your mother's maiden name. But what about the subjects of our blog posts and our tweets? Have you ever stepped over the line? Have I? I'm not so sure. I may well have done. If you have a duty of care to people, professionally, ethically, morally, take a breath and think before you post.
20 May 2010

Digital Communications & Social Media

This may be of interest to some of my contacts and students. It's a report on social media in PR and comms agencies, based on interviews with industry bods. I've only skim read it, so this is not an endorsement of the content or the methodology, but there seems to be some interesting points raised and if nothing else then, for me, it gives me an insight into how established industries are thinking about social media in terms of their existing business models

The report was written produced by Watson Helsby 

(download)

8 May 2010

Why do companies blog? - The non-snake oil answer

Why do companies blog? 

A common answer is: "to join the conversation". That's a pretty good answer, especially if you're in the business of helping them to have that conversation. But actually, that's the answer to the question "why should we have a company blog?".

Why do companies blog?

A lot of companies have never been to a conversation agency, or spoken to a social media guru, and yet they have a company blog of sorts. It's easy at this point to get tied up in semantics, and start saying "well it uses a blogging platform, but that's not blogging" or "that's just a HTML page with some links to press releases"; let's assume for the moment that "blogging" is a neutral term, a broad church taking in all denominations of "web log".

Businesses are hard wired to keep websites up to date

The web design industry has, by and large, programmed clients to keep websites up to date; the "latest news" section has been at the heart of every website proposal since people started selling websites. "Your website needs to look fresh and up to date" is a mantra that designers have pedalled, that managers have taken up, that students are taught, that books espouse. Keeping the website up to date is an accepted part of what you do when you have a corporate website; that it should be done is not questioned. This is, in the purest sense, an ideological condition: there is an idea - that websites must be up to date - that is hidden as a truth. It would be disingenuous if we thought this ideology of updates didn't stem form designers locking in further work from clients, but we should also consider that company website owners brought this upon themselves through giddy excitement at the idea of a "brochure" that you can update ad infinitum. 

The need for "latest news" must surely have been entrenched by the work of the nascent SEO industry in the late 1990s and early 2000s who would suggest to you that pages need to be updated regularly if they were to get to the totemic top of Google's results pages (top spot results for any vague term being the one thing that would get any middle manager in charge of a web project frothing at the mouth). So pretty much from day one, a lot of company websites had a page that was regularly (or not so regularly) updated with company "news". The more adventurous companies might also have posted interesting and insightful commentary on things, based on their specialist knowledge - much more engaging than another press release about winning a big contract, and certain, they would think, to deliver the other big ideas of late 90s web marketing "stickiness" and "community".

UK PLC - Blogging since 1997...

...and before then really, I guess. But look, I started building websites in 1997, and they all had news sections in them. If you read Scott Rosenberg's Say Everything (don't, it's pretty rubbish) what I was doing on corporate websites was the same thing that fêted blogging pioneers were doing in a personal context: hand coding a HTML index of latest items, maintained in chronological order. Overtime personal blogging was made easier by the creation of content management systems, and the same is true for corporate websites (I note here, that the first CMS I ever had developed was just for the "latest news" section). This trajectory continues until, for many smaller businesses, it's easier and cheaper to set up a "blog" (that is, an install of a blogging platform like WordPress) than it is to set up any other type of website. So now we have a lot of companies with easily updated websites who believe that websites need to be regularly updated

Why do companies blog?

Companies "blog" because they can: they have the facility built into their website. Companies "blog" because that is what they do: you must keep the website up to date. Companies have "blogged" since longer than most bloggers, and never even knew they were doing it. They often don't stop to ask if they should because the idea is entrenched in the very notion of the company website. Perhaps they do need to rethink their blogging, and they should certainly question the orthodoxy of the "latest news" page, but we should also - academics, bloggers - not try to retrofit our ideas of what blogging is or isn't, when it did or didn't come about, onto corporate bloggers. We shouldn't try to explain all company blogs as responses to social media cultures; some corporate blogs are a social media strategy, the rest are just "latest news".
31 Mar 2010

Digital Birmingham Web 2.0 for Business Seminar

This morning I spoke at a Web 2.0 for business seminar at Digital Birmingham, as part of the digital champion project
Below are my slides from this morning's Digital Birmingham seminar. 

(there are notes on some of the slides, so you may want to head over to slideshare to see with some more info)

Further reading: 
Next

Jon Hickman's Posterous



Hi, I'm Jon. I teach and research digital culture, social media and new media practice at Birmingham City University.

Find out more about me with this lovely CV:
http://uk.linkedin.com/in/jonhickman

Find out about my work at the Birmingham Centre for Media & Cultural Research:
http://interactivecultures.org

My Work

Me elsewhere

Clever folk I know

Search

Listing socialmedia

Obox Design