Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Tag: social media

  • Who will build the next Barnes and Noble?

    Who will build the next Barnes and Noble?

    As US bookseller Barnes and Noble shrinks its store network, Mark Athitakis has a tribute to the once ubiquitous chain in The New Republic.

    Barnes and Noble was never popular among US independent booksellers because of the perception, probably true, that the chain drove locally owned stores out of business.

    What it offered though was a safe, comfortable place for booklovers to gather in suburban shopping malls. As Mark points out, it created a community.

    Its stores were designed to keep people parked for a while, for children’s story time, for coffee klatches, for sitting around and browsing. That was a business decision—more time spent in the store, more money spent when you left it—but it had a cultural effect. It brought literary culture to pockets of the country that lacked them.

    In recent years that community moved to coffee shops, in the United States B&N’s role was taken by Starbucks, at the same time our reading habits changed and the business of selling books and magazines became tougher.

    Now that community is changing again, as the online societies like blogs, Facebook and Twitter become important, the coffee shops have responded with free wi-fi which is a perfect example of how the online and offline world come together.

    That need to create communities, either physically or online, is a driving human urge.

    Online that role is being catered to with social media platforms and sites like food, mommy or tech blogs where like minded people can gather.

    Down at the mall, Barnes and Noble catered for that need in the 1980s and Starbucks in the 1990s. What will follow them may be the next big success in the retail or hospitality industry.

    Image courtesy of Brenda76 on SXC

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  • Tracking the knowledge graph

    Tracking the knowledge graph

    “Married Men Who Like Prostitutes” is juicy search term and the results can wreck marriages, careers and lives.

    This is one of the Facebook Graph searches UK tech commentator Tom Scott posted on his Actual Searches on Facebook Tumblr site which lists, mercifully anonymised, the results.

    What should worry anybody who uses Facebook is that this data has been in the system all along, advertisers for instance have been able to target their marketing based on exactly this information, Graph Search just makes it quicker and easier to access. This is why you should be careful of what you like and who you friend online.

    Tom Scott has a terrific Ignite London presentation which looks at just how vulnerable an individual is by over sharing online. In I know what you did five minutes ago, Tom finds an individual, discovers his mother’s maiden name and phone number all within two minutes.

    Facebook isn’t the only service we should be careful of, it just happens to be the one we overshare data with the most. When you start stitching together social media services with government and corporate databases then a pretty comprehensive picture can be made of a person’s likes and preferences.

    The best we can hope for in such a society is that picture is accurate, fair and doesn’t cast us in too unfavourable a light.

    In same cases though that data can be dangerous, if not fatal.

    As potential employers, spouses and the media can easily access this information, it might be worthwhile unliking obnoxious, racist and downright stupid stuff. There’s a very good chance you’ll be asked about them.

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  • Digital hunter gathering

    Digital hunter gathering

    It has come to this – we’ve had the digital natives, the digital immigrants and now we have the digital hunter-gatherers.

    This is the logical end of the ‘sharing economy’ philosophy which sees retweets, mentions and Facebook likes a hard asset.

    Unfortunately having 100,000 Facebook friends giving the thumbs up to your latest retweet of an article of dubious value doesn’t translate into income – most of the digital curators find themselves living a hunter-gatherer lifestyle.

    Life as a hunter gatherer is not pretty or easy – it’s short and brutal. The only certainty as a hunter gatherer is if you don’t find something to eat today, you will starve tomorrow.

    In some ways, it’s fair to say the modern social media expert is not dissimilar to the prehistoric hunter gatherers in that their days are numbered and starvation is a near certainty.

    One conceit of modern times is that life was so much better in the pre-industrial era; that before the industrial revolution people worked less and primitive man lived a noble life unshackled by possessions.

    That’s all nonsense. Mankind shifted to an agricultural and then an industrial society because life is a lot better than fighting sabre toothed tigers for buffalo or trying to live on berries.

    Myths like this are part of masking the steady decline in middle and working class incomes. George Freedman, the CEO of the Stratfor security consultancy, discussed this in his blog post The Crisis of the Middle Class and American Power.

    The rise of the precariat, workers employed on a casual or project based basis, is part of that erosion of incomes. As Freedman says, the “the decline of traditional corporations and the creation of corporate agility that places individual workers at a massive disadvantage”.

    In this respect, today’s digital hunter gatherers are more like the day labourers of a hundred years ago where workers, like my great-grandfathers, would wait at the gates of the factories or docks hoping to be picked for the day’s work.

    One of the truths of today’s workforce is that it’s a harder place than a generation ago and the expectation of naturally rising incomes is gone for the bulk of the population.

    This means we have to re-imagine our own roles in a changed economy. The assumptions of the post-war economy which have sustained us for over fifty years no longer hold.

    Hunter gathering hopefully won’t be option which we end up with.

    Reproductions at the Museo del Mamut, Barcelona 2011 from quinet on Flickr

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  • Customer lock in as a business asset

    Customer lock in as a business asset

    US booksellers Barnes and Noble has been struggling for years and things aren’t getting better reports the New York Times.

    An important part of the New York Times story is the quote from a Forrester industry analyst,

    “The problem is not whether or not the Nook is good,” said James L. McQuivey, a media analyst for Forrester Research. “What matters is whether you are locked into a Kindle library or an iTunes library or a Nook library. In the end, who holds the content that you value?”

    Locking in customers lies at the heart of the Kindle and iTunes business model. Once users have a substantial investment in their book or music collections on one platform it’s unlikely they will go elsewhere as the costs, and risks, of moving are too great.

    This doesn’t always end well for the customer and it gives online businesses great power which they often misuse.

    Every online business tries to lock their customers into their ecosystem – Google, Amazon, Facebook and Apple are the most successful but every single social media and cloud service tries to make it hard for users take their business elsewhere.

    In some respects this is no different to the phone company or bank which have historically tried to lock customers into their services, but the online social media, cloud computing and e-commerce platforms make a much more ambitious grab for their users’ data and assets like music and book collections.

    The New York Times article illustrates just how critical that user lock in is to the success of online businesses. The question for us as consumers is how much we want to be locked inside the web’s walled gardens.

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  • The Lives they Loved – Another future for journalism?

    The Lives they Loved – Another future for journalism?

    The New York Times’ wrap up of the year’s obituaries may give us an idea of one of the many futures for journalism.

    It’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking that obituaries are just dry recantations of the lives of dead white men and they often are – particularly when about celebrities or undistinguished politicians and businessmen.

    Good obituaries though are masterpieces and those of society’s genuine unsung heroes are moving and educational. A well written obit of an obscure but deserving person is usually a rewarding read.

    As part of the their summation of 2012, The New York Times has taken their obituaries one step further by asking readers to submit photos and stories of their loved ones who’ve passed away during the year.

    The Lives They Loved is the result, a wonderful collection of touching photographs and stories of parents, partners, children and friends who have passed away in the last year.

    User Generated Content – UGC – is one of the foundation stones of new media. The idea is the audience themselves provide the content which frees services like Facebook, YouTube or I Can Haz Cheeseburger from the costs and irritations of actually creating things that people are interested in.

    The New York Times project may well show that traditional news channels with their dedicated audiences and relevance to communities may do UGC as well as any hot new Silicon Valley startup.

    While User Generated Content isn’t the future of journalism, it almost certainly will be one of the them. Whether it turns out that old media use it better than the newer upstarts remains to be seen.

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