Tuesday, October 20, 2009
Monday, October 19, 2009
Facing a rhetorical explosion
It's risky business admitting you're a late adopter, especially when this adoption is something you're supposed to be professionally involved in. I don't think it would be fair for me to bore you with details of my psychological malfunctions over the past five years or so in trying to deal with the Mypace explosion and subsequent Facebook dilemma.
Why an explosion and why a dilemma?
Well, I think I used to place an awful amount of trust in representation, regardless of the medium employed; believing that whatever is thought about and applied through such representation - however unqualified, inaccurate, incredible, unpopular or vice versa - is an 'histo-cultural' artifact whose (infinite) value is reckoned through the jadedness of having absolutely no idea of what the future has in store. On this basis, I used to think, every mediated representation is imperative in the anxious preparation for the unknown, to serve as records and/or references in a puzzle-solving exercise in the distant future.
Nauseatingly romantic? Maybe. A firm basis for engaging professionally with media, particularly those of the social kind? I'd have to say yes based on two things. Firstly (this is the most obvious reason) because the word 'social' in the term 'social media' implies having to deal with psychological malfunctions and dilemmas inherent in the randomness of social interaction; and secondly because approaching something professionally allows one the privilege of detachment, allowing for the selective implementation of communication ranging from personal interaction to full-blown rhetotic.
Now, if I wasn't a late adopter, chances are I would have been sucked in on the consumer end back when Myspace was thought to be everyone's chance to get noticed. You made your page look sexy then you made friends to show them how sexy you are. What's more is that everyone else was doing it so you didn't have to feel alienated, as most actors probably do. Enter Facebook and its marvelous promise of connectedness, 'safety' and easy in-group sharing - packaged more like a sterile directory vis-a-vis a sexy TV show - and you figured that Myspace was more for people who regarded their activity on that channel as products (e.g. musicians, bands, actors, etc).
Facebook, in all its sterility, presented a solution to being noticed in a slightly more modest way, a retreat from being exposed on Myspace to a simple listing. Here's the dilemma: in listing yourself on Facebook while acknowledging it as a social network, you inadvertently exposed yourself as a potential product much like an electro-glitch band's flashy neon Myspace page.
You may ask how and why a product and not a participating consumer, but isn't that exactly what a participating consumer is, especially when considering relatively new terms like User Generated Content (UGC) and User Generated Media (UGM)? It's simple, at some stage you're going to accept a friend request from a person whom you may or may not have met in real life and know something about them through some association, that person is a group or Fan Page administrator, his/her profile or page status updates appear in your news feed, you decide whether to click through or not but either way, you got the message in headline form which means you're already an indirect contributor to the product's overall representation.
Now all you have to do is click the 'Like' button...
But is being a product by virtue of being a participating consumer really that bad? After all, there is a transaction taking place whereby the sender constructs a message to elicit a response from the receiver and the only manner of gauging the effectiveness of such construction is whether it is responded to upon reception. Similarly, the only manner of gauging your personal success on social media channels is selecting and effectively responding to messages that are of interest to you, thereby enhancing your profile.
Coming from the perspective of a late-adopting Facebook ghostwriter, this dilemma is one that helps explain things more than it does cause retraction because it is likely that through a seemingly dichotomous situation a dynamic solution can be derived.
Kind regards,
Ahmed Patel
Why an explosion and why a dilemma?
Well, I think I used to place an awful amount of trust in representation, regardless of the medium employed; believing that whatever is thought about and applied through such representation - however unqualified, inaccurate, incredible, unpopular or vice versa - is an 'histo-cultural' artifact whose (infinite) value is reckoned through the jadedness of having absolutely no idea of what the future has in store. On this basis, I used to think, every mediated representation is imperative in the anxious preparation for the unknown, to serve as records and/or references in a puzzle-solving exercise in the distant future.
Nauseatingly romantic? Maybe. A firm basis for engaging professionally with media, particularly those of the social kind? I'd have to say yes based on two things. Firstly (this is the most obvious reason) because the word 'social' in the term 'social media' implies having to deal with psychological malfunctions and dilemmas inherent in the randomness of social interaction; and secondly because approaching something professionally allows one the privilege of detachment, allowing for the selective implementation of communication ranging from personal interaction to full-blown rhetotic.
Now, if I wasn't a late adopter, chances are I would have been sucked in on the consumer end back when Myspace was thought to be everyone's chance to get noticed. You made your page look sexy then you made friends to show them how sexy you are. What's more is that everyone else was doing it so you didn't have to feel alienated, as most actors probably do. Enter Facebook and its marvelous promise of connectedness, 'safety' and easy in-group sharing - packaged more like a sterile directory vis-a-vis a sexy TV show - and you figured that Myspace was more for people who regarded their activity on that channel as products (e.g. musicians, bands, actors, etc).
Facebook, in all its sterility, presented a solution to being noticed in a slightly more modest way, a retreat from being exposed on Myspace to a simple listing. Here's the dilemma: in listing yourself on Facebook while acknowledging it as a social network, you inadvertently exposed yourself as a potential product much like an electro-glitch band's flashy neon Myspace page.
You may ask how and why a product and not a participating consumer, but isn't that exactly what a participating consumer is, especially when considering relatively new terms like User Generated Content (UGC) and User Generated Media (UGM)? It's simple, at some stage you're going to accept a friend request from a person whom you may or may not have met in real life and know something about them through some association, that person is a group or Fan Page administrator, his/her profile or page status updates appear in your news feed, you decide whether to click through or not but either way, you got the message in headline form which means you're already an indirect contributor to the product's overall representation.
Now all you have to do is click the 'Like' button...
But is being a product by virtue of being a participating consumer really that bad? After all, there is a transaction taking place whereby the sender constructs a message to elicit a response from the receiver and the only manner of gauging the effectiveness of such construction is whether it is responded to upon reception. Similarly, the only manner of gauging your personal success on social media channels is selecting and effectively responding to messages that are of interest to you, thereby enhancing your profile.
Coming from the perspective of a late-adopting Facebook ghostwriter, this dilemma is one that helps explain things more than it does cause retraction because it is likely that through a seemingly dichotomous situation a dynamic solution can be derived.
Kind regards,
Ahmed Patel
Monday, October 12, 2009
Snap out of it
To try and avoid projecting the image of ranting helplessly in the face of ignorance, I'll attempt to navigate my way around certain clouds in my head toward understanding how and why Online Reputation Management (ORM) may or may not be the elusive grand solution to any digital/social media/webpr/online guy's major problem; that is, finding and maintaining focus long enough to crack the vague level he's currently on and proceed to the next non-level.
I think I've reached the point where I see ORM, or at least one of its many magical powers, the same way I'd imagine a roving reporter at a stadium rock concert tasked with getting a vox pop from every person who attended: 'Good evening, sir. Can you briefly tell me about your experience here this evening?'... thousands of times.
What makes this kind of reporting slightly different to that done on crime, sports, politics, entertainment, etc is the process of data analysis, and therein lies the problem. This expansive data has to be processed, analysed and interpreted while it's being generated, and only once this uber exercise in multi-tasking is complete can one shift from hyper- to mild-anxiety and compile a report detailing the successes and failures of the campaign. Seems like voodoo, alright. Didn't we integrate computers into our lives to avoid the burden of multi-tasking in the first place?
From this sprouts a paradox. Using of the word 'campaign', as we often do in our business, implies there is a beginning, a middle bit and a climax. How should a person working on a medium that was developed and is continuously developing entirely organically approach reputation reporting and management when what he/she is working on is conceived and subsequently planned in strict adherence to a timeframe? I think now's the time to kill all that buzz around the advantages of the Internet's immediacy.
Experience in research has taught me that the only good report is a done report (thanks, Prof Kariithi) and the only good way to get a report done is to take time and think about it as deeply as you think you possibly can, note those thoughts, find relevant things to read, review your notes with the reading in mind, conjure up an hypothesis and test it with your data in order to justify, in conclusion, the inherent thread of partiality throughout the process.
This tried and tested research process would work well for a postgraduate producing a paper on the ephemeral and simultaneously self-rejuvenating nature of the Internet and social media, but not for a digital strategist eyeing a non-level from the precarious vantage point of a vague one.
Isn't it time to develop a simple methodology for qualifying the vast quantity in a manner that bypasses the 'rating system' and its obfuscating implications? Should reputation management tools out there offer methodological solutions rather than final reporting solutions, or do they already? But most importantly, isn't the creation of a custom methodology part of keeping up with the Internet's dynamism?
Maybe viewing something in awe is the first step toward learning about it.
Yours sincerely,
Ahmed Patel
I think I've reached the point where I see ORM, or at least one of its many magical powers, the same way I'd imagine a roving reporter at a stadium rock concert tasked with getting a vox pop from every person who attended: 'Good evening, sir. Can you briefly tell me about your experience here this evening?'... thousands of times.
What makes this kind of reporting slightly different to that done on crime, sports, politics, entertainment, etc is the process of data analysis, and therein lies the problem. This expansive data has to be processed, analysed and interpreted while it's being generated, and only once this uber exercise in multi-tasking is complete can one shift from hyper- to mild-anxiety and compile a report detailing the successes and failures of the campaign. Seems like voodoo, alright. Didn't we integrate computers into our lives to avoid the burden of multi-tasking in the first place?
From this sprouts a paradox. Using of the word 'campaign', as we often do in our business, implies there is a beginning, a middle bit and a climax. How should a person working on a medium that was developed and is continuously developing entirely organically approach reputation reporting and management when what he/she is working on is conceived and subsequently planned in strict adherence to a timeframe? I think now's the time to kill all that buzz around the advantages of the Internet's immediacy.
Experience in research has taught me that the only good report is a done report (thanks, Prof Kariithi) and the only good way to get a report done is to take time and think about it as deeply as you think you possibly can, note those thoughts, find relevant things to read, review your notes with the reading in mind, conjure up an hypothesis and test it with your data in order to justify, in conclusion, the inherent thread of partiality throughout the process.
This tried and tested research process would work well for a postgraduate producing a paper on the ephemeral and simultaneously self-rejuvenating nature of the Internet and social media, but not for a digital strategist eyeing a non-level from the precarious vantage point of a vague one.
Isn't it time to develop a simple methodology for qualifying the vast quantity in a manner that bypasses the 'rating system' and its obfuscating implications? Should reputation management tools out there offer methodological solutions rather than final reporting solutions, or do they already? But most importantly, isn't the creation of a custom methodology part of keeping up with the Internet's dynamism?
Maybe viewing something in awe is the first step toward learning about it.
Yours sincerely,
Ahmed Patel
Monday, October 5, 2009
Pressure's always on when rolling backwards
I am inclined to think the vast majority of reading and writing done by people in the business of communicating falls within the frame of a window belonging to an email client like Outlook or Thunderbird. If we had to go a little further, it might even be worthwhile suggesting that most people who have a reasonable amount of access to computers and the Internet do a considerable amount of email reading and writing. Think about those endless gmail threads on any given workday with either bored or chatty friends stationed at other workdesks in different companies, firms or agencies... and that excuse to knock off the first forty five minutes at work every day.
What's more is that we expand our literacy, or lack thereof, communicating on social media platforms that not only serve as vents for workplace angst, relationship troubles or baby daddy issues, but also operate on the fundamentals of electronic mail. Reading friends' status updates in our Facebook news feeds is as entertaining, informative or tactical in the time-wasting game as receiving daily newsletters, RSS feeds or updates from the plethora of so-called established news and information services.
Social media platforms have, in this sense, become the primary facilitators of most communication whether it be as inane as sharing with others what you did over the weekend, or as earth shattering as breaking the news - via Twitter - of Princess Diana's return from the island where 2Pac and Hansie Cronje live.
Based on this, what seems evident is that electronic communication defines a large part of the humanity of the workplace not only because people share minutiae of their lives online while they are at work, but also because they do so in ways they perceive as expressive of their emotions given the limitations of the sharing medium. That makes everyone, from the PA or admin clerk to the director or CEO at any organisation complicit in this game of communication and indeed social media.
In other words, it might be worth everyone's while to view social media the same way we view email, fax, cellphones, telephones or postage stamps. It's here, we have to use it whether we like it or not, so I guess we must come to terms with it and start using it in ways that suit us best.
Yours after a great weekend,
Ahmed Patel
What's more is that we expand our literacy, or lack thereof, communicating on social media platforms that not only serve as vents for workplace angst, relationship troubles or baby daddy issues, but also operate on the fundamentals of electronic mail. Reading friends' status updates in our Facebook news feeds is as entertaining, informative or tactical in the time-wasting game as receiving daily newsletters, RSS feeds or updates from the plethora of so-called established news and information services.
Social media platforms have, in this sense, become the primary facilitators of most communication whether it be as inane as sharing with others what you did over the weekend, or as earth shattering as breaking the news - via Twitter - of Princess Diana's return from the island where 2Pac and Hansie Cronje live.
Based on this, what seems evident is that electronic communication defines a large part of the humanity of the workplace not only because people share minutiae of their lives online while they are at work, but also because they do so in ways they perceive as expressive of their emotions given the limitations of the sharing medium. That makes everyone, from the PA or admin clerk to the director or CEO at any organisation complicit in this game of communication and indeed social media.
In other words, it might be worth everyone's while to view social media the same way we view email, fax, cellphones, telephones or postage stamps. It's here, we have to use it whether we like it or not, so I guess we must come to terms with it and start using it in ways that suit us best.
Yours after a great weekend,
Ahmed Patel
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