If you’re not in the tech world, you probably have never heard of the Silicon Valley blog called TechCrunch. This is a widely-read and frequently-updated blog on happenings throughout the tech world. It is among the handful of top news sources for the tech world.
Bear with me as I set up a scenario. The details are important.
About a month ago, the site’s founder, Michael Arrington, wrote “An Apology To Our Readers” in which he said:
I received a phone call from someone I trust who told me that one of our interns had asked for compensation in exchange for a blog post. Specifically, this intern had allegedly asked for a Macbook Air in exchange for a post about a startup
After an investigation we determined that the allegation was true. In fact, on at least one other occasion this intern was almost certainly given a computer in exchange for a post.
The intern in question has admitted to some of the allegations, and has denied others. We suspended this person while we were sorting through exactly what happened. When it became clear yesterday that there was no question that this person had requested, and in one case taken, compensation for a post, the intern was terminated.
Arrington went on to delete all posts that had been written by the intern. Since the intern was underage, his name was originally withheld.
Daniel Brusilovsky by Flickr user magerleague
Later, though, the intern came clean in both a blog post and an interview with the startup-focused blog Mixergy. His name is Daniel Brusilovsky and he’s a 17 year old senior.
There is supposedly a company I was meeting with who offered me a MacBook Air in exchange for a post. That got escalated to TechCrunch and TechCruch wrote a post about it and terminated my employment with them.
Brusilovsky is in the news again, one month after the incident came to light, because another character has stepped forward — a business owner who says he was the one shaken down for a story.
Sam Odio, who is CEO of a tech startup called Divvyshot (and who is as far out of the Valley as you can imagine — in Charlottesville, VA [UPDATE -- that's 'cause he's at school at UVA, according to his web contact details]), has written in his own blog that, “Daniel Brusilovsky recently asked the founder of a startup for a Macbook Air and offered coverage in exchange. That founder was me, the CEO of Divvyshot. I came forward to Mike at TechCrunch.”
For a long time, Odio had remained silent. According to him, he was initially shaken down evidently sometime in December 2009:
Daniel came to me about Air while writing this article. He wrote the article in “real time” while interviewing me. It was in this context that he told me a friend of mine (a guy I went to college with) bought him an iMac in exchange for an article. Daniel told me that the “cover story” for the iMac was that he had received it as a gift for his birthday. I don’t know exactly what their agreement was as I wasn’t there.
Sam Odio, from his blog
When Daniel told me about the iMac, he mentioned that he needed a new laptop and that he would cover Divvyshot’s upcoming announcements in exchange for a new Macbook Air. I was stunned and responded with something like “Haha, we’ll talk about it later.” I hoped the issue would be dropped after that interview but over the coming weeks Daniel continued to bring up the Air.
My reaction was always “we can do this, but not right now.” That was a mistake – I should’ve just said no. Instead it took me over a week of struggling with the issue before coming forward to Mike at TechCrunch.
Some time after coming forward to Arrington (but while he had still not told anyone else), Odio came upon what he saw as a sympathetic piece by prominent tech journalist Jason Calacanis. The piece criticized Brusilovsky’s less than full-throated apology. Odio sent a note to Calacanis saying that he was the one who’d been shaken down.
Calacanis forwarded the email to acerbic commentator Loren Feldman who took the opportunity to exert pressure to get more of the story by Tweeting: “Divvyshot. You have 24 hrs.”
And so Odio wrote his piece on Monday, laying out his role.
I am sharing the details of this story because it is a potentially very, very fruitful study about ethical decision-making. There are right-wrong as well as right-right questions all over the place:
Brusilovsky: The way he tells it, he and Odio were sort of joking over IM and the language could have been construed as a shake down. (He’s also said Odio was the one who initiated the exchange.) If the “joking around” story is true, at what point do you put a stop to such conversation and inform your superiors?
Odio: His start up could be made or broken (or so he thought) by a story in techCrucnh. How do you have the courage to say “no” when it is necessary (instead of a week later)?
Arrington: Confronted with the evidence, but faced with denial, how do you respond? Do you divulge who is involved? How about the companies involved?
Calacanis: You are a high-profile person who gets an email out of the blue. What obligation do you have over whether you divulge it or not? And to whom?
Feldman: You care deeply about transparency. Where do you draw the line over who you “out?” Or is that even a relevant question?
My own take is that Brusilovsky was in the wrong, and I find his explanation of the story hard to swallow. But he is also a young person. While he should know better, he may not have developed his moral compass fully yet — so, while his punishment seems right, the court of public opinion might do well to give him a second chance. Don’t hate on him too hard, in other words.
But, in the chain after the initial shakedown, the questions become much more murky and interesting. Each player had a right-versus-right dilemma (as my friend Rush Kidder would say). You can make a case that they did the wrong thing or that they did the right thing.
This is worth studying as a public leader. Often, it is the wrongdoing of others that places us in our own ethical dilemmas.
This morning, as I went outside to pick up the many newspapers to which I subscribe to home delivery (I’m old school that way), I saw an extra bundle in the middle of the driveway. It was a free print version of a new online newspaper, being helpfully delivered to my doorstep.
My immediate thoughts were very negative. More to recycle. More to pick up every morning. More to read.
But my main thought was: No one asked me if I want this, they just toss it my way for me to deal with. This is the anger that so many feel when confronted with intrusions in daily life, and why spam is so objectionable. No one asked me. The implicit statement by the organization doing the spamming is: “Our goals are more important than your convenience.”
In the commercial world, junk mail has long been despised for just this reason. But, as the imperative to communicate more effectively spreads throughout the nonprofit and public sectors, we get more and more such unwelcome messages.
I get emails that seem to be directly from the heads of small- and medium-sized community benefit organizations from which I had never heard before. I am suddenly on new lists. They all tell me to click here, or respond there, in order to unsubscribe, which is nice. But I don’t unsubscribe, as I sort-of know the people and don’t want to hurt feelings.
This has caused me to pay far, far less attention to my email inbox than I used to, because I cannot control what comes into it. That’s the “push” approach to social marketing.
Meanwhile, information streams over which I do have control, like Twitter, Facebook, and RSS feeds, have become my main source of information.
The Pull World
That is the new, “Pull World.” There is a new best practice being developed before our eyes when it comes to social marketing. As is often the case, the nonprofit or community benefit sector is a bit behind the curve. It seems like they are all suddenly discovering targeted email newsletters, just as their utility is flying out the window.
What works in the Pull World? Useful sharing. This is what can drive effective social marketing in a world where mindshare is moving from passive receptacles (reading my Inbox) to active engagement (who am I following, what feeds am I reading). When organizations share usefully with me, I go ahead and pass those messages on to my own network.
The Pull World requires discipline from any organization. It’s not easy to move from a Push mentality to a Pull mentality. It’s even harder when you factor in the organizational needs that must be met – even in the public benefit sector, organizations are not in business just to share and make people feel good, they need to survive and thrive. That means, in many cases, that their marketing messages must get out there.
It is a fine line to walk between letting people know what we are up to, and just plain vanilla PR that will be ignored. There’s no magic bullet, and different organizations are answering this question in different ways:
Some organizations designate a few people to be their public face and unleash them to share however they choose.
Some organizations try to create an engaging mix of equal parts organizational PR, sharing of others’ work, and just useful information regardless of source.
Some organizations try to create communities where users create and share material that has to do with the organization.
Since there is not a consensus set of best practices yet, many organizations are trying all of these and more tactics all at once. For someone looking for The Answer, it may be dispiriting to learn that there isn’t one. But that’s just how things go at the beginning of adoption curves.
For now, most of these strategies are playing out in social media, but as the novelty of Twitter and Facebook wears off and they become unremarkable platforms, I believe these overall approaches may migrate across platforms.
The Push-Pull World
Eventually we may get to a Push-Pull world, where organizations will put out messages for people to pull down on the various sharing platforms, and will also have a set of close-in friends who have given permission to be pushed to. A great deal of an organization’s attention will be directed toward moving people from the Pull category to the Push category.
Thinking about that helpful newspaper in my driveway, it’s an attempt to create a Push relationship. But because it starts with Push, it is inherently intrusive. It’s essentially a strategy that goes like this: “We will push something into your life (a newspaper) and if you don’t complain we will keep pushing it. Our revenue model (display advertising) depends in part on the numbers of such packages we are pushing. We hope that eventually you will act in some way on something that is contained in one of our pushed messages, which will allow us to point to impact as well as reach.”
I wonder if strategies like that one will survive. They’re expensive, both in wasted material (newsprint), wasted energy, and wasted goodwill. On the other hand, maybe enough people respond, and they push enough numbers, to make it worthwhile.
But I think things are changing and someday soon we will chuckle at some of what we take for granted nowadays. The same way we chuckle at press releases sent by postal mail.
When will we get there? I don’t know. What will that look like? I don’t know that either. Some of today’s experiments will pan out, others won’t.
Now, I have one last admission to make. I do have an email list to which I send every week or two. I think that everyone on it wants to be there. But just in case, please let me know if you ever get an email you don’t want from me. It won’t hurt my feelings.
Meantime, I am going to spend a little more time on my sharing usefully.
I am proud to announce the launch of a major new initiative that I have been working on with a few partners. The formal announcement will come later this week, but I wanted to give a preview to my readers because I am so excited about it.
Today, we are soft-launching the new Washington Times Communities. This is a new social journalist network tied into The Washington Times.
Along with partners Jacquie Kubinand Joe Szadkowski, we have been working furiously for the past months to get this in shape.
My role was to help design the management structure for this new network and to add in what I know about social networking and blogging from my experience with various other initiatives. I am also taking part in the day-to-day management of the Communities.
What It Is
We think that we have developed something that is somewhat unique among these kinds of things. Many newspapers have “community blog” sections. (In fact, the The Washington Times had one, which this new initiative replaces.) These can have widely varying content quality, widely varying updating schedules, and are typically hidden from view and separate from the rest of the newspaper’s online space.
The fundamental problem for many news organizations is that these things are hard to manage and it’s hard to know what kind of quality you’re getting.
We have created a structure which we think makes the Washington Times Communities “manageable” from an organizational perspective while at the same time open enough to make it a real blog network. At the same time, we’ve organized it so that, from a reader’s perspective, it should be easy to find what you are looking for.
Each of these communities is led by a “mayor” who essentially curates the content for each community. Within each Community, there are between five and ten (for now) “neighborhoods.” Each of these Neighborhoods is a blog, with one author responsible for the content.
So we’ve created a hierarchy, where each of the community “mayors” is acting like the editor of a newspaper section or magazine, with each author having a specific “neighborhood” beat.
It’s all volunteer, we are not staff for the paper.
What’s Different
While we don’t claim that this is a revolutionary idea (after all, it’s a blog network, nothing earth-shaking), we do think it’s an innovation in how to approach something like this. There are a few things that make this different, in my view:
There is direct involvement with senior management at the paper. The paper’s senior managers take a personal interest in this, all the way to the top.
There is a direct tie to the regular online space of the paper. Content from the Communities will be featured on the main page of the Times. This means that there is a greater chance for the community content to be seen by the many millions of unique visitors to the Times’ front page per day.
The writers are handpicked. People have to be invited to take part as an author. We chose participants keeping in mind both quality of their work, potential for growth, and willingness to devote the energy it takes to promote the Communities through social networks.
There is support at every level. Individual authors are supported, mayors are supported by management. Authors support one another.
There is ongoing innovation. The initiative is committed to iterating and learning at a rapid pace so we can best improve it.
There is a constant stream of content. Every author is committing to a certain number of posts per week, so there will always be something new coming from the Communities.
I sincerely hope you will take a look, poke around, comment on a few articles, and give your feedback.
Like other blog networks, viral word of mouth will be key. You can help this initiative out immensely by sharing any articles you find interesting and by spreading the word. The Times management will be watching this closely and we want it to succeed!
Public Good, A New Online Space
Public Good
There’s another aspect of this new initiative that I am very excited about. You might have noticed above that there’s a Community called “Public Good.” I am in charge of that, and it’s an online space devoted to examining various takes on public life and community today.
I have brought together a terrific portfolio of authors, each who is writing their own blog that takes a different perspective.
Faith: The Flip Side, by Allison Addicott: How faith and politics intersect around the globe
Making Change, by Donna Rae Scheffert: About people who are getting involved in helping others and making a difference
Public Square Today, by Brad Rourke: What’s happening in public life — and why it matters (this is my column)
Teaming Up For Success, by Carla Ledbetter: People celebrating good things that happen through successful teamwork
Truth Be Told, by Carla Harper: Thinking a little deeper about our lives, our country and our values
Went West, by Sutton Stokes: A transplanted easterner reflects on culture, politics, and the pursuit of happiness from his new vantage point in the Rocky Mountain West
I know that many of my readers are deeply concerned with public life and thought leaders when it comes to many different aspects of it. I hope that you will get in touch to talk about ways that I might include your perspectives, perhaps by showcasing some of your work or through an interview or podcast, or through a guest post.
The great promise of the Web, which was finally fulfilled by the pervasive existence of blogs, was that everyone would be a publisher. With cheap, easy tools, anyone can publish work that is immediately accessible across the globe.There is literally no fundamental barrier to the creation and distribution of your work.
There is a new epochal shift whose effects are only now beginning to be felt. While everyone can be a publisher — more people are also programmers.
I don’t mean people who write computer code — which a lot of people can do — but I mean programmer in the sense of a TV or radio programmer.
What’s driving this is the pervasiveness of the Stream. More and more people interact using status updates and other ephemeral, time-limited messages: Twitter updates, Facebook status updates, TXT messages, Media posting on YouTube, Vimeo, Posterous, and similar sites. All of these add up to a Stream of output.
What differentiates the Stream from my blog posts or from email messages is that, at any given time, some people will see parts of this Stream and others will miss it.
And those who miss it won’t come back to it unless they are highly motivated. There is an inherent time component that I have to take into account.
In other words, as a person who creates content, I’ve got to think like a programmer, keeping in mind not only what content I am creating, but also when I push it out, how I push it out, and how often I do that.
Here are five tips to thinking like a TV programmer when it comes to linking your blog with social media:
Tip #1: Schedule reruns.
Ever watch C-SPAN? Have you ever noticed that they will rerun certain shows? That’s not just to fill time. It’s to give more people a chance to see the show. Use this idea by repeating yourself if you have something important to let people know about. There is no perfect time to add your link into the stream. There are a number of good times. Add a link to your new blog post on Twitter right when you’ve posted it. Then come back around in 4-6 hours and repeat the update. The maybe once or twice more, with sufficient time in between that you can be sure you’re catching different people. Do NOT go overboard with this because people will just tune you out and it’s rude. But a bit of “twepeating” is useful.
Watch your own behavior and experiment with different times. You’ll find a good mix. For me, I’ve found that some of my friends are reading in the early morning (eastern), but there’s another big block that is reading in the late afternoon (eastern). And, while Sunday afternoon is death for news, it’s great for social media interactions!
Tip #2: Tease different.
Lots of people, when they complete a blog post, will paste the title into their Twitter client, add a link, and just go with that. If you’ve written a decent title that should work OK. But you might also want to think about varying your language, even highlighting different things. For instance, if there’s a key question or insight in your blog post, try repeating that question along with the link.
The same goes for sharing the link in Facebook, too. As you repeat, try different teases, calling out different aspects of your post.
Tip #3: Interact with commenters.
The vast majority of blog posts garner few to no comments. If you are lucky enough to generate comment activity, mention that in social media streams! “Great conversation in the comments at this post about widgets. http://xx.xx/xxxx.” People like to go see what other people are talking about.
If you don’t have a plug-in on your blog that lets people follow the comments on a particular post, get one. Then make sure you respond to people when they comment on your blog. They will feel a greater connection and will start to come back more and more. If you “know” them on Twitter, consider sending them an “@” message after you comment, with a shortened link to your blog post. “@blahblah Great comment, thanks! I have some thoughts about that which I added in the comments. http://xx.xx/xxxx”. This may intrigue others to take a peek.
Tip #4: Syndicate to Facebook.
Lots of people will read my blog at my website, but there are some eople in my audience who seem to live their entire online lives in Facebook. I’ve found that if I repost the articles on Facebook, I am likely to get comments and interactions from people who never post on my blog. (You do this by writing a “note” in Facebook — make sure you set it so “everyone” can read it unless for some reason it’s top secret.) It’s like I’m “synidcating” my show to another outlet. If I have the energy, I’ll mention comments in one sphere in the other (e.g., “great conversation going on at Facebook on this post, too. <link>”.
You can set up your Notes in Facebook to automatically import your blog, so that each time that blog is updated a Note is generated. (This typically happens within an hour or so of the original posting and sometimes it is a bit flaky but it beats doing it manually.)
Tip #5: Maintain flow and mix it up.
With a few exceptions, the stream approach is not very compatible with a “news bureau” mindset where you just broadcast your own content. For one thing, just issuing social media updates about your own content is seen as overly self-promotional. For another thing, unless you are in the breaking news business, you will have long stretches of no updates. In an environment with constantly-flowing streams of information, you want to be a presence throughout the day.
So don’t just post links to your blogs, but link to other interesting things — friends’ blogs, useful articles, good videos. Do this regularly, so there is a constant (not overbearing) flow.
Remember, with all these tips, I am not advocating spamming your Stream wantonly. You’ve got to be providing useful content. Some of your posts might be throwaways that you don’t necessarily need to go hammering on — it happens to everyone. But for the blog posts, questions, or other information that you want to get out, you need to have an approach that recognizes the time element and allows more people to see your material.
There have been long dry stretches, where I could barely get anything written. I didn’t know what to write, I didn’t want to write anything, I could not motivate myself.
Other times I had too much — three, four posts per day which for some people is just right but for me is overwhelming.
Right now I am in a groove, though. I thought I would share the four main tips that have made this current state possible:
Tip #1: Dig a hole.This is the biggest single piece of advice I can give. You need a news hole.
There was a long time when I wrote essays “occasionally.” This was designed to let me off the hook if I just couldn’t get it together to write. Result: long stretches of bupkis. Once I committed to a regular schedule and stuck to it for long enough for that to become a habit, it’s dialed in. Now I know every weekday I need a new post. (Sometimes I think of it as “feeding the beast.”) Since I know that every day I need to write something, I can schedule ahead, putting things in the can for vacation times, or just getting next week set so I can take it easy. You might go on a weekly schedule, daily, bi-weekly, or some other schedul. But the key is to make it regular. Don’t post “occasionally” or you will not be able to sustain it. If you want to post two stories per week, decide which days you will post. That’s your news hole.
Tip #2: Limit your time. Don’t allow yourself to work too long. Stop at 30 minutes.
It’s easy to not write because I think it’ll take a whole bunch of time. So I limit myself — 30 minutes to write a post. (Your own duration may differ.) It is 100% easier to say, “I am going to bang this thing out becuase I only have 30 minutes” than it is to say “Wow, I have to write something about health care reform (or whatever).” Remember, this is blogging, not writing for print publication. It should not take a long time.
Tip #3: Lower your bar. Do not shoot perfection. Go for “good enough.”
Here is a good way to keep yourself within your time limit. Don’t pursue perfection. This is a blog, for goodness’ . Good enough is totally, completely good enough. Maybe once in a while you will want to write the definitive post — set yourself a long time and go for it. But for day-in, day-out production, just keep it simple. Four paragraphs or less. Breezy style. And don’t edit too much. Just feed the beast — who cares if it’s prime rib or hamburger?
Tip #4: Link, baby, link. Use links to help you write. Make sure you are linking.
This is a bit of a technical piece of advice but it also helps with production. Make sure you link to something, even if it’s another article you wrote. Why? Well, for one thing, this is a blog and people expect that. For another, it gives you something to hang your piece on. It gives you something you have to describe (the thing you are linking to) and that means you’ve got one paragraph down. Three to go!
These aren’t hard and fast rules, obviously, just tips. And they don’t at all cover what to blog about. These are just things to think about.
If you write a blog, how do you make sure you’re getting it done? And, if you are considering blogging, what are the things holding you back?
I can’t tell if they are mocking me, poking good-natured fun, or are serious.
Back in April, I recorded a video that outlined my note-taking strategy. Over the years, lots of people have commented on it in meetings and have been curious about how it works. I’ve got the video embedded down at the end of this article.
The basic idea is to draw a box in the upper right of your notes pages, in which you put key ideas. The important thing is to think ahead of time about your purpose for taking the notes so you know — during the meeting — what to record.
But now, three months later, Last night I noticed this odd flurry of comments on the video. They are a strange mix of praise, jest, and sarcasm:
Thank you very much! This system has really expanded my post-meeting analysis. I’ve also expanded on your technique by adding an extra box in the lower left hand corner to record random thoughts unrelated to the subject of my meetings (such as what others are wearing or the types of pens they use, etc). Though somewhat recently I’ve been considering using a rhombus because my style of note analysis may be described as oblong or semi-circular. What are your thoughts on other shapes?
And:
I think we would get along well because I use graph paper too! Do you ever doodle when you take notes? I confine myself to the lines of the paper, so my doodling comes out looking like something made on an etch a sketch.
And:
thanks! now i can tell if somebody is a virgin or not just by looking at his notes!!!
Yes, I get that they are making fun of me. It’s just the all-over-the-map tone is sort of interesting to me. I kind of like it. Lately I have been getting a bunch of quite nasty comments on Rockville Central, the local blog I run, and these comments are pretty fun and refreshing.
The thing is, if I squint a bit, I can see how that “rhombus” comment might be meant in earnest.. And if that is true, then what about the others?
Anyway, I am just glad some folks found the video again! (It’s one of my more-viewed videos; people seem to come back to it every few weeks.)
I used the occasion to make a broader point about being anonymous (which I have a bias against in most cases). But the underlying story — the battle between publius and Whelan — got a lot of blogosphere attention. By the end of the night, Whelan had apologized for disclosing publius’ identity:
I realize that, unfortunately, it is impossible for me to undo my ill-considered disclosure of his identity. For that reason, I recognize that Publius may understandably regard my apology as inadequate.
I also got a note from the author of the amusingly-named Bloggasm, who got in touch with both Whelan and publius, (on the phone no less, how groovily old-skool) and filed a useful report here.
Because I enjoy publicizing the activities of my band, The West End, here’s our most popular YouTube video, in which we perform Husker Du’s “Sorry Somehow.” I thought it apt for the moment.
There’s a controversy right now over an exchange between two notable bloggers, each from opposite sides of the liberal/conservative divide.
An author at the “moderate” liberal Obsidian Wings blog who writes under the pseudonym “publius” has long criticized conservative Ed Whelan, who writes at the National Review’s Bench Memos and is the president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center.
Whelan recently learned through what he terms a “reliable” source the true identity of publius. He asked for confirmation and received a brief email: I am not commenting on my identity. For a variety of private, family, and professional reasons, I write under a pseudonym (like many blogers). If I wanted to publicly disclose my name, I would do so. Thank you.”
It turns out that publius is a pre-tenure law professor at a Texas school. After being exposed, he wrote an article confirming his identity. He had attempted to remain anonymous, he writes, out of concern that blogging might damage him professionally, might upset some conservative people in his family, and might make conservative students who take his classes uncomfortable.
Now the controversy rages: Did Whelan do something wrong in exposing publius?
Most people agree that people who have compelling reasons to remain anonymous ought to have their identities protected. I happen to believe that publius’ reasons are not compelling. It is uncomfortable, but not dangerous that he is now exposed.
I’m not naming him here because I have no reason to do so. But the exchange illustrates an interesting point in digital public life.
I have long been opposed to anonymous blogging, and commenting on other blogs. At the local blog I run called Rockville Central, I’ve tried on occasion to disallow anonymous commenting, but the stream dried up whenever I did that. (In large part, I believe that is because people found it difficult to register.) Our current policy is to make a simple request of commenters: Think about whether you really need to be anonymous to make this comment and, if not, use your real name.
While I am not revealing publius’ name here, I don’t think Whelan did anything wring in revealing the identity of his critic. I likewise don’t think publius did anything wrong in writing under a pseudonym — but I wish he had not.
To write under a pseudonym simply because it is more comfortable diminishes the public value of anonymity, which is to protect those voices that need protection and need to be heard.
The Internet’s provisions of anonymity bring with them formidable powers to blow whistles and fight large powers from small platforms. But being anonymous can also untether writers from accountability — which is a key element in a healthy public square.
A town meeting can be a difficult place, as we argue and disagree. But because I can see your face, and you mine, we keep our remarks within the bounds of civility. Anonymous comments and blog postings remove this built-in control.
My friend Mike Weiksner pointed out an interesting set of observations about the important role that “shared links” are increasingly having. More and more, people come across links to information not because they searched for it, but because someone shared it with them.
The article is by Fred Wilson, a New York City-based venture capitalist. Embedded in a series of points is this observation:
When I take a step back and look at my own behavior, I also have a hard time denying the fact that my media consumption habits and behaviors have changed in the last 18-24 months. I’m getting more and more of my information from the people I’m connected to through email, IM, RSS, Facebook, and Twitter. Also, the nature of the searching I’m doing now is much more targeted and specific. I won’t search as much for content or something that’s happening now because I’ve probably already received the link from someone I know or follow. The links that are relevant to me and timely find their way to me these days with remarkable efficiency.
"Oscar Is Sharing Snack With Lily" by Flickr user Phil Scoville
(The italics are mine.) That observation seems right on, if I look at my own behavior too. I have long been an inveterate news-and-information consumer. I had a short list of sites that I was almost constantly reviewing. I go to them with little frequency these days, instead relying on a network of people I know to pass things along to me. This “corwd-sourced” early warning system by and large keeps me ahead of the curve. It’s uncanny.
What does this mean for a nonprofit or community based organization? You need a strategy to get this link-sharing to happen in order to spread your messages. There appears to be a sea change beginning (especially if you add in demographic analyses), where people rely more and more on information coming to them from trusted connections — not because they read it in a newspaper.
Of interest in the article is that 25% of the sharing that this VC’s company is watching (which is not the whole Web) gets shared by e-mail, a very old school means of sharing. Twitter and other social media account for just 9% of link sharing. So we’re not talking a Twitter or Facebook strategy here, we’re talking email and blogs.
I’ve been posting to this blog daily for some time now. I am doing it to keep a rhythm, but sometimes it’s rough finding material.
Yesterday I saw a perfect item for days when the Muse isn’t striking. It’s from Seth Godin:
I had, as I do every year, [an April Fool's] post written and queued up. (It was about JD Salinger and the Dalai Lama as twitter users.) It was good, not great.
So I posted nothing.
I couldn’t exceed my (or your) expectations, so I posted nothing.
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