Center for Citizen Media

(Here’s an op-ed column I wrote for PR Week, on the issue of buzz marketing.)

When I was in my 20s, I rented an upstairs apartment from a middle-aged couple. Not long after I moved in, they invited me down for a beer.

After a brief chat, they launched into a pitch to a) sell me home products; b) make me a salesman of the same products; and c) become a wholesaler myself.

It was creepy. So were they. I moved out quickly.

What bothered me, apart from the somewhat unsavory industry they represented, was their initial deception. They weren’t trying to be my friends. They were trying to sell me stuff.

This came back to mind as I read a recent story in BusinessWeek. It told of the campaign by Procter & Gamble, one of the world’s great consumer-goods companies, to recruit “buzz moms” as word-of-mouth marketers to their friends and acquaintances by engaging them in supposedly personal conversations. Why? Because surveys are clear that people trust personal recommendations more than advertising.

It was more evidence of a shift that is gaining velocity. Those who sell goods, services, ideas, and candidates must recognize that the world of TiVo, pop-up blockers, and increasing skepticism about traditional selling techniques requires a different way of seeing the marketplace. Which means, ultimately, that PR is the new advertising because conversation is the new PR.

But there is an honest way to have a conversation. As the magazine story noted, P&G didn’t insist that the moms disclose that they’re being rewarded for their efforts. In fact, the company said that it was somehow more in keeping with today’s style to let the moms make up their own minds about whether to disclose.

Reading this story made me less likely to buy P&G’s products, hard as they are to avoid. I don’t trust companies that try to fool people.

Buzz is great. Genuine buzz comes from those who truly care about something, not from corner offices.

I have news for the buzz moms and those who choose to be the corporate or political foot soldiers: If you are being compensated for this activity, tell me. A supposed friend who tries to sell me without such disclosure won’t remain a friend if I discover the deception.

Transparency is vital, not optional, in this new marketing relationship – and this is not simply about what’s ethical. Transparency is also smarter. You may never get caught pulling a fast one, but if you do, you will be punished.

I’m not saying advertising is dead, by the way. There will remain plenty of opportunities to sell things in the traditional ways for some time to come. Some buyers actually prefer to be passive consumers as opposed to active ones. And in highly targeted niche media, the ads can be as interesting as the journalism.

Meanwhile, the conversational aspect of marketing and image-making will continue to grow. PR folks will be helping their clients’ various constituencies in this way, and we’ll be relating somewhat differently to each other as time proceeds. It’s a messy process, true, yet also a valuable one.

It won’t work in the end, though, if the conversations aren’t open and honorable.

The U.S. House of Representatives is voting today on amendments to a new telecom law. One in particular, supported by Ed Markey of Massachusetts and Anna Eshoo of California among others, is vital in keeping the Net open to innovation from the edges.

If you want to prevent the big telecom companies from turning the Internet into their own walled gardens, please call your member of Congress and ask him/her to vote FOR the Markey amendment (scroll down to see it, number 7 in amendment summaries, on this page).

This is not a partisan issue; members on both sides of the aisle are supporting (and not supporting) the amendment.

You can find your representative’s phone number here.

Dave Winer and I participated in a moderated discussion at the excellent Future in Review conference last month. Here’s the podcast (MP3 file).

Jaron Lanier’s essay, “Digital Maoism: The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism,” has sparked tons of responses, as he no doubt hoped. Here’s mine:

The collected thoughts from people responding to Jaron Lanier’s essay are not a hive mind, but they’ve done a better job of dissecting his provocative essay than any one of us could have done. Which is precisely the point.

Does Lanier truly not see the historical absurdity of equating Wikipedia and other such phenomena with Maoism and collectivism? Even the most cursory examination of the Communist predations of the 20th Century makes that clear. A tendentious title and analogy undermines the many interesting facts he’s assembled.

The better analogy is the old-fashioned barn-raising, where people contribute their labor for a specific purpose. It takes more than a hive to raise the barn. (I’d say it takes a village, but that’s been turned into a political cliche.) People with a variety of expertise, ranging from expert to pure novice, come together to solve a problem. Leaders emerge to steer the process, and a barn happens.

It’s not about an all-wise hive mind. It’s not about a collective. It’s about community.

It’s also about persistence — and celebrating the reality that knowledge is not a static end-point but rather an ongoing process. New facts and nuances emerge after articles are published. One of Wikipedia’s best characteristics is its recognition that we can liberate ourselves from the publication or broadcast metaphors from the age of literally manufactured media, where the paper product or tape for broadcasting was the end of the process. My mantra as a journalist was a simple one: My readers know more than I do. We may (should I use this word?) collectively not get it right, and in fact humans almost never get anything entirely right, but get closer the more we assemble new data and nuance. If Steven Spielberg and other Hollywood folks can create directors’ cuts of their movies, why can’t journalists and other creators, amateur and professional, keep updating and improving some of their own works?

Pointing out the flaws in Wikipedia seems to be a new participatory sport. Let me join for a minute; the entry about me is both incorrect in small ways and grossly out of date. I’ve honored the site’s request that people who are the subjects of articles not fix them, but I’m definitely annoyed.

Then again, no article about me or my work in a traditional media outlet has ever been precisely correct. Factual errors, mostly minor, are common. Ditto out-of-context quotes. Yet those articles are now there — in print and even in databases, never to be updated, because the manufacturing model doesn’t permit such things.

The flaws in Wikipedia and other kinds of media are real. (Disclosure: Jimmy Wales is a friend; he is on my advisory board; and I’m an investor in his for-profit company.) But ways it shows us how to improve, along with watching how the community (not collective) operates around individual articles and the project as a whole, are lessons in themselves.

The debate does demonstrate how much we need to update our media literacy in a digital, distributed era. Our internal BS meters already work, but they’ve fallen into a low and sad level of use in the Big Media world. Many people tend to believe what they read. Others tend to disbelieve everything. Too few apply appropriate skepticism and do the additional work that true media literacy requires.

We need better tools to help us, as a community, gauge the reliability and authenticity of what we find online (or in print or on the air, etc.). Popularity is only one measure. Reputation has to become part of the mix in systems that combine human and machine intelligence in novel ways.

What’s most essential, though, is to remember how early we are in this process. Wikipedia isn’t the ultimate authority. It is, however, a remarkable achievement. And it’s getting better. I look forward to seeing how it proceeds.

Yochai Benkler has written perhaps the most important book of year, The Wealth of Networks, which expands on work he’s been doing for a long time now on the advantages of peer production as opposed to top-town production. Anyone who wants to understand much of the intellectual underpinning of what comprises citizen media needs to read it.

My colleagues at StopBadware.org, a Berkman Center project, report:

Thousands of visitors to StopBadware.org have shared their badware experiences with us since we launched. From their stories, we’ve identified and tested four applications that contain annoying or objectionable behaviors.

The idea here is that people — perhaps we can call them citizen journalists for this purpose — have told what is happening to them, information that others then analyze for everyone’s good. This approach would be useful in traditional newsrooms if organizations cared to try.

I am so glad I don’t run Windows at this point. Of course, the Mac will soon be a target of the slimeballs, but so far we’re relatively safe.

Just installed Call Recorder, a new Skype add-on (Mac OS X only) that lets me record both sides of a voice call as a QuickTime file. The application comes with a utility that converts the file to an MP3. With QuickTime Pro, each side of the call can be separated into a channel, which is handy to boost one side or the other when someone talks softly.

Give the high quality of Skype, this is an excellent interview tool.

Caution: It’s illegal in some places to record other people on the phone without permission. I don’t know if this law applies to Skype, but it’s not honorable to record someone else without permission no matter what the medium.

Amy Gahran, on the Poynter site, asks if competition has outlived its usefulness in news gathering:

Imagine: someday a Pulitzer Prize might be awarded jointly to an enterprise reporting team spread across several news organizations.

This convergence has already occurred. The New York Times collaborated with Frontline on a brilliant series of articles/broadcasts, and won a well-earned Pulitzer.

Silicon Valley companies have an expression for this: co-opetition. They compete in many areas, but cooperate in others.

This is definitely the way of the future for news companies. I’ll be even happier when the collaborations include citizen reporters, but the NYT-Frontline example is a great start.

We’re in Massachusetts with some fellow fellows of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society.

Linux Devices: Nokia turns cellphones into webservers: “If every mobile phone or even every smartphone initially is equipped with a webserver, then very quickly most websites will reside on mobile phones.”

Interesting possibilities for citizen media in this — talk about real-time updating, among other things.