In 2011 it is no longer possible to be a top professional journalist without  mastering social media. Here are five reasons why news organizations need to care about the new trends.

Social media is starting to become an integrated part of the work of many news organizations.  Yet many editors and journalists still struggle to see why they should put a lot of effort into understanding the dynamics of Facebook, Twitter and other social networks.

• Read also: Social networking tips for mainstream media

I gave a speech this week for the annual conference of the European Alliance of News Agencies in Geneva, Switzerland. In preparation for the presentation I compiled this list of five key reasons why social media should matter to news companies:

1. Distribute the content

Social media is all about sharing – and sharing drives traffic. As such Facebook and Twitter can be powerful channels for distributing content.

There are two main reasons for that:

• People tend to trust tips from their friends more than others. Stories shared on Facebook and Twitter therefore have a higher chance of being clicked on.
• People spend much more time on social network sites than on other sites. According to Facebook, the site’s 800 million users spend on average 15 hours per month on the site. By making their content available on these sites, media organizations make it easy for people to share their stories.

Source: Comscore

2. Create engagement

Content without engagement has no – or at least low – value.

Good content creates engagement, emotions and reactions. And social media provides excellent tools to create such engagement.

Most news sites will find that content that creates engagement will have a longer average length of the user sessions. People spend more time on the content and they will move on to more of the other content of the site as well.

The big social networks, like Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin and YouTube, provide efficient tools to create engagement and they also provide lots of information about who actually engages with your content. And THAT is valuable information most news organizations would struggle to find on their own.

Journalism used to be a one-way process. Editors selected the news and presented the same stories to a large audience, confident that no other could reach the same audience.

This premise has changed. Today everyone can create a mass communication channel. Journalists do no longer have a monopoly of distributing information.

This fact changes journalism. And it changes people’s expecations of the journalists. It also mean that journalism hasbeen redefined. It is no longe a one-way street. Instead modern journalism is a continueous stream of two-way communication.

3. Pick up news fast

When big news events occur there are no better place to keep track during the first hours than in social media.

In fact social media is a great tool for professional journalists to pick up news. And this seems to be done in at least three different ways:

• Big and live news events. In these situations journalists should immediately start monitoring Twitter to pick up any news from eyewitnesses or other sources. News will typically be distributed in social media first – and then in the traditional media.
• When social media becomes part of the news event itself. We see this happen more and more often, for instance in the uprising in Libya or in the terror attack in Norway. How people use social media during the events – and what role this plays – becomes an important element of the story to be told.
• Monitoring social media for particular areas of interest. This is the everyday use of social media in an editorial organization. Most journalists have an area of expertise. They should systematically monitor what is being said about that area – including the messages from important sources – in social media.

The Twitter photo of the airplane that landed in Hudson River in New York became an iconic symbol of news reporting in the age of Twitter

4. Dialogue with readers

Social media forces us to change our way of thinking – from journalism being a “one-way-communication” to looking at our profession as a two-way dialogue.

Social media is all about sharing – and dialogue. Unfortunately many editors don’t seem to realize this. They look at social media primarily as a  place to distribute content – and don’t reflect on the fact that people want them to share and communicate as well.

In fact sharing is the core of social media. And there is no way we can succeed with a social media strategy if we do not start to share

For editors there are many benefits in starting to talk to readers through social media.

Take the Facebook page of Aftenposten – Norway’s largest newspaper - as an example.  It now has 67.000 followers. Aftenposten has been quite skilled in using the Facebook page not only to distribute content, but to ask for the advice from readers in covering specific stories. For the editorial staff this has turned out to be extremely useful.  (Disclaimer: I work for Media Norge, the owner company of Aftenposten)

5. Build brand value

This is the more overriding reason: How a news company uses social media influences the brand value of the company.

During the meeting of European news agencies I was asked which business opportunities I saw in social media.

I am not sure that is the right focus. At least business models are not the first we should look for. But doing things right in social media is an efficient tool to build brand value over time.

And high brand value always creates business opportunities.

How you dialogue with your readers in social media can strongly influence the perception of your brand – for better or worse. Your task therefore should be to establish brand missionaries,  people who will do anything to promote your brand among their friends and acquaintances.

Summing up

It is in fact becoming more or less impossible to be a professional journalist today without an active attitude towards social media. Yes, Facebook and media brands are to some extent competitors, at least when it comes to catching people’s attention. Yet, social media and traditional media organizations are in position to collaborate much more than before – to the benefit of both parties.

Do you need to catch up on the latest mobile internet trends? Check this excellent presentation from the highly respected analyst Mary Meeker.

Few analysts receive as much attention when presenting the future internet trends as Mary Meeker. Until recently she was with Morgan Stanley. She is now a partner with Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.

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The presentation was given together with partner Matt Murphy at Google’s Thinkmobile conference in New York this week.

I really recommend that you flip through it. They elaborates on several mobile internet trends that are taking place at the moment:

• Mobile platforms hit critical mass
• Mobile is global
• Social networking accelerating growth of mobile
• Time shifting to mobile usage
• Mobile advertising – growing pains, but huge promise
• mCommerce – changing shopping behavior
• Emergence of virtual goods and in-app commerce
• Not all platforms are created equal
• Change will accelerate, new players emerging rapidly

You can download the presentation from Slideshare.

Screenshot of VG+, the iPad app from Norwegian news company VG

Apple’s ‘Jesus tablet’ seemed to be the news industry’s best hope of salvation but few publishers are finding apps to be the moneyspinners they so desperately want.

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This article titled “iPad apps – still more dash than cash” was written by Jemima Kiss, for The Guardian on Monday 10th January 2011 06.59 UTC

The news industry embraced the launch of Apple’s iPad in April 2010 with something that felt like true love: feverish anticipation at that first meeting, lengthy sentimental eulogies and whispers of hope that this must finally be The One.

In an industry largely uninterested in gadgets, the iPad offered optimised reading and viewing, portability – and a built-in payment system wired to the credit cards of 280 million iTunes customers. Editorials began asking if the iPad might be the saviour of an industry in a seemingly terminal decline.

But less than a year on there are already signs that the romance is fading, along with those first flushes of novelty. The latest figures from the Audit Bureau of Circulations in the US show average monthly downloads slumping by the end of 2010. Only two publishers were brave enough to share their figures.

In for a long wait

Condé Nast’s Wired US iPad magazine sold 73,000 copies through the app in its first nine days in May 2010 but that fell to 23,000 in November – a bad month all round. Vanity Fair sold 10,500 in October but 8,700 in November, and GQ’s average fell from 13,000 in October to 11,000 in November. And Men’s Health, published by Rodale in the US, fell from 2,800 monthly shortly after the iPad launch to 2,000 by November.

These baby steps need to grow up fast if they are to compare to the sales and profits enjoyed by print. Last year’s census by the Association of Online Publishers showed nearly two-thirds of publishers pinning their hopes on in-app content as the best chance of making money through mobile – but they might be in for a long wait. The tablet userbase is small and the potential app userbase outside the US smaller still – and Apple takes 30% on every app sold.

Analysts Research2Guidance estimate that 100,000 app sales at 79p would make the publishers £40,000 – not exactly a moneyspinner, when they will have to wait three years to see a return. By then, Apple’s domination of the tablet market could be at an end, bringing a new problem of developing for multiple devices – though Screen Digest senior analyst Dan Cryan expects 6.5 million people will use an iPad by 2014.

If there is any business model to be found for innovative publishing on the iPad, Condé Nast is determined to find it. Albert Read, general manager of Condé Nast UK, acknowledged it is an “undoubtedly expensive” commitment. “It’s a punt,” he said. “A long-term hope is that we create something exciting for readers and advertisers – and that brings its own returns over time. In five years we will have reaped those benefits.”

Read would not comment on how much Condé Nast has invested or when it expects to see a return. But he described the projects as “resource intensive”, with Wired’s app needing up to five dedicated staff. Print pages have to be redesigned and copy resubbed, and advertisers – who are keen to experiment, Read said – have to submit horizontal and vertical formats.

“Though we are ambitious, we are also relatively cautious. We haven’t launched apps for every magazine and have only done one experimental edition for Vogue.

“Rather like the dotcom era, there was a period of hype and excitement over the iPad and then things calmed down. In two, three, perhaps five years, that excitement will be justified.”

Rupert Murdoch seized on “the Jesus tablet” as part of his crusade to elevate his news business from free web content. With a reported investment of m (£19m), he has a team of 100 in New York furiously putting the finishing touches to The Daily, News Corp’s dedicated iPad newspaper, which is due to roll out next Monday. The Daily is expected to include a new push subscription feature that automatically delivers and charges for weekly or monthly editions.

Murdoch will be hoping to outshine Virgin boss Richard Branson, whose own New York-based iPad magazine, Project, launched in November, charging .99 per month. But whether Murdoch can turn around his dubious track record in digital projects, from Iguide to MySpace, remains to be seen.

The Daily could become a mass-market phenomenon – a next-generation Sun – but at 99c (62p) a day, it will be some time before the experiment sees a return.

The Financial Times took advantage of the traditionally lucrative financial news sector to launch an extensive app in May. Download numbers have reached 487,000 in total, the FT said, with iPad generating more than 10% of new digital subscribers. Deputy chief executive Ben Hughes has said that iPad ad revenues reached £1m in the first six months, and ad inventory has been sold out since launch. The app is free and users are encouraged to register to read 10 free stories per month. Subscription models

Common complaints among readers include huge file sizes, and, with more than 300,000 apps in the app store, visibility is also a problem. But by far the biggest issue is that of offering a subscription model within an app. Apple does not share names and addresses of iTunes App Store customers, meaning publishers cannot build that valuable subscriber database. Reports have persisted since September that Apple is working on a subscription service for news and magazine apps; that could launch alongside the second version of the iPad rumoured for April – if it doesn’t debut in Murdoch’s Daily first.

“Apple needs a better balance between its own desire to have visibility of all the data, and the needs of publishers to get data about their readers that is crucial to their businesses,” said Edward Roussel, Telegraph Media Group’s digital editor.

Both the Telegraph and Guardian used big-name advertisers to launch free iPad apps. The Guardian’s Canon-sponsored photography app, Eyewitness, had had 404,559 downloads at last count, with a separate news iPad app under development. Audi has extended its initial 12-week sponsorship of the Telegraph’s iPad app, of which about 100,000 have been downloaded since launch, and version 2 is due out by the end of March.

Roussel said the Telegraph’s in-app registration system shows the iPad is attracting new readers, with most aged between 30 and 50. “We’re making reasonable sponsorship but at this stage apps are more a beta product than a substantial revenue earner.”

Those in the industry express optimism but a lack of confidence in how best to exploit the tablet explosion. Roussel says apps offer the best of the old world and the new. “There’s no question, , it’s a highly significant development of the media industry and the potential is massive. But it will take years, not months, to work out how to make apps better than both the web and newspapers, which they have the potential to be.”

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010

Published via the Guardian News Feed plugin for WordPress.

Even before iPad has been launched in Scandinavia, ten thousands of people have managed to get hold of a tablet. But they are almost all male!

In hardly any other parts of the world there is as high Internet penetration as in the Scandinavian countries. Scandinavians love techology and tend to be early adopters of whatever new gagdets and trends that pick up speed in the international market.

Therefore: Even before iPad has been launched in the Scandinavian countries, the biggest web sites in Sweden, Norway and Denmark register ten thousands of visits from local iPad users every week.

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But who are these early adopters in the high tech market of Scandinavia? And what do they use iPad for?

The Swedish communication agency Daytona decided to find out and has just completed a survey of Swedish iPad users. The results give some insight into the user habits of early adopters of iPad. As iPad probably will be launched in Scandinavia within a very short time, I believe these results might be of interest to an international digital media audience as well.

• Read more about the survey here (in Swedish)

272 Swedish iPad owners have responded to the survey. Three out of four of them live in the cities and nine out of ten – !!! – also own an iPhone. Also: Nine out of ten iPad users are men!

One interesting result is that 57,7 % say that they share their iPad with other members of their household. This is noteworthy as Apple has not really designed iPad for sharing. Rather it is constructed as a personal device without any possibility to log on to the tablet with different user IDs.

When do you use your iPad during the day?

Almost two out of three iPad owners say that they use the iPad several times per day. This is similar to what we have seen in Norway: The iPad is primarily a sofa device used at home in the night!

But what do they use it for?
Here is a summary:

What we see, is that e-mail, news, video and social media are the most common uses of iPad.

Many people report that their media habits have changed after starting to use iPad. For instance as many as one out of five iPad users say that they have stopped readings newspapers alltogether!

One in three use television less than before, according to the survey.

Early adopters in Scandinavia choose to download a large number of apps, according to the survey.

More than 60 per cent say that they normally start their iPad for a specific purpose.

What should we make out of this? Basically it is an early indication of how tablets might be used in the Scandinavian market, where people often tend to be early in adopting new technology. However, this group will not be representative for the average users one or two years from now.

• Read more about the survey from Daytona here (in Swedish)

From a media industry perspective two results are worth noting:

• Although many use iPad for news, apps from media companies are rare on the top list of what apps have been downloaded.
• Four out of ten users say they have either stopped reading newspapers or are reading them less.

——–

Talking of iPad and Sweden: Media company Bonnier just conceptualized their idea of news in the tablet format

In February Bonnier caught a lot of attention with their visualization of how magazines might look on tablets. Now their creative lab has done the same for newspapers. Watch this video about “News ++” for inspiration. What do you think?

[iframe: src="http://player.vimeo.com/video/17148059" width="560" height="315" frameborder="0">]

From Copy Economy to Access Economy: The media industry must prepare itself for a future in the cloud, claims a digital future expert.

Media futurist Gerd Leonhard was the keynote speaker of the Future Media Days conference in Oslo, Norway this week. Leonhard is a media strategist and popular keynote speaker on the future of media. He lives in Switzerland and also writes the Mediafuturist blog.

The Future Media Days conference was held for the first time by the New Media Network in Norway. After his speech (you can download his slides here) I made a short video interviw with Leonhard that you can watch above.

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- A tornado is coming for the media industry,  warns Leonhard. He points out how some big mega trends will affect the very essence of how the media companies have been used to running their business.

One of the most important trends is the transformation from a Copy Economy to Access Economy.

Traditionally media business models have been based on selling copies of content: A printed newspaper, a book, a DVD, a music record, even a digital copy of a song.

That model is about to disappear, claims Leonhard. He compares Internet to a giant copy machine. Selling “copies” is a model of the past. Instead the entire world shifts to a world of access.

“If you are in the media industry you better get used to this. It is a whole new industry.”

Gerd Leonhard

We must review our assumptions, says Gerd Leonhard.  Like what is a copy in this new world? How do you define “a copy” when you have unlimited music streamed to you like in Spotify? If we cannot even define a copy, how can we speak of copyright?

Gerd Leonhard’s answer: Access (to the cloud) is the new copy!

We used to live in what can be described as the Broadcast Culture.  It was a disconnected society, based on everybody watching or reading the same content. For the media it was a one way stream of publishing.

Now it has been transformed to the Broadband Culture, which is based on millions of links between people.

“What matters on the Internet is not the noise, it is the trusted connections that you have generated”

The future of the media is not a fight for distribution, it is a fight for attention, says Leonhard.

In the past the media made money through control and scarcity.

“The future of the media is not a fight for distribution, it is a fight for attention.”

What then about media companies’ attempt at putting up paywalls in such an economy, like what The Times is doing.

- The paywall is an attention wall, unless it is so cleverly done that you don’t really notice that you pay, says Leonhard.

“Forcing people to pay cannot possibly be our future!”

Leonhard wasn’t necessarily agains asking users to pay, but underlined how i all depends on how it is done.

- It is very important to make models that keep 95 per cent of the population engaged. Then you can create uppselling options, he said.

Related articles about Gerd Leonhard

• Gerd Leonhard: The Future of IPR and Copyright (presentation at TedX NewStreet London) (slideshare.net)
• The Future of Advertising: Gerd Leonhard at Adtech London 2010 (slideshare.net)
• Gerd Leonhard: The Journalists Formerly Known as the Media: My Advice to the Next Generation ( /Jay Rosen) (mediagazer.com)
• New video: 5 customer engagement trends by Gerd Leonhard (future of marketing) (mediafuturist.com)
• Gerd Leonhard: Hot Trend – Tools To Find Relevant Web Information (gigaom.com)

Gartner and IDC data shows slower growth in sales of PCs than expected – with Apple tablet reckoned to account for shortfall.

This article titled “iPad chokes netbook sales” was written by Charles Arthur, for guardian.co.uk on Thursday 14th October 2010 07.31 UTC

Netbook sales are slowing as people consider buying tablet computers – particularly Apple’s iPad – instead, according to data released separately by research companies Gartner and IDC with their analysis of third-quarter computer sales worldwide.

Overall, sales of PCs grew slower than had been expected. Gartner said 88.3m were sold in the third quarter, up 7.6% compared with the same period a year ago when 82m were sold, but below its earlier forecast of 12.7% growth (which would have meant 92.5m sold).

IDC, which uses a different method to measure sales, said there were 89.7m sold, up 11% (80.8m) but nearly 3% below its expectations (which would have seen 92m sold).

The data exclude the millions of sales of Apple’s iPad, which Gartner and IDC do not classify as a “PC” for the purposes of their data.

Horace Dedlu, who runs the Asymco consultancy, estimates that if the iPad were included in the figures, it would add 4m to the PC sales figures – neatly closing the gap between Gartner’s sales forecasts and the observed outcome.

Excluding the iPad, PC sales growth in the US was just 3.8% year on year, much slower than second-quarter growth, which was 11.7% – and a long way short of IDC’s expectations of 11% growth.

IDC said that the slower sales were due to the influence of Apple’s iPad on consumers’ intentions on buying PCs, and that it had had a notable negative effect in the US on the netbook market.

Gartner said that sales of “consumer mobile” PCs – netbooks and laptops – were the weakest in years in the US. “The third quarter historically is a strong consumer quarter, led by back-to-school sales,” said Mikako Kitagawa, principal analyst at Gartner. “Consumer mobile PC demand, driven by low-priced notebooks, including mini-notebooks, slowed after very strong growth the past two years.”

She added: “Media tablet hype around devices such as the iPad has also affected consumer notebook growth by delaying some PC purchases, especially in the US consumer market. Media tablets don’t replace primary PCs, but they affect PC purchases in many ways. At this stage, hype around media tablets has led consumers and the channels to take a ‘wait and see’ approach to buying a new device.”

Gartner said HP remained in the top slot for worldwide sales, with 15.4m, followed by Acer (11.5m), Dell (10.8m) and Lenovo (9.1m).

In Europe, Gartner said there were 27.3m PC sales, up 7.3% from the same period in 2009 (25.4m). “The western Europe PC market slowed as professional buyers and consumers held back on PC purchases,” the company noted.

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010

Published via the Guardian News Feed plugin for WordPress.

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For a few weeks I have used iPad for news consumption, daily tasks and fun. It is wonderful. And terrible. Here is why.

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iPad is my first Apple product. As my laptop I have used PCs, while my smartphones have been Nokia at first and now the Android-based HTC Desire. Kindle has been my e-reading device of choice for books. And I have had a strong interest in all the new mobile platforms, especially when it comes to media content.

This summer I became the proud owner of an iPad.  Working with digital strategy for Norway’s largest newspaper, Aftenposten, I had of course tested out iPad for a long time. But testing a device used by many colleagues is nothing near the experience of customizing it for your own personal use. Finally I had my own device that I could set up in exactly the way I wanted it for myself.

And my first discovery was just this: iPad is a personal device – and NOT a family device. Once you start purchasing many apps and customize the tablet with your accounts for mail, Facebook and Twitter it becomes very personal. Not that I have many secrets, but I soon found myself hesitating to let my family members use my iPad. The reason is very simple: Mail and an number of apps are very personal in nature.

+++ What do I love about iPad?

Convenient user situations. I just love how the iPad offers me convenience in consuming media and browsing the web.  Yes, I can bring my laptop with me to the sofa if I like. But I just don’t want to. The laptop is too bulky and too much associated with work. The iPad, however, gives completely different associations.  It is like reading a magazine: Comfortable, relaxing and efficient. Suddenly I find myself doing a lot of my web stuff in the sofa rather than at my desk. I love it.

Efficient cloud services. I love services in the cloud. They help me not to worry about where I store my stuff – and it is always available when I need it. A number of cloud services apps have made iPad a very convenient tool for me. Most important is Box.net. I syncronize all my work documents as well as important private files with Box.net – and now I have very easy access on my iPad. Need to read a report? Before I would print it out at work and bring it home to the sofa. Now I just pick it up on my Box.net app. Another very good cloud app is Kindle. I can now read my book four places: On my Kindle e-reader, on my PC, on my HTC Desire and on my iPad. And they all syncronize smoothly! For this reason alone I haven’t even considered using Apples iBooks app for reading books.

Touching the news. I love not having to use the mouse when navigating. Touching the news is a wonderful experience and a very easy way to move around. In many ways I feel it brings me closer to the content.

Rich media experiences. I love how iPad offers much richer media experiences than any other platform I use. In my opinion using iPad to consume news works just great. Unfortunately most media apps are still first generation, but I am convinced that is about to change very quickly. Already I find it a much nicer way to read news that the typical web experience.  The display of photo and videos is just great!

Efficient and portable. I love how iPad gets started in a couple of seconds after you push the on-button. Compare that to my one-minute-to-start laptop and it becomes amazingly convenient. Suddenly I can check stuff in a few seconds without having to wait for ages. That the iPad is small enough to be truly portable adds to this experience.

Extremely useful.  I love how iPad can be used to solve so many problems. There is always an app for what I need done and there seems to be no limitations of creativity among the thousands of app developers out there. Sure, many of the apps are crap. But there are also numerous apps that are really useful and which help me do my stuff in an extremely easy way. And since it is so easy to pay, I keep buying new apps.

— What do I hate about iPad?

Lack of multitasking. I keep getting irritated of all the times I am being thrown out of a task and have to backtrack through the start page. Take downloading apps, for instance. The procedure itself is simple, but once I click download I am being sent back to the start screen and I have to click on the app store tab once more to get another app. Back and forth. Back and forth. Why? I just don’t get it.  The same goes if I read my mail and click on a link to an interesting article. Safari (an inferior browser) opens – and I have to go via the home screen to get back to my mail. I guess I have been spoiled by my Android smartphone which is so much more user friendly in this regard. Why not make it simple, Apple?

Wrong display of Powerpoint. I use iPad a lot for work. As for millions of users out there, most of my work documents are in Microsoft formats. Not only do I want to read them, but I also need to make changes. But I keep getting into trouble doing this. Graphs in my Powerpoint files frequently get distorted and even working on the Word documents takes some effort to figure out how.  Given the popularity of Powerpoint this is quite a surprise. Why not make it simple, Apple?

No Flash. iPad is great for browsing. I enjoy sitting in the sofa and flip through web pages. But one big hurdle restraints my use: The lack of Flash support. I keep visiting web pages where I cannot do what I want to do. My 14 year son put it very clearly when I asked why he was not more eager to user my iPad: “Isn’t that obvious, dad? It has no Flash! I cannot watch the videos on my skate sites”.  Again: Why not make it simple, Apple?

Useless in the sunshine. I have tried to bring my iPad out in the garden. It is just not a pleasant experience. It becomes very difficult to read at all and if there is any sunshine at all the iPad only works as a mirror. Reading books on the beach? Forget iPad! Use Kindle instead!

Too heavy.  The weight takes away a number of user situations. One typical example: I like to read holding my book in one hand and a coffee cup in another. But holding the iPad in one hand only soon turns into a weighlifting exercise.

Cannot syncronize.  Yes, I know most people have no trouble syncronizing their iPad with iTunes. Yet I am among the users who have been unable to syncronize my iPad to my PC. Each time I try I am being asked to authorize the computer. I do so and iTunes responds that the computer is already authorized. Yet when i continue, I am being asked to authorize again. And so it goes in an eternal loop. Many have described the problem in support forums, yet there doesn’t seem to be a clear answer from Apple. And I keep wondering why I have to syncronize in this way. Why not do it in the cloud as with services like Box.net and Dropbox.com? Why not make it simple, Apple?

Google’s Eric Schmidt suggests we may need to invent new identities to escape embarrassing online pasts – while Facebook has launched a tool to share users’ locations. So does technology pose a threat to private life?

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This article titled “Does technology pose a threat to our private life?” was written by Jemima Kiss, for The Guardian on Friday 20th August 2010 23.06 UTC

Are you in a relationship? What are your political views? And where did you go for breakfast this morning? What would once have been details of our lives known only by those we know and trust, many of us now willingly display online.

From the surveillance entertainment of Big Brother to CCTV and celebrity magazines, the boundaries of what is regarded as appropriate to put in the public domain are shifting dramatically. But nothing is challenging our notion of privacy more than social networking, with 26 million of us using Facebook to share the minutiae of our lives every month in the UK alone.

Facebook has proved irresistible to many because we are lured into joining by friends and family. Browsing, reading, comparing and nosing is instinctive, impulsive and reflects our tendencies offline, our “social graph”, as Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg likes to call it. Having executed the social networking business idea better than its rivals – MySpace, Bebo, Friendster and Hi5 have been left for dust – Facebook has seen astonishing growth, from a Harvard dorm project in 2003 to a global phenomenon that had 500 million monthly users by July this year. That’s already one in 13 people on Earth, and Zuckerberg recently predicted it was “almost a guarantee” that his site would reach 1 billion users, with growth in relatively untapped markets such as Russia, Japan and Korea “doubling every six months”.

On Thursday, Facebook unveiled its latest gambit in the battle to remain top of the social networking heap with a move into geolocation services, which harness the GPS functionality of increasingly powerful mobile smartphones. Facebook Places will launch first in the US and later in the UK, allowing users, if they choose, to share their location with friends on the site by checking into public venues. Sensitive to intense public scrutiny of its privacy controls, Facebook was careful to make the service opt-in but every geolocation service – including Google’s Latitude, Gowalla and Foursquare – has prompted renewed debate about the protection of personal details online.

“This is a seminal moment where we’re seeing new thinking and new practice starting to emerge around the issue of privacy,” says Stephen Balkam, chief executive of the Family Online Safety Institute and member of Facebook’s safety advisory board. “The battle lines are being drawn between generations. Facebook is headed by someone who hasn’t hit 30 yet, but has very different perceptions and assumptions about what is private and what is not. We need to recognise that with social networking, geolocation and digital technology, the privacy bar is being reset.”

Facebook has come under significant pressure to make its site safer for users. Incidents of serious crimes facilitated by the internet such as the murder of British teenager Ashleigh Hall by Peter Chapman earlier this year, are tragic but rare. More common is the embarrassment from a compromising tagged photo of a drunken night out.

The rapid pace of development by technology companies often throws up new cultural and ethical challenges. Google’s Street View has frequently been challenged by privacy campaigners who question whether the logistical and commercial benefits of making every property in every street visible on the web are worth the sacrifice of the individual’s right to privacy. Facebook users first raised their pitchforks in 2006 when the site introduced a news feed for each user, summarising their friends’ activity. More recently it came under pressure to simplify its privacy controls with some high-profile commentators and groups – organised on Facebook pages, naturally – encouraging others to remove their profiles. It responded in May with simplified privacy settings.

Richard, now Lord, Allan is a former Liberal Democrat MP and Facebook’s European policy director. “The internet is here to stay as a ubiquitous way for every individual citizen to capture and share information. The challenge is how you manage that increasing flow of information and that’s where Facebook is at the bleeding edge, allowing people to navigate that world. Expressions of concern and criticisms are really of that direction of travel, rather than any particular product, like Facebook.”

Allan thinks it is an exaggeration to characterise privacy as a natural state of man, citing societies before mass transport where a large community would know every intimate detail of each other’s lives. The modern sense of privacy came much later, with modern transport and cities. “Notably with new technology, you end up with a utopian viewpoint and a dystopian viewpoint, but a lot of things those dystopians feared did not come true. To say you’re ‘living in Facebook rather than the real world’ is a complete misreading of what’s happening. The reason it is so compelling is because it is so connected to the real world. With every wave of technology we need to get used to it.”

Our personal information can broadly be categorised as trivial data such as music preferences, behavioural information about our activity and connections, and confidential information including credit card numbers. But even seemingly innocuous information can be used against us, says security expert Rik Ferguson of Trend Micro. “In isolation, much of this data may be trivial but from a hacker’s perspective, any information is good information,” he says. “Use search engines to discover the extent of your online footprint and tailor it. Keep tabs on yourself before anyone else does.”

Balkam describes the internet’s two biggest privacy problems as reputational damage – inadvertently posting drunken photos that your boss might see, for example – and physical safety, the latter being the issue for women particularly wary of location tools. Burglary is another concern, when users of location services announce they are out of the house; in February three developers built PleaseRobMe.com to raise awareness about the implications of broadcasting location to a public audience.

Currently location games such as Foursquare, where users check in at public venues to earn points and prizes, tend to have a small, enthusiastic and largely trustworthy group of dedicated users comprised of so-called “early adopters”. For them, this period of intensive invention and opportunity is a golden age. Christian Payne – who describes himself as a “social technologist” – abandoned a career as a photographer in early 2008 when he had a “car crash epiphany”. Within minutes of tweeting a video of his crashed Land Rover, he had an offer of help from a local crane operator, his AA membership number sent to him and a call from BT asking for the serial number of the telegraph pole he’d crashed into. He worries that spirit of helpfulness will dilute as social media becomes more commercialised, and its users more sceptical.

“We’ll never see it like we do now – more nefarious people will come later,” he says. “But it would be more risky for me not to take the chance of building meaningful connections with acquaintances who then become friends when one of you needs some help.”

Payne seems to put a lot of intimate information into the world, but still skillfully manages to keep his personal life, and that of his partner and son, almost completely private. It’s up to the user to decide what they want to keep private, he says, though he’s uncomfortable with the idea that he is unknowingly creating a public persona for himself. “I’d hope I’m doing this naturally and not thinking about it. But then asking me that is like taking me out of the play I’m acting in as myself – and asking me to direct it.”

Online privacy is intrinsically linked to identity. Author Peggy Orenstein wrote in the New York Times recently that her reflexive compulsion to tweet a pleasant moment with her daughter had also spoilt the moment, and mused that our online personas are elaborate constructs that we, knowingly or unknowingly, craft into an identity we want the world to see. The internet has provided a platform that seems to challenge us to present a single identity to the world, yet we struggle to balance the profiles we share with family, friends and work colleagues.

Stories of employers sacking staff for drunken Facebook photos will be replaced by an acceptance that drunken university pictures are the norm, says Dr Joss Wright, Fresnel research fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute. He hopes sites will develop more intuitive ways to share information with the appropriate people; when his grandmother joined Facebook it “severely curtailed” what he could share with his friends.

“I’d like to believe people will learn how to guard their privacy, but we’re more likely to see societal shifts in what is seen as acceptable for privacy,” Wright adds. “Privacy has tended to be something quite intrinsic, and there hasn’t been a mechanism for privacy violation in general society until the arrival of the internet. The rise of Facebook and Foursquare show we don’t really understand privacy or what it means to preserve it, and don’t have an ability to understand the consequences of violating it either.”

Regulators struggle to keep up with the pace of technology and enforcement of what rules there are is weak, meaning the onus for education should be on the services themselves, says Wright, who doesn’t think they are closely scrutinised enough. Though sites like Facebook have a duty of care, “the economics are against that, because their entire business model is built around getting us to share as much information as possible”.

But there are upsides, too. Sharing personal information is beneficial in giving insights into different aspects of society. “If you can see the details of people’s lives, when you can see someone’s actual persona, it’s harder to be biased and bigoted,” said Wright. “But a balance has to be struck between the amount we share for the positive and negative.”

Eric Schmidt, Google chief executive, recently reiterated his suggestion that internet users may one day be able to change their identities in order to distance themselves from personal information shared so freely in their formative years. “I don’t believe society understands what happens when everything is available, knowable and recorded by everyone all the time,” he told the Wall Street Journal.

Zuckerberg takes a different tack. “You have one identity. The days of you having a different image for your work friends or co-workers and for the other people you know are probably coming to an end pretty quickly … Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity,” he was quoted as saying in David Kirkpatrick’s book, The Facebook Effect.

Part of Facebook’s success has been to demand people’s real identities. In that way, it represents the maturation of the internet where the previous norm had been a wisecrack pseudonym and a world of “trolling”, where faceless, nameless commenters could easily post abusive messages and attack each other. The improvement in the quality of communication and debate online is in no small part down to the trend towards using real identities. However, anonymity still has its role in whistleblowing sites such as Wikileaks, or in debates where a contributor to a discussion on rape, for example, deserves protection.

If you think the current internet landscape is frightening, don’t think too much about what’s coming next. Already served with targeted ads based on keywords in our Google email, or picked out by our age and interests on Facebook, the future is more personalised still. “Sites will get much better at filtering information and predicting our behaviour, serving us what we want to buy and finding new ways to share information, like location. Three years ago, people wouldn’t even have dreamed of sharing their location,” says Wright. While the sensitivities and sensibilities of managing our online data still need to be clarified, there will be benefits in personalisation, which promises more meaningful, relevant advertising for consumers and consequently, for advertisers, far more effective bang for their buck.

So what next? Three years ago, rival social networking site MySpace seemed invincible. Could Facebook still lose its edge? Anything is possible.

Balkam recently suggested Facebook recruit a philosopher to help interpret some of the demanding and unprecedented ethical and sociological challenges it faces.

“No company in the world has ever attracted 500 million users, and they are having to come to terms, at lightning speed, with what is good and what is abhorrent behaviour. Aristotle and Plato struggled with that – and the average age at Facebook is 28.”

Where the Twitterati draw the line

Zoe Margolis, blogger

While I’m very active on social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook, I have so far avoided all the location-based tools on my phone. Primarily, this is because I do not want to publicly announce where I am – I wish to protect my privacy and safety – but also because I don’t want to bombard people with incessant, dull, information; I’ve unfollowed people on Twitter and Facebook due to their too-frequent (and, might I say, very annoying) Foursquare updates being fed through to their timelines.I can see the point of location tools – they’re an easy way to connect people who might otherwise be unaware of their proximity to their friends – but given the amount of information we already share using social networking sites, it almost seems like overload to add yet another method of input, and it’s pretty much redundant if not all of your friends/social circle are using the same tool.

I have some major concerns with Facebook Places though and believe it is a huge threat to people’s privacy. It is already live in users’ settings(though the feature has not yet been rolled out in the UK) and while there is the option of limiting the location info to friends only, they have to de-select the automatically enabled “Include me in ‘People Here Now’ after I check in” box in order to opt out of their location being included on a public list for all to see.

In addition to this, people’s friends can “check’ ” them into locations, so even if someone has limited the information about themselves that they are sharing, there might still be a breach of their privacy from others.

Most of my friends on Facebook have never heard of Foursquare or Gowalla, let alone used a location-based tool on their mobile phones; I assume the majority of people who use Facebook are similar. Given this, it concerns me that Facebook Places appears to be lacking transparency about privacy. The ability to change the settings to ensure personal information is protected seems more geared to the tech-savvy, than the lay-person; I fear many people will discover their privacy has been breached only after the event.

Privacy on any social networking site or location-sharing tool should start off being intact: 100% protection, with the chance to opt-in to less privacy, should you wish to share information with others. Facebook seems to take the opposite view, making the default position little/no privacy with the need to opt-out; I won’t be using Facebook Places any time soon.

David Nobbs

I don’t believe total privacy is possible so I never telling anybody anything on line that I wouldn’t be happy for the nation to know (if it was interested!).

I think some people are so hungry for celebrity they’re happy not to have a private life at all. I’m very careful with my tweets. People can never be quite sure whether they’re true or false, and I never reveal when I’m going to be away.

Sorry this is so short but I’m off to Portugal now for five months. Only joking.

Max Tundra, musician

I probably spend too much time online, sharing details about my life with anyone who has the remotest interest in my music. I don’t like the idea of letting people know exactly where I am right this second, but as my fans tend to be fairly sane and unstalkerish, I feel comfortable letting them know what I’m up to in a general sense.

I don’t use Foursquare or any applications which might reveal my geographical co-ordinates, although I am often easily locatable, as I play advertised concerts. I did, however, recently delete my personal Facebook profile, as that seemed to be a cluster of unnecessarily pertinent information about my life and the people I share it with, as well as being a colossal waste of time which could be better spent telling people on Twitter that I prefer the Henry vacuum cleaner to the Dyson.

Graham Linehan, comedy writer:

I always hated Facebook because it made me very uncertain about what I was and wasn’t sharing with the world. The privacy settings were, famously, a bit of a maze, and seemed subject to sudden changes that you hadn’t agreed to. I felt like one day I might open up the site to see a picture of myself in bed asleep with my wife, like in Hidden’.

Twitter is different because it forces you to be very selective with what you choose to share, and so forces social media back to a more private place. I personally don’t tweet much stuff about my home life, because I don’t want to accidentally tweet something stupid like “Holiday starts tomorrow!” along with a geotag to my home address. So my tweets are generally links to things I find funny or interesting, and my home life only gets a look-in when something truly interesting or funny happens.

Once I made a mistake and posted my home number while trying to send a direct (private) message to someone and we had to change it, but that was a valuable lesson to learn early on, because now I’m a lot more careful with what I put out there. It wasn’t too much of a problem, though. We only got two or three callers who hung up as soon as my wife said “Hello, Dreambeds”. I asked her who Dreambeds were and she said “Dunno. I suppose they sell beds.”

I think people should start to claw back as much privacy as they can. Services such as Twitter show that it’s possible to share selectively. Sharing selectively should be the default setting on every social network service. Which, again, is why you won’t see me on Facebook any time soon.

John Prescott, politician

Twitter has been a revelation. In the past if I needed to get message out I’d have to convince a paper to publish it. Now I can tweet my thoughts and, if interesting, it’ll get pick up. My Milburn tweet was running on rolling news within 10 minutes.

I share a lot of content like my blogs and vlogs along with links to stories and virals from others I like. Twitter is also great to run campaigns and organise tweetups.

We did the first pastiche of the Cameron airbrushed posters, which then inspired mMyDavidCameron.com. Suddenly hundreds of thousands of people were doing their own versions. It destroyed Ashcroft’s poster campaign and cost nothing.

And when the founder of the National Bullying Helpline said people were bullied in No10, someone tweeted me a link to the industrial tribunal which proved she was accused of bullying herself! It killed the story within 24 hours.

I’ve found Twitter to be a fantastic way to communicate, learn from others and show the real me, not the distorted view peddled by the media.

But I’m not convinced about geolocation applications. You have to have some privacy.

Suzanne Moore, journalist

Don’t mistake personal information for honesty. Personas are created and people play as well as tweet their hearts out. If you don’t want to bare your soul you don’t have to, but the dividing line between public and private is now generational, one that neither mainstream culture nor government appears to understand.

I don’t much care what people think of me and was wondering who some guy on MasterChef was the other day on Twitter and wondering if I had slept with him. Turns out I hadn’t which was a relief. And a joke!

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010

Published via the Guardian News Feed plugin for WordPress.

After all the hype and all the disappointment, a report from Reuters Institute for the study of Journalism digs deeper into the effect of social media on the 2010 campaign.

This article titled “How the internet really affected the election” was written by Jemima Kiss, for The Guardian on Monday 12th July 2010 06.00 UTC

Among the many promises broken during the course of the 2010 UK general election was the contention that this was to be Britain’s first true internet campaign, won and lost Obama-style due to grassroots funding campaigns, intimate video messages and – anathema to the serious political pundits – soundbites on Twitter.

What we got was a sensational election dominated by some very traditional TV debates, while the promises of the web and social media seemed to provide an entertaining but superficial backchannel. But with two months’ breathing space since 6 May, a refreshingly thorough report by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism illustrates just how much impact social media had on the election, and particularly how the engagement of younger voters may have influenced the outcome.

Nic Newman, the BBC’s former future media controller for journalism, spent six weeks reviewing Facebook groups, Twitter coverage and the use of social media by traditional media organisations. “This was never going to be an internet election,” he says. “Social media is just another layer … it has always been there, through discussion and networks in the pub.”

Facebook dominated the media behaviour of the 18-24 age group he surveyed, with an emphatic 97% saying they used the site during the election. The same group used the web more than any other source of news – 89%, compared with 81% for TV and 59% for newspapers.

When asked how they used social media during the election, 64% said discussing events, joining a group or clicking on links from a friend, while 30% said the TV debate was the biggest factor in swaying their vote – more than TV, newspapers or friends and family.

After decades struggling to engage the youth vote, the Electoral Commission had a major success with aboutmyvote.co.uk, which recorded 1.8m visits, 40% of them from 18-24s. But does the trend for paywalls threaten to cut off a supply of authoritative, informative online news for this group? Though few sites charge for access to general news now, an accelerated trend could mean this would be the only election where wide engagement combined with open sharing of information.

“It is clearly an issue, as social recommendation becomes bigger, that some of that content will be behind paywalls, and this is not just about the election,” Newman says. “But it becomes more significant around election time, and an issue about access and the necessity to get free information.”

The challenge is to engage individuals deeply enough that they will escalate from passive viewer to active participant. Aboutmyvote.co.uk certainly succeeded to some extent, but Photoshop also helped, as illustrated by the reworked campaign posters that littered the web. Labelled “the fifth estate” of grassroots commentary and activism by the report, this trend was made even more accessible by Clifford Singer, who launched mydavidcameron.com to invite anyone to customise the latest Conservative billboards. Singer claimed 3,000 posters were made through the site, and that spreading the images through Twitter and Facebook “enabled us to contest a £500,000 Tory advertising campaign at zero cost”.

Was it a problem that so much of the backchannel commentary, particularly during the debates, was humour? Newman says analysing 1,000 tweets sent during the final debate showed 34% were jokes, with 39% definitely serious. But what matters is the quality of the commentary, not the tone.

“A lot of this was absolutely fantastic. It was like watching the debate with some of the best scriptwriters in the business – the gags came thick and fast,” he says. Politicians’ campaign trail anecdotes were so quickly and thoroughly parodied, he notes, that they were abruptly dumped.

He likens the debate to a Roman forum where everyone could have a say – “cynics and humorists heckling from the back, with activists closer to the debate making more serious interventions”.

Those interventions included the Guardian’s Richard Adams, who tweeted a link to figures on Eurozone debt levels in response to one point in the debate, while The King’s Fund posted a link to its election guide to healthcare policies.

Overall, mainstream media has learned, through experimentation during major news events, how to involve readers and use social media tools; but for politicians, this was the first election where Twitter was taken seriously – more than 600 of them were tweeting.

“Mainstream media are largely getting it right, and recognising that this is about conversation and not broadcast,” Newman says. “For politicians, this is the first election where they are really having a go and some, like John Prescott, have been authentic and posted regularly while others have been in broadcast mode, still finding their feet.”

Easy to dismiss, but less easy to master – social media is yet to come of age. But its growing influence and ubiquity, particularly among younger voters, cannot be ignored. Newman cites one of the more modest estimates, by Mori, that the voting turnout of 18- to 24-year-olds increased by 7%, above the national average of 5%.

“The complications of this new reality are that 18- to 24-year-olds do enjoy big events like the TV debates, but they are not prepared to consume political messages passively,” he says. “[Social media] puts more tools in the hands of audiences to make politicians and the media more accountable.”

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010

Published via the Guardian News Feed plugin for WordPress.

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Here is Living Room 2.0 – New York Times‘ vision of how the news site content on the work on your living room wall. It is another video which Nieman Journalism Lab has recorded from the R&D Group at New York Times. Some great and fascinating experiments here. Also find the video “The future of advertising”. Read more at Nieman Journalism Lab.

Earlier videos from New York Times R&D department:

• New York Times 2.0 – report from the lab
• Preparing for a future across platforms

Here is the video about the future of advertising.

New York Times R&D Group: The Future of Advertising from Nieman Journalism Lab on Vimeo.

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