News: For the Masses, By the Masses?

This is a repost of the latest article I wrote for my work blog on how digital tools are changing journalism. ___________________________________________________________ As social media gets more integrated into people’s lives, they’re demanding more control over the content they interact with. This behavior is happening organically in the digital space. In response, newspapers are changing the way they create content to include consumer participation – and consumers are changing how they interact with the news.

According to an eyetracking study by the Poyner Institute, the shift within newspapers towards focusing on more digital consumer participation makes a lot of sense:

• Online participants read an average 77% of an article versus the 62% within broadsheet and 57% within tabloids. 
• People consuming news digitally also read more regardless of the length of the article. 

This could directly relate to the fact that people have the option digitally to aggregate news in a way they rarely can offline.

And, people are taking advantage of this by personalizing the news for themselves:

• Digg Newswire and Redditt both allow consumers to act as an editor by voting news stories up and down depending on the topic and its relevancy to the individual.
• Trove creates personalized content based on individual user’s interests. It instantly builds a user’s personal home page by matching its channels to the user’s Facebook likes and interests. It then searches and analyzes articles and blog posts to find entities – people, places, things, or concepts – in text. Based on what it finds, Trove classifies the article into one or more of hundreds of topics.
• XYDO is a news-based social network. It focuses on the social endorsement, prioritization and engagement of news. XYDO provides users with a prioritized view of articles/features, editorials, blogs and other news being shared within their social graphs, together with the ability to observe and track broad global news trends and specialized domain-specific trends. Personalized news emails, the XYDO brief, are sent to the users regularly.

Newspapers are also adapting to find real time, socially curated content. For example, New York Daily News is now requiring that every editorial computer has tweetdeck installed on it. This was mandated by Scott Cohen, the New York Daily News’ digital executive editor. Even more interestingly, the Guardian just began an experiment in which consumers helped curate the news. Beginning Oct 11th, the newspaper began publishing a live account of its news diary online, allowing consumers to see the scheduled news of the day as well as any upcoming breaking news. Consumers were encouraged to tell editors what they thought about individual stories and suggested stories using Twitter by tweeting with the hashtag #opennews. They could also follow the editor’s opinions about stories in a Twitter feed and add their own opinions to the conversation by tweeting to the hashtag #opennews. Editors dropped stories in the queue that received a lukewarm response. The purpose of the experiment was to increase readership, online conversation and positive sentiment around the Guardian’s news.

And, tools are coming out that change the definition of what it means to be a journalist. For example, Public Laboratory is creating a number of tools that are available to allow anyone to cover the news. These tools can take aerial photos or video of an event or story. These tools are facilitating the means for anyone to tell their story from a different standpoint.

However, this evolution in the news begs a question. Does news that is created or influenced by the informed public elevate certain stories like celebrity gossip over others such as the protests in Syria? Or, does it allow for truly unbiased reporting or information gathering? There are examples that point to both options as possible and indicate that the answer will probably lie somewhere in between. It feels like time will tell.

Tapping our Digital Behaviors to Ignite Social Change

This is a repost of an article I wrote for my work blog in October on how digital technologies are being used to impact positive social change.
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The rise in digital technologies is empowering social change on an unprecedented global scale. While it is true that digital technologies fueling social change have allowed for some negative consequences such as increased surveillance and the ability to mobilize riots, this article is specifically focused around positive examples. This is evident in the use of social media to change regimes in Egypt and Tunisia, to monitor elections in Kenya, and to aid earthquake relief efforts in Haiti. One particularly interesting example is the Cairo Harass Map, which empowers women to report sexual harassment via email or SMS. The purpose of this project is to end the social acceptability of sexual harassment in Egypt.

Many social change projects focus around fundraising platforms that tap into existing digital behaviors:

• 50/50 is a 50-day creative collaboration fundraising campaign encouraging creative projects that generate awareness and raise money for the famine in East Africa. 100% of the donation goes directly to UNICEF. 
• Thanksforteaching.us is a 30 day campaign, hosted by tbd, dedicated to thanking teachers all over the world by sharing the actions, dreams and passions they inspired. This campaign aims to bring the spotlight back on the teachers that make our classrooms thrive in a time when funding for schools is being cut. 
• Africa Needs You is trying to raise money to combat the famine in East Africa through leveraging the cultural phenomenon of paid celebrity tweets and turning it upside down. It is asking people to challenge celebrities via twitter to donating a tweet – the equivalent of $10,000.
• Charity Swear Box looks for swear words on twitter. When a person enters his or her twitter name in the search box on the Charity Swear Box homepage, it checks all his or her past tweets for any sign of a swear word. These are added up to a suggested amount to donate to a favorite charity such as Unicef, WWF (World Wildlife Fund), and Feed the Children. 

Digital technologies are simplifying and enhancing the communication required to get social change moving. For example, in the past year, the Social Change Impact report stated:

• 110 million Americans expressed an opinion on an issue by posting a comment on a blog or Web site.
• 93.8 million Americans joined or created a group on a social networking site devoted to a cause.
• 82.1 million Americans texted to make donations, voted, organized a demonstration, etc. related to a specific cause or issue.

Digital technology is allowing people to get involved in social change issues faster and more frequently than ever before. And, digital technology as a conduit for social change is cross-generational. As noted in the Walden study: eight in 10 American adults, from Gen Y to through the Silent Generation agree that thanks to digital technology, people are getting involved in positive social change issues faster and more frequently than ever before. This belief is strongest among the Baby Boomers.

A number of brands are leveraging this momentum to align with specific social change campaigns:

• Levi’s WaterTank game was a Facebook game that inspired consumers to participate in online water-saving challenges. Each challenge completed “unlocked” water from the Levi’s WaterTank and ultimately supported Water.org’s life-saving clean water projects worldwide. This game has evolved into Levi’s Go Forth Platform.
• Aviva USA’s Status for Youth made the brand's new Facebook page a catalyst for good. "Status For Youth" asked people to donate a status update to a youth-related charity. In lending their voice, people also influenced the amount of grant money given to each charity.
• Pepsi Refresh is funding programs across a number of disciplines that “refresh” the world through local communities. Projects are focused around education, communities, art and music.
• Chase Community Giving’s American Giving Awards is Chase’s first-ever celebrity tribute to community heroes, offering 5 charities a chance to share $2MM in grants so they can continue their work helping others.
• Starbucks’s Create Jobs for USA is a partnership with Opportunity Finance Network to create and sustain jobs through providing capital grants to select Community Development Financial Institutions. Additionally, this platform wants to build a community of interested people via Facebook and Twitter to express opinions and ideas about to improve and take action in local communities.

As the world becomes increasingly more interconnected, it will become more important for brands to think about ways to incorporate social change platforms into their brand promise.

The Emergence of Digital Secret Social Clubs

This is a repost of an article I wrote for my work blog in September on the rise of the secret social club in the digital space.
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The idea of the secret social club has been prevalent in the real world throughout much of history. However, until recently, this was not replicated in the digital space. In the last few years, status stories shared via social platforms and in real life have become increasingly more attractive and prevalent. Digital secret social clubs have begun to actively tap into these status stories. These clubs unify members not only through their exclusivity but also through shared passion points. They provide members a way to be on the inside, “in the know” about specific passions from food to art to travel. These clubs also give their members the outlet to be able to lead the way to the “unique,” the “cool,” and the avant-garde in their community.

The idea of the secret social club taps into some key emotional needs of consumers:

• The desire for unique stories to tell 
• The promise of “shared” experiences
• And, the feeling of increased social status.

As noted, in Trendwatching’s report, Statusphere: "When individuality is the new religion, owning or experiencing something no one else has is the ultimate status fix.” Secret social clubs are directly answering that need by providing participants stories that aren't common knowledge for the masses and helping consumers tell their own status-yielding stories to other consumers.

• Excursionist is a members-only travel site where travel is tailored to a consumer’s passions and around unique experiences. The trips are curated by world-renowned experts and guided by people in the local community.
• The Global Party is a worldwide extravaganza featuring luxury lifestyle brands and 80,000 of the world's elite inspired by the adventures of fictional character, Phileas Fogg. 80 exclusive parties will take place in venues across the globe all launching within 24 hours. This is based around an effort to raise funds and awareness for a collection of charities around the world.
• Diner en Blanc is an exclusive pop-up secret dining society. Members must dress in white to recognize each other and everyone brings his or her own food, tables, chairs and glassware to a secret but public location, which is revealed shortly before the start of event.

Secret social clubs allow brands to reward loyalty in a smart way. Brands can provide well thought out and unique incentives. For example, the Patron Social Club encourages consumer participation by promising the more a person participates the more likely he or she is to get an invite to one of the secret dining society events. This intrigues and engages consumers well beyond a simple offer or coupon.

The one of the strengths of these branded social clubs is that they share credible and original content that’s engaging and relevant to their target audience. They create compelling content their consumers actually want to consume. Moreover, these secret social clubs provide a holistic experience for their members by taking digital experience off-line into real life social engagements and then bringing the real life engagements back into the online experience. The branded secret social clubs have found clever ways to engage the social media audience to amplify an experience that already works well in the physical world.