Ian M Rountree

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Children's Games and Social Media

January 8, 2010 by Ian 1 Comment

Follow the Leader - FlickrI was always crap at Simon Says. I was the kid who could only ever think of three things to have people do – stand up, sit down, run in place – and I’ve learned to mark this down to both an inability to develop internal go-to lists, and a dislike of having to issue mindless rapid-fire commands. Yet as I watch people tweet their lives away sometimes I wonder exactly how useful these skills are in real life? Like learning trigonometry, I had always figured it was something to get good at or avoid, but now I’m not so sure.

Like it or not, Social Media is here to stay. I hope someone comes up with a better, permanent term for what’s going on, because I dislike that buzzword, but there you are. I’m fortuitous to be getting into networking just now, because I have a nearly three year old son, and while considering the things we need to make sure he learns, at the same time I’m watching the foibles of high-powered people online, and seeing a lot of parallel.

One of the many things I dislike about Twitter’s ecosphere is the MLM phenomenon. It sounds like a pyramid scheme on the outside (and runs like one) but the behavior of the people involved, or at least the visible output of the bots, looks an awful lot like Simon Says. Rapid fire information with little available content driving people who are unlucky enough to get sucked in to useless products or a hookup to the scheme. It’s a social failing, but it’s one of those pendulum behaviors – those who understand just enough are exploiting those who don’t yet know.

How many pundit blogs do you read? I don’t specifically mean political pundits, I mean Apple and Google and Microsoft fanboy blogs as well. Notice anything about their habits? Suggesting certain new products, dropping bombs on others. For some reason this always reminds me of Red Light, Green Light.

The less said about Michael Arrington’s apparent tabloidism the better – but the entire leak culture feels like one big game of telephone.

Corporate recruiting feels a bit like Red Rover.

It’s amazing how often this kind of thing happens. Perhaps it’s early training, rearing it’s head on our adult lives. On the other hand, like just about anything, when you know just enough about how these habits form, you can exploit them. And when that gets old, you can become a benefactor and teach others either to exploit the habits, or how to avoid having these habits exploited.

Until you know where your habits come from, and what the tells are, how are you going to ensure you’re not being taken advantage of?

Otherwise, it’s duck-duck goose, and someone’s got their eye on turning you into the next goose.

Photo by Mykl Roventine

Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: apple, boneheaded-businesses, ecospheres, ecosystems, fanboys, google, internet, media, michael arrington, microsoft, news, pyramid schemes, rant-alert, social-networks, sociology, technology, the-web

Tearing Down the Murdoch Wall

December 5, 2009 by Ian Leave a Comment

photo by tinyfroglet

Let me see if I understand this correctly, because this whole business of newspapers charging for their content online kind of makes my brain spin diagonally in my skull. Rupert Murdoch is cutting Google out of the circulation of News Corp. headlines because somehow, he’s become convinced that the search giant is a thief, stealing all of his profits.

WTF?

Amateur math time. Working backward from Jeff Jarvis’ assertion in the video on Six Pixels (link batch below), a web-based news business has a running expenses margin of about 50%. Let’s assume a significant portion of a given newspaper’s revenue online comes from advertisements, we’ll call this amount 50%. This matches up cleanly with the running expenses, so we can assume from this that ad revenue covers everything that keeps the lights on, and the remainder – that 43% of other revenue – is what drives the growth, innovation and renewal of the business.

This means that just having the pages up and accessible is capable of driving a business and keeping it going. For a business run entirely on the web, that’s their entire operating budget, production to dissemination and maintenance. 57% of revenue, actually, which means a sustainable business. Not a growing one, but sustainable, which is more than most entrepreneurial enterprises enjoy.

So what happens when you mess with what is proven, in actual business and in models designed by people who know what they’re doing? You begin to slowly, inevitably fail.

Let’s say you remove Google, as Rupert Murdoch is doing with News Corp. What will happen to his ad revenues? Let’s say that, of the ads a given site has, 5% are impression-based, rather than click-based. Now assume that Google’s referrals account for 25% of your total page views. This alone means that (on even distribution) suddenly 1% of your total business revenues disappears. That may not sound like much, but in a company like News Corp with its current values and performance, that’s a staggering 7.1 million dollars. Just because one percent of your revenues disappeared. And then there are the clicking 8% of internet participants. I can’t even begin to filter those numbers.

Unless I’m missing a beat, it looks like Rupert’s sneezing away 7 million dollars with a few extra lines in a robots.txt file somewhere on a server or eighty. I desperately hope someone corrects me because that is some new breed of stupidity.

Someone tell me my math is way off here, please, because I feel a little ill.

Link Batch:

  • The Times Online: Will papers’ pay walls topple the web’s freedom to pillage news?
  • Six Pixels of Separation: How Journalism Survives New Media (By Saving Itself)
  • Buzz Machine: The Half-Life Of News, Nose, face, cut, spire: Blocking Google

Side note: As I was writing this, I was watching the presentation on Six Pixels, and TweetDeck popped out a notification with a tweet FROM Jeff Jarvis. Weird, right? Thus Follows:

@IanMRountree: Definition of trippy: Seeing a tweet pop up from @jeffjarvis WHILE watching a presentation of his on @mitchjoel‘s blog! (Sat Dec 05, 22:09)
@jeffjarvis: @ianmrountree I haunt you. (Sat Dec 05, 22:15)

How does this relate? Simple: As Jarvis says in the video, the future of the web is interactivity and contribution. And FREE. The future of the web is the future of society, much as we dislike it sometimes. Let Rupert put that in his pipe and smoke it.

Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: boneheaded-businesses, jeffjarvis, murdoch

A Note on Leadership for Bloggers

November 28, 2009 by Ian Leave a Comment

photo by pedrosimoes7
photo by pedrosimoes7

If you’re paying attention at all these days, decentralisation is everywhere. Crowdsourcing, microbrands, personal branding – The Cult of Me is in full swing, and it’s leaving a lot of people really puzzled as to how they can either not fall behind, or avoid the trend all together. Here’s a hint: you can’t avoid it. But you can weather it and come out on top. Especially if you treat it with respect.

Some background. Twitter. You’ve heard of it, right? If ever there was an example of perfect Cult of Me behaviour, this is it. You get on, you follow people, they reciprocate, and soon hundreds of thousands of people are on your list of followers. It’s a daunting task, imagining that thirty thousand, a hundred thousand, a quarter million (ok, a stretch), even a million (@stephenfry) people might just be hanging on your every tweet – it’s a weight and a responsibility. Or is it?

Most online community has very little reliable hierarchy. In many cases, the people setting up the systems sit back and let others participate. They can be called upon in extremis for moderation, yes, but never for motivation. Reliable hierarchy has been the driving thrust of progress for a long time – and it’s useful, the way having the sharp end on front of the spear when you throw it. What the trend of decentralisation does is seemingly remove the shaft and turn everyone into individual spearheads going for their own targets, with no weight behind them. When you’re trying to hit a broad target, grapeshot works wonderfully, if the target’s soft.

But where’s the hierarchy? That’s the wrong question to ask, isn’t it? The question I’d like you to ask is not where has the hierarchy gone – there are still leaders, and just about everyone has followers.

You’re a leader. Face it. Own up to it. Even if you lead your friends to coffee once a month, you’re leading, especially if you have any presence on the web. What are you doing with that leadership potential?

The questions I want you to ask are, firstly, when you send out your followers to get their followers and aim at a target, what would the action look like? Are you at the head of the spear, with everyone you have access to helping to create momentum for you to move forward and pierce to the heart of your goal? Or were you playing catapult and sending out thousands of tiny pieces of ammo in an effort to spread your effectiveness over a wider area? And, secondly, how much effort did you put into deciding which method to use, if any at all? How much energy did you devote to making sure the approach you used was the most appropriate for the situation?

Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: boneheaded-businesses, marketing

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