The Participatory

Communications Revolution

a wander through the blogsphere and

look at its implications for communicators.

Andrew Lark
andy@andylark.com
andylark.blogs.com
Jan 21 2005
fuckedcompany.com corpwatch.org
internalmemos.com whistelblowers.com
vault.com rottentomatoes.com
Sept 2002
Shanghai
The WebMink
The Roller
 Jonathan

“OK, I'm starting a blog. Why shouldn't an

officer of a public company start a blog?
Hey, life is short. At Text
some point, take
this
how we're all going to be communicating
anyways. Think about it.”
Jonathan Schwartz, June 28, 2004
sun.com/news
2nd Attempt
 Conversations
Connections
New Connections
Why Do I Learn more - see new

Blog? things
Experiment & Ideate
Like to write
Great Archive...
Technology Changes Everything
 LiveJournal - 5,861,527
(...2,528,043 active)
34m blogs worldwide (est.)
8m US bloggers
32m blog readers
5% Internet users using RSS

The Sphere 400,000 posts per day

16,000 posts per hour

= as many stories
as AP sends out
each day
 70 new users signed
up for NTT DoCoMo
400 new users came
to the Internet

In The Last 2 1,000 auctions closed

on eBay
Minutes 2,100 cellular phones
were sold
$30,000 was
transacted at
Amazon.com
What’s Your $3.2 billion
Ringtone? (up 40% over 2002)
The Arc Group, WSJ, May 4, 2004
15 billion SMS Messages per
month on GSM networks
worldwide in 2004*

Vodafone AirTouch processed

160 million text messages on
its U.K. network in September.
* The GSM Association
 The Revolution
Society

Ethics/Law You! Technology

Network
Effects
Copyright Lark Ventures
 aka Linux
This is a aka Chat
Grassroots
Revolution aka Google
aka Skype
Why are organizations,
everywhere, whether political,
commercial or social, increasingly
unable to manage their affairs?

Why are individuals, everywhere,

increasingly in conflict with and
alienated from the organizations of
which they are part?

Why are society and the biosphere

increasingly in disarray?
Dee Hoc!
 "We are entering one era in which the
technological infrastructure is creating a different
context for how we tell our stories and how we
communicate with each other. "
Andrew Nachison, Director, Media Center
“Network Computing creates a global brain whose
capacity to remember expands exponentially”
Don Tapscott
Triangulating News
 The "The
Media telegraph is
ruining our
Crisis business."
(coming soon to
James Rothschild
analysts)
 Since 1997 the share of
available viewers
commanded by local early
evening newscasts around
the country has dropped
18% and later evening news
Confidence Down has dropped by 16%.

Trust Down Ratings for the three nightly

newscasts have dropped
Circ Down 34% in the last decade and
44% since 1980.
Newspaper circulation has
declined 11% since 1990
(about 1% a year).
Pew Internet & American Life Project
“There has been a long drift away from mass media
to more specialized media ... The bloggers are the
latest manifestation — more messages to smaller
numbers of people.”

Phil Meyer, University of North Carolina journalism professor.

Author of The Vanishing Newspaper: Saving Journalism in the Information Age.
“That traditional media are shrinking down to a few
dominant players... When old methods of
communication mature, it's natural for them to
merge. Diversity in media will win out, thanks to
faster, cheaper and smaller computing power.”

Larry Downes, author, The Strategy Machine

 Proprietary Shared Media
Media Space Space
Media As Media As
Business Community
Appointment On Demand
Driven News News
Consumption Consumption
(rss = Tivo for the Web)

Tom Curley, President & CEO, Associated Press

 1.Open Source is as Applicable to
Industry Analysis as it is to
Software

Open
2.Great Ideas Come Can Come
from Anyone

Source
3.The Group Mind is Smarter than
the Individual

Analysts
4.An Idea's Power is Proportional
to Its Audience

5.Proprietary Analysis is a Myth

6.Open Source is About More than

Source Code

Stephen O'Grady - the other half of Redmonk

This Changes
Everything
(You Are Naked!)
"If you are a flack or
a PR person, your
business is gone."
Marc Canter
"Horseshit!"
Andy Lark
 Community Building &
Advocacy

?
Employee
Communications
Knowledge Management

Why Measurement
Monitoring
Media Relations
External
Communications
Marketing
 1. Listen-Up!
Creating The 2. Authenticity Matters
Participatory 3.
4.
Love Your S Webs
Communities Are
Communications Conversations
5. Publish Or Perish
Network 6. Measure & Manage
 1
Listen-Up!
Engage & vs.
Participate Transmit
 vs.
Advocate Control
 Canaries
Bloggers in the
(the new constituency)

Coalmine.
Blogger As Employee
Recommenders
engadget gizmodo
Blogger As Ex-Employee
Blogger As
Pointer
Blogger As
Evangelist
Blogger As Leader
Blogger As Marketer
(& crazy evangelist)
 2
Schwartz & Scoble
Authenticity vs. GM
Matters
vs. Boeing
 Opacity vs.
Transparency
“Sunlight Is
The Best
Disinfectant”
Louis Brandeis - U.S. Supreme Court Justice
“A Blog, you see, is a
little First Amendment
machine”
Jay Rosen
 “Well over 1000 (Sun employees) have been given
space for blogging. There's no restraint on what
they can blog about. We provide tools and expect
them to use them responsibly. Restricting what you
can write on a blog is the same as restricting what you
can say in an email or a phone call. And if they
aren’t speaking as an employee, well, we
live in a country that values free speech.”

Jonathan Schwartz, coo and president, Sun Microsystems

“Sun is using blogs, open letters, Web
sites, and customer testimonials as
guerilla warfare, take-it-to-the-streets
tools to force a much larger competitor
to accede to its needs/demands.
It's becoming totally embarrassing for IBM. It's hard to
imagine how IBM can come up with any reasonable
excuse that the IT community (customers) would accept
and save face at this point. Given the public forum and the
support Sun has built up among customers and other
vendors for its request, IBM should just bite the bullet and
port the apps.”
Dan Farber, ZDNet
 “Wherever there has been a gross
injustice because of a broken system,
the muttering "transparency" usually
isn't far behind.  If we can go behind
the scenes, we'll spot trouble before
it happens, and the actors--knowing
we're there--will all behave better.”

David Berlind, ZDNet, Jan 18, 2005

 Authenticity Axis

Best-In-Class
Opaque
(Naked)
(voice & authenticity)
Behavior

Graveyard Aspiring

Transparency Copyright Lark Ventures

 “If you fudge or lie on a blog, you
are biting the karmic weenie. The
negative reaction will be so great
that, whatever your intention was,
it will be overwhelmed and
crushed like a bug.”
Steve Hayden, vice chairman, Ogilvy & Mather.
Fortune, Jan 14, 2005.
 3
Love Your S
Webs
 Option Two:
Option One:
Start a
Conventional PR
(non participatory -
Conversation
inflames the S Web) (participatory -
engages the S Web)
 “We have no way of
knowing if Sun has sold us
out”
 • Employees
• Stakeholders

S Webs •
•
“Developers”
Educators
• Smart Mobs
• Recommenders
Email correspondence (grey lines) mapped to organizational hierarchy (black lines)
How To Search a Social Network, Lada Adamic, Eytan Adar

Pattern Recognition
 “Information flows freely
from areas of high
concentration to low,
where it disseminates
rapidly across space and
time”

Anthony Williams - Researcher

Audience Community
 4
Communities of Interest
Communities of
Business
Communities Communities of
Are Geography
Communities of Events
Conversations Communities of Support
(Channel 9)
....
 Advocate
Coach
Role of The Writer/Poster

Communicator Editor
Traffic cop
in the Policy maker (& breaker)
Blogsphere Blog program Lead
Blog tracker and
conservationist
 New spokespeople
New rock-stars
New intermediaries
Implications New channels & outlets
New conversations
News at the speed of
light

Incompleteness
(a total rethink of outcomes)
“You can’t have a weblog
if your style of writing is
that you finish your
pieces. Therefore, anybody
who works in a profession
which depends on
completed documents–
journalism, academia, law,
engineers, medicine– it is
impossible to develop
community.”
David Weinberger
Real Challenges
First Amendment
SOX
Cost & Resourcing
Blog Success “Passion &
Factors Authority”
Scoble
 Clear sense of the outcome
Be blogger friendly

Real people doing real stuff.

Focus - pick a topic

Link. Link. Link.

Blog Success Comments. Comments.

Comments.

Factors Note questionable or biased sources

Authenticity
Voice
Audience Clarity
Thinking

Willingness to play (Cuban)

 Make bias apparent
Full disclosure
Correct mistakes

Basic Rules Don’t lie

Attribute.
Congratulate.
Celebrate.
Have fun!
 5
Publish Or
Perish
 Bytes Are
Cheaper Than
Atoms!
 “We are in the twilight of a society based on
data. As information and intelligence become
the domain of computers, society will place
more value on the one human ability that
cannot be automated: emotion. Imagination,
myth, ritual - the language of emotion - will
affect everything from our purchasing decisions
to how we work with others.

Companies will thrive on the

basis of their stories and
myths. Companies will need to
understand that their products
are less important than their
stories.”
Rolf Jensen, Copenhagen Institute for Future Studies
 What Does Your
Computer Most Look
Like?
 OTS

6
Visits
Pull thought

Measure & Links & Trackbacks

RSS
Monitor Opt-ins
Call’s to action

Sales!
Track The Ecosystem
That’s The Measure Of Community Health!

Who is Pointing?
Who is Driving?
Who is Linking?
Who is Making?
 Do you blog?
Do you podcast/
webcast?
Do you do search?
Your PN What’s your Ring tone?
Competency? Do SMS/Text?
Do you have a game , a
cartoon?
Do you RSS?

Copyright Lark Ventures

 Releases & Speeches
posted with comments
sections
Start a news channel
Post interview notes and
transcripts

Other Changes Blend your PR/AR/crisis

and online practices
Get the latest gadgets
Understand search engine
strategy - Recommend
keyword buys &
sponsorships
Copyright Lark Ventures
You Must Be The Change You
Wish To See In The World

Mahatma Gandhi
Thanks!
please send me feedback, ideas, thoughts and corrections:
andy@andylark.com
andylark.blogs.com
408.656.9446