Social Media has to be about something

What fascinates me about all the companies that are rushing to have a social media presence is that many of them are simply overlook the fact that social media is a means to an end. The users of Facebook, or Bebo, or any other social network are not interested in Facebook per se, but rather their friends, or topics of interest, through Facebook, etc. Corporate marketing departments are obviously obsessed with the product they are selling, as they should be, but can forget that many of their customers probably aren't that interested. So even if they grasp the key concept of interaction, allowing the customer tangible input, which is vital to a successful social media campaign, they still often overlook the equally important question 'Why would the customer want to?' I recall reading some years ago that Coke set up a social network for customers to share their experiences and ideas about Coke, but why would they want to? I like drinking coke, but in day to day life I'm not that interested in talking about. This is not to malign Coke, this was before many other companies were even aware of social media, and obviously first movers are going to make some mistakes - I'm not sure whatever happened to that. Coke have done some great social media stuff since then, particularly some great viral videos.

If you have a company selling a product, presumably you have identified the market you're selling it too - ie the group of people whose wants or needs are being met by your product. Unless the product looms large as a cultural icon already, like an Apple iPod or Nike shoe, then people probably aren't going to want to spend much time talking about it. To successfully utilise a social media campaign to draw attention to a product then, you need to essentially identify a new 'social' product, something that meets a social need and which you can tie to your actual product, like the Ford Fiesta Movement campaign, giving 'social agents', people with a personal mission, cars and getting them to share the results of their endeavours via social networks. With this type of thinking you move beyond your core fans to get average people talking about your product - because you provide them with something in return. It's a tricky balance, finding the social media need to match your product, but it's the only way to be truly successful, and hopefully more agencies will take up this approach.

Cultural Navigators

My thoughts on this topic in written form are well overdue, so here goes...

The quantity of media in our culture is expanding at an ever increasing rate. As communication technologies allow us not only to access content from further and more disparate sources (imagine how much more news you'll be able to read when automated translation services become really usable) but also allow an increasing number of people access to the tools to create and distribute content. So we're basically drowning in content, much not very good or personally relevant, and it's only going to get worse. For a culture junkie it's great, but also overwhelming. How is anyone going to find the content of value, both meaningful and entertaining, in this deluge? They need good cultural navigators to guide them.

Whatever topic I might be interested in, it is quite possible for me to spend all of my time trying to keep up with it - let alone should I be interested in more then one topic. So I find those people who know the topics I'm interested in, who keep up with them, and who have the similar tastes and values to me, and I allow them to point me towards the content I'll probably like. I'll let them do the leg work, that is what bloggers do. What critics do. What celebrities, or more often 'personalities' do. So it means that I don't have to try to watch every movie that's released, rather I can cut down the potential number of films I'll watch based on Margaret Pomeranz's opinions. Or David Stratton, or Roger Ebert. I don't have to read through all the gossip magazines and websites for my celebrity fix, I can just pick a few blogs with similar tastes and interests, perhaps with a style that I like, and let them point me to the good stuff. I don't have to try to figure out what it means to smell good, or what scents are 'in', I can just take Britney's word for it.

The cultural navigation function of bloggers is why that have risen in prominence so rapidly in the last decade. What they are doing isn't new, it's just that the medium in which they do it is particularly suited to cultural naviagtion. Critics in all fields have been doing it for years, but as the volume of content increases, so does their need to specialise. So we are moving away from 'book reviewer' to 'children's book reviewer' or 'sci-fi reviewer'. Previously, when cultural dissemination was more limited, when people had fewer choices for the content they consumed, the demand for cultural navigators was much smaller. Hence, with this proportionally smaller number of people offering their cultural guidance, they needed to offer guidance that appealed to a broader base (ie all music listeners, not just punk listeners) to be successful. This meant that cultural criticism/guidance aimed to be objective, impartial and therefore broad in it's appeal. As we move into a denser cultural, with a higher proportional need for cultural navigators, we are seeing that those that wear their values, tastes and bias on their sleeves become more successful - it differentiates them from the others. The other form cultural navigation has taken in the past is celebrity endorsement, and it works on the same principle. Whoopi Goldberg may be far from an expert on incontinence, yet her fan base trust her values and tastes because they like her (or maybe they like her because they trust her values and tastes?), and hence accept her guidance on a product they probably don't wish to spend a lot of time finding out about themselves.

There is so much more for me to say about the concept of Cultural Navigators; It's an important concept to consider and use in analysing our culture. There are overlaps with the worlds of cultural criticism, journalism, education, celebrity, with marketing concepts like 'Influencers' and of course new media and social media trends. I'm going to get to all that hopefully, and ultimately thinking about cultural navigators might just give us a powerful way to understand the dynamics of our culture. To survive and thrive in the ever increasing deluge of content that we face, we are going to have to rely on our Cultural Navigators.

Pay-walls, News and the Public Interest - Does Journalism Exist?

Just read a brilliant lecture from Alan Rusbridger, Editor of the Guardian, "Does Journalism Exist?" in which he eloquently and diplomatically covers the major points and concerns facing the newspaper industry as it finally wakes up to the digital era. I've blogged some of my thoughts on newspapers before (and it seems this blog is going to be my main forum for media analysis now), however Rusbridger's lecture inspired lots of new thoughts.

I am so glad that a major media voice has finally challenged Murdoch's awful idea of pay-walls, and his evangelism for the 'end of free'. Rusbridger makes a neat argument about the short-sightedness of Murdoch's attacks on the BBC, and points out the hypocrisy the his media empire also expanding into free content, while simultaneously criticising it. In response to News Corp's demands for pay walls from everyone, Rusbridger concedes "There is probably general agreement that we may all want to charge for specialist, highly-targeted, hard-to-replicate content. It's the "universal" bit that is uncertain." I think he is referring here to the success of the Wall Street Journal charging for online subscriptions, yet it needs an important caveat. The market for specialist, highly-targeted, hard-to-replicate content is contingent on that content being uniquely valuable when it is not shared. For example with the WSJ, financial insights are more valuable the less other people have them. In fact, in the reputation economy online, the reverse is true - you gain value from sharing information, not with-holding it. Online there are many specialist communities creating highly targeted content for themselves that are not turning a profit, and probably wouldn't dream of making themselves exclusive through paid access, because there is little value to being the only one with the content, hence no one would pay for it. There would seem to be few cases where content or information access gives such a competitive advantage as in finance (commericial scientific/medical research perhaps, but thats another issue altogether). Most endeavours are more successful and productive when information is shared. So other then a tiny handful of examples, I don't think there is much of a future for the pay-wall model.

Of course this all neglects the fact that pay-walls just won't work anyway. Has Murdoch not heard of 'Copy - Paste'? In the current link ecosystem which the papers like to whine about, if they block the content with pay -walls then people will just move it onto their own sites. It only takes one person with access. As has happened with music, tv, movies - basically all other content, all of which is actually harder to copy then news (text essentially). The only way to prevent this would be an aggressive course of litigation, suing the customers that share, and we've seen just how successful that strategy was for the MPAA. Pay-walls just won't work Murdoch - let it go and move on!

Rusbringer uses a great term for the newspaper business model that is currently crumbling- "the Walmart-Baghdad subsidy theory – that it is retail display advertising that pays for the New York Times Iraq operation, not the readers." So why doesn't this model translate online? It's simple, online advertising has better metrics then the old system and can be much better targetted, offering vastly greater value for money to the advertisers. In the past advertisers had to saturate the market with their message to reach the right people, and newspapers where essentially soaking up the excess to cover the costs of the important stuff they wanted to do. Now, advertisers can target so specifically, they don't need to be wasteful, and there is vastly less excess value for funding the rest of the papers' 'public service' activities. One way to consider it is that corporations were indirectly paying for the public service of information dissemination. The corporate mindset is notoriously callous about the public interest - they only care for it when it's also directly in their interest, and newspapers where a handy way of making them pay for something they otherwise wouldn't have. To play devils advocate for a moment - so in the emerging cultural space, if corporations are better able to target their sales, at reduced costs, then it seems only fair to increase taxes on them, and funnel the revenue into the production of news in the public interest. I don't mean in the form of bigger budgets for public broadcasters, but in tax breaks for the individual - for the citizen journalists that are picking up the slack for the media empires, and doing it for free. Surely they should get a little something for their efforts.
I'm not saying this is necessarily the way for the news industry to move forward, but I think its an interesting angle to consider it from.

Phew, that will do for now. :P

Westboro Baptist Church a bizarre new media narrative?

If you were to describe the Westboro Baptist Church to someone that hadn't stumbled upon them in the detritus of pop culture, they might think you were talking about a mockumentary or perhaps some edgy new sitcom. A 'church' which is really just an extended family all living in one big house under the leadership of an insane old patriarch, who fly around the country to protest at the funerals of dead servicemen because 'God Hates Fags'- it's a concept that has to be met with incredulity. Yet they are real apparently, even the awesome documentarian Louis Theroux has spent time with them, though I only know this because of the bizarre transmedia narrative of their existence.

The latest WBC stunt, in their typical, strangely attention-seeking way, is to protest Lady Gaga! I'm a little late coming to this because I've been travelling, but I mean Lady Gaga?? Good Lord! She's a singer, she's popular, and she likes the gays... so burn her at the stake? You could make an argument about the social, cultural and hence political power of celebrities these days, but that would imply far too much reason, intelligence and general sanity on behalf of the WBC. No, there can be only one explanation - they must actually be a fiction, a piece of performance art, an elaborate and ingenious media event.

Their reputation is such that now when they protest they are typically out-numbered several fold by anti-WBC protesters telling them to go home, and supporting whatever they are against. They have cultivated the ultimate anti-fan following. (There really should be a term for anti-fans) I quite liked Lady Gaga before, but now that I know the WBC wants her to burn in hell, I absolutely love her. By being the perfect, quintessential example of cruel, stupid, mean-spirited pig-ignorance the Westboro Baptist Church produce a sort of inverted golden seal of approval. It's pure marketing brilliance. The 'WBC' even sounds like some cutting edge media agency, whose dedicated performers could demand top dollar for their stamp of hate. It seems like just the sort of avant-garde chutzpah that her Ladyship Gaga would condone.

Interactive Movies and the Excitement of CD-ROMS

I remember when I first started studying multimedia in the late 90s there was a lot of buzz around 'CD-ROMS' and the potential for games to become interactive movies.What eventuated from these ideas was   narrowly constrained point and click movies, playing snippets of film as you progressed, that hardly set people aflutter. Now, of course, we have PS3s and Xboxes that render high end graphics on the fly, displacing the aspiration for actual film footage, and offering a greater sense of immersion and interactivity. I often wonder though what interactive cinema, decoupled from the quaint excitement of CDs as a storage medium, might look like.

I don't think it is what any of us expected it might be back in the 90s, but disembodied narratives are our interactive cinema today. The concept of interactive cinema was originally imagined loosely as 'choose your own movie', and in many ways that is what disembodied narrative encourages. In massive transmedia universes, such as Star Wars, we acknowledge that it becomes almost impossible for any one person to consume every text - they must pick and choose the ones that appeal most to them, and in doing so choose their own story of that universe. This personalization of stories in transmedia will become more apparent as the content within given transmedia universes multiplies exponentially through the growing legitimization of user-generated content. In fact the creation of that content will become an aspect of the interactivity itself.

What is great about this scenario is that although we will all potentially have a wholly  unique experience disembodied narratives, we will still have shared experiences of the universes themselves. Textual critique and debate of disembodied narratives will have to extend beyond contrasting interpretations to contrasting choices of how and what aspects of the narrative are consumed. They will certainly make for some fascinating debates, don't you think?

Is it wrong to be excited by Transmedia semantics?

I came across Xiaochang Li's wonderful blog CanaryTrap.Net once I stumbled into the online academic community of transmedia enthusiasts. There is a great discussion in the feed back of her recent post "Transmedia as intertext and multiplicity: why some types of stories lend themselves to transmedia" which gets into the semantics of transmedia. What is the significance of the distinction between medium and platform? How 'trans' must transmedia be for it to be authentic? Erek and Scott in comments both contribute some really good questions (some of which I've been pondering myself), which have helped me see how useful the term 'disembodied narrative' is. In one comment Erek poses the question of whether different stories told about the same universe all in one medium, such as comics, would constitute a transmedia story. It is suggested that in fact such a story would not be transmedia proper, with which I agree. Disembodied narrative however, would be an accurate description.

The defining idea of 'disembodied narrative' is that the story exists across multiple independent texts, with no need to make distinctions of media. I say independent here to draw a distinction between sequels and serialisations, ie each of the texts should work primarily on its own. The concept of disembodied narrative then allows us to move beyond the discussion of variety in mediums and platforms, and focus on the questions of how to work with such a fractured narrative, and how independent the individual elements should be. Ooh, its all so exciting!

Marketing is part of the Story

Advertising is part of the narrative in a transmedia story. What I have read on transmedia so far doesn't give much consideration to the integration of adverstising into the whole transmedia narrative. Certianly there is acknowledgement that when being innovative with narrative extensions on the web, it's the usually the marketing depts that are brought in to do it. This however is failing to grasp the potential of the transmedia narrative to utilise advertising. Take Heroes - it's ground-breaking in its transmedia approach, releasing back-story web comics simulataneously with the show being aired for example, yet it still has traditional advertising in a variety of media to drum up viewership. All those adverts are just wasted airtime / media space that could be used to tell more of the Heroes story, rather then just give glimpses of what they will get in the actual show, and doing that would still entice viewers.

In the last decade or so I'd be hard pressed to think of one movie or TV show that I hadn't already seen at least one advert or review of before I watched it. Not one. Usually I've seen a number of adverts and/or reviews. So everything I watch, I already have some small pieces of the narrative before I even start. That is why it is important to consider the role of advertising not just in terms of building or drawing viewers, but also in the actually unfolding of the narrative itself. This is one of the ways Cloverfield succeeded, although in a limited way, by utilising non-film footage on the internet, to both draw an audience and start telling the narrative. Unfortunatley I'm not aware of any of that footage actually making it on to TV or into cinemas like regular film adverts, but that should be the studios next step.

What needs to happen is a holistic approach to the narrative, one that includes all the marketing/advertising as well as the primary texts (films, shows, books, etc). Too often audio visual texts are sold short by their advertising, which often undermines the narrative experience of the text rather then enhance it. I only hope we will finally see the last of this as transmedia become the norm. Maybe then I won't have so many movies ruined by adverts that explain the whole thing before you even watch it.

Hard and Soft Transmedia

So listening to a couple of cool podcasts from Henry Jenkins blog, most from about 2-3 years ago, I can't help but feel a little out of date. I've been thinking about these things for that long, but haven't put much effort into researching them until now. Still better late then never.

It's funny how all the examples I was thinking of are the ones they are using too - ie Matrix, Star Wars, LOTR, Batman, Spiderman, etc. Listening to this podcast with the creators of Heroes about transmedia and learning just how transmedia the show is has been fascinating. I always liked the program, but felt it fell flat in some places and didn't quite live up to its potential. That's what all these transmedia academics have been saying too! I have much more respect for the show now, and will have to make an effort to watch past season 2.

It seems one of the students in the Q & A session at the end of the podcast is thinking about some of the ideas I mentioned in my last post. The distinction I talked about between a 'disembodied narrative' and 'transmedia narrative' is described by the student as 'hard' and 'soft' transmedia, soft being those transmedia media stories that are just alternate media extensions of a successful property, and hard being what I describe as a disembodied narrative below. I like the scalability of his description which allows for a grey area rather then either/or, though I must admit I'm still partial to my term disembodied narrative. Coming from an interest in the queer community and politics, transmedia just makes me think of movies for transgendered people. (I won't even get into the resulting conotations then of 'hard' and 'soft') :P

Transmedia Storytelling

What spurred me to start this blog was the enthusiam I had recently when I finally found other people talking about these same narrative ideas. I'd been thinking about how stories are told in contemporary media for a couple of years, and came up with the term 'disembodied narrative' for my own reference and understanding of the concept I'm getting to grips with. Of course, trying to find others interested in a similar idea is difficult if you don't know the right terminology, but I found it hard to believe that I could be the only looking at narrative in this way.

I wasn't, and it was quite exciting to find that academics have been talking about something called 'Transmedia Storytelling' for a couple of years now. It's a relatively new area of study, but it hits the nail on the head. Henry Jenkins, author of the book 'Convergence Culture' (which I really must read now) has a great blog on which he frequently discusses transmedia, in particular he offers a great introductory explanation of transmedia storytelling. He identifies many of the key ideas I considered part of disembodied narratives, particularly defining them as having 'no one single source or ur-text', which is the source of all information. He gives The Matrix universe as the example of this, although I would have to disagree on that point. Having other sources of narrative information, as many not-so-transmedia stories in our culture do, is not enough to undermine the status of an 'ur-text'. With Jenkin's example of The Matrix I would say the first film is the ur-text, even though there is plenty of other narrative information to be found in other matrix media. The reason is two fold - firstly because the film was the primary and main conception of the narrative, and where produced as the primary product (and income source), with all other matrix media seen as ancillary, even promotional product for the films. It was only after the success of the first matrix film that the franchise became transmedia. Secondly, this primacy of the films, at least in a commercial sense, does translate in to a cultural perception of the films as the more authentic source of narrative, esteemed by virtue of their greater marketing budgets, as the 'true' Matrix story. In other words, the Matrix film is still the ur-texts of the universe.

A true disembodied narrative would be created when not only the artistic, but also the commercial producers conceive of the narrative across multiple media as a unified whole, right from the conception, with none of the elements seen as merely promotion for others. I think what we have at the moment is transmedia narratives, but a disembodied narrative would have no original, initiating text - ie it's innately and neccessarily transmedia right from inception. We're close to that happening, but I'm not entirely sure we are there yet.

What do I mean by ‘disembodied narrative’?

Originally stories only existed in people’s heads. Before writing, ancient cultures passed stories on orally, and each recipient could make what they wished of them in their own interpretation or retelling. Then people started making marks on things, voila we have writing, and now there is a much more accurate way of passing stories on. Skip ahead a whole bunch of centuries, and the majority of all stories, the ones that define our culture, are contained in books.

Since then a plethora of other media have developed that offer a variety of means for telling stories. We have come to think of these as what stories are – books, movies, plays, tv shows, but really the stories have always been in our heads. We know that books and movies etc can have as many interpretations as the people that consume them – but until recently the public perception was that author’s should limit the range of interpretation. There have always been authors who make their work deliberately ambiguous, forcing the audience more overtly to find their own interpretation and make their own story from it, but I would assert that this type of work has not been valued by the majority of our society. Then we got video games and Web 2.0 – and, well, as a culture we are still coming to terms with that, but we are slowly beginning to place more value on the interaction and contribution of the audience. We are in the midst of learning to appreciate that stories are as much what the audience brings to them as what they are given.

This is all very esoteric, but I do also have a much more tangiable concept of what disembodied narrative is. Media conglomerates have brought us some amazing franchise stories (and not so amazing) in the last few decades. There is the quintessential example, Star Wars, though there are many others, including Lord of the Rings, Star Trek, The Matrix, Harry Potter and Batman, just to name a few of the larger ones, but any book, movie, tv show, comic, etc that has been reimagined or extended into some other form fits here. Typically these stories all have a central text that is privelidged above all other texts, which are considered subsidiary. With Star Wars it was the ‘original’ movies, Batman was a comic, Lord of the Rings a book. Even the Bible could be considered the central text in the Christian story franchise. Yet why must we consider one text the most authentic source of the narrative, while others are secondary, just because they came after? Both the Matrix movies and video games where authored by the Wachowski brothers, yet the films are considered the ’source’ material. I would argue that The Animatrix, although created by different directors, and therefore not as authentic as the films, is actually, better and perhaps closer to the narrative I took from the original Matrix film, then the shoddy sequels Reloaded and Revolutions. This is becoming an irrelevent point, as media conglomerates put into production many of these elements simultaneously these days, with books, games and toys ready to go at the same time as a film. When all these things are essentially created all at once by an extended creative team, how can form of the narrative seriously be considered more authentic then the others?

What will emerge in our coming culture is a form of story-telling not embodied in a single text, but rather extant as disembodied narratives accessable through multiple texts in a variety of media. I’m looking forward to these stories with bated breath.