Archive for category online communication
Governance – where to draw the line?
Posted by Lab rat in digital governance, online communication on January 12, 2012
Back in the days of the wild, wild, west, gun fighters and bank robbers ran amok. Gentle folk were afraid for the lives and street brawls were commonplace. Okay, it was exciting, but reputable companies – I mean folks – stayed in the big cities and left the frontier towns to the lawless.
Aw shucks, it’s another metaphor.
The good thing about all those gunslingers and rot gut whiskey drinkers was they opened up opportunities. It was their all round recklessness that pushed the boundaries. But before these new opportunities could be truly capitalised on, somebody had to impose order.
Enter the sheriff…
The sheriff slung the drunks in jail and ran the gunslingers out of town. Sheriffs were also pretty handy with guns themselves. Not a few gunslingers were hired by towns to police their streets and gun down the ‘bad guys’. In fact, apart from the presence of the sheriff’s 5-pointed star, very little differentiated the law man from the lawless.
So, when you’re policing the streets, where do you draw the line? Okay, we’re ditching the metaphor now.
In terms of rolling out the concept of digital governance to wider audiences, I’ve chosen legislation and regulation as my entry point*. This is because, in lawful societies, the risk of legal penalty is a sufficient deterrent (particularly if you’re a big company with a lot to lose). It’s also something that attracts the attention of the board room, which, sorry, content per se does not
*I started to group together some of the more pertanent rules and regs in my previous post
But when you seriously consider what could impact on the correct governance and risk mitigation of digital content, you begin widening your scope – quite considerably.
For example, culture secretary, Jeremy Hunt, plans to publish a Green Paper setting out the scope of a new communications act by the end of this year. If you think this is just about hacking and tabloids, think again – and read the below…
Hunt gave a few clues as to areas on which he may focus, but appeared to indicate that one may be regulation of programming content on the internet.
Under the current EU Audiovisual Media Services Directive, “TV like” services, such as the BBC iPlayer, are subject to regulation. However, the level of regulation is less than that imposed upon traditional TV channels.
“Whether we are watching a broadcast live or through catchup TV services, via a TV or a computer, it is the content that matters, rather than the delivery mechanism,” said Hunt. “So should it be the case that the method of delivery has a significant impact on the method of regulation? Or should we be looking at a more platform-neutral approach?”
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/jan/19/jeremy-hunt-communications-act
There’s data protection and eprivacy and the implications of the European Data Protection Framework (EDPF) Review (don’t ask me, I’m new here) and the Digital Economies Act; some might say the latter was rushed legislation aimed at pirate downloaders and which now seems to be languishing somewhere in Brussels. PRS for Music, which brings together the two royalty collection societies MCPS and PRS, is also looking at the whole area internet piracy and controlling copyright online.
Plus:
- The EUs general concerns and overall remit around data protection and how personal data is used.
- The ongoing digital implications for copyright and its infringement including ideas floated by the Hargreaves Review.
- The impact of changes to internet protocols.
Then there’s the whole area of cyber security , the Government’s plans for a cyber security strategy, the implications of the Home Affairs Committee inquiry following last year’s riots, a warning from head of GCHQ’s about a ‘disturbing’ level of cyber attacks, as well as high-profile security breaches involving big names such as PlayStation and Google.
It’s not that organisations and governments are not increasingly on their toes when it comes to critical issues such as hacking and data protection. As early as its 2008-2009 report, the UK’s Intelligence and Security Committee raised concerns about the potential threat posed by cuber crime, not only to the UK government, but also ‘critical national infrastructure and commercial companies’.
We therefore welcome the fact that this threat has been recognised and that cyber security is now listed as a Tier One national security risk. The new funding that has been made available, as part of the SDSR (Strategic Defence and Security Review), to fund cyber security work is a significant step forward.
Source: 2010–2011 Annual Report, Intelligence and Security Committee
All fine and dandy. But its the next bit of their latest report which attracts my interest…
Whilst the priority and funding are to be welcomed, structural issues continue to cause us concern. We have noted 18 units with particular responsibilities in this field across the three Agencies, two law enforcement bodies and five government departments. Between them they cover policy, management, intelligence operations, protective advice, detection and analysis, with some focused on crime, some on hostile activity from overseas, some on Counter-Terrorism and others covering all three. This risks duplication and confusion and cannot be cost-effective. We therefore recommend that work be done to rationalise the existing structures.
Source: 2010–2011 Annual Report, Intelligence and Security Committee
Some 18 different agencies all getting their head around cyber security. Cooks? Broth? Anybody?
I think there is a real danger that as the digital wild west becomes the tamed west that we could end up in a situation where the streets are populated by too many sherif’s, firing off their six guns for offences no more horrendous than jaywalking. I’ve read the phrase ‘governing the internet’ more than once and frankly it worries me. Didn’t Canute try something similar?
But it’s not all bad news…
After the gun and the guns for hire, and the early day sheriffs who relied on their quick draw, there came judiciary and laws than formalised the processes for identifying bad from good and exacting appropriate penalties. That’s where I think we now need to go with digital governance.
Those of us involved in content, its creation and implementation are ideally placed to step into and exert our influence in this area. I used the word ‘influence’ rather than, say, ‘control’, after careful thought. Think traffic police rather than Big Brother. It’s all about enabling the flow of communication while mitigating the risk of pile ups.
We already act as the linchpin for a whole range of disciplines. The image below was created by Richard Ingram and is one of many of his stunning visualisations that go towards explaining our turnkey positioning.
• We already have, and continuing to improve, a range of tools and methodologies that allow us to guide clients in project choice, rationale, implications and implementation.
• This is alongside the deploying of the actual content itself across an increasing array of channels and delivery mechanisms.
• To this array of tools and services we ‘simply’ need to add governance tools and methodologies, such as a suitable content risk matrix that will allow us to identify the more important issues that clients need to address – and mitigate.
I’m going to show you what that content risk matrix might look like in my next blog.
Why content strategy is no miracle cure
Posted by Lab rat in content strategy, online communication, web content on July 4, 2011
Penicillin, central heating, Spanx… could be termed ‘miracle cures’ (okay, so some antibiotics don’t work as well these days, but I’m wrestling with analogies here – cut me some slack). What I mean is that once they’re applied their impact is almost instantaneous and evident. I live in a world which is warmer and where I suffer less strep throat thanks to two of my analogies.
If you want to know more about Spanx, consider why actresses strutting their stuff down the Oscar red carpet never wobble or bulge. Ever.
But content strategy isn’t Spanx. For a start, it isn’t one thing. It is a lot of expertise housed within the brain of a person demonstrating content strategising abilities and which includes “established disciplines – such as communications and editorial planning, marketing, content and author development, with new disciplines such as digital workflow planning and management, auditing and behavioural insight, social media and traffic analysis”.
The preceding bit is within inverted commas because I’m quoting from the content strategy course that CDA runs through emarketeers and where the emphasis is very much on skills development. » Web content strategy training course: Maintain control of content planning for online projects
We can also define CS as a range of solutions, supported by tools and methodologies. CS is Spanx, personal trainers, Botox, dieting, cosmetic surgery, gatric bands, cunningly cut designer gowns, make up artistry… plus other stuff that Hollywood celebrities will go to the grave without revealing. Miracle cure it isn’t. It takes time. It’s painstaking. It’s more than just contouring underwear.
Yet there is an assumption from clients that content strategy might cure content ills in an out of the box way. Just slip the website, say, into its figure-defining support and it can strut its online stuff down the red carpet, ready to pick up an Oscar or two from an adoring user base.
If anything, CS has more in common with a good personal trainer who will figure out why your content is unfit. A good personal trainer will devise diet plans (what goes in) and excercise regimens (outputs). He or she will get to the bottom (so to speak) of your bagel dependency and adapt your programme as you get more fit – or fail to. It is an ongoing and evolving process. The bulk of the work is going on inside.
Okay, where I am headed with all this…
Well, part of me is questioning whether we are in danger of defining CS as Spanx sometimes? Are we guilty of allowing clients to think they can buy (and we can price) this stuff in a box? Do we name it too often as if it were a single thing? Do we appear to promise it as a miracle cure rather than a fitness programme? Take two pairs of Spanx and see me in the morning?
When I run the web content strategy training course I am constantly considering how movers and shakers within orgnisations conduct themselves and get thesmelves and their proposals taken seriously. A Finance Director wouldn’t define is skill set as finance directing. So, if I’m not a content strategist – what am I? Answers on a postcard please…
Web content strategy training course
There are places left on the July 18 content strategy course in London. » If you’d like to book a place you can do so here
Why the Spanx analogy Anne?
I was at an awards evening in London a little while ago and was in conversation with two fellow content strategists, when the miraculousness of Spanx and ordering them online was revealed to me, forever linking CS and Spanx in my head. You know who you are…
Why does less cost more?
Posted by Lab rat in audience engagement, content strategy, online communication on February 22, 2011
The lab rats and I have been pondering the quality v. quantity question recently. A lot of what we deal with as content strategists seems to rest on a (client?) perception that content is relatively low cost and readily available. Everybody can write, right? (And lots of people can pick up a camera to create moving or still images – which are also content, let us not forget.) The big money is in the code and the technology, the build and the maintenance, even the search and findability aspects of a project.
Sometimes I just drive out into the countryside, find a lonely hillside and howl “WRONG!!!” at the moon. Other times I sit in the office and ponder what we’re really dealing with here in terms of perception / mindset… It’s an interesting ponder.
? And as I’m going to be speaking around this subject a little at next week’s Congility @ Publishing Expo in London on March 2 I’ve been pondering more than uusual.
» The lab rats go to Congility @ Publishing Expo
Scarcity and monetary value have long been linked. It’s one of the reasons why I don’t have a platinum bathtub or a 2 carat solitaire diamond ring. But underpinning the scarcity-value proposition is a far more fundamental one – supply and demand…
As soon as demand exceeds supply in the monetary model the price starts to rise. Financial markets are founded (and occasionally founder) on this principle. So there’s an automatic hardwire in our brain that takes us from less to less costs more.
Bloody publishing battles
This has created some bloody battles that started happening long before the internet was a glint in the eye of Tim Berners-Lee. For example, traditional newspaper publishers have been fighting price and circulation wars for years (I speak as a former journalist and editor). Newspapers compounded things by introducing the more costs less approach, battling for readers by slashing prices and offering newspapers composed of myriad sections, a glossy magazine and a free DVD if you’re lucky.
And then the internet came along and there was even more more. We filled this virtual world with websites, emails, text messages, blogs, social media hubs and all this information composed of bits and bytes that can now be squeezed onto flash drives, themselves as cheap as chips. The entire Library of Congress could be digitised and secreted in a gnat’s armpit.
So, where does that leave us? Is more always going to be cheap? Does it deserve to be anything else?
Okay, so those were rhetorical questions. What we have to do is get behind the content and feel the value.
Content is a means to an end. Content brings us information, which if configured right, allows us to extrapolate value as knowledge – usefulness, if you will.
We may have lost the ability to value to content intuitively because all we can see is how much of it there is, but we can reconnect with it’s unlying value as a carrier of knowledge.
More is priceless
As a content strategist I know that, far from more containing less value it has given us something priceless. More content has allowed us to experient and ring the changes with content in a way that was not possible when all content was offline and there was less of it (or it took longer to create and was more unweildy once created).
We can flex it and change it, measure it and track it – then change it some more. We can move people seamlessly through journeys that connect across on’ and offline nodes of information (a while since you heard the old ‘node’ term huh?).
We can also think long and hard about how we monetise these journeys. I hate the term ‘paywall’. It’s not the concept I hate, it’s just the idea of a pay wall. It sounds too much like pain barrier to me. And there’s all sorts of stuff that we’ve yet to grasp effectively. The use of moving images and interactivity, the use of the visual (eg QR codes), hyperlinking and microlinking. Maybe more will never cost as much as it should but we can certainly get better at attaching the right value it.
You can find out more about where these thoughts are leading me and the rats in the lab if you come to Congility @ Publishing Expo, Wednesday, March 2, Earls Court 2, London. » Read an outline of my presentation
The case for collaborative consumption
Posted by Lab rat in audience engagement, online communication on January 29, 2011
For those of your who know all about Rachel Botsman, apologies. But I’ve just come across the video below and it struck a very deep cord. See what you think…
Online marketing comms – rules tighten. Let the seller beware
Posted by Lab rat in auditing websites and emails, branding, online communication, web content, web copywriting training on January 24, 2011
From March 1, any communication on your website that sets out to tell users about goods, services, opportunities, freebies… but where the primary or ultimate aim is to sell something, will be regulated by the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA).
The ASA is the UK’s independent advertising watchdog, responsible for controlling marketing communications in all media in the UK. (They work with statutory partners such as Trading Standards, the Office of Fair Trading and the communications regulator Ofcom.)
The March 1 changes cover the marketing communications of all organisations operating from the UK on their own websites and in other non-paid for space online under their control eg Facebook.
The ASA talks about copy a great deal in its guidance but their remit could easily extend to any type of content, for example a home page video or a viral campaign on YouTube.
Ready?
The ASA’s extended remit may come as a surprise to a lot of organisations (the ASA’s own cross-media advertising campaign was only launched at the weekend). As always the big question is who’ll get their knuckles slapped first, for what and how hard?
The ASA’s punitive powers already include obliging broadcasters to comply with ASA rulings but it’s also brought in some new sanctions from March 1 including “an enhanced” name and shame policy. And paid-for search advertising that links to non-compliant marketing communications may be removed with the agreement of the search engines.
It’s also important to keep in mind that marketing content that falls under the scope of the ASA’s remit may not necessarily include a price or seek an immediate financial transaction. Let the seller beware.
The change falls under the scope of UK Code of Non-broadcast Advertising, Sales Promotion and Direct Marketing (the Committee of Advertising Practice / CAP) Code.
CAP decided to extend the digital remit of the ASA in response to formal recommendations from a cross-section of UK industry, including the Internet Advertising Bureau. Nick Stringer, director of regulatory affairs for the IAB stresses that self-regulation must maintain pace with today’s fast-moving digital environment and changing consumer behaviour. “The ASA’s extended digital media remit aims to protect internet users and enhance their trust, as well as industry and political confidence, in the medium.”
What’s covered:
- advertisers’ own marketing messages on their own websites, regardless of sector, type of businesses or size of organisation
- marketing communications in other non-paid-for space under the advertiser’s control, such as social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter.
What’s not covered:
- classified private advertisements
- press releases and other public relations material
- editorial content
- political advertisements
- corporate reports and investor relations.
User generated content?
ASA points out that generated content (UGC) that has been adopted and incorporated within an organisation’s own marketing communications could be covered. This will be considered on a case by case basis.
For example: “ASA is likely to take a very different view of a consumer’s positive comment that has been posted, by the website owner, in a prominent way on the front page of its website, than if that same comment appeared within the context of a consumer message board moderated for harmful and offensive language or images only”.
How to make sure you comply
CAP is offering guidance and courses. The IAB has also including some useful FAQs on its website. From a content strategy (CS) perspective the key thing is to make sure that all your content is fit for purpose and doesn’t fall shy of any regulation.
While the March 1 changes are the latest, many websites fall short of what’s required elsewhere – for example Part 3 of the Disability Discrimination Act which covers access and came into force back in 2004. Ringing any bells? It means your website must be accessible to blind and disabled users and this should be influencing everything from colour choices to meta data.
Content audits and the use of copydecks are just two of the CS tools where regulatory or legislative requirements could be captured and verified. Even without the weight of law, large organisations need to be running tight ships – eg who wrote it, when, who signed it off? Clearly defined and maintained internal content creation processes are a must. And let’s not forget content training that not only improves content creation skills but raises general organisational awareness of why all content, on’ and offline is so important.
Apart from anything else, if you can demonstrate you did your best to comply with this law or that regulation, the punitive response maybe be less harsh than in organisations where content is chaos rather than king.
Useful links
» More about the CAP guidance
» IAB Extending the digital media remit of the Advertising Standards Authority FAQs PDF
Hello DAWN
Posted by Lab rat in mentoring, online communication on October 22, 2010
In my previous post – Mentoring. Is it different for women? – I told you a little about plans to set up a mentoring scheme aimed specifically at women working in the digital industry. Plans are progressing and a steering group are meeting shortly. The climate just seems right for an initative like this.
I became even more firmly convinced when I attended another meeting, this time arranged by DAWN, the Digital Advertising Women’s Network, which has been gestating since the Spring. Another room full of inspiring women with some great ideas. Plus wine and nibbles (again). It doesn’t get any better.
But wait, I here you say. Two organisations that might have some degree of overlap? Is the space big enough? Is there enough interest and momentum to sustain both? Well, yeah!
I’m a great believer in tipping points. (I didn’t know they were called tipping points until I read The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference by Malcolm Gladwell a few years ago.) It’s that point when you realise that what’s on your mind is on the minds of a lot of other people. Things are just about to go – kaboom!
In fact, people are not just thinking about the same thing as you but they’re talking about it – loud and often. One of the best things about both meetings was when one woman raised an issue or voiced a concern and least three other women said ‘yes, that happened to me – I did this’ or ‘I might be able to help’, or simply ‘call me’. You can have too many platforms for that sort of support.
So here’s to DAWN and Mentoring Women in Digital. Let’s get these parties started.
Mentoring – is it different for women?
Posted by Lab rat in mentoring, online communication on October 11, 2010
I was at a meeting organised by Amanda Davie at Reform, which looked at the need for a mentoring scheme aimed specifically at women working in the digital industry.
It was a great meeting.
I met some great women.
The mentoring potential in the room was awesome.
Ah, if only I was 30 years younger and had just one of those women going into bat for me. I could have invented facebook, or, at the very least, been running Microsoft.
I’ll tell you how the scheme develops over the coming weeks, but, in the meantime, the meeting got me thinking about the whole area of mentoring, whether women need specific schemes and what is it about the nature of digital disciplines that might make women less, or more, enfranchised?
I started to think about my early year’s in the newspaper industry. One thing I remembered was that, when I started out, I was my own worst enemy. I remember attending an interview and saying that I had ambitions to work in the magazine industry. Why? I was asked. Because I thought that it would be easier for a woman to get on in magazines than in newspapers, I replied. I was in a room full of blokes, all with newspaper backgrounds, and you could have heard a pin drop.
The fact is I’ve seen women struggle through glass ceilings only to pull the ladders up behind them to prevent other women getting through. I’ve seen men and women extend the hand of support and give me and others, opportunities that I can only wonder at in retrospect. They had faith. They gave us a chance. They gave us the confidence to give something new (and scary) a go.
And I suppose that’s what we all need – faith, opportunity and confidence. And, I suspect, that’s what good mentoring comes down to.
I distinguish mentoring from other types of ‘help’, such as old boy networks. Old boy networks are predicated on something different entirely. They’re based on giving someone a leg up because they happened to go to the right school (or be the ‘right’ gendre).
Modern mentoring is all about spotting the potential in someone, or coaxing out that potential, so they can be the best they can be. In that respect, perhaps women are more able to spot potential in other women. And as digital disciplines are relatively young, the women who have experience in them are even more valuable (as younger industries don’t have a large population of veterans to call on). These woman have seen their areas of expertise evolve at a breathtaking pace. In some areas they may well be the minority gendre. They recognise the issues – a lack of confidence, perhaps; lack of technical training, concerns around combining work and family…
I mention the latter but this is not about women needing different mentoring because they also make babies. Some women have families, some women don’t. It may be part of what makes you, you. It certainly isn’t all of what makes you, you. Not by a long chalk. But a mentor could just as easily be dealing with someone who wants to combine a fulfiling professional role with time to volunteer in the charity sector.
The fact is I warm intuitively to the idea of women, such as the ones in the meeting I attended, using their experiences, empathy and objectivity to mentor other women. And, as a woman, I set great store by my intuition.
» Find out more about Mentoring Women in Digital on LinkedIn
10 really good reasons (no, honestly) for postponing what you could do today about your website content
Posted by Lab rat in content strategy, online communication, web content on July 22, 2010
Walk around client offices and marketing seem to have a spring in their step. Even the guys in IT are whistling ’1000 Points of Hate’ by Anthrax (this is a good sign). But… Well, there’s always a but, isn’t there?
Just sometimes I hear those sit on your hands excuses in some quarters. They may get trotted out just before you press the big fat ‘Go’ button, after all the discovery, auditing, interviewing, planning, workshopping etc has gone on. And, of course, they’re always really, really, really good excuses reasons for not doing something. They’re so good, in fact, that I thought I’d list them here.
1. ‘We can’t start the web project until we’ve…”
This is an excellent reason for not doing something. It’s worth making a real effiort to find another piece of work that requires time / budget and which can be positioned in the way of the proposed web project. Particularly if that proposed web project might take your organisation outside of its comfort zone.
2. “All this background and planning work is fantastic. But we need to spend some time considering the next step.”
Okay, if used in moderation this is fine, valuable even. But, to quote Dionne Warwick: “Weeks turn into years – how quick they pass.” Of course, it makes perfect sense to see any web project as a single, HUGE project that can’t be broken down into sections. It’s a much better idea to think about things really slowly and lose all the forward momentum. With a bit of luck all the prep work will be out of date and useless.
3. “We’re currently advertising for a Head of Interactive Experiential Human Interfacing and all projects are on hold until we appoint and they have a chance to review everything.”
Maybe it’s just me but didn’t you know you were planning to get a new Head of IEH before we started working on this project?
4. “We want to carry out your recommendations but we haven’t got sufficient resources.”
Maybe it’s just me but didn’t you know there were resource issues before we started working on this project?
5. “Thank you so much for all the time and effort workshopping taxonomy, Information Architecture and topic headings but we don’t want to change the current site navigation.”
Yup. That makes perfect sense.
6. “Rather than make some changes now we’ve decided to wait until we can afford a totally new website in a year or so.”
We totally agree. Your site users will be quite willing to wait and it shouldn’t impact on sales or your brand one jot.
7. “You seem to be suggesting that there should be collective responsibility for content creation and maintenance and we can’t just leave the job to… Our people just don’t have the skills or the time.”
Of course you can give people skills, processes and methodologies that help create the time (efficiencies) and also impart a collective shared enthusiasm for the power and benefits of web-based communication. But heck, I’m just messing with your head.
8. “The chairman’s wife does a little creative writing and we’ve asked her to look at the website.”
Okay, I only heard this one used once and that was several year’s back. But it’s still a corker.
9. “We haven’t got the money to do everything we want so we’re not going to do anything”.
Do you want me to pop the toys back in your pram now?
10. “This is David. He’s working as an intern with us over the next six weeks and will handle most of the implementation.”
Hi David. How many pairs of hands have you got?
How online audiences are treated – and why?
Posted by Lab rat in audience engagement, cost effective marketing, customer engagement, online communication, Web 2.0 on June 2, 2010
I was talking to CDA co-founder Clare O’Brienabout her her presentation to the Content Strategy Forum in Paris and how online audiences are treated (and the role of metrics in framing that relationship). That got me thinking (slowly) and the below is the result.
Most people accept that online is not a broadcast media and while we are confronted with harnessingf the power of the many we’re actually having mutiple one-to-one conversations in the deeply personal space that exists between the user and their screen. But at the same time we measure in a very broadcast way. It;’s so easy to become obsessed by search volume and clicks.You here audiences talked about as if they were individuals, but then measured as collectives.
Yet some organisations still don’t appreciate what this means in terms of what they say and why they say it. They can be glib and almost naive in terms of the messages they put out, assuming that tricks and finesses will engage users as if they were magpies drawn to sparkly objects.
And just in the same way that a magpie may be attracted as much by a cheap shiny bead as by a precious ruby, so many organisations have come to assume that cheap content will do.
Oh, I know that certain types of content have a value that’s higher than plastic beads, but this value was often originally ascribed in a traditional space – for example, television advertising, or the exquisite glossy brochures much beloved of the high end car market.
But content that developed in the online world came into being, originally, as an afterthought:
“Hey, Joanne, the new website’s up but there seems to be a problem.”
“What’s that Stan?”
“Well, there seems to be all these white spaces. Looks great though…”
“Where are these white spaces?”
“Kinda in the centre of the screen. And on every web page!”
“We didn’t have white spaces like this in the last brochure that went off to the printers.”
“No.”
“Well, can’t we do the same thing on the website?”
“Hang on – I’ll check with IT…”
So words flowed on to web pages, in around the lovingly built online spaces. Often the brochure copy was sliced and diced to fit – hey, it had already been paid for, so it was a cheap fix.
Now that’s all fine and dandy, but online isn’t offline. It’s that one-to-one conversation. Plus, people are online to do something. They require useful content that centres on their needs and actions.
Organisations have picked this up but the cheap thing still seems to linger. And words can be bought by the yard to fill websites by the page. The fact that content doesn’t have to be words and can be a rich and varied mixture of words, imagery and interactivity, is still being grappled with in the budget configurations that may operate like glorified jam jars (only one of which is labelled ‘website’). Apart from anything else, once you get into all that other stuff – forms, videos etc – the price starts to go up. Plus you need a cohesive content strategy that oversees communications across on and offline positions and is coupled to processes designed to evolve communication creative that can be atomised, repurposed and applied across multiple platforms…
Of course, strategy and process can help organisations save on costs. But they would have to think about things very differently. It would also redistributed budget load, placing earlier and deeper emphasis on planning and thinking rather the the cost of the final content output. Yes, there are exceptions to this. but not enough to make a rule in my book.
And while audiences are still being measured as collectives, organisations are unlikely to be too uncomfortable with this words-by-the-yard approach.
The dissatisfaction an individual user may experience is obscured by mass metrics in a medium when we can measure everything and know so very little. The metrics, on the other hand, make for great bar charts and PowerPoint presentations. How you analyse these mass metrics but also hear all these lone voices takes up a great deal of CDA’s thinking time and is the driving force behind CUT – the Content Usefulness Toolkit, which we’re currently developing.
So, I thought, will organisations ever value online content as they ought while they’re still grappling to value individual consumers as they deserve to be valued online? How can content be king when we treat web users as the great unwashed? Valuing content is all about valuing individuals and their experiences. Now, that would be more precious than rubies and just as attractive to magpies.
All kinds of useful stuff
Information entropy – ah, hmmm, huh?
Posted by Lab rat in audience engagement, communication training, online communication on April 12, 2010
A friend of mine recently reviewed a book chapter for me, in which I examined what lies behind the concept of information overload. She asked why I’d chosen not to touch on information entropy. My answer was simple and somewhere along the lines of: “Duh?”
In the physics lab “entropy” is used to described certain states in thermodynamics. I’m no physicist, so bear with me on this one; the lab rats have been doing their best to explain things to me. So, in lay terms, entropy is used to describe
- Energy that is no longer available (an example of this would be a car where the brakes have been applied and where energy has been lost in road friction / heat).
- The amount of disorder or randomness in a system. Gas, as it whooshes about, being more random / disordered than a solid. (Or a group of adults who get up from the dinner table on New Year’s Eve and start dancing to Jeff Beck and Hi Ho Silver Lining being more random than the same group when sitting and eating.)
Okay, that’s the end of Thermodynamics 101.
But there’s also Information Entropy. This is very different but you need to know about the physics one (entropy as the second law of thermodynamics) so you can ignore it completely (for the time being).
Anyway, you can trace Information Entropy back to the 1940s and Claude.E.Shannon (1916-2001), known as the father of modern digital communications and information theory and his paper, “A Mathematical Theory of Communication” (1948, Bell System Technical Journal), which looked at the engineering challenges involved in getting a message from one point to another.
The information content of a message, he theorized, could be reduced to the number of ’1′s and ’0′s it took to transmit it. This idea was gradually adopted by communications engineers and stimulated the technology which led to the binary language that underpins the digital information age. Shannon also coined the term “bit” for a binary digit.
Shannon Entropy, sits within Information Theory, the mathematical discipline that looks at how information is stored, transmitted and reproduced. It measures it, accounting for the possible variables eg a flipping a coin (2 sides) will have less entropy than rolling a dice (6 sides). While Shannon Entropy is strictly applied to the the minimum amount of binary code required to transmit a message from A to B it is also being deployed by non-mathematicians as a way of showing how much information is unequivocally captured within a message (its meaning to the recipient). Shannon himself didn’t get sidetracked by the semantic value (language comprehension and connotation) in the message, just the engineering challenge of transmitting it from A to B intact. In fact, the application of entropy to wider semantic issues of meaning hacked Shannon off quite a bit, apparently.
Time for a joke I think…
Back in the days before email. Way, way, back. People used to send messages via telegram. Such communications were expensive and often charged by the word, so people became very economic with their phraseology. This was particularly evident among professionals who used telegrams regularly – ie journalists.
Back in the 1960s a journalist sent a telegram to the home of veteran Hollywood star Cary Grant. It was a simple question, in theory, designed to establish the actor’s exact age. The telegram read: “How old Cary Grant.” The reply that came back was: “Old Cary Grant fine. How you?” The joke, I believe, establishes the potential difference between the minimum character / bit count for information delivery and minimum required for accurate message comprehension / connotation. It would have been worth paying for the “is”.
You can also argue, well, I do, that the journalist was also applying data compression – the minimum number of words / bits required to convey the information. They fact that the journo failed shouldn’t prevent us acknowledging that they tried. You can also argue, well, I do, that the problem wasn’t the data compression but in its decompression by Cary Grant and what was probably a very knowing attempt to sidestep the sensitive subject of age.
Data compression is useful because it reduces space in information transmission and storage. But, at a language and messaging comprehension and connotation level, we ‘re also trying to apply reduction (compression) techniques so that we can dispense meaning the the minimum space / time possible. On one level this may be a practical desire to reduce issues around “information overload” but that doesn’t explain the phenomenal success of Twitter where the 140 character limit is almost winsome. Data compression at a semantic level is becoming more important if we believe that one key to resolving information overload is to reduce the amount of information people have to deal with. I have an alternative view about this which relates to how we feel about information and this was the subject of a recent survey on this blog. But I’ll save that for another day.
Okay – back into the physics lab
You remember I told you to forget all about the second law of thermodynamics for a bit? Now’s the time to start thinking about it again. What happened with Information Entropy was actually a bit of a hijack. The mathematicians kinda stole the word entropy and messed with it’s meaning a bit, on the basis that most of the population wouldn’t notice or understand. But there are aspects of thermodynamic entropy that are interestingly applicable for information and how it becomes more random / disordered as changes take place. In thermodynamics the classic example involves the ordered structure of sugar crystals compared with the disordered / random nature of sugar dissolved in water.
If you think about information and how it changes, it’s remarkably like the sugar dissolved in water. Over time, different bits of information get de-structured and mixed with other bits. It can become impossible to disentangle this information and restore it to the order of its original components. Looked at one way, this could result in knowledge. High quality information brought together, some bits lost / discarded along the way, but resulting in something different but useful. (It’s also entirely possible that there is a negative outcome possible where poor information is brought together resulting in dissatisfaction and misinformation.)
This makes for a slightly more refined version of the basic knowledge pyramid, which CDA used as the starting point for its Hierarchy of Mutuality and which is loosely modelled on Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs*.
* Maslow argued that human beings required basic needs to be met in a hierarchy before they were free to realise themselves creatively and intellectually.
Maslow’s Heirarchy of Needs
Knowledge Pyramid
» CDA’s Heirarchy of Mutuality
The question is, where are we going with all this? CDA is currently actively engage in development measurement systems for online engagement. We believe that these have to be a mixture of qualitative and quantitative data to be truly meaningful and that there comes a point where you have to park interpretation of the metrics; dwell times, page views, bounce rates and simply ask “How was it for you?”
Contribute to the debate
I’m currently working on a second part to the article above which will also cover The Triangle of Truth (thanks Clodagh). I’d been interested in any feedback on the argument so far.
» Email me at the lab cdacontentlab@webwordsworking.co.uk