One of the things that is readily apparent, both from this workshop and from many of the conversations I have and see, is that many institutions – museums, galleries, businesses – have climbed over the first hurdle when it comes to social media. Many of them – more than you would expect – now have a social media presence. Usually this is a Facebook page or a Twitter account, sometimes it is a collection of Flickr pictures, sometimes a blog.

On first glance, these networks are of value because of their enormous size. Facebook currently claims 500 million active users (that’s, what, about a 14th of the world’s population). Twitter has 200 million or so (or is it a mere 15 million? who knows).

At that kind of scale, though, these networks are just sub-silos of the web. Just “having a presence” on Facebook or Twitter means as little as “having a web page”. We all learnt a long time ago that creating a web page was merely the tiniest tip of the biggest iceberg and that all the hard work comes after that: maintaining, driving traffic, linking, content, content, content. These networks differ because of the ease with which they allow network effects to bloom, and they have power when there is a personal nature to the interaction. The size itself isn’t by any means a guarantee of success, and nor is the hype.

This is a big lesson that many institutions – and people, for that matter – are only just  beginning to learn. Social media and social networks aren’t a golden bullet. The ease with which you can set up a presence belies the hard and clever work that is required to maintain this presence.

The thing we talked about a lot in the workshop last week was about how you put social media into a strategic framework: one which asks “should I be doing this at all?” as regularly as asking “how should I be doing this?”. I’ve always argued that we needed a JFDI beginning in order to kick start a more strategic conversation, but the reason for doing it should be made very clear right at the beginning. I (shameless plug) talk a lot about this in my book.

Gartner casts a light on what is likely to happen in the near future: many institutions will fall down the trough of disillusionment as they realise that social media isn’t the save-all that they thought it might have been, and we’ll see interest wane as Facebook pages remain unfriended, Flickr pictures aren’t looked at, and blog posts aren’t visited. The people who have thought about things a bit harder and a bit more strategically – those who are in it for the long game – will weather this storm and realise that the ROI on social media comes later on, and only with more strategic thinking.

…I should probably rephrase that…

The social web has changed as it crawled its way through those painful teen years of greasy skin, piercings, “you just don’t understand me” and shouting at its sooooo 1.0 parents. And so, too has the institutional assessment of these environments and tools. Once upon a time the development of social tools had our fellow insitutions looking on with horror. After a while it became entirely de rigeur. Round about now, it has become unfashionable to launch anything without some kind of social element.

This is the inevitable Gartner Hype curve in action. We’re right up there at the peak. Everything is exciting, new, spangly. Institutions – not just cultural heritage, but enterprise too – are like kids in a toyshop. Everything we see is exciting. Everything, frankly, also has FUNDING embossed on it in an enormous web2.0 font.

This is inevitable, but irritating. With the rise to the peak of inflated expectations, budgets rise, projects become longer, teams get bigger. In some ways, this should make people like me happy. What we’ve banged on about for so long is at last funded and adopted by institutions. As always, the irritation is more about doing technology for the hell of it rather than looking at how users might really want to interact with our content.

Being at the peak naturally has people considering the trough. Recently, I’ve noticed two cultural heritage commentators taking this kind of angle. Brian Kelly’s recent stop doing, start thinking presentation took our original one (stop thinking, start doing) and turned it around in ways that are probably obvious from the titles. He suggests a more conservative approach to Web 2.0 which looks at risks, balances concerns, considers reliability, accessibility and archiving. Nick Poole does the same – a recent tweet talks about the “luxury of the last ten years” and asks how we should be focussing our efforts from now on.

These are extremely valuable viewpoints. Building our digital strategies on ground that is shifting constantly is a scary thing, and it is absolutely right that we have considered, serious responses to new technologies and the hype. It’s obviously particularly important that we consider this stuff carefully given the current economic climate.

The problem I have is that serious is where people start asking about consequences, are suddenly asked to provide figures on return on investment. Serious is where things slow down and stop being agile. Serious is where Project Managers live. Serious, frankly, isn’t where innovation, fun and excitement happen.

Twitter didn’t grow out of serious. Nor did Facebook. Or Launchball.

Now, I’m convinced that the core proposition of the social web transcends any kind of hype. So ultimately, I think we’ll continue producing online experiences that tend (albeit slowly) towards a viable, fun, user-centric horizon. I also think we’ll come up with the kinds of strategies that Brian and Nick have written about. We need to find ways of safeguarding our approaches, shielding them from the hype as much as is possible. But we need to do this as much (if not more) with big, funded, serious projects (“do it because it addresses user needs, not because you can get funding”) as with the lightweight, agile, rapid ones.

In a sentence: let’s work hard to find coherent and sensible strategies to what we do, but let’s also make sure we continue to innovate, to play, to fail rapidly and then move on. It is here that we’ll likely find true audience engagement.

Over the last few weeks in particular, we’ve seen the public finally sitting up and noticing Twitter. It’s been on the BBC, all over the news and makes for interesting watching on Google Trends, too:

Twitter / UK / 12 months

About a year ago, my assessment of so-called “lifestreaming” was that it was all a timesink. Back then, I hadn’t pulled as deeply on the Twitter crack pipe as I have since, or do now. Looking back (nearly 5,000 tweets and 300 followers in), my thoughts are on the one hand changed – radically – and on the other, mostly the same.

My views have changed in terms of signal / noise ratio because Twitter has deeply, deeply affected me, the way I work and the way I consume and receive content and news. I can’t think of a technology that comes even close. The panic – and it is panic – that I feel when I consider a world without Twitter is, actually, pretty worrying.

On the other hand, my views about institutional Twitter have changed only a little. Back then, I questioned that Twitter has a place at all in an institutional setting. Now, with some water under the bridge, I’ve tuned my assessment of this. My current take on this is that there are only a few ways in which institutions can create convincing, fun, and followable Twitter streams.

The first of these is when it is automated (for example, Towerbridge – and this particular example is a genius use of various bits of technology). The second is at the opposite end of the spectrum, and that is when institutions are given personality, usually because the person doing the tweeting can sit outside the corporate MarketingFluff (TM). The obvious example is the always-great Brooklyn Museum. The third is when it is just plain useful, giving rapid updates on a topic in a way that other channels can’t.

As the interest grows, we’re starting to see the cultural sector increasingly wanting a slice of the pie, and the first thing they’re asking is how do we engage with this new channel? How do we mix it into our offering and make it work for us?

Right now, many of the museums on Twitter are using it in an informal, below-the-radar context. The problem is that as the thing goes more mainstream, we’re likely to see the same old problem we’ve seen with institutional blogging: it just ends up becoming the same old shit from marketing leaflets, regurgitated into new channels.

Twitter, like blogging, needs an edge, a voice, a riskiness. As long as institutions can retain this – i.e., do it for a reason – then, IMO, things will get more interesting. If they don’t, we’ll probably all be unfollowing museums as quickly as we can slide down the steep, slippery trough of disillusionment…

The last talk I gave – in December 2008 – was at Online Information and titled “What does Web2.0 DO for us?”.

Here are the slides (my third slide deck to get “homepaged” on slideshare…yay…):

This one was attempting to focus on Web2.0 in the Enterprise. Frankly, “The Enterprise” is a subject which fills me with fear, dread and trepidation, but the movement of Web2.0 into that space is probably inevitable as sales teams around the world spot another opportunity and sell it out to cash-rich bods wanting to “be innovative” in the name of their behemoth of a company. It’ll be interesting to watch.

The talk was popular, which I’m pleased about. Online Information is a funny old conference – the halls are stacked with basically the same company replicated about 200 times: reasonably bad CMS systems with reasonably bad sales people trying to sell to a reasonably badly informed market of people. I sound over-rude, but I have to be honest – I last went in about 2003 and absolutely nothing has changed. Which can’t be good in the tech field, right?

My slides were supposed to be about one thing (why the social web is important in “The Enterprise”, and why “The Enterprise” should take it seriously) – in the end, I actually focused on why “web2″ is important to people rather than as a “thing” in abstract. I see the connecting of people with other people as reason for believing in the social web as a sound platform upon which to build any content. I believe this engagement is key to bringing (heritage) content to the foreground; furthermore, I think that even though web2.0 has been hyped to death, we should continue to believe in what “the social web” means. Mainly, we should believe this because the social web is about people and connections and as such has enormous importance to us as social, connected animals. 

One of the problems with talking about “Web2.0″ is that the phrase carries an implicit weight with it: as soon as there is a count attached, you’re naturally looking for the current one to expire – for “Web2″ to be replaced by “Web3″ and shortly after that, “Web4″. Useful though “Web2.0″ is as a phrase, I’m with the commentators now who suggest we talk about “the web”, or – my preference – “the social web”. Not because it is any less important, but because it is more so.

Incidentally, earlier today I was researching some stuff for a keynote I’m due to give in The Hague later in February (more details soon…) and used Google Trends to check on the phrase “web2.0″. It’s interesting to note that it reached its peak during q4 2007, and has since dropped off in popularity: 

You’ll see immediately that this follows the Gartner Hype Curve prediction (or at least the beginning of it) – it’ll be interesting to watch in the coming months and years how the curve settles into a dampened “plateau of productivity”. (I’d also be interested if anyone can figure out why there is a gap between 2004 when O’Reilly first mentioned the phrase and mid-2005…)

For the graph junkies, here’s the same period for the phrase “social web”:

So. That’s the hype. Maybe now we can get on with producing some astonishing, user-focused content..

Fundamental, of course, to any conversation about technology is that you are ultimately destined to fail, if you’re hoping to know everything. I’ve been following the conversation at a sprint for more than ten years now and like to think that I’ve got a reasonably good grasp of the web technologies out there, but it doesn’t take a genius to recognise that the speed of change is so intense that we’re all going to get left behind sooner or later. Those who have tried particularly hard to keep up have suffered because of it – Om Malik’s heart attack and the death of Russell Shaw are pretty well publicised. While much of the media are swinging off in what is obviously ridiculous “blogging kills you” type directions, there are still some lessons. We’re all getting older (goddamit) and sooner or later we’ll be that “back in the days of X command-line interface, when the world was rosy” IT bod in meetings. Get used to it. I’m almost there already – remember the…NO, STOP..

There’s a tendency I’ve noticed when some are faced with this craziness: ostrich the problem. The argument is articulated like this: “With so much noise, maybe we’d be better off just not doing anything“. It’s either a conscious decision, or a rabbit-stuck-in-headlights paralysis. Either way, to me it’s always been the most spurious of positions to take. To steal and adapt (CC-styley!) a well-known phrase:

“where there is noise, there is signal”

Choosing to actively run away from the noise – to “not do the social web because it’s too noisy” is a hugely perverse argument. Yes, there is noise and hype…no, Twitter probably won’t last..no, you shouldn’t be on Facebook just because you can…but the point as far as I see it is this: the social web has signal far above the hype: signal far stronger than the noise, provided you can take a step backwards and look at the direction of travel rather than the individual paths being walked. The social web is important because it lets us connect, not because it lets us tweet.

There’s no doubt that the noise is intense – unfiltered, it is way more than most of us can cope with. Here’s a (probably incomplete) list of my current inputs. Every one of them is a stream of information but also a potential distraction, red herring, attention-grabber, too:

email (Outlook), email (Gmail), twitter (via twhirl), IM (Google Talk), IM (MSN), IM (Skype), phone (mobile), phone (desk), phone (skype), feeds (google reader), “the web”, …not forgetting conversations with real people…

I may be in the upper quartile of “wiredness” but I’ll bet most of you are exposed to these, and some possibly more.

As many commentators have pointed out, as the noise continues to grow (which it will), the signal to noise ratio drops and the need for us to find mediated experiences will become ever more important. My good friend Dan Zambonini pointed me to this excellent blog post by Kevin Kelly. Here’s a quote:

“I have tried to temper my celebration of the bottom with my belief that the bottom is not enough for what we really want. To get to the best we need some top down intelligence, too. I have always claimed that nuanced view. And now that crowd-sourcing and social webs are all the rage, it’s worth repeating: the bottom is not enough. You need a bit of top-down as well.”

He’s right of course – the lesson that we all take away is that although the technologies get more “intelligent” (dare I say, “Semantic”..?), the noise is probably increasing at a far greater rate. Net result – at least a cancelling-out of the “filtered benefit” and more likely – just more and more noise.

The human author – the topdown influence in Kelly’s post – is the conduit by which everything is managed. This role isn’t going anywhere, but it’s easy to forget this when we’re all getting excited about the machine -processable web, the API, Twitter and so on.

The human element is always going to be the single most important thing in the equation, which is exactly why the social web is so important, and can’t – or won’t – be ostriched.

In this particular area I have to say I pretty much fall on the side of the anti-standards bods – lifestreaming should be about spontaneity and not regulation – but there are still some interesting issues about the modes of use of these tools, and I can understand what Brian is pointing out.

The reason why there are issues is pretty clear: lifestreaming is a paradigm shift; it’s disruptive and hence different from everything that has come before. In some ways, tools like Twitter are IM-like in the way they work. In others they’re a little bit more like a chat room. In others, they’re like an email thread and in yet others more like a discussion board.

There’s no surprise therefore that we’re all a bit confused. Throw into the recipe tools like Twitterfeed (passes feeds to your Twitter stream), Hashtags (enables you to tag tweets), Twitter Facebook app (feeds your tweets to Facebook status) or Twittervision (type ‘L:’ for location…). Then lightly saute before throwing in some finely chopped Pownce (it’s the new Twitter, only ‘better’) or Jaiku (Google bought it so it must be good..) or Tumblr (who really knows what ‘microblogging’ is anyway?)…and it’s hardly surprising that we’re feeling the need for some sanity.

This is classic Gartner hype in action. The emergence and adoption of these technologies is rapid, exciteable, reactionary. Darwinian evolution is choking the ideas that don’t work and elevating those that do.

Take the Twitter Facebook app as an example. Both Brian and I installed it at pretty much the same time. It links your Twitter updates to your Facebook status. All good, you think – I only have to do this once, updates both – excellent. Then you realise that actually the use mode is different: Twitter isn’t being used as a “what are you doing” tool (the original intention) but instead has become a way of having a conversation with your fellow users. In this context, linking it to Facebook makes no sense, as the following screen shot demonstrates. Shortly afterwards, both Brian and I (independently) removed it.

In “conversation” mode, Twitter doesn’t actually work – if I’m friends with person B and they’re friends with person C then all is fine from my perspective if I’m having a conversation with B. If, however, B is having a conversation with C, I just get B’s side of the discussion. And that, frankly, is rubbish…

Pownce might be about to help out here – it gives you the option of posting comments to public/all friends/selected friend. But then we’re really back to square one: sending a message to “public” and you might as well use Twitter. Send it to a single friend or a group and you might as well use email or Facebook messaging.

And here, for me, is the rub. I’m going to go out on the line here (always risky) and suggest that essentially none of these tools actually adds anything. Let me rephrase that. All of these tools do add huge amounts of noise, but to me none of them add signal. Sure, they’re fun. Sure, I check mine every so often and take part in the conversation, but they’re not doing anything useful for me apart from…er…um…

It’s a bit like those 3D world conversations when you discuss the various technical aspects of the 3D world and actually find after an hour or two you haven’t actually shared *anything* useful. It’s technology for technologies sake. I think we’re getting caught up in the fact that we *can* rather than finding a gap in need and responding to that gap.

This is not to say that lifestreaming doesn’t have a place. I can see that during a conference, being able to send comments is useful. I can see that the mobile integration factor is a pretty exciting area of development. I can see how this might help during an emergency, or during a live event like a talk as a way of garnering feedback. Here on my desktop, however, it’s just a distraction, a timesink.

Within an institution, I’m also failing to see the applications. And this is where Brian and I both converge and diverge all at the same time. I think he has a point in trying to establish the modes of use, settle these down and try and get some clarity. But unlike Brian, I’m not convinced that institutionally there is anything in it. It may be that these tools and modes of use mature, and once we’ve all skidded through the trough of disillusionment we’ll find we’re in more informed place. But for now, I’m watching (and taking part…!) with an air of cynicism.

What do you think? Do you use these tools? Do you think they have a place in institutions? Should we look to standardise, either technology or modes of use? Comments please!

To date, most of what I’ve read puts “the semantic web” – in quotes because no-one really seems to agree what it’s actually all about – in the “web 3.0″ spot. Ms Wu makes life easier on herself by instead focussing on the experience that each of these generations of the internet have brought to the party:

Web 1.0: Information Sharing
Web 2.0: Interaction
Web 3.0: Immersion

The 3D nature of Second Life leads itself to an experience which is immersive, but as Susan Wu points out, 3D isn’t the only way of doing this: it’s just the one which is most obvious, and apparently sexy.

I really like this way of thinking about the paradigms of experience – it works both from a technology and a Hype Curve perspective. Also the concept of immersion meshes nicely into the firm beliefs I have about the way that good technology becomes invisible, ultimately making the user experience seamless.

The iPhone (which I finally got to play with last week) falls neatly into the invisible technology slot. As a device, of course, it’s hugely tactile, beautifully designed, and far from invisible in a real-world sense (especially if you’re on a late tube train in a dodgy area of town…), but as a technology experience, it’s pretty close to seamless, and as such becomes immersive.

Although I spend a lot of time going on about how we should “just do it” (good tagline, that. Shame it’s been claimed by a global corporation of dubious ethics..), I’m also well aware that museums aren’t immune from the hype curve either. The suggestion we should “do something with Facebook” throughout the thread is terribly reminiscent of many requests I’ve had to “do web 2.0″. The conversation usually goes like this:

——————

Web team office, early morning. Somewhere a phone rings.

Web Team: “good morning, this is your friendly web team. how can I help?”

Important Person, usually somewhere high up in the organisation: “we need a blog/discussion board/wiki/podcast/facebook account/mobile website/[insert other new tech thingy here]“

WT: “why?”

IP: “because I read an article in the Guardian on Saturday and it’ll improve our productivity/sales/grooviness. Besides, it’s free”

WT: “what do you want to say on your blog/discussion board/wiki/[...you get the picture...] ?”

IP: “why does that matter?”

WT: “who is your audience?”

IP: “the kids, of course. da street. da yoof. innit?”

WT: …

IP: “right, I’ll hope to see some serious re-alignment of our visitor figures by, say, a week Wednesday. I is expectin’ big fings in da hood. Bitchin’. “

——————-

There’s a fine line of course between what I push for – technology growth, user understanding, fast to market, flexible applications – and the Important Person’s vision. This is a subtle game, and one which often causes concerns.

I see it like this:

> the mashup environment is about playing with technology – it is therefore partially technology driven (a bad thing) but also understands and build on content and data from disparate sources in the hope that the thing which pops out at the end is useful (a good thing). It relies on a Darwinian process to determine what works and what doesn’t: if your users like it, they’ll take to it and it’ll succeed.

> the drive to make things happen – the push which I believe museums should be making to be more leading than lagging – should always come out of user centred design. Websites should come from a user need. Ultimately, they should fill a hole in people’s lives. The bitter pill to swallow is that the needs of the institution aren’t always the needs of the user, and that’s where conversations like the one above start to cause pain.

Sometimes the needs of the institution do match (or can be bent so they match) the needs of the end user – this is when the best things happen. Take for example the fabulous English Cut blog – a fascinating look into the otherwise closed world of the Savile Row tailor. Hugh Mcleod helped put this together and he writes wonderfully about the value of the “micro smarter conversation” vs the value of the “macro brand metaphor”.

This is where web teams need to be incredibly savvy about what is out there and how to make this stuff happen. Actually, the conversation above should have a moment where Web Team gets in quickly with “Good plan, Mrs Important Person. How about a personal blog written by X about the way in which we Y”, thereby cutting off any possibility that you’ll “just do it” in the wrong direction with some god-awful corporate nonsense.

So….should museums be on Facebook? Yes, probably, if that presence does something interesting and motivating for users. Should museums be on Facebook just because it’s there? Obviously not.

It’s an obvious and well established model. A first boom in interest, a trough as people decide they weren’t that interested after all, and then a steady rise (or so the startup hopes..) to the service plateau where growth continues but in a more measured, sustainable way.

I’ve been wondering whether the Garnter Hype Curve is one of life’s immutable laws – something that applies to almost anything you care to point it at, from fashion to technology. Another one is the Power law (lots of small things, a few big ones). Interesting…