Maintaining  the digital footprint of the deceased is not without its challenges. (image via lanier67)

As content strategists, we’re used to working with lifecycles. We create content, watch it flourish, and then put it to rest when outdated or no longer useful. The same lifecycle exists (or should exist, anyway) for brands, campaigns, websites…any medium, really. But in this social media age, our creations can develop lives all their own. Content may be repurposed and exist outside our control, it may be archived as just one among a stream of our creations, or it may even truly outlive us.

The latter observation entered my consciousness in an unwelcomed fashion this spring. A very good friend died much too young, losing a lifelong battle with depression and all its demons.

My friend was always connected, always available. In the days following his death, it pained me to log into instant messaging and see his account still online, though “Idle.” It pained me even more when I noticed one day he’d been logged off, his icon never to again grace my active contacts list. The FTP server where we’d shared media soon went down, too. It was official: my friend was permanently offline.

But in the social cloud, traces live on. His Twitter account remains active, but only in a technical sense—he hadn’t tweeted anything in nearly a year. He wasn’t terribly active on Facebook, either, yet his profile wall has taken on an afterlife all its own.

Around the funeral date, friends and family gathered virtually to share their grief. A particularly moving memorial was posted upon request days after the service. Remembrances continued to trickle in, their frequency dwindling as the weeks passed by.

I stopped checking his wall about a month after he was laid to rest. The stories and reminiscences continued to move me, but oftentimes too much so. I thought it time to let my friend go in the online space, just as I was forced to do in offline reality. And for a while, that tactic worked. Mutual friends occasionally would ask if I’d seen such-and-such post, and when I answered no they would relate it to me so we could share in its wisdom and our pain.

But, Facebook being Facebook, every once in a while I’d be prompted to “say hello” to my friend. I could not willfully ignore his profile without hiding it or de-friending him—neither acceptable options.

Just this week, I decided to stop by his wall. Four months after his passing, my friend’s Facebook wall now functions as group therapy where anything goes, ranging from wish-you-were here sighs to irresolvable anger at our collective loss.

I’ve discovered the ability to smile at and sometimes laugh along with the posts. A lump still rises in my throat every now and again, but it’s reassuring to see that he continues to factor just as vividly into the daily thoughts of others as he does with me.

And thanks to the social cloud, we can share in our healing among the company and comfort of friends. For as long as we have media like Facebook, the content lifecycle can be endless.

But some people are questioning whether this is necessarily the best way of handling the digital footprint of the deceased. The New York Times points out in a recent article “As Facebook Users Die, Ghosts Reach Out” that Facebook has an ongoing challenge in balancing the need for public memorials with the acute pain of personal loss.

What do you think? If something were to happen to you, would you want your social networking accounts to remain open for use by friends and family? Are there risks associated with open-ended memorials?

Truth at your fingertips, courtesy of Hunch.com. (Image via Laurie).

This summer I found myself with an absurd amount of free time between finishing graduate school and beginning my new job. Amid marathon sessions of Rock Band and America’s Next Top Model, I logged many an hour on Hunch.com, the latest brainchild of Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake and a group of MIT and Harvard alums. For those unfamiliar with Hunch, it is a decision-making site that provides personalized answers to questions ranging from “Which camcorder should I get?” to “Do I have bipolar disorder?” Or even more timely inquiries like “Have I had an affair with Tiger Woods?” to “Should I get my DNA sequenced?” Hunch relies on its community to generate and maintain a myriad of content, much like Wikipedia. In addition to providing their own questions and results, users edit, flag, approve, and refine their peers’ creations to improve the advice that the site doles out.

I hopped onto to the site at the tail end of its public preview phase, and after the June 15 launch there was a noticeable jump in both the site’s membership and its coverage in the tech blogosphere. Industry buzz about the NYC-based startup intensified last week when Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales joined the board of directors on December 7. Wales cited Hunch’s unique combination of algorithms and collective intelligence as its major draw, saying,

[U]ntil recently I hadn’t seen a great example of how the two approaches could come together, co-exist and truly complement each other to form something greater than the sum of the parts – which I believe is the future of the web.

Staff members pitch in as well – one of Ms. Fake’s most recent additions was a thoughtful list of pros and cons about her dishwasher. The quantity of submissions continues to rise with nearly 15,000 as of this writing, and while every submission would ideally jibe with Hunch’s witty tone, even expert users’ contributions probably won’t be 100% perfect. As a result, Hunch employs some unique features to manage this deluge of user-generated content.

The “Workshop” section of the site helps determine which topics are of publishable quality; it provides a space where users can view and edit recently created topics, promoting the stronger contenders and voting down weak or redundant ones. Once a topic receives enough votes the staff promotes it to the main library, while unpopular topics become dormant. Hunch also provides a “Training” feature in which users adjust the logic of both promoted and Workshop topics, after which staff members lock thoroughly trained topics to prevent further unnecessary edits. Finally, a system of badges and points – “banjos” in Hunch-speak – encourages a steady stream of new content by making participation addictive and fun. While the satisfaction of contributing to a greater cause may inspire altruistic types to remain active members, racking up pieces of flair provides the extra nudge that the rest of us need to do the same. I would be lying if I said that I didn’t go on a contribution spree while chasing after my “10,000 Banjos Club” badge.

Of course, just as information-seekers must remember that Wikipedia entries aren’t always reliable, it seems twice as true that Hunch results – especially regarding major life decisions – should be taken lightly. Whereas Wikipedia’s vast and active user base allows for rapid self-healing of its inaccuracies, mistakes seem less likely to be corrected on Hunch, which has a much smaller community. However, as Hunch attracts a larger and more diverse audience it will hopefully grow and evolve to truly harness the wisdom of the crowd. It is already far more content-rich than when I first logged on, and while I still wouldn’t seriously listen to Hunch’s advice on how many children to have or whether to leave the East Coast, maybe it will help me plan my next vacation or choose a new hobby. I’ll also keep doing my part to make the site smarter for my fellow Hunchers. Why stop now? There are so many more banjos to be had.

News lovers beware. (Image courtesy of the talented Eleanor Rudge)

The breakdown: Robert Stribley discusses how a recent national tragedy was covered in the Huffington Post through a consolidation of local tweets.  What’s the impact of using these Twitter lists on citizen journalism?  Read on to find out.

“Good lord, is this hen scratch they call tweeting REALLY supposed to keep us informed?” – goodog, Comment posted 06:10 PM on 11/05/2009, The Huffington Post

Late last week unwitting citizens of Fort Hood, Texas suddenly found themselves serving as national correspondents, when the news-aggregation site Huffington Post began livecasting their tweets. HuffPo corralled their tweets via Twitter Lists and presented them within a Twitter widget—both shiny, new features the micro-blogging service had released just days before.  The implementation by the Huffington Post was somewhat shoddy. As of this moment, it’s still running.

Some background: On Thursday, November 5^th, Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan began a shooting rampage at the Fort Hood military base that left 13 service men and women dead and 29 injured. In an attempt to tap into local reactions to the event, The Huffington Post set up the Fort Hood List and began streaming the tweets of people whose profiles indicated they lived in the area. I’m sure it seemed like a good idea at the time.

HuffPo should have considered the impact of posting random tweets simply based upon their geographic location. Instead they let loose with a torrent, and the results, as people quickly noted, weren’t pretty. Don’t get me wrong: There were some poignant and informative tweets. However, many of them weren’t particularly relevant, were inaccurate, or made little sense out of context.

Some examples:

iTraceyRenee: watchin Gucci Mane ft Usher – Spotlight Video

Barbaramagana: Writing blog. hmm what will the topic be!!!

RicoRossi: I’m about to go assist in oral surgery, ill tweet later

sunnylena: @ArmyBarbieGirl do u have children?

One 17-year-old participant mentioned the Fort Hood incident precisely once, before resuming her random, typically sexually explicit tweets. Which are still being posted to HuffPo, as of this moment.

A few issues are at play here. Let’s take a quick look at them.

Security by Obscurity

Ideally, people should be made aware when their tweets are being broadcast in a more prominent venue. Now, arguably, the whole point of Twitter is to disseminate information in a public venue. And, by publishing content to Twitter (and, increasingly, Facebook, too), folks are engaging in a privacy transaction each time wherein they tacitly agree to make their content public. Unless they make their profiles private. For better or worse, people depend on “security by obscurity” where Twitter’s concerned. They realize their tweets are observable (one would hope), but they sometimes depend on their mutterings being lost in the noise. As we all continue living our lives more publicly, we’ll probably adapt and learn that security by obscurity is a myth.

In the meantime, publishing people’s tweets at such a visible level raises some issues. For example, in an internal conversation, Razorfish content strategist Rachel Lovinger suggested that HuffPo did Tweeters an injustice by publishing their tweets out of context:

It makes me wince that the top comment from a local says “Andy Pettitte, Houston misses you!!” I feel embarrassed for the person who said it and is going to be judged as shallow and insensitive, just because she used her Twitter account the way she always uses it, perhaps not aware that she’s now an unfiltered spokesperson for her troubled community.

Curation

How to avoid this context problem? Tweets should be curated, of course, at least automatically by keyword, if not manually. When they published their Twitter list, HuffPo claimed, “we’re capturing all the tweeted updates related to the terrible events at Fort Hood. This search is targeted, filtered, and local.”

Really? Targeted and local? Somewhat. Filtered? Not so much.

The first thing I thought upon seeing the Huffington Post widget was that many of the tweets weren’t remotely relevant. It desperately needed some curation. Of course, Twitter lists aren’t currently set up to do that. Since HuffPo couldn’t do the filtering, they put the onus on us. And why should we take on the cognitive burden of filtering out irrelevant, often inaccurate information? We came looking for signal, not noise.

Accuracy & Authenticity

For a news-oriented site, of course, accuracy should be the weightiest concern of all: by placing those tweets on their site, The Huffington Post amplified some misinformation, a problem more serious journalistic enterprises would be excoriated for.

Some have suggested we shouldn’t expect a high level of accuracy from real-time, citizen journalism. Perhaps. But relying on it is a mistake we’re seeing all too often. A more stringent process for participation certainly would’ve helped in this case.

Maybe we’re entering an age where – more than ever – news needs to be viewed with the admonition Caveat Lector, “Let the Reader Beware!” We should certainly maintain a healthy sense of skepticism when reviewing content, which comes our way. But news practitioners – and aggregators – should also be aware of the damage that the careless use of such information does to their sense of authority.

Unless sensationalism, not authority, is what they’re really aiming for, of course.

Further Reading

Columbia Journalism Review, “Fort Hood: A First Test for Twitter Lists”

Paul Carr, TechCrunch, “After Fort Hood, Another Example of How ‘citizen Journalists’ Can’t Handle the Truth”

Matthew Ingram, “Citizen Journalism: I’ll Take It Flaws and All”

In the future, technology enables us to give birth to precious little content babies. (Image via Flickr)

The Breakdown: User-generated content — You are all too familiar with it. It’s where the mob rules. It’s where anything goes, where anyone can post anything, and where the experts and the crazies exist as equals. It’s information overload where expert opinion is often hard to find. There is much at stake for those who can capitalize successfully on the evolution of user-generated content. We asked a panel of UX and Media experts about the future of user-generated content — for good or bad.

Shiv Singh, VP & Global Social Media Lead

User-generated content — or content that we create as regular people influencing, entertaining and informing each other is the most important form of content. It is what we create — our conversations, our thoughts, our opinions and our imagination expressed. The notion of it being considered something risky, dangerous, damaging or a bit too voluminous is looking at user-generated content through the wrong frame. It is time for marketers and individuals alike to realize that everyone else’s content (in all its forms) is the greatest asset that they ever had. The question really is whether the technology is where it should be to allow us to sift through all the user-generated content and figure out what’s important to us as individuals. The problem isn’t with UGC, it is with the filtering, sorting and prioritization and that’s where the technology, the semantic web and also the ability to filter through the lens of a social graph is going to make a big difference.

David Deal, VP of Marketing

Consumers will create more powerful personal brands thanks to our culture of self-idolatry and the proliferation tools that make consumer generated content more slick and professional. We will make our own “American Idols.”

Michael Barnwell, Content Strategy Lead

Allowing user-generated content usually has the goal of enfranchising the user and, indirectly, giving a greater sense of authenticity to the content — two noble goals, surely, although with very mixed results. How can anyone sort through the ton of dross to find commentary that’s in some way useful? It’s probably too late to recall the invite, but there may be a way to salvage the intention. It might be described as UGC light touch, or in other words annotations. A simple ranking of content — one basic example of annotation would be an easily sifted way of letting you know what someone thought about a piece of content, without the noise. Collectively, this kind of user contribution could lead to something resembling real added value, while saving a place for the user’s voice.

Steve Clough, Media Planner

We often talk about social media like it’s reinventing marketing, but the reality is that the fundamental strategies for success in social media and leveraging user-generated content are the same ones that marketers and sales people have been preaching for decades: 1) build relationships, and 2) provide value that fills consumers’ needs/wants. While the means may change slightly, I think the future of social media and UGC will continue to fulfill these fundamental business strategies.

Chris Boese, Information Architect

Now hear the user-generated First Principle of the Internet. First there was the Word, and the Word was the Internet. Users uttered the Internet into existence with their socio-communicative acts from the very beginning.  Non-social interfaces are an anachronism, a horseless carriage phase, like the early days of television when programs looked like filmed radio plays.

I believe the social Internet has always been profoundly destabilizing and politically empowering, and will remain so.  As with the French Revolution, there is an upside and a downside to this kind of grassroots empowerment, but that Cluetrain Manifesto left the station 10 years ago. This is no news flash. Former media monopolies are discovering it very late, to their own detriment. All businesses will face the same grim realities as the newspaper industry if they depend on old models for controlling and restricting commerce to futilely manipulate these empowered and uppity “customers.” Real power has already shifted. Some sectors just didn’t get the memo.

Robert Stribley, Senior Information Architect

There’s a lot of talk about the dark side of social media, as everyone clamors for their 15 minutes of fame – every day. But social media and the increasingly ubiquitous use of user-generated content are also ushering in an era of transparency unlike anything we’ve ever seen before. Companies (and individuals) have long espoused transparency, of course, but the economic and viral advantages of tapping and responding to user-generated content are nudging us into arenas of more authentic rather than staged transparency. This open, real-time dialogue not only forces companies to maintain their brand more rigorously, it also demands that they express it more clearly.

Matt Geraghty, Content Strategist

One of the biggest areas for UGC innovation lies in global rights management. Who’s thinking big about the future of copyright? Well, YouTube has launched a service called Content Identification allowing major content partners and rights holders to better identify user-uploaded versions of their videos. With these content management tools, major media companies partnering with YouTube are deciding if they want to block, track, or take steps to reduce infringement. But it’s a two-way street. They can even encourage fans to market or distribute the content for their own benefit. The future of UGC global rights management will lie in solutions that strike a perfect balance between the goals of the copyright holder and that of the user.

Melissa Joulwan, Senior Content Strategist

It’s imperative that clients relinquish a bit of control over their brand voice and buy into the true value of UGC, i.e., arming customers with the mechanisms and information to be brand ambassadors. We recently had a client admit they were thinking about hiring writers to impersonate community members so that the resulting content was of higher quality. This kind of thinking will absolutely doom the future of UGC. An important component of our job as user experience professionals has to be to educate our clients to do UGC right or not at all.

“Don’t delete my tweets Pete.” (image via Ben Pearce)

I had a slight panic attack yesterday when an entire string of direct Tweets disappeared from my account. I’d been having an intense back-and-forth with a friend; at first I thought I’d been blocked, then I thought my account was corrupted, and then I just had no idea what happened.

So I did some tests using two of my accounts. It turns out that both the sender and the recipient of the Tweet have equal control over the deletion of the Tweet, even when it’s a direct message. If you delete direct Tweets from your sent box, they also disappear from the recipient’s inbox.  And if the recipient of a direct Tweet deletes it from their inbox, it disappears from your sent box.  It even disappears from your iPhone text notifications.

I was mortified – as a librarian, as a content strategist, and as a social stalker.  Those direct messages that disappeared became mine once they were sent to me!  The copies may belong to the sender, but once the messages were sent to me, the final ownership changed hands, didn’t it?  And how can someone have the right to delete something out of my inbox?  Or out of my sent box?

This debate over who owns digital content isn’t new.  Back when my co-workers and I at the Boston Public Library began digitizing rare books, we ran into similar issues: is the owner the original copyright holder of the intellectual property itself, the creator of the digital version, or the recipient of the digital content?  This question has shifted into social media, like whether or not Facebook has ownership rights to what is posted.  But no one is really debating the ownership of privately sent digital content – like a direct Tweet or Facebook message – the equivalent of handwritten letters.

For example, if you send me a handwritten letter, I am the permanent owner of that letter – you can’t demand it back. Libraries never even considered ownership/copyright issues around the hardcopies of the manuscripts, because it’s just assumed that the physical recipient is the legal owner. But if you send me an email or a direct Tweet, aren’t I the indefinite owner?  Do I own the future rights to it, or do you?  According to Twitter, we both own and control it equally.

I’d seen minor versions of this, but nothing on this level. I wasn’t as alarmed by the “undo” in Gmail, because you only have a few seconds to retrieve your content; it’s more like a second thought than a reclamation.  Amazon’s similarly outrageous behavior with the Kindle (changing/removing books from your Kindle without your consent) gets into this gray area too, though somehow it feels like less of a violation because it isn’t a message that someone has given to me directly.

But Twitter has taken ownership of content into an entirely new place by allowing direct, personal, and given content to be taken back – without permission or even notification. Why is it ok to allow the sender to rescind without permission of the new owner just because the delivery method is electronic? Why is it okay for the recipient to delete content from the sender’s account?

And, most importantly, who will set the precedent for ownership of electronic content? Is it really going to be Twitter?

Under the influence on the information superhighway. (image via FFFFound)

The breakdown: What are the pitfalls of relying on user-generated content without verifying its authenticity and source? Robert Stribley confronts the issue and provides sound advice for content curators below.

“Trust, but verify.” That saying’s often attributed to Ronald Reagan. Turns out, though, he was likely quoting an English translation of the Russian proverb, “doveryai, no proveryai.” Furthermore, some folks claim the American journalist Damon Runyon crafted the quote decades earlier. Let me know if you can track down an authoritative source to verify that.

Regardless of who first said it, however, that maxim should be the mantra of any content professional relying on user-generated material to enrich their site. Truth is, there’s no shortage of the stuff these days and more and more companies, organizations — even the media — are turning to user-generated material to fulfill their content needs. During the recent protests over the election in Iran, for example, we saw the media trolling Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and other social networking sites for photos, images, anecdotes, quotes – any information they could glean from that society, whose government builds tight dams to control the flow of information. However, after they got burned a time or two, we also saw the media back-peddling and presenting such content with a caveat or two, as well. Presenting such loosely vetted content repeatedly was probably not a good move for the integrity of journalism.

Read the rest of this entry »

Young and old alike engage in the UGC. (image via Orion Nebula)

Blogs, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, discussion boards – these are just a few of the sources companies have these days for the cultivation and harvesting of user-generated content – or UGC, if you prefer fewer syllables. Still, many organizations hesitate to delve into this rich world of often freely-provided content. Why? Well, it’s often due to some crippling fears they have about the quality of such content. And where to begin in moderating it.

In their new white paper “Cultivating Effective User-Generated Content,” Razorfish’s Bob Maynard and Robert Stribley discuss how imperative it is for companies to address this content and to overcome the fears that prevent action on this front.

One day we will teach teh cats to type, sing and project manage. (image via Ben Pearce)

“Like it? Well, I don’t see why I oughtn’t to like it. Does a boy get a chance to whitewash a fence every day?”

— Tom Sawyer incentivizes his friends to whitewash a fence in Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer, Chapter Two, 1876

Attempting to solicit help with an article recently (ironically, an entry for “content strategy” on Wikipedia), I revisited some thoughts I’ve been having about strategies for successfully crowdsourcing content. You may have any of several reasons you need to crowdsource: usually, you just don’t have time, expertise, or money, resources, or employees to do it yourself. Non-profits, for example, are increasingly tapping into the crowd to help evangelize their myriad causes for many of those reasons. So what are some things to keep in mind to ensure your attempts to crowdsource are efficient and effective?

1. Be Clear About What You’re Looking For

The more precisely you frame your solicitation, the more likely you’ll entice and inspire contributors. We all have a lot to process daily, so sending folks a vague entreaty will probably only provoke a middling response. Your request should explicit about what you need, direct about how and where it can be completed, clear in explaining why the request applies directly to the recipient, and it should intimate why folks would want to contribute in the first place. (More on that in a moment.) Since we’re talking about crowd-sourcing here, you should also point out that efforts contributed can be small, so that folks understand they’re not being asked to complete an entire task on their own.

2. Tap into Networks

You’re probably familiar with the typically abysmal response rates to polls, surveys and other online implorations. Few people who read blogs actually comment on them or contribute to them. Getting folks to create content for free is no mean task. That means you’re going to have to put some time into reaching out to a large pool of potential contributors and you’ll also want to be efficient about how you do that. Fortunately, the Web provides a zillion outlets for networks and you can often quickly discover some you may not have been aware of. In addition to any professional associations, you’ve probably established a network on Twitter, for example, and there’s a Facebook group for everyone from weasel lovers (82 members) to Bluegrass fans (2828 members). You should tap into as many networks as possible, but ensure they’re carefully selected, so you’re not just spamming subscribers. An email to all your 400 friends on Facebook might be perceived as spam, but an email to a group with 25,000 members with the same interest might not – if your entreaty’s explicit and your incentives are clear.

3. Offer Incentives

So, yeah, incentives. One of the great mysteries for some folks is why people would want to contribute content for free in the first place. Aside from financial remuneration (which probably isn’t an option if you’re crowdsourcing), there are many intangible incentives for people to contribute content for free – you just have to enunciate what those incentives are. Sure, Amazon’s Mechanical Turk offers people (often laughably miniscule) micropayments to create, modify, massage, and otherwise slap content into shape, but sites like Yahoo! Answers, Yelp, and Wikipedia offer folks zero financial remuneration. What they do offer instead are opportunities to establish oneself as an authority, to be ranked among a large community of contributors (Amazon mastered this ages ago), to feel a sense of contribution and community, and, simply, to have your ego stroked for airing your knowledge. Arguably, creating content for free even provides an outlet for the obsessive compulsive among us to rid themselves of excess energy.

We’re gaining some clarity around why people contribute content for free, too. In their paper “Why Do People Write for Wikipedia?” (link to PDF), Georgia Tech’s Andrea Forte and Amy Bruckman assert that Wikipedia’s ostensibly uncredited contributors tap into an incentive system similar to that of the scientific community’s. People contribute not to accrue financial reward, but credit or credibility, which gives them increasing notice and influence in the Wikipedia community. They also conclude that “providing some obvious indication of what kinds of activities warrant higher levels of credibility may help fledgling communities grow in desirable directions as participants invest their time and identities.” Sound advice for anyone attempting to develop a community of online contributors from scratch.

So, this article includes its own little opportunity in crowdsourcing. Remember that article on “content strategy” on Wikipedia mentioned above. Why not see what you can contribute to the evolving article over there? Regardless of your motivation.