The Lair

Or, things not to do with your organization’s incursion into social media.

• People find out that you’re not very interesting. Or even worse, people tend to make judgments based on the content appearing in your social media profile.

  Bonus points: hashtag spam on selected high value keywords. Dear god. Please stop. Now.

• Once you establish that beachhead into the brave new world of Twitter, followers/fans become public information.
  Social media is, or so I am told by the experts, all about the networks of connections. Mining the followers of your organizational incursion into social media gives everyone a list of kool aid drinkers that it is probably best to avoid online in most shapes and forms. Win-win all round.

Bonus points: watch a follower count pissing contest develop, as the marketing drones frantically try to astroturf support.

All in all, this is a perfect example of situational irony.

Update: It might also help if said social media site is accessible from within the corporate network. Unfortunately, this isn’t the case.

It’s frightfully hard to write a blog without feeling that it must do something: even the most humble blogger is encouraged to create a unique selling point, target a ‘laser-focussed niche’, embrace social media, spawn viral content, track stats, and have a dedicated marketing drive; they must teach and inspire, build ‘authority’, start a ‘conversation’, and foster a ‘community’; they should seek out a purpose, a gameplan, a revenue stream, and an exit strategy.

This socially enforced framework creates problems, not least of which in changing Web writing from an expressive, emotive celebration of free speech to an electronic stocking filler: tabloggers aren’t writing; they’re creating content — content that hopes to satisfy self-inflicted quotas, boost traffic, and burn another post on the digital altar to appease the blods. Tabloggers write from a sense of obligation; a feeling that their content must be regular and — worst of all — useful. And I’m not alone in thinking that it’s a shame:

Yet tablogs publish the ugliest kind of useful information: vacuous lists, tutorials, and recycled how-tos that try so hard to be handy as to become meaningless, soulless, voiceless and occasionally dangerous

The Rise of the TabLog

Ain’t it the truth?

When it started out, Wikipedia was a poster child for everything that mainstream media outlets wasn’t – decentralized control and editing abilities (“anyone can edit anything!”) and filled with obscure yet fascinating pieces of information. Is it the same today? Yes, yes it is but the limits under which Wikipedia (like most other organizations) must operate have become clearer. Because yes, there are limits. A free-for-all editing structure requires more rules, not fewer.

The first signs: banning Church of Scientology IP addresses from editing Wikipedia. So, not such a big deal after all – Wikipedia routinely bars most open proxy IPs from editing pages, after repeated and sustained editing abuse. This is all part and parcel of Wikipedia practice, made necessary because of the anonymous internet. Perhaps it was the first time that Wikipedia had performed an organizational IP block, though (although I doubt it).

But this most recent case? Much worse, depending on your perspective. The New York Times is reporting that Wikipedia voluntarily suppressed news about a kidnapping in order to prevent the ransom value from going up.

Times executives believed that publicity would raise Mr. Rohde’s value to his captors as a bargaining chip and reduce his chance of survival. Persuading another publication or a broadcaster not to report the kidnapping usually meant just a phone call from one editor to another, said Bill Keller, executive editor of The Times

Mmmm. Collusion to prevent the publication of items with legitimate news interest to the public? check. Self censorship? check.

And then it gets better.

The Wikipedia page history shows that the next day, Nov. 13, someone without a user name edited the entry on Mr. Rohde for the first time to include the kidnapping. Mr. Moss deleted the addition, and the same unidentified user promptly restored it, adding a note protesting the removal
…
Around that time, Catherine J. Mathis, the chief spokeswoman for the New York Times Company, called Mr. Wales and asked for his help.

And then there is a (not very) interesting story of cat-and-mouse, of editorial freezings of pages and so on.

What does this all mean? The person asked by the article author seems to think that –

[Wikipedia] role in suppressing news about Mr. Rohde would [probably not] prompt an outcry among longtime editors, because in the Rohde case, lives were at stake

That’s probably true. I don’t think there was any other choice for Jimmy Wales and his administrators, even if they had contemplated alternatives. But on the other hand, the media is responsible for the destruction of lives too. What made the life of a random reporter (who must have known about the risks going in) more important than media witch hunts which bring down so many?

Part of the appeal of a true crowd sourcing was that interests were diluted. No single person is accountable, no single point of view pushed (but then again, we all know that with Wikipedia editorial politics, that was never true at any point anyway). What if the next people who’s lives are at stake don’t have Jimmy Wales on their rolodeck to call and ask for a special favour? Democracy didn’t die with the publication of this story. The illusion that any crowd sourced site is more powerful than the administrative cabal probably did though. And not a moment too soon.