Something that keeps cropping up whenever I meet with museum and gallery professionals is the tricky issue of Authorial Voice (caps added to make it sound more… er… authoritative).

The traditional model has of course always been: we tell you what we believe… and you (the public) believe us. The explosion of online content sources such as Wikipedia has put a rather large dent in this model; users have access to so much information (and not all of it good) that they are perhaps less likely to accept what institutions tell them at face value. Or, to put it another way, a dialogue is beginning to happen between institutions and users. And that’s a good thing.

My naughty link to the questionable content at the Creationist Museum leads to an important point. Some institutions in America are now adding ‘we believe’ to long-held absolute positions, like evolution. There is an opposing belief - and if cultural institutions scoff and ignore they will only help to legitimise it. We need to engage with the argument and prove our point.

Users have access to unparalleled amounts of content; this is a new thing, it’s a good thing but it’s never happened on anything like this scale before. The more viewpoints we can access, the more complicated the cultural landscape becomes - and therefore it is all the more important that museums and galleries are seen to take a firm but well-reasoned - and appropriately open - position.

But what happens when the content leaves the institution and Joe Public gets their hands on it? I’ll look at that in my next post, You’re wrong and I’ll write (clever, eh?)

photo by thornj

I’ve just returned from MIPTV the AV and digital content market held each year in Cannes. It’s a vast event – over 13,000 delegates attend – and the buzz of trade inside the Palais des Festivals is matched, if not outstripped, by that of the deals being struck and contacts made in the many coffee shops, bars and hotels along the Croisette.

While there to build on Cogapp’s links with TV indies and broadcasters - and to explore the creative opportunities of convergence and multi-platform - I made sure I found the time to attend a number of conferences. The MIPTV programme gives a useful insight into what are currently felt by the industry to be some of its most pressing challenges and opportunities – and so I’d thought I’d pick up on and summarise a few themes that kept cropping up: the growth of online video, monetisation and how to measure engagement. Or, media, money and metrics…
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Last week, I had the good fortune to be invited to speak at the Over The Air conference at Imperial College. Organised by Mobile Monday London, it was focussed on mobile phone development, and had a great lineup of speakers as well as lots of techy fun including an all-night hackathon.

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Journalism professor, Jeff Jarvis, has written an interesting piece in this week’s Media Guardian, provoked by the New York Times’ decision to abandon its policy, after two years, of charging for content online. Jarvis proposes that this step is the latest affirmation of:

“a new economy of content online that isn’t built on scarcity and control but instead relies on the idea that content must be public and permanent to realise its value in the wider conversation.”

He suggests that the notion that consumers should come and pay for scarce and controlled information, seeking out brands and entering through the front doors designed for them is dying a death. Instead, people will arrive because of their own needs (ie search) or peers’ recommendations (via links).

He goes on to counsel:

“we in the media must open ourselves to the public in every way possible. Tearing down walls – pay, registration, archive. or just obtuse navigation – is only the start of it. I believe this also means finding more ways for our audiences to distribute us”.

Just as the publishing world attempts to get to grips with the seismic shifts de-stabilizing long-held business models and practices, so broadcasting is tasked with similar challenges – and opportunities.

This week sees the announcement of BBC Vision’s multi-platform strategy, as the public service broadcaster continues to re-position itself within a digital world of plenty. A Pact preview of the strategy suggests that the BBC are thinking in a similar way to Jarvis – that real value is not built upon scarcity and control. Rather, as content is woven into the tapestry of the online media ecology, it is about engaging in the wider conversation.

Read the article here

Jeff Jarvis’ blog

If engagement is the key to the Web 2.0 (and Media 2.0) world - and that’s what we believe - then what are the implications ? What are the rules of this new world ?

Reviewing our own experience (over twenty years and hundreds of projects) and what we know of the industry at large, we have developed a proposal: four rules for success in the world of Web 2.0 and Media 2.0.

Our four proposed rules are as follows :-

1. Be engaging - reach out, garner attention, give the network reasons to engage with you
2. Be engaged - join in, be part of the larger process, grow your network and help to grow the network as a whole
3. Be authentic - remember who you are and take the process to heart
4. Be agile - things are happening quickly, respond quickly and economically

The first rule addresses the economy of attention - interactive media are engaging media and people now expect you to compete for their attention and reward it when you get it.

The second rule addresses the network economy - as the network created by online media grows it brings bigger and bigger rewards for those who can work with it effectively.

The third rule is a rider to the first two and likely applies to any organisation working in a time of accelerated change - but it is particularly important in a media-saturated world where organisations and people have enormous freedom over where they go and how they present themselves (and will therefore encounter many challenges to their sense of identity).

Lastly, the fourth rule speaks to the unprecedented speed with which the Web 2.0 world is developing and the opportunities it provides for rapid, collaborative, development.

As we said above, we arrived at this set of rules by reviewing the past, out of that review came a dozen or so principles which seemed to apply pretty universally. The process of condensing that larger set down to these four keys was then surprisingly quick and the result feels right and has been pleasingly robust - i.e. working with the four rules has confirmed for us their importance and primacy. Time will show how well they stand up when more widely publicised and applied.

The four rules will each be the subject of forthcoming articles.

MySpace is signing up 250,000 new users daily - March 2006 [source]

“Media companies don’t control the conversation anymore…” Rupert Murdoch 2007-05-07 [source]

The world where organisations controlled access to the media and operated on a ‘we publish; you consume‘ basis is disappearing. The impact of what has been called ‘Web 2.0′, as seen in blogs like this one, YouTube, MySpace, Facebook, Flickr, open source software, and social networking, is all around us.

Maybe that is obvious, but it is also unprecedented. The internet, i.e. the world’s first truly global network, has recently been supercharged: first by growth in bandwidth; secondly by a profusion of connected multimedia devices; and thirdly by an epidemic of social networking systems.

So Rupert Murdoch is right: these changes are profoundly important. This is not just about Web 2.0 it’s about Media 2.0. The impact extends far beyond the worldwide web. But if so, how should we respond?

Trying to find an answer we have been asking ourselves some questions :-

Cogapp has been working with interactive media for over twenty years, what have we been doing? What have we been doing for our clients? What have our clients been trying to achieve for their organisations? And what more can we all do now?

Our conclusion is that the answer to these questions lies in a practice - something that we have (all) been doing for the longest time but which now needs to be moved up-front and centre, to become the theme of our work and for our industry generally.

We are talking about ‘engagement’: a practice of open, active, mutual interaction, extended over time, in a group of more or less equal participants, undertaken for mutual benefit.

[For a discussion and definition of customer engagement, a current hot topic in brand marketing, see the excellent Wikipedia article on Customer Engagement. The engagement we are talking about goes wider than brands and customers.]

Engagement turns out to be what people want, what the new media can deliver and also the key to their development.

We arrived at ‘engagement’ by reviewing our past projects, examining what was good about them (or bad) and why.

Where we could point to success, ‘engagement’ was the word that kept cropping up: engagement between ourselves and our clients, engagement between our clients and their communities; the desire to stimulate engagement as a gateway to learning; the need for programmers to engage deeply with their technology; the use of social networking systems to stimulate engagement within a community.

It turns out that interactive media are the engaging media - engagement is what interactive media can deliver.

And as the interactive media become pervasive and predominant, engagement becomes a public expectation. Modern communities expect organisations to engage with them. Engagement is not just an opportunity for organisations it is also a challenge to which they have to rise.

Engagement is the key to the success of our products and the key to the success of our projects. Where our products create engagement between an organisation and its community they succeed, where engagement fails they fail. Similarly, engagement at all levels and between all stake holders turns out, perhaps unsurprisingly, to be critical to success of the corresponding development projects.

Since we have adopted engagement as our theme we have found it endlessly useful. Useful for diagnosing how problems have arisen and how to fix them and also creative, suggestive of new ideas for projects and new ways of tackling them.

In the next post we’ll set out the four rules we are using to help us apply the theory of engagement to our work.

Where are the Joneses? is an online comedy produced by Steve Coogan’s company BabyCow. The show was published online during the summer, one episode a day. It told - in 92 2-minute episodes - the story of a woman who finds out her father was really a sperm donor and that she has 26 siblings scattered across Europe. Her journey to find them forms the core of the show.

http://wherearethejoneses.com/

Here’s the interesting bit: as the show was originally broadcast users could register with the show’s wiki:

http://wherearethejoneses.wikidot.com/

and suggest plotlines, characters and scripts. Users could also amend existing posts. BabyCow claim that a number of posted scripts have already been turned into episodes.

Some of it is really rather good. Worth a look.