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TWICs XXI

DR1665 — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 12:00:46 +0000

The Week In Comments, 21st Edition.

This Week In Comments (TWICs): Why Twitter vs. G+ matters, multi-author blogging 101, sucky business blogs, and signature content.

The week of January 13 – 19 2012.

Geoff Livingston: Why You Should Care About Twitter vs. Google+
(01.17.12)

I’m still very much on the fence about this. I can see Twitter’s point, but I can see Google’s too. It also seems a good way to drive more meaningful, strategic connections on g+ and other social networks. Curate a strong personal network, reap big rewards when you search.

FBBB: Multi-Author Blogging 101
(01.17.12)

For all the added complexities of running a multi-author site, the one really big perk is how we can all share the load together. When my partners get twisted IRL and I have to dust off my one-man-band hat, it’s obvious just how much work we get done as a team.

FBBB: Your Business Blog Sucks, Part I
(01.19.12)

There’s a special space in the digital world where upper management basically gives us permission to set things in motion they ultimately will not be able to control – to start revolutions – but we’ve got to get people to care. Nobody cares about things they don’t even know exist.

Neiman Journalism Lab: The Newsonomics of Signature Content
(01.19.12)

Signature content. Sounds like a charge to specialize; do one thing and do it better than anyone else. What a novel idea, ya know? Instead of trying to be all things to all people, delivering an overall compromise, signature content stands on its own two feet; strong, meaningful, valuable.

Want to see more TWICs posts?

Thank you for inspiring me this week. Keep going fast with class, pressing on regardless, and doing it yourself (or doing what you can).

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Social Networking: It’s About People

DR1665 — Tue, 27 Dec 2011 21:29:08 +0000

Learning from failure.

Just over a month ago, I posed the question “Is 1 Hour a Day All it Takes?” I setup a simple experiment. I would commit to spending 1 hour per day socially networking with my business Twitter account (@GBXMNET) and then report the findings before the end of the year. It didn’t work – because I didn’t work – because my heart just wasn’t in it.

Oh, the humanity.
I did not stick with this plan, mostly because I failed to fully explore why I wanted to use social media in the first place. This is not to say I didn’t spend an hour on social media channels each day during this time, but that I didn’t do so with my business account.

I gave it a shot on-and-off for a couple weeks. I ended up following people who looked promising initially, but either did not tweet, tweeted banal, ignorant garbage, or re-tweeted same. It was terrible. Every time I opened the app, I felt a little more of my faith in humanity ebb away.

In defense of the status quo.
The status quo should always be subject to challenge. We should always be open to new ways of doing things and willing to let go of the way we’ve “always” done them. In this case, however, I realized the way I had been using social media (read: Twitter) worked better for me.

Did I spend just 1 hour a day on Twitter in the last month? I can’t say for sure, but I’d be surprised if I averaged much more than that.

Social Media Connects PEOPLE
NOT brands. @DR1665 is a person. It’s me. So is @GBXMNET, but at the same time, it’s just another brand taking up space on Twitter and Facebook (and Google Plus). When I set out to conduct this experiment, I was thinking about how to engage enthusiasts through Twitter. I want to see more PEOPLE get to know each other, step up and participate.

Brands are not people. Is my goal to encourage gearheads to seek out and interact with brands? Oh hell no. I want gearheads to interact with other gearheads. Considering I’m a gearhead, shouldn’t I want these folks to connect and interact with me, personally?

Here’s an idea…
What if, instead of splitting my time between business and professional accounts, we just made sure our personal accounts reflected our business connections? Instead of having one GBXM Twitter account, there could be dozens of personal accounts following GBXM who genuinely felt our stuff was worth sharing?

I’m tempted to close the GBXM Twitter account (or lock it down), but I wonder if this isn’t the business owner’s dilemma – Get that social media real estate before someone else does? Is someone really likely to setup a bootleg GBXM account?

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Gimme a Reason

DR1665 — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 22:13:13 +0000

I’ll give you ten reasons.

An otherwise exciting conversation about the discovery of Keppler-22b was broadsided by pessimism, when it was brought up that humans likely do not deserve to inhabit other worlds. A litany of human shortcomings were provided to support the argument. Strangely, while “war for oil, the United States Federal Reserve,” and “The United States Government,” were mentioned, The Holocaust, WWI, and WWII were absent. Go figure.

I’m not suggesting the human race should (or is even in any position to consider) inhabiting literally new worlds, but the aforementioned rant basically closed with a challenge to give one good reason why humans might deserve such opportunities. Took me all of half a second to see the following in my mind’s eye. I called it…

A Top 10 Reasons List so Easy I Could Serve it up with a Soundtrack.

I’m not saying we’re perfect. Or even that I’m anything on the order of the above, but so long as there are people like these in the world, there is hope. And I refuse to subscribe to the kind of vagabond thoughts that lead into dark alleys where troublesome individuals lurch.

Part of the solution, part of the problem, part of the landscape.

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Autoblog Burns More Gas than 3,790 Mazda iPhone Apps

DR1665 — Sun, 09 Oct 2011 18:21:12 +0000

Stakes through the heart of real journalism.

As I was skimming Twitter this morning, I came across @RatRodsRule‘s picture captioned, “That tree has *got* to go!” I re-tweeted it with the tagline, “It’s more car than landscaping,” poking fun at the Chevy Volt (“more car than electric”).

I wanted to use the latest Volt tagline – the one about the electric car that can also use gasoline for long trips – but I couldn’t remember it, so I tried Google. Enter the fail.

I came across the following headline:

3,790-mile trip shows how a Chevy Volt can burn more gas than a Prius

Intriguing. Snark and hater status aside, I’m always interested in stories of people who hit the road with their vehicles; hybrid, EV, or otherwise.

I found myself on a site called ev-olution.org, starting to read the story of a guy who bought a Volt in SoCal, drove up to Vancouver, BC, picked up his wife and son, then drove them back to San Diego, then drove them all back to Canada. In total, 3,790 miles.

At this point, the author points out the takeaway, as if there is some kind of lesson learned. “This 3,790-trip shows that it’s possible to have a Volt burn more gas than a Toyota Prius would on long trips like this.” WTF? No. It doesn’t. And I’m just the kind of anti-GM troll to be looking for that sort of information.

Breaking down the miles between electric and gas-powered (so much for “pure electric vehicle”) is a start, but saying the Volt burns more fuel than a Prius on long road trips implies telling the reader how much fuel a Prius burns on the road.

I click the “Continue reading how a Chevy Volt can burn more gas than a Prius,” thinking I’m just a click away from the rest of the story, where all will be made clear.

Instead, I end up on Autoblog, viewing the exact text I just read:

3,790-mile trip shows how a Chevy Volt can burn more gas than a Prius

Word for word, the exact same two paragraphs, followed with a button to “Show Press Release.” Are you kidding me?

I went back to the ev-olution page. Maybe it was scraped, but both articles show published by the same author, Eric Loveday. Clicking on his profile link on Autoblog doesn’t bring up anything about him, it just filters content he’s produced over there.

Fail #1: clearly misleading headline
I read the press release (something I ordinarily refuse to do). Absolutely nothing to do with the headline. Just a bunch of anecdotal (questionably real) stories of Volt owners across America who took long road trips this summer. Chevy runs deep in our season of doing more car than electric.

Fail #2: obvious link farming
Digging deeper, I Googled the headline and came up with over 8,000 links with the same exact content, many of which link to the Autoblog article, if they don’t just run the entire press release as content.

There’s no way I’m going to spend my Sunday investigating this much further, but many of the links above do not appear to have been scraped, so much as published BY Autoblog. So, one more try, and I hit the main Autoblog site to find another headline.

MyMazda app lets you keep tabs on service schedules

Google, what does the scouter say about their huckster level? It’s over 7000!

It looks even more sinister when you add “+autoblog” to the end of your search for the headline. Still over 5,000 hits, on all kinds of sketchy, link-farm-looking sites. On some of these, it’s clear Autoblog’s is the only content being published. Why is that, do you think?

Is Autoblog, gleaming paragon of integrity that it is, simply the victim of content scrapers publishing content via RSS? I don’t doubt that for a second, but some of those sites – far too many, as I see it – don’t exactly make it hard to suspect these cats are engaged in shady link-building techniques.

The Razor: Ignorance or Malice?
I have to go with ignorance. The world of PR-driven “journalism” demands these larger outlets shill as if their lives depended on it. If they don’t run the marketing-approved content from their sources, their sources dry up. If they don’t build the double-super-secret link farms to get their content at or near the top of the search results, their pageviews dry up, taking their ad revenue with them.

It’s a tough racket, so I can’t chalk this one up to malice. We all gotta eat. But given the industry’s penchant for graft, and apparent inability to spot conflict of interest, I can say this sort of thing smacks of bullshit; disingenuous, huckster bullshit.

And I hate it.

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AutoJournos, Meet Auto-Journo

DR1665 — Thu, 15 Sep 2011 20:06:33 +0000

Your days are numbered.

In his book, A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future, [aff. link] Daniel Pink pretty much warns, if someone in China can do your job cheaper, or a computer can do it faster, your ass is on the line. Last weekend, The New York Times introduced a small company already well underway to that end; computer-generated news stories. In this story, the author looked into a startup outfit developing software which turns data into articles almost instantaneously. (Computer-Generated Articles are Gaining Traction, linked below.) If computers can turn sports scores into news stories, how long before they turn press releases into same?

Allow me to translate Pink’s sentiment above for the auto-writers of the world. If a computer can turn facts and figures into an automotive news story within minutes, you’d better be delivering real journalism.

Why does this matter?
Despite all the talk about “new” and social media, not much has changed when it comes to how said media pays the rent. The name of the game is growing a large audience and serving up advertising. Google made US$28Bn in ad revenue in 2010 (source: Google Financial Tables). Facebook saw an estimated US$1.86Bn in ad revenue the same year (source: Mashable). The New York Times Company saw US$1.25Bn (source: NYTCO annual report, p. 26), which represents more than half their income.

Everyone seems to be playing the attention game. Sensationalist headlines draw readers to paraphrased briefs of little substance, and keeping those eyeballs on the site demands the creation or, as seems more common in the automotive media, curation of large volumes of “news” stories. Why these stories are meaningful and how they constitute news takes a backseat to almighty SEO, resulting in a landscape of what, what, and more what.

Why are auto-journos days numbered?
“What” is data, pure and simple. Data is the domain of the machines.

The Big Ten Network, … began using the technology in the spring of 2010 for short recaps of baseball and softball games. They were posted on the network’s Web site within a minute or two of the end of each game; box scores and play-by-play data were used to generate the brief articles. (Previously, the network relied on online summaries provided by university sports offices.) [NYT, linked below]

What’s more, according to the article,

[Clients pay] Narrative Science less than $10 for each article of about 500 words — and the price will very likely decline over time. Even at $10, the cost is far less, by industry estimates, than the average cost per article of local online news ventures like AOL’s Patch or answer sites, like those run by Demand Media. [NYT, linked below]

As the machines get better and faster at turning data into simple “news” stories, supply will outstrip demand, driving the value of articles ever lower. Maybe sourcing articles will become more like buying pay-per-click advertising; this story is worth a couple cents, that one a couple more, this one is worth a whole dollar. How are legitimate automotive journalists going to make ends meet in market like that?

Practice REAL, AUTHENTIC JOURNALISM.
Where these computer-generated articles fall short, it seems, is context. The human element of journalism is the ability to provide context, color beyond the black-and-white realm of ones and zeros – meaning. Computers can’t tell you why or who, only what. SkyNet has no emotions. It does not care one way or the other which team wins, what new model was just released, or the implications of Bob Lutz’s on-again-off-again relationship with GM. Everything is reduced to a number and processes accordingly.

Journalism, on the other hand, adds value to the data by informing the reader why the home team won, how the new model feels compared to its predecessor, or how the return of Maximum Lutz stands to impact the future of the auto industry.

How will this impact digital automotive media?
From where I’m sitting, the bulk of the content passing as “news” these days is merely rehashed press releases or otherwise part of a concerted effort to draw in UVs (unique visitors) to keep the advertising money coming in every month. This is not journalism as much as it is hucksterism.

A quick 300 words and stock photo which ends with “You can read the full press release after the jump” isn’t obsessively covering the automotive industry – it’s obsessively covering an inbox and playing the SEO game. And once computers can automatically convert the press releases into articles within minutes of them going out over the wire, humans doing the same thing will not be able to keep up.

What can we do about it?
Focus on the human element. Add context. Add meaning. Fancy yourself a journalist? Then act like one.

Make sure your work reflects an obligation to the truth and loyalty to your readers above all others.
Fact-check and verify your stories before you publish them.
Endeavor to make the significant interesting and relevant, rather than vice-versa.
Maintain a clear independence from those you cover.

The supply of hastily-produced sales copy posing as “news” is growing. I challenge you to think about how this will impact the demand for advertising space on your automotive media outlet. If a machine can do it faster and cheaper, you had best be doing it better.

Here is a link to the NYT article.

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