back row snap of the event

I first saw Sebastian Chan speak at Web Direction on 2007. He presented on social tagging (“folksonomy”) projects at the Powerhouse museum. The first of these projects was the digitisation of electronic fabric swatches. After that the entire collection was digitised and published available for public classification. Recently I saw him present and got an update on these projects.

When I first saw this case study presented in 2007 the stats amazed me:

• 95% of all available objects were visited at least once in the first 10 weeks of the collection being published online
• 86% of tags created by users were not found in museum (curatorial) descriptions
• 88% of tags were assessed as useful by museum staff

The result since has been an amazing amount of web traffic, content sharing and fresh perspectives on objects and audience interests. The technology has developed to include geo coding and search term generated tags or “frictionless” tagging as Chan called it. But in all that time I had one question, well make that two:

• Do the same items stay popular because of tagging? (i.e. does tagging perpetuate was is already popular?)
• Does the tag list get unwieldy over time?

I got the opportunity to ask Sebastian from the audience Q&A after he spoke at the Australian Infront Insight series of talks. Warning audio taken from iPhone and not that great.
Sebastian Chan on Tag Lists by erietta

What are the lesson to be learnt here? 

The museum found that audiences didn’t need incentives to describe objects. The audience tags unveiled a new lexicon of descriptions that in turn led to deeper and wider content exploration. If you have a large library of information, a catalogue, or a huge database of content open it up. Let your audience help you describe it and in turn, help other users find what they are looking for. I encourage you to check out the original 2007 presentation.

Related links:

• Seb Chan’s 2007 Web Direction’s presentation
• Fabric swatch project
• Some of Sebastian Chans’ other posts on the subject of tagging:

• http://www.powerhousemuseum.com/dmsblog/index.php/2007/06/27/a-reminder-about-user-incentives/
• http://www.powerhousemuseum.com/dmsblog/index.php/2006/09/01/taxonomies-of-tagging/

Dae Levine and John Johnston on stage

Lessons learned from John Johnston, Social Strategist of original Earth Hour strategy

The core of the original Earth Hour strategy was the combination of user generated content with brand assets that were licensed as open source. There was take up from people, organisations and creative agencies; the latter happy to have the opportunity to work with an open brief. The major points of Johnston’s talk were:

• Keep the message simple. User generated content is easy when people like the message.
• Encourage others to build grass roots campaigns and facilitate them creating profiles (Twitter profiles, Facebook pages) and their own material with open source assets.
• Seek partnerships with organisations that can help spread the message.
• Outreach to bloggers.
• Don’t intervene. Let conversations flow.
• Don’t stop at English. Translate collateral into other languages and outreach to regional blogging networks.
• But what about the haters? There were a few including the editor of Tech Crunch, and a new group, the Human Power Appreciation Hour. Don’t get dispirited, it just goes to show you are getting somewhere when detractors feel threatened.

Lessons learned from Dae Levine, Head of Communications with Greenpeace, speaking about the Nestle anti-deforestation campaign

The lessons learned were spelled out in this how-to of social campaigning. After 10 years of Greenpeace lobbying Nestle and its supplier of palm oil, Sinarmas, they decided to change tact and create a campaign. The campaign was in the form of a video:

The lessons learned

• Leverage a brand. It was not until Greenpeace ran this social media campaign leveraging the Kit Kat brand that people took notice … and Nestle took action.
  

  Kit Kat brand appropriation

• Create an emotional entry point for your audience. People need something they can relate to, e.g. a cute orang-utan.
  

  Greenepeace thanks its supporters with this cute orang-utan

• A bad reaction from your target can only help your campaign. Youtube pulled the video when Nestle complained about copyright infringement. The result? Nestle inadvertently created the desire for people to watch it. People re-posted the video. It went viral. This decision by Nestle was the catalyst to the success of the whole campaign.

Greenpeace Nestle video stats

Audience advice to Nestle

• Embrace your social media moment. Secondary video campaign launched instructing people on how to call the Nestle CEO. by the end of the campaign this had resulted in almost 350,000 emails and phone calls.
• Time your campaign. When to launch an anti-chocolate campaign? How about Easter?
• Integrate your campaign with traditional activities. In Greenpeace’s case this involved hacking the wifi at the Nestle AGM so that attendees were directed to a spoof site. Interestingly Greenpeace also showed a twitter feed outside the AGM so that Nestle could see what people were actually saying. Other activities included stickering Kit Kat point of sale displays with the appropriated Killer logo.
• It helps when your target sucks at social media. Greenpeace encouraged people to join Nestle’s Facebook fan page. Numbers jumped by 20,000. Nestle removed negative posts from its profile only adding fuel to the fire.
• “People are awesome”. Something that Earth Hour designed as part of its campaign but Greenepeace did not anticipate was people creating their own content supporting, promoting and building on the campaign. E.g. this video.

This was the best Social Media Club I have attended for a while, but I love a good case study. The campaigns were very different but both offered a hook, something emotional that people could relate to, and of course, share.

Posted via email from everyday eri

Posted via email from everyday eri

What was most interesting to me, was the discussion and difference of opinion on whether social media spaces like YouTube, Twitter and Facebook are publishing or conversation. Damien Damjanovski was a conversationalist; Sam North was of the opinion that as soon as you put something online you are publishing, and by entering the public domain you are availing yourself to be quoted, scrutinised, sued for defamation and have your Facebook photos printed in the Sydney morning Herald. Renai LeMay from Delimiter was a journalist trying to toe the publishing and ethics line. While he would freely quote a public figure’s tweet in an article he would only use an image found online if it was published under creative commons. He added that a journalist should go to the primary source of material they are using to verify its accuracy if nothing else. So at this point in the night the debate became one based on the premise that if we are putting ourselves out there publicly how can this content be used and how do we feel about that use (and vulnerability).

I side with the publishing angle myself and by that I mean that posting something online is a form of publication by its inherent distribution. Having said (and contradicting) that, I feel it is completely inappropriate for a newspaper to obtain a photograph from a social network because that photograph is from an entirely different context to the story. Who is the publisher? This was not explored in tonight’s discussion at the event but it did get me thinking. Part of the reason why the likes of Facebook and Tumblr claim copyright on your material is so that they can have the right to distribute your material which is what they are doing when you post content to them. While I think it is wrong of newspapers to delve into Facebook for pictures to illustrate their stories I think that the users of these platforms should take issue with Facebook as much as they may take issue with the journalist and the newspaper. Surely it is Facebook’s responsibility to protect its copyright as a means to protect its users. What should users expect of the social networks they participate in?

I could go on but I think the debate will continue at the next Digital Citizens event.

N.B. The hashtag for this event was #digicitz. The title of this post is paraphrased from a tweet on that stream.

webDU logo

May 21 and 22 was the 7th webDU and my 3rd as part of the Daemon team who organise the event. WebDU is a technology conference, primarily but not solely, focused on developers. Amongst all the code and whiz bang-ery this year was an entire track dedicated to the consulting and planning side of projects: Team/UX (user experience). The room was packed for the whole two days.

As a non developer, the theme I took away from webDU 2009 was prototyping. Delivering prototypes be it a wireframe or design, that are closer to the final web page or web application.

Both Adobe and Microsoft debuted products at webDU. Steven Heintz of Adobe talked up the re-branded Flash Catalyst. Anyone familiar with the Creative Suite can now deliver interactive wireframes and designs to developers. As Steven put it in the keynote Flash Calatyst seeks to “make interaction more of a design experience“.

Shane Morris of Microsoft switched off the microphones (the recording) at the end of his talk, for the Australian debut of Sketchflow; which is all my dreams come true. It’s Visio on steroids and is more of a drawing tool where interactive elements can be produced easily. Not only does Sketchflow provide stencils for re-usable elements like controls and buttons but it lets you use and repurpose data, for instance creating different views. Information can be exported by developers for use as their sample data.

It was interesting to me that Adobe and Microsoft were both on such similar tracks. Both products get the prototype looking more like the design and both the wireframe and design behaving and functioning more like the application. Or as Steven Heintz put it “build[ing] high fidelity earlier in the process and bridging the gap between designers and developers“.

It wasn’t all new product releases though. Richard Turner Jones showed us how to use Fireworks for prototyping. He used it as a hybrid Visio/Photoshop tool. I love seeing how other people work. Richard went from sketch to wireframe, to design, to interactive prototype in an hour. He shared lots of tips and tricks. I had long forgotten Fireworks but Richard’s demo of the Pages utility in Fireworks to walk a client through each stage of the design process was compelling.

Simon Reid bought it back to the user defining user experience as a wholistic change to workflow not a redesign. He took us through his four pillars of user experience in his session “Pixel Envy: The Digital Art of Pencil and Paper” emphasizing that aesthetics should be the last step to avoid mimicry. He then spelled out his seven step design process which included people watching (contextual research) and persona development. My biggest take away from this session will be incorporating a process map to illustrate what a user is thinking at each step and not just drawing application workflows.

Since I am part of the organising team I wont speak to the atmosphere or awesomeness of the conference. I am clearly biased ;-) So I will instead leave you with the following reviews to check out more details of the event from impartial third parties.

• http://www.insideria.com/2009/05/webdu-2009-that-geeky-rock-con.html
• http://blog.magda-stremeski.com/2009/06/webdu-2009/
• http://artselearning.wordpress.com/2009/06/02/webdu-2009/
• http://portal.lacaterinca.com/w-w-webdu/
• http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2009/05/28/the-future-of-flash-and-the-return-of-coldfusion/
• http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2009/06/04/webdu-2009-how-to-be-a-rockstar-developer/
• http://dalerankine.com/index.php/2009/05/thank-you-webdu-2009/
• http://www.actionscript.org/resources/blogs/29/WebDU-2009-Day-One.html

I cannot wait until next year.