Relationship = Attention x Trust

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As I talk with many of you about the new mindset and business model for local information, you often say something like “There is just too much.  How do I use my limited time on information that is truly meaningful to me?”

Blogs, tweets, links, flashes, facebook, myspace, linkedin – it all becomes a blur, a cacophony, sometimes disorientating, or even nauseating.

A reaction of many is to avoid the cacophony, and retreat to the one-way, broadcast it to me, world of traditional newspapers, websites, and television stations.

However, many people are trying to drive through the cacophony, and figure out a way to create a new model, whereby any individual can develop a relationship with a network of information, to get what they want, when they want it, and be shown what might interest them, with a high likelihood of success.

As Clay Shirky said:

By the time that the publishing industries spun up in Venice in the early- to mid-1500s, the ability to have access to more reading material than you could finish in a lifetime is now starting to become a general problem of the educated classes. And by the 1800s, it’s a general problem of the middle class. So there is no such thing as information overload, there’s only filter failure, right? Which is to say the normal case of modern life is information overload for all educated members of society.

If you took the contents of an average Barnes and Noble, and you dumped it into the streets and said to someone, “You know what’s in there? There’s some works of Auden in there, there’s some Plato in there. Wade on in and you’ll find what you like.” And if you wade on in, you know what you’d get? You’d get Chicken Soup for the Soul. Or, you’d get Love’s Tender Fear. You’d get all this junk. The reason we think that there’s not an information overload problem in a Barnes and Noble or a library is that we’re actually used to the cataloging system. On the Web, we’re just not used to the filters yet, and so it seems like “Oh, there’s so much more information.” But, in fact, from the 1500s on, that’s been the normal case.

So, the real question is, how do we design filters that let us find our way through this particular abundance of information? And, you know, my answer to that question has been: the only group that can catalog everything is everybody. One of the reasons you see this enormous move towards social filters, as with Digg, as with del.icio.us, as with Google Reader, in a way, is simply that the scale of the problem has exceeded what professional catalogers can do. But, you know, you never hear twenty-year-olds talking about information overload because they understand the filters they’re given. You only hear, you know, forty- and fifty-year-olds taking about it, sixty-year-olds talking about because we grew up in the world of card catalogs and TV Guide. And now, all the filters we’re used to are broken and we’d like to blame it on the environment instead of admitting that we’re just, you know, we just don’t understand what’s going on.  (Emphasis in bold, underline and italics added by Chuck Peters on 12/21/08)

The ideas on this are not new.  As mentioned earlier, Bruno Giusanni noted many of the ideas over 11 years ago.  Tom Ratkovich outlined the role of the trusted “infomediary” over 6 years ago:

There are three essential qualities of the infomediary:

1. Trust. As stated by Hagel and Singer, “Trust
   is the infomediary’s lifeblood.” Without trust, consumers
   will not share their personal information. Any doubt concerning
   the integrity and credibility of the infomediary will entirely
   undermine its ability to serve it that capacity.
2. Existing relationships with consumers and
   merchants. While today’s newspaper is the logical entity to
   evolve into tomorrow’s infomediary, it is not the given entity.
   The Internet opens the door to numerous other institutions to
   usurp that role. The window of opportunity is not a large one,
   and those posturing to serve as the dominant infomediary will
   be disadvantaged if they must build these relationships from scratch.
3. Channel integration. The ability to integrate
   the distribution of marketing communications across multiple channels
   is vital for two reasons. First, it allows for communication utilizing
   the preferred medium of the consumer. Second, it contributes to
   the optimization of merchant ROI by minimizing redundancy. (This
   is the primary impediment to companies like Amazon.com and Yahoo!
   in assuming the infomediary role.)

In order to engage and strengthen our communities, we need to engage and inform each individual.  We, as the local media company, cannot know what each individual is truly interested in.  The individual does not want to tell the whole world exactly what their interests are, for fear of loss of privacy, or being abused.

Yet, we are moving to a Relationship Economy, in which how we act will depend not only on the information we receive, but how those in trusted relationships with us inform and guide us.

The formula I have been testing lately is Relationship = Attention x Trust.  I am sure that others, at other points in time, have come up with this, but I could not find a direct citation.

In order to have a long relationship with a local information organization, I want to know that I will find everything happening in the community relating to those people, places, events or topics in which I have expressed an interest, without wading through lots of articles and content in which I am not interested.  I also want to be aware of other information which a trusted “conductor” thinks someone in my community should know, or someone with my particular interests should know.

Despite the running commentary on whether print newspapers or broadcast news can survive, I think Tom Ratkovich had it exactly right in his expression of complementarity in channel integration.  I want those broadcast sources to act like they know that I have the option to be plugged into a relevant network of information.  So, in those broadcasted, print media, provide overview, context and promotion of the network.

Those interested in the Semantic Web, including e-Me Ventures, recognize that machines reading code, tags and text can only do so much to serve relevant information.  Each individual needs to declare interests, pretty specifically.  They are not likely to do so without trust.

People working on the trust side of the equation include the Information Valet Project and Attention Trust.  What I think we need for C3 is a plug-in, widget, or service that will allow individuals to clearly express their interests, in exchange for our promise to only use that information to serve information of value to that individual, in a long term relationship.

That information of value can be information created without an agenda ( what we ideally think “news”  currently is) and information with an agenda (advertising and commercial content).

That relationship has to be built over time, with lots of conversation.   If something is no longer of interest, we need to know, and react quickly.

Without replaying the rest of this blog, we cannot actually serve as the trusted infomediary without the right mindset, tasks, organization, technology and persistence.  If we break trust, by failing to provide accurate, timely and relevant information, the game is over

With the daily bemoaning of the fate of local media, and the general economy, the time to act is now, with urgency, as this is our time of greatest opportunity to actually implement these old ideas.

What do you think?

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Information in the First Instance

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Being with Bill Densmore and the group he assembled at Missouri this week was a refreshing introduction to new people and ideas.  We were gathered to create the “blueprint” for the Information Valet Project, which we tentatively described as:

A permission-based ecosystem assuring privacy that allows you, in a trustworthy way, to share personal information so that content providers and partners can create a structure to provide you with content, applications and incentives tailored to you and your needs.

This “ecosystem” assumes that an individual, by giving secure personal information and desires for specific information, will be able to access that information in an elegant way.  As I participated in the discussions, I kept coming back to the need for a whole new structure to create the Complete Community Connection (C3). So, with a nod to Steve Outing, I am trying to be as transparent as I can be, both to our employees and the industry, about the issues in creating this new entity.

In looking for discussions on changing the way we create information in the first instance, I was struck by the conversation between Jeff Jarvis and Dave Winer on the Ecology of News.  They both break down news into the essential elements, and then discuss the best way to package and distribute those elements.  I would propose that the elements are Sources; Quotes; Factual Statements about people, places or events; Ideas; Data; and Opinions.
The Complete Community Connection would expand the current reliance on packaged stories in both directions – back toward the original elements, offering transparency, and forward toward a summary of local knowledge in a local wiki.

So, how do we do that?

We have to start with the creation of the “elements” in the first instance.  By starting with each source, quote, factual statement, picture, graphic, audio clip or video clip as an isolated element, or “tweet”, properly tagged with automatic tagging engines, those elements can be packaged or searched directly, allowing the most transparent view of local information.  Sometimes that could be done by reporting on scheduled events by live blogging, using Twitter tweets for participant comments, with the resulting “record” time stamped.  All audio and video clips could also be tagged to the time, place, event and people.  From those elements, packaged stories could be written, but any reader could go “through” the story to the original elements.

For investigative pieces, getting at those issues harder to pry out of the community, the reporter could still keep track of the elements in a similar system, but without the initial public input.

Patrick Thornton, with his BeatBlogging posts, is trying to highlight the best efforts to learn what can be done in this area.  I believe that the transformation necessary from “for and to” to “with and by” will not take place until we engage our communities in the first instance of information creation.

To take it another step, what if the community could suggest what needs to be investigated?  Leonard Witt arranged funding for a representative journalism project in Northfield, MN that Bonnie Obremski is carrying out at Locally Grown.  Listening to Bonnie describe what she has accomplished in her six months in Northfield makes me think that local community bloggers, both employees of media organizations and organizers of particular micro-communities, can be the key collecting forces of the elements of local information for C3.

Those community organizers, with their blogs, would be operating under Alfred Hermida’s Three Principles for social media:

1. Be human: Mass media was based on the notion of reaching millions of people with one message. As a result, that message often came across in an impersonal, corporate voice. Social media provides an opportunity to be more personal, informal and conversational.
2. Be honest: Be transparent and open about what you are doing. Social media is about genuine relationships and anyone trying to fake it is likely to be found out very quickly.
3. Be involved: Journalists should not approach social media by thinking, “how can I use this for a story”. Social media should be part of your job, not an add-on or something to be used for a story and then abandoned.

What do you think?

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Three Gorillas

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The whole point of this blog is to share management insights as a traditional media company – print, online and broadcast – attempts to convert into a Complete Community Connection or C3.

Anyone attempting to make such a transition will run into three big gorillas – organization, culture and technology. Each of these is pretty big, but so embedded in most traditional media organizations that each is almost invisible.

In the next few days, I plan to explore each of these gorillas in more depth. As a thought starter, we traditional media organizations are organized by products, not communities, audiences or content. Our cultures are risk averse, not entrepreneurial. Our technology is designed at the very core to create “protected” proprietary products, not open content in flexible context across multiple platforms.