Chapter 7:
The New Society - Content Nation Redefines
How People Live Their Lives

The rise of social media is more than just a "new, new thing," more than just a fashionable way to buy or sell things or to get a job done or to elect someone to office. Social media is in fact the beginning of a new way of living for the people who make regular use of its capabilities. I say "beginning" because it is truly only the very early days of a movement towards citizens as the world's leading publishers. Content Nation may be as large as many of the world's leading nations, but it is an assemblage of people who in many ways are like people on a busy street. We see the people passing by, we know that we're part of a crowd, yet to call that crowd a group with a purpose or even still a movement would be a mistake. Just for the moment there are a lot of people going in the same direction, each for their own reasons, or in different directions, but perhaps with a similar purpose.

But then, suddenly, something happens - and there is indeed common purpose. Things align, take form, and then there is an enormous amount of power to compel people all in one place. It is no real surprise that the power of social media to shape human society catches people off guard so often, because the potential for that power has always been around us in the form of personal communications. Like a substance that crystallizes in just the right conditions but remains liquid in most other conditions people using social media go unnoticed most of the time until they join forces to assume a common form for a common purpose.

Frozen Grand Central: The Predictably Unpredictable Power of Social Media

An interesting example of this concept of crystallizing human power through social media can be seen in the work of Improv Everywhere, a group which organizes live performances in public places, oftentimes using people who follow their exploits on their weblog and who are informed of upcoming events via a mailing list. Social media is used to organize their events and in turn is used to communicate the power of their events. One of their recent projects was called Frozen Grand Central, in which 200 volunteers entered the main concourse area of Grand Central Terminal in New York City and at a precise chosen time they froze in place in whatever position they were at the time at whatever place they were in at the time. This assembly of random people frozen in random positions in a common area all of a sudden startled passers-by: what did this mean? Why were all of these people stopped in these positions? Was it funny? Was it serious? Was it dangerous? The police began to investigate. Then, exactly five minutes after they had begun, the figures "unfroze" and went their individual ways as if nothing unusual had happened. Video recorders captured the scene from many angles and they posted the edited results on the Web, turning what would have been otherwise just a moment in time into a moment that could compel people for a long time.

So it is with social media. We are seeing the potential for its power to influence how people behave as a society in glimpses, small projects that scale rapidly to take on huge significance and huge numbers of small projects that may stay small individually but add up to major changes. There is not a major motion picture in the world that is filmed, edited and distributed with the notion that a few of their friends might see it and eventually make it popular with millions of people. Yet with social media that is exactly what happens time and again, day in and day out. A few people align themselves on a whim, an idea takes hold and before you know it people around the world are experiencing something new. Individually we can dismiss these events of influential publishing, much as we can dismiss soon enough random figures frozen in place for a few minutes at a train terminal. But over time the regular occurrence of these events changes society as we know it. The rhythm of life changes. Our flesh, our clothes, our food and most other things in our lives may be all quite the same for an indefinite period of time but our toes and our fingers are tapping out a new beat. Eventually it becomes everyone's beat in their own unique way, until it is part of everyday society by default. Eventually the notion of everyone not freezing randomly for five minutes every now and then becomes intriguing and, perhaps, even quaint.

A Horseless Carriage?: Trying to Imagine a Society Built Around Social Media

If social media's emerging impact on society is so significant, then why is it that so many people have a hard time accepting its importance? The answer to this question comes in part by acknowledging that as popular as social media has become it's still a phenomenon that is in many ways still packaged into the technology and mindset of previous generations of human communications - including early Web communications. Although the Web was conceived of from its inception as a vehicle for peer-to-peer communications, it took a long time for the Web technology to get to the point where it began to start supporting social media functions on a massive scale efficiently. Even today the relentless drive to adapt social media to the existing marketing strategies of many of today's established companies obscures much of the real value available through social media that has little to do with today's marketing concepts.

It may help to understand how the full potential for social media's impact is misperceived by some people if we look at the early history of another innovation that transformed society: the automobile. When in 1885 Karl Benz invented and then manufactured the first practical self-propelled vehicle for personal transportation it looked more like a light horse carriage of the era than anything like today's automobiles.

Widely known as "horseless carriages," these new inventions looked much like their horse-driven predecessors for many years, even though they functioned quite differently. They still ran on the same roads as horse-drawn carriages, which dominated traffic and required automobiles sometimes to follow traffic laws ridiculously stringent by today's standards (a still enforceable law in Redlands, California: "Motor vehicles may not drive on city streets unless a man with a lantern is wallking ahead of it.").

Eventually the personal and commercial advantages of the automobile became popular enough that roads, laws and manufacturing technology adapted to their importance to the point that the thought of an automobile being a carriage without a horse would seem antiquated and inappropriate. Improvements in technology and new features that made sense only on automobiles eventually made automobiles look altogether different from the original self-propelled vehicles, even if they served much the same function. Their functionality also changed how we behaved significantly: in some places driving a block or so to a store to pick up a bag of snack food is considered a normal way to go shopping. Not all changes created by new technologies are equally beneficial, of course.

Today we are just beginning to emerge from the "horseless carriage" phase of social media. The very fact that we use the phrase "social media" is indicative of the fact that in many ways people expect social media to act the way that traditional media does, only in a more personal way. At the same time we expect social behavior to be pretty much the same as any other situation when we use social media, only in a more media-oriented way. We try to apply regulations and social standards to social media which make sense to our current culture but which may make little sense to people far less than a generation from now. Currently the U.S. Congress is investigating what the implications are of putting official materials on Web video services such as YouTube: even today many media companies are deeply concerned about the implications of doing likewise with their television programming. Are these the "lamps in front of the horseless carriages" of today that will seem silly and senseless all too soon?

A Nation of Publishers is Also a Nation of Inventors

As seen in in the parallel themes in the rise of the automobile social media is not just one particular kind of technology for one particular kind of purpose. Social networking, instant messaging, weblogs, wikis, social bookmarking, remixes and mashups of other people's content - all these and many more represent an explosion of communications technologies in the hands of individuals who are using them creatively. The Museum of Modern Betas, a Web site that catalogs promising new Web publishing products in pre-production beta testing, has listed more than 5,600 beta publishing products introduced on the Web since April 2004 - most of them related to social media collection and publishing. Oftentimes several new social media product betas will appear in a single day. And those are just the publishing products and services developed by programmers to facilitate social media: the people who use these products oftentimes have the ability to create their own unique programs or services using these publishing tools. Factor in the development of social media tools for other cultures around the world not covered by the Museum of Modern Betas and the global innovation coming from social media tools is a breathtaking phenomenon.

So out of thousands of social media publishing tools that have come into existence in just a few years many of them have spawned thousands of their own tools in turn and millions of customized publications using those tools. This is more than mass customization: this is mass invention on a scale that human communications has never experienced ever before. Content Nation is not only a society that is a nation of publishers but as well a nation of pioneering inventors who no longer rely on a handful of sources for creativity and innovation. If Tim Berners-Lee was the Karl Benz of social media and publishers like Facebook and Digg are the next-generation Toyota and General Motors of social media then there are still countless creative independent toolmakers and tool users out there creating social media independently in ways that will challenge our ideas about how its power can shape society for years to come.

The Sharing Society: Content Nation Shares New Spaces for Common Experiences

A Society of Third Places: When the Coffee House Becomes Your Life

Interestingly the roots of social media's impact seem to go back to those coffee houses and taverns in which Thomas Paine's pamphlet Common Sense was discussed. You may recall that while the pamphlet was powerful in its own right it was the awareness and the discussion of the pamphlet in meeting places that accelerated opinion about Paine's ideas rapidly through the American colonies. There was something about ideas in a gathering place away from work and home that opened people up to influential ideas and the willingness to endorse them in front of other people.

In his 1999 book "The Third Place" author Ray Oldenburg noted that gathering places like coffee houses and cafes that encouraged people to take in the scene and to chat with old and new friends were key to the health of a society and its public institutions. The concept of a "third place" was packaged and marketed by the Starbucks chain of coffee shops quite successfully. Starbucks recognized that in a mobile society people are in search of a "third place" with which they're comfortable in a wide variety of places around the world. A perfectly good local cafe may be right next door to a Starbucks in many places, and yet Starbucks has become the brand to which many people gravitate in a place that's new to them, in part because they feel comfortable there socially. Yet Starbuck's is not a brand that people can call their own: it is a corporate brand in which they participate only by purchasing items at their shops. The employees, the furniture and the food are all chosen and managed elsewhere by the Starbucks corporate staff. This can affect the quality of the experience at these locations significantly: recently Starbucks had to re-train workers in more than 7,100 of their stores in the art of making a good cup of coffee.

By contrast in a truly local cafe, such as the historical Cafe du Monde in New Orleans, Louisiana, known for its great coffee and pastries, the owner is likely to be present almost always, the employees may be friends or relatives of the owners and may know many local patrons very well, yet people from far and wide may be attracted to its unique flavor and appeal. This does not make a local cafe altogether better than a Starbucks: if people are in Beijing and need a bit of the flavor of home in a distant country - or need the experience of a foreign country near home - then a Starbucks may serve an important purpose. By the same token if the owners of a local cafe don't keep up the quality of their establishment loyalty to their business will last only so long before people choose another one. Being local and being global each have their own advantages and in any particular situation a person may choose one over the other for any number of reasons.

This example illustrates that engineering a social experience is a matter of both what makes people feel comfortable enough to walk through the doorway of an establishment and what makes them feel comfortable enough to stay there a while and, perhaps, to keep coming regularly. In social media we see the same phenomena being played out on a massive scale via the Web and in ways that mix both the feel of a local experience with the feel of a worldwide experience. The "cafes" of social media form themselves into whatever shape makes people comfortable, which helps them to attract the community of people who will sustain its value on an ongoing basis. Like a coffee house, it takes work to make a social media service a success: rarely do they succeed just by having the right technology in the right place at the right time.

Unlike a Starbucks or a Cafe du Monde, however, social media offers many different kinds of "third places" in which people can congregate. Thinking of the example of the thousands of different social media services that have been that have been tracked by the Museum of Modern Betas, and of the millions of people who have used those tools to make pages on a social media site more powerful experiences, you might say that social media has enabled thousands of different types of Starbucks and local cafes to span the world and millions of different ways to build and decorate them. The number of possible combinations of social media publishing tools, communities of people attracted to them and variations on their use is unthinkably enormous.

Moreover, people using social media can be "present" at these "third places" in any physical place at any time. Oftentimes people can be found using several social media services at the same time. On any typical day I may find myself bookmarking content on Digg, checking out friends on Facebook, sending or watching messages appear on Twitter, participating in a video phone call on Skype with someone halfway around the world, writing or commenting on a weblog and, oh yes, checking my email. I may be somewhat extreme in this regard because of my interests in social media, but looking at younger generations of people using social media it's safe to say that social media's "third places" are becoming primary places through which more and more people around the world experience life.

As a result local personal influence becomes global personal influence through any number of channels simultaneously and global influence impacts local influence as well in the same time frame. People we encounter in our social media "coffee houses" are becoming our families, our work mates and our villages, even as our villages, or work makes and our families are becoming a part of a global coffee house through social media.

Content Nation Social Rule #1: In social media, any place could be the right place to find a third place in which to create meaningful social exchanges.

The Global Cafe: Qik Invites Anyone and Everyone to the Scene

Qik is a relatively new service that enables people who use the video recording features of their mobile phones to post video on the Web as it's being recorded. Qik provides features that enable people made aware of these live events via text messages to look at and hear what's happening elsewhere via these live videos and to send live text messages to people watching the live video session. When a text messaging service such as Twitter is used to broadcast links to these sessions hundreds of people could be "stoppng by" to join a scene anywhere in a world - a conference, a coffee house, a pub, a jazz club, someone's home, a disaster scene, or, in one recent broadcast from Congressman John Culberson, the halls of Congress. Once these recordings and messages are complete they remain on the Qik Web site for others to experience and share later on.

Qik video and discussion services are an illustration of how easy it is not only to be socially engaged with others around the world on a moment's notice through social media but as well how easy it is to experience it together with people who are a part of a live scene and with people who are experiencing it virtually via the Web. With social media the lines between "being there" and "hearing about it" begin to blur to the point that one wonders: what was the real nature of the experience? Was the experience the things that were seen in the video shared with others or was it the interaction of the people there and on the Web with one another?  And for the people who experienced it later, did they have to "be there" when it happened to "be there?" Social media is begging us to consider these questions but even moreso asking us to consider that regardless of our personal answer the changing behavior of people will form their own answers regardless.

Content Nation Social Rule #2: Anyone, anywhere at any time can make any social experience a social media experience.

Facebook: A Public Space That's Strictly Personal

You've heard about the club from your friends. It's the hottest place in town, so much more interesting than that place where you hung out when you were younger. It's where everything that people talk about is happening. You check it out with other people, perhaps someone a bit more conservative: they're going there, too. You get an address. You go down an alley and there, lit dimly by a menacing light, is a plain doorway. You're told that it's public, that you can go in, that anyone who goes in there is a member of the club. But first you have to go through that door and trust that everything on the other side of it will be as you hope it will be, that your friends will be there and that you'll have a good time. Finally, you approach the door...and it opens. Just like any other door.

So it is for many people who approach the simple entryway to Facebook , one of the most popular social networking Web sites in the world. Facebook offers a bare-bones home page, with only a place for current members to log in and prospective members to register. How can this almost anti-social entryway into Facebook be such a popular destination? By contrast the MySpace social networking portal is filled with promotions for famous musical groups, ads, lists of most popular songs, blogs and videos, search boxes - all of the things that someone would expect to find on any media Web site. And there you have the major difference between MySpace and Facebook. Both offer social networking, both offer the ability to become fans of people or members of a group - but where one is like hanging out with your friends at the music store at the mall the other is a place where real social things happen with real people.

This is not to say that MySpace is a commercial failure. Even though Facebook traffic is up roughly fifty percent since a year ago in 2007 while MySpace's growth has stalled, there are still roughly double the people who visit MySpace. But where MySpace seems to be driven largely by very young members - many not even in their teens - and as well by people with real or assumed identities promoting products and services through aggressive ads and promotions, Facebook has always concentrated on trying to build trustworthy relationships between real people displaying their real identities. Facebook members are invited to call upon their real-world network of friends and enables people to keep their networks and profile on Facebook as limited or as exposed as they would like.

Facebook is a powerful media property in its own right, but it has avoided assuming that the world of traditional media is a good place from which to build the assumptions that power social media. Instead, it focused on the power of communicating with peers, learning about what they're doing, what they're endorsing, what they're joining, who they've met - and who on Facebook might be worth having as a friend. All of this builds into a rich network of content that people share through Facebook. Commercial entities are an important part of Facebook's membership, but a Facebook member builds relationships with those entitites the same way that they would anyone else. Trust has to be earned. Endorsements of others are weighed. If it looks too tacky or self-promoting, a company is not likely to succeed with promotions on Facebook. Fun is a big part of being on Facebook, but it has to be a geniune kind of fun to get most people's attention. There has to be something that draws people together in truly common bonds.

In Facebook people share their vacation photos, fun games, videos, personal triumphs and insights and what they're trying to do professionally, oftentimes. All of your life is on Facebook, not just a fantasy image of what you want people to think is your life or just your business life. Facebook is a place where people learn how to express themselves in public with friends in a way that is at once both very personal and very public. Except for some occasional ads that are clearly marked as separate from personal communications Facebook is social media without the assumptions of traditional media - without someone trying to push their message more loudly than other people's messages or with tricky slogans repeated again and again or ads that splash over what you're trying to read.

There are some who pay lip service to the concept that markets are conversations and who then turn around and enable splashy ads and promotions over their social media service that enable traditional marketers to shout at audiences instead of having a conversation with peers. They are like prostitutes who will go to social spots and try to seduce people into using their services, pretending that they really like someone - but everyone knows that they're in it for the money. They make money well enough. But they miss out on the real relationships that are the real gold in life, the relationships on which all good personal transactions are built.

Facebook challenges marketers to learn about what a real conversations amongst friends and peers sound like. It also challenges everyday people to realize how valuable they are to one another - and to build upon  the value of their conversations in a largely public venue to enhance their lives and to influence other people's lives in a genuine way. Being yourself in a public place with others who are just trying to be real human beings sharing their real lives is a lot better social experience than hanging out at the music store with some bored friends down at the mall. And I can do it at any time, anywhere, with any number of people in the world.

This isn't just a game-changing experience: it's an indication of just how fundamental a change social media is from traditional media and how more complex and rich it can be compared to traditional social venues. Facebook challenges us to be ourselves in public places with people who know us and to enjoy it. It's a simple enough human concept, but one which many modern societies have left behind as they've ceded power over public venues to governments and tradtional media and entertainment companies and forced both our personal and our public lives into ever-smaller social spaces. In social networking communities like Facebook we learn to remember that the public is made up of real people - people from anywhere and everywhere, people who can be, by and large, our trusted friends. Companies and products can be a part of this conversation, but first they must gain our trust.

Content Nation Social Rule #3: Social media challenges us to treat our trusted relationships with people and institutions from around the world as the basis for a rewarding way of life that's both public and personal.

Muxlim.com: Using Social Media to Create Social Identity Out of Cultural Identity

Europe has more than 12 million followers of Islam in its midst but many of these people live in isolated communities, with little cohesiveness as a presence across Europe or within the nations in which they live. It should come as no surprise, then, that one of the fastest growing Web sites in Europe is Muxlim.com, a social media Web site started by Scandinavian Muslims that is said to have attracted more than a million registrants since its 2006 launch from 190 countries around the world as well as in Europe. Muxlim.com has weblogs, member-uploaded videos, forums, polls, interest groups, photo sharing and member profile pages that facilitate online social networking. Most of the members of Muxlim.com post content that focuses on personal and religious topics, with just a thin vein of political insights and opinions on the site. Notably many of Muxlim.com's members are Muslim women, who seem to find in its pages an opportunity to express themselves in ways that they cannot do easily through more secularly oriented Web services or in their native cultures.

In all of this Muxlim.com creates a breadth of content not too different from any other social media Web site, but shaped uniquely by a community that has an intense focus on both its faith and on expressing themselves passionately on the world. Sometimes cultural borders are hard to work out with political borders. For the group "Politial Muslims" the location of the group is listed as "birmingham prefer-not-to-say" - an indication of concern over government scrutiny. This self-censorship may limit political expression, but it needs to be taken in the context of what is happening in the wider world of Muslim social media. At the time of this writing the predominantly Muslim nation of Iran's parliament is considering legislation that would provide the death penalty for anyone who in that nation who is found to be blogging, making the relatively modest efforts at self-expression on Muxlim.com all the more important: cultures of many nations as well as the culture of Islam must find common ground in this publishing service.

A new generation of Muslims in Europe and elsewhere are breaking through their isolation to define a cross-border community with people of similar faith and faith-driven culture, shaping through their public expression and discussions a common understanding of one another apart from the institutions of family and national culture. For people who have lived in a world where Western culture was never quite their own culture social media offers an opportunity to forge a new sense of constructive collaboration guided by their fellow believers. Perhaps from the pages of Muxlim.com will come a new sense of Muslim culture, a Content Nation devised from that global understanding of themselves and their worlds.

Content Nation Social Rule #4: Social Media can enable existing cultures to define a new sense of their own society through new channels for local and global public expression.

Bringing Your Community to Your Content, Bringing Your Content to Your Community

Many social media publishing services use technology that can allow anyone to assemble content from many sources into one unified display on a computer screen. This ability to embed content from many sources into a Web page enables anyone's Web publication to become a social media experience or to expand the depth of the content in their existing social media pages. Shelfari is an example of an service that embeds content to create new facts to relationships with other people. Shelfari members can build a virtual "bookshelf" of books that interest them, rate them, review them and learn about what other people think about them. If I embed a Shelfari content tool in my Facebook page, for example, I learn instantly who else on Facebook is interested in the books that I read - and what they say about them. In a matter of moments I can go from having no one else to talk with about a book to a whole world of people connected to me by our common interest in a book.

Embedding content from a social media service can also bring communities to a weblog. MyBlogLog is a service that  enables people to embed on pages in their Web site a listing of people who are members of MyBlogLog that have visited their Web site. MyBlogLog is used by bloggers frequently to enable people to see who else is interested in their content who may not have left other signs of interest such as comments or bookmarks to their pages. Clicking on the links to a MyBlogLog member's photo and name in an embedded MyBlogLog listing will bring you to their profile page in MyBlogLog, a member feeds in their content from their various social media services. In visiting these pages I will encounger the members who have visited there as well: it's a gathering that moves on and on, like moving from one discussion at a social gathering to another, recombining with new and familiar people again and again. With MyBlogLog any page on the Web could be a place where one encounters people who they know and encounter people who they may not know with similar interests in a given topic.

The interchange of social media worlds can go in seeming circles at times. Lively, a virtual reality service under development by Google, enables people to move a virtual-person avatar through three-dimensional virtual rooms where they can encounter and have text chats and "physical" interactions with other people's virtual figures. You will also be able to embed content in a Lively room such as videos from YouTube or photos from a photo-sharing service and comment on them with other people in the virtual room. In turn a Lively virtual room can be embedded in a Web page, enabling people to experience both a virtual world with content embedded in it and a Web page's content with a virtual world embedded in it all at the same time (I'm hoping that you followed that...).

In all of these instances there is a key common element: people like content that includes contact with influential people who they they'd like to get to know better as a part of the experience of "being there" at a Web page. Whether we bring our content into our social media community or whether we bring our social media community into our content we are seeing the presence of social networks in everyday content as key elements of its value. The content becomes a launching point for expanding our relationships with people as much as the relationships in our social media communities become a launching point for expanding our insight into content. In doing so social media challenges us to recognize that the power of personal relationships is needed more than ever to make a public media experience valuable to people.

Content Nation Social Rule #5: Social media enables the power of personal relationships to transform any public experience into a personal experience.

FriendFeed: Creating an Inner Circle of Friends

Sometimes there's the party within the party within the party - a certain group of people on whom you focus most intently, no matter where they may be. But when those people are posting content to dozens of potential social media outlets trying to keep up with them can be truly exhausting. We can't all be social butterflies, after all.

Friendfeed is one of a number of social media services that enable people to consolidate updates that they post in their social media services all in one place. Instead of having to go to serveral services to keep up with a special group of people you can concentrate on them on Friendfeed and have a quieter, more private environment in which to offer short comments. In a sense Friendfeed turns everyone's social media publishing into a consolidated weblog of all of your favorite people and publications, including social networking, social bookmarking, weblogs, photos, videos, music and other key sources into a common stream. You can refine this process even further by creating a private "room" on Friendfeed to which you can invite an even more select group of people to discuss a particular topic or piece of content. Social media is learning through tools such as Friendfeed to enable people to have multiple levels of social engagement that parallel what people expect from their real-life relationships.

Content Nation Social Rule #6: Social media enables relationships to unfold on multiple levels in multiple venues, each appropriate to a specific group and purpose.

The Organizing Society: Content Nation Aligns People to Achieve Goals

While getting to know people through publishing is a good goal unto itself in social media, eventually there comes a time when we actually want to accomplish something with these publishing tools. We need to solve a problem. We need to get timely information. We need to figure out what's really important. Traditional publishing tools can help to address these needs, but the challenge is not always met easily by their capabilities. In traditional publishing we rely upon the insight and skills of a specific group of authors and editors producing a publication to come up with quality information that will help us to achieve our goals. Social media challenges this method of relying on a specific organization to come up with answers by calling upon people to contribute and organize their own answers through publishing. Who knows who has the right answers? The answer to that question can be surprising when social media tools are applied.

What's the Right Hotel? Twitter Offers the Answer Out of Thin Air

When Scott Monty, a Web marketing specialist, visited New York City recently he was in a bit of a bind. He realized that his travel plans would require an unexpected overnight stay in a hotel, but rooms at less-than-astronomical rates in a convenient spot were not to be found. Scott turned to his Twitter network of friends by typing in a text message into his phone that was forwarded to the hundreds of people who followed his messages on their computers and mobile phones. Almost instantly he got replies flowing in with suggestions from his contacts, including a Twitter message from a business friend who had his travel coordinator get in touch with him through Twitter. The travel coordinator contacted a specialist in hotel reservations and a few minutes later Scott Monty received a Twitter message with a reservation at a hotel that fit his needs quite well.

Could Scott Monty have reached his goal some other way? Sure - if he had been willing to wait for people to pay attention to emails or for phone calls to be returned. By thinking of himself as a person with a publishing audience through Twitter, Scott Monty was able to tap into hundreds of people who follow Twitter on a moment-by-moment basis to keep up with short messages from their contacts. Twitter was just the right medium to focus his personal network on his problem, which they were only too eager to do. Why? Because they were eager to share their knowledge as part of their social publishing relationship with Scott Monty. The rewards of helping were both personal and public: Scott Monty reached his goal by publishing his needs instantly to a community of people willing to focus on him through their publishing; his friends in turn shared their ideas both with him and others on Twitter, creating an instant brainstorm of ideas that could be used both immediately and later on by people searching through Twitter messages. One person's need became an instant publishing event with a solution that is now part of the knowledge available through Twitter.

Content Nation Social Media Rule #7: Social media can turn immediate problems into worldwide searches for answers by people aligned through influential publishing.

NowPublic Aligns Citizens to Report on The World

Many social media Web sites collect links to pages on the Web contributed by members but NowPublic has been a pioneer in building a community of people dedicated to making and sharing real news in communities around the world. With members in 5,500 cities in more than 140 countries NowPublic enables people to write their own news articles on events and have other members contribute additional content such as photos, videos and links to their own stories as well as comments. Members can vote up stories in popularity for more visiblity on their Web site but collaboration on collecting news matters on NowPublic as much as competition for attention.

The importance of collaboration in news gathering was espectially important for NowPublic members in 2005 when they organized to facilitate news and information flowing into and out of New Orleans, Lousiana in the wake of massive damage to the city by Hurricane Katrina. With local news gathering organizations crippled social media from NowPublic and other organizations was a key link in helping people to understand local conditions and to locate missing relatives. More recently a major electrical failure in Vancouver, Canada demonstrated how the growing and maturing NowPublic community can deploy itself rapidly to cover a major local event. One central news article became the point of collaboration for dozens of photos, quotes, links to supplementary stories filed by NowPublic members as well as comments from people offering information on the impact of the outage in their area. Traditional news organizations have performed these functions for centuries, of course, but with NowPublic the public itself can establish its own unfiltered coverage of events, prioritize them according to the interests of a community instead of an editorial board and reach a new kind of goal for journalism -enabling a community to tell its own story and to strengthen their community through becoming their own publishers.

Content Nation Social Rule #8: When a community publishes together it aligns itself towards the goals that are most important to their community.

Organizing Sensitive Technology Manufacturing through Social Media Collaboration

Any number of organizations are experimenting with social media as a means to improve workplace productivity, spurred on by the gains from companies which learn to implement social media practices effectively. One company which is serving as a role model for many others is Lockheed Martin, a major aircraft manufacturing company with many contracts to develop advanced airplanes for the U.S. military. With layers of control to manage sensitive and complex government projects Lockheed Martin might not appear to be the most logical candidate for social media, but in part because of the habits of working in an organization that had a lot of segmentation in its work roles its was necessary for them to come up with a better way for people to work together. Existing tools for collaboration - email, a file sharing site, scattered social media projects - were not resulting in teams who knew what one another were doing to foster strong collaboration on key design and production issues.

The solution that Lockheed Martin implemented was Unity, a customized publishing platform that integrated information from across the enterprise using social media publishing tools. Using the popular Microsoft Sharepoint Server enterprise collaboration platform integrated with social media software from NewsGator and other social media tools, Unity brought together all of the shared information resources across a given team and made it easy for people to monitor people's contriubtions to Unity across the organization, keeping issues such as government security clearances in mind. The result looks somewhat similar to a system developed by NewsGator for another client, depicted in the above YouTube video.

Unity takes many of the key concepts found in social media services on the Web and applies them to the people who work with one another in aeronautics design and manufacturing. People using Unity can follow colleagues' contributions to Unity as they would their friends on Facebook, bookmark web page links for others to view, add keyword tags to content that can be tracked by other team members to be alerted to new kinds of content, encouraged internal weblogs, wikis, Web conferencing and other social media tools integrated into Unity to minimize the use of person-to-person emails and to maximize the amount of publishing available to their teams. Instead of information staying tucked away in email folders and people being unaware of what others were doing Unity fostered an internal culture that saw collaborating through social media as the default behavior for getting work done in an enormously complex development and operations environment. The results from Unity are good enough that Lockheed Martin's efforts with Unity are the source of great interest from their clients, improving and deepening their relationships and helping Lockheed Martin to be seen as a thought leader in developing efficient workplace environments through social media.

While many enterprises are beginning to explore social media very seriously to improve their own operations, it makes some institutions uncomfortable. Work for many organizations is still about strict hierachical distribution of information, hidden networks of knowledge to protect a person's job security and secrecy used to accue power over other people in an organization. While these types of behaviors that inhibit collaboration at work are likely to be a part of society for many years it is interesting that fostering an environment in which employees think of themselves as publishers collaborating with colleages as a default behavior is becoming so critical to the success of so many organizations with extremely complex and critical tasks to complete.

Content Nation Social Rule #9: When everyone sees themselves as publishers, everyone is empowered through common knowledge to work flexibly and rapidly towards common goals.

The Giving Society: Content Nation Builds New Value from Altruism

One of the aspects that is both most powerful and, for some people, most troubling about social media is that so much of it appears to be "given away" without people charging for the content that they contribute to a service or the service charging them or others for the content. To someone first encountering social media it seems as if it's all about giving away something and expecting nothing in return. People think oftentimes that this "something for nothing" type of transaction is known as altruism.

We'll examine the full influence and impact of altruism expressed through social media later in this book, but for now it's important to recognize that altruism is not really a "something for nothing" transaction. Altruism is really about people who give something to a community that has something more to offer them than just money, goods or services as a reward for their immediate actions. Altruism is a human trait which helps people to recognize that people benefit from a society that can offer them rewards on many levels.

The rewards that come to people from altruism are not always about philanthopy or the general betterment of mankind. In thinking of some of our earlier examples from the world of business the altruism of social media can have many very concrete benefits for the people giving and receiving content. Altruism is about more complex transactions between individuals, organizations and society as a whole. The elements of altruism that are at the core of much of social media, then, are really at the heart of a much more complex economy based on more complex social relationships than those usually experienced in the world of commerce. We may not always see money changing hands in social media, but through the concept of altruism there is defintely value passing from one party in a social media transaction to another - value that is changing how people define their lives and their society.

The "Give to Get" Equation: The Value of Providing Content to Get Something Back

Why should an individual provide content to someone else for free, especially information that reveals who they are to the public? It's a question that's still a mystery to many used to traditional publishing models, but one which millions of people answers every day. The answer is simple: people learn to understand the value of doing so.

When the new social media search service Delver was launched recently the home page of the Web site asked the question that is on the minds of people visiting the site: "Why should I sign up for Delver?" The answer to that question was in plain language: "Your [social] network will be kept permanently, you will be able to access your network from any computer and your friends will also benefit, you'll see." This is a "give to get" transaction as much as when someone buys a magazine or a movie ticket, but the transaction is based on contributing something other than money to gain access to the "get." The "get" is the promise of both personal and social benefits for contributing some information to the service. Yet the promised benefits are vague: the person signing up for Delver is asked to trust that the service will deliver on its promises, based on the assurances of...someone. 

Millions of people wanting to use social media services confront similar types of messages and promises when they sign up for a social media service. People really don't know what the benefits will be. In the instance of Delver, a person gets the ability to search for and find social media content on the Web and to learn about how they are related to the people who produce it. Instead of just searching information, you're searching through current and potential social contacts who not only may have the answers that you're looking for but as well may be a person who can help you personally through establishing personal and social media links. By making yourself a little bit vulnerable you get the potential of enormous insight and enjoyment from others who can enrich your world both through the social bonds that are created and through other opportunities that for career advancement or commerce through personal relationships.

Content Nation Social Rule #10: Social media requires us to become a little vulnerable personally to make the connections necessary to get broader personal benefits from publishing.

The 2004 Tsunami: Altruism Invents a Social Structure to Respond to a Disaster

When the second largest recorded earthquake in history off the coast of Indonesia triggered widespread tsunamis in December 2004 more than 240,000 people in south Asia died from the enormous waves and their aftermath, with millions more having lost their homes and their livelihoods. It was an event of global proportions that overwhelmed the governments of the nations impacted by the tragedy as well as world relief organizations. Because of the suddenness of this widespread disaster just getting basic information on the scope and scale of its impact was difficult.

Social media played a critical role on many levels in the aftermath of the tsunami. People equipped with video cameras uploaded the scenes of destruction and made a worldwide audience aware of the impact of the news almost immediately. Many social media outlets such as the pioneering ICQ instant messaging service set up special message began to create special bulletin boards for people to share needs and information. Members of Wikipedia set up a new page on its site to cover the event, with people collaborating from around the world to piece together events as they were unfolding. Dozens of weblogs relayed what was happening at the scenes of devastation, helping governments and relief organizations to see where help was needed before they could even deploy their own assessment teams.

The relief efforts from this massive tragedy also benefitted from media outlets that accomodated purely social goals into their otherwise commercial goals. Links to relief organization Web sites were promoted online on many commercial and non-commercial Web sites donating space for ads promoting relief efforts, enabling them to obtain massive amounts of aid money rapidly and to then funnel relief efficiently to where it was needed the most. Many Web sites also opened up message boards to help coordinate relief efforts and provided consolidated listings of relief resources.

The greatest tragedy in this event is that although apparently individuals in the area were receiving alerts via email and other message services on the earthquake that triggered the tsunamis hours before the tsunami waves struck the affected areas. Governments did not have the organizational structure and the infrastructure in place to communicate the danger to settlements in harm's way, even though information was available. Yet in spite of social media being a very new phenomenon in 2004 it was able to provide massive amounts of information, coordination, publicity and to contribute enormously to the relief efforts in its aftermath. Very few if any of these efforts were done for personal profit - yet the world as a whole profited enormously from the sum of these individual efforts.

With an event that was unprecedented in modern human history humans collaborating with one another independently created their own solution to a humanitarian crisis. The hierarchies of government and traditional media work well when there are relatively fixed patterns of problems to solve, but faced with a unique crisis social media enabled people to organize themselves on both a local and a global scale to respond to a novel problem rapidly and relatively effectively. There appears to be a problem-solving aspect to altruism that challenges many of the ways in which humans have organized themselves in modern societies.

Content Nation Social Rule #11: The natural communication abilities of people can combine with the natural problem-solving abilities of people through social media to provide benefits to society of almost any scale imaginable.

I'm Talkathon: Why Some Marketers Have Such a Hard Time Doing Altruism

The folks at Microsoft, having done some research on the impact of altruism on the marketing value of a company's brand, decided recently to do a nice thing: they decided that for a limited time they would donate to charity a portion of the ad revenue every time someone used their Windows Live Messenger instant messaging product or their Windows Live Hotmail webmail service. The basic concept: the more messages you send, the more Microsoft would give to charities. Microsoft called this product promotion the I'm Talkathon, an effort that seemed to be hitting all of the right buttons. Microsoft was honest about what they were trying to accomplish ultimately (promote their products and services), all you really had to do was to register at the event Web site to have your messages count towards the charitable goal. So far, so good - people like to do the right thing, and a fund-raiser was a concept more likely to generate use of the products than any sort of small rebate or other direct financial incentive would provide.

And then came Parker.

Parker appeared as the author of a weblog associated with the I'm talkathon campaign, saying in a note on the home page of the weblog, "I’m just a guy with a computer and good intentions. A couple of months ago, I found out about the i’m Initiative...I hope you join me. Thanks for checking out the Talkathon!" Parker's blog entries had links to his pages on major social media outlets, the ability to post comments, embedded videos - all the things that one would expect from an enthusiast's weblog.

There was just one problem. Parker was fake, an actor hired to play the role of a blogger along with "friends" who would appear in videos. A disclaimer at the very bottom of the weblog notes: "If you’re reading this, your BS detector is chirping like a smoke detector with a dicey 9-volt. As you’ve probably guessed, this blog is fictional, but the causes, and the i’m Initiative most certainly are not. The purpose of this blog is to raise awareness of the i’m Initiative and the worthy causes it helps. If we rubbed you the wrong way in the process that wasn’t our intention, so “sorry, our bad.” The alternate was something called an 'e-mail blast.' But, believe us that’s not nearly as exciting as it sounds." Funny in its own way, perhaps - but words that came no doubt from McCann Worldgroup, an advertising agency hired to develop and to promote the fund-raiser. The weblog was received for what it was - a promotion that was entertaining, but not real - but the weblog received few comments and its YouTube videos were viewed by a handful of people. The link to Facebook was to a page where grahics were posted; no person, real or otherwise, was there to respond.

Promoting charities is a good idea for marketers, but if your aim is to position your company's brands in the marketplace as being more sincere and in touch with your customers, why would you use a pretend spokesperson instead of a real person? If altruism in social media is about allowing yourself to become vulnerable enough to offer something to a community who will give back to you social rewards, why would you be afraid to put someone out in front of the public as a spokesperson who was real? Why use a medium that's all about genuine conversations to promote a cause based on genuine conversations by using social media to provide fake conversations? And most importantly, why go out of your way to pretend to be linked in to other social media networks and then allow people to see that these were fake presences?

People accept that companies are trying to use social media for their own marketing and people accept that actors can be entertaining, even in social media outlets. But it's probably a mistake to try to create something that's supposed to be promoting altruism with an actor pretending to be a person doing something for purely altruistic reasons. It may be an indication of how much some companies struggle to engage a public that has grown cynical from mass marketing in general, but it's also an indication of how hard it is for some people to accept that altruism is truly about getting benefits back from society as a whole where and when society as a whole is able to give them.

Content Nation Social Rule #12: It's possible to mix your own commercial goals with social goals through social media, but pretending to be sincere about social goals is not a good way to go about it.

Pregnancy Blogs: Sharing the Common Across the World

Few life-changing experiences are more common than having a baby, yet each pregnancy - or attempts at getting pregnant - has its own story. With the growth of blogging on the Web many women decide to write their own blog about their experiences. Why blog about something that is going to happen anyway? Why blog about something that happense to so many people? It turns out that pregnanacy blogs are quite popular, a resource for those who are pregnant themselves or just wanting to share in another person's experience in a way that fills their lives a little more. Sometimes these bloggers are very witty even while capturing the frustrations of their problems. The "a little pregnant " weblog is a currently popular example of pregnancy welogging, written anonymously by "Julie," who says of herself "I'm 35 years old. I'm married to Paul, who's 48, and we live in a small town in New England. We conceived our son after four rounds of IVF. Along the way we experienced an ectopic pregnancy, a miscarriage, a complicated third pregnancy, and, finally, the birth of our son, Charlie, 10 weeks premature." Julie is pregnant again so her weblog continues with the adventures of a second pregnancy. Julie's weblog captures the frustrations, terrors and joys of her situation with graphic honesty for nobody in particular and for no real reason in particular except to share her experience with the world. All of a sudden the world becomes her cheerleaders, sharing hundreds of comments on each of her posts and building a community around a real but anonymous person. Julie gives of herself freely and through her anonymity she can talk about things in a way that might be difficult otherwise. People around the world give back to Julie freely as well, inspired by her honesty, her creativeness andher wit to share a little bit of themselves with her and with the world.

This kind of sharing happens across the world in countless of topical online forums, user groups and online chat rooms in which people are giving of themselves to share experiences, ideas and camaraderie that breaks across barriers of time, location and culture to bring people together in common experiences for the sake of just being human. Weblogs in particular help the most talented and poignant story-tellers to rise above the crowd to become heroes or heroines of their followers, still very much life-sized but standing on their own as unique talents who are able to bring the world together in their common experiences. Such personal stories used to have to wait for a publisher to discover them, but now people can discover them in social media on their own through recommendations from friends, other social media outlets or search engines. In a world seeking caring and seeking to offer it, social media enables people more than ever to break the isolation of their lives and to become a part of a community of like-minded people - just for the sake of being human.

Content Nation Social Rule #13: Sometimes the gift of just being yourself as you are in the moment is the most valuable thing that you can offer in social media.

The Educating Society: Content Nation Discovers New Ways to Learn

One of society's key functions is to help people to learn from one another, to teach us about things that will help us to survive and to thrive. Education is a basic human institution, but with the advent of widespread publishing advanced education began to move beyond a handful of elites to society as a whole. Today's schools and universities are awash in valuable content, but it is social media which increasingly plays a role in educating the world both in formal settings and informal ones. While social media is not replacing the tradition of instruction from formal textbooks in education it is changing peopel from being passive vessels into which knowledge is poured into active creators and distributors of knowledge.

Wikipedia: Let's Educate the World Just for the Fun of It

Few online publications get tongues wagging more quickly in academic circles than Wikipedia, the ongoing project of the Wikimedia Foundation to assemble an authoritative source of reference materials on topics that span far more than a traditional encyclopaedia is able to cover. Teachers and university professors discourage students oftentimes from using Wikipedia as a reference source because its articles can be edited by anyone who registers for a Wikipedia account. At times companies, governments and other entities have edited entries on Wikipedia to bias its materials towards their point of view - attempts that are regularly identified by Wikipedians and corrected. These are the typical negatives that can occur in any social media project dedicated to assembling objective and accurate materials that educate people.

Yet more than 50 million people visit Wikipedia each month for quick facts and links background documents in Wikipedia's millions of articles on everything from the War of 1812 to computational genomics to breaking news that gets folded into its reference materials even as it's occurring. Why do people come to Wikipedia again and again for learning? In large part because people find its information to be very useful, accurate and up-to-date. A 2005 study by the prestigious scientific journal Nature found that scientific articles in Wikipedia were at least as accurate in sum as those found in the long-established Encyclopedia Brittannica. A later study from the University of Nottingham focused on how experts in a given topic viewed Wikipedia articles versus non-experts. To the surprise of some people the subject matter experts rated the Wikipedia articles to be more accurate than those non-experts reading them.

In other words, people know very well how to assemble their own educational materials if given the proper collaborative environment. It doesn't happen without a certain amount of forethought -there are ground rules for Wikipedia authoring and editing, enforced by volunteers who monitor Wikipedia for needed corrections and improviments - and it won't happen perfectly with each topic every time. But Wikipedia has established once and for all time that human learning is a collaborative process that can be empowered by social media to reflect a summary of knowledge available from humankind on a given topic more effeiciently and more effectively than any other method. If humans are by nature publishers we are also by nature teachers who can use social media publishing to donate our knowledge to humankind - knowing that an educated world is our best tool for survival.

Content Nation Social Rule #14: People trust the world to teach them about the world.

Wikis for Kids: Collaborative Education Creates a New Generation of Publishers Who Learn

Even as students reach out to the Web to learn from social media students are using social media to create their own learning experiences. Social media is powering many education efforts around the world, enabling student to collaborate on studying a subject and reporting their findings. Wiki software similar to that used by Wikipedia to develop its famous encyclopedia is powering many innovative projects in education.

While many of the initial efforts at using social media in education are focused on teaching writing and technology skills collaboratively some are beginning to work their way into mainstream education. In New York City a class studying civil rights issues has used a Web-based wiki to capture their views of the subject, adding and revising their materials as the class moves on to new views of the subject. The students learn not only about the subject but get to reshape their thinking again and again as they learn more and more about the topic from the teacher and from one another. In the process of doing so collaborative publishing is becoming ingrained in them as a new learning and teaching method as surely as earier students moved from writing on bark to slates to paper and to computers for their personal publishing. But with social media students will learn from their earliest experiences that their publishing is highly scalable, able to reach the world and very focused communities within the world with their insights. As they do so, learning will never be the same.

Content Nation Social Rule #15: Social media changes how we learn from the world and how the world learns from us.

Demystifying Education: Teaching and Learning as Default Behavior

 As social media permeates our lives from childhood onwards a new picture of human learning is taking shape. Education remains an extremely vital and important element of society, but as society, its technologies and its economies becomes ever more complex it becomes increasingly difficult for them to make informed choices. The education of our youth prepares us to begin life as an adult in society but by the time that young adults arrive to put their education to use the world has already changed significantly. Books used to capture the distilled sum of human wisdom, collected by experts and then distributed out to the world. Now as our problem-solving needs shift from moment to moment our need to education cannot wait oftentimes for a book to put everything that we need to know together. Life moves too quickly: we need the world to tell us about the changing world. By the time that will have read this book my blog and countless other blogs like it will have updated the world thousands of times over on the progression of these ideas.

This means that to a large degree we are becoming a society that has a constant need to teach and to learn from everyone through publishing. Social media makes us teachers and learners on a constant basis, sharing both our insights and our need for insight nearly every day of our lives. When I look at a social media service like Yelp, which collects reviews and ratings on restaurants, I see educators and learners as much as I see enthusiasts. People organize their content using taxonomies, much as an educator or scientist would, they respond to questions, they grade one another, working together independently and collaboratively to create both knowledge and learning. And, of course, it's fun - just what your teachers and professors always promised their courses would be. It's fun because people are invested in their teaching and their learning, they want to influence people, they want to expose their value to society. And society, both collectively and individually, rewards them through their own use of publishing. Traditional education will live on indefinitely, but as we become more used to being teachers and learners on a constant basis our perception of society will change into one where we see ourselves being in front of and in a classroom constantly.

Content Nation Social Rule #16: In a world where everyone is a teacher and a student the learning never ends.

The Publishing Society: Content Nation Becomes a New Way of Life

What does it mean when we're always teaching and learning from one another through publishing? What does is mean when the world shares themselves with the world on a constant basis? What does it mean when publishing is one of the most important and rewarding things that an everyday person can do in society?

It means that society has changed fundamentally. It means that instead of being a society that uses publications created by a few elite organizations for the world we are a society in which publishing has become one of the most common and basic human functions with which people can communicate with anyone throughout the world, with or without elite publishing organizations. We challenge the world's nations in our responses to disasters of historical proportions. We learn how to give and to get from one another in ways that industrial titans never dreamed of. We teach one another around the world, even as the world teaches us. We share our humble humanity with the world, and the world embraces us. Content Nation is no longer just a concept, a statistic or a catchy slogan. Content Nation reflects the current reality of our global publishing society, unified in their way of looking at publishing even as they use it to communicate and to organize themselves both globally and in very focused groups.

A Nation of Publishers: Prometheus at the Arena Rock Show

The nature of this nation of publishers is still hard for us to imagine sometimes, but it can be seen perhaps more clearly in a relatively new phenomenon being seen at concert performances: the mobile phone encore. With smoking cigarettes banned in may public locations the tradition of lighting a match or flicking on a butane lighter to encourage an artist to perform an encore has given way to people holding up their mobile phones instead, their lit screens flickering in the dark of arena, auditoriums and cafes, many of them in the hands of people taking photos and videos of the scene to share with others elsewhere.

In the age of flickering matches and lighters asking for an encore performance it was fire, the basic tool of humanity, that people used to summon the creative spirits to return to them. The legends of the Titans from ancient Greek mythology tell us that Prometheus had stolen fire for mortal humans from Zeus, who was angry with mortals and wanted to keep them ignorant. Today Content Nation offers performers the new basic tool of humanity in tribute, millions of people lighting up the world with their own creative spirits, sharing in the moment as performers themselves in the creation and global distribution of content, uniting the world through their influential publishing. The performers on stage give them an experience to remember. The audience replies, yes, we do this too. Prometheus' torch has been passed back to us.

The world has become a nation of publishers. Society is changing fundamentally through social media, moving past our old archetypes of how humans survive and thrive far more rapidly than the early motorcars passed by the horse-drawn carriages. Society must embrace these changes brought about by Content Nation, not as a convenience or a courtesy, but as a necessity. For the very survival and success of humanity is now in the hands of Content Nation.