Radio, music, curation and social objects

I have a lot of time for the guys at One Golden Square Labs as they try to adapt Absolute Radio's broadcast model to the networked world.
The latest example is Compare My Radio. Absolute's Dan Thornton pointed me at it (here's his take) - and I want to thank him for making me think a little about radio, music, curation and social objects. Which is what follows.

Anyways, to start at the beginning, Compare My Radio requires a little data from you about musical tastes before attempting to match you with the most appropriate broadcast channel.

Bravely, users get directed to rival properties as well as Absolute's own.

No doubt the payback for Absolute is the data they receive from users which could, for example, be used to hone Absolute's broadcast output: ie they learn more people want more Britpop, so they play more Britpop.

So, I muse, what may the outcomes be if you include not only the output from mainstream broadcast radio in the search returns, but also the narrowcasting shows of podcasts and the likes of Mixcloud (touted as The YouTube of radio). Tough to do. And I'm not criticising that this is not included in CompareMyRadio - I'm simply indulging in the thought experiment of assuming it could and should.

A model like CompareMyRadio could surface the single largest group by revealing the lowest common denominators (ie, the most searched-for artists).

And that is useful for honing broadcast.

And in a broadcast way, it will also point you at the mainstream channel which is the best fit for your expressed tastes.

But that can't be as good a fit as is available from the long tail (think last.fm and spotify for starters).

Imagine if CompareMyRadio could point you at the channel most fit for you? The outcomes would certainly point you at the long tail more often than they would the mainstream broadcasters. That's because your own itunes playlists are a better fit for you than anything Absolute, Capital, Heart or Radio 1-6 etc can come up with. In a long tail world there are bound to be niche shows that are closer to your itunes playlists than the big broadcasters can ever provide. It's a simple matter of too many niches - and those niches being better provided for by narrowcasting (a tautology of course - if it's niche it must be narrow).

Of course, the mainstream broadcasters may still account for the largest single groups (with viable numbers), but that, in a long tail world, is the minority - and significantly so.

Add peer to peer recommendation to the long tail model and you also add discovery - a role previously retained by the broadcast playlist creators.

When I shared CompareMyRadio with peers on Twitter, one point raised was that in a world of spotify etc, access to a best fit of music selection is less of a differentiator than placing value on the human voice content - does the presenter make you laugh/talk about stuff that interests you? Do your peers trust her and her playlists?

Valuing the presenter; their curation of taste and their human voice, is what Mixcloud does.
In the podcast world (see blogtalkradio for example) we are all potentially radio show hosts now (just as, through YouTube, we are TV hosts and through blogs and other social media we are publishers). And that means there will always be a show with a list of content which is a great match for you.

But we want that to be more than a playlist. We want the show to be the social object around which the community of purpose gathers.

So where does broadcast play it's part?

For many of us, it acts as The Great Reminder.

Two examples:
1. BBC4 broadcasts Synth Britannia on Friday night, I download Tubeway Army's Replicas.
I didn't see the show. But it became a social object around which conversation happened on Twitter. I joined in the conversation on Twitter. It's the conversation, not the show, that inspired the purchase. But the conversation needed the show (the social object).

I also got reminded about Bill Nelson in conversation about the show. He wasn't even featured. But I'll likely be searching iTunes for Art, Empire, Industry later today. Where is the broadcaster's revenue share?

The broadcaster created the social object, inspired the conversation, triggered no end of purchase downloads - but gets nothing.

At the very least, in a YouTube-of-radio model, the creators of the shows (the social objects in this instance) should make one-click iTunes purchases (tickets, dvds, merchandise etc) easy and get a good share of the profit. But that's before the peer to peer interaction has even started - and that's where the greater value for all lays. There's the conundrum - how to track conversations inspired by social objects.

2. I go to see The Pixies with a friend I haven't seen for a while.
The Pixies gig is the social object. My friend and I are brought together (again) by our common interest. We talk about (guess what at a gig?) music. He tells me about another gig we should see together (ker-ching) and I end up buying some of the band's work as downloads (ker-ching, ker-ching)

In short social objects and peer-to-peer interactions are fabulous reminders of what you already knew. The 'value' of that knowledge may be enhanced, of course, by the context. And 'the show' is very much about context.

So what about discovery? Well, discovery all depends on silos and silo walls.
If the community of purpose surrounding a social object has a hard edge, nothing much new is going to arrive.

But if the community is more like most networks of peers, the edges are fuzzy. More people can be attracted to join by the social object (or by their interactions with their peers) but with a different take on the social object. They bring with them different ideas for content (for example) from their peer to peer interactions in their other communities of purpose.

Provided the show host employs feedback loops which constantly remind her that it's their show, not hers, then the new discoveries can be passed on through the show content.
Even without this, the p2p interactions around the show will share (or not) and rate (or score down) the latest collective community discoveries. The most apt will flourish, the least die out.

So, in summary.

Broadcast is The Great Reminder. It has real potential to be the social object around which peer-to-peer interaction happens. And the real magic of this happens in the peer to peer interactions. This is where the purchase reminders and recommendations happen in the main. It is therefore where the greater revenue opportunities lay. Your click-to-buy model (or it's equivalent) therefore has to be portable so peers can take it with them on their journeys.

Narrowcasting serves a greater number of people. All those tiny niches are bigger in total than the largest of your lowest-common-denominator single groups. So if you're really about scale - you know what to do.

Discovery = community created playlists ONLY where communities are fuzzy edged. Bear that in mind when you consider whose communities we are talking about - and where they reside.

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• Mixcloud goes public (fasterfuture.blogspot.com)
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Purpose: Stop talking, start acting - do good.

If you are trying to understand Purpose (as best articulated by Mark Earls) and the role of Social Objects in that (very much at the heart of my insistance on 'Make Interesting Things For People To Do Together' as core to social media [all?] strategy) you can't miss this from Hugh.

"Purpose-Ideas are articulated via Social Objects, not Messages."

Hugh reminds us that the Why of a business (its purpose) can't simply be expressed in messages. It has to be expressed in actions.

As he puts it beautifully:

"Social Gestures beget Social Objects".

Quite.

It's something I talk about a lot as we organise around the Purpose (our why) that drives Brando-Digital (the story so far in five slides, below). What stuff do we do that is more than skin deep? How will we live our purpose?

Brando Digital: What we do

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: media digital)

Perhaps there's a call to action in all this for those who believe in the power of the network and the dominance of communities (and I know I ain't the only one...).

Maybe, if you aren't already, consider taking your love of the social offline?

Do something for your community in the real world. Pledge away (by posting a comment) below. If five people post a pledge, I'll join in and share what I'll be doing and have been doing.

I'd rather do it that way because then I'll know the community of loosely connected nodes that make up this blog DO care. And it makes me sound a bit less like ' I-do-a-lotta-work-for-charidee', mate.'

One thing I know all of us who join in will share is a sense of community.

And it is a sense that is more than skin deep.

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Recommending the thoughts of JP Rangaswami...

JP Rangaswami (one of my personal recommendations in the Rock Stars of Web2.0 list) has been considering the idea of twitter 'tweets' as recommendations.
I've had my own musings about marketing in this medium. Among others.
JP's take is to define what makes a recommendation different from an advert.
He says:

1. The tweet must be unbiased, it must be about an entity that is in no way connected financially with the tweeter
2. The tweet must be clear in signalling something sufficiently positive about the entity
3. The tweet must be actionable, it must link to somewhere that the tweetee can do something about the recommendation
4. Most importantly, a tweet becomes a recommendation when the tweetee decides it is one

He says his fourth point is the most important. I'd argue it could stand alone. It stands out and alone because it is the one that is all about how much you trust the recommendor. Trust is what transforms what might otherwise be seen as an advert into a valued recommendation.

We build that trust on a whole super-structure of metadata. The ability of one factor to bring that house of cards tumbling down will vary from instance to instance (and it is a precariously constructed structure, one which requires we don't lean too heavily on its walls, or over load it by piling card after card on top).

Yes it helps if there is no financial connection between you and the product or service you recommend if you want me to trust your recommendation, but not as much as it matters that I trust (or don't trust) your opinion in the first place.

I'll take the chef's recommendation in his restaurant, for example. I'm particularly likely to take it if he knows my taste. And I'll take a friend's recommendation on the right mobile phone package for me - even if he works for one of the operators. I trust him to do the right thing for me more than for the organisation he has a financial interest in.

I'm not that fussed about number 2, the clarity issue. In the conversational mode of twitter you can always ask for clarification. A recommendation would typically require this.

Even number 3 is of low importance to me. Adding links is a kind of nice-to-have, make-life-easy function. But we have google. And we like to control our own user experience. Direct links are fine if helpful - but lead me to your checkout page on amazon and I might gag.

No, for me, point 4 is king: "a tweet becomes a recommendation when the tweetee decides it is one".

The tweetee makes that decision based on whether or not they trust the tweetor, and whether or not the tweetor is talking about something they are interested in today.

In fact, the most effective manifestation of this is when the tweetee is the tweetor (sorry!) ie the person wanting a recommendation is seeking a recommendation. I ask my network of trust which small wifi-enabled decent-sized keyboard device to buy, they tell me the asus eeepc.

And it is this that led me to the idea of Conversations of Intent

It's very much inline with Doc's VRM (I believe) and also with JP's conclusion:
"It is the “follower” who imbues the “tweeter” with the “recommender” tag about a particular class of social object."

So here I am sharing the thoughts of JP Rangaswami, Doc Searls, Hugh MacLeod and Mark Earls. You can choose to treat this as recommendation. But only if you trust me.

Marketing is not something you do to people.

Sometimes I can be intensely annoying

Thank you Hugh.
Read his post on social objects.
It'll help me waste less time.
But as I posted on Hugh's blog, the metaphor may not be wholly applicable.
What if the dinosaurs are actually collectives of feisty mammals waiting for the opportunity to throw off their dinosaur costume and crack on with evolution.
Digging the meteor from the inside?