jill/txt

A woman in the audience at the healthcare and mommyblogging panel I somehow walked into here at BlogHer ‘09 just stood up and said that she’ll use google rather than go to a doctor simply because of the cost of healthcare. Her family has “good” insurance but it still costs them $300 to take a child to the ER!!! And more to go to the pediatrician.

Could I just say that the more I hear about the US health system the more horrified I am. And even more horrified that so many Americans, despite this, are against universal health care for everyone.

I genuinely don’t understand how Americans can think that free or close-to-free, universal healthcare as most other Western democracies have is a bad thing.

1500 bloggers is a lot of people, I realised when I walked into the huge ballroom filled with round, white-tableclothed tables fitting 10 people each. Everyone at the table immediately started introducing themselves: “Hi, I’m Amy of Up With Moms“, “Hi, I’m Amy of InherentPassion.com, I’m Fruitlady on Twitter”, “I’m Amy of doobleh-vay, here’s my card!” They were all called Amy, except Neil, who is one of the vaginally-challenged male delegates to BlogHer, and who I actually follow on Twitter because he blogs strange stories about his mother that I can never decide whether I like but for some reason read. And everyone has a card, a thick pack of business cards advertising their blogs that they hand out with their left hands shaking your hand with their right hands. I can’t believe I forgot to bring more than a dozen business cards (I hardly ever need business cards) The best ones are odd-shaped or have textured paper or ziplocked bags of glitter stapled to them.

Then there was speed-dating. If you’ve not been in a room of 1500 women introducing themselves to each other all at once you cannot imagine the volume of that chatter. I fine-tuned my elevator pitch after the first five or six bloggers:

Hi, I’m Jill! I teach social media and blogging at a university in Norway in Europe, and I blog about my research and about being a newbie woman in academia!

I don’t really blog much about being a newcomer to academia any more, not being so young any more and being tenured and secure and settled and all. But I figure the more personal the better, seems to be the currency around here. And I did wrote some damn fine posts about learning the ropes of academic administration!

I walked in to the session on owning your expertise, which turned out to be a great workshop run by The Op-Ed Project, a group that works to train women to participate more in mainstream debate. Did you know that 90% of submissions to the Washington Post are from men? And that 85% of bylines are male? And that though many of the pieces actually published are not from that pile of pieces sent in to the newspaper without the editor having requested them, the editor does largely select writers based on cold submissions. But I’ve been to too many workshops on how to talk to the media already, and when the first exercise was how to present yourself as an expert when you don’t have typical expert credentials such as a book or degree or institutional affiliation I snuck out the back feeling kind of guilty for having plenty of all of those.

Instead I went down to the expo and came out with vast quantities of free swag:

I got free Play-Doh, a Mr Potato Head toy, a SpiderMan book, toddler snacks from Gerber, shaving cream, a compact mirror from Microsoft (because all women in tech really care about is makeup?), baby food, laundry detergent, chocolate fairy wands from another laundry detergent brand, a couple of USB memory sticks, drinks, chips, snack bars, lip gloss, socks (2 pairs), a step-counter, several kinds of lipgloss and some things I’m not sure what are.

Some of the sponsors are pretty odd. Listerine’s booth promises to donate ten mouthwashes to children in need if I hang a fake dollar they’re handing out on their fake tree. I hadn’t realised children in need needed mouthwash…

The MommyBlogging session I walk into in the afternoon is sponsored by a line of saccharine movies and girls’ toys who have stands, signs beside the presenters and who hand out gift bags with pink tissue paper and Polly Pocket-like dolls. I keep them for Jessie, thinking we’ll probably lose them on a plane anyway.

The panel doesn’t do presentations, they invite questions from the audience straight away, to have a conversation. One of the panelists writes nothing but haikus on Twitter.

The great thing about Twitter is that you can see what’s going on in parallel sessions - so I walked next door to the session on how to make your blog into a book, where they’re discussing how to get an agent. Sell your book in the back of the room when you’re speaking somewhere, they say. And use your book instead of a business card! People will remember you better! (Damn, I should have brought 100 copies of my book…)

The final session of the day is the community keynote, which showcases some excellent writing from excellent bloggers. Twenty bloggers have been selected to read twenty blog posts - what a great twist on the traditional keynote-by-an-external-expert. My favourites were JD from I Do Things So You Don’t Have To talking about faking concussion as a child, which had the audience in stitches, Black Hockey Jesus of Wind in Your Vagina’s love letter to his daughter on her fifth birthday, Karen Walrond from Chookalonk’s analysis of why Obama’s win resonated so deeply with her, and Melissa Ford from Stirrup Queens tale of trying to get involved with her husband’s semen collection for their infertility treatment.

The real problem, of course, the real reason why I’m not “squeeing” over BlogHer (ugh, what a word, squee), is that these aren’t really the blogs I read. As Melissa Ford wrote, “This is why I go to BlogHer—to get to see the people I read.” Or read Samantha Campen’s similar but more detailed explanation at her blog (I’ve read Samantha’s blog on and off after meeting her husband at a Second Life meetup last year, and she’s an excellent blogger, writing funny and incisive posts about her life and baby who just happens to be about the same age as our baby). BlogHer is a meetup for a particular set of blogging communities, and that’s why people bond and hug and clap and get so emotional. The problem for me is that I read geek blogs and copyright blogs and academic blogs and some politics blogs and some crafts blogs, and those bloggers aren’t at this conference. This conference is for a fairly specific slice of the blogosphere, and I guess it’s not really the slice that I feel at home in.

That, and the all-over-the-place sponsorship and monetizing, oh, and words like “squee”, well.

Mind you, Jessie loved her free Mr Potato Head.

One of the most interesting case studies here at BlogHer Business was about Fiskars’ community creation. Fiskars have been making scissors for 360 years, but didn’t have a very hip image - when they did a survey of what consumers thought about Fiskars people said that if Fiskars were a drink it would be milk, if they were a snack they’d be crackers. Not very trendy or attractive! But they did find that there was a lot of passion about scrapbook and crafts online, which is something you need scissors to do, so Fiskars wanted to become part of this passion.

Their ad agency, Brains on Fire, surveyed scrapbookers and crafters and found that they weren’t passionate about their tools but about sharing their lives. So they decided to find people who were leaders and superstars in this area, to find “leads” to run their community. They flew to major cities and did interviews with bloggers - running traditional campaigns in stores and so on, and asking scrapbookers “bring your craft, show us what you do, and show us your life.” On their first search they found four leads and hired those women in part time paid positions. They brought them in to Fiskars headquarters and trained them about Fiskars history and products, introduced them to engineers, they let them play with all the stuff - the leads were so excited to see rows of trimmers and stickers and paper. These ladies just screamed with excitement to see it all and to get to play with it. When they saw that, the team realised they were really onto something.

The Fisk-a-teer leads are the lead characters on the Fisk-a-teer community space, a social space where scrapbookers can discuss and share their craft by uploading pictures of their creations and so on.

Answering audience questions, the Fiskars crew explains that they pay their lead “Fiskateers”. The way they designed the program was that the leads were going to do about 20 hours a week work for Fiskateers - in practice they probably spent about 80 hours a week [laughs]. The leads represent Fiskars at various trade shows across the country, run live chats, are active on the message boards, they’re blogging and so on. Fiskars set up training sessions to teach the leads to talk about Fiskars, and clearly stated that they should say the good and the bad, to talk about their Fiskars tools but also their other tools. They’re not paid to blog positively about the company, but to plan contests and events. How did they disclose this, someone in the audience asked? The Fisk-a-teer leads wrote it on their blogs, and it was in the original job descriptions.

Angela Daniels is Fiskateer number 9 - she heard about it from a girlfriend who was one of the original Fiskateers. She was already in the crafting social media community. I noticed when I went to the website that the lead Fisk-a-teers are so tightly integrated as hosts for the site that when you go to register for the site, to “become a Fisk-a-teer”, you pick a lead by clicking on their photo and that opens up a personal email from you to that lead - you have to enter your own subject line and your own message. Angela tweeted to me that she’d seen my request, so the leads really do answer these registrations personally. What a great way of immediately creating a personal relationship between the scrapbooker and the community!

Another trick is using non-digital networks. Scrapbookers regularly have parties where they bring their gear and craft together for a few hours. Fisk-a-teers (all members? select members? I’m not sure) get (or can buy?) special Fiskars scissors with orange and green handles. Normal Fiskars scissors have only orange handles, so people always ask where people got their scissors - a great way of starting a conversation about the community space.

Sales was not their immediate metric, they want to raise awareness, fans, evangelism about the product. Yet other results too: product development (they ask Fiskateers for feedback on ideas, and Fiskateers take pride in that), marketing (launching different stamp designs and ask Fiskateers which they like, which helps identify which stamps are going to be the most popular), sales (Target, we did a survey with 7000 consumers and they loved these stamps; and they got Fiskateers who were involved with stores - just connecting with other crafters, showing how stuff works etc - those stores have three times higher sales than others.)

The current case study at BlogHer Business is about how Coach ran a campaign to have consumers design their own Coach bags. The company wanted to engage a younger market, and the campaign was successful: they had 3200 submissions and had 6 million “engagements” with the site. The company told the agency “We want consumers to put their DNA on our bags” - much as Fiskars realised users wanted to tell the story of their life rather than talk about tools. The campaign invited users to “design the next Coach totes”, and the prize was that for the bag that was selected by Coach, they’d create the bag and throw a party for the creator and your friends in your local store. They gave users some patterns they could choose to use and uploaded it using share tools, named it, wrote about it. They had 3200 entries. Were picked up by over 30 blogs (interesting: that doesn’t really seem like a lot?)

They sold the bag in a limited edition for $220 at the store where the designer lived near, and a few other stores. But it was essentially a PR product, not that they really wanted to make money off the bag. I wonder whether the novelty of this kind of campaign will wear off? Will consumers get sick of this? Especially if their input is not sufficiently listened to by the company - after all, the bags weren’t really sold. Did the designs really influence the way Coach designs their bags? (Yes, they say towards the end - they went through all the designs looking for trends and inspirations.) They didn’t promote the bag chosen - is this a slap in the face to the creators?

There are three reasons why people participate, says Jamie Dicken from Brickfish, the agency doing this campaign, and that’s done similar campaigns for Victoria’s Secret and other brands.

1. I can do it - I can drag and click and create something quickly and easily.
2. I’m a creator - it’s my goal in life to create a bag for Coach.
3. I want to be a celebrity. 25% of young people believe they can be a celebrity.

Pretty interesting presentation - though there are quite a few other similar campaigns around.

I loved the first case studies presented at BlogHer Business, and the BlogHer 2009 Women in Social Media Survey was really interesting too, but by now I’m getting a little disgruntled.

• Two hours and ten minutes of continuous talking from stage is too much. I was unable to focus after 90 minutes.
• After two hours and ten minutes of continuous listening, it’s really disappointing to walk into the hallway and find no coffee and no snacks. I had to walk a block and a half to raise my blood sugar. (Mind you, I got excellent coffee and snacks once I got there).
• The keynote conversation currently going on isn’t about blogging, it’s about how you can still sell stuff during a recession. And it’s going to last a whole hour. Also, the BlogHer program states that “”Sponsors do not pay for or influence session content” yet this keynote speaker (Lauren Zalaznick of Women@NBCU (iVillage etc) represents a company that’s an investor in BlogHer. So I’m paying $600 for non-blogging related keynote by a sponsor of BlogHer.
• The current session will go on for 2 hours and 45 minutes before the next break.

People are starting to look rather bored in the audience. I suspect I’ll find BlogHer regular more fun - it starts tomorrow.

Update: The Tropicana case study is also about a promotion specifically conducted on the BlogHer website and on iVillage, which is, of course, also an investor in BlogHer. Great.

Allstate is a major insurance companies in the US and when they started working with social media they ran into a lot of resistance from the company itself, especially from the legal department. The liability issues for an insurance company are immense - if Allstate runs a message board, and a user writes that they’re happy with Allstate’s insurance, and another user takes their recommendation and gets the same insurance and then something bad happens, Allstate is liable for the advice given by the user on their website. Lizzie Schreier was in charge of introducing social media to Allstate and has five very useful strategies for how to convince the legal department that social media will be OK.

How to get things through legal:

1. Fact finding. Uncover their problems. E.g. ask group of lawyers/decision makers “raise your hands if you know anything about social media” and find out what they know and what their concerns are.
2. Truly educate them. At first, most of them really don’t know why she’s there (i.e. Lizzie Schreier who was trying to get them into social media). If she hadn’t succeeded in making legal and the leadership understood why social media were important, they’d have thrown it out and said no, it’s too dangerous. She did a lot of homework - for instance on guidelines, where she looked at what Farmers was doing and was able to tell legal at Allstate “here’s this other insurance company’s guidelines, I know you’re worried about this liability issue and here’s how others have dealt with this.”
3. Choose your words wisely. In insurance, you can’t use the words “advice” or “recommend” because of liability issues.
4. Baby steps. Compromise. Legal told her: “You can have your forum, but you can’t talk about insurance.” OK, but then I want all comments posted and moderated after, no moderation until posts are published. As it turned out, not talking about insurance worked in their favour. There were lots of mundane conversations - about siding on a house, children’s clothes. Once the site was discussing more insurance-related things, the legal department weren’t so nervous about it.
5. Prove, Communicate, Enhance and Repeat. Show up weekly with doughnuts and walk them through the comments on the site and show them that there’s nothing dangerous out there. After 2-3 weeks Schreier said “here’s a new topic I want to put out there”, and it touched upon insurance. At that point they trusted her and let her do it. Also, over time, she identified the one lawyer who was the only one who was actually sound asleep through the whole first meeting, which was actually OK because he already knew the internet and social media - so Schreier and her team worked on making a strong connection with him.

This case study spawned other projects that were actually less successful. A lot of other groups wanted to do everything at once. They walked in and wanted to change the world. Whereas Lizzie started much slower - yet launched faster as a result. Started really small - not a lot of traffic, which she used in her favour - see, it’s not getting a lot of traffic, it’s not a threat!

Leadership wanted to get a social media board up and running, get people to connect with each other - there wasn’t a clear strategy. Lizzie went into more detail, defining target audiences. Their main goal was to educate consumers on what’s important when considering insurance, primarily auto insurance.

OK; moving on to the next case study… Fiskars and their Fisk-a-teers.

[You can also read about this presentation at Renée Blodgett’s blog down the avenue.]

I absolutely loved Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother, a young adult novel set in a very-near-future San Francisco where high school students’ every move is tracked by censorware in their laptops and on the school network and surveillance devices in the hallways. Of course, students learn how to evade much of this, and when terrorists blow up the Bay Bridge and the Department of Homeland Security turns the country into a totalitarian, total-surveillance horror, it’s high school kids who hook up their xboxes to create an alternative network and figure out ways of showing the cowardly complying adults how outrageously their government is treating them. At times the novel is a little too pedantic - three pages explaining how PGP encryption works can get a little tedious - but the story’s good enough to forgive this.

Better yet, I gave the novel to my 13-year-old daughter, and to my delight, she also loved it. This is the kind of stuff I want her to learn about the web and privacy and how the world works. And now she knows what PGP encryption is - not a bad thing in my book.

Today Cory Doctorow tweeted a link to a lesson plan he created to teach kids network literacy - not the kind that is taught in schools today, which largely involves teaching kids to assume everything they do will be surveilled, yet that they should guard their privacy by being terrified of putting anything at all online. No, Cory’s lesson plan has kids learning about the censorware they’re submitted to, figuring out how it harms their learning, how arbitrary it is, how people get around it and how to find out more about it. My favourite assignment?

7) Research how to file a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request and use the procedure to discover how much your school or school board spends on censorware.

Is there something similar to the FOIA in Norway? Can Norwegian students find this sort of information as well?

After reading Little Brother I wondered how realistic the heavy surveillance of high school kids was. Quite realistic, I suspect. I already knew that every move students make in It’s Learning, the LMS most schools in Norway use, is tracked by the teacher (something my 13-year-old was shocked to hear: they’ve never been told this), but the laptop every high school student gets and is required to use also comes with many limitations on how students can use them. Freakforum.nu seems to be where most of the discussions about this are - for instance, How to get administrator access to your computer. Norwegian media has written recently about surveillance of high school kids - worryingly, kids studying media at Elvebakken videregående in Oslo think it’s fine that their every move is watched so long as the purpose “is good” and their private email isn’t read by their teachers. Camera surveillance in schools would be great, they think, and while they don’t want radio surveillance sewn into their own clothes, they’d approve of it for little kids. According to Dagsavisen, in Nord-Trøndelag all high schools have installed an “Employee Computer Monitoring Software” called 2 AMI MAS on all student laptops, which according to the website tracks everything:

MAS captures and securely stores records of all user activity – not just on the internet but in every application including email, word processing, spreadsheet applications, instant messaging and online.

Happily, the Norwegian -.. is skeptical to all this, as they certainly should be. As a commenter on the article in Dagsavisen wrote, this certainly appears to be in contravention of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child:

1. No child shall be subjected to arbitrary or unlawful interference with his or her privacy, family, or correspondence, nor to unlawful attacks on his or her honour and reputation.

What are we teaching our kids? That they should assume their every move is being tracked? What kind of a society is that?

I hope these kids read Orwell’s Big Brother AND Doctorow’s Little Brother.

I’m in Chicago, ready to attend BlogHer Business this morning and BlogHer itself tomorrow and the next day. I’m excited: I’ve been curious about these conferences since I read about the first one several years ago, and I’m happy things finally worked out so I can attend one. Also, I mainly attend academic conferences, and this is anything but - 1200 blogging women (and a few men) all getting together. Sometimes most of the pre-conference discussion seems to be about What to Wear to BlogHer, which makes me a little worried, but I figure with all the enthusiasm about this conference there’s got to be a lot of good stuff.

Anyway, got to get to breakfast now, but I promise to blog and tweet the conference - I gather that’s one of the main activities there, so I’d better, eh?

A few weeks ago I was asked to give a talk on Twitter, but the dates didn’t work out - so I compiled a list of Norwegian experts who I think would do a great job speaking about social media. Some of these are people I know well, others were suggested to me on Twitter, and looking at their online work I think they look really interesting. I’m pasting in my list here because I know there are lots of people loooking for speakers on subjects like social media and Twitter, and I hope this will be useful. It’s in Norwegian though, sorry if you don’t read Norwegian.

Jeg satt nylig sammen en liste anbefalte foredragsholdere for en som trengte en til å snakke om Twitter - da særlig i forbindelse med journalistikk, men det er jo en god del overlapping der. Noen av disse kjenner jeg selv, andre fikk jeg tips om på Twitter. Her er listen jeg kom opp med:

• Bente Kalsnes har jeg stor sans for - hun har bl.a. vært community leder for Dagbladet.no, så frilansjournalist fra Brussels, men flytter nå hjem til Oslo 15. august. Hun er et fyrverkeri av skarpe meninger og skriver veldig bra i bloggen sin. Her er LinkedIn profilen hennes.
• Elin Sjursen er en tidligere kollega av meg som har gjort det stort i et av Londons mest spennende konsulentfirma, Made By Many - de leverer “digitale strategier” og er eksperter på sosiale medier. Elin er opprinnelig fra Bergen (vel, Askøy) men har bodd i mange år i USA, hvor hun bl.a. studerte med Henry Jenkins på MIT, og nå bor hun i London. Hun har arbeidet med digitale medier og det som nå heter sosiale medier i over ti år og er en dyktig visuell og fortellende formidler. Her er Elins poster på Made by Many bloggen.
• En annen dyktig taler er Marika Lüders - hun er på Sintef i Oslo og har skrevet doktoravhandling om hvordan ungdom bruker nettet (dette er fra hukommelsen, aknskje litt unøyaktig). Hun er god å snakke for seg og har veldig interessante meninger, samt at hun er internasjonalt anerkjent i forskermiljøet - i vår kom hun ut med en forskningsartikkel i prestisjetidsskriftet New Media and Society om “personlige medier” som altså står i kontrast til massemedier og omfatter alt fra dagbøker og fotoalbum til Twitter og Facebook og blogging. Hun er på Twitter og har en (ikke særlig oppdatert) blogg.
• Vi har en stipendiat her på UiB, Linda Elen Olsen, som skriver sin doktoravhandling om LinkedIn og Facebook og “trust” - høyaktuelle temaer! Jeg har ikke hørt henne holde foredrag ennå men på tomannshånd og i grupper er hun en aktiv debattant som gir et svært godt inntrykk - jeg gleder meg til å se mer av hva hun jobber med. Her er hun på Twitter og på LinkedIn
• Jeg fikk tips om Ragnhild K. Olsen som er høgskolelektor på BI hvor hun underviser i “flermodal ledelse“. Hun er også en av to bloggere på mediehus.org (”Mediehus.org er et nettsted om redaksjonell utvikling og konvergens. Det er en ressursblog for Mediehusrapporten 2008, en casestudie av redaksjonell organisering i ti norske mediehus.”) Og hun er på Twitter. Jeg har altså ikke personlig kjennskap til Ragnhild K. Olsen, jeg fikk dette som et tips fra en på twitter, men hun ser jo interessant ut.
• En annen Twitrer anbefalte Vilde Schanke Sundet (Twitter: http://twitter.com/vildess ) - hun er stipendiat på UiO og skriver en PhD “on media institutions’ use of new media platforms”. Ifølge @iacob tenker hun “smart om Twitter”. Jeg kjenner henne ikke personlig.
• Og da @carstenhp så at @ingeborgv hadde anbefalt Ragnhild K. Olsen kommenterte han “Nå er jo @ingeborgv litt beskjeden. Hun kan mye om Twitter selv fra sin tid på IJ.Og har foredratt i flere redaksjoner om temaet.” Så kanskje hun også er et alternativ! Ingeborg Volan - her er bloggen hennes.
• @VirrVarr, også kjent som Ida Jackson, har også holdt mange foredrag om Twitter - hun er kjent for boken Jenter som kommer, for å ha vunnet flere bloggpriser og for sin innovative bruk av sosiale medier.

Har dere flere forslag? Skriv en kommentar!