Do social media conversations have rules or is it just a free-for-all?

How to put the sociology into social media: a conversation with Stephen Fitzpatrick, JSM editor.

This is part one of an interview that proved to be quite long as it ranged all over the place to cover the problems of pitching social media, the academic study of conversations and ‘conversational psychology', Internet campaigning with Greenpeace, Steve’s time at Saatchi and Saatchi where, by chance he bumped into Peter and started the Social Media Lab, as well as putting some of the theory into practice with a government agency by the name of the Inward Investment Group (part of the DTI).

I’ve broken the interview up into six thematised parts so that it’s (hopefully) not too onerous a task to read and digest.

Preamble

I thought about how I might set up this idea of an 'interview with myself' in order to make it less boring.

In a moment of divine inspiration I decided to ask my partner’s 15 year old, who has ambitions to go to business school after university and I thought, maybe this could be my big chance to help save him from being embraced by the 'top four' agencies and disappearing into the jargon-o-sphere of management and communications consulting.

He was aware that I 'worked with The Internet’ but not much else, as an occasion hadn’t arisen before which called for me to be ‘talking shop’ with him, so this proved to be a voyage of discovery for both of us.

So what you’re about to read is the transcript of an interview with me, conducted by a precocious 15 year old named of Miheer who was given a very perfunctory masterclass in marketing jargon by Peter (plus twenty quid for good measure) before being instructed to give no quarter and pull no punches. 

Post-preamble

By Miheer

Steve asked me if he would interview him. I knew beforehand that he worked with the internet and businesses but not much else. Before the interview I had an hour with Peter who gave me some advice about how to do interview questions.

He told me to imagine I was Jeremy Paxman and that I should give Steve no quarter.

We had to stop quite a few times during the course of the interview while Steve explained some of the vocab but it’s been edited out, mostly because it made the interview too long and was a bit boring. 

M: So why a social media ‘journal’….is this some kind of pseudo-academic exercise?

SF: I hope not. The reason we are calling this a journal is as follows.

When we (that is Myself, Peter and Thom) go into organisations as consultants (as Social Media Lab) we would always get this….slightly disconcerting response from clients – “When you talk, you’re so…..conceptual” (that was when they were being kind) and they would look worried, as if we might have crashed out of some new age west-coast business school.

So we thought – conceptual? business school? If we are going to publish, then why not a journal? 

We thought that maybe it would make our job easier, to 'publish', to show that what we were telling them wasn’t crazy, so that we’d have to justify less, explain less. We could just point them at the site.

I guess we hope it will help to validate the research and development work and make things a bit easier.

It’s different now that there is a term –social media - to describe what’s happening out there and that there are bloggers now, but for a long time the response was, “Great story, guys – but, well, whew - not here, not now. Please. not now, not us….(laughs)

M: So who else is involved, besides you and Peter and Thom

SF: Well, over the past five years or so we’ve built up quite a network of contacts who work with us on consultancy projects and also collaborate and consult with social media lab research. These contacts will also be acting as stringers for the journal?

M: Stringers?

SF: Commentators and contributors – giving us their perspective on our stories about media and organisations..

So, we’ve got a very diverse group of people we can now call on to contribute and comment.

There are people from marketing and communication, journalists and PRs as well as people you wouldn’t usually associate with media or business  -  organisational psychologists, cyberneticians and systems theorists, group analysts, philosophers of language.

M: I think I can see why you’ve got the communications people in there - but what about that other lot – what have they got to do with social media?

SF: It seemed to me that the problems that these people – the psychologists and philosophers - were addressing in their own fields (the study of live real time communication in families, organisations, communities) were very similar to the communications problems that we were looking as companies struggle to come to terms with how to communicate in realtime with their customers and, beyond them, the general public 

I was looking for models, rules, precedents that might help with the consultancy model we (the social media lab) were developing.

We were looking for insights into how to create a structured and sustainable way of embedding conversational communications processes in an organisation, rather than just throwing caution to wind and flying by the seat of our pants.

I already knew how to do that.

A lot of these people were in working in academia or research institutions and were analysing how conversations between real people actually worked in realtime.

They were working out the rules or grammar of live conversations in different contexts and spelling out how these rules could be learned by professionals working in these contexts.

Some fascinating stuff about what happens when conversations go wrong, why they go wrong and how you could put them right.

They were talking about how to manage difficult conversations, how to open up the emotional bandwidth of these conversations safely.

There was a huge body of work and it seemed that a lot of it was transferable, with modifications to the online environment.

M: Did these people understand why you were interested in talking to them?

SF: More often than not – no. But they were intrigued that someone from the universe next door had come knocking.

M: Do you think ordinary people will understand what they’re talking about? 

SF. That’s a part of what the whole social media lab and social media journal project is about – to liberate the knowledge that’s is locked up in these disciplines that media people don’t usually come into contact with – and it’s very often expressed in an arcane language which is designed to preach to the converted, to to other specialists – and get it out there, into the public domain.

Anything that’s new and different will be a challenge to communicate more widely – it will be hard to explain and difficult to reduce to soundbites and messages.

So we thought – lets prove we can do this – make the links between these worlds, get the insights out there and hot-house a deeper level of conversation about social media.

The world needs desperately needs disruptive ideas right now – don’t you think – new social movements, products and services that can make a positive difference, make the world a better place?

I think social media could be one of these

M: Peter seems very interested in the media and technology. You seem to be more interested in the social side of social media than the media side? 

SF: I’m interested in what has to happen inside organisation so that they can embrace social media and use it to really communicate with people as well as how social media changes the way they communicate with their customers and the general public.

In fact I don’t see a difference – one reflects the other. That’s where this specialist knowledge that we’re talking about comes in – it can be used to help make for better communications inside organisations so that they can rise to the challenge of changing the way that they communicate outside too.

There’s a lot of fear around about – organisations aren’t using to talking directly to customers- they are right to be a little bit frightened because this is a big change.

If they can do this then there’s a chance they can take advantage of working with the grain of the medium otherwise it’s going to be a case of new media, old mindset

In other words they’ll turn social media into anti-social media. More mistrust, more alienation, more scepticism

Part two: Social media activism: the Greenpeace experience

Blazing a trail as an online Greenpeace campaigner 

Part three: What do Greenpeace and Saatchi and Saatchi have in common?

Someone disturbed enough to work for both, does his best to tell us
Part four: “I’ve just had a very interesting meeting”
How Saatchi’s ‘open door ideas policy’ kick-starts the social media lab by introducing Peter to Steve
Part five: Virtual Donal McIntyre? Not quite.

How Donal McIntyre almost became an online environmental activist (courtesy of Saatchi and Saatchi)

Part six: Social media meets e-government

Repositioning a government department as a social media business