Picture the scene: you’re ready to hit go on your big social media project but are suddenly gripped by fear. The fear that despite all the research, the great concept, media spend, beautiful design and user interface, the audience just may not react with the infectious thrill you need to make this a ‘message that moves’. We deal in human responses and can never completely mitigate risk, but could it be that a solution to successful creativity in social media is so obvious that the clue is in the name… that ‘sociability’ is the fuel we need? Read More »

The Guardian is scrapping some of the functionality within its much derided frictionless sharing Facebook app, in a seeming attempt to generate more direct traffic for its website. The app was launched in September last year, soon after Facebook’s F8 developer conference, which opened up Facebook as a platform. The Guardian were one one the first users of Facebook’s Open Graph system announced at that conference.

The app meant that users could read Guardian stories directly in Facebook, and the stories they were reading appeared in the newsfeed and ticker, and so where highlighted to reader’s friends.

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Bad news again from Guardian News & Media as it announced that as many as 100 jobs are to be cut, from its staff of 650, and losses of £44m — up by £6m on last year.

Amid all of this financial pain it has pushing been ahead with its digital first ‘open journalism’ strategy that has become the core of the paper’s business. Underpinning this is an old style digital land grab. A drive for the largest audience the paper can find online fuelled by expansion into the US. All this, we are told, is apparently at odds with the implementation of any kind of paywall.

We hear this even though there is mounting evidence to suggest that having a metered paywall, as that is the only variety of relevance, is the right answer for similar newspapers. Read More »

Interesting long piece on Intelligent Life talking to Guardian editor, Alan Rusbridger, who pushes his case for keeping paywalls out.

His comments appear in the same piece as another Guardian journalist, this time phoning hacking reporter Nick Davies, gives a much gloomier take on the digital future.

I wrote earlier this week on speculation that the Guardian was planning to ditch print for digital future sooner rather than later and, quoted back in March at the Guardian Open Weekend,  Davies is extremely blunt about the future of newspapers on the web:

“In 20 years’ time there won’t be any newspapers left to do this. All these millions of hits won’t pay our salaries. The internet is killing journalism,” Davies said. Read More »

There are rumours flying around that the Guardian is planning widespread redundancies and possibly even closing all or some of its print editions in a radical move to turn itself into an entirely digital operation in 2013.

While it seems highly unlikely that the Guardian would cease printing in the next year or so Alan Rusbridger said last year, when the paper unveiled its digital first strategy, that “every newspaper is on a journey into some kind of digital future”. Read More »

It was only a few months ago that frictionless sharing was being talked about as the future of social media. It followed Facebook’s launch in September of what it called a “new breed of apps” that displayed video, music and news alongside its new timeline profile feature.

While initial results from the likes of The Guardian, The Independent and The Washington Post were very positive, with millions signing up for these Facebook social apps, that trend has now gone into steep reverse indicating the problem of over-sharing. Read More »