Monday 6th September 2010

Digital development and Application; Content and Creativity

The publishing industry is currently undergoing major challenges: digitisation: is changing the material form of the industry’s key artefacts; the internet is transforming the potential ways in which publications can be distributed and the expectations of their consumers; and these two lead to profound implications for the business models of companies in the industry. Through this event we hope to bring together individuals and organisations involved in academic publishing to identify the issues and set out a way forward. We will present research we have undertaken into the perceptions of publishers, and identity models for the future which have been developed in both publication and our own work with the music business.

Date: Monday 6th September 2010
Venue: The Bond, 180-182 Fazeley Street, Birmingham, B5 5SE
Travel: a five-minute taxi ride from Birmingham New Street Station.
Parking: £5 a day to be booked in advance

Full programme and details of how to be invited to this free event are available on email request from here.

On, Archives! was hosted by the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research (WCFTR) and also contained within it a dedicated symposium on ‘Broadcasting in the 1930s’ organized by Hugh Chignall (Bournemouth) and Jamie Medhust (Aberystwth).

En route to Madison we stopped over in Chicago. Now Chicago is undoubtedly a ‘cinematic’ city, so mythologised in American and wider cultures as to be already familiar to new visitors like me. We arrived on Independence Day which meant that the Stars and Stripes was ubiquitous and firework displays abounded.

Given the tendency to wax lyrical about such places in comparison to the familiarity of home I’ll reserve further remarks for another occasion. However, and acknowledging the trompe l’oeil effect of the cityscape and delights of wandering the streets in sweltering heat, what impressed were the various ways in which the cultural heritage of the city was celebrated.

Whether it was the architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright or the heritage of blues music and others, this place had plenty of cultural confidence (although less evidence of the bluster which earned the label of ‘The Windy City’). What I liked was the unself-conscious aspect of celebrating all avenues of culture, ‘high’ and ‘low’, and the entrepreneurial spirit which made this place so interesting and interested in its own history.

On to Wisconsin and ‘On, Archives!’; WCFTR was an apposite place for this event as it is home to one of the oldest and most extensive collections of print, audio/visual, and graphic materials relating to film, theater, radio and television in the United States.

The conference organizer, Professor Michele Hilmes is International Visiting Fellow in the Birmingham School of Media and a scholar whose work on media history is truly inspirational . Michele and her husband were generous enough to host a ‘Cook-Out’ for us and other visitors at their lakeside house, a highly agreeable way to acclimatize.

The conference commenced with a keynote from Tino Balio who recounted the story behind the various archives procured by WCFTR. The collections focus mainly on US entertainment-based media, particularly archives of the American film industry between 1930 and 1960 (the business records of United Artists are here), popular theater of the 1940s and 1950s, and television from the 1950s through the 1970s. Holdings include over three hundred manuscript collections from playwrights, television and motion picture writers, producers, actors, designers, directors and production companies. In addition to the paper records, materials preserved include fifteen thousand motion pictures, television shows and videotapes, two million still photographs and promotional graphics, and several thousand sound recordings. For most of us in attendance, we could spend the rest of our scholarly lives here and happily never leave the reading desks.

Later in the first day, the keynote address for the symposium was given by Dr. Kate Lacey, University of Sussex. Her paper
”Paradoxes and Paradigms: Broadcasting and its Publics in the 1930s” drew upon her knowledge of the UK and German contexts in that decade, challenging us to think in more detail about the act of listening and reception of radio in this period.

Given the size and scope of the conference there were, inevitably and regrettably, many papers that one had to miss. Nonetheless, the overall quality of scholarship was high and made each panel rewarding.

One of the most stimulating panels concerned ‘Archives and the Internet’. This featured papers from Mark Hain, Indiana University
(“Resurrecting the Vamp: Cinema’s Loss and New Media’s Finding of Theda Bara”) and Josh Jackson, University of Wisconsin-Madison
(“YouTube and the User-Generated Online Archive”). The stand-out paper here, and perhaps of the conference, came from Ken Garner of Glasgow Caledonian University. His paper continued his ongoing concern with the life and work of John Peel and was entitled:
”Ripping the Pith from the Peel: Institutional versus internet cultures of archiving popular music radio – The case of BBC Radio 1′s John Peel Show”. This reported back on the activities of fans to unearth recordings of Peel’s show from over 4 decades of broadcasting and to digitize and share the fruits of these labours. Most intriguing were the results of his online survey of Peel aficionados and their perception of the BBC’s archiving activities.

The symposium proved to be a successful innovation and further papers of note included those in the ‘BBC Talks and Education’ panel, notably Todd Avery’s 
”The Trumpets of Autocracies and the Still, Small Voices of Civilisation: Hilda Matheson, Emmanuel Levinas, and the Ethics of Broadcasting in a Time of Crisis”. While Levinas never emerged in this paper, the account of the remarkable Hilda Matheson’s ideas on radio and the 1930s moment was a useful extension of Avery’s exploration of ‘Radio Modernism’.
Elsewhere, Ben Harker (University of Salford, biographer of Ewan MacColl) spoke on “Communists on the BBC, 1935–39″. Undoubtedly a small number of individuals, communists in the BBC were responsible for some of the most interesting of productions in the 1930s which challenged the patrician and culturally conservative nature of the voice of UK radio. While other papers illuminated other stories that also challenged any view of the BBC as politically and culturally heterogeneous, its dominant character for so long was exactly that, this calling into question the nature of the ‘public’ it addressed (or constructed) in its remit. I look forward to reading the results of this research as it emerges.

Tim Wall gave two papers. The first took place under the aegis of the symposium and was entitled: “Radio Remotes and the Nightlife of the Big City”. Although I missed the presentation and what sounded like a stimulating panel, Tim’s paper concerned the way in which histories of radio and jazz tended to reproduce each other’s shortcomings. This was explored through a reflection on Tim’s passion – Duke Ellington – and accounts of his place in early ‘remote’ radio broadcasts, or transmissions from jazz and other music venues. He revealed how existing histories are deficient in mapping the practicalities of these early years, leading to various kinds of historical confusion.

This historical reflection was taken up in Tim’s second paper as part of the panel ‘Archives and Institutions’. Speaking on “Public Service broadcasting, archives, and cultural television” Tim outlined some of his thinking on the way in which the BBC have constructed histories of popular music in recent years, notably in the ‘Britannia’ series of programmes.. Given the enviable resources amalgamated in such works (and in the US in series such as Ken Burns’ ‘Jazz’ et al), they often fall short as history, tending to offer rounded narratives in the service of the demands of televisual convention when audiences and materials suggest that something more adventurous and stimulating might be attained. The challenge of this paper however was to reflect on what role the academy might play in critiquing and aiding such histories. That we might actually take a role would be a start!

This panel also included Christopher Cwynar, University of Wisconsin-Madison
speaking on “NFB.ca: The Digital Archive as National Place in the Virtual World” and Jennifer Porst, University of California-Los Angeles
”The U.S. v. Twentieth Century-Fox, et al.: How the Forced Disclosure of Documents in Legal Cases Provides an Invaluable Resource for Researchers”. Chris provided a very stimulating assessment of the Canadian Film Board’s online activity (and a nuanced reading of its sight) while Jennifer used legal records to get at the kind of interview questions one would ask of film executives if only one could go back in time.

My paper was part of the first panel of Friday, the final day, encompassed in the theme ‘Documenting the Documentary: Postwar Public Affairs Programming’ and chaired by the delightful Shawn VanCour, University of South Carolina. Matthew Ehrlich, University of Illinois, gave an interesting paper:
”Radio Utopia: Postwar Audio Documentary in the Public Interest”. This exploration of dynamic radio production on issues of public concern was fully illustrated with extracts from US radio features from the 40s and early 50s which for us drew attention to how different the sound of US radio was compared to the staid BBC.

My own paper was entitled “Inscribing the work of Philip Donnellan into documentary and other histories”. This developed my longstanding concern with the work and archive of this important, but not obscure, documentarist. My aim of exploring the nature of Archiving was rather attenuated but it is important I think to record a comment I picked up from Mark Haynes and which brought home to me something of the value of doing archive work. He suggested that for most people, the Archive is not something that they are familiar with, even though of course, many people are involved in a kind of personal, informal archiving process (of their cultural collections, personal artefacts etc). For us academics, our access to and use of archives is a privilege, even if we are sometimes under the controlling eye of archivists and institutional regulations which appear at times as if it would be preferable to NOT use the archive and touch its treasures.

Such observations, as well as the particularity of media archives raise questions about how we understand the Archive. Perhaps it is down to the variety of sessions and my own choices, but what did not emerge as fully as I had hoped were more provocative reflections on this meta-area. Nonetheless, this event was broad enough and gathered together enough scholars with an interest in such questions as to allow other discussions and collaborations that prompted reflections outside of the formal spaces of panels and papers.

On the final day we had the option of being taken on a tour of the WCFTR archives that are housed in a fine old building on the university campus. On the tour then, it was a delight to sample some of these treasures and to see original sketches from costume designer Edith Head as well as a set of letters from the screenwriter Dalton Trumbo. One of the ‘Hollywood Ten’, Trumbo was jailed for his defiance of the anti-communist Senate hearings in the 1950s and we were privileged to be shown some of his letters to his wife that were written from his prison cell. Faced with such documents, the value of the archive is tangible and one feels able to commune in some manner with the historical moment. The skill of those at this event was to make media history come alive out of such materials.

Social capital also crops up a lot in conversations about social policy, and in this sense it flows from the ideas of James Coleman (1988) and Robert Putnam (2000, 2003). Putnam is most commonly associated with a model for measuring social capital that equates membership of clubs and societies to the stock of social capital within a community. His work is positioned as a treatise to social policy makers calling for a renewal in civic society:

“As the twentieth century ended, Americans gradually began to recognize that the sprawling pattern of metropolitan settlement that we had built for ourselves in the preceding five decades imposes heavy personal and economic costs […] So I challenge America’s urban and regional planners, developers and home buyers: Let us act to ensure that by 2010 Americans will spend less time travelling and more time connecting with our neighbors than we do today, that we will live in more integrated and pedestrian-friendly areas, and that the design of our communities and the availability of public space will encourage more casual socialization with friends and neighbors.” (Putnam, 2000, pp.407-8)

It has been pointed out (Fine, 2001) that Putnam and Coleman loom large over academic literature of social capital, and many academic authors build theoretical frameworks around their ideas. So, as academics start to examine social media they are likely to think about social capital, and they are likely to read Putnam’s (2000) Bowling Alone. But Bowling Alone doesn’t talk about social capital in quite the same way that “the Internet” talks about it.

For some studies, Putnam’s work, and the work which follows it, can be incredibly useful. If your questions want to measure networks, and bonding structures then follow the citation trails from Putnam that lead you forward to Burt (2009) and back to Granovetter (1973). But if you’re looking to write about online culture, this framework is limited. You need Bourdieu.

Bourdieu defined social capital as the:

“aggregate of the actual or potential resources which are linked to the possession of a durable network of more or less institutionalized relationships of mutual acquaintance and recognition” (Bourdieu, 1986, p.248)

Bourdieu’s model of social capital is quite loose and theoretical, and all the more useful for it when attempting to understand social media culture. There are no equations here, as with Putnam, simply an acknowledgement that social capability can confer power upon individuals and groups. To my mind, that is the key issue at the basis of much that is interesting about social media.

At IAMCR 2010 I presented a paper called Help Me Investigate: the social practices of investigative journalism. The paper explored a crowdsourced investigation, seeking to understand how people worked collectively to affect a positive outcome for the group. A member of the team behind the project told me they were:

“Very happy [with the outcomes of the investigation], but also wondering how easily you can recreate that. It tapped into the right community at the right time… and unearthed a big story.”

For me this is social capital, after Bourdieu, reified: a potential resource existed within a pre-existing community, and it was activated by a set of social media practices, delivering benefit to its collective owners. Without the social capital, the clever social media tools would be useless.

I’m not seeking here to critique those who use other approaches to social capital: they are valid ideas for important questions. What I hope to point out is that “social capital” is a term with different meanings; when we talk about “social capital” we need to be quite clear about what we mean. Also I want to highlight that by going back to Bourdieu, we can reclaim the idea to think through some interesting questions that describe social media as culture, rather than as a network.

This is an expansion of a point made in my paper, presented to the 2010 conference of the International Association of Media & Communication Research – the full paper is on my personal blog. I have also written an extended literature review on the topic of social capital which I would be happy to share.

Bibliography

BOURDIEU, P. 1986. The Forms of Capital. Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education. Connecticut: Greenwood Press.

BURT, R. S. 2009. Network Duality of Social Capital. In: BARTKUS, V. O. & DAVIS, J. H. (eds.) Social Capital: Reaching Out, Reaching In. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing Limited.

COLEMAN, J. S. 1988. Social Capital in the Creation of Human Capital. American Journal of Sociology, 94, S95 – S120.

DOCTOROW, C. 2003. Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, New York, Tor Books.

FINE, B. 2001. Social Capital versus Social Theory, London, Routledge.

GRANOVETTER, M. S. 1973. The Strength of Weak Ties. American Journal of Sociology, 78, 1360.

PUTNAM, R. D. 2000. Bowling Alone, New York, NY, USA, Simon & Schuster.

PUTNAM, R. D., FELDSTEIN, L. M. & COHEN, D. 2003. Better Together: restoring the American community, New York, NY, USA, Simon & Schuster.

Tony Palmer’s – All You Need is Love from Interactive Cultures on Vimeo.

Prof Tim Wall and Dr Paul Long presenting to the Sights and Sounds conference, University of Salford, June 2010. All You Need is Love is a 17 part documentary covering the Story of Popular Music. The program was originally broadcast between 1976 and 1981, but since that time it has neither been commercially released or repeated.

Popular music fandom: a one day symposium, took place at the University of Chester and was organised by Mark Duffett from the School of Media at Chester. As I will be conducting some research around fans as part of my PhD research I thought it would be useful to attend.

The keynote presentation was from Matt Hills from Cardiff University who is one of the UK’s key thinkers in Fan Culture and Fan studies. I had worked with Matt in the past as part of a research team that conducted some research about audience/fan online interaction with the BBC Radio websites as part of a Knowledge Transfer Project. Matt’s presentation was around considering new ways of looking at and researching fan culture based on three ideas of post-popular music, mnemic communities and intermediary fandoms. What I particularly liked was the area of mnemic communities drawing on the work of Bollas (1993) and how music has personal and/or community memory stored within it. He also touched on the idea of whether those memories are imagined and /or a community narrative. I thought this would be very useful to my research as my object of study centres around cultural/popular memory.

Mark  Duffett delivered an interesting paper on moving towards a new vocabulary of fan theory in researching and investigating fandom. He laid out a 9 step vocabulary model which due to my deep interest in what he was saying I failed to make any notes-doh!! I am hoping he will e-mail me his PowerPoint slideshow and if so I will comeback to discussing his ideas on a future blog. What was great about these two presentations was the fact that I am new to fan studies and it seems that I am at a point of entry where the ways of thinking about fandom are taking a new turn and I am getting current and future ideas from two of the leading UK researchers and commentators in the field.

Alexei Michailowsky from the University of Rio De Janeiro delivered an interesting paper about when the researcher is a fan and methodological points in carrying out research into your favourite artist. This was based on his experiences into researching Brazilian musician Marcos Valle. This brought up some useful strategies for me regarding my own research as a fan of British anarcho-punk.

I also met two very interesting people John Harries and Lisa Busby from a band called Sleeps in Oysters who have released records on Seed Records . John had attended to present a paper on David Bowie: A Case Study of the Established Artist as Fan and ‘Musical Conscience’ for the Mainstream which I unfortunately missed because it clashed with another presentation about Northern Soul from Dr Nicola Smith from UWI Cardiff which was really interesting and informative.  Lisa is not only a musician but also an academic who teaches music at Oxford Brookes University We had some interesting conversations about their band and performing their music live and also the revival of the audio cassette and interesting ways to package and market music in the digital age which is something that they and Seed Records really like to explore and develop.

We also talked about her course and she has said that there may be an opportunity to talk to her students about marketing, PR and promotion of music and musicians. She discussed a future conference she is organising and said that there would be an opportunity for me to present at it which will be a great opportunity.

A real coup of the day was meeting a fellow punk Michelle Liptrot from the University of Bolton. She is in the final stages of her PhD research into the longevity of anarcho-punk and hardcore. She hopes to submit in November but from our discussions we determined that some of her research and research findings would be really useful in informing my research. She has generously offered to send me a list of useful texts from her bibliography which I am really grateful for. I wish her the best of luck with the completing stages of her thesis and look forward to reading it once it’s published-if not before. We will definitely keep in touch.

All in all a really informative day that has given me some great ideas and very useful contacts. Thanks to Mark Duffett and his team for organising the symposium.



To enter the competition, bookaholics need to express their love of the printed word by uploading their own book-themed photos to Flickr. Some examples can be seen in the Flickr slideshow below.

Can you be more creative? Full details of how to enter are available here. The deadline is 15 July 2010. Good luck!

6-8pm

Wednesday 30th June 2010

Birmingham Library Theatre

The Colony, originally made as an innovative TV documentary, explores the experience of members of the Caribbean migrant community in Birmingham and the Midlands. The film allows its subjects space to candidly evaluate their reception in the UK and their relationships with home and other migrant workers. Controversial at the time of its original broadcast the film is an enduring and powerful document of a key moment in post-war British history.

Everyone is welcome but the event is particularly aimed at those with an interest in the social history of the region, post-war migration and community, documentary film and the BBC. We want to contact educators, heritage and community groups and researchers who will find Donnellan’s archive useful and who might aid in finding ways of preserving it and promoting its use as a resource for the social and cultural history of the region.

Biography: Philip Donnellan (1924-99) worked for the BBC from 1948-84. Much of his professional life was spent in the Midlands where he worked first in radio and then in television. His work expressed his belief in the value of ordinary life and culture and the need to give working people and underrepresented social minorities a space in which to articulate their concerns in their own voices.

The project: Philip Donnellan’s un-catalogued archive is held in the Birmingham Archives and contains an extensive range of film, audio and print material pertaining to his career with the BBC and the works he made in and about the region. An award from Screen West Midlands has allowed the employment of an archive worker to assess these deposits. As a result, we are already finding rich materials such as unbroadcast films, oral histories and programme research materials.

More information: Details of Donnellan’s life and work can be found at the

‘Friends of Philip Donnellan’ website

Subscribe to the posterous site

Join the Facebook group

Help? Please pass this invitation on to your networks and to those who may find the project to be of interest. If you are interested but cannot make the event, let us know and we’ll keep you informed of developments and available resources. If you can get an audience together and find a venue, we’ll be glad to come and show some of the films to you and talk about the project.

RSVP: If you wish to attend, please forward your details to:

donnellanphilip@googlemail.com

Postal address:

Dr Paul Long
Reader in Media and Cultural History
Birmingham School of Media
BCU
B42 2SU

Who is involved? The project is funded by Screen West Midlands and managed by a partnership of Birmingham Archives and Heritage, Media Archive Central England (MACE) and Birmingham Centre for Media and Cultural Research, Birmingham City University.

Essays must reach the Editor of Midland History by 31 October 2010. The winning essay, and others judged meritorious, will be published in Midland History.

Applications should be addressed to: The Editor, Midland History, Department of History, University of Birmingham, B15 2TT, United Kingdom

r.p.cust@bham.ac.uk

Last week, I spoke here about attempts towards a formula for measuring social media engagement about a music artist on Twitter. That was one of the conversations I had with New Music Labs founder Ard Boer, whose Tribemonitor service tracks social media and online metrics for artists and labels.

I’ve been working on a small, IDEA-funded Knowledge Transfer project with New Music Labs to help think through new ideas and approaches for Tribemonitor.

Ard and I spoke at length about the idea of innovative strategies for independent artists in the social media space. At present, a default approach appears to be to do whatever it takes to get followed and increase your audience size.

Artists will encourage their fans to ‘Add me on Facebook, Follow me on Twitter, Sign up to my email list, Friend me on MySpace, Subscribe to my RSS feed, Go to my blog…’ and so on. The idea behind this strategy is that the artist can then continue to develop their fanbase as a discrete number of people, and communicate with them (broadcast to them) on a regular basis.

However, a reflective discussion with Ard about the realities and psychology at work within the social media space suggest that an alternative strategy can be identified. It’s one that has a potential to use the medium more effectively, and around which an innovative business development can be formed.

And that’s to turn the process inside out.

Following your fans
The degree of success to which an individual or organisation uses social media is not proportionate to the number of people to whom they manage to broadcast. As we touched upon in the social media algorithm experiment, it’s important to consider the degree of engagement, and the ‘interestingness’ of the artist – not simply the broadcast-era formula of ‘reach and frequency’ by which advertising success is measured.

As a result, a two-way, reflective and responsive approach is needed. Collecting people who will sign up to your mailing list, or add your Twitter feed to their ever-expanding stream of social media noise is not sufficient. It’s important to listen more than it is to talk.

As a result of these discussions, we proposed a hypothetical ‘inside out’ artist signup page. When you discover an artist and decide that you like their music, you go to a page where you add your own social media information.

My Twitter name:
My Facebook page:
My MySpace:
My Flickr account:
My YouTube:

and so on.

By volunteering this information, it’s possible for the artist to learn what is of interest, and how to connect directly with the fan.

Of course, with any significant numbers of fans, the role of the entrepreneurial innovator is to aggregate the information and provide meaningful data to the artist or label. For instance:

“A lot of your fans are also interested in motorsports. I know that you’re interested in motorsports. Perhaps this is a topic you could talk about on your own Twitter profile or engage with to strengthen the fan connection…”

“These fans took photos at Glastonbury festival last year. You’re playing at Glastonbury this year. Why not comment on their Flickr stream and ask if they’re coming to see you this time around?”

“This fan has been raving about your music on Facebook to their 500 friends. You should leave them a comment or send them a free track…”

And so on. The opportunity to do textual and content analysis to spot trends and identify shared areas of interest amongst your fans is only possible if you consider the social media environment as a conversational space, rather than as a broadcast medium.

This is not to say that building an ever-larger fanbase is not a helpful strategy for independent music promotion – but that thinking of that only in terms of a numbers game leads to the kind of strategy that automatically adds friends on MySpace whether or not they like (or have even heard) the music.

A smaller number of engaged and interested people is worth far more than a large number of people who are either disinterested in or actively annoyed by your communication.

By listening more than talking, an artist’s social media interaction has the opportunity to be far more engaged and responsive – and in order to facilitate this, there lies the potential for an online service (or what we conceived of as an additional aspect of Tribemonitor) to provide the opt-in signup facility, as well as the data analysis and interpretation that will inform conversational media strategy for the artist.

Obviously, these principles do not simply apply to music fandom, but can be applied equally to businesses and communities of all kinds. It’s possible to extrapolate broader principles and methodologies from this discussion – but my focus was on being helpful to Tribemonitor, whose focus is on music artists and record labels.

I’m grateful to Ard for the permission to discuss here in public what some might consider to be commercially sensitive information (Tribemonitor plan to build such a service, but have not as yet done so). However, Ard is keen to hear open discussion on the ideas around strategy. New Music Labs’ expertise with respect to this service is more in the area of interpretation, analysis – and the consultancy that can come out of this sort of market intelligence.

I’ve just been in Groningen in the Netherlands to brainstorm and research Tribemonitor – an online information service to artists and record labels, created by New Music Labs.

The purpose of Tribemonitor is to measure the popularity of music artists based on social media buzz across a range of platforms, rather than on sales or radio airplay.

Measuring online buzz is not a simple thing to do, however. There are some scrapable and publicly accessible pieces of information such as Last.FM plays or numbers of MySpace friends that are obvious and countable. These simple statistical measures that make a good starting point that can act as a basis for artist consultancy (or reassurance): number of MySpace plays, number of artist followers on Twitter, number of YouTube views, etc.

But these metrics only measure what could be described as fan activity, rather than a useful and measurable social score, which would have more to do with the extent to which that artist is being discussed outside of their own sphere of influence. And this is the reason for this intervention.

Social capital and the popular music artist
Popularity is the basis on which commercial music derives income from recordings and performances. But popularity is not the same as CD sales or gig attendances. Instead, those are mechanisms of commercial activity based on the social capital afforded by popularity. In other words, popularity is the engine of commercial music success, and not simply its measure.

Thus, gauging that social currency allows for commercial approaches that understand and maximise popularity. Being interesting, noteworthy or remarkable is not a business strategy – but it is a platform on which a business strategy can be built. Monitoring and tracking the social capital of popular music artists offers up important market information for analysis and interpretation.

The first step is to be countable and comparable – both against competing artists, and longitudinally with respect to one’s own previous performance. By comparing data over time, it’s possible to get a sense of ‘what’s working’ and ‘what’s not’. It’s a blunt tool, but does flag up when and where there are things of interest going on. On that basis, targeted content analysis can be indicated and recommended.

Seeking a simple but practical approach
Leaving aside sentiment analysis (whether the mention is positive or negative, or to what degree), there is challenge enough in simply weighing that media data – let alone analysing it for mood. However, for the sake of simplicity, and on the pretext that ‘any publicity is good publicity’, merely identifying messages and their capturing their echoes through the social media environment provides the basis for a useful indicator of online ‘buzz’.

A good place to start is the area of mentions in social media contexts. While the demographics of different services are quite different (users of Twitter tend to be older and of higher socio-economic standing than users of the popular Dutch social network Hyves, for instance), it’s difficult to take the temperature of social media buzz in closed and largely private systems such as Facebook. A predominantly public and externally measurable system like Twitter gives a good leaping-off point in terms of measuring online social currency, and how that changes over time.

At the very least, it provides a starting point for an exploration of the complexities of this sort of social media data.

Simply measuring mentions of the artist is not sufficient. There is a difference in impact between a mention and a reply – but an algorithm that worked by identifying the artist’s Twitter user name would not necessarily distinguish between the two:

Mention:
I went and saw @thisiskrause perform last night. She was amazing!

Reply:
@thisiskrause I liked your show.

Twitter distinguishes between those two types of directed message – and so as far as ‘buzz’ is concerned (certainly from a promotional culture perspective), a mention is ‘worth more’ than a reply. And a mention may equally be the artist name (‘Krause’) or their Twitter handle (‘@thisiskrause’).

Now, if I tweeted those messages above, all of my followers would see the ‘mention’ – but only those people that followed both me and @thisiskrause (as well as Krause herself) would see the ‘reply’.

Next there are variables to be considered:

1) How many followers do I have?
2) How engaged/interested are those followers?
3) How influential are my followers on average?
4) How many people responded to or retweeted that particular message?

In order to factor those in, it’s necessary to come up with a calculation that accounts for each, and then arrive at a score that can be additive, so that a total figure across all mentions within a particular period can be arrived at. That score can be monitored over time for that one artist, or compared across the board with other artists.

Doing the maths
While the numerical value of ‘social media score’ is essentially an arbitrary figure, as it does not count a specific measurable object, when applied across the board it does provide a meaningful and (most importantly) a comparable index.

The first variable – number of followers (F) – is easy to count. But it’s perhaps not the most important thing. If I have 1000 followers, but they’re not really paying attention to what I have to say, then my tweets will have less impact than someone who has the same number of followers, but whose followers actively engage that person in conversation.

So we came up with a ‘Social Score Multiplier’ (M), which is simply a means by which it is possible to arrive at a weighted figure that is based on the average number of replies that the person receives each day. In other words, the degree to which the tweeter’s followers are ‘engaged’.

After playing around with a number of formulae to come up with a figure that would make what we considered to be a reasonable adjustment with respect to the level of attention and interest that person receives online (E), we decided on an algorithm that would return a figure that started at a multiplier of 1 (zero average replies a day), and increased by 0.1 (to a multiplier of 1.1) for each 1 daily reply, averaged from a year’s worth of data.

So the social score multiplier was 1 + (0.1 x (Replies in the past year ÷ 365))

M = 1 + (0.1 x (E ÷ 365))

Then we factored in the small impact of the overall influence of the followers of the person who has tweeted about the artist, by including the AVERAGE number of followers that the tweeter’s followers have (A), as well as an adjustment for the number of retweets and responses that individual tweet inspired (N).

In so doing, we arrive at a weighted ‘Buzz’ score (B) for each tweet:

B = ((F x M) + ((1+N) x A))) ÷ 100

To explain – the buzz score of a certain tweet is measured by the number of followers, adjusted by the social score multiplier (to account for how engaged that user is), PLUS the number of retweets multiplied by the average number of followers (plus one, to avoid a zero result where the tweet is not retweeted at all), divided by 100 – to give a usable and comparable score.

So… if a person with 1000 followers, who has had 1825 replies in the past year (an average of 5 replies per day), tweets about Krause, their social score multiplier is 1.5. If their tweet about Krause is not retweeted, and their followers collectively have an average following of 150, then the sum is as follows:

((1000 x 1.5) + ((1 + 0) x 150))) ÷ 100 = 16.5

The overall social score of that one tweet is measured at 16.5

Alternatively, a tweet from a person with 2000 followers, who had 1200 replies in the past year have a social score multiplier of 1.33 (ie: 1 + (0.1 x (1200 ÷ 365))). Let’s assume that their followers also have an average following of 150, but that they were retweeted once. The social score of their similar tweet will be as follows:

((2000 x 1.33) + ((1 + 1) x 150))) ÷ 100 = 29.58

And finally, that one person who retweeted our last example has the following impact, given that nobody retweets them, they have fewer followers (say, 100), their followers are less engaged with them (20 replies in the past year) and their followers have, on average, fewer followers themselves (60).

((100 x 1.01) + ((1 + 0) x 60))) ÷ 100 = 2.21

Now, in order to arrive at an overall social score for Krause for this week (day, month…), we simply add up the scores of all of the mentions in that period.

16.5 + 29.58 + 2.21 = 53.3

Now we have a number that we can compare to previous periods, and to other artists.

This is not a “value”
It’s important to bear in mind that there are plenty of other variables that could potentially influence this social score, if they were factored into the calculations. For instance, if a person who tweets a link to a YouTube video is then retweeted by two other people, there are some very simple calculations that would follow above. However, those calculations do not factor in the extent to which an audience overlaps. If I have 1000 followers, and I send out a message – and two people each with 1000 people retweet that message, we come to a conclusion as if there is no overlap between those three audiences of 1000 different people. However, it is conceivable that they are the SAME 1000 people (or at least, significantly overlapping), so that rather than reach 3000 people, you have reached 1000 people three times.

And there are plenty of other variables besides.

However, the social score is not a measurement as much as it is an indicative figure. It would be possible to complicate the algorithm with this, and any number of other variables, but there would be diminishing returns in terms of factoring those variables in – and counteracting factors such as the principle of reinforcement. Arguably, a message heard three times has more than three times the psychological influence than that message heard once – so what may appear on the surface to be a diminished impact may be more influential through repetition.

Without getting too deeply into cognitive science (and, for that matter, deep maths), it is possible to arrive at a figure that while neither pinpoint accurate nor comprehensive in terms of what it represents, can still be a meaningful and useful figure. While a broad and necessarily imprecise statistic, the social score can provide a consistent and comparable guide that factors in some of the main influencing factors within a social media framework.

This is not a “cause”
However, I’d caution further that it’s not possible to ascribe causal factors to that data.

For instance, while it is meaningful to assert that an artist with a score of 100 is more “interesting” in the online social sphere than an artist with a score of 10, one cannot draw correlations between those scores and sales of records or attendances at performances. An artist who has not released an album for ten years, but has recently died may draw more ‘buzz’ online, but will not attract any more concertgoers as a result.

And while it’s possible that the interest in this newly-deceased artist may result in an increase in sales, that would only be true if their record is in the store available in shops or online.

In other words, the social score gives an indication ONLY of how “interesting” the artist is at a given point. But that level of interest provides useful market information to artists and labels that might indicate where opportunities may exist.

It is neither the role of Twitter nor its effect to cause consumers to act in a particular way – nor is it connected with the extent to which businesses are supplying a market. The social score is a broad marker of discussion – and not a reason that one artist may be more successful than another in financial terms. Some moderately successful artists are entirely invisible in the online sphere, and some lesser known acts are very active with large and engaged fan communities online.

This is an instructive and indicative data set
There are three main ways in which this data can be used:

A snapshot figure – a single score looked at in a moment in time. Useful as a comparison amongst other, similar artists. (“How interesting am I, comparatively speaking?”

Over time – whether or not that number increases or decreases from week to week. (“Am I doing better or worse online? Did my publicity stunt draw more people?”)

Rate of change – the acceleration (or deceleration) of buzz. If the score goes from 1 to 10 to 100 to 1000 week by week, that is an exponential rate of change – as opposed to a score that goes from 10 to 20 to 30 to 40 – which has a linear growth. (“Is there something interesting going on with this artist that we can capitalise on?”)

Providing commercial clients with these statistics, which would be difficult to collect, analyse and interpret themselves, provides an opportunity to discuss ways in which the social media environment could be captalised on and changes in interest can be used as an occasion for marketing.

Moreover, it would be possible to identify and engage with key online influencers – in order to incentivise and reward those fans and opinion leaders who contribute the most to this social media process.

We don’t think the formula is correct
While the algorithm we’ve arrived at is simply a tool to arrive at a comparable and trackable social score, we think it will be very possible to improve upon its methods and become more sophisticated with time.

The second part of this research is to invite people to suggest alterations to the formula, integrate other factors you think may be important, and correct the ways in which the design of the formula calculates and communicates what we are trying to capture and present.

While Tribemonitor is a commercial service, which includes further analysis and interpretation of the data, we believe the means by which some of the data is arrived at would benefit from an open source approach. Mathematicians, statisticians, psychologists, social scientists – as well as musicians – will have opinions as to how this algorithm could be developed further.

As a piece of research, we are very keen to hear what effects could be incorporated to represent important social impacts; and ways in which the numbers could be more meaningful.

For instance, we were interested in ways in which the social score multiplier (M) could be expressed as a ratio of the number of followers (F). Having 1 reply per day, on average, could be considered not very engaged for a Twitter user with thousands of followers – but very engaged indeed for a Twitter user with only ten followers.

Likewise, adjustments could conceivably be made to allow for differences between occasional tweeters and verbose Twitter users. It’s certainly possible that a single tweet could be buried under an avalanche of tweets if the person is a heavy twitter user. To what extent is this significant, and how could this be represented in the formula?

We look forward to hearing (and sharing) your thoughts.