Making crowdsourcing work: some examples from the UK election

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(This article was also posted today on the BBC College of Journalism blog – http://www.bbc.co.uk/journalism/blog/2010/06/what-makes-people-send-us-thei.shtml)

The idea that journalists can tap into online sources to access a kind of collective consciousness is often touted as the next – or at least the current – big thing. If this is the way forward, news organisations need to understand what makes audience members decide to interact or participate.

‘Crowdsourcing’ may sound very contemporary, but it’s simply a more sophisticated version of a process that’s been around for decades, in at least two earlier forms.

- Traditional feedback

In the beginning, interaction between audience and news organisation was a simple a call-to-action, with audience members responding independently of each other.

e.g. radio call-in shows, letters to the editor

- Technologically enhanced UGC (user-generated content)

More recently, this approach has blossomed into an almost unrecognisable diversity as the audience makes use of a much wider range of technology to submit material.

e.g emails and text messages to news organisations, pictures of breaking news events submitted via mobile phones, Tweets and additions to Facebook pages.

Both the above should be distinguished from the current phase:

- Social media

Today people can comment and discuss with one another, so a feedback mechanism exists beyond the news organisation.

e.g. online dialogue between audience members, integration of social networks into news organisation output, collaborative crowd sourcing

As I’ve written about previously, I led a piece of research about UGC at the BBC, exploring the motivation of people who submit material (pictures, comments, story suggestions) to a news organisation, and to examine what stops people from responding to calls-to-action. In December 2007, only 4% of the UK population had submitted anything to an online news website.

While there were a number of reasons that people gave for not submitting material – lack of time was a common one – the most interesting reasons were:

- “I don’t know enough to comment or add anything.”

- “It’s complicated. I wouldn’t know how to take a video or photo or even how I would contact a news organisation or send anything in.”

- “There would be no point contacting a news organisation with a suggestion about a potential story as they already know about it. If they don’t cover a story I’m interested in it’s because they don’t think it’s important enough, not because they don’t know about it.”

- “I would be much more likely to comment if I thought someone important was listening, such as the Prime Minister.”

I’m repeating these here as I want to stress how important they still are, although our research was completed when journalism was still very much in the second (Technologically enhanced UGC) of the above stages. At the time, social media had hardly made a dent on newsrooms.

News organisations are slowly experimenting with innovative ways to use social media to engage the audience. The imaginary apostophes around the term ‘crowdsourcing’ make it appear to be a new and exciting element of journalism, but many crowdsourcing initiatives depend on the same behavioural characteristics that limited participation in the earlier stages of audience interaction.

So how, specifically do those factors play out in the current context? I’d like to compare three crowdsourcing initiatives from around the time of the General Election in May 2010.

- “If I were Prime Minister” video wall (BBC News – Have Your Say)

The BBC’s election wall appeared at the beginning of the campaign and featured short videos of people talking to camera saying what they would do if they were prime minister.

The hope was that people would submit their own videos but in fact very few people did, and many films were professional vox pops filmed by BBC crews when they were on location during the campaign.

In lots of ways this initiative theoretically had potential and it could have taken off. The main problem with it was the barrier to participation: most people don’t know how to film themselves, and even if they did, they would struggle to know how to submit their video to the BBC or would worry about cost. In addition, many people would feel unable to comment for 20 seconds on political policies.

- Message for the new Con/LibDem Coalition Government (Guardian Flickr Group)
The Guardian created a group on the photo-sharing site Flickr and asked people to send a message to the new Coalition Government using a photograph. In contrast to the BBC election wall, the Guardian overcame three key barriers to participation:

- Difficulty of creating and sending content

- Concern that participating was pointless

- Fear that they didn’t know enough to comment.

The project was based on photography – which is much more accessible to most people than video. The call-to-action also encouraged participation by emphasising that this wasn’t necessarily a serious project: “A greeting? A warning? Some sage (or silly) advice? An idea? A request.” And while there was no guarantee that David Cameron or Nick Clegg would look at the results, rhetorically it was set up with that intention, giving the project a purpose beyond simply contributing.

While someone might not have felt confident sending in a picture that outlined the finer points of a potential economic stimulus package, it was easy to draw “TELL THE TRUTH” in big letters on a piece of paper and hold it up to the camera.

- Commons Sense book for new MPs (BBC Radio 5 Live)

This was a project which produced a real life object, not simply a digital object. A Commons Sense book was made, and given to all of new MPs as they arrived at the House of Commons for their first day.

The suggestions in the book came from audience members who had attended outside broadcasts at the party political conferences last September. The wider audience then whittled these 600 suggestions down further to select entries for the final book.

This is a powerful example of the merits of combining off- and online engagement. It always results in the best material. And like the Guardian example, the very design of the project emphasised that suggestions would be read by people that matter, rather than soliciting audience comments for the sake of it.

All three of these initiatives had merit. This post is merely attempting to compare and in the process share what we can learn from such experiments. And experiments they are. We’re still learning what works and what doesn’t.

My point is that we already know something about what motivates and prevents people from engaging with the news – whether in a call-in radio show or an ambitious crowdsourced project online. When newsrooms are planning these initiatives, it is worth considering…

- How simple is our call to action?

- Have we made it as easy as possible for people to contribute?

- Have we made it as clear as possible how people contribute (technology needs and associated costs)?

- Have we given people a reason to contribute – beyond simply contributing (‘faux interactivity’ as one of our participants called it)? Who might be listening? Might change actually happen as a result of someone contributing?

Successful crowdsourcing projects don’t have to involve the Prime Minister listening. Two of my favourite initiatives are the BBC World Service Save our Sounds project and BBC Radio 4′s History of the World.

In both, people are asked to contribute to an online ‘archive’ that would remain for others to experience and enjoy.

To be successful it can’t be ‘interactivity for interactivity’s sake’. The audience can smell it a mile off.

Social media & journalism: a research critique

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This morning I awoke to a few people in my twitter stream retweeting a piece of research by the Society for New Communication Research about the increased reliance of journalists on social media. As someone who works every day with BBC journalists training them to do this, I was sceptical of the numbers, so did some digging.

The report was actually published in February this year, and you can read the executive summary here, and see a slideshare presentation here. The headline findings suggest social media is being taken very seriously in newsrooms.

48% are using Twitter and other microblogging sites
66% of journalists are using blogs
48% are using online video
25% are using podcasts

Overall, 90% of journalists agree that new media and communication tools and technologies are enhancing journalism to some extent.

For those of us who use social media everyday, and understand its value, it’s tempting to see these figures and quickly bookmark the document in delicious, happy they support the way we believe journalism should be headed.

The bottom line is that while the research is valuable as a qualitative study of some journalists’ attitudes (and the quotes listed in the slideshare offer some interesting insights into these), this research isn’t a quantitative representative study, however tempting the statistics are. When you look at the methodology, you can see that only 341 people took the survey and the survey was web-based.

Unfortunately I couldn’t find out how the survey was undertaken, and without that information it’s impossible to do a proper critique. For example, the executive statement claims a 95% confidence ratio, which doesn’t even make sense without other information. (Apologies to the authors if I’ve missed the detailed methodological explanation, but it should have been in the Executive Summary).

I’m particularly interested by how the web survey was distributed. Was the survey sent via email to journalists. If so, how were the journalists chosen? What was the ‘population’? To produce a representative survey, you need to be clear about the total population, and sample randomly from that population. In a world of fluid labour markets with increasing numbers of freelance journalists, how do you get a clear population, particularly when this survey boasts about its worldwide sample.

If it was a web-survey on a site where it was hoped journalists would stumble, you’re already self-selecting journalists who are spending more time on the web, and the types who are more likely to fill in web surveys. And even if it was an email with a web survey link attached, it would be self-selecting. That is fine, but the authors should have disclosed the number of journalists who received the email, and those who went on to complete the survey.

The reason I was sceptical about the figures, as much as I would like them to be true, is that I have spent the last 6 months leading training courses with BBC journalists about social media. While the journalists I have trained are mostly enthusiastic about learning more about these tools, my anecdotal evidence from training about the same number of journalists as were involved in this survey, does not support these figures.

That does not mean the BBC are behind in this regard. That also does not mean I have a self-selected sample because the people coming on the course are in some way ‘behind’. In many ways the journalists coming on the course are the ones who are ready to embrace it. But in very busy newsrooms, where resources are becoming increasingly limited (and I recognise the BBC is in a very special place in comparison to other newsrooms where income is not guaranteed), most journalists have not had the time to spend experimenting with these new tools. When your day is spent desperately trying to meet deadlines, there is no time to have a play with twitter, find relevant blogs, spend time verifying who the authors are, or battle with Facebook’s privacy settings.

Most journalists I train are aware of all the tools mentioned in this report, and want to feel more confident using them, but want time to experiment, and learn the subtleties before relying on them for newsgathering.

While they might have answered the question ‘have you used twitter in your reporting’ with a ‘yes’ because a colleague pointed them in the direction of twitter when a breaking news story unfolded and they were intrigued to see what was being said, that is different to actively using twitter as a newsgathering tool everyday. So when 48% of journalists from this survey said they have ‘used twitter’, how is ‘used’ defined? Does ‘used’ equal occasional or frequently lurking, or does ‘used’ mean regularly engaging with sources and contributing to the community?

I want to stress wholeheartedly that this post is not meant to highlight the shortcomings of BBC journalists. I have talked to a number of other people who lead training at other news organisations across the world, and I know everyone shares my experiences.

I offer anecdotal evidence to show how wary we have to be of research that is not statistically representative. This research is worthwhile and interesting, but beware of drawing conclusions which can not be drawn.

Social media offers everything the authors suggest in terms of disseminating news, finding story ideas and sources, monitoring sentiments and discussions, researching individuals and organisations, and keeping up on topics of interests and participating in conversations with the audience, but I would argue it is far from universally accepted in newsrooms.

There are some journalists who absolutely understand the value, engage daily, are wary of the potential pitfalls and their reporting is significantly improved because of it. The majority of journalists understand social media offers a range of new tool for newsgathering and building community, but understand it should be treated with caution, and the subtleties appreciated. I would say the same of this research.

User generated content and public service broadcasting

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This has also been published on the Public Service Broadcasting Forum

Between summer 2007 and 2008, I led a knowledge exchange research project, examining the use of user-generated content at the BBC. The research was co-funded by the BBC and the Arts and Humanities Research Council, and the objectives were to understand: how user-generated content was being used across BBC news; who submitted user-generated content and their motivations; and the barriers for those that did not submit content. The final report can be found here, but in this post, I want to explore the public service dimensions of user-generated content and how the rise of social media fits into the equation.

User-generated content has always been, and remains a terrible phrase because it simplifies a vast range of behaviours, but is used as a way of describing any type of material created by the audience. Our research identified five different types of user-generated content, and we argued that the catch-all term prevents a more interesting discussion of the subject. (The problem is no worthy alternative has appeared. Our attempt at ‘audience material’ was not quite right either).

We identified five main types of ‘user-generated content’:

  1. Audience content (breaking news footage, first-hand experiences)
  2. Audience comment (opinion and discussion about a news story)
  3. Collaborative content (journalism created between reporters and the audience, e.g. digital stories, community reporters etc)
  4. Networked journalism (heavy reliance on external expertise being shared on blogs and forums)
  5. Non-news content (pictures of snowmen!)

One of the main findings from the research was an acknowledgment that the ‘audience’ has always been involved in output, from letters to the editor, phone calls to radio call-in shows, to amateur footage of breaking news events. As many older journalists were quick to remind us, user-generated content in the way it was being used at the BBC, does not represent a revolution within journalism, it’s just the term ‘user-generated content’ makes it appear new and different.

While this point of view is a valid one, it is, however, difficult to believe that there was almost no user-generated content in the news coverage of the 9/11 attacks. By the London bombings, this had changed substantially, and it was the first major news event where user footage was included alongside user-generated content output. At that point the BBC had recently launched their user-generated content hub, which was a central area for gathering pictures, emails and texts from the audience, so it could be shared across the organisation. Five years on, it is the norm to expect amateur footage of a breaking new story.

The user-generated content hub situated at the heart of the BBC’s multimedia newsroom is a fascinating case study of a news organisation taking seriously material submitted by the audience. Our research showed that through moderating the Have Your Say message boards the hub journalists were constantly looking for story suggestions and case studies. This active newsgathering, significantly, was never transmitted to the audiences. The BBC was taking this material very seriously but audiences didn’t know this, which was a shame. By signaling the importance being placed on this material, it might have encouraged more people to become involved.

Perhaps the strongest aspect of the research was the exploration of who submitted user-generated content and their motivations for doing so or not. In December 2007, 72 percent if the UK population had never contacted a news organisation on any platform (17 percent had contacted a newspaper, 9 percent a radio call-in show and 4 percent an online news site). As you would expect those who had were overwhelmingly white, educated and middle class, and very heavy news users. They were also defined as ‘activists’, i.e. they had previously written letters to MPs or been members of local organisations.

When we did focus groups to examine the barriers for wider participation, there were a range of answers, but the most common were a feeling that a) they didn’t know enough about a topic (the three topics which always receive the most contributions are weather, pets and sports – issues which people feel passionately about but which there is little expectation of specialist knowledge); b) there was no reason to do so if it wasn’t going to be taken seriously, i.e. “If the prime minister was reading the message boards I would be more likely to get involved” and c) a lack of understanding that the BBC would need story suggestions (“I’ve seen the news, I know how many journalists there are. They know about everything that’s happening in my community and if they don’t cover it, it’s because they don’t care”).

All of this is very interesting in terms of public service broadcasting. If we return to the five types of user-generated content above, it is ‘collaborative content’ which is the most powerful form, but it is extremely resource heavy. Only a public broadcaster could invest time empowering audiences in terms of training them up with concrete media skills, or working jointly to tell stories from particular communities.

When we talked to people who had been involved in the digital storytelling projects in Wales, it was evident the scale of the impact on their lives. A week working with BBC journalists had provided important new digital skills, but more importantly raised self-esteem levels and empowered people to do different things with their lives. The quality of the final projects resulted in high quality content for the BBC.

However, when measuring resources versus impact, the user-generated content hub receiving 12,000 pictures a day registered highly in terms of the content received versus journalistic output, whereas a week-long intervention in the south Wales valleys was expensive to produce and only involved small numbers of people. The bottom line is that it is impossible to measure the wider impacts of those collaborative projects in the community more generally. Even the most powerful qualitative data will always struggle against statistics.

The research was published in the summer of 2008. It’s now mid-2010, and it is astounding to me how out of date the research seems in many ways. The astonishing rise of social media has meant the way the BBC interacts with the audience has changed quite fundamentally. The user-generated content hub continues to thrive and the BBC still receives emails and photographs everyday but there has been a significant shift. The amount of content flowing to the BBC via the official  user-generated content channels has decreased as people are now much more likely to share breaking news footage with friends (and a wider audience) via youtube, flickr, facebook or twitter. One of the barriers people spoke about (“I don’t know enough to comment on a BBC site”) disappears when you’re setting up or commenting on a facebook page related to the news story of the day. Similarly, the user-generated content black hole which the BBC faced (people taking time to send in a photo or comment to the BBC and seeing it never used), disappears when your friends immediately comment, like or share what you have posted.

As a result, the BBC is now spending more time on these social media sites, looking for story suggestions, case studies and breaking news footage. I designed a one-day training course to support BBC journalists in doing this. For a short time, I struggled with the idea of training journalists how to use sites such as facebook, caught up with the idea of these as private spaces, even if they were technically public. Very quickly however, I realised how journalists were connecting with a much broader spectrum of people – people who did not normally connect with the BBC. Previously the BBC would add a ‘post-form’ to the bottom of their online articles and ask people to get in touch. That type of reactive newsgathering meant the BBC was getting suggestions and materials from a very small section of the population. By being proactive and getting into the spaces where the audience is spending more of its time, it is broadening its sources, the types of stories it tells and how it tells them.

Being honest, this social newsgathering, while an improvement, is still very much about power resting with the BBC journalists to take the material and to make a story with it. It is still very much in the model of user-generated content as it has always been. The news organisation sets the agenda, and then sees whether the public can add any material or opinion, which it will then try to integrate with the ‘polished’ material they have created.

The aim is for the BBC to move in the direction of social news production, exploring ways in which these social platforms can help the BBC produce the highest quality journalism in partnership with the audience. That is quite a leap for any news organisation, but the BBC are well-placed, and because of their funding structure, have a responsibility to be leading the way in this type of journalism.

A Facebook Election: Revisiting my analysis

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Below is a post I wrote for the BBC College of Journalism blog back in January about the UK General Election. I thought it would be interesting to follow up on the numbers in terms of facebook fans and twitter followers.

I could write another full post on whether this was *the* social media election, and hopefully I will do so in the near future. But what I want to point out now is the jump in numbers in terms of Facebook fans and twitter followers. This shows that these sites did attract supporters during the election. The Conservatives jumped from 14,037 fans to 108,574 in a four month period. It will be very interesting to see whether the Conservative/Liberal Democrat coalition are able to harness this support during the process of governing. As many commented of Obama, he failed to translate his huge popularity on these social networking sites when he became president, disappointing many people who believed he would usher in a new way of garnering support for presidential policies.

This is what I wrote back in January…..

Take a look at the number of fans on the Conservatives’ Facebook page, Nick Clegg’s Twitter messages or the comments on Labour’s YouTube channel and you might conclude that 2010 will be the UK’s first social media general election.

Indeed, January began with a rush of such speculation about the electoral role of theinternet and social media. It’s an easy line to take – but the reality isn’t so clear.

Social media has the potential to affect the election in two very different ways.

First, it could offer bloggers, citizen journalists, or even an eavesdropper in a lift, the opportunity to turn an unguarded comment into a viral sensation – and, in the process, to give mainstream news organisations a chance to reflect the campaign in new ways by involving the audience in telling the story.

Secondly – which I will look at in more detail here – social media could give political parties themselves new ways to campaign.

A recent study sponsored by Hansard reported on the use of technology by individual MPs. It showed that 92% of MPs use email, 83% have a personal website, 23% use social networking and 11% blog. The report concluded that, while MPs are increasingly using technology, overwhelmingly, they are using these tools to keep constituents informed, rather than to engage them in a two-way dialogue.

As for the three main Westminster parties, each has a central website which prominently includes a menu of grassroots campaigning options (click to donate, volunteer, see events near you, sign up for email alerts etc), as well as offering ways for people to express their support for the party. In addition, each party has a presence on the main social networking sites:

The fact that these sites exist suggests social media could make a significant difference to how the parties operate in the election, but I don’t believe they are on course to realise the potential.

When you look more closely, there are already some big problems:

• There is confusion in terms of reputation management for David Cameron and Gordon Brown – with multiple false or hoax accounts. Nick Clegg appears to be more aware of this issue when you look at the number of social networks it appears on.

• Many of the more innovative ideas are not cross-linked, so the videos of people explaining ‘why they support the Conservatives’ stay hidden on the Conservative site. Likewise, Labour has an initiative called Labourspace.com where people are encouraged to suggest campaigning topics but it is hidden deep on its main site.

So what are the lessons for the UK General Election? Well, first, social media requires significant time and energy to build up a credible presence and to encourage participation and engagement. Online community management, as any successful brand or news organisation will tell you, requires focus and resources.

But the most important lesson from Obama’s campaign is how he empowered his supporters to campaign for him. He reached out to people who weren’t necessarily his core supporters, to turn supporters into doers, and doers into activists. He treated them as citizens rather than consumers.

In Britain, for the most part, the main Westminster parties’ political websites and social media sites are still preaching to the party faithful. It feels as if boxes have been ticked from an imaginary ‘Obama’s Guide to Winning Elections’, but the parties are still only scratching the surface of what is possible.

The technology exists to bring together an enthusiastic, passionate community. Encouraging peer-to-peer conversations has limitless potential for engaging new voters. To date, those tools have not been fully used. Instead of trying to reach floating voters or the apathetic and disenchanted in places where they are spending their time, the main campaigning sites appear to be working on the old broadcast model – providing information for supporters. And that’s what political websites have been doing for the past two general elections.

Treating supporters as passive consumers of scripted one-way campaign messages will have limited impact. When technology exists which allows a completely different type of campaign, it would be a wasted opportunity – and give us a General Election whose novelty is purely superficial.

Knowledge Exchange Stories

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On the 9th October, the Technology Strategy Board is hosting Innovate ’09 at the Business Design Centre in London. I’m going to be there with some people I met through the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and BBC Knowledge Exchange Programme which ran between the Summers of ’07 and ’08. We will be presenting some knowledge exchange stories – attempting to share our experiences from the programme. What worked? What didn’t? How should collaborations between academia and public service institutions be organised? How could we advise others considering going down this path?

My task is to visually map the connections I have made, both between the research team and the BBC journalists we were working with, but also the connections we managed to facilitate within the BBC. That’s not because we had special ‘connecting’ skills, but speaks to the silo mentality which develops in all large institutions, and how the simple addition of an outside pair of eyes, sees obvious connections and odd non-sensical divides.

Having no agenda (eg. no budget, no objectives to meet, no previous awkward exchanges at meetings) when walking into a room of people is strangely empowering. You can say things – make observations and even make suggestions, which might be unthinkable from someone inside the institution.

‘Consultancy’ has almost become a dirty word – too much money to state the obvious. But the truth is that the perspective of the outsider will always have real merit. I would just like to see more academics playing the role of ‘consultant’, although we need a new label. Whereas highly paid consultants from plush Soho offices can make a difference, the relationship feels one sided. For academics, having real world experience of the industries about which they write and undertake research is hugely powerful. For every presentation I’ve given at the BBC where I’ve heard ideas and suggestions, the experiences from within the room were continuously revealing, always forcing me to re-evaluate the theoretical learning I was drawing upon.

My knowledge exchange story, which will be told through a visual mapping of connections, is a story of personal relationships. Knowledge Exchange will always be limited if it is based on written reports and PowerPoint presentations. Real knowledge exchange involves people sitting alongside one another, talking, sharing and asking the most obvious questions. Throughout my 6 months on a knowledge exchange secondment, I had countless conversations with people across all departments, learning how many people were interested in similar issues and trying to find solutions to similar problems. More often than not, whenever I asked ‘ have you spoken to Bob from x department’, the follow up was ‘who’s Bob’?

All organisations are searching for the perfect internal communications strategy/best technological tools for collaboration. An outsider’s eye, without any knowledge of boundaries, divisions, internal politics or budget can work wonders. Higher Education has to find a way to make this way of undertaking research common place, rather than filing it away under ‘innovation’.