Australia’s biggest telco closed down their corporate blog nowwearetalking without warning yesterday — and deleted all the content. While I can understand they want to put the often-controversial forum behind them, I think the move was a mistake.

I’ve already written about this for Crikey, Telstra consigns nowwearetalking to the memory hole. It seems odd to kill NWAT just as it was changing for the better – even more so given there’s no replacement. There’s comments from Stephen Collins and Fake Stephen Conroy, as well as Telstra’s official spokesperson Craig Middleton. It’s free to read. Off you go.

But I’d also like to publish the full interviews I did for that story. So here they are.

Stephen Collins

First, here’s my email interview with Stephen Collins of acidlabs, aka @trib.

What do you think of Telstra’s sudden closure of NWAT?

Obviously, it’s up to them, they own and ran NWAT. But I think the approach taken is incredibly disappointing. It shows that while they have taken some steps in engaging with their community they still don’t get what community is. What they’ve effectively done is bulldoze a four year old village before building a new one. It smacks of paternalism (though I don’t think that’s quite the right word).

What’s wrong with closing it down the way they did, removing content?

By simply closing NWAT, Telstra shows incredible contempt for the people who gave over their time to contribute to the site over the past four years. They fail to realise that by creating a community at NWAT (whatever its shortcomings over the years), they ceded some ownership of that community to its participants. Just shutting NWAT down demonstrates pretty clearly that NWAT as a community and community as a practice at Telstra are actually pretty low on the list of priorities. I find it quite surprising as I know several of the people involved in NWAT and have met and spoken to their senior management. The things they’ve told me in the past don’t point to this type of action. Perhaps the new CEO is ensuring he marks his territory the way he wants it?

Here’s the thing, though. By destroying NWAT and not having something to replace it, and ideally to improve upon it, Telstra leaves a vacuum. Nature abhors a vacuum. So, where will we go to talk about Telstra issues and their community? It’ll be Whirlpool, or somewhere else where Telstra will either simply ignore the issues or have to build significant social capital in order to be engaged with. Just shutting NWAT down is a remarkably short-sighted corporate play.

Of course, despite tanking share prices, Telstra and its management have a swimming pool of money to frolic in, so they can afford to not care about community. As the major telco, they still have the lion’s share of the market and likely will for a long time. They could as easily ignore community as pay the apparent lip service to it that they have. I really hope this backfires on them to show the power of community, but at the moment, they’re probably just too big to care — we’re the gnat trying to annoy the elephant. I hope we’re a big enough gnat.

Any comment on their explanation given at nowwearetalking or with their new temporary blog at telstrablogfeedback.com.au?

It is and looks like a half-baked interim measure. As I’ve said, it’s incredibly short-sighted. It’s great that they’re coming out with something new, but to kill NWAT before the new site was ready is plain dumb and disrespects the community they’ve built. Any failings NWAT had were at least in part offset by the fact that Telstra were engaging with people in some way.

I have to suspect that the death of NWAT is a part of some internal Telstra turf-marking war in the wake of the last of the Trujillo management.

How would you have handled it?

I wouldn’t have done what Telstra has, that’s for sure. I have more respect for my community and the people I talk to than they do, apparently.

I’d have announced the new site, probably on NWAT itself, but I’d have kept NWAT going. The content there has so much value — it represents four years of sometimes useful engagement between a huge corporate and its community. Just imagine what would happen if all the online engagement activities Dell or Microsoft do were just switched off? There’d be uproar. Telstra deserves the same.

Even if Telstra slowly wound NWAT down, reducing activity as they moved to the new site, that would have been so much better.

And they should never, ever have just removed NWAT. By building community there, it no longer belonged just to them. It’s incredibly disrespectful.

Craig Middleton

Craig Middleton is Telstra’s official media spokesperson, on Twitter as @VoxofTLS.

While I understand you might want a change of style or direction, why remove all the content that’s been built up? Doesn’t that lack transparency, and show a lack of respect for the value of people’s contributions?

The conversation moves on. Social media is very much about the now and the future. My understanding is that the National Library in Canberra has archived the site, so that is good from an historical perspective, but it’s a bit like keeping old newspapers and I say that with due respect to the contributions and effort people put into their NWAT contributions.

Why do it suddenly and without any warning, especially when there’s no replacement ready for “months”?

The delay in bringing out NWATs’ replacement is so that we can hear from our customers, stakeholders and social media followers what will be important for them in the next iteration of our social media strategy. Think of it like a big focus group.

Why didn’t you just have kept using the NWAT platform, albeit with less-frequent posts, until the replacement was ready?

It’s a different world for us now. NWAT was part of a different conversation and different approach. It was ground breaking and a milestone in corporate social media engagement, but we now have new management focus for Telstra and all of our communications channels need to reflect this new approach.

There’s speculation that this is part of an attempt to make Telstra look less aggressive, removing the last remnants of the Sol era. As Tim Burrows put it, “[NWAT was so associated wit Phil Burgess and the Sol era that it couldn’t get rid of that stench of propaganda.” Is that a fair summary?

It goes without saying that we want to ensure that our external communications reflect the vision and aims of our management team. David Thodey has made it clear he has a different approach to engaging customers and stakeholders. And there is no argument we intend to remain a leader in corporate engagement through social media.

So there you have it. What do you think?

Ten years ago The Cluetrain Manifesto claimed, in the first of its 95 Theses, that “markets are conversations”. Unfortunately, this has led marketers to continue to believe that the reverse is also true — that all conversations are markets.

Or, more precisely, marketers believe that all places where humans gather to converse are places where they can and should take their marketing message.

Some marketers, anyway.

The marketers I want to slap.

This isn’t helped by some later theses of The Cluetrain Manifesto. Unless you read these next two very carefully…

38. Human communities are based on discourse — on human speech about human concerns.

39. The community of discourse is the market.

… you could end up believing that all human discourse is nothing but a market! That in turn leads to the “marketing everywhere” idea.

This. Belief. Is. Wrong.

Now the “markets are conversations” meme isn’t bad, as far as it goes.

There is indeed a continuing conversation about the need for and value of the myriad goods and services on offer. That conversation takes place between businesses and potential customers, and amongst the customers themselves. It can eventually lead to that bit of conversation called “purchasing”. It also continues after purchase too, as people discuss the actual value they’re receiving, compared with their perceptions beforehand.

A core message of The Cluetrain Manifesto is that these conversations take place regardless of whether the business is listening and participating effectively or not.

There are other messages too, and a decade later The Cluetrain Manifesto is still worth a read.

But…

The problem is that the entire focus of The Cluetrain Manifesto is “business” and “markets” — all that buying and selling stuff. Other important conversations in human society are being forgotten.

Now this whole essay was triggered by three things…

First, that presentation at the top of the post, Marta Kagan’s What the F**K is Social Media: One Year Later. At one level it’s a reasonable introduction to social media for marketers, and it does make the point that “it’s supposed to be a dialogue, not a monologue”. But that only happens on slide 46 — more than half-way through!

The first half of the presentation is all numbers. Big numbers. 3.6 billion photos on Flickr. 5 million supporters of Barack Obama. 1 billion links shared on Facebook every week. Two-thirds of the global Internet population “visiting” social networks. (I thought you participated in a social network, but never mind.) Lots of big numbers. The kinds of numbers which raise a marketer’s pulse rate and get them going, “I need to be there and sell these people something!”

I wonder whether this presentation, despite eventually making the point about dialogue, is… unhelpful.

Second, my friend Kate Carruthers’ blog post Get lots of followers on Twitter?.

With all the cravings some people have to gather lots of Twitter followers, Kate wonders what it’s all for.

Are [social networks] just a place to aggregate all the consumers to facilitate better focused corporate marketing? That does seem to be the attitude of the many people who exhort me to ‘click here to get lots of followers’ and the like.

The other thing that happens a lot is people challenging me to show ‘the power of my network’ by asking followers to do something (usually sign up for a conference or something).

I hate this approach to social networks. To me they are community gathering places not centres of commerce. Sure asking people to take social or charitable action fits in. But commercial exercises feel very unnatural.

It feels like it is almost time to throw the ‘money changers’ out of our social networks. Is commerce the only truly valuable thing we can do with social networks?

Kate’s thoughts are echoed by Stephen Collins over at Money lenders, temple, door — and some interesting discussion kicked off over there.

Third, I read Jonathan Crossfield’s response to these posts, Social network marketing isn’t evil! — to which I’ll now do complete injustice by quoting just two fragments out of a well-reasoned whole:

Sales advertising is only one aspect of marketing, but it is the aspect most people seize upon as characteristic of the industry. I am a marketer who uses social media as a tool in building relationships that — in turn — can benefit the company financially. Often indirectly. That, to me, is marketing. Putting up promotional link after promotional link is merely advertising…

Kate laments social networks being seen by marketers as a centre of commerce. I would suggest this is unavoidable and is certainly not a negative trend. A centre of commerce is always going to be where the people gather. Google is a centre of commerce — hence SEO was born. Town centres are a centre of commerce which is why shops charge more rent there. Television broadcasters are a centre of commerce for advertisers because they have the audience.

Social networks are no different. Marketers are not wrong for describing networks as a business opportunity. Some are just misguided in how they exploit that opportunity.

Jonathan’s right: we shouldn’t tar all marketers with the same brush. Some folk are “doing it right”. But if he sees those gatherings of people as nothing more than another business opportunity, he’s wrong. Very wrong.

Yes, there are shops in the town centre because that’s where people gather. But there are also council chambers, parks, churches (or mosques or synagogues or temples as you wish), schools and universities, playgrounds, hospitals, law courts, libraries and concert halls.

Where people gather to engage in the dialogues we call family picnic, tutorial, marriage ceremony, criminal trial, prayer, diagnosis or concerto, messages of commerce have no place. Indeed, probably none of those conversations should intrude on the others either.

In the physical world, we separate these conversations into different physical locations, and mark them with signs and symbols so everyone’s clear about the context.

Even without overt signs, we can usually tell whether we’d be welcome to join a particular conversation or not. In a public park, for example, we know we can join the audience of a political speaker stood on his soapbox and, perhaps, argue with him, but we’re not welcome to join the family picnic of complete strangers.

The problem is that we have yet to develop online signs and symbols of demarcation. All these disparate conversations are dumped together in the same “places”.

Twitter, for example, is an undifferentiated stream of conversations. The conversations can be anything from a silly game like twitterfisting to a serious conference-based discussion or even a kind of religious observance. While hashtags are perhaps a beginning, not everyone uses them. And in any event, the conversation can shift and morph so quickly — even with multiple conversations involving the same individuals happening in parallel — that’s it’s difficult to see where the boundaries lie.

I’m wondering, therefore, whether the boundaries of conversation are no longer at the level of the venue, but of the individual, and the individual moment in time.

For me, the fact that I’m “on Twitter” doesn’t of itself indicate whether I’m being serious or having fun, looking for a solution for a work problem (where a commerce-like response might even be welcome!) or being a smart-arse (when it wouldn’t).

Indeed, in my always-on hyperconnected life, being “on Twitter” is almost a meaningless concept. It’s a bit like asking whether I’m “on electricity”, when it’s always on, with various gadgets “doing things with electricity” whether I’m paying attention or not.

Being “on Twitter” as opposed to “on Facebook” or “on email” is also a pointless distinction, since I’m likely to have all of those things open on my computer all at once. However I may or may not be personally paying attention to them at that particular moment.

That’s why I can’t quite agree with Kate’s point that “social networks… are community gathering places not centres of commerce” because, as Jonathan points out, centres of commerce are very much community gathering places. Community gathering places include centres of commerce. But they include many other things besides.

The issue, therefore, is not whether social networks are a suitable venue for marketing messages. They are. The real issues are where and when it’s appropriate, and how it’s done. So where are those boundaries?

[Credit: Cartoon Twitter-bird courtesy of Hugh MacLeod. Like all of Hugh's cartoons published online, it's free to use.]

It happened again! It’s been days and days before I got around to telling you that Stilgherrian Live episode 49 is online for your viewing pleasure.

So sue me.

The clear winner of “Cnut of the Week” was the government of China for continuing to deny the extent of the massacre at Tianamen Square twenty years ago (54%). The audience of The Chaser’s War on Everything came in 2nd place (25%) for complaining about the now-deleted comedy sketch about the Make a Realistic Wish Foundation — beating The Chaser themselves, who came in 4th place (8%) for making the sketch in the first place.

Heritage media came in 3rd place for their continued panic over Swine Flu.

Congratulations to Nick Hortovanyi , who won a t-shirt from our friends at King Cnut Ethical Clothing — and a big raspberry to Stephen Collins and mal who would’ve won if they were watching the program when their names were drawn from the Cocktail Shaker of Integrity.

I plan to have a regular edition of Stilgherrian Live tomorrow night at 9.30pm Sydney time, but we’ll see how we go. I’ve just received some important news about Project TOTO.

In his column Transnets, Francis Pisani‘s article Blogalaxie/4: “futur des médias” et “rumeurs” quotes my rant about journalism from last week.

Ils ont parlé de la “tension artificielle” blogueurs-journalistes qui, selon Stephen Collins occupe trop de place (voir ce qu’en ont écrit Narvic et Éliane Fiolet sur Transnets).

J’ai bien aimé cette phrase du blogueur australien Stilgherrian: “Ce qui est fatiguant dans cette fausse dichotomie c’est qu’elle compare les idéaux les plus élevés du journalisme et le degré le plus bas du blogging personnel.”

Et ce petit avis aux journalistes traditionnels: “La forme de votre métier et la forme de vos articles était déterminée par la technologie pour les distribuer.” Aujourd’hui “nous avons tous des claviers, nous avons tous des téléphones mobiles avec des caméras ou nous les aurons bientôt. Nous avons tous des outils de publication et de distribution” comme WordPress ou YouTube entre autres.

I sound much more intelligent in French… and I do like the word “blogalaxie” rather than “blogosphere”. Still, I reckon “blogueur” and “blogueuse” sound more like something you’d pump out of an asthmatic duck.

Statistics on how businesses use the Internet demonstrate how the Web 2.0 digerati are rocketing so far ahead of reality into their self-obsessed digital fantasy-land that they might as well be on Mars.

ABS figures show that fewer than a third of Australian businesses have a “web presence”.

This week the redoubtable Laurel Papworth complained about that:

Well, that sucks… Not much hope for Web 2.0 if 70% of us can’t get our heads around Web 1.0, is there?

Stephen Collins, who I’ve read for a while and chatted with recently, agrees.

I am disappointed. It indicates just how far behind the 8-ball most business in Australia is…

Laurel associates this lack of penetration with the widespread lack of understanding of the power of the Web, and specifically Web 2.0 technologies, amongst Australian business. I’d have to say I agree.

Really? Disappointed? I see steady growth in those “web presence” figures. I’ll show you in a moment. First, though, I need to tell you why I reckon you’re wrong.

“Disappointment” shows a misunderstanding of what constitutes “business”, even in the 21st Century. And there’s still a lot of work to help businesses lay the digital foundations before we start building so many crystal castles.

Most of us have the wrong idea about business. In part that’s because TV news is lazy, and shows us stock images of office buildings, factories, coal mines… yet there are 3 million active registered businesses in Australia, and fully 72 percent don’t have any employees. And in part it’s because it’s sometimes useful politically to make “business” sound like some Big Scary “Them”.

The median “Australian business” is a single man or woman — probably a sole trader because sole traders are the most common form of businesses (39%).

Now here are those “disappointing” numbers:

% businesses with…	2002-03	2003-04	2004-05	2005-06
computer use	83.0	85.2	88.6	88.5
internet use	71.4	74.2	76.8	81.3
web presence	23.0	25.1	26.7	29.8
% businesses who have…
placed orders via internet	27.8	31.3	32.7	37.3
received orders via internet	13.3	12.0	12.2	20.9

The “web presence” figure went up 3.1 percentage points between the last two surveys. In just one year, 93,000 Australian businesses created a new web presence. That’s one hell of a lot of websites: more than 350 every working day!

That’s even more impressive when you consider that it’s only been 12 or 13 years that most of these businesses could even connect to the Internet.

And consider the profile of businesses…

On a brief stroll yesterday I saw a late-night pharmacy, a barber, a locksmith, a carpenter whose van was parked outside a building site, a laundromat, a $2 shop, 2 x cafés, a local pub, a greengrocer, a watchmaker, a local medical centre, a masseur and a corner shop. Most of them will still be getting used to using email in their business, if at all. Only one had a website that I know of — can you guess which one?

I think we should be very, very happy.

[Photo: Bell Aviation's Rocket Pack, demonstrated at the 1964 New York World's Fair, from the book Exit to Tomorrow: World's Fair Architecture, Design, Fashion 1933-2005. Hat-tip to Paleo-Future.]