EIDOS Brisbane conference: Social media in times of crisis

(Kym Charlton of QPS speaks at Eidos. photo: Fiona Muirhead)

One predicted outcome of climate change is more frequent and intense severe weather events (today’s report in The Australian predicting the opposite shows only the paper’s ideological bias.) Given the likelihood, a conference called “Social Media in Times of Crisis” in Brisbane yesterday was timely. Organised by the Eidos Institute, the conference brought together speakers from academia, media, public relations and public affairs to discuss the use of tools like Twitter and Facebook in crises, particularly in the 2010-2011 Queensland flood event.

Queensland Police Service media unit manager Kym Charlton was responsible for the delivery of a service that set the gold standard in crisis response. Charlton told the audience she set up the QPS Facebook Page in May 2010 without asking for permission.

She admits it was a risky move in a notoriously risk-averse organisation but the page grew slowly through word of mouth. Charlton eventually realised she needed high level sign-off and approached her boss Deputy Commissioner Ian Stewart (who later played a leading role in the flood response). The tech savvy Stewart agreed to trial the page for six months and by December 2010 the page had 6000 likes. Early experiments such as live-streaming the funeral of an officer who died on duty failed, but the experience gained was crucial.

On 15 December 2010, as Charlton laconically put it, “it began to rain”. Many people, myself included, signed up to the QPS Facebook feed in the days that followed as it sent out reams of useful and relevant information covering flood events across the state. On 11 January 2011, a torrent of water rushed through Toowoomba and into the Lockyer Valley below. Journalist Amanda Gearing later took the conference through a harrowing blow by blow of events in the region from her eye-witness perspective.

There was a desperate need for credible and quick information about missing family and friends. USQ’s Kelly McWilliam told the afternoon session how one person’s page Toowoomba and Darling Downs Flood Photos and Info was set up within an hour of the flood (well ahead of scanty official responses from Toowoomba Regional Council) as a repository of photos and information about the missing. It remains the most popular site with 37,000 fans.

QUT’s Axel Bruns and Jean Burgess measured Twitter use of the #qldfloods hashtag. They noted a huge spike in tweets on the day of the Lockyer floods and an even bigger one when Brisbane flooded. The ABC’s Monique Potts told the conference how they used tools such as Ushahidi to map crowdsourced incidents in the flood (and later cyclone) region.

On the day of the Toowoomba/Lockyer Valley flood, the QPS Facebook page was a crucial resource. 16,000 fans of the page became 160,000 in 24 hours as people across Queensland, Australia and the world desperately sought to get information about the disaster zone. There were 39 million views of the page that day, over 450 views a second. “Thank heavens it wasn’t our website,” Charlton said. “January 11 blew us out of the water.” The pressure remained intense to get timely and accurate news out all week as the wall of water headed towards Brisbane. Just as valuable as the information sharing were the QPS “mythbuster” posts and tweets which punctured many rumours. Then “after a week off” as Charlton put it, tropical cyclones Antony and Yasi struck the north coast pushing the QPS team into overdrive again.

It was an astonishing effort for a team with just one acknowledged social media expert in an organisation with no official social media policy. Emergency 2.0 Wiki Project Leader Eileen Culleton (a survivor of Darwin’s Cyclone Tracy in 1974 when it took days to let the world know what happened) later told the conference a social media policy was a must for all organisations with a public presence. Culleton noted how Brisbane City Council galvanised the “mud army” to help the clean-up with their use of social media.

For Charlton the QPS social media updates were simpler still; it was something they had to do to save lives. The conference’s final speaker UQ’s Mark Bahnisch put these usages in a social sciences context of “social resilience”. Disasters, said Bahnisch, expose our social structures more sharply than any other event. They unsettle us by taking us out of our normal rituals. But panic is rare, Bahnisch argues and there is a social good of new communities created out of the common bond of crisis. Social media go a long way to help creating those communities and, as the QPS found out, saving lives.

Is Media140 abandoning Twitter?

The inaugural Media140 conference in Australia is on in November in Sydney. As a totally Twitterised wannabe journalist, I’m looking forward to attending. There will be lots of great speakers and good discussions, I’m sure. Interestingly, the event’s flyer barely mentions Twitter, the technology that inspired the 140 idea. That’s a pity in some respect because sometimes a little technological determinism doesn’t hurt. Twitter is a reforming technology.

Its name may be for the birds, but Twitter is usually imagined as a stream. Right now, it is a raging current rushing towards some eventual ocean of communication. The channel is known but it might be more difficult to work out who is saying what to whom and for what effect.

At first glance Twitter seems anchored and orderly with a precise naming system. There are hashtags denoting issues and an honest sounding at-sign denoting voices – My voice is @DerekBarry. But the information in the sign may not be reliable as it seems.

Fakes abound on Twitter. The real fakes acquire a fixity over time channelling another personalities. Tiny Buddha spreads 140 character wisdom, Marcel Marceau spreads a similar amount of silence. Nietzsche may have killed God but he cannot stop him/her from tweeting.

If there is genuine in the fake, there is also as much fakery in the genuine. Last week, “Media-more-than-140” gleefully published research that headlined 40 percent of Tweets are pointless babble. They were wrong to call it Twitter twaddle; the figure grossly underestimates the need for phatic conversation as a part of social bridge-building. Whatever the true ratio of signal to noise, the question has validity. It implies there is a discrete judgement about each individual communication.

Discrete Twitter may be, but discreet it ain’t. Yes, there are backchannels where you can privately engage in conversation via the deep and meaningful DM. Most of Twitter’s output is in the public sphere where followers can see directly and a network of others can indirectly. Twitter is a 21st century agora and a marketplace of ideas. China and other countries can switch it off from time to time and the US can keep it on the air in an attempt to keep the Iranian protests bubbling.

Twitter is useful. It is a vibrant source of news, stories, information, jokes, links, music, arguments, gossip and goofs. There are leads, information, signposts, arguments, diary entries, story, contact, and laughing. There are many expressions of boredom. It is how taste is transferred; a sort of Bourdieu on Big Brother.

Much of this milieu is familiar to other modes of communication. But there is also joy in the technology itself. Like Google, it is simple. Unlike Google there is a restriction. Twitter’s most ingenuous factor is the creative motif of denial. The need for brevity is paramount. The 140 character limit concentrates the mind. Every letter of every word must be scrutinised to ensure it is working for the cause. Driven by the limit, Twitter is a 21st century telegraph on steroids. But it is digital, so what goes on in Vegas doesn’t necessarily stay there.

Twitter search has its faults as it doesn’t keep a great history, but it is right up to date with the present. Anything new, interesting, informative or important will cascade quickly through its networks in the form of an accelerating power law. It can go from 0 to 140 in under ten seconds. Google might be able to tell you what something is, but Twitter can tell you what it is right now.

Citizen Byte conference part 3: Political blogging in Australia

This is the third and final post about Friday’s “New Media and the Informed Citizen” symposium at Brisbane’s South Bank. See links to parts one and two.

In his book Blogwars (2008), American academic David Perlmutter says too many news and information blogs read like reporters’ notes prior to going to press. Washington Post publisher Philip Graham said journalism was the first draft of history. Blogs, said Perlmutter, could now be considered the first draft of journalism. But where exactly blogging and journalism intersect has always been a thorny subject in the Australian political and media landscape and this was a topic Graham Young touched on in his speech to the Citizen Byte forum.

Young has vast experience across blogging, the media, and politics. He blogs at Ambit Gambit, conducts online polling at What the People Want and is also the chief editor of one of Australia’s most important Internet journals, On Line Opinion. In the 1990s he was vice-president and campaign chairman of the Queensland Liberal Party. He was successful too – the Liberals’ last election victory in 1995 occurred on his watch. But Young was too iconoclastic to be a Liberal hero and is now outside the fold.

He discussed how the Internet was affecting Australian politics. He quoted the 2007 Nielsen Internet Technology Report which found the technology was pervasive and that 72 percent of all Internet users use it for news, sport and weather updates. However despite thousands of political blogs, online users were consistently turning to existing media organisations for their news. The most accessed were (with Alexa ranking in brackets) Nine MSN (9), News.com (11), SMH (14), ABC (21) and The Age (26). The exclusively online organisations were well down the ladder with the biggest Crikey at 40,977 and Young’s On Line Opinion further down at 142,137.

The message, said Young, was “tyrants rule” in Australia. Existing brands count as do the number of resources at their disposal, their national presence, and the fact Australia is such a small and competitive marketplace. The few successful exclusively online operations serve niche markets. Young also found geographical proximity counted on the Internet and 30 percent of On Line Opinion’s users were from Queensland.

This accentuation of the local was repeated in the Youdecide2007 citizen journalism project which Young was also involved. This 2007 federal election site was an initiative of the Creative Industries faculty at QUT, funded by the Australian Research Council, and supported by On Line Opinion, SBS and Cisco. The intention was to provide hyperlocal news and information on a seat-by-seat basis. The project was run from Brisbane and audiences and stories from Queensland predominated (including the site’s one ‘gotcha’ story “crategate”).

Young noted how Australian “para-parties” use the Internet. In the last election, 200,000 people joined the union-based Your Rights At Work campaign to fight the then-Governments Workchoices legislation. Activist group Getup! has an even bigger membership with 325,000 people. Young disputes these are “members” in a traditional sense. He see Getup! as a harvester of e-mail addresses which it then targets fundraising and single-political issue campaigns. According to AEC returns Getup! raised $1.2m in the election year of 2007 and campaigned heavily with mixed success in Bennelong and Wentworth against Liberal heavyweights John Howard and Malcolm Turnbull.

The mainstream political parties haven’t embraced the Internet as much as the “para-parties”. Young says there is a good reason for this – old fashioned methods still work. TV ads and direct mail remain the most successful media campaign techniques. According to Young, Liberals used the Internet the most (with 44 percent of candidates having websites) with Labor 30 percent. The minor parties such as the Greens and the Democrats were well behind, preferring to use scarce funds on traditional advertising. Despite apparent net-friendly credentials, these parties were aware of the real priority when it came to spending money. This is not a uniquely Australian problem; Perlmutter notes in his book that despite being an adept blogger, Iowa Democrat governor Tom Vilsack dropped out of the 2008 presidential race because didn’t have the money to buy television time.

Young turned his attention to the problem of “the failure of the blogosphere”. He gave his version of an a-list of blogs he called “the domain” which included Larvatus Prodeo, Jennifer Marohasy, Homepagedaily, John Quiggin, Club Troppo and Henry Thornton. Young said that with the possible exception of Thornton who writes a fortnightly column in The Australian, none have successfully made a breakthrough like US blogs. Possible reasons for this include their point-of-view, a competitive market, the unwillingness of the MSM to interact, and the lack of a sustainable financial model. Young conceded polling blogs have impacted the agenda but this was hardly a mainstream interest. He also suggested the highly educated people that ran most of the “domain” blogs may not be talking about issues relevant to everyday Australians.

Because in the mainstream, he said, “brands count”. Media companies rely on audience inertia acting against change. Commercial television stations know the 5.30pm slot is the most important because if they can lock in viewers prior to the high cost ads of the 6pm news, the likelihood is they won’t change the channel. Other issues affecting the ability of blogs to impact on politics include the central control of party funding and candidate selection and the fact that Australia is, generally speaking, well run. People don’t need to think about politics in daily life – they have more exciting things to do. The reason almost 100 percent of people voted in Iran’s recent election, said Young, was because there was a burning desire to fix a problem. The same desires don’t exist here. The blogs have their community but have not crashed through to a greater public. According to Young, “the days of the Interknight errant never arrived”.

Citizens bite: Part 2

“Everyone, from journalists to the people we cover to our sources and the former audience, must change their ways. The alternative is just more of the same” – Dan Gillmor (We the Media).

Speaking of changing ways, I must begin with a correction. I gave the impression that other Brisbane media did not attend the Citizen Byte new media symposium in Brisbane yesterday. That wasn’t true. Graham Young (OnLine Opinion, Ambit Gambit, What the People Want) was an invited speaker and there was also Wotnews.com.au. I have since found out that other journalists and academics would have attended with more notice. The proceedings were also filmed.

Citizen Byte is a community research project to “examine what the implications of the new media environment are on politics and the political sphere both in Australia and in Malaysia.” New media is having a bigger impact in Malaysia than in Australia. Yesterday I discussed keynote speaker Steven Gan. The editor of Malaysiakini is the “new media” go-to person for the White House and the New York Times and he has transformed a small online venture into Malaysia’s most popular news site. Now I discuss other Malaysian wisdom on offer at the symposium. Tomorrow I will conclude with some great observations by the conference’s only Australian speaker, Graham Young.

Not the least wisdom came from a member of Malaysia’s media elite: Datuk Azman Ujang. Datuk Azman is chair of the Malaysian Press Institute and editorial adviser at national news agency Bernama and broadcasting arm Bernama TV. He took up the latter two jobs having retired as overall GM of Bernama. Datuk Azman is an experienced powerful insider who can call a spade a spade in the corridors of power. He said the government admonishes him for being “too honest” but does not dare censure him further. Yet even he was disturbed by the last election result which was a wake-up call for the media as well the government. Azman said entrenched government support within the media has resulted in biased news for 50 years. The arrival of new media suddenly made credibility a marketplace issue for urban voters. Malaysiakini took up the challenge and inspired other news portals. Opposition politicians began blogging in numbers to enhance their appeal with younger audiences and crash through their lack of coverage in the MSM. They also used the world’s highest mobile penetration to spread viral political messages.

Most villages don’t have the Internet or mobile phones and the government won the election overall 60:40. Poorer states, particularly East Malaysia voted for BN. Entrenched corruption in Sabah and Sarawak has survived for half a century which KL turns a blind eye to. The government uses regulation of the broadcast spectrum and annual licensing of newspapers to keep the media in check. Azman said “unwritten laws” depended on the circumstances, mood and attitude of the government at a particular time.

Mohd. Zulkifli was the next to speak. Zulkifli is a content manager at Media Prima Berhad, Malaysia’s largest media company with four free-to-air TV channels. Zulkifli is bringing the power of new media to bear on many of those assets. He said audiences had to register to the websites but the content was free and 838,000 Malaysians have signed up.

Zulkifli says their biggest differentiator is video content but they are also providing Tweetdecks, SMS alerts (with video alerts starting next month), streaming content on mobiles, and interacting with television shows in innovative ways that would please fan theorists like Henry Jenkins.

Their websites are full of blogs and online discussions with network stars and there are discussion rooms where audiences have their say and affect the plots of soap operas. There is also an “Indie showcase” channel that deliberately attempts to “push the boundaries of censorship”. In 2007 Berhad released Malaysia’s first made-for-web drama. “Kerana Karina” which tells the story of overnight pop star Karina in 20 four-minute episodes. Though he didn’t mention it, Zulkifli also wrote the lyrics to the KK theme song.

What he did mention was Berhad’s investment in new media (including 60 staff) is paying off. The most popular site TV3.com gets 41 million hits each month. His job is to keep the revenue high otherwise, he said, he “wouldn’t be here next year”. Zulkifli says that social media is the big challenge of the next couple of years. Somehow, I don’t expect him to fail this challenge – Mohd. Zulkifli is definitely not “more of the same”.

Malaysiakini editor speaks in Brisbane

When Barack Obama’s campaign team and the New York Times online editor were scouring Asia-Pacific for innovative ways to harness the power of new media, they avoided Australia. There was little going on here they did not already know. Where they did go was Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, home to some of the most cutting-edge use of media in the world. The person both organisations sought was journalist and editor Steven Gan. Gan is editor of Malaysiakini (MK) an online citizen news service that has become the most trusted media organisation in the peninsula. MK publishes in Malay, Chinese, English and Tamil and has expanded into video.

Today, Brisbane was fortunate enough to host Gan and other key Malaysian new media players at an all-day symposium called “New Media and the Informed Citizen” at the Queensland Conservatorium of Music at South Bank. The conference outlined the vibrancy of the industry in Malaysia in front of audience of about thirty people. It was a shame more people in Brisbane didn’t get to listen to how the media is being shaped in new directions in our part of the world.

“Malaysiakini” means Malaysia Now and celebrates its tenth anniversary in November. Up to 1998 the Malaysian Barisan National (BN) government (which has ruled since independence in 1957) had a monopoly on news in cyberspace. But after visiting Silicon Valley, Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad introduced the Multimedia Super Corridor (now MSC Malaysia) to kickstart local IT industry. Bill Gates and others told Mahathir he should not censor the Internet. While Mahathir had misgivings (particularly over pornography) he saw the business benefit and agreed. Malaysiakini exploited the loophole, starting up with just four journalists.

Despite liberal censorship rules (by Malaysian standards) the new publication still attracted unwelcome attention. In January 2003, police raided MK offices looking for details of an anonymous letter writer who satirically compared a politician to the Ku Klux Klan. Gan refused to divulge his source. Police seized four servers and 15 central processing units from its office and interrogated Gan and senior staff. The move provoked an outcry with spontaneous protests outside the office and led to a coalition of groups condemning the raid. Police never formally raised charges and returned the now obsolete boxes two years later.

MK attacks on government corruption attracted a new readership unhappy with the servile nature of Malaysia’s mainstream press. In 2006 they broke the Petronas story over lies the oil company boss told about activities in Sabah. The following year they took on Abdul Taib Mahmud, long-term corrupt leader of Sarawak, over logging kickbacks to Japanese shipping firms. Last year MK played a pivotal rule in the general election (where the MSM supported the government) and BN had its worst result in 50 years, losing control of five states.

MK employs 30 journalists and has moved into video at www.malaysiakini.tv. They have also trained up citizen journalists and provided them with video cameras to report on local news across East and West Malaysia. MK grew steadily with a subscription only model (the advice Gan gave the NYT) and a large bed of content.

As the 2008 election got closer, Gan made an important decision. He opened up the site for free for the entire period of the election. By the time of the 8 March vote it had overtaken The Star newspaper as Malaysia’s most popular political site. Gan called the election a tsunami that almost completely overturned Malaysia’s political system (a later speaker said it wasn’t a new chapter in Malaysian politics – it was a new book).

Thanks to a corrupt government and the biased MSM, Malaysiakini established itself as the most trusted media brand and brought in thousands of new subscribers after the election. The badly shaken BN government admitted they lost the Internet war and have begun to negotiate with MK and other online outlets.

MK is now a thriving media organisation that has made a profit in each of the last four years. Gan says they were lucky they started their subscription model early. After the election he said big advertisers started to take notice. He described one of his proudest moments as a video they released of a “nude ear-squat” form of prisoner punishment the government claimed had not been used in decades. The video scandal caused a Royal Commission to be set up to investigate the affair. “A half minute video changed practices that were going on for years,” he said.