[This is the second part of a short series, based on a talk I gave at MIPTV in March 2009, sharing some insights from our commissioning social media projects at Channel 4 Education]

Matt Webb, the dashing internet guru who is half of boutique design duo Schulze and Webb, has pithily described the challenge facing anyone creating content or services online:

“2008 is the year we hit Peak Attention. You can either carry on encountering as much as you do now, giving every input less and less attention every year, or you can start managing it, keeping some back to take long-haul attention flights. What are the consequences of living post-Peak Attention? Nobody will be able to understand anything hard unless they make sacrifices.”

When I started at C4 in 2007, the first challenge we faced was how to get the attention of the 14-19 age group we were targeting. Up until Jan 2008, C4 Education made (brilliant) TV programmes that were broadcast in the morning schedule, during term time – a throwback to earlier Education programming that was aimed directly at teachers and classrooms. About 6 years ago, the strategy shifted to trying to reach teens directly, making this morning slot an anachronism, as most of the target audience would have been in work, school or college. Janey Walker took over C4 Education in 2006, and realised that TV just wasn’t the right platform anymore, at least not for this audience, with these slots. This led her to make one of the most radical decisions in UK broadcasting – she decided that from Jan 2008, the entire budget (about £6m) for the department would go on cross-platform projects, trying to reach teens in the spaces where they spend their attention, rather than this rather empty part of the morning schedule.

A major broadcast channel like C4 has a number of routes to getting attention – a prime-time slot, an established programme brand, hiring a major talent/celebrity, or a massive above the line marketing push. We didn’t have any of these, so had to go out into the wild web and try and drum up as much attention as we could in whatever ways we could. Over the last 18 months we’ve tried a number of things – partnering with spaces where teens are paying attention, like Myspace and Bebo; distributing content over many different 3rd party networks; making content available for download to podcasts and mobile phones; seeding content in existing special interest communities; running competitions with glamourous prizes – to be honest, I’d fly a plane over a city with our project URL on it if I thought that would bring it to people’s attention. Not all of this worked, obviously. The traffic to our sites isn’t anywhere near the kind of traffic that C4 gets for Hollyoaks or Skins. But here’s a few things I think we’ve learnt.

Design for streams, not for sites

Most people using the web, especially in younger age-groups, now experience the web as streams, not sites. It might be the stream of updates in Facebook, or their contact’s Flickr photostream, or a string of results on Google, or in an RSS reader.

The average number of sites people regularly visit is generally reckoned to be 5 or 6, and most of these are services that organise and stream information to you – email, social networks, search engines, media libraries (ie Youtube or Itunes) etc. Every now and then a new site emerges that takes its place in this hallowed pantheon, but I wouldn’t bet on your project being one of them. Much better to design content that plays nicely with streams – content that can be interesting and enticing as a one-line text result in a search query, and that doesn’t mind being broken up into small pieces (Cf Matt Jones’ reference to the coke bottle in my earlier post). This is much harder for narrative projects than functional projects, as storytelling tends to rely on controlling the context for its impact – think of how the audience is controlled in a  theatre or cinema, or how television has built its aesthetics around its ownership of the living room and the strictures of scheduling.

I don’t think we’ve really got this right in any of our projects yet, but its the thing I’m most interested in exploring and playing with. Funnily enough, I think I was playing with similar ideas in a project with Tim Etchells in 2000, called Surrender Control, which assumed that we had no control over the audience or context at all, and tried to create an intriguing piece of theatre using just 40 SMS texts. But maybe this is going too far – maybe you need to base a story in a solid context, but let it be manipulated, ripped up and shared around the web as much as your users want to. Dan Hill summed this up beautifully in a post about the social media ‘ripples’ around LOST a few years ago. In the end, I don’t think there’s one model here, just a set of principles – design your content to play nicely with streams, or to be ‘spreadable‘, in Henry Jenkins’ terms.

Don’t be snotty about marketing

This is a simple one, really. Too many people in the storytelling business look down on marketing. Some people I know in web startups think that marketing is a tax you pay for having an inferior project. Bollocks. The reality is, in a post-Peak-Attention world, sitting there expecting people to discover your genius is frankly naive. We’ve had our digital agencies and TV companies working as one team, making decisions together about casting, shooting, web design and marketing. Its all the same project, and it should be the same people making decisions about everything. Marketing now is just another way that people find out about you – another ripple in the stream. Its too important to draw an imaginary line that fetishes some activity as ‘creative’ and some as mere ‘marketing’. If you do that, you’ll miss the opportunity to be really creative with marketing, and will fail to market your creative genius. Think of the coke bottle again – every fragment and shard of the project should be as beautiful, enigmatic and thrilling as the whole.

One last piece of advice – take your time. Trying to mimic TV and get millions of people online to look at the same thing at the same time would be hugely expensive and a waste of time. In a spreadable media world, it will probably take weeks or even months for people to find your project. Designing something that has to be experienced within a certain period or synchronously with thousands of other people is a nice idea, but it plays against the asynchronous nature of the internet. Unless you’re building a site that works alongside a major piece of event TV – think X-Factor or Strictly Come Dancing – just relax, and don’t worry about overnights.

Instead, launch the project early, and often. Put out lots of little bits of content over time, and reward people who stick with you. Take the time to listen and work out why people are coming to the project, and more importantly, why they’re not. Make it easy for newcomers to pick up the story at any point, and to view content in any order if they want to. Attention is far too precious a resource these days to act like a bouncer and pull across a velvet rope if people turn up too late. The dirty secret of the web is that, although its never been easier to publish, its never been easier to be ignored. Worship every bit of attention you get from your users, as it’s their gift to you, not the other way around. Which brings me to the next issue – keeping attention. More on that in the next post.

I’ve just presented at MIPTV on the theme of ‘commissioning for attention’, a phrase I’ve been using for a while to describe what I do at Channel 4 Education. I hate phrases like ‘360 content’ or ‘multiplatform’, as these encourage people to get hung up on technology or to have a box-ticking mentality to where ideas can exist, rather than really focusing on users and understanding what they’re doing. We’ve learnt a lot from running projects like Yeardot, Battlefront and Routesgame over the last 18 months, so I thought I’d write up some notes on this blog from the presentation.

But before that, these ideas have been massively influenced by friends working in game design, agile website design or service design. Narrative media is still (outside of gaming) light-years behind the curve compared to the work going on in these disciplines, so a lot of the time I’m trying to act as a translator – taking concepts and ideas from more functional design disciplines into narrative/editorial contexts. When I speak to indies or producers, there’s a set of blogs/presentations that I tend to refer them to, so I thought i’d start by sharing this reading list:

If it doesn’t spread, it’s dead – Henry Jenkins
This is an incredible series of 8 blog posts, from a report commissioned by a consortia of US media producers. In this series, Jenkins elegantly skewers some of the terminology and assumptions in discussion of ‘viral’ media, and proposes a new set of concepts that beautifully illustrates how people share and participate in social media. In particular, he’s really insightful on the interplay between the commercial world of commodity media and the ‘gift economy’ of users’ social networks, and how ’spreadable’ media works in the overlap between the two.

Tiny Social Media Objects – Jyri Engestrom
Jyri explains how social sites have at their core a ’social object’ – eg photographs, music, second-hand goods – around which users congregate and act. The loveliest part of this presentation is his recommendation to start your site by defining its social object, and then to think about the verbs that people will apply to them. Eg in Ebay, the objects are second-hand goods, and the verbs are ‘buy’, ’sell’ etc.

Native to a web of data – Tom Coates
Slightly earlier than Jyri’s presentation above, this is a fantastic clear and articulate presentation of how to design projects as flows and visualisations of data, rather than documents and sites. Tom elegantly reframes designing for the web using an ecological data model – design to create good, clean reusable data, that other services and users can benefit from.

Designing for the coral reef – Matt Jones/Matt Biddulph
This is a hilarious transcript from the Dopplr team’s talk at Dconstruct last year. I don’t think you had to be there to get the jokes, or to imagine what the slides were, as their descriptions are pretty good. In this talk, they’re building on some of the ideas that Tom Coates used in ‘Native…’ and bringing in Matt Jones’ interest in time/space and how you tell stories to people about their activities over time. But the great insight for me here is in designing a project so that users can engage through lots of different access points, not just a monolithic site. Matt uses a great analogy with a coke bottle – “Martin Lindstrom said, “The genius of a coke bottle is when it smashes into a thousand pieces, you still know it’s a coke bottle”. Designing your project so that its still recognisible from a fragment as it is whole is a lovely challenge.

Putting the ‘fun’ into ‘functional’ – Amy Jo Kim
My fellow commissioning editor – Alice Taylor – saw Amy give this presentation at GDC (I think) a few years ago (the link above is to the 2009 edit). Many of the design and interaction metaphors we use from the web were inherited by traditional software design, mainly from productivity software like Office. In this presentation, Amy looks at interaction concepts from game design – such as collecting, points, feedback and customization – and shows how they can be applied to social software design.

Copy as Interface – Erika Hall
I’ve not seen Erika give this presentation, but its so fantastically clear and well designed that you can get the gist of it through the presentation alone. Erika demonstrates how the web is largely navigated and understood by users via text, and how the kind of language used on web 2.0 sites relate to oral vernacular (paging Walter J Ong!), rather than more formal professional language. This is just a great presentation to give to people who think their site is about shiny flashy images or video. Its not. The cheapest and most effective thing to get right in a project is its ‘voice’ – the language and style you use in the text of the site and your other interactions with the user (email, twitter, etc).

Everything you know about ARGs is wrong – Dan Hon
As a pioneer in the world of ARGs (Alternate Reality Games) Dan has earned the right to call the top of the market, and skewer some of the cliches and lazy assumptions about audience interaction that have built up around the genre. Anyone that can show a presentation slide saying “WE SUCK” in 40pt type to an audience of peers and get away with it must be doing *something* right…

And here’s a couple of more specialised presentations that I also recommend:

Content is not King – Andrew Odlyzko
Working in the content industry, its really hard to get people to understand that historically, social technologies have been more commercially successful than content technologies. Social media is potentially the first space that mixes the two (as Jenkins illustrates in his work on gift economies and commodity culture in “if its spreads…”) but most people coming to social media from broadcast forget this, and see these networks as pipes to shove content through. Odlyzko’s essay starts with a plain assertion of fact – “The Internet is widely regarded as primarily a content delivery system. Yet historically, connectivity has mattered much more than content” – and then proceeds to show why this has been true for every communication network since the telegraph. Written in 2001 at the cusp of the dotcom boom, he calls out the telcos who convinced themselves they were in the media industry rather than the ‘dump pipes’ comms market, and points out that the real money is in facilitating gossip, not commissioning ‘rich media’. Replace the comms companies with todays social media stars, and its still true.

Startup Metrics for Pirates – Dave McClure
Containing some of the most bafflingly designed slides I’ve ever seen, I think I understand just enough about McClure’s presentation to know he’s a genius. I saw him give a version of this presentation at Seedcamp in London last year, and it nailed an issue I’d been struggling with for a while – how to create a simple metrics model for complex interactive projects. His one-page buisiness plan (slide 11) is a masterpiece of clarity and simplicty, elegantly allowing you to track complex user behaviours with just 9 metrics. I’ve adapted the categories, but kept the same logic and purpose in our metrics models for Channel 4 Education. The real insight here is getting people to use the same set of metrics for both reporting and agile design. This is obvious for geeks, but for TV people raised on Overnight Ratings that happen after the project is put to bed, its a revelation.

So – that’s it for influences. Over the next few days I’ll write up some of the ideas and concepts that we’re using in commissioning at C4 Education.