I was at another one of those dinner parties last night where the other people were frankly bothered and bewildered by the fact that I blog and use RSS to track hundreds of different information sources. "How do you find the time?" was the cry, and I didn't have an answer. I don't know where I find the time. Maybe I watch less television.

But it did make me think - again - that people in Britain over the age of, say, 35, are in the main not using this stuff. And then I found this on my RSS reader this morning: MetzMash: 89% of Your Customers Don't Blog:

So, based on the aggregation of the Forrester studies from 2007, based on the United States, here are the key take-aways that I have, about our social media use, on average:

75% of your customers don't read blogs
89% of your customers don't write a blog, either
71% of your customers don't watch user-generated content
75% of your customers don't visit social networking sites (e.g. MySpace, Facebook)
82% of your customers don't participate in discussion forums
75% of your customers don't read online ratings or reviews
89% of your customers don't post online ratings or reviews
92% of your customers don't use RSS

And this is in America. In Britain, I reckon those numbers are even bigger, and for the over-35s, even bigger again. Worth thinking about.

Fascinating article in the NY Times today about the way younger people are swapping news among themselves:

According to interviews and recent surveys, younger voters tend to be not just consumers of news and current events but conduits as well — sending out e-mailed links and videos to friends and their social networks. And in turn, they rely on friends and online connections for news to come to them. In essence, they are replacing the professional filter — reading The Washington Post, clicking on CNN.com — with a social one.

This trend away from gatekeepers and towards social networks is not a new idea, of course, but the importance of the Times piece is perhaps the extent to which it has already happened - and the extent to which it is driving engagement. The piece makes the point that the Democrat nomination race has attracted a lot of attention among young people, and it is perhaps dangerous to see the present, unique, political moment as the start of a long-term shift. But it's also true that in Britain the reemergence of the right wing has seen the start of a similar movement, albeit on a smaller scale, led by successful right-wing bloggers. And for news organisations, here's the money quote:

Ms. Buckingham recalled conducting a focus group where one of her subjects, a college student, said, “If the news is that important, it will find me.”

Thanks to Hilary for the link to a brilliant post by Kyle MacRae, Unedited. Unfiltered. Untrue, which brilliantly skewers CNN's new iReport site. If you haven't seen iReport yet, here's what CNN had to say about it:

Welcome to a brand new beta site for uncensored, user-powered news. CNN built the tools, you take it from there. All the stories here are user-generated and instant: CNN does not vet or verify their authenticity or accuracy before they post. The ones with the "On CNN" stamp have been vetted and used in CNN news coverage.

Anyone who knows anything about online communities and their intersection with online media should have all their lights flashing now, and Kyle obviously did. He uploaded a spurious picture, claimed it represented a fire in Scotland, and then sat back. He even managed to get the post on the front page of iReport by opening multiple tabs in Firefox and getting them to autorefresh. A citjournalism site that allows stuff like that is like a newspaper site that allows anyone on its editorial team to edit the front page. Stupid stupid stupid.

Read the whole post, and then wonder on the thing that got to me about it: the pompous prognostications of Mashable, who declared:

Ultimately, I’d say that CNN “gets it” with the iReport site. In addition to clearly understanding how to organize user-generated content, they are taking a fairly hands-off approach by not screening or censoring content, and not requiring registration to navigate around the site. Plus, with the bonus of being so closely tied to CNN, it should serve as a “minor leagues” of sorts for those that aspire to work in broadcast journalism, since citizen reporters will have an opportunity to become “stars” on the site and have their work aired on the cable network.

This points to a whole category problem with online journalism: people with no understanding of it, and with no understanding of how useable media comes about and comes to be trusted, can airily and condescendingly claim a company "gets it" just because they've put some UGC tools together, refused to moderate and generally just been super-cool and laid-back about the whole thing. Media cannot and will never be created on that basis. You need an editor. Otherwise it's just a message board with pretty pictures and a cool toolbar.

I've been having a few meetings with Big Media Companies recently in my role as a consultant (best gag of recent weeks: someone I met told a friend that they thought they were now officially a consultant, and the friend replied: "Neither am I"). One thing that's hit me very strongly is that all these companies have community elements to their sites. And actually none of them quite know why.

Some of them have a strategy, but it's at such a high level that the reality of managing the community on the ground is completely out of whack with what senior management think is happening. Some of them have provided community tools, but only out of some sense that this is the "right thing to do" for the 21st century media company. But none of them have sat down, looked into each other's eyes and asked the fundamental question "why do I need a community? What does this add to my business?".

I think there are several answers to the question "why". They differ by company, but they include:

• to extend the output of the company, for instance by allowing users to ask questions on message boards which are then answered live on air
• to deepen the engagement of some (or even most) users by encouraging them to discuss and participate
• to allow users to submit content which could be used by the company concerned in their media output
• to create relationships between the creators within the company and potentially domain-expert users, which can enrich the output of the organisation concerned.

There are almost certainly more, and these are only ingredients. Listing them is rather like saying a cake contains butter, flour and eggs. And of these four ingredients listed here, I think the second is the most dangerous, because it is vague and actually potentially misleading. Communities do deepen engagement, but only for a subset of users, and often quite a small subset. Conversely, the amount of management attention placed on them is out of all proportion to the impact they have on most users.

Also, what I've seen happen when companies are thinking about the second option is that they end up creating an environment where a subset of users can simply go into hyper-critical mode. It's like a shop opening an area where people can stand around slagging off their goods. Then the company hosting the critical community goes into hand-wringing mode, with some internally arguing that they have an obligation to allow the feedback, while others argue that the whole thing should be shut down.

What's happening, of course, is that the theoretical nirvana of community - engaged users who are enriching the output - is crashing up against lack of internal skills, lack of planning and in many cases lack of confidence. And by lack of confidence I don't just mean the confidence to allow users to criticise you on your own platform; I also mean the confidence to shut that community down when it starts becoming toxic. People talk about banning or suspending users like it's the nuclear option. It isn't. The nuclear option is shutting the thing down and rethinking why you did it in the first place.

So, in summary: user engagement with your output is almost always, and almost always by definition, a good thing. But if you don't think about why you want it, and thus about the best way to deliver it, you're headed for a world of pain. And never forget that it's your platform, even when it's peopled by your users, and you should deal with it confidently and in a way that benefits most users, not just the ones who have something to say.

Thinking of launching what we used to call an "online community" and what we now call a "sticky Web 2.0 social media experience"? Then read Alan Jones on moderating community and social media. In fact, read it, print it out and laminate it for use when talking to managers and lawyers who may not understand risk:

Will moderating content too much kill the pavlovian reward of "post-reply-reply-to-reply-repeat" that makes a social network sticky and compelling?

Why does that matter? Because woven tight into the good stuff, growing like weeds, you'll always find weird stuff also growing on your social networks, no matter what original purpose it has. Show me a user-generated content database, I'll show you some weird shit in there, every time.

Further, the line between "weird" and "bad" is wiggly, broad and fuzzy, with transparency set at >10% and sporting extra-aliased edges. Further, "bad" comes in a wide variety of flavours, including "bad for business", "bad for conservative families" and "bad for the legal budget line".

Alan comes down on the side of less moderation and more weirdness, which is pretty much what I'd expect from him, in the nicest possible way. And I think this story should be read alongside the slightly odd news that BBC News is making its "UGC hub" work "24/7", though interestingly they seem to be more interested in people as case studies rather than contributors.