How Google Wave could become the multimedia publishing platform of choice

Next month Google Wave goes live to those who’ve signed up to test it out. Why should journalists care? Specifically, B2B journalists?

Because wave just might be the platform that enables us to do easily  what we aspire to in multimedia journalism: to work collaboratively, bring all media together in one place, and enter into a full conversation with our readers – who in B2B are often a pool of experts.

So what is wave? Well, that’s harder to explain that to demonstrate, so you might want to watch Google’s own video demo.




Or there’s Wikipedia’s definition which reads in part: “It is a web based service, computing platform, and communications protocol designed to merge e-mail, instant messaging, wiki, and social networking. It has a strong collaborative and real-time focus.”

As Google themselves put it: "A wave is equal parts conversation and document, where people can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more."

You can check out all it can do at Mashable or Techcrunch

My interest was sparked by a series of questions from Paul Conley He believes wave could be “the thing that may push the entire business world into a more collaborative, more conversational mode -- creating the situation where all industries can report on themselves".

The vital questions he asks are: “Can a news story be a wave? Can trade show coverage be a wave? Can a recurring feature or major issue in the industries we write about be a wave? What does that look like? Who participates?"

We can’t know the answers yet – although I’d hazard a yes in answer to the first three -- but come September 30 we can begin to experiment.

Here’s my take on the most interesting aspects of wave as it relates to journalism.

A wave as an editorial brainstorming, conferencing and editing tool

You can use waves to collaboratively author documents. So instead of, say, sending notes from a meeting out either in an email or putting them into a wiki for collaboration, you can do both at the same time.  

Wave offers a mix of collaborative editing and online discussion – you just add the people who you want to collaborate with on a wave. Everyone on the wave can make changes, those changes will be trackable back to them, and the original author can accept or reject what they like. Once they are happy, they can publish it. 

So an editorial team could privately discuss coverage, assign reporting tasks and pull that material, once created, together for editing.   

Once edited and approved, the material could be put into a new wave – a public wave -- that can be distributed to a much wider group of wave participants.

Reporting collaboratively in a wave, using all media 

Say you are covering a major story, or a conference, trade show or convention. A public wave – or one with a limited invited audience, as is appropriate – can be your platform. 

And it’s multimedia. 

Attachments can be dragged and dropped into the wave – pictures for example. All members of the wave conversation can throw their photos in and they become part of one collective slide show.

A Wave is a hub of conversations that is constant and can be returned to by any number of people and updated by them all, and read by them all, at any time. It's like a mix of instant messenger and email; any wave participant can highlight an element of a message and respond directly to that bit.

So on a major breaking news story, the output from a range of reporters, plus citizen journalists and participants, can be pulled into the one wave.  

At a major event, any number and range of participants can pool their knowledge, expertise, comment and reporting in a single wave that can be the hub of coverage for that event.

A wave as a universal, multimedia publishing platform
 
You can embed waves in your web pages, into a blog, on discussion group sites, community forums, and you can let users discuss the content using waves that they create. 

Any individual web user can aggregate the wave conversations they are interested in and keep tabs on them all easily. They can bring them into the wave client so they don’t have to go hunting for them all over the place.

Could an industry report on itself? And, if it could, what role would be left for the B2B journalist?

I ask because there has been some fascinating discussion on the topic recently, notably from Dan Blank -- director of content strategy and development for Reed Business Information  -- and Paul Conley, a specialist in web-first publishing among other things.

The questions need posing because of the growth of social media. Twitter, Flickr and YouTube-distributed video are being used extensively by both trade journalists and participants at major trade events.

Dan presents an example, the NeoCon trade show in Chicago, which was covered by Interior Design magazine. The magazine had a website, two Twitter accounts, an online navigator and a blog.

But this  was only a part of a much bigger picture of coverage of the event undertaken by participants using social media.

Dan found around 1,500 tweets a day with 400 individuals updating, hundreds of photos on Twitpic and Flikr and dozens of videos shared via YouTube.

He points out that some of this content is from other professional journalists and trade publications, some from manufacturers and PRs, but says: “Plenty of these tweets, photos and videos were shared by industry insiders, regular attendees, and fans. The overall point here is that this content is being found on social networks not associated with a single media brand.

“This content is being published more broadly to the web, and then shared and talked about in places that no single company could ever control -- they can just try to be there in ways that help their audience.

“What this means is that journalists, publishers and media companies need to rethink their roles, and the value they are offering their industries.”

And this is where the good news comes in. As anyone who follows a lot of people on Twitter and subscribes to a range of RSS feeds knows, you can easily get swamped by information. It’s hard to sift it.

What you need is an editor. And that’s where the journalist comes in.

The value of the editor is not diminished in all this, it is enhanced. A professional journalist can filter all this and bring the very best of it to their readers’ attention. So while an industry can, to an extent, cover itself, it takes the journalist-interpreter to make sense of that, and to make all that collaborative effort comprehensible.

Some people talk of this as being a curatorial role: like the curator of a museum collection, the journalist brings the really good stuff to the fore and showcases it, and may also offer context and interpretation.

So any B2B magazine’s social media strategy has to be rooted in the industry conversations that are taking place, and in filtering them.

Social media make it possible to serve niches within a B2B’s readership.

Dan says: “When considering your social media strategy, keep these niches in mind. Can you have multiple brand accounts on Twitter in order to serve the needs of very specific audiences you serve? If you are creating a Facebook group -- are you targeting your industry broadly, or focusing in on the one sub-group who is most passionate about a key aspect of things?

“Social media strategy can become very sophisticated very quickly, but can be more straightforward if you always consider the needs you are serving and work to measure what is working and what isn’t.”

What any B2B publication must seek to do is to lead the way within its industry. Paul Conley picks up on this point and says: “For every B2B publication that is participating in -- even leading -- the conversations, there are still plenty that lag years behind.

“Twitter -- at least in most B2B verticals -- is a media phenomenon. Most tweets come from journalists, marketing execs and public-relations pros.

“If you're a reporter for Paper Bag Weekly walking the floor of the Paper Bag Expo trade show, you'll likely find dozens of folks tweeting. But they will nearly all be from the media side of the paper bag industry. You can read tweets from flacks and tweets from hacks, but you won't find a tweet from anyone who actually makes a paper sack.

“The obvious exception to this is in tech. Walk the floor of a tech trade show and you'll find that everyone really is tweeting. Tech really does cover itself.

“So this poses a question: what will it take to reach the point where a non-tech industry actually reports on itself?”

Paul says that better software is needed, and suggests a project called Google Wave, currently under development, could be the key to making that happen.

I’ll look at Google Wave in detail in my next post.

Is B2B about to collapse?

Times are hard. So far they've looked harder for general news publishers. B2Bs appear to have been holding up relatively well. But...here's someone who thinks they are in as dire a situation as any other sector.

Here's an extract. It's from a US B2B specialst called Paul Conley:

1. The B2B publishing industry -- which is now dominated by giant print companies and smaller Web-only companies -- is about to collapse.
2. When the dust settles, B2B journalism will still be here -- but many of the companies that make up the industry will be gone.
3. The dominant business models of both the past and present will fail.