#SHRIMPALERT

THE BEAUTIFUL COLLISION OF A SHRIMP ON A TREADMILL, YAKETY SAKS, BASEBALL& ONLINE COMMUNITY

LIFE IN DIGITAL MEDIA

Here’s how we’ll do this:

1) After a small amount of setup, we’ll walkthrough a ridiculous, but hopefully helpful, example of one corner of the digital media world

2) Mix in relative examples to you all in this classroom that may not seem as crazy

3) Qualify it with broad media changes and the whatnot to try to get from the granular to the big picture

4) Point out how this all affects my day job (as a Digital PR/Media and blogger)

FIRST UP: SHRIMP

WE’LL GET BACK TO THIS – AND WHY IT RELATES TO BASEBALL – IN A BIT

The probability of two people out of a random group of 57 having the same birthday is over 99 percent.

What does this have to do with digital media and shrimp? Everything.

UNRELATED:LET’S PLAY A GAME

Source: Flickr user MangoPOPTART

Source: Future Perfect Publishing

POWER LAW DISTRIBUTION

“THE LONG TAIL” IN MEDIA

Original Picture by Hay Kranen / PD

You get VERY different audiences up here…

…and down here

BACK TO BIRTHDAYS: FORGET STATS

Original Picture by Hay Kranen / PD

You are likely to find someone who shares a birthday with you here because the room is so big. That’s probability, it’s how we got by in media for years.

…but down here, you can find a room just for people who share your birthday. The freedom to create rooms at will changes the way you think about the issue.

THE DISTRIBUTION DEMOCRACY

“…then came broadband, which

essentially removed any channel scarcity. The

distribution, which had been in the hands of a

few large media conglomerates, was

suddenly available to everyone…Just like television, we have

seen the same drama unfold in the music,

radio, newspaper and magazine industries.

The gatekeepers of attention have been

disrupted.”

Om Malik, May 11, 2011

JUST LIKE BIRTHDAYS…

WHEN MEDIA WAS LIMITED BY TECH, IT NEEDED TO REPORT BROADLY

That’s why we have box scores. They tell

us the score at the end of the game. Most

people reading the newspaper want to

know the basics of who did what, and that’s

what broad media tells them.

There’s no line in a box score for when those

hits, appearances, runs and walks happened – perhaps, say, to end a game. It doesn’t make sense to include that.

BUT BASEBALL GAMES DO END IN DIFFERENT WAYS – SOMETIMES IN DRAMATIC “WALKOFF” FASHION

Walk Home Run Triples HBPs0

500

1000

1500

2000

2500

Walkoff Samples from 1973-2011

Walk-Offs

Not all Walkoffs are built the same way, though:

SOME PEOPLE CARE ABOUT THE UBER-SPECIFIC WAYS THAT GAMES END

THIS BRINGS US ALL BACK TO SHRIMPI’ll let Rob Iracane – founder of blog Walkoff Walk – explain it. As he wrote in a Yahoo! Sports post* earlier this year:

In my previous stint as a co-founder of the baseball blog called, you guessed it, "Walkoff Walk," we had a peculiar way of celebrating each time a walkoff walk happened in the bigs. After then-Phillies outfielder Jayson Werth(notes) drew one in April 2008, my co-blogger Kris Liakos spontaneously posted a video of a shrimp running on a treadmill  accompanied by "Yakety Sax," the Benny Hill theme song.

It was a tradition that continued for the next two seasons. Even since we have shuttered the blog, the shrimp video has taken to Twitter. Any time a team gets close to winning a game on a bases-loaded walk, the hashtag #shrimpalert starts appearing in the Twittersphere to alert fellow shrimp devotees that a walkoff walk is nigh somewhere in baseball and the treadmill video could get posted any second.

*Some of the other numbers in this presentation are also from that great post.

PEOPLE WHO STALK WALK-OFF WALKS ARE NOT COMMON

But this is why I love the Internet – there is in fact an active community of them online who have rallied around this video and this gimmick.

IN ONE SENSE, IT’S JUST A SHRIMPThe shrimp had nothing to do with baseball, and was recently brought into questions about the validity of government spending and research into the habits of aquatic creatures.

IN ANOTHER SENSE, IT’S JUST ANOTHER BENNY HILL MASH-UP

The video of our friend Shrimp-on-a-treadmill is far from the first or last video to get the Benny Hill treatment. In fact…

IT’S EASY TO DO (AND IT MAKES ME FEEL BETTER ABOUT FOOTBALL)

I call it #YaketyShinskie, and absolutely no one will ever use it again.

BUT IT WAS WHEN THEY ALL CAME TOGETHER THAT SOMETHING ELSE HAPPENED

TIME TO BE PRACTICAL

BOOOOOOOOO…

(KIND OF)

THESE THINGS MADE #SHRIMPALERT POSSIBLE1. Technology changes in the last decade have made it really easy

and cheap to create and consume media – video, blogs, etc.

2. So easy, in fact, that people are trying different stuff within their own interests everyday:

• Instead of waiting for chance to bring them people with similar interests, the opportunity cost to search for people with really specific similarities is really low.

3. The cost of failure to connect would have been zero.

• That means that posting a ridiculous video – and using it for equally ridiculous means – has no cost if it doesn’t catch on.

Amazing things can happen when you take away the barriers to create and to connect.

• Amazing things like celebrating the rare occurrence of a walkoff walk with 435 of your closest friends and a hashtag through a video of a shrimp running on a treadmill set to Yakety Sax.

ENVIRONMENTMATTERS

For every community that latches on to something, there are myriad other ideas that don’t work.

48 hours of video are uploaded every minute to YouTube – why did that 90-second video get 1.5 million views?

THERE’S ALSO THE CHANGING WAYS WE GET OUR NEWS

Pew’s Journalism study looked at the different channels that someone under 40 uses to get information:

• Internet: weather, politics, crime, arts/cultural events, local businesses, schools, community events, restaurants, traffic, taxes, housing, local government, jobs, social services, and zoning/development

• Newspapers: crime, arts/cultural events, community events, taxes, local government, jobs, social services, zoning/development

• TV stations: weather, breaking news, politics, crime, traffic, local government, and social services

• Radio: traffic• Word of mouth: Community events

BUT THE CHANGE IS JUST AS MUCH ABOUT THE FACT THAT WE CARE ABOUT MORE THAN ONE THING – AND AREN’T LIMITED BY SOURCE ANY LONGER

That is to say, every single person reads the newspaper in a different way – but if they read it all, no matter what order, they end up with that perspective of the news.

When you open up the floodgates to consuming and creating news, the ability to dive deep and use myriad sources fundamentally changes how we get information.

SOME OF IT IS SPEED AND CONVENIENCE

In selecting specific sources for the content we seek, we get very different approaches to the same story.

I’d be lying if I said that Shrimp Alert, the retired Walkoff Walk blog and the Yahoo! blog are the only places out there to find the exact same information of how a baseball game ended.

But in choosing to digest my walkoff walk news via those avenues, I get a very different presentation of it (namely, you guessed it, a shrimp on a treadmill set to Yakety Saks).

SELECTING SOURCE AND CONTENT CREATES THE COMMUNITY

*as a PR pro who hangs around digital media and a blogger, nerd, etc.

HOW DOES THIS RELATE TO WHAT I DO*XKCD's map of online communities

We can go down that path any way we want – searching for different communities about many, many different things.

The best way to understand these communities is to participate and see how each one reacts differently. The #WeAreBC tag that has grown on Twitter over the last few years talks about everything from sports to activities on BC’s campus and acts very differently than #ShrimpAlert.

These also change based on different channels. Facebook relies more on a handful of close connections even if you have a ton of friends, YouTube users love search and related videos, Tumblr is a different beast all together and we could spend days on traditional media news sites (and their comment sections). We could spend days on each of these. We won’t.

THIS WORKS BEYOND SPORTS MEDIA – ACROSS CHANNEL

NOT ONLY IS THERE A COMMUNITY BEHIND THIS LITTLE FELLA – BUT WE CAN LEARN ABOUT THEM

The people following the @ShrimpAlert account are more active than most, and many appear to be well-followed baseball bloggers and sportswriters, living almost entirely the east coast of the US.

A REALLY FAST STUDY…

THERE ARE A BUNCH OF PEOPLE WHO OBSESS OVER THE MINUTIAE OF BASEBALL TO THE POINT THEY STALK WHEN GAMES END ON WALKS

These people have something in common. They stalk Shrimp Alert. That’s one part of their identity...they are at once consuming the media of Shrimp while being media themselves.

THAT AUDIENCE HAS A VALUE TO SOMEONE.

I mean, there has to be a reason to talk to active and well-followed baseball bloggers and sportswriters, living almost entirely the east coast of the US.

Right?

…I promise the point of this lecture is not “watch how many things we can connect to sports.”

But this one is more functional than shrimp, I promise.

MOVING FROM SPORTS TO HEALTH

ONLINE COMMUNITIES FOR SPORTS TEAMS OFFER THE FOLLOWING

• A group of like-minded individuals who share the joy of victory or the agony of a tough season month day.

• A place to build out personal connections based on no more than a single interest.

• A support group that already knows what it’s like to follow the experience.

• Around the clock access to a communications channel to stay up on what is happening in a world that matters to them.

• A way to get involved in something that may seem distant, and unique ways of communicating and bonding within that shared experience.

ONLINE COMMUNITIES FOR PEOPLE WITH SIMILAR HEALTH CONDITIONS OFFER THE FOLLOWING

• A group of like-minded individuals who share the joy of victory or the agony of a tough season month day.

• A place to build out personal connections based on no more than a single interest.

• A support group that already knows what it’s like to follow the experience.

• Around the clock access to a communications channel to stay up on what is happening in a world that matters to them.

• A way to get involved in something that may seem distant, and unique ways of communicating and bonding within that shared experience.

HOW THIS IMPACTS YOU

In the last five years, a few things changed:

• Sure, I work in PR, but because of how the digital medium works, I ultimately have to be making things – writing posts, creating videos, jotting tweets, you name it – that gets my clients out there.

• We don’t necessarily wait for other people to tell their story anymore. This is good and bad.

• My job and industry went pretty starkly from the idea broadcast to narrowcast. Digging deep to tell your story to the right people is how we can impact the people most likely to continue that good will.

This YouTube video has 17,000 views in four days and went out to 152,109 subscribers.

The quality is the same as a TV commercial, it’s 34 seconds long, and it cost $0 to post.

Discussion question: is this an effective way to get people to go see a new movie?

QUICK CASE STUDY

…we are not driving a car, with gas, brakes, reverse and a lot of choice as to route. We are steering a kayak, pushed rapidly and monotonically down a route determined by the environment. We have a (very small) degree of control over our course in this particular stretch of river, and that control does not extend to being able to reverse, stop, or even significantly alter the direction we're moving in.

-C. Shirky, Many to Many, Jan 22 2005

Photo: Flickr user visbeek

QUESTIONS?

DAVE LEVY (@LEVYDR/EMAIL)

OCTOBER 2011