From Publisher to Platform: 14 ways

to get benefits from social media

Mike Bracken
Technology Director – Development
Thanks Mark, and thank you to all of you who have taken time to be here today. Let me show you a little about who we are and what we do….
 Founded in 1821

2nd largest English language online

readership

Publishes the Guardian and the Observer –

and the Guardian.co.uk, & Guardian
Professional, in the education, media and
public sectors
We are a small company, just 1600 people, with a huge brand. We have been publishing newspapers for over 200 years, and yet in the last 3 years our use of social media
is transforming both what we do and how we do it. Guardian.co.uk is a long time leader in the use of electronic and social media solutions. Let me show you a little about
who we are and what we do….
 montage

Technology and the social relationships with a user in this country helped us to uncover the truth behind the death at a G20 rally in London. Our investment in social media
and technology allowed us to analyse and bring to life the largest information leak of modern times. Our reporting and films behind the scenes with US servicemen and
women in Afghanistan has won awards. And our many brands and new products, from iPhone apps to Eyewitness, have social media at their core
 Massive change

Peter Sondergarrd at keynote: “We have created a platform for massive change. Information will be the oil of the coming century” Cloud, social, context aware and pattern
based computing will be the 4 areas of the future. For technologists in the media industry today, there is a massive change taking place today. At its centre, this change is
the change in relationships between brands, products and the consumer. Today I’m going to show you 4 areas where use of social media and technology is core to dealing
with this change, but first a quick statement of our strategy:
 So what do we mean
by social?

So let’s define what we mean by Social.

 Social

Here’s our definition

 Social = us + them/
you

Its starts off being about us, meaning us and them, or you.
HTTP://WWW.FLICKR.COM/PHOTOS/
TOASTWIFE/

us + them/you =
Mutualisation

And it’s the heart of Mutualisation, a phrase coined by Alan Rusbridger, our editor, to describe increasingly active relationship between us and our audience
 All about lowering barriers

Its all about lowering barriers. But what sort of barriers are these?
 Between editorial and readers

Well, the first ones are obvious, such as the barriers between editors and readers. In our earlier video showing a policeman pushing Ian Tomlinson, who later died, to the
ground, this clip was sent to us by a visitor from the USA
 Between content producers and developers

But its also about changing the barriers between people who produce content, and developers who consume it, embellish it and re-distribute it to new audiences.
 Between business departments and entrepreneurs

Its about reducing barriers between commercial departments and entrepreneurs who can use our content to make money for them and us, and about getting out of the way
and letting them do it
HTTP://WWW.FLICKR.COM/PHOTOS/
NATIONSTUDIO/

The social media you may think I’ll talk

about is what the marketing department
does.

Adding a like button to your site is the beginning of

social...

What social isn’t for us, is what you may have thought I would be talking about today

Just adding a Facebook ‘Like’ button to your site for instance. This isn’t social, its marketing
 The Guardian

Huffington Post

The Guardian

The Guardian

Washington Post

Huffington Post

To illustrate the point, here are some headlines from the day the Like button went live. As you can see, we’re in the information business, and it’s very difficult to Like a
plane crash or indeed, and oil leak. Of course social media has its place for this, but that place is usually found in the marketing department. The social media I am here to
illustrate is core to our mission, technologically advanced, commercial in nature and fundamentally about….
HTTP://WWW.FLICKR.COM/PHOTOS/
CURRYBET/

Social is more important to your business if it is about

providing a culture within your organisation where the
permission to remove and cross barriers is
paramount.

Its about people. Lowering barriers between internal and external developers, as witnessed at one of our regular Hack Day seen here.
HTTP://WWW.FLICKR.COM/PHOTOS/
PIGSAW/

Social is also about creating new businesses and

revenues

About transforming internal and external

relationship

Its about bringing new businesses in, and being a proper partner with them to mutualise the opportunity
 If social technology is implemented by you, the
technology change agent, it is the key to
unlocking huge cost savings and driving new
revenues

Crucially, social technology is also the key to unlocking huge cost savings internally and driving new revenue creation with minimal investment up front.
 How do you make it a
core part of all you
do?

So how have we made it core at the Guardian? We believe there are 4 areas of social media transformation, so I’m now going to give you some examples.
Innovation
 SIGNPOSTING
Innovation Products &
business
 SIGNPOSTING
Innovation Products & Organization
business
 SIGNPOSTING
Innovation Products & Organization Technology
Business

Innovation. Products & Business development. Organisation. Technology.

Innovation
1.
Innovation is implicit, not a department.
Challenge your way of working from within.

Innovation is, as you know, a frame of mind. Its not a department. The surest way to demotivate anyone is by hiving them off in an innovation function – as this is
inherently anti-social
HTTP://WWW.FLICKR.COM/PHOTOS/
KAMSHOTS/

Innovation cannot be engineered

or just delivered

But innovation won’t just arrive. You can’t just pick up the phone and order 6 boxes of it
 Create conditions for it to flourish.

Those conditions are human rather than

purely technological.

As a technology leader, you have to create the conditions for it to thrive

 27

This is a panda, which like innovation is another animal which too is tough to cultivate. Its also our iPad app, and when we created it we faced a conundrum:
 We didn’t want to release bad iPad app or
miss out on product launch.

How could we create a great product in

minimal time which would show off aspects
of new device?

Of course, we didn’t want to launch a bad application, but we wanted to be there at launch, so the challenge was to get a great product ready in a short period of time
And how could we make it so compelling that our product would feature on launch advertising?
Well it turns out that we had some internal prototypes. We had a product manager and an interactive developer at this for 3 days, and gave them the freedom to use
whatever tools and resources they felt appropriate
 After about 2 hours
they’d made this...

They used some classic social technology – a whiteboard – and Flash, and after 2 hours they had made this:
And they made this. And it allowed us to get into new opportunities:
 Missed opportunity cost is not of not doing
it, it’s of doing it wrong

Not just taking part in a new platform for media,

 320,000 new users

But attracting 320,000 new users. That is a few thousand more than the average daily sale of the newspaper in the UK
 UK: 18% US: 50% ROW: 32%

Now digitally, our web based breakdown is around 40:30:30, with 40% from the UK, 30% North America and 30% Rest of the World. But as you can see, 82% of these new users are in
markets weʼve often found it difficult to crack.
 Social Reputation:
Everybody’s talking
about it

And, as we’ll see, people are saying nice things about us. This is our social reputation. But really, innovating around iPad apps is surely par for the course for a media
company? Fair enough. But here’s the flipside of innovation
2.
Innovate the middleware & back end to
reduce costs

The key innovation principle is to focus this type if talent on the middleware and back end costs.
 Make money by saving money

Now middleware costs don’t make for as attractive slides as iPad apps, but in this audience I know where your costs are hurting. Like me, you’ve got ever more digital
channels, social technologies products to satisfy and yet, perhaps, uncertain rewards to come
Web developers are
often excellent at
scaling middle tiers.

Which is where Graham Tackley comes in. Graham is a very, very good web developer, from the same team as the iPad guys. He’s particularly good at understanding how
the infrastructure and middleware of web services work, and how web services scale, and there’s a reason for this:
HTTP://WWW.FLICKR.COM/PHOTOS/
HOWZEY/

They understand what users do, how users

flock and operate as a crowd and how best
to cache and make efficiencies

Developers like Graham understand what users do. How they interact, what they want to do on our sites and services and, crucially, how their expectations change as a
crowd. Or put it another way – they understand users social expectations far more deeply than any technology services company
So what Graham did was implement memcache to reduce the number of database calls. You can see here with the big red arrow to show when it was switched on. This
enabled us to scale spectacularly well. While our customer base doubled from 17 million to 37 million per month in 2 years, our scaling costs were expected to increase by
$3.5 million in that time. Instead, we made a saving of
 How much saved on database licensing and
new hardware?

$2+ million per year

A modest number, for sure, but this continues to grow, and we get the benefit year on year.
 Social technologists:
There are no tiers

What this shows is that there are no tiers in the technology organisation – no separated front end and back end team competing for resources. Success is celebrated
whether it be in the hands of the consumer or in real innovation in the infrastructure, and our people are expected to treat working on either in the same way. Socially,
there are no internal tiers
3.
Regardless of sunk cost, stop competing
with yourself.

Kill stuff. Fail fast

The third innovation lesson from social technology is about how to approach technology which already exists.
HTTP://WWW.FLICKR.COM/PHOTOS/
SONGZHEN/

Don't spend all your time money and

resources reinventing wheels

In 2007/8 we spent money building our publishing platform, so that our editors and journalists, and commercial teams, could use it. And it worked. It was our set of
wheels, so to speak. A technology platform delivered on time and under budget, we then proceeded to turn it inside out
HTTP://WWW.FLICKR.COM/PHOTOS/
LOOP_OH/

Make a wheel factory.Build a platform for

you and your partners to use.

But what we realised is, in a mutualised world, our advertisers, partners and users needed to use it too, so we set about building a wheel factory
Its called the Open platform, a set of API’s and data constructs, a platform for us and our partners
 Use the platform to speed up product
development and reduce risk of trying
something new

We now use this platform to speed up our product development, and by using our platform we’re able to innovate quickly, succeed and fail fast, and cheaply. You’ve seen
this panda before, it’s our iPad app
And it was developed very quickly, in about 3 days, and people say nice things about it
 Social reputation:
You can’t buy this
sort of influence. You
can only earn it through
what you make and do.

So the key for us that social media enhances reputation, but doesn’t create it. If you start off with the premise: what is our social media strategy? And then try to create it,
you’ll probably not be in as good a place then if you created the conditions for innovation and then used social media to amplify the results.
4.
Open up. Allow your customers & partners
to innovate with and for you. Celebrate and
reward them

The final innovation point. Open up – its hard to innovate when all you know is yourself. As we’re in Florida, let me show you one quick example which may resonate
At the recent UK election a third party developer created Voter Power Index, which shows the true weight of each voters power, as due to our electoral system some seats -
as Florida was here – are marginal and important, while some seats barely see a real competition for votes
This application shows the relevant voting power by ratio across the UK
And shows how some seats are barely competitive. We would probably not had the time or resources to build this, but it happened quickly as a result of us opening up our
innovation capacity. And who knows, as in the UK we’ve just elected a coalition govt for the first time in decades, perhaps it was more important than we can guess.
 Product and business

How can social media impact products impact the core business
5.
Empower domain specialists: Product
management demonstrates immediate
success

We’ve had some great success with product management

We took our existing comment system. We believe the social conversations with our users are so crucial that we invested our development resources into this platform.
 on Thursday 16th September

1 comment every 6
seconds

As you can see, it’s a very busy platform, with live engagement with hundreds of thousands of our users every day
 345386 users who have posted at least one
comment

$220k CAPEX + development cost

63¢ per user

commenting

We took this in house, saved over $300,000 as a result, and have much more control over our future in this area. It’s the perfect circle for us: A decreasing cost per user,
daily feature additions and innovation, negligible scaling costs. Enables new revenue streams.
 The best way of getting
people talking is to
make it the best possible
experience.

The lesson here is that generic, business analysis won’t cut it for results like this. We need dedicated, passionate product management who know the technology and have
a passion for this use of social technologies. No one brought us the requirements!
6.
Social media is quick:
Prototype to product speed: from 3 months
to 3 days

The next issue is speed. Every piece of work is categorised as 3 day, week or month
HTTP://WWW.FLICKR.COM/PHOTOS/
PDCAWLEY/

You can now build working

software in less time than it
takes to have the meeting
to describe it.
Simon Willison

We knew this sort of innovation pace and thinking was possible with social media tools, but possibly
didn’t appreciate just how effective this could be so quickly. Mark gave some great examples yesterday
– here’s ours
This application captured over 300,000 individual MPs expense records, and allowed our users to
crowdsource them. Suddenly, our readers can see where exactly UK MPs expense spending has gone,
and take part in the reporting and classification system
 Hosting cost $600
(no k’s or m’s on the end of that number)

The crucial part of this application is not just the speed, but the cost: By using Amazon EC2 the entire hosting cost was $600. It was done in 3 days.
 The cost of missed
opportunity, priceless.
People are still benchmarking
democracy apps against it.

So, by making this quickly, we spent barely any money and deepened our reputation, because politics apps are still benchmarked against this today
7.
Technology *is* business development

A personal bugbear, but when I hear CIOs and CTOs talk about ‘the business’ I know they’re failing. There is nothing more demotivating, more inherently anti-social than
to tell developers they are not part of the core business, and if your core business is about making profits, so be it
HTTP://WWW.FLICKR.COM/PHOTOS/
WORLDECONOMICFORUM/

This guy knows it, but his answer is not social. One of the biggest problems to the paywall approach is
that it breaks the interlinked nature of the internet and moreover makes social distribution hard if not
impossible. If you had to ask your friend to pay when you passed them a physical newspaper for them
to read a story it would seem odd. Online never imitates real life.
HTTP://WWW.FLICKR.COM/PHOTOS/
WORLDECONOMICFORUM/

vs
paying for
content paying for
utility
We don’t believe he is wrong to charge for content, just that the mechanism is wrong. We believe that users will pay for functionality and utility, and our technology team
have proved it
This is the Guardian iPhone app. It’s beautiful and, contrary to conventional wisdom when launched in October 2009, it charged for news. It came from the technology
department, was developed in just over a month, and the results speak for themselves:
 200k+ new users

$0.45 million+

Over 200,000 new users and a healthy profit already

 Second mover advantage is often best.
Understand possibilities first.

Second mover advantage is often best.

 Organization

I now want to talk about the most important part of our social technology.
8.
Sit close: get to know your internal
audience

Its how we organise ourselves.

HTTP://WWW.FLICKR.COM/PHOTOS/
PIGSAW/

Kings Place is a social building. Last year we moved from 8 buildings to 1, removed nearly all offices
and integrated our teams. What we effectively did was….
 Build a social network

Build a social network.

 Build a social network
out of your building.

With our building, and it’s the most important part of our success. It may signal the end of the technology function. So what?
9.
You cannot achieve long term
organizational change with hired help –
talent is everything
 105
contractors

28
developers

This shows the position I found in 2007, so we turned the recruiting system inside out. Peer reviews, peer recruiting and attraction of talent via social media was key. I was
asked by one CIO here whether to turn Facebook on – it’s a productivity problem apparently. If your people are not on Twitter and Facebook telling their peers how good it
is to work there, then why not?
HTTP://WWW.FLICKR.COM/PHOTOS/
PIGSAW/

Talent begets talent

But to deliver on social media its vital that the users of these technologies are a key part of the
business. So we invited the right sort of people who could do it to join us and work with us.
 The people you hire
are your new
recruiters.

So the key message is: social media is inherently based on peer review
10.
Technology is a first class citizen. There is
no ‘business’, its you.

Something I’ve touched on already is inclusion

HTTP://WWW.FLICKR.COM/PHOTOS/ HTTP://WWW.FLICKR.COM/PHOTOS/
MEG/ TOBYBARNES/

Dan Meg

Once you have this talent there’s no point in

constraining it to a small area where it can’t
do stuff.

Talent like Dan and Meg here require a central place in our business. Dan lead development at Flickr, the photo sharing site which is one of the primary social media
services on the Internet
After 2 months, in his words, ‘playing with a newspaper’, he delivered to me: a napkin
Which, using free, social media tools and services, delivered Zeitgeist, a brand new way to show the news. It’s colourful, deeply addictive and optimised for the iPad.
Crucially, before the iPad existed
HTTP://WWW.FLICKR.COM/PHOTOS/
PIGSAW/

So, rather than take it from him and give it to the marketing dept, we encouraged him to talk directly to our clients
 Let your talent drive,
and then tell the story.

No-one has the passion for social technologies more than those who create and use it, so let them drive
 Technology

Finally, a word on technology

11.
Apply web 2.0 & open source to the
enterprise.

This is a no brainer
FROM PUBLISHER TO PLATFORM // GARTNER CIO BRIEFING
We introduced Google and Salesforce across the enterprise
 We have reduced our opex costs
by roughly 65% and the project
paid for itself within the first
year.

Increased comms. Skills take-up. Virtual working increased. Speed and low cost of internal development on internal systems.
 Oh, and people can
collaborate better. It’s
more social.

Socialising the enterprise is an absolute must. If the only way to get something done – whether it be a helpdesk call or a request for investment – is social, then everyone
becomes social by default.
12.
Find the right tools, use them. Write off the
investments

The other part of enterprise renewal with social media tools is the headshift to start throwing stuff away
HTTP://WWW.FLICKR.COM/PHOTOS/
BONNIERD&D

Sometimes you
need a container
ship sometimes you
need a speedboat.

Chris Thorpe

This is Chris, one of our developer advocates, who has helped usher in the use of tools like Google app
engine and various open source databases and tools
 Bring things in house where
appropriate

In 2009/10, the use of social technology

to replace existing enterprise and
license software saved 70% of the total
cost of the development
costs of the business

And the financial results can be staggering

 Use external resources where appropriate

MPs expenses - Amazon EC2

Zeitgeist - AppEngine

These are some of the services we use in anger, but there are many more
 Compute on demand
and platform agnostic
means less cash spent
and more friends.

And crucially, these costs scale, both in terms of money, but in terms of the size of your social graph.
13.
‘Bench strength’: open up to external
developers & partners

Finally, social media is inherently scalable

54
staff

3000+
in network

300+
38
partners
coding
And what this shows is the new tiering of social technologists around our business
THANKS TO PROF SHADBOLT FOR
THIS IMAGE

As we were open to more developers, The government asked us to get together a collection of people
who had made stuff with our API to make stuff with their data. So they turned up at our offices, and
you may recognise this guy: Sir Tim Berners Lee
 Our social network.

This is our social network. You should have one too

14.
Peer reviews wins every time stick to it.
People will validate your results.

Social is important to your mission. We found that when we did the first 13, then the 14th thing to happen was validation
HTTP://TWITPIC.COM/
ELEMENTARI86

This social power brought us to the attention of our Government

Who, seeking to be open, gave us a hard to understand finance data set. Basically, UK PLC on a USB stick. Within a week, our social network had pulled apart COINS, and
made the finances of the UK open to everyone
And people with big amplification power notice, and use their social tools to tell others
 When people like this talk
about you publicly, others
listen and influence
spreads.

And this is where influence comes from, and why I’m here today to talk to you. So, if you want governments and communities to talk about you, if you want to reduce
costs, get closer to your users and drive your business, then social media is the way to go. If you want to use the Like button from Facebook, knock yourself out, but this is
social media. Let’s just recap these points:
Innovation

1. Innovation is implicit, not a department.

Challenge your way of working from within.

2. Innovate the middleware & back end to reduce costs

3. Regardless of sunk cost, stop competing

with yourself. Kill stuff. Fail fast

4. Open up. Allow your customers & partners to innovate

with and for you. Celebrate and reward them
Products &
business

5.
Empower domain specialists: Product management
demonstrates immediate success

Prototype to product speed: from 3 months to 3 days

6. Technology *is* business development

7.
Organization

8.
Sit close: get to know your internal audience

You cannot achieve long term organizational

9.
change with hired help – talent is everything

Technology is a first class citizen. There is no

10.
‘business’, its you.
Technology

11. Apply web 2.0 & open source to the enterprise.

12. Find the right tools, use them. Write off the investments

13. ‘Bench strength’: open up to external developers

& partners

14. Peer reviews wins every time stick to it. People

will validate your results.
 Social = us +them/you
Mike Bracken
The Guardian
Web: www.guardian.co.uk
Email: Mike.Bracken@guardian.co.uk
Twitter: leftback

Social media is about us and them/you.