On Making Your Archive Work Harder

Jul 19

How real estate marketing can lean on what’s happened in the past
Originally Published at RETSO, October 2012

“We found a nearly linear relationship between time of sharing of the resource and the percentage, lost, with a slightly less linear relationship between time of sharing and archiving coverage of the resource.

From this model we conclude that after the first year of publishing, nearly 11% of shared resources will be lost and after that we will continue to lose 0.02% per day.”
Hany M. SalahEldeen, Michael L. Nelson: ‘Losing My Revolution: How Many Resources Shared on Social Media Have Been Lost?’

Much of the advice centered around growing a business online, especially a real estate brand presence, centers around the idea of curation. Specifically, the tenured growth of sharing links, at scale, over time. It’s very often a way that we demonstrate collective value to the customer, and position ourselves as experts in our particular locale. It shows that we’re taking all the hard work out of the sharing process, proactively seeking out the most interesting pieces of information, and distributing them to the social stream in a way that cumulatively builds value and sparks conversations. In short, it’s one way that we differentiate ourselves competitively in an era of commoditized listing syndication, where all listings are available everywhere.

However, recent studies from Cornell University suggest that this might not be an effective long-term strategy, as the sustained use of social media begins to sharpen it’s focus as it ages, and becomes more deeply understood over time. As Mathew Ingram suggests over three wonderful articles, information decay is simply eating away at our collective online histories, with linked content either being deleted, moved, or edited in ways that destroy the original source and create broken links.

Simply put, the web is decaying and aging in ways that destroys our old work.

This poses interesting challenges for those building digital businesses predicated upon volume of content over time, as it calls into question notions of legacy, scale and ultimately, the longevity of online relationships.For those building out their long-term digital expertise, the older content is eroding at a rate of 0.02% every day, which might not seem like much, but that’s 11% a year, reaching almost 30% after 2 years. For example, how much of the 2002 web is left online? Compare that to how much you think of what you’re doing today will still be around this time next year.

“The companies behind these networks can, and someday will, destroy all of those moments. Delete them from the record. Forever. With no advance notice… history shows us that it happens. Over and over and over.

The clips uploaded to Google Videos, the sites published to Geocities, the entire relationships that began and ended on Friendster: They’re all gone.”
Anil Dash, quoted in ‘Twitter Is A Stream, But It’s Also A Reservoir’

Widely citing an incredibly comprehensive study entitled ‘Losing My Revolution: How Many Resources Shared On Social Media Have Been Lost?’by authors Hany M. SalahEldeen and Michael L. Nelson, Ingram continues by suggesting that much of the content that currently gets linked to in the stream, simply disappears, sometimes incredibly quickly. And just as the modern web is inherently ephemeral as it moves from a page-based model to a stream-centric approach, real estate, especially real estate marketing, is beginning to experience a dissonance between what constitutes ‘building’ a digital business, and what that means for content that deteriorates at 11% each year. In essence, it solidifies the idea that sharing, likes, retweets and other such methods of distribution all have significantly diminished value in the face of truly building relationships, offline, through sharing content in the right place, at the right time, with the right person. Taking the activity offline becomes paramount in the face of these findings.

“The long-term social effects of this digital amnesia remain to be seen.”
Mathew Ingram: ‘The Disappearing Web: Information Decay Is Eating Away Our History’

In conducting their research, SalahEldeen and Nelson analyzed a large number of recent momentous news events, such as the Egyptian revolution, the Iranian protest movements and even Michael Jackson’s death, and tracked the links shared on Twitter. What they found was that after two and a half year, almost 30% of the original sources had disappeared, 11% of that having taken place within the first year, and then accelerating as the content continued to age. Furthermore, they concluded that this form of online link sharing, with specific reference to news, disappears at a rate of 0.02% per day. And while it’s still unclear how or why the information is disappearing (if it’s being archived, moved, or just deleted), what’s essential is understanding how critical this kind of information is in documenting how information spreads, how events unfold, and which accounts were the most accurate (or not). Many Facebook timelines within the real estate industry, especially for brands and brokerages, are already beginning to experience this as Facebook and Twitter continue to deprioritize archived search in their user experiences, making access to older content inherently difficult.

If information is, as Ingram argues, being perpetually being replaced, overwritten and deleted, often at the same pace at which it’s being created, then the notion of long-term investment in content strategy and the building out of libraries of information becomes much more problematic, especially if they leverage social and are primarily curation-centric and link-driven.

“What makes collecting the ephemera of online communications difficult, said Elmer, is that Twitter, Facebook and YouTube are not public spaces; they belong to corporations looking to turn a profit.

Every one to three months, the social media giants change the code used to archive their collections, which increasingly include political campaign videos, heated debates and, perhaps just as importantly, pointed political quips.

Governments who want to keep a record of their elected politicians are left scrambling to keep up.”
Teresa Smith: ‘Social Media Proving Difficult For Archivists’

Interestingly, initiatives in the United Kingdom, which would allow for the detailed and consistent archiving and storage of websites are currently being discussed, with The National Library of Scotland urging the government to allow rights for such a project. Indeed, social archiving is becoming a greater issue as the web shifts towards a stream-centric approach. It raises some fascinating questions about how such an archive would work, as there’s currently no standard protocol (like the Dewey decimal system) for indexing digital content in a way that would level the playing field across all platforms. For many, the notion of circumventing this problem and working with independent or third-party archiving, outside of the realm of the platforms themselves is fast becoming a reality.

Take the open sourced ThinkUp for example. It lets you store all your social activity from networks such as Twitter, Facebook and Google+ in a database which you can control, search, sort and analyze,solving a very real business problem. This counters the notion that the services can delete or reorganize, even repurpose your content at any time, based on their terms of service, and returns that content’s use and maintenance to its originator, or at the very least, those who discovered and shared it. For many building long-term business and brand presences on social platforms, not abdicating control over the data to the platforms themselves becomes something critical to consider, especially in an age where the content is decaying at 11% each year.

The power of archived content, if it’s sales data, marketing content, or even customer activity over time, is always in the ability to be able to spot patterns of behavior and tailor your marketing appropriately, especially if it’s predictive. Having a stronger, more detailed sense of what you’ve built and how much of it actually still exists is key. And in an era of extremely corrosive digital information decay, in order to strengthen existing relationships, grow new ones, and ultimately break away from the tyranny of the stream, this is something many brands are beginning to take into their own hands, and it might be time for the real estate industry to consider making those same decisions.

Further Reading:

Andy Baio: ‘ThinkUp Hits 1.0!’

BBC News (Unattributed): ‘Warning Over Digital Archive Black Hole’

Anil Dash: ‘ThinkUp 1.0 And Software With Purpose’

John Herrman: ‘So, Is The Library Of Congress Still Archiving Twitter?’

Lev Grossman: ‘Iran Protests: Twitter, the Medium of the Movement’

John Hudson: ‘The ‘Twitter Revolution’ Debate: The Egyptian Test Case’

Mathew Ingram: ‘Twitter Is A Stream, But It’s Also A Reservoir’

Mathew Ingram: ‘New Twitter Search Is Nice, But Still Needs Work’

Mathew Ingram: ‘The Disappearing Web: Information Decay Is Eating Away Our History’

Natasha Lennard: ‘Twitter Histories Of Events Are Vanishing’

Matt McGee: ‘Twitter Inching Closer To Giving You All Your Tweets’