Paul Jacobson

I am periodically reprimanded by some security guard for taking photos of or in the vicinity of a shopping mall. I have essentially been told that taking photos in or of shopping malls is banned with no real rationale. I took a photo of a renovated space inside Balfour Park yesterday and I was told about the ban and also that photos have been banned for more than 20 years. No-one has been able to give me a reason for the ban. The closest was Melrose Arch where I was required to complete a film production request for filming before I could take photos.

I don’t think I have talked about why I even want to take photos of malls. One reason is that I am fascinated by some of the designs and architectural elements. I don’t know much about design or architecture but some of these buildings fascinate me and I feel this compulsion to share my experiences.

This compulsion brings me to the main reason I take photos of these sorts of places and other areas I visit. I think of it as local tourism powered by social media. It really struck home for me how empowered we are if we have a decent mobile phone with a camera and access to our social networks the other day when we were at the Joburg Zoo. We were walking from one section to another and passed a family where everyone was holding a camera-phone. Rather than visit all these local destinations oblivious to their various appeals, I like to capture the interesting and attractive things I see and share them with my communities on the various social networks I frequent.

A number of shopping malls in South Africa have undergone fairly extensive renovations in an apparent effort to make them into lifestyle destinations rather than just a series of shopfronts. The owners appear to want visitors, local and foreign, to frequent their malls and spend as much time as is possible there. Heck, the parking rates alone must make longer stays lucrative. It isn’t always possible to travel outside of your hometown for a break so local destinations are so important. Consider this tweet I noticed on Melrose Arch’s Twitter page:

When you overlay a social media and the social Web, experiencing local destinations becomes a social event if we can capture our experiences and share them. Geolocation means you can take a couple photos or videos while you are having lunch somewhere or just taking the little ones out for a walk and have that content show up on a map. Those maps can be pretty handy for other people who want to have similar experiences. You know, they guide those potential visitors to the locations their predecessors frequented.

I don’t know why shopping malls prohibit photographs and I wish someone in the know would explain it to me. It just seems to me that the people who make the decisions are missing a valuable opportunity to put their destinations on the map in a very meaningful context, literally. Visitors should be encourages to share their experiences at these destinations and interact with them as much as possible. What about QR codes on shop windows linking to their websites or information about the shopping malls themselves (design, history, future plans). Visitors to these malls are increasingly online, mobile and connected and shopping malls have thusfar only managed to achieve lackluster engagement with the social Web. Here are how two of the higher end shopping malls are doing online:

• Sandton City
• Twitter: 568 followers
• Facebook: 511 fans
• Melrose Arch
• Twitter: 148 followers
• Facebook: 36 fans (JB’s Corner, one of its tenants, has 358 fans)

Imagine if visitors were encouraged to capture their experiences and share them? It must be possible to manage security and safety concerns and still facilitate this? I don’t think that shopping malls can really afford to neglect the social Web as a tool in their marketing toolkits. These malls need to realise that engagement with their customers is more about just throwing up a Twitter account and a Facebook fan page. What about engaging with those customers in the malls themselves and encouraging them to share their experiences on location with their social networks. Remember “word of mouth”? Well, this is how it works.

I have been thinking about this question for a little while now. Anyone who has been following me recently will have noticed a certain degree of emphasis on Nokia and its products and services. In fact, looking back at my last 20 posts (not including this one), 6 were not specifically about Nokia or a Nokia product/service. I have also tweeted extensively about Nokia and its products/services. You can be forgiven for asking this question Rich Mulholland asked me the other day:

Now while I am pretty public about my approach to what I write about, questions like Rich’s have me thinking about which rules bloggers should/could play by and what the implications of not playing by those (or any) rules may be.

There was some talk a number of years ago about bloggers being citizen journalists. This was pretty controversial at the time because there were these upstart bloggers encroaching on more traditional journalists’ territory without the overhead of an editorial process and a variety of checks and balances that journalists are supposed to comply with. Bloggers, it seemed, wanted all the benefits journalists enjoy without the limitations and controls they are subject to. Those limitations and controls exist for good reasons, not least of which is to keep the press a reliable source of information. It was around that time, or perhaps shortly afterwards, that someone (I don’t remember who and I can’t find the post) published a post on Thought Leader (I think) about how journalists have the benefit of a sort of quality control process in the form of their editors and other similar mechanisms which help keep them honest. Of course this is an ideal situation because there have been comments about declining journalistic standards and ethics leading to a relatively poor state of journalism at some publications.

So here we are, a couple years later, and bloggers are attracting more and more attention by companies who would otherwise focus their PR efforts on traditional journalists. Bloggers are invited to product launches, site visits and other media events. I was recently flown to Dubai together with a journalist to cover a Nokia media event. It wasn’t too long ago that no-one would seriously have considered sending a blogger, of all people, to an event like that and yet here we are. Last week a number of bloggers were sent to the Seacom landing site. I estimate that there were at least as many bloggers on that trip as there were traditional journalists, if not more. The reason for this is fairly obvious. Bloggers are networked and can be pretty influential in their niches. Some bloggers even have mainstream journalists following them and engaging with them.

None of this background really answers my question though. If bloggers are treated a bit like journalists, should they play by the same rules? Should bloggers gather information in a similar way, approach the material from a similar perspective and adopt a similar stance towards the subject matter of their posts or do bloggers have the flexibility to do things differently?

I suppose it is a little simplistic to assume that all bloggers want the same thing and approach their work in the same way. It is also a good idea to remember that many traditional journalists are bloggers too and they approach their blogging with the discipline they apply to their careers as journalists (blogging may even be part of that work too). It is probably more helpful to focus on the blogger’s activity instead. Does the blogger’s work resemble a journalist’s or is it something else? Does a blogger purport to cover her material as if she were a journalist or does he approach his material in a more casual manner?

I write about things I am passionate about. I believe that this passion means I am incapable of being unbiased about what I write about and I instead focus on being authentic in my posts. I write what I feel, think and believe rather than what I am told to write. That has become my measure of success as a blogger. In doing so I also attract criticism for being too focussed on particular brands or topics. Does this undermine my credibility? I don’t really know and I would rather be as transparent as I can be about my influences and leave it up to my readers to decide how much weight, if any, to give to what I write.

That may be the wrong approach. Perhaps bloggers should follow some baseline set of guidelines. Authenticity would be one of those guidelines but there may well be more guidelines dealing with degrees of detachment from the subject matter of a post and other measures designed to ensure more objectivity and a more balanced approach. I tend to think of bloggers being a little like Romulans to journalists’ Vulcans – influenced more strongly by emotions and willing to follow them in a post. Should bloggers be more detached? Is there a line to be crossed at which point a blogger goes too far? If there is, where is that line?

Photo credit: Journalist taking notes by quinn.anya published under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 license