It's Open - Social Media Strategy Consultancy

I found this really interesting interview with Scott Monty of Ford about the company’s attitude to social media and the approach they are taking. Heartening to see a traditional company, from the CEO down, recognising the value of social media.

Monty emphasises how social media is so important in terms of them being able to connect and listen to people. It is also interesting to learn about how they are incorporating what people are saying about them on their site, which aggregates Twitter, Youtube and Facebook coverage. Will be fascinating to see how this engagement with social media could affect the development of their products.

Monty actually emphasises during the interview that the success of social media does come down to the quality of your products. If people are not interested in what you have to offer, no amount of social media activity will compensate for that shortcoming.

When a new marketing channel appears, can regulation be far behind? There are moves afoot to extend the remit of the Advertising Standards Authority to include social media.

In the US, the Federal Trade Commission has already set guidelines for social media marketing. Now in the UK the Advertising Association has proposed an amendment to the Committee of Advertising Practice (CAP) Code which, if accepted, will cover ‘companies’ marketing communications on their own websites and other non-paid for space online’.

This move is hardly surprising, considering how controversial marketers’ activity has been in the past, in the areas of mail, email and telephone especially. Regulation is something we are getting used to. And one thing has become clear: after the initial panic at the thought of restraints to their activity has subsided, most marketers don’t worry about it. They recognise that some sort of order and discipline is required if consumers are not to be turned off, making it impossible for businesses to benefit from the channel at all.

The problem, as always, is keeping the miscreants in check. It only takes a few cowboys to ruin it for the rest. So a lot will depend on how far the ASA’s remit extends in practice with regard to social media, and what powers it has to enforce the new rules.

Interesting and succinct piece here on how to approach social media.

The article below by Jay Rosen is key to understanding the changes being caused by social media. It was referred to by Ben Edwards at our recent Social Media Leadership Forum event with The Economist.

If you have read it already, it is worth a re-read. It’s an excellent reference for those people who are interested in the new tension between traditional media and social media/between brand driven content and citizen generated content/between corporate PR and the online crowds. Above all it underlines how a shift in the balance of power is taking place. Organisations no longer have control online and they have to work hard to gain influence.

The People Formerly Known as the Audience

That’s what I call them. Recently I received this statement. The people formerly known as the audience wish to inform media people of our existence, and of a shift in power that goes with the platform shift you’ve all heard about.

Think of passengers on your ship who got a boat of their own. The writing readers. The viewers who picked up a camera. The formerly atomized listeners who with modest effort can connect with each other and gain the means to speak- to the world, as it were.

Now we understand that met with ringing statements like these many media people want to cry out in the name of reason herself: If all would speak who shall be left to listen? Can you at least tell us that?

The people formerly known as the audience do not believe this problem-too many speakers!-is our problem. Now for anyone in your circle still wondering who we are, a formal definition might go like this:

The people formerly known as the audience are those who were on the receiving end of a media system that ran one way, in a broadcasting pattern, with high entry fees and a few firms competing to speak very loudly while the rest of the population listened in isolation from one another- and who today are not in a situation like that at all.

Once they were your printing presses; now that humble device, the blog, has given the press to us. That’s why blogs have been called little First Amendment machines. They extend freedom of the press to more actors. Once it was your radio station, broadcasting on your frequency. Now that brilliant invention, podcasting, gives radio to us. And we have found more uses for it than you did. Shooting, editing and distributing video once belonged to you, Big Media. Only you could afford to reach a TV audience built in your own image. Now video is coming into the user’s hands, and audience-building by former members of the audience is alive and well on the Web. You were once (exclusively) the editors of the news, choosing what ran on the front page. Now we can edit the news, and our choices send items to our own front pages.

A highly centralized media system had connected people “up” to big social agencies and centers of power but not “across” to each other. Now the horizontal flow, citizen-to-citizen, is as real and consequential as the vertical one.

The “former audience” is Dan Gillmor’s term for us. (He’s one of our discoverers and champions.) It refers to the owners and operators of tools that were one exclusively used by media people to capture and hold their attention.

Jeff Jarvis, a former media executive, has written a law about us. “Give the people control of media, they will use it. The corollary: Don’t give the people control of media, and you will lose. Whenever citizens can exercise control, they will.”

Look, media people. We are still perfectly content to listen to our radios while driving, sit passively in the darkness of the local multiplex, watch TV while motionless and glassy-eyed in bed, and read silently to ourselves as we always have.

Should we attend the theatre, we are unlikely to storm the stage for purposes of putting on our own production. We feel there is nothing wrong with old style, one-way, top-down media consumption. Big Media pleasures will not be denied us. You provide them, we’ll consume them and you can have yourselves a nice little business.

But we’re not on your clock any more. Tom Curley, CEO of the Associated Press, has explained this to his people. “The users are deciding what the point of their engagement will be – what application, what device, what time, what place.”

We graduate from wanting media when we want it, to wanting it without the filler, to wanting media to be way better than it is, to publishing and broadcasting ourselves when it meets a need or sounds like fun.

Mark Thompson, director general of the BBC, has a term for us: The Active Audience (“who doesn’t want to just sit there but to take part, debate, create, communicate, share.”)

Another of your big shots, Rupert Murdoch, told American newspaper editors about us: “They want control over their media, instead of being controlled by it.”

Dave Winer, one of the founders of blogging, said it back in 1994: “Once the users take control, they never give it back.”

Online, we tend to form user communities around our favorite spaces. Tom Glocer, head of your Reuters, recognized it: “If you want to attract a community around you, you must offer them something original and of a quality that they can react to and incorporate in their creative work.”

We think you’re getting the idea, media people. If not from us, then from your own kind describing the same shifts.

The people formerly known as the audience would like to say a special word to those working in the media who, in the intensity of their commercial vision, had taken to calling us “eyeballs,” as in: “There is always a new challenge coming along for the eyeballs of our customers.” (John Fithian, president of the National Association of Theater Owners in the U.S.)

Or: “We already own the eyeballs on the television screen. We want to make sure we own the eyeballs on the computer screen.” (Ann Kirschner, vice president for programming and media development for the National Football League.)

Fithian, Kirschner and company should know that such fantastic delusions (“we own the eyeballs…”) were the historical products of a media system that gave its operators an exaggerated sense of their own power and mastery over others. New media is undoing all that, which makes us smile.

You don’t own the eyeballs. You don’t own the press, which is now divided into pro and amateur zones. You don’t control production on the new platform, which isn’t one-way. There’s a new balance of power between you and us.

The people formerly known as the audience are simply the public made realer, less fictional, more able, less predictable. You should welcome that, media people. But whether you do or not we want you to know we’re here.

At the recent Search Marketing Expo in Santa Clara, California, Google announced plans for a new system of realtime indexing. With the exception of direct feeds from social media websites such as Facebook and Twitter, the Google index is currently updated by ‘crawling’ spiders. The frequency of that process depends on the popularity of a given website; but for smaller publishers, crawling usually means a delay of several days between the publication of content and its eventual appearance in the Google index.

What is potentially so significant about Google’s recent announcement is that any content, from any website, regardless of size, could in theory be submitted to the Google index within seconds of publication. Google will use the PubSubHubbub protocol (PuSH), a syndication system based on the Atom format. This system will allow publishers to update a network of hubs with their content updates, which are then fed to subscribers (such as Google) in realtime. Because it is an open protocol, PuSH will also yield benefits for the wider search community, including Google’s principal competitors, Bing and Yahoo.

PuSH will also have important ramifications for the future of social media: for example, updates on corporate blogs could be ingested into search indexes far more quickly than at present. It will effectively reduce the lag time between the incidence of news and its coverage on the web to seconds. For communicators, the inexorable shift towards a more efficient, realtime web presents a unique set opportunities and threats.

On the one hand, it will be possible for communicators to play a more active and responsive role in online news and comment. This will have benefits for the continuity and breadth of business news coverage. On the other hand, a torrent of realtime updates from across the world will also make it harder for communicators to manage the profile of the company. Indeed, an unintended consequence of PuSH is that mistakes, as well as deliberate misinformation, will become even more visible within search engines.

The challenge for Google and others will be to find a balance between the efficiency of realtime indexing and the danger of an open door system, which risks polluting indexes with irrelevant results, as well as spam or even links to malware. Given these limits, it is likely that the realtime approach announced by Google will have to live alongside more traditional forms of crawling and indexing for some time yet.

More evidence of the value big brands attach to social media comes from the recent Brand Building event hosted by Marketing Week. A speaker for Sony Vaio revealed that the company’s campaign for a special edition of its Cyber-shot camera range achieved £12.5m in revenue by using social media to extend PR coverage over nine months.

Interestingly, the brand also made over £1 million in sales from its Twitter account, suggesting that social media can be a viable sales platform as well as being used as a communications channel.

Sony head of corporate communications Nick Sharples said, “The marketing budget is now skewed to wards integrated campaigns and includes PR and social media at the inception of a marketing campaign. Even if we decide to run a big above-the-line campaign or focus on TV, we’ll apply social media amplification.”

However the consensus at the event was that social media has more value for amplifying other marketing approaches than as a stand alone activity, and that one should not expect sales to come directly as a result.

There has been a mixed reception to Twitter’s plan to launch advertising on its site. Ads will have the same 140-character format as ordinary tweets and, emulating Google, will be tied to search results, which means they won’t appear in users’ regular streams.

Some brands are dubious. Advertising on Twitter will feel like your social media strategy has failed, argues Paul Troy, Barclaycard’s global head of advertising and content. “I think we’ll only see lazy advertisers queuing up for this. It doesn’t feel like something leading brands will do,” he says.

There are also worries about ads appearing next to detrimental content, and the quality score algorithms will need to be powerful to stop this happening.

But considering Twitter is where so many consumers are, and how straightforward it is to target them from keywords in their profile, my guess is that a lot of brands will certainly want to try this out. Those who get in first are likely to benefit most.

How well it works will depend largely on how Twitter rolls out its advertising model, and what safeguards it puts in place to protect consumers from unwanted messages.

The Pew Research Center has confirmed what a lot of people probably knew: online news is becoming more popular than reading newspapers in the States. And what happens there, tends to come over here.

This has massive implications for communications. Those organisations who are weighted towards newspapers are now in danger of getting their
priorities wrong, and need to re-engineer themselves to become relevant to the prevailing culture of sharing information online fast 24/7.

“News awareness is becoming an anytime, anywhere, any device activity for those who want to stay informed,” the Pew Research Center said.

Learn more.

Social media seems to be impacting positively on televised events. That’s a common explanation for the sudden revival in big pop culture shows, which are seeing a turnaround in their dwindling ratings.

In 2009 the Grammys drew 19 million viewers, but that was up to 26 million this year, the Golden Globes’ ratings went up by 14%, and there have been bigger audiences than usual for events such as the Olympics and the Super Bowl.

The Oscars on March 7 will be one of the most watched shows of the year (it pulled 36 million viewers in 2009), and is for the first time using social media in its marketing campaign. It streamed the nominations live through Facebook, and will aggregate tweets from guests and workers at the event.

In practice, the organisers do not really need to manipulate social media to draw the crowds, even if they were able to. The Oscars is just the sort of “water-cooler” topic that will bring it to the attention of Facebook and Twitter users who otherwise might not have bothered with it.

Forrester analyst Josh Bernoff thinks that social media are amplifying this kind of activity. Author of Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies, Bernoff says that live experience now includes this sort of interaction, and that whatever else people are doing or talking about online, these events bring them together.

“The one thing that everybody knows they’re doing at the same time is watching the Olympics. The same thing applies to the Super Bowl or the Academy Awards – these are the sort of big tent pole event programs,” he says.

More here.

Demand for places at The Social Media Leadership Forum’s next event with The Economist is building.

It takes place this Thursday, and there are still opportunities for companies to become members of the forum and come along. But don’t leave it too long!!

Ben Edwards, Executive Vice President, The Economist Group, will be explaining how and why The Economist is adopting social media.

The Economist has built a fan base on Facebook of 230,000 people and is adding 10,000 followers on Twitter every week.

On its main website, www.economist.com, readers out-publish journalists forty-fold, with 20,000 comments (and hundreds of thousands of recommendations) published to the site every month.

Ben will explain how and why The Economist is driving the adoption of social computing technologies – and the business value that The Economist expects this to deliver.

If you are a leading forward-thinking company, feel your organisation could benefit from hearing about The Economist’s social media strategies, and would like to participate in this event, please contact me direct: justin.hunt@itsopen.co.uk.