Increasing numbers of people are growing suspicious of official messaging
from company web sites, so instead they are turning to social media
networks for views and news.

It is frankly amazing how many companies know that people are talking
about them through social media but still they do not take any actions
based upon what is being said.

Speaking in the book, What Would Google Do?, Marc Benioff, CEO of salesforce.com, points out that social media is a live focus group that never closes. He points out that customers are having conversations about every company and its products.

Benioff says the questions every company has to ask are:

Do they want to be part of these conversations?
Do you want to learn from them?
Are you willing to innovate on the basis of what is being said?
Do you want to harness the power of these communities for your benefit?

He adds that the days of the dead-end corporate suggestion box and
corporate indifference will no longer be tolerated.

The risks of ignoring these conversations is that they could benefit your
competitors ;you could become highly vulnerable to escalating negative
speculation ; or over time you could become culturally irrelevant and
detached from the new media realities.

The key underlying change driving the emergence of social media and
conversations about companies and their products is that anyone now can
easily create and distribute content using social media tools.  A hugely
expensive printing press is no longer mandatory to publish news. You no
longer need to be a rich press baron to publish information. The
professional elite who controlled traditional media and decided what the
amateurs should read are no longer in power.

No one newspaper or media outlet exclusively controls content.  There is
no scarcity of content. It is everywhere across the web and being shared
amongst people.  Despite advertisers trying to convince you of the
opposite so you pay over the odds for your adverts.

And the fact that more people can create content more easily does not mean that all of that content carries influence or is worth reading, but neither does it follow that none of it has influence or none of it is readable. So, on balance, it is best to listen and see what is worth acting upon and what isn’t. You never know what you might learn….

Here’s an interesting new survey that underlines the way social media usage is taking off. According to eMarketer, 39% of UK Internet users, or more than 15 million people, will use social networks at least once a month this year.

In five years time the social networking population will reach 22 million, half of Web users, it says.

No surprise that most users of social networking, forums and blogging are young and male, although more and more women are getting involved. Older age groups too are increasingly represented, as professional social networking among UK employees grows.

The report analyses the way that social networks are growing, also other topics such as the most popular blogs, how social media differs by age group, and how marketers can make use of it.

More details here.

Barack Obama revolutionised political campaigning by using social media to the full in the run up to the presidential election, bypassing the usual handful of wealthy supporters to go straight to the grass roots. So it comes as no surprised that, now he’s taken office, the president has decided to use social media as a way of engaging with the public, opening accounts on FaceBook, MySpace and Twitter, as well as Flickr and YouTube.

Content will mainly be derived from White House blogs, though the press release making the announcement said, intriguingly: “We’re looking forward to hearing from our fans, friends and followers.”

It seems inevitable that the president will gain thousands, and probably millions, of followers. Will the White House be keeping track of all the comments generated on its social media sites? Will it use them to monitor public opinion and inform policy? Does it regard social media as a way of engaging in dialogue with the public, or simply as a way of informing them?

The press release doesn’t offer answers to any of these questions, so we’ll be watching to see how it all pans out. But it’s an initiative to be welcomed – and let’s hope it’s more successful than the faltering attempts of the British government to engage with the public through its YouTube channel.

I’m not used to thinking of the Daily Telegraph as especially cool – in fact as long as I can remember I’ve associated it with dyed-in-the wool conservatism. So it’s surprising to see it emerging so strongly in the digital space and giving The Guardian,  smugly sure of its pre-eminence in that area, a run for its money.

The Barclay brothers, the paper’s owners, are said to be spending millions on a new digitally equipped open plan office, in a bid to make the tired old format appeal to younger readers. The Guardian is all aflutter.

But these days a lot of the action is online, and the Telegraph has been scoring there with its website Telegraph.co.uk.  This got 28 million visitors in March, making it the UK’s most popular newspaper site.

According to the site’s head of audience development Julian Sambles, no less than 8% of its readership – a staggering 75,000 readers a day – now comes from social media sites like Diggit, Delicious, Reddit and Stumbleupon, which enable members to choose and identify stories that they like.

The fact that Sambles chose to impart this interesting piece of information in an interview to blogger Malcolm Coles, itself says something about the company’s  understanding of social media.

“What we have done is to enable all of our stories to be submitted to these social sites by adding a ‘share this’ button on every article,” Sambles explains. “In each case they can then add their own headline and comments onto the article so enabling their point of view to get across. By continuing to deliver a large volume of good, rich content we have found that our readers enjoy engaging with it.”

Two recent examples he gave from Digg were:

* Drug Murders And Gold Machine Guns In Mexico PICS
* IMF to Create Billions of Dollars Worth of Super Currency

With a vast store of content that is refreshed daily, newspapers are clearly a prime destination for online readers.

But other types of businesses can learn from this too, especially those who are committed enough to keep adding to their sites. Where there is fresh and interesting content, providing a link to sites like Digg has been shown to bring in serious amounts of traffic.