It's Open - Social Media Strategy Consultancy

The Beeb is to have its first social media editor. Alex Gubbay, who is currently Interactive Sports News Editor for BBC Sport, has been appointed to lead editorial development of user-generated content and social media initiatives across the newsroom from next year.

The job will involve co-ordinating the work of correspondents and reporters who use social media tools, and help develop new ways for audiences to have their say on stories being covered by BBC News.

My first thought about this announcement was, Why doesn’t the BBC already have a social media editor? It’s not just that it already has a big online presence, and advertises links on many of its programmes. Audience participation has been going on for years, and, in a way, television has been a precursor of the online social media revolution.

Members of the public are involved in quiz shows, reality programmes, and so on, and the barriers between programme makers and audience have long been blurred, just as is starting to happen between companies and consumers. A programme like Autumnwatch, for instance, largely depends on viewer input.

But this has also been an organic, informal process. It has been driven by the development of technology that enables audiences to contribute to news, by sending in photos, video clips, comments and eyewitness accounts. This appointment takes the process a step further by overseeing all this activity and ensuring that all the opportunities are being exploited.

In the past year marketing agencies have leaped aboard the rolling social media bandwagon, urging their clients to include blogs and networking sites in their marketing and advertising strategy. But are they exploiting the benefits for themselves?

Not so much, it seems.  According to a new survey most agencies are active on key sites such as Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook but rarely use them for marketing purposes or to attract new clients.

The poll of 212 agencies by RSW/US and Second Wind found that nearly three quarters are connected to LinkedIn, two thirds to Facebook and 56% to Twitter. But most use them no more than once a month, and half never tweet at all. More than half have blogs but two thirds of these add new posts as little as once a month.

If agencies aren’t using these resources, how can they possibly advise their clients about the best way to take advantage of them?

More details and quotes here.

I blog for Media  Week (see Bloggerati at www.mediaweek.co.uk) and this week the magazine kindly published  my post in their ‘Best of the Blogs’ section. It is about Lawyers and Social Media. Please read the post below. It might be interesting for those of you struggling with compliance issues!

‘I know some companies are experiencing difficulties with their legal departments when it comes to blogging and using Twitter.

Some legal departments want to see every blog post before it is published and they are worried about the implications of Twitter channels.

Basically they are not comfortable with their company having more open conversations, which is the key point of social media.

Legal departments have a role, but they should not be able to dictate social media policy. They don’t know the best way to speak with a journalist or to speak with a customer. That is not their expertise.

Of course there are regulatory frameworks that companies need to work within, and these need to be respected, but having said that, companies must be free to communicate using social media. Otherwise their reputations could be damaged. And there are plenty of examples of lawyers issuing warnings to bloggers which totally backfire because they are too heavy-handed.

This is partly about companies trusting staff to use social media sensibly according to agreed guidelines.

Newspapers are a good model here. Journalists and editors are expected to have a certain knowlege of the law but are free to make their own editorial judgements in terms of what is most likely to appeal to their readerships. Lawyers are not writing the articles. But if and when there is a clear legal issue then the lawyers are brought in to advise.

Now granted, not all companies have the role of newspapers. But the communications departments of major companies kind of have the role of newspapers, in that they are reaching out to the public. They need guidelines but they need to be free to use their skills to judge which is the best way to approach people. They also need to have the space and support to be able to experiment. Social media is new, and people have to be given the opportunity to learn.

There are some individual communications executives for large companies who are uncomfortable with how lawyers want to respond to posts on blogs, and rightly so. Social media is about humanising organisations and treating people like people. The lawyers need to educate themselves about social media; relax a bit and recognise that they need to move with the times. Making communications teams paranoid about everything they write is only going to freeze people up and prevent the possibility of genuine conversations between companies and their stakeholders. Companies need to be more accountable to their stakeholders. They need to break down barriers between themselves and the markets they serve. They can do this through more open conversations.

This does vary from company to company.  Some company cultures are more open and empowering, of course.’

Engaging consumers in dialogue is the rationale for businesses using social media as a marketing channel. But for what purpose, exactly?

A widespread assumption is that a presence on sites like Twitter and Facebook boosts awareness and makes consumers feel good about a brand. But a new study suggests that consumers are looking for deals, pure and simple, rather than expressing a shared passion for a brand’s values.

The survey by Razorfish of 1000 internet-savvy consumers reveals that 44% of those who follow a brand on Twitter do so mainly for access to exclusive offers and discounts. The figure is 37% for social networking sites MySpace and Facebook.

Offers of coupons for free pastries and ice cream might explain why Starbucks, for instance, has collected nearly 5 million fans and established itself at the top of Facebook brand pages, the report’s authors argue. Another example they cite is Whole Foods, whose weekly specials and shopping tips have made it the top brand on Twitter, with more than 1.5 million followers.

There are quite a few useful facts and figures here, so it’s worth a look.

The Social Media Leadership Forum starts this week. The forum is designed to bring together leading companies so they can share ideas, collaborate and seek advice from each other and from independent experts in a friendly environment.

Our purpose is to help leading companies build successful social media programmes.

A big welcome to Motorola who have just become the latest company to join the Social Media Leadership Forum.

The Social Media Leadership Forum is a project managed by ItsOpen.

You can learn more about The Social Media Leadership Forum here.

A lot of the best case studies on the use of social media come from across the pond, so it’s good to see Marks & Spencer, a quintessentially British brand, setting an example.

M&S has gone through quite a few changes recently, embracing social media by incorporating ratings and reviews in its main website, and using Facebook and Twitter to carry on conversations with customers. As writer Aliya Zaidi says, it’s encouraging to see a major brand experimenting with new online channels.

Zaidi interviewed the company’s business development manager, Sienne Veit, who points out that the business has actually been engaged in conversations ever since it was founded more than a century ago, via letters, phone calls and, more recently, e-mails. “Really, what we are now doing is moving that conversation along technologically, to where our customers are now having their conversations: Facebook, Mumsnet, YouTube, Flickr, Twitter or wherever they may be online.”

Veit concedes that the company has not cracked the problem of measuring and benchmarking successful use of social media, but after trialling different approaches says it has a better idea of what success looks like.

“It is easy for us to look simply at the metrics: 80,000 Facebook fans, 4,300 Twitter users, traffic and revenue directly from social media sites building. However, for us, the true strength of social media is engagement so we also look at which discussions, posts, videos and events get the most comments and the level of detail of those posts. What we also need to do is quantify the value of the insight we receive about our products, services and brand through social media.”

See the rest of the interview here.

Facebook has launched a peace initiative using its technology. As part of this project, you can see all the different connections that are being made each day between people of different countries, religions and political affiliations.

I have just looked at the site and it lists more than 5000 Israel-Palestine connections in the last 24 hours; more than 11,000 Greek-Turkey connections in the last 24 hours and more than 7,000 India-Pakistan connections in the last 24 hours.

It is highlighting the possibility of social media being a force for good in the world.

Using an “Open Happiness” theme,  Coca-Cola has selected nine potential brand ambassadors to visit every country where Coca-Cola is sold and discover what makes local residents in each nation happy.

Before Expedition 206 starts, Coke is letting fans select the final three team members out of the remaining finalists. The winners will travel 150,000 miles to 206 countries during 2010, documenting the experience through blogs, social media sites, video, and photographs.

Learn more.

Who would dare to predict how social media will look in 2010? No one knows for sure. But it is becoming mainstream fast.

With anyone able to publish and distribute information, the battle for attention is growing. You have to think about what content is going to capture the imagination and the interest of your audiences, as they have so much choice. You have to earn attention. You cannot simply buy it. And barging into social networks and clumsily shouting about your products and services, or slapping down dissent with intimidatory legal threats, is not going to work effectively.

The relative stability of the media market has been severely disrupted by social media, as have traditional communications agencies and traditional PR practices.  Many established names in the world of corporate communications have grown up off the back of traditional media. Their contacts are in traditional media. But the days of traditional media more or less controlling the production and distribution of news and information are over. Everyone can publish now, and distribute around the world, to be found on Google, through Google alerts or to be followed on RSS readers. New skills, new contacts, new agencies are required in order to prosper in this new communications ecosystem.

Previous significant changes in  our culture, such as the introduction of the railways and the printing press, required significant investments in physical infrastructure. But driven by software,  the changes expressed through the explosion of social media keep coming. There will be more disruption to established industries as social media goes mainstream. People are publishing content for the first time, joining communities, sharing content and realising their own power.

At the same time, organisations  are having to experience how they can connect with their customers through social media, and this touches everything we do in organisations.  It’s not just a job for the media department, it extends across HR, customer relations, legal departments, product development,  and supply chains.

This is also not just a question of companies having to skip a generation to deal with what is going on. Everyone is using Facebook now. Every demographic is participating. Teenagers might be technically literate but they are not socially literate and don’t understand brand management issues.

In a entertaining and intelligent presentation, Anthony Mayfield explores these issues in more depth.  It’s well worth a listen if you want to gain more of an understanding of the background of social media.

Capitalism is becoming a  conversation, and stakeholders who were the audience are now initiating dialogues and moving to the centre of the stage. Customers and stakeholders cannot be controlled by large organisations. Although of course they can be moderated and nurtured through strategic social media participation programmes.

The democratic diffusion of information presents a number of challenges to organisations. While  social media encourages open collaboration in horizontal networks this collides with powerful top-down systems in a lot of organisations.

However to remain competitive companies need to change and cannot remain walled off from these developments.  There are big risks attached with not keeping up with what is going on through social media.  The impact of technology and competitive pressures to innovate are going to lead to change and this will be driven in part by the heightened expectations of younger generations coming into companies. Trying telling a teenager they cannot access Facebook and you’ll understand what I mean!

Also once boardrooms have realised that greater participation in social media leads to greater productivity and better profitability change will develop at a quicker pace.

Inevitably some managers distrust social media because it is challenging to control. For organisations to be successful, they need to find a proper balance between loosening controls and losing control – between self-regulation and legal constraints. There need to be basic rules to follow when engaging with social media and there has to be trust. Trust in the values of social media and trust in those who are participating within guidelines on behalf of organisations.