Dr Andrew Currah, research fellow from Oxford University, says that companies cannot control social media but have to develop new methods for engaging with news stories as they break.

Speaking exclusively with members of the Social Media Leadership Forum
(www.socialmedialeadershipforum.org) yesterday, he said that a richer ecology of news was developing and that whereas traditional media sees articles as a product, bloggers saw news as more of an on-going process where they could comment on developments. He also highlighted the speed at which news is happening and being reported on; which is being supported by the emergence of real-time search. With results from Twitter and social media networks being incorporated into search engines.

He said it was essential that companies start to monitor social media and develop ways of managing risks and of capitalising on the new opportunities.

As the web becomes more predominant, he foresaw blogs breaking influential news stories and urged CEOs and directors to end an irrational attachment to traditional media.

He discussed how brands could engage with relevant online communities and said that corporates needed strategies so they could correct and comment on stories breaking from social media.

He felt that social media raised important questions for how companies shared knowledge. The rise of social media means that a blog post could rise quickly on merit to the top of a search engine, regardless of who wrote it, but on the basis that people were interested in what was being said. Therefore companies could use social media more internally to
harness ideas from their staff.

The next Social Media Leadership Forum event is going to be held at Aviva’s offices in London in January 2010. The Social Media Leadership Forum is managed by ItsOpen (www.itsopen.co.uk).

It’s bothered me for a while now that the phrase “Facebook and Twitter” has become virtually interchangeable with “social media”. Flickr often gets a mention, as does YouTube and LinkedIn. But whatever happened to all the other social networking sites?

Some have dropped out of the headlines. MySpace in the past year has been referred to almost as an also-ran, yet it still has 270 million users, and is thought likely to stage a comeback thanks to the relaunch of its MySpace Music site.

Of course, defining social media by just two or three sites is just handy journalistic jargon, but it tends to obscure its diversity.

Movie site Flixter has 60 million users, music specialist Last.fm has 30 million and Friends Reunited 19 million, and there are loads more with similarly high usage. There are also sites like hi5, which has 80 million members in countries all over the world bar the US, and Netlog with 59 million, which is especially active in the Arab world. There are also a host of specialist sites that cater for things like books, shopping, genealogy, charities and travel.

Any business that is serious about taking advantage of social media to raise awareness and win sales might do well to check out what else is going on in this space besides the big names like Facebook and Twitter. A presence in one or two other sites might help to target consumers with particular interests and/or regional markets.

A good place to browse is Wikipedia, which lists some 200 sites, and gives a good sense of just how much is going on out there.

We are offering a link to a fun free application on the Social Media Leadership Forum site (www.socialmedialeadershipforum.org) which enables you to type in your company name and immediately see the level of mentions across a wide range of social media sites and networks.

It is a quick and easy way to show how companies are being discussed even though many are not even participating in social media.

So, let’s say you try out this tool and wonder what you should do next. Any company should be monitoring social media properly – there are free tools like’ how sociable’, but you need a comprehensive monitoring tool to keep in touch with what is being said about you. Then you need advice on how you act upon the information and how you use the insights.

Essentially, though, monitoring tools can help you identify which sites and networks your stakeholders are using. What are the preferred ways for them to share information? You can follow them, listen and begin to plan what would be the most effective ways for you to participate. You have to participate. Otherwise you are highly vulnerable. Companies who participate successfully can become trusted members of communities and that helps them gain online power and influence. Something that advertising cannot buy in this new brave world.

Dell is way ahead of a lot of companies when it comes to engaging with social media. Learn about their journey by reading these two presentations by Kerry Bridge. One explains generally about how and why Dell is engaging with social media and the other is about Twitter and brands.

These are useful because they spell out the different uses of Twitter which are often overlooked by some companies and also it highlights the results that Dell is getting through Twitter. Many companies have not sat down and thought through social media marketing plans for Twitter. They are just scratching the surface with this immensely powerful tool or they break out in a sweat when anyone mentions it!!

The main Dell presentation underscores the importance of social media and its unique properties as a medium for engaging with key business audiences and how you measure the success of social media.