It's Open - Social Media Strategy Consultancy

Will Buzz help Google keep up with Facebook? That’s the question. Well no, not really. Google is hardly a social site and seems just to be intent on slapping social functionality on top of applications. Its main interest is generating relevant data for search results to help its ad business.

There’s been some criticism of Buzz. Commentators have pointed out that it is limited and you can for example bring Twitter into Buzz but not use Buzz to publish Twitter.

But I think the last word has to go to Jeff Jarvis who points out that ‘the internet is our social network’.

It’s a question of finding the best ways to organise the internet. Social networking will never be won by one particular site. The internet is far bigger than one site – even bigger than Facebook.

The Technology for Marketing and Advertising show is on next week at Earls Court (February 23-24) and one of the six themed seminar theatres will be focusing on social media.

Eight talks have been scheduled over two days on topics such as ‘twitter for business’, ‘how companies are connecting to the social web’, ‘creating conversations for online communities’ and ‘creating an integrated social media strategy’.

There’s a strong technology bias, with speakers from Oracle, RightNow and Alterian, for instance, and it would have been nice to see marketers from big brands giving the benefit of their experience using social media. Perhaps next year. Even so, there’s likely to be a lot of useful stuff to be gleaned.

More details here.

Stories are just breaking about Google introducing social media elements into its Gmail service to provide updates on what your friends are doing. Details are a bit fuzzy but journalists are billing it as Google taking on Facebook and looking to capitalise on the desire of people to connect with themselves more easily online.

Some managers fret that they cannot let their staff loose on social networking tools because they will do no work.

However, I believe that internal social networking will enable people to share data more quickly and free up knowledge and know-how that might not have been previously recognised.

As staff get more used to openly sharing information and collaborating online out of work, the more they are going to expect it within work.

The fact is that most people’s personal computing applications – handhelds etc – enable them to do more than they can through their own companies internal systems. This disconnect is unhealthy and suggests that companies are behind their staff in terms of adoption of new technologies. It will also be intolerable to new waves of recruits who are completely comfortable with social networking.

Social media arrived with a bang in 2009, and inevitably now, after the dust has settled a bit, there’s a bit more reflection going on. What exactly are we dealing with here? How can marketers adjust to this latest shift in the way people communicate?

Yesterday I posted about how social media should not be seen as the basis of a marketing strategy itself, but more as the means to execute a strategy.  Today I came across another piece in a similar vein on Marketingweb, where Kate Elphick argues that the pendulum has swung too far, with a proliferation of unnecessary social media tools on so many websites.

“It’s as though people are adding Facebook and Twitter links for social media’s sake, without thinking about their strategic objectives; blogs stand sparsely populated, links are broken and wikis left unattended. Why do I want to become a “Fan” of some arbitrary photography shop on Facebook? What is the point of being a “Fan” if all I get is some self-serving drivel, or worse still a price list, from someone who is married to his business? There are no interesting conversations or people to meet, the owner merely has access to Facebook and thinks that web advertising is free.”

Elphick concludes: “Social media may well have changed our ability to communicate with our environment and the way we do business but, fundamentally, the rules of engagement and marketing have stayed the same.”

None of this is to backtrack on the importance of social media to businesses, but simply to reinforce the message that it needs to be properly understood.

See the article here.

Here at ItsOpen we flag up the benefits for businesses in using social media as a means to enter into a dialogue with customers. But should a company develop a social media strategy?

This may seem like a silly question. Of course it needs to understand the medium and work to a set of principles in order to get the full benefits. But blogger Farshid Ketabchi argues that using social media is not in itself a marketing strategy, merely a means to implement it. He approves the senior marketing executive who has banned words like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn from his planning and strategy meetings.

“The point is that while social media may serve as an effective method of promoting your business, it is only a set of tools and channels that you may use to execute against your business plan and strategy.  It is part of the tactical stuff that you do after you have figured out your strategy.”

It’s an interesting view, and Ketabchi cites articles that expand on this thinking. See his piece here, and follow the links.

According to Rod Liddle in The Sunday Times last weekend, David Cameron is insisting on vetting all Tory party tweets before they are published. He’s running scared that someone might tweet about something which would be off message and cause controversy.

If the story is true, I can understand Cameron’s concerns. However, it is disappointing that the political parties are not appearing to make more of an effort to engage with people through social media in order to discuss ideas.

I watched an interesting BBC programme over the weekend called The Virtual Revolution which looked at how social media is challenging repressive political regimes. Commentators suggested that new models of democracy could emerge through the use of social media tools. Access to new ideas through social media could act as a catalyst for political change, some suggested.

It is a shame that Cameron is not embracing social media in a more fundamental way to engage with people to discuss ideas about the kind of society we want to have and how it could best be governed, rather than focusing too much on a few potentially rogue Tory MPs and their tweets.

During its live online video coverage of the Iraq Inquiry the BBC has been incorporating real-time Twitter feeds on its web site of the conversations people are having on the proceedings.

This is yet another example of how news and information is being democratised.

During the cross examining of Tony Blair, it was interesting to see that Iain Dale, the well-known political blogger, was joining in the Twitter conversation and commenting on how it was going.

Dale is clearly a forward thinking political commentator but his use of social media tools shows how you can influence and participate effectively in democratic online conversations about matters of importance.

Bing, Microsoft’s search service, and Google have struck deals with Twitter that allow both companies to include tweets from Twiter’s database in their search results. This means that increasingly news and information will be influenced by people around the world who are using Twitter and less by professionally-paid elites of editors and producers.

The implications for organisations is that they need to connect with Twitter but more than simply broadcasting out messages. They need to be monitoring Twitter and joining in, having conversations and in this way they can gain influence over what is happening.

Briefings to journalists over the phone or privately will have no impact on streams of tweets so methods of organisational communications have to change if organisations are to successfully reach their customers in new ways and those that influence their customers.

Here’s a bold prediction. Gartner has decided that social media will start to replace email as the primary means of communication within as little as four years. Its research suggests that by then a fifth of organisations will be using it as their key communication medium, driven by greater security, the ability to create their own networks and greater tolerance of employees using personal accounts at work.

Gartner also predicts that in the next couple of years more than half of global businesses will be blogging in some form.

But it also sounds a warning about letting IT departments handle social media projects, many of which will fail. What’s needed is not an IT solution but a social solution that targets specific business value, which will mean developing a different set of skills.

More here.

In an interesting interview in yesterday’s FT, the CEO of Guardian Media Group Carolyn McCall addressed the issue of the moment for newspaper publishers – to charge or not to charge for online content.

Media analysts have questioned the Guardian’s strategy of building large online audiences and delivering content for free. However, the article points out that around 25 percent of the group’s advertising revenue now come from its online channels.

McCall doesn’t reject the ‘paywall’ idea favoured by Rupert Murdoch completely, suggesting that “certain areas of specialist content could be charged for”. A theory backed up by the success of FT.com, Economist.com and niche sites such as Breakingviews.com (prior to its sale to Thomson Reuters); sites that all charge for content in one form or other.

In my opinion, the most telling comment from McCall explores how charging for content fits with the culture of online media consumers in 2010. “It [a paywall] is not really the way that the web works” – a comment that rings true with organisations that are demonstrating successful online strategies. Why would you want to limit the number of people who link, share, comment on or bookmark your content?

The Guardian website’s army of ‘commenters and sharers’ are a far broader (and far larger) group than the newspaper’s readership ever was. Why make these online brand advocates pay to read and promote your online content?