It's Open - Social Media Strategy Consultancy

Interesting UK research just in. Twitter continues to build its popularity and has overtaken MySpace, according to Hitwise.

The researchers know that the figures for Twitter are higher than the ones they have recorded because people can access Twitter via mobile phones and third party applications.

Meanwhile traditional media continues to shrink and some companies still continue to pour money into traditional media PR agencies. How long can this last?!

Read the details here.

Twitter has launched a new service which will enable people to reveal the location of where their ‘tweets’ are coming from. You can read more about the introduction of the new service here.

This development clearly has implications for organisations who are interested to know where their customers are based who are using Twitter. In theory, it will be possible to build up Twitter followers in specific cities and countries, and send direct messages to them.

If you are interested to know more about this Twitter development, or if you would simply like to know more about how you can use Twitter to gain attention and manage your reputation, then please get in contact with us directly.

The latest user numbers for Twitter are frankly staggering. According to ComScore, Twitter had racked up 44.5 million unique users by June 2009. This total in itself is mind boggling enough, but when you realise that it represents a growth of 7 million users from the previous month and an astronomical 1460% growth from its base of 2.9 million in June 2008, the numbers take your breath away.

In a seperate piece of research Nielsen has discovered that adults use Twitter at twice the rate teenagers do. Only 16% of Twitter users are under 25.

All this adds up to a rapidly changing media landscape. Companies that align their communications strategies with a diminishing ‘traditional media’ sector will be increasingly missing the opportunity to have conversations with their customers and stakeholders. As if to underline the point, rumours that Guardian Media Group is going to close the Observer won’t go away. If the world’s oldest Sunday paper is under threat then the shift away from traditional media channels is becoming very real indeed.

As further evidence that traditional media is adjusting to the social media landscape, Media Guardian is running its own Twitter channel.

This looks like part of a strategy to distribute The Guardian’s content wide and far across the web in order to win more readers and brand advocates, and to extend its influence and secure its relevance.

The MediaGuardian supplement on a Monday is a must read for the media industry. Its move to Twitter underlines the importance of social media tools not only for the paper but also for the constituency it serves.

The fact that more and more traditional media organisations are adopting social media strategies underlines why it is important for communications teams at organisations to develop and implement their own social media strategies. Otherwise they are going to start to slip behind their more innovative and forward-thinking competitors.

Jet Blue now has more than 900,000 Twitter followers as it continues its strategy of using Twitter as an effective medium for engaging with customers.

You can read more here.

Jet Blue is successfully harnessing the power of social media to boost its reputation and gain influence.

The company is showing that in a global economy new social media tools enable you to be innovative and highly competitive.

It can now communicate directly with hundreds of thousands of its stakeholders and does not have to be so dependent on traditional media which can distort its messages.

Jet Blue is also recognising the fact that hundreds of thousands of its customers/stakeholders are using social media tools. It is their preferred way of communicating.

Reid Hoffman, chief executive of LinkedIn, is a fascinating Silicon Valley entrepreneur. As well as LinkedIn, he has joined the board of directors of PayPal and provided early capital as an angel investor to Facebook, Digg and Friendster. So who better to listen to for advice on social networking?

In a fascinating interview with the FT, he says there is a strong future to come for social network sites.

‘There is still a massive shift from offline to online, which will benefit them,’ he says.

We get people asking us at ItsOpen if social media, and Twitter in particular, are fads. The world is changing rapidly. The world of communications is fundamentally altering in our view and some companies are going to be at a serious disadvantage if they don’t recognise the new reality soon.

Like us, Hoffman is very positive about Twitter. Does he think it is worth the hype?

‘It will almost certainly make money. They have yet to do the business model part of their strategy. It is a classic consumer internet path which LinkedIn itself did in the first few years to get growth and traction first and then start working on monetisation.’

There are plenty of great companies and smart communications people out there – we are very fortunate to be working with some very progressive minded and supportive individuals within well-established companies – however there are still naturally some folks who do not accept the changes that social media is engendering.

In our view, traditional media is dying on its feet. Traditional newspapers are reeling as news is commoditised by the web. Advertising agencies are struggling because they are based on mass media models when the internet is based on niches and people using social media hate big display ads because they are so disruptive. Traditional PR agencies are clunky and are based on dealing with a small group of so-called experts when social media is empowering everyone to get involved and comment on market developments. This requires very different skills.

I went to a large PR agency in the City last week. I walked into the reception and it was plastered with coverage gained in traditional paper-based magazines. But that is not the audience that matters anymore. Everyone is migrating online fast. Some companies, I feel, are wasting their money investing in traditional PR at exorbitant rates. Traditional PR services do not work in a social media context. Spin is out. Social media users are tired of the spin doctors. They ignore them. Fresh voices and fresh thinking are required to win influence through social media.

Hoffman sees trouble for traditional agencies (and by direct association for companies who base their communications models on the ideas of traditionally-minded agencies).

Asked if there is a future for traditional media companies, Hoffman says:

‘I hope so. Traditional media companies have created a lot of interesting products. The challenge is obviously that there is a massive switch of attention to online. And, as yet, relatively few traditional media companies have created the right product solutions there. Now, whether they will create it, buy it or partner or whatever, I do think there’s going to be a very strong shift online and then traditional media companies are going to need to navigate that or it will be very painful.’

Read that again and remember Hoffman has had a big part to play in creating the future that is around us now. We wholly support what he is saying.

Read more of the fascinating interview here.