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).