Chris Applegate posts a list of 20 familiar signs that a company really doesn’t want to get engaged in social media. It’s brilliantly funny, if not also a tad depressing (but then isn’t all the best humour) as it’s instantly familiar to anyway working in a social media sphere who’s had any of the 20 conversations.
Suw Charman-Anderson follows up with an internal version. Both are spot on. And while the web geeks amongst us giggle, they should also be compulsive reading for anybody or company thinking of getting into social media.
I’ve come across all these comments over God knows how many years in all walks of life. I’ve spoken to a few people who are so enthusiastic about social media but work for companies who take about six months to take any kind of decision on it. I’m quite thankful mine’s pretty proactive and willing to try new things.
Social media isn’t like other popular areas where you can just wade in go “hey, we’re great” and leave. What worked before offline won’t necessarily work online.
The best thing anybody can do if they want their company or client to get into social media is read and listen. Engagement also helps, but I’d honestly say just immersing yourself in blogs, wikis, pods, Twitter and forums and getting a feel for how they work will do no end of good.
If a blogger has a pop at your company, chill. Maybe it’s better to understand the reason behind the rant than panicking or getting worked up about the contents of the post. People say bad things, it happens.
Viral videos are called viral for a reason. If it’s something you’d want to send your mates at a slow day at work, then you’re onto a winner. If you struggle to watch it through, it won’t.
And while mass emailing bloggers may seem like a quick and efficient way to work, it probably won’t generate that much positive coverage. Certainly not compared to if you’ve taken the time to read, engage and see what’s relevant to this particular blog.
It’s not hard to do, but I suspect these won’t be the last conversations Chris and others have on this topic.
[I'd also quite like to add 21. Client puts something on the internet with no links in or out and wonders why nobody visits.]
written by Gary Andrews
\\ tags: Chris Applegate, engagement, social media, Web 2.0
It’s hard not to raise a smile at Dave Hill’s gentle fisking of his local newspaper’s rather arbitrary leader on why teh blogging is rubbish. The column is the kind of thing you’d have expected half or dozen a so years ago when blogging wasn’t as mainstream or as popular as it is now, and everybody (read: the media) seemed convinced citizen journalism via bogs was going to take down traditional media and rule the world and journalists were worried they’d become redundant. Or something.
Fast forward to today (or, if you happen to be reading this light years in the future, 2008) and bloggers haven’t exactly killed off the medium of print, although they have changed the nature of journalism, and how that change will finally pan out is unclear.
But the two are sitting, if not exactly comfortably together, in closer proximity than perhaps was expected. Most major papers now have blogs where journalists and, horrors, the great unwashed interact. Even more shocking is the number of journalists who maintain their own blogs. In their own time! Lawks! Who’d thunk it. Look, there’s one. And here’s another. And, my gosh, another. They’re bloody everywhere.
And what’s more it’s not just journalists who can write and have opinions. A lot of other people do it rather well, often in a niche area. One of the trouble with journalists is, unless we end up seriously specialising, our knowledge is spread a little thin and there’s invariably people out there who know more about the topic than we do. Which is, I think, largely a good thing. Holding the fourth estate to account and all that. And, blimey, occasionally you can learn something. Hell, transparency, which is pretty hot on the web these days, is a good thing. After all, journalists call for it all the time, right?
Ok, blogland does have more than its fair share of tub-thumping nutters who do like causing a shit-storm and enjoying the controversy. That’s largely the nature of a free and open platform for publishing. I’d hazard a guess than the majority of the tub-thumping nutters can also be found among the retired colenels in the letters pages of local newspapers. At the very least, they’re no less nutty than some of the people who write in.
But one of the great things about blogs and other social media is how they’ve changed the nature of newsgathering.
Certainly, today’s journalists are as likely to be tracking a breaking story online using Technorati, Summize and Twing as they are door-knocking (and both have their merits and disadvantages, and are best used in conjunction). Similarly, they’re turning into a great source of news as more newsworthy people get blogs.
So it’s just slightly depressing to read the following comments in the leader column:
“It’s accepted practice – particularly if a public figure makes controversial remarks on a blog – for newspapers to use them as source material for their follow-up story, subject to the paper contacting the person quoted to check that what appeared is accurate.”
“For a blogger to moan that what they themselves put in the public domain has somehow been pillaged because a newspaper hasn’t acknowledged them smacks of breath-taking petulance.”
And is also one of the fastest ways to severely hack off the blogging community.
I’m not disagreeing with the idea of using blogs as source material, providing the information is verified. There’s fair comment, and taking chunks to build the article around is, in my book, fine, but it helps if you at least let your readers know where you got your information from. Hence trackbacks and links and the like in blogs.
But there’s a world of difference between quoting a blog (or any other piece of work) and lifting the whole thing wholesale, not that national organisations would ever do such a thing. Put this another way. I have no problem with people quoting or referencing this blog, especially if they find it interesting. To me, it’s a great way of getting feedback, extending conversations, getting points of view I wouldn’t have thought of and, yes, a slightly nice feeling that somebody actually thinks what I’ve written is worth reading and discussing further. And that’s a feeling I got in journalism as well. But if anybody thinks they can lift an entire post, they’ll get an invoice off me for work. Like they would from any freelancer. And I’m not in blogging to make money. If I was, I’d have been out on the streets long ago.
It may seem like I’ve probably just sat grandmother down and spent over an hour teaching her to suck eggs with the help of every egg-sucking training aid on the market. But sometimes it’s worth repeating these things, especially when you combine said leader with the Gripe section in the last issue of The Journalist (thanks to Pink Sunshine for sending me a copy). When you have a member of the NUJ’s national executive write the following:
“Too often, blogs seem like slags or slogs, probably both; disappointing slogs through slaggings off. Perhaps when blogs have grown up a little more they’ll be better. For many, still, maturity seems a long way off.”
it makes you realise that even though blogging is very much part of the media, there’s still a large number of journalists who don’t or won’t get the potential benefits to their own industry.
Not every journalist makes a good blogger, and certainly not every blogger makes a good journalist. But there’s so much more to the internet, and the communities, and the conversations that take place around these communities. Conversations that don’t necessarily need newspapers to facilitate them.
Quite whether the two writers of the respective columns utilise social media for journalistic purporses, I’ve no idea. But I know if I were at a local paper, I’d like to be engaging with people who can shape my paper, buy my paper, engage with my paper, produce ways to make my paper more profitable, and ultimately help gather news for the paper.
Because, at the end of the day, journalism, local or otherwise, done well will be read accordingly. And journalism done well than engages online with its audience stands a chance of being read, shared and trusted by far more people than a print run could manage. [And, just to round things off, I stumbled across the initial post from Dave Hill via Martin Stabe] written by Gary Andrews
\\ tags: blogging, Dave Hill, Hackney Gazette, journalism, Web 2.0
Hands up who remembers the dotcom bubble burst of the late 90s? Recently, I’ve sometimes mused to myself on the possibility of it happening about but with social media. Every day, there’s a new social media app, often with a ridiculous name, to be discovered. And at least half of them I haven’t got a clue what to do with.
So it’s with a small degree of relief on my part to read Livingston Communications muse on a similar topic and conclude social media isn’t about to burst, but scale back a tad, probably shaking out some of the worse/more unsustainable sites.
It’s an excellent post, especially the first point:
“1) Too many communicators have the shiny object syndrome, yet don’t have domain expertise. That means we’re seeing a lot of bad social media this year. In turn, you can expect corresponding failures and a reaction against social media.”
One of the saving graces for social media, though, is many of the sites and applications seem to be born out of an idea of how to make something better or improve communication – something that will work for the group rather than immediately designed to make money. Take crowdstatus, a neat little site still in alpha – it was born out of the creator’s desire to make communication easier and it’s easy to see the potential uses. The note on the about page, to me, sums up this attitude nicely:
“This is a personal project for the moment so don’t ask me about business models :p”
Social media at the moment feels like its reached a tipping point of sorts. The secondary and tiertary adopters are now using these sites a lot more while some obvious cases, like Facebook, have gone beyond any expectations.
To some extent these new users will follow the early adopters, but they’re also likely to be more discerning. They’ve not drunk the initial kool-aid and will be asking questions such as “How can this help me in a personal/professional manner?”
I’ve started training, in the loosest sense, colleagues on how to get the best out of social media and, along the way, they’ve fired some difficult, direct questions at me. Sometimes it’s easy to show the value of a site like Twitter to PR, or netvibes to your personal way of working.
But with many of the other sites it’s somehow difficult to justify exactly why it’s worth spending time getting to grips with it and often it’s just a case of play and see if it suits you.
And this is where the shakedown comes. If you’ve got an overcrowded marketplace, there will undoubtedly be some casualties and financiers tighten their belts and new users ask why they should be using two or three similar applications.
Take Plurk, which I like but don’t use often, against Twitter, which is unreliable but has embedded itself in my life. It’s hard to tell if it’ll become Facebook to Twitter’s MySpace or Betamax to Twitter’s VHS. The most common question I’ve had in the past few weeks is ‘why should I use site x over site y?’ And there’s no good answer. At that point, I drop my geeky semi-early-adopter mentality and start thinking about if site x or site y is more useful to me in a work setting. And I’ll confess sometimes I get overloaded with the amount of new sites that pass by my eyes and wonder how or why the hell I should keep them all going.
Blogging is now embedded in online culture. Sites like Facebook have become part of our everyday lives, regardless of how much you use it. Twitter’s becoming a great source of not just conversation but also breaking news and news gathering.
I’m not quite sure what the final point is, other than that social media is here to stay but will eventually fall back into line with the basic laws of economics and the markets. And, at that point, as Livingston Comms say, “a more measured, intelligent debate will take place.” It’s a debate I’m looking forward to, even if the enthusiasm for social communication tools is fun at the moment.
written by Gary Andrews
\\ tags: blogging, dotcom crash, Livingston Communications, Plurk, social media, Twitter, Web 2.0
Now the dust’s settled both around Giraffe restaurant in Exeter and in the general world of breaking news, and yesterday’s events are becoming clearer, it’s interesting to see how the coverage of the event has also settled down both for traditional media and more Web 2.0 sources.
While yesterday the best sources for breaking news were the online Exeter City fans forum Exeweb, and Twitter, today things have settled down somewhat. The thread on Exeweb has slowed and hasn’t been updated in a while, while Tweets on the issue have been restricted to those from traditional media accounts like ITN and the Guardian [1].
Likewise, Technorati and del.icio.us have sporadic entries, but nothing traditional media hasn’t already told me.
[A quick aside here - partly to blow my own trumpet, but partly because it fits in well here - POLIS director Charlie Beckett followed up his very nice comment with a blog post praising what I wrote yesterday, which is as unexpected as it is flattering (and humbling). But where did Charlie find my piece? Via his colleague on del.icio.us. QED.]
But where it gets really interesting is Digg. If you search upcoming stories for Exeter then the majority of articles ‘Dugg’ are from traditional sources: the BBC, the Telegraph, etc. [2].
Now, I’ll admit this has only been a cursory glance and any research I’ve done hasn’t been as thorough as yesterday but there’s still a few strands of hypothesis we can draw from this.
The main point being, when you have a breaking news story, traditional media is a lot slower than online sources and social media tool and, in many cases, less reliable. This also suggests that people are moving towards these tools rather than more traditional sources when they want to find out more information.
However, once the story moves beyond it’s initial ‘breaking’ stage (usually 24 hours, or an overnight gap), traditional media reasserts itself. The posters on Exeweb or Twitterers are likely to have the time or access to compete with media outlets, so at this stage the fastest, most reliable sources online will revert to the familiar brand names. They have the lines to the police, they eyewitnesses, and the politicians and now can be seen to be across the story.
The big loser in all this now is not social media, which can happily exist outside of the mainstream media and isn’t solely news-orientated, but the Express and Echo, Exeter’s local paper.
Yes, the Echo have continued to add updates to their site, but I still can’t read today’s coverage, which is maddening – the message to buy the paper for full information has been on the site since they posted a brief summary of their lead story, and they’re already telling us to buy Saturday’s paper for the update. Which would be great if I still lived in Devon, but I don’t.
Now, the Express and Echo may well have some of the best journalistic coverage on this topic, and today and tomorrow’s papers may well be ground-breaking award-winning stuff, but it’s really too late. Any smart reader, Exonian or otherwise, will have gone to somewhere like Google News, done a search for Exeter and read a lot of the pieces available there, most of which contain not just yesterday’s story but up-to-the-minute articles with today’s events (the Telegraph’s is particularly good). In the meantime, the Echo sits with none of this.
Taking this logically to its conclusion, why would I – the online reader – then need to buy tomorrow’s Express and Echo or visit it’s website when I know there is better information elsewhere? In looking to maximise the paper sales, the Echo could potentially lose out on readers both on and offline.
[By the way, if you want to contact me with any links or aspects of this online case study I may have missed, or anything that may be interesting or relevant to the blog or, for whatever reason, you don't want to leave a comment, there's a contact form on the About Me page.]
[1] Assuming you can actually get onto Twitter – it’s having another bit of downtime/crash. Honestly, it’s more tempramental than all of my ex-girlfriends morphed into one.
[2] Anti-fascist campaigners may want to note the amount of Diggs BNP links are getting (and on Technorati as well).
written by Gary Andrews
\\ tags: del.icio.us, Exeter, Exeter bomb, Exeter explosion, Exeweb, Express and Echo, journalism, online journalism, social media, Twitter, Web 2.0
Could this be the moment I finally embrace Seesmic to my man boobs? The PR for Indiana Jones have done a bit where Seesmic users could post video questions for Spielberg and the films stars and get an answer. As a marketing tool, it’s a fantastic idea and creates a great buzz from the online community, and more specifically fandom. If, as a teenager, I ever thought there would be a point where I could get to ask Steven Spielberg a question and he’d reply, I’d have been way beyond cloud nine. Probably nearer to cloud 57 or something.
Up to this point, I’d got what Seesmic did and how it could be used, but had no real wish to sign up, partly because this would involve exposing my face to the world and frankly I don’t want to crack anymore computer screens than necessary (I worked in radio for a reason, mmm’kay).
So, as a non-user, I’d only paused to consider how it could be used for PR and journalism purposes and had filed it somewhere in the back of my mind to explore at a later day. This has brought it back firmly to the forefront on my mind (note to self: remember to eat. This shouldn’t be done at the expense of food).
Creating an online buzz is just as important as traditional methods of PR these days and Seesmic could be an important part of this. The fanboy in me would love the chance to get to speak to some of my heroes, even just via video, and as a communication tool it feels a lot more personal than Twitter. Similarly, the chance to put a question direct in video to some of the top bods always quoted in press releases is very tempting, and opens up the company, personalising whatever is being promoted.
Similarly, it’s something any journalist should be looking at with interest. Video blogging is something I’ve always been a little bit skeptical on newspaper sites, but if there’s a conversation going on around a major, or interesting story… now that’s a little more like it. And the fact that many other users are posting comments in their pyjamas may loosen up hacks who’re not used to facing the camera. The potential for engaging directly with your audience is immense and could possibly do more than arbitrary video-for-video’s sake that many traditional media seem so fond of doing online.
Now all I’ve got to do is get beyond my utter dislike (not fear, just an extreme dislike) of seeing my face on screen before I hit the sign-up button.
written by Gary Andrews
\\ tags: Indiana Jones, Seesmic, video blogging, Web 2.0
Twitter, it seems, is definitely flavour of the month. Last week it got a front page mention of the Guardian due to Downing Street, no less, dipping its toe into the Twittersphere, and the amount of Twitter-related articles and posts in my RSS reader keeps on growing by the day.
Twitter’s tipping point, if not already here, is close to arriving. And that means both the company and PR Tweeters need to start sitting down and thinking out their respective strategies.
Firstly, here’s an example of how Innocent, a company that is usually pretty with it when it comes to social media, seems to have got Twitter a bit wrong. It’s a bit embarrassing when a government aide can work Twitter better than most companies. Usually this government is one of the last to leap on board new web projects and gets it hideously wrong in the process.
But Innocent’s misstep shows that in the age of social media, you can’t just stick out a press release or fire out updates. Perhaps that’s fine for a standard Web 1.0 website, or even a corporate blog. But if you’ve going to join Twitter then you’ve got to understand it’s a conversation not a lecture or an high-tech information pamphlet.
Whatever you’re promoting, you’ve got to be prepared to interact with your audience. You may even be promoting a brand that has lots of fans. But what’s in it for the fans if they’re just getting links or updates but no conversation? Other than the immediacy, why should that make Twitter any better than just sticking a regularly updated website into your RSS feeds.
Another side issue is brand v trust. Depending on how big the brand or event or whatever you’re publicising is, perhaps its worth having a trusted employee with an established Twitter presence on there. It’s a question I’m going to have to answer soon, with a football (sorry, can’t quite bring myself to write soccer) related bit of publicity for work. I’m getting plenty of football-related followers on my feed. Would they get annoyed or offended if I start using Twitter to publicise something I’m working on, or would it be more successful than if I launched a branded feed?
There’s also a fine line between PR on Twitter and spam. At what stage does targeting those who might be interested in your product cross the line and make your average user reach for the block button quicker than you can say tinyurl?
Finally, in Japan Twitter have started running adverts. As David North cautions, they need to handle this carefully, lest the company themselves cross that line into spam.
But for those Web 2.0 fans, and casual supporters, Twitter seems to be finally arriving. And now us in the media need to deal with it.
UPDATE: Ben Ayers asks if Downing Street has peaked on Twitter.
written by Gary Andrews
\\ tags: Downing Street Twitter feed, Innocent, PR blogging, Twitter, Web 2.0
Nosemonkey, who runs the excellent Eutopia, has a fascinating post on citizen journalism/blogging, inspired by an emailed question on the subject [1].
[A quick bit of background here, if you haven't just gone through and read his long piece. On the day of the July 7 bombings, Nosemonkey ended up liveblogging the event due to conflicting reports on news channels, plus the general sense of confusion that abound. It was, and still is, a great example of how blgging and/or citizen journalism can work and is possibly one of the best posts to emerge from the blogosphere].
What’s refreshing is his mixture of cynicism and enthusiasm for blogging. Much as I’m a proponent for all that is Web 2.0, it’s always useful to step back and ask: “So, we can do this. What is it actually achieiving?” In the case of social bookmarking especially it’s a great way to share stories (an update on cutting a story out of the newspaper and passing it onto a friend), find great content, and, for journalists, track what users believe to be important. Slow burning stories can also be picked up this way.
The best blogs too aren’t the ones that claim to be breaking the news or searching for bias, but the ones that have a genuine knowledge and passion for their subject (which is why I think niche sites will be the next big thing, internet wise this year).
And yes, in these cases they often surpass coverage in the traditional media because the blogger is more au fait with the subject than the journalist (assuming the blog isn’t already hosted on a major site). Other citizen journalism is more a case of being in the right place at the right time and happening to have a blog.
The concept of citizen journalism from a few years ago is probably near to vanishing. Those blogs that do, on occasions, break news stories, are largely well-known and well-staffed (and often pick up their sources from other blogs or websites, they just don’t bother running them through the laywers first). More often well-known bloggers use their site as a shop window and earn their corn thanks to their blog but not because of it.
But blogging is still a great medium, whether you’re running a personal blog for three or four friends, covering a niche topic, or attracting a large readership as an expert on the topic. It’s a great way of carrying on the conversation beyond the news article (which I still think should be kept as separate from comment as possible), can provide a great lead for a story, or a change to gauge the depth of feeling if you’re a journo or PR. It also makes it easier to pick up on errors of poor writing.
I’m still positive about the bloggersphere and Web 2.0 as both a journalism and a publicity medium, and it’s great to see the media embracing new trends and experimenting with them, a la Birmingham Post and delicious.
But it still doesn’t hurt to be cynical about the Web. For every trend that works, there’s half a dozen that the media will jump aboard only for it to be a less than stellar success. In some respects you could say the philosophy of scientific testing and paradigm shifts applies just as much to internet trends as it does to biochemistry and physics. Eventually the problems with citizen journalism or a Web 2.0 trend will collapse under the weight of all the problematic rocks that have been thrown at it.
I’m not quite sure what point or conclusion I’m trying to come to here, other than embrace Web 2.0 but also question why, how, and what you want to achieve at every step of the way.
[1] I emailed Nosemonkey with a similar request several years ago when I was doing a similar piece for my postgrad course. If I kept the post from the now defunct Coffee and PC, I’ll post it up here. It’d be interesting to see if his views have changed since then.
written by Gary Andrews
\\ tags: blogging, citizen journalism, Eutopia, Nosemonkey, Web 2.0, web trends
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