A new report has been published about 'Business becoming Social'. It was commissioned by Maitland (www.maitland.co.uk) and I was one of the participants. You can download it from their site.
The author, Dr Andrew Currah, a research fellow from Oxford University ,has written about the cultural bias towards traditional media and the fact that there is an irrational bias in boardrooms towards traditional media. Which caught my eye. There is a sense in traditional media that the article is the end of the process. Whereas bloggers look to extend the natural life of stories by commenting on them and passing them on.
Despite Facebook and Twitter generating literally millions of users, and bloggers breaking and adding to news stories, the boardroom seems to think on the whole that the world begins and ends with publications like the FT. Now, the FT is a fine paper but it does not always manage the conversations that its stories generate online and these conversations can have an impact on the reputation of a business. Especially when someone tweets something about them which might be just a rumour.
There is a real risk I think that generational and cultural barriers could hold back UK companies from fully engaging with social media in innovative ways like Dell has for example. I'm not suggesting all boardrooms have an irrational attachment to traditional media. But a lot do. I have personally spoken with heads of communications from some companies and am astonished by their attitude for example to Twitter. The mistake some communications professionals are making is that their personal prejudice is not shared by their stakeholders or customers. There is hardly any company out there which is not mentioned in social media. But how many companies actually have social media strategies? How many are running cohesive social media programmes? There is such a gap between corporate communiations culture and consumer communications culture at the moment. Not in all cases but there does appear to be plenty of status quo upholders who are very uneasy with the idea of having to relate to bloggers rather than editors who they went to college with.
Typically of course while a lot of businesses hesitate Richard Branson is using YouTube, Twitter and blogging. Which is what you would expect, isn't it. A sharp communicator who recognises change and acts upon it.
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