Media Week

I know some companies are experiencing difficulties with their legal departments when it comes to blogging and using Twitter.

Some legal departments want to see every blog post before it is published and they are worried about the implications of Twitter channels.

 Basically they are not comfortable with their company having more open conversations which is the key point of social media.

Legal departments have a role but they should not be able to dictate social media policy. They don't know the best way to speak with a journalist or to speak with a customer. That is not their expertise.

Of course there are regulatory frameworks that companies need to work within and these need to be respected, but having said that, companies must be free to communicate using social media. Otherwise their reputations could be damaged. And there are plenty of examples of lawyers issuing warnings to bloggers which totally backfire because they are too heavy-handed.

This is partly about companies trusting staff to use social media sensibly according to agreed guidelines.

Newspapers are a good model here. Journalists and editors are expected to have a certain knowlege of the law but are free to make their own editorial judgements in terms of what is most likely to appeal to their readerships. Lawyers are not writing the articles. But if and when there is a clear legal issue then the lawyers are brought in to advise.

Now granted not all companies have the role of newspapers. But the communications departments of major companies kind of have the role of newspapers in that they are reaching out to the public. They need guidelines but they need to be free to use their skills to judge which is the best way to approach people. They also need to have the space and support to be able to experiment. Social media is new and people have to be given the opportunity to learn.

There are some individual communications executives for large companies who are uncomfortable with how lawyers want to respond to posts on blogs and rightly so. Social media is about humanising organisations and treating people like people. The lawyers need to educate themselves about social media; relax a bit and recognise that they need to move with the times. Making communications teams paranoid about everything they write is only going to freeze people up and prevent the possibility of genuine conversations between companies and their stakeholders. Companies need to be more accountable to their stakeholders. They need to break down barriers between themselves and the markets they serve. They can do this through more open conversations.

This does vary from company to company. Some company cultures are more open and empowering, of course.

www.itsopen.co.uk

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.

 www.itsopen.co.uk

The Ecologist - if you haven't noticed - has turned off the printing presses. It is no longer available in print.

Instead readers are urged to go to www.theecologist.org

Eco stunt/shrewd business move?

Which magazines and or newspapers will follow suit?

Any doubts about the impact of social media? Watch this short video...it's a bit melodramatic. But the statistics come at you in a barrage and are astonishing when you appreciate the changes they reflect in how people are consuming media.

http://socialnomics.net/video/

It is a big mistake for News International to start charging for content. It is a regressive move in my view. It takes News International back to the walled garden web site approaches of the 1990s. One which Yahoo has been struggling to break free from. If you charge for content you put up barriers. Besides news is a commodity now. News International will deny itself readers. It will prevent its columnists from getting their viewpoints across; it will be hard for News International writers to enter into conversations with other online communities and so on. My argument would be to make News International's content as accessible as possible: let go and be everywhere. Build the brand. Gain influence and charge more for ads. Unique visitors will increase. Be innovative about where you put your ads. Also I think there probably is a case for re-thinking the role of journalism as practicised by News International. How do you compete when news is everywhere for free. How do you really distinguish yourself? Having said that, I don't blame Murdoch for trying to protect his assets. But in my humble opinion, he is not approaching it in the right way.

www.itsopen.co.uk

So David Cameron can't be bothered with Twitter. Clearly he is not as smart as Obama's campaign team who used Twitter ruthlessly and cleverly to reach out to different sections of the electorate.

Still if he's having second thoughts he might want to read about how many progressive companies are using Twitter and getting some pretty stunning results:

http://itsopen.co.uk/twitter-for-businesses

Memo to Cameron: the media landscape has fundamentally altered and unless the Tories participate they will lose influence.

It seems that Yahoo was not too pleased with Forrester's US Interactive Marketing Forecast and they have asked for changes to be made.

 You can read the full blog post about it here:

http://blogs.forrester.com/marketing/2009/07/yahoo-has-the-right-mobile-priorities-1.html

Like most blokes I enjoy a good shave in the morning but I was suprised to see poster-sized ads for Gillette Fusion plastered over broadsheet sports supplements this week.

First of all, on a personal level, it annoyed me. I enjoy reading sport and these ads were screaming for attention. But they were just not relevant to my mood or what I was doing.

 Some years ago, I was involved in a blog seeding campaign for Gillette Fusion with Shiny Media (www.shinymedia.com). Disclosure: I'm a shareholder in Shiny Media. I thought the idea behind that campaign was smart: look to participate in conversations with bloggers where relevant. Maybe Gillette fusion is running a blogging outreach programme to support these latest ads.

However the poster-sized ads in the sports sections seemed from a different advertising age to me.

www.itsopen.co.uk

There's been a lot of talk about whether or not Twitter should take advertising lately.

But you can advertise on Twitter. Check out betweeted.com or www.monitter.com. These are popular, some would say, iconic, Twitter applications that take ads. Here's another: featuredusers.com.

I reckon these mark the start of a new type of advertising. It's niche and relevant. It's not mass. It's about a mass of niches.

Any views?

www.itsopen.co.uk

Digg is launching, if you have not already heard, a user- driven ads system. This is how it works: if the readers of the site love your ad: you pay less; if they hate it, you pay more. Imagine if that was applied across the board to advertising!! Advertising now has to created in collaboration with the customer or it has to be bang on the money and be really relevant otherwise it is going nowhere.

 Read more here:

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/06/03/told-you-digg-for-ads-coming

So what's the future for advertising: my opinion, for what it is worth, is that it will be niche, niche, niche and more niche. Mass advertising is dying on its feet. Who watches TV ads when you can skip them? Who bothers with one- size- fits all  ads in print to ink newspapers which are not sustainable in the long term?

 Any comments?

Jeff Jarvis has come up with an interesting idea about advertising. He argues that ideally there should be no need to advertise as people should love the product so much they rave about it to their peers and thus promote sales. Advertising, he suggests, points out that the direct relationship has broken down somehow.

http://www.buzzmachine.com/2009/05/30/advertising-as-failure/

I think there is an element of truth in what Jarvis is saying particularly in an online context. Some companies seem to have already given up on entering into conversations with their customers online. They just allow complaints to carry on without saying anything. They feel they cannot change anything. Why are they so pessimistic? So instead they resort to ads to try to blast the message out that everything is alright really but if it is in effect just brash make- up on a pig then it ain't going to work. And people will continue to trash the company's reputation online. Motto of the story is listen to what your customers are saying online, involve them in your products, take their criticisms on board, collaborate with them and then you are more likely to be successful. Your customers will do the advertising for you by word of mouth.

www.itsopen.co.uk

Social media spreads..... People create their own content. As people co-create brands by editing youtube videos of ads and taking photos on flickr of products they are supplanting traditional brand advertising. Glossy brand messages - one size fits all- do not work well in a social media context. If you were at a party you wouldn't want to be interupted by someone shouting about a product which you did not care about, would you? The internet now is about niches. Niches of interest. Advertising has to get smaller to get bigger. Think niche. The trouble is that many ad agencies are not in a position to think niche. Big sweeping, centralized brand plans and campaigns are relatively easy to carry out. Big money, big messages, and in theory big reach. But they are not working. I saw a music festival recently which is accepting no sponsors. Brands are banned. Brand advertisers should take heed. A social media generation is here which demands more sensitivity. Your ads better be useful and relevant to them wherever they are online otherwise their will be a backlash.

www.itsopen.co.uk

Press barons and journalists trapped in traditional editorial mindsets cannot accept that their content should be free. They have failed to recognise that news is now a commodity. Google has made more or less everything a commodity. Everything is searchable. Content is everywhere. Newspapers who fight to charge for their content are going the way of the dinosaurs. It is time to open up. Drop the charges. Enable your columnists to enter into broader and wider conversations with audiences. Develop communities of interest around your content. Invite people in. Be interesting and you will gain influence for your content as it is shared around more easily and you will get more clicks on your ads because more people can get in.

 www.itsopen.co.uk

With the Evening Standard promising to be different, it is interesting to read the debates taking place on BuzzMachine (www.buzzmachine.com) about the future of newspapers.

Here is the key message: In the old way of thinking, the newspaper was a product. In the new way, news organisations provide a service. In the old way of thinking readers sat still to observe a performance.Now readers are participatory. In the old way of thinking newspapers marketed themselves to a population. In the new way, they converse, engage and collaborate with the communities they serve. The population markets the news organisation among itself. In the old way of thinking, editors were in charge, choosing which stories to provide to readers based on what they thought the readers wanted to know. In the new way, readers are in charge. They read what they want, when they want.

 If the Evening Standard really wants to be relevant to London, then Buzzmachine would suggest it puts these principles into action.

Lots of US companies are launching intern social media initiatives. See this one below from Anway, where they have invited interns to create videos about working with the company.

It looks like the digital immigrants are starting to hand the show over to the natives. At the moment those natives are on the fringes, what happens when they get their hands on the controls of the company?

http://interns.opportunityzone.com/2009/03/20/Interns-Expose-Amway.aspx

www.itsopen.co.uk