Digital Era Needs YOU
Originally uploaded by sofiagk
I’ve been asked to give a presentation on Social Media – and especially things like blogging, twitter, linkedin and facebook – for some people (by the way – this is a friendly favour. I am not getting paid to do this).
I’d like to give the basics, some examples and the main players of the scene (always think comms & PR with me). I would also like to talk a bit about exposure, engagement and the development of a very very thick skin. The attendees are young people who work in communications (not agency – style) and would like to stay abreast of developments and see whether social media can be used to our advantage in campaigns or generally in external relations.
Well – since this will be about Social Media I though that all my friends/ acquaintances on blogs – twitter – facebook and linkedin could help me with ideas and suggestions. Apart of that I can also show how I set up the presentation with help via Social Media.
So. Digital – Era needs you.
- What would you talk about?
- Which services would you present?
- Who are the key players these people need to know?
- What are the pitfalls of social media?
- any more questions? any answers?
Ideas/topics:
- social media are personal. even if you represent a brand, it's usually better to sign with your name, not the brand.
- social media is more about the "social" than the "media". People move from blogs to facebook to twitter to friendfeed to whatever comes next, and mix and match all of these new media at will. They should connect to you, not your profile.
- see how on-line celebrities like Kevin Rose, or Jason Calacanis, or Robert Scoble move from one service to the other, yet they keep, if not increase, their followers.
You could always start with the definition of the "Web 2.0" term by Tim O'Reily which you could compare with the current social media practices. You could map out the major social networking websites (Friendster, MySpace, Facebook, Bebo, etc. ), their date of launch, how they are developed, the growth of their users numbers, their features.
As for blogs you could present them with the most well-known platforms such as WordPress, Blogger, TypePad, Vox, etc.
Key players: MySpace and Facebook founders, prominent and influential bloggers.
Twitter should have its own session. Why? Because right now it's the hottest topic in the Web industry. A successful service with no business plan. The advancement of micro-blogging and its purposes.
Linkedin: a successful social networking website with actual revenue. Targeted audience, pure business networking.
In this web era, users are not only the consumers but also the creators and the people who disseminate information and data.
"Share" and "Collaborate" could be the key-verbs of our digital era.
*That's all I can think for now. If I come up with more, I will post you another comment!
I like your idea about "you" and not the profile.
However – what would you say when the inevitable question of 'how much time is THIS going to take me' comes?
Hey iliask, a lovely idea on share and collaborate.
But how about questions of 'going off message' and 'moving too fast for a company employee to catch up'?
how much time are you willing to invest to build a better relationship with your brand's stakeholders?
Unfortunately "moving too fast" is one of the downfalls of the social media era. Entrepreneurs, developers, designers, geeks and more try daily to find or create the next big web thing.
Depending on the industry, employers and employees can discuss on which web tools or services they can use to maximize their digital footprint. According to their choices companies could fund seminars for their employees on how to use them properly.
New media and technology need constant learning. Adapting to the new web trends will become eventually a work-related prerequisite.
Yes, good point.
I always say that you have to think of Social Media of having Return on Time (instead of the boring and in reality quite useless Return on Investment)
J. sent me via Facebook a lovely video where Steve Lawson speaks out in Defence of twitter. Check it out. http://ub0.cc/4P/2b
I won't go into the stuff that have been already mentioned in the previous comments, but would rather focus on what makes social media such a hype.
I think social media are centered around a simple fact: people want to show off. This goes from the insecure teenager that needs to be cool among its friends and class, to the entrepreneur that needs to show how awesome he is (and sell their products/services etc). It's a bargain of "awe" points that people exchange (things like grader.com etc make this literal). Everybody wants to get more points, even if it's for coolness, profit, fame or any other reason.
This can be exploited in two ways: people can expose themselves in order to build an online/social presence that will help them achieve their goal, but they can also be smart enough to make other people feel better because they're interacting with them.
The perfect example that comes to my mind, is Loic LeMeur (@loic). He's a clever guy who's turned to be a 'web celeb' by now, and he's using his personal presence to promote his services and software. He's got a strong online presence on Twitter/Friendfeed; he replies a lot to people whom he doesn't know or follow; his promotional e-mail messages are written in a nice way as if they were intended for just one person (i.e. "this video I made for you" etc); whenever something's new, his company is not issuing a press release, but he rather uploads a video of himself explaining what's new and how cool it is.
I don't think Seesmic / Twhirl would have been such a success if it wasn't for Loic exploiting social media to make people feel they're important, that they can reach him and interact with him, get to like him and therefore like the stuff he's promoting. (Of course we don't know that it is Loic himself the person behind the Twitter account, it could be or it could not – it doesn't really matter.)
I think you could make an example of him and they way he's using social media for promotion.
Hey Panos.
Loic's example is actually very interesting – I usually refer to what he does one way or another. Very interesting stuff in your comment, thanks for dropping by
How much time were we prepared to invest in … telephones? These questions do not make sense. As long as it takes.
Sofia, the idea of crowdsourcing a presentation is great. Actually, I think we should all do it to a certain extent.
My pick:
a. Talk about social technographics, to make clear the different kinds of engagement in social media.
b. After that make a quick social technographics poll to see what kind of people you have n your audience.
c. Based on b. talk about the 2-3 most prevalent profiles more and mention the media that fit to them most. If they are joiners, talk facebook and linkedin etc
d. Go from case to rule: show from a specific case what looks like a 'law'. Working the other way around is boring.
I think you have to understand how the average comms person thinks. We are trained to think return on investment/ time – we are trained to count minutes and exhibit results somehow (i'm not saying I agree with with) – Hence taking them away from one type of thinking (eg. "All these people on Twitter – don't they have a job to do") to another type (eg. "Being on Twitter is an integral part of my job") needs a lot of explaining. You can't make people do stuff. I think it's just a case of explaining the pros and cons and then letting people choose.
Sofia,
Probably another aspect; the signal to noise ratio which in the social media environment is imho quite at the same levels compared to the era where Usenet was a main 'venue' characterizing online behavior. I think that both in 1993 and in 2009 the same issue persists: The discovery/implementation/use of a filtering process that will help eliminate (or get it to a near zero value) the noise and strengthen the signal (the useful bit of info, whatever this is depending on the usrs' expectation). Nowadays it's probable harder to do this, apps and platforms like blogs, twitter, facebook, linkedin etc do communicate via APIs but they are incompatible to each other, they follow different principles, processes, licensing schemes, so it's far too harder to get the "juice" out of them. Just my 2 cents..
Hey Sofia, sorry for being so late to the party – I have some strange days…
I'm afraid that a talk about the various tools (facebook, twitter, etc) misses the whole point, but on the other hand, I'm not sure your potential audience wants to see the point – instead I'm sure they're able to buy hype.
All in all, I have to agree with iliask about Tim O'Reilly's definition of Web 2.0, which consists of "users add/create value". I always like to engage my audience in a conversation about how their users/clients/markets could create value for their products/services.
For different industries it could be a different answer. Value from users could come for different areas of corporate funcions such as: research and development, production, distribution, customer support, promotion and edvertising, etc.
I would investigate these sections to find ways to engage my customers and let them help me build better products, make their life easier.
Apart from that, I'm afraid that you're looking for an answer focused on the Marketing – Communications departments. Is this so?
Hey Nikos – yes you are right. This is for Communications people
Dear Sofia,
First of all I fully agree with all the comments above. I only want to add that
I wouldn't confuse them with technical things, platforms etc.
I would focus/emphasise the following things:
How these tools increase transparency within an organisation, improve collaboration, enchance communication and finally how easy is to publish something.
I always use the example with the org chart. Within a large organisation an org chart constantly changes and you always had to find/chase the person responsible for that page in order to update it.
By empowering the user to do that everything becomes a lot easier….
You might find this case study helpful – although it is based on a wiki – I strongly believe that it can be applied to all the social tools.
http://bit.ly/6qh5G
Best of luck with your presentation
Myrto
I've just realised that the link to the pdf is broken so here it is
http://bit.ly/hGzhS
Hey Myrto this looks really interesting – thanks for bringing it to my attention.
To add my 2 bits… I think in social media there are no formulas. Sure, you can do basic things like create a branded facebook page and twitter updates (where relevant), but it all depends on the product/company you're trying to promote and the nature of its products. In terms of communication I think the difference with communication in the traditional (top-down) sense is that brands and companies in social media need to learn how to communicate in a different tone and they need to know how to listen and respond accordingly. An analogy that comes to my mind in terms of communication is that companies should adopt a behavior one would expect from a mature adult. That means when mistakes happen, apologies are in order and honesty and transparency are paramount. In this way people learn to trust the brand/company and listen to what you have to say when you need to say something important. As for the impact of social media on the internal organization of a company I was reading an interesting article in the WSJ which I think sums it up well: http://blogs.wsj.com/management/2009/03/24/the-fa...
Enjoy.
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