Thunking, Uncategorized•
on October 26th, 2009•
From the 80’s through to the 90’s, business found competitive advantages in deploying technology to either cut costs or speed up transactions. In the mid-90’s came the move to networking technologies exploded as the Web began to go mainstream. Business slowly embraced the Web by building websites that offered little interaction, were mostly one-way communications and offered purchasing ability.
But as human beings one of our fundamental drives is to connect and communicate. We always form groups; to either share ideas or to complete a task, big or small, short term or long term. The point is, humans always communicate and always form into groups. Always. The more effective a business is at communicating internally, the better it performs.
The newest technologies to improve internal and external communications is social technologies. Tools such as blogs, social networks, microblogging, video and photo sharing. Businesses that recognize these tools go beyond one-way broadcast messaging and can be used to gain competitive edges are ones who will succeed in the future.
More compelling is that spread of the Web. It doesn’t mean being wired into a desktop computer anymore. The Web today is so pervasive and ties into mobile devices.
The first adoption wave of IT in an organization was essentially to build databases with an illogical communication tool thrown over top – email. Companies who figure out how to use social technologies to communicate better, not just internally, but externally with all stakeholders (suppliers, government, customers, partners) are the ones who will gain the next competitive edge.
When we think of and mostly talk about, Social Media crises, we tend to look at the bigger stories; United Breaks Guitars, Motrin Moms, JetBlue. Let’s face it, they’re juicier and hit a broader audience. These stories bring together traditional and social media. But smaller, mostly “hidden” issues can create PR nightmares for a business.
As we experienced with a client today. For obvious reasons I can’t name them, I like having clients and don’t like making a painful issue worse. The issue didn’t get broadcast across Twitter or Plurk or similar microblogging channel. Nor did it wind it’s away through Facebook.
This crisis took place across three “closed” forums. By “closed” I mean that it was in semi-moderated forums focused to a particular topic/industry. Someone posted a topic in a forum, within a short while, others joined in, discussing a product and their feelings about that product. It started only 3 days ago, but by this morning had reached a significant volume and resulted in a large volume of calls to a contact centre and began migrating up to senior management.
We monitor for this client monthly. Which helped. But the challenge of automated Social Media monitoring tools becomes quickly apparent – most of them are locked out of these forums. And this is a huge gap in Social Media monitoring.
Although this issue was “localized” and didn’t hit broadcast Social Media levels, it still caused a drop in sales in just 2 days of 8% and forced a mid-size business to focus many hours of senior management and people resources to contend with it. Fortunately it was kept localized and didn’t seep over into more public forums.
So what are some take-aways for a situation like this?
1. Don’t rely on Google Alerts or basic monitoring services.
2. Find out where “discussions” are going on in closed forums like newsgroups, chats or discussion forums and check in weekly to see what might be going on.
3. A crisis can occur in Social Media in closed loops and cause as much damage as if it hit the more public forums.
4. Engage in these discussions (be open and disclose who you are, trying to pretend your a customer is dangerous) and stay engaged.
5. Often times, these “hidden” sides of Social Media can be of more value than more public forums.
So what do you think? Have you had a similar experience? What steps do you take in this type of issue?
(Author: G. Crouch, Managing Director)
So any of us reading this blog article have used a telephone. We’ve grown up using it to talk to each other. To leave and check voice mail, weather reports, bank balances, buy things. But that isn’t why Alexander Bell invented the phone. He thought people would use it to listen to music (specifically opera) and get weather reports. That was it.
Certainly Gutenberg when he invented the printing press did not envision newspapers. At that time one of the main reasons people went to church was to get local news. Fast forward a few hundred years to the dawn of the Internet – designed to be a secondary military communications system in case of a nuclear war.
It’s a similar story to Twitter. The inventors did not know how it would be used or become the phenomenon that it has. Facebook was supposed to be just for university students, yet the age range of the average user is in their mid-40’s and skewing older all the time.
My point here is; the intent with which a social media tool is designed is not necessarily the same as how it will end up being used. More importantly, predicting the usage of Social Media as a whole? Impossible until we have more time with it, more data, more case studies…just plain time. Perhaps in part, this is also why business is struggling to understand the uses of Social Media?
What do you think?
(Author: G. Crouch, Managing Director)
Many bloggers and media trend watchers and a few industry pundits might have us believe Mass Media (or Industrial/Traditional Media if you prefer) is dead or at least dying. These mediums serve different purposes and that’s the key point, I’ve found.
Why Is Mass Media Still Relevant?
Recall the recent United Breaks Guitars video? How it had a few hundred thousand views and suddenly it was on CNN and other Mass Media outlets (including radio and newspapers?) Suddenly the YouTube views surpassed 2 million in just a few days. Or the iPhone launch protest in Canada over carrier Rogers pricing? Once it hit mass media the petition sign ups rocketed from 30,000 or so to over 70,000 in just 2 days.
What we’re seeing today is that Mass Media is watching what’s happening on the Social Web front…those Gatekeepers at Mass Media outlets (sic. editors) are connected, searching for stories. When they see the crowd jump on something, they know it will have mass appeal; because we STILL watch TV, listen to the radio and read newspapers and magazines.
Think Media Consumption: It’s About Passivity
It’s HOW we consume all these media channels today. We still consume them, but differently.We “watch” TV and we “listen” to radio and we “read” the newspaper. This is the way we consume these channels.
Think Social Media Consumption: It’s About Activity
We “tweet” a message on Twitter, we edit photo’s or videos online…we’re always moving, clicking, sharing..actively participating. Social Media is “active” not “passive” in nature. Sure we might read a blog, but the best blog posts are 300 words or less…because we don’t spend much time reading passively online…how many of you will read this post to the end?
Think of Your Own Habits: How You Consume
I’d lay a friendly wager you have 2 or 3 or more favourite TV shows? A radio show you like to tune into on the way home? Flick on the news at night sometimes? I like “Q” on CBC in the morning and often flip on the CBC National at night or BBC World; to passively catch up. I enjoyed being entertained with shows like the Border…I don’t always want to be engaging, clicking and moving about.
Translate all this out to the population of the Western world and think about all those eyeballs and ears still consuming mass media…albeit in different ways and less time than before. But it’s still relevant.
What do you think?
(Author: G. Crouch, Managing Director @webconomist on Twitter)
Some Social Media consultants will tell you “hey, just set up Google Alerts and do some occasional checking across search engines, it’s all you need!”. There’s two major flaws to this approach.
1. Regional Result Changes: Google, like other search engines, collects massive amounts of data constantly. To help manage this load, Google, among others, have data centres scattered around the world. If you try a search string in Atlantic Canada you will get different results from New England etc. This effect can be seen with Google Alerts for news and other data as well. The same impact is seen with Bing and Yahoo! While you may get some data, you’ll miss a lot more. Perhaps what is critical.
2. They Don’t Dig Deep: Yes, the search engines dig into a lot of content, but they miss a lot of newsgroups, Bulletin Boards, Usenet, .alt discussions and all of the Social Networks, such as Facebook Groups and Fan Pages. It’s these places where the deeper discussions about your brand, service or organization are often taking place. In fact 95% of the monitoring or “reputation management” solutions out there also miss this critical data.
3.The Context and Sentiment is Missed: Search engines just deliver results, they don’t care if it’s good or bad. That means a human resource needs to read, analyse and place into context all that information. Is that an effective use of time?
4. The Flow of the Conversation: It’s often to also understand the “flow”, “spread” and valleys of a conversation to gain perspective. Search engines don’t provide this. Neither do most reputation management solutions.
5. It’s Getting Too Local for Search Engines: With smart phone usage growing and increased free public Web access, the Web is becoming very local. As this trend continues, consumer search engines will face a challenge in keeping up. Alternative local search engines may help. But reputation management and online brand monitoring solutions have yet to catch up to small and local as well.
6. The Commercial Ecosystem Bias: That’s a fancy way of saying “search engines are more likely to deliver results in Social Media services from applications that they own.” For example, Microsoft owns Bing, and LiveJournal; if the content is “relevant enough” Bing will be biased towards LiveJournal to increase the chances of advertising click through on their ad network. In our analysis of Google, Bing and Yahoo! we found a 46% bias on the same search strings to deliver search providers ecosystem relevant content. We’re just sayin’.
In the end, we’re saying that doing the odd Google or Yahoo! search and not finding anything about yourself or your business is a dangerous way to approach understanding your reputation or leveraging a reputation management service. Food for thought. What do you think?
(Author: Giles Crouch, Managing Director)
Likely, most of us associate Social Media usage with the under 25 crowd and city slickers. There’s two things wrong with that assumption and a trend we’re noticing in Atlantica (New England and Atlantic Canada.) Here’s what we’re seeing.
Social Media Use by Age: There’s a plethora of research showing average ages (this old RapLeaf study said youth last year and that’s already changed.) Here in Atlantica our own research shows an increase in the average age of a Facebook participant from 47 in late 2008 to 53 by August of 2009. Twitter shows the most usage by the 30+ crowd and MySpace is the hang-out of youth. Social Media is not the exclusive domain of youth.
Rural Usage: As governments in New Hampshire, Vermont, Maine, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and Newfoundland has funded high-speed infrastructure into rural areas, we’ve monitored Social Media activities in those areas since 2008.
What we’ve found is that as new areas are “lit up” so to speak, usage of tools such as Facebook, LinkedIn, FastPitch, Flickr and blogs spikes. In Cape Breton as the Straight-Highlands area expanded Internet access, Social Media usage rose steady as new communities came online. In the small community of Arichat as it came online for high-speed we saw over 150 residents go on Facebook within 3 weeks and a 20% increase in photo’s posted in online photo services with Arichat tags and locations. In Southern Vermont, we saw a similar increase to Arichat, in fact, almost exactly the same numbers in the area of Hanover.
This is but a small sampling of research indicating rural uptake of Social Media services. For marketers, the rural markets are reachable in an affordable way. For general thought, this shows people in rural areas are finding their voice as well. The more communities going on line, the more we will hear from the rural voice. This is relevant in terms of where we will see significant growth and I suspect, participation, in Social Media services over the next year. As wireless carriers push 3G and other similar services into these markets as well, we expect to see increased use of mobile Facebook and Twitter apps. Increasingly, Social Media will get very local. Soon smaller, regional and local businesses will have to take notice even more than today.
(Author: G. Crouch, Managing Director)
I’ve had 2 calls in the last week from businesses looking to build their own Social Network and over the past several months, similar inquiries. When I ask them if they have about $40 Million to invest in getting it going I either get dead silence or a nervous chuckle. My advice is “forget it and invest elsewhere.”
The space is well established now. The leaders are Facebook and NetLog followed by MySpace and MyYearbook among others. Perception-wise Facebook is leading internationally. The others vary by country (these come from a simple but good site for this data.)
One might and I emphasize “might” succeed with a micro-Social Networking site that caters to a specific ethnic, cultural or special interest group. But often those are well supported by services like Ning. Of course it’s one thing to build it, then you need to attract people. Even in ethnic/cultural group terms, they’ve tended to have found their piece of turf inside Facebook or other services. For clubs and organizations there’s services like Qlubb – well, there’s over 60 of them out there. In the business world it’s a fight now between LinkedIn and FastPitch.
Only about 5% of people spend more than a few hours a week inside a Social Network and less than 3% belong to more than one Social Network (our research, March 2009). Once they have established a presence and entered their personal data and made connections, it’s very hard to move them. Porting the data over is hard enough to do, but porting their connections? Almost impossible.
Venture Capital companies are not financing Social Networks. Raising debt to finance them is personal financial suicide. And quite frankly, you’ll need at least $40 Million to build a presence. If you can figure out a very compelling reason to switch for a person (porting over data and friends included) then you might have something. Over time, opportunities might present themselves. The one sector we see some opportunity through our research is better ethnic/cultural focused Social Networks in countries like America, Canada, England and Europe. Possibly. But there are services for those markets (BlackPlanet and Migente are two) and the revenue opportunities may be limited based on demographics and adoption.
Our advice then is, work within a Social Network to build community if that’s your goal (here’s an example). For big brands, I’ve yet to see a sustainable model – the reality is, once the brand has accomplished it’s marketing objective, are they really going to want to spend the money required to maintain that presence? Not likely.
Are “consumers” dead? Is our consumptive society changing. No and not quite, but it’s interesting to see what is being said as we hear more and more the term “citizen” as a replacement for the consumer. In the strict sense of the word “consumer” it is a post-industrialist term for people who buy products and services made by businesses. A business does not see a “person” it sees “consumers” who are simply sliced and diced into various buying categories – demographics and in the late 90’s “psychographics” became a marketing meme.
I started hearing the word “citizen” as a replacement vernacular for “consumer” a year or so ago and decided to put our research engine on it. Researching over 300 prime blog entries where this has been discussed, the “volume” of discussion over the past 12 months has increased by 78% over August of 2008. A significant uptick happened just after the primary market crashes last year.
Based on reading 46 of the 300 blogs I tagged here’s what it seems “citizen” has come to mean. Essentially, the “consumer” is now able to self-define who they are and what they want. Social Media tools like Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, Ning etc., have given the Post-Industrial defined consumer a voice. This “voice” has caused significant upheaval in the traditional marketing and communications aspect of corporations in the developed world. The Motrin Moms issue, the most recent Honda/Facebook mess and more. CEO’s have lost their jobs, stocks have plummeted or shot skyward.
As the population increasingly engages on the Web, they are drawn to Social Media tools. About 3 years ago some research by PEW Internet showed people went online to browse, buy products (consume) or do research. There’s was little to actively “do” there. Now, with Social Media tools and services, people are finding there voices.
As a result of this, consumers are re-defining the way they have been seen by the Corporation. Yes, we are still in the true sense “consumers” for we buy. This is changing, but it is far too early to truly define “how” and to what degree – we simply lack any historical or empirical evidence. Yet.
The other word that “citizen” is replacing is the old early computing days term “user”; people don’t see themselves as “users” they are (as we’ve called them for years now) participants. Should we perhaps use the term “neo-citizen”? To describe the rise of the New Citizen? Or are we just ignoring reality and we’re still just the same old consumer with a fancy name?
So the concept of “citizen” has become a societal meme; we say citizen because in this wonderful democratic world of developed nations, the concept of “citizen” implies having a voice and rights.
From my anecdotal research and not being a social anthropologist, what the evidence points to is a significant shift in consumer perceptions – the “people” do not want to be voiceless consumers anymore. The general population that is connected and has shared, created, collaborated, has begun to define themselves.
This is perhaps a “tipping point” for corporations and any large organization to be cognizant of. I don’t presume to have any suggestions on exactly how things will turn out…but I’m sure that together, as citizens, we’ll figure it out.
(Author: G. Crouch, Managing Director)
A wiki, certainly the one that started it all, Wikipedia, is an argument. Disagree with me? Let’s argue about it. Seriously though, a Wiki is an argument based system. Not the shouting until you’re red in the face angry argument (though for some it can be), but a way of communicating through “debate”. It’s amazing because never before in mankind’s history have we been able to debate topics, subjects, issues etc in such a way that is so accessible.
I can go an make an entry on a topic right now. You can then come in and change my entry. Someone else can change it again. There are lots of errors on Wikipedia. Through a constructive argumentative process, we get closer to accuracy on any given topic or issue.
Wiki’s have grown in popularity for business and organizational use. In this use-case, wiki’s are often purely “knowledge centres” where the organization loads knowledge with various publishing rights, or no specific “rights” for publishing at all – they are then less an argument.
Wikipedia, and any wiki that is publicly collaborative is essentially an argument. See Wikipedia’s definition of an argument. is it correct to your idea of an argument?
So what’s the point? The example of Wikipedia as an argument-based Social Media application is just another example of how there are different tools for different purposes. In this case, Wikipedia is similar to the early days of book printing, when all of a sudden scholars from other regions could engage in debate with others – idea creation and is a logical process to defining whatever it is your defining.
Twitter is the “water-cooler” of the Social Web, while Digg and Mixx are popularity-based news systems. Blogs are in a sense a “positioning-statement of opinion” where debate is limited to the comment section. Understanding the context of the tool will help in understanding what tools should be used for your engagement.
Care to argue?
(Author: Giles Crouch, Managing Partner)
@webconomist on Twitter
Stating the obvious: There has never been so many media channels in the history of mankind. This will signal a new challenge to marketers and communicators: ethnographic considerations.
It’s nothing to do so much with technology as it does with human nature and culture. During the heydays of broadcast media (TV, radio, print) we saw very little, comparatively, of specialized media channels for different cultural groups. What specialization there was (such as hispanic only radio stations in non-hispanic countries) were limited in scope due to the costs of the mediums being used.
Enter the digital media age and Social Media. These tools enable communications in a way that humans prefer to communicate – enabling groups to form, create, act and continue or cease. In the last 20 years we’ve also seen an increase in migrant populations to various countries. This means more varied cultures sprouting in within countries. Keeping an element of ones home culture is important as an identifier. Even in Canada and America, those originally of British, Irish, Scottish or Scandinavian descent are increasingly identifying with their originating roots.
This will present a whole new set of challenges to organizations reaching an audience – especially via digital media. I predict that the next trend for marketers will be understanding ethnography when doing their marketing research. It’s been hard enough for marketers to gather and incorporate demographic information and then we had to consider psychographic information in planning.
Because Western developed nations are seeing such a dramatic increase in immigrant populations who are gaining increasing purchase power, marketers and public relations pro’s will increasingly need to consider these factors. In Social Media we’re already seeing services like Hi5 develop dedicated Social Networks to hispanic and other cultures. NetLog (Facebook’s main European competitor) has language already figured out. If Facebook wants to be a serious global contender it’s going to have to improve it’s foreign language capacities.
While English may be the most spoken language outside China, it remains to be seen the impact this will have on businesses engaging in Social Media and digital marketing communications as a whole in the future.
Do you think cultural ethnographic considerations will become increasingly important to marketing communications professionals?
(Author: Giles Crouch, Managing Partner)