The Constant Rebellion Towards Channels

YouTube became successful in large part because people wanted an alternative to boring old tv broadcast stations that dictated what you could watch and when. Internet radio was largely the same reason and blogging etc., because people could tell their own stories, create and share their own ideas. Throughout history, whenever someone creates a media channel to broadcast, someone looks for a way around it because they have another view or find too many restriction imposed by the gatekeeper of that channel.

This is always happening. With Facebook effectively now a “channel” it was no surprise over their leak of Project Spartan with the intent to deliver apps within the Facebook channel. Some media channels are looking at developing apps in HTML 5 to be delivered in the Safari browser in iPad and the iPhone and other smart-phones, bypassing iTunes and the Apple gatekeeper. Sure they’re a tad slower, but they work. More importantly, they avoid Apple’s control.

As we indicated in an earlier article, it’s the Hippies who created the Bulletin Boards and the The Well back in the 70′s and into the early 80′s. Steve Jobs was one of them, he knows the aversion to enterprise systemic control – and yet is creating an Apple-centirc channel today. We’re always, as humans, looking for an alternative…technology always disrupts, just as the printing press eliminated scribes and the car the horse and buggy.

We see the issues of Apple, Google, Microsoft and Facebook as basic economic cycles. They are disrupting and in some cases creating, entirely new forms (i.e. app stores), of channels. People will certainly use them, but at some point, people will find a way around them when they want a different form of content and new channels will evolve. Google+ threatens Twitter more than Facebook, yet now Google and Facebook are trying to outdo each other by adding new features to encourage people to stay within their channels.

At its inception, Facebook was intended for a narrow audience with a channel that did not exist in the form desired. YouTube, DailyMotion, Break.com have succeeded because people wanted other forms of video content than what broadcast television was providing. Social media channels are simply alternatives or new forms based on either a want or need of the market. Therefore, disruption will be the norm and people will always look for ways to communicate that fill a new perceived desire, decrease friction and cost.

Is It Getting Harder to Be Found?

The market for search engine optimization is huge. It’s also confusing and a constant battle for those consultants who do it to stay on top of it. Then there’s the black hat SEO types muddying the waters; link spammers, baiters and more. Then enter Facebook and it’s growing power of search. Let’s toss into that mix the Microblogs like Twitter or Plurk and the 40+ smaller ones. Next to toss in is social bookmarking like Dleicious. Then news aggregators like AllTop, Mixx or Digg. Don’t forget other social networks like Russia’s Vkontakte or Badoo in India. Spice it up with video channels like Vimeo and YouTube (over 40 of them in there) and then photo sharing like Flickr and Picasa. Getting to be a lot isn’t it?

These are just the channels. Let’s add some more ingredients to the mixture – how people are searching and how content is being identified. We have tags, slashtags (from Blekko), hashtags in Twitter and good old SEO tactics like meta tags and word weighting. Let’s not forget the growing element of content seeding in social media channels.

The recipe is getting rather complex; more terms and ingredients than in a Twinkie but with a shelf life less than a ripe banana sitting in the sun. All of this driven by a multitude of chefs screaming their recipe is the best. Is there a Gordon Ramsay to step in and give a liberal dose of the “F word” to straighten it all out? Not yet. A Jamie Oliver to gracefully put it all into an easy to digest, healthy, tasty full course meal? Not yet.

With all the research and consulting we do, it seems increasingly harder for companies to get found out there. So many channels, so many services and so many approaches. Add in the fact you can spend a whole session online without even using a Web browser or traditional consumer search engine.

I have no answers. We’re just one of many chefs stumbling about the kitchen…what do you think?

When to Adopt Social Media Tools into Marketing

There’s three ways to look at adopting new digital media and social media channels for your marketing and communications efforts.

A) Bleeding Edge: Get in before the service becomes super hot to build presence and traction (i.e. getting into Twitter in 2007.) The upside can be getting to shape the tone and manner and building a strong brand presence. The downside is knowing it will be a winner and that it won’t shut down for lack of service. If you picked Plurk as microblog platform, well, sorry about that.

B) Leading Edge: This is when, it would seem, mainstream media first starts to report on a service. A good example would be blogging. You can better pick which service is likely to be around in a few years (even through acquisitions or mergers) and you can still play a role in shaping the channel and building  a strong presence.

C) Laggard: Shareholders of pharmacy chain Walgreen’s kept pushing senior management to build an online presence fast and start an eCommerce site. Management resisted and waiting until 2000, watching and learning from others who failed. Smart move on Walgreen’s part. Sometimes this can be a safe bet, but you’ll expend more human resource time and money in social media channels the later you enter.

In large part, when you choose to use a social media  service depends mostly on senior management’s comfort with that level of engagement, expenditure and how it can relate to ROI for the business. Other factors include time, brand values, market size etc. As always with social media, do some listening first. A service may not always live up to the hype or may not even be right for your organization.

Some companies have a culture of being “bleeding edge” and want to be at the visionary stage of product adoption (i.e. Moores Law of technology adoption)

What Newsgroups & Forums Can Teach Us

Newsgroups, forums and bulletin boards. They go back rather a long way in the ancient history of the Web…some as far back as the late 70′s and early 80′s, like the WELL (born out of the Whole Earth Catalog days.) And they remain a key place of conversation and opportunity for engagement.

Yet marketers often overlook them. Likely because those using them have guarded them well as a place for people, not companies. Although some companies have done well. For fans of Anne of Green Gables, production company Sullivan Entertainment has done very well providing forums for Anne fans. Mostly because they clearly understand the value of the newsgroups. While they may monitor them, they stay away from always trying to upsell – but rather wrap the forums access with merchandise. They built a brand following, long before blogs, Social Networks and Twitter popped onto the scene.

Forums, newsgroups and bulletin boards can be excellent sources of information. Sources that 98% of “reputation monitoring” services don’t cover. Gaining access in an automated fashion (i.e. through an API) is not always easy either.

But these social media channels are very active to this day and perhaps the least untouched and least touchable, by marketers. If you’re a marketer looking to push your product, tread gently. Protocols are strong in newsgroups and aggressively enforced.

As we do research into Social Media use, we spend a fair bit of time in these channels. There’s three key things I’ve taken away from spending many an hour validating our search results in them;

1. They are a channel that marketers have had little true success in. They are a place to truly have a conversation with your potential or current prospects. To do otherwise will end up in tears.

2. They are a very rich source of insights for public relations practitioners, product managers, researchers, sociologists an marketers. Perhaps a much undervalued one.

3. Not all online spaces are susceptible to marketing and public relations activities. When people just want to socialize, they can and will, make a place of their own.

A fairly decent free monitoring tool is BoardTracker; although not comprehensive, it does a pretty good job of digging into these channels. No reputation management tool has yet been able to conduct an automatic crawl however, and due to the technology, it may be a while yet. Our mediasphere360 is about as good, but manual validation and review remains vital.

So next time you’re planning for Social Media engagement, having  a look around newsgroups and forums; you may be quite surprised at what you uncover. Good and bad.

(Author: G. Crouch)

The Biggest Hurdle for Public Relations

One word: Attention.

Basic economic theory states that when you create a wealth of one thing, it creates scarcity of another. In the case of modern day media it’s a wealth of channels and a scarcity of attention. For the most part today, we “snack” on media. We consume when we’ve set aside our attention to watch a movie or a whole TV show or listen to a full broadcast of a radio show.

On the Web we mostly snack. The most effective bloggers have posts no more than 300 words.

Public Relations practitioners have always fought for our attention. But today that’s harder than ever. So many channels. And consumption changes by channel. Twitter is “grazing” while Blogs are a quick bag of crisps and Facebook is a cup of coffee and a cookie.

If the “story” starts as a press release and media advisory, backed by the press kit or background kit, then it will need to break into many little pieces as it goes out into all of the various media channels. Each snippet hopefully getting the right readers attention.

It might follow then that the second biggest hurdle is then getting your audience to act on the information they’ve received.