Trevor Cook

NYT and social media

Paul Smalera - Living Through 1500 - Q&A with Times’ Social Media Editor: All about the conversation - True/Slant.

Combined with the Times’ dozens of other official and unofficial feeds, the Times is approaching two million social media followers, daily. 

That's an amazing statistic.

Corporate Engagement finds a new home at Crikey Blogs

I am pleased to announce that Corporate Engagement has been moved, in it's entirety, to the recently created Crikey Blogs platform. We're still waiting for a bright, shiny new banner but I've been familiarising myself with Wordpress and posting to the new site in recent days, so if you wondered why my posting frequency had dropped off, that's why.

Corporate Engagement has been going since February 2004 (itself replacing an original blog I started with in November 2003 on the Blogger platform).

Moving to Crikey is the next step in my blogging adventure and an exciting step it is too.

Crikey is the first media site in Australia to fully embrace bloggers as bloggers rather than as journalists doing a bit of blogging on the side or outsiders being brought into provide some additional content.

The Crikey blogs are real blogs managed as blogs by real bloggers. That's BIG I think. I hope other media sites, particularly the ABC and SBS, might eventually do the same. (update: I should also mention that Wotnews, formerly Plugger, is also very blogger friendly too).

Aggregating blogs in this way and promoting them off a media site (although not an MSM platform) will give us bloggers access to much larger audiences and it will introduce many new readers to the potential of blogging.

So here goes, I hope you will drop by to the new home of Corporate Engagement and give me your feedback.

And if you have any suggestions for posts, please drop me an email ...

Update: More discussion on Crikey Blogs: Public Opinion and John Quiggin

Quantity vs. quality in corporate blogging

Link:
Corporate Blogging: The Fallacy of Quantity vs Quality
.

As a corporate blogger I rarely post "off topic". There's a reason for that, and a reason why I'm doing so now. The core reason for doing so now is that it's a subject that's near and dear to me, having spent the majority of the past eight years writing and blogging in publishing and on the corporate side of the table, and I see far too many posts out there offering advice about blogging that's focused solely on "getting more hits".  While that might be sound advice for personal blogs, it's off-key when it comes to corporate efforts.

There is a belief, and it's wrong, that more is better - whether it's more posts or more hits - when it comes to corporate blogging. In fact, the opposite is true: quality is more important - whether it's readers or posts - than quantity.

Social media and insurance

DigitalWatch » Blog Archive » Social Media & Insurance?.

Is social media really suitable for all brands? Irrespective of its growing popularity, there are any number of low involvement categories that don’t really seem to fit the social mould. The insurance industry is one of the first that comes to mind. As Forrester’s prominent social computing analyst, Jeremiah Owyang writes on his blog “social media isn’t great for everything, let’s use our heads, not everything is a nail . . . in general, most financial and insurance industries are going to fall ust behind the curve of mainstream adoption when it comes to social media tools, they rightfully will wait and vet out what works and what doesn’t”

Echo chamber: Social media strategists are talking to themselves

Echo chamber: Social media strategists are talking to themselves | Feeds | ZDNet.com: "Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about social media as an industry. Or as a field. It’s very new. We’re still finding ourselves. We’re trying to figure out exactly what it is. What the parameters are. Who should lead it within an organization. For that matter, we’re still struggling for a specific definition as to what social media actually is.

As far as social media strategists, we’re a tight lot. We’ll friend one another on Facebook, follow one another on Twitter, read one another’s blogs. We’ve formed a reasonably tight community in which we’ll evangelize to one another concepts such as authenticity and transparency, relevance and subtlety. We’ll say that companies today must listen. They must engage their communities. We’ll all agree with ourselves. But at this point, that’s clearly not enough. And the first thing we must do is recognize this.

About a month ago Forrester came out with a study of 16 social networking efforts put together by brands and their agencies. They found that of the 16, a full 15 were failing to make the grade. According to their metrics, this is a 94 percent failure rate. And the primary reasons for these failures were that those that were implementing the campaigns were using traditional online methodologies, leading Jeremiah Owyang to state ‘many brands are wasting their time, money, and resources.’ That’s not harsh…it’s accurate and fair.

The negative consequences of what we would call poorly run campaigns may not be all that readily apparent either. They could be looked on as learning experiences, experiences that can be improved on the next time around. A tweak here, a tweak there. All done by the same players that were in the first go around. Now many of us will say, in a somewhat frustrated and self-satisfied tone, that ‘they just don’t get it.’ These senior advertising agency and PR firm execs or corporate CMOs and marketing directors don’t know what they’re doing when it comes to social media."

Read the rest...it's well worth it

Will nowwearetalking survive the departure of Phil Burgess from Telstra

Mixed farewell for Dr Phil | smh.com.au. After several years, nowwearetalking remains Australia's one major example of corporate use of social media and its existence and success is almost entirely due to the drive of Burgess. It will be interesting to see if the momentum can be sustained without his forceful presence.

Are you being exploited on the lazy web?

The Lazy and Smarter Web : A VC:

"If you spend a lot of time reading web/tech blogs, you'll be familiar with the concept of the 'lazy web'. The idea is instead of doing a lot of work researching/googling, you just ping/spam your social net with a question and get them to do the work for you. I was accused of doing that in the comments to the peer producing the web 2.0 speech post: I love when rich guys involved in tech 'ask for help' from the crowd (i.e. get for free what well-to-do businessmen can easily pay for) and then turn around and tell the audience how innovative and amazing it is that we can all simply put a call out on the web for a collaborative web 2.0 speech and it gets done! presto! amazing! I guarantee you that this will be part of what he tells the audience. What a hustle. What is this, AOL/Weblogs Inc.?? Write your own damn speech.

Or perhaps it doesn't matter, after all responding to these requests is voluntary.

The great blog 2.0 debate

Blogging 2.0 Meme Doesn't Go Far Enough: "Duncan Riley is promulgating 'Blogging 2.0' to represent what I consider the erosion of social media by their historic communities under the inexorable rise of flow applications, like Twitter, Friendfeed, Socialmedian, and Feedly (to name only a few). I think his description of what is happening is overly simplistic, and the appropriation of the term 'Blogging 2.0' is a jingoistic attempt to leverage the 'paradigm shift' magic of the 2.0 suffix."

Another thing to remember in all this is that only a tiny fraction of the people who use the web are into flow. About 99% (I'm guessing of course) of online users just want to access informative websites (mostly through search) when they want to find something out. I think flow is pretty much a geeky thing and I doubt it will emerge from that ghetto anytime soon.

A coming shakeout in social media

Post 55:08 Is a social media bust coming? « JargonMaster: "I don’t see how social media overcomes the combination of apathy and inertia that so many people display in their media consumption. The fact that some of that consumption has gone online seems to me irrelevant. If people are passive, it does not matter whether they are online or offline."

This is an interesting response to my recent article: "The revolution will not be blogged".

Unleashed: The revolution may not be blogged

Unleashed: The revolution may not be blogged.

Social media evangelists extoll a modern 'david and goliath' fable where the old, ossified institutions of media, government and business are forced to their knees by millions of people tapping away on keyboards.

They believe that our big institutions will have to become open, transparent and accountable or they will crumble like so many Berlin walls unable to withstand the internet-empowered populace's thirst for freedom.

Or they used to believe it. Doubt is emerging. Now we have the 'disappearing blogger' phenomenon. It seems the dream that sprang from the tech labs of California a decade ago and spread around the world, might be losing its remarkable impetus.

Read the rest and tell me I'm wrong ...

Future of media: how relevant is social media?

Unfortunately, I missed last week's Future of Media summit so I've been trawling through some of the participant commentary. Overall, I think a lot of these debates are getting a bit tired and repetitive and it would be good to get some reality in them.

There is a peculiar lack of perspective in the contributions of many participants both on-stage and off-stage (and isn't interesting how many social media advocates, just like real people, crave the onstage limelight rather than being up the back of the room in the long tail):

1. The scale of social media

If you're inside the social media bubble it is easy, very easy, to exaggerate the importance of social media as we know it now and perhaps as it will be in the future.

For instance, for many years now we have been hearing predictions like this one from Gordon Whitehead (a great blogger and smart marketer):

there’s going to be a huge media train wreck and it’s heading towards those media and news organisations that are ignoring the huge social networking & media groundswell.

This, I'm afraid, is largely wishful thinking:

• Major media response.Tthe biggest players in social media are in fact major media companies both traditional media companies (like News Ltd, ABC, BBC and so on) and big 'new' media companies, specifically Google and Apple (hugely important in podcasting and vodcasting). Contrary to what many social media evangelists like to believe, big media has been fast to adopt social media. The reason, of course, is that social media can deliver millions of links and page views for media websites.
• Audience size. Some people do live in Twitter or second life, others have a heavy involvement in social media in all its forms but the numbers are still miniscule as a share of the overall audience size. While social media is adding some more competition for more traditional media outlets (as well as some handy business opportunities), it is a long way off being the main game. Social media is a supplement to traditional media providing highly valuable extra information and commentary but it is an error to confuse that with some sort of serious challenge to media overall.

2. Bloggers vs journalists

This is one of the most tedious parts of the whole debate. Part of it flows from the  silly idea that blogging and micro-blogging are a serious challenge to the media. Bloggers often exhibit frustration that journalists want to keep drawing a distinction between bloggers and journalists and part of it is the ignorance and arrogance of many journalists who tend to sanctify their craft beyond anything that is reasonable.

While bloggers can be journalists (ie doing original reporting in an objective way) and while journalists can be bloggers (ie adding commentary and additional insights), the two are not synonymous.

I think we would all be better off if we left this argument off the table and just recognise that there are differences and similarities and so what?

3. Monetisation

The people who make real money are largely the owners of companies who provide the social media platforms where others post their content e.g. google (including youtube, blogger).

For most bloggers, the reality is that their social media incomes will never exceed minimum wages unless they can make it in consulting and public speaking about social media i.e. passing their knowledge along.

Mostly, social media ventures are still in 'start-up mode' with lots of people working around the clock and burning out trying to get up their traffic and google juice etc. These ventures are not stable employment in the way that traditional media allows people to work a relatively normal work week for a consistent and livable wage.

Blogging works for most people as an additional (non-core) activity as a way to promote your business, book, consultancy services, speaking engagements and so on. Or as a hobby.

It also works for organisations as a cheap way of extending their other PR, advertising and marketing activities. And here again, we need to have perspective. Even companies that are big into social media still seem to spending no more than a few percent of their communications budgets on social media.

I don't want to downplay the importance of social media, I just think that it's not helpful to keep exaggerating social media and to talk as if it's going to sweep all before it. We can all do better if we keep a firm and realistic perspective on where social media fits in.

Suggested additional reading:

Jonathan Este

Hugh Martin

Bank PR ‘outed’ via Social Media interview

PR Disasters:

"National Australia Bank has distanced itself from a PR consultancy (p’raps Cox & Inall), which attempted to spam post commercial messages on several leading Aussie sports blogs. Local SEO practitioner Jim Stewart tele-interviewed NAB PR Felicity Glennie Holmes who asserted that ‘this activity was poorly executed by our PR agency’. Jim Stewart primarily challenged Felicity on corporate spamming & the ethics of placing covert NAB ads disguised as blog posts. Felicity kinda defended her employers decision. Interesting note to PR practitioners; be wary of responding to a blog query. As you would with a journo query, ask if they plan to broadcast your communication and if you’re uncomfortable with their response, decide if you wanna participate (or not). For eg: Jim Stewart conducts his interview with Felicity, filming himself for vodcast, and putting her on speakerphone - his body language, facial expressions and other non-verbal silently ’spin’ his take on her responses. Judging by Jim’s raised eyebrows in his vodcast of the telecon, he couldn’t quite believe what he was hearing from FGH. I’ve called Cox Inall to see if they were involved and if so, to hear their side of the story. Someone called ‘Killingly’ is supposed to contact me; after almost 18hrs, am still awaiting any call or email. Agency head Tim Powell left a voice mail for me around 9am and is happy to speak to me later today…stay tuned."

I'm looking forward to Powell's account.

The long tail debate

Marginal Revolution: Has "The Long Tail" been refuted?

Social media: Some lessons from America

I spent most of April in the USA and apart from going to baseball games I caught up with some great bloggers. Here's some key points from those discussions:

• Although many bloggers are very successful esp in this presidential year there still isn't a sustainable business model. Many high profile bloggers are still operating in start-up mode which means working round the clock and burning people out
• At the same time, it is much harder for new bloggers to carve out a niche than it was a few years ago
• Big media has adapted very quickly to the new environment over the past year or two and organisations like Forbes have some big plans for building communities and marketing in that environment
• Most companies basically have a GMOOT (get me one of those) approach to social media; they don't really 'get it', they just want to do something cool.
• Many early adoptors are blogging less because of micro-blogging (twitter, facebook).
• Second Life has not been a winner for corporates and 'we were all guilty of rushing into it without thinking it through'.

Twittering to escape

Why Do People Twitter?: Results of a Scientific Study: "Results revealed that Twitter users were more likely to communicate in order to Escape. This means they chose items in line with: I talk to put off something I should be doing; I talk to get away from what I am doing; I talk because I have nothing better to do; I talk to get away from pressures and responsibilities. My earlier research on Twitter had led to the assumption that it was a ‘water cooler’ of sorts for bloggers (as a group and occupation type) to convene, ask questions, get feedback, and spend time with colleagues. These findings make it clear that Twitter users do not view the social media site as an online water cooler. In fact, the Escape factor as a reason for communication puts Twitter more in line with ‘happy hour.’"