The|Intangibles

Social Media - A Global Phenomenon?

Next week I will be in London for the International Public Relations Association (IPRA) Summit. Although at the Summit as a paying attendee, I will be facilitating something called a "champagne roundtable" around the issue of social media and its impact on issue management strategies.

I suggested the topic because I am hoping to learn whether the phenomenon of social media as a connector and driver of new communications strategies is as global as those of us engaged with it believe . . . or hope. There are some top notch speakers and program subject areas during the conference, but not much focus on digital communications in general or social media in particular at least that I can see.

So, my roundtable may be an outlier, sparsely attended and, therefore, featuring a surfeit of champagne which I will feel compelled to consume! Nevertheless, I promise to report on the outcome fully and with appropriate sobriety. 

Once Again - Who's Blogging?

At another conference at which I presented last week (Yes, I do a lot of public speaking on behalf of Hill & Knowlton Canada), I again asked the audience of communicators whether anyone blogged. Not one person put up their hand. This is the third time I have asked that question of a conference audience, which means there at least 60 professional communicators in Canada who haven't even tried blogging. 

Given how easy it is to get started, what's the problem? I'm not sure: Fear of the medium? Confusion about its impact? Not enough time to care? Surely, though, it can't be because they need more evidence of its efficacy as a method of talking directly with people who care about a subject, an idea or problem -- dialogue with stakeholders as we like to call it. Ask Dell or GM. 

Again this morning, an article in our national newspaper provides evidence of another case in point. A Canadian petrochemical company created a series of "pump talk" videos with employees exlaining why gas prices rise and fall, as they have a propensity to do daily. The videos were posted on YouTube and on the company's web site. Since August 1st, there have been 350,000 downloads of the videos! Even assuming repeat downloads by the same individual, that's a hell of a lot of people the company has reached with its message . . . people who have self-selected engagement with the company's point of view.

I am an issue manager, so my interest is not in the ways social media can be used to influence buying behaviour. But I would be less than responsible to my clients if I didn't recognize -- and try to get my mind around -- how a direct connection can be made and conversation started with an audience that simply couldn't be reached before without some form of intermediation. 

Summer Content Problems

Toronto business lawyer and active blogger Ron Hyndman wrote this weekend about what he calls "content discontent", a feeling he has that some blog prose is getting stale in part because "of the common attitude that to get one’s traffic up (a common web 2.0 mantra, it seems) one needs to 'blog early and blog often'." His later explanation is probably more on the mark; It's August; it's hard to care too much. Never mind . . .  the kids will soon be back at school (for my two sons -- university), and time -- like price in economics -- will become more elastic. It will, won't it? 

Quirky Links

Some Wednesday morning links with purpose . . .

Iran's rather odd president has commissioned a "nuclear symphony" inspired by the country's push to become a nuclear power. It will debut next week. The argument that culture is politics has been given new credibility.

According to an article in New Scientist, researchers at Newcastle University discovered that simply placing a photograph of a pair of eyes next to a box where people paid for their coffee or tea on the honor system resulted in triple the amount paid for the beverages. CSR practitioners may now have a new tool at their disposal to ensure responsible corporate conduct.

A young man in Santa Cruz, California was so affected by a screeening of Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth he decided everyone should see it. So he established an online process by which he is encouraging people who want to help others to see the movie to donate to a PayPal account. These funds will then be used to offer free admission to people who can't afford the ticket price. The web site is fascinating because he descibes the chronology of his decision to undertake the campaign, the building of the site and registering the domain, creating an activity log, etc. It is a chronicle of individual citizen activism.

 

Web 2.0 and Language Redux

I am delighted to see that Business Week's Robert Hof agrees with me about the somewhat abstruse nature of Web 2.0 language. After nodding to its language "peculiarities", he goes on to argue that  "For all its appeal to the young and wired, Web 2.0 may end up making its greatest impact on business", and later quotes Canada's own Don Tapscott on a similar note.

The article is a primer on how companies are trying to get their minds around the idea of the folksonomy of online conversation (Yes, I do know what it means . . . although I think the descriptive power of the word extends beyond its Wikipedia defintion of a community-oriented way of categorizing Web content) and its application to management and business strategy. Read it for verification that we are on to something here.

Social Media and the Language Problem

Having tried on a number of occasions to argue with clients and friends about social media, social computing, citizen journalism and their collective impact on how we are talking and creating differently, I have more often than not been met by blank stares. I suspect it is the same genre of blank stare that faced people who made a passionate case ten years ago about the new 'paradigm' (They likely used that beleaguered word.) to which email, e-commerce and webcasts gave birth. Evidently, there are many clients and even colleagues who don't seem to get it.

So, why the incredulity? Well, a light went on the other day when I was scanning some posts on Alexandra Samuel's blog --Social Signal -- that linked me to the online Netsquared conference. I parsed the posts and chats and realized I was labouring to understand what was actually being said . . . a problem I often have whenever I read posts by bloggers on blogging. (Let me say that I learn a great deal from Alexandra even if I sometimes need a 'Blogging for Dummies' book beside my keyboard or phone as I read or speak with her.) 

I'll admit it . . . I don't fully understand the infrastructure of 'tags' and 'tagging', am fuzzy about 'tag clouds', know too little about how wiki's work, prefer the word 'taxonomy' to 'folksonomy', know the function of RSS but wouldn't know how to use it, and find 'del.ici.ous' (Do I have the periods in the right place?) pointless. So am I, a relatively active professional and personal blogger, and all those incredulouous corporate communications types, simply dense or a Luddite?

Frankly, I don't think so. The language of many who are enagaged and passionate about social media production has becomie increasingly insular, self-referential and, dare I say it, almost cultish. The language of Web 2.0 is unnecessarily obscure . . . almost as if some bloggers who blog about blogging are satisifed just to speak to each other about it, and not proselytize in an idiom that actually explains and teaches.

Those of us who believe social media and social computing strategies should increasingly stand side-by-side with traditional communication program approaches will have to find a lexis to describe the technology components that encourages abductive (a lovely word I learned today at  Rotman Business School conference on creativity which means 'the logic of what could be') reasoning about these new models among audiences. Cute terms like 'tag clouds' and 'folksonomy' simply push people away.

When the language of social media creation becomes less self-referential, less murky, more self-evident, then we will have an easier time convincing organizations and companies of the logic and merit of engaging in the online conversation. 

Thinking Social Media and Politics

With all due respect to my colleagues who practice government relations, political parties seldom lead when it comes to communication strategies, preference being given to door-to-door campaigning, legacy media relations and staged debates.

When it comes to web strategies, however, political campaigns -- in the US at least -- seem to be one step ahead of many corporate communications departments in taking full measure of the web as a campaign tool. A recent report by The Bivings Group on the 2006 US Senatorial campaign found that 97% of the candidates had live web sites. Most sites were used to provide a combination of news, biography, online donations, etc. However, a large minority of the candidate sites offered blogs, multimedia presentations, RSS feeds and downloads  

The key word here is "campaign". Political campaigns are engagements . . . with citizens and opponents (and sometimes with staff). Engaging with voters and making them feel part of a decision process is essential to a successful election effort.

Now, think about it. Aren't corporate issue management programs actually campaigns in which the company hopes to engage stakeholders, communities, regulators and the public at large in understanding its point of view on a problem? If so, then it seems self-evident that corporate issue managers should be watching closely -- even adopting -- new online information management and dialogue facilitation strategies being employed increasingly by political parties.

Web 2.0 and Collaboration

A few weeks ago, I posted a short comment on potential uses of wikis as a means of creating collaborative engagement between a company and its communities, for example in the development of a regional environmental strategy.

Well, I just finished reading an article by Andrew McAffee in MIT Sloan Management Review called Enterprise 2.0: The Dawn of Emergent Collaboration which carries the same theme into positing new ways for companies to use Web 2.0 technologies to create and manage knowledge.

His thesis quite simply is that 'old' knowledge management platforms such as intranets will be replaced by group authorship -- mediated by blogs, wikis, tagging etc. -- which make "an episode of knowledge work widely and permanently visible." With Web 2.0 technologies you not only get the results of knowledge work stored in a searchable fashion, but you also get the process of creating the knowledge made observable.

His conclusion . . . "Enterprise 2.0 technologies have the potential to usher in a new era by making both the practices of knowledge work and its outputs more visible. Because of the challenges these technologies bring with them, there will be significant differences in companies' abilities to exploit them. Because of the opportunities the technologies bring, these differences will matter a great deal."

Exactly the same can be said of companies which choose -- or do not choose -- to explore how Web 2.0 technologies might change their relationship with their external stakeholders.  

The Immense Personal Value of a Creative Commons

Politics and economics aside, I will buy the whole book.

I am talking about a book praised lavishly by Lawrence Lessig called The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom by Yochai Benkler.

How do I know I will buy the book? Because it can be read for free under a Creative Commons License and very early this morning I downloaded and skimmed three chapters . . .  Chapter 6  Political Freedom Part 1: The Trouble with Mass Media; Chapter 7 Political Freedom Part 2: Emergence of the Networked Public Sphere; and Chapter 10: Networking Together. It is an academic exegesis of the impact of the shifts in politics, business, culture, and music being wrought by networks and digitally intermediated social connectedness.

I might have stepped right by the book at my local bookshop had I not been able to read a few chapters over early morning coffee. Hence my praise of Benkler and Yale University Press' willingess to make it available for donwload.

Interesting Piece on Employee Blogs

Mark Scheffler at Chicago Business posts a story this week about employee blogs and the corporate reaction . . . It is evident that companies need specific policies on blogging about the company by employees. Some do; many don't. The point is the blogs will happen anyway so being transparent about expectations just makes sense.