Recently in Social media Category

In the aftermath of John Hagel and Chris Anderson's conversation at the Future of Media Summit, John has posted an interesting commentary on the long tail and Chris's new book on his blog. As John was bringing out at the Summit, he is very interested in the impact of the long tail on media industry structure. While Chris seems to believe this will not necessarily be radical, John thinks it will be. In particular, the unbundling of existing media companies may take place along the lines of infrastructure management and customer relationship management. Well worth a read - complementing the live conversation with written reflections...

Our group's topic was "Bloggers. Are they newsmakers, newsfinders, opinion shapers or annotators"? We were a small group - but lively - including owners of businesses and people who although not owning the company would obviously have significant influence on decision-making. Experience included very senior corporate, finance, media, small business networks, creative, advertising, technology transfer. Two or three bloggers in the group.

These notes which I took as host of the group are mere snippets from a lively discussion - I'm hoping others who participated will add/comment/disagree etc.

One person was interested in the possibilities for using blogs to help with a small business network, another as part of developing corporate cohesion across several formerly discrete companies or business units. Interest expressed in the intra-corporate possibilities of blogs "behind the firewall", ie in VPN mode.

Discussion about Australia's government majority owned (for a while) telco Telstra and its Now We Are Talking group of blogs It was stated that the blog/s had been introduced on the initiative of one of the new American execs at Telstra and not without angst/resistance from others at a high level. Are the Telstra bloggers newsmakers, newsfinders, opinion shapers or annotators? Is there mainly a 'top down' view expressed - 'depends on who you talk to'. Feeling was that this was largely annotation. Noted there is some filtering by a person or persons with editorial overview, but as far as we know this is for inappropriate language etc, rather than to censor deviations from a corporate line. See also the acerbic post on Telstra's blogging venture, by Future of Media panelist Mark Jones on his Filtered blog - Now we are NOT talking.

One participant felt that the only reason for a blog or blogs would be to attract people to the company website. There was some inconclusive discussion about the community-building aspect and also the role of blogs in enabling a company to be more transparent.

One consultant regularly sees opportunities for clients to promote themselves more effectively by setting up a blog, especially in industries where there is tangible value in demonstrating openness, transparency, honesty, and getting people to trust the company - not every client wants to do that or follow through with a blog once initiated. A blog doesn't suit every client.

Noted in the small business context that only 44% of Australian businesses have a website.

Mention of the challenge of seeing that a blog could help the company you are working for and then having to get the CEO and/or senior management onside to enable it to happen. Wariness? Scepticism?

Brief discussion about wikis.

Mention of Trevor Cook as a leading and prolific blogger in the PR industry - see his Corporate Engagement group blog.

The author of this blog volunteered at our table as I had a laptop and thought it would be appropriate to make good use of the technology at hand at the Future of Media Summit and enter directly into the blog. Unfortunately, I spent a good 10 minutes getting my laptop up and running before it crashed and now must consider what is ahead of me given the blogging interest regarding Dell's Customer Service as discussed on the day!

Our table was equally devided between those belonging in the content camp and those in the advertising camp.

In respect to User Generated Content (UGC) there is the question of "to censor or not to censor". Hugh Martin noted that the BBC copped a lot of criticism over the censoring of posted content during the London tube bombing last year. This was different to the BSkyB approach of putting it all out there. A media service with a strong brand still needs to maintain a level of editorial integrity to ensure that UGC is considered appropriate for its audience.

So in the case of UGC there are, broadly, 3 options (i) uncensored (the MySpace, YouTube approach) (ii) manual filtering (resource intensive) (iii) automated content filtering - use heuristic models ("editor is an algorithm!") to filter content based on language/topic/image content etc. Or a blend of all 3.

The topic of viral marketing was discussed with ads like Carlton's Big Beer Ad and John West's bear Ad being great examples of these. The point was made that these can either win or lose an audience - a case in point being the tastefulness of the VW Polo advertisement (personal opinion... I would NEVER buy a Polo! ... current model Golf GTI is a different story! ;^)

A recent classic example of viral marketing was the tagging of AirForce One "Still Free". One estimate suggests that, at twenty-five frames per second, this video clip is worth over 3,000 words every time it's viewed given the amount that has been written about it on internet sites and newspapers around the world. 87M views in the first week alone!

From viral communications we moved onto the topic of UGC in the context of creating "mini sites" on brands and products. General consensus is that this would work for fast moving consumer goods such as beer or cars but not necessarily toothpaste. One needs to be able to engage consumers at a mainstream level. If there is general passion around a topic (where's the passion in toothpaste?!?) then there exists the opportunity to create sites on given topics with blogging/creative marketing/content aggregation on the topic from other sources. If a given audience with a specific demographic starts to build on these sites, then the opportunity exists to monetize through specific advertising. The author would suggest that knowledge of a consumer's behaviour on that site (what they search for/write about/view/purchase at the site) would provide the essential events to analyse and therefore target highly personalised advertising even to a site that attracts and extremely broad audience.

Many more interesting topics where discussed at the table, however my mind kept wandering to the Dell service challenge that confronts me and, alas, I feel I was way too distracted from the task at hand. Any others at the table that day or others that feel so inspired, I invite to you keep the thread alive!

At my talk on Creative Commons last night (I believe heard only by the San Francisco audience, alas), I used the "strategic questions" posed by the Future of Media Report as a foil for the role of the commons in the future of media. I want to post here about small points I raised regarding a few of the questions.

How can you best draw on social networks for content and ideas?
How can you encourage consumers to become creators?

Turn users into stakeholders: give them some rights.

Turn the second question around: "How can you encourage creators to become consumers?" Creation is often a consumption good: rather than expecting to be paid to create, people will pay you if you can help them be better creators. The millions of bloggers who pay for blog hosting are a case in point, as are the vast majority of artists and musicians who spend more in a year on gear than they will directly earn from their artistic efforts in a lifetime and (back to the web) those who pay Flickr for a "pro" account so they can better share their photography.

Remix is not just [re]creation, it is a conversation. Make that explicit -- and thus more exploitable, sticky, etc. A particular implementation.

How can you faciliate social media commenting on and annotating content?

One emerging technology that I like to turn people on to are semantic wikis. The data in your wiki (assuming you're using one) may be more valuable than you imagined.

Users should obtain private benefit when annotating. If they do, the social benefit (or the value added to your website) may be enhanced.

Again, make users stakeholders: allow them to export annotations they've contributed at a minimum. Several [inter]related ideas here, which may be exploited selectively.

Regarding several of the questions, which I won't repeat here, I mentioned the importance of open formats. Consumers are rapidly becoming aware that the media they create (and that you help them create) should be usable for their lifetimes -- decades. Users who couldn't care less about open source software want access to their data. Stay ahead of the curve and make open formats and open standards compliance a part of your strategy.

These are just some relatively narrow considerations. For a big picture introduction to Creative Commons specifically, visit creativecommons.org and watch Get Creative (5 minutes) and for the big picture check out the book Free Culture.

Finally, I forgot to mention that Creative Commons has a monthly event in San Francisco featuring people (essentially) building the future of media. Hope to see some of you at one.