I have been working on-and-off over the last few days on a BIG POST about stories and how the social media revolution is putting the story at the centre of not just communications planning, but organisational management as well.
As part of this I was re-visting the ideas of Marshall McLuhan – author of ‘Understanding Media’ and originator of ‘medium is the message’ idea – a phrase many use, but much less understand I suspect. Continue reading
A journalism student in Australia (@jadelemoigne) contacted me last week (through good old fashioned email) to ask questions about Twitter and whether it was encouraging journalism.
I thought I would also blog the answers I gave, since this is a good question.
Dear Jade,
First off – its very difficult to separate Twitter from the rest of social media – it’s just one piece of the whole new information ecology that is transforming the way we access information. In general terms this shift is making traditional institutionalised media (and with it the journalists they employed) less relevant and creating processes that allow individuals to share with each other the information they need about the world.
Therefore – within my answers you could effectively substitute the term social media for Twitter. That said… Continue reading
What do social media monitoring and the English Channel have in common?
Answer: if you understand how you sail a ship up a busy sea-lane, like the English Channel, you will understand how to do social media monitoring.
As I have previously posted, there are basically two approaches / camps within social media monitoring. First is the data capture approach that uses proprietary paid-for tools to crunch all the data and churn out charts and graphs and measure sentiment etc. Second is the real-time approach based on constructing a monitoring panel that monitors activity in the relevant conversation spaces as it happens. I sit very firmly in the latter camp, not because the analysis tools don’t work – they have their uses – but because they are nowhere nearly as important or useful a tool to an organisation that wishes to design and manage a social media campaign. Continue reading
The ever controversial Andrew Keen has just published this in his Telegraph column – a guide to winning in social media. As with much of what Andrew says its true – the five steps he recommends would help gain attention. However, the assumptions that lie behind it render it (and also much of what Andrew says) misplaced shall we say. Continue reading
I have recently had reason to focus on the area of monitoring of social media which has involved looking once more at the whole range of black box monitoring solutions that are out there. This has caused me deep feelings of confusion and uncertainty.
The reason is this: when I do monitoring for a client, or advise a client on how to do monitoring, this is what I do. Continue reading
Here is a blast from the past (Sept 2006) about the future. I came across it again because I was searching for something I knew I had written once about the future of advertising / creative agencies. It has always been in my mind to update this article, but having read it I think most of the predictions it makes are still current and so – since I haven’t got around to finishing my post on the connected crowd – I have decided to punt this around again.
@obionyeaso recently sent me this DM on twitter:
Hi Richard.I wonder if you can point me to a more detailed A-B-C introduction to understanding ‘process ‘and ‘space’.
Not the sort of thing you can answer in a tweet – so rather than email a response I have decided to share this in a post. Continue reading
I have just been to the Social Media Club / Gov2Gov event hosted by the Canadian High Commission
Its purpose was “to bring together leaders from the Canadian High Commission in London, UK Central Government, the Greater London Authority (GLA) and the United States Department of State with Social Media leaders to discuss the changing nature of civic engagement and the relationships between citizens and their government.”
I took three things from it.
First, it was a very geeky event, which in some ways was a shame. Continue reading
Wired has just published an excellent article on the battle between Facebook and Google. It covers the key issues concisely and is well worth a read.
However, I think both companies (and possibly Wired) are wrong to think that this is a battle for future of the internet. Instead it is a battle for today’s internet. In my view neither Google nor Facebook will win the battle for the future of the internet because both are fighting in the wrong space. Both organisations are basing their strategies on the assumption that the future lies in an ad-driven, data capture, real estate model of the internet – and this is a 1.0, traditional institutionalised communications model.
Advertising is a creation of the world of traditional institutionalised information. No one is suggesting that advertising is still not incredibly important – but it is a pot that is shrinking as distribution-based communication itself shrinks. And while some of it is moving on-line, the on-line opportunity is never going to be as big as the current total pot and ultimately will disappear altogether.
Here’s why. Continue reading
Telling people that social media is about spaces rather than places draws a blank look from 90 per cent of people. I have therefore been searching for the good old analogy that helps people understand this concept. This search has also been prompted by a current project where a client “wants to be on Twitter” but wants to achieve this is a viral, one Tweet will make me famous, sort of a way and it is important to help them understand why this is unlikely to work.
The analogy I have come up with is that of trade show or exhibition. Suppose your business or organisation was to have a presence at the leading exhibition within your sector and you were presented with two choices as to what this presence would be. Continue reading