Twitter - trash or treasure?

Those that work with me in the Espresso office have watched with some amusement as my Twitter fixation has progressed. It started as the obligatory ‘we should really be doing this’ back in June 07, but didn’t really get into the swing of things for nearly a year. Since June 08 I have twittered pretty regularly although not prolifically – and I love it. You can twitter any time anywhere and I’ve taken great pleasure in twittering from the back of a moto in Cambodia, from the side of a dirt road in regional SA and of course from my desk.

Non–twitter folk, would argue (in the words of David Pogue in the NYT – thanks @pocketmojo!) that ‘the world doesn’t need ANOTHER ego-massaging, social-networking time drain’. Well, maybe not, but I have seen plenty of naysayers jump the fence - and I expect there will be plenty more.

Until recently I cruised along comfortably following a relatively small number, and with a relatively small number following me. As a result, I became pretty familiar with the twitter habits of those I followed. General musings, weather updates (thanks @annebb!), tweets directly from media press conferences and up to the second reporting on the US election from those on the ground in North America. It’s great, addictive stuff and really gives one the sense of being plugged into a wide, robust community. The regularity and brevity of the tweets gives twitterers a new take on the old ‘stream of consciousness’ literary technique.

Recently I have been more proactive in extending my community and as such, have realised that in Australia Twitter is poised to move quite quickly out of the realm of early adaptor geekville and into the mainstream. Hitwise recently announced that Twitter is holding its own after a phenomenal 2008 and that in the week ending January 10 hit an all time high as folk returned to work for the year. And just maybe some of those will be people who I awkwardly explained Twitter to at social functions over the break!

@barackobama, @kevinRuddpm and @turnbullmalcolm all twitter, although I think Turnbull probably takes the lead for transparent, open and genuine engagement. And while the traditional media followed Lance Armstrong’s every move as he sweated it in out in stinking hot SA during the recent Tour Down Under, he was twittering directly to his network of 25,000 odd followers.

In Australia, businesses are starting to realise that what is said about their brands on these channels really does matter, and that they have to be prepared to quickly and effectively acknowledge and respond. Social software consultancies such as Headshift (disclaimer – client!) are starting to work locally with multinational consumer brands to help them listen to the chatter about their products, understand and interpret the nature of the dialogue and advise how to respond appropriately.

It’s only a matter of time before we start seeing the tidal wave of stories about the cost to employers in employee time wasted on Twitter al la MSN and Facebook. My money is on April. And yours?

Social Media - are we getting it?

Jumping on the New Year’s resolution band wagon, I’m determined to blog-start into the new year with regular posts. No time like the present.

Over the past couple of days it has been interesting to watch a wave of activity on the social media front. It would seem that 2009 could just be the year where organisations start to really understand that engaging their audiences, rather than ‘targeting’ them is the way of the new world.

Tim Burrowes in his blog mUmBRELLA did a roundup of some recent viral campaigns which you can find here. These show that while marketers are cognisant of the power that consumers have to help disseminate corporate messages, navigating the limitations that many marketing departments have to be irreverent, challenging or pithy is very tricky. And as Tim states in his blog, there are only so many truly original ideas. It’s great to see organisations giving it a go but it’s probably worth them having a cold hard think about what sort of content is really going to cut it.

In terms of engagement, viral campaigns really only require a community to watch, filter, endorse and forward to their friends and colleagues. So, while they provided early signs of the power of online networks, the real power of social media is in the ability to create ongoing engagement and enable audiences to create their own content that compliments the brand. Much like Apple who have people ranging in age from 14 to 50 submitting content that could be perceived as brand ads, or create the creative thinking on which the ads are based.

The Best Job in The World campaign currently underway, is a great example. While they have a viral video here - which is mediocre at best – it’s been the UGC aspect to the campaign that I expect will keep the campaign alive. With the applicant videos posted on the site and viewers given the ability to rate each application, it creates far more interest and colour than any other traditional competition or stunt.

It’s their ability to access traditional media with good pick up yesterday in international press, coverage in The Australian, and Channel 7 Sunrise giving it a hammering, that no doubt drove the majority of the traffic to the site. And stay tuned for the announcements of the successful applicant. The campaign that just keeps on giving.

Kudos for incorporating all the notes - UGC, viral and heritage media (nod to SilkCharm :).

The WikiScanner effect…

Just as an addition to our last post, it looks like WikiScanner is already wreaking havoc.

In Australia, we are being inundated with reports of changes to Wikipedia being linked back to staff in the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, from immature vandalism to making edits to entries about subjects such as children overboard and the Treasurer. However, if we were just starting to think this was just another political stone-throwing match in the lead up to the election, unfortunately this is not the case – it’s a world-wide slinging match.

Government employees in South Africa have been accused of editing entries on its HIV/Aids policies, in Ireland North’s civil service employees have made over 1,000 edits. Organisations as varied as SeaWorld theme parks, Amnesty International, Pepsi, Exxon Mobil, Disney and Apple don’t escape either…

Mind you, I think that the Sydney Morning Herald asks a pertinent question today when they inquire: “If the Central Intelligence Agency, the Vatican and the Australian Department of Defence can't get it right, what hope is there for the rest of us to adjust, clarify or improve a Wikipedia entry without fear of being branded a wiki vandal?”

This will be an interesting one to keep an eye on!

Who is accountable for UCG?

As we track the social media phenomenon, we are honing in on the different elements of the ‘new’ media sphere. What really caught our attention this week was user generated content, who owns it and how accountable are individuals for their creations.

We are all experiencing and participating in the shift towards an active consumption of media and entertainment. More and more people are engaging with content, leaning forward to the computer screen rather than passively receiving, leaning back on the couch. (Mind you, some would argue that consumption of all media is growing and no one platform is being abandoned – but we’ll discuss this another time).

With this shift towards active consumption comes an increasing desire, driven innately by customer behaviour, to be a part of the creation of content: from videos to blogs to podcasting to wiki sites to citizen journalism. But, at what point does the content have so many creators that it no longer resembles the truth and is not beneficial to anyone?

Wikipedia has certainly seen its fair share of criticism, with entries being defaced and having incorrect information published. However, I met the news last week about the development of the wikipedia scanner designed to track the source of edits, with mixed feelings.

Whilst I believe it is a good thing that self-serving, false information can be traced and the people trafficking it can be made accountable, it also adds an editorial filter which user generated content is meant to bypass. All of a sudden, any shared information can be checked by a ‘higher power’. To me, this seems to be in direct opposition to the spirit of the game. Because really, being engaged with the information, not taking anything for face value and continuing the search – isn’t that where the fun really lies?

This only gives a general snapshot of the swiftly changing social media landscape and is just the starting point of this discussion, however it has made me think about a number of other issues such as trust and ownership – and we’ll be looking at these more over the coming weeks.

An introduction!

Welcome! We are off and running this week with our new site going live. This has been under development for a number of months so we are pretty excited.

Some background on the site…

There have been volumes (or the cyber equivalent) written about the changing media landscape as well as the role of PR and marketing in this new mix. It is no surprise to me that most of the conversations that have taken place are being driven from the US.

This piqued our interest in the local blogosphere from an Australian media perspective: Who is blogging? What are they blogging about? What are the hottest topics and biggest issues being discussed in our own backyard? Even more importantly, where is Web 2.0 taking businesses and the community at large?

In our own search to answer some these questions we were inspired to aggregate the blogs and sites from our region to create better access to the discussions that are happening locally and to provide an overview of the local online media landscape in its current form.

The obvious argument is that Web 2.0 and all of its various entities are a global phenomenon by nature then a localised approach is contrary to the point of the whole exercise. But if we are to look at blogging as an extension of the conversations that we are holding within our communities, then it makes sense.

A quick tour of the features:

Perspective: Every week in Perspective we provide an overview of the most active Australian media blogs and the topics they are discussing. Currently, most of the dialogue (when it comes to the vendor community) is limited to the usual suspects – but we expect that as our media landscape continues to broaden – so too will the discussions to include a much wider range of brands and vendors.

Caffeine: Our blog – Yikes. This week I attended the Future of Media Summit and a consistent theme was that there are, indeed, many more questions than - as Brad Howarth notes in his blog from the summit - answers. For example, whilst attending the ‘Tapping the Power of Influence Networks’ topic, I noticed that while there is some good discussion being generated, we are definitely in our infancy when it comes to understanding and harnessing these tools.

The Caffeine blog is our opportunity to highlight some of these questions as they arise. To help keep it interesting and insightful we will also be inviting guest bloggers, who are experts in their respective fields, to contribute to the discussions on this space. We are aiming to generate some local signal – not noise!

Journalist blogs: Aggregated in one place – we like it!

Technology blogs: A hub for all things tech.

Finally, you will notice our company Twitter – the latest, meaningless fad or an insight into the dynamic pulse of our organisation?

Welcome to the new website!

The new website is up and going!

Visit us at www.espressocomms.com.au!