I had a great time talking to a business group in Sydney today, my theme was that social media is suited in some corporate circumstances and not others. I made the point that there was nothing blue sky or revolutionary about social media and, indeed, it has some real drawbacks for corporates. I made four points:
- Mainstream. The yes or no debate is over, its now about how. Social media is here and its important that we understand it and use it or respond to it in ways that are consistent with our corporate objectives. So social media should be in every comms strategy even if we consider it and decide not to use it or not to use it much
The Obama campaign is the current gold standard of this approach – they controlled message but they allowed people a great deal of lattitude in the way they helped promote that message
- Scalability. MySpace is dead, lost its cool. Facebook is too mainstream to be cool for kids anymore and Twitter is very limited. The more people using something, the more chaotic and junky it becomes.
- Nothing is dying. Media is fragmenting. Big media is still big media but there is more of it, more of it is delivered over the Internet and more of it has a participatory component. A fragmenting media means we as communicators have to get in front of people through a range of media. But radio will be here for a long-time, so will TV and so will newspapers.
- Content will be king, again. Especially content that actually contains new and important facts. Conversation is fine but it’s better if it’s informed. We’ve seen an explosion in opinion outlets. Crikey, the punch, national times, ABC unleashed. I don’t think business is using these outlets effectively. But opinion is great and can be important and entertaining, what is harder to do and costs more is the generation of facts – business and non-government organisations are well-positioned to help feed this need. But we’re not doing much of it yet.
