Strategic context is key: social media in the Optus future of business report.
May 7th, 2013
Matthew Cox
Optus recently released a Future of Business Report; the document is intended to give an overview of what aspects of digital will become more important to businesses over the coming years.
Social media is right up there in the list of priorities, both internally and externally, with 68% of organisations currently owning or building a social media strategy and 81% currently owning a digital marketing strategy.
50% of all businesses surveyed are looking at implementing or further growing their digital/ social offering in the next few years.
The major social media takeaway was enforced twice within the analysis document. It provided the following the following comment:
Writing a social media strategy in isolation is the biggest mistake you can make. Companies need to figure out how to use it in context, as another channel through which they can communicate, service, and engage with customers. … Our [Westpac] app gives clients the service they want. However, it has also enabled us to build our brand, and start customer conversations, leading ultimately to higher sales.”
-Carly Loder, Chief Marketing Officer, BT Financial Group
I’ll start off by saying that creating any kind of strategy in a vacuum is cheating yourself. Nor should social media be perceived as stand alone solution to marketing. But instead of looking at the issues, I want to examine the supercharged power a social strategy has within the canvas of context.
What happens when we combine a social media tactics with an organisations strategic goals or better yet, a communications strategy?
Well firstly, these strategies take significantly less time to write. A good strategic plan will provide a point of reference as to where the organisation wants to move and how they intend to get there. A communications strategy will take the next step and examine the role of communication in achieving these goals. We’ll also know exactly what the organisation’s key messages are and how they want to be perceived.
If your building a social media strategy on the foundations of one or more of these documents, you only need to look at the existing goals and look at how the tools available through social might be harnessed towards achieving them.
For example :
Strategic:
An organisation might want to invest a greater portion of time towards building up a particular product within their offering.
Communications:
To inform the target audience groups as to the selling points of this product through promotional content that resonates with them.
Social Media Tactics:
- Direct inquiries towards social media
- Provide tailored responses to individual inquires
- Capture and analyse the most common inquires
- Use this information to develop high-quality content that manages these typical inquiries pre-emptively.
Better still, if the communications strategy provides a series of key messages, we will have n even better idea of how to dress up our content.
Whilst the above is a pretty general example, it illustrates the advantage of being able to join the strategic dots. Additionally, whilst every strategy is going to have different tactics that will work towards achieving their goals, knowing what these goals are, and what tactics already exist will allow you to incorporate a social media strategy that complement them.
Strategies work best when all of the pieces work together, and social media is simply one tool within a much broader palette of communications tools available to you: public relations, digital media, advertising, hardcopy promotional material. They are probably all going to have an element of overlap in terms of what they communicate (not to mention who within the organisations owns them), but It’s when these tools begin to work together, leveraging off one another that you unlock the real value of each.
If you have developed social media strategy on it’s own, it doesn’t quite represent critical failure. For many organisations, social may be one of the view promotional methods that can be afforded. But if you have other communications tactics that have been implemented, you owe it to yourself to connect your strategy to it, even if only slightly. As your arsenal of tools grow, more puzzle pieces can be slotted in, and around, adding to the strength of the bigger picture.
Happy trails
- Matt
Last week the city of Boston endured a horrific bombing during the Boston City Marathon. The attack has left three people dead and hundreds more injured. As usual, I’m not going to discuss my opinions of the event beyond that sentence; instead, I want to look at the discussions on social media.
Subsequently, the day after, my news feeds were populated with people, offering their sympathies, thoughts and prayers to those in Boston.
However at roughly midday, the tide brought in the first round of backlash from others. The popular opinion was that by offering tweets and statuses of sympathy to those impacted by the Boston bombings, people were turning a blind eye to similar incidents that occur in high conflict areas, such as the Middle East.
There are a number of things that really annoy me sometimes about brands (and people — my ‘friends’ on Facebook and people I follow on Twitter can be just as bad) on social media.
Here are a few of my most hated things — all of which have a place at times, but are so often misused it’s just not funny. I’ve chosen not to provide screencap examples of each given that I don’t want to single out a specific brand.
For some more hilarious examples, you can check out the Condescending Corporate Brand Page Facebook Page — it’s full of examples that are sometimes “meh, that’s almost acceptable” and other times “how did that get approval?!”.
Many Australians would be familiar with the recent viral exposure of a young man being subjected to police brutality at the Sydney Mardi Gras last weekend.
I will quickly preface what I’m about to write with the following: I found the video to be very difficult to watch. From what is visible, one police officer clearly crosses the line on the front of physical force, and the young man is visibly shaken as a result. I’m also open the notion that this may well also be a severe understatement. Additionally, at least two Police officers seem to be incredibly misinformed, or at the very worst, deliberately deceptive as to the rules surrounding privacy and filming in a public place.
It’s this notion, social media and it’s impact on the new world of open justice that I’m keen to explore.
We live in a world now where everyone has the power to click a button and publish. Mass media publications are rapidly going out of business because journalism has undervalued itself.
When I say undervalued, I’m talking about two key issues; The first is that Joe and Jane Citizen are now willing to fork out upwards fifteen dollars for a magazine filled with ads, whilst only paying two gold coins for a newspaper filled with informed journalism.
The other is that, with the constant pressure to churn out material in the hope of filling the void that the first issue left; informed, quality journalism has become an endangered species. So endangered in fact that most people don’t value it, or even recognise it when they see it. Quality journalism is simply overshadowed by the poor.
Enterprise Social Networking, Internal Facebooks and Significant Savings
January 14th, 2013
Matthew Cox
The report from the McKinsey Global Institute (July 2012) is an incredibly readable document that adds to the already heavy case for Social Media in business. However, it’s quick to lend a considerable amount of weight to the case for Social Media within internal communications, a facet that’s perhaps all-too readily dismissed.
“Two-thirds of the value creation opportunity afforded by social technologies lies in improving communications and collaboration within and across enterprises.” states the paper. These words may come as a shock to many who, as a knee-jerk response to the existence of Facebook have simply blocked the site entirely, removing ‘temptation ‘in an effort keeping productivity high. Social-media policies often consist entirely of the sentence “Employees are not permitted to use Facebook during work hours” and in doing so organizations seek to mitigate each and every risk with an all-out blanket ban. The advantages remained unexamined and untapped.
The stranger than fiction rise and fall of the Kony 2012 Viral Campaign was one of the most fascinating in media history.
The 30 minute video that first began its circulation in the early stages of March this year, now rests at a whopping 93 million views.
On the other hand, the 30 second video of its creator Jason Russell looking for the mind he lost- naked in the streets of LA, scrapes a comparatively minor 1.8 million.
Despite a few shades of grey, opinions towards the video and the campaign became quickly polarised. A huge number of people remained all aboard the Kony express, and rode that train into the sunset of April 20th, when the supporters were encouraged to go out after dark and clad their respective cities in Kony promotional material. Others, arguably the majority, became cynical. They questioned Invisible Children’s financial workings, and indeed, it’s leadership. Urging people to take a closer peek at the organisation that they have chosen to support.
If you wish to find more information on these perspectives, enlightenment is, as always, a Google search away.
I want to do something slightly different and take a deeper look at KONY 2012, not at Invisible Children and not at Jason Russell but rather at us, the people who have consumed it. I want to look at what the video appealed to within us.
Almost every campaign that’s gone viral in the past has centered on the driving force of humour. People see something that they find funny and pass it on. Those that receive it enjoy it and give social kudos to those that sent it. The process continues and the video spreads like wildfire. Social kudos is the driving factor behind virality. But Kony has appealed to a force far stronger than humour.
Being socially conscious gets you some social kudos. Just ask Patrick Bateman.
Being perceived by others as a good person is a pretty darn stylish thing, and we would all like to be perceived as having a social conscience. Kony 2012 has given us the cheapest way to achieve that feeling, circulate the video. Get likes; achieve the image of a socially minded individual. Granted, it sounds spiteful but it’s not intended as such.
It also feels good to help people, this is why we drop fifty cents into the guitar case of the busker, it’s why we volunteer to give blood and it’s why we buy the Big Issue (journalistic value aside). For many people, the good feeling one received by sharing the video was a strong motivator. This shouldn’t be shunned for its superficiality. Regardless of whether or not one wishes to appear socially minded, feel good for their actions or both as long as these motivators prompt legitimately socially conscious action, then it can be argued they are each still positive motivators.
But I do not believe that it was either of these components, these motivators within the Kony 2012 campaign that became the driving factor of its virality.
I believe it’s the grander idea of being a part of something, throwing in your lot to a quest that’s romantic and uplifting- that sense of purpose. Kony 2012 appeals directly to the stories that we were told as children of good ultimately overcoming evil. Not the morality of it, but the dream of wanting to be a part of the band of heroic knights that slay the dragon. We all want to be heroes.
To quote Hunter Thompson
“A fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning…”
The Kony video is successful for exactly the same reason that this scene from Lord Of The Rings is amazing. It fills us with contempt, then inspires us.
Feel the despair at the screams and hopelessness of the Gondor civilians!
Feel the anger as you see them desperately struggle against the evil oppressors!
Feel disgust as their evil leader- the witch king- does his evil thing!
The feel the hope as the third party forces of good arrive!
Feel the excitement as the heroic king Theoden calls his men to arms!
Feel the surge of power as they charge down hillside to glory, saving the Ugandan childre- I mean Gondor civilians!
Kony 2012 invites us to join the Riders of Rohan, It paints a polarized picture of good versus evil and quite literally calls us to arms. For those with limited understanding of how messaging is constructed within the media, this is an incredibly potent idea.
It’s terrifying to think that this emotion is so universally powerful within us. Not to mention so easily tapped. That so many people can be prompted to simply switch off that higher judgement and become carried away by a beautiful energy. Of course- channel this for good and it’s fantastic. But it’s also just as terrifying to think how easily that emotion could be manipulated and harnessed to achieve anything. Sending our military to occupy another country for instance. But hey our democratically elected officials would never dream of something like that.
So where are those WMD’s again?
Unmasking of ‘the biggest troll on the web’ reveals no one is truly anonymous
October 16th, 2012
Briony Walker
An online debate has erupted over the last few days about online privacy, in the light of the outing of ‘the biggest troll on the web’.
On Friday, online news organisation Gawker published the real name, location and photograph of all-round creepy bad guy Violentacrez.
Violentacrez (pronounced Violent Acres) is notorious in online forum Reddit for posting and moderating thousands of morally ambiguous and offensive images, including but not limited to, photos of dead children, sexualised images of children and teens, bestiality, racist memes and images that glorify violence against women. Read more
Like a phoenix from the ashes, Myspace is set to rise again… Maybe.
The platform has previewed the visuals for what will essentially be a complete website overhaul in an effort to bring the people back.
It’s not too surprising. When Justin Timberlake purchased the crumbling platform in June 2011, everyone suspected a revamp. The question is, will the audience actually bite?
The site looks to be remaining true to what became its accidental major selling point; giving music artists a place to build their own profiles and share their sounds. The new visual optimisation seeks to build on this, allowing people to share playlists and show people what they have been listening to.
Artists can also promote other artists and even their fans, a feature that is essentially the “top friends” component from the Myspace of old.
The artists were the last one off the boat when the Myspace titanic begun it’s steady descent into the waters of irrelevance years ago. Now that music and musicians have become MySpace’s key selling point, it’s going to need those same artists to return if it is to draw in the masses once again.
User experience is difficult to gauge at this point, although one can only hope it will be improved. Harrowing recollections of loading a Myspace profile, only to have the not-so-sultry sounds of a pop song involuntarily blare through your speaker system, still linger.
It could take off. There is certainly scope to develop something unique for music. Additionally, now that Myspace has firmly identified its target audience, it can take steps to cater to their specific needs. How well it manages to do this, and how effectively it can take steps to compete against platforms like Soundcloud and Spotify, will ultimately determine whether or not the renewed platform actually develops any traction.
Another thing to consider is that Myspace has undergone severe layoffs since the beginning of its decline back in 2009, slowly trimming the organisation’s 1600 person strong workforce to a group of around 200. The question then not only becomes will it get traction, but whether or not it can respond to that traction rapidly enough.
Whilst certainly the largest, it’s certainly not the first attempt Myspace has made at winning back the crowd, and every previous attempt has failed to prevent the snowballing decline in users.
This is a last ditch effort of a Platform that have been falling into obscurity for sometime now, that said, it is a very flashy effort. The preview video shows a platform that has a much better idea of what it wants to be (even if it does look a lot like Pinterest).
Will it pay off? Judgement will be reserved until the beta release.
Something we often get asked when talking about sharing online content is “what about copyright?”.
It’s a good question. And (disclaimer: I’m not a lawyer) my answer comes down to the idea of intent. What is your intent on using the image? Is it for directly commercial purposes? Are you suggesting that it is your own content, or providing a link to the source?
The internet, particularly social media, is built for sharing. Sharing content is the social basis for sites like Digg, Pinterest, Reddit and more. Users like to see content that isn’t just your own stock images, but also things that are interesting, funny, engaging, depressing or otherwise emotive.
So we generally advise organisations to provide a source where possible. I strongly believe that from the view of a user, the assumption is that the content you’re sharing (e.g. a funny meme) isn’t under the premise that you own the copyright: it’s just for the sake of sharing something funny/sad/…
But this isn’t always the case. Have a look at the ad that I saw on my Facebook page recently:
Director Hugh Stephens wrote an article in mUmbrella, the Australian media, marketing and entertainment online newspaper, about the use of Twitter in the final of The Voice.
Read the full article here on mUmbrella, or have a look at the infographic he made below.
