Social Media and Public Relations

These are interesting times, as the economy buckles and sways under the onslaught of rising debt and falling sales, the new economy, espoused by Wired magazine back at the turn of the century suddenly seems relevant again. As traditional companies fall by the wayside, a new breed of Digital Media Agency is poised to leapfrog the traditional PR practice and take the art of promotions into the 21st Century.

For traditional PR companies, the art of publicising a brand, be it a drink, a musician or a charity, is well established. Essentially, market research gives a picture of the current awareness of the brand and of the temperature of public opinion. This is compared to the desired state for the brand and a strategy is created that moves public opinion from the current position to the would-be position. At least, that’s the theory.

Most campaigns have a certain amount in common. Traditional media such as Print, Radio and Television are used to host advertising campaigns whilst promotional slots are arranged with ‘influencers’ appropriate to the desired brand. So an interview set up with Jonathan Ross for example on prime time BBC National Television will have a massive influence on the intended audience and will reinforce the effect of a straightforward advertising campaign.

Nowadays however things are changing. It’s hard to get a slot on the Jonathan Ross show and there are only a limited number of slots available in a season. Didn’t somebody say Facebook had over 300 million users? Hang on a minute! Jonathan Ross averages only 3.5 million…. and so logic being what it is, a new industry is born.

Given those figures, a digital media campaign ought to be able to deliver unprecedented conversion rates – shouldn’t it? Well a measure of caution may be appropriate – advocacy is often blinded by a fatal mixture of naivety and hope. There are a number of very significant factors, reducing the potential of digital campaigns to much more realistic figures. For example the degree to which a large audience might identify with the brand. Is it global or niche? Is it possible to correctly identify the location of the target audience? We know that Facebook tends to attract young professionals, creatives, writers and artists, that MySpace attracts a younger audience that is interested in music and movies but within those broad demographics, how easy is it to get to the target audience?

Let’s examine a case.

The movie ‘End of the Line‘ is a documentary which puts forward the idea that if current fishing practices are allowed t ocontinue unchecked, we may as a species succeed in turning our oceans into a primordial sludge supporting only single cell organisms – within our lifetimes. Apart from the compelling nature of the subject matter, a few things make this film especially interesting.

The film has now run for four weeks in the West End of London and has been picked up by cinemas around the country, with bookings until the end of September. The cause has been taken up by mainstream mass media - the Sun, Hello and Heat magazine,  as well as regional and local papers and the entire national press.

It has also engaged with the corporate world in ways no one can remember any other British film doing. The head of a major High Street presence, Pret a Manger, saw an early screening and changed his entire company’s policy on tuna.

Waitrose put backing into the making of the film and even Morrisons is now advertising some of its fish as line-caught.

The fact that the film has struck such a chord with the people and companies who have seen it has put the issues in the film on the political agenda, in ways they were not before.

This is remarkable stuff – and unprecedented for a documentary to cause this much of a ruckus. Here are some more facts.

1. Facebook profile - 4,596 fans
2. YouTube trailer – 41,566 views
3. Twitter page – 2,225 followers
4. Claim your Piece of Ocean Campaign

Notwithstanding the emotive content of the film and I’m quite sure it would have had a substantial impact in it’s own right. it has undoubtedly benefitted to some degree from a well orchestrated PR campaign based primarily on using Social Software to raise the profile of the film. How was this done?

The film was backed by a web site and merchandising, so far, so Web1.0, but where this movie moves away from the mainstream is in it’s espousal of Web2.0 sites such as Facebook, YouTube and Twitter and it’s innovative use of a web site hosted campaign that gives viewers a chance to make their presence felt. What is especially interesting is that Twitter was added almost as an afterthought – a fact which is reflected in the comparitively low number of followers.

It is possible to visualise a campaign, something like the figure here. Web1.0 technology, traditional media, funding etc all have a part to play.

The key to leveraging Web2.0 technology is in fostering a sense of community, and it is on Facebook and YouTube that viewers have the chance to make their opinions known.

It is this sense of involvement that encourages users to return and continue the conversation, and critically, to recommend the site to their friends. In this way, it is possible to encourage almost exponential growth for a message which has a universal meaning. It might be more difficult to stimulate the same degree of growth for a line of clothing or a CD, but the principle remains the same.

Twitter has a particular characteristic that gives it huge potential in this space, the character limit of 140 and the inclusion of a URL make it possible to attach a clickable link to an irresistable tag line. This is a very different notion to the idea of pirating the hash tag to insert a completely inappropriate advertisment into the trending topics. Retweets spread the link virally and the takeup, relying entirely on the suitability of the content to the task in hand could encourage users to self select – I’m reminded of a campaign that ran in the New Musical Express in the mid seventies, to promote the T. Rex album The Slider – the first few weeks a teaser campaign ran consisting of a small photograph printed on multiple pages – a rear view of Marc Bolan, unidentifiable except perhaps for the trademark curls. After a couple of pages, the photograph appeared with a caption, printed large across the photograph “Bolan’s Back”. The campaign scored a bullseye with the intended audience and the album was a substantial hit. In a sense, the same kind of opportunity is available with Twitter, a tag line, sufficiently intriuging to deliver the click through would serve to tickle the appetite of the target audience.  The beauty of Twitter is that the model dictates that anything resembling spam would die a death, Twitter depends on retweets to spread the message.

The key to success in harnessing the power of Web2.0 technology is to engage the audience with a strong message, and interesting content, to choreograph the interconnectivity of multiple forms of social media in a pattern that reinforces the message, keeps content fresh and encourages the audience to revisit and to pass the message on. Blogging, Web Sites with a high degree of interactivity, Facebook, Youtube and Flickr may all have a part to play.

Meh!

The recent inclusion of ‘meh’ in the Collins English Dictionary and the elevation of “wiki” to the Oxford English dictionary have provoked some hilarious postings on The Register. The subject of net neoligisms is one which by turn vexes and fascinates.

History tells us that the evolution of a spoken or written language is accelerated by slang, by the absorption of ‘foreign’ words into the current idiom. Over time, some of these words stick, others fall by the wayside. The continuous process keeps language alive and vital. Attempts to record a language, definitively, are by their very nature doomed to failure because existing words pick up new meanings, and new words emerge to provide more distinct or precise meaning.

The evolution of the English language can be traced to several significant stages. The spoken language in England  was originally several dialects of Celtic origin. In the 5th Century, the Angles, the Saxons and the Jutes invaded from Denmark and northern germany, in the process pushing the native inhabitants and their languages, north to Scotland and west to Wales and Ireland. Gaelic, one variety of a Celtic language is found in Scotland and Ireland, Welsh, another variety is still spoken in Wales.

During the 600 odd years leading up to the Norman invasion of 1066, the languages imported by the germanic tribes coalesced into what we now call Old English – about half of the words in current parlance have their roots in Old English. The Normans brought French to the island and with it, a rigid class system. The upper classes and business classes spoke French, the peasantry Old English. Over a period of some 400 years, middle English, the language of Chaucer emerged – broadly, Old English with added French!

The 16th century brought the Renaissance and with it, travel – this had a profound effect on the language, new words were imported by traders and other travellers and the invention of the printing press accelerated the standardisation of what became Early Modern English.

Late Modern English has persisted from appproximately 1600 to the present day, spurred on by the Industrial Revolution creating a need for new words to describe new technologies and the British Empire adopting words from the colonies. Varieties of late modern english have evolved and cross pollinated through the power of media, so American English with its strong Spanish and French influences has brought words such as vigilante into the common language via the movies.

Which brings us to the vexing question of ‘meh’. If there were a Darwinian theory of language it would say that the words that are fit for purpose, that bring more precision, that are required would be the ones to survive. There is a very strong argument that, that has usually been the case. This is why slang has such a strong influence on language. Slang evolves, to meet circumstances which are geographical, cultural and societal at specific points in time. An example of this would be the changing usage of the word ‘swinging’.

Originally ‘swinging’ referred to the sideways oscillation of an object, suspended from a fixed point. In the fifties, it acquired a new meaning, related to jazz, swinging morphed into a description of rhythm – still vaguely related to oscillation. In the sixties it was used to describe a different form of music – beat, and ‘Swinging’ became an interjection of approval. A pop group ‘The Swinging Blue Jeans’ capitalised on this meaning as a means of buying instant credibility with the public. The seventies, brought with it a darker meaning, completely separated now from its roots, swinging referred to the appalling practice of wife swapping for sexual adventure that is reputed to have infested suburbia during those straitened times.

Two things are significant – the greatly reduced time span – 30 years in this case and the completely different meaning attached to the word by the end of the tie span – it is the speed of change that has increased dramatically.

‘Meh’ is a word that has not evolved so much as occured. Hijacked from the Simpsons, it has held its original meaning, and been gleefully adopted by the Nathan Barley generation as an all purpose utterance signifying boredom, ennui. Like many neoligisms spawned by the net, it serves no uniquely useful purpose and does not substantially clarify nor make more precise the articulation of that feeling it purports to describe.

Not all net neoligisms are so useless – meme, cyberspace, unfriend are all useful words which better describe something – they bring value to the language in a way which ‘meh’ conspicuously fails to emulate. ‘Meh’ is a word which is so strongly reminiscent of the utterance of a sheep that its continued usage by otherwise intelligent people mystifies me totally. I wonder about decadence at times – the adoption of useless and ultimately destructive practices. In the increasingly self referential world of new media, I see useful technologies whose advocates, in their frenetic adoption of every passing fad, are ultimately failing to communicate – the very issue these technologies are supposed to solve.

Comments in Late Modern English please!

// Credit for much of the thinking behind this post should be given to Jacqui Rowe, Mel Curtiss, Elle Gee, and Brenda McWalters whose spirited rejoinders to my flippant post on Facebook made me think!

Influence & Authority in a Web 2.0 World

When we talk about influence and authority in the Web, it means ‘the quality of being a trusted source’ or more simply, ‘credibility’. In real life we tend to treat as authoritative, people whose position or profession suggest a degree of knowledge greater than or equal to our own. A questioning mind continually tests this authority and once lost, it is difficult to regain.

My thoughts on this topic have been meandering slowly towards some kind of conclusion, but last week two things happened to accelerate the process.

1) The publication of a report by Universal McCann entitled ‘When Did We Start Trusting Strangers‘

2) A thought provoking post by Shefaly Yogendra on the subject of ‘authority’ on the web

I quote liberally from these sources in this post – because they put it so much better!

On the internet, we have to use a different mechanism to decide what sources of information are trustworthy – everyone is, or could be an authority. Shefaly describes the process of gaining authority thus:

“‘Authority’ on the web is difficult to establish – and even more difficult to maintain – for several reasons.

One needs to be consistently authoritative in one’s views; this suggests that it is, über alles, a game of ‘content‘ or ‘substance‘.

One needs not just to be substantive but regularly substantive; one needs to be not a passive observer and a reporter, but a participant-observer who is not afraid to share knowledge, raise questions, initiate and promote debate, and do all of this gracefully. One’s opinions need to demonstrate one’s ability to ask questions, make connections, dig data and substantiate one’s points of view.”

So from the consumer’s perspective, a very reasonable reversal of the real life process is taking place – the suggestion is that we don’t necessarily trust a source of information (Joe’s Expert Blog) just because it exists, but we increase our level of trust as we realise that a consistent quality of information is being delivered.

Shefaly goes on to point out that ‘authority’ requires an audience and that it is the quality of interaction between consumer and provider that creates worthwhile measures of credibility. To me this represents as clean and incisive a definition of credibility as I could wish for. A further point is that the role of provider / consumer shifts – in other words, to become a credible provider of information, one should also prove to be an inquisitive and selective consumer. If only this were standard behaviour in real life!

Of course this whole subject of influence is of great interest to Advertisers – this is where the story gets really interesting. The Universal McCann report “When Did We Start Trusting Strangers?” crunches some numbers to offer some extraordinary statistics.

Based on a sample of 17,000 people, spanning 29 countries, the study describes a “new influencer landscape” which is characterized by three significant trends: the rise in social media, the importance of digital friends, and the proliferation of influencer channels.

The study also mentions the impact of this phenomenon: an influence economy, the democratization of influence, and the new“super influencer.” Some figures illustrate the study’s findings:

• 44% of people surveyed have a blog (compared to 28% in 2006)
• 57.5% have a page on a social network (compared to 27% in 2006)
• 42% download video clips (compared to 10% in 2006)
• 34% of users share their opinions about music
• 55% share their photos online

As I noted in my earlier posting ‘Are Friends Electric?‘, the arrival of social media has allowed millions of people to create content and publish their opinions online. Social interactions have become virtual and communication now takes place online and in writing.

We are able to “meet” people and maintain relationships that we may not have done in “real life” and we are able to keep in touch with old acquaintances much better than we could before the Internet era, when we relied on the telephone or even the written word, via letter, to bridge the distance gap.

Digital media facilitates interaction and enables influence to be established and to grow very quickly. Thanks to these new tools, it no longer requires huge efforts to become an influencer. The study found that:

“We trust the recommendations of strangers just as much as we trust those of our friends. We also trust information found in social media more than the information given to us by brands.”

According to McCann, we are finding ourselves in an influence economy. Brands are therefore forced to respond to numerous opinions published on the web, to become more transparent, and to open up to social media. Internet users have a penchant for music, films, and technology, but we also find the same phenomenon in a variety of other arenas like finance, housing, and insurance.

The democratization of influence: many individuals can become influencers, or even “super influencers.” Super influencers are very active in social media; they create and share rich content.

McCann recommends that brands should act according to four principles:

• Transparency and honesty with consumers, without becoming ‘hyper-transparent’
• Participate in conversations that generate discussion: create blogs, be present in social networks, etc.
• Consider every person as a potential influencer and encourage the target audience to share its opinions
• Approach new creators: bloggers, video creators, podcasters, etc.

The last one is the key measure of the importance the report attaches to the new information brokers – the report appears to be advising brands – ‘if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em’.

So, in the spirit of the McCann recommendations, here are a few questions to ponder..

1. Do you include blogs amongst your principle information sources?

2. Do you find information on blogs that you would not be able to find elsewhere?

My answer to both of these questions is emphatically ‘yes’.

And one for the conspiracy theorists -

3. Do you think that it is possible for advertisers to manipulate the market to the detriment of the consumer?

My answer to this is – consider the music industry. A CD or DVD is an artefact of very little intrinsic value, that generates a very large profit. The investment is in the creation of the content – in the case of pop music, that investment is pro-rata less than at any time since the early sixties when acts were manufactured for profit, at the behest of the labels…er hang on a minute.. Coincidence?