Take for example, the Telstra Social Review program, a competition whereby Australians with a social media presences could ‘compete’ (in loose terms) for the chance to be one of 25 social reviewers.  The final 25 were each given a HTC handset and asked to review it for 2 weeks.

There is nothing new about this initiative in some respects – it is essentially a blogger relations program – but the public nature of the Telstra ‘experiment’ represents a very different approach.  Good blogger relations practitioners will insist on full disclosure but its rare for an organisation to PR this kind of program in the way that Telstra did.

As a result, Telstra has telegraphed its respect for blogging (as well as other forms of social media) and I believe that other Australian corporations will sit up and take notice.

I believe that ‘commercial confidence’ in blogging is a requirement for blogging if it is to acheive genuine mainstream acceptance.  This ‘commerial confidence’ could take many forms including advertising and sponsorship investment, collaboration, access, insights or simply advocacy.

The blogging community is challenged however by a fundamental lack of transparency.

Readership data underpins the traditional media sector, it provides the business justification for advertising spend and PR programs. In a section of the media where the glossy finish of the product (or lack of it ) bares little or no relationship to its reach and influence, its essential that proprietors become more open about their traffic and engagement scores.

Commercial (business) decisions are based on an assessment of risk over opportunity.  The blogging community in Australia needs to help its potential partners understand the opportunity.

That might sound like a scary proposition for a young blog with low traffic scores today.  But remember this.  At some point, consumption of print media will be a small proportion of what is consumed online.  Transparency can help you build trusted relationships with potential commerical supporters today, for the future.

What do you think?  Do you agree?  If not, why not?

Is it wrong to assume that all blogs have a commercial imperative?

Should bloggers be open and transparent about their number of readers, time spent, uniques?

If so, what data should they share?

• Facebook has 250 million active users to Twitter’s 19 million (eMarketer research via Mashable)
• A large number of users quite within the first month (Nielsen)
• Twitter has no revenue stream

So, is Twitter the new attention dashboard? I have my doubts. I think that’s a very limited view of the conversations that are occurring online.

Will the real-time Web be a major influence on communication in the future? Absolutely.

The focus on the newness of things, the tool and its features and the immediacy of information (Twitter beat CNN to the Tiger Woods story this week by 45 mins) is compelling – but only to a point.  Beyond that point, Twitter discussions tend to become rather sycophantic, repetitive, tactical and/or theoretical.

This stuff is important though; The immediacy of micro-blogs like Twitter influences the way that we value information and perceive it.  It speeds up the news cycle and makes information even more of a commodity.

In a presentation at the recent Media140 event in Sydney Barry Saunders spoke about the danger of not considering context when we use the real-time Web as a primary source of information.  This is among the most insightul and interesting things that I’ve heard said about this space.  Its a very valid point, which is – along with others -  being overlooked in a plethora of hype fuelled conversations about Twitter.  Mr. Saunders make some additional points on related topics here.

The Twitter purists consider Twitter to be a conversational tool but many organisations are, in my experience, approaching it is a broadcast medium, as research that we are releasing tomorrow will show.

I will leave you with this analysis from BlogPulse, which shows comparative mentions of ‘Twitter’, ‘Unemployment’ and ‘Iraq’ in all forms of consumer generated media over the past six months:

]]> http://justanother24hours.com/blogging/just-home-much-air-time-does-twitter-actually-deserve/feed/ 0 http://justanother24hours.com/blogging/just-another-24-hours-is-re-re-launched-again/ http://justanother24hours.com/blogging/just-another-24-hours-is-re-re-launched-again/#comments Fri, 18 Sep 2009 08:35:46 +0000 Daniel Young http://justanother24hours.com/?p=881 Welcome to the new look justanother24hours.com.

The theme is a modified Depo Skinny and the work was completed by Sweans Technologies who I commissioned via elance.

Still no advertising on the site (I wonder if that increases or decreases the credibility. I suspect that its detrimental).

I am going to be ramping up my blogging activities, more focus, some new regular features, more keywords and more plugins.

I am also going to change the header – I’ve had feedback that the image is ‘too cheesy’. It was taken at an ill-fated party a few years back. It’s just a placeholder for the time being.

Let me know what you think of the new look and feel.

]]> http://justanother24hours.com/blogging/just-another-24-hours-is-re-re-launched-again/feed/ 0 http://justanother24hours.com/politics/critical-mass-use-of-social-media-to-mobilise-cyclists-in-cities-around-the-world/ http://justanother24hours.com/politics/critical-mass-use-of-social-media-to-mobilise-cyclists-in-cities-around-the-world/#comments Sat, 02 May 2009 02:11:39 +0000 Daniel Young http://justanother24hours.com/?p=578 The use of social media by corporates is an interesting area and one that I intend to blog on in the future but I am also interested in the use of social media to mobilise individuals and create communities of action around particular topics and campaigns with a focus on changing stuff.

My new bike

A friend who recently returned from a holiday in California was talking about the Critical Mass meeting that he saw in San Francisco.  The Critical Mass movement uses blogs, forums and wikis to mobilise bicycle riders in cities around the world to stake their claim for road rights.  Critical Mass have varying levels of respect for the law – my understanding is that the San Francisco Critical Mass ride is quite confrontational to the point of disrupting traffic and closing roads.

The following information is taken from the Worldwide Critical Mass Hub:

The name “Critical Mass” is taken from Ted White’s 1992 documentary film about bicycling, “Return of the Scorcher“. In the film, George Bliss describes a typical scene in China, where cyclists often cannot cross intersections because there is automobile cross-trafic and no traffic lights. Slowly, more and more cyclists amass waiting to cross the road, and when there is a sufficient number of them — a critical mass, as Bliss called it — they are able to all move together with the force of their numbers to make cross traffic yield while they cross the road.

The origins of the Critical Mass movement:

The first Critical Mass ride was in September 1992 in San Francisco. There were 48 people. The ride increased in size by about 75% each month so that by the time 1993 came about, Critical Mass had almost 500 riders and was becoming well known among bicyclers in the city–although city officials still hadn’t registered its existence. A couple months after that people in other cities started noticing and began other Masses. Also in 1993, San Francisco police and Mayor Frank Jordan noticed us and struggled with how to deal with us. It took until June 1997, when Critical Mass was almost 5 years old, for the “new” mayor Willie Brown to make any special note of us: He proved he had no idea what we were about when he made comments that motivated the big July 1997 ride and police riot.

Here is the home page for the Sydney Critical Mass Group, which meets at 5:30pm on the last Friday of each month in Hyde Park.

Links have been added for the benefit of this posting.

CEO as Chief Communicator

Current economic challenges have lead to intense scrutiny of executive decision making, corporate culture, compensation, risk management and due diligence in business. 

This close examination by Government and the media of corporate largesse has highlighted a vast chasm between senior executives and the general workforce leading to unprecedented levels of mistrust towards the business sector.  It has highlighted the urgent need for cultural change within the corporate sector in the developed world. 

 A January 2009 survey by a rival PR firm – Edelman – found that 38 percent of American respondents between the ages of 35 and 64 said they trust business.  This is the lowest rating in the survey’s 10-year history.  The corporate sector must act quickly and decisively to address deteriorating levels of trust between itself and the pool from which it must draw its customers and employees.

The question is: whose responsibility is it?

The buck must surely stop with the CEO.  Research conducted by Burson-Marsteller in 2005 found that perceptions of the CEO represent 65 percent of a corporate reputation. 

The role of the company CEO is to set the company vision, values and direction.  They then must develop the plan of actions.  The critical step lies in the effective communication of the strategy, and the consistent demonstration and reinforcement of the stated values. 

The rise of digital media has had a major impact on corporate communications since 2005.  It has provided the opportunity for corporations to establish an ‘authentic voice’.  This singular, human voice enables corporations to engage in meaningful two way conversation with individuals in the media, customer base, bloggersphere and so on. 

Interestingly, that authentic voice is rarely if ever the voice of the CEO.  A 2008 research project by Burson-Marsteller found that just 18% of CEOs have used social media to communicate with stakeholder groups.

There are exceptions, most notably in the technology sector, but typically the engineer, product strategist, technician or designer is perceived as the authentic voice. 

CEOs are overlooked for a wide variety of reasons; they don’t have time; they are not close enough to the detail; they are generalists; they don’t see the value in mass-communication; they are constrained by corporate disclosure guidelines.

This must change.

Businesses find themselves less trusted than ever before.  This fact is a critical business issue and will be a major inhibitor for many companies in the years to come, more pressing in some industries than others.  One time, one directional communications will not re-build trust.  Businesses need to engage in a continuous dialogue. 

The good news is that CEOs today have a wide variety of communications tools at their disposal and these tools will be second nature to the next generation of CEOs.  These individuals assisted by corporate communications experts will recognise the need to  communicate their vision and values for the company as well as encouraging and facilitating transparency across all operations.  

There will continue to be a place for the ‘at the coal face’ bloggers within organisations – those individuals that discuss their daily challenges, share insights and generate ideas with likeminded people.  In doing so, they generate goodwill, enhance reputations and engage various audience groups.

The organisations that recognise the need to re-instate and re-equip the CEO as the Chief Communicator will be the first to begin the process of re-building trust.  Those businesses that deploy a strategy and the tools that enable continuous CEO communications will invigorate their reputation and establish refreshed relationships based on trust.

Comscore now rates Twitter as the third most popular social network after Facebook and MySpace. It should be in its own (microblogging) category but whatever.

I came across this great Twitter tool today – monitter. Monitter allows you to view activity on Twitter in real time, which can be quite amazing to watch. Social media skeptics should take a look at this. Its kind of exciting to watch people express their personal view on a topic be it Greys Anatomy, HP or the weather.

There are a lot of tools out there and this post provides a rundown on eight of them.  Welcome to the world of analytwits.

If you don’t know what Twitter is by now then I’d argue you don’t need to know.

The only people that will get value out of Twitter today are people that use the Internet as a core part of their professional or personal lives (or some combination of the two). Rubel refers to the lack of organisation and this is going to be a major turn off to your average users who is happy with the way Facebook and other networks serve everything on a plate in a personalised fashion.

Twitter will need to evolve considerably to appeal to a mass-user audience. I remember reading about a lot of very switched on social media experts who questioned the value of Twitter when it first came on the scene.

Twitter has hit the mainstream media as the latest social media phenomenon but it’s not new – its been around since 2006. It’s being positioned by the mainstream media as the latest hot thing on the Web and there has been much discussion around its lifespan, future, viability, business model. The geek chic Twitterati feel discovered and are looking for their next big thing as the general population flocks to Twitter to check it out. Nielsen has reported a 1,000+ percent growth rate.

I spend loads of time online

Twitter started to become uncool when Britney and a raft of celebs signed up but surely the fact that it has taken three years to ‘go mainstream’ provides some indication of its relevance to the general population.

I’d say that talk of Twitter’s demise is premature – not withstanding the questions around its business model, which is surely the real issue here.  I’d bet that the vast majority of new Twitter registrations that come as a result of this publicity fade and die very quickly – having zero impact on the activity that’s going on right now and minimal impact on the protective community of active Twitter users today.

Forrester’s Technographics research found that only 13% of (US) online consumers are Creators.

It takes a lot of time to identify and build your community on Twitter. It works for:

• The digerati – the population that spends a lot of time online
• Thought leaders and those that have something interesting to say
• Individuals promoting their own commercial interest or reputation
• People who want to promote their own content
• People who want to receive randomised news items from ‘authorities’ and experts in their field
• Chat in real-time at real-life events #hashtags
• Those that are generally interested in social media and how it works

You have to invest a fair amount of time in Twitter to generate returns, simply by virtue of the fact that messages don’t hang around for long – apart from anything else. As Rubel points out, it is disorganised and this will be the networks biggest challenge if it wants to retain the mainstream user.

My sense is that large swathes of the general population will quickly migrate back to the familiarity of Facebook and other multi-function social networks. The press coverage will undoubtedly drive a ton of people toward Twitter but I doubt that many will become very active.

The general population would be better advised going to Yahoo Answers! or a specialised social network if they want to tap the opinions of a mixed collection of people on an ad-hoc basis.

The attention paid to Twitter will be a positive thing for the service in the long run – it will also increase its attractiveness of potential acquirers. If Twitter can couple the increased user population with a workable business model then Twitter will remain relevant for a long time to come.

Does the mainstream’s media sudden obsession with Twitter reflect the growing importance of social media OR does it reflect the fact that social media is maturing and there are fewer new things to get excited about? What do you think?

Forrester re-visited the topic of March 6 as it has generated a lot of feedback. Google have said that sponsored content should not appear in organic search results, which make sense. This is a impossible thing for Google to police – Forrester has recommended that sponsored content should have the tag ‘no follow’, which will prevent search engines picking it up. I wonder if clients will invest in sponsored content knowing that it will not be searchable.

Forrester breaks sponspored content down into two streams:

1. Editorial Stream: allowing paid for guest writers, thank you posts, disclosed sponsorships

2. Out of the Editorial Stream: banner ads, sponsorships, text links

The danger with sponsored content is that it may marginalise or compromise the blogosphere – the value of which is based on the fact that each blog represents an authentic and independent voice.

However, the simple issue of long-term viability and economics provides the need for bloggers to seek a return – some form of compensation – for what is a very time consuming task. The purests will argue that the commercialisation of blogs denegrates this form of consumer media. The counter argument is that commercialisation will enable blogs to survive and grow for the long term.

In time, perhaps high profile bloggers will be to the leverage the fact that they don’t accept any form of sponsorship as a source of ‘competitive advantage’.

I have seen a few examples of bloggers that make it very clear that they accept sponsorship and transparency is the absolute key here on both sides (blogger and sponsor) – as it is in the print media (where advertorial or sponsored feature clearly inform the reader that this is paid for editorial).