There is considerable talk among social media "experts" on how companies, particularly PR and marketing companies, are failing to utilise social media wisely - often getting it so wrong that they end up pissing people off. I think that we are currently seeing a change in how to communicate online which is both an evolution and a return to pre-internet values.

The first wave

The proliferation of online communication tools such as email marketing and electronic press releases created a new, more structured way for PR and marketing to be handled. The process of distributing and, to a large extent, measuring the effectiveness of releases was soon a mostly automated process. You write the copy, select a distribution list, hit send and then run reports to see how many people received the information - job done.

The big downfall in this process is that the measurement stops at the number of people who read the email or visited the landing page on the website, there is very little examination of the number of people who read the information and dismissed it without further thought, or those who were annoyed at receiving information that was useless to them and harming their perception of the company being "supposedly" promoted.

The next wave

Social media has given everybody a chance to have a public voice, and they are increasingly happy to use that voice when they feel as though they have been mistreated in some way. In order to really get the most out of social media, companies need to return to the old-fashioned system of talking to people and getting to know them.

If I get a simple email saying:

Hi Dave,
I noticed you were discussing product x on facebook the other day, thought you might be interested in this: [link to product website]
Jon Doe, community marketing manager, Y Corporation

It's going to be WAY more effective than sending me an impersonal, flashy, hype-filled email.

Stop shouting and start talking

Identifying key influencers and engaging them on a personal basis is the basis of effective social media marketing and PR. Talk to a handful of bloggers for instance - and by talk I mean build a relationship, not just email them and ask them to blog about your company or product. If they like you then they will write about you. The people reading their blogs will trust their opinion far higher than the contents of a press release and they may also blog about you. This "network effect" not only has the potential to create much greater awareness than an email campaign but the duration of the effectiveness is prolonged. Blog posts and other social media entries (microblogs, bookmarks, shared clips etc) hang around on the web indefinitely, long after emails (which are only visible to the recipients) have been archived or deleted.

Why is it so hard?

The reason companies are finding it hard to move with these changes are that in many cases, the corporate culture has become stuck in the inflexible processes of the "first-wave" of electronic PR and marketing. I see a few organisations finding people who understand the new models (and people who say that they do but obviously don't), but these people are still in the minority and have a difficult job ahead of them in bringing about the required changes. I wish those brave pioneers the very best of luck.

Labels: Opinion

Today I was trying to find out which of PayPal's services was the most suitable for a client's project. After go through the questions on their recommendation wizard I was still unsure based on some of the specific requirements for the project. Luckily beneath the resulting recommendation is the following text:

Have questions or need a different solution?
Contact a PayPal specialist

"Excellent", I thought, "just what I need". However after dutifully filling out the contact form I was unable to submit due the the validation insisting that I had not entered a question (see picture). Knowing the difficulties in building for multiple platforms, I tried the form again in a different browser - same result.

Does this failure mean that nobody has ever contacted a PayPal specialist? Are PayPal ignorant of this error and believe that the recommendation wizard is so good, that nobody needs any further information?

The Lesson

Test, Test, Test, especially if your online presence is responsible for generating sales or revenue.

Labels: Web

I wouldn't normally comment on politics but today I was prompted into posting a rant which I've had brewing for a while.

Whilst catching up on my blog subscriptions, I read Cory Doctorow's post concerning this podcast interview with Sir Bonar Neville-Kingdom, I'm certain that this is satire but the fact that I had to do some checking and many other people are taking it seriously highlights two important points:

1. - As a satire, it's extremely well done.
2. - The fact that there is uncertainty demonstrates the low regard with which government IT initiatives are held.

We live in a communication-rich world these days, and ideas spread faster than could ever be imagined a few years ago. Mainstream media has lost control over the up-coming generation and it wont be too long before the newspaper-reading influencers in society have retired and made way for the RSS connected who can put across a point of view to thousands of people before a newspaper journalist has fired up his wordprocessor. And yet the speed at which politicians react to the world around them makes the Sunday newspapers seem speedy by comparison.

Whilst the blogosphere can light up in a matter of hours over subjects which people are passionate about, Politicians seem to spend a majority of their time finding ways to score points by criticising their opposition, a game which frankly, generates little interest (and more commonly exasperation and derision) from anybody outside Westminster.

The civil service in general seems to be desperately fighting any sort of change, my experiences of working for public sector departments has always been somewhat frustrating. Whole departments staffed according to equal opportunities quotas with everybody hoping that someone else in the department understands what should be done. Combine that with a morbid fear of making any sort of decision in case it turns out to be the wrong one and you should get the gist.

If  the government wants somebody to advise on technology, they need someone who is utterly immersed in the stuff, and as such he would most likely have a large network of tech-savvy contacts making his job easier - for free. Maybe Chris Pirillo could be tempted into the job or maybe Jason Bradbury would be a good choice. Either way, it would be better than having a senior civil servant delegating email duty to an assistant whilst going off to play at politics with his chums in the ivory towers of Whitehall.

Labels: Opinion