A wide ranging presentation on the use of social media which I've created for an audience of people working in broadcasting. Most examples taken from UK media use of social media, with emphasis on techniques and tools are simple, yet powerful, such as finding and reflecting audience opinions rather than building platforms that support this functionality. Towards the end, it gets to examples of deep engagement, where audiences co-create content.
3. • New Statesman New Media Awards 2008: • Forrester Groundswell Awards 2008: Finalists
Winners
• HEIST Awards for Education Marketing: Gold
• Prospect Magazine Think Tank of the Year
• Marketing Week Best Packaged Goods Web
Awards 2006: Best website
Site: Top 10 placement
• New Statesman New Media Awards 2006:
• Legal Business Best Legal Website: Top 20
Highly commended
placement
• International Information Industry Award 2005:
• Internet Marketing Attorney: Global Top 10
Innovation in Knowledge Management
placement
• New Media Age Effectiveness Awards 2004:
• Revolution New Media Marketing Awards:
Best Public Sector Website
Best use of new media for customer service
• International Information Industry Award 2003:
• IVCA Awards: Two Runner-up positions
Best intranet / extranet
• New Media Age Effectiveness Awards: Finalist
• CRM Industry Awards 2003: Innovation of the
Year • New Statesman New Media Awards: Finalist
• International Visual Communication • Central IT Unit, Cabinet Office: example of
Association Awards 2003: Commended best practice
[headshift awards]
4. disseminated through social
interaction, created using
highly accessible and
scalable publishing
techniques. Social media
uses Internet and web-
based technologies to
transform broadcast media
monologues (one to many)
into social media dialogues
(many to many). It supports
the democratization of
knowledge and information,
transforming people from
content consumers into
content producers."
Wikipedia [what is social media]
6. • conversational - not just
broadcasting, but listening too
• accessible - anyone can create or
consume social media
• disintermediation - social media can
slice through normal channels and
bureaucracy
• it's not just for Christmas...
[key aspects]
7. Social Media Formats
• discussion
• publishing
• content sharing
• networking
• rating, commenting and reviews
• micro-blogging
Some Context Specific Formats
• online gaming
• online education
• workplace collaboration
[formats]
37. http://www.facebook.com/westmidlandspolice
"had it not been for twitter and
facebook, we wouldn't have policed
that operation effectively... it's
core to our business" - Gordon Scoble
http://www.youtube.com/westmidlandspolice [not just the media]
I have over 10 years professional experience devising, implementing and managing audience focused social media propositions.
7+ years at the BBC; nearly two years at Headshift; + some time at ITV and a wireless start-up.
I was one of the first two online community specialists hired by the BBC and wrote, in consultation with people across the BBC, the social media management procedures, guidelines and training courses.
My last role at the BBC was as the Head of Blogging - a service that, when I left, around 7.5 million unique users per month and generating just under 20 million page impressions. Was also involved in a wide range of projects which I'll talk about here.
I'm also a Visiting Journalism Fellow at City University, London, where I teach over 200 journalists in training per year how to use social media in their work.
Headshift, which has an office in Sydney, has worked with a wide range of clients in different sectors. Our media clients include the BBC, Channel 4, Sky, Metro Newspapers France, Random House Publishing and many others.
We've won a whole bunch of awards...
So what exactly is social media? This definition from WikiPedia - itself a social media proposition - is one of the better one's out there.
This video, from Common Craft, will help explain social media as a short story...
Social media, then, is different than the broadcast model because it's conversational, accesible, disintermediates... but it's "not just for Christmas".
Social media is more than just a set of tools. Each tool has it's own techniques, and is driven by a different set of motivations. Here are the main, top level, formats of social media.
Forrester has created a "consumer technographics ladder". Essentially, this shows that a far smaller percentage of users is engaged in the creation of content than the consumption of it. So whilst social media is potentially two way, and highly accessible, most people still don't experience that.
Why is this important? Because you have to think about how to encourage participation, ranging from simple participation - surfacing usage data, which can be done without the users even knowing that, by viewing content, they're creating a navigational element for those who follow, to rating and tagging, which takes a bit more time and effort but is still easy for most users to engage in, to taking away and embedding content to share with friends or audiences, to deep participation, for example, getting involved directly in the co-creation of an editorial proposition.
Most successful examples of social media use by brands and media companies utilise simple participation to draw users further up the participatory ladder, deepening their engagement as they go.
Here's how social media participants in Australia stack up...
Here's another way of looking at participation, in terms both of the time that it takes people to participate, the barriers to entry, and the level of engagement...
But there is a lot of hype out there. Services come and go. Audience reactions to propositions changes over time. The key to success, then, is being able to move in an agile way as audience needs and expectations change.
Invest in getting the editorial proposition right. Only invest heavily in tools when you know that they'll have longevity or where your editorial proposition absolutely requires you to do so.
Simple participation. In the example on the left, a Headshift project for Metro Newspapers France, we allowed all audience members to participate by rating. On the right, the BBC surfaces usage data to create a navigational element for those who follow. This requires no active participation at all.
Commenting on a piece of content is a fairly standard use of social media in the broadcasting industry. But what does it achieve? I would argue that asking people to comment, then not bothering to read those comments or re-use them in your broadcast or print content, is wasteful, and with little benefit to anyone.
Tell story of submitting a birthday card for my kids to CBBC.
Increasingly, audiences expect transparency and demand explanations for editorial decisions. The BBC News Editors blog was created to serve that need. It's mostly one directional - like a broadcast - but audiences still enjoy it because they get a glimpse of the thinking behind the scenes.
The BBC Internet Blog does the same sort of thing, but integrates with Delicious, the social bookmarking tool, so in addition to reading what the BBC has to say, audiences can also view links to what the editors of this blog are reading - primarily comments and criticisms of the BBC's online services... using delicious like this means the editors are able to turn the process of finding and reading content into actual content.
That's one of the keys to successful use of social media by time poor broadcasters - mapping social tools onto existing processes.
Only ask people to take part in ways that are meaningful to you - from which you can extract value - but also keep an eye on motivations.
In this project, we got the meaningful to us and to audiences right... it's a repository for people to post natural remedies. What we didn't realise is that, when people visit the site, there isn't much incentive to create an entry in the repository. People don't visit to do that, they visit to find a cure then head off to the health food or natural remedies shop to make a purchase with their new found knowledge.
BBC News Have Your Say - gives audiences the opportunity to comment on the news stories and debates of the day - which they do, in droves.
There is a 15 person "user generated content hub" team at Television Centre. Doing some simple arithmatc, figure an average salary of £25k per year, x 15, and we're already talking about a service that costs nearly £400,000 per year to moderate comments and sift through images that have been submitted. Yet the BBC doesn't do anything with this content. It bares the cost - as well as editorial risks, infrastructure costs, and legal risks - but extracts little or no value.
Not for the faint hearted, Speak You're Branes extracts value from the same body of content - BBC News Online's Have Your Say discussions - but editorialises them into satire. Bitter, cutting, satire.
A Headshift project. A different person every hour, 24 hours a day, for 100 days...
Initially we intended to add commenting functionality to this propostion, but when we launched we realised that the moderation budget wouldn't last a week if we did. So, instead, we came up with the idea of finding, monitoring, and curating the best of what people said on twitter, and photographs they posted on flickr. This meant that rather than having a flood of content we had to do something with, we simply dipped in when it suited us and extracted the content with the highest value and displayed it to our audience - most members of which would have only read, rather than contributed, comments and content anyway.
We also involved the online audience in making the weekly highlights programme by adding a "Like This Bit" button, which was used by programme makers to quickly identify potentially interested sections of the video rather than having to trawl through it all, waiting for something to happen.
A Headshift project. A different person every hour, 24 hours a day, for 100 days...
Initially we intended to add commenting functionality to this propostion, but when we launched we realised that the moderation budget wouldn't last a week if we did. So, instead, we came up with the idea of finding, monitoring, and curating the best of what people said on twitter, and photographs they posted on flickr. This meant that rather than having a flood of content we had to do something with, we simply dipped in when it suited us and extracted the content with the highest value and displayed it to our audience - most members of which would have only read, rather than contributed, comments and content anyway.
We also involved the online audience in making the weekly highlights programme by adding a "Like This Bit" button, which was used by programme makers to quickly identify potentially interested sections of the video rather than having to trawl through it all, waiting for something to happen.
The Frontline Club has numerous audiences - they are a membership club, have a restaurant, run hundreds of events each year, and sell video from their archive of war coverage.
We knew that it's facinating members were it's core asset, so wanted to surface some of their knowledge and insight. All members were given the ability to create a profile and a blog, the blog being publicly visible on the site. But also we were realistic. Many members are still international journalists, so spend a good deal of their time travelling to the world's hot spots. Many also already use services such as dopplr, delicious, flickr and others. So we integrated streams from these external services into the members area, making it possible for them to push the content they were already producing to the frontline site. They don't have to even visit to have a presence.
These days, the competition doesn't entirely come from established media brands - you're also competing against niche publishers who can make a dime, or a full time living, finding, aggregating and commenting on content they find elsewhere.
These days, the competition doesn't entirely come from established media brands - you're also competing against niche publishers who can make a dime, or a full time living, finding, aggregating and commenting on content they find elsewhere.
My St. Albans Blog, which I primarily author on an iphone using a Wordpress application, is a perfect example...
Not only do I have an audience, but because I spread my content around, and embrace other local bloggers, I rank higher than the local newspaper in the google rankings.
Using the whole web as your canvas creates a range of new opportunities - it reaches out, with content of relevance to different audiences, to those audiences. It also makes best use of the tools available.
Pushing content out to multiple platforms is easier than you might think...
Plane in the Hudson river -  http://twitter.com/jkrums/status/1121915133
Audience content is potentially everywhere - but you have to understand that there motivation for sharing it isn't to become famous, it's because they want to tell their friends what they saw, or where they're at.
Flickr meetup
http://www.flickr.com/photos/chleong/2710778700/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/liliana_rodriguez/463790683/
It's not limited to photos - using qik, flixwagon, bambuser and several other services, a person with a 3g cameraphone can stream live to the web.
Twitter is a rapidly growing micro-blogging service - and it's the main place where I, nowadays, hear about breaking news.
You can also set up more sophisticated monitoring solutions for twitter and other social media services. Netvibes lets you do this - effectively, it's an RSS readers with a visual interface that most people can figure out.
Bombs in Jaipur - http://www.cybersoc.com/2008/05/twitter-proves.html
The BBC has been in the social media monitoring game for a while. First time was when I found first hand accounts of the Virginia Tech shootings. We got more sophisticated with time - Jaipur being an example of stuff we found using a Yahoo Pipe I made.
#iranelections on twitter - when mainstream media really woke up to the possibility of finding and reflecting audience content on third party services.
Robin Hamman interviewed by AlJazeera on Iran's online media - 15 Jun 09
It's not just the media making use of social media monitoring - law enforcement authorities are doing it too.
BBC Shownar - http://www.shownar.com
And new ways of telling stories are emerging - this, a CNN project - used sophisticated "photo stiching" software to enable audiences to zoom in and out, and change their perspective, using thousands of audience uploaded images.
When flooding hit the county of Berkshire, the BBC put together a mash-up showing disaster relief sites, containing BBC audio and video reports, as well as youtube avideo and flickr photos uploaded by individuals. The result was a website where people could see, on a map, exactly what was happening on the ground.
That's all interesting... simple participation, creating meaningful editorial and participatory frameworks, monitoring and reflecting, thinking about the whole web as your canvas. So what's next? Propositions where you co-create content, tapping into the skills, knowledge and experiences of a highly engaged audience...
The Daily Telegraph got the story, but with thousands of expense claims to go through after their successful freedom of information request, it was the Guardian - who crowdsourced the sifting using a simple, drupal back end, that extracted maximum coverage...
iPM on BBC Radio 4 - it's "a blog with a radio station wrapped around it" - Eddie Mair
Not a media example, but an interesting one on end to end involvement in innovation, testing ideas, planning, implementing and marketing...
Enabled by Design was created to give those living with a disability a place to discuss product design issues, and ideas, with each other. It's hoped that, in time, some of the ideas generated by the site can be given or sold to manufacturers, road-tested by the co
It might be that, in the future, audiences will help determine which stories we cover, which journalist will do it, and will actually pay for the content...