The last post?

There was an interesting article on Click this morning about online advertising targeted at kids. It mentioned some research in the Wall St Journal and I thought how interesting it would be to read around the subject and do a blog post about ‘cookies 4 kids’. Then I remembered. I’m almost time-expired:  I created this blog because it was a requirement for the social media module of my MSc at LeedsMet.

My blog about social media had to run from 1 November 2010 to the end of January 2011. I’m virtually at the end of the line for assessment purposes. So I thought I’d use this final post to offer a review of my learning journey. And now I’ve got used to blogging, I wanted to be brave for my final fling and do it as my first ever webcast ….. so I thought aboout what I wanted to say, recorded it all and then found out I’d have to pay $59.95 for a  video upgrade to upload the wmv file – or do it via Youtube.  I don’t think my musings merit posting on Youtube – it’s too mainstream! So I’ll post the snapshot and its essence instead:

Ready to webcast

When Clay Shirky wrote ‘Here Comes Everybody’, it wasn’t meant for me.  I’d have been included in a postscript  saying ‘wait for the laggards – they’ll be along eventually’.  Well – here I am!

When I first knew I’d have to write this blog, I thought … I can’t.  I don’t want to. I’m too old.  I don’t have a clue where to start. I want to live my real life not a virtual one. But three months on, I feel quite differently: you’re never too old. Technology makes it all easy. Social media tools and channels are extremely powerful and a great leveller. Everybody is out there – you can’t afford to work in marcomms and not be out there with them.

 Social media offer fantastic opportunities to connect to people with shared interests. I conducted an email interview with Andrew Gossen,  who runs Cornell’s alumni engagement programme.  I loved his ‘you’ve got to experiment’ attitude. Actually this is all new and to some extent we’re all learning together. Some things will work, others won’t. So we’ll try something else. That’s quite liberating.  

 I titled my blog after Professor Dunbar’s premise that the maximum number of connections we can maintain is 150. I don’t think I’ve got anywhere near that from my blog. But I’ve realised that sites such as LinkedIn can be of huge networking value. And I have made some new contacts through blogging.  I’m still not convinced about Twitter though – there are so many haystacks to search in for that one needle! I’ve tried short posts and long, reviews,polls – and nearly made it to a webcast! But most importantly, I’ve engaged with social media and started to think critically about the impact of social media on me and my professional practice. 

 I’m not sure now whether this is my final post – it’s the last one before I’m assessed on how I’ve done. But it’s certainly not the end of my social media learning journey – I’m enjoying it too much  … I think I just might be a convert!

 

Anti-social media!

I’m taking time out from social media to comment on the mass media today.

I’m not sure whether to feel sorry that Andy Coulson has resigned as Downing Street’s Director of Communications.  I guess we may never know the truth about his involvement in the News of the World’s phone-hacking scandal when he was editor there. I am though struck by the irony of the media causing the downfall of ‘one of its own’ .  

As a PR practitioner, I absolutely believe in the right of the free press,  and the role of the media in holding public bodies and figures to account.  But I’ve also found the media pack mentality and baying for blood distasteful.  

During my career, I have had to defend individuals from misplaced journalistic investigation that has been unpleasant, intrusive and utterly relentless.  In one case, the maligned individual was victim of a hate-campaign.  This was proven by the GMC, (as reported in The Independent at the time) but still the media campaign persisted.

Fortunately, the maligned surgeon had motivation and money enough to challenge the media through the courts. He won his case, costing Channel 4 and ITN over £1 million and forcing a high-profile apology from Channel Four News.  But in the end, of course, no-one really won. The process was long, costly and exhausting for all involved.  

If Andy Coulson was behind some of this murky low-grade journalism, then his resignation is long overdue. If he was ignorant of what was going on under his editorship, then his leadership was flawed.  Whatever the case, it is clear that the mass media still have the power to bring down those in high office. And, as Mr Cameron now knows all too well, the fallout is not confined to those in the wrong.

Happy birthday Wikipedia!

Cosmic networks are mind-blowing!

An astronomical presentation to a conference in Seattle seems an odd starting point for a blog post on social media.  I was, at first, slightly underwhelmed by the image of the whole of our night sky shown on BBC Breakfast this morning.  Apparently, it would require half a million digital TVs to display in detail, so we had to make do with the composite overview.

But I was soon blown away by the data it encapsulated which has:

• already been studied for ten years
• given rise to the discovery of around half a billion new stars and galaxies
• been collated from seven million individual images each comprising 125 million pixels.

These kind of numbers are like the neural connections in our brains … or the number of pointless tweets posted each day!

What I find really exciting though, is that new technology and social media have made the world of science accessible to ‘ordinary people’.  There is simply too much data in the composite image for the scientific community to unpick.  So, thanks to Open Source technology, the image is freely available to us all to view and interrogate – or just marvel at on YouTube. The academic community has opened the door to contributions from ‘citizen scientists’  who can discover new stars and galaxies through a virtual study of the night sky. The media world has already opened up to citizen journalists and now science is following suit.  

I started my ‘social media learning journey’ with some scepticism last November, but the further I go, the more  of a convert I become.  We all say we suffer from data overload yet it opens amazing new worlds – or even galaxies – for us!

Social media for social good

Image courtesy of http://www.freedigitalphotos.net

We’ve heard so much via the traditional media about the evils of social media:

• wikileaks threatening our national security
•  Twitter being subpoenaed by the US government for its role in the wikileaks debacle
•  Facebook being a data free-for-all in spite of its privacy settings
•  employees whiling away their employers’ time keeping up with their friends online
• the potential for libel and defamation of character … in a high-profile case which will give further ammunition to the detractors of social media, Courtney Love is to stand trial next month for posting defamatory comments about a fashion designer on Twitter.  (See: Courtney Love’s Twitter case) 

Perhaps for the news media, this is just business as usual – demonstrating the old journalistic adage about man bites dog!  But social media can be a force for good too.  Last year, Facebook co-founder, Chris Hughes,  launched Jumo in a philanthropic  bid to link individuals with causes that interest them.

Two of Mashable’s social media awards for 2010 were around social media for social good.

The ‘most creative  social good campaign’  was won by Twitchange,  which offers fans a chance to bid for celebrity mentions and retweets. It has 175 celebrities signed up and claims to have produced over 30 million hits in 30 days last autumn.  

The  ‘most influential social good champion’ was won by actor John Cena, who has been working with the Make-A-Wish Foundation (for children with life-threatening illnesses) since 2004. One of his recent initiatives has involved encouraging people to donate Delta air miles – which he’s already matched with 3 million miles of his own.

I can’t claim to have monitored all the traditional media, but I don’t recall seeing these developments in the newspapers or on TV.  Maybe more of us should stop looking out for the bad and take more note of the good.  For starters, next time I buy something via PayPal on eBay, I’ll remember to tick the ‘donate’ box.

Resolutions and predictions

Welcome to 2011 … and as ever a new year brings out the predictions and resolutions in us all. 

As well as over-eating, playing lots of Christmas games and plenty of R&R, I have spent some of the holidays  researching  media fragmentation and its impact on marketers.  The prescient abilities of some commentators amazes me.  Lindgren et al in their 2002 book, Beyond Mobile, were already predicting that the mobile marketplace “will be filled with services that are time and position critical”¹.  Having successfully googled a really lovely pub (the Crown at Tolldown)  as an alternative to motorway services,  and been wowed by the potential of web 3.0, I’m resolving to go fully web mobile this year.

Or take Martyn Davis:  the third edition of his book, The Effective Use of Advertising Media² , was published in the 1988 heyday of VCR ownership. He predicted that new media and audience fragmentation would necessitate a re-think of the marketing concept, based around segmentation and narrowcasting.  A whole decade later, with less crystal-ball gazing, Tony Yeshin³ was still writing about the impact on advertisers of people fast-forwarding their video tapes.   

I predict a greater chance of success for the News International takeover of BskyB, after the debacle of Vince Cable proclaiming that he was out to get Rupert Murdoch. But beyond that, who knows what 2011 will bring?

¹ Lindgren, M., Jedbratt,  J. and Svensson. E.,  2002. Beyond Mobile. Basingstoke: Palgrave.

²  Davis, M., 1988. The Effective Use of Advertising Media. 3^rd ed. London: Century Hutchinson.

³  Yeshin, T. 1998. Integrated Marketing Communications: the holistic approach. Oxford: Butterworth-Heinemann.  p183.