Changing the rules of communication engagement

While online media is something that a lot of companies in the country have yet to appreciate and use, along comes what has been labeled "social media" to underscore the lateness of our technology adoption. As Angelo Fernando reports in Communication World, the term social media is a catchall praise for everything that the old media is not, and it is where consumer-generated content rules. The audience, whether or not it is made up of "consumers," takes charge of the content and defines the rules of engagement. It may sound a lot like allowing the inmates to run the asylum, but it also offers phenomenal opportunities to marketers — with a few caveats.

In August 2006, Fernando’s report reveals, a crude, albeit funny animated video of former US Vice President Al Gore started getting a lot of play on YouTube, the social media portal and clearinghouse for amateur and professional video clips. It was a short caricature of Gore lecturing penguins about global warming.

Indeed, such fare is commonplace on YouTube, where some 70 million videos are watched every day. But this two-minute clip was of a different pedigree. It poked fun at Gore’s documentary film An Inconvenient Truth, and was supposedly the work of a 29-year-old from California. It soon came to light that it was the work of a PR agency, one of whose clients happened to be ExxonMobil — the kind of company that the movie blamed for global warming. The PR agency got a public shaming, illustrating that this new customer medium is not for the faint of heart.

One other case talks of an ad agency called Agency.com, which pitched for the Subway sandwich-chain account. Because there was a lot of buzz around the value of social media, the agency decided to upload a video to YouTube — a video featuring the making of a client pitch. It was a thinly veiled attempt to impress their prospective client with their knowledge of emerging media, but it backfired. It provoked the viewers to chastise the agency in this very public space. Within a few weeks, the agency pulled out of the client pitch.

A second social medium for communication that is getting more actively used is podcasting. Fernando underscores that it has truly matured within the past six months, and has shed its early model (ranting in a P3 format) to become a business communication strategy that’s conversational, collaborative and highly credible — the 3C format, if you will. It involves opinion makers, journalists, seasoned practitioners and, of course, audiences that interact with one another on a regular basis. That’s right, the audience is very much a part of this new media conversation.

In podcasting, the word "conversation" isn’t used lightly. Unlike blogs, where "authors and readers" converse via comments and TrackBacks (a protocol for communicating between blogs), podcasting gives the audience a true voice. Communication consultants Shel Holtz and Neville Hobson co-host a twice-weekly conversational PR podcast called "For Immediate Release: The Hobson and Holtz Report" that is so popular that it pulls in listeners from several continents through a slew of technologies.

Holtz and Hobson have a voice line in Europe and the US for listeners to leave comments and suggestions, and another number for voice mail via Skype, the free PC-to-PC phone service. The hosts also encourage listeners to use an audio comment service that allows someone to send them voice mail directly from the podcast web site or record and e-mail a five-megabyte audio file from his or her PC.

While all this social media space is being carved out by individuals, corporations have been taking notes. You can tell that social networks are going to be the next frontier of marketing by a few bits of recent news. YouTube, MySpace and Facebook are hogging the arena. Prior to this, there were social networks such as Linkedin and Plaxo that paved the way for the network at a peer-to-peer level, without the help of an enterprise.

For communicators, Fernando stresses, there has never been a greater need to produce much more than content — to set up and nurture communities. It’s a new discipline that takes a different branch of creativity and a lot of risk-taking. There’s always a new technology to get a handle on for different experiences and different constituencies. Take a simple chat room. If you’ve ever hung out in one of these virtual spaces, you know that there’s etiquette to follow and that some degree of moderation exists amid the creative anarchy. Often, there’s a live person making sure nothing gets out of hand.

If you were to venture into the BMW customer chat room, for instance, people might be discussing water pump leaks and issues unflattering to the brand. But should they be shut out? In the old brand world, such comments would have been heresy, because brand managers controlled the information flow. In the new brand world of social networking, marketers know that allowing customers to initiate conversation is what keeps brands alive.

The question, Fernando asks, is "Can you afford to keep up?" The need to interact with customers and audiences in a truly social way is where much of our communication is headed. But this time, there are no brand guidelines, and there is no handbook from the corporate office. Whew! That’s quite exciting.

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E-mail bongo@vasia.com for comments, questions or suggestions. Thank you for communicating.