by Dave Fleet

In recent months I, along with many other people, have voiced concern about the influx of “social media experts” with no real background in communications but a strong enthusiasm for social media tools. We’ve worried publicly that they lack real-world experience and strategic communications insight and that these two things will lead to their failure and, by extension, to them damaging the fragile reputation of the communications industry.

Yesterday my attention was drawn to a post by Phil Butler from Pamil Visions PR, entitled According to “Experts” – Normal Communication Is Dead? which takes aim at Twitter as a communications tool and at social media more generally.

I take issues with a few points in the post, although I wholeheartedly agree with Phil that some people are falsely building Twitter up to be some kind of silver bullet solution to companies’ problems.

Twitter isn’t a silver bullet

I’m NOT one of the people who thinks that every company should be on Twitter (last week I told one company that it probably isn’t the right tool for them). However, I do believe that Twitter and similar tools (it’s just one tool in the social media toolkit) are useful for companies in the right situations.

Perhaps more importantly, I do not agree that traditional communications is dead. I’ve written several times in the previously that social media tools add to our communications toolkit; they don’t replace the old tools. While the growth of the Internet is changing the influence levels of our different tools, traditional tactics are still critical for most companies, and in all but a few cases are central to the success of promotional efforts.

Emotion doesn’t trump reality

I have a strong concern about posts written from the perspective of someone who admits they “hate” Twitter. I’m fine with the sentiment – I’ll be the first to agree that no tool will work for everyone, and Twitter takes some getting used-to. I’m also conscious that I come from the opposite bias.

Still, people contemplating such posts should remember that there are other perspectives, and that pure emotion doesn’t trump reality:

• Butler’s post implies that while journalists may be on Twitter, you can’t engage with them there. While relationships should extend beyond tools, I and many other people have appeared in tier one media outlets thanks to journalist connections made on Twitter, I’ve developed solid relationships with journalists and, thanks to these tools, I can often see if it is a bad time to be contacting those people with story ideas.
• Butler also says that Twitter is mainly a conduit for the already famous and that you can’t learn anything from using it. If all you’re trying to do is broadcast, then that’s right – as if you have no voice then broadcasting doesn’t work. If, however, you’re trying to connect with people in your market and your target market do use Twitter, then it’s possible. Companies like Freshbooks, Zappos, Radian6, Fairmont Hotels and more are taking that approach. Note that I’ve included small companies as well as big ones to demonstrate that you don’t need to be huge to engage effectively.

Business benefits

The post also asks whether businesses have benefited directly from using Twitter. Bottom line: ours has. While I can’t give specifics without getting a red-hot poker inserted somewhere painful, I can tell you that we have landed large corporate accounts thanks in large part to our Twitter presence.

We’ve also seen corporate outreach through social media tools, both Twitter and others, to have a noticeable effect, especially when solving problems for people. Simply put, it’s the personal touch that most people no longer expect – by exceeding their expectations, you can delight people with little cost.

Senior management adoption… huh?

Lastly, you point out that most CEOs don’t use Twitter. To that I say, “do they sit in their offices writing the news releases, too?” No, because they have communications staff to do that while they run the company.

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By David Chartier | Published: December 30, 2008 – 11:40AM CT

Ubiquitous microblogging service Twitter is once again making political news today with the announcement that the Consulate General of Israel in New York will hold a “Citizen’s Press Conference” today. David Saranga, Consul of Media and Public Affairs, will be taking questions about the situation in Israel and Gaza via Twitter, and anything that requires more than Twitter’s 140 SMS-friendly characters will be posted to the Israel Consulate’s blog.The conference is set to run from 1-3pm EST, but the consulate’s Twitter account, twitter.com/IsraelConsulate, is already active and responding to questions.

If you aren’t familiar with how this “tweet and reply” system works, here’s a quick primer: On Twitter, users can direct public “tweets” (basic Twitter posts that are 140 characters or less) to other users by prefixing the message with an @ symbol and a username.

For example, if you want to ask the Israel Consulate a question for today’s conference, either log in or sign up and type a message like “@IsraelConsulate Can bombs really root out Hamas?” This will allow the people running the Consulate’s account to see your question and, ideally, reply back to you with a public message that (barring any custom preferences) all other users can see.

A screenshot of the Israel Consulate’s Twitter page with tweets and replies. Click for a larger view

Twitter can be used with a desktop browser, mobile applications, or even via SMS, allowing virtually anyone with some kind of an Internet-connect device to participate and as questions at this “Citizen Press Conference.”

A few drawbacks to this approach, however, could cause trouble for the Israel Consulate and Twitter’s participants. Opening the doors this wide to a global audience could very well overwhelm the Consulate’s team with question, many of which will undoubtedly be duplicates. Twitter’s focus on absolute simplicity may also make some Q&A conversations difficult to follow, as one of the most useful tools that could visualize threaded conversations, Quotably, has closed up shop; Twitter offers no comparable alternative.

Plus, Twitter offers a preference to only display replies to users that you follow, which will effectively hide any replies that @IsraelConsulate sends to most participants. Depending on the Twitter circle that you choose to follow, disabling this preference could result in a flood of @replies that drown out the Consulate’s conference.

Still, the adoption of Twitter for larger social and political exchanges will only be a boon for the service, even if this latest experiment encounters some turbulence. Other, more ambitious experiments, such as the dual-party presidential debate conducted over Twitter, may have had more trouble, but we have seen everything from C-SPAN, CNN, Shaquille O’Neill, school classrooms, Comcast, JetBlue, and even law enforcement agencies adopt the service to communicate in more personal, professional, and accessible ways with audiences.

By Ed Lee

On Monday, technology analyst house Forrester released a report that demonstrated consumer adoption of RSS had reached 11 per cent (versus almost 50 per cent of interactive marketers) and wonders:

“What’s holding RSS back?” (available to you for just $279.00)

The report, as blogged by Steve Rubel at Micropersuasion, included the following chart:

So, with just 3 per cent of the 1,900 U.S. adults who frequently go online and who don’t currently use RSS, “very interested” in using RSS in the future, is RSS as a technology reaching it’s zenith? Is it destined for use by a committed, yet niche audience?

No.

RSS use is only just getting started

RSS may not be used actively by consumers but the people who are design Web sites and online applications sure are using RSS. Look at the 110 million people on Facebook who use RSS via the “news feed” option.

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by Josh Bernoff

Data is my secret weapon.

Every time I visit a company, we bring data we’ve collected about the social behaviors of their customers, structured according to the Social Technographics Ladder we introduced last year, a technique we rang the changes on in chapter 3 of Groundswell.

When I go to Vanguard, I show them the profile of their customers – and their competitors’. I went to a company that makes replacement hip joints – I showed them the profile of people with arthritis. I just came back from Brussels, where I showed a bunch of direct marketers how Europeans participate – and how many people who resist direct marketing still embrace social technologies. We’ve published lots of this data right here on the blog, including data on voters. Data settles the pointless “everybody does this/nobody does this” arguments and allows people to invest in the appropriate technologies for their customers.

But data gets old, especially in the rapidly changing social world. Time for an update. Today, we’ve released our 2008 data from around the world. Go ahead and play around with it, free, at our just-updated Social Technographics Profile tool page. We’ve got data from 11 countries around the world, by age and gender. (For the Canadians who’ve been bugging me since Groundswell came out – yes, we now have Canadian data, too.)

Forrester clients can see our complete analysis of the 2008 data in a document we just published, called The Growth Of Social Technology Adoption. (If you’re not a client, the link will just show you an executive summary.) I’ll also be speaking on this topic at our 2008 Consumer Forum.

Looking at the US data, the big news in 2008 is that, not unexpectedly, social technology participation has grown rapidly. Inactives — people untouched by social technologies — have shriveled from 44% down to 25% of the online population. Spectators — those who read, watch, or consumer social content — have ballooned from 48% to 69%. If you think social technology is about to become a universal phenomenon, we just handed you a nice little bundle of evidence.

As you can see, there was also a nice healthy jump in Joiners (social network participants), Critics (those who react to social content they see), and especially Collectors (those who organize social content). None of these are quite as popular as being a Spectator, but I think there’s plenty of growth ahead for these groups. (If it’s bothering you that the numbers add up to more than 100%, remember that these groups overlap – this is not a segmentation.)

I find it just as interesting that the Creators group grew only slightly, from 18% to 21%. I have long suspected that there aren’t more people blogging, creating Web pages, or uploading video or audio, not because the technology gets in the way, but because they’re just not the kind of extroverts who want to talk about themselves or anything else online. I think this group will continue to grow much more slowly than the others. Interestingly, this kind of participation is far greater in some places like Korea and China.

As usual, the real story comes when you look behind the statistics. Where is the growth in consumption of online content coming from? From older people – the group my young colleagues who manage all this data call “middle-aged.” (Ouch!) Social activity is way up among 35-to-44 year-olds, especially when it comes to joining social networks and reading and reacting to content. Even among 45-to-54 year-olds, 68% are now Spectators, 24% are Joiners, and only 28% are Inactives.

Here’s what it means. It will soon be no more remarkable that your grandmother reads a blog than that she reads email. Social content is going mainstream. Social content ranks high on search engines because it changes so frequently and gets linked to more often, so more and more online adults are becoming exposed to it, accepting it, and embracing it. If you’re a marketer, no matter what group of consumers you’re targeting, this means you must pay attention to the social world online.

But the future of social applications online will not include contributions from everyone, because not everyone has the temperament to create content. Don’t count on all your customers to contribute, and don’t believe that what you see online is representative of your whole audience. The shy among your customers are reading this stuff, but most of them aren’t ready to contribute, and won’t be for a while.

This is the power of data – the power to see beyond the hype and see what’s really changing. I’d love to bring some to your company and start the conversation.

Postscript: I’d be remiss if I didn’t give credit to the people who make this data collection possible (and excellent). Cynthia Pflaum is the secret force behind my data insights – she not only finds these tidbits that companies find so useful, she’s also my watchdog for maintaining consistency in our surveys worldwide. Reineke Reitsma is in charge our worldwide data collection and her support of this project (and her budget) make this possible. And Roxana Strohmenger for the second year assembled our worldwide data so we could put it into the profile tool. Thank you, colleagues.

September 11, 2008 02:49

The kids are back at school and the laptops, cellphones, iPods, MSN, text messaging and every other form of technology are all  getting a real workout from the younger generation.

A feeling for just how important technology is to young people comes via a survey done by a group of high school students in Ottawa. Under the guidance of teacher Robin McAteer at Sir Robert Borden High School, students devised, executed and tallied a survey of their peers.

Here are some survey highlights:

• Seventy-three per cent of teens own their own computer; 63 per cent own a cellphone; 41 per cent a web cam; 86 per cent an MP3 player.

• On the Internet, the top five daily activities — and they are done in almost equal amounts — are: e-mail, instant messaging, music, social networking sites and work.

• On average, kids spend close to three hours a day on the Internet.

• Eighty per cent of them use social networking sites and share a lot of personal information but they still feel safe; 37 per cent of them have 200 or more friends on their social networking site.

• Most teens feel “pretty safe” on the Internet and see it as a social, friendly, entertaining place to go.

You can check out the full report at cyberbully.pbwiki.com.

McAteer says young people live their lives on the Internet and their parents, for the most part, work on the Internet. Yet there is no doubt, she adds, that there is a digital gap between generations: 68 per cent of surveyed teens said they never or seldom talk to parents about the Internet.

Her advice is to get involved and the best way to do that is to admit to your kids that you are not the savviest person online, and that they teach you about what they do.

You might be amazed at how much your kids want to be your guide to the Internet. It may be a time when technology opens up a whole new real-life conversation between you and your children.