Journal

Is Social Media Already Over?

In a nutshell, no – social media is not already over. It is, however, most definitely over-saturated.

Look at the bottom of this post – you’ll see the nice little Share/Save icon, as well as footer options to share this post with your friends on Digg, Reddit, Mixx, Stumbleupon and Delicious (and please do feel free to forward this on – always appreciated!) 🙂

Hover your mouse over the Share/Save icon and it opens up a whole host of other social media sites where you can submit this post to, should you so desire. Go one step further and click on the small downward arrow near the bottom of the Share/Save list. This offers even more social media sites to share this post with – well over 100, in fact.

This is too much (and a reminder to myself to edit the amount of Share This options). Who in their right mind would join 100+ social media sites? I think I may be on about 10 or so and even that feels a little too much, although I do use each end every one of the sites I’m on.

Mention social media and it’s pretty much guaranteed that these names will come out: Facebook, MySpace, Digg, Twitter, Stumbleupon, Technorati, Mixx and Reddit. Yahoo Buzz is becoming more popular while newcomers to the scene like BackType and MeeID are starting to build up a nice head of steam.

But what about the others that make up this 100+ list? Have you heard of Pusha, or Gravee, or Yoolink? How about Twiddla or Taggly? Apart from having names that George Lucas might use in his next movie, the abundance of these social media sites are what’s causing people to be wary about stepping into the social media pool in the first place.

Look back through the ages and it’s clear that the most successful products or services were the ones with the fewest choices – VHS or Betamax video tape, Sega Genesis or Super Nintendo, cable or satellite TV and so on.

While there’s no doubting that social media offers a wonderful opportunity to truly open up the world to everyone for the first time ever, it’s also apparent that there needs to be a reining in of the services available. Yes, choice is great but not at the expense of scaring everybody away through confusion.

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The True Meaning of Social Media

So, social media. It can be pretty confusing, right? After all, one person tells you one thing about it while another person tells you the complete opposite not 5 minutes later. And then the day after, you have someone else telling you it’s something in-between the previous two explanations! No wonder social media is so confusing. So what does it mean?

To be honest, social media is exactly what you want it to be. You want it to be a way of finding cool and interesting websites that you would never have found before? Sign up to Stumbleupon. You want to know what blogs are popular? Get yourself a Technorati account. History of all the comments you’ve ever left? Backtype. And the list goes on.

For me, however, the true meaning of social media can be found in the way that people who would normally be business competitors offer support, knowledge and different expertise to those who need it.

I’ll give you an example. On my Twitter account, I’m probably connected to around 40 or so people from the PR and copywriting industry, whether it’s through me following them or them following me (or both, even). Now, in the “normal” business world, they would be competitors so you’d think the last thing we would want to do is help the other out.

Yet instead, Twitter sees any request for help or advice answered almost immediately, and often with information that would offer a distinct advantage if kept private. Now to me, that’s social media at its finest.

Yes, we’re all in business and we all want to succeed, but gone is the “at all costs” attitude of the last decade and beyond. With the Internet opening up a whole new world of commerce and potential customers, there really is enough to go round for everyone. And people are realizing that.

Not only that, but people are also encouraging others to succeed and offering up the tools with which to push for that success. You can’t get much more of a truer meaning of social than that, media or otherwise. Perhaps we should get the leaders of the world into social media? After all, they could use all the help they can get.

The Dinosaur and the Journalist

Bloggers and journalists have held an uneasy truce for a while now (particularly when there’s an easier target to pick on – like PR).

While some journos have embraced bloggers as viable sources of both information gathering and dispersal, others have scoffed at the very idea that a “bedroom writer” would have anything of value to add.

Of course, the same can be said in reverse – many bloggers don’t integrate themselves with the journalistic crowd, either believing them to be cliquish or simply wanting to keep the information to themselves for their blog and readers.

Which is a shame since, when done properly, the pooling of writing talent and information can be a very powerful tool. Journalists can gain excellent leads for stories and bloggers can gain invaluable insight into the world of investigative writing. However, despite the often protective/dismissive nature of both parties toward each other, at least they’re acknowledging each other’s place in the written world.

Where the real problem arises is with over-the-hill journalists that can’t grasp the growth and reason for bloggers and the blogosphere. These are the ones that (probably) cut their teeth on an Imperial typewriter and for whom a computer is a necessary evil to ensure their continued collection of a paycheck.

One particular example is Christie Blatchford, a journalist for leading Canadian newspaper The Globe and Mail. In a recent column, Blatchford complained about a colleague at the paper blogging about the triathlon at the recent Olympic Games in Beijing. To quote Blatchford, “I’m not sure if my hair burst into flames, but I wanted to burn something down.”

Why was Blatchford’s reaction so negative (not to mention a little over-dramatic)? After all, as she mentions in her post, she believes her colleague to be a fine writer – so why such a damning statement? Perhaps the answer can be found in another comment she made in the column.

“And journalism wasn’t meant to be a conversation, anyway. It was maybe a monologue, at its most democratic a carefully constructed dialogue. If readers didn’t like or agree with the monologues in paper A, they bought paper B. What was most important about their opinions was that they thought enough to spend the coin.”

If this is truly Blatchford’s view, then it explains why she feels so strongly about blogging and why she will never get it – she doesn’t know how to communicate (or doesn’t want to). Who cares about the readers – after all, if they don’t like it they can go elsewhere is the message being displayed here.

It’s a view that belongs in the pre-Internet era of journalism (and one that I’m not too sure her paymasters at the Globe and Mail should be too pleased about, either, sending readers to competitor newspapers).

The very essence of writing a news story in a newspaper is so that you can share it with your paper’s readers. Notice that word there, Christie? Share. Now, it’s been a while since I was in school, but the definition of the word share then was to participate, open up, use jointly, and a whole slew of others.

This is why newspapers usually have a Letters to the Editor section, so that readers can respond to news stories or opinion piece columns. With her statement that readers’ opinions should only be as important as deciding what paper to read, Blatchford shows a complete lack of connection with those that she should be connecting with the most – her readers.

This is why she doesn’t get blogging, and why she’s in an ever-decreasing minority of journalists (and other professions) who refuse to accept this newcomer to the writing world.

Yes, bloggers can get it wrong – as the citizen reporter for CNN did so spectacularly with the incorrect news that Apple CEO Steve Jobs had suffered a heart attack. (Of course, CNN should have done its job properly and taken responsibility for checking the story before publication). Yet many other times they get it right, offering instant and shared news for a worldwide audience.

If Blatchford’s main gripe with blogging is that “you can have more pensive chats in a bar fight” – which is a rather strange analogy – perhaps she should recall that the newspaper industry is 250 years old. It’s had plenty of time to fine-tune its appearance and professionalism, yet it still gets it wrong now occasionally (as the infamous Hitler diaries hoax proved on a major scale).

Blogging and the people that participate aren’t even a signpost on the journalistic-style writing road as far as age goes. Yet already the power bloggers and professional bloggers are putting many journalists to shame. And therein lies the nub, it would seem – Blatchford is scared of becoming irrelevant so she dismisses instead.

I guess it’s hard to grow old gracefully, huh?

The Battle for the US Election, Social Media Style

As November 4 and the US Presidential Election looms ever nearer, there’s a new battle going on for the hearts and minds of the American voters. It’s not between Barack Obama and John McCain (although they are the two major players in it). No, this battle is between social media giants MySpace and Facebook.

Ever since Facebook broke the 100 million users barrier, the dogfight between them and MySpace has intensified, with each one coming out with new ways to keep their users happy.

(Not counting the forced-upon Facebook redesign, of course, which has split opinions on Facebook considerably).

Therefore, it’s incredibly zen-like timing that the battle is picking up in the US Presidential Election year. After all, this is a decision that’s going to impact the world we all live in for the next 4 years. What better opportunity to engage your users and give them something the other site isn’t?

Looking at Facebook and MySpace, it’s interesting to see the different approaches they’re taking. Which one works best, of course, is down to the user and target audience.

MySpace, for example, have set up a special My Debates area in partnership with the Commission on Presidential Debates. Their aim with this is to truly offer an interactive medium for both MySpace users and non-MySpace users alike (an excellent idea).

Entering the My Debates area, users can join interactive forums, watch the live debates between the candidates and even submit questions for the candidates to answer. There are also options to host your own group discussion, as well as print off the key issues that the candidates are using for their campaign voice.

Encouraging visitor interaction, MySpace are also involved in a Town Hall debate on October 7 where questions and views uploaded to the My Debates area will be discussed via a live stream on the site. With MySpace traditionally attracting a younger demographic, their election options offer an invaluable insight into what the new generation of voters would like to see change.

Compare this to Facebook. Unlike MySpace, there is no dedicated option for Facebook users to log into and offer their opinions. Instead, the second-largest social media site has left it to the politicians, their campaign teams and the ordinary Facebook user to start their own discussions or groups – so, nothing really different from existing discussion groups.

There are some useful applications that Facebook are allowing on the site. One, from ECOresearch, allows users to cast their vote weekly, as well as taking part in an interactive real-time quiz that discusses the latest updates and news from the campaign trail.

Apart from this, though, and the ability to join your preferred candidate’s Facebook Election 08 group, there’s not really a lot on Facebook when it comes to the upcoming election. This seems strange for such a major event that impacts us all. The limited options offered by Facebook are thrown into perspective even more by websites like If The World Could Vote which has seen over 104,000 votes from 176 countries so far.

There’s no doubt that in this particular battle, MySpace wins hands down. Which makes MySpace one to watch for all the candidates looking to see how the younger and more traditional voters are swaying. If the latest graph from the MyDebates area is correct, it doesn’t make pretty reading for McCain.

If the actual election goes anything like the current social media one, then MySpace and Obama will be sitting pretty while Facebook and McCain will be left to wonder where it all went wrong.

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Backseat Drivers and Blog Commenters

Back in January of this year, Hjortur Smarason (owner of Scope Communications) wrote an interesting blog post about Target and their response to feedback left by a blogger named Amy Jussel.

Jussel had written to the retailer to complain about an advertising campaign that showed a woman lying spreadeagled on a target, with the unfortunate placing of the woman meaning that her crotch was immediately over the bulls-eye.

What makes the whole thing interesting was not the fact that Target used the ad in the first place, nor the fact that Jussel complained about it, but the response that she received from Target. Hjortur goes into it in more detail in his blog post, which is gaining a second wind thanks to a new-found popularity on social media site Stumbleupon. But basically, the gist of the post is that Target didn’t deem it necessary to respond to Jussel because she was a blogger.

(It’s particularly amusing that Target seemed to ignore the fact that Jussel is the founder of Shaping Youth, an organization that looks at the media’s effect on impressionable children).

While Hjortur (quite rightly) makes many valid points why Target and its PR team got this so wrong, the whole episode also raises some interesting points regarding the whole blogosphere and its standing with the business world, and certainly within the eyes of the PR industry.

When the PR team of Target responded in the manner they did – “Unfortunately we are unable to respond to your inquiry because Target does not participate with non-traditional media outlets” – they made it quite clear that they didn’t take blogging as a serious media outlet. Big mistake.

With the power that the blogosphere holds today, not recognizing it as a credible media source is just opening you up to a major backlash – just ask Associated Press and the furore they created when they went after the Drudge Retort. Yet, at the same time, is the blogging community to blame as well for the views that Target’s PR team held?

For critics of the blogging community, one of the weapons they’ve always used as an argument is the unprofessional and irrelevant nature of many commenters. Yet is this fair? Yes, there can be some incredibly bizarre and often unfortunate comments left by blog visitors, but is this any different from other forms of media?

Target’s argument at the time was that it preferred to deal with the traditional media outlets. Now, depending on what your view of? a traditional media outlet is, this would mean newspapers, television and radio. But traditional media outlets don’t always get it right either – many letters to national newspapers are just as irrelevant and pointless as some comments to blogs are.

The point is, it’s true that blogs by their very nature offer the personal voice of the person writing them. Yet that doesn’t mean that they should hold less sway with the businesses, media, news sites or similar that seem to hold blogging in disdain. The introduction of tools like BackType should also help to improve the quality of comments left on a post.

I find it hard to believe that Target – or any other business – would refuse to offer a media response to bloggers like Seth Godin, Brian Solis, Chris Brogan or others like them, merely for the simple reason that these guys can still be considered bloggers. Then again, Target never showed any sense in the first place, so perhaps they would ignore them.

Blogging has come a long way from its early days of sharing a few thoughts and stories with anyone interested enough to read. Professional bloggers have audiences of thousands and can wield some powerful influence when it’s needed. Companies like Target would do well to keep this in mind.

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