social media

Sao Paulo, risotto and anarchism

07/01/2008 by simoncollister 4 Comments

So I’m here in Sao Paulo for a couple of days doing some social media training for Brazil’s PR trade body, Aberje, as mentioned in my previous post and while I’m here I’ve been catching up my Edel-colleagues.

Yesterday I had a fantasic lunch with our Digital Manager, Thiane Loureiro at a restaurant where you can buy everything in the place. We had a great discussion over risotto and beer about social media, PR, relationship building, sustainable communications and anarchism – but despite having many shared interests I’m sure I keep mis-pronouncing her name! I think it’s pro: Tee-ahn-nee. ~~Tee-arn-uh~~. ~~Thiane – am I right?~~

And then today I visited Edelman’s rapidly expanding Sao Paulo office to meet the rest of the digital team. Our office is on the twentieth floor so you get quite a view from the window:

Anyway, I sat with the team and we talked about monitoring brands online, the difference between digital advertising and digital PR, the added value of relationship building in the online space and they took me through a couple of case studies – all of which were really cool, well thought-out and executed programmes.

I think it is really cool to see that even in another (pretty different) market that the fundamental ideas behind delivering online PR campaigns remain the same – and more importantly are successful.

The reason for this – I decided today – is that aside from a few cultural differences, people are people throughout the world. They are largely driven by the same desires, needs, likes and dislikes.

By putting them (indeed, us!) at the heart of our work then we can finally start to make meaningful connections with society on a global scale. And that can only be a good thing, can it not?

I’ll end this post with a top quality Brazilian tune, Sex-O-Matic by Edu K. The Amazonian natural world video is amazing too. Check it, as they say:

UPDATED Bloggers, Tory MEPs and why political parties should be worried

06/08/2008 by simoncollister Leave a Comment

One of the findings from my research into agenda-setting and political bloggers in the UK earlier this year was that there is a distinct blurring of the roles between infuential journalists/media and influential bloggers.

To reinforce this, Mark Hanson has blogged about how two top political blogs drove last week’s high-profile campaign to unseat a number of corrupt Tory MEPs.

Both Guido Fawkes and Conservative Home were "swapping research, swapping sources, [and] referencing each other" according to Mark.

Two things strike me as interesting and significant here. Firstly, the timeline of this bears hallmarks of previous political blog campaigns – specifically Guido’s hounding of the Smith Institute which was closely followed/suported by the Daily Telegraph.

However, in this instance the sharing of material and sources came primarily from online sources – ie. without support from a mainstream publication (although I acknowledge this may have happened covertly).

Secondly – and as Mark points out – this was a Tory/libertarian attack on Tory MEPs. Antony Mayfield suggests it may be "right-wing bloggers cleaning their own house" but equally it suggests two further things:

a concerted online campaign around a specific issue – significant because the internet allows people to aggregate around single issues, something traditional political party structures are unable to foster
these single issue campaigns and campaigners are becoming more and more powerful. So potentially powerful in fact that parties ought to be extremely wary of their disruptive force in the future.

This campaign is fascinating because it is a ‘ritual cleansing’ (to adapt Antony’s idea) of the Tory party in Europe – but one conducted by those on the periphery of the party and even beyond (as Antony Mayfield points out: "Guido Fawkes is *not* a Tory").

Traditional political party structures are becoming increasingly redundant and threatened by highly influential and super connected individuals driven by single issues. If was in charge of the Tories, Labour or the Lib Dems I would be investing heavily in understanding the major changes the internet is having not just on communications but on an organisational level as well.

*UPDATED* Political consultant and blogger Tim Pendry gives his very expert analysis on what this online encounter means for the UK’s wider political scene.

Technorati tags: Politics, Guido Fawkes, Conservative Home, Mark Hanson

Finding ‘natural communicators’ – the real role for PR consultants in a social media world?

06/02/2008 by simoncollister Leave a Comment

May has been a crazy month and hopefully normal blogging service will resume shortly.

But in the meantime I was thinking about some work we have been doing with one of our clients over the past month – seeking out views on how social media (and the wider social web) affects business and more specifically corporate communication.

One of the key questions that saw significant debate was whether organisations are in a position to trust their employees – both communications/PR staff and non-communications/PR staff – to become online advocates and de facto communicators for the business.

The discussion was varied and swung between those who argued that employees are effectively communicating about their employer all the time anyway so why not support that; and those that adhered to the traditional notion of channelling all the company’s news and communications through professional communicators.

The interesting thing for me is that the opposing views didn’t follow a divide between comms and non-comms staff. It seems that the main differentiator between those that ‘get it’ and those that don’t is dependent on a much wider mindset; perhaps between those that recognise the importance of authenticity in business and those that like a more traditional controlled approach.

This got me thinking: some of the best ‘communicators’ or ‘communications advisers’ in a socially connected online world are not corporate communicators, but those that can be considered more ‘natural communicators’.

And maybe that is where we are going wrong with social media strategy and programmes – we try to teach corporate communicators how to communicate naturally – that is authentically – which doesn’t necessarily come easy. An analogy might be trying to teach a senior civil servant to write poetry.

Instead of focussing our effort on converting people in roles that are traditionally siloed, should we – as PR consultants – instead be tasked with identifying an organisation’s natural communicators and empowering them (or helping their employer empower them) to speak authentically on their employer’s behalf.

Review of Charlie Beckett’s Supermedia

05/22/2008 by simoncollister 2 Comments

So it’s been weeks since I’ve ahd a chnce to put some thoughts down into a blog post, but an email from Charlie Beckett, director of the new media think-tank at the LSE and London School of Communications, about his new book called Supermedia [full title] has finally spurred me into action.

Supermedia is an optimist and positive book outlining how the media can enhance its forces-for-good using the internet. its essential argument is that:

journalism plays a vital role sustaining healthy liberal societies;
journalism (like most industrial economic complexes) is being re-shaped by the internet;
that we are a media cross-roads where we have the chance to shape the future of journalism for the better;
that when we talk about contemporary journalism we mean, in effect, digital journalism.

Charlie terms this type of contemporary digital journalism: Networked Journalism. Networked Journalism includes what we term ‘citizen journalism’ bit it is also a type of journalism that “is a reflection of emerging realities” as well as an opportunity to transform the ethics as well as efficacy of journalism.”

Now I haven’t read the full book, just the introduction (available with other chapter excerpts over at Harvard University’s Berkman Center). But it seems to me that in creating the concept of Networked Journalism Charlie is seeking to explore how journalism – and by extension – the news media can function in an internet-enabled or to use Yochai Benkler’s term, networked information economy.

This gets my thumbs up. There is a lot of general talk about how the social web and its various tools is changing media production for the worse – eg. the dumbing down argument (in fact, Private Eye magazine, the original challengers of establishment views are one of the worse purveyors of this which really annoys me – but that’s for another post).

The only issue I would raise about this line of argument is that in a networked world where everyone can publish their news, Charlie takes a specifically journalism-centric approach to the question of who actually owns contemporary media production.

Nowhere (at least in the book’s intro) is this made more clear than the following sentence: “Networked journalism offers the news media to enhance its social role.”

In my notes I wrote: “Or offers society to enhance its news media role.”

The point I’m making here is that the internet rejects the traditionally formalised structures and boundaries we artificially created around things like “the media” and “business” and “politics”. To borrow David Weinberger’s idea, the internet makes all of these traditionally siloed areas of life miscellaneous.

To push that idea a bit further, the interent removes these areas of life of their identity until we chose to invoke those identities in what ever form suits us best – not media publishers, not politicians, not business leaders, us.

So with this logic, the news media is no more. Or at least is no more different than citizen journalism, blog content, Flickr content etc. Charlie discusses the importance of these new social media tools, but still privileges ‘real’ journalism as a separate part of this new media ecology. In my mind the internet rejects any and all hierarchy and distinctions between citizen journalism and professional journalism.

Anyway, I’m getting abstract and I don’t think this represents any faults with Charlie’s arguments. Charlie himself tells us early in the intro that “I do not pretend to be objective … So I’m afraid that it is back to the journalist this time to understand what is happening to our news media.”

Supermedia is a book about what is happening to contemporary journalism, written by a journalist, from a journalist’s perspective. That’s not a problem – that’s the framework through which Charlie is interpreting the miscellaneous landscape of the internet.

One final thought on this is where PR or the professional communications industry sits in this view. I bet that for every 10 citizen journalists or bloggers there is a PR person trying to work out how to influence what that blogger blogs about.

This clearly presents challenges and opportunities to the growing ethics and efficacy of the news media. Maybe this issue is covered off later in the book but I’d love Charlie’s take on the subject.

Technorati tags: Charlie Beckett, Supermedia, Polis, London School of Economics