Blogher Biz: A brief history of Social Media

Notes from the first session, which a combination of introduction about the jargon and social media and discussion from the audience.

A brief history of social media

What is social media?

the title is the state of the social media world…so let’s see what you were talking about over lunch about your case studies.

1. Dove, Evolution, was not just put a video on YouTube, they did UGC ad on Superbowl. Linking SL and RL, asking questions in SL being relayed to a press conference.

2. Blogher…one of the best SM case studies, that came from te community of women, saying it was wrong that women bloggers are not heard. Twitter is a good study = microblogging your daily activity.

3. Burning questions – how to track and measure and get and understand ROI.

4. BQ: now you have the blog how do you make it relevant to your audience, how do you get a new audience, how do I get them to interact. How do you keep staff motivated.

5. Forwarding happens a lot, sometimes when people are too embarrassed to comment (eg a recent one about a penis festival in Japan). the ones that gor forwarded can be regarded as better, as it could be capturing a new audience.

So, did anyone hear of something that surprised them? No…

Twitter is being used in the’wrong way’, there are lots of different ways to use it. But we are business conference, so here’s a few things – the 6 word twitter contest, the news feeds, the weather on twitter. So you could use it to give updates….

So some of the use explore about when you go to far, when to engage without crossing a line.

A brief History.

at the beginning, around 2000, we assumed that we could build a site and no one would go away. In 2002, the portal deals were not working, the internet does not ness keep people. Web2.0 is about eeping people, about making it more relevant to people.

In 2002 Heather Armstrong was dooced, the next year Scoble was hired for Microsoft. In 2005 GM started a blog; a the last Blogher GM brought cars along, they bring it to you/ The blog was a big stepping stone, laying out their problems.
2004 we had kryptonite issue; this was apivotal moment for companies and blogs; got reported on NYT from blogs breaking it.
2006, a little strange. Walmart had jounalists blogging without disclosure. this was not just the fault of the agency, of Walmart but also the bloggers as bloggers should be more savvy.

(and here someone did ask waht is flickr)

So what’s the line between citizen journalism and blogging

A: jounalism is not a role it is a series of practices; anyone can commit acts of journalism; we do not have licenced journalists in this country. Try and hide things and it will come back to bite it.

People often say we need a code for this blogger and that blogger; but professionals have codes and if you are blogging as part of a profession, you follwo that code.

Q: what about outside the US? How about China. Who is working with RoW traffic. Who caters for a wider interest than US.
A: in 2007 their are more people with access than here.
A: Minty, we provide parenting advice, UGC, and almost everything is outside the US.
So with a global audience, daypart is irrelevant.

Where are we today?

We are slightly more cutting edge then general enterprise world. 65% have a blog, 25% use video/audieo (out of the audience). Enterprises are far less. 63% of enterprises (a porter novelli survey) were blogging cos they thought they should. similar to having a website cos you have to. 57% did not have blogging guidelines. 76% have noticed an increase in traffic and attention. 71% were not happy with their interaction (but f they are doing cos they think they have to, they have no incentive)

One person had a conversation with an author who was scared about having a blog cos they may leave comments. And why wa he wanting a blog – to be part of the conversation. Can;t have one without the other. But talking to a lot of people go to the fear factor.

Q: we have been working with Macy’s, doing a project for black history month, got involved with bloggers, fashion bloggers, who got to speak to their favourite designers.

So who is reading. Pew says 39% of US readers read blogs, even if they do not know what it is. 24% of genY read blogs. more and more it has B2B implications as well.

Buzzwords…lets explain

Web2.0 speaks to an ethic. we allow comments, participations
Open source is ‘user generated’. it is participatory, community generated, not a free for all. They key is learning how to shepherd the conversation, make it useful
These are ‘push’ technologies; RSs, Twitter, etc are all push, giving the content where you want it, not where creator wants it.
Widgets are spreading, a great way to get your content on other site. but it is difficult to measure your effects, no page views.

A-list…we’ll explore tomorrow, usually means a ‘known’ list of prominent bloggers, but whom are not really known outside a small group.

Influence – there is no one way of measuring, it means something different to all.

Longtail…what social media can all be about;

[Many people had heard of all the words, but they were new for many as well]

Now onto values buzzwords. Blogs and SM are just tools; you can do plenty of things with them. So how do you measure a new way of doing things; you no longer push, you have a conversation with your customer. Look at authenticity, community, conversation, disclosure, engagement and transparency. They all come down to trust and respect. you have to approach different topics in different ways. Be clear on what and how and why you are doing it.

So why does i matter and how has it changed our work? It’s impossible to capture all the ways it has changed, Our credibility of brands etc depends on how you appear in the new distributed media, matters more than what you put on corporate website. Working with consumers is key to determine how you are received. So how when working in real time, with changing tech, how can you still achieve profitability. So if you don;t focus your budget on the fact that the internet is the majority medium, you need to change that,

Back to the audience…open discussion on what happens next?

Comment: NYT, recently started publishing permalinks, without registration or payment, you can blog it, and WSJ does not do that. You point people through and hit paywall for WSJ. Hopefully, more major news corps will get it and allow their content to become more popular.

Comment: I don’t talk about stuff if I can’t permalink. So I won’t talk about products and news I cannot point to

Comment: we have to balance SM tools and where our audience is. Look at USAToday. WSJ audience is probably still reading on the train from Connecticut. so if we get too far ahead of audience, what can we do.

Comment: a lot of trends with blogs and communities is the changing face of learning; you move away from a course/book and now people can take learning into their own hands. It will change how corps/orgs are going to do learning and training.

Comment: working with environmental journalists who were technophobes, did not use laptops etc; but give them smartphones, then they were away. Had to find the right form to make it easy.

Comment: anyone here have thoughts about changes to how mind works; anyone talk to teenagers about how they use it.

Comments: (professor from De Montford) we are working on a theory of transliteracy, across all media. divisive to say somethings are tech based and some not, it’s al the same kind of things. It’s about stripping away domination of print and going back to multiple ways of communicating, stripping way barriers.

Comments: blogging is more than just the publishers; readers are going to consume in a number of different ways. you have to meet many needs. The exciting part of tech is unification of tech and the spreading out, giving multiple ways of reaching content. we live in the echo chamber, we get it but much of the world does not. We should be figuring out how to deliver the content in the way that the readers do. do not coerce the readers to do it your way.

Comment: I disagree, as many of us in the room are on the front line with consumers/customers.

Comment: at TED there was a great conversations bout copyright laws. It is about allowing people to co-create and remix, that could be part of the future.