Kiss Me

Originally uploaded by KennethMoyle

Don’t you think it’s surprising that you don’t really read about or hear people talk about web 2.0 and social media and what the difference between the two are.

But today the formidable Techcrunch blog did pronounce – in passing – on relations between the two. They are kissing cousins!

“Adobe’s play is with developers, primarily those reaching the broad consumer playground known as Web 2.0 and its new kissing cousin Social Media. Of course, cloud computing is in there too, but..”

Smootch!

Say what? There ain’t much of a difference, that’s what.

And just in case you were also wondering what the difference is between web 1.0 and 2.0, don’t. Just click the link.

Last Friday I gave a talk to a large UK PR agency about social media. I told them they (PR) were (or should be) much better placed to engage people through social media than traditional advertising agencies.

The Wikipedia definition of PR is -

“Public relations (PR) is the practice of managing the flow of information between an organization and its publics. Public relations – often referred to as PR – gains an organization or individual exposure to their audiences using topics of public interest and news items that do not require direct payment. Because public relations places exposure in credible third-party outlets, it offers a third-party legitimacy that advertising does not have. Common activities include speaking at conferences, working with the press, and employee communication.”

Social media is all about communication. The so-called conversation. Tools like blogs, micro-blogging (like Twitter) LinkedIn, YouTube and social networks are a heaven sent for communicators.

PR people should have an instinctive feel for this brave new world.

Press releases have always attempted to be more ‘content like’. They had to be newsworthy and authentic to make it into the media. To achieve word of mouth the message had to truly interesting. Good communication with a businesses’ “publics” have always been more like talking – a conversation – than shouting (advertising).

Sponsorship – also a PR preserve – can be seen a form of ‘content funding’.

One has to look no further than Barack Obama’s recent election campaign to see how social media can be used for things that look a lot like PR. The NY times enthused:

“But by using interactive Web 2.0 tools, Mr. Obama’s campaign changed the way politicians organize supporters, advertise to voters, defend against attacks and communicate with constituents.”

Mind you PR have not done too badly of late. Some of the decline in media spend, away from TV, radio and print has in fact shifted to PR. And PR is often rightly seen as a cheaper way of getting your message out.

Why? As less and less advertising occupies column space in the press, hard pressed editors with less and less staff are looking for easy copy to fill their pages. PR releases have found some fertile soil.

Can PR rest on its laurels? This PR renaissance could be short lived. Without advertising, many magazine titles, papers and even TV channels will cease to exist (at least in their current form) and the available column inches with them.

There are skeptics. During my talk I was either told that the blogs and the like are not as popular in the UK as the US. And the Brits have an enduring love affair with newspapers was another retort.

But just today the Media Guardian reported:

Two of the biggest regional newspaper publishers, Trinity Mirror and Johnston Press, issued interim reports last week detailing how their advertising revenue was crumbling faster than they had expected. They each recorded falls in property advertising of almost 50%, against a general ad slump of over 20% and 15% respectively since the end of June. Trinity Mirror has closed 44 local titles because of the advertising downturn and the switch to the web, where profits are harder to come by.

Dear (of the NUJ) thinks further cuts will damage the industry, and expects more titles to close in the months ahead. “It’s a false economy to make such deep cuts. I think the cuts are already deep but I can see more on the horizon. The warning signs coming out of a number of companies about their ad revenue makes it clear to me that there will be further cuts. The problem a lot of companies are creating for themselves is that, post-recession, many of them will not be in a position to take advantage of the opportunities because they will have lost so many readers and advertisers because of cuts [to staff].”

Dear’s assessment tallies with that of Richards, who thinks the worst could be yet to come for consumer titles in general.”

The closing of local newspapers and many consumer titles will hit PR hard.

In the same Guardian Rupert Murdoch was quoted as saying that journalism will not die. But he added:

“Our real business isn’t printing on dead trees. It’s giving our readers great journalism and great judgment.”

“At a time when new printing technology was making other papers around the world more efficient, newspapers in Britain were forced to rely on a technology that had not changed much since Gutenberg’s Bible. The costs were destroying hundreds of jobs and crippling what is now the world’s most vibrant newspaper market…”

Echoing the impact of social technologies that Li & Bernoff describe so eloquently in their Groundswell book he says:

“Today editors are losing this power. The internet, for example, provides access to thousands of new sources that cover things an editor might ignore. And if you aren’t satisfied with that, you can start up your own blog and cover and comment on the news yourself.”

ZuluZulu thinks blogging is the PR tool par excellence.

It is an easy to use, powerful and flexible platform for companies with a complexity problem to conduct their brand PR (PR that shifts products) efforts. It allows a company to speak to customers in the middle of the funnel.

But so to does almost all corporate public relations (PR that builds reputations) benefit from using a blog. (Corporate public relations are almost always complex in nature.)

You can see the whole presentation I gave here:

I was recently asked to do a presentation on the impact of social media on marketing, advertising and public relations (PR).

The take way? Brand advertising is under severe pressure, and what was referred to as advertising in the past is becoming more and more content like.

Social media will become home to many erstwhile advertisers. It is the dawn of a new and different way of engaging your customers.

The slide show (below) is UK centric and still has room for improvement. Any feedback or criticism is welcome.

LinkedIn until very recently was a rather anodyne business networking site that had about only that, the ability to friend (by mutual permission) business contacts.

It had very little by way of – wait for it – user generated content (UGC) besides user’s online resumes.

Then, a bit more than a year ago they added the questions and answer section which really upped the value of LinkedIn. The answers on LinkedIn if often very good and detailed. (I wonder why LinkedIn do not open these to the web to be indexed by search engines? But I digress.

Still, LinkedIn was lacking a bit of exposure to activity that would matter to you.

You were often not aware when one of your contacts asked or answered a question, or updated their profile. In short it needed a Personal newsfeed like Facebook had, so you could share ‘in the wisdom of your crowd‘ as Jeff Jarvis put it.

But now it has a personal feed as well, complete with a status updating tool a la Facebook and Twitter.

And this morning I noticed a new feature. Applications!

You can add applications like Slideshare or Wordpress, that notifies your contacts via their feeds if you have updated your blog post or have uploaded a new slide show. Cool!

This video explains how it works with Wordpress.

And cool is not a word I would have associated with LinkedIn before.

PS: The app platform is a Google OpenSocial-based application platform called InApps.

This week, on LinkedIn, the business social networking site there was a flurry of user generated content (UGC) created around a question of one Tillmann Neben.

He asked?

By what will “Web 2.0″ be remembered 20 years from today? (now that it’s over…)

The first generation of internet apps (or Web 1.0) is basically remembered by its publisher to reader model, letting the webmaster (does this word still exist?) produce content, and the website visitor was reading that stuff. Also online shops were big and kind of the killing feature of the internet. I can still remember the buzz about “imagine, you can buy it anywhere, for the best price, over the web, it’s called web store”.

Web 2.0 brought the idea of user generated content. Well known sites here: youtube, digg, blogs, wikis, linkedin …
People came up with the content.

So what’s up next?

Many that answered spoke of Tim Berners Lee’s idea of a smarter semantic web.

I have to admit that it surprises me that many people still can’t see what’s becoming more and more obvious.

There is no difference in its essence between web 1.0 and web 2.0, only what was successful in 1.0 is even more so now as the web matures.

The killer apps of web 1.0 measured in both reach (how many people used them) and frequency (how often they were used) was at their core social as well.

• It was email (user generated content);
• Instant messaging (the same);
• People selling stuff to each other (Ebay)
• And search.

Oh I hear you say, search is surely not UGC or social?

Oh yes it is.

In 1994 Jerry Yang launched Jerry’s guide to the World Wide Web, a human made directory of the few websites out there (there was only about 100,000 websites at the time).

This guide became Yahoo! but the directory itself failed. It could not keep up and keep track of all the websites. By the time Google launched in 1998 there were close on 10 million websites already, the vast majority of them amateur sites or pages on Geocities, Tripod etc. Today there is one website for every 30 people on the planet.

Without a search engine that delivered relevant results this medium would have looked a lot like other forms of media, and would have discouraged ordinary people and favoured companies with deep pockets.

But Google introduced PageRank, a social technology if ever there was one.

Google explains it simply:

‘PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves “important” weigh more heavily and help to make other pages “important”.’

The result of this is profound. It has made the web a meritocracy.

This meritocratic system is the foundation of social media. Anybody can create a web page and can link (vote) to what they like.

It fundamentally changed the way we found stuff on the web. It ensured that the most compelling, most useful web content always floated to the top of search rankings.

It’s great for ambitious creative and skillful individuals with something to do or to say. You will be found even if you have no brand or big marketing budget. Provided you are good.

In short the web – at its core – has always been about people. Who would have thought that the convergence of the huge telecoms, media and computing industries will have people at its heart?

This people focus of the web is what Forrester Research has called ‘the groundswell’ – a set of media technologies that enable people to get things from each other that they used to get from big institutions.

In Web 2.0 this social character of the web has been even more profound and obvious than earlier, and it will be even more so in Web 3.0.

Yes there might be semantic technologies transforming the web even further and making it smarter, but web 3.0’s advances will still revolve – at it’s essence – around empowering people.

Just last week I wrote about Zopa, the social lending bank. Well it turns out, its US branch is shutting it’s doors.

Does this mean social lending – where people borrow money from others who are prepared to lend it – is failing? Turns out no.

The Zopa blog has this to say:

“You probably know that Zopa’s US operation has a very different model to that in the UK and Italy in that it works in partnership with financial institutions (the credit unions) rather than being a pure peer to peer marketplace as it is here and in Italy.
So while our model is doing very well in current market conditions, the US has been adversely affected in a way that just couldn’t have been predicted when we launched int he US and is no way the fault of our partners. For us, a real shame is that we weren’t able to launch the original model over there for regulatory reasons.

So, sadly, our US colleagues have decided to withdraw from the US marketplace. This decision will have no impact on Zopa’s other activities in the UK, Italy and Asia.”

It’s rather ironic that the US is in such dire trouble now because of a reckless lack of proper financial regulation. But that at the same time Zopa is not allowed to operate as a social person to person lender, due to US regulations. Odd that.

Zopa is doing very well in the UK.

Zopa’s UK operation has experienced significant volume increases in 2008 with huge growth in new members and increasing lender returns, while continuing to maintain excellent credit quality – currently less than 0.5% of loans are affected by any kind of late payment issue, with actual losses below 0.04%.
Zopa Italy has also achieved the highest growth of any European peer-to-peer operation since its launch in January, and has recently launched the first secondary market for any peer-to-peer operation.

Demos the influential left think tank has just published a report titled Video Republic. And it makes for interesting reading. In it they use Nerimon, an 18 year old YouTube user with subcribers totaling 30,000 as an example.

Generally positively deposed to user generated video and sites like YouTube, the report includes a quote by Jeff Jarvis, also one of ZuluZulu’s favourite media commentators.

“The revolution won’t be televised, it will be YouTube’ed”

They’re sounding a bit like Forrester Research with their Groundswell book does Demos. Forrester argues that social media is a trend, a groundswell where people turn to each other for things that where previously provided by corporates.

Demos argues that the Video Republic also promises a redistribution of power and has the possibility for a new kind of democracy.

Cecilia Hanon a researcher and lead author of the report made an telling observation in the UK Guardian with regards to the denizens of the Video Republic:

“Youngsters are working out their relationship to the outside world and forging an identity.”

This is of course not limited to YouTube. Sites like MySpace makes showing off and forging an identity easy with functionality that allows complete customisation of your page, blogging, video and audio streaming.

Ever since the start of the credit crunch I was wondering how Zopa, the social lending service that connects lenders and borrowers are doing.

Apparently they are doing well.

Giles Andrews, managing director of Zopa, told the FT recently in an article Innovative lending increases, that he has seen activity increase by 100 per cent month for month on last year.

The company has lent £26m since its inception in March 2005 to individuals borrowing an average £5,000 for personal purchases or debt consolidation.

“When we launched Zopa, we were seen as the wild child of loan finance,” Andrews said.

“Suddenly, we are the safe and sensible alternative to something that is broken. No-one could have predicted that, even 12 months ago. Unlike the banks, who depend on the wholesale money markets, we only loan what we have on deposit.”

And due to the tightness in the credit market those willing to lenders are achieving more than 10% in interest.

And Zopa have introduced some new functionality and ways to get a loan. One of them is called listings. (See picture).

They describe the listings thus:

In a nutshell, they work just like an online auction, except that the ‘price’ comes down instead of going up.

Once a listing becomes 100% funded, you’ll see that the overall interest rate will begin to fall as lenders compete with each other to be included in the loan.

Don’t worry if it doesn’t look like much is happening on a listing. The real action usually happens just before the listing ends.

Once a listing has finished, the borrower has up to 48 hours to decide if they want the loan at the final interest rate. There is no obligation to take the loan.

Also interesting to note is that some customers looking for a loan mention their Ebay score as a measure of their trustworthiness.

I just received this email.

To coincide with asking radio stations to think about playing Reckoner we are breaking up the tune into pieces for you to remix. After the insane response we got from the Nude remix stems and the site that was dedicated to your remixes…

Unique visitors: 6,193,776, Page Views: 29,090,134, Hits: 58,340,512, Bandwidth: 10.666 Terabytes, Number of mixes: 2,252, Number of votes: 461,090, Number of track listens: 1,745,304

…we thought it only fair to do the same with a tune that at least is in 4/4. You can get the stems (the different instruments/elements) from here

Sample, cut, take the sounds, whatever. Play it in a club. Or your room. Then if you want you can upload your finished mixes to http://www.radioheadremix.com and be judged by everyone else. You can create a widget allowing votes from your own site, Facebook or MySpace to be sent through too. To start things off we asked James Holden and Diplo to do their versions.

Oh, and by the way, if you weren’t lucky enough to get your hands on one of our recycled plastic bottle shirts at a show this summer, you’ll be glad to hear we’ve made some more and they are available at the w.a.s.t.e. shop here

All at w.a.s.t.e x

Radiohead is surely creating a, wait for it – ‘buzz’ by asking their fans to download and remix their songs. Not only are they releasing song elements for easy remixing, they have a platform to where it can be re-uploaded, voted on and even widgets for distribution for to other sites. Talk about a 360 social media campaign ;) !!

They certainly are ‘energizing’ their ‘customers’. Energising your customers to promote your brand is after all one of the most difficult but effective social marketing technique.

Reckon they went to Forresters for some Groundswell consulting?

Nope not really. I think they just get it. Sometimes being nice, savvy, creative and sharing really pays.

One complaint though, they don’t say in their email that you have to purchase the stems for 79p. Small beef though.

The best remix I have listened to so far has to be the Sebastian Project Remix. See Widget below.

PS: Radiohead is the bestest band ever, even if you might think they’re too serious. Quite frankly there’s a lot to be serious about.

PPS: I wish Bok van Blerk and Jacob Zuma would release the stems of Umshini wam and De la Rey.

Ads ain’t working – Britain is better off with Google

A few casual searches of well know business consultancies and business magazines websites and something becomes apparent. Companies really are clamouring for any credible information and analysis. They want to know what to make of the so-called “social media” phenomena.

Hang on.

What does businesses want from social media anyway?

Social, socialist, social club…

When I used to work at Lycos Europe circa 2001 – who had some of Europe’s largest online communities like Love@Lycos and Lycos (Jubii) Chat – the marketing department ran some focus groups with our young users.

The company was looking to rebrand and wanted to move away from being perceived as just a provider of Internet Search.

Lycos was obviously a community website, and was toying with using the word ‘community‘ as part of a strap line. We therefore wanted to know what its users think of the word ‘community’.
And word came form these focus groups that the term ‘community’ sounded just way to… communal. To our surprise community was actually a word with many negative associations.

And the words ‘community’ and ‘communal’ not only sounded like the word ‘communist’ (heaven forbid) it made people think of hairy bleeding heart hippies (unfashionable). In short it did not sit next to cool anymore.

In that context I wonder what our focus group would have said if we had put to them the word ‘social’?

Until not so very long ago social and community was not terms you’d imagine large corporate companies try and understand in respect of digital business.

Not anymore. Business is now full of socialists. Or rather people interested in social media. In the space of a few years the words ’social’ or ‘community’ seems to have been rehabilitated.

Today big companies’ interest in social media ranges from the casual dipping of toes into social seas to more ambitious missions: The hope that they might just serendipitously discover & conquer a bright new world.

To be more specific. Companies are looking at social media because:

• They have an urge to monitor ‘the conversation’ about their brand;
• They are trying to shape that conversation;
• While a few of the more ambitious companies are seeking to leverage social media to compliment their business.

So who are the socialists?

Mostly – yes even in the third case above – social media is seen as the preserve of companies’ marketing or public relations departments.

This is because to most companies social media is either a threat to a brand image, a research tool or it’s a massive – if unpredictable – low cost marketing opportunity.

And actually, if you are a marketeer, the preeminence of social media could not have come a moment to soon. Because marketing was not working.

Part 2 (When the web turned marketing on its head)