Media'ZBiz!

There is a great opportunity for businesses to use social media to enable conversations and to create communities that extend their capabilities and engage their constituents in richer ways that results in higher retention, lower risk, increased ROI, and faster operational capacity.

Businesses entering the social media space must first figure out where their audience is (isn’t it the beginning of any type of strategy?). Working with communities of any kind, whether it’s a forum, a fan page on Facebook, or a bunch of people on Twitter discussing a particular subject every week, takes care and time. It involves developing true relationships with the audience by helping community members with information they need or solving their problems. A lot more goes into developing the type of respect, authority, and relationships in communities that generate successful strategies and attained goals for companies.

Chris Pirillo, last November at LeWeb, gave us his ‘original’ thoughts about the essence of ‘community’.  Community …

…lives inside us. Where I go, community goes. We create it based on our preferences, like dislikes and the people we link up with.

…is becoming increasingly distributed, as we distribute our ideas and thoughts across social networks.

…requires tools that can’t be built (so don’t try), ie if its us, we can’t scale ourselves.

…is a commodity, but people aren’t. It’s easy to set up a website or blog, but the people and voices behind it are what makes it unique, special.

…cannot be controlled, but can be “guided”.

…is no longer defined by physical boundaries. You probably have more in common with a geek living on another continent than your next door neighbor.

…grows its own leaders. the best leaders come organically out of a community, and is not an appointed one. It’s crucial that communities grow it’s own leaders for credibility and respect reasons.

…is the antithesis of ego. Community is myself and everyone else, not just me or my Twitter stream.

… is everywhere, inside you. It’s what you share, your passions — and it’s this that will spell success.

If there is one company who recognizes the vital importance of communities is Coca-Cola, who has developed an Online Social Media Principles and has put its fans (consumers) at the heart of its (online) strategy. This presentation by Michael Donnelly, Group Director of Worldwide Interactive Marketing for Coca-Cola, is a great example of how companies should embrace social media and build social communities.

Since last quarter of  2009, we’ve seen companies like FourSquare and Gowalla – companies allowing customers to check into physical locations and earn badges or points, discounts and share/show nearby contacts where they are – gaining heavy traction (more than 1 million FourSquare checkin per week).

So why many thinks that 2010 will be dominated by one theme: location-based social networking companies.

Reasons to Leverage Location

1. Immediacy. Location inherently breeds immediacy and action.  If a consumer is at a location, close to a location, or close to a contact, they’re more likely to purchase (if they’re there), travel to purchase (if they’re close), or meet up to share (close to a contact).  Immediacy enables actionable behavior, and actionable behavior is valuable because it provides measureable results.
2. Measurable results. Using location and proximity to measure effects is easier than measuring what happens when eyeballs read a tweet.   Retailers can use the location-based technologies to further understand their consumers.  When consumers check into a location, data such as when consumers visit, how often they visit, and their behavior before and after they visit becomes valuable.  With added incentives from brick and mortar stores partnering with these technologies, it is valuable through the information they can receive.
3. Laser pointer theory. Think of the world as your company’s target – with no map, you’ll fire all over the globe and hit a fraction of your targets.  This happens in business too- intentional or unintentional displaced messaging is the result of mis-firing and ill-placement.  With location, companies can laser pinpoint and succeed.  Misguided marketing and advertising no longer need to be the standard.  Marketing and advertising are sometimes described as an art.  In 2010, they become a science.

(source: Social Media 2010: The Year of Location)

And I think there’s a further two potentials likely to emerge. The first is for a wikifixing of venues and locations.

says David Cushman in his recent post.

The second is an extraordinary potential to redraw the WHOLE map niche by niche (by each niche and for each niche) wresting control from the centre to the edge. It’s our world, we should map it.

So how Foursquare can help consumers and businesses (by @christuff):

Social Media and Web 2.0 are altering the entire media landscape, placing the power of influence in the hands of the ‘crowd’, a crowd made of regular people with opinions, expertise and the passion of sharing those opinions with friends, colleagues and people.

Brian Solis believes that communications technology is going to fundamentally change how we communicate with each other, with family, friends, and business associates. Although people have not yet begun to see the true ramifications of actually what they’re doing with each update, which is to change how we share information and how people are getting information, and in turn, re-sharing it.

In this video interview, Brian Solis explains the deeper significance of the connections we make through social media.

Public Relations as we know it is quickly changing.

Public Relations was once an exclusive club. PR people occupied their time by writing press releases targeted exclusively to reporters and editors…

PR people are used to thinking about consumers as an audience. Prior to 1995, outside of paying lots of money for advertising or working with the media, there just weren’t any significant options for a company to tell its story to the world!

Consumers are NO longer passive but active participants via their conversations on social networks, forums and blogs.

The Web has changed everything. And the Social Web is empowering a new class of authoritative voices that we cannot ignore. Monologue has changed to dialogue, bringing a new era of Public Relations. It’s no longer about traditional media and analysts. PR must now also focus on the very people it wants to reach.

The people formerly known as the audience wish to inform media people and brands of their existence.

The time has come now for PR 2.0.

Traditional PR cannot any longer buy influence, same as the movement from traditional advertising. A business report published in 2007 by IBM cited the impact of changing patterns in consumption and consumer influence on content as major issues for the advertising industry. In its opening paragraph it states:

The next five years will hold more changes for the advertising industry than the previous 50 did. Increasingly, empowered consumers, more self-reliant advertisers and ever-evolving technologies are redefining how advertising is sold, created, consumed and tracked… Traditional advertising players – broadcasters, distributors and advertising agencies – may get squeezed unless they can successfully implement consumer, business model and business design innovation.

The internet has made public relations PUBLIC again, after years of almost exclusive focus on media. Blogs, online news releases, social networks and other form of web content let now organizations communicate, exchange, converse and engage directly with consumers (buyers).

Social Media is transforming the business, ROI and the role of public relations.

Some PR 2.0 takeaways:

1. Be active on social media (you have no longer the choice)
2. Switch to online ‘multimedia’ news content
3. Learn PR-SEO = how to optimize your news content for search
4. Share your content onto social networks and social news sites
5. Use Twitter to gain traffic nd for media relations
6. The social media press release, if done right, is your best tool:
7. -  Provide all the fact checking and research the reporters need
8. – Learn to use del.icio.us (or other social bookmarking) to make fact pages for a press release
9. -  Offer the quotes and access for interviews
10. - Upgrade your newsroom to a social media newsroom (such as ours @ 90:10 Group)