Social Media: What the experts had to say
The social networking value of MySpace, LinkedIn, YouTube, etc. and the influence these “experiences” have on communication are fairly straight forward … or are they?
In November, IABC Wellington hosted a half-day session with leading international and New Zealand experts on the hot topic of web-based social media. This was the first such seminar in New Zealand on communicating through Social Media.
Social media is effectively participatory online media where news, photos, videos, and podcasts are used to communicate. Social Media is effectively viewed as the democratisation of information, transforming people from content readers into content publishers. It is the shift from a broadcast mechanism to a many-to-many model, rooted in conversations between authors, people, and peers.
Todd Hattori, a US-based communications expert and world Chair of IABC. Todd talked about the use of social media to engage citizens and employees – including how to navigate the ethics and issues that social media networks create in communications.
Currently communication manager for the Washington Department of Information Services, Todd manages the employee relations, customer relations and web communication strategies to promote technology solutions to state and local government agencies, tribal and nonprofit organisations in his state.
Alex Manchester, from Melcrum, an internal communications company based in Sydney, shared new Melcrum research into what larger organisations are doing in the social media space.
Other presenters included Colin Jackson, an independent technology consultant, writer and blogger based in Wellington, who contributes to the Nine to Noon programme. He has over 20 years’ private and public sector experience as a technologist, including IT policy, the Internet, IT strategy and IT security.
Colin talked about the New Zealand landscape and the issues that local communicators need to take into account when utilizing social media.
Some of the key takeouts from the day were:
- Social Media or Social Networking is fundamentally different from traditional media such as newspapers, television, books, and radio because it is not finite: there is no set number of pages or hours and the audience can participate in social media by adding comments or even editing the stories themselves.
- Social media is a big deal. More than 110 million blogs are being tracked by Technorati, a specialist blog search engine, up from 63 million at the beginning of the year; An estimated 100 million videos a day being watched on video sharing website, YouTube; More than 200 million profiles created by users on social network MySpace3; more than 200,000 people a day are joining Facebook.
- Social media is a low-cost and often potent communications tool but organisations have to be prepared for the fact that it is owned by its audience. It is about participation, openness, conversation and connection.
The event was made possible thanks to our event sponsor Melcrum, and our chapter principal sponsor Media Monitors.
Check out what Alex and Colin had to say about the workshop on their blogs:
- Alex Manchester’s blog: http://www.melcrumblog.com/
- Colin Jackson’s blog: http://it.gen.nz
- Todd Hattori’s blog: http://blogs.iabc.com/chair/
Some examples of social media applications are
- Wikis: Wikipedia
- Social networking: MySpace and Facebook
- Presence apps: Twitter and Pownce
- Video sharing: YouTube
- Virtual reality: Second Life
- News aggregation: Digg and Reddit
- Photo sharing: Flickr and Zooomr
- Livecasting: Justin.tv
- Social bookmarking: magnolia and StumbleUpon
- Social shopping: Amazon.com
Communicators in the public sector may be also interested in the State Services Commission’s Participation Project: www.e.govt.nz/policy/participation/
We could ask if members have blogs and promote them on the site?
NB: IABC Wellington is not endorsing any particular site or company. These are purely examples.