Ogilvy’s Digital Influence team held another Open Room, titled “Journalism’s from Mars, Social Media’s from Venus” and after tonight, I think it’s clear that the problem they have is the problem everyone (businesses, schools, non-profits, the music industry, etc) is having. They were sitting on a model that was working for the last 50 or so years, have been blind-sided by the sudden tidal wave of social media and not only are they not scrambling to catch up, but they’re actually holding on to the old world for all that it’s worth.
As with panels, I was fully prepared for some of the audience to be un-accepting of some young (and even worse, enemployed) punk telling them what the world is like. And it was no different this time, which is fine with me, it makes life exciting! How awfully boring would it be if everyone just nodded their heads and agreed.
I think it was a really interesting discussion. There was as much uncommon ground as there was common, and it’s painfully obvious both sides have to learn from each other. Monetisation is not a dirty word, but neither is trusting a fellow blogger. I think we have to move away from our normal worldviews that content creating is done for passion (for bloggers) or that the man on the street (or the Tweeter on Tweetdeck) is less reliable and/or credible than the journalist.
Thinking about “journalism” from the point of breaking news and real good opinion pieces is one thing. But I think we need to think about where the money comes from. Thinking about subscription models and what not is fine (even though they won’t work), but as Thomas Crampton brought up, mainstream media has enjoyed the monopoly on reaching people and advertising for a very long time, and companies are just beginning to realise that they can bypass the “middleman” entirely, thus crippling the revenue model. Will it provide them the reach? Probably not. Will it provide them the influence? Barack Obama’s YouTube channel suggests yes (yes yes I know it worked in tandem with traditional media).
As a closing comment: someone said that old habits die hard, referring to the staying power of traditional media and being used to opening that Sunday edition of the paper over a slow and leisurely breakfast. Here’s a thought: my “old” habits from the old world started changing by the time I was thirteen, and many were gone by the time I was seventeen. Radio, once a nightly listen for the dedication show, is an afterthought, so are magazines. TV serves my purposes when I want it to, newspapers have flown out of the window, music exists in the form of mp3s, not cds. The only “old world” habit I maintain is the reading of books.
My point is this: as much as old habits die hard, to the new generation, new habits form at an alarming speed that the world has never seen before. When, if ever, has a generation been influenced so quickly and successively like from the transition to Friendster to Facebook? That’s not just the speed of platform change, but the speed of diffusion from half a world away. When and how fast did we take up texting to replace calling? The speed of change is crazy. Geographical boundaries barely exist anymore. And I would ask people who believe in the “old habits” to take a look at their children, their nephews, their nieces or anyone under 20 and tell me how many of their “old habits” they see replicated in them, and ask how different the world will be in five or ten years, and if now’s the time to think about that change, or cling on to “old habits”.
Earlier in the year I reviewed Tactical Transparency and said that it’s a good book for an introduction to the social media scene. However, I now feel Personality Not Included is the book I would recommend as the intro book, simply because it explores more than social media, and is about really changing the mindset of organisations from within, which is what the vast majority of organisations these days need to do. Social media is merely a byproduct and tool to helps make achieve this change in mindset easier.
There are five main thrusts to the book:
Find (and use) your accidental spokespeople
Define your personality by being unique, authentic and talkable
Craft a backstory people will care about
Conquer internal fear about embracing this change
Finding and using personality moments
The first half of the book is about explaining why these are important and providing many case studies of real world examples, and the second half provides steps that can be taken to bring the aforementioned concepts to reality. Of course, the steps are general guidelines and must be tweaked to be made relevant to your organisation.
Many of these concepts and steps will sound simple and intuitive to those of us who have grown up in a world where mere transactions aren’t enough anymore, but is probably difficult for the Generation X or Baby Boomer boss at work to wrap their heads around. If so, buy this book and give it to him or her, and make it an office copy after that.
There’s a really good video introduction to Personality Not Included that I encourage you to check out at the Personality Not Included blog (sorry, I couldn’t find a way to embed it on the site!)
Firstly, let’s state the obvious that physical newspapers cannot be searched easily, as compared to bookmarking and saving a link online.
Next, even if there were links online to the news articles, it usually ends up in one of two ways:
1) The link expires when it is transferred to their archive section or some similar movement (Ever bookmarked a page to find it’s not there anymore? That’s what happens)
2) They try to make you register with them after the “free access” period has expired. Whether or not they try to charge is another issue, but registering for news which is essentially free, is ridiculous.
With such a poor value proposition (information can’t be found, or is hard to access), is it any wonder we’re turning more and more away from newspapers? Yes, there are some mainstream media news sources that are doing a good job online as well. That’s fine and good, but the industry as a whole doesn’t seem to be getting it’s act together.
Add in the Associated Press threat of legal action against bloggers who wrote about news and linked to them (which incidentally, actually helps the papers), and you just wonder if newspapers and mainstream media are enjoying themselves walking backwards instead of progressing
Yin and Dorothy take a break from this episode, but here to join us in their place is Brian! The regular cast of Yinqi and Krisandro are around as well.
The show notes
Total running time: 19:43
00:00 - Yin starts us off - introductions all round
00:14 - Brian aka @litford finally joins the team!
01:02 - Is Gen Y voyeuristic?
02:36 - When is it too much information that is being posted up on Facebook or anywhere on the Web?
03:59 - Kris suggests that “too much” lies in the “eye of the beholder”, aka the person viewing the content
04:47 - Daryl introduces the “Grandma test”
05:25 - Is it reaching the stage where everything you do is broadcast online?
06:04 - Kris hammers home the point that it’s really about the person who is reading it and their levels of acceptance. Of course he uses a porn star as an example.
07:26 - Brian is in favour of “what I do is my business”
08:30 - If employers feel strongly about employees’ conduct online, it should be made crystal clear upfront
09:57 - Daryl says 7 “likes” in 20 seconds and sounds a little bimbotic
10:27 - But maybe people do it for attention!
11:52 - Kris makes it a hattrick by bringing it back to filtering by the reader
13:00 - The availbility of platforms just allows us to tap into the desire to broadcast our lives that has been there all along
13:23 - Brian takes the opportunity to tell us he has about 800 friends on Facebook
13:38 - Brian then tells us about this comic he read while he was “working” earlier in the afternoon
13:52 - The “comic” blows all our minds. We’re now accepting submissions for a graphical depiction.
15:14 - Daryl blames prior drinks for incoherence
15:57 - Brian decides to add in some academic value by telling us the theory of the media spike
17:27 - Brian tries to direct the group back to voyeurism
18:22 - Yinqi tries to find the point of the night
19:03 - Not to be outdone during his first recording session, Brian provides the key takeaway
If you’d like us to talk about anything and hear Gen Y’s perspective, leave a comment and we’ll definitely record it if it’s within our collective sphere of knowledge.
If you’ve been following me on Twitter or Plurk, you may have gathered hints about a podcast coming your way.
Well, it’s here! It’s called Genny (pronounced Jenny - you have Krisandro to thank for the name) and the deal behind the podcast is that we decided to just get a handful of people from Generation Y in Singapore, and just really talk about what’s going on. Sometimes it’ll be about social media, sometimes it won’t be.
First, let me introduce the people in this podcast:
GennY Episode 1 Team
Krisandro, myself, Dorothy, Yin and Yinqi make up the people behind this episode, but it’s a revolving team and the voices will change from time to time, depending on who’s available to record the show. (Big thanks to Ingrid for putting together the graphic!)
As our first episode goes, this is pretty raw because we just sat in a room and talked into a laptop (Anyone wants to sponsor us proper podcast equipment?), but I hope you enjoy it anyway. It can only get better.
The show notes:
00:00 - Krisandro starts us off - introductions all round
00:53 - The topic: How is Gen Y different in the work force?
01:28 - Will Gen Y mindset change during the recession?
02:26 - Gen Y has no qualms with changing jobs, even in a recession
03:39 - Perhaps Gen Y feels there isn’t enough recognition at work
05:08 - Did the media influence Gen Y’s outlook on life?
07:56 - How is Gen Y different outside the workspace in peer-to-peer interactions?
09:57 - How does online interaction affect offline interaction?
10:51 - Krisandro claims he’s 19
11:01 - Are there different norms that apply online and offline?
11:58 - Maybe it’s easier for us to verify if people are weirdos online
15:10 - Blooper!
Please check out the podcast here and give us your feedback! If you’d like us to cover a certain topic, just drop a message in the comments. Thanks for your support!
I’ve been volunteering at my secondary school scout troop with a few of my friends since 2005 and among “management”, we’re the most junior, the rest being school teachers. The difficulty that plagued us forever was that we were very scattered. Some were in school (and within that group, different schools), some teachers, some working adults. As a result, with the exception of physical meetings, it was very hard for us to share information that required decisions to be made.
The one singular thing that got on my nerves the most, was how documents (and meeting minutes in particular) were continuously sent via email. Some people had multiple email addresses, when the documents were updated people frequently referred to different versions thus creating a lot of confusion.
Thus in April, 2008, our wiki was born, primarily to deal with the issues of documents. A file dump, if you will.
I had to sell the idea upwards, but luckily there was little to no resistance to it. The problem though, only one other person and myself were actually using it.
Fast forward to 2009 and now we have a full-blown “Project E” (that stands for electronic) team, with the mission to fully digitise everything within the unit where possible. It’s a great feeling to see the team (most of whom are 18 or 19) embracing the tools and really realising that it is a hugely beneficial alternative to anything we’ve used before.
So we’re having proper meetings now to work out the kinks. How should the pages be used? Are we going to develop a template for our “project” pages?
And the biggest question of all: How do we get everyone - not just the Project E team - to really use this as an organisational tool?
It’s interesting to see how the wiki has developed from a file dump to an actual tool. Just having one practical usage has led to further exploration and incremental usage.
I’m going to keep blogging about this story as it progresses. Right now we’re trying to get everyone from the Gen Y segment on it, next stop, the “older” segment (aka the teachers). I can’t wait to see if it will happen.
Twitter/Brand Monitoring
Jesse Stay has an exclusive interview with the woman behind @BritneySpears on Twitter over on Louis Gray’s blog, and I found this to be a very, very interesting read. When you think about Twitter, you think about people in social media or tech people or people who live their lives online. Yet @BritneySpears has found some footing with an audience of more than 10,000 (maybe it isn’t even her audience, maybe it’s a wider audience than her usual), and the results look to be, for the most part, positive.
It just makes you think, if a female pop star with a tarnished image in the last few years can get on something like Twitter and begin to make small steps to getting back on the right track, what can your company do with it?
if you have a “spying” culture you distrust your employees’ reading habits and how they spend their time. You will therefore distrust their ability to engage with customers on your behalf or you will put so many controls over it that it will sound 100% inauthentic. Think of people willing to speak in public in dicta rial countries - they have zero credibility, as most people assume that they are shills for the regime.
If your company is one of those that blocks Facebook, all it does is signal an extreme lack of trust in your employees. And most of Gen Y aren’t going to take it (Minus the bankers. They’ll do anything for money)
Generation Y/Millennials/Digital Natives
Read Write Web tells us that Millennials Will Route Around IT Departments - There are statistics in this research, but here’s the bottom line:
This report definitely makes it clear that IT departments can either choose to adopt some of these technologies, or they will risk that a large number of their young employees will simply go rogue.
I’ve had a little bit of experience with this in the past and I can say with some certainty that whatever organisations think they’re blocking, they’re not. Whether I want my email forward to Gmail and IT won’t do it for me, or running Firefox from my USB stick because I can’t download Firefox, there are ways to get it done. Blocking IM and/or Facebook? Pretty much useless with the 3G iPhone. (not that I have one).
Just let it go and find more meaningful work for the IT department to do (like improving web analytics, for one).
Blogging
Bryan Person of Social Media Breakfast asks whether blog sidebars are useful. I think they are and I feel I could definitely utilise mine more efficiently. How do you use yours? What are the must haves for your blog sidebar?
That’s it for this week, do share links with me on Delicious.com (I’m uniquefrequency) or just leave them in the comments below!
Social Media How To Be The Social Media Champion At Your Office by Jason Falls. Many of us are graduating this year if not next, it might be time to think seriously about bringing such a change to our offices.
Collaboration
And speaking of offices, EtherPad is a tool that allows you to collaborate on text documents in real time. I was pretty blown away by the screencast, you should give it a view. I’m looking forward to using this on future projects!
Recessionary Marketing Do Not Kill Off Marketing During A Recession is the call by Hutch Carpenter. Most of us in marketing (unlike the CEOs) know this, and I’ve read that there is statistical data to show that it’s a bad idea. Try Hutch’s little cartoon for a more intuitive feel.
Generation Y/Millennials/Digital Natives New Study Shows Time Spent Online Important for Teen Development - I’m a little out of the “teen” demographic, but I think this study hits the right notes and more importantly, should give employers an idea of what to expect when we hit the workforce. I haven’t had time to read the full white paper, but the two page executive summary is pretty exciting.
A weekend of travel means less blogging this week, but definitely not less reading!
Blogging
You want to show you know what you’re doing, even if the company you’re in follows prehistoric methods, so that the next person who hires you has a reference point. Joseph Jaffe tells you how in AdWeek - Save Your Career, Start A Blog
John Johansen had a great experience at Best Buy, which is the polar opposite of what some companies are doing in this recessionary period. (Examples to be posted, soon). He also mentions that because it was a special event there was extra help, free drinks etc, but many people also bought something. Do you think they included his blog post (or any other positive ones) while measuring the ROI of that event?
One of my previous bosses once said: You don’t need to spend $20k on market research to know what the youth are into. Just sit on the train from one end to the other end of the subway and you’ll see the iPods, Playstation Portables, Nintendo DSes and the like.
I’m reading a lot about how Gen Y’s expectations of work from the Baby Boomers (read: our bosses) are different. It doesn’t necessarily lead to conflict, but it can lead to misunderstandings.
But the best “focus group” or “market research” comes from these fresh grads who are seen surfing Amazon one day, coming in with a product bought off Amazon the next. All without watching a TV ad for it, or flipping a magazine to see an ad, but maybe got an e-mail from a friend (read: someone like themselves) with a link to check out this cool new product.
Since your company is probably thinking of cutting back advertising and/or marketing in these recessionary times anyway (bad move, by the way), why not ask him or her what led to that purchasing decision? When was the last time they even saw an ad on TV? They’re sitting in the office working at double the normal productivity and have time to spare anyway.
The even better way to do this, if you have kids, is to just watch your kids. If my folks were marketers (and they’re not), it would be folly for them to think I would ever see their company’s advertisement on TV or read about their company’s new product launch in a physical newspaper.
Years ago, during festive seasons (Chinese New Year, Christmas), families would gather for dinner and the TV would be showing some “special” programme, chock full of advertising. Growing up for me, that’s where the kid’s eyes were glued.
Now? My younger nephews and nieces are huddled around my laptop or around their gaming console. So why pay money for those advertisements that no one’s watching? Do you even know they’re not watching?
In my previous internships I’ve been lucky enough to have bosses who let me do what I want (within reason), and I like to think as much as I learned a lot from them, they’ve learned a bit about my generation and how to stay relevant as well.
