The compass (navigation series, post #3)

New publics are populating new continents of influence on the Internet. On the left is a nice map of this world created by xkcd’s Randall Munroe in spring 2007. It is already outdated, though. These continents are changing so rapidly that they are pushing communicators into a new Age of Discovery. E.g. Facebook would have to be much larger, new social networks based on short messages such as Twitter or social aggregators such as FriendFeed would have to be put on the map. Navigating through this emerging world, I thought it would help to have a compass. I tried to create something simple and came up with four guiding principles for discoverers in this world of change: Map it out! Explore! Respect natives! Find India!

Map it out!

While most companies know that people are talking about them on the Internet, many don’t take the effort to listen in systematically. What is the volume, what are the issues and who are the influencers? These are the questions calling for an answer, in particular in a space that is growing and changing so fast. Yesterday, our stakeholders might have met on messaging boards, today they might meet on blogs, Facebook, Twitter or FriendFeed, and tomorrow it might be some place else. As a result, we need to track what’s going on and find the places that are most relevant to us at specific points in time. It’s the counterpart to the resonance test we are used to in the world of traditional media. However, the new publics are moving faster, and they are creating new lands of influence all the time. We need to redraw the map as we go, like in the first Age of Discovery. My previous post on this blog was dedicated to the question how social media activities can be visualised. I will have to come back to this topic talking about the growing number of social media tracking services that can help you to navigate through communities online.

Respect natives!

Other than in the first Age of Discovery, there is no way natives will surrender to colonists. Trying to exploit them for your own purpose can backfire tremendously. Just to mention one example: when Wal-Mart faked grassroots movement while they just rolled out their own astroturf, they were seriously punished with an uproar in the blogosphere, followed by negative stories in major media. Members of new publics value transparency and they build trust via relationships they develop online while discovering information, building knowledge and sharing insights and emotions with their peers. They don’t like undermining their communities of trust.

Gartner has suggested that we need a new category beyond demographics to understand the behaviour of online personas and find the right way to interact with them. They call them “Generation V”, the virtual generation. I tend to agree. By virtue of the Internet, the bonds between online personas can reach across social and geographical demographics. For example, a 2006 PEW report on generations online shows: while teens and generation Y are still leading the early adoption of social technologies, generation X and boomers are increasingly closing the gap. There is no clear cut between these age groups, just tendencies. As the populations of many important countries are aging, we will see more surprising changes in this field. So, we shouldn’t assume that there are only young male geeks populating new publics. The best way to find out about our online communities is to listen and relate to them via their relationships online, not via pre-defined marketing clusters.

Respecting natives also means respecting their privacy. In fact, I believe that privacy issues will quickly become one of the most important questions for corporate communications and marketing. While people are prepared to show more of themselves online than ever before, this doesn’t mean that they concede any kind of surveillance. They might have a wider definition of privacy, but one thing certainly hasn’t changed: they want their personal information only being used in a manner they agree with. An increasing number of power users is currently trying to answer the question how to make that sure. They are either trying to solve the problem with technical precautions on how to safeguard your privacy online, or they are trying the legal route developing frameworks like a privacy manifesto or even a bill of rights for the open social web.

Explore!

What would an Age of Discovery be without exploration? However, exploration and experimentation are not exactly the focus of traditional corporate communications. Studying corporate communications plans, you are more likely to read terms like “safeguarding” or “protecting” reputation against risks – which are indeed important tasks for communicators. We just need to understand that it is riskier to ignore or avoid new publics rather than listening to and interacting with them. Some companies such as Dell learned that the hard way. The challenge is that new publics are moving so fast, that it’s not prudent to place all your bets on one technology platform that is currently in fashion, simply because it might be a different one next year. And after all, it’s not the platform that is important, but the community we are trying to follow. In dealing with new publics we will benefit from a “beta” approach to communications. After mapping out what our communities are and what they are talking about, it makes sense to set up a variety of different communications channels to serve different purposes, to test them, tweak them and invest in the ones that work best. When new social media technologies emerge, don’t wait and let the opportunity pass by. If they are relevant to your community, give them a try. Start early and small, and tune them as you go. If it doesn’t work, pull the plug, if it works, provide more support. This kind of exploration through participation will keep your risks low, both in terms of investment and reputation.

One area of social media technologies that I believe deserves special attention is video. According to Universal McCann’s Social Media Tracker, video is the quickest growing social media platform. We have always known that pictures are more compelling than words, but they have never been easier to produce than today. You basically don’t need more than a mobile phone. People don’t care that much, if your production is not that polished, they care about the quality of content. E.g., a quick video statement of an executive spoken into the mobile phone while on the way to the office in his limo might have a much larger impact than a full blown scripted business tv production, simply because it’s more authentic, and low cost to boot! There are also many new video technologies such as Qik, Seesmic or Utterz offering new angles for video communications worth considering.

Find India!

Exploration is not an end itself, though, at least not in corporate communications. While I would encourage everyone to discover the world of new publics, that shouldn’t happen in a random fashion. E.g., creating a blog with no better reason than other companies having one already is not good enough. Think of Columbus as a role model here. It’s all about finding the sea passage to India, in other words: keep your business goals in mind! Otherwise you might get sidetracked too much. The tool you are evaluating should at least hold the promise that it will be a likely way to engage your stakeholders based on the analysis following your mapping exercises.

So, this is my little compass for the emerging world of new publics. What do you think? Will it work? What else would you put on it?

Georg Kolb

 

A new Age of Discovery (navigation series, post #2)

Today’s new publics create a whole new world of influence pushing corporate communicators into a new Age of Discovery where our traditional instruments of navigation are of limited value. Let’s see why.

Traditionally, corporate communications worked mostly from the inside out. We started with introspection: we thought hard about our brand, what it stood for, what its promises were, and which messages we wanted to convey. Then we pushed the message out to the media, since the media was the best amplifier we could use to reach our target audiences. Working with journalists we tested our message, they challenged us on the news value or credibility of our pitch. But if it resonated with them, we got our message out to our audiences who read, viewed or listened to the media we worked with. Accordingly, measurement was focused on “coverage” reports analysing reach, quantity and message alignment.

While this approach still is important, it just doesn’t work as well with today’s new publics, since mainstream media has lost its monopoly on public information. The new publics are empowered to use many other sources. If our story smells like spin or marketing talk, or if it doesn’t fit exactly what they want, they don’t have to just sit there, listen and be our “target audience”. They have options. They can raise their own voice and connect with others who share their specific interest and who are credible to them, people like themselves.

As a result, the experience of our brand will be less shaped by “key messages” we put in front of anonymous “eye balls”, but by many little conversations between people who share an interest in something that relates to our brand. For instance, they could get involved with a Facebook group of disgruntled employees who give insider reasons for glitches in our product quality. They could read a profile of our brand on Wikipedia that might not be “on message” because we couldn’t control it. They might have an exchange with a blogger who wrote about a bad customer service experience. They might find videos on YouTube showing one of our executives talking off guard while being recorded by a mobile phone. There might be kids on MySpace who laugh about our brand being so totally not cool while we think it’s youthful and fresh. Or there might even be avatars in a virtual world like Second Life redesigning virtual copies of our products for their own purpose. Of course, we might also find that all these people are raving about our brand, because their experiences are consistently thrilling at all touch points. We would want to know that too, wouldn’t we? Whatever they are saying or doing, they are influencing the reputation of our brand. We can’t afford to not know what’s going on there. We need to switch on the light in this black box of new influence, in particular if the brand experiences expressed by people there are not aligned with the “official” messaging.

The fact that the new publics can tap into many sources of information on our brand beyond mainstream media creates a huge pressure for authenticity. If there is a gap between the company speak and the way people experience the brand, they will talk about it and the brand reputation will suffer. In other words, the consistency has to come from the consistency of the brand experience, consistency of our messaging is not enough.

In summary, there is a world of influence emerging at a rapid pace that presents us with a new Age of Discovery where explorers are needed to map it all out. Nobody can have all the answers, since this world is evolving, but those who command map and compass will certainly be better off than those who don’t. By the way, the map I used as background of the chart on the left was created one year ago by the geekily funny physicist and cartoonist Randall Munroe. It is pretty outdated already, though. E.g. it doesn’t incorporate new social networks in microformats like Twitter or new social aggregators like FriendFeed. And today Facebook would have to take a much bigger share on this map. So, how would a compass look like that could help us navigate through this world populated by the new publics? I will try to provide a first answer to this question in my next post.

Georg Kolb

 

Today’s new publics (navigation series, post #1)

Welcome to my Corporate Communications Compass (CCC)!

This first post is not only to inaugurate CCC but also the first article in a little series on how to navigate today’s marketing milieu. The series is mainly based on a presentation I held at Bulldog Reporter’s Media Relations Summit 2008 in San Francisco. Following the presentation I got a lot of great feedback and requests to share more of my approach and continue the discussion. So, here you go!

Today’s marketing and communications environment can look confusing. While the traditional approach with mainstream media is still dominating the daily routines of most marketers and communicators, a myriad of new online media is emerging: blogs, RSS, wikis, social networks, social bookmarking, sharing and rating sites, virtual worlds, you name it! How can we detect and leverage new opportunities for our business, but also avoid wasting resources on dead ends? How can we navigate through this rapidly evolving space?

I tried a couple of navigation systems to see what they can do for our situation.

The first one is a subway map.

It was created by an organization called the Future Exploration Network and is meant to illustrate how trends blend and impact each other. Each subway line represents a major force of change in our lives: yellow is society, purple is politics, pink is demographics, green is economy and red is the technology line. The points where they cross are major interchanges. While I don’t necessarily agree with all the stops they put on these lines, I think they have a strong point here, which is: today’s marketing environment is more connected than ever. Some people think that it is mostly technology that changes communications or even our lives. I disagree. I believe we need to understand all the forces in this milieu, so as to understand the change and make our work successful. Don’t be afraid, I won’t even try to talk through ALL of this now. But what I will do is to address those forces that make the most difference to us. How does this kind of milieu impact what we as communicators should worry about most? How does it affect the people we want to communicate with?

Let’s start with the societal perspective. We are living more individualized lives that are not as regulated by public institutions as they were by previous generations. As a result, people are building trust in new ways. They have less trust in established institutions like governments or brands. Even personal advisers like doctors or lawyers are less trusted. Instead they build increasingly trust with people who share an interest with them: their peers. In summary, we have more confidence in each other than in institutions. Most of us will be able to confirm this anecdotally, but there are also studies from Forrester Research, Yankelovich Partners or Edelman’s annual trust survey that prove this is happening. Let’s look at an example. While our grandparents would have typically followed the advice of their doctor without asking any questions, we not only call for a second opinion, but we also seek someone else who suffers from that same disease before we undergo that surgery.

Aiding this social dynamic are new technologies that actually empower us to connect with our peers in peer-to-peer (p2p) networks. We can use search engines to locate someone else with that same rare disease who lives on the other side of the planet. The same dynamic is true for all aspects of our lives, as well as the products we use. Any group of people who share an interest in what a company does or stands for can easily connect through the internet and share their views by electronic word of mouth. They can do this on a growing number of new media platforms like blogs, wikis, social networks or even in a virtual world like Second Life. These communities of interest can include customers, employees, media, analysts, partners or members of any other traditional audience, each of them a potential source of trust or distrust between the other.

In economic terms, networks of individualized peers create niche markets. However special someone’s interest might be, the probability that this person will find peers who share this interest was never higher than today. And commmunities of interest create demand. Let’s again look at an example. My 11-year-old son is a penguin enthusiast with a lot of specific questions. You wouldn’t believe how quickly he found online buddies who could help with things like: Where is the best zoo for penguins? Where is a toy store carrying cool plush penguins? What are the best penguin movies? Where can you watch, rent or buy them? Where is the best place to meet these guys in their natural environment? Is there a travel agency that will take you there? And, of course, how do you pitch a penguin budget to your dad? (By the way, there is a virtual world called “Club Penguin” where children play games and interact with penguin avatars. Last year, Club Penguin was acquired by Disney for $ 700 m US-Dollars.) In the grand scheme of things, the penguin “industry” might still be a niche market, but you can see how market fragments can shape up today fueled by social networks of peers.

Based on this triple dynamic in society, technology and economy, I believe it’s fair to say that we have to deal with new publics. What makes them new? Since this space is evolving rapidly, any definition claiming to be exhaustive will fail, but here are a couple of characteristics. Firstly, new publics are constituted by people who couldn’t connect as an interest group before, because they were limited by all sorts of borders: geographical, cultural, hierarchical, etc. Think of the examples with the disease and the penguins above. It also makes them new that they are or can be interactive. Rather than one talking to many, as in traditional media, everyone can talk to everyone else. In other words, traditional publics favor large audiences of listeners whereas the new publics facilitate smaller communities of networkers. And it is new that an interest group can shape up ad hoc in response to an event. For instance, an audience that doesn’t like what they see on stage, can get organized and react badly, as we have seen when Business Week’s Sarah Lacy interviewed Mark Zuckerberg. As I am writing this, I realize, that the definition of new publics warrants further exploration. In the meantime, what do you think of the idea and what other characteristics would you add?

Georg Kolb