Building Bridges in Business - Social Media [24.01.2011]

Erste School of Banking and Finance

Group Lecture - Holding Series – 2011Building Bridges in Business


A billion target audiences of one: How social media challenges the corporate world

Ritchie Pettauer, Media Consultant

January, 24th 2011, Event Center, Room K4, Vienna


The core principles of social media

Marshall Mc Luhan:

„The medium is the message.“

and

„The medium is the massage.“

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− The message is not an objective set of meaningful codes.

− The way we understand/value/rate messages is closely connected to our relationship with the „source“.

− The more we trust in any given source, the more closely we listen to ist messages.

− This basic principle, deeply rooted in humankind‘s cultural history, is reflected throughout all kinds of mass-, individual- and social media.

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− „Individual“ and „mass communication“ once used to be two clearly separated fields, as the technologies which empowered and enabled mass communication (the printing press, radio and tv) where one-way streets.

− Digital media aka the internet introduced a completely new network topology: a one-way street has turned into an information highway.

− Consumers become „prosumers“, market communication turns into an extended dialogue.

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The Shannon-Weaver Model

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The Mesh Topology

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How it all began

− The „1st generation“ internet mainly relied on static pages (HTML-code). While the „trust factor“ established within the old media system did play an important role in the early days, the world‘s most succesful soon found out how to use the structure of the net itself to structure the immense amount of available pages.

− Google‘s Pagerank algorithm relies on the hyperlinking structure of the net to rank pages and create rankings of relevancy.

− Google‘s idea therefor also determined the visibility of information – in less than 10 years, an algorithm replaced gatekeeping and the traditional role media professionals as „selectors“ or „gatekeepers“.

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Facebook, Twitter and the Web 2.0

− Increasing bandwidth and new technologies enabled users to actively engange with web pages.

− There were plenty social media services before MySpace and Facebooks: „guest books“ on personal homepages, online discussion boards, IRC chat and newsgroups let the once-passive visitor voice his opionions publicly.

− Yet these services mostly attracted geeks, digital natives and professional media users. So Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and LinkedIn did not invent „social networking“, but they turned the paradigm of the active user into mainstream.

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What is the „Social Graph“?

− Google: „The more incoming links a webpage receives, the more relevant it is“ (to everyone)

− Facebook: „If you‘re friends are interested in a certain kind of information, you probably want to hear about that stuff, too.“

− Google: „If you don‘t find what you‘re looking for, you didn‘t enter the right keywords.“ (And if you don‘t know what you‘re looking for, we can‘t help you at all.)

− Facebook: „Information will find you!“

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Corporate Social Media Challenges

− Social media is fueled by dialogue between a large number of users. People have been talking to each other for quite a while, so what‘s the big deal?

1. The internet/social media fuels the formation of „tribes“ – groups of people defined by similar interests, independent of geographic factors.

2. A large part of these dialogues does happen in a new „demi-public“ space: Social media quite forcefully redefines our notion of „privacy“, as the internet tends to be a lot less forgetful than the human brain.

3. Human ressources become the main factor for digital success, as brands usually don‘t talk.

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− Social media optimiziation is an inhouse job, as is requires skillful experts in the field of – YOUR BUSINESS!

− Social media services are very easy to use – so it‘s not a technical challenge or a question of skills, but internal communication / knowledge managment.

− Social media cannot really be ignored: staying away from social media platforms will not make users stop about your company.

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Social Media

Thanks for your attention!

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Internet

Building Bridges in Business - Social Media [24.01.2011]