Welcome to the Fifth Estate: How to Create and Sustain a Winning Social Media Strategy

Introduction

by Adam Ostrow

By the end of 2009, fifty-eight percent of Americans were watching TV and using the Internet simultaneously. Among those that were doing so, the average consumer was spending 3 hours and 30 minutes each month engaged with both mediums at the same time.¹

While that’s one quantitative way to look at an obvious trend in shifting media consumption habits that many have observed anecdotally for some time, here’s another: At some point within the next decade, there will be between 15-50 billion devices on our planet that are in some way connected to the Internet.²

At the time of this writing, that trend is probably showing itself most visibly in the living room with smartphones and tablets, or at the local cafe or in the car with the increasingly distracted people in our lives firing away texts and e-mails instead of focusing on (gasp!) real world conversation.

But the trend is only at the beginning. The innovations we’ve seen in the last few years—from the rise of social media, to the increasing ubiquity of smartphones, to advances in wireless bandwidth—have set the stage for dramatic changes to take place in our culture, our media and the role of the corporation.

With everything from cars to kitchens about to get connected to the Internet, a new way of thinking is required.

The Like Economy

It took the Facebook Like button just 8 months to find itself embedded on more than 2 million websites and applications.³ While on one hand that helps solidify Facebook as the most dominant social network by a significant margin—and builds it a much bigger moat than leading networks before it—on the other it creates an important new reality for businesses.

There’s a battle for mindshare on Facebook, and much of it is now being fought on content and e-commerce sites, where Likes equate to links in user’s news feeds that create exposure for brands. Similarly, within the walls of Facebook, Likes equate to popularity for the pages of businesses large and small. Already, we’re seeing this data applied to what to-date has been the largest source of traffic for most businesses: search. In October, 2010, Facebook and Microsoft rolled out an integration of Likes within Bing’s search results that gives preference to links that have been Liked by your friends.

Likes are starting to show up in other areas too. A number of startups are allowing users to check in to television shows from their smartphones and tablets, and share their viewing experience with friends. One of those services —Clicker—scored a partnership with Facebook that allows them to make recommendations for what to watch, based both on your own viewing and Liking history, as well as data gleaned from your friend’s activities and conversations on the social network.

The growing ubiquity of location services like Foursquare (and Facebook, with its Places product) has similar implications to the Like button. As of this writing, Foursquare is said to be working on a recommendation engine that suggests venues based on your prior check-ins and places that your friends like.

Every Company Needs a Content Strategy

The new realities of the Like economy have only further increased the pressure on corporations to become content producers and gain mindshare within the social media ecosystem. While several years ago this meant blogs – or at least gaining influence with bloggers – today it means reaching consumers in their medium of choice (and choices are abound) with compelling content of your own.

That’s why you see not just media companies like The Wall Street Journal and MTV embracing a service like Foursquare, but also retail brands like Gap and Radio Shack. It is why you see the already clichéd Old Spice campaign being emulated (albeit with considerably less success) by companies like Cisco. And it’s why you see TV networks experimenting with entertainment check-in services and offering prizes for watching content and broadcasting about it, even though business models are still nascent to non-existent in the space.

That said, the proliferation of media and entertainment options has created a whole new set of challenges. Organizations need to be structured such that it doesn’t take seven levels of approvals to post a tweet (a reality at a multi-billion dollar corporation I won’t name here). Social media policies need to be crafted to keep employees nimble yet on message, but still not bigger than the brand they represent. And influencer needs to be redefined, looking within each medium—and within individual segments of that medium—to identify the most important people to reach.

Advertising’s Evolving Role

Some might think that advertising has no place in this environment, with everything from the 30 second TV spot to the banner ad being displaced by so-called earned media. In reality, the opposite is true. Because of the wealth of data and personalization options being developed, along with increased connectivity and a digital identity that follows us across platforms and devices, unprecedented opportunities for precision messaging will emerge for marketers.

Early examples are abound. Twitter’s business model went from punchline to promising in a matter of months, with promoted tweets showing us what a cost per engagement (a retweet, a reply, or a click) model of advertising might look like. Facebook has demonstrated the power of friends’ suggestions, with ads accompanied by likes, as well as moved into payments and the lucrative world of virtual goods that many brands are now clamoring to get inside of. On the mobile front, GPS-equipped smartphones are enabling unprecedented location targeting options in advertising, helping fuel one of the quickest creations of wealth in history with the ascent of Groupon.

It goes much further, however. With TV and radio (through advances in wireless technology) becoming Internet connected, visual and audio advertising will move from a purely push model to both push and pull. For example, that means ads on television that behave more like ads on the web, with interactivity that lets you download content, make a purchase or share something with a friend. On radio, it means being able to sync your music or talk shows from your car to your mobile to your desktop, with advertising made much more precise based on your location and listening habits.

The Fifth Estate

What’s implied in all of this is that in the years to come, the multitude of choices for content and entertainment consumption will only continue to increase. Much like the advent of blogs and social media that turned the print publishing world upside down in the first decade of this century, Internet connected television and radio will provide consumers with virtually unlimited options in the second and create hundreds if not thousands of new media outlets.

What’s so interesting about this shift is that much of the groundwork has already been laid and much of what’s to come is simply an extension of what’s already been built. As consumers, we already have social profiles – in the next few years, they will simply become intertwined in more places, providing more intelligence to the devices that get us through our daily lives. As businesses, many of us are already producing content —in the next few years, we’ll simply be producing more of it and providing our audiences with more ways to consume it. As non-profits and other cause-based organizations, technology has finally enabled the type of outreach we’ve long suspected is most impactful; local and in real-time.

The Fifth Estate presents a framework for all constituents attempting to navigate this world. Through research, case studies and a multitude of expert opinions, it presents a thoughtful look at the evolving media landscape, with lessons that will undoubtedly permeate as the next decade of change takes hold.

Chapter 1:

The Rise of Citizen Media

In life there are few moments of clarity when you realize that things have completely changed, and that nothing will be the same. These moments vary in cause and significance, from the birth of a child or the assassination of a president to an executive departing unexpectedly or a new technology like an iPad arriving in your home.

I described one such seminal moment in my first book Now is Gone. In November 2006, Jim Webb won the Virginia race for U.S. Senate. He had done the impossible–defeating George Allen, a formidable incumbent who only three months earlier was considered a serious 2008 presidential candidate for the GOP. George Allen was considered so safe for re-election that his initial campaign manager left to work on a race that was considered tougher.⁴ But he was brought down by bloggers.

Allen had the misfortune of using a word, macaca at a campaign event and having it caught on video. The perception began to grow that he had uttered a racial slur. The Webb campaign intentionally spread the video and talked it up through social media outlets such as blogs and YouTube. The ensuing uproar in the media and back into the blogosphere turned a runaway race into a dogfight; ultimately it cost the Republicans control of the Senate.⁵

At that moment, I knew the face of communications had been altered forever; the traditional media—the so-called watchdog Fourth Estate—had failed to report the story. Instead the public spread the story using social web properties until the cacophony of voices had risen to the point that the traditional media had no choice but to report on it. As a professional communicator of 13 years at the time, this moment caused me to rethink my entire approach to public relations and marketing. What had been mostly fun and experimental became the primary thrust of my business. I was launched, unexpectedly, into an incredible new career trajectory.

As evidenced by the Webb election, social media–blogs, social networks, localized-search-enabled maps, SEO, user-generated video and audio, arose with millions upon millions of content producers. These content creators and readers suddenly had achieved a new level of power and weight. More recently, turmoil in the Middle East showed that the way countries were run could change with one major initiative.

It was time to stop experimenting with new media and instead get to know everything possible about its workings. The social media boom was different than the dot-com era–users fueled the new media, not venture capital-backed startups. It became a society-fueled trend that continues to grow in scope, scale and impact. Communications has evolved more in the past ten years than it did in the previous 50, when television broadcasting took the world by storm.

Welcome to the Fifth Estate

Five years after the Webb moment, social media users have become a force of their own, community members with a voice not supplanting the media, but augmenting it. Since I wrote Now Is Gone, when it was called new media, social media has assumed its place in the larger media mix. It has become the Fifth Estate.

The Fourth Estate, or the traditional media, got its nickname by policing the governments of France and Great Britain in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.⁶ The French Estates General consisted of The First Estate of 300 clergy, the Second Estate of 300 nobles and the Third Estate of 600 commoners. The media fulfilled a new role, providing their readership with more factual information about political events. As a result, politicians were held to a new level of accountability. Media became the fact provider, the great source of objective information. When the politicians stepped out of line, the masses were informed. Protests, and in some cases mobs and revolution, ensued.⁷

Since the 18th century, the Fourth Estate has grown to include broadcast media forms, as well. In modern times, the Fourth Estate’s role has extended into new facets of life, from business reporting (for example, the Hewlett-Packard Board scandal during Carly Fiorina’s leadership) to entertainment (Lindsay Lohan’s ongoing woes with the law). Perhaps the greatest moment of the Fourth Estate was the epic Watergate scandal, in which two Washington Post reporters—Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein—exposed the connection between the White House and a break-in at the Democratic National Committee’s offices during the 1972 U.S. presidential election. The ensuing scandal eventually caused President Richard M. Nixon to resign.

Yet, the media creates their own fallacies. PR execs swarm the traditional media (and now bloggers) to place stories. Corporations, nonprofits and politicians alike employ spinners to ensure favorable coverage, and decreasing budgets have brought about newsrooms with fewer and younger journalists.⁸ While some still are authoritative, the media no longer enjoys widespread trust. According to Edelman’s 2010 Trust Barometer report, most forms of traditional media are trusted by only 30-plus percent of the population.⁹

The Fifth Estate—citizen media—often introduces previously unreported, yet relevant, news, and it questions stated facts. Marshall University Professor Stephen D. Cooper proposed the concept of a Fifth Estate in his 2006 book, Watching the Watchdog: Bloggers as the Fifth Estate.¹⁰ Cooper observed that blogs create a new level of accountability caused by the emergence of a Fifth Estate in our social system: The social media content creators and users keep the Fourth Estate honest. Indeed, in some cases traditional media outlets have embraced social media voices, using them to augment their own research. Consider how CNN has moved away from just presenting its own news reports and Associated Press coverage, and it now uses user-generated iReports to enrich its online offering.

The popularity of social networks, where content and ideas can create viral explosions of widespread ideas. With just the right spark, increasingly accessible historical data has made it easier than ever for the media and rival campaigns to spot the mistakes and exaggerations of politicians. The Republican National Committee employees people to analyze each presidential speech for inaccuracies and then tweets them publicly. And the phenomenon is not isolated to politics. The Washington Post published a piece on how fan-generated media is driving sports stories.¹¹ Here’s a snippet:

But in the arena of sports, the arbiter of what matters is increasingly shifting from the mainstream media to the freewheeling realm of the blogosphere, where impassioned fans opine about the playing field’s heroes, villains and controversies of the day.

Like the Fourth Estate, the role