Social Media: The New Business Communication Landscape

Social Media: The New Business

Communication Landscape
LEE HOPKINS

LEE HOPKINS

PUBLISHED BY IN ASSOCIATION WITH

Social Media: The New Business Communication Landscape
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 Social Media: The New Business
Communication Landscape
LEE HOPKINS

PUBLISHED BY IN ASSOCIATION WITH

Contents

Executive summary ............................................................................................................VII

About the author................................................................................................................XI

Acknowledgements ..........................................................................................................XIII

Chapter 1: The birth of social media .................................................................................. 1

Mitochondrial Eve ................................................................................................................. 1
Media versus medium ........................................................................................................... 2
Blogging .............................................................................................................................. 2
Podcasting............................................................................................................................ 3
Video ................................................................................................................................... 4
Keeping the conversation flowing around the web ................................................................... 4
Cross-linking (aka ‘link love’)................................................................................................. 4
Extract from the Cluetrain Manifesto ....................................................................................... 5
Case study: BT’s wiki............................................................................................................. 5
Wikis.................................................................................................................................... 6
Really Simple Syndication (RSS) .............................................................................................. 8
Micro-blogging (aka Twitter) .................................................................................................. 9
A web of monsters and aliens, as well as butterflies and angels .............................................. 10

Chapter 2: The virtual world ............................................................................................ 11

Being versus doing.............................................................................................................. 11
2.5-dimensional (2.5D) ....................................................................................................... 13
3-dimensional (3D) – Second Life ........................................................................................ 14
Case study: Accenture’s island ............................................................................................. 14
Case study: Second Life Association of Certified Public Accountants (CPAs) – North America .... 15
CPA of Australia ................................................................................................................. 15
Educational uses of Second Life ........................................................................................... 17
Technical complexity of Second Life ...................................................................................... 19
Welcome to the dark side of Second Life’s sweet shop, Luke .................................................. 19
Rules of behaviour .............................................................................................................. 20
IBM social computing guidelines .......................................................................................... 22
Alternatives to Second Life ................................................................................................... 23
LiveWorld social media content guidelines ............................................................................ 23
Managing time wasting and virtual rabbit holes .................................................................... 24

III
Contents

Demographics and inferred psychographics .......................................................................... 27

Policing kids’ worlds ............................................................................................................ 27
Adult worlds ....................................................................................................................... 27
Organisational leadership and World of Warcraft.................................................................. 30
Show me the money............................................................................................................ 30
Recent investments in virtual worlds ...................................................................................... 31

Chapter 3: Social marketing............................................................................................. 33

The difference between social networking and social marketing .............................................. 33
Johnson & Johnson and Motrin take social media into the mainstream ................................... 34
Staying on top of the mountain of social media tools ............................................................ 36
Monitoring the social sphere ................................................................................................ 37
Contributing to the social sphere.......................................................................................... 40
Examples of social media mishaps ....................................................................................... 43

Chapter 4: Social media strategy ..................................................................................... 47

Good communication is not the goal ................................................................................... 48
Culture, change and communication.................................................................................... 48
The strategic planning process – from the beginning ............................................................. 49
Pre-step A – establishing a vision ......................................................................................... 49
Pre-step B – a ‘where are we now’ analysis........................................................................... 49
Pre-step C – ‘your mission, should you choose to accept it’… ................................................ 50
The communicator’s four-step strategy process...................................................................... 50
Examples of some great (if often, overly verbose) mission statements ...................................... 51
Examples of some not-so-great mission statements ................................................................ 53
Social media is not a magic bullet ....................................................................................... 55
What social media cannot do .............................................................................................. 56
What social media can do................................................................................................... 57
Case study: Motrin .............................................................................................................. 57
Measuring and evaluating social media initiatives ................................................................. 59
How to effectively engage in the social media landscape – the MAIL method .......................... 60
Rinse and repeat… ............................................................................................................. 62
The dreaded ROI question and how to get the CFO on board ............................................... 62
Assessing the layout of the land ........................................................................................... 64

Chapter 5: The three social media tools and the seven social networking sites you need to
know about...................................................................................................................... 67
Delicious ............................................................................................................................ 67
Digsby ............................................................................................................................... 68
Facebook ........................................................................................................................... 69
FeedDemon ....................................................................................................................... 73
LinkedIn ............................................................................................................................. 75
MySpace ............................................................................................................................ 76
MySpace user testimonials ................................................................................................... 77

IV
 Social Media: The New Business Communication Landscape

The socio-economic divide between MySpace and Facebook ................................................. 77

Case study: Genocide Intervention Network (GI-Net) – social media for non-profit organisations .....78
Ning .................................................................................................................................. 78
ShareThis ........................................................................................................................... 80
Twitter ................................................................................................................................ 80
YouTube ............................................................................................................................. 83
YouTube at work – do we or don’t we? ................................................................................. 84

Chapter 6: Everything old is new again ............................................................................ 85

The five psychological drivers of generations X and Y ............................................................ 85
So where does this leave us? ............................................................................................... 88

Appendix: Recommended resources and glossary ............................................................. 89

Blogs ................................................................................................................................. 89
Podcasts/vidcasts ................................................................................................................ 90
Books ................................................................................................................................ 90
Glossary ............................................................................................................................ 91

Index ............................................................................................................................... 95

V
Executive summary
THE TRADITIONAL means of communicating
with audiences – such as employees,
customers, investment communities – have
relied heavily on print-based documents,
e-mail or static internet websites. Today,
these methods are rapidly giving way to
a new generation of internet-based tools
that enable far greater levels of two-way
interaction, discussion and conversation.
The media no longer own the audience.
Text, audio and video are available to
everyone. The internet is now the
world’s most powerful publishing and
broadcasting platform.
The new web tools are cheap (often
free) and easy-to-use, and content is now
fast and easy to produce. Communicating
can become seamlessly integrated with
your ‘regular’ workload. Everyone can
communicate, not just the corporate
communications team. This immediacy
and integration can energise your
communications, creating a relationship-
building ethos in the organisation that
has been absent from old-style corporate
communication tools.
Indeed, so fundamental has the shift
been from ‘static’, ‘brochureware’ websites
to the new ‘conversational’ ones that many
pundits are calling the ‘old’ internet ‘Web
1.0’ and this new web world ‘Web 2.0’,
reflecting dramatic improvement based, in
large part, on improved software coding
and functionality.
A key pointer to this shift towards a
‘conversational web’ is the book
The Cluetrain Manifesto.1 This book was
the first website to be made into a book
and comprises the ’95 theses’, which
the authors called the elements of the
conversational web.
The key underpinning element to
the ‘95 theses’ is that markets are now
‘conversations’, and unless companies are
willing to enter into that ‘conversation’, they
are going to miss out. The conversation is
happening anyway, the authors contend,
thus it is better to join in and have a say,
than risk having lies and distortions go
unchallenged in the conversations that are
happening every day around the proverbial
water cooler and over coffee, as well as
in phone calls, e-mails, forums and online
meeting areas.
The tools that enable companies to
join in the conversations (happening in
every industry and marketplace) have been
named social media tools, because of the
new social nature of the internet. Whereas
mainstream media – such as newspapers,
TV, radio and magazines – are traditionally
one-way media devices (experts pontificate
and readers have little opportunity to
contribute or start any discussion with the
author), social media enables players,
protagonists, pundits and the public to
interact, engage and build rapport more
easily than ever before.
The three biggest and most widely-used
social media tools are blogging, podcasting
and video. It is probably impossible to count
the number of blogs in the world today.
VII
Executive summary
Technorati.com – the world’s biggest blog
monitoring and searching service – now
indexes nearly 113m blogs worldwide. One
hundred and seventy five thousand new
blogging websites are brought online every
day and 1.6m blogposts (think of a blogpost
as an article published by someone on his/
her own website) are published every 24
hours – working out to be 18 new posts
each second.
There are currently in excess of 100,000
podcasts and the number is growing fast,
though not as fast as blogs. But Apple’s free
software – iTunes – has done more to grow
podcasting than any technical innovation
other than the creation of the RSS code
that allowed podcasting to exist. Podcasts
are a powerful communication tool in any
company’s communication distribution and
public relations toolbox, and more and
more are turning to podcasts to engage with
jaded audiences who are turning away from
traditional mainstream media outlets in ever
greater numbers.
Add to this the recent boom in online
video through YouTube and the millions of
photos uploaded through photo storage
and sharing services like Flickr, and you
can see how the internet is transforming
into a broadcasting, as well as a text-based
publishing platform.
Micro-blogging services like Twitter and
Jaiku are just the latest in a long and never-
ending line of improvements in the technical
process of communication.
Every month sees new innovations and
services aiming to facilitate conversations,
but keeping up with them is more than a
full-time job. Without a personal network of
informed, net-savvy peers, any communicator
and leader would be hard-pressed to
know what the right tools are in any given
situation. Without a robust strategy, even the
best tools can turn out to be useless.
VIII
In this report the reader will be able to
tap into the collective minds of some of the
world’s sharpest thinkers in the areas of
business and leadership communication.
The reader will learn of the various
communication challenges that affect and
afflict all organisations, the strategies that
overcome them and the tools needed
to change the way your organisation
communicates to the marketplace.
The report is also punctuated with case
studies, which enable the reader to learn
and discover how other organisations
have met the communication challenges
associated with social media tools, and
gain confidence to try out some of the many
ideas captured in this report.
The report is divided into six chapters.
Chapter 1 introduces social media and looks
at the evolution of communication. This
chapter gives the reader a solid grounding
in the major ‘players’ of the social
media landscape and the underpinning
technologies of blogs, podcasts, vidcasts
(video podcasts) and wikis. Readers can
come away with tips and hard-won secrets
from the trenches of the social media front
line, i.e those organisations which have long
been experimenting with social media tools
and have learned lessons from the pitfalls.
Chapter 2 takes the reader through the
virtual worlds journey, considering what
kinds of virtual worlds and major players
there are in each type, and their geographic,
demographic and psychographic differences
that exist within all of these various and
varied properties.
Chapter 3 offers expert advice on how
to engage your social media audience and
have them positively attend to your brand,
product or service. You could, of course,
visit every single social networking property
and spend innumerable hours on each of
them, or you could utilise SMART (Social
 Social Media: The New Business Communication Landscape

Media Aggregation and Republishing Tools©) a list of additional resources should you
to better manage your valuable time. The wish to explore this new communication
principles of online marketing haven’t landscape further.
fundamentally changed, but they have been It’s a really exciting time for business
reshaped by the rules of engagement in this communicators at the moment and your own
new communication landscape. personal journey starts on the next page...
The best tools in the world are useless
without a plan and Chapter 4 examines Reference
the implementation of a social media 1. Levine, F., Locke, C., Searls, D., and
strategy to inform internal cross-company Weinberger, D., The Cluetrain Manifesto,
communication, thought leadership, Basic Books.
community brand raising, digital reputation,
crisis communications and team working.
This chapter also enables the reader to
discover how others have solved the business
communicator’s perennial challenge of
how to ‘sell’ communication innovations
to senior management and how others are
measuring the impact of social media on
their communications and digital reputation.
Chapter 5 investigates some of the
bleeding-edge tools available to business
communicators and social media practitioners,
and enables the reader to decipher the
obscure language of the media gurus to gain
a better understanding of what is on offer.
Chapter 6 analyses where the new
communication landscape is leading
us and why having a sense of history is
vital to avoid being accused by sceptics of
‘drinking the ‘Kool-aid’. There is no
doubt that much of what is currently
unfolding in the social media space is
challenging to existing practitioners, but
there are lessons to be learnt from both old
technologies and old practices, and benefits
to be gained from applying the relevant
elements of old processes with the new
technologies. I hope after reading this
report you will be able to recognise a
pothole from a mile away.
In addition to the six chapters, there
is a useful glossary of social media
terms appended to the report, as well as

IX
About the author

LEE HOPKINS is a management psychologist and business communicator with nearly 30 years of
experience in helping businesses communicate better for improved results and financial returns.
At the leading edge of online business communication in Australia, Lee understands the
transformative nature of social media and he spends a considerable amount of time advising
businesses, business communities and individual business communicators on the tectonic cultural
shifts that new communications technology is facilitating, and how they can best position themselves
to take advantage of them.
In addition, he is currently undertaking doctoral research at the University of South Australia’s
School of Communication, looking at how virtual worlds can impact on the effectiveness and
profitability of small to medium-sized businesses.
An internationally sought-after speaker, Lee combines his passion for employee and online
business communication with his dynamic presentation skills to create ‘once seen, never forgotten’
live experiences.
He has written over 200 articles on business communication available for reading at:
http://www.LeeHopkins.com. Additionally, his blogs, podcasts and vidcasts can be found at:
http://www. LeeHopkins.net

XI
Acknowledgements

FIRSTLY, I wish to thank Laura Scully from the Ark Group in Sydney who first approached me out of
the blue to write this report. It came as a most delightful surprise, thank you, Laura.
I would also like to thank Anna Shaw, Ark Group’s London-based Commissioning editor who
continued the great working relationship with me when Laura moved on to other challenges. Anna
gently prodded, poked, encouraged, cajoled and supported me all the way through this endeavour –
thank you, Anna.
To Danielle Filardi and Stephanie Ramasamy, my thanks for making sure the images and layout,
and more importantly, the words made sense; and especially Stephanie for helping the light shine
through the detritus of words I collected haphazardly on each page.
I wish to thank my friend and business communication colleague Trevor Cook for his initial
inspiration and guidance, and who contributes exceptionally insightful commentary on Australian
politics and public relations at: http://blogs.crikey.com.au/trevorcook
I wish to thank all those who read my blog and watch my Twitter and Facebook streams, who put
up with my absence and occasional acerbic status updates.
But mostly, I would like to thank my wife for her grounded view of life, for an almost undying patience,
for an occasional kick up the proverbial and for being so supportive of all of my online endeavours.
Lastly, thanks to the glorious and autumnal Adelaide hills for inspiration.

Lee Hopkins

XIII
Chapter 1: The birth of social media
THE ONLINE communication landscape that
is social media didn’t arrive fully formed and
ready-to-go – it has enjoyed many years of
gestation and training.
Many commentators point to the
development of ArpaNet as the birth of
social media’s underpinning technology, but
I believe it stretches back further than that.
James Harkin, in his book Cyburbia
(published by Knopf Canada) argues
convincingly that the online world as we
know it has its roots buried deep behind
the front lines of World War II, when British
military minds were desperately attempting
to find ways of accelerating the tracking and
targeting of German bombers by those whose
thankless task it was to manoeuvre slow and
cumbersome anti-aircraft machinery.
One could take the birth of social media
back even further in time – to an era before
computers (let’s call it BC), and a period
when men and women with ideas could
stand on boxes and proselytize their views to
sometimes disparaging audiences.
Consider, if you will, Judea two thousand
years ago – soothsayers, prophets and
political ‘wannabes’ would stand and deliver
their views at the risk of boring any audience
they could capture, or inciting them to some
sort of action. It’s not hard to recall Monty
Python’s movie The Life of Brian (1979) in
such moments.
But I believe that to find the birthing
ground of social media, we need to look
further back in human history, to a time
when thoughts and ideas were unable to be
written down – something like 7.34pm on a
mild Tuesday in mid-April, around 165,000
BCE (Before Common Era). Give or take
50,000 years.
Mitochondrial Eve
Mitochondrial Eve, the mother of us all,
lived on one of the many plains of Africa,
and with her fellow clan members gathered
and shared childcare duties while the men
hunted. Come evening, they would all
gather together and share the fruits of
their labours.
The men would recount how they
combined forces to track and kill that night’s
dinner, while Eve and her sisters would
discuss local foraging opportunities.
There was no formal language as we
would recognise it, but because of a genetic
mutation around 30,000 years prior, Eve and
her clan did have the ability to communicate
via speech, albeit with a vocabulary far
smaller than ours, and with a slower delivery
and simpler grammatical structure. Eve
wasn’t quite ready to dictate Hamlet.
Having progressed past the rock-
banging and the jumping-up-and-down
method of communication, Eve and her
contemporaries were sophisticated enough
in their communication to be able to
manage moving out of Africa and across to
Asia, then on to New Guinea, Australia and
eventually into Europe.
It is, therefore, not too big a leap of
the imagination to envisage Eve and her
fellow clan members discussing, arguing
1
Chapter 1
and negotiating about the big and small
issues of each day; and thus was a social
communication environment born. Their
‘medium’ was, of course, primarily speech,
possibly augmented with sticks and lines
drawn in the sand.
Media versus medium
‘Media’, according to Dictionary.com,
is the plural of ‘medium’, which it also
holds to be – amongst many things
– “an instrument or means by which
something is conveyed or accomplished”
and “one of the means or channels of
general communication, information, or
entertainment in society”.
My trusty and dog-eared New Collins
Concise English Dictionary agrees that
‘media’ is the plural of ‘medium’, which
it holds, inter alia, to be “an intervening
substance or agency for transmitting or
producing an effective vehicle” and “a
means or agency for communicating or
diffusing information, etc., to the public”,
further noting that “careful writers and
speakers do not use ‘media’ as a singular
noun when referring to a medium of mass
communication: ‘television’ is a valuable
medium (not media) for advertising”.
Thus, social media can arguably be
various channels or instruments by which
ideas can be expressed, shared, debated
and/or negotiated.
Looking at the development of human
communication over the millennia, I
believe that various channels or vehicles
for expressing, sharing, discussing and
negotiating have come about as homo-
sapiens like Mitochondrial Eve progressed
her tribe along the path of civilization.
It is the developmental work of only
a few hundred thousand years from
speech-rendered proto-language to the
sophisticated word and visual play of
2
today’s digital multimedia artists – and
note that we have five times more words
to play with than Shakespeare had in
his time.
Let us hop in that handy time-machine
over in the corner of the cave and fast-
forward to 2004 – arguably the year
when everything started. (Actually, the
technological seeds of 2004 are rooted
further back, to 1999 and beyond, but for
the sake of simplicity and illumination, let’s
focus on 2004).
Blogging
In 2004 blogging came to the world’s
attention – personal online publishing moved
out of the hitherto ‘IT geek’ domain and
into the consciousness of the general public.
Folks other than IT evangelists started using
websites such as blogger.com, livejournal.
com and typepad.com to publish their
personal news and views on the issues that
affected them.
The Wall Street Journal ran an article
on 15 August 2007 in which the author
claimed that the blog, as a distinct life-form,
started on 23 December 1997 with the
publication by Jorn Barger of his site, ‘Robot
Wisdom’. That claim was quickly shot down
by the blogosphere (something that the
blogosphere is exceptionally quick and able
to do), which pointed out that Steve Jackson
had been publishing a site called ‘The Daily
Illuminator’ since December 1994.
Such a heady claim was subsequently
trumped by Electronic Frontier Foundation
chairman Brad Templeton, who speculated
that the blog has its origins pre ‘WorldWide
Web’, residing in the moderated newsgroup
mod.ber, run by founder Brian E. Redman
(the ber) and friends. Templeton went on to
claim that his own moderated newsgroup,
rec.humor.funny/netfunny.com, may possibly
be the longest still-running blog, being
 Social Media: The New Business Communication Landscape
nearly 22 years old (beginning life on 7
August 1987).
What all of these sites allowed was a
serial publishing schedule – like a journal –
written as a series of new items on a
semi-regular basis, with a coherent and
personal editorial voice (whether that
voice was the voice of one person or a
small team), and the ability for readers to
comment in some way.
Podcasting
In 2004 the Apple iPod became the mp3
player of choice for the ‘digiliterati’ (digital
literati) and the cashed-up. It seemed that
everyone who had one gloated about it, and
those who didn’t have one envied those who
did. So iconic became the iPod that in some
communities you weren’t taken seriously by
your peers unless you had one.
Various technologies already existed
to enable the transfer of music from the
PC to the iPod, but when online audio
pioneer and former MTV presenter Adam
Curry (aka ‘The Podfather’) and coding
guru Dave Winer joined forces, things really
accelerated. They wrote a small piece of
code that enabled attachments to be sent
via RSS feed to users’ computers, and thus,
the era of podcasting began.
Podcasting represents many uses
to many people – ‘radio with a rewind
button’ is my personal favourite – but
no matter what one’s choice of material
(music, voice, sound effects, experimental
sound theatre, walking soundscapes
and so on), the technology provided the
individual yet another channel through
which to broadcast his/her views, engage
in inter-podcast discussions with other
podcasters (broadcaster-to-broadcaster
dialogue), provide thought leadership for
the community and potentially find new
audiences with which to engage.
For the business communicator,
4 January 2005 saw the first release
of ‘For Immediate Release’, a twice-
weekly conversation between two highly-
experienced business communicators
– Shel Holtz and Neville Hobson – and
their community. ‘For Immediate Release’
spawned a host of excellent business/PR/
marketing podcasts, but remains the king of
them all (there is a list of useful podcasts
at the end of this chapter.)
When Apple upgraded an early version
of its iPod music management and transfer
program – iTunes – to enable the capture
and transfer of podcasts, and at the
same time enabled podcasters to list their
podcasts as available for download via
iTunes, the iPod-owning audience suddenly
had their ears opened to a whole new
range of material.
From music bands giving away their
music for free, to voice actors giving
audio books away as a showcase for
their voice talents, and from devotees
rebroadcasting 1930s and 1940s radio
shows, to universities rebroadcasting
lectures, suddenly an iPod was no longer
an expensive portable music player, but a
portable university, radio station, gossip
columnist and industry news provider,
all in one sleek and desirable package.
Overnight, iTunes became the leading music
transfer software, putting quite a few others
out of business, and the iPod continued
to steamroll over any competition and
completely dominate the portable music/
video player market.
The term podcast continues to cause
confusion, however. Contrary to initial public
perception, you don’t need an iPod to listen
to a podcast. In fact, you can use any mp3
player, including computer-based ones, to
listen to or watch a podcast or vidcast (the
term I have settled on for video podcasts).
3
Chapter 1
Video
With the advent of cheap video production,
either via webcam or digital camcorders
(and digital cameras with movie capabilities),
came the rise of YouTube and other video-
sharing sites.
Accompanying this was the ability
to subscribe to video podcasts via iTunes
and watch them on a computer monitor, a
video iPod or a mobile phone. Of course,
such features have come with a plethora
of new names, which can cause confusion.
For example, no general consensus has yet
been reached on what to call video podcasts
– vodcasts, vidcasts, vidblogs, vlogs – have
all been used to varying degrees in various
geographic regions and with varying success.
Video-sharing sites
There are many video-sharing sites on the
internet, the top 10 sites being:
„ YouTube;
„ MetaCafe;
„ Break;
„ Google Video;
„ DailyMotion;
„ Yahoo! Video;
„ Revver;
„ Vimeo;
„ vidLife; and
„ Stickam.
There are also peer-to-peer video
conversation sites such as ooVoo and
Seesmic that offer the ability to engage
in video conferencing via simple webcam
and microphone (usually a simple headset
microphone will suffice in terms of quality).
The Voice Over Internet Protocol (VOIP)
service provider Skype also provides for
video conferencing.
These sorts of sites aren’t geared for
(or even about) high-production values,
4
but they are about using video to take
multi-location audio conversations to the
next level.
Keeping the conversation flowing
around the web
Whether the channel of communication
is a blog, a podcast, a vidcast or even one
of the newer tools such as a Wiki or
Twitter (see Chapter 5), the fundamentals
remain – online communication in a
‘human’ voice with the ability for others
to respond – either directly or indirectly
via their own preferred channel and
with a clickable link back to the original
communication.
The clickable link back to the original
communication is key to keeping the
conversation flowing around the web. The
ability for anyone to come along, pick up a
conversation half-way through, and track it
back to its antecedents, is a vital component
of social media .
In this way, it doesn’t matter whether a
comment is left on, for example, the
original blog post or the commenter’s own
site. Indeed, it doesn’t even matter what
channel is used to reply. One could, for
example, leave a comment on a blog post
in the form of a video or make an audio
comment. Person B can comment about
Person A on Person C’s website. Or
Person B can leave an audio comment
about Person A’s video to be played in
Person D’s podcast.
As long as a way is given for others to
access the start of the conversation, then
the conversational thread can be followed
by others.
Cross-linking (aka ‘link love’)
All of this cross-linking serves several
purposes, some more altruistic
than others.
 Social Media: The New Business Communication Landscape
Naturally, it is good manners to
reference the source of the original material;
that way, anyone reading, listening or
watching a comment can quickly research
and understand the context of the
comment. In addition, it is handy for the
originators of content to know when
they have been talked about. Thankfully,
there are several mechanisms by which
an author can find out who is talking
about them.
Extract from The Cluetrain
Manifesto, p.123
A human voice
“To have a conversation, you have
to be comfortable being human –
acknowledging you don’t have all
the answers, being eager to learn
from someone else and to build new
ideas together.
You can only have a
conversation if you’re not afraid to
be wrong. Otherwise, you’re not
conversing, you’re just declaiming,
speechifying, or reading what’s on the
PowerPoints. To converse, you have
to be willing to be wrong in front of
another person.
Conversations occur only
between equals. The time your
boss’s boss asked you at a meeting
about your project’s deadline was
not a conversation. The time you sat
with your boss’s boss for an hour in
the Polynesian-themed bar while
on a business trip and you really
talked, got past the corporate bullshit,
told each other the truth about the
dangers ahead, and ended up
talking about your kids – that maybe
was a conversation.”
Case study: BT’s wiki
Three communication and IT-savvy
folks at BT decided to work a
small number of hours after work
for a few days and knock together
a wiki.
Released unannounced and
unpublicised, with just a small
logo in the corner of BT’s default
intranet as a link to it, ‘BTpedia: BT’s
Collaborative Encyclopedia’ had a
very slow beginning, and no training
or instruction was given as to what
it was there for and how employees
were to use it.
That was part of a deliberate
strategy by the head of
communication services at BT,
Ross Chestney, who wanted to see
what would happen next.
Slowly at first, but with
accelerating pace, ‘BTpedia’ took
off to the point where it now has
more visitors and content than BT’s
traditional intranet.
Chestney and BT internal
programme manager Richard
Dennison are also using project-
based wikis to enable greater cross-
collaboration and build communities
of interest, as well as continue
to build the company’s shareable
knowledge base.
Chestney and Dennison
have a great slideshow presentation
that highlights all of BT’s various
social media initiatives and the
lessons they have learnt; this can be
found at:
http://www.slideshare.net/
whatidiscover/social-software-in-a-
corporate-context-presentation
5
Chapter 1
“There is only one thing worse than
being talked about... and that’s NOT
being talked about!”
Oscar Wilde, according to Monty Python.
The ability to see who is ‘talking’ about
you is a fundamental part of managing
one’s online, digital reputation. With every
comment – be it brickbat or bouquet – now
being captured digitally and stored forever,
the need to monitor what is being said about
a company, its products and services, and its
key personnel is finally being understood by
the business community.
“Increasingly, your reputation is what
Google says it is.”
Allan Jenkins, communication analyst
and consultant.
We will discuss monitoring in further detail
in Chapter 3, but in the meantime, don’t
underestimate the importance of knowing
what is being said by others. It can sometimes
be dismissed as ‘ego-surfing’, but finding out
who has linked back to what content, and
who has mentioned it but not linked back,
is vitally important to any corporate (and
personal) social media success.
Wikis
If the social media community is undecided
about what to call video blogs, then the
general business community is equally
undecided about how to define what a
wiki is and what use it might have ‘inside
the firewall’.
Ward Cunningham coined the term
‘wiki’ back in 1994, basing it on the
Hawaiian word for ‘quick’. Since then, it
has become a firm favourite in the toolbox
of many knowledge management gurus
6
and tech-savvy project managers, but alas
relatively unappreciated across the wider
business community.
The most well-known wiki is, of course,
Wikipedia – the online reference site
that is currently five times the size of the
Encyclopaedia Britannica and, according
to various academic and independent
studies, equally as accurate.
Wikis can have a tremendous impact on
a company’s knowledge bank. For example,
some employees at British Telecom (BT as
it is known) launched a small wiki with no
fanfare or publicity. Curiosity and word-of-
mouth grew it in size and popularity to levels
far in excess of the developers’ dreams,
and at a speed that shocked them (see case
study: BT’s wiki).
A wiki is a content management system
(CMS) that is open to alteration, addition
and amendment by more than one person.
Wikis bypass the traditional corporate
roadblock – e-mail – to enable rapid
collaboration and information sharing.1
In essence, a wiki enables a project
team to agree a common set of documents,
terms, details and so on, without the
endless to-ing and fro-ing of e-mails, and
without the rapidly confusing visual mess
that a Word document descends into
after more than two alterations by two
different collaborators.
Wikis solve office politics problems
Wikis also help get office politics out in the
open and dealt with, so that the real work
can get done. For example, consider this
scenario: your project entails input from a
formally-titled business communicator, a
lawyer, a project manager, a marketer, an
inventory manager, a product manager and
a financial gatekeeper.
In my 25-plus years of business
communication experience, I have yet to
 Social Media: The New Business Communication Landscape
Lawyer
Accountant
Marketer
Manufacturing/
production manager
!*!@!
Figure 1: How a wiki functions
meet a lawyer who didn’t think that his/her
command of the spoken and/or written word
was superior to most (if not all) of the other
project team members. Thus, the belief that
his/hers should be the final wording, as it
is the clearest, most concise and logical,
creates conflict with other teams. Equally,
I have yet to meet any member of a team
who didn’t believe that his/her principal
concern was not worthy of being in the top
three priority of concerns that the project
must address. Every time a draft document
was circulated for comment, back would
come conflicting viewpoints and emphases.
Having spent far too many years lost
down the rabbit hole of piecing together
paragraphs of conflicting information and
Document collator/editor
Sales
Customer service/support
Product manager
Inventory manager
dealing with resultant upset egos, I can
assure you that a wiki allows the egotists
to ‘fight it out’ in public as documents and
pages go through their various iterations. If
one particular team member becomes too
insistent on his/her point of view, despite
comments and revisions from others, then
the team can point this out to them – an
action that usually very quickly modifies
over-exuberant behaviour.
Should the team member continue to
insist on his/her dominant point of view,
resulting in unnecessary delays to the project
and increasing disharmony, the project
manager can have a quiet word in his/her
ear, or else escalate the issue higher up the
management chain for adjudication.
7
Chapter 1
Irrespective of harmony or disharmony,
the group always works from the one
webpage to shape and agree on a final
version. Each section or sub-section of a
document, report or project can be its own
standalone webpage, editable by only one
person at a time (to avoid any data conflicts)
and with a toolbar that offers the standard
word-processing options such as bold, italic,
heading and sub-heading, adding a link,
adding an image and so on.
When a page has been agreed and
finalised, a simple copy-and-paste job can
take it from the wiki into a more formal
document created within a word processor
or desktop publishing application. Any
stylistic variations can be accommodated
by the style sheet underpinning the word
processor or document layout tool (Word,
Illustrator, etc.).
Wikis have taken off within the large
enterprise, particularly amongst knowledge
management teams, who leverage the power
of the wiki, in order to shorten project design
and delivery time.
Really Simple Syndication (RSS)
A tiny piece of computer code enables
unparalleled knowledge sharing. That
code has been called RSS, although exactly
what RSS stands for is sometimes the subject
of debate.
Really Simple Syndication is arguably
the most accepted definition, highlighting
how content from one content provider can
be syndicated or re-published on the web
property of others. For example, anything
I write on my blog can be automatically
inserted into someone else’s webpage.
This is how news sites like BBC.com and
ABC.net.au are able to fill their home pages
with constantly updating and changing
headlines; rather than have a web team of
sub-editors constantly re-writing and editing
8
webpages. RSS code pulls in data from the
company’s servers, wherein the style sheet (a
piece of computer code that web browsers
read, in order to know how to display the
content in your browser) formats the ‘look
and feel’, and placement of the data.
RSS allows for the separation of content
from presentation, enabling a single piece
of data to be delivered across multiple
platforms and formats, and in multiple
documents for multiple uses.
The data itself can be shared and
republished both in front of, and behind
the company firewall, so that the public
can access some of the data, perhaps
with more in-depth content or company-
sensitive analysis.2
There has been a tremendous growth in
the use of RSS behind the firewall. Fuelled by
employees who routinely use this technology
outside of work and often from their work
computer, many organisations have introduced
personalised employee home pages where
the data presented to the employees once
they have logged into the network is content
delivered automatically from pre-determined
content providers, deemed useful for that
particular employee in their particular
department or work environment.
Additionally, many organisations also
allow their employees to search, find
and subscribe to content from other, not
necessarily related content providers, both
inside and outside of the organisation. In
this way, employees can stay abreast of
developments in their industry, movements
by their competitors and keep in touch
with thought leaders from their own and
allied professions.
Some of the earliest adopters of
social media into the organisational
communication matrix took particular care
to ‘not scare the natives’ – they didn’t use
the ‘buzzword’ terminology of social media,
 Social Media: The New Business Communication Landscape

such as RSS, feeds, blog, podcast, wiki and

so on, but instead, chose to use neutral or Twitter list:
old-fashioned terms for the new tools. They
also offered multiple ways for employees to „ Looking for a job;
access or subscribe to these data sources, „ Complaining about a job;
including good old e-mail. After all, it is „ Networking for a job;
not the tool itself that is transformative „ Posting a job;
within an organisation, but how it is used. „ Launching a business;
If employees are comfortable using e-mail „ Complaining about a business;
technology, then there is little point forcing „ Advertising a business;
them to change their information-receiving „ Personal branding;
style. The less resistance to change, the „ Getting feedback;
smoother the cultural transformation and the „ Directing web traffic;
quicker the improved information process „ Reading breaking news;
can start delivering its potential. „ Using it as a to-do list;
„ Notifying customers;
Micro-blogging (aka Twitter) „ Taking notes;
If there is one technology which has taken „ Updates/changes at events (e.g.,
off to the amazement of even us ‘wizened’ speakers, venues);
old social media salts, it is Twitter. Each „ Live coverage;
month sees a growth of, at least, 33 per cent „ Setting up meetings;
in users, month on month. „ Physician to Physician
Trying to explain in simple-to-understand communication for general
terms what Twitter is... well, let’s just say that medical questions, curbside
herding cats would be an easier task. consults;
At one extreme, it is akin to a text- „ Crowdsourcing for resources;
messaging service, enabling anyone with a „ Emergency response
free Twitter account up to 140 characters team management;
at a time to ‘say something’. Every time a „ Disaster alerting and response;
message is sent (a ‘tweet’ as the ‘Twitterati’ „ Exercise management and
call it – don’t worry, the use or abuse of encouragement;
the English language with ‘twit’ as a prefix „ Issuing alerts for missing nursing
knows no bounds and shows no signs of home residents;
stopping), it is stored in a database, wherein „ Hazardous materials
it can be searched by Google and other communication;
search robots, including Twitter’s own. Each „ Environmental alerts: pollen
person’s message stream is RSS-enabled, counts, pollution levels, heat
letting anyone subscribe to their feed. waves, severe weather alerts;
These RSS feeds can either be read in „ Psychiatric ‘check-ins’ for patients;
traditional RSS readers (such as Google „ Tracking antibiotic resistance;
Reader, FeedDemon, GreatNews, inter alia) „ Tracking disease-specific
or in a dedicated Twitter-centric tool such trends; and
as TweetDeck or Twhirl (the two current „ Issuing asthma alerts.
favourites) for your desktop/laptop, or

9
Chapter 1

ceTwit, Jitter, Hahlo or PocketTweets amongst

many for your smart phone/iPhone.

Why would anyone do that?

Upon first seeing Twitter, I was not alone in
asking why would anyone use that. However,
it only took a short while to develop a full
appreciation of it. The box ‘Twitter list’
contains some of the many uses to which
Twitter can be put.

A web of monsters and aliens, as

well as butterflies and angels
We are just at the start of our journey
discovering this new communication
landscape, but already we have briefly met
many of the most-used tools and platforms.
But lest you think that the social media
world is confined to the usual flat, two-
dimensional, toilet-roll type pages of the web
as we have known it until now, be assured
that there is a whole other web out there – a
web full of colour, movement, interaction,
people and places.
It is a web run entirely by people like you
and I, and you just need to turn the page
to begin your labyrinth-like descent into
2.5D and 3D web worlds that reflect human
creativity, ingenuity and madness back at us.
See you there...

References
1. My namesake, Lee LeFever and his wife Sachi
have created a fabulous series of videos
that explain much of the various elements of
social media in very simple terms, including
the wiki. This can be found at: http://www.
commoncraft.com
2. There is more detail on RSS, including a
plain-English definition of how RSS works on
the BBC website at: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/
hi/help/3223484.stm

10
Chapter 2: The virtual world
THERE ARE some who say that the virtual
world is the future of the internet. I happen
to be one of them.
Being versus doing
Going to the movies is great fun, but I
get fidgety after a while. It’s not just the
seating that causes it; quite often, it’s the
immersive nature of the film itself. I may
be overly suggestible, and I find it hard not
Figure 1: Some of the most popular virtual worlds
to flinch when the hero gets hit, or duck
under bridges that race towards me
on the screen. After a while, I feel a real
need to get up, stretch and unclench the
muscles in my legs and hands. I have
a very real need to take some sort of
action to release the tension I’ve built
up in my body. I much prefer to ‘do’, rather
than passively sit and watch someone
else ‘doing’.
11
Chapter 2

Figure 2: Habbo Hotel room with friends

Figure 3: Habbo Hotel screenshot during its beta phase

12
 Social Media: The New Business Communication Landscape

Revenue (2008) Valuation (2008)

Service Registered users
estimated US$ estimated US$

Habbo Hotel 125m 74m 1.25bn

7m unique visitors per

Gaia Online 10m ?
month

Stardoll 20m 30m 450m

Club Penguin 12m 50-150m 350-700m

Yoville (via Facebook 6.6m unique visitors

? ?
and MySpace) per month

Table 1: Most popular 2.5D worlds – Europe and North America

Revenue (2008) Valuation (2008)

Service Registered users
estimated US$ estimated US$

Cyworld 22m 200m 1.25bn

Mobile Game Town 12.6m 250m 1.4bn

Gree 8m 60m 1.2bn

Nicotto Town 100,000 ? ?

Table 2: Most popular 2.5D worlds – Asia

Thankfully, there are places I can
go to on the internet, where I can ‘do’.
Not yet, unfortunately, where I can run
around in order to release the tension in
my legs, but places where I can actually
interact with the environment around me
– change the plot of the movie, if you like
– rather than passively sitting and letting
the story wash over me.
These places are known as virtual
worlds (or vw as they are often abbreviated
to) and they mirror our real world in ways
that are constantly surprising.
Arguably, the most well-known virtual
worlds in the business community is
Second Life (also often abbreviated to SL),
but it is by no means the only virtual world
– indeed, in population terms, it is only a
small fish in a rapidly-expanding sea.
Nor are virtual worlds built just for
adult users; many of the most popular (and
financially lucrative) virtual worlds are aimed
at children and teenagers.
Let’s start our journey through the virtual
worlds labyrinth by considering what kinds of
virtual worlds and major players there are in
each type.
2.5-dimensional (2.5D)
The 2.5D virtual world is, most often,
a room or other environment as seen
from the perspective of a camera at
45 degrees elevation.
The most popular virtual worlds using a
2.5D perspective are (at the time of writing)
in Europe and North America (see Table 1).
In the Asia/Pacific region, however, other
2.5D worlds ‘come out to play’ (see Table

13
Chapter 2

2). It should be noted that figures around „ Lacoste;

the most popular virtual worlds in China are „ Nesquik;
hard to verify, but hopefully, future increased „ Yves Saint Laurent;
levels of transparency will make research „ Herman Miller;
and comparison easier. „ Ben & Jerry’s;
„ ABN Amro;
3-dimensional (3D) – Second Life „ Playboy;
The true 3D world is a fully-immersive one „ Nissan;
– the user can walk and even fly around it, „ Pontiac;
create 3D objects, and interact with those „ Orange;
objects in ways that simulate the ‘real world’ „ Autodesk;
laws of physics. Again, as with 2.5D worlds, „ Electrolux;
some of these 3D worlds are designed for „ H&R Block;
children and teenagers, some for adults, and „ Kelly Services;
some for both. „ Vodafone;
Amongst the general public, the most „ Visa;
well-known 3D world is, arguably, Second Life, „ Mercedes Benz;
and businesses have experimented with this „ Ford;
virtual world the most (but many corporations „ Colgate;
are also investigating other virtual worlds and „ Swedish Embassy;
reality environments). The following is a list „ Sky News;
of some of the 170 brands that virtual worlds „ BMW; and
analysts KZero (http://www.kzero.co.uk) are „ Save the Children.
tracking in Second Life:
Case study: Accenture’s island
„ Adidas; The uses to which businesses have put
„ Reebok; Second Life are many and varied. For
„ Penguin books; example, the global management consultancy
„ Circuit City; Accenture has built its own island, which is
„ Sears; used for recruitment purposes.
„ Dell; As highly influential virtual world
„ IBM; analyst Gary Hayes reports (see: http://
„ Calvin Klein; personalizemedia.com), Accenture’s
„ Toyota; investment in the island paid for itself after
„ Coke; six recruitment fairs. Accenture carries
„ Kraft; out recruitment activities in 49 countries,
„ Bruna; therefore, by using one recruitment-oriented
„ Wella; island – rather than each territory, country or
„ Cecile; region building their own – the savings start
„ Armani; to quickly mount up. The global recruitment
„ Steelcase; marketing team at Accenture hold meetings,
„ Starfruit; calls and tours with recruiters from around
„ 1-800 Flowers; the globe, and have even created a guide on
„ L’Oreal; how to sign up for a Second Life account.

14
 Social Media: The New Business Communication Landscape
Case study: Second Life Association
of Certified Public Accountants
(CPAs) – North America
The association uses its island as an
information resource for the general public.
More importantly, it runs regular training and
information sessions for its members; and
separate information evenings and informal
social events.
CPA of Australia
The CPA of Australia introduced its
membership to Second Life and now works
within a virtual world from within Second
Life – at its own custom-built location.
Lindy McKeown and I presented at their
2008 National Congress, which was run
in Melbourne. But rather than travel to
Melbourne, McKeown presented from
Figure 4: Second Life Association of CPAs and some upcoming events
her office in Brisbane and I from my office
in Adelaide.
Helen Mitchell, CPA Australia’s director
of Knowledge Networks commented on the
presentation on her blog:
“Feedback to date shows they valued the
event, content and experience – we had
them logging in from all over Australia
and the world, including the UK and
USA. Broadband and other technicalities
aside, they all experienced the same
environment, no matter where they were
logging in from.
“And it was in real-time, 3D, where each
person’s avatar provided a visual and
spatial indication of them as a person;
and the event as an occasion, where
15
Chapter 2
interaction and Q&A were a natural
part of proceedings. A much richer
experience than if this was a webinar,
videoconference or video recording
of a session.”
But it is not just industry bodies that are
using Second Life and virtual worlds for
meetings. The following is a list of corporate
bodies which are using Second Life and
virtual worlds:
„ BP’s technology team have experimented
with virtual worlds in a number of
scenarios, such as IT strategy planning,
training, collaboration, online events and
consumer education;
„ Recruitment marketing solution
provider SmashFly Technologies has
Figure 5: The CPA of Australia’s Second Life presence for the 2008 National Congress
16
opened an office in Second Life for its
distributed workforce;
„ New Business Horizons is opening a
new office for the Institute of Travel
Management in Second Life as a
way to cut down on the need to travel for
conferences;
„ Johnson & Johnson and KPMG use
virtual worlds to recruit globally, just as
Accenture does;
„ Cisco Systems uses Second Life for
developing its sales force;
„ IBM is heavily invested in 3D virtual worlds,
including not only its own home-spun
experiments, but also Second Life; and
„ The Gizzard Communications Group
runs meetings and conferences in
Second Life on fundraising for
non-profit organisations.
 Social Media: The New Business Communication Landscape
Linden Lab, the owners of the Second Life
platform, and IBM recently released a case
study1 in which IBM estimates that
by using Second Life for two of its major
events, it saved over US$320,000.
“With an initial investment of roughly
US$80,000, IBM estimates that it saved
over US$250,000 in travel and venue
costs, and more than US$150,000
in additional productivity gains (since
participants were already at their computers
and could dive back into work immediately).
It saved a total of US$320,000 (when
compared to the potential expense if the
event had been held in the physical world),”
the report said.
Educational uses of Second Life
Many educational establishments use
Second Life for both research and long-
distance education purposes.
The University of South Australia’s
School of Communication, for example,
runs some of its courses in Second Life,
giving students the opportunity to investigate
the nuances of communication
in a 3D virtual world.
The prestigious Harvard Law School
was the first top tertiary institution to move
into Second Life, running a module on ‘law
within the virtual environment’. There was
no ‘real-world’ way to take the course – all
students had to take the module from within
Second Life.
Manchester Metropolitan University
(MMU) has brought its film and media
undergraduate degree to Second Life. Even
though most of the classes will be virtual,
MMU is interested specifically in Second
Life as a tool for training, including a game
based around film editing, practical skills
and simulation. “The course is the first to
be delivered almost entirely in Second Life,”
said Paul Booth, senior lecturer in film and
media at MMU. “The media collaboration
syllabus is designed to be contained
within the virtual world; all exercises use
a combination of real-world skills, and
in-world production and distribution. Only
two lectures will be delivered in a real-world
classroom as an introduction to Second Life
and new media technology.”
Third-year medical students at Imperial
College London have found that Second
Life provides a useful supplement to their
normal studies. As part of a pilot test,
students walk through the ins and outs
of a realistic hospital – washing hands,
diagnosing patients, ordering X-rays and
more. And while they have noted that it’s
not as helpful as actually walking around
a real hospital’s halls, they’re finding –
as paramedic students at St George’s,
University of London and Kingston University
similarly have – that the 24/7 availability of
a virtual world is a convenient way to drive
home other lessons. “The aim,” according
to Maria Toro-Troconis, a senior learning
technologist at Imperial College London,
“Is to develop a more engaging learning
environment, rather than just replicate what
you have in real life. Game-based learning
plays a very important role.”
The University of Nebraska-Lincoln,
Iowa State University and Wright State
University have partnered to teach over
100 part-time MBA students many key
computing concepts based around IBM’s
‘Power Systems’ and infrastructure. Over five
weeks, pairs of students spent about four
hours per week in Second Life, researching
server issues and IBM solutions to prepare
for a Second Life-based presentation. The
goal, noted Dr. Keng Siau, Professor of
Management Information Systems (MIS) at
the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, was to
keep business managers and executives
abreast of technology (both IBM’s and
17
Chapter 2
Second Life’s), but also to use the virtual
world to cement the lessons learned.
“The process of doing the project is more
important than the output,” Dr. Siau
reported on Chris Maxcer’s SystemiNetwork
blog. “By going through these phases of
understanding, researching on the web and
discussing with their partners... I bet that
after five weeks, they’ll remember this for the
rest of their lives – it’s not just another guest
lecture for three hours.”
The Nature Publishing Group (a division
of Macmillan) uses its group of Second
Life ‘islands’ to host an educational game
tribute to Charles Darwin. “ ‘Notes from the
Voyage’ is an interactive game that promotes
engagement and knowledge,” explains
Kristen French, Nature’s head of community
business development.
North Carolina State University received
US$400,000 from the Ernst & Young
Foundation to continue with the development
of its distance learning programs within
Second Life, particularly with regard to the
department of accounting in the College
of Management.
The United States Holocaust Memorial
Museum has run an exhibit in Second Life.
The exhibit was inspired by a separate effort
that asked a group of high-school students
to conceive an interactive space around
the Holocaust. The students produced a
design document that has been brought
to life. Users take the role of a journalist
– investigating what happened on the
‘Night of Broken Glass’ (also known as
Kristallnacht), listening to testimony from
Holocaust survivors and examining artefacts
in a ransacked section of a city. “I wanted
something which gives visitors a reason for
them to engage, not necessarily that they
were a part of the history, but they have
a reason to be there,” said David Klevan,
education manager for technology and
18
distance learning initiatives at the Museum.
“I wanted visitors to be asking questions as
they went through.”
The Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter
Partnership Foundation and the University
of Texas are working together on the
Carter Academic Service Entrepreneur
(CASE) grant program for virtual worlds.
It’s Second Life-focused, asking students
to use the virtual world to serve real-world
communities. One example given is using
it to tutor local high-school students. The
CASE grant offers US$1,000 to support the
project and a US$500 scholarship upon
its completion. “Our CASE grant model
has proven extremely successful offline.
This project will be a demonstration that
community service can be a new horizon
for online virtual worlds,” said foundation
president Sue Sehgal.
The University of Houston Department
of Health and Human Performance has
moved the class on public health issues in
physical activity and obesity into Second Life.
“In discussions on how obesity impacts the
heart, I can make a 3-D model of a healthy
heart and a diseased heart, and allow the
students to view the inside of the left ventricle
to demonstrate how blood flow is altered
by disease,” said Brian McFarlin, assistant
professor of health and human performance.
“I want to be mindful of what students want.
It’s about them and trying to give them a
better learning experience.”
Social scientists around the world
are using Second Life as a platform and
environment from which they can monitor
and map human interaction and learning,
and identity formation and maintenance.
Librarians across many campuses
regularly meet in Second Life to swap ideas,
share tips and see what benefits virtual
worlds can offer their institutions, their
academics, their students and themselves.
 Social Media: The New Business Communication Landscape
Figure 6: Various bodies and clothing for my Second Life avatar
Technical complexity of Second Life
Second Life allows people to present
PowerPoint-like slideshows, play movies
and soundtracks, speak ‘live’ to their
audience and colleagues, and offer
information and additional resources to
visitors, either in-world or via links that
open up web pages in the visitor’s
web browser.
Of course, Second Life is not just for
business use. Shopping for digital goods
is, by far, the biggest activity in-world, with
everything from shoes, underwear, suits,
shirts, dresses and bikinis for sale, alongside
furniture, houses, animals, plants and
additional animations for your avatar (the
in-world representation of yourself).
You can buy different hairstyles and
even different bodies if you don’t like the
one you are given when you sign up.
You will see in Figure 6 the various bodies
that I have bought for my own avatar,
and you can see that they range from male
to female, to alien to the robot from the
classic 1960s TV show ‘Lost in Space’ (and
yes, it even comes with appropriate sound
effects such as ‘Danger! Danger!’).
Welcome to the dark side of Second
Life’s sweet shop, Luke
Just as in ‘real life’, there is a darker side to
Second Life, too. These are designated areas
where sex services are for sale, and there is
no shortage of shops that sell clothing, body
parts and avatar animations of a strictly
R-rated nature.
But despite the occasional mainstream
media exposure about this dark side, the
vast majority of Second Life is safe from
such activity.
19
Chapter 2
Figure 7: Amsterdam buildings in Second Life ©image courtesy of Ashanti Leshelle (can be found at: http://www.flickr.
com/photos/ashanti_leshelle/1070111266)
Much like a child in a sweet shop, many
new residents of adult worlds like Second Life
gorge on the sweet stuff until they are full, but
that full feeling doesn’t take long to reach.
Most new residents visit one or two
sex-themed areas – usually just to see what
the fuss is all about – and then go off in
search of other entertainment. This includes
searching for friends, companies they
have heard are in Second Life and themed
regions that have received mainstream
press attention, such as goth-themed
worlds, worlds of furry animals, battle war
zones, replicas of real-world areas such as
Amsterdam and so on.
Rules of behaviour
Many companies which use virtual worlds
such as Second Life for their business
20
meetings provide their employees with
guidelines or rules of acceptable and
unacceptable behaviour in these and other
social media environments.
Such policies can include elements that
remind employees that at all times they
represent their employer and, therefore, they
must not act in any way that could bring the
company into disrepute; in other words, the
same behaviours that are expected in the
‘real world’ are also expected in the virtual.
Some companies also use open
source software, such as OpenSim (http://
opensimulator.org/wiki/Main_Page ) and
Project Wonderland on their own servers
behind the firewall, thereby ensuring the
‘integrity’ of the environment.
Others give their employees permission
to visit any area, as long as their avatar
 Social Media: The New Business Communication Landscape
Figure 8: Amsterdam in Second Life ©image courtesy of Zya Kraft (can be found at: http://www.flickr.com/photos/
zyakraft/1467037825/)
does not, in any way, suggest links back
to the employer. While this can leave an
employer open to the risk of an employee
accessing an area that might cause
offence if seen by another employee, most
employees are sensible enough not to put
their access to Second Life at risk.
Microsoft reportedly has an effective
informal policy regarding blogging and
other social media activity: “Don’t do
something stupid that will lose you your job.”
Wise advice, indeed.
As with social networking sites like
Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and
YouTube, some companies believe
that providing access to virtual world’s
like Second Life will only result in lost
productivity as the employee ‘runs amok’,
and wastes all of his/her time running
down endless virtual rabbit holes. However,
this reflects a general distrust of employees
and is a damning reflection of the
company’s culture.
If the company so distrusts its
employees to ‘do the right thing’ that it
gives them only partial access to the tools
required by today’s knowledge workers to
do their job, then no amount of ‘employees
are our greatest asset’ rhetoric from the
senior management team will convince
employees to give any trust or loyalty to
the company.
But the company that shows respect
to its employees, that recognises in them
a fundamental curiosity and interest
in exploring novelties, and that allows
employees the freedom to explore and play
(because it is through play that we most
21
Chapter 2

quickly and profitably learn), is more
likely to reap greater rewards from its
employees. These rewards include faster
take-up of new working practices, faster
adoption of new workplace cultures,
quicker returns on the investment in
infrastructure and training, and improved
productivity and increased collegiality.
Studies show that the increased collegiality
that comes from the adoption of social
media tools and social networking strategies
in the workplace brings with it increased
loyalty, lower turnover and increased
productivity. Not a bad outcome.
Much like YouTube and Facebook,
virtual worlds offer tremendous networking
and learning opportunities – not just
funny videos, inane self-congratulation
or invitations to be a vampire. Project
managers are showing their clients

IBM social computing guidelines

1. Know and follow IBM’s Business Conduct Guidelines.

2. IBMers are personally responsible for the content they publish on blogs, wikis or any other form
of user-generated media. Be mindful that what you publish will be public for a long time –
protect your privacy.
3. Identify yourself – name and, when relevant, role at IBM – when you discuss IBM or IBM-
related matters. And write in the first person. You must make it clear that you are speaking for
yourself and not on behalf of IBM.
4. If you publish content to any website outside of IBM and it has something to do with work you
do or subjects associated with IBM, use a disclaimer such as this: “The postings on this site are
my own and don’t necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions.”
5. Respect copyright, fair use and financial disclosure laws.
6. Don’t provide IBM’s or another’s confidential or other proprietary information. Ask permission
to publish or report on conversations that are meant to be private or internal to IBM.
7. Don’t cite or reference clients, partners or suppliers without their approval. When you do make
a reference, where possible link back to the source.
8. Respect your audience. Don’t use ethnic slurs, personal insults, obscenity, or engage in any
conduct that would not be acceptable in IBM’s workplace. You should also show proper
consideration for others’ privacy and for topics that may be considered objectionable or
inflammatory – such as politics and religion.
9. Find out who else is blogging or publishing on the topic, and cite them.
10. Be aware of your association with IBM in online social networks. If you identify yourself as
an IBMer, ensure your profile and related content is consistent with how you wish to present
yourself with colleagues and clients.
11. Don’t pick fights, be the first to correct your own mistakes, and don’t alter previous posts
without indicating that you have done so.
12. Try to add value. Provide worthwhile information and perspective. IBM’s brand is best
represented by its people and what you publish may reflect on IBM’s brand.

Source: http://www.ibm.com/blogs/zz/en/guidelines.html

22
 Social Media: The New Business Communication Landscape

what a new, yet-to-be-built customised Alternatives to Second Life

component can look like; clients can
walk around it or interact with it, and
see how it fits in with their current office
decor or plant machinery.
Training institutions are using virtual
worlds to train emergency department nurses
in how to use new equipment by letting them
‘play’ with the various controls and see what
effects they have on patient welfare and the
other elements of patient management.
World of Warcraft
Of course, Second Life is not the only 3D
virtual world. The role-playing game World
of Warcraft is an extremely successful 3D
environment. It currently boasts 11.5m paid
subscribers, generating some US$184m
gross income per month, in comparison to
Second Life’s approximately US$1.2m gross
monthly income.

LiveWorld social media content guidelines

My business communication and social media colleague Bryan Person recently based a set
of guidelines both to, as he says, “support the talents and online freedom of expression of
LiveWorlders and to reflect the best interests and reputation of the company. We think they’re
easy to understand, straightforward, and free of corporate mumbo-jumbo or legalese.”
Based on IBM’s own ‘gold standard’ guidelines, see if you agree.

Be transparent
If you’re writing or commenting about company business, always identify yourself and
LiveWorld by name. If you contribute to, or maintain a personal blog or website that
covers the company’s business space, make clear that your opinions are your own and
not that of LiveWorld’s.

Be respectful
We encourage you to express your opinions, but we ask that you don’t resort to personal attacks,
harassment, cultural insensitivity or discrimination in the process.

Be yourself
We value your personality and individual interests, including those that fall outside of your
primary work responsibilities. Let that personality shine in your online content!

Be smart
Some company projects, lessons learned and success stories are fine to share; others aren’t.
Don’t reveal company secrets or proprietary information, and make sure you have permission
from our clients and partners before mentioning them by name. Your words and statements
online are a reflection of LiveWorld. Use your best judgment when deciding whether content is
appropriate to publish. If you have any doubts, ask your company executive.

Source: http://bryanperson.com/2009/01/07/creating-social-media-guidelines-for-your-employees/

23
Chapter 2
Managing time wasting and
virtual rabbit holes
Employers worried that their employees
will waste endless hours accessing
non-work material already have access
to two valuable tools to manage the risk:
„ KPIs (Key Performance Indicators);
and
„ Shame.
Individual productivity is still governed by
agreed job performance requirements
and KPIs.
If employees are frequenting
social networking sites at the expense
of their performance, it usually only
takes a quiet word in their ear from their
manager to bring them back into line. If
this fails, the usual disciplinary measures
can be utilised.
Additionally, nothing spreads
around a company faster than gossip,
and firing an employee for gross
negligence, dereliction of duty or
grossly-inappropriate behaviour, will
generate a non-verbal message that
will quickly rip through the hallways if
unofficially allowed.
Add to it a memo from HR to the
whole company that explains why the
unnamed employee was dismissed and
you have introduced a prophylactic
against further abuse.
In this current business climate few
can afford to lose their job, let alone
their reputation and future employability
owing to an act of extreme foolishness,
and an attitude of ‘they’re not smart
enough to catch me’ or ‘it will never
happen to me’.
24
IMVU
IMVU is a 3D chat environment that has
30m users, which is almost double Second
Life’s 17m. IMVU is a very popular chat
engine amongst teenagers.
Home
Sony has just launched Home, a 3D world
for Playstation 3 owners, and with visual
effects and appearance notably superior to
Second Life – perhaps a similar offering is
about to be announced for Microsoft’s XBox.
Home captures its members for around 40
minutes per session, which is significantly
longer than traditional web properties,
making virtual worlds like Home very ‘sticky’
in marketing terms.
In a ‘GamesIndustryBiz.com’ feature
article, Jack Buser, director of Home
at Sony Computer Entertainment, and Peter
Edward, director of the Home Platform
Group, commented that, in the first
month of release, they brought in over
US$1m of revenue. Home is now
recognised by the publishers of computer
and console games as a major platform
and a hub for gamers.
“Here you can speak directly to the
PlayStation audience on the platform. It is
unbelievably economical. And there are
commerce opportunities for partners. You
have publishers and brands coming into
Home looking to engage with an audience,
but they also have the opportunity to
generate revenue. It’s a model that makes
sense for everybody. It’s kind of a perfect
storm,” says Buser.
Nurien and HiPiHi
Nurien (http://www.nurien.com) is
exceptionally popular in South Korea
and offers compelling visuals. In China,
HiPiHi is the market leader. (Remember,
obtaining accurate information from some
Continued on Pg26
 Social Media: The New Business Communication Landscape

Figure 9: Screenshot from World of Warcraft

Figure 10: Screenshot of IMVU sign-up process

25
Chapter 2

Figure 11: Screenshot of Sony’s Home for PS3

companies in the Asia Pacific region is

proving temporarily challenging.)

YoVille
YoVille, the virtual world based within
Facebook and MySpace, has garnered over
5m active users in under 12 months, which
is an impressive growth by any standards
and definitely one to watch.
But before Second Life is written off (a
meme in the popular press is to write off
Second Life as a ‘has been’), facts to note from
long-time Second Life residents and developers
Timothy Allen and Jennifer Vatza are:2

„ The amount of active users has grown by

25 per cent since September 2008 and
March 2009;
„ The total number of avatars created
since it came out of beta in June
2003 has eclipsed 16m; Figure 12: Screenshot from Nurien

26
 Social Media: The New Business Communication Landscape
„ Unlike some Web 2.0 companies
that are still media darlings – like
Facebook, YouTube and Twitter –
Linden Lab and Second Life are
profitable enterprises;
„ The average number of concurrent
users logged into Second Life at any
given time is 70,000 (that includes ‘bot
users’ – avatars that are programmed for
various purposes. Linden Lab estimates
10-15 per cent of users are ‘bots’);
„ Residents spent 41.5m hours in Second
Life in January 2009, compared to
28.3m hours in January 2008;
„ Over US$1.3m changes hands daily
through Second Life’s micro-currency, the
Linden dollar;
„ A rich array of innovative educational
programs exists in Second Life; and
„ In February 2009, over 64,000 Second
Life users made a profit during the
month. Of that group, over 200 made
a profit of over US$5,000, just under
1,000 made between US$1,000 and
US$5,000, and just under 4,000 made
between US$100 and US$1,000.
These facts are impressive by anyone’s
standards, and as Linden Lab points out, “With
nearly US$35m traded between residents each
month, the Second Life economy has grown
to become one of the world’s largest user-
generated virtual economies.”
Demographics and inferred
psychographics
There is a myth that virtual worlds are
populated by primarily two types:
„ Middle-aged men pretending to be
young, in order to lure the under-aged
into predatory sexual relations; and
„ Pimply and unwashed teenage boys who
sit in darkened bedrooms.
Neither stereotype is particularly true. While
it is true that roughly 31 per cent of virtual
world inhabitants will probably take on a role
or avatar of the opposite gender (based on
Nick Yee’s research into text-based role-playing
virtual worlds), the majority of those who enter
virtual worlds will ‘stay true’ to their own gender.
Policing kids’ worlds
In addition, virtual worlds whose target
audiences are children and teenagers have
very strict policies regarding inappropriate
behaviour, and actively manage their
environments. Not only are text comments
moderated – usually by some sort of
automated word-filtering system – but human
intervention also plays a part.
Some virtual worlds also have in-house
‘prefects’ – children who interact with their
in-world peers and privately report any
suspicious behaviour or character.
I have it on very good authority that
the Australian Federal Police (AFP) work
with several teenagers to identify possible
paedophiles. The strategy behind the program
is that teenagers would be more likely than
adults to recognise language that wouldn’t
naturally belong to someone of their age.
As teenagers cringe and roll their eyes when
parents try to ‘talk the lingo’ in order to
‘connect’, the AFP-sponsored teens can very
quickly spot an adult pretending to be a
teenager. So sophisticated are these linguistic
nuances that early teens can even spot when a
late teen is trying to be younger than they are.
Adult worlds
Virtual worlds, where the minimum age of
residents is 18 are, understandably, less
concerned with in-world language and
behaviour, although it should be noted that
when Linden Lab, the creator and owner of the
Second Life platform, announced its intention
of moving all sexual content to a specific region
27
Chapter 2

within the Second Life universe, there was, Country Percentage of

and still remains, a tremendous amount of avatar count
discussion, both for and against, and as I write United States 36.9
this, no final decision has been announced.
Germany 8.6
Interesting statistics emerge when looking
at the various types of users that make up United Kingdom 7.5
adult-only virtual worlds. The following Japan 5.0
statistics and inferences are based on data France 4.9
released each month by Linden Lab: Brazil 4.5
Italy 4.3
„ The average age of a resident of Second
Canada 3.3
Life is 34, and the gender ratio is
approximately 60 per cent male, 40 per Spain 3.3
cent female; Netherlands 3.1
„ Whereas the average time someone Australia 2.3
spends on Facebook is around 50 Belgium 1.2
minutes per month, the average time
spent in Second Life is around 40 hours; Table 3: Countries by active users – the top 12
Data supplied by Linden Lab, June 2008
„ Although the vast majority of those
involved in Second Life do not do so
in order to generate any income, the early adopters, however, Australian business
number of individuals who have a is, in the main, quite conservative when it
positive cashflow is growing every month; comes to the use of new technology.
and several individuals and businesses
do generate enough to supplement or Adult psychographics
replace the typical income; and From the Linden Lab data we can make
„ Reflecting the internet in general, the some interesting inferences about Second
dominant language in Second Life is Life ‘residents’ (as those who regularly visit
English, but it by no means holds a and inhabit Second Life are called), and I
crushingly-imperialist position. Non- would argue, adult virtual worlds in general.
native English-speaking countries are The following are my inferences,
a major group within Second Life’s followed by my rationale.
demographic, and there are several Second Life residents are well-paid,
regions within Second Life where English time-rich individuals, who are intelligent,
is not spoken at all unless prompted. patient, persistent and interested in
new technology. They are likely to be
As can be seen from Table 3, European knowledgeable, curious, well-educated and
countries have taken to Second Life in socially connected. That’s probably the sort of
the same way that the US has. Australia, individual that many companies would like to
too confirms its early adopter status with develop a conversational relationship with.
regard to new technology, which compares Here is how I reached this conclusion:
to its 52nd place spot on the ‘real world’ Second Life residents spend a considerable
population table. However, a caveat needs amount of time in-world, possibly at the
inserting here – Australians as individuals are expense of interacting with traditional media.

28
 Social Media: The New Business Communication Landscape
Both Neilsen-Online and Forrester Research
have recently released figures showing that a
growing number of online adults are choosing
to spend their time participating in online
social networking, rather than consuming
traditional media such as radio, television and
newspapers. Virtual worlds are very much part
of the social media landscape.
Second Life residents are spending an
average of 40 hours per month in-world,
reflecting their freedom from time-intensive
responsibilities such as children.
Virtual worlds are graphic-rich
environments, requiring powerful computers
and graphic cards. Such hardware comes
at a price. So too does the broadband
bandwidth required to interact meaningfully
and with minimal ‘lag’ frustration (the amount
of time between your keyboard key press and
your avatar reflecting that action request).
The learning curve to successfully navigate
one’s avatar and interact with others, as
well as tailor one’s appearance to one’s
tastes, is steep; therefore, much patience and
persistence are required to graduate from
‘beginner’ to ‘competent’ in-world resident. It
can take many hours of practice to be able to
proficiently engage in conversations with others.
Steven Noble in Forrester’s November
2008 report ‘Australian Adult Social
Technographics® Revealed’ (a PDF of which
can be bought and downloaded at: http://
www.forrester.com/Research/Document/
Excerpt) highlighted that the average ‘social
mediarist’ (or, as they classify them, ‘creators’,
‘critics’, ‘collectors’ and ‘joiners’) earn
between AUS$75,787 and AUS$79,580 per
annum. They are usually educated past high
school and are more likely than the rest of
the Australian online population to be at the
forefront in the use of new technology.
Academic research over many decades
shows how innovation spreads through a
community (the late Ev Rogers is the best
source for an overview of the baseline
academic work3).
‘Innovators’, the testers of new technology,
comprise 2.5 per cent of the population.
They are the individuals who try out the
new technology or innovative practice, both
because of intellectual or sensual curiosity,
and to see if it would benefit others in the
innovator’s personal community. If they
believe it would, they begin to embrace it and
incorporate it into their daily life.
The next tier of adopters – the early
adopters (who comprise 13.5 per cent of the
population) – see what the innovators are
doing and talking about, and get hold of
the technology and begin to play with it, in
order to gain the personal benefit from the
innovation and uncover ways to ‘translate’ the
innovation and its benefits into a language that
the community will more readily understand.
This second tier (to which I arguably
belong) is made up of highly-connected
individuals who can have influence over
considerable numbers of the population
when they ‘evangelise’ an innovation.
The third tier – the early majority which
makes up 34 per cent of the population –
notice what the second tier are evangelising,
and so too seek to benefit both personally
and reputationally amongst their peers by
also taking on the role of an evangelist.
Once the early majority start evangelising,
then the product, service or process gets
closer to the ‘tipping point’.
The fourth tier – the late majority which
makes up 34 per cent of the population,
then take on the innovation, in order not to
be ‘left behind’. By this stage, the innovation
definitely moves into the mainstream and
existing standards of process, design or
production are raised to this new level, and
the cycle of adoption starts again.
A fifth tier – the ‘laggards’ which makes up
16 per cent of the population – usually pick
29
Chapter 2
up the innovation when it is nearing the end
of its lifecycle, or when a newer innovation is
already close to its own tipping point.
In today’s lightening pace of innovation
and change, where technical knowledge
and innovation is doubling every year, the
first tier ‘innovators’ are already playing with
‘innovation number two’ while the third tier
‘late adopters’ are taking up ‘innovation
number one’. By the time the ‘laggards’
are taking up ‘innovation number one,’ the
‘innovators’ are probably already playing
with ‘innovation number four’.
Put all of these factors together and
that is how I reached the conclusion that
Second Life residents are well-paid, time-rich
individuals, who are intelligent, patient,
persistent and interested in new technology.
Organisational leadership and World
of Warcraft
When it comes to World of Warcraft, new
rules around real-world recruitment need
considering. The Royal Australian Air Force,
for example, actively interacts with young
World of Warcrafters for a very sound reason
– the successful World of Warcrafters have
proven their ability to survive and thrive in
combat situations. In addition, they have
grown into leaders.
As one RAAF recruiter said to me, “Why
would the typical World of Warcraft-playing
school-leaver be happy in a white-collar
job, where he/she has to start at the lowest,
‘know nothing’ rung of the ladder?”
The recruiter claimed that they knew and
interacted with many 15 and 16 year olds who
successfully manage and lead squadrons of
fighter planes and pilots. In some instances,
that means successfully coordinating and
leading hundreds and sometimes thousands of
other World of Warcrafters, each of whom has
their own particular personal agenda they want
to get out of the game.
30
“Some of them have more real managerial
experience than even top-level corporate
managers. They have had to learn cooperation
and negotiation skills, motivational skills, and
strategic and tactical planning skills.
“These are the sorts of kids who we
want as the next generation of leaders in the
armed services,” he said.
Massively multiple online role-playing
games like World of Warcraft are proving to
be valuable training grounds for managers
and, at the elite level, leaders.
How corporations and smaller
organisations choose to recruit them may well
turn out to be a key differentiator for recruiters
in the near future – not just as an indicator of a
business’ potential sustainability and longevity,
but also as a company with an ‘employer of
choice’ reputation, which goes out of its way to
attract the brightest and the best talent.
Show me the money
Naturally, in a difficult and challenging
economic climate, it is only fair to ask if
anyone is actually investing in virtual
worlds. The box overleaf includes some
of the investment highlights over the
past two years.
As Barry Gilbert, vice president and
research director of strategy analytics
reports,4 virtual world users are increasing
as a percentage of total broadband users,
suggesting a positive conversion sign for the
virtual world industry.
While advertising within virtual worlds
will slow down during 2009, they are
expected to recover and continue their
growth curve in 2010. However, the growth
of revenue from microtransactions for virtual
goods and subscriber fees are expected to
continue in their dramatic fashion in spite of
any economic ‘hangover’.
For example, in 2008 the total revenue
generation of virtual worlds was US$1.26bn
 Social Media: The New Business Communication Landscape
(not including Second Life land purchases,
maintenance, hosting and development fees,
non in-world purchases of merchandise,
and licensing fees). In 2009 total revenue
(similarly not including the elements above)
is predicted to reach US$2.16bn.
China’s internet and mobile-based social
network ‘TenCent’ announced unaudited
annual revenues for 2008 exceeding
US$1bn, an 87 per cent year-over-year
increase from 2007 revenues. Of that figure,
Recent investments in
virtual worlds
„ US$408m invested in 40 virtual
goods-related businesses in 2008;
„ 200+ youth-oriented worlds live or
are developing in January 2009;
„ US$594m invested in 63 virtual
worlds-related companies in 2008;
„ US$101m invested in 13 virtual
worlds-related companies in the
fourth quarter of 2008;
„ US$148.5m invested in 12 virtual
worlds-related companies in the
third quarter of 2008;
„ US$161m invested in 16 virtual
worlds-related companies in the
fourth quarter of 2008
„ US$345m invested in 39 virtual
worlds-related companies in the first
6 months of 2008;
„ US$184m invested in 23 virtual
worlds-related companies in the first
quarter of 2008;
„ US$425m invested in 15 virtual
worlds-related companies in the
fourth quarter of 2007; and
„ US$1bn invested in 35 virtual
worlds companies between October
2006 and October 2007.
US$719m was generated by sales of virtual
goods to internet-based users of the service.
Internet virtual goods sales for 2008
represent a 95.5 per cent year-over-year
increase from 2007, while mobile virtual goods
sales for the same period had increased 73
per cent. Only US$120m of TenCent’s 2008
revenue is accounted for by online advertising.
TenCent lists its total 2008 gross profits as
US$729m at a margin of about 70 per cent.
Note that the revenues from internet
virtual goods sales alone are only US$10m
short of accounting for all of TenCent’s 2008
gross profits.
In addition, Habbo Hotel’s developer,
Sulake, recently released figures showing
that 85 per cent of its 2008 revenue came
from microtransactions for virtual goods5.
While the hype led by the mass media
has gone out of virtual worlds, their popularity
continues to grow. Not only are more
individuals choosing to spend time in-world
at the expense of traditional activities, but
organisations are also taking advantage
of the benefits of virtual worlds to cut costs
(including travel and the lost opportunity
costs involved with that travel) and increase
learning and development.
One IBM employee reportedly claimed
increased productivity gains through the use
of virtual worlds. This was calculated by using
the extra five minutes before and after formal
in-world meetings as personal networking
time, rather than the more traditional
paper-shuffling down-time of traditional
teleconferences. New contacts are made,
ideas shared and possibilities generated.
The gaming industry now generates
more revenue than Hollywood,6 and all
predictions are that the consolidation and
integration of games and 3D virtual worlds
will continue, as shown by the outstanding
success thus far of Sony’s Home 3D
environment. We witnessed an explosion
31
Chapter 2
of virtual worlds aimed at children and
teenagers in 2008, and there is no reason
to believe that the trend will slow down.
There are over 250 virtual worlds already
in existence or in development; naturally
there will be a shake-out and consolidation
of worlds over time, but just as there are
hundreds of thousands of traditional websites
that generate real-world returns on investment
for their owners, so too will hundreds of
virtual worlds serve us in similar ways.
The integration of virtual worlds with
mobile platforms is a major focus for virtual
world owners, as the reach of smart phones
and the iPhone continues at its rapid pace. As
Apple showed the world when it allowed the
integration of podcasts into its iTunes software
that applications can sit in a mobile phone
and one can seamlessly access his/her virtual
world of choice, this will probably explode the
membership numbers of virtual worlds.
The future for virtual worlds is so bright, I
have to wear shades.
References
1. Can be found at: http://secondlifegrid.net.
s3.amazonaws.com/docs/Second_Life_Case_
IBM.pdf
2. Can be found at: http://www.peregrinesalon.
com/2009/03/22/whats-with-the-second-life-
death-watch/
3. See Wikipedia for an overview of Ev Rogers’
work: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Everett_Rogers
4. See: http://www.engageexpo.com/
presentations/Gilbert-StateOfTheVWMarket.
pdf
5. See: http://www.sulake.com/press/
releases/2009-03-30-Sulake_reports_strong_
growth_and_profits_for_2008.html
6. Figures from US Entertainment Merchants
Association, 1 July 2008: US retail gaming
US$ 18.85 bn; global box office US$ 9.6 bn;
and US home DVD market US$ 16 bn.
32
Resources
Metaverse Journal – a holistic look at
virtual worlds from consumer, producer
and enterprise perspectives
(http://www.metaversejournal.com)
Clever Zebra – enterprise-level virtual
world intelligence
(http://www.cleverzebra.com)
Kzero – virtual worlds research company
(http://www.kzero.co.uk)
Gary Hayes – virtual worlds uber-guru
(http://www.personalizemedia.com)
Virtual Worlds Weekly – more traditional
news and opinion site, focusing on the
business side of virtual worlds
(http://www.virtualworldsweekly.com)
JoKay – an Australian freelance designer
who is very involved with Second
Life, particularly from an educational
perspective (http://www.jokay.com.au)
Lindy McKeown – a global facilitator
of virtual world strategy and tactical
planning (http://www.lindymckeown.com)
Wagner James Au – a full-time
journalist in Second Life and virtual
worlds in general
(http://www.nwn.blogs.com/nwn)
Metaverse Business – specialists in
virtual world metrics
(http://www.metaversebusiness.com)
Second Life blog – the official Linden
Lab blog about Second Life
(http://www.blogs.secondlife.com)
Chapter 3: Social marketing
“MARKETS ARE conversations. Markets
consist of human beings, not demographic
sectors. Conversations among human
beings sound human. They are conducted
in a human voice. To speak with a human
voice, companies must share the concerns
of their communities. But first, they must
belong to a community.”
Theses numbers 1, 2, 3, 34 and 35: The
Cluetrain Manifesto
Let us understand first the question I
am often asked by marketers: ‘does
social networking mean the same as
social marketing?’
To which I reply unequivocally: ‘yes
and no.’
The difference between social
networking and social marketing
To help explain and refine that somewhat
unhelpful answer, let’s define what I mean by
social networking and social marketing.
Social networking
Social networking is tapping into groups of
friends and their friends – and even their
friends’ friends – because there are shared,
common interests. For example, within
every major social networking site there
are groups that focus on fishing, dining,
scrapbooking, pets, movies, gossip... you
name a particular hobby or topic of interest,
it’s probably there. The members of these
groups use the group as a ‘collection
point’ for the various ideas, suggestions and
questions they have.
This is nothing new. Before the ‘World
Wide Web’ we had text-based newsgroups
and bulletin boards performing exactly the
same functions. In this new era we can now
do this with video, still pictures, sound files
and an infinite number of cross references
to other relevant content. Additionally, others
can share an idea with their own friends
who may not be a part of one particular
group, but who might benefit from it,
creating a cross-pollination of ideas.
Social marketing
Social marketing, on the other hand, is
the strategic use of tactics and tools to
meet marketing plan objectives – such as
increasing sales, gaining market share,
improving market reach, tapping into new
markets and territories, and so on.
And unlike ‘traditional’ marketing
activities, social marketing is focused entirely
on generating results through the growth
and maintenance of positive customer
interactions that take place within the social
media webspace.
I advocate that social marketing should
be part of any company’s daily activities,
but unlike a traditional print campaign, it
cannot be a ‘one-off’ exercise or something
that a social media expert comes in and
performs once a month. It requires every
business to have a central point – be it
a person or a team – that can engage
knowledgeably with what usually turns out to
33
Chapter 3
be a very sophisticated audience. It requires
an individual or team to engage with these
knowledgeable audiences in multiple social
networking sites and platforms, using the
same social media tools that they use.
Consider it to be ‘grass-roots’
marketing or ‘word-of-mouth’ marketing
performed over electronic communication
channels, and it can take many forms
such as:
„ ‘Friending’ someone on a social
networking site;
„ Commenting on someone else’s ideas,
either on his/her’s own site or on a
networking site;
„ Joining a group that is relevant to
one’s business, industry, or products
and services;
„ Asking questions of, and/or answering
questions from, a knowledgeable
audience (and always bearing in mind
that they may be wrong, but they
probably don’t think so);
„ ‘Digg’ing a blog post, video or article
that is relevant to a target audience,
and so helping them find new material
with which, perhaps, to answer
their own questions, but certainly
which adds value to their work and/
or life; and
„ ‘Tweeting’ links to new material of
relevance to an audience, such as when
new products or services are released,
or when new solutions to customer
challenges are found.
But as the quote at the beginning of
the chapter makes clear, the language
that any conversation takes place in
must be the language of the audience, not
that of the marketer. Nothing puts off a
potential conversationalist in an audience
than being ‘talked at’ by someone who
34
values corporate jargon and company-
speak more than a relationship with a ‘real’
human being.
Thankfully, there is a software
which can be downloaded called Bullfighter
(can be found at: http:// FightTheBull.
com) to help find and eliminate jargon in
Microsoft Word and PowerPoint documents.
Bullfighter is a Windows-only product
(i.e. it does not work with MacOS, Palm,
Unix, Xenix, Linux, Spandex, Kleenex, etc.).
The website comes with an additional
feature – the ‘Mystery Matador’. This
is how it works: copy and paste some
baffling text you recently received, enter
the e-mail address of the sender, and
the ‘Mystery Matador’ will measure the
jargon and verbosity, then e-mail the
content’s creator anonymously with a link
to his/her score.
Indeed, it was a video that arguably
pushed social media into the general
public’s consciousness and out of the
‘geek-only, someone-with-no-life’ area
they might previously had thought it
belonged to. For that, we have Johnson &
Johnson to thank.
Johnson & Johnson and Motrin take
social media into the mainstream
Saturday 15 November 2008 was a watershed
day for social marketing, and highlighted the
power of this new online channel.
On this day Johnson & Johnson
subsidiary McNeil released a video on its
website for its Motrin range of ibuprofen-
based painkillers, and in one fell swoop,
managed to incur the wrath of a whole
cross section of its target audience – an
audience who immediately started a
storm online.
Courtesy of Lisa Belkin, a journalist at
the New York Times1, the following is the
voice-over text to the video:
 Social Media: The New Business Communication Landscape
“Wearing your baby seems to be in
fashion. I mean, in theory it’s a great
idea. There’s the front baby carrier,
sling, schwing, wrap, pouch. And
who knows what else they’ve come
up with. Wear your baby on your side,
your front, go hands free. Supposedly,
it’s a real bonding experience. They say
that babies carried close to the body
tend to cry less than others. But what
about me? Do moms that wear their
babies cry more than those who don’t. I
sure do! These things put a ton of strain
on your back, your neck, your shoulders.
Did I mention your back? I mean, I’ll
put up with the pain because it’s a
good kind of pain; it’s for my kid. Plus,
it totally makes me look like an official
mom. And so if I look tired and crazy,
people will understand why.”
As Belkin goes on to note:
“Online Moms did not respond to the
ad by racing out for Motrin. They were
offended by the suggestion that they
carry their babies to be ‘fashionable‘.
They were outraged at the idea that
they look ‘crazy‘. They vehemently
disagreed with the phrasing that ‘in
theory‘ carrying your baby around
is a good idea.
By Saturday evening they were the
most tweeted subject on Twitter. By
Sunday there was a nine minute video
on YouTube, to the tune of Danny Boy,
showing screen shots of the outraged
twitter posts interspersed with photos of
Moms carrying babies in slings.
Bloggers began calling for boycotts.
Bloggers asked their readers to alert the
mainstream press.
By Sunday afternoon a few bloggers
and tweeters had gotten the ad agency
that created the ad on the phone, to find
they didn’t know a lot about Twitter and
didn’t seem to have a clue that there was
so much anger piling up online.”
Equally damaging for the company was
the realisation that not only had it upset
a large group of its target market who
spent some of their precious time interacting
with others online, but it was also going to
have to deal with the firestorm for at least
the next month or so, because, as Kathy
Widmer, the vice president of marketing at
McNeil Consumer Healthcare pointed out in
an e-mail she sent out to everyone who had
posted comments across the blogosphere
that weekend about their displeasure:
“Please know that we take your
feedback seriously and will take swift
action with regard to this ad. We are
in the process of removing it from our
website. It will take longer, unfortunately,
for it to be removed from magazine
print as it is currently on newstands and
in distribution.”
Google the phrase ‘motrin backlash’ and
you’ll get an idea of the scale of the PR
disaster. It was covered by a large number
of online-only publications – including
TechWorld in Australia2 – to highlight how
far and how quickly an idea can now
spread. It was even picked up by the
Wall Street Journal, Scientific American
and Computerworld.
Someone calling themselves ‘BZ’
commented on influential commentator
Jeremiah Owyang’s blogpost3 on the disaster:
“Oh it POed the wrong crowd of
moms alright. And they are the vocal
ones. Attachment parenting, nursing,
co sleeping, SAHM vs WM, these are
35
Chapter 3
all touch points for moms. I cover this
industry and I wish they would have
run that by me or my team beforehand.
I could have told them the fashionable
thing and the tone would have gotten
them in trouble. The women that
would agree with that are the type that
would let things roll or are too busy
to make a stink. The ones that don’t
like it have the time and the inclination
to be the squeeky wheel. So that’s
the part they didn’t understand about
who they are marketing to. Sensitive
issues are not to be taken lightly when
rolling out large campaigns for exactly
this reason.”
Courtesy of Motrin, social media came
of age in the mainstream media. It
was by no means the first example of
social media outrage – known in social
media circles as a ‘blogstorm’ and
‘twitterstorm’ – but it was the first to
impact a company so rapidly and
dramatically, and be covered so quickly
by the mainstream press. I very much
doubt that it will be the last.
The influential website ‘Social Media
Influence’ points out that4 it found six
distinct ‘waves’ of blogger activity about
a controversial topic in a five-week
period, each wave being stronger than
the previous (its research suggests a six-
fold increase between the first and last
wave). It comments:
“The commotion begins to simmer
down over time, but it’s unlikely this
story will ever truly go away. That’s
the incredibly resilient nature of blog
storms. They are capable of building
tremendous momentum for a story and
resurrecting the debate long after
the mainstream press have moved
36
on to the next story. It’s a bad-news
phenomenon we call the half-life of
social media – stories that impact a
company’s reputation may eventually
run their course, but they never really
die. In this index-able/searchable/
Google-able newscycle we live in, a
related development can reignite the
controversy at any point.”
Laura Fitton of Pistachio Consulting notes5:
“Even if your brand or agency isn’t
ready to engage formally and integrate
the business applications of Twitter
throughout your campaigns, community
building and other market engagement
efforts, you need to get clued in – fast –
to the reasons, times and ways that
you can listen. Maybe you’re not
even ready for full-time social media
monitoring. That’s your call. But not
tuning in while you launch a new tactic
borders on gross negligence, in this day
and age.”
Even if you are not ready to engage directly
via any of the social media channels, you
really do need to be paying attention to them.
All of which raises the very important
question – how?
Staying on top of the mountain of
social media tools
The social media world moves a lot
faster than anyone could possibly keep
up with. Not only are there new software
updates and upgrades released on most
of the major sites, but even ‘hard core’
evangelists (who make it their job to
stay on top of these things) find it
impossible to keep up with the plethora
of tools and platforms that are released
on a weekly basis.
 Social Media: The New Business Communication Landscape
Therefore to try and count the number
of sites that enable anyone to ‘manage’ or
attempt to ‘stay on top’ of the tsunami of
information that can arrive from the internet
is just about impossible. The last time I
looked there were:
„ Over 300 blogging platforms;
„ Over 80 calendar services;
„ Twenty microblogging platforms;
„ Two hundred news feed services;
„ Numerous web conferencing solutions;
„ Multiple instant messaging services;
„ Over three hundred variations on
RSS feeders;
„ Over 20 web-based sales automation
and CRM solutions;
„ Over one thousand CMS solutions to
manage your content; and
„ Fourteen teleconference solutions.
In other words, we’re not exactly short of
Web 2.0 and social media applications with
which to manage our online lives.
This has implications for not only us
as consumers, but also for us when we
are actively (or inactively) engaged in
marketing activities.
Taking a marketing perspective for a
moment, we need to be able to not only
monitor what is being said about us, our
company, our brand or our top people,
but we also need to input into the various
conversations that are taking place.
This falls neatly into two different
activities – monitoring and contributing, or
as I prefer to think of it, withdrawing from or
depositing into your social media goodwill
bank account – and thankfully there are
both online and desktop tools that enable us
to do this.
Let’s delve into each separately and then
wrap up by looking at some tools that let us
do both in the one package.
Monitoring the social sphere
The ability to monitor what is being said
online about the things which concerns
us is key to keeping up with the current
zeitgeist. There are many case studies
where we see companies either failed to
pay attention to a conversation or dismissed
it as irrelevant. Some of those cases are
highlighted in the ‘Social media mishaps’
section of this chapter.
It is only by monitoring what is being
said about you or your organisation can
you react appropriately and engage
fruitfully. There are far too many examples
of companies, or their PR and marketing
agencies, which have barged their way
into conversations (often by setting up
a conversational tool such as a blog
or Facebook page), and were less than
enthralled with the response they received.
Many times they received no response at
all; ignored by the populace at large, they
finally got the message.
While there exist many tools that
enable you to monitor the online
conversation, it needs to be noted that
there are two distinct ways of monitoring –
qualitatively and quantitatively.
Quantitative versus qualitative monitoring
Of course we can measure how many
times our brand, product or CEO has been
mentioned online; but nowadays, this is
about as helpful as clinging to the notion
that all that matters in PR is column inches.
What is far more important is what is being
said, who is saying it and how many are
listening/paying attention.
We cannot escape the fact that such
qualitative measurement comes at a cost
greater than mere quantitative measurement.
It takes ‘someone’ to analyse the content
of what is being said online and to discern
how influential the speakers are. And while
37
Chapter 3
there is no magic bullet to instantly produce
answers to the questions of ‘who’, ‘what’,
‘when’, ‘where’ and ‘why’, there are, at least,
tools to help determine answers to some of
these questions. Let us investigate some of the
major tools social media analysts use to help
them trace the relevant information.
Google News Alerts
Google allows us to set up alerts that
can be sent to our e-mail inbox (or RSS
reader) when any mention is made of us,
our company, our brand, our people, our
competitors, our industry or any other area
of interest to us.
If we bear in mind that in just about
every major country, half the number of
top 20 websites are Web 2.0/social media
sites, this unfortunately means that Google
News Alerts can miss many of the large
conversations that take place outside of the
mainstream media. But it is still invaluable as
a way of monitoring coverage.
Technorati
Technorati (http://www.Technorati.com)
is a useful tool that allows you to monitor
what is being said across not only the
blogosphere, but also across sites such
as YouTube. Live Web is a total web
space that currently tracks over 133m
different websites which produce
something in the order of 900,000 posts
every 24 hours.
Technorati sometimes struggles
with the amount of data it processes,
and is slowly building a ‘once was great’
reputation amongst the alpha-users of
social media analysts. Google often
reflects more up-to-date results in its
searches; but Technorati is still extremely
useful because of its blog relevance and
ranking system, which they call ‘Authority’
and ‘Rank’ respectively.
38
‘Technorati Authority’ is the number
of blogs linking to a website in the
past six months. The higher the number,
the more ‘Technorati Authority’ the
blog has.
It is important to note that Technorati
measures the number of blogs, rather than
the number of links. Thus, if Blog A links to
Blog B many times, it still only counts as +1
towards Blog A’s authority.
‘Technorati Rank’ is calculated based
on how far a blog is from the top of the
popularity tree. The blog with the highest
‘Technorati Authority’ is the ‘No. 1’ ranked
blog. The smaller a ‘Technorati Rank’, the
closer that blog is to the top.
Thus, and confusingly for some at
first, most bloggers would prefer to have
a large ‘Authority’ number and a small
‘Rank’ number.
Being SMART – staying in touch with the
thought leaders
The astute amongst you will notice that both
Google News Alerts and Technorati are
more ‘general’ search and monitoring tools;
that is, they help you get a snapshot of
what is being said at that moment, or has
been said recently, but they don’t allow
you to stay in touch with those thought
leaders outside of the mainstream media
who might be of importance.
Having said that, Technorati allows
a greater degree of identification of who
might be important, but it is only when we
purposefully monitor those key influencers,
as well as the mainstream media, that we
begin to gain value from social media
analysts tools.
This is where the next generation of
monitoring tools comes in – a set of tools
that is constantly being refined as the
needs of marketers and analysts become
more distinct.
 Social Media: The New Business Communication Landscape
These are the tools I call SMART: Social
Media Aggregation and Rebroadcasting
Tools. Every analyst I know uses a
combination of the ‘traditional’ tools such
as Google News Alerts with one or more
applications from the SMART kit, which
monitors content that exists outside of the
mainstream media.
One of the principle SMART applications
used by analysts for monitoring the key
influencers is FriendFeed.
FriendFeed
FriendFeed (http://www.friendfeed.com) is
a true aggregation service, in that it pulls
in data from a variety of the most popular
online services, and presents it in a ‘stream’
that allows for additional content analysis
and conversation monitoring.
Just a few short years ago the only
place one would need to monitor was
the ‘blogosphere’, the various blogs
and bloggers who were creating content
and, occasionally, controversy (such as
when, for example, they were called
‘pajamahudeen’ as they relentlessly
‘outed’ the lies of politicians, in particular
US politicians).
Some bloggers were and remain, more
influential and have more readers than
mainstream media giants such as the
New York Times and the Washington Post.
Sites such as Instapundit.com – run by
Glenn Reynolds, Professor of Law at the
University of Tennessee and Hugh Hewitt
(http://www.HughHewitt.com) Professor of
Law at Chapman University Law School –
spring immediately to mind in this category.
However, as we have seen earlier,
today’s digital influencers can be found
across multiple channels: blogs, podcasts,
videos, Flickr, Twitter, Facebook, MySpace,
Bebo, Hi5, iMeem, Last.fm, Ning, Windows
Live Spaces, to name but a few.
Once a decision has been reached as
to ‘who’ to ‘follow’, the next step would be
to set up a FriendFeed profile to keep up
with their output across the 40 websites that
FriendFeed monitors. Not only can their own
blog (if they have one) be monitored, but
also their activities across a swathe of sites
such as Twitter, Flickr, Last.fm, Delicious, and
so on.
The only inconvenience or risk in
such a tool is that you may have to expose
that you are monitoring them – you can
only ‘follow’ people who have already
signed up with FriendFeed, and if they set
their content feed to ‘private’, you will
have to ask for their permission to ‘follow’
them. However, this is not really of major
concern – most, if not all, social mediarists
want their words read by others. I have
yet to find any feed of any analyst or
blogger that is not fully open to the public.
FriendFeed allows for the splitting of
data into several streams – ‘personal’ and
‘professional’ are two of the default
options, but it is easy to add more – which
makes managing monitoring activities a
whole lot easier.
In addition, influencers who don’t yet use
FriendFeed can still be followed, through the
creation of ‘imaginary friends’. For example,
if an influencer’s Flickr username or their
Twitter username is known, one can create
an ‘imaginary friend’ with that Flickr or
Twitter account, and be notified every time
he/she publishes a photo.
Naturally, one can ‘pull’ all of this
monitoring activity into an RSS feedreader
(‘Google Reader’ and ‘FeedDemon’ are
my two recommended readers; see the
Appendix for a list of recommended
software, reading material and online
commentators worth following).
But lest you think that FriendFeed
is the only game in town, be assured that
39
Chapter 3
there are a plethora of other sites out
there with not-dissimilar, yet also
complementary offerings.
Tweetdeck
Many of the leading alpha users and
commentators are using Twitter as a way of
capturing the zeitgeist and staying on top of
breaking news. For example, news about
the Asian Tsunami, the London bombings
and the Mumbai hotel massacres were
whizzing around the ‘Twittersphere’ long
before mainstream media could even get
anyone to the scene, let alone report these
tragic events.
Most of the major news organisations
now have presences on Twitter, and
despite many independent bloggers
finding that it took away their focus
from blogging (which is the best way of
generating ‘Google Juice’ and showcasing
one’s personal communication and
thought leadership abilities), they came
to realise that even just monitoring what was
being said by the hard core ‘Twitterers’ was
invaluable in keeping abreast of
current affairs.
Tweetdeck (http://www.tweetdeck.com) is
a desktop application that enables the user
to break down the massive amount of data
that comes ‘down the twitter pipe’, into more
manageable chunks.
For example, one could keep one’s entire
list of fellow ‘twitterers’ in one column, a
list of ‘twitterers’ who tweet primarily about
topic A in another, a further column for
‘twitterers’ who tweet about topic B, and so
on. The search facility in Tweetdeck dovetails
into Twitter’s own search engine, and the
continually updating results are stored as
separate columns; allowing for columns
dedicated to tweets that contain, for example,
the word ‘FTSE’ or ‘second life’, or who reply
to, or mention a particular twitterer.
40
Many analysts have found that running
Tweetdeck full-screen on a second monitor
is especially helpful in keeping track of the
zeitgeist without intruding on their day-to-
day computer activities, and as Tweetdeck
stores the updates overnight, it is easy in
the morning to quickly scan through the
columns to see if anything relevant needs
urgent attention.
And this is where we enter the realm of
contributing to the social sphere.
Contributing to the social sphere
Once the key influencers have been identified
and monitored, it becomes useful to move to
the ‘interact’ phase of a social media strategy
(for more on this, see Chapter 4).
The ‘interact’ phase is where already-
existing conversations are purposefully
added to by a business communicator. As we
shall see later, just barging in and ‘selling’
is a sure-fire way of generating a massive
backlash, hence it is important to choose
the conversation and the tone of voice one
uses correctly.
Obviously, there are so many possible
platforms (websites, forums, Facebook,
MySpace, twitter, inter alia) that spending
time crafting a message for each and every
one can be time consuming. One needs to
choose which conversation to enter into and
which will deliver the most value; that’s a
decision that can only be made on a case-
by-case basis, and is dependent upon who
the conversation is between, how many are
‘listening’ but not directly engaging (also
called ‘lurking’), and how much time is
available to spend conversing.
But when it comes to broadcasting
a message, rather than engaging in an
already-existing conversation, there are
several SMART ways of going about this.
There are instances where letting a
network or platform know that a business
 Social Media: The New Business Communication Landscape
is releasing a new product or service, or is
seeking ideas from outside of its own walls,
is valuable. Creating a traditional ‘media
release’ style of message will definitely not
reflect well.
The template-approach of ‘fill in the
blanks’ does little to enhance the credibility
of any company; the “[insert person or
product name] recently [joined/catapulted]
the [industry] with the [promotion/release]
of ...” type of release will only infuriate the
social media community, and quite probably,
stir up a mini-backlash.
But shaping short messages “written
by humans for humans” will definitely win
friends. Remember the quote from The
Cluetrain Manifesto.
ShareThis
An add-on to your existing website or
blog is the ShareThis plugin, which enables
others to share your content on Reddit,
Facebook, Delicious, Technorati, Yahoo!
Bookmarks, Windows Live, SlashDot,
N4G, Blinklist, ma.gnolia, Digg, MySpace,
StumbleUpon, Google Bookmarks,
MyWeb, Propeller, Newsvine, Mixx, Furl,
Mister Wong, Faves, Simpy, Yigg, Fresqui,
Care2, Kirtsy and more...
AddThis
In much the same manner as ShareThis,
AddThis enables readers to share your
content on Google Bookmarks, Delicious,
Digg, MySpace, Facebook, Furl, Yahoo!,
MyWeb, StumbleUpon, Reddit, Newsvine,
Live, Technorati, Twitter, Yahoo Bookmarks,
myAOL, Ask, Fark, Slashdot, Propeller, Mixx,
Multiply, Simpy, Blogmarks, Diigo, Faves
(Bluedot), Spurl, Link-a-Gogo, Mister Wong,
FeedMeLinks, Backflip, Magnolia, Seganlo,
Netvouz, Tailrank, Blinklist and more...
I have saved the best until last. Without
doubt, my two favourite applications for
online contribution (apart from my blog) are
Hellotxt and Digsby.
Hellotxt
Hellotxt (http://www.hellotxt.com) is a
highly-valued website that enables one to
rebroadcast and cross-pollinate a message
across multiple channels at the same time
(thus saving valuable time visiting each
channel and pasting the same message over
and over).
The same 140-character message
can be delivered, for example, to social
networks, such as Facebook, Blinko,
LinkedIn, hi5, Plaxo and Bebo, as well as
micro-blogging platforms such as Twitter,
Friendfeed, Identi.ca, Plurk, Rejaw, Meemi,
Brightkite, Youare.com and so on. As I
write this, Hellotxt covers 35 different social
networks and micro-blogging platforms,
making it a comprehensive way of rapidly
getting a message out.
In addition, Hellotxt allows the cross-
dissemination of YouTube and Seesmic
videos, music, and Flickr photos. If the
receiving application cannot directly
view the videos or listen to the music,
a url is instead provided, so that the
end-user can visit the material in his/her
own browser.
Digsby
Digsby is not a website, but rather a
downloadable desktop application. Digsby
(http://www.digsby.com) pulls various online
and Web 2.0 activities into one ‘place’.
Wakoopa.com, a social network centred
around the software ‘real’ people use,
named Digsby as the ‘Best New Application
of 2008’.
Digsby enables the aggregation of
many of the leading social networks
(Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn,
for example), as well as various different
41
Chapter 3
e-mail accounts (Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo
Mail, AOL/AIM Mail, IMAP and POP
accounts). Not an essential feature, but a
nice one nonetheless.
The beauty of a desktop application like
Digsby is that, because it ties in a user’s
personal data with a central web-database,
even if the user changes computers, it
will keep his/her settings and, once the
application has been installed on the new
computer, duplicate them.
However, the downside of an application
like Digsby is that it is a ‘now you see it,
now you don’t’ type of application – it
notifies the user of new activity across
various platforms/channels, but doesn’t
store any records of those activities. In
addition, if the user clicks on, for example,
a Facebook link, it will open up a new
tab in his/her default web browser, and
he/she may need to log into the site – a
nuisance. But it is an otherwise handy way
of keeping a ‘stream of consciousness’
overview of the various activities across
some of the main channels.
Another huge downside is its ‘spammy’
installer that asks you to install a whole
bunch of trial software and advertising
nonsense. While it’s relatively easy to
uninstall them, or not even install them in
the first place, I hope that they receive more
venture capital funding, so that they can
jettison such an unfriendly approach.
The ‘spam-filled’ installer aside, Digbsy
is revolutionary (and the only one of its kind
as I type this, but no doubt by the time this
report goes to press, that situation would
have changed), because Digsby is similar
to all other instant messaging. It enables
anyone to chat on all the major networks,
as well as monitor and update their e-mail
and social network sites (yes, one can use
Digsby’s built-in very basic e-mail client to
send/reply to e-mails).
42
Instead of segregating each service to
its own area, like the other tools do, Digsby
mixes them together, removing barriers. It
is easy to tell who is on which network by a
symbol added to their picture, but they are
all listed in one large contact group. It is,
therefore, easy to start chatting with people
on multiple networks by double-clicking their
name, with no need to change windows or
panes. Furthermore, if a targeted influencer
is on multiple networks or channels, the
Digsby user can combine all of his/her
different profiles and points of contact into
one clickable profile. Clicking that will
allow engagement and ongoing messaging
on whatever network(s) users are currently
online with.
Using Hellotxt to ‘seed’ out information
and Digsby to interact with those who
respond, can represent a time-efficient way
of contributing to the social media space.
Social media marketing is different from
social networking – it taps into the networks
in a way that doesn’t scream of traditional
marketing approaches. Social media
marketing deliberately uses the language
of the target market, not the marketers.
As explained previously, it uses human
language instead of corporate-speak.
Social media marketing involves
companies realising that they no longer
‘control the message’ (in fact, they never
did), but that the audience can now ridicule,
lambast, criticise, and send brickbats and
bouquets far quicker, and with more power
and reach, than organisations ever could,
no matter how large their advertising and
marketing budgets.
Therefore, it is imperative that
companies learn to communicate openly
with their audiences – and communicate in
the language of those audiences. Luckily,
there are plenty of tools to help them do just
that in a time-efficient manner.
 Social Media: The New Business Communication Landscape

Examples of social media mishaps

“Motrin places ‘witty’ video on its website, outraged mothers create angry backlash”
Seemingly not testing its consumer market first, Motrin places a video advert on its website that
angers a very vocal, networked group of mothers. The anger first swamps the ‘Twittersphere’,
and then the video and spoofs of it show up quickly on YouTube and across various blogs.
Motrin has hopefully learned to test its campaigns first, to listen to the discussions that take place
online directly as a result of the campaign, and to never launch any initiative on a weekend
when there are no support or PR folks available.

“CNN falls for rumour, Apple stock sinks as a result”

A rumour created by community-created news site iReport had CEO Steve Jobs having a heart
attack. It spread to mainstream media website CNN and caused a dip in Apple’s stock price.
User-generated content will always have the risk of falsified content.

“Exxon Mobil brand-jacked in Twitter”

The twitter community was eager to embrace Janet, a no-holds-barred, upfront, in-your-face
corporate representative who was ready to tackle the hard issues – sometimes without grace.
Unfortunately, to both Exxon and the Twittersphere’s surprise, Janet was not the official company
representative she claimed to be.

“JC Penney brand-jacked by fake ‘sex’ ad”

We’re seeing more and more brand-jacking ads being created. In this case, a third-party vendor
(possibly an ad agency) created one and submitted it to Cannes. JC Penney wasn’t happy and
had it removed from YouTube. Unfortunately, blogs picked it up and now it will never go away.

“Louis Vuitton (LV) gets brand-jacked in anti-genocide campaign”

An artist creates and sells t-shirts demonstrating how the media turns a deaf ear to real-world
tragedies such as genocide in Dafur, infringing on the LV logo. LV fires back with a lawsuit, and
a groundswell begins.

“Burger King VP Steven Grover ‘trash talks’ a union using his daughter’s e-mail
account”
Allegations aired by Grover at a Senate enquiry were eventually repeated on blog posts,
but not in Grover’s own name. The posts were traced to the online user name of Grover’s
daughter. The girl, who is in middle school, later confirmed her father had used her online
screen name. In a post still available on YouTube, an individual with the girl’s screen name
wrote: “The CIW is an attack organization lining the leaders pockets by attacking restaurant
companies. They make up issues and collect money from dupes that believe their story.”
Messages left for Grover at work and at home by The Associated Press were not immediately
returned. We are not sure why he didn’t just create a new e-mail address, which would have
been a lot safer.

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Chapter 3

“Anonymous unmasks Church of Scientology”

The Church of Scientology has long been criticized by many, including an anonymous group that
has created videos, staged marches and protests, and is out to subvert the Church from within
the internet.

“Marvel nearly cuts off bloggers from Iron Man screening”

The powerful website ‘Techcrunch’ (700,000 + subscribers) intended to host a screening for loyal
readers (perhaps the movie and genre’s perfect audience – tech bloggers). Alas, the screening was
denied by Marvel. ‘Techcrunch’ is well-known for copy and pasting legal notes right onto its blog,
so any ‘cease and desist’ approaches to them are aired for all to see, with commentary usually to
the detriment of the letter writer. Fortunately, in this case, matters were quickly resolved.

“Target-ed by bloggers”
A blogger’s four-year old daughter asked a pertinent, yet embarrassing question about a
billboard ad from Target that was potentially demeaning to women. The blogger eventually
found a ‘spokesperson’ at Target and complained, and was unceremoniously shoved off by
someone who “only spoke to ‘real’ journalists, not bloggers”. The story very quickly made it to
the New York Times. As in life, little things can become big.

“Target’s ‘Rounders’ program”

Target encouraged its premier members in the ‘Rounders’ program to pump up its brand in a
Facebook group. The covert operation ended up on blogs and then mainstream media. Ooops.

“HD DVD decoded by Digg, unDugg, then Dugg again”

Digg.com users ‘promote’ and re-publish ‘top secret’ unlocking code. The entertainment industry
understandably goes into PR overdrive, worried that too many users will use the code to ‘crack’
their protection software. But Digg.com maintains its stance and the story remains high on its
‘promoted’ pages to this day.

“Whole Foods CEO caught being a troll”

John Mackey, the CEO of Whole Foods, spent a lot of time on Yahoo message boards,
bashing the value of (competitor) Wild Oats stock – just before bidding to take over Wild Oats.
For about eight years until last August, the company confirms, Mr Mackey posted numerous
messages on Yahoo Finance stock forums as Rahodeb. It’s an anagram of Deborah, Mr
Mackey’s wife’s name. Rahodeb cheered Whole Foods’ financial results, trumpeted his gains on
the stock and bashed Wild Oats. Rahodeb even defended Mr Mackey’s haircut when another
user poked fun at a photo in the annual report. “I like Mackey’s haircut,” Rahodeb said. “I think
he looks cute!”

“Delta holds customers hostage”

What’s worse than being held prisoner on a dirty aeroplane? The answer is quite possibly
watching the crew getting off the plane while you are still stuck on it. Oh, and having no food

44
 Social Media: The New Business Communication Landscape

and quite a few crying babies. One talented videographer in the passenger list wasted no time in
spreading Delta Airline’s faux-pas around the internet.

“Taco Bell’s infestation crawls into YouTube”

A rat with a penchant for Tex-Mexican food found its way onto YouTube, spreading faster and
farther than expected – a total of more than one million views for all of the different videos about it.

“Data storage blogger posts industry price lists, sales reps cry foul!”
Robin Harris, one of the most well known of the data storage bloggers, posts price lists that were
received from various industry suppliers and customers. On the internet, it seems, there are no
secrets, or at least not for long.

“Dell laptop explodes, news at 11 on YouTube”

Dell laptops explode in Japan, videos of which became very popular on YouTube.

“Comcast suffers from Narcolepsy”

A sleepy technician is caught napping on the job. The video is posted on YouTube. Comcast’s
already dusty reputation gets a further beating, and the employee is fired. See also the ‘Comcast
must die’ blog at: http://www.comcastmustdie.com as an example of how disgruntled customers
can make Google’s visitors see the ‘bad’ stuff before the ‘good’ stuff.

“The naked NOKA chocolate uncovered”

A premium chocolatier (Noka) had a tremendous mark-up (US$309- US$2,080 per pound)
of its secretly re-packaged chocolate. Unfortunately, for them, this mark-up was exposed, as
was the secret of its chocolate being a re-packaged fraud, and the deception spread in the
blogosphere. Noka’s Google results are still really painful – results 3, 7, 8, 9 and 10 of the first
10 results for the search term ‘noka chocolate’ are negative.

“How to get on our nerves – AOL account gets cancelled (eventually)”

A customer rings AOL to cancel his account. Unfortunately, he ends up dealing with
someone from the customer retention team who becomes increasingly annoying as he
attempts to hold the customer hostage and keep the account. The blogger recorded the
conversation because he had heard many tales of similar frustration. These are some of the
damaging statistics: customer spends four minutes navigating through the automated voice
prompts, then 11 minutes on hold waiting to speak to a
customer service representative. He then spends five minutes being hassled by the customer
service rep, and a further one minute listening to an automated ‘goodbye’ message. The
story ended with the blogger being interviewed and the story receiving prime airtime on
US breakfast television.

“Starbucks brand-jacked by YouTube video”

Who wants a tasty frappuccino when there are kids starving? This was one of the first cases of

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Chapter 3

brand-jacking seen, and Starbucks at that time had no way of responding. ‘No comment’ means
the same as ‘guilty’ and ‘I am clueless’ in the social media webspace.

“Dell hell”
Influential blogger Jeff Jarvis launches a blog post that sends a flurry of PR negativity at Dell
North America’s poor service. Since then they have improved enormously. Interestingly, many
Dell fans across Asia Pacific and Europe come to Dell’s aid and sung their praises in reply to
Jarvis’ (and others’) tales of woe.

“Kryptonite unlocked”
The bike locks of the bike courier world, the Rolls Royce of bike locks, were proclaimed by their
manufacturer as unbreakable, and a US$10,000 reward was offered to anyone who could
break one. Unfortunately, for them, one bored cyclist with a video camera and a spare five
minutes disabled one using the cap from a simple bic biro. The video and the news spread on
forums and blogs, and became one of the earliest examples of social media news that received
mainstream attention.

“Apple’s dirty little secret plastered over New York City”

Apparently, 18 months is all the iPod will run before you’ll need to buy a new one, says one
popular video that was aired on YouTube and quickly spread around the blogosphere.

Links to these stories and more courtesy of Jeremiah Owyang6

References
1. See: http://parenting.blogs.nytimes.
com/2008/11/17/moms-and-motrin/
2. See: http://www.techworld.com.au/
article/267694/motrin_maker_feels_pain_
from_social_media_backlash?pp=1
3. See:http://www.web-strategist.com/
blog/2008/11/17/motrin-mothers-
groundswell-by-the-numbers/
4. See: http://socialmediainfluence.
com/2008/11/09/case-study-the-anatomy-of-
a-blog-storm/
5. See: http://pistachioconsulting.com/motrins-
twitter-moment/
6. See: http://www.web-strategist.com/
blog/2008/05/02/a-chonology-of-brands-
that-got-punkd-by-social-media/

46
Chapter 4: Social media strategy
FRUSTRATED INDIVIDUALS realise that they
can vent their feelings to create an impact
via social media:
“My tax dollars are being used to
bailout companies that made bad
business decisions? Screw them, let them
go bankrupt.”
“Do we really want to bail out General
Motors, which mocked global warming
and stubbornly cranked out SUVs?
Darwinism should prevail: adapt or die.”
“I’m sick and tired of these CEOs getting
millions of dollars to ruin companies. It’s
greed pure and simple.”
“Dear Valued Verizon Investor: There’s
something you should know. Verizon
executive compensation is out of control
while performance has been mediocre.
Shareholders can make their opinions
known on compensation and on the
Board members responsible for such
high pay. Learn more...”1
‘Strategy’ is one of the most misunderstood
and, therefore, abused words in
organisations today. Consultants, managers
and the mainstream media are guilty of
misusing the term.
It comes as no surprise that the band of
social media gurus and experts that have
recently emerged, are equally comfortable in
confusing ‘strategy’ with ‘tactics’.
The Compact Oxford English Dictionary
defines ‘strategy’ as: “A plan designed to
achieve a particular long-term aim; [or]
the art of planning and directing military
activity in a war or battle. Often contrasted
with ‘tactics’”.
Contrastingly, the definition of ‘tactics’ is:
“The art of disposing armed forces, in order
of battle and of organising operations. Often
contrasted with ‘strategy’”; further noting that
its origin is Greek, from words “taktike teckne
art of tactics, from taktos ordered, arranged”.
Therefore, it becomes very important for
us to separate the goal from what tools
we deploy to achieve that goal. But my
all-time favourite definition of ‘strategy’
comes from the world’s most successful
online marketer, Mark Joyner. In his book
Integration Marketing (can be downloaded
for free at: http://www.sboacademy.com/
free-report/mark-joyner-free-integration-
marketing-book), he defines strategy,
thus: “To see the battlefield.” Or, to put it
more comprehensively:
“Strategy: a long-term plan for achieving
an aim that allows one to see the
battlefield (no matter how complex it
becomes) and make consistently correct
decisions quickly (even when a correct
move is seemingly impossible to find), no
matter what may arise.”
Drawing on the ideas of one of the world’s
best business communicators, Shel Holtz
(http://blog.holtz.com), I have narrowed
47
Chapter 4
down the plethora of terms, stages and steps
that different consultants and organisations
promote in their own definitions of a ‘good
strategy’ to four key elements that help
achieve Joyner’s powerful definition:
„ Goal – what is the desired end result the
organisation wants to achieve?
„ Plan(s) – any goal will require
more than one plan to bring it
about, therefore, strategic plans can
work to achieve the overall goal from
different directions;
„ Steps – the measurable steps an
organisation can take to achieve a plan,
including the choice of tools and their
phased roll-out; and
„ Evaluation – did the steps meet the
needs of the particular plan? Did the
plans achieve the goal?
Most people equate strategy with planning,
but they are not the same thing. As the
Prussian military philosopher Carl von
Clausewitz once said, “No campaign
plan survives the first contact with the
enemy.” A plan is rigid, a strategy fluid.
A plan either hits its target or it doesn’t; a
strategy allows you to use several plans,
changing them on the fly as required, in
order to hit the target.
Good communication is not the goal
All communication must be aimed at meeting
a specific business objective. If it does not
support a business goal, then it has no place
for its existence.
That is not to say that fluffy pieces about
the ‘3 Bs’ (Brides, Births and Barbecues) don’t
belong in a corporate communication vehicle;
depending on what the communication piece
is designed to achieve, it may well be the
perfect place for non-financial and non-work-
specific material.
48
But communication itself is not the goal –
the goal should always be a business goal
– the meeting of which will help C-level
executives (CEO, CFO, CIO, COO, inter
alia) sleep better at night.
It is from that business-driven goal that
a communication strategy must be formed
and informed.
The goal-setting and subsequent
communication-strategy-setting process is
covered in this report, but there are equally
many good resources available to business
communicators from professional organisations
like the International Association of Business
Communicators (IABC – see: http://www.iabc.
com) and the many national public relations
bodies around the world.
Culture, change and communication
In my humble opinion, communication is
all about culture change. Communication
practices should either be supporting the
introduction of cultural changes in the
way ‘things are done around here’, or
else supporting the embedding of recent
change initiatives – all under the umbrella of
supporting a business goal.
As management and business consultant
Tom Lambert says:2
“Cultural change is designed and created
at the highest levels of the organisation. It
is communicated from the highest levels
clearly and unambiguously to those who
have to make it work.”
He also remarks:3
“Nothing should be done in a business
unless: There is a good business reason
for doing it; it will pay for itself in a
reasonable time; It can be explained in
simple language to those who will have
to make it work.”
 Social Media: The New Business Communication Landscape
Therefore, all communication should
either be:
„ Preparing the ground and introducing
and explaining a new cultural
requirement (bearing in mind that
‘culture’ is nothing more than ‘how we
do things around here’); and
„ Supporting and helping embed these
cultural requirements and existing
current ‘best practices’ (and bearing in
mind that ‘best practices’ are constantly
moving targets).
I will explain further how communication,
change and culture relate to social
media, but for now, the four steps of
a communication strategy – or more
accurately – the three pre-steps before you
start the four-step strategy-setting process,
should take place, thus giving a seven-step
company-wide holistic process, with the
emphasis for corporate communicators on
the last four.
The strategic planning process –
from the beginning
While strategic direction must, from the
outset, come from the top-most level
of the organisation, every department and
every constituent part of the organisation,
right down to the individual employee,
must know and have the clearest
understanding of:
„ Its purpose;
„ Its stakeholders – both principal and
minor, internal and external to the
organisation, and immediate and
longer-term;
„ Its policies;
„ Its procedures;
„ The ethical considerations on which all
business decisions should be based;
„ Its resource needs – human, time,
inventory, fiscal, inter alia; and
„ Where it is going.
Thus, it becomes necessary to create or
use a pre-existing model that takes the
organisation, each department, each team
and each employee from where they are
right now to where they need or desire to be.
Pre-step A – establishing a vision
The sole reason for creating a vision is to
design the future and decide where the
department, team or individual wants
to end up. After all, if they don’t know
where they are going, that’s where they’ll
end up.
The purpose of the vision is not, at this
stage, to constrain it with ‘reality-based
thinking’ (also known as the pull-down ideas
of the ‘naysayers’), but to establish a future
that is compelling and exciting enough, that
will bring others onto the journey.
Pre-step B – a ‘where are we now’
analysis
The idea of Concerns, Opportunities,
Strengths and Threats (COST) comes from
Lambert4 and is, I feel, a more effective
variant of the traditional Strengths Weaknesses
Opportunities and Threats (SWOT) analysis.
Concerns
Concerns describe the weak areas of the
department, team or individual, and provide
evidence that these occur periodically. Score
on a scale of one to five (low to high) the
seriousness, urgency (in the need to address
and resolve) and growth (how quickly it
might worsen if not addressed) of these
weaknesses. Focus on the causes, rather
than the symptoms of these weaknesses and
determine what actions need to be taken to
address them.
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Chapter 4
Opportunities
What opportunities are there to add revenue,
reduce cost and maximise resources? Is
the team, or anyone in it, qualified to
exploit them right away? If so, should they
be exploited now or left until later, or not
exploited at all? If no one is qualified, what
additional resources are required to ‘skill up’
and take advantage of the opportunity? Is it
worth skilling up or hiring that resource now,
later or never?
Strengths
What strengths are there – no matter how
trivial or similar to other departments, teams,
individuals or competitors they might seem?
Are any of those strengths marketable? Would
any of them make a ‘unique’ feature/benefit
worth exploiting? If so, what action should be
taken next?
Threats
What could possibly go wrong in the near
future? What impact might government
legislation, environmental events, competitor
activity, or technological innovation or
collapse have on the organisation or the
department, team or individual? What could
be done to avoid it? If it happens anyway,
what can be done to fix the negative effects
upon the organisation?
Pre-step C – ‘your mission, should
you choose to accept it...’
With all of the blue-sky dreaming of pre-
step A and the more down-to-earth realities
of pre-step B under one’s belt, it is time to
lay down concrete, easily understood, easily
quantified and measurable sentences about
what the organisation, department, team or
individual is going to do.
There is no room for ‘wishy-washy’
corporate nonsense in the mission statement
– those ‘best in class, synergy-seeking,
50
paradigm-shifting’ phrases have only one
place: the corporate waste bin.
In the words of Guy Kawasaki:5 “The
ultimate test for a mission statement is if your
telephone operators (Trixie and Biff) can tell
you what it is. If they can, then you’re onto
something meaningful and memorable. If
they can’t, then, well, it sucks.”
Personally, I hold to the view that the
mission statement should be no longer
than 25 words. Management guru Peter
Drucker suggests that it should be able to
fit on a t-shirt. Take the example of Enron’s
mission statement: “Respect, Integrity,
Communication and Excellence.”
The communicator’s four-step
strategy process
The following is the shorter four-step strategy
setting process that is part of the seven-step
holistic system.
Step one – the goal
As discussed previously, the goal is the
business objective that any communication
must be supporting.
For example, let’s say that a business
goal is to increase the ‘share of wallet’ in
existing customers. That, as simple and
concise as it is, is a very good goal. A
goal doesn’t need to take four paragraphs
to espouse – indeed, if it does take four
paragraphs to explain – it’s not a goal, it’s
an unfinished thought. Like the best elevator
speeches and positioning statements, if
it takes more than one short sentence to
explain, then it’s too long and convoluted.
A goal should be measurable, concise,
with just one idea and easily understood by
everyone likely to come across it.
After having clearly defined your goal,
we can now move to the next stage –
creating one or several strategies to achieve
that goal.
Continued on page 53
 Social Media: The New Business Communication Landscape

Examples of some great (if often, overly verbose) mission statements

The Jeremiah Program: “A broad-based collaborative community initiative, assists low-income

mothers and their children to help themselves complete their education and achieve economic self-
sufficiency through empowerment skills, access to affordable housing, child development services,
healthcare, support services and meaningful employment. The Jeremiah Program’s mothers and
children develop positive self-esteem and clarify their values on which to build a successful life.”

Coca Cola: “Everything we do is inspired by our enduring mission: To Refresh the World… in body,
mind and spirit. To Inspire Moments of Optimism… through our brands and our actions. To Create
Value and Make a Difference… everywhere we engage.”

Toyota: “To sustain profitable growth by providing the best customer experience and dealer support.”

The Bradford Group: “We are an affinity marketing company which specialises in the development
and the direct marketing of collectibles and other products. We strive to build a long-term relationship
with each customer as an individual. We relentlessly pursue breakthrough ideas for our products and
direct marketing approaches. We serve niche markets and try to be the leader in every market we
serve. Our employees are the most important assets; we will develop the highest quality workforce in
our industry. We seek to engage each employee in the continuous improvement of our business by
recognizing their success and by rewarding them with increased responsibility and authority. We have
dual core competencies: product development and marketing.”

Lisa Ekus Public Relations Company: “In the crowded marketplace of cookbooks, food and food-
related products, it is crucial to have a savvy, well-seasoned team strategizing, coordinating and
implementing your public relations efforts. All of our nationally recognized promotions at Lisa Ekus
Public Relations Company, LLC are built on the same foundation: innovative campaign strategies;
meticulous attention to client needs; and creative networking across the food, media and publishing
industries. Lisa Ekus Public Relations Company, LLC strives: to create and implement innovative public
relations campaigns for culinary professionals including cookbook authors, chefs, restaurants, food
products; to be a leading food media resource of culinary information for print, radio, television,
Internet; to be a leading food industry resource for partnering culinary professionals with opportunities
ranging from spokesperson placements to publishing ventures.”

Advance Auto Parts: “To provide personal vehicle owners and enthusiasts with the vehicle
related products and knowledge that fulfil their wants and needs at the right price. Our friendly,
knowledgeable and professional staff will help inspire, educate and problem-solve for our customers.”

Ameren: “To generate electricity, deliver electricity and distribute natural gas in a safe, reliable,
efficient and environmentally sound manner. Our vision is to be the recognized performance leader
of the U.S. electric and gas utility industry. Being a performance leader means we will achieve
operational excellence, industry-leading customer satisfaction and superior financial performance.”

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Chapter 4

MBNA Corporation: “To provide you with an outstanding member/customer benefit that helps
you meet your organization’s objectives. We work very hard to understand your objectives, then
create a program that can help you meet them. Whether you want to attract new members, retain
existing ones, drive incremental sales, or reinforce member or brand loyalty, we will work with you
to help you achieve those goals.”

Brannigans Restaurant: “To ensure that each guest receives prompt, professional, friendly
and courteous service. To maintain clean, comfortable and well maintained premises for our
guests and staff. To provide at a fair price – nutritional, well-prepared meals – using only quality
ingredients. To ensure that all guests and staff are treated with the respect and dignity they
deserve. To thank each guest for the opportunity to serve them. By maintaining these objectives
we shall be assured of a fair profit that will allow us to contribute to the community we serve.”

Yoshinoya: “To create the structure and systems needed to allow our customers access to
the majority of their away-from-home daily meal requirements on a one-stop-shop basis. All
our products shall be of the highest quality and value, be healthy, nutritious and provided
with outstanding personal services at the lowest possible prices consistent with a fair return
on investment for our shareholders, job enhancement/security for our employees and a level
of community involvement by everyone connected with our business. All of our products and
services shall be delivered consistently and measured by one satisfied customer at a time, whether
by company-owned or franchised operations, in superior, clean, convenient, fun and friendly
neighborhood environments. We pledge to make Yoshinoya the best place to eat and the best
place to work.”

McDonalds: “To be the world’s best quick service restaurant experience. Being the best means
providing outstanding quality, service, cleanliness, and value, so that we make every customer in
every restaurant smile.”

J. Sainsbury: “To be the consumer’s first choice for food, delivering products of outstanding quality
and great service at a competitive cost through working faster, simpler, and together.”

Big Binoculars: “To simply offer our customers the most binocular aperture, at the highest quality, for
the lowest price.”

Levi-Strauss: “We will market the most appealing and widely-worn casual clothing in the world. We
will clothe the world.”

Microsoft (pre 2002): “To empower people through great software – any time, any place, and on
any device.”

Lee Hopkins (my own mission statement): “Helping businesses communicate better for better
business results.”

52
 Social Media: The New Business Communication Landscape

Examples of some not-so-great mission statements

Wendy’s: “To deliver superior quality products and services for our customers and communities
through leadership, innovation, and partnerships.”

Levenson Public Relations: “To help clients achieve their most ambitious marketing
goals and strategic communications objectives. To deliver the highest levels of
professionalism and experience. To provide strategic counsel, creative solutions and timely,
responsive services.”

Aztec Marketing Solutions: “To approach all client projects with competitive creativity and flair,
and to service our clients to the highest professional level.”

Publishers International Marketing: “To achieve the highest possible standards in all that
we do. Our number one priority and commitment is therefore to offer, at all times, a world
class service which enables our publishers and customers to increase their business and reach
sales targets.”

Ford: “We are a global, diverse family with a proud heritage, passionately committed to
providing outstanding products and services.”

Success Networks: “To inform, inspire, and empower people and organizations to be their best
– both personally and professionally.”

Ninety Nine Restaurant: “A Passion to Serve.”

Step two – setting a strategy
As Shel Holtz says, “Strategies are general
directions you take to meet the goal.” Any
business goal will require several strategies in
order to achieve it – no one strategy or plan will
represent the ‘magic bullet’.
Let’s return to the goal of increasing
‘share of wallet’ in our customers. Some
of the strategies or directions won’t involve
us as communicators – for example,
pricing decisions, product and process
re-engineering, customer service and
support initiatives, and so on. However,
we, as communicators can certainly add
value to support the achievement of this
goal. We could, for example, come up with
a strategy that requires good communication
– show existing customers the benefits of
spending more of their hard-earned cash
with us.
The communication will need to offer
compelling reasons without ramming these
reasons down their throat like an over-zealous
sales trainee (nothing is more off-putting).
It needs to grab their attention – with
their permission – if it is to be attended to in
a positive way.
It needs to be highly relevant to their
wants, needs and emotion-led drivers. It
needs to be specifically relevant to their own

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Chapter 4
circumstances at the moment they receive
the communication.
It needs to clearly state what they can
get out of it and what they risk if they don’t
spend more with us.
And if all that wasn’t enough, it should
have, at least, drawn them closer to the
company, not further away. It needs to do all
of this in a way that brings them closer to a
purchasing action, and does not repel them
to a less-pushy competitor.
We are now starting to see how social
media might have a place in the business
communicator’s toolbag.
Step three – establishing the steps
If steps one and two are about setting
the ‘Generalissimo’-level priorities, step
three is where the battle-ready officers
and senior non-commissioned officers
decide on which tactics will most efficiently
and effectively meet the strategic direction,
and how best to use which infantry,
battalion and armoury. (Okay, so I’m
overdoing the military motif, but hopefully
you get my point.)
Steps one and two have looked at the
‘whys’, and now, steps three and four look
at the ‘hows’. In step three the aim is to
decide on the measurable steps to be taken
to support the plan to meet the goal. Why
measurable? Because, if it’s not measured, it
cannot be improved.
Sticking with our business goal of
achieving a greater ‘share of wallet’ for
our existing customers, and our need to
create compelling, concise, attention-
gaining, relevant, respectful and affirming
communications aimed at our existing
customers, our tactics could possibly
include the following:
„ Pages on the corporate website that
articulate these desirables;
54
„ Print brochures aimed at conveying
these same desirables, perhaps
encouraging deeper engagement and
information at a special section of the
company website;
„ A spreadsheet or worksheet that
allows customers to calculate
the fiscal benefits of increasing their
spend with us;
„ An ongoing relationship-building
communication programme
aimed at encouraging and
supporting level ‘A’ customers
to become level ‘B’ – higher
spending customers;
„ A communication programme that
encourages existing customers to
feel ‘closer’ to the company, perhaps
through invitation to customer-only
events, or the receipt of ‘special
customer/friend of the company/
brand’ merchandise;
„ A communication programme that
encourages new product/service
ideas from customers. The computer
company Dell do this particularly
well with its blogs, garnering
great ideas on what products
to make next, and at the same time,
turning keen customers into brand
evangelists when these ideas are
recognised and turned into real
product/service innovations; and
„ A consideration of the cost of a
programme compared to the
results it garners (after all,
there’s no point in spending
US$100 to gain only US$20).
This last point needs further exploration.
Cost is a vital factor to be considered
when settling on a tactic, but cost
alone should not preclude a tactic from
being used.
 Social Media: The New Business Communication Landscape
Step four – measure and evaluate
We now have our various steps – some
using social media tools and some not –
which we are rolling out, in order to
meet a particular strategy that supports a
business goal.
We of course must measure each of our
tactical operations to see how effective they
are, what outcomes they are generating and
what adjustments need to be made in order
to improve the outcomes.
Measurement is not, therefore, a task to
be done at the end of the campaign, but it
should be part-and-parcel of the operation.
Thus, we could use any tools available in
order to measure ‘effectiveness’, and these
could be:
„ A survey;
„ A reward of some sort in
exchange for information
(a bribe, in other words);
„ Focus groups;
„ Face-to-face meetings;
„ ‘Town hall’ meetings;
„ Visits to, and time spent on a
particular webpage (although beware
of any results given to you by web
consultants that mention ‘hits’;
these are useless numbers that are
best considered to mean ‘how idiots
track success’);
„ The number of comments generated
or requests for further information
left; and
„ The number of calls into a dedicated
call centre.
These are, of course, not the only
measurement tools available, and I
would strongly advise those interested
in this topic to visit the websites of KD
Paine (http://www.kdpaine.blogs.com
and http://www.measureofsuccess.com)6
and Angela Sinickas (http://www.sinicom.
com); arguably two of the smartest and
savviest communication measurement
experts around.
Irrespective of which measurement
tool you use, you must ensure that the
tool matches the measurement objective.
Obviously, it’s pointless using a quantitative
tool if you are trying to measure qualitative
data – and very often, social media data
is qualitative. After all, measuring just
the number of visitors or comments to a
blog post is not as ‘rich’ a data source as
examining if the comments are positive or
negative in number.
Social media is not a magic bullet
There exists a perception that social media
means communicators can do away with all
of the other communication vehicles and it
will solve all of a company’s communication
challenges. Nothing could be further from
the truth.
Television advertising is expensive,
but it still remains the best way of
reaching a mass audience through the
modalities of sight and sound, and using
humour or shock to elicit an emotional
response in the viewer.
While the number of hours spent
watching TV is reducing and the number of
hours spent engaging in social media and
social networking is increasing, no one is
seriously contemplating the sudden demise
of the giant plasma TV.
Similarly, no one seriously expects
radio or newspapers to disappear. TV
didn’t kill off radio, the internet didn’t
kill off TV, and social media won’t kill
off newspapers.
All that happens when a revolutionary
technology arrives is that the previous
technologies take an ‘audience hit’, redefine
what their core strengths are, and refocus
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Chapter 4
their energies on delivering those strengths
to new audiences.
About a decade ago, there was a
widespread perception that companies
could do away with expensive-to-print and
expensive-to-post annual reports, and instead,
make downloadable PDF digital copies freely
available on the company website.
The cost of printing, it was argued,
could be shifted from the company to the
end consumer, and the cost of returned
reports, due to incorrect or outdated postal
addresses, reduced to zero.
But a digital representation cannot
replicate the tactical, non-verbal
statements made about the company by
the choice of paper stock, the packaging,
the binding and so on. There are certain
non-verbal values that are still clearly
communicated better by print than by an
on-screen representation. It is sometimes
worth the risk of the end consumer printing
off the report on the back of cheap,
pre-used paper with poor-quality printers
and inks, and thus, gaining a subtle,
unconscious, but powerful impression about
the value the company places in non-verbal
communication.
iTunes may be the world’s biggest
music store, but it doesn’t have any of the
Beatles’ songs on its digital shelves. EMI
and Apple Corps have finished digitally
remastering the entire Beatles catalogue
and will shortly release them on CD – a
technology platform many have thought
long-made redundant by the dominance of
the digital MP3 file and the digital music
download store such as iTunes and others
of its ilk.
Perhaps EMI and Apple Corps will
eventually allow Beatles songs to be
sold for instant download via online
resellers, but the only way to get a
digitally remastered masterpiece from
56
arguably the world’s most successful
musical band (over 300m albums sold)
for now will be to get a tangible disk
in a holdable, caressable plastic disk
case that comes complete with a
full-colour booklet – old-tech, maybe,
but certainly not redundant. And there’s
surely something more romantic in saying,
‘come up and see my CD collection’ than
‘come up and look at my MP3 collection
on my hard drive’. If nothing else, it’s
easier to let one’s fingers do the walking
and rummage through a bunch of physical
What social media cannot do
Social media will not:
„ Solve all communication headaches;
„ Help slash department budgets
by $000s;
„ Allow for the sacking of expensive
senior communicators and then
replacing them with inexpensive
and gullible school-leavers;
„ Have the world beat a path to
one’s door just because one has
set up a Twitter account;
„ Elevate its chief in-house
evangelist to a seat on the board
and a seven-figure quarterly
salary; and
„ See the blogging CEO featured
on the front page of the Financial
Times, the Washington Post,
the New York Times, or on
the cover of Forbes, Harvard
Business Review, Fast Company,
Wired, GQ, Maxim... all in the
same month.
(Sorry to burst some bubbles.)
 Social Media: The New Business Communication Landscape
What social media can do
Having quite rightly pointed out that
social media is not a magic bullet,
it is only fair to point out the results
experienced already. Social media tools
can:
„ Foster an ongoing dialogue between
and amongst a company and its
varied and various stakeholders;
„ Help a company find new markets for
its message;
„ Help innovate its products, services
and processes by tapping into the
wisdom of its customers and end users;
„ Find evangelists amongst the greater
population;
„ Arm those evangelists with information
that enables them to continue
evangelising and draw in other
potential evangelists, all at little or no
cost to the company;
„ Make company information more
easily ‘findable’ on Google;
„ Make that information more end-user
focused, informative, relevant,
interesting, appealing and simple to
understand;
„ Help a company engage with the
nearly 70 per cent of internet users
who are already engaging with each
other via social media;
„ Help a company engage with the
largest online demographic group –
the 35-44 year olds;
„ Help a company tap into the
higher productivity that comes from
accessing social networks;
„ Help employees be seven per cent
more productive at work; and
„ Help a company’s key information and
messages be found on Google quicker.
CDs, than it is to mentally grasp the size
and scope of a music collection by scrolling
down a long toilet roll of a list, or flicking
through endless tiny pictures of album
covers on a computer monitor.
But I digress...
Case study: Motrin
On 15 November (a Saturday) Johnson &
Johnson posted a short video on YouTube7
as the leading edge of a multi-channel
ad campaign for Motrin (a headache
tablet) that was aimed at young mothers.
Unexpectedly, the video drew a fast and
furious backlash from its intended audience
(the very powerful ‘mommy bloggers’ group),
and the company decided to ‘kill’ the entire
campaign in its infancy.
The Motrin ad used an irreverent tone
to identify with young mums and the back
pain associated with lugging infants in
baby carriers. But it struck the wrong chord
with some and drew fire on Twitter and in
the blogosphere.
As Wired Magazine pointed out in an
article following the debacle, brands are
delicate things. Social media tools exist not
only to hear bad news, but more importantly,
to engage with that part of the crowd.
“These tools allow advertisers to listen to
what people are saying – and can provide
free, instant feedback before they buy
marketing efforts in traditional media,”
said Jeremiah Owyang, senior analyst at
Forrester Research. “But brands have to
make sure they understand the medium
and how it’s different. The consumers are
in charge here. And as much as brands
are doing the talking, they have to do as
much listening.”
“If [Motrin] better understood the nature
of social networking, this could have been
a different story,” said Dan Gould, senior
editor at trends and innovation agency PSFK.
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Chapter 4
Had Motrin joined the debate,
or allowed offended mothers to offer
suggestions on how to rectify the problem, it
could have likely moved on quickly, without
wasting all of the time and money already
sunk into the campaign.
“They pulled into their shell instead of
redirecting their energy,” says Owyang. “But
they could have leveraged the weight of the
negative energy into something that would
have benefited the brand.”
Motrin tried to adapt its reaction to the
audience it had engaged, but the company
wasn’t prepared to react in real time. They
had no Twitter presence when it happened
and took a typical ‘nuclear’ corporate
approach. Seemingly unable to remove
the advert, the company allegedly took
the decision Sunday evening to pull down
its entire brand website, motrin.com. On
Monday morning (presumably when it finally
had someone around who could actually
make the content changes required to its
website), they re-opened the website and
posted a statement:
“We have taken immediate action
to respond to these concerns and
have removed the advertisement
from our Website... Unfortunately it
will take longer for us to remove this
advertisement from magazines, as
several are currently on newsstands and
in distribution.”
By Thursday 20 November, the brand’s
response on the site had shifted to better
address its audience. Kathy Widmer, vice
president of marketing at McNeil Consumer
Healthcare penned a new apology that began:
“So…it’s been almost 4 days since
I apologized here for our Motrin
advertising. What an unbelievable 4 days
58
it’s been. Believe me when I say we’ve
been taking our own headache medicine
here lately!”
Jessica Gottlieb, one of the original bloggers
who took offence to the ad, didn’t even
think it should have been pulled. She wrote
on her blog:
“Did Motrin really need to take the
ad down? No, I don’t think so. Yes,
I really did say that. Much has been
written about how the company (and
every brand and every person) ought to
monitor their reputation online.”
Upset bloggers may be a vocal bunch,
but they are often easily appeased (with
attention, or as Gottlieb notes on her blog,
free stuff). If Motrin had been less scared
of the ‘mommy bloggers’ and their angry
backlash, and instead had been willing to
talk it out online (preferably in advance
of the campaign launch), they might have
received a better campaign as a result,
instead of no campaign at all.”
As experienced Canadian PR practitioner
David Jones from Hill & Knowlton noted:
“Your corporate and product image is at
risk every day and you better be listening
at the very least and ready to respond if
you know what’s good for you.
“It’s getting through to PR people that
they need to have the ability to update
websites themselves at a moment’s
notice. It’s the front door of the
company to pretty much everyone and
the traffic will skyrocket when your
image is under attack.”
Later in this chapter I’ll be using a great
plan of Jones’s that leads a company
 Social Media: The New Business Communication Landscape
through the steps to be able to effectively
contribute and engage with the online
communities of interest.
Motrin is just one of the latest in a
growing line-up of examples of companies
which received a sudden wake-up call that
this ‘social media thing’ is very real and
powerful. As communication analysts, we
are seeing more and more examples of
real consequences of mistakes. If social
networks and social media didn’t matter,
we wouldn’t see this type of reaction from
Johnson & Johnson.
Measuring and evaluating social
media initiatives
Of course, as business communicators, we
can preach the benefits of engaging in the
social media space until we are blue in the
face. But the ultimate decision of whether we
get to go into it usually rests with the CFO
or other financial managers. Their interest
and decisions are historically determined by
the return on investment (ROI).
Not one presentation I give on social
media ends without, at least, one person in
the audience asking me about the ROI.
There are several areas that you can
look at when measuring the success (or
otherwise) of your social media marketing
efforts; and of course, it depends entirely on
what your overall goal is. Is it to push sales,
drive engagement or increase awareness?
Whatever your success metrics are, the
following are some others to consider as well.
Content consumption
If the company has a blog – and at least
one person in the organisation should – a
good way to measure engagement is to
monitor who is reading that blog, where
they are coming from and what content
they are reading. Running web analytic
reports will show the most popular content
on the company website and/or blog – but
beware, just looking at ‘hits’ is how idiots
track success. Hits are merely how much
data is requested; if you have a webpage
with six images and one paragraph of text,
that page will generate seven ‘hits’ – in other
words, meaningless data. Web analytic data
will also show how long visitors were on that
particular page, where they came from and
also the bounce rate (percentage of
visitors who left the site after visiting a
particular page).
Content contribution
Assuming that a company has a blog/wiki
and allows for comments, a quick and easy
metric would be to monitor the number of
visitors who are actually interacting with
your content. But, as always, be very wary
of equating high numbers with ‘success’.
As we saw with Motrin, high numbers do
not always mean that your content is being
viewed positively.
Social bookmarking
Now that social bookmarking sites
like Delicious.com, Reddit.com and
Stumbleupon.com are popular, finding out
who is actually adding a site/article/blog
post for both themselves to find later and for
others to find out about is even easier: use
a web analytic tool to run a click map report
and see how many web visitors are clicking
on the social bookmarking icons. Or, simply,
create profiles in each of the bookmarking
sites and search for specific urls.
Subscribing to an RSS feed
Free services like FeedBurner.com measure
how many readers are actually subscribing
to RSS feeds. By setting up an account and
running a website/blog’s RSS feed through
FeedBurner.com (now owned by Google),
not only can reader numbers be obtained,
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Chapter 4
but useful cross-marketing information and
tools accessed. FeedBurner is one of the
early Web 2.0 services that very quickly grew
into a ‘must use’ tool-of-choice for online
content syndication.
E-mailing posts
Assuming that the company blog allows for
blog postings to be e-mailed to others, blog
platforms such as Wordpress and suitable
(usually free) ‘plug-in’ applications offer
simple ways to see how many e-mails are
actually being sent.
Who is talking about you?
Again, with WordPress, there is functionality
built into the platform for the administrator
and other password-authorised users to
allow you to see which other site(s) are
linking to the blog. One can also go to
blog search engine Technorati.com and
search for the company’s domain. Lastly,
one can always use the old search engine
optimisation trick by searching for a domain
in Google, Yahoo! and MSN with the
following link: http://www.yourwebsite.com.
This data is unlikely to completely match
up, because different search engines
capture data at different times, but it
serves as a good indicator to see who is
talking about a site (or, at least, linking to
the site and its content).
Profile engagement
Although the company may not yet
have a blog – but once again, I strongly
suggest that at least one blog is set up – it
may well have a profile for a company
or brand on MySpace, Facebook or
Mybloglog. One can always apply the
same metrics already mentioned, as well
as monitor the number of friends that the
profile has, total profile visits, etc. Each
social networking site offers some type of
60
‘vitality’ metric to see what’s going on in
the various communities. All of the above
services are free, but there is good reason to
consider ‘paid’ services, too.
Radian6 (http://www.radian6.com) is
but one of a number of services that offers
to monitor the social media environment
for mentions of a brand or company (or
particular term). The monitoring occurs
not just across the typical text-based sites,
but also within audio podcasts and videos,
photo sharing sites like Flickr and Picasa,
and of course, Twitter.
One might reasonably ask why
anyone would pay for services that are
already freely and abundantly available.
The answer lies in the integration that
occurs in paid services which isn’t offered
in the free tools. For example, Radian6
offers a secure web-based platform that
allows companies the opportunity to not
only monitor what is being said, but
discuss and understand what to do with
that intelligence. Having a secure
dashboard allows all relevant participants
within the company access to the data
and each other’s insights, and thus
more easily discuss and decide what to
do next. Which brings up the question,
how do we effectively engage in the social
media landscape?
How to effectively engage in
the social media landscape – the
MAIL method
David Jones is a business communicator at
Hill & Knowlton in Toronto, where he is the
VP of Digital Communication. He devised
a four-step method of engagement that
starts at a baseline of ‘the company is brand
new to social media’ and ends with ‘the
company is fully engaged in the social media
landscape’. He calls the method ‘MAIL’,
which stands for:
 Social Media: The New Business Communication Landscape
„ Monitor;
„ Analyse;
„ Interact; and
„ Lead.
No doubt, it is apparent how such a
process works, but Figure 1 is the process
in visual form.
Monitor
The social media landscape is not a
closed system, but a vibrant, dynamic and
transparent one that buzzes with conversations
24 hours a day, seven days a week.
One of the principle mistakes companies
make in engaging and utilising social media
and social networking tools is to use the
new channels in traditional ways – that is,
use the new channels for one-way message
delivery vehicles. This is fatal. The social
media landscape has time and time again
shown itself to be extremely unhappy with
companies that engage in such practices
and has created online backlashes.
The social media landscape is one built
upon conversation, therefore, the company
new to social media must first ‘listen’ to what
is being said about them, their brands, their
products and services, their key personnel
and so forth, before they begin to send
messages out along these channels.
Only by monitoring what is being said
and utilising the tools previously mentioned,
can a company hope to eventually engage
meaningfully and positively in the landscape.
Analyse
Of course, as mentioned previously, noting
that a company or brand is mentioned
many times does not necessarily mean the
company or brand is ‘successful’. As the
Motrin example earlier proved, plenty of the
online conversation can be negative and
result in a backlash against the company.
Monitor
Lead Analyse
Interact
Figure 1: How the process of MAIL works
It is important to content analyse what is
being said – not just giving the individual
contributions to the conversation a ‘thumbs
up’ or ‘thumbs down’ quantitative score,
but actually taking into account the content
and conversation around the contribution.
For example, a sarcastic ‘Company X is
wonderful and I love them to death’ does
not mean what the words say. Only content
analysis and a time-consuming quantitative
approach can give a richer, more accurate
picture of what the market is saying.
Interact
Once analysis has taken place, it becomes
easier to interact with the conversationalists.
In the first instance, this can be done on the
conversationalists’ ‘home turf’ – their own
blog or YouTube video, or Flickr photo, or
Twitter. Once the conversation has progressed
and the company is more comfortable using
social media tools in a ‘to-and-fro’ way –
rather than the traditional ‘command-and-
control’ approach to message dissemination
– then they are likely ready for the final stage
of the process – leading conversations.
Lead
After a while, a company brand new to the
social media landscape will have earned
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Chapter 4
enough experience from engaging with
others in their conversations to be able to
launch ‘conversation starters’ from their
own web properties, such as their own
blog(s) or Twitter accounts, Facebook
profiles and so on.
The company can lead conversations
more easily on its own properties than on
the properties of others, simply because it
can set the ground rules.
For example, the RSPCA in South
Australia8 has a very clear policy regarding
comments left on its blog, quoting in full:
“1. This is a family-friendly site. Whilst
you take all legal responsibility for
the comments that you make and
indemnify the RSPCA of SA from any
legal liability that may result from your
comments, we reserve the right to edit
or withdraw your comment should
it contain defamatory content or
inappropriate language.
2. If you are a first-time commenter your
comments will be held in a moderation
queue and not published. Once
someone has had a chance to review
your comment, and assuming that your
comment meets the guidelines above,
it will then be published. We don’t sit
by our computer and wait for someone
to comment – we all are very busy,
so it may be a little while before your
comment is published.
3. Whilst you may use this site to further
your own personal agendas, please
be aware that should a comment stray
‘off-topic’ and away from the main
thread of the article at the top of this
page, your comment may be removed.
4. If your comment repeats previous
comments (either by yourself or others)
and adds nothing to the conversation it
stands a good chance of being deleted.”
62
Rinse and repeat...
Of course, the MAIL cycle is not just
completed once; it should be an ongoing
process conducted at least weekly, and
more appropriately, daily. Just because a
company has its own blog, for example, it
should not stop leaving comments on other
blogs that have posts about them or topics
of interest to the company. In this way, those
in the social media landscape can see that
the company is genuine about engaging with
its audience/marketplace. Such ‘goodwill’
becomes important for when the inevitable
crisis occurs – a company is more likely to
find itself surprised by the number of ‘social
mediarists’ who rise up out of nowhere to
lend support.
The dreaded ROI question and how
to get the CFO on board
If there is one question that is asked at
presentations, it is the ROI question: ‘This
is all well and good, and we like the idea
of social media, but how do we get senior
management’s buy-in? How do we convince
them of the ROI?’
It’s not an easy question to answer, and
it very much depends on what purpose a
company has for entering into the social
media landscape in the first place. Here
follows some questions any communication
team should consider asking themselves
before submitting a proposal up to the
senior management:
„ What is investment? Is it just financial,
does it include time? Is social media
an extension of business ethics? If so,
should there even be a return?
„ What do we want to measure to judge
the return? For example, is ‘success’
the number of people who fill in the
‘get more info’ form or the number of
influential people who Twitter about the
 Social Media: The New Business Communication Landscape
company? Is it an increase in Google’s
page rank? Is it the number of influential
blogs that link to the company or the
number of features suggested by users
that we actually implement? and
„ Are sales directly attributable to a
particular channel – Twitter, the
company blog or a particular friendly
blogger outside of the company (aka
‘an evangelist’)?
From the answers to these questions can
come specific, measurable steps that can be
taken and tracked; but equally important to
track is the correlational data.
For example, if a social network
campaign launches and does not specifically
drive traffic to the main website (or call
centre), see if any rise in sales also occurs
around the time of the campaign launch. The
social media campaign may not be driving
specific traffic, but it may be generating
‘top of mind’ presence in consumers and
influencing their purchasing behaviour.
Analytics guru Avinash Kaushik9 has
eight rules for entering Key Performance
Indicator (KPI) heaven, as he calls it (KPI
being “measures that help you understand
how you are doing against your objectives”,
according to Kaushik). The eight rules are:
„ One – start simple, start direct and
please start with outcomes;
„ Two – leverage metrics that identify
success for areas where you spend the
largest efforts;
„ Three – wean your marketers off the
‘one-night-stand’ mentality, do pan
session analysis;
„ Four – if you can’t segment a KPI, you
have picked the wrong one;
„ Five – even ‘brand’ and
‘site usage’ can be measured,
loyalty rocks;
„ Six – if your shortlist of KPIs doesn’t
include those that report customer
voice directly, then you will never be as
successful as you should be;
„ Seven – use KPIs that can tie back to
the ‘old world’ and traditional metrics
to help you bring people to the current
age; and
„ Eight – not using competitive
intelligence KPIs can be considered a
crime against humanity.
Dennis R. Mortensen, director of Data
Insights at Yahoo! and author of the book,
Yahoo Web Analytics: Tracking, Reporting
and Analysing for Data-Driven Insights10
suggests that KPIs should:
„ Echo organisational goals;
„ Be decided by management;
„ Provide context;
„ Create meaning on all organisational
levels;
„ Be based on legitimate data;
„ Be easy to understand; and
„ Lead to action.
By having the CFO or equivalent help
determine the KPIs, ROI can be more easily
measured in a trial, and approval sought for
a major rollout/campaign.11
In today’s culture there is a very
strong trend towards truth, accountability,
transparency and clear communication,
which many organisations align with their
own values. Opening up the organisation
with social media tools helps show those
outside the organisation that the company is
serious about being a 21st century employer
and a winner in the war for talent.
Additionally, the hype about
organisational collapse and combustion
because of the amount of time wasted
on social media activities by employees is
63
Chapter 4
not a reflection of the reality, and usually
promoted by companies that sell software
to help you monitor employee activity. As
Dilbert’s creator, Scott Adams mentioned
many years ago in The Dilbert Principle
(published by HarperBusiness in 1996), the
internet is the latest in a long line of time-
wasting opportunities – as in, if an employee
wants to waste time, he/she will find a way.
Of course, no one wasted time at work
before the arrival of the internet, did they?
Similarly, before social media, no one
ever worried about industrial espionage,
did they? And before e-mail no one ever
thought the company photocopier would be
used to copy confidential documents either.
Social media and social networking have
replaced e-mail as a means by which the
average person communicates; and three-
quarters of adults online now use social
media technologies.
Lastly, social media initiatives aren’t
expensive to try out, and most new
applications come with security settings that
enable companies to try them out away
from the public gaze, thereby not setting any
expectations in their audience.
Low cost, quick to install/roll out, easy
to measure and track, and flexible... they all
sound like CFO-friendly words to me.
Assessing the layout of the land
In order to successfully engage in
conversation with any marketplace, a
company or organisation must first study
the ‘layout of the land’ to see how rocky
it is, what traps there might be, where the
best paths are and whether the natives
are friendly. Engaging a set of measurable
tactics based around a strategy that
allows that business or organisation to
‘see the battlefield’ for what it really is
(not what the planners think it is) is key to
successful engagement in this new online
64
communication landscape, where the lone-
voice customer sometimes has more power
than the New York Times to shape opinion.
It is a new communication landscape
that eats ‘dinosaur’ companies for breakfast,
yet it is a landscape easily traversed and
mapped. Many have gone before and
successfully reached the other side – the land
where more and more customers actually
want to give us their hard-earned cash.
Useful resources
Blogs to read
Avinash Kaushik: http://www.kaushik.
net/avinash
KD Paine: http://www.kdpaine.blogs.com
Jason Falls: http://www.
socialmediaexplorer.com
Axel Schultze: http://www.
socialmediatoday.com
Useful websites
Angela Sinickas: http://www.sinicom.com
Social Media Statistics: http://www.
socialmediastatistics.wikidot.com
Constructing Social: http://www.
constructingsocial.com
Slideshare presentations on social
media strategy: http://www.slideshare.
net/search/slideshow?q=social+media
+strategy
Slideshare presentations on social
media measurement: http://www.
slideshare.net/search/slideshow?q=soci
al+media+measurement
 Social Media: The New Business Communication Landscape

References
1. Meyer, R., ‘Social Media: What you’re
afraid to admit you don’t know’, powerpoint
presentation can be found at: http://www.
worldofdtmarketing.com
2. Lambert, T., Key Management Solutions: 50
leading-edge solutions to executive problems,
Pitman Publishing, 1996, London, p. 234
3. Ibid; p. 269
4. Ibid; pp.19-25
5. See: http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2006/01/
mantras_versus_.html
6. Paine has a useful slide presentation,
‘Measuring Naked Conversations: How to
Measure Social Media Connect’ over on
slideshare, which can be found at: http://
www.slideshare.net/ugaconnect/katie-
delahaye-paine
7. Can be found at: http://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=Mztymu72l7c
8. See: http://blog1.rspcasa.asn.au/
9. See: http://www.kaushik.net/
avinash/2008/09/rules-choosing-web-
analytics-key-performance-indicators.html
10. See: http://visualrevenue.com/blog/yahoo-
analytics-book
11. Consider what Alex Manchester, in a Melcrum
report, Transforming Your Intranet suggests
any CFO might want to think about; this can
be found at: http://www.melcrum.com/store/
products/product.shtml?id=300000283

65
Chapter 5: The three social media
tools and the seven social networking
sites you need to know about
THERE ARE a million social media tools.
Well, perhaps, that’s a slight exaggeration,
but I’m sure the day won’t be too far away
when that number is correct. I could waste
a whole heap of time by detailing every
single tool out there at the moment, but
this would be a full-time, ongoing research
project and you would never finish this
chapter because the research and discovery
would never end. As discussed in Chapter 3,
there are currently:
„ Over 300 blogging platforms;
„ Over 80 calendar services;
„ Twenty microblogging platforms;
„ Two hundred + news feed services;
„ Numerous web conferencing solutions;
„ Multiple instant messaging services;
„ Three hundred + variations on RSS
feeders;
„ Over 20 web-based sales automation
and CRM solutions;
„ One thousand + CMS solutions to
manage your content; and
„ Fourteen teleconference solutions.
From this list, it is evident that we are not
exactly short of Web 2.0 and social media
applications with which to manage our
online lives.
In this chapter, I focus on
the key social media tools and social
networking sites that every business
communicator needs to know about at the
first hurdle, before they or their social media
consultants start getting carried away:
„ Delicious;
„ Digsby;
„ Facebook;
„ FeedDemon;
„ LinkedIn;
„ MySpace;
„ Ning;
„ ShareThis;
„ Twitter; and
„ YouTube.
We have already had a look at some of
these tools and sites in Chapter 3, but we
will analyse, in detail, the others which have
not been addressed.
Delicious
Delicious (http://www.delicious.com) is a
social bookmarking service that enables
users to tag, save, manage and share web
pages from a centralised source. With
emphasis on the power of the community,
Delicious greatly improves how people
discover, remember and share on the
internet. The following summarises what you
can do with such as tool as Delicious.
Bookmark any site on the internet and
get to it from anywhere
Instead of having different bookmarks
on every computer, Delicious makes it
easy to have a single set of bookmarks
kept in sync between all of your computers.
Even if you’re not on a computer you own,
you can still get to your bookmarks on the
Delicious website.
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Chapter 5
Figure 1: Delicious.com logo
Share your bookmarks and get
bookmarks in return
If your friends use Delicious, you can
send them interesting bookmarks that they
can check out the next time they log in.
Of course, they can do the same for you.
As you explore the site and find interesting
users, you can use the ‘Subscriptions’
and ‘Network’ features to keep track
of the Delicious tags and users you find
most interesting.
Discover the most useful and interesting
bookmarks on the web
See what’s hot with Delicious users by
checking out its most popular recent tags.
By looking at popular bookmarks for a
tag, you’ll be able to discover the most
interesting bookmarks on the topics in which
you’re most interested. Browse bookmarks
on just about anything from the best
programming tips to the most popular travel
sites, all in an easy-to-read format.
Digsby
Not a website, but rather a downloadable
desktop application, Digsby (http://www.
digsby.com) pulls various online and Web
2.0 activities into one place. ‘Wakoopa.
com’, a social network centred around the
software people use, named Digsby the ‘Best
New Application of 2008’.
68
Figure 2: Digsby logo
Digsby aggregates many of the leading
social networks (Twitter, Facebook, MySpace
and LinkedIn, for example), as well as
various different e-mail accounts (Hotmail,
Gmail, Yahoo Mail, AOL/AIM Mail, IMAP
and POP accounts). Not an essential
feature, but a nice one, nonetheless.
The beauty of a desktop application
like Digsby is that because it ties in a user’s
personal data with a central web database,
even if the user changes computers, it
will keep his/her settings and, once the
application has been installed on the new
computer, duplicate them.
However, the downside of an
application like Digsby is that it is a ‘now
you see it, now you don’t’ type of application
– it notifies the user of new activity across
various platforms/channels, but doesn’t
store any records of those activities. In
addition, if the user clicks on, for example,
a Facebook link, it will open up a new tab
in his/her default web browser, and he/she
may need to log into the site (which can
be a nuisance). Otherwise, it is a handy
way of keeping a ‘stream of consciousness’
overview of the various activities across some
of the main channels.
Another downside discussed earlier in
Chapter 3 is its very ‘spammy’ installer that
asks you to install a whole bunch of trial
software and advertising nonsense.
 Social Media: The New Business Communication Landscape
Figure 3: Screenshot of Digsby’s pop-up
messages in action
With Digby, however, it is easy to start
chats with people on multiple networks by
double-clicking their name, with no need to
change windows or panes (see Chapter 3
for more on the upsides and downsides of
using Digby).
Facebook
The current ‘big hitter’ of the social
networking world is Facebook, and it is
the place (along with Twitter) to be seen
and have a profile. More than just a place
to send friends a digital cocktail, become
a vampire or look at the photos of your
friend’s new baby, Facebook is now the
recipient of more site traffic than any other
social media site in the world.
According to Nielson Online’s
report, ‘Global Places for Global Faces’
for the year December 2007 to December
2008 (available at: http://www.Nielson-
online.com), while the time spent on
the internet, in general, increased by 18
per cent, the time spent on Facebook
increased by a whopping 566 per cent.
For this reason, Facebook should be of
primary consideration for any company’s
communication activities, either for itself or
for one or more of its brands. It is the social
networking site on which I shall spend the
most time examining in this chapter – a
reflection of its importance in the social
media/social networking universe.
A brief history of Facebook
Launched in February 2004 by Mark
Zuckerberg, then a student at Harvard
University, Facebook took its name from the
printed directories known as ‘face books’
that students were given to help match their
classmates’ names with their faces.
Zuckerberg thought that having an
online version, where students could create,
personalise and update their own profiles,
and interact with each other, would be a
‘cool’ concept. He was right.
A guiding principle behind the site
was that members would be forced to
use their real names, and their identities
would be verified by their profiles being
linked to their school-issued e-mail address.
Unlike MySpace and other sites, no
pseudonyms, aliases or fake names would
be allowed on Facebook, thus engendering
a high level of accountability to how each
member behaved.
Originally launched in Harvard for just
Harvard students, the service became so
popular that it was soon expanded to other
universities and colleges, then caught on to
high schools, and then workplaces.
But it really exploded when, in
September 2006, Facebook dropped the
requirement for a school or work-based
e-mail account, effectively opening the doors
to anyone older than 13 years of age with a
working e-mail address.
By July 2007 nearly half of Facebook’s
users were 35 years of age and older. As
Nielson Online’s report states: “Facebook
started out as a service for university
students, but now, almost one third of its
global audience is aged 35-49 years and
almost one quarter is over 50 years old.
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Chapter 5
In the UK, for example, if the average
month-on-month audience-changes were to
continue; by mid-June 2009 there would be
as many 35-49 year olds on Facebook as
18-34 year olds.”
How business communicators can
effectively use Facebook
In March of this year (2009) Facebook
changed the layout of its ‘Page’ offerings
for brands and companies, making them far
closer in appearance and functionality to the
traditional ‘Profile’ offerings for individuals.
At last, companies and brands can have
a ‘lifestream’ (a chronological update of the
brand or company’s activities in Facebook)
in the same way that individuals already
enjoy. As with individuals, brands and
companies can now have that lifestream as
the first thing that ‘Fans’ see when they visit
the brand’s or company’s page.
Each brand-landing page (the first page
you see when you visit it) has, running across
its top, up to six tabs: Wall, Info, Photos,
Video, Events and Boxes. We will briefly
address each.
Wall
This is the default landing page and the
equivalent of a ‘home’ page on a traditional
website. It is here that the ‘lifestream’ is
published, acting as the primary visual
focus. Thankfully, Facebook has given
brands and companies the opportunity to
have two ‘Wall’ default landing pages –
one for fans, and one for non-fans and
non-facebookers. An essential part of any
strategy, therefore, is to figure out and
clearly articulate why someone should
become a fan (obviously from the brand or
company’s perspective, it is because those
fans become unpaid evangelists). Perhaps,
providing fans with special offers, early
notification of upcoming events, discounts
70
and so on will incentivise the non-fan to
opt-in and become one.
Info
This is always the second tab (as ‘Wall’ is
always the first), and someone from the
communications team needs to complete
this as much as possible for maximum
effect, the reasons being self-evident once
they start, and don’t forget to link off to
any other web property where the company
or brand may be found online – YouTube
videos, Flickr profiles, other websites, Twitter
accounts, MySpace profiles, individual
company leaders’ public profiles, evangelist
sites, etc.
Photos
Consider this an ideal place to house photos
of your latest product launch, or ‘meet the
design team’ function or user-generated
content. Facebook is the world’s largest
photo-sharing platform and there is no limit
to the amount of content that can be put up
– think about collections of old advertising
and posters and collections that show how
a product has changed in appearance
over the years. Most powerfully, think about
including photos of fans – as a psychologist
and as a hard-core Facebooker myself, I
can assure you that once fans recognise
themselves in event photos they will tag
themselves and will tell all of their friends,
bringing more and more Facebookers to
the page.
Tagging is a subset of ‘Photos’. Tagging
is how other Facebookers can be identified
in images. Consider this: when someone is
tagged (his/her name added to the names
of the people in the photo or video) they
are notified of the action, the tagged item
appears in his/her own newsfeed/lifestream
for friends to see, and most importantly, he/
she or any of his/her friends can comment
 Social Media: The New Business Communication Landscape
or share it with their own friends. This is also
known as ‘going viral’. Fans can add the
names of their own friends to images and so
fill in the missing names, thus spreading the
images and the brand/company further.
Videos
As with ‘Photos’, this is an ideal place
for videos of your latest product launch.
Never underestimate the pulling power of
the moving image. As with static photos,
consider having a number of people at
events whose job is to take digital imagery
(and hopefully, also attach the names of fans
to the shots). Imagery is the number one tool
for obtaining the most comments, interaction
and viral activity, so the more imagery is
allowed to be captured (yes, especially by
fans) and posted up in Facebook, the bigger
the reward the brand will reap.
Events
This is the perfect place to announce your
upcoming events, whether fans can visit
them or not. Not everyone can visit a Milan
Fashion show, but fans would, no doubt,
love to know that the company is going to
be there. Similarly, fans would love to know
about events that they might be able to
attend – new product launches, competition
winner cocktail evenings, parties, concerts,
new store openings, etc.
Boxes
It is on this page that custom text, graphics
and self-chosen third-party applications
can be displayed. A powerful page full of
opportunities to engage and become ‘social’
with the brand’s or company’s fans, and
where the clever company or brand places
custom-built specialist scripts allowing fans
to, for example, subscribe to an e-mail
newsletter, submit a job application form,
enter a competition and so on.
In addition to those six tabs, you can
replace any but ‘Wall’ and ‘Info’ with other
tabs, such as ‘Discussions’, ‘Reviews’,
‘Notes’, ‘Links’, and customised tabs built
to specification, housing content such as
physical store addresses, contact details,
case studies, client portfolios, inter alia.
Setting up a Facebook page
When first setting up a ‘Page’, Facebook
asks for a category to be selected. Currently
those categories are: ‘Local’ (bookstore,
cafe, club, grocery store, pet store,
professional service provider, etc.), ‘Brand’,
‘Product’, or ‘Organisation’ (consumer,
film, fashion, travel, website, inter alia), and
‘Artist’, ‘Band’, or ‘Public Figure’ (actor,
athlete, comedian, critic, model, politician,
writer, and more besides). Many of these
categories have applications already built-in
to the ‘Page’; for example, the ‘Musician’
category comes with a music player and
a ‘Discography’ application, designed to
display a listing of all the recordings the
artist/band has released so far.
Indeed, such is the range of options
available on what tab or information to
place that a lot of thought needs to go into
designing a Facebook business profile – a
company or brand Facebook presence is not
something to design and shove up on a wet
Friday afternoon.
To status update or to spam update,
that is the question
Where once it was only individual Facebookers
who could provide status updates, now
companies and brands have the same
powerful functionality. It allows for the
broadcasting of short messages that will
appear on everyone’s homepage, in the same
style as Twitter status updates (Twitter asks,
‘What are you doing?’, whereas Facebook
asks, ‘What are you doing right now?’).
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Chapter 5
Facebook used to insert a mandatory,
non-removable ‘is’ into the answer for
status updates, so that any answer would
have to be in the present tense: “Lee
Hopkins is considering how to write a book
about social media.” However, listening
to its (very) vocal community, Facebook
removed the ‘is’ and now we can draw on
the whole glorious range of verbs in the
English language – past, present and future:
“Lee Hopkins has now finished his report
for Ark Group on social media” is now an
equally viable answer.
But irrespective of the verb tense, nothing
gets fans more irritated than seeing an
irrelevant, obvious sales message in their
lifestream from a company or brand. Few
activities the company gets involved in will
cause fans to de-register themselves quickly,
therefore, be very careful about what sort
of message is put into the ‘Status Update’
box. Use the update box as a conversation
starter, remembering that the status update
can be commented upon by others. Or
else use it to ask a targeted question of the
fanbase, or to publicly thank a fan who gave
a great review (which they can do on the fan
‘Review’ tabbed page) and provide a link to
the review.
Companies and brands should also
take into consideration that status updates
can be targeted to specific sub-groups of
fans, including by location, age and gender,
enabling a greater targeting of message to
their audience.
Gaining valuable insights
Pages have a very distinct advantage
over individual profiles – the ‘Insights’
page (which is viewable only by
administrators). It gives a very robust set
of data regarding page traffic, numbers
of new fans per day, which content is
proving effective at engaging fans and
72
which content isn’t, including enabling the
demographic breakdown of fans by age
and gender. Thankfully, it also allows for
the exporting of the data as either an Excel
(XLS) or comma-separated (CSV) file. This
is exceptionally handy for building an ROI
case for the roll-out of more brand pages
on Facebook.
What gender am I?
Unlike individual profiles which have
a choice between ‘male’ and ‘female’,
‘Pages’ can be set up to reflect the
correct pronoun. Thus, if the ‘Page’ is
for a female writer, then stories can be
in the feminine: “Diedre Van Popolov
updated ‘her’ profile”; brands can be
in the neuter: “The Twisted Lemons
updated ‘their’ profile”, or in the case of
movies, TV shows, inter alia, “The ‘That
Guy’ Show updated ‘its’ profile”.
Seeking advice
My own advice would be to utilise the
services of specialist communication
consultants and consultancies – be they of a
marketing or a PR philosophy.
My personal recommendations, based
on following their work for a number of years
and being impressed by both their successes
on behalf of their clients and their own
personal ethics, are Laurel Papworth (http://
www.laurelpapworth.com) and The Advance
Guard (http://www.TheAdvanceGuard.com)
for multi-consultant advice.
To end this discussion on Facebook, I
echo the thoughts of The Advance Guard
as found in their must-read Facebook
primer, About Face (freely available at:
http://aboutface.theadvanceguard.com):
“Remember most of all: social marketing
– especially on Facebook – is the art of
interacting with people and contributing to
a Community rather than just broadcasting
 Social Media: The New Business Communication Landscape
promotional messages. This, more than
any design or functionality strategy, is the
key to growing a successful Fanbase of
enthusiastic and engaged consumers.”
FeedDemon
There was a time, early in the life of the
internet, when one spent time visiting
each and every website of interest to
see if anything had changed, new content
had been added and so on. Hours and
hours of productivity were lost by doing this.
Then along came RSS technology and
suddenly the world came to one’s own
computer, not the other way around, saving
countless hours and server bandwidth (the
latter which the IT and finance folk seemingly
consider a precious resource).
RSS enables the accumulation of content
of interest into one area (usually either the
desktop or a dedicated profile-managed
website). FeedDemon was one of the earliest
RSS readers.
FeedDemon (http://www.feeddemon.
com) is a wonder-tool, as simple as that. It
used to be a paid-for product and service,
but is now freely offered by its parent
company, Newsgator Technologies (http://
www.newsgator.com).
A Windows desktop application,
FeedDemon also synchronises with an
online profile application to keep your
reading up to date – read something
in the desktop application and it is
marked as ‘read’ on your browser-
viewable profile as well. The Mac version
is called NetNewsWire and is equally as
impressive. NetNewsWire is also available
as an iPhone application.
Now that FeedDemon comes with the
ability to synchronise itself from within
Outlook (using a product called NewsGator
Inbox), you can keep Outlook as your
primary information message delivery
Figure 4: The ubiquitous radar button: it signifies
that the website offers RSS feeds that can be
subscribed to
channel and still be able to view your
key content sources and favourite
authors’ latest blogposts when away
from your desk.
FeedDemon is the most lauded desktop
RSS reader, eliciting praise from such
quarters as the Wall Street Journal (Walt
Mossberg: “FeedDemon.is especially
powerful, with extensive options for
customizing the way news feeds appear
on your screen”), CNet (Elsa Wenzel:
“RSS reader that can handle hundreds of
subscriptions faster and better than
the many free Web-based readers
available”) and my personal technology
guru, Amit Agarwal,1 who believes that
FeedDemon is better than Google Reader
and Bloglines, the two other ‘big’ online
RSS readers (meaning one has to be online
to read them – the desktop application
allows one to go online, download reading
material, then go offline and still be able to
read it later).
FeedDemon integrates tightly into the
leading browsers, Internet Explorer and
Firefox. Thus, when an orange ‘radar’
button (see Figure 4) is pressed in either
browser, the RSS feed of the visited site is
stored in the FeedDemon application, which
is also recorded on one’s web profile.
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Chapter 5
Reading feeds
When you select a channel (a grouped
collection of feeds that is based around,
for example, your industry, your friends
and so on), FeedDemon’s tabbed browser
displays the channel’s news items in a
newspaper for easy reading. FeedDemon
displays a newspaper of news items for
an entire folder and you can view one feed
at a time. You can also watch embedded
video from within the newspaper view, so
that any RSS feeds that include embedded
video can be seen in context, rather than
the video playing separately away from
the words that surround it on the content’s
original website.
FeedDemon enables you to store news
items in a central location, and provides a
handy way to collect items from different
channels. If you find an interesting item that
you might want to read again, just store it in
a ‘News Bin’ for future reference. ‘News Bins’
are synchronised through the NewsGator
Online platform, so you can read these items
from FeedDemon on other computers, as
well as other NewsGator readers.
FeedDemon provides a shared
experience, letting you see what news is
popular with other NewsGator users and find
out who is linking to the news you’re reading.
Most handily, FeedDemon offers
a ‘Panic Button’. Ever gone on holiday
and got a little behind on your RSS feed
reading? The very large red ‘Panic Button’
solves this and many other problems by
quickly marking all older items read.
Suddenly faced with an inbox of a thousand-
plus unread e-mails? Alas, FeedDemon
can’t help you there, but my personal
recommendation is, in Windows Outlook, to
Ctrl+A, then Ctrl+Q: the first action selects
all of the messages in your inbox and the
second marks them all as ‘read’. Suddenly
you have a lot less stress.
74
Finding Feeds
Watches
Look for keywords in news items as they’re
downloaded. After you create a watch,
it examines every incoming news item
whenever any channel is updated.
‘News Comes To You’
Subscribe to feeds from all over the web, or
choose some of the dozens of default feeds.
Search
Search outside of FeedDemon’s subscriptions
by selecting a feed search engine, then enter
your keyword and FeedDemon will subscribe
to a dynamic channel containing the search
results for that keyword.
Can FeedDemon replace iTunes on
my computer?
The answer to this question is yes, you can
download audio files and automatically copy
them to your iPod or other media player.
The bundled FeedStation utility enables you
to schedule downloads, so that they occur
overnight while everyone is asleep, or the office
is empty and the desktop computers unused.
FeedDemon works inside and outside
the company firewall
FeedDemon works not only outside of the
company firewall, but also seamlessly with
RSS feeds generated behind it. Any enterprise
2.0 initiatives that have been set up inside
the company can be captured by the reader,
enabling employees to keep abreast of not
only industry news, but also internal news
and information, such as upcoming product
launches, fiscal and sales results, and so on.
FeedDemon is an essential tool for every
business communicator. Download it, install
it on every team member’s desktop, let him/
her set up his/her own profile, and let him/
her begin subscribing to the sources of data
 Social Media: The New Business Communication Landscape
most important to them – other business
communicators, industry news websites and
commentators, competitor websites, internal
subject matter experts, and external podcasts
and vidcasts (very often used as training videos;
Adobe has a wonderful vidcast series for its
‘Creative Suite’ design tools, for example2).
LinkedIn
If Facebook is fast becoming a great resource
for brands and companies, then LinkedIn
(http://www.linkedin.com) is equally fast
becoming the ‘go to’ place for individuals
looking to network and companies looking to
hire skilled, highly-networked individuals.
There are two principle parts to LinkedIn:
the individual profile and the corporate
profile. Having a corporate profile on
LinkedIn makes good sense – it shows that
your company is fluent in the language
of social media, and it enables highly-
leveraged information workers to view job
opportunities in your company and better
understand the types of roles your company
hires for. It also provides the latest news
on people that have recently joined the
company. Simply put, it is the place to
connect with professionals in your industry,
or as LinkedIn defines:
“LinkedIn is an interconnected network of
experienced professionals from around
the world, representing 170 industries
and 200 countries. You can find, be
introduced to, and collaborate with
qualified professionals that you need to
work with to accomplish your goals.”
Using LinkedIn for the individual’s benefit
As a business communicator, you can use
LinkedIn for your own means to:
„ Reconnect with a host of current and
prior associates across most of the
companies you have worked for. The
best way to get this done is to use the
‘Import Contacts’ feature. This will let
you securely download the contents of
your Gmail, Yahoo, AOL or Outlook
address book into LinkedIn. From
there, you can automatically see who,
in your contacts, is already part of the
LinkedIn network;
„ Search for connections via your college
affiliation and former employers;
„ Join ‘Groups’ to connect with others who
share your interests or past employers.
For instance, I belong to the Fans of
Digsby, adtech-Sydney, Association of
Virtual Worlds, Melcrum’s Communicators
Network, Social Media Marketing and
vBusiness Expo groups. These groups
enable members to have discussions,
share news and receive updates of
relevant interest;
„ Receive testimonials about your work.
The single best way to receive more
recommendations is to write them.
Alternatively, there is a ‘Can you endorse
me?’ request feature that you can use
to request a recommendation from a
specific contact; and
„ Ask questions of your contacts, or post
answers to questions in your area of
expertise. Either way, you are able to
demonstrate knowledge and increase
your exposure.
Using LinkedIn for the company’s benefit
To further the social media ends of your
employer, you can also use LinkedIn to:
„ Gain more business – as soon as the
company begins networking on LinkedIn,
it increases its chances of reaching new
customers. After all, individuals are
consumers, too. However, be prepared
and be willing to work at it;
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Chapter 5
„ Gain priceless competitive intelligence
– within LinkedIn you can see your
competitors’ teams, clients, references
and plenty of other information not readily
available otherwise. You may also catch
a glimpse of what they’ve been up to
recently, or who they’ve let go of that may
be an invaluable addition to your team;
„ Obtain greater visibility – LinkedIn
provides options that will enable a profile
to be indexed by search engines such
as Google. Making use of these options
allows for greater visibility on the web.
Links from high-traffic websites like LinkedIn
provide what is known as ‘Google Juice’
– a high-level recommendation that helps
promote the corporate or brand website
further up the search results;
„ Conduct market research – if considering
designing a new product or service
offering, see what type of demand there
is for that type of product or service. Do
research on what other companies inside
and outside of the company’s own are
offering. Additionally, one can make great
use of the Q&A feature to post questions.
I’ve never failed to be amazed at the
incredible high quality of the answers that
come back;
„ Facilitate introductions – LinkedIn offers the
opportunity to ask the people you already
know to introduce you to someone you’d
like to know. This gives you or a member of
your team greater credibility, and improves
the chances of actually getting that meeting
you want, in turn leading to a greater
opportunity to ‘make that sale’; and
„ Show recommendations – we are
very often judged by the company we
keep. Encouraging those with whom
your company has done business to
recommend its products or services is a
powerful marketing tool of which to take
full advantage.
76
The website Linked Intelligence (“the
unofficial source of all things LinkedIn” as it
brands itself) offers a post3 on 100+ smart
ways to use LinkedIn, linking off to articles
focused on:
„ Business development;
„ Marketing and sales;
„ Career management;
„ Personal branding and resumes;
„ Job search and recruitment;
„ Growing one’s network;
„ Keeping in touch;
„ Meeting face-to-face; and
„ Organising and extending groups,
inter alia.
Facebook or MySpace may not be the best
place to promote your brand or company (I’d
use a skilled consultancy or consultant, such
as those mentioned previously, to help you in
reaching an informed decision). LinkedIn is
the social networking site of choice if you wish
to promote your business and services, and
build business relationships that will prove
profitable to everyone involved. All 500 of the
Fortune 500 companies are represented on
LinkedIn – the previously-mentioned benefits
are the reasons why.
MySpace
Once the 5th largest population on the
planet (were it to be a real, geo-physically
locatable population), it has been overtaken
in popularity by Facebook. But that doesn’t
mean that less attention should be paid to it
– it is still a relevant social network for those
close to ‘street culture’ and those who want
to connect with it. For example, I twittered
the question, ‘Is MySpace still relevant?’ and
received a score of affirmative answers from
fellow business communicators, which have
been recorded and commented on in the
following box.
 Social Media: The New Business Communication Landscape
MySpace user testimonials
Graham White (@GWhiteOz): “Lee, my
teenagers are hooked on MySpace, it
is very relevant. They think Facebook is
for old folk!” He followed this up with,
“I think they like the user interface, the
music option, their friends’ network,
privacy control and ease of use.”
Monica Wales (@iChild): “I think
MySpace still has its place, connecting
musicians to their audience, that’s the
only reason I log on.”
Prue Robson (@pruerobson): “I think it
still has a lot of relevance in the music
industry. When was the last time you
looked up a band on Facebook?”
Yet, there are more and more
bands, perhaps appealing to a non-teen
audience, appearing on Facebook
pages. Robson continued on tweet:
“MySpace will fade over time, but it is
carving out a music/entertainment niche
and is more profitable at this stage”,
which is very true.
Mandy (@mab397): “Facebook is
very locked up, whereas MySpace
gives exhibitionists a better chance
of being found. It’s what they want.
I think you’ll find that MySpace and
Facebook are like Holden and Ford,
and you can almost stereotype by the
user differences”, which is, in part, a
reflection of the controversial research
conducted by Dana Boyd4 that found
a very real socio-economic divide
between Facebook and MySpace users.
Facebook, she argued, drew a college-
educated user, whereas the typical
MySpace user was less-educated.
The socio-economic divide between
MySpace and Facebook users
To quote Dana: “The goodie two shoes,
jocks, athletes or other ‘good’ kids are now
going to Facebook. These kids tend to come
from families who emphasise education
and going to college. They are part of
what we’d call hegemonic society. They are
primarily white, but not exclusively. They are
in honors classes, looking forward to the
prom, and live in a world dictated by after-
school activities.
“MySpace is still home for Latino/
Hispanic teens, immigrant teens,
‘burnouts’, ‘alternative kids’, ‘art fags’,
punks, emos, goths, gangstas, queer kids
and other kids who didn’t play into the
dominant high-school popularity paradigm.
These are kids whose parents didn’t go
to college and who are expected to get
a job when they finish high school. These
are the teens who plan to go into the
military immediately after schools. Teens
who are really into music or in a band are
also on MySpace.”
On a lighter note, performer, Molly (aka
Sweetafton23) published a video on YouTube
of her singing one of her compositions,
MyHope.5 A song about what might happen
when the MySpace generation grows old, it
includes the classic chorus:
“How I hope that you forget your MySpace
I hope it slips completely from your mind
And I hope it stays up long enough for the
next generation to find
And I hope that it embarrasses
your children
I hope their bratty friends all forward
it around
And I hope that you forget your password
So you cannot take it down”
Like Facebook, MySpace is for:
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Chapter 5
„ Friends who want to talk online;
„ Single people who want to meet
other singles;
„ Matchmakers who want to connect their
friends with other friends;
„ Families who want to keep in touch –
there’s even a ‘Family Tree’;
„ Business people and co-workers
interested in networking;
„ Classmates and study partners; and
„ Anyone looking for long-lost friends.
More interestingly, and giving us a vital
clue as to what sort of ‘business’ might
be interested in branding themselves in
MySpace, the site offers members the
chance to discover new bands, filmmakers
and comedians. This seems to align with
Robson’s earlier-quoted insight into the
niche that MySpace has aimed for and in
which it is profitable.
Case study: Genocide Intervention
Network (GI-Net) – social media for
non-profit organisations
The same sort of rules for engaging with
audiences in Facebook apply with MySpace,
and both can prove very powerful tools for
non-profit organisations. For example, Ivan
Boothe, the creative director of ‘Rootwork.
org’, was a co-founder of the GI-Net and
served as its director of communications and
internet strategy coordinator for four years.
At the Democracy in Action Community
Conference in June 2008, he talked about
some of the successful approaches for non-
profits in using social networks like Facebook
and MySpace for membership development,
advocacy and fundraising, and gave the
following results:
„ Through a set of coordinated activities
on MySpace, Facebook, Twitter and
LiveJournal, the Genocide Intervention
78
Network raised more than US$500,000
in three years of annual events; 2007
saw participation from 450 high schools
and 300 colleges;
„ With a view to raising an issue’s profile
and engaging members, GI-Net’s
student division created ‘Picture a
World Without Genocide’ campaign,
which encouraged high-school students
to submit photos on Facebook and
MySpace of their activism on Darfur.
Hundreds of pictures were collected and
compiled into a large poster spelling out
‘DARFUR’; and
„ A bill with bipartisan support was being
held up by the Senate Committee’s
Chair. Using Facebook, the GI-Net
identified and reached out to students
in the senator’s home state. Facilitated
by the identification by students of the
senator’s top donors, using OpenSecrets.
org, the senator was put under pressure
and eventually passed the bill.
As Boothe says in his slidedeck6,
successfully using social networks from
a business perspective is a long-term
proposition, not something that arrives
in the short-term. It takes considerable
effort over the long-term to work with the
people you wish to communicate with and,
as mentioned previously in this report,
the conversation needs to take place in
the audience’s language – which is a
human language – not the language of
‘corporatese’ with its mission and vision
statements, ‘best in class’ synergies, four
and five syllable nonsense jargon, and the
‘verbifying’ of nouns.
Ning
If ever a business wanted to create its own
social network – Ning (http://www.ning.
com) – is the perfect place to do it. As it says
 Social Media: The New Business Communication Landscape
on its website: “Ning empowers people to
create and discover new social experiences.
“Ning was started with a simple premise:
when people have the freedom to create
a new social experience online, uniquely
customized for the most important people
and interests in their lives with no effort,
no cost, and infinite choice, the world is
a better, more colorful and certainly more
interesting place in which to live.”
The range and number of user-created
communities in Ning is staggering, and like
Facebook and MySpace, each community
supports the usual tools: video, message
boards, comment walls, lists of friends’ friends,
auto-importing of RSS feeds and so on.
The Centre for Learning & Performance
Technologies rates Ning as “one of the 25
free tools every learning professional should
have in their toolbox”.7 However, there are
some conveniences and inconveniences
involved with Ning.
On the plus side, creating a community
(for example, around a brand) in Ning offers
less distractions than Facebook pages and
MySpace profiles do – they are captive in the
Ning community and are presented with less
opportunities to wander off to other areas.
Building on the privacy aspects of other
community sites such as Facebook and
MySpace, Ning allows for a higher level
of privacy than even MySpace, which itself
has higher privacy options than Facebook
(although, of course, all that could change
in a day).
Further, adding other Web 2.0 tools is
easier, in my opinion, within Ning than it is
within Facebook and MySpace, but no doubt
that is a contestable point of view and plenty
of other communicators and ‘hard core’
users of those services would dispute that.
On the negative side, it can take longer
to set up a brand or company community
on Ning than it does in MySpace (but at
least it is quicker than setting up a page on
Facebook if you are going to use Facebook
to your best advantage). Additionally, the
free version of Ning slots Google ads into
your community pages; for US$24.95 a
month, those adverts can be removed. If you
are willing to spend a little more money on
Ning, you can:
„ Receive specialist help in growing and
customising your social network, starting
at US$10 per month;
„ Point your domain name to the
community for US$4.95 per month;
„ Add additional units of 10GB of storage
and 100GB of bandwidth for US$9.95
per month, per unit;
„ Run your own adverts, with all of the
revenue going to you, or else not run
any adverts at all for US$24.95 per
month; and
„ Remove the links that offer community
members the opportunity to create
their own network on Ning, although
the references to the Ning ID and the
Ningbar at the top of one’s social
network must remain. This can be done
for US$24.95 per month.
Why would you use Ning?
Ning was one of the early build-your-own-
community sites, but now that Facebook has
greatly increased its offering to companies
with its pages, the reasons to use Ning as
against any other service begin to become
less relevant.
However, what Facebook doesn’t
offer nor does MySpace, is a totally-
branded environment. As Ning points
out on its website, the social network
‘TuDiabetes’ uses its premium services to
own and promote the ‘tudiabetes.com’
domain name to position its own ads in
the desired location.
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Chapter 5
ShareThis
ShareThis (http://www.sharethis.com) is a
free one-step sharing tool that saves time
and makes sharing online fairly hassle
free. Anything on the web can be shared
to a choice of social bookmarking options,
post-to-profile and blog choices, e-mail,
instant messaging services, or even as a text
message to a mobile phone. The ‘ShareThis’
button is now on tens of thousands
of different websites, and in addition,
individuals can download ShareThis’ toolbar
buttons for FireFox and Internet Explorer.
By putting the ‘ShareThis’ button on
web pages, communicators can enable
viewers to pass along the company’s or
brand’s fabulous content to their friends
via e-mail, instant messaging, MySpace
and Facebook, as well as post it to a
large number of social websites, effectively
providing fans with a way to spread your
content all over the web. If you normally
market to your viewers, then you’ll be happy
to know they’ll now be marketing for you. If
you don’t, you’re viewers will be spreading
your reputation regardless. Of course, the
more links to your site that appear on the
web, the higher your search engine rankings
may be.
By using the ShareThis button, you can
reclaim valuable screen real-estate, since
you will be able to place just one button
on your site and remove all the more
traditional, space-hogging web buttons for
social networking sites such as Delicious,
Digg, Reddit, Technorati, Stumbleupon,
Blinklist, Furl, Google Bookmarks, Windows
Live, Blogmarks, Tailrank, ma.gnolia and
Newsvine. Don’t panic if few or none of
those names mean anything to you. They
are for when you have progressed past the
primary sites such as Facebook, MySpace
and Ning, and are ready to expand your
market reach.
80
Reports and analytics for businesses/
content producers
ShareThis captures a considerable amount of
data and offers it for free. For examples, see
the screenshots in Figures 5, 6 and 7 overleaf.
Through this level of detail, the savvy
business communicator can see which
aspects of their content are being ‘shared
around’ the most, how it is being shared,
and where that content is ending up. For this
reason alone, ShareThis should be a tool
embedded into every page on every brand
and company web properties.
On top of that, all of this data and
sharing service are provided for free. That
makes it cost-efficient in terms of ROI.
Twitter
If one platform or social network has
generated the most media attention in 2009,
then Twitter is it. But many people quite
rightly ask, ‘what is Twitter?’ The answer is as
diverse as there are users of Twitter, because
everyone has a different reason for using
it and how they use it. We will discuss this
more in detail further in this chapter.
The growth of Twitter and ‘tweeting’
Nielsen Online recently reported8 that
Twitter’s year-on-year growth was nothing
short of astounding – from 475,000 unique
visitors to the site in February 2008 to seven
million in February 2009.
Many analysts consider that final
number to be vastly under-reported, citing
for evidence that calls from Twitter-focused
software clients like Twhirl (http://www.twhirl.
com) and TweetDeck (http://www.tweetdeck.
com) are seemingly not reported as unique
site visits. Most of the engaged and prolific
so-called ‘power tweeters’ use applications
like those just mentioned, plus dedicated
applications on their mobile phones to
access and post to Twitter.
 Social Media: The New Business Communication Landscape

Figure 5: Button views and clicks, as reported by ShareThis (on 23/04/09)

Figure 6: Traffic sources, as reported by ShareThis

Figure 7: Most popular content, as reported by ShareThis

Twitter’s user demographic user group appears to be the 35-49 age

Intuitively, one would think that Twitter’s group, which comprises almost 42 per cent
main demographic would be teens and of the site’s audience. Additionally, two-
tertiary-level students. But just as with Second thirds of Twitterers tweet from work, rather
Life, Nielson Online found that the primary than from home.

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Chapter 5
Uses of Twitter
Twitter is a phenomenon that is resisting being
‘put in a box’ by analysts, because it can be
used in so many different ways by companies.
The following highlights some examples:
„ Comcast, Network Solutions, JetBlue,
H&R Block and Zappos use Twitter as a
way of creating and sustaining customer
loyalty and satisfaction;
„ Dell uses it as an ‘early warning radar’ for
customer service issues that need attending
to, before the customer gets ‘heated’;
„ A local public radio station in
Melbourne, Australia used Twitter to keep
the public aware of what was happening
during the disastrous Victorian bushfires;
„ Californians are kept similarly informed
during their own fire seasons;
„ Mzinga uses Twitter to offer user
promotions and to enter into real
conversations with its customers;
„ British Telecom, recently having purchased
two major businesses in the security
industry, uses Twitter to engage with the
security industry about future trends;
„ Evernote used Twitter to invite people
into a private beta of their software,
continuing to use Twitter as a bug
reporting and feedback channel;
„ General Motors (GM) uses Twitter to
connect with its customers: “We usually
try to Tweet some sort of question for
our followers every day. These questions
can be vehicle-related (i.e. what’s your
favourite convertible?) or just for fun (i.e.
what’s your favourite roadside diner). This
two-way approach continues to work well
for us and we’ve seen a number of people
tweeting more about GM because of our
presence there,” says Adam Denison, GM
social media communications;
„ EMC uses Twitter to not only push out press
releases about new products and services
82
(not something I personally recommend),
but has also created a separate Twitter
profile, in order to communicate to
participants at their conferences. EMC
uses it to send people to different on-site
podcasts, blog posts by attendees and Flickr
photos, as well as direct people to contest
areas, keynote speeches and so on;
„ The Home Depot uses Twitter to
promote the ‘out-of-store’ lives of their
employees, helping create a family feel
to the store; and
„ Baskin-Robbins uses Twitter to promote
feel-good offers such as: “Join us for
31 Cent Scoop Night at Baskin-Robbins
and help us honor America’s firefighters.
Participating stores will reduce prices of
small ice cream scoops to 31 cents.”;
„ Publishers John Wiley & Sons have
several employees who use Twitter to find
new authors, talk with existing authors
and customers, and use it for market
research. For example: ‘would you buy
a book on X?’ and ‘what cover would
make you more likely to buy this book?’;
„ FreshBooks uses Twitter to handle small
support issues, update friends and fans
of new developments, and listen to its
customers; and
„ Plaxo uses Twitter to engage with its
members and potential members, as
well as use Twitter’s search capabilities
to see what is being said about Plaxo in
the Twittersphere. That way, says John
McCrea, Plaxo’s head of marketing,
he can reach out to answer questions,
help solve problems and correct any
misperceptions.
The uses, as you can see, are only limited
to one’s imagination (see Chapter 1 for
more uses).
Chris Brogan offers 50 ideas on using
Twitter for business9 and is an ideal aide-
 Social Media: The New Business Communication Landscape
de-memoire for those rainy days when
inspiration is finding it hard to break through
the brain’s fog.
Just remember, as Steven Covey reminds
us to “seek first to understand, before
seeking to be understood”, which translates
to listen first, then enter into the conversation
with something valid to add.
YouTube
Not just the home of pirated television
shows and funny as well as not so funny
user-generated videos, YouTube is an
entertainment phenomenon. Each minute,
over eight hours of entertainment is
uploaded to the site, making it impossible
to keep up with what sort of material is up
on its servers.
While most YouTube visitors don’t think of
the site as a natural ‘fit’ for business marketing,
many companies use YouTube as an important
part of their online communication mix.
YouTube enables companies to spread their
messages out in ways that can entertain, as
well as inform, and useful ‘how to’ videos can
often be more easily and efficiently spread
via YouTube, than if they are posted on the
corporate website.
As communications agency
DHCommunications points out in its report
on the blocking or otherwise of YouTube
at North American businesses,10 video
campaigns for B2B and B2C seem like a
natural fit: companies can demonstrate their
products, produce commercials at less cost
and inject humour into their messaging that
might not otherwise fare well on television.
Video that resides on a corporate
website can also be aimed at a narrowly-
defined audience, and clips can be longer
than 30-second TV spots. Combine B2B
video with YouTube, the phenomenally
popular social media site, and a company’s
message can potentially be seen and heard
by tens of thousands of people who wouldn’t
otherwise come across it.
YouTube is the world’s largest focus
group – the audience is so diverse that the
developers have created targeting tools that
allow advertisers to pinpoint their reach as
deep, wide, thin or precise as they wish. This
gives businesses the opportunity to reach
virtually any particular target audience they
wish, and show entertaining content that
encourages the audiences to engage back.
Not only can companies create and
promote their own video material, but also
niche-advertise over other video content.
Businesses that either have video assets or
are able to create them can place video
ads on YouTube’s home page, create
a promotional channel, use YouTube’s
sponsored videos space on the home page
to drive traffic to their content, use their
‘annotations’ tool to make interactive ads
and so on.
But it’s not just advertising and marketing
folks who get excited about YouTube.
YouTube videos can save valuable server
space behind the firewall, so that high-
resolution in-house training videos don’t
have to clog up server space and internal
bandwidth. The Google team created a
video and placed it on YouTube11, showing
how they use ‘Google Video for Business’ for
executive communication, training sessions
and some fun, quirky, employee-generated
content as well.
‘Google Video for Business’ is a paid-for
extension of the YouTube platform that
enables secure, private video sharing behind
the firewall. Video sharing makes important
communications like internal trainings and
corporate announcements more personal,
engaging and effective. Employees can
securely share videos with select co-workers
or everyone at the company, without making
confidential information public. Google itself
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Chapter 5

YouTube at work – do we or don’t we?

DHCommunications conducted research into the use of YouTube at work, concluding:

“For companies considering whether video is a viable marketing tactic, the answer is ‘yes’.
Clearly, people access YouTube for both business and pleasure during and after work hours.
“However, B2B marketers need to ensure that they don’t rely only on video to get their messages
out. And relying solely on video as a method of lead generation will not work. Research by Enquiro
Search Solutions, Inc., a search engine marketing firm, has shown that B2B technology buyers prefer
‘lots of information in an easily accessible, text-based format that can be passed from individual to
individual within the organization’.
“In addition, marketers should work to develop integrated campaigns to help drive offline
‘eyeballs’ to online media. Research conducted by iProspect, another search engine marketing firm,
showed that over ‘two-thirds of online search users are driven to perform searches as a result of
exposure to some offline channel’.
“Developing an integrated campaign that takes into account how B2B buyers consume
information is key in terms of generating leads that turn into future sales.
“And finally, marketers within companies who do block access to YouTube should present a case
that YouTube is a viable B2B marketing vehicle. Blocking access only hinders a company’s ability to
successfully use social media to present messages in the places where people congregate online.”

Source: http://www.dhcommunications.com/youtubesurvey.pdf

securely hosts and streams the videos, so
employees don’t need to share videos over
e-mail or burden IT for a video solution.
Finally, employees can share videos instantly.
Viewing and annotating do not require any
special software, just a standard browser.
Companies using YouTube to host
marketing, customer service, training,
corporate executive communications and other
video material range all the way from Fortune
500 members to mom-and-pop enterprises.
References
1. See: http://www.labnol.org/software/tutorials/
feeddemon-rss-feeds-reader-software-
review/2058/
2. See: http://www.Creativesuitepodcast.com/
3. See: http://www.linkedintelligence.com/smart-
ways-to-use-linkedin/
4. Boyd, D., Viewing American class divisions
through Facebook and MySpace, Apophenia
Blog Essay, June 24, 2007, can be found
at: http://www.danah.org/papers/essays/
ClassDivisions.html
5. Can be found at: http://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=avxpn_MsPYs
6. See: http://www.slideshare.net/rootwork/
using-social-networks-for-social-change-
facebook-myspace-and-more-presentation
7. See: http://www.c4lpt.co.uk/Top100Tools/
ning.html
8. See:http://www.nielsen-online.com/
blog/2009/03/20/keep-on-tweetn/
9. See:http://www.chrisbrogan.com/50-ideas-
on-using-twitter-for-business/
10. See: http://www.dhcommunications.com/
youtubesurvey.pdf
11. See:http://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=iWzwLGJ0BIo

84
Chapter 6: Everything old is new again
IF SOCIAL media is the ‘how’, then social
networking is the ‘why’.
The human need to ‘connect’ with others
is every bit as relevant today as it was when
Mitochondrial Eve and her clan relaxed
around the evening campfire and shared
stories of past tragedies, current triumphs
and future tribulations.
The five psychological drivers of
generations X and Y
The highly-respected researcher Mark
McCrindle considers there to be five main
drivers of online behaviour of generations
X and Y. I would argue that the following
four of his conclusions apply not just to
generations X and Y.
Driver one – a love of technical innovation
Today’s 20 and 30 somethings like their
grown-up toys to do more and more in a
smaller form. The iPhone is the revolutionary
tool that kick-started a new wave of mobile
phone development, this time centred on
user-friendliness, as well as technical ability.
The so-called ‘Smart Phones’ have
been around for a while – the O2 being an
early stand-out of the hybrid PDA (personal
digital assistant) and mobile phone for the
non-corporate user, while the Blackberry (or
‘Crackberry’ as they are also known by users
because of their alleged addictiveness) has
long been the corporate mobile warrior’s
tool of choice.
But before the smart phone and the
Blackberry, back when mobile phones were
only mobile phones, Bluetooth wireless
technology filtered down from the innovators
to the early and late adopters, and it became
easier to find a phone number on one’s PDA
and auto-dial it from one’s mobile.
The smart phone and the Blackberry
arrived in all their clumsiness, hefty in
weight, and thus take-up was slow.
Apple’s iPhone completely changed the
nature of our interaction with the mobile
phone – from clunky, clicky and tortuous
menus, it became simple to tap on an icon,
use our finger to scroll through a list of
contacts or map our destination, and zoom
in to see Google map details.
The increasing complexity of our
communication technology is unparalleled
in pace. Previous technologies seemed
to be around forever – it took decades
for the transistor radio to be usurped by
the Walkman; it took decades for the film
camera to be usurped by the digital camera;
and it took decades for the in-car cassette
player to be usurped by the CD player. But
in the space of a mere few years, the mp3-
playing mobile phone has replaced the
radio, the tiny digital camera has disposed
of even disposable film cameras, and the
iPod and iPhone have replaced ‘traditional’
DVD players (you can now connect your
iPod/iPhone to your TV for high-definition
playback, and similarly connect them to your
in-car media player for high-quality audio
and video playback).
Second-hand cars are now considered
‘lacking’ if their in-car entertainment system
85
Chapter 6
doesn’t allow for connection to, and control
of an iPod. At an increasing pace, the
power of the computer has grown whilst its
size has shrunk to the size of a ‘traditional’
mobile phone.
The iPhone and the various windows-
based smart phones now hitting the market
provide a mobile road warrior with a
complete office – just add a Bluetooth-
enabled fold-up keyboard, a Bluetooth
mouse and hook up a monitor if the
phone has a connection port, and the
warrior can truly work anywhere. But this
increasingly smaller and powerful technology
is not enough.
Today’s X and Y generations want
each new tool to do more in less space.
There are always tasks and processes that
can be added to even the leading-edge
tools. For example, I adore my iPod but
I have long wished for the ability to add
to, and remove tracks from playlists on it,
rather than wait until I get back to my office
desktop and perform these tasks in iTunes –
very often I’ve forgotten what songs I wanted
to add or remove.
Even as one piece of technology is
released, development teams are working on
what additional features will be added to not
the next version (which is probably already in
production), but the version after that.
The lifecycle of mass-market
communication technologies is now
measured in single-digit years, rather than
decades. Last year’s ‘cool’ mobile phone is
next year’s paperweight.
Driver two – ‘fully sick’ is the new ‘cool’,
the new ‘hot’ and the new black
Each twelve-month period seems to bring
a new piece of must-know jargon to
cool-chasing teenagers. Twenty and thirty
somethings, on the other hand, replace
their buzzwords less frequently, perhaps
86
reflecting that they have priorities other than
being completely up to date with this week’s
terminology. But this propensity to replace
buzzwords less frequently is also a reflection
of their increased loyalty to whatever they
do adopt.
For example, Facebook has become a
global phenomenon, seemingly sweeping
all in its path. Twenty and thirty somethings
make up the majority of its membership,
although the fastest growing demographic is
the 45+, as parents and grandparents join
to stay in touch with their geographically-
dispersed extended families.1
Facebook has become a ‘cool’ place to
hang out online and the early adopters have
been joined by the masses. Naturally, to the
early adopters and the innovators before
them, this very mass popularity is a source of
frustration. There is no longer any significant
differentiation between them and the ‘great
unwashed public’; no one would know they
were part of the ‘ultra-cool’ set. They have
largely left Facebook, keeping their profiles,
but rarely visiting. They have moved to newer
‘cool’ places such as Twitter, but as Twitter
rapidly becomes the new water cooler, they
are already moving away from Twitter to find
new digital watering holes, where only the
‘coolest of the cool’ ‘hang out’ in relative
peace and seclusion.
As the country rock band The Eagles
sang many years ago: “You call some place
Paradise, you kiss it goodbye.” Once word
leaks out of the location of the next digital
oasis, as it always does and at an increasing
pace courtesy of the internet, it will become
flooded with visitors and the peace and
tranquillity destroyed.
The 3D virtual world Second Life was
one such oasis – and then the mass media
and large corporations blindly rushed in.
Second Life’s ‘hype cycle’ has seemingly
peaked, the mass media and many of the
 Social Media: The New Business Communication Landscape
corporations have left, and it has arguably
returned to its former state, the sound of its
digital wind only broken by the occasional
party or the fevered scratching of academics
and librarians penning great treatises on
social psychology, sociological technology,
and how to file and find information in a
3D environment. But the ‘ultra-cool’ have
probably already moved on.
What is ‘ultra cool’ at the moment?
What new oasis should you focus your
marketing and PR activities on? Well,
as the late great Satchmo once allegedly
replied to someone who asked him how
to know whether the jazz they were listening
to was ‘cool’, “If you have to ask, you’ll
never know.”
Like those kids in high school and
university who somehow managed to glide
through life and ooze ‘cool’ from their
pores without trying – those ‘cool’ kids that
everyone gravitated around and tried to
imitate – ‘coolness’ is not something that
can be manufactured nor ‘marketed’ into
life. There are far better instant messaging
platforms than Twitter, but it is Twitter that
has captured the ‘cool’ elite and not better
and more robust, fully-featured competitors
like Jaiku.
Trying to predict what the next ‘cool’
thing will be is like trying to predict which
one of a million flies will land on a sugar
cube first; the odds are stacked pretty high
against you.
Additionally, recent history has shown
us nothing if not that giant killers very often
come from ‘left-field’, the so-called experts
and pundits more often than not caught
flat-footed by some new arrival that came
not from the back of the visible pack, but
seemingly out of nowhere.
For example, YouTube owns the online
video space and has done so since January
2006. In October 2005, of the 470 sites in
the online video category, YouTube ranked
39th, with only 0.17 per cent of visits to the
category. It came out of beta in November
2005. The move from obscurity to ubiquity
took just 35 days.2
Driver three – show me the funny
If hearts and minds of generation X and Y
are to be captured, the surest ways to do
so will include strong elements of fun and
entertainment. Consider just some of the
YouTube videos that have gone massively viral:
„ The lipdub of ‘Flagpole Sitta’ at
Connected Ventures, probably the best
recruitment video ever made, and all it
cost was an idea and a few beers after
work (http://www.vimeo.com/173714);
„ Fritz Grobe and Stephan Voltz, the ‘Diet
Coke and Mentos’ guys (http://www.
youtube.com/watch?v=hKoB0MHVBvM);
„ The gym running machine
dancers (http://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=pv5zWaTEVkI&NR);
„ The indie rock band Weezer’s
promotional video for their song
‘Pork and Beans’, which deliberately
referenced, at least, 20 other ‘cool’
viral videos, and thus automatically
creating an in-group/out-group effect:
the more videos you recognised in
the clip, the ‘cooler’ you were. Judge
for yourself your ‘cool’ factor – watch
the video and count how many other
videos you have seen – and then
for bonus points see how many you
can name (http://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=muP9eH2p2PI); and
„ The ‘Free Hugs Campaign’, the real-life
controversial story of Juan Mann, a
man whose sole mission was to reach
out and hug a stranger and put a smile
on their face (http://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=vr3x_RRJdd4).
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Chapter 6

Although generations X and Y are not afraid
to confront the ‘bigger’ issues – indeed, they
are bringing in a new age of environmental
awareness and online political protest –
according to Mark McCrindle, they prefer
their insights into the workings of the world
to be delivered with style, respect for the
intelligence of the audience and a sense of
perspective. They also want it served with a
dash of humour where appropriate.
Driver four – the search for higher
meaning
Reflecting a move away from post-
modernism, today’s younger web
workers are showing increasing interest in
spiritual matters.
There isn’t a return to the old sanctity,
safety, security and spiritual guidance of
the Church (of whatever flavour), but there
is a rejection of the 1980s-style Gordon
Gecko greed in favour of a greater work-life
balance. Job title, income, car and clothing
are no longer the only ways by which today’s
knowledge workers define themselves.
Whether this rejection of the previous
generation’s main focus is sustainable in
light of recent financial circumstances,
remains to be seen.
to be known), our very human need to
connect with others is the rope that ties the
eras, millennia, centuries, decades and
generations together.
We no longer bang rocks together, or
bang jungle drums, or bang the Morse code
key, but we still bang. It’s just that these days
we bang plastic keys on plastic keyboards,
or touch-sensitive fingers on touch-sensitive
screens. But we are still banging – to be
heard, to warn others, to inform others, to
teach ourselves about ourselves, and to
amuse others and ourselves.
Bang on I say.
References
1. My own mother reads my blog as a way of
keeping up with what I’m up to, even though
we live in the same city (yes, I am a naughty
son who doesn’t ring his mother enough!)
2. Tancer, B., Click, HarperCollins, 2009,
London, pp. 243-245.

So where does this leave us?

The tools of communication have changed;
the pace of communication has changed –
instant messaging systems like Twitter mean
that both truth and lies can be spread in an
instant. The personal publishing revolution
means that everyone has a voice, whether
they choose to use it or not, and whether
what they might say is deemed by others to
be valuable or not.
What hasn’t changed is the need to
communicate. From Mitochondrial Eve
through to today’s iPhone-toting geek
girl (or ‘GeekGrrrl’ as she often prefers

88
Appendix: Recommended resources
and glossary

TO COMPILE a list of recommended sources is to attempt to circumnavigate the universe; just when
you think you’ve got it all mapped, along comes another shooting star. However, what follows is a
list of the people and resources that have greatly helped me understand this new communication
environment. It is not exhaustive of all who are influential in this landscape, but by visiting the
websites or reading the books of those who come below, you will find links off to others who will also
help you in your journey of discovery.

Blogs
Blogs come in countless varieties, including news journalism, personal journals and musings on
topical or industry themes.

43 Folders http://www.43folders.com
Allan Jenkins http://www.allanjenkins.typepad.com
Amit Agarwal http://www.labnol.org
CC Chapman and The Advance http://www.theadvanceguard.com
Chris Brogan http://www.chrisbrogan.com
Dan York http://www.disruptiveconversations.com
Darren Rowse http://www.problogger.com
David Jones http://www.twitter.com/doctorjones
Donna Papacosta http://www.trafcom.com
Gary Hayes http://www.personalizemedia.com
Gerry McCusker http://www.prdisasters.com
Heidi Miller http://talkitup.typepad.com
Jeremiah Owyang http://www.web-strategist.com/blog
Joseph Jaffe http://www.jaffejuice.com
Laurel Papworth http://www.laurelpapworth.com
Leesa Barnes http://www.marketingfit.com
Mark Joyner http://www.markjoyner.name
Martin Waxman http://martinspalette.blogspot.com
Metaverse Journal http://www.metaversejournal.com
Michael Bellina http://www.theadvertisinglunatic.com

89
Appendix

Mitch Joel http://www.twistimage.com/blog

Neville Hobson http://www.nevillehobson.com
Occam’s Razr http://www.occamsrazr.com
Official Second Life blog http://blog.secondlife.com
Paull Young http://youngie.prblogs.org
Presentation Zen http://www.presentationzen.com
ReadWriteWeb http://www.readwriteweb.com
Seth Godin http://www.sethgodin.com
Shel Holtz http://blog.holtz.com
Stephen Collins http://www.acidlabs.org
Terry Fallis http://www.terryfallis.com
Trevor Cook http://blogs.crikey.com.au/trevorcook
Wagner James Au http://www.nwn.blogs.com
Web Worker http://www.Dailywebworkerdaily.com

Podcasts/vidcasts
Financial Aid Podcast – http://www.financialaidpodcast.com
For Immediate Release – http://www.forimmediaterelease.biz
Inside PR – http://www.insidepr.ca
JaffeJuiceTV – http://www.jaffejuice.com/jaffejuicetv
Marketing Over Coffee – http://www.marketingovercoffee.com
MarketingFit – http://www.marketingfit.tv
OnTheRecord – http://www.ontherecordpodcast.com
Six Pixels of Separation – http://www.twistimage.com/blog
The M Show – http://www.theMshow.com
Trafcom News – http://www.trafcomnewspodcast.com

Books
Reynolds, G., An Army of Davids
Wright, J., Blog Marketing, Nelson (Thomas) Publishers, US
Hewitt, H., Blog: understanding the information reformation that’s changing your world, Nelson
(Thomas) Publishers, US
Holtz, S., and Demopolos, T., Blogging for Business, Kaplan Publishing
Lindstrom, M., Buy.ology, Doubleday Publishing, New York
Tancer, B., Click, Hyperion
Boellstorff, T., and Kim, J. A., Coming of Age in Second Life: an anthropologist explores the virtually
human – Community Building On The Web
Holtz, S., Corporate Conversations, AMACOM
Harkin, J., Cyburbia, Knopf, Canada
Awl, D., Facebook me!,Peachpit Press, CA

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 Social Media: The New Business Communication Landscape

Holtz , S., and Hobson, N., How to Do Everything with Podcasting, McGraw Hill books
Meadows, M. M., I, Avatar: the culture and consequences of having a second life, New Riders
Godin, S., Permission Marketing, Simon & Schuster
Van Orden, J., Promoting Your Podcast, Larstan Publishing
Rymaszewski, M., Wagner, J. A., Ondrejka, C., et al., Second Life: the official guide
Holtz,S., and Havens, C. J., Tactical Transparency
Levine, R., Locke, C., Searls, D., Weinberger, D., The Cluetrain Manifesto: the end of business as we
know it, Perseus Publishing
Tasler, N., The Impulse Factor, Fireside
Friedman, L. T., The World is Flat, Douglas and McIntyre Ltd
Demopoulos, T., What No One Ever Tells You About Blogging and Podcasting, Kaplan Business
Tapscott, D., and Williams, D. A., Wikinomics, Portfolio
Mader, S., Wikipatterns, Wiley Publishing Inc.

Glossary
Blog: A website that features regular, dated entries (as in a journal) using text, graphics, video and/
or audio posted by an individual or small group of authors. Blogs come in countless varieties,
including news journalism, personal journals and musings on topical themes.
Blogosphere: Blogosphere is the term used to describe the totality of blogs on the internet, and the
conversations taking place within that sphere.
Blogroll: A blogroll is a list of sites displayed in the sidebar of a blog, showing who the blogger
reads regularly.
Bookmarking: Bookmarking is saving the address of a website or item of content, either in your
browser or on a social bookmarking site like delicious.com. If you add tags, others can easily use
your research too, and the social bookmarking site becomes an enormous public library. If groups
agree on the tags they will use, it makes collaborative research much easier.
Control: Social networking is difficult to control because if people can’t say something in one place,
they can blog or comment elsewhere. That can be challenging for hierarchical organisations used to
centrally-managed websites.
Conversation: Conversation through blogging, commenting or contributing to forums is the currency
of social networking.
Culture: Social media only works well in a culture of openness, where people are prepared to
share. For that reason, commitment and attitude are as important as tools. Creative two-way
communication and collaboration is unlikely to flourish in an organisation where the norm is
top-down control. When people in that sort of culture talk about networking, they may have a ‘hub
and spokes’ model in mind, with some kind of centralised control.
Listening: In the blogosphere, ‘listening’ is the art of skimming RSS feeds to see what topics are
bubbling up, and also setting up searches that monitor when you or your organisation is mentioned.
Lurkers: Lurkers are people who read, but don’t contribute or add comments to discussions. The ‘10
percent’ rule-of-thumb suggests that about 10 per cent of people contribute new content to an online
community, another 10 per cent comment, and the rest lurk. However, this may not be a passive role
because content read may spark interaction elsewhere.
Mashup: A media product that combines and/or manipulates video, audio, text, images and/
or designs from two or more sources to create a new work. For example, a political mashup video

91
Appendix

might combine news footage of candidate speeches with a pop song and some other video to create
new commentary.
Podcast: A podcast is a digital media file, usually audio or video, that can be played on a
computer or portable media players (MP3 players, mobile phones) and is delivered by RSS
subscription. Podcasters can post their creations to their blog or website, or have it re-purposed (aka
‘re-syndicated’) on other websites.
Post: A post is an item on a blog or forum.
Presence: Presence online has (at least) two aspects. One is whether you show up when someone
does a search on your name. If not, it is no good pretending to be an online guru, for example. The
second is whether you use tools that show you are available for contact by instant messaging, voice-
over-IP or other synchronous methods of communication.
Profiles: Profiles are the information that you provide about yourself when signing up for a social
networking site. As well as a picture and basic information, this may include your personal and
business interests, a ‘blurb’ about yourself, and tags to help people search for like-minded people.
RSS: RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is a way to feed websites that publish frequently (such as blogs,
news, podcasts) into one’s computer, website or portable media player (MP3 player, mobile phone).
RSS makes it possible for people to keep up with their favourite websites in an automated manner
that is easier than checking them manually. An RSS document, which is called a ‘feed’, ‘web feed’ or
‘channel’, contains either a summary of content from an associated website or the full text.
Sharing: Sharing is offering other people the use of your text, images, video, bookmarks or other
content by adding tags and applying copyright licences that encourage use of content.
Social media: Social media integrate technology, social interaction and the construction of shared
meanings and experiences from many different users. Social media users create content, share
various perspectives, swap favourites, tell stories and make comments using words, pictures, video
and audio. Unlike traditional media that use technologies as conduits to deliver meanings and
experiences, social media focus on people’s interactions with each other and with media texts as
shared experiences. Social media also provide people with venues for asserting and developing their
identities, tastes and values through their media messages and interactions.
Social networking sites: A social networking site allows users to join communities of people who
share interests and activities, or to explore the interests and activities of others. Most sites allow
users to create profiles or self-description pages, which often include pictures, video, music, text
and a variety of design elements. Some educators encourage students to build profiles that include
academic interests, achievements, representations and discussions, and help students connect with
groups interested in course content.
Tag: A tag is a keyword that attaches to a text or media file on a website, which can be used to
organise and find. Many websites feature a list of tags or a ‘tag cloud’, a graphical representation
that emphasises by word size and bolding, which are the most-used keywords to organise the content.
Trackback: Some blogs provide a facility for other bloggers to leave a calling card automatically,
instead of commenting. ‘Blogger A’ may write on ‘blog A’ about an item on ‘blogger B’s’ site, and
through the trackback facility leave a link on B’s site back to A. The collection of comments and
trackbacks on a site facilitates conversations.
Troll: A hurtful but possibly valuable individual who, for whatever reason, is both obsessed by and
constantly annoyed with, and/or deeply offended by everything you write on your blog. You may be
able to stop them commenting on your blog, but you can’t ban them from commenting on other sites

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 Social Media: The New Business Communication Landscape

and pointing back to your blog, and you can’t ban them from posting things on their own blog that
point back to your site.
User-generated content: User-generated content (UGC) refers to text, audio, video and
applications created by users who post their work to internet sites produced by others.
Virtual worlds (VWs): VWs are online places like Second Life, where you can create a
representation of yourself (an avatar) and socialise with other residents. Basic activity is free, but
you can buy currency (using real money), in order to purchase land and trade with other residents.
Second Life is being used by many voluntary, government and corporate organisations to run
discussions, virtual events and fundraising.
Web 2.0: Web 2.0 refers to internet sites and applications that facilitate creativity, interaction,
collaboration, participation and data-sharing between users and producers (as opposed to websites
that simply display information). Web 2.0 emphasises community by incorporating wikis, social
networking, tagging, RSS and other tools.
Widget: A widget is any tool or piece of code that can be embedded within a web page. It allows,
for example, a user to display content from someone else’s website on his/her site.
Wiki: A wiki is a web page – or set of pages – that can be edited collaboratively. The best known
example is Wikipedia, an encyclopaedia created by thousands of contributors across the world.
Once people have appropriate permissions – set by the wiki owner – they can create pages and/
or add to and alter existing pages. Wikis are a good way for people to write a document together,
instead of e-mailing files to and fro. You don’t have to use wikis for collaborative working; they can
just be a quick and easy way of creating a website. Although wikis are easy to use, that doesn’t mean
everyone in a group will commit to their use with similar enthusiasm.

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Index

A
ABN Amro ............................................................................................................................... 14
ABSs ..................................................................................................................................... 111
Accenture .......................................................................................................................... 14, 16
Accessibility............................................................................................................................ 111
Accountants ..................................................................................................................... 15, 111
Accounts........................................................................................................42, 62, 68, 70, 111
Action .........................................................1, 7, 11, 29, 35, 50, 54, 58, 63, 69-70, 74, 78, 111
Action Community Conference .................................................................................................. 78
AddThis ................................................................................................................................... 41
Adidas ..................................................................................................................................... 14
Adobe ..................................................................................................................................... 75
Adult ......................................................................................................................13, 20, 27-29
Advance Auto Parts................................................................................................................... 51
Advertising ............................................................................. 2, 9, 30-31, 42, 55, 58, 68, 70, 83
AFP ......................................................................................................................................... 27
AIM Mail ........................................................................................................................... 42, 68
Allegations ............................................................................................................................... 43
AMACOM ............................................................................................................................... 92
Ameren ................................................................................................................................... 51
America .................................................................................................................13, 15, 46, 82
Amsterdam ......................................................................................................................... 20-21
Analytics ...................................................................................................................... 30, 63, 80
AOL ......................................................................................................................42, 45, 68, 75
Apple ......................................................................................................... 3, 32, 43, 46, 56, 85
Apple Corps ............................................................................................................................ 56
Armani .................................................................................................................................... 14
ArpaNet .................................................................................................................................... 1
Artist.................................................................................................................................. 43, 71
Asia ........................................................................................................................1, 13, 26, 46
Asia Pacific .................................................................................................................. 13, 26, 46
Asian Tsunami .......................................................................................................................... 40
Associated Press, The................................................................................................................ 43
Association of Virtual Worlds ..................................................................................................... 75
Australia .............................................................................................................1, 15-17, 28, 82

95
Index

Australian Adult Social Technographics ...................................................................................... 29

Australian Federal Police ........................................................................................................... 27
Australians ............................................................................................................................... 28
Authority ...................................................................................................................... 27, 38, 51
Autodesk ................................................................................................................................. 14
Avatar .................................................................................................. 15, 19-20, 27-29, 93, 95
Aztec Marketing Solutions ......................................................................................................... 53

B
B2B .................................................................................................................................... 83-84
B2C ........................................................................................................................................ 83
Band ..........................................................................................................47, 56, 71, 77, 86-87
Baskin-Robbins......................................................................................................................... 82
BBC .................................................................................................................................... 8, 10
Beatles .................................................................................................................................... 56
Bebo ................................................................................................................................. 39, 41
Before Common Era ................................................................................................................... 1
Belgium ................................................................................................................................... 28
Best New Application .......................................................................................................... 41, 68
Biff .......................................................................................................................................... 50
Births ....................................................................................................................................... 48
Blackberry................................................................................................................................ 85
Blinklist .............................................................................................................................. 41, 80
Blog ........ 2, 4, 8-9, 15, 18, 23, 32, 34, 36-39, 41, 43-47, 55, 58-63, 65, 80, 82, 84, 88, 91-95
Blog Marketing ........................................................................................................................ 92
Bloggers .......................................................................................... 35, 38-40, 44-45, 57-58, 94
Bloglines.................................................................................................................................. 73
Blogmarks ......................................................................................................................... 41, 80
Blogosphere...................................................................................... 2, 35, 38-39, 45-46, 57, 93
Blogroll ................................................................................................................................... 93
Blogs ....................................................... 6, 22, 32, 38-39, 43-44, 46, 54-55, 62-64, 91, 93-94
Bluedot.................................................................................................................................... 41
Bluetooth ............................................................................................................................ 85-86
BMW....................................................................................................................................... 14
Board .......................................................................................................................... 47, 56, 62
Bookmark ................................................................................................................................ 67
Bookmarks........................................................................................................41, 67-68, 80, 94
Books .................................................................................................................3, 14, 69, 91-93
Booth, Paul .............................................................................................................................. 17
Boothe, Ivan ............................................................................................................................ 78
Boyd, Dana ............................................................................................................................ 77
BP ........................................................................................................................................... 16
Bradford Group ....................................................................................................................... 51
Brand .................................................... 22, 36-38, 44, 52, 54, 58, 60-61, 63, 70-72, 76, 79-80

96
 Social Media: The New Business Communication Landscape

Brannigans Restaurant .............................................................................................................. 52

Brazil ....................................................................................................................................... 28
Brides ...................................................................................................................................... 48
Broadband ...................................................................................................................15, 29-30
Brogan, Chris .................................................................................................................... 82, 91
BT .......................................................................................................................................... 5-6
BTpedia ..................................................................................................................................... 5
Building .....................................................................................................14, 36, 38, 72, 79, 92
Bullfighter ................................................................................................................................ 34
Business .................................................. 3, 5-6, 9, 13, 16-20, 22-24, 28-34, 36, 40-41, 43, 45,
47-56, 59-65, 67, 70-71, 73-76, 78, 80, 83-84, 92-94
Business Conduct Guidelines .................................................................................................... 22
Businesses ........................................................................................... 14, 28, 31, 52, 80, 82-83

C
C-level .................................................................................................................................... 48
CA .................................................................................................................................... 41, 92
Californians ............................................................................................................................. 82
Calvin Klein ............................................................................................................................. 14
Canada ......................................................................................................................... 1, 28, 92
Canadian PR ........................................................................................................................... 58
Cannes.................................................................................................................................... 43
Career..................................................................................................................................... 76
Carter Academic Service Entrepreneur ....................................................................................... 18
Case ..................................................... 5-6, 14-15, 17-18, 32, 37, 43-44, 56-57, 71-72, 78, 84
CD.................................................................................................................................... 56, 85
CDs ........................................................................................................................................ 57
CEO ................................................................................................................37, 43-44, 48, 56
CEO of Whole Foods ............................................................................................................... 44
CFO ................................................................................................................48, 59, 62-63, 65
Chapman University Law School ................................................................................................ 39
Chestney, Ross ........................................................................................................................... 5
Children .............................................................................................. 13-14, 27, 29, 32, 51, 77
China .......................................................................................................................... 14, 24, 31
Church .............................................................................................................................. 44, 88
Church of Scientology .............................................................................................................. 44
CIO ........................................................................................................................................ 48
Circuit City .............................................................................................................................. 14
Cisco Systems .......................................................................................................................... 16
CIW ........................................................................................................................................ 43
Classmates ........................................................................................................................ 69, 78
Click ........................................................................................................................... 59, 88, 92
Client ....................................................................................................................42, 51, 53, 71
Club Penguin ........................................................................................................................... 13

97
Index

Cluetrain Manifesto, The ...........................................................................................5, 33, 41, 93

CMS ............................................................................................................................. 6, 37, 67
CNet ....................................................................................................................................... 73
CNN ....................................................................................................................................... 43
Coca Cola .............................................................................................................................. 51
Colgate ................................................................................................................................... 14
College of Management ........................................................................................................... 18
Comcast ............................................................................................................................ 45, 82
Communication ................................. 2, 4-6, 8-10, 13, 17, 23, 29, 31, 34, 40-41,43, 45, 48-51,
53-56, 59-65, 69, 72-73, 83, 85-86, 88, 91, 93-94
Communicators Network .......................................................................................................... 75
Community ............................. 3, 6, 13, 18, 29, 33, 36, 41, 43, 51-52, 67, 72, 78-79, 92-93, 95
Compact Oxford English Dictionary ........................................................................................... 47
Companies .......... 20-21, 26-28, 31, 33, 37, 42-43, 47, 56, 59-61, 64, 70-72, 75-76, 79, 82-84
Computerworld ........................................................................................................................ 35
Concerns ...........................................................................................................7, 33, 37, 49, 58
Connected Ventures.................................................................................................................. 87
Consultants.......................................................................................................47-48, 55, 67, 72
Control............................................................................................................42, 47, 77, 86, 93
Conversation ...................................................3-5, 34, 37, 39-40, 45, 61-62, 64, 72, 78, 83, 93
Conversations .................................................. 4-5, 22, 29, 33, 37-38, 40, 61-62, 65, 82, 92-94
COO ...................................................................................................................................... 48
Covey, Steven ......................................................................................................................... 83
CPA of Australia .................................................................................................................. 15-16
Crackberry ............................................................................................................................... 85
Creative Suite .......................................................................................................................... 75
CRM ................................................................................................................................. 37, 67
CSV ........................................................................................................................................ 72
Culture .......................................................................................................21, 48-49, 63, 76, 93
Curry, Adam .............................................................................................................................. 3
Cyburbia ............................................................................................................................. 1, 92
Cyworld ................................................................................................................................... 13

D
Dafur ...................................................................................................................................... 43
Daily Illuminator, The .................................................................................................................. 2
DailyMotion ............................................................................................................................... 4
Darfur ..................................................................................................................................... 78
Darwin, Charles ....................................................................................................................... 18
Darwinism ............................................................................................................................... 47
Data......................................................... 8-9, 28, 38-40, 42, 45, 55, 59-60, 63, 68, 72, 74, 80
Data Insights ............................................................................................................................ 63
Dell ..................................................................................................................14, 45-46, 54, 82
Dell North America .................................................................................................................. 46

98
 Social Media: The New Business Communication Landscape

Delta .................................................................................................................................. 44-45

Delta Airline ............................................................................................................................. 45
Dennison, Richard ...................................................................................................................... 5
Democracy .............................................................................................................................. 78
Demographics ......................................................................................................................... 27
Denison, Adam ........................................................................................................................ 82
DHCommunications ............................................................................................................ 83-84
Dictionary ............................................................................................................................ 2, 47
Diet Coke ................................................................................................................................ 87
Digbsy ..................................................................................................................................... 42
Digg......................................................................................................................34, 41, 44, 80
Dilbert Principle, The ................................................................................................................ 64
Disaster ............................................................................................................................... 9, 35
Discography............................................................................................................................. 71
Discussions ............................................................................................ 3, 18, 43, 71, 75, 93-95
Document....................................................................................................... 6-8, 18, 29, 94-95
Doubleday Publishing ............................................................................................................... 92
DVD ............................................................................................................................ 32, 44, 85

E
Eagles, The .............................................................................................................................. 86
Echo ................................................................................................................................. 63, 72
Electrolux ................................................................................................................................. 14
Electronic Frontier Foundation ..................................................................................................... 2
EMC ....................................................................................................................................... 82
Emergency ........................................................................................................................... 9, 23
EMI ......................................................................................................................................... 56
Employees ............................................................ 5-6, 8-9, 20-22, 24, 51-52, 57, 63, 74, 82-84
Employers .......................................................................................................................... 24, 75
Encyclopaedia Britannica ............................................................................................................ 6
Enquiro Search Solutions .......................................................................................................... 84
Enron ...................................................................................................................................... 50
Europe .......................................................................................................................... 1, 13, 46
Evaluation ............................................................................................................................... 48
Events................................................................................... 9, 15-17, 40, 50, 54, 70-71, 78, 95
Excel ....................................................................................................................................... 72
Extract ....................................................................................................................................... 5
Exxon Mobil ............................................................................................................................. 43

F
Facebooker.............................................................................................................................. 70
Facebookers ....................................................................................................................... 70-71
Families ........................................................................................................................77-78, 86
Family Tree .............................................................................................................................. 78

99
Index

Fanbase ............................................................................................................................. 72-73

Fans ...........................................................................................................46, 70-72, 75, 80, 82
Feedback ...........................................................................................................9, 15, 35, 57, 82
FeedBurner ......................................................................................................................... 59-60
FeedMeLinks ............................................................................................................................ 41
FeedStation .............................................................................................................................. 74
FightTheBull ............................................................................................................................. 34
Financial Times......................................................................................................................... 56
Firefox ............................................................................................................................... 73, 80
Fireside.................................................................................................................................... 93
Flickr ............................................................................................. 20-21, 39, 41, 60-61, 70, 82
Flowers .................................................................................................................................... 14
Folders .................................................................................................................................... 91
Folks .........................................................................................................................2, 5, 43, 83
Ford ............................................................................................................................ 14, 53, 77
Forrester ............................................................................................................................ 29, 57
Forrester Research .............................................................................................................. 29, 57
Fortune .............................................................................................................................. 76, 84
France ..................................................................................................................................... 28
Free Hugs Campaign ............................................................................................................... 87
FreshBooks .............................................................................................................................. 82
FriendFeed ......................................................................................................................... 39, 41
Friends ...............................................................2, 12, 20, 33, 39, 41, 60, 68-71, 74, 77-80, 82
Fritz Grobe .............................................................................................................................. 87
FTSE........................................................................................................................................ 40

G
GamesIndustryBiz ..................................................................................................................... 24
GeekGrrrl ................................................................................................................................ 88
General Motors.................................................................................................................. 47, 82
Genocide Intervention Network ................................................................................................. 78
Germany ................................................................................................................................. 28
GI-Net .................................................................................................................................... 78
Gilbert, Barry ........................................................................................................................... 30
Gizzard Communications Group ............................................................................................... 16
Gmail ......................................................................................................................... 42, 68, 75
Google Bookmarks ............................................................................................................ 41, 80
Google Juice ..................................................................................................................... 40, 76
Google News Alerts ............................................................................................................ 38-39
Google Reader .............................................................................................................. 9, 39, 73
Google Video ...................................................................................................................... 4, 83
Gottlieb, Jessica ....................................................................................................................... 58
Gould, Dan ............................................................................................................................. 57
GQ ......................................................................................................................................... 56

100
 Social Media: The New Business Communication Landscape

GreatNews ................................................................................................................................ 9
Greek...................................................................................................................................... 47
Groups....................................................................................................... 33, 55, 75-76, 93-94

H
Habbo Hotel .................................................................................................................12-13, 31
Hamlet ...................................................................................................................................... 1
HarperBusiness ........................................................................................................................ 64
HarperCollins........................................................................................................................... 88
Harvard ....................................................................................................................... 17, 56, 69
Harvard Business Review ........................................................................................................... 56
Harvard Law School ................................................................................................................. 17
Harvard University .................................................................................................................... 69
HD DVD .................................................................................................................................. 44
Hellotxt ............................................................................................................................... 41-42
Hewitt, Hugh............................................................................................................................ 39
Hits ............................................................................................................................. 48, 55, 59
Hollywood ............................................................................................................................... 31
Holocaust ................................................................................................................................ 18
Holtz, Shel ..................................................................................................................... 3, 47, 53
Home .............................................................. 8-9, 17, 24, 26, 31-32, 43, 61, 70, 77-78, 81-83
Home Depot ............................................................................................................................ 82
Home Platform Group .............................................................................................................. 24
Hotmail ............................................................................................................................. 42, 68
Hours ........................................................................5, 17-18, 24, 27-29, 38, 55, 61, 73, 83-84
HR .......................................................................................................................................... 24
Human Performance ................................................................................................................. 18
Hyperion ................................................................................................................................. 92

I
IABC ....................................................................................................................................... 48
Illustrator ................................................................................................................................... 8
Imagery ................................................................................................................................... 71
IMAP ................................................................................................................................. 42, 68
Imperial College London .......................................................................................................... 17
IMVU ................................................................................................................................. 24-25
Innovators................................................................................................................29-30, 85-86
Insights ..................................................................................................................60, 63, 72, 88
Institute of Travel Management .................................................................................................. 16
Integration Marketing ............................................................................................................... 47
Integrity ............................................................................................................................. 20, 50
International Association of Business Communicators .................................................................. 48
Internet ................... 4, 11, 13, 28, 31, 37, 44-45, 51, 55, 57, 64, 67, 69, 73, 78, 80, 86, 93, 95
Internet Explorer ................................................................................................................. 73, 80

101
Index

Iowa State University ................................................................................................................. 17

Iron Man ................................................................................................................................. 44
IT ................................ 11, 13-19, 21-24, 26-30, 32-45, 47-51, 53-64, 67-80, 82-88, 91, 93-95
Italy ......................................................................................................................................... 28

J
J. Sainsbury.............................................................................................................................. 52
JaffeJuiceTV ............................................................................................................................. 92
Jaiku ....................................................................................................................................... 87
Japan ................................................................................................................................ 28, 45
Jarvis, Jeff ................................................................................................................................ 46
Jenkins, Allan ....................................................................................................................... 6, 91
Jeremiah Program .................................................................................................................... 51
Jitter ........................................................................................................................................ 10
Job ............................................................................8-9, 21, 24, 30, 36, 45, 52, 71, 75-77, 88
Jones, David ................................................................................................................ 58, 60, 91
Joyner, Mark ...................................................................................................................... 47, 91
Judge ................................................................................................................................ 62, 87

K
Kaplan Business ....................................................................................................................... 93
Kaplan Publishing ..................................................................................................................... 92
Kaushik, Avinash ...................................................................................................................... 64
Kawasaki, Guy ......................................................................................................................... 50
Kelly Services ........................................................................................................................... 14
Key .............................................. 4, 6, 17, 24, 29-30, 37-40, 48, 57, 61, 63-65, 67, 73, 84, 88
Key Management Solutions ....................................................................................................... 65
Key Performance Indicator......................................................................................................... 63
Key Performance Indicators ....................................................................................................... 24
Kingston University ................................................................................................................... 17
Kleenex ................................................................................................................................... 34
Knowledge Networks ................................................................................................................ 15
KPIs................................................................................................................................... 24, 63
KPMG ..................................................................................................................................... 16
Kraft .................................................................................................................................. 14, 21
Kryptonite ................................................................................................................................ 46

L
Lacoste .................................................................................................................................... 14
Lambert, Tom ........................................................................................................................... 48
Larstan Publishing ..................................................................................................................... 93
Leshelle, Ashanti....................................................................................................................... 20
Levenson Public Relations .......................................................................................................... 53
Levi-Strauss .............................................................................................................................. 52

102
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Librarians........................................................................................................................... 18, 87
Linden Lab ..............................................................................................................17, 27-28, 32
Linked Intelligence .................................................................................................................... 76
Links.................................................................................. 19, 21, 34, 38, 46, 71, 76, 79-80, 91
Linux ....................................................................................................................................... 34
Lisa Ekus Public Relations Company ........................................................................................... 51
Live Web ................................................................................................................................. 38
LiveJournal .......................................................................................................................... 2, 78
LiveWorld ................................................................................................................................ 23
LiveWorlders ............................................................................................................................ 23
London ..................................................................................................................17, 40, 65, 88
Louis Vuitton ............................................................................................................................ 43
Lurkers..................................................................................................................................... 93

M
Macmillan ............................................................................................................................... 18
MacOS ................................................................................................................................... 34
Magnolia ................................................................................................................................. 41
MAIL ......................................................................................................................42, 60-62, 68
Management ................................................... 3, 6-9, 14, 16-18, 21, 23, 48, 50, 62-63, 65, 76
Manchester, Alex ..................................................................................................................... 65
Manchester Metropolitan University ........................................................................................... 17
Marketing .............3, 14, 16, 24, 33-37, 42, 47, 51, 53, 57-59, 72, 75-76, 80, 82-84, 87, 92-93
MarketingFit ........................................................................................................................ 91-92
Markets ....................................................................................................................... 33, 51, 57
Marvel ..................................................................................................................................... 44
Mashup ................................................................................................................................... 93
Matchmakers ........................................................................................................................... 78
Maxcer, Chris ........................................................................................................................... 18
Maxim ..................................................................................................................................... 56
MBA ........................................................................................................................................ 17
MBNA Corporation .................................................................................................................. 52
McCrindle, Mark ................................................................................................................ 85, 88
McCusker, Gerry ..................................................................................................................... 91
McDonalds .............................................................................................................................. 52
McGraw Hill ............................................................................................................................ 93
McIntyre Ltd ............................................................................................................................. 93
McKeown, Lindy ................................................................................................................. 15, 32
McNeil Consumer Healthcare ............................................................................................. 35, 58
Measurement ............................................................................................................... 37, 55, 64
Media ...................................................... 2, 4-6, 8-10, 13, 17, 19-23, 27-29, 31, 33-34, 36-47,
49, 51, 54-57, 59-65, 67, 69, 72-75, 78, 80, 82-86, 93-94
Meeting ............................................................................................................................. 48, 76
Melbourne ......................................................................................................................... 15, 82

103
Index

Melcrum ............................................................................................................................ 65, 75

Mercedes Benz ......................................................................................................................... 14
Messages ................................................................41, 43-44, 57, 61, 69, 71, 73-74, 83-84, 94
MetaCafe .................................................................................................................................. 4
Metaverse Business ................................................................................................................... 32
Metaverse Journal .............................................................................................................. 32, 91
Micro-blogging .................................................................................................................... 9, 41
Microsoft ...............................................................................................................21, 24, 34, 52
Microsoft Word ........................................................................................................................ 34
Miller, Heidi ............................................................................................................................ 91
MIS ......................................................................................................................................... 17
Mitochondrial Eve .......................................................................................................1-2, 85, 88
Mixx ........................................................................................................................................ 41
MMU ...................................................................................................................................... 17
Monitor ............................................................................ 4, 6, 18, 37-40, 42, 57-61, 64, 86, 93
Monty Python ......................................................................................................................... 1, 6
Mortensen, R., Dennis .............................................................................................................. 63
MP3 .............................................................................................................................. 3, 56, 94
MSN ....................................................................................................................................... 60
MTV .......................................................................................................................................... 3
Mumbai................................................................................................................................... 40
Museum .................................................................................................................................. 18
Musician.................................................................................................................................. 71
Mybloglog ............................................................................................................................... 60
MySpace ................................................................................................................................. 77
Mystery Matador ...................................................................................................................... 34
MyWeb .................................................................................................................................... 41

N
Narcolepsy .............................................................................................................................. 45
National Congress .............................................................................................................. 15-16
Nature Publishing Group .......................................................................................................... 18
Nesquik ................................................................................................................................... 14
Netherlands ............................................................................................................................. 28
NetNewsWire ........................................................................................................................... 73
Netvouz ................................................................................................................................... 41
Network ..................................................................................... 8, 31, 40-42, 63, 68, 75-80, 82
Network Solutions .................................................................................................................... 82
New Collins Concise English Dictionary ....................................................................................... 2
New Riders .............................................................................................................................. 93
New York City .......................................................................................................................... 46
New York Times ......................................................................................................39, 44, 56, 64
News Bin ................................................................................................................................. 74
News Comes To You................................................................................................................. 74

104
 Social Media: The New Business Communication Landscape

NewsGator ......................................................................................................................... 73-74

NewsGator Inbox ..................................................................................................................... 73
NewsGator Online ................................................................................................................... 74
Newsgator Technologies ........................................................................................................... 73
Newsvine ........................................................................................................................... 41, 80
Nicotto Town............................................................................................................................ 13
Nielson Online .................................................................................................................. 69, 81
Ninety Nine Restaurant ............................................................................................................. 53
Ning ID ................................................................................................................................... 79
Ningbar................................................................................................................................... 79
Nissan ..................................................................................................................................... 14
Noble, Steven .......................................................................................................................... 29
NOKA ..................................................................................................................................... 45
North America ............................................................................................................. 13, 15, 46
North Carolina State University.................................................................................................. 18
Nurien ............................................................................................................................... 24, 26

O
O2 ......................................................................................................................................... 85
OpenSecrets ............................................................................................................................ 78
OpenSim ................................................................................................................................. 20
Opportunities ............................................................................. 1, 22, 24, 49-51, 64, 71, 75, 79
Orange ............................................................................................................................. 14, 73
Outlook.............................................................................................................................. 73-75
Owyang, Jeremiah ..................................................................................................35, 57-58, 91

P
Pacific ......................................................................................................................... 13, 26, 46
Page..............................................................8, 10, 20, 37, 56, 59, 62-63, 70-72, 79-80, 83, 95
Pages ..............................................................7-8, 10, 19, 44, 54, 67, 70, 72, 77, 79-80, 94-95
Paine, KD .....................................................................................................................55, 64-65
Papworth, Laurel ................................................................................................................ 72, 91
Paradise .................................................................................................................................. 86
Passion ................................................................................................................................... 53
PC ............................................................................................................................................ 3
PDA ........................................................................................................................................ 85
PDF.......................................................................................................................29, 32, 56, 84
Peachpit Press .......................................................................................................................... 92
Penguin .............................................................................................................................. 13-14
Percentage ................................................................................................................... 28, 30, 59
Performance Technologies ......................................................................................................... 79
Permission Marketing ................................................................................................................ 93
Perseus Publishing .................................................................................................................... 93
Photos ............................................................................................ 20-21, 35, 41, 69-71, 78, 82

105
Index

Physician ................................................................................................................................... 9
Picasa ..................................................................................................................................... 60
Picture ...................................................................................................................42, 61, 78, 94
Pitman Publishing ..................................................................................................................... 65
Plan ..................................................................................................... 33, 47-48, 53-54, 58, 77
Plaxo ................................................................................................................................. 41, 82
Playboy.................................................................................................................................... 14
Playstation ............................................................................................................................... 24
PocketTweets ............................................................................................................................ 10
Podcast....................................................................................................................3-4, 9, 92-94
Podcasters ........................................................................................................................... 3, 94
Podcasts ...................................................................................... 3-4, 32, 39, 60, 75, 82, 92, 94
POP ............................................................................................................................ 42, 68, 94
Portfolio ................................................................................................................................... 93
Power Systems .......................................................................................................................... 17
PowerPoint ......................................................................................................................... 34, 65
PowerPoints ................................................................................................................................ 5
PR ....................................................................................... 3, 35, 37, 43-44, 46, 58, 72, 87, 92
Presentation .................................................................................................. 5, 8, 15, 17, 59, 65
Print ................................................................................................................33, 35, 51, 54, 56
Product ............................................ 6, 29, 34, 37, 41, 51, 53-54, 58, 65, 70-71, 73-74, 76, 93
Project ............................................................................................................5-8, 18, 20, 22, 67
Project Wonderland .................................................................................................................. 20
PS3 ......................................................................................................................................... 26
PSFK ....................................................................................................................................... 57
Publishers International Marketing.............................................................................................. 53

R
RAAF ....................................................................................................................................... 30
Rahodeb .................................................................................................................................. 44
Rank ................................................................................................................................. 38, 63
Readers ....................................................................................... 3, 9, 35, 39, 41, 44, 59, 73-74
Really Simple Syndication ...................................................................................................... 8, 94
Rebroadcasting Tools ................................................................................................................ 39
Recruitment ......................................................................................................14, 16, 30, 76, 87
Reddit.......................................................................................................................... 41, 59, 80
Redman, E., Brian ...................................................................................................................... 2
Reebok .................................................................................................................................... 14
Reports ......................................................................................................14, 30, 32, 56, 59, 80
Research.................................................5, 14, 17, 27, 29-30, 32, 36, 57, 67, 76-77, 82, 84, 93
Residents ............................................................................................................9, 20, 26-30, 95
Resources ..............................................................................................9, 19, 32, 48, 50, 64, 91
Respect .............................................................................................................21-22, 50, 52, 88
Revenue .....................................................................................................13, 24, 30-31, 50, 79

106
 Social Media: The New Business Communication Landscape

Review ......................................................................................................................... 56, 62, 72

Reviews ................................................................................................................................... 71
Robot Wisdom ........................................................................................................................... 2
ROI ..................................................................................................................59, 62-63, 72, 80
Rolls Royce .............................................................................................................................. 46
Rootwork ........................................................................................................................... 78, 84
Rosalynn Carter Partnership Foundation ..................................................................................... 18
Royal Australian Air Force ......................................................................................................... 30
RSPCA ..................................................................................................................................... 62

S
Satchmo .................................................................................................................................. 87
School of Communication......................................................................................................... 17
Schultze, Axel ........................................................................................................................... 64
Search ................................................ 8-9, 20, 38, 40, 45, 59-60, 64, 74-76, 80, 82, 84, 88, 94
Second Life Association of Certified Public Accountants ............................................................... 15
Second Life Association of CPAs ................................................................................................ 15
Senate Committee .................................................................................................................... 78
Service ............4, 9, 13, 18, 29, 31, 39, 41-42, 45-46, 52-54, 67, 69, 71, 73, 76, 79-80, 82, 84
Setting ................................................................................. 9, 37, 50, 53-54, 59, 64, 71, 79, 93
Shakespeare .............................................................................................................................. 2
Shareholders ...................................................................................................................... 47, 52
Shopping ................................................................................................................................. 19
Siau, Keng, Dr. ........................................................................................................................ 17
Sinickas, Angela ................................................................................................................. 55, 64
Sites ............................................3-4, 8, 21, 24, 34, 36-40, 42, 59-60, 67-70, 79-80, 87, 93-95
Sky News ................................................................................................................................. 14
Skype ........................................................................................................................................ 4
SlashDot .................................................................................................................................. 41
Slideshare .................................................................................................................5, 64-65, 84
SMART ...................................................................................... 10, 23-24, 32, 38-40, 76, 85-86
Smart Phones ................................................................................................................32, 85-86
SmashFly Technologies ............................................................................................................. 16
Social Media Aggregation......................................................................................................... 39
Social Media Influence ............................................................................................................. 36
Social Media Marketing ................................................................................................ 42, 59, 75
Social Media Statistics .............................................................................................................. 64
Sony ............................................................................................................................ 24, 26, 31
Sony Computer Entertainment ................................................................................................... 24
Source................................................................................. 5, 20, 22-23, 29, 55, 67, 76, 84, 86
South Australia ..................................................................................................................... 8, 62
South Korea ............................................................................................................................. 24
Space ....................................................................................... 18-19, 23, 38, 42, 59, 83, 85-87
Spain ...................................................................................................................................... 28

107
Index

Spandex .................................................................................................................................. 34
Starbucks ............................................................................................................................ 45-46
Stardoll.................................................................................................................................... 13
Starfruit ................................................................................................................................... 14
Status Update ..................................................................................................................... 71-72
Strategies ................................................................................................................22, 50-51, 53
Strategy .......................................................5, 16, 27, 30, 32, 40, 47-50, 53, 55, 64, 70, 73, 78
Studies ............................................................................................................. 6, 17, 22, 37, 71
Subscriptions .................................................................................................................68, 73-74
Success Networks ..................................................................................................................... 53
SUVs ....................................................................................................................................... 47
Swedish Embassy...................................................................................................................... 14
SWOT ..................................................................................................................................... 49
SystemiNetwork ........................................................................................................................ 18

T
Taco Bell ................................................................................................................................. 45
Tag ........................................................................................................................67-68, 70, 94
Target .................................................................................................. 27, 34-35, 42, 44, 48, 83
Technorati Authority .................................................................................................................. 38
Technorati Rank........................................................................................................................ 38
TechWorld ......................................................................................................................... 35, 46
Teens........................................................................................................................... 27, 77, 81
Television .....................................................................................................2, 29, 45, 51, 55, 83
Threats ............................................................................................................................... 49-50
Toyota ............................................................................................................................... 14, 51
Trafcom News .......................................................................................................................... 92
Traffic ....................................................................................................9, 58, 63, 69, 72, 81, 83
Training ................................................................................... 1, 5, 15-17, 22-23, 30, 75, 83-84
Troll................................................................................................................................... 44, 94
Tweet ..................................................................................................................9, 40, 77, 81-82
TweetDeck ..................................................................................................................... 9, 40, 80
Twitterati .................................................................................................................................... 9
Twitterers ........................................................................................................................... 40, 81
Twittersphere ................................................................................................................ 40, 43, 82

U
UK .............................................................................................................10, 14-15, 32, 70, 84
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum ............................................................................... 18
University of Houston Department of Health ............................................................................... 18
University of London ................................................................................................................. 17
University of Nebraska-Lincoln .................................................................................................. 17
University of South Australia ..................................................................................................... 17
University of Tennessee ............................................................................................................. 39

108
 Social Media: The New Business Communication Landscape

University of Texas .................................................................................................................... 18

Updates........................................................................................................9, 36, 40, 71-72, 75
US Entertainment Merchants Association .................................................................................... 32
Users .............................................................3, 9, 13, 18, 24, 26-28, 30-31, 40, 42, 44, 57, 60,
63, 67-69, 74, 77, 79-80, 84-85, 94-95

V
Valuation ................................................................................................................................. 13
Verizon .................................................................................................................................... 47
Video .............................3-4, 6, 16, 33-35, 43, 45-46, 57, 61, 70, 74, 77, 79, 83-85, 87, 93-95
Videos ...............................................................10, 22, 39, 41, 44-45, 60, 70-71, 75, 83-84, 87
Vimeo ................................................................................................................................. 4, 87
Visa......................................................................................................................................... 14
Visits......................................................................................................................55, 60, 80, 87
Vodafone ................................................................................................................................. 14
Voice Over Internet Protocol ........................................................................................................ 4
VOIP ......................................................................................................................................... 4
Voyage .................................................................................................................................... 18
VP of Digital Communication .................................................................................................... 60
VWs ........................................................................................................................................ 95

W
Walkman ................................................................................................................................. 85
Wall Street Journal.......................................................................................................... 2, 35, 73
Washington Post .................................................................................................................... 39, 56
Watches .................................................................................................................................. 74
Website ........................................................ 4, 10, 22-23, 34-36, 38, 41, 43-44, 54, 56, 58-59,
63, 67-68, 70-71, 73-74, 76, 79, 83, 93-95
Wenzel, Elsa ........................................................................................................................... 73
White, Graham ........................................................................................................................ 77
Whole Foods ........................................................................................................................... 44
Widget .................................................................................................................................... 95
Wilde, Oscar ............................................................................................................................ 6
Widmer, Kathy.................................................................................................................... 35, 58
Wiki .............................................................................................................4-10, 20, 32, 59, 95
Wikinomics .............................................................................................................................. 93
Wikipatterns ............................................................................................................................. 93
Wikipedia ...................................................................................................................... 6, 32, 95
Wikis ..................................................................................................................... 5-6, 8, 22, 95
Wild Oats ................................................................................................................................ 44
Wiley Publishing Inc .................................................................................................................. 93
Windows .............................................................................................. 39, 41-42, 69, 73-74, 80
Windows Live ............................................................................................................... 39, 41, 80
Windows Outlook .................................................................................................................... 74

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Index

Winer, Dave ............................................................................................................................... 3

Wired Magazine ....................................................................................................................... 57
WM......................................................................................................................................... 35
Wordpress ............................................................................................................................... 60
World of Warcraft ......................................................................................................... 23, 25, 30
World Wide Web ...................................................................................................................... 33
Wright State University .............................................................................................................. 17

X
XBox........................................................................................................................................ 24
Xenix ....................................................................................................................................... 34
XLS 72

Y
Yahoo ............................................................................................. 4, 41-42, 44, 60, 63, 68, 75
Yahoo Bookmarks .................................................................................................................... 41
Yahoo Finance ......................................................................................................................... 44
Yahoo Mail ........................................................................................................................ 42, 68
Yahoo Web Analytics ................................................................................................................ 63
Yoshinoya ................................................................................................................................ 52
Young Foundation .................................................................................................................... 18
YouTube .................................................................................................................................. 83
YoVille ............................................................................................................................... 13, 26
Yves Saint Laurent .................................................................................................................... 14

Z
Zuckerberg, Mark ..................................................................................................................... 69

110