The Economist, as it often does, sums up a business trend succinctly: In the introduction to its special report on social networking, its author argues "Lastly, it will contend that this is just the beginning of an exciting new era of global interconnectedness that will spread ideas and innovation around the world faster than ever before."

If that is not reason enough, here are four other arguments for caring about social communications (For the contrarian perspective, you can always depend on Paul Seaman blogging at 21st Century PR Issues, who believes "Social media is looking less glossy after bruising encounters with business, personal and political reality"):

1. Major brands are beginning to invest heavily in social media projects. Unless a company or organization creates a strategy based on an analysis of its readiness, balancing of the opportunities and risks, and designing a road map to social success it could easily be out-manoeuvred.  Although missing the point about Twitter, even venerable Procter & Gamble apparently has dozens of projects underway looking at how social media can benefit their marketing programs and reputation. If coldly sober P&G is taking social media's measure, it's evidence that this isn't kids stuff.
2. If you don't listen to what bothers people about your organization, and don't recognize how social communication has become the midwife for organized anger, you could easily be out-gunned by someone who doesn't like you and knows how to use social networks and social communications to do something about it. This is simply the lucid logic of effective issue management playing out on a new battlefield.
3. People are becoming hardwired to react, take advice, learn and challenge ideas differently. A whack of research studies have identified that the most trusted source or information for people today is someone like themselves. People find people like themselves in social networks. This is unlikely to change, even if the social networks or social communications infrastructure within which they seek the advice. Such an evolutionary reconstruction of culture is always hard to accept since it happens slowly and often finds itself questioned by short-sighted talking heads. But organizations who need a public license to operate should recognize that the zeitgeist of engagement is bending differently today.
4. The marketing and corporate communications vocabulary in social media is also shifting, and some marketers insist on speaking the wrong language. An example: Marketers have slapped the social media concept of 'engagement' on top of their beloved 'brand' and come out with a concept called "engage with a brand". Engage generally means to interact with or attract (It can also be defined as 'to enter into combat with'). It is personal and reciprocal, and it is only wishful thinking when it comes to the relationship between a person and a product or company. Avoiding this type of awkward and alienating juxtaposition of a social communications reality with a marketing communications ambition happens when you recognize your word-stock doesn't fit anymore.

I'll leave the conclusion to David Carr writing about Twitter in the New York Times at the start of the year in an agreeable precis of the personal pleasure and business opportunities of social communications that is better than anything else on the subject I have read recently . . . "The most frequent objection to Twitter is a predictable one: 'I don’t need to know someone is eating a donut right now.' But if that someone is a serious user of Twitter, she or he might actually be eating the curmudgeon’s lunch, racing ahead with a clear, up-to-the-second picture of an increasingly connected, busy world."

Domino's on a Roll

As a corporate reputation watcher, I like to find examples of new takes on traditional reputation building. Here's one to watch at a website called pizzaturnaround.com. Domino's Pizza, the unfortunate quarry in a legendary YouTube video, is now addressing criticisms of products in a series of videos in which it admits customer dissatisfaction with its pizza. 

Rather than hide behind weasel words like 'enhanced' or 'improved', the company is changing its pizza recipes, from crust to sauce to cheese to find a combination its customers will find more appealing. Organizations whose reputations are in the toilet could learn from this 'let's be honest about what's wrong and just fix it' approach.

Political iPhone Apps

In Canada, we are well behind Americans in using social media as a political organizing and advocacy tool, largely as a result of differences in our political systems. In the U.S. individual senators and members of Congress aren't subject to the party discipline which hampers independent thinking here in Canada.  The flip side is that in the U.S. politicians become the target of interest group pressure and popular advocacy, and the newest channels for pressure are social media.

Ian Capstick at MediaStyle singles out three political iPhone apps, at least two of which could be adapted for use in Canada. One is a complete contact list of members of Congress and their staffs and the other an application which allows users to see "if a brand they are about to purchase is – or is not – supportive of their community."

The slides below are from a presentation I gave today at a conference on renewable energy infrastructure. I am not sure how useful the presentation will be without my narrative, but if you have any questions post a comment and I promise to answer.

I am a bit late to the game with comments on Sidewiki. (It launched more than a month ago.) A student in my Ryerson University reputation management class gave a presentation on it the other night which got me thinking that the debate about its influence on public relations has been thin. Surprising really given that some, like Mark Rose, believe Sidewiki "is a PR game changer".

Here's what Sidewiki allows you to do once you have installed the application: As Google describes it "Google Sidewiki is a browser sidebar that lets you contribute and read information alongside any web page."

In other words, you can write an un-moderated comment beside any web page you want. You can add anything you like (with the usual caveats about libel, perversion, vulgarity, etc.), provide your perspective on the page, add new information, share an anecdote, or add a link that sends readers somewhere else.

I believe Google uses an algorithm to rank Sidekwiki posts by relevance and credibility rather than chronology. Through its webmaster tools it will also allow the website owner always to have the first note in the sidebar.

Of course, the dangers are self-evident. My first Sidewiki contribution to the front page of the Globe and Mail was a complaint about the panic-inducing headlines and coverage of H1N1 in Canada's national newspaper. As much as I like to be helpful, I am just as likely to get frustrated by the content on organizations' web pages. Now I can have that frustration, even anger or disgust  made evident to every other reader of the page with the Sidwiki app.

The debate about the ethics of being able to tread on the last piece of web ground that an organization could "own" should go on for a long time yet once people take the full measure of this new social combat tool. At least I hope it does. (If you want to see some pretty harsh and cogent criticisms take a look at the website called Sidewiki Sux.)

But Sidewiki may have one benefit. For those of us who get stonewalled whenever we suggest that organizations should pay more attention to their websites, make them more peppy and responsive, treat them less like a print annual report or marketing brochure and more like, say, a collaboration platform, this may be a turning point.

Could Sidewiki actually encourage (force) website owners to breathe life back into moribund web anatomies because people may actually be stopping by and, excuse the vulgarity, taking a piss on them?

A post by a colleague got me thinking about the phrase 'social media' as the lexeme to describe the technologies of web-based self-publishing that have led to unprecedented connection, conversation, engagement and community.

The provenance of the phrase is evidently to contrast user-generated news and comment with mainstream or industrial media in which the 'means of production' to use the Marxist description (also favoured by cultural commentator Andrew Keen) are owned by corporations not the individuals who create the content. The debate about whether 'social media' is the right term has been going on for at least two years.

The problem I have is less with the 'social' element of the lexeme than with 'media' to describe the interface, although a colleague did comment the other day that it would make it easier to sell social media as a communications strategy to companies if it didn't contain the word 'social' which smacks of people-driven rather than business-driven decision making . . . which is the point of course.

Let's do a little academic geekery here. Dictionary.com defines media as "the means of communication, as radio and television, newspapers, and magazines, that reach or influence people widely." (The 'reach' is becoming questionable and the 'influence' declining. But that's the subject of a future post.) The Online Etymology Dictionary suggest a derivation from the "notion of 'intermediate agency,' a sense first found around 1605." According to Spiritus Temporis, media refers to "those organized means of dissemination of fact, opinion, entertainment, and other information."

You see the trend: The word 'media' has about it the notion of a channel by which you deliver something to people, not interconnect with them. Some, well many, communications and marketing people have a hard time switching mental models when it comes to assessing social tools for online interaction. They fixate on the term 'media' and apply old public relations patterns and benchmarks to social media strategies.

Doc Searls (co-author of the groundbreaking book The Cluetrain Manifesto), for one, objects strenuously to the limitations and misdirection prompted by the 'media' terminology. I do to . . . but the battle for a new conceptual model may already be lost as usage soon drives definition. Even though the conceits of social computing tools, social interaction software or social engagement strategies seem to collocate better the important elements of the digitally-driven cultural revolution, they still aren't really there yet.

So, can we revive the two-year-old or longer debate? Or has it been resolved and I am just out of the loop?