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The New York Times and the BBC College of Journalism hosted the Social Media Summit, in New York City, on Saturday, 20 April 2013.  I joined a host of journalists, broadcasters and social media buffs at the event, to look at the use of social media in journalism.  The Boston Marathon Bombing was a constant reference point.

The Summit revealed converging practices to craft influential social media content, and shared common themes with this year’s Social Media Week, about which I wrote here:

1. People want to be engaged, not marketed at –“One-sided conversations for brands are long gone.” @tim_nolan
   
2. Social media engagement helps build trust in your brand, mobilizing action and purchase decisions
3. A là Warby Parker, to capture attention content must authentic and disrupt the conversation.

To do this, organizations must be ready to take advantage of opportunities, like Oreo’s now famous Super Bowl tweet:

Source: http://www.slingshotseo.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/Oreo-Tweet.png

Social Media Content – Stuff to Keep in Mind

Effective social media content will be relevant, targeted, and reflect a tone that is appropriate to a specific audience.  Market testing content, and tracking results, allows campaigns to adjust to maximize impact.  Panelist Shaker Gupta, Strategy Director at @360i, posited that in the realm of social media metrics, “Shares are king.”

To resonate, content must tap into emotions and passions of the audience, and be paired with an outlet for enthusiasm and anger.  Tim Nolan of BBH Labs provided a cautionary tale, when this approach was perhaps too successful.  In an effort to raise awareness, BBH Labs hired local homeless people to wear mobile WiFi devices during the South by Southwest conference in 2012.  The reaction to the campaign easily became the story.

Local homeless man carries a mobile WiFi device

Everyman as Anchorman

Social media give everyone a voice, causing the sources of content to explode.  The public is now an active participant in emergency management; after Hurricane Sandy this phenomenon has transformed from a trend to an expectation.  Tim Nolan reminded the audience, “Now everyone has a news van in their pocket.”  As we saw in the aftermath of the Boston Marathon Bombing, the public is broadcasting and will tell their own stories.  Enter video.

The ‘Citizen Journalist’: Everyman as Anchorman

Video

I remember a Heavy Metal story depicted a dystopian future where the populace, armed with cameras, clamour over each other to catch the most sensational footage, and remunerated based on the number of views.  The audience is a passive consumer of content.  Despite the obvious similarity with YouTube, the Heavy Metal future is not our present.  Consumers are active.  Our video is social.

The future of social media is cross-platform collaboration that touches people in multiple ways, a future in which video will prominently feature.  Video must go social because what happened to newspapers will happen to TV: people abandoning the traditional medium to social media, on which they can connect and share experience.  Roy Sekoff, President and co-creator at HuffPostLive and founding editor of the Huffington Post, noted, “Marshall McLuhan said that the medium is the message.  Now production values are the message, and the message is: authentic engagement.”

To make video social, it must break down the complex to the simple.  Video that allows the viewer to share what the subject is feeling, in the moment, a shared social experience, will produce the most echoes.  In this way, Sekoff explains, “HuffpostLive is not a video experience.  It is a platform for engagement.”

Keys to social media content

To summarize, here are the keys to effective social media content:

• Talk like a human being
• Meet your audience where they are
• Immerse your messages in pop culture
• Engage your audience as equals
• Write about a community as an insider, not an observer
• Strategy, strategy, strategy: “As a content strategist, everything should be part of a series because you are trying to build an audience.” @kmonson

Final thoughts – Crisis Communications Must-Do’s

The role of social media in the aftermath of the tragic bombing of the Boston Marathon on 15 April 2013 – both good and bad – formed the context for much of the event discussion.  On the subject of social media for emergency management, a number of ‘crisis communications must-dos’ emerged:

• Take down your pay wall during an event
• Disable all scheduled social media posts
• Marketers: don’t compromise your brand; journalists: don’t compromise your objectivity

Related articles

• Social Media Week 2013: My Take Aways (buridansblog.com)
• Why Your Crisis Communications Plan Needs to be SOCIAL (melissaagnescrisismanagement.com)
• Roy Sekoff Speaks At Social Media Week Panel: The Shift From Presentation To Participation (VIDEO) (huffingtonpost.com)

Filed under: Communication, Crisis Management, IM, KM, Social Learning, Social Media, Social Web | Tagged: BBH Labs, Facebook, Marshall McLuhan, New York Times, Oreo, Roy Sekoff, Social Media, Social Media Week, Twitter, Warby Parker | 2 Comments »