Social Media Week 2010

It’s Social Media Week! To mark the occasion, Johnson King has teamed up with one of its Global Reach partner agencies – US-based Affect Strategies – to report on the latest from the annual global conference.  Read our collective thoughts on the week on this blog, or check out our LinkedIn discussion groups and JohnsonKingPR Twitter updates.

Has social media come of age?

By Tom Kirkham

The Johnson King Twitter Team is excited, and with good reason.  You see today marks the start of Social Media Week, a five day annual conference taking place simultaneously across three continents.  Twelve months ago I doubt I’d have been as excited, for while I appreciated the need for companies to investigate new media channels, I personally felt underwhelmed with Twitter and the whole social media experience.  However, over the past year and the events I’ve witnessed, I’ve undergone a road-to-Damascus conversion (except without the temporary blinding).

 

Most of these events have taken place on Twitter – surely the online phenomenon of 2009.  We’ve had Haiti and Iran and Michael Jackson and many other fascinating global trending topics, but the events that have influenced me the most have been UK-specific.  For example, in October 2009 The Guardian newspaper received a court gagging order, preventing it from reporting on a parliamentary debate over Trafigura, a company implicated in a toxic waste dumping scandal.  In obtaining the gagging order, Trafigura did not consider the Twitter-effect.  Twitter users and bloggers pieced together the various elements of the puzzle, and within 24 hours the whole story had spread across the UK – including to other national newspapers – rendering the gagging order meaningless. 

 

At the time, we asked whether this was the moment at which Twitter came of age, and just a week later further evidence suggested that indeed it had, when Jan Moir at the Daily Mail wrote a hugely controversial article on the recently departed Boyzone singer Stephen Gately.  Twitter users didn’t like this, and within hours Jan Moir’s name was social media mud; indeed, users submitted so many complaints to the Press Complaints Commission that its website crashed, forcing the commission to create a special page specifically for Jan Moir complaints.

 

The final part of my conversion occurred on Facebook.  In December 2009 we witnessed Joe McElderry, winner of the X Factor television series, going head-to-head with iconic rap-metal outfit Rage Against The Machine, in a music chart battle started by disgruntled music fans fed up with X Factor’s monopoly of the Christmas number one spot.  Jon and Tracy Morter launched a Facebook group and set about creating social media noise, through their efforts gaining thousands of group members, attracting significant media interest, and even getting the band themselves involved.  RATM’s eventual triumph marked the first ever download-only UK number one, with a song from 1992 that never would have re-charted without the power of social media.

 

Unprecedented?  Well, social media’s impact in general is pretty unprecedented.  Sure, there’s an element of the ‘angry mob’ about all this, but in each of the above cases, Twitter has been used to liberate and to enforce change, which bodes well for the forthcoming UK general election.  The main political parties will all be plotting their social media election strategies, and it remains to be seen whether they’ll successfully compete with the efforts of the general public.

 

But can social media channels really be exploited for business gain?  For giant multinational companies the answer may be obvious, but what about everyone else?  At Johnson King we’re regularly asked by small-to-medium-sized tech companies what they should be doing on LinkedIn, YouTube, Facebook etc. and there’s not always a straightforward answer. 

 

Earlier I mentioned Twitter coming of age, yet at the time of writing, the trending topics are ‘#HugATree’, ‘#desperatehousewives’, ‘#Ugly Betty’ and worryingly, ‘#itampon’.  Similarly, on Facebook this morning I was invited to become a fan of ‘Picking leaves off trees and bushes and ripping them up whilst walking’.  Managing social media outreach can be unbelievably time-consuming, and with so much pointless ‘noise’ out there, your company risks being completely drowned out unless you can plot an effective and viable strategy that ties into your existing marketing and PR activities.

 

It will be interesting to see how the various presentations during Social Media Week tackle this issue, because one thing’s for sure – social media isn’t going away anytime soon.