Communication Overtones Comments
The corporatization and commercial application of social media is inevitable. It will only be a matter of time before consumers will be forced to seek out "clean" channels.
It's called new media, because like in MSM, your attention is sold to advertisers. The only differnce is, in the case of the new media, there are no reporters for them to pay to create the content.
Organizations making a serious committment to social media communications are deploying their own social media portals on their own websites, rather than give their exclusively to a third-party like YouTube to sell ads against.
The opportunity is not simply engagement. It's about converting awareness into transactions. You can build awareness by posting content to YouTube. But their advertisers get the make the sale against yur content.
If you have the infrastructure to host VOD or video podcasts on your own site, you can leverage your content to acheive your own measurable transactions.
In my current podcast inteview with Duncan Wardell of Disney, he says we are rapidly approaching an age where consumers will filter out the brands they don't want to hear from. So providing entertaining, informative, valuabel content is one way to get throught he filter.
But unless your equipped to conduct social media campaigns on your own site, your mising the real opportunity.
Right on, Kami, with your comment on delivering relevant and compelling content. And to that I would add "credible." Public relations can and should do this.
But, I don't get Geoff Livingston's implication above that efforts by commercial interests to influence through social media, whether by building relationships with social media influencers like Geoff or directly engaging consumers through the social media channel, is somehow or another defiling the inherent cleanliness of social media.
Particularly American, this trap of "rhetoric of the technological sublime" that Geoff and others frequently fall into. There's a near-puritanical insistence out there on the purity of social media that discards out of hand that commercial/business activities, such as marketing or public relations, can engage in ethical, responsible and credible communications.
Marketing and public relations not only can and should deliver relevant and compelling content through the social media channel, they can and should be encouraged to try to make that content and its delivery ethical, responsible and credible.
Commenting by HaloScan
