Jeremy Owyang, Sr. Analyst for Forrester Research recently wrote a White Paper for Dow Jones Business, http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/2007/08/20/social-media-white-paper-tracking-the-influence-factiva-of-dow-jones/ after attending a conference with social media
experts from many different industries hosted by Dow Jones. Here is what he said in his opening statement in the White Paper
As adoption of Web 2.0 technologies – with their emphasis on
collaboration and sharing – continues to accelerate in both
consumer and corporate environments, tools like blogs,
podcasts, video blogs and social networking sites have begun
to surface as topics of mainstream news coverage.
We’re reading just about every day how your customers and
prospects – many of whom have never known an exclusively
offline business world –are communicating online using some
of these tools, and making business decisions more quickly and
collaboratively as a result. (Owyang)
Businesses need to be aware that nearly every company that provides products and services to these buyers has, in recent years, been impacted to some degree both positively and negatively by social media and the technologies that facilitate it.
The static messages of traditional media such as radio, television and print media do not foster immediate feedback from the audience—the few emerging exceptions being so-called “talk
radio”– or delayed feedback responses like sending a letter or e-mail to the editorial page of a print newspaper. Owyang points out that, “… filters exist in each of these cases, meaning that an individual’s feedback is subject to interpretation, to say nothing of outright omission.” (2). Newspapers in any city give no feel of connectiveness to their readers, “If you take something like the New York Times, the audience has a very trivial relationship with it – I mean, nobody
feels like they’re connected to the Times,” said Greg Narain, a blogger and respected social media consultant. AS quoted by Owyang (2).
Understanding the power of blogs like Narain’s is important, as social media refers to a form of communication where two or more individuals can participate in a discussion, virtually in real time, with special emphasis on more people – “engaging in conversations” in a very literal sense. Social media is two or more directions in communication, using simple tools that are as easy as e-mail.
“From the 10,000-foot view, social media enables individuals to connect to each other and then share using easy-to-publish tools. (Creating a blog from scratch can take less time than creating a cappuccino.) The visible discussions that result can include customer experiences, both negative and positive, about any particular brand.” (Owyang 3)
The advent of social media – blogs in particular – thus brings with it at least the potential for removing the barrier between a seller and buyers who are likely remote – geographically, economically, culturally or otherwise. The social media platform truly leverages the Web’s massive scale to carry information – fact or opinion – globally and instantly. Those questioning social media’s impact on corporate marketing strategy today may well work for the same corporations that questioned whether creating a corporate Web site in the mid- and late-1990s, or allowing employees to access the Internet at work, was a wise move.
For many organizations wanting to join the conversation, social media tools such as corporate blogs are the chosen path, but strategists recommend that these corporations first gauge the climate of conversations before actually engaging. While there are dozens of free tools that
can help measure the conversation, many of these tools are not designed for in-depth analysis, benchmarking, or to show the impact of media on businesses and their markets. So even “listening” to the conversation is not as simple as it might seem, whether that listening is part of a preliminary process to understand the environment or an active monitoring program to measure the impact of some event on a corporation’s reputation or strategy. And to back up even further, merely making the decision to engage in, and measure, consumer-generated media is just the first step, given that the influence of social media itself is often difficult to pin down. This strikes some experts as surprising. “It’s kind of ironic, because it was exactly the promise of all the measurability and metrics that originally got a lot of companies to initially start
going out onto the Web, because the whole idea was, ‘Well, you can measure everything,’” said Chris Kenton, a marketing strategist, blogger and president of consultancy MotiveLab. “That expectation has been set, and it has to be rationalized.” (quoted in Owyang 6)
Marketers who advertise on a website or blog are able to track exactly how many people open pages, how long they stay and how many people have clicked on their ads from a blog or website, so measurements are available to corporations who choose to use social media. They still know virtually nothing (nothing specific, anyway) about how many people saw their billboards or newspaper ads – and even less about whether anyone cared – but now that the Web provides the promise of metrics, the reality of just what and how to measure social media still seems a few steps away. Owyang makes the point “Small niche conversations can create long-lasting impact. Chris Anderson’s “Long Tail” theory suggests that content and communication are becoming tightly focused among small groups rather than large mass-media buys.” (Owyang8).
One example is the way in which individuals with similar interests are connecting with each other using social media tools, forming small communities with very specific needs. These
groups of small influencers have intimate conversations in sharing information about a specific market or corporation. The small and concentrated conversations within these passionate groups may be more influential to prospects in a marketplace than a mass media review.
The Dow Jones meeting that Owyang attended was to be a very open roundtable conversation where all participants were encouraged to be honest in all their opinions. The group formed of thirty bloggers and social media experts all agreed that past metrics and measurements of mass media did not apply to the new media, nor do the current measurement tactics apply to traditional media.
What was agreed by virtually everyone in the conference as Owyang points out is the importance of who is paying attention and participating in the conversation of social media efforts. That same sentiment was echoed in the phone interview with Matt Dickman held in November of 2008. Dickman stated that it is more important to be speaking to the top ten influential people in the industry than it is to every possible consumer in the market.
Owyang quotes Steve Wilhelm, Director of Applications of Podtech.net, in the White Paper, “If you write a memo that gets to [George] Bush, Bill Gates and … just pick one other person – it has very little reach, right? But that memo is probably thoroughly influential.” So the “reach” attribute has less to do with sheer numbers than it does with influence – making it a difficult, but potentially crucially important, metric and a crucial component of Anderson’s “long tail.”
The concept of influence within a specific community becomes increasingly important as small communities form and niche conversations start in every industry. While an “A-list” blogger may have a large, diverse audience, he or she may not have an intimate relationship with specific influential individuals within any given community.
edia is important and necessary for Realtors and all small business' trying to find new and different ways to reach their past, current and potential customers.
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