Facing the challenge of Web 2.0

By James Smith | 5 October 2008 | Permanent link | 0 comments

Beware self-appointed experts at the best of times, but particularly when it comes to planning your Web 2.0 strategy. I popped along to an informal gathering held at Singapore’s Urban Redevelopment Authority yesterday, and listened to an interesting panel discussion debating how corporates could leverage the rise of the social internet.

First the bad news. At least half the panel of MNCs and PR strategists didn’t quite understand how to engage with citizen bloggers. One PR professional asked the audience of bloggers what would motivate them to attend a media event: “Freebies? Competitions? Food? Beer?” Another individual, a representative of an MNC, said that you should apply pressure to bloggers, by advertising with them, or threatening not to do so, in order to get them to play ball.

My heart sank. These, afterall, were the ‘experts’.

I know that a key challenge of leveraging Web 2.0 to engage with citizens and consumers is simply that these technologies are so new, that people are still only in the initial stages of exploring how best to deploy them. Even Web 2.0 darling Facebook (feel free to add me at james.smith@alphabet-media.com) has struggled to understand the dynamics of social media - as demonstrated by the alienation of users with its ‘Beacon’ advertising recommendation service last November.

But the idea that traditional marketing messages can be translated into the language of the social internet by celebrity bloggers receiving ‘guidance’ in the form of a steady drip feed of freebies from public and private sector organisations … it’s almost too stupid to comment on. So let me try and shine a little light for those of you looking to be a positive part of citizens’ online conversations.

The first thing you need to bear in mind is that you need to be invited to take part: the social internet does not recognise traditional top-down information delivery structures. No matter how important a minister’s initiative is to his or her ministry, government has to understand that it is now competing in a multi-million channel universe: their hot breaking news is merely one message amongst a multitude.

The logic of the internet’s ‘long tail’ is that I can surround myself with everything that matters to me as an individual, and opt out of anything I find tedious. I can choose to ignore government unless I find it engaging.

The second thing is that government needs to realise that to be part of a conversation is to lose control of the message. That alone is going to require an almighty culture change in government communications strategies. If you talk to me, but I disagree and tell my friends that I disagree, there’s not a lot you can do about that. The only thing you can do is to really, really try to understand me as an individual citizen in order to frame the discussion in as convincing a way as possible. The alternative - of not trying to engage me - runs the greater risk of me passing on misinformed comments to my friends, or to simply ignore government completely.

Before you start getting palpitations regarding this loss of control over the conversation, this is not really very new. People have been having conversations with their friends for a long time. The only new thing with the social internet is that the content of these conversations is now more visible, and that these conversations can now scale to reach many more people as Web 2.0 extends our social reach.

The third thing touches upon what it is that bloggers want. It’s not free food and drink - it’s content and status. Similarities with traditional journalists are only superficial - scratch the surface and you’ll see that they are driven by different things. A journalist may be paid to dutifully turn a press announcement into a story; bloggers do what they do for its own sake - the vast majority are motivated by passion, not money.

Bloggers should be seen as social entrepreneurs - their currency is social capital. As every blogger can tell you, blogging is at some level an act of egoism. You’re saying to the world ‘I have an opinion worth sharing with strangers’. Likewise, every memorable incident in the life of the blogger is liable to be turned into a blog post. What follows from this is that if you want to engage the blogosphere, you have to have something that they will find noteworthy.

The final point I want to make is that the path ahead is necessarily a bumpy one. The kids get it, because this is their world. The staff most likely to understand the dynamics of the social internet are, for now, your most junior civil servants. To the senior decision-makers brought up on a diet of measured, controlled and accountable policy formation and distribution, the social internet is definitely not ‘business as usual’. But it is where business is going to be conducted in future nevertheless.

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