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[Tuesday at NAB]
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Social Media Success Demands Listening
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by T. Carter Ross,
~ April 15, 2008
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RADIO WORLD
When it comes to determining the “Next Big Thing,” it can be hard to tell the difference between the experts and the experienced.
To help delineate between the two, Monday’s Super Session “Social Networking and the Democratization of Broadcasting” paired several digital media luminaries with a quartet of Baylor University students to look at how people use the Internet versus traditional media and where the two intersect.
THAT VERY MOMENT
Keynoter John Gage, chief researcher and director of the science office at Sun Microsystems Inc., began the session by demonstrating what people are posting to the Web at that very moment and where they were doing it. “This mixture of location and identity is altering our relationship to the media,” Gage said.
The focus of the keynote then shifted to analysis and insight from four students who are interning at the NAB Show.
Gage queried Bethany Wekesser, Ryan Huestis, Melanie Sayed and DeAndr้ Upshaw about their use of traditional media and social media and their expectations for each.
The four noted that while they watched anywhere from zero to three hours of television per day, they spend “all day” on the social networking site Facebook.
“First thing in the morning, I check my e-mail, Facebook and MySpace; before brushing my teeth,” Upshaw said.
Wekesser said that clubs she is involved with at Baylor use Facebook for communication. “It’s something I have to check constantly for information.”
The student panel led into a conversation moderated by Intervox Communications founder Peggy Miles, who noted that she was blogging the convention at nabshow.com.
Forrester Research Vice President and Principal Analyst Josh Bernoff, co-author of the recent book “Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies,” and Veoh Network CEO Dmitry Shapiro joined Gage and the students for a wide-ranging discussion about what social media means for broadcasters.
CONTENT CONNECTION
“What matters isn’t so much how many people are seeing your content; it’s how many people are connected with your content,” said Bernoff. “
Broadcasters, as a group, aren’t used to thinking that way. You think
an audience just sits there, right? They consume what you’re showing to them.
You’re not used to them saying ‘Uhm, actually, the ending wasn’t the way I’d like it; can you change that please?’”
Shapiro noted that nowadays many “viewers,” when they do not like the ending to something, are going out and making their own ending, distributing the rewritten mash-up via the Internet.
The problem then becomes, with vast stores of content produced by both traditional media and individuals in every nation around the world — stored digitally, posted to the Internet and available for eternity — how do people find programming they enjoy?
Gage spoke of finding ways to mine information created via social networking to develop new metrics for relating information that allow for “emotional searches.”
Such “collaborative filtering,” Shapiro said, “allows for serendipitous discovery
the essence of what really connects people.”
It all sounds fairly straight forward, but before anyone starts trying to develop a new social networking matrix, Bernoff cautioned that the first thing to consider is: what is the goal?
“Don’t get involved if you don’t know what you want to accomplish
and measure it once you’ve done it,” he said. “
People in the television industry live by demographics
but when we get into social networking, it’s all ‘Oh! A new toy!’”
The key, the panelists agreed, is to take advantage of word of mouth and conversational marketing to follow consumers.
Shapiro noted that while all available advertising time may be sold out on NBC’s “Heroes,” both online and on air, social networking data can help find other programming that “Heroes” fans with similar demographics are also watching.
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