Thoughts on Social Media by Nathan Flowers

Thumbs down for American Express’ ‘Your live story’

Fri, 01 Oct 2010 15:32:00 +0100

American Express has teamed up with Mark Ronson and Channel 4 in an interactive campaign heavily...

Iranian Bloggers Beware

Fri, 01 Oct 2010 15:06:00 +0100

This week the Iranian blogger Hossein Derakhshan known at the Blogfather of Iran, who blogged at...

Thumbs up for Disney's "Let the memories begin"

Thu, 30 Sep 2010 09:12:00 +0100

This week Disney have launched a platform that allows guests of their parks and resorts to share...

The case against TripAdvisor. The legal action against...

Fri, 24 Sep 2010 18:29:00 +0100

The case against TripAdvisor.

The legal action against TripAdvisor which could have far-reaching social media implications.

Mentioned in this video

Happy Social Good Day

Thu, 23 Sep 2010 22:07:00 +0100

Today is Social Good Day, a day that coincides with world leaders meeting in the UN to discuss the...

It is amazing what a YouTube video can do to smash a carefully...

Tue, 21 Sep 2010 13:10:00 +0100

It is amazing what a YouTube video can do to smash a carefully rehearsed publicity stunt.

Vladamir Putin has been touring Russia in a yellow Lada. For four consecutive evenings in August, the main bulletins on state TV showed the Prime Minister driving along the highway and stopping off for stage-managed photo opportunities. He took tea with villagers, chatted with lorry drivers and construction workers and visited a hydro-electric power station and the proposed site for a space centre.

All the reports featured prominently the brightly coloured Lada, and the Prime Minister talking up its attributes. In Channel One’s Vremya bulletin on 29 August, he told construction workers that it “goes smoothly, holds the road beautifully and is not noisy”.

However, The Prime Minister probably didn’t notice the little knot of people from the appropriately named Diversant (Saboteur) off-road-vehicle club who had gathered along the side of the Chita-Khabarovsk highway in the hope of catching a glimpse of him behind the wheel. As he drove past, they had their cameras at the ready and what they filmed wasn’t quite the picture shown on television.

Instead of the mainly close-up shots of the Lada Kalina, giving the impression that Putin was virtually alone on the open road, the Diversant film shows Putin’s car dwarfed by an enormous motorcade, numbering, according to one eyewitness, over 100 police cars, black jeeps and back-up vehicles.

More damaging for the Russian car industry was the revelation that the motorcade contained two more yellow Lada Kalinas, one driving behind Putin and the other riding on the back of a transporter truck. The common assumption was that the spares were needed because the car was so unreliable.

In the video you can see the Diversant vehicle club celebrate when the second Lada drives past, and toward the end of the video when the third rolls past on a repair truck they are beside themselves with laughter.

This video has become a YouTube hit with the two most viewed copies having around 850,000 views, the videos have also been mentioned by bloggers within Russia and has been used for political ridicule within the region.

This has also led to a number of pertinent questions being asked about the quality of reporting within the country, why was this not reported by the large media entourage within the cavalcade of cars following the former president?

The interesting thing here is not the fact that almost a million people have seen the truth from his road trip across Russia. But rather that this has shown the power of social media. If things are not what they seem and if someone finds out about it then they have the power to tell the world in real-time.

This is something that politicians and companies will have to get used to because it is becoming increasingly the case that everyone is just one Google search away from the truth.

ScienceBlogs: Its Complicated In July scienceblogs.com, a...

Mon, 20 Sep 2010 19:49:00 +0100

ScienceBlogs: Its Complicated

In July scienceblogs.com, a blogging platform which supports around 80 amateur scientific bloggers, caused international uproar when the multinational corporation Pepsi was granted permission to publish a blog called Food Frontiers on the site.

ScienceBlogs’ editor, Evan Lerner, welcomed the partnership with this statement…

The result of this partnership is that we are to hear from a wide range of experts on how Pepsi is developing products rooted in rigorous science-based nutrition standards, to offer consumers more wholesome and enjoyable foods and beverages.

The focus will be on innovations in science, nutrition and health policy and the transformations in Pepsi’s product portfolio, but we will also learn about some of the innovative ways the company is planning to reduce its use of energy, water and packaging.

The reaction to this was significant and immediate. There were blogger defections and extensive media coverage from the likes of Guardian, Newsweek and Daillykos.

This negative reaction was mirrored by the active community of readers…

Craig Holman wrote his comments below the Food frontiers welcoming statement above (now taken down but referenced here):

A corporate-sponsored blog has no place in ScienceBlogs.

It can’t be taken seriously and drags down the legitimate blogs by association.

If this blog is not closed prompty [sic], I hope the other blogs leave ScienceBlogs as quickly as possible.

Shame on you.

Shame on the ScienceBlogs management.

Within a day of the Food Frontiers blog appearing and before any meaningful content was posted ScienceBlogs removed the blog and replaced it with this statement:

We apologize for what some of you viewed as a violation of your immense trust in ScienceBlogs. Although we (and many of you) believe strongly in the need to engage industry in pursuit of science-driven social change, this was clearly not the right way.

How do we empower top scientists working in industry to lead science-minded positive change within their organizations? How can a large and diverse online community made up of scientists and the science-minded public help? How do companies who seek genuine dialogue with this community engage? We’ll open this challenge up to everyone on SB and beyond in the coming days so that we can all find the right solution.

So what happened?

What went wrong? Why was this move so controversial? And how should ScienceBlogs have handled this situation?

Tackling what went wrong

In a nutshell; Scienceblogs breached the implicit trust that was built within the site.

The implicit arrangement was that ScienceBlogs would manage the platform and publisise the site and allow bloggers to discuss scientific matters how they wanted, which meant (after initial vetting) the bloggers had full editorial control of their content.

The trade off is that ScienceBlogs could monetise the site by selling advertising space with bloggers receiving some of the proceeds.

That was the deal.

Put simply, Science Blogs provided the platform, the bloggers provided the material.

In giving access to Pepsi ScienceBlogs essentially moved the goalposts without any warning or notice to the lifeblood of the site.

This is why there was widespread condemnation of the Food Frontiers blog.

So how should ScienceBlogs have acted?

If there was a financial or strategic imperative to include companies such as Pepsi on the ScienceBlogs platform, then this argument should have been made first.

If the motivation of this move was made transparent to all of their bloggers and readers before talking to potential brands, then they would have been part of the process and a compromise could have probably been reached.

From this consultation a set of criteria or a list of potential partners could have been agreed upon

For example; some kind of profit-sharing if this was a move seen to profiteer from the contributions of the standard (non-affiliated) bloggers, or differentiation between standard content and the new “paid for” or “sponsored by” content, if there was concern that readers would not realize that the sponsored blogs were not authored by the same (non-affiliated) authors of standard content.

Most likely, a mixture of the two solutions would be required in order to reach a compromise. The fact is that ScienceBlogs’ success depends completely on the goodwill and trust of its bloggers, so reaching this agreement would be paramount.

Acting unilaterally like it did has not only damaged ScienceBlogs’ reputation in the community but also broken the implicit agreement of trust with its contributors immeasurably.

The knock-on effect of this is that this kind of negotiation in the future will be facing a much more cynical audience, if even possible at all.

Picture: Gapingvoid.com

I was at OxfordJam, a conference about social entrepreneurship...

Wed, 14 Apr 2010 18:13:00 +0100

I was at OxfordJam, a conference about social entrepreneurship and social innovation where I had the opportunity to speak to David Wilcox about a specific type of social network dynamics that I am describing as the work of ‘Social Insurgents’, groups of people on the internet that are united by common interests, that are using guerrilla warfare tactics to gain maximum disruptional benefits, for the minimum amount of effort. This applies to a number of groups, in this video I mention a group of climate sceptics who worked so successfully in sharing the emails hacked from the CRU under the frame of “climategate”.

However I believe that this post could have easily have mentioned a number of different groups, this kind of behaviour is becoming more and more common, the work of GreenPeace against Nestle could have been described as GreenPeace advocating and looking to inspire a type of Social Insurgency, although as I have described before this was not quite achieved.

This links to some research that I found on KDPaine’s blog in reference to work by Bokyung Kim and Joonghwa Lee from the University of Missouri (graduate students from South Korea) which stated that (in this case observed in relation to the Samsung Oil Spill Korea 2007)…

bloggers tended not to report at all on Samsung’s apologies (standard crisis communications reactions) and even claimed Samsung denied responsibility and made excuses that, in reality, it had not. Also, the trajectory of intensity of anger and duration of coverage for the bloggers actually increased over time. All this suggests that we need to rethink “the rules” for corporate response to a crisis, given the changing news cycle, the presence of bloggers and other advocates, and proliferation of news outlets.

So in the light of the the fact that people are organising themselves very successfully online and the fact that there is more and more research stating that the social web reacts differently to traditional channels and as it is simply not as accountable for the information it disseminates, means that we now need new rules to deal with this threat.

In this video I talk about a few solutions that can be explored to tackle social insurgent attacks, one solution could be to fight back with counter-insurgency efforts, essentially looking to form small agile organisations (the fact that large respected organisations cannot do this is simply because, large organisatons do not want to be seen to be bullying adversaries into submission) that can quickly mobilise to deflect the attention and attacks from the social insurgents, however if you attempt to do this you are immediately entering into an arms race where success will be dictated by whether you are faster, more knowledgeable and better equipped than the insurgents.

A strategy with much more chance of succeeding would be to take the ‘moral high ground’ by entering into conflict resolution, where the social insurgents are brought into a neutral space where dialogue can be established in the hope of reaching consensus on key issues.

Social Media apparently will drive election campaigning

Thu, 08 Apr 2010 16:11:00 +0100

Social Media apparently will drive election campaigning: In Marketing Week (7 Apr) it states that...

These are my thoughts on the Nestle and Greenpeace Palm Oil...

Thu, 08 Apr 2010 10:22:00 +0100

These are my thoughts on the Nestle and Greenpeace Palm Oil discussion and how both sides could have improved their respective positions.

Note: This video does not deal with the complex issue of Palm Oil production generally, this simply deals with the communication strategies of both parties.

When most people think of social media they think of tools and...

Thu, 08 Apr 2010 10:20:00 +0100

When most people think of social media they think of tools and technology. However I think that all the tools have done is moved the emphasis not to where a message is stated but toward what an organization will say.

This is where organisations have problems, they simply do not have a voice in which to communicate. And if they do have a voice they use it in the wrong way. An example of this was with Nestle, who were accused of killing orangutans to get palm oil by GreenPeace. They were attacked on the official Nestle page on Facebook and they simply didn’t have a voice in which to respond. It took them two days to respond and in that time the conspicuous silence was as good as an admittance of guilt.

If they had had a voice they could have avoided what is being described as a PR disaster, whether it actually effects Kit-Kat sales is another matter.

I have discussed this issue on this video which can be accessed here