Moderator: Keith O'Brien, Editor-in-chief, PRWeek
Panelists: Charlene Li, Analyst, Forrester; Steve Rubel, Senior Vice President, Director of Insights, Edelman Digital
Charlene: The Groundsweel- using technologies to get what they need from each other. The one key framework:
People (Assess you customer’s social activities)
- Think About how these people participate with each other. In the ladder there are Creators at the top, critics, collectors, joiners, spectators, inactives (25% of adults are in social networking sites)
-Age is a major driver of adoption- older boomers are very active as spectators; if you are younger you are much more active up and down the ladder
- 5 objectives: Listening, talking, energizing, supporting and embracing
2012:
- Media is going to become more personal (not personalized)
- Social networks will be like air- if you want to be social you have to go somewhere
- Media will be filtered through your networks
Billions of search results
Millions of products
Thousands of recipes
Key Success Skills
- Storytelling
- Insights and synthesis from unlikely, multiple sources
- Community-building with people NOT like you
- Change management and negotiation skills
Steve: my job is to spend time with the people actually building these sites and try to make sense of it all.
The cut and paste web: the number of sites is at a number under 15/20. People are going to want content they care about regardless of where it is from. When you are in the content creation business, you have to make your content portable. Traffic is something that happens elsewhere, it doesn’t happen at home.
The attention crash: The number of inputs succeeds the your span. Made to Stick is another good book addressing this.
Digital curation: Humans can be the digital curator in a certain niche. The NY Times is becoming a digital curator. To service content that is relative to you when you want it is very valuable. I am currently addicted to FriendFeed- it is the aggregator of all social networks. It is sticking with influencers. Mahalo.com is a social search engine. They are paying people in the community to curate links on the 50,000 most important search engines.
A little further out in the horizon: living room 2.0- the internet is going to come into the living room in a big way. Connecting television and web is a powerful experience- American Idol. Video chat and video on demand is going to be a big deal
Another trend: the power of Google. Google is the number one media outlet in the world. Google is a reputation management engine. It is rewarding quality content. That content can come from brand, media, or users. The wealth of tools Google makes available to you in tremendous. Google Ad Counter just launched this week. The top 5 most searched words can give you great content to play off of.
Federated Media- they find independent content producers and work with advertisers on behalf of them. POPURL is represented by Federated. They brought him together with Intel and created an Intel version of it There are thousands of niche’s that can be owned by that.
Audience: Opinion leaders speak for their communities as well as themselves. You have a lot of people saying different things, with the opinion leader leading the thoughts.
Charlene: The opinion leaders are given authority by the people who follow them. Anyone can become an opinion leader. Jeremiah Owyang is a great example of an opinion leader. He is a total non traditional Forrester analyst and he has been great. He is by far the most influential analyst in the space.
Keith: You have to monitor your brand. Dominos- they may get too worried about what happens when people search for dominos. They should worry about happens when you search for pizza.
Steve: A lot of people focus on SEO, but a lot of what shows up is created by PR people.