Water cooler conversations

According to a report by Melcrum, an internal communications research and training business, less than one-third of 2,100 corporate communicators that they surveyed felt confident about using social media as part of an integrated communications plan.

Yet, 60% of respondent felt compelled to press ahead with getting started inside their organisations anyway. In the survey, the top perceived benefits for implementing social media tools are improved:

Employee engagement (71%)
Internal collaboration (59%)
Internal community development (51%)
Two-way dialogue with senior executives (42%)

This survey raises a couple of questions namely, given that social media in its widest definition are hardly new media opportunities, why haven’t internal communicators already started to implement strategies containing their use and secondly, if these same communicators are not confident in the use of these tools, how can they be confident that they will improve anything?

A Talent2 survey in Australia found that 40% of respondents got all, that’s all, of their information about the organisation they work for from ‘water cooler’ conversations. Given that organisations are concerned that sponsored use of social media tools could create an atmosphere where controlled messaging is more difficult, it’s good to see that organisations are currently controlling their message so effectively!

One word equity?

In a speech in Cannes in 2006, Maurice Saatchi extoled the virtue of reducing a brand's proposition to one word only. In a world of media fragmentation and message divergence surely this approach makes sense - as consumers can we really be expected to recall any more than one word?

M&C Saatchi have christened this approach One Word Equity, which a white paper by Mohammed Iqbal from O&M Bangalore amusingly points out is two words too long to fit its own maxim!

Judge the merits for yourself at http://www.onewordequity.com/

Tangled up in the new web

Web 2.0 is well established, and sites such as YouTube, Flickr, Facebook and Digg have turned the internet from a static source of information into a huge, interactive digital playground.
But where to next?

What will the next stage of web culture - which some people call Web 3.0 - be like?

The expectation seems to be that profound changes are on the way. If Web 2.0 is about generating and sharing your own content, Web 3.0 will make information less free.

Privacy fears, new forms of advertising, and restrictions imposed by media companies will mean more digital walls, leading to a web that's safer but without its freewheeling edge.

One serious leak or theft of private data could change opinions overnight and create a backlash against Web 2.0 sites.

Another factor that will restrict web freedom is advertising. Desperate to be noticed by people whose attention spans are a mouse-click long, advertisers will invent ever-more devious strategies to suck the punters in.

A few tricks are around already.

Say you are trying to reach Microsoft.com but you accidentally type Macrosoft.com. That will take you to a page for a company whose name has nothing to do with "Macrosoft" - they're just parked in that domain to get more exposure. You can find something similar at Mycrosoft.com.
Web advertising is likely to balloon from another direction, too. "Blogvertising" is expected to take off in the next five years and produce a stark change in the medium.

Bloggers stand to gain more of the advertising share because they can create custom content for their advertisers, and that is leading to a new style of blog on which the line between editorial and advertisement is blurred.

Enjoy Web 2.0 - while it lasts.

Extracted from an article by Annalee Newitz published in the New Scientist in April 2008