Social media has opened up a world where peers and colleagues decide what news is valuable and important. Articles that are shared most by your friends on Facebook show up in your Facebook news feed and Google+ highlights search content in Google that has been shared by your Google circles. Most social networks use this algorithm to highlight news. The higher the ‘share’ volume the more popular the article and the more exposure it gets on the networks. The problem is that these articles may be popular but they are not necessarily providing verified facts about the news subject.

Twitter has gone a long way with their new Twitter iPhone app by identifying trends in the most tweeted keywords and then linking that trend (or news item) to a reputable news source like CNN or BBC. This bridges the gap by highlighting the most ‘shared’ content on twitter and providing the best, most reputable source of news available. Two thumbs up to Twitter.

Aside from the steps Twitter has taken, most networks have become aggregators of popular content instead of good, reliable and verified journalistic content. This presents two scenarios that need to be addressed:

1) News readers need to learn how to apply journalist type skills in reading content online in order to make a judgement on its validity. The book discusses these techniques in more detail and is well worth the read.

2) The role of journalists must change because news readers are no longer need ‘gate-keepers’ of new content. Our social networks have become those gate-keepers for us.

The new roles that are suggested by Bill and Tom are:

“Authenticator”–The press will do more authentication of reported facts and will gather evidence in more transparent ways. In the information age, news consumers want to know not only the evidence in a report but also the process of uncovering it.
“Sense maker” – With updated news available all the time, even the slightest change in a situation can command a headline. This promotes a fragmented understanding of the world. Journalists can transcend “incremental” coverage by connecting threads in multiple reports to produce broader coverage that makes sense of the news.
“Investigator”–The news media traditionally have served as a public watch dog, alert to possible government malfeasance. Some reporters, editors and producers will play this role more vigorously, while others will avoid such verification-based journalism.
“Witness bearer” – The presence of the press at public meetings is a pillar of democracy. It shows elected officials that they are doing public business in full view. New ways of covering local government may involve partnerships between news media and part-time correspondents with no formal journalism training.
“Empowerer” – More journalists will empower their audience by providing self- service tools for learning about any subject. Journalists offering stories online now can choose among many reporting assists, like links to related data.
“Smartaggregator”–Collating online content allows news organizations to purvey information about the best websites and to offer unique news-filtering services.
“Forum organizer” – News outlets now have opportunities to distinguish themselves by producing fact-based discussions of public issues and presenting a diversity of opinions.
“Role model” – More professional journalists will become role models for citizens 
enlisted by the news media, part time, to extend their coverage base.

I would recommend reading the book if this topic interests you, especially if you are a news publisher looking to socially reinvent your business model to survive the social media revolution

How social media is changing the role of journalism originally posted on Mike Saunders - Keynote Speaker and Social Media Coach

” If you’re amongst the many people that are totally overwhelmed by Social Media, who may love and use Facebook for your personal networking or connecting with school friends but haven’t seen or understood the value of using this tool for business; if you think Twitter is for people who have too much time on their hands and can’t even begin to fathom how something like a 140 character conversation can add value; or whether Linkedin is a tool you’ve signed up for, but aren’t quite sure what to do with the connections you’ve made – Join the club, I was there as well! This bootcamp helped me understand it all!” – Vicky Coats, TomorrowToday

Some of the topics that we covered are:

• What is Social Media or Social Networking?
• An introduction to the various networks, like Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin, as well as blogging. How they work and whats makes then so effective when used together.
• Advertising online
• Marketing strategy; Inbound marketing; building your own strategy, and managing and measuring your strategy.

Workshop Dates

• Cape Town – 29th March 2012
• 
Johannesburg – 19th April 2012
• 
Durban – 24th May 2012
• Johannesburg – 15th August 2012
• Johannesburg – 8th November 2012

Social Media Bootcamps in South Africa originally posted on Mike Saunders - Keynote Speaker and Social Media Coach

The Green Apron Book is a booklet that Starbucks gives its baristas.  It outlines Starbucks mission: “To provide an uplifting experience that enriches people’s daily lives,” along with 5 Principles for doing exactly that:

1. Be Welcoming: Offer everyone a sense of belonging.
2. Be Genuine: Connect, discover, respond.
3. Be Knowledgeable: Love what you do. Share it with others.
4. Be Considerate: Take care of yourself, each other, and the environment.
5. Be Involved: In the store, in the company, and in the community.

The principles promote that good business and great customer experiences come out of a personal connection between people. Social media relies on this principle as fundamental to your social media strategy. Without being personal and considerate you will struggle to build community.

Community is the centerpiece of your social media strategy, everything said and done by people inside your community will shape and define how your community evolves. By applying principles like the one’s outline here you can be sure that your community online and offline will grow and evolve into a very valuable business proposition.

Yes, this does mean that you need to allocate resources (mainly people) to manage the social media engagement for you business. Automation will just create a flat community with no energy and even less business interest.

Social Media principles from The Green Apron Book originally posted on Mike Saunders - Keynote Speaker and Social Media Coach

Social media campaigns normally find their place inside the marketing budget and can be conceptualised, executed and measured relatively quickly. A social business reinvention take time to conceptualise, it needs to become a part of strategic direction and the overall business plan. In most cases these reinventions take considerable time and investment to navigate successfully.

When looking at a social reinvention I would suggest navigating your business in the following manner.

People connection

Start with how the reinvention will impact the people in your team. Think about what benefits your employees and customers will experience from the reinvention. Find the ‘value point’ that makes the need for reinvention apparent. Social reinvention is all about adapting business to meet and connect with people better. This takes places internally and externally in marketing, knowledge management, recruitment, and many more aspects of business.

Technology integration

Once the ‘value point’ to people has been established we can now take the brief to the technology. The reason we don’t start with the technology is because the technology should not dictate the strategic direction. Just because something is possible with technology does not mean that it is a strategic fit with your business goals.

At this point it is important to allow your technology experts freedom to explore the possibilities. They may be able to find ways to enhance you idea. Just be sure to always ensure that you ‘value points’ are not compromised and suffocated in a sea of technical gadgets.

Enable your people

Once the technology has been built to deliver the ‘value points’ to the customer or employee you need to be focus on your communication strategy in rolling the new project out. They way you educate, communicate and guide your customer or employee is imperative to see the successful integration of your project into their lives. It’s true, the value is there but they need to see it, understand it and how it will fit into their life.

Navigating the world of social media in business originally posted on Mike Saunders - Keynote Speaker and Social Media Coach

Social media is about the people, well at least it should be. Approaching social media strategy with a “platform mentality” is like focusing our attention on the which bike we need to ride when we should be concentrating on our fitness levels to win the race.

Fitness in social media is the ability to understand our consumers. Social media allows us to engage, communicate, question and observe our customers.  This should give us a wealth of information to better understand our customers and better meet their needs. Regardless of the platform, their communication over these platforms should give us insight into their lives, their vales and their needs. Social media opens the door to understanding the new consumer, consumer 2.0. This is what a social media strategy should create, better customer understanding in order to win sales and loyalty.

The path to purchase is too complicated to suggest that social media can be an isolated sales channel on its own. What people see in social media circles often impacts their purchase decisions in a point of sale environment. Consumer opinion online can overpower your offline branding objectives and a physical experience of bad customer service will always impact sales negatively, whether experienced online or offline.

Social media cannot be strategised in isolation to other marketing channels and product design should not take place without researching customer opinion in social media channels. The complexity of social media as an industry is growing to the point that it’s starting to replicate the complexity of a human being. We use forums for formal discussion, search engines and wikipedias for research, micro-blogs for short everyday conversations and we even see business networks realising real return on investment for its users.

People are not social online because of Facebook, Facebook is social because of people.

The new consumer uses the Internet in their own way, the way that makes sense to them, that makes life easier for them. The new consumer does not use all of the Internet, only the parts that makes sense.

So our role as social media strategists is to leverage social media platforms to build communities of people online, in order to listen to, and engage with our ‘fans’. We should encourage those interested towards loyalty and listen to the entire community to learn what interests them. We should stop trying to connect with everyone, and start creating communities of value rather than size. We should start the conversation so that we show our openness to connect and we should be equipped with the ability make a real impact in our customers lives.

Social media strategy is more than Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin originally posted on Mike Saunders - Keynote Speaker and Social Media Coach

Feel free to search www.onthinsabove.co.za for the article you were looking for.

My apologies for the inconvenience.

God Bless

My www.onthingsabove.co.za have moved originally posted on Mike Saunders - Keynote Speaker and Social Media Coach