Social media and the Media Mix Like Oil & Water?

A recent media furore in the US caught my attention today.  The venerable TV news organisation CBS News has been burnt by its close association with a news blogger when they ran a tweet about Steve Jobs death. The story was utterly wrong but the tweet went out from CBS News because of content deal. As a result, CBS has ended its relationship with the blogger who didn’t help matters with her initial flippant apology.

When Twitter and other social media are often cited as the place where stories are broken (think the Hudson River air crash), this recent case illustrates the risks of embedding a social media news feed that has none of the checks and balances of traditional journalism inside a traditional media organisation like CBS.

Professional media clearly is turning to social media and citizen journalists for content but this incident shows more thought needs to be invested in how the two sides interface without causing discord.

The London Riots and the ensuing blame game

2011 is proving to be the year of extreme news events that explode either without or seemingly without warning in rapid succession. Think of how the New Zealand earthquake was followed by the Arab Spring and then Japanese tsunami and nuclear leak. Most recently we’ve experienced Hackgate followed by the Riots.

One interesting common feature of all these stories has been how the media – and sometimes the PR industry – has become fixated on putting  the biggest tech brands at the heart of the story. So we have seen Twitter and other social media praised for helping coordinate the Arab Spring uprisings, but criticised for helping the country’s looters play cat and mouse with the police.   And opportunities to redeem the same social media have arisen as Twitter, Facebook et al are praised for helping to coordinate community clean-ups by the Riot Wombles. But then might those same Riot Wombles turn into tomorrow’s Twitter vigilantes? And so the news and PR agenda swings the other way.

Actually, the role of mobile technology and social media in recent events is less interesting than we realise. I liked what a London Evening Standard columnist said recently about how blaming mobile phones and Twitter for the London 2011 riots is as ridiculous as blaming the Brixton 1980s riots on the push button telephone. Similarly, social media supported the Arab uprisings but the reasons for its’ momentum and success have very little to do with Twitter or Facebook when you consider the importance of protesters’ personal bravery or the unwillingness of some state organisations to hold back from doing their governments’ dirty work.

Quite obviously such technology is useful for criminality and rioting – as is it for more usual law abiding uses – but it does not give us much insight into why these events occurred. It is lazy politics and journalism to heap much significance on how restricting social media will stop riots recurring.

Power of Pics versus Words in Hackgate Stories

Within the whole Hackgate saga, as PR bod  I have been enjoying the choice of head shots used by the Media Guardian to illustrate the stories. Typically the picture of Cameron or Murdoch used for an article  acts as a visual headline. Check out today’s one about the allegations of James Murdoch misleading parliament. In my cynical mind, the crooked line of his lips says it all in this picture.

Coincidentally in today’s Guardian, another article by the recent children’s laureate  Michael Rosen takes an  opposing view  that I find equally fascinating. His argument is that the Hackgate story is driven less by the powerful  images used -  Murdoch chased by the press pack and   sweating on his jog, Brooks’s Pre-Raphaelite locks – than the use of words to evade and obfuscate the truth.  There are some choice words here. I particularly like his picking out of the word “actually” as a word used to over-emphasise and hide the truth.

So, appropriately and ironically  enough for a story that’s tearing apart the old ecosystem of  tabloid journalism and politics, tabloid news values of powerful combinations of words and images are integral to how the story works as, in the words of the PM, a raging  media firestorm buring through the press, politics and police.

Connected Devices take over the World!

Future-gazing usually ends up with visions of everyone doing the shopping in flying cars or taking a holiday on the Moon with their robo-dog. Never turns out that way but a vision of a world dominated by tiny intelligent machines that know everything about you and are constantly talking with one another is coming true or so Cisco would have us believe.

Their  recent survey caught my eye because it seems that by 2015 there will be more Internet connected devices on the planet than people. In fact, 15 billion devices or twice the world’s human population. We’re going to be outnumbered by devices in a way that the car or the TV never achieved (though there are some techy obstacles like a looming shortage of IP addresses that we need to fix)

And this forecast of being surrounded by connected devices  seems rooted in reality. Mobiles are almost an additional body part, never leaving our grasp and more likely to be in our hand than our pocket. We constantly want to touch them and check our connectivity more often than we actually ever check our pulse rate.

From a communications perspective, the opportunities to engage with people seem limitless because we are so connected.

But then again the fact that we’re living with so much readily available connectivity intensifies the need for communications that are highly personal and stand out from the crowd.

Sony Caught in PR Firestorm

Feeling sorry for the PR team at Sony as they negotiate a perfect PR storm.

News of their Android-based tablet launch and  fight back against Apple is being overwhelmed by the gathering storm about the PlayStation customer data breach.  

While the new tablets are capturing media imagination for their original folding touch screen design, the unwinding of the PlayStation story is undermining Sony’s credibility on taking on the IPad on the front that matters most – the ability to manage a user friendly but secure  eco system of easy to buy and use content and services.  With consumer trust in PlayStation shaken, Sony has its work cut out to retrieve goodwill and realise a network strategy that competes with iTunes and the AppStore.

You have to wish Sony well because the market does need strong alternatives to Apple and  Sony should be well-placed to deliver iconic consumer devices that people love to use.

In terms of managing the PlayStation story, the best advice is to be as transparent as possible and to be seen to share with your customers all available knowledge about what has happened and provide firm assurances about the counter-measures and defences in place to prevent this occurring again. It very much seems that Sony are attempting to do this now.

As always the worst damage to a brand’s reputation comes less from the effects of the incident itself than whether the communications process has gone well or not.