This panel explored the idea RIchard Edelman introduced this morning, "every organization is a media company." The speakers were Mike Slaby, Obama for America, now at TomorrowVentures; Debbie Curtis-Magley, UPS, and David Liu, AOL.
According to Nancy Ruscheinski (Edelman), Andy Heyward of CBS was the first to say that every company is a media company; everyone can produce and distribute their own content.
Debbie: There are strategic advantages to engaging the public and attracting the attention of key audiences. She said the company can reach out to customers who have questions or concerns; also reaching out on discussion forums and blog posts where people are talking -- if you offer help when someone's venting frustrations, you can turn them into an advocate. They also used social media with a new product launch: they used a football theme to show how you could "intercept" and redirect a package; collected videos of amateur football interceptions. They also extend the reach of information that might've just been kept on the company Web site, by putting it on YouTube, etc. Other examples: they used a Facebook app for digital re-gifting and got a lot of media coverage as well as participation online, and employees did parody videos of the famous whiteboard ad campaign and voted on the best ones.
David: AOL has expertise in real-time or synchronous communication as a core competency, whether one-to-one (such as AIM and ICQ) or one-to-many. AOL employees all use AIM internally, daily. People have asked him if new media will replace traditional media; he thinks not. He argues that social media amplifies what people do, good and bad. An example at AOL is a new application that uses realtime conversation like AIM but it's opening the network and is desktop-based. It will allow broadcast communication to the person's buddy list; so, for example, the CDC could make an announcement and send it realtime to individuals, who could forward it to their buddies.
Mike: Social media and new media got a lot of attention regarding the Obama campaign, and a lot of mythology has built up around it. Short answer: was the Obama campaign a media company? Yes. Mike recognized that "We had a once-in-a-lifetime candidate. His skills are hard to match" -- there was a movement going on, and our job was to get the candidate in front of the media more. He insists that in social media you are not broadcasting, but participating as an equal member of a community. You can't just set up a profile and walk away. At the same time, you can't just talk about your products all the time; you have to figure out a way to have a personality -- easy with a candidate, harder with an organization. People miss the opportunity with social media when they treat it like a broadcast medium; it's all about telling a story. We went out to find people in as many places as we could -- big, small, niche social networks -- and tell the same story, one set of values, one narrative; but you need to speak in language of the network (for example, a Facebook status update is not the same as Twitter). Mike also emphasized trust, saying that at some point the communicator has to trust that you have a good company/campaign etc. -- the Obama campaign took out hate speech but otherwise allowed people to talk, and they took some hits for it (as when Hannity took a blog comment to mean that the campaign had been endorsed by the Black Panther party). Mike concludes that they did best was talk about their values and then trust people. For example, they gave out high-resolution photos and let people use them. While the quality of the art was sometimes debatable, it gave people a sense of ownership. "The sense of being in partnership, of trying to do something together, was palpable in the campaign," he said. This approach is uncomfortable because it's new, it's not messaging or other familiar tactics, he said, but it works. Debunking the myth, he says that the Internet didn't win the campaign, because in the end politics is only relevant to what happens on the ground: having millions of Facebook friends doesn't matter if they don't vote. Mike concluded that not all companies are media companies, but they could be; they have to weigh the commitment of resources, including money, to decide if it makes sense or if that's where they want to go.
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