"Social media is just another channel"

Okay guys, tell me, how many times have you heard PR consultants tell you this? Or seen this statement in a slide? Deep down inside - somewhere - I cringe everytime I hear a PR consultant waving off social media saying: "Social media is just another channel."

Social media is the channel - right. The message is still what matters - right. But wait a minute - don't you think it lends a bit of credence to say that the way you deliver your message (or even your message itself!) changes when your channel changes?

Just a couple of random thoughts I had when I was sulking in the corner and thinking a bit more on the subject:

Does a change in "channel" represent a societal change?
Someone needs to help me back this up with historical data, but we've often credited the Reformation to the invention of the printing press. Also, not too few civil revolutions. The written form of languages have evolved thanks to the printed press (Simplified Chinese anyone?) You also don't have to be too much of a sociologist or historian to observe major changes in the values and acceptable norms in our society over these couple of years.

So, if society is changing, shouldn't messages change also to resonate more / be more relevant to the audience? The channel is just indicative of a wider societal change. If anything, internet culture is a good indicator of how society is changing / modernising.

Just another stray thought here: it's really difficult to say if technology is impacting the way society evolves or if society is evolving independent of technology, but is being made much more apparent thanks to technology. It is, however, clear that both are closely-linked; as-if con-joined at the hip.

I'll just close off this post with three key things I think communicators need to note about their audience:

Your audience wants things straight.Cut the willy-nilly small talk and get right to the point. Positioning should happen in five words or don't bother. Too many tagged-on adjectives and superlatives spoil the broth. Sadly, this is easy to observe and say, but very hard to practice.

Your audience wants more than you can give. I think since the advent of the internet, companies have started getting more questions than they care to answer. There's never a product announcement from a major tech company that doesn't attract open questions / discussion on the internet. Which GPS chipset do you use? What are your margins? Do you plan to support this product the next 5 years? It's the age of the specialist-highly-detailed question. Do you have an answer?

Your audience wants to talk back, so listen! This was one of the first lessons I learned about using today's "channel". Feedback is an incredibly component. More so, oftentimes, than "messaging". The fact you listen is an incredible message in itself. Today's audience pay attention to those who listen first. Useful thought, no?

Slowly slipping to communism totalitarianism

I'm reading with concern the The Malaysian Insider's report on plans for a "Malaysian Green Dam". Apparently, there are plans to implement an internet filter in Malaysia. Tender documents seen by The Malaysian Insider say tenders are:

• to evaluate the readiness and feasibility for the implementation of Internet filter at Internet gateway level, through assessments on the existing infrastructure and existing products in the market.
• to evaluate and estimate costs for the implementation.
• to study the existing legal framework in addressing content filtering and no censorship issue, including the impacts that are caused by the implementation to Internet users and the Malaysian economy.

Sounds like gibberish? Here's the Cliff's Notes version: The Malaysian government is planning how it can best censor the internet.

As @derekw points out, this is in direct contradiction with the MSC's Bill of Guarantees which promise "no internet censorship."

Now, the discussion can easily devolve into politics and speculation on what the government is actually trying to block. But even before that, the fundamental questions is: "should censorship come from our government?"

Sure, the excuse could be to "block undesirable elements" from our society. But the government should govern, not play the parent. The key difference being parents are given the uni-lateral right to decide what's right for their children while the government decides according to the people's will.

And I hardly see any people's will decrying the "harmful elements" of the internet. And if there are, isn't it the responsibility of the parents to block it? Isn't it your responsibility to surf only to the clean sites? Isn't it your responsibility to sift thru the lies and get the truth?

If the government dictates what we can or cannot see, are we slowly slipping to communism totalitarianism? Are the communists totalitarians winning after all, after all these years?

*Note: Edits made to this post after useful and sound feedback from StefStefStef and Jia-Yi. See the comments for more info. Thanks guys.

Was that your "publishing" voice or "conversation" voice?

Perhaps plugging nicely to the post just below, Mashable posted a story about a woman getting sued for $50,000 for a tweet. The Twitterer was Abonnen and she had 22 followers.

The offense? She was tweeting to a friend:

"@JessB123 You should just come anyway. Who said sleeping in a moldy apartment was bad for you? Horizon realty thinks it’s okay."

Sounds like a tweet you could have written? Yeah, me too. Apparently, though, Horizon Realty thinks this was tantamount to defamation. Is it? That depends on the context of the word "moldy" and what Abonnen meant by saying "Horizon realty thinks it's okay."

It's like me telling my colleague: "You sure you want my moldy old sandwich in the fridge?" when factually, there really isn't any mold on the sandwich and "old" refers to the sandwich having been in existence for the past 5 hours.

What I'm alluding to is the tone and manner by which we converse on Twitter. Do we think of what we write in a "publishing" voice (the same way we might in a blog or an article) or do we write in a "conversational" voice, like how we'd talk to a friend and insert contextual quips.

You don't talk to your friends the same way you would write a press release. And often, sarcasm and exaggeration comes into play too. Twitter, being the social network it is, means people are often talking in their "conversation" voice. We're talking to like-minded people who understand the things we say and the way we speak.

Should we now carefully vet every 140 characters we post to ensure in no way can it be taken out of context and be construed as libelous? I wonder how this suit will change the face of tweeting.

Should we be afraid, very afraid, of #streamyxsucks?

Can you purchase conversation?

So Nuffnang's launched a new service called - appropriately - ChurpChurp. The proposition is simple: create a way for advertisers to easily propogate "word-of-mouth" campaigns whilst allowing top tweeters (not twitterers ok?) to make a pretty penny. But the question is: "will it work?"

I'm not the first to analyse this (heavy work day and all), so you should check out these posts by Shaolintiger's and Bytebot's for additional viewpoints. What I'm really interested in is the dynamic of introducing in-stream advertising into a medium such as Twitter.

Advertising on the web isn't new and it isn't bad. Websites and blogs cost money to host. And let's face it, a good blogger deserves to make some money from his content. But I've always maintained that there's a right way to advertise and then there's the wrong way. Google's probably the best example: Adsense is genius! And Nuffnang themselves are quite the revelation in our Malaysian market (You'll notice the Nuffnang banner ad at the top of my blog.)

But banner advertising, large-rectangle advertising, text advertising have always been tolerable because they are clear and distinct from the actual content of the blog / website. And the best kind are non-intrusive - large enough that you'll notice it, but small enough that you aren't irritated by it.

Then there's the other kind of advertising. Paid for advertorials, not unlike the kind you'd find in print. The modus operandi is simple: the blogger is paid a certain sum for writing an article. And the article is added to the site's content stream (blogposts, stories whatever). Properly disclosed, the occasional advertorial can be informative, and even useful. But here's the twist: Twitter isn't a blog.

Imagine: if half your friends whom you've been having awesome conversations with on Twitter suddenly joined ChurpChurp. Then suddenly, an advertiser purchases an ad campaign where half of them get included in the automated tweet list. And your Twitter stream gets filled with 20 of the exact same tweet from 20 of your pals.

The ideal situation (for the company that paid for the ad, at least) is you get all excited about these "tweets" you're seeing and you go and do whatever the tweets tell you. Or start a conversation.

The reality, I suspect, is much uglier. You'll get irritated, annoyed by the in-flux of ads and seriously have your respect for the offending tweeter damaged.

"Just unfollow them!" I heard you say?

Well, I've thought about it. But I still love having conversations and being connected to those friends.

"Use another platform? What about Facebook?"

Well, those 20 friends don't often chat on Facebook. The action takes place on Twitter.

"Well, why don't you just tell them you don't like that their allowing in-stream advertising?"

That's probably the most sane approach. But as I hope you'll start to see, it isn't about to be so cut and dried. And if they simply refuse, well... it's become a tough decision for you.

How would you feel about the advertiser that got 20 of your friends to post tweets about their latest products or upcoming event? I doubt there'd be much positivity. Not only do those tweet-ads irritate you, they also push you to making the tough decision to follow/unfollow some of those people you may have been enjoying a great deal of interaction with. Which makes me really question the value of advertising thru these means.

If you're a brand that's looking to reach out, Twitter seems to be the perfect place to facilitate two-way conversation between brands and customers or other interested parties. It's a great place to get a great story (or a quirky one) spread around thru re-tweets too. But instead of just buying tweet-ads, these tactics call for investing into a long-term plan to maintain a company / brand presence on Twitter. Dell's a great success story. And locally, there's MAS, AirAsia and P1WiMax too.

Conversations can't be purchased. Getting 20, 100 or even 10,000 people to re-tweet your ad isn't going to generate the kind of good-will, interaction and stickiness (marketeers love this word) that creating your own free Twitter account and actually interacting with people will.

NASA's Apollo 11 Highlight reel

The wonders of digital technology today. It's been a week since this has posted, and if you've been living under a rock, you've come to the right place. I'm late too (blame it on work)!

The folks at Hollywood have teamed up with the geeks at NASA to restore the original footage of the first every landing on the moon. You can apparently now see the reflection of the earth on Neil Armstrong's helmet. I simply love space, don't you?