Just a brief Round-up of barely-related things that have caught our magpie-like attention over the last few days. We've been researching materials for the "Marketing in the Digital Age" presentation we're doing as part of the social media workshop series we're putting together for the BBC. Predictably, it looks as though it's going to be pretty freewheeling (we've got the first one of the two sessions we're doing coming up later today). Anyway, here are some of the things we've turned up while looking at areas like reputation management, business model promiscuity and the changing nature of broadcasting brands when a. talent can have a direct relationship with the audience and b. s much content is available beyond its official broadcast time-slot.
Trent Reznor has been widely praised for constantly experimenting with digital business formulae. This presentation by Michael Masnick at MidemNet does a nice job of trying to capture it all.
You certainly can't rely on the old ways of doing things, that's for sure. It seems that in the week after playing the Superbowl, watched on TV by 90 million Americans, Bruce Springsteen managed to flog just 100,000 units of his new album, Working on a Dream. Meanhwile, U2 opened up the Grammys with their new single Get on Yer Boots without managing to get it into the top 100 songs on the iTMS. (And all this against a background of 2008's most talked about about album - G'n'R's 17-year-hiatus-ending Chinese Democracy charting only at No 3 on its US release.
For social media dissenters, check the news that up to 75% of 15+ Europeans now use networking services. The UK top the table at more or less 75%; the Austrians are "bottom", but even they're at 46% or so. That's quite a fad.
Still, you can get this so badly wrong. We've especially enjoyed the Wal-Marting Across America fiasco, in which (to be as brief as possible) it turned out that the lovely couple Laura and Jim, who were blogging about their experiences of travelling across the US and camping in Wal Mart car parks, tuned out to be related to Walmart's PR agency Edelman's, "experts" in blogging. The very widely held suspicion is that the whole shebang was a get-up; certainly, the Walmarting Across America blog no longer exists.
(Aside: at another of our BBC sessions last week, Roo Reynolds talked about the default status of content on the web being permanent. I think we'd want to qualify that: its ideal default status is permanent; in reality - as we increasingly discover when researching areas considered even vaguely contentious - content is all too frequently taken down for any number of political, legal or personal reasons.)
The new generation of world-leading politicos - from Sarkozy to Cameron, Merkel to Obama - have certainly grabbed the interweb by the scruff of the neck. I think it's not unreasonable to say that none of these names was know to all but students of politics perhaps as little as five years ago; one wonders whether comms tech has played a pretty significant role in the hasty spread of their thinking.
There are dangers, of course. Cameron's inner circle recently earned opprobrium for altering a Wikipedia entry on Titian to back up a PMQs jibe made by their leader; and Obama's getting a creeping bad rep for his post-White House occupancy abandoning of the very social media he'd exploited to gain power.
All of which pails into insignificance when considering Palin, of course. It seems pointless to pick out any one of her gaffes, but the continued presence of the Sarkozy prank call rather bears out our "you can't run, you can't hide thinking.
Another more recent example, if less celebrated example of the phenomenon: Japanese finance minister Shoichi Nakagawa pretty obviously drunken appliance at a G8 press conference seems to have led to his resignation...
We heart Mary Anne-Hobbs at DS. Here's a very obviously home-made film she made while recording her West Coast Rocks show for Radio 1; it's as fine an example of broadcasting "talent" having a direct relationship with the audience as, say, Stephen Fry's very amusing Twitter feed.
(Again, with regards to Roo's nostrum above, note that MAH's own film is still on YouTube; the original Radio 1 WCR show, of course, is no longer available on the iPlayer. The collateral outlives the intended... another common phenomenon when broadcasting and online paradigms collide.)
Anyway, that's just a smattering of stuff we'll be discussing later. If you work at the BBC and like the sound of this, we'll be repeating the session on March 12th; check in with BBC Training & Development.
Simon
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