Wednesday, May 27, 2009
The stereotypical corporate newsroom, long an online place for companies to shill favorable content about themselves, needs a facelift. Though exciting developments at the intersection of social media and communications are already driving change, these new technologies have enjoyed widespread adoption from individuals, not companies.
Fortunately, that’s beginning to change.
Though they vary slightly from company to company, a typical corporate newsroom includes news releases, case studies, photography, events, press contacts, and other corporate goings-on. Aside from a handful of notable exceptions, their content is stagnant, being updated infrequently and existing on a closed platform that doesn’t encourage user feedback.
However, today’s popular platforms are built expressly to be the opposite of these static sites. Blogs have comments sections; Twitter users can rebroadcast or respond to their connections’ messages almost effortlessly. It’s easy for these platforms to turn into a honeycomb of echo-chamber, but most users are effectively building unique content on top of existing content. Written another way: Bloggers who are rehashing content from other blogs, for example, add in their two cents, and this combination of new and recycled content still serves a legitimate purpose.
There is a term for what the social media sphere is quickly becoming. A couple of months ago, at a panel discussion about how journalists are using social media, former Huffington Post editor Rachel Sklar compared Twitter posts to excited utterances, the legal doctrine that states what a person says when startled or in shock is quite likely to be a true, if uncalculated, remark. That window of truth, that absence of message strategy and spin, she said, is why people like Twitter.
And the existence of these excited utterances is what makes social media engagement a real murky issue for a lot of corporates.
Today’s semantic web – or, more accurately, the conversations it enables between innovator, company, customer, partner, competitor, and lawmaker – seems to spit out excited utterances by the tons.
This opens up opportunities for companies while at the same time creating new challenges for them to address. On one hand, transparency and accessibility can distance an organization from its competition in a very good way. On another, too much transparency and accessibility can create crises and destroy market share. Finding the balance between the two is critical.
Companies right now are grappling to understand how to use the social web to participate, and in some cases lead, dialogue without digressing to the seemingly insignificant excited utterances that can immediately become big headaches. Most organizations aren’t, or shouldn’t be, afraid to cede some level of control and lead a discussion about the issues that lie at their core—and an organization that feels threatened by social media today is, in effect, grasping at shadows.
Because traditional media is dwindling in size, organizations can step up and fill the void left by downsized reporters and editors. They have more control than they realize. A corporate newsroom needs to be just that: a newsroom—not a section of an organization’s web site that gets new content every now and again, but a functioning newsroom that filters information to not only the press, but to customers, competitors, lawmakers, and other audiences.
With the right strategy, knowledge of the tools available and, most importantly, a willingness to promote and host a true dialogue, this change is easier to pull off than many companies think.
Andrew Graham
andrew.graham@greentarget.net
Follow me on Twitter@andrew_graham