Awaken journalists, you have nothing to lose but your bylines

(This was a rant post that sort of morphed into a speech that was never given…yet)

People tend to blame technology for all their problems.

Social networks are causing the rise of _____________ (fill blank space) eg. divorces, rapes, home invasions, suicides, crime, bullying, etc.

Of course, there may be validity to some of these cases. No one wants to belittle an incident that happens to a child, a spouse, a mother, a friend or a partner. When it’s personal, it’s tough not to find the nearest technological scapegoat. What’s worrying is how the “experts” extrapolate cause-and-effect from a small sample, raising fears and feeding the ignorance of technology to the masses.

“Productivity is down, there is lack of focus and no one seems to have an original thought – everything is copy and pasted from the net.” Or so they say.

In truth, there is nothing to suggest that human nature has changed pre- and post-Internet.

The perennial truth about humanity is this: In life there will always be those among us who are deliriously happy and depressingly suicidal and every emotion in between. We already live in both the “real” and “virtual” worlds equally intensely. The virtual can be as real as you want it to be and the real can be as imaginary as you want it to be.

But if you talk to anyone my age, 48, with two school-going children, they have a tendency to get nostalgic about their childhood.

It usually starts with the phrase: “When I was young, we never had these computers lah, Internet lah, sitting in front of the game console all day long lah. We used to go outside, enjoy the sunshine, climb trees, catch fish in the longkang, etc.

Now if you go back into the past, say the 1960s-70s, you can hear people of that time reminiscing about their childhoods. And they say this: “Ayahhh I wish by kids wouldn’t sit in front of the TV all day long. You know when I was young, we used to go outside, enjoy the sunshine, climb trees, catch fish in the rivers…”

Now go further back to this person’s parent’s time in the 1930s-40s-50s, when there was an explosion of recorded music and you hear the same thing. “I wish my kids wouldn’t listen to that music all day long. I wish they would go outside in the sunshine and climb trees and go swimming and catch fish……”

And then you step back into the 1920s and when radio came about…you know the drill.

There is no doubt we are going through one of the biggest explosions in the http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifuse of media. People can create, share, spread and distribute information like never before. The ubiquity of media everywhere is driven by falling prices in all things digital.

Nicholas Negroponte equates the net to a library but with a difference. If you go to a regular library you take a book off the shelf and if there is no other copy of that book, no one in the community, that reservoir of people being serviced by that library, can read it. But if you take a digital book of the Internet, anyone can go in there and take another and another and another.

Of course, if millions are accessing a particular site — web servers have limitations too — it can crash. But every time you go to a webpage you are actually downloading a copy onto your machine. Very few sites are live streamed, in the strict sense of the word, although that is changing rapidly even as we speak. So the Internet is actually a giant copying machine.

In the 15th century we had another giant copying machine of that time – it was called the Gutenberg Printing Press. Before that machine came to be, scribes used to sit down and copy everything word for word and so the church and the institutions of that day controlled the information.

When the printing press came about we hear only about the Gutenberg Bible as an early publication was reproduced in large quantities, but in truth there was an explosion of works — many of these secular, naughty, perverse and “mindless”. So much so, that intellectuals of the day were worried that the printing press was making people obsessed with trivia, gossip and the mundane.

But that media explosion eventually did society wonders. It gave us newspapers, it gave us specialized magazines, it gave us fiction and non-fiction, it gave us peer-reviewed scientific journals, it gave us academic books like never before. The entire spectrum of what we knew as “information” and “media” widened and deepened beyond belief.

Fast forward to 2012 and here we are — right at the heart of something wondrous. This is the dopamine injection of truly beautiful awakenings. It’s the eye of the digital storm. It’s raining down on us in bit buckets.

People keep referring to it as information overload. But that debate, as Clay Shirky rightly points out, is over. We cannot afford to take shelter and hide and put umbrellas up and wait for this storm to pass. We must learn how to filter the data, embrace it and become a filter ourselves so that others can make sense of the joys of this liquid, ubiquitous manna.

Journalists are at the heart of this. We have to embrace this. We have to learn these tools and gadgets and “Internet stuff”. We have to become aggregators and filters ourselves. We have to become like curators in a museum. But not in the old, grey-walled definition of a museum but a living, moving and constantly evolving museum and we have to choose what we want to exhibit today, and how the stuff we put out is shared and spread.

Journalism stands at the crossroads. This is the most transitive period in our lives as the “new media” re-define who we are.

Marketing, a dirty word for journalists, and more so personal branding is a huge chunk of this. Google, Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn are all a part of this movement.

We have to play where everyone is playing. We have to get our hands dirty and learn this, so that others who will come after will benefit from our knowledge and not supercede us, just because “they are young lah, so they know all this technical stuff”.

As a former tech journalist, I am a believer in that McLuhan quote: “We shape our tools and then our tools shape us.” We reported on these devices and now these devices are changing how we capture, edit, produce and tell our stories.

But we mustn’t forget what our roles are.

We are here to ask the questions on behalf of those who have no voice and cannot ask them because their tongues are tied.

We are here to tell the stories of those who cannot tell the stories on their own because they have been silenced.

We are here to uncover the truth and confront the corrupt with that truth so that they can be more accountable and transparent.

We are here to make those responsible measure up to a higher ethical and moral standard.

But we are also here to educate; to entertain; and to engage our communities in things that matter to them.

That’s journalism to me. That’s the journalism I was taught. That’s the journalism we need to continue to practise.

The old way was to produce the stuff and send it out to them as an act of faith.

The new way is to produce the stuff in collaboration with the people, not the faceless readers as we call them or the audience in a darkened theatre but real people who are just like us, yet different in so many ways.

We must set up “conversation platforms” by which they can come and interact with us or among themselves.

But we don’t need to re-invent the wheel. The 800-pound gorillas are already in the room. FLYTBG: Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Twitter, Blogs, Google. We must go where our readers are and engage with them. We must fish where the fish are.

Journalists are great whiners. We really need to stop whining and get on with understanding, using and leveraging on the tools and apps out there and in here. There really isn’t anymore time to bitch about “those bloody bloggers.” The time now is to dive in and get to know our readers like never before. There really isn’t anymore time to moan the loss of a simpler world.

Just a few years ago, a number of longtime journalists found themselves out of a job. There were tears, real tears shed. People cried because it was the only life they ever knew. Their lives could be summed up in this way: “Hey, I was so arrogant and hard-headed that I thought that I needn’t learn new things. My skills were enough. Now, I am jobless, with bills to pay! Get me a blog, please, and please pay me to keep it updated.”

Wake up fellow journalists. Learn all you can about social media and pick up social media skills. You can learn from your colleagues, peers, children, nephew and nieces. You need to know that these are new journalism skill sets — it is very different and you need to OWN these skills if you are to survive, not only here in your current organisation, but anywhere out there.

I can tell you this, because I have been there and done that. If you do not have a brand behind you, then you better bloody well create that brand around your byline. Who you are and what you do matters. Don’t be insecure about that. It’s much easier to do it now, than there ever has been. Ever.

No trainer is going to turn you into a multimedia journalist overnight. You have take time to learn these skills yourselves. Our role is to provide you the big picture, the guidance, yes. We may handhold you for two or three days through some of rough spots if you need it, and give you a few technical pointers, then set you off in the right direction.

But the commitment to become very good at any of these tools must come from inside. If your current role doesn’t give time and opportunity to learn these skills on the job then you must find time — one hour or two hours a day or one day every weekend to learn it yourself.

There are people who are coming from behind you who will speed past you before you know it. They may not have the journalism mind, the news sense, the writing and grammar skills but that doesn’t matter — this is the new vocabulary and they can shine in ways that will get them ahead. Your competition isn’t even local. Awhile ago, a new Malaysian network player hired 10 content people from — get this –the US. All former journalists!

Think about that. Is their content going to be better than anything you can produce here? No. It’s just they haven’t discovered you yet. You are the gem everyone is looking for. Gleam like the jewel that you are. It is your time to shine.

The messenger is the media

(Above: Painting entitled The Messenger, 1996. by Bill Viola)

If Marshall McLuhan were alive today, would he instead say the messenger is the media?

The media is crass, commercial and aimed at the lowest common denominator. An endless parade of wannabe idols on a dubious stage. You have to have the "whole package" yet "be original' and then have 14-year-olds decide your fate. Or wipe out.

The media is biased, agenda-laden and orchestrated. It is the coloured ball bouncing around on a snooker table, depending on who's holding the cue for the day. It gets sunk into holes of its own choosing, only to be retrieved by another, so points can be tallied up for either side.

The messenger is the filter, the curator, the aggregator, the means by which we decide what we want to see, hear, debate. When the messenger massages the media, we like him all the more. We subscribe to his take, his point of view, his clarification of the thoughts we think -- but can't seem to express. No spin, nor hype. Just the truth. Plain and simple.

The media is flawed, the messenger is flawed genius. We like him all the more for that very fact. The messenger validates us. He needs us as much as we need him. We become one with him -- momentarily. But we are not so naive as to take him wholesale, all the time. We are, afterall, as empowered as him.

The messenger helps us keep our wits about us when everyone else seems to be losing theirs. He keeps us in the loop and affirms our right to know. He digs down deep, and pushes us to the edge of reasoning. He draws from diverse sources and sieves what needs to be shared, what has to go out, what can't be bought and sold under-the-table, what can't be taken from us by those who feel entitled.

The messenger is in our corner. He's on our team. He doesn't give us a bollocking at half-time even though we are losing. He restores our faith in what we already know. That we need to get out there and just play the game. The way we know. The way we trained for it. For what is the point of being on the field anyway, if we don't want to play the game? He gives us a sense of worth and pride.

The messenger puts us all on the same playing field. It may not always be level, but at least we know the rules of the game. The right way, the way it should be done.

The messenger makes us want to aspire for our higher selves. To make things accountable. To stem the rot and change the status quo. The messenger is our avatar. He is blue and larger than life. We live our lives vicariously through him.

The messenger is the media. The messenger is us. We are the new media.

Spreadable media

Henry Jenkins, Professor of Communications, Journalism, and Cinematic Art at the University of Southern California, makes a case for "spreadable media".

Jenkins doesn't like the use of the word Viral in describing media. I must say a disease-based metaphor never sat well with me in describing 'new media'. Neither did I like the concept of Web 2.0, a borrowed programming metaphor, that is still vague and inaccurate.

Our easy reliance on the word "viral" as if communication takes place by way of an infection, Jenkins explains, has two issues:

1. It reduces consumers, often the most unpredictable variable in the sender-message-receiver frame, to involuntary "hosts" of media viruses;

2. It holds onto the idea that media producers can design "killer" texts which can ensure circulation by being injected directly into the cultural "bloodstream."

Quote:

Douglas Rushkoff's 1994 book Media Virus may not have invented the term "viral media", but his ideas eloquently describe the way these texts are popularly held to behave. The media virus, Rushkoff argues, is a Trojan horse, that surreptitiously brings messages into our homes -- messages can be encoded into a form people are compelled to pass along and share, allowing the embedded meanings, buried inside like DNA, to "infect" and spread, like a pathogen. There is an implicit and often explicit proposition that this spread of ideas and messages can occur not only without the user's consent, but perhaps actively against it, requiring that people be duped into passing a hidden agenda while circulating compelling content. Douglas Rushkoff insists he is not using the term "as a metaphor. These media events are not like viruses. They are viruses . . . (such as) the common cold, and perhaps even AIDS" (Rushkoff, 9, emphasis his).

Media viruses spread through the datasphere the same way biological ones spread through the body or a community. But instead of traveling along an organic circulatory system, a media virus travels through the networks of the mediaspace. The "protein shell" of a media virus might be an event, invention, technology, system of thought, musical riff, visual image, scientific theory, sex scandal, clothing style or even a pop hero -- as long as it can catch our attention. Any one of these media virus shells will search out the receptive nooks and crannies in popular culture and stick on anywhere it is noticed. Once attached, the virus injects its more hidden agendas into the datastream in the form of ideological code -- not genes, but a conceptual equivalent we now call "memes" (Rushkoff, p.9-10).

The "hidden agenda" and "embedded meanings" Rushkoff mentions are the brand messages buried at the heart of viral videos, the promotional elements in videos featuring Mentos exploding out of soda bottles, or Gorillas playing the drumline of In the Air Tonight . The media virus proposition is that these marketing messages -- messages consumers may normally avoid, approach skeptically, or disregard altogether -- are hidden by the "protein shell" of compelling media properties. Nestled within interesting bits of content, these messages are snuck into the heads of consumers, or wilfully passed between them.

These messages, Rushkoff and others suggest, constitute "memes", conceived by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in 1976 as a sort of cultural version of the gene. Dawkins was looking for a way to explain cultural evolution, imagining it as a biological system. What genes are to genetics, he suggested, memes would be to culture. Like the gene, the meme is driven to self-create, and is possessed of three important characteristics:

1. Fidelity -- memes have the ability to retain their informational content as they pass from mind to mind;

2. Fecundity -- memes possess the power to induce copies of themselves;

3. Longevity -- memes that survive longer have a better chance of being copied.

The meme, then, is "a unit of information in a mind whose existence influences events such that more copies of itself get created in other minds" (Brodie, 1996, p. 32). They are the ideas at the center of virally spread events, some coherent, self-replicating idea which moves from person-to-person, from mind-to-mind, duplicating itself as it goes.

Language seems to 'evolve' by non-genetic means and at a rate which is orders of magnitude faster than genetic evolution. Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation (Dawkins, 1976, p.189).

Dawkins remained vague about the granularity of this concept, seeing it as an all-purpose unit which could explain everything from politics to fashion. Each of these fields are comprised of good ideas, good ideas which, in order to survive, attach themselves to media virii -- funny, catchy, compelling bits of content -- as a vehicle to infect new minds with copies of themselves.

We are all susceptible to the pull of viral ideas. Like mass hysteria. Or a tune that gets into your head that you keep on humming all day until you spread it to someone else. Jokes. Urban Legends. Crackpot religions. Marxism. No matter how smart we get, there is always this deep irrational part that makes us potential hosts for self-replicating information. (Neil Stephenson, Snow Crash, 1992, p.399)

Though imagined long before the rise of the Internet and the Web, the idea of the meme has been widely embraced as a way of talking about the rapid dispersion of informationn and the widespread circulation of concepts which characterize the digital era. It has been a particularly attractive way to think about the rise of Internet fads like the LOLcats or Soulja Boy, fads considered seemingly trivial or meangingless. The content which circulates in such a fashion is seen as simplistic, fragmentary, and essentially meaningless, though it may shape our beliefs and actions in significant ways. Wired magazine (Miller, 2007) recently summed it up as a culture of "media snacks":

We now devour our pop culture the same way we enjoy candy and chips - in conveniently packaged bite-size nuggets made to be munched easily with increased frequency and maximum speed. This is snack culture - and boy, is it tasty (not to mention addictive).

This description of snacks implies that they are without nutritional value, trivial or meaningless aspect of our culture, a time waste. And if this meaningless content is self-replicating then consumers are "irrational," and unable to escape their infection. Yet these models -- the idea of the meme and the media virus, of self-replicating ideas hidden in attractive, catchy content we are helpless to resist -- is a problematic way to understand cultural practices. We want to suggest that these materials travel through the web because they are meaningful to the people who spread them. At the most fundamental level, such an approach misunderstands the way content sprehttp://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=8769336#ads, which is namely, through the active practices of people. As such, we would like to suggest:

1. That "memes" do not self-replicate;

2. That people are not "susceptible" to this viral media;

3. That viral media and Internet memes are not nutritionally bereft, meaningless 'snacks'.

The 8-part posts with embedded videos can be read at: MIT Convergence Culture Consortium or Henryjenkins.org

10 Multimedia and Social Media Journalism Resource Sites

Here's a list of useful resources on multimedia journalism:

1. MINDY MCADAMS' Reporters' Guide to Multimedia Proficiency is a 42-page PDF of all 15 posts on her blog compiled since Feb, 2009. This is great mini-manual to learn multimedia journalism skills such as how to post an audio interview on your blog, edit video using iMovie or Windows Movie Maker or produce slideshows using Soundslides.

Follow Mindy's blog, RSS feed, Twitter feed or Facebook account.

2. NO TRAIN, NO GAIN has a Multimedia Reporting section that posts some really useful updates. Recent posts on Liveblogging, Multimedia Story-telling, and Ethics in Social Networks.

3. MEDIA HELPING MEDIA has a diverse range of training resources. David Brewer and Craig Kanalley have contributed some useful posts on the social networks and online and multimedia sections such as 30 tips on online news presentation, multiplatform authoring, tips for livetweeting and "Grazing on Rumour, Feeding on Facts".

4. MARK BRIGGS' Journalism 2.0: How to Survive and Thrive is two years old but still a worthy resource. You can download the PDF or read it online.

5. KNIGHT DIGITAL MEDIA CENTER'S Tutorials page as a list of useful skills to pick up on such as FTP, creating widgets and geotagging.

6. POYNTER'S NEWS UNIVERSITY has various courses you can follow for free but you need to register first.

7. NEWSLAB.ORG has various tips on its Tools and Resources sections such as Multimedia Planning and Production, Learning From Hyperlocal Failures, and Getting More From Social Media.

8. DIGITAL NEWS JOURNALIST has some interesting tutorials including a 4-part piece on using Google Docs and Caption Writing for Web Slideshows.

9. RYAN THORNBURG's The Future of News has some interesting how-tos and slide stacks eg: How to Edit for Online and SEO, Social Media and User Generated Content for Journalists and Reporting for Online Media.

10. JOE MURPHY, a Denver web developer and journalist, posts at his Joe Think blog. Some choice posts:
"Towards meaningful metrics", "Tips on writing headlines", "Getting your online news site off the ground in 7 steps".

FOR MULTIMEDIA INSPIRATION visit these sites as suggested by Angela Grant: Kobre Guide, MultimediaShooter, Interactive Narratives, Las Vegas Sun videos, The Globe and Mail multimedia section and News Videographer.

BONUS: 10,000 Words

Six types of news journalists

[from MediaPost]



American journalists are ready and eager to speed up the transition from print to digital, and almost half surveyed believe their newsroom is moving way too slowly.

The Northwestern University’s Media Management Center came to this conclusions in a report, "Life Beyond Print" (3.8M PDF) based on a survey of almost 3,800 print, digital, and hybrid journalists in a cross section of 79 U.S. newsrooms.

The survey classified journalists into six groups:
1. Digitals (12%): They already spend a most of their time working online. They are either online editors or producers, but about 17% are reporters or writers, and more than half are journalism grads. They are newer to journalism (< less than 10 years experience) but are open to change, new career options and more likely to try something new. In a typical newsroom, they likely got the most training last year.

2. Major Shifts(11%): Those who are currently doing the least digital work but would like to increase it by five times. They are the most dissatisfied with their current state, more pessimistic about staying in the business long-term and want the most pronounced changes. An equal mix of reporters, mid-level editors, copy editors, designers and videographers, most of whom have been in the business at least 15 years are deeply engaged online in their personal and social lives, but see a disconnect at work. They could help the newsroom adapt faster, but need a sign they should stay in newspapers.

3. The Moderately Mores (50%): Those who would like to double their current digital activities to achieve a 50-50 split with their print efforts. They have been in news business more than 20 years. They believe their newsroom transition has been too slow although they do think it is headed in the right direction.

4. The Status Quos (14%): They believe the 30% of effort they currently devote to online is sufficient and prefer to see no change. Most believe the pace of change to date has been "about right." This group is slightly older than the overall population. Nearly half are age 50 or older and 1-in-10 is 60 or older.

5. Turn Back the Clocks (6%): Those nostalgic for a return to print and wish online would go away. They report about 30% of their current effort is spent online, nearly triple the amount they would prefer. This is a group that has tested the online environment and they don't like it. They less satisfied than their Status Quo colleagues and have the lowest opinion of leaders of all the groups and are least likely, in particular, to believe executives really understand what it takes to put out the newspaper.

6. The Leaders (5%): Publishers, editors and managing editors, most of whom have been in the news business more than 20 years. Most report their roles are primarily print-focused but want to shift to online. Like Digitals, they describe themselves as open to change and optimistic about their career options. The Leaders report spending about 25% of their work effort on online matters, but believe the emphasis should shift to favour digital (53%) over print responsibilities. 28% of Leaders think their job is changing too fast overall, which could reflect the lack of clarity around a business model to sustain digitally delivered journalism but nearly 70% say the newsroom is on the right track. This group reports somewhat greater Internet use outside work than other journalists.

There are differing expectations for leaders among the segments:
* The Digitals want The Leaders to be even more immersed in online trends and to sharpen the digital vision.
* The Major Shifts want more risk-taking.
* The Status Quos generally like what leaders are doing and advocate staying the course.

The study by Vickey Williams, Stacy Lynch and Bob LeBailly, found that online desire in the newsroom is not driven by the fallacy of youth.

The top predictors of wanting to switch to digital are:
1. Heavy Internet use outside work.
2. Online customer knowledge.
3. Openness to change at work and adaptability.
4.Digital training: Receiving training necessary to learn online skills.
5. Personality: Keeping up with company initiatives, online trends and industry changes.

THE STUDY CONCLUDES:
1. Journalists' passion for the mission is there, but they need basic tools for reinvention and more engaged leadership. More than half of the journalists working primarily in print had no training in the previous year to equip them for a digital transition. One in four journalists reports having had no training at all.

2. There are major gaps between how leaders think they are doing and how staff view them, in such areas as fostering collaboration, seeking out input from employees at all levels, and communicating strategy in a way that relates to employees' jobs.

3. Senior managers rate research about what online users want low on their list of priorities suggesting that editors are at risk of repeating the errors of the past by not ensuring that everyone in the newsroom develops a deep knowledge of who their readers are and what they want.

4. Despite the turmoil in the industry, the vast majority of the journalists surveyed reported that they were "still satisfied with their jobs and believed they would be in the news business two years from now -- and more than half with the same newspaper."

5. The surveyors advised: "Leaders should encourage all employees to use downtime to edit video, tweet, upload mobile photos to Facebook pages and otherwise keep current in online trends. Even for employees who don’t have any online work responsibilities, the more engaged they are with the Internet on their own, the more eager they will be to transition to online at work."

Links: Life Beyond Print (3.8M PDF)
MediaPost

Mobile media as a force for change

Full script of the extended presentation on "Mobile and social media as a force for change."

Hi. My name is Julian and I have five stories to share with you on today. One from Iran, one from India, one from Kenya and, because I really don't like government slogans, 2 from Malaysia.



1. IRAN: This is Neda Agha-Soltan. She was 26, an university student in Teheran studying philosophy, music and was planning to learn how to play the piano. She'd already ordered the piano.

On June 20, 2009, at around 6:30 p.m, Neda was stuck in a traffic jam for more than an hour inside a Peugeot 206 with a poorly working air conditioner. She and her music teacher, a family friend, decided to get out of the car for some fresh air.

The two were near where protesters were marching and chanting. Suddenly, Neda is on the ground -- felled by a single gunshot wound to the chest.

Cameraphone footage show men kneeling beside her trying to help. But it is too late. Neda's eyes roll back, her body falls limp and blood streams from her mouth and nose. The teacher is heard calling out: "Neda, do not be afraid, do not be afraid."

She died on the way to hospital. Later, a witness said her last words were: "I am burning, I am burning!" Neda neither supported Mousavi nor Ahmadinejab, the two candidates in the elections.

Here is the video. Warning to weak-hearted -- the scenes are graphic and explicit.

Neda became the symbol of injustice in Iran. Her killer was never found. Protesters took the streets with the graphic images of her bloodied face. By marching they risked arrest, and possibly a bullet themselves.

The online community used Neda icons and badges on blogs and personal sites and replaced avatars with Free Iran buttons in sympathy.

In France, a 40th memorial day march was held in her honour and the marchers held up Neda images to their faces as if to say "We are all Neda".

The video struck a cord with sympathisers around the world. President Obama himself described it as “heartbreaking.” To date (Oct 20, 2009) it has racked over 4.6 million views from various copies on YouTube and other sites. The trending topic #neda on Twitter continues to be used until today on any news coming out of Iran.

I tell you this story without ever having stepped in Iran. But based on Neda's story and the 17 others reportedly killed in protests on the streets of Teheran, there is definitely an underlying and seething unhappiness in Iran.

These people were young, urban, self-motivated and self-organising as far as we can tell. There was no backing from any invested party. They marched because they were angry on the results of an election that didn't reflect their beliefs. I don't even think Mousavi or Ahmadinejab knew what was going on until the protests began.

The bottomline, the peaceful protesters connected with each other, armed only with their mobilephones and the power of social media skills.

Anthropologist Margaret Mead said it best: "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has.”

2. INDIA: The second story takes us to Mangalore, in India in Jan, 2009. A group of about 40 followers of Hindu fundamentalist group Sri Ram Sena pulled out women found drinking at two bars in Mangalore and then proceeded to beat them up. Two women were hospitalized. The videos of the attacks were shot with cameraphones and posted on YouTube.



Sri Ram Sena chief Pramod Muthalik (left) condoned the beating of women , Nisha Susan (right) fought back with Facebook

The man on the left is Sri Ram Sena Chief Pramod Muthalik. His organisation also planned to protest the upcoming Valentine’s Day and he warned any couples found in restaurants and pubs would be dragged to the nearest temple to be married. Thank god, good sense prevailed and police arrested most of the men involved in the incidents and Muthalik himself was held on the eve of Valentine’s Day.

But the incident riled many people around the world who saw the videos. Tehelka journalist Nisha Susan turned to Facebook and formed a protest group called "The Consortium of Pubgoing, Loose and Forward women”. Within days, the group grew exponentially, and Susan decided to launch an offline activity via a blog: the Gandhigiri-inspired Pink Chaddi campaign.

To mock the fact these religious conservatives are called Chaddi-wallas – people who wear big, loose underwear - The idea was to send Sri Ram Sena cadres pink underwear. Over 39,000 people joined the Facebook group within ten days from all over the world and dispatched a variety of underwear to Sena’s offices. The group page was later hacked.



But the protest had already struck a cord with women and women supporters around the world. They were encouraged to write whatever they felt on the underwear – these women (above) scrawled Discrimination, Bigotry and Intolerance, then sent the pic and underwears off.

The Pink Panty Protest was non-violent. It shamed the perpetrators and brought global attention to the issue. It wasn’t easy like an email petition which wouldn't have had the same impact. The protesters had to mail in the panties. The unusual protest received worldwide coverage.

Clay Shirky in his book Here Comes Everybody says efforts like these suggest how ridiculously easy it is to organize people now. "The cost of all kinds of group activity – sharing, cooperation and collective action – have fallen so far so fast that activities previously hidden beneath the floor are now coming to light." He has gone so far as to call what is happening a revolution -- "When we change the way we communicate, we change society."

3. KENYA: This third story is from Kenya. The United Nations agency Habitat is working with 15 youth groups to build businesses through microfinancing and the use of mobile phones in the slums of Nairobi.



This is Kibera in Nairobi. It is the largest urban slum in East Africa with an estimated population of between 600,000 to 1.2 million inhabitants. Kibera accounts for less than 1% of Nairobi's total area, but holds more than a quarter of its population.

Kibera is one of the most studied slums in Africa, not only because it sits in the centre of the modern city, but also because Habitat, the United Nations' agency for human settlements, is headquartered close by. Ban Ki-moon visited the settlement within a month of his selection as UN secretary-general.

Kibera is heavily polluted by garbage and contaminated with human and animal faeces, thanks to the open sewage system and the lack of sanitation and no regular supply of running water.

The dam water that people use is the root to cholera and typhoid. It is estimated that one-fifth of the 2.2 million Kenyans living with HIV/AIDS live in Kibera. Access to a cheap alcohol called Changaa, drugs and glue-sniffing has led to crime, rape and and unwanted pregnancies. Just 20% of Kibera has electricity. This place is the closest version of what you would call hell on earth. The children and youth here often ask “Why was I born here?”.

The government, UN-Habitat and a contingent of NGOs, charities and churches, have made brave attempts to lift these settlements out of squalor. On Sept 16, 2009, the Kenyan government started moving families out of Kibera as part of a mass relocation project, which is expected to take five years. However, more than 80 people - a mix of "landlords" and residents - have gone to court to fight the government from demolishing their shacks. If you had watched the science-fiction movie District 9, shot in South Africa, you will find many parallels to what is going on in Kibera. If you read our local newspapers you will find parallels to Kampung Buah Pala and other squatter re-settlement issues.

But there is hope and it comes in the form of a Mobile Movement. Here is the video that is self-explanatory on the initiative.



4. MALAYSIA: TWESTIVAL: My fourth story is closer to home. This is about the Twestival movement which is reaching hundreds of thousands of Twitter users across the world and here in Malaysia too. Twestival is an event run via Twitter and combination of the words Twitter + Festival. It started from an idea a group of friends had in Britain to do something for a charity – something real-world and meaningful from all their chatter and friendship in the online world. Twestivals allowed tweeters to meet and socialize in person over drinks, music and entertainment and tie the social event to a fundraising activity.

The first global Twestival was held in Feb 12, 2009 across 200+ cities. It raised US$250,000 that went to non-profit charity:water. Charity:water builds wells in African countries and raises awareness about the serious issue of contaminated water in the developing world.

On Sept 12, 2009 there was a second global Twestival event, and participants could raise money for local charities of their choice. In Malaysia, the KL Twestival was organized in two weeks, via Twitter, SMS, Facebook and blogs and utilized the talents and financial support of the local Twittersphere to make this happen.

By rallying together, under short timescales, for a single aim on the same day, the KL Twestival was a small but significant success. There was entertainment, music and dance performances, an auction and participants left with goodie bags.

A number of sponsors and celebrities came in in short notice and every sign-up was announced on Twitter – so you could see it in real-time. The event raised RM11,000 and two free desktop PCs with broadband access which went to a deserving home for delinquents in Klang.

On Sunday, (Oct 18) the PCs were delivered to the home and a friend who helped organize it said the pastor of the house was so grateful for the money and PCs he hugged him.

The common grounds again: The Twestival participants were young or young-at-heart, self-motivated, armed with mobile devices and the power of social media.

This is Niki Cheong. He perhaps exemplifies the demographic we have been talking about all day today. He was a co-organizer of the event.

He is an assistant editor for The Star, the largest English daily in Malaysia, he writes a column called Bangsar Boy, he manages several reporters under him including a section called R.AGE, he is a blogger and manages his own personal website.

He also helps train the young teenage journalists who attend the B.R.A.Ts programme and teaches them journalism and multimedia skills. He dabbles in theater and has over 1,650 friends on Facebook, and 1,770 followers on Twitter. Niki has been involved in media activities for the last 15 years, and get this he just turned 30. In a sense, Niki is the kind of person we look to to bring change in this country.

Full disclosure -- I met Niki through our training efforts. For the past three years we have been training journalists and media professionals in various industries on multimedia skills.

As former IT journalists ourselves, my partner Anita and I were shocked at the huge gap with those who had the skills and those who didn’t. So we designed and developed modules on how to use Google for research, how to edit audio and photos, how to conduct interviews via email, instant messaging and Skype, how to write for the web, and we extended the training to other companies on how to use social media, how to monitor your brand online and engage with your online constituents, how to fight negative feedback online or react to an incriminating video, how to do effective media relations and crisis communications in the online world.

We are still surprised that many companies, even public-listed companies still don’t get it. They put up walls and lock off YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, photo sites and blogs. But how will they firewall this - the mobilephone? These companies fail everyday to tap a golden resource - the very youths we spoke of in Iran, India, in Kenya and in small ways here in Malaysia.



5. MALAYSIA: CITIZEN JOURNALISM: My last story is about Malaysiakini, the independent news site that hits a milestone in its tenth year in Malaysia in November. Malaysiakini has been profitable for the last four years. Its pageviews on some days exceed that of The Star Online. It has successfully built a subscription model that works, and even advertisers that were previously terrified to advertise have come in.

Malaysiakini started an interesting project last year to train citizen journalists – people who were keen on reporting on the news they were witnessing. The course is short and intensive and covers all the tools to equip Malaysians with the know-how to be responsible citizen journalists.

These CJs submit videos every week and some are picked up and published by Malaysiakini.com. I would like to show you one example done by Jimmy Leow in Penang, of an uncompleted highway in Balik Pulau and the danger it poses.Remember this is done by someone who only recently learnt about scripting, handling videocams,, editing and putting a whole package together for a news site. Shortly after the video was posted, the agency responsible for the project re-started it.

Here in summary are what I hope you takeaway from these stories.
1. Everyone is the media.
2. We are no longer passive consumers, we are ACTIVE participants, creators, producers and organizers.
3. This change is fundamental, permanent and messy.
Live with it.

Slides and video: on Slideshare. A shortened version of this presentation was made at GoMobile Conference 2009 on Oct 20, 2009.

How to apologize

In crisis communications, we tell our clients that if they have to apologize - do it quickly and sincerely and suggest specifically the remedial action you will take.

This advice, however, gets lost when a crisis hits. The human thing to do is take things personally, get caught up with heated emotions, be in denial, try to deflect and play the blame game.

When the sh*t hits the fan, we have heard CEOs and public figures explode and wonder how such "terrible things" could happen on their watch.

David Letterman seemed calm and was his usual deprecating self when he told his audience his "little story" of "terrible things" on Oct 2, 2009.

He claimed he was the victim of an alleged US$2m extortion bid by someone, later named to be Robert 'Joe' Halderman, an Emmy-winning producer of CBS' 48 Hours Mystery.

Apparently Halderman was going to write a screenplay and a book exposing him for "creepy stuff" he did. Dave then told the audience this: "And the creepy stuff was that I have had sex with women who work for me on this show. Now, my response to that is -'Yes, I have.' " That statement was met with laughter and applause.

He then went on to say: "I have had sex with women who work on this show. And would it be embarrassing if it were made public? Perhaps it would. Perhaps it would. Especially for the women." Again more laughter and applause.

Halderman was arrested after allegedly trying to cash a fake cheque made out to him and has since pleaded not guilty to the charges.

On Oct 5, Dave continued to use the show, now with an obvious rise in ratings, to paint himself as "the victim" and try to deflect the odd confession he made:



As I suggested in a previous post, by talking about his previous indiscretions, Letterman immediately made every woman in his employ, currently and previously, fair game for the media.

His disclosure definitely warranted the apology to his staff and his "horribly hurt" wife.

But here's the blunder in the statement that comes at 1:00 into the vid: "I'm not having sex with these women - those episodes are in the past."

Sorry, Dave, that sounds like a flip-flop to me. You are sorry for mentioning the "creepy stuff" but you are not sorry for doing it, and now even deny having done anything wrong.

Letterman seems to suggest this: "Having sex with interns, subordinates and women who rely on you for their pay cheques, bonuses, raises and positions, is okay, as long as it was a LONG TIME ago, and no one complained about it publicly." To underline it, he says at the tail-end that "I still feel I did the right thing."

To me, that just seems like a 62-year-old man trying to wiggle out of past indiscretions, without being accountable for his actions. Shades of Roman Polanski and Bill Clinton come to mind.

CBS' rules and guidelines on the conduct of its employees TMZ.com points out may not apply to Letterman because he isn't in their employ. He merely heads Worldwide Pants Inc, the production company which produces the show for CBS, and also The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson and previously, Everyone Loves Raymond.

I think as apologies go, Letterman comes across as sincere and genuine. But by repeating his indiscretions on camera, he's digging a deeper and deeper grave on his image.

By throwing wisecracks such as "This is only phase one of the scandal. Phase two: Next week I go on 'Oprah' and sob", Letterman seems to be capitalizing on the scandal. He continues to feed the flames, daring the media to find out more, while profiting from the revelations with a higher ratings boost.

Wrong move, Dave. You need to suspend the show, take a vacation, save your marriage, and stop speaking out in any platform for awhile.

Here's Washington Post's Howard Kurtz's take on the unfolding crisis:

Dealing with Internet rumours

Shout out to Neil Gibbons, editor of UK-based Communicate Magazine, for the use of my comments on countering Internet rumours in an article entitled, "Ugly rumours" in their most recent issue.

“In the digital age, a reputation that has taken years to build can be destroyed in seconds - by anyone,” says Julian Matthews of international media training consultancy Trinetizen. “Rumours can spread via the internet like wildfire. And what’s scary is that anyone can have an impact on your brand. An especially motivated, persistent and vindictive individual can be a nightmare.”

And later...

"Official tweeters on corporate Twitter accounts already help to manage the discussion of Zappos, Honda, Dell, Comcast and Southwest Airlines. “They do a great job addressing potential crises in real-time,” says Matthews."

Some valid points brought up in the piece:
1. PERMANENT SECTION: Internet rumours spread quickly and can linger long after you have addressed it officially - if necessary, have a permanent section on your website addressing the issue.

2. TOUGH CALL: Lawyer Simon Smith, partner at Schillings, siad: "If you don’t act it may be perceived as a tacit admission, if you do respond it can give credence to the rumour and validation to those spreading it. It is a difficult decision.”

3. MONITOR NOW: Watching should be a company’s first line of defence: it can only manage rumour if it knows what’s being said. "Every rumour that pops up should be considered a credible threat in the first instance,” says Peter Roberts, senior associate director of Hill & Knowlton Issues & Crisis.

4. PLAN YOUR TERMS OF ENGAGEMENT NOW: Paul Miller of media intelligence firm Cision says: "If it’s just low-level, respond to the user and ask for a retraction... if the rumour is being mentioned by top bloggers or the mainstream media, I’d advise putting something on the corporate website."

5.ENGAGE CONSTITUENTS NOW: Certain brands are fortunate enough to have a loyal, sometimes evangelical, online following. By engaging with these advocates, a company can have much of its work done for it. A rebuttal from a loyal customer may carry more weight than a company spokesperson.

6. BE PRO-ACTIVE OR YOU MIGHT FAN THE FIRE: Roberts says: "The biggest pitfall is inflaming an issue. The risks will be things like perpetuating an issue that would otherwise have died away all on its own; and bringing legitimacy to the rumour by giving it your brand’s credibility in a response. The ideal approach is to be an active participant in online conversations, both listening and engaging. The better you know the environment in which you’re operating, the easier it is to manage, and the less likely it will be that an issue will take you by complete surprise."

My complete reply to Mr Gibbons:

In our experience, as media trainers and consultants, we find many companies underestimate the damage an email, blog post, photo or video can do to their corporate reputations.

Some companies have crisis management plans tucked away in a drawer somewhere which have not been updated in three years or more.

These plans possibly do not include the crisis communications plan as a subset, nor do they incorporate responding via online communications as a crucial channel.

We have seen in the famous cases of Wendy's (finger in bowl of chilli), Kryptonite (bike locks easily opened with ballpoint pens), Dell (exploding notebooks due to faulty lithium ion batteries) and Tommy Hilfiger (false racist statements attributed to the founder apparently said on the Oprah show) that speed is of the essence.

The fact is in the digital age, a reputation that has taken years to build can be destroyed in seconds -- by anyone. Rumours of a corporate impropriety or an incriminating video of a faulty product can spread via the Internet like wildfire. It can cause serious damage to corporate reputations and substantially reduce shareholder value.

We always tell clients: "If it's good news get it out fast, if it's bad news get it out faster." The caveat here is to have your facts in order when you decide to face the media or respond to the rumour. Most companies can't react quickly enough. They feign ignorance of new media when outed, suggesting lack of resources or time.

In our training, we emphasize that companies have to get pro-active in their approach to online reputation management.

They have to employ online tracking tools and dashboards to track every mention of their brand, products and services in blogs, social networks, photo- and video-sharing sites and Twitter.

They must have a long term strategy in place to engage with "online constituents". These may be your customers, prospects, partners, suppliers, stakeholders or whatever term you may want to use for the 1.5 billion people online.

What's scary, and I can empathize with many corporations on this, is that anyone can have an impact on your brand.

An especially motivated, persistent and vindictive individual can be a nightmare.

With an online rumour, it's a four-way problem: One, it is difficult to identify source. Two, you can’t tell how widespread it is. Three, if you choose to ignore, it may go viral later. Four, if you choose to fight it, it may attract even more negative attention than it deserves.

The worst rumours are those that are partly true. People are likelier to believe that where there is smoke, there is fire. An all-encompassing denial may seem insincere, fan the flames and amplify the rumour rather than kill it. In every case, it's always better to stick to the truth.

My advice is if it is an email or blog post, go to the source and engage the person. If there are factual errors or inaccuracies, point it out as a representative of the company. If you are at fault, use the 4As method: accept, acknowledge, apologize and act. Whatever the rumour, do not take it personally, even if it is a personal attack!

You will find it is often the case that once the aggrieved person is officially acknowledged and a solution provided, he or she will likely be accepting of the remedial action. The person may be even blog positively about it, which is the ideal outcome.

On Twitter, you can see the official tweeters of companies in Zappos, Honda, Dell, Comcast and Southwest Airlines, do a great job addressing potential crises in real-time.

Rumours that are persistent and longterm need to be addressed with a consistently updated page, a blog, mini-site or a complete separate site.

The Coca-Cola Company has addressed persistent rumours on its Coca-Cola Facts and Myths section of its website. Barack Obama used FightTheSmears.com to tackle the many rumours during his presidential campaign. Lionel Menchaca, the chief blogger of Dell Inc, was the first to acknowledge the fiery notebook issue when it blew up on the net.

Corporations, who care about their reputations, need to test the waters. They need to start listening and engaging with people online, it's a skill that can only be honed through trial and error. It requires learning a new language, less of the corporatespeak and legalese that bog down real communication.

They may begin with at least one channel, a blog, a Twitter account, or Facebook page, to encourage conversations, to listen and gauge what their constituents are saying. They have to start getting their feet wet soon before the swirling tide starts to rise around them.

The rise of Twitter

A Burson-Marsteller July 2009 study of Fortune 100 companies surprisingly found that more companies had a presence on Twitter (54%) than on Facebook (29%).



Comparing the use of Twitter vs. Facebook vs. corporate blogs, the study states about one-fifth of Fortune 100 firms only used one of the three channels and those companies were overwhelmingly likely to choose Twitter (76%) over Facebook (14%) or blogging (10%).

Companies that used two of the three channels were most likely to have a blog plus a Twitter account (64%).

Many of the companies surveyed do not even have a blog (68 percent) but instead have embraced Twitter.

So what are these companies using Twitter for?
1. Company news updates
2. Customer service
3. Direct marketing responses
4. Promotions, deals and contests
5. Employee recruitment

Examples of companies on Twitter: @SearsDeals, @WalmartSpecials, @Lowes, @BestBuy, and @VerizonNewsroom. Many have multiple accounts eg: ATT has accounts for Small Biz, Mobile Music, News, and Job Recruitment among others.

Earlier, Compete reported that Twitter and Facebook had pretty flat months in July and August 2009.

Twitter chalked a sliver of rise in uniques of 1.27% with 23.58m visitors but a -2.99% drop in visits, down to 148.65m. Facebook had 122.22m unique visitors in August; a -0.37% drop compared to July, but it grew to 2.2b visits in the same period, rising 4.69%. MySpace, Bebo and hi5 dropped unique visitors by -6.73%, -7.68% and -15.36%, respectively.

An earlier report from comScore, states that Twitter passed a fairly big milestone in July of 50 million unique visitors worldwide, reaching 51.6 million unique visitors at the end of the month. In US visitors, Twitter grew to 21.2 million uniques from 20m in June, representing 41 percent of traffic. International visits now represents 59 percent of traffic.

Note that estimates only count traffic to Twitter.com whereas many users may not even go to the site and update via various popular Twitter clients ie. Tweetdeck, Twitterfeed, Twhirl, Twitterberry, Twitterrific, Twitterfon, Hootsuite and Seesmic.

Links:
Mashable: Flat month for social media
Burson-Marsteller and Fortune 100 social media study
Burston-Marsteller report on Slideshare
eMarketer: Marketers embrace Twitter over Facebook

Taking the twit out of Twitter

My recent presentation:

Taking Twit Out Of Twitter (updated)

View more presentations from Julian Matthews.

20 ways to measure social media ROI

Justifying your ROI for social media can be done quantitatively or qualitatively.

Quantitative
1. Blogs: Number of posts, visitors, comments, repeat posts of your posts.
2. Twitter: Number of followers, tweets, re-tweets, clicks to short links (use bit.ly)
3. YouTube: Number of views, number of embeds
4. Facebook: Number of fans, number of repost of status messages, number of views of videos, photos
5. Campaigns: Sales revs, new leads, new subscribers, traffic on landing page, conversions, number of people who filled up follow-up form, used coupon, took up offer, bought stuff, number who visited or viewed campaign, or downloaded app or widget.

Qualitative
6. Blog/Twitter/Facebook Comments: Positive/negative/neutral
7. Google: Do a search comparison on keywords with your competitor
8. Interaction and conversations: What are people blogging/tweeting about the campaign, product, service or company - for or against, did you learn something, solve a customer complaint, avert a crisis, find new ways to save costs or discover useful feedback for management?

Free tools to track and monitor:
09.Google Analytics
10. Google Alerts
11. Tweetbeep
12. Social Mention
13. Xinu
14. Feedburner
15. Social Too
16. BoardTracker
17. BackType
18. KeoTag
19. Compete
20. Trackur

Jeff Bezos on Amazon and Zappos

In eight minutes, Jeff Bezos sums up everything he knows in running Amazon and plugs latest buy Zappos:

1. Obsess over customers.
2. Invent.
3. Think long term.
4. It's Always Day One.

He might have added 5. Buy companies that trumps you on their culture.

8 lessons from Best Job In The World campaign

Rohit Bhargava posted his view on the viral social media campaign by Tourism Queensland for an AUD$150,000 dream job as an island caretaker that was eventually won by Ben Southall:

6 Lessons From the Best Marketing Campaign Ever (edited the sub-heads)

1. MAKE IT BELIEVABLE. Many marketing groups would never make a claim if they can't provide substantial evidence. How might Tourism Queensland prove that their job is the best in the world? They can't. But it is believable because it is a beautiful place and fits what many people's definition of a dream job might be.

2. TELL A GOOD STORY: It's not about how much you spend. One of the major benefits of smart public relations and social media is that it scales in a way that advertising typically doesn't. In other words, you don't have to pay more to get more. The real trick is to have something worthwhile to say that people can't help talking about. You need a good story.

3. USE YOUTUBE, IT'S FREE: Focus on content, not traffic. The typical marketing campaign focuses on traffic to some kind of site. For Tourism Queensland, the biggest payoff of this campaign was having over 34,000 videos on YouTube from people around the world talking about how much they love Queensland. Aggregate the views of all those videos, and multiply them over the long term and you'll start to understand the true impact of their campaign.

4. EMPOWER USERS TO SHARE AND VOTE: Create an inherent reason for people to share. Another element of this campaign that worked extremely well was the fact that there was voting enabled on the videos. What this meant was that after someone submitted their video, they had an incentive to share it with everyone in their social network online to try and get more votes.

5. USE THE INFLUENCERS: Don't underestimate the power of content creators. Most recent statistics point to some number between 1% and 10% of the user base of any social network are the active content creators. Though these percentages may seem small, the potential impact of some of these individuals are vast online. It could easily become the secret weapon for your next marketing campaign.

6. LEAVE IT ONLINE, RIDE THE WAVE: Give your promotion a shelf life. The best thing about this campaign may just be the content yet to come. Ben, the winner, just started blogging and sharing videos and photos, but the content is already engaging, high quality and inspires you to dream of making it to Queensland yourself. Over the next six months, his itinerary will take him across the state of Queensland and unlock many other unique opportunities. Best of all, this content will live on far beyond the time span of the campaign.

I added two more of my own:
7. DON'T FAKE IT: Tourism Queensland almost derailed its own campaign when it posted a fake video resume of a woman named "Tegan" getting a reef tattoo in order to win the job. The woman was a staff of the advertising agency linked to the authority, and even the tattoo was a transfer.

8. MAKE SURE SERVER IS UP TO MARK: The overwhelming number of applications slowed down the server leaving many left out in the cold.

CumminsNitro Brisbane won the Grand Prix at the International Cannes Advertising Festival for the campaign.
MORE.

10 step guide to social networks

This is an oldie but goodie from Cynthia Medina at Amadeus University:

The top 10 things we recommend to do before implementing a social network.

1. MANAGEMENT TRAINING: Have your management staff attend a Web 2.0 awareness training that describes social networks, blog, wikis, discussion boards, and social bookmarking. If management understands the differences between these technologies, it will be easier to determine whether you really need a social network.

2. STAFF TRAINING: After you determine you want to implement a social network, have the entire staff attend the same training your management staff attended. It’s only fair they understand this as well since they will be the ones using it, right?

3.SPOT CHAMPIONS: Observe which of your staff members really get excited about these changes. You will need some ambassadors to drive the change in your organization, and these are usually the ones that like change or technology.

4. FORMULATE POLICY: Come up with a Social Network policy. Everyone should know exactly what can and cannot be posted. Also, include employee contributions in their annual objectives to help ensure they’ll contribute content.

5. START WITH FACEBOOK: Before investing in software, start with one of the top social networks. The best one to start with is Facebook, which allows businesses to create a business page that is available to all Facebook users as well as non-users.

6. START POSTING: After you create the business page, have your ambassadors post notes (”blog post” in Facebook terms), discussions, videos, pictures, etc., that are related to your business. They can also create groups of special interest that promote certain travel destinations or types of travelers. Get some more tips on what to post from our article “What’s all that Web 2.0 stuff?“

7. GROW THE TEAM: Allow your staff to also create their own personal Facebook page. This way they can network with your existing customers and get new ones. They can also become fans of your business page and help you promote your business.

8. APPOINT MODERATORS: Assign some of the staff to moderate your business page. You need to make sure that everything that gets posted on your page is in good taste and doesn’t harm your business. Having someone moderate the page and delete distasteful comments will keep your page clean.

9. SPREAD THE WORD: Include your Facebook business page URL in all communications sent to customers. The more people see it, the more they will remember it. Tell everyone you are on Facebook...this is seen as a positive thing.

10. QUALITY MATTERS: Use your business page to communicate your business news and promote your specials. The quantity and the quality of the content posted on your business page is very important. The more you post, the more people will come back. Again, quality is very important.

Do this for a year while using and analyzing the "Insight" reports that Facebook offers. You can track stats on page views, discussions, video plays and more, plus you can export the data. Use it to assess changes or enhancements you need to make on your business page or to help you in your decision making later on.

When the year is up, you’ll be a social network expert and will be able to make a better decision on whether to buy software or develop your own social network. You might even decide to continue with Facebook. There is nothing wrong with using a free service.

MORE.

So, don’t jump on the band wagon just because others are. You need to know if it’s going to work for your business. To help you in your research, check out this list of Business & Travel Social Networks. Download it, sign up and test them. It’s what I do (well, as long as they’re free). This is the only way you will know what others are really doing and what you can do for your business.