The Great Debate UK
The 2010 general election and new media
Matthew McGregor is the Director Blue State Digital’s London office. The opinions expressed are his own.
The 2010 general election will be the first closely British election in which the internet will be an important factor. The last truly close election in 1992 was fought in a way unrecognisable to campaigners today. In 1997, most of us had yet to use email. In 2005, YouTube was barely three months into its existence.
So how will new media impact on the contest between the parties — and how will independent organisations use the potential of online media to insert themselves into the process?
Perhaps the most obvious difference for members of the fourth estate will be the encroachment of bloggers on the “old” media’s hallowed turf as the arbiters of what constitutes the news of the day.
Blogs are increasing the echo chamber through which the most actively engaged voters will get their news and opinion from, and bloggers are increasingly confident in their ability to break news stories that the old media will follow.
It will be interesting to see the extent to which the media cycle is affected by the blogging cycle. The impact on the media itself is likely to be the bigger factor, with no blog in the country yet commanding a sufficient readership to be a player on its own. We won’t see an “It was Iain Dale wot won it” headline in this election at least.
Politicians can now communicate directly with their constituents more effectively and more easily than ever before. The number of politicians using Facebook, YouTube and Twitter has exploded over the last year – and some are even pulling it off. The jury is out on how genuinely effective this is. While most MPs would be delighted to have 800 people come to hear them at a public meeting, having that many views on a stilted to-camera video is unlikely to become the brave new internet world that some seem to hope.
Are mobile networks at risk of a meltdown?
- Steve Nicholson, CEO at The Cloud. -
Five years ago the thought that we could be on the move accessing applications such as You Tube or Facebook, or watching TV or listening to music using our mobile phones was no more than a dream – today it’s a reality.
If we take a step back and assess the journey of the mobile phone over the past few years it has been nothing short of epic. It has progressed from a piece of technology for the modern business person to a must-have item.
A mobile phone is no longer just for making calls or for sending texts. Apple, Google and traditional stalwarts of the mobile industry like Nokia are increasingly adding sophistication and functionality that turns our phones into multi-media entertainment devices – capable of watching TV, listening to streamed music, downloading films and even playing high quality interactive games.
The majority of TV broadcasters are making their TV programmes available via the internet and their iPlayers – thus starting the process of enabling people to watch TV using their mobile phones.
According to both Facebook and YouTube we are viewing over one billion video clips on You Tube each day and over 2.5 billion photos via Facebook each month – with a clear and increasing trend to do so using our mobile phones.
There are many more examples that culminate in a massive surge in our collective demand for bandwidth hungry Internet services that are slowly beginning to outstrip the available capacity on traditional mobile networks.
from Commentaries:
Gut feeling: How Google CEO valued YouTube deal
Let the second-guessing, the mock horror, the disbelief, the crowing begin.
Google CEO Eric Schmidt has acknowledged he realized upfront that he was overpaying to acquire YouTube, to the tune of $1 billion, judged by any conventional measures.
The many critics of Google's $1.65 billion deal to acquire the video-sharing site three years ago will claim this confirms everything they have always said about the deal. Not quite.
In fact, not really at all.
Schmidt came clean in a deposition by lawyers in the Viacom copyright lawsuit that there was very little revenue coming into YouTube to justify the price his company paid.
No surprises here. There were intangibles to consider:
1. YouTube's popularity was sky-rocketing, making it the runaway market leader among video-sharing sites. 2. It was crushing his company's own site, Google Video. 3. YouTube was up for auction and would be sold to a competitor unless Google jumped first. 4. Google overbid to ensure YouTube didn't fall into rival hands.
Yet, the author fails to mention perhaps the most important reason Google bought YouTube– to defend online content.
If Google’s objective is eyeballs– and we can all agree that it is– then it would benefit Google to have Internet users across the world being able to infringe copyright, i.e. upload copyrighted movies, tv shows, and clips.
At the time of Google’s purchase, the number one threat to YouTube’s success were lawsuits from copyright holders.
Without having the resources and clout of a serious parent company (i.e. Google, Microsoft, Newscorp, or maybe Yahoo at the time) YouTube would have been sued, and subsequently lost in the courts, therefore, setting a precedent that would have been much more detrimental to online video, and Google’s business, than overpaying for YouTube. Even at a price of more than $1.5 billion.
Don’t be fooled, Google knew exactly what it was doing when it agreed to pay more than 1 billion extra than it had “valued” YouTube, which was, reducing a threat to its business- which isn’t search, but rather attention. skh
Do you know what people are saying about you?
-Connie Bensen is Director of Community Strategy and Architecture at Alterian, working cross functionally to provide strategy and best practice in social media. The opinions expressed are her own.-
It took radio 38 years to reach 50 million listeners, terrestrial TV took 13 years, the internet took four years… In less than nine months, Facebook added 100 million users. We are in the midst of a digital revolution that is shaping the way we communicate and these social media technologies are continuing to grow a pace in 2009. Now more than four out of five online users are active in either creating, participating in, or reading some form of social content at least once a month.
While young people continue to march toward almost universal adoption of social applications, the most rapid growth is occurring among consumers 35 and older. Consumer behaviour has always had an effect on the way we do business and this is no different as social media enters the business realm full swing.
It’s not about selling something anymore; that might be the end result, but to get there, you need to work on the relationship. To get it right it is about listening to what your consumers want. Social media is defined as user generated content and has empowered the everyday consumer so marketing departments no longer control distribution and disposition of information about their company, brand, and products – the consumer does.
Your brand’s message matters but more important is the message the consumers are sending about you. Customers are turning more towards digital influencers, bloggers and peers than company “ads” for product information so negative opinions online can be hugely damaging. Social media sites such as YouTube, Facebook, Linkedin, Myspace, and Twitter have demonstrated the speed with which a company’s reputation can be drastically affected by an unhappy consumer.
Open and real-time dialogue can offer endless opportunities for brands but must also to be approached with a level of caution. For example, there needs to be clear guidelines agreed between personal views and the views of a company for those employees responsible for online interaction. This is to ensure a level of personalisation is achieved, showing the human side of a company, without compromising brand values.
So social media success is about listening, engaging, and measuring. Where are consumers discussing it online? Who are the key influencers? What is being talked about? What is the mood; is it positive or negative? These are the questions businesses need to ask before they act.
“the internet took four years” – And when, precisely, do you believe the Internet came into being? It sounds like you disagree with accepted date of the late 1970′s….
“If you aren’t listening to the noise in the online world” – Noise is noise. If the signal to noise ratio in the online world is a hundred times worse than it is elsewhere, then that’s you’re reason for ignoring it right there. Of course you’ll take a hit until the hoi polloi themselves realise that all they can find on social sites is noise, but I’ll wager it will only be a short wait.
from For the Record:
Citizen journalism, mainstream media and Iran
Dean Wright is Global Editor, Ethics, Innovation and News Standards. Any opinions are his own.
The recent election in Iran was one of the more dramatic stories this year, with powerful images of protests and street-fighting dominating television and online coverage.
Because traditional news organizations were essentially shut down by the authorities, it fell to citizen journalists -- many of whom were among the protesters -- to provide the images that the world would see, using such social media as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube.
This has raised a number of ethics, standards and legal questions for mainstream journalists. My colleague John Clarke, Reuters Global Television Editor, found himself in the middle of the issue as images became available and clients demanded coverage of the election's aftermath. John discusses the issues raised, the lessons learned and the opportunities for the future below. As always, his opinions are his own.
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Protests following the controversial Iranian election have put citizen journalism even more firmly in the spotlight. With traditional news gathering organizations effectively shut down by authorities, text, video and stills being produced and posted on social websites by the protesters themselves became the main way that much information was getting out of the country. This dramatic coverage -- regardless of (and perhaps even enhanced by) its shaky nature -- was accessed by Reuters (and other news organizations) and distributed to clients and viewers around the world.
Citizen journalism isn't new. We have long accessed amateur footage of stories around the world, from plane crashes to wars to natural disasters. However, the internet and mobile devices have resulted in a dramatic increase in the amount of content available and the speed of delivery, the ability to deliver outside of normal controls, more uncertainty over origin, ownership and verification, and the viral nature in which it can all spread around the globe.
Interesting post Matthew! One area I think will prove critically important is whether the political parties can monitor and understand the sentiment of the election chatter online. They are inherently and by definition control freaks and the fact that they can get feedback from voters above what the research and polling companies can provide them will be seen by them as gold dust.
At Tamar, our first political analysis was jumped on by the Labour Party and they were all over it like a dirty rash, but it did highlight that they are constantly tracking and listening to what is going on online. What this did highlight is that they are using digital channels to be proactive and get their important messages in front of voters, as per your examples, yet they are able to go into defensive mode when they feel that their messages are being diluted and threatened.
Profit-making organisations are waking up to the fact that the consumer now owns the conversation and that brands need to become solipsistic in their approach. If the political parties do not entertain the same approach will this lead to eventual failure to connect with their voters?