Should Traditional Media Be On New Media?

I got thinking about this topic when I attended a lunch recently where several editors of major news media organizations in Singapore spoke.  Represented were the Straits Times, Lianhe Zaobao (Chinese) and ChannelNewsAsia.  It was meant to be a session where these editors shared their “invaluable” knowledge on the basis of their decision making when selecting news stories.  Considering a good portion of the attendees were from PR firms, it was obviously a topic of some interest.  Attending more out of interest than any real professional need to get my company in the news, I was able to listen more closely and objectively to what was being said.

Sad to say, the presentations by these so-called media giants was neither well prepared nor well structured.  They wandered off on irrelevant tangents and seemed more interested in whining about their jobs.  Their insights were neither insightful nor useful.  They spent a good portion of their time complaining about being “scooped” by one of their “competitors” at the table.  They rounded it off by talking about how they were undecided on using Social Media as a channel to their readers.

To make sure it wasn’t a total waste of my time and money, I got to thinking about how Social Media can be used to complement Traditional Media.  I know this topic has been argued to death in many other countries, but Singapore is quite different.  At the end of the day, the three “competitors” at the lunch ultimately report in to an organization controlled by the Government of Singapore.  That in itself defines the limitations on news coverage and commentary, but also ensures a sustainable income and subsidy, something which is critical for survival in today’s media environment.  Without this support, the main newspapers and news channels in Singapore would be treating Social Media with a lot more fear than they currently are.

In their defence, it has to be said that even with the high internet penetration rate in Singapore, most news readers still prefer to get their news in a format that they can touch, feel, turn pages and roll under their arm to bring to the toilet.  So print news is not going away anytime soon.  However, this issue of who “scooped” who is pretty much a non-issue.  The main english paper, the Straits Times, is printed and distributed at a fixed time every day.  Even if the US were to sink under the waves in an Atlantean catastrophe, readers of the Straits Times would only find out in the next day’s paper.  ChannelNewsAsia is slightly better.  They can put a headline above their news ticker similar to what CNN has.  However, unless you are a couch potato or carry around a portable TV, it is unlikely you will get this news till you are home.

Thats where Social Media can be useful.  Most people now access the web using their mobile devices.  Some companies, including the Straits Times and ChannelNewsAsia, even have mobile apps that embed their news bulletins on iPhones and Blackberries.  In the worst case, you can go onto their corporate website using your mobile devices.  It might seem a logical way to keep your readers in the know, but it doesn’t take into account how humans form habits.

I have the apps for the Straits Times on my iPhone.  Its free, but I very seldom access it.  A few reasons.  First, its slow and takes a long time to load, even using 3G.  There seemed to be a need to incorporate pictures and details into the articles.  Secondly, I haven’t formed a habit to click it to find the latest news.  Thirdly, the habit I have already formed is to use  Twitter for my short communications.  One of the organizations I follow on Twitter is Fox News.  Anytime there is breaking news, I get a short 140 character update from FOXNEWS.  I use this update to verify news that I would usually have obtained on Twitter earlier.  If I’m interested, I would click a link to read the details.

The beauty of Twitter is that you don’t need to craft an elaborate copy to hook the reader.  All you need to do is to shoot off a headline (once the news has been verified of course).  Its somewhat akin to the newsboys standing at street corners in the early part of the last century, shouting out the news headlines to passerbys in the hope that they would buy a paper from him.  And there is no dispute about who scooped who since all Tweets have time/date stamps.

I don’t expect these media giants in Singapore to change their philosophies anytime soon.  They lack the hunger and urgency brought about by a highly competitive environment, and to a certain extent, the luddites in senior management probably wouldn’t be comfortable in such a fast paced media environment.  So, till something happens to make them change, I expect things to remain status quo for at least another couple of years….while the rest of the industry worldwide moves on to the next big thing.

Tong Hsien-Hui

So Majority of Tweets come from only 5% of Twitter Accounts?

People who meet me for the first time often ask me, “For a guy who claims not to like Twitter, you sure blog about it more than any other topic..”.  Mea culpa.  Ever have a scab you kept on scratching even though you knew it wasn’t doing you much good?  I feel much the same about Twitter.  I don’t dislike Twitter.  I just find it functionally irrelevant, and those Tweets that tell me I can make money on Twitter..?  Well I give the same amount of consideration to those as to those emails from Nigeria telling me can share in a fortune and all I need is to send a couple thousand dollars to clean all that black money.

Well anyway, following this kid’s comments about how other kids don’t use Twitter much (see my blog post on “Why are we so quick to run down a teen’s opinion about social media?”), Mashable, a pretty decent aggregator and publisher of social media news, conducted or gathered research information pertaining to useage of Twitter.  The findings were interesting:

–  5% of Twitter accounts generate 75% of Tweets.  I speculate that 100% of this 75% is useless spam.

–  24% of Tweets are generated by bots (or small programs that automate some action…in this case retweeting stuff on DIGG, etc…).  Spamming used to be frowned upon.  In Twitter it seems to be encouraged!

–  60.6% of the most active (the top 5%) Tweeters live in the US.  The next is the UK at 6.9%.  I suppose everyone else has a life.

–  54% of the most active are male.  I suppose when they aren’t on WOW or some other inane MMPORG, they have to do something.  That or its actually only 1 guy who generated thousands of Twitter accounts using a blog and created his own virtual Twitter farm.

–  48% of the most active accounts have more than 100 followers.  If I were a follower…I wouldn’t be for long…imagine 150+ updates daily from a single account.  Mostly crap I assume.

–  Ok, so FoxNews is one of those most active Twit(s).  Maybe its not all crap.

So how to separate the wheat from the chaff?  You can’t really.  Its not possible to turn someone’s updates off unless you “unfollow” them.  I live in Singapore, a country with a reputation for high rate of internet penetration among the population.  A significant percentage are ostensibly registered on popular social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, and the local press has been playing up Twitter recently (no surprise there….see FoxNews…..).  That said, I only know of a small handful of people who Tweet regularly.

My company has a Twitter account to keep our members posted on the latest events.  We will shortly be promoting certain programs and activities solely on Twitter and Facebook.  But this isn’t really creating a conversation.  Its just another channel of communication (like ads, flyers, etc..).  We do get feedback and criticism occasionally, but we need to actively search for it using Twitter’s search function.  In each instance, we engage using Twitter and close it online.  This usually doesn’t take more than 2 rounds of engagement which hardly constitutes a conversation.

For those keen advocates of Twitter out there…I am open to any suggestions you may have on how to make better use of Twitter given that few of our target market is on Twitter and even fewer are regular users!

Tong Hsien-Hui