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

Social Media and the pirating of the new Wolverine movie…

One of the biggest issues dominating discussions on cyberspace these last few days hasn’t been the meeting of the G20 which gathered for their annual social events where expensive wine is consumed in copious quantities and general decisions are minimal.  Nope, what has consumed most of cyberspace’s attention has been the news that a pre-release of the much anticipated Wolverine movie was posted up on multiple P2P Torrent sites on Tuesday where close to 200K (at latest count) copies have been downloaded .

 

Obviously 20th Century Fox is up in arms over this.  Their chairman came out to state that the release was missing some key scenes and wasn’t fully edited yet, and promised that the perpetrators would be found and dealt with.  In what I applaud as the first sign that the cyberspace community is acting responsibly, most reputable blog or movie review sites refused to carry reviews of the pirated download.  The general sentiment is that piracy is inherently bad for long term production of good content and that it should not be encouraged.  I know of several site or community managers that took this stance even in the face of serious opposition and threats from their own followers.

 

So wasn’t it ironic and extremely annoying to all of us that the first review posted by a site with any authority was that of FoxNews, a subsidiary of the Fox empire of which 20th Century is part.  Carried by one of their own writers, it made a mockery of the company’s stance that this was something they considered a serious breach of the law.  When this report was first posted on Friday, a number of the people I discuss these matters with were up in arms.  They felt that since Fox wasn’t taking this matter seriously, why should they, as outsiders even be bothered to help them at the detriment of their own online cred?  The general sentiment was that the gloves were off and screw the so-called corporate lawyers.  I read a number of articles that were being prepared for release on Monday, all pertaining to a review of the pirated movie.

 

Just a few hours ago, Fox announced that they had fired the columnist responsible for the article.  They also removed the article from the site.  They also posted another article over it so that even viewing the Google cache of the page won’t show it.  Needless to say though, thousands have already read it so the damage is done.  I am really trying to get my head around what the editor who allowed the article was thinking when he/she gave the go-ahead to post it.  Didn’t they realize this was akin to committing corporate suicide?

 

I speculate that the following issues at Fox lead to this misstep, all of which are enshrined as problems facing big companies in the social media space:

–  They believe that to develop a strong following, you have to be badder than bad.  In their mind, controversy pulls the crowd in.  

–  To be successful in the social media space you need to forget corporate structure and position

–  You don’t need to see what others are doing online…..they are probably doing something just as bad

–  There is no morality in social media

 

All these stances, in one form or other permeate corporate thinking with regards to social media.  Sometimes its due to having a person in charge of the social media initiative who is too inexperienced to know what marcom is like in the real world.  At other times its because the person in charge has his/her strategy entirely coloured by what they read on DIGG or Twitter.  What is more often true is the following:

–  Being bad or controversial doesn’t really lead to long term communities unless there is an underlying cause.  Being bad just because you want to be bad just makes you look stupid.  Controversy is a subset of Innovation.  Ultimately the most innovative or original content builds the largest, most loyal following.

–  You don’t just forget you are part of a bigger company just because you are in social media.  Relationships with your community is dependent not only on what you do online, but what you do offline.  Don’t ever forget that unless your money is all made online, that the offline experience is more important than the online one.  People sometimes forget mistakes or arguments online, but are much less forgiving if this happened to them in the real world.

–  Not checking the general mood of the online community is a common mistake made by executives with little time to do such research.  Thats why so many promotions fail.  Nearly all marketing consultants in the field of social media tell their clients to do their groundwork in understanding their online target audience…only a very small percentage in my experience, actually do.

–  To build a strong online community you need to have a consistent moral position.  Its well and good for the once a month blogger to write scathing articles on everything from religion to government, but quite another for a blogger with a strong reputation to uphold in a pretty fickle community.  That is where a distinction must be drawn between the community leader and the community followers.  In this example, the followers were all for piracy.  Its the leaders that finally put their foot down and said that it was not right to do so and backed it up with action.

 

Its ironic and idiotic that the so-called leader who finally broke ranks was from the company that actually suffered the most from this issue…..in social media, we learn new lessons every day…..

 

Tong Hsien-Hui

Do we need a new Internet?

This was the title of an article in the New York Times published on Valentine’s Day.  The link is here http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/15/weekinreview/15markoff.html?_r=1.  The gist of the discussion is whether it makes sense to ditch the existing internet in favor of one with more control points and greater security.  In effect, to gain entrance, one would need to register and have their identity confirmed before being allowed in.  The current ability to remain anonymous online will no longer be possible with this new internet.

The issue is one that has been debated for some time and in fact I refer to it in my earlier blog post on how the Government could takeover the internet.  The question really is how acceptable will this be to the current users, and if not, why not?  I can’t really see how a responsible person who wants to use the internet for responsible activities and penning his thoughts could possible be against such a move.  That said, if the country in which the person resides does not allow certain liberties, then he/she would be similarly restricted online.  In effect, the online world becomes a mirror of the offline world.  In a more tightly restricted internet, the controls put in place by the law can be enforced easily.  It is still currently possible, but at great expense in time and money.  The benefit obviously is that it will be harder to perpetrate online scams (I’m not so ignorant that I believe a more tightly controlled internet will eliminate ALL crime) and that people will put in more thought and consideration before posting inanities on blogs, commentary, etc…..  It will also be easier to police the darker aspects of the internet such as child pornography, etc…..

In general, I am in favor of an internet that offers better security and would be willing to surrender my anonymity to partake in a more thoughtful network.  Having said that, I do realize that most people would not.  The internet in its current incarnation offers them a release from the real world and the one being touted is too much a mirror of the real world for them to like it.  So, while I see great benefits of such an action, I believe that it won’t happen anytime in the next ten years.  I mean, the UN can’t even agree as a body on some simple issues.  How do they plan on establishing a global change on the internet?  All it takes is for one or two countries not to accept the new conditions and everyone would flee to their servers and set up shop there from which they can go rogue.

As a sub thought, I seriously question how many of the 174 million Facebook users are unique users.  I know of many many friends who have more than five IDs on Facebook by registering with five different email accounts for a variety of reasons.  Could the growth of Facebook effectively just be the same users registering the new IDs?

 

Tong Hsien-Hui

New Ministers for Singapore?

With Obama and Congress pushing for limits on the salaries of CEOs in companies the US Government has had to bail out, there has been an uproar in the private sector that this would lead to an outflow of talent from the US.  Given that the cap on salaries is US$500K, this would effectively mean that CEOs of companies whose turnovers are larger than the GDPs of some countries, will be paid less than even some heads of states.

With our Singapore Government salaries being the highest in the world, wouldn’t it make sense to bring some of these exceptional talents into our own upper echelons?  Wouldn’t a Jamie Dimon make a better Finance Minister than anyone we could produce?  Or a Jeffrey Immelt as Minister of Trade and Industry?  What a coup it could be for Singapore!  With the salaries our Ministers are paid, compensating these ultimate foreign talents above what they could get in the US will be easy!  Heck, most of our Ministers are paid at least double what Obama’s cap is on executive salaries!

 

Tong Hsien-Hui

Government taking over the net? Part 2

So now we have the infrastructure aspect done up.  Each country controls and runs their internal ISPs.  All net traffic thus passes through their servers before making their way out to the rest of the world.  There is now control of new online IDs being created although who is actually creating them may be harder to pin down.  I suppose the next step would be to create unique identifiers for each person before they can log on to the internet.  This would only be possible if the government themselves offered internet access free within their own country.  With the increasing prevalence of fingerprint recognition hardware, a person could log on to the net with his/her own bio ID.  Thus everything that person does on the net is now logged and retrievable.  It  is now possible to identify the person behind each action taken on the internet.  Sure, there are details to work out as to how to prevent or minimize fraud, etc….but this is already done imperfectly in the real world so I will gloss over that for the moment.

 

Tong Hsien-Hui

Government’s taking over the net? Part 1

This last week in Singapore, there have been quite a number of discussions regarding the role of Government within the domestic internet community.  The implication of the Government regulating the online community was met with derision, anger and not a few stupid comments that seemed to justify the Government’s stand.  In the end however, the relevant authority came out to state that this would not be the course of action they would take….for the moment.

This issue got me to thinking too however.  Should they really want to police the internet, how would any Government go about it?  I believe that its a matter of looking at what the internet really is.  Effectively, the internet to all intents and purposes is a world, no different from the world we live in.  That being the case, shouldn’t it be policed the real world is?  But how will this be done?  The NSA together with Homeland Security spends billions of dollars data mining the online traffic to pick out the nuggets of critical information that could lead them to a plot being hatched to destroy property or cause damage in the real world.  Does it make sense to do so however?  I think that with a fundamental shift in thinking, Governments can take automatic control of the key channels of the internet.  All they need to do is to takeover and run all the ISPs in the country.  If each country were to do this, it would be easy to impose strict guidelines on the users and the concept of anonymity would be significantly reduced.  Obviously it is not possible in practice to monitor every keystroke made by every user within the country, but it is no different from the real world where you can’t possible monitor all the conversations that take place in the country.

Fact is though, I love the internet as it is, with all the negative and sometimes gross things on it.  I’ve had more negative reviews and comments than positive ones, but that doesn’t make me want someone to control it.  However, this intellectual exercise is interesting and I will post more once I have had time to think through more of the issues.

Hsien-Hui, Tong