Over the weekend, I repeatedly came across examples of the realities of the new media ecosystem. On Saturday, I saw on Facebook a hot conversation about an apparently serious car accident in my town. People were reporting what they saw. They were sharing second-hand accounts, and of course, opinions. I toggled over to the local daily newspaper's website. Nothing. I went to the weekly paper's site. Nothing. The local Patch sites have been decimated, so I didn't even bother checking them.
The next day I spent part of the morning reading about the crisis in the Crimean Penninsula online (in old-school newspaper brands) and engaged in conversations on social media around that situation. I subscribe to the paper New York Times, but only opened that later, after I had read the most recent headlines on the paper's home page, or on links shared through Facebook and Twitter.
Later on Sunday I read about how "social buzz" can be a very accurate predictor of key pop culture events, including, of course, last night's Academy Awards.
The article relies on an Adobe initiative, called the Adobe Digital Index, which is based on an analysis of data from more than 5,000 companies worldwide that use the Adobe Marketing Cloud solutions. The ADI, this story reported, has already demonstrated pretty convincingly the ability of social buzz to predict a movie's financial prospects. ADI correctly predicted that “Ender’s Game” and “Delivery Man” would do poorly, while “Thor: The Dark World,” “Anchorman 2,” and “The Hunger Games: Catching Fire” would make money.
So how did it do with the Oscars? Hmmm. It predicted that Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence would win, and we all now know that Matthew McConaughey and Lupita Nyong'o won. Beyond that, the ADI was close. It predicted that Cate Blanchett would win, and she did. It predicted that the race for best picture was too close to call between "Gravity" and "12 Years a Slave." The latter won. It did, however, say that "12 Years a Slave" director Steve McQueen had run away with the social buzz and would win best director. He did not.
But put aside the accuracy of those particular indices and you realize that something really important is going on in media. Social is where the action is. It's where people get their news. It's where they engage with commmunities. It's where marketers measure pop-culture resonance. One of the things I was thinking about as I read about the Ukraine crisis was how old the headlines in the print newspaper really were. They were published on the Saturday, probably late afternoon. They were based on reporting from earlier that day and the day prior. So what I was reading in the print version of the Sunday New York Times was anywhere from 24 to 48 hours old, while what I was reading on the New York Times website was very close to real time. At best, it was a few hours old. Where would you gravitate?
All of which leaves PR pros with five important takeaways.
• Don't obsess over traditional media relations and media placements. Instead, make your brand and your clients part of the social-media news and information ecosystem.
• Old-style media coverage, while still important, has absolutely been eclipsed by social communities, and sometimes those communities don't even need the established media brands.
• News travels fast. Don't find yourself responding to what was relevant 48 hours ago.
• Make social-media monitoring and measurement a top priority for your team. It's a more productive source of cultural understanding than older media.
• Old media brands offer first-rate journalism. Social buzz tells you how your own brand (and other relevant entities) are faring among stakeholders and the culture at large.
—Tony Silber
@tonysilber