With the Prime Minister on Twitter, blogging his way to the next election, maybe business should get a little more serious about social media. All the evidence suggests it will.

Twitter, a micro-blogging venture in which users post views, or "tweets", to a maximum of 140 characters, is still tiny.

But numbers are up more than 500 per cent this year in Australia, says Hitwise. And the time Twitterites spend with the application is greater than MySpace, Facebook and any of the big five online publishers, including ninemsn and Yahoo!7.

Twitter is just one emerging social media application, but combined with others (and there are hundreds) it is creating a boom for the PR industry because someone's got to interpret what's being said about companies and brands online. Most critically, they've got to figure out the tone - and algorithms can't do that yet.

Technology may be helping media audiences swim in more ponds outside the mainstream - blogs, social networks, podcasting, vodcasting, video-sharing sites and the like - but it can't deliver what companies need: automated insight about consumers. Statistics, yes, but good thinking is a different beast.

Companies the world over are starting to dabble with social media - and they have to.
Universal McCann's latest global round of research on the media, derived from interviews with 17,000 active online users in 29 countries, hammers home the booming participation in this arena. Here are some of its statistics on online users gathered this year:

* Bloggers globally: 184 million;
* Those who watch video clips online: 82.9 per cent;
* Those who say they have joined a social network: 57 per cent;
* Those who have uploaded photos to a network: 55 per cent;
* Those who have uploaded videos to a network: 22 per cent;
* Those who have uploaded a video clip to a video sharing website: 8.5 per cent.

These are global figures, but UM breaks out some numbers for Australian users: 62 per cent say they have read a blog, up from 21 per cent in 2006 and 55 per cent last year.

But here's the critical point for companies: 34 per cent of bloggers say they post opinions about products or brands.

This underlines the rush by PR firms to figure out how to use social media for commercial gain, or at least damage control. The first step is usually monitoring online conversations, but the real action is how to participate in them.

There are pitfalls - just ask National Australia Bank and one of its PR outfits, Cox Inall, about the drama of overtly "seeding" commercial messages on Twitter without following the right protocols or tone.

In contrast, Launch Group quietly introduced clients such as Lovells Lager to pub gatherings of Twitter freaks with sponsorship deals so low-key many at the bar were not aware the beer was free.

"The demand is growing very, very fast for specialised services in social media," a Bendalls Group director, Fi Bendall, says. "We're looking not at influencers, which might be a blogger with a big following, but more the propensity of those influencers to actually advocate and spread the word with an independent passion.
"It is about very different engagement tactics ... To sense the emotion people are feeling online about brands, issues or whatever it may be you need to have human analysis attached to it."
Tricky stuff, but it is a grand irony that with all the latest online technology, humans are still needed to decode other humans. For the digerati, it must be so uncool.

Labels: Social Media Intelligence